Bohemian Girl, The (33 page)

‘Being shot?’

‘Ye-e-e-s, but—Boxes.’

‘Boxes.’

‘Yes, boxes. That’s all I remember.’

‘I was always looking for something in the boxes. It was horrible, but there was nothing horrible about it. It was just - the boxes. Over and over. And the person - thing - with the shotgun. Not Struther Jarrold.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘The man who shot—’ He raised himself on his elbows. ‘I remember! I think. Not in the dream, in - life. Struther Jarrold with a revolver, standing over me. Laughing.’ He put his head back. ‘He seemed so - pleased.’

‘You’re sure this wasn’t in the dream?’

‘I’m not sure of anything. Maybe you’re a dream, doctor.’

‘More a nightmare, I expect. How’s that leg?’

‘White. Dead.’

‘I was told you went down the corridor yesterday.’

‘Carried by two sisters.’

‘Mmmm.’ Gallichan pinched his upper lips with thumb and forefinger. ‘You use guns yourself, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Carry one?’

‘Usually.’

‘You’ve shot someone?’

‘I was in a war. Then there was the time they write all their crap about. The dime-novel hero. Three minutes that made me famous. Or infamous.’

‘You killed someone?’

‘Four men. They were going to rob people; I was a peace officer.’

‘You shot them?’

‘I did.’

‘In the back?’

‘Of course not.’

‘With what sort of weapon?’

‘A shotgun.’ Denton lay still. ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at. No, I think you’re wrong.’

They allowed him to start reading the mail that had piled up at home. Atkins sorted it, he was told; Janet Striker vetted it more carefully. Nothing was to worry him.

Twice a day, a sister with a chubby, red-cheeked face raised his right foot until the leg was bent and then pushed it up until the thigh almost touched his midriff. He was supposed to push against her. When the leg was all the way up, he was supposed to push it all the way back down.

‘The mind drives the body,’ Gallichan said. ‘We want the brain to tell the nerves to move the leg. You must
think
the leg to move.’

‘William James would say it’s the other way around - the leg moves and the brain thinks about moving.’

‘Mr William James is not here.’

She pushed, and he thought about pushing, and so far as he could see, nothing happened.

One day, however, he could move his toes.

‘Tell me about the boxes.’

‘They were boxes. Just—Some of them were hatboxes.’

‘Were there hats?’

They had raised his torso on pillows. A window stood next to his bed, a good placement to light the room and the bed but bad for looking out; he would have had to lean far to the left, and they wouldn’t let him lean yet. By looking out of the corners of his eyes and rolling his head, he could see the glass and the mullions. A sprinkling of snowflakes lay on them. ‘Is it Christmas?’

‘It’s the sixteenth of January. Were there hats?’

‘Women’s hats. Over and over. Why?’ He didn’t tell him about the bloody rags; he didn’t know why.

‘Do you read German?’

‘Good God, no.’

‘There’s a new book,
Die Traumdeutung
- Dream . . . mmm . . . Inquiry, no, Analysis. It implies that dreams have meanings.’

‘What’s the good of meanings if we forget them as soon as we wake up?’

‘Well, you didn’t, obviously.’

‘You said yourself they’re the product of fever and morphine.’

‘But not necessarily invalid for that.’

‘So I was talking to myself?’

‘Mmmmm - no, I prefer to think of it - this is all speculation - as working.’

‘It certainly seemed like work. What I remember.’

‘Working something through.’

‘Counting women’s hats? What’s that got to do with me?’

‘Were you counting them? That’s new.’

‘I was—God, I don’t know. No. Yes. There was some sort of list. It was just something I had to do over and over. There was no end to it.’ He gave a graveside chuckle. ‘There’s a cliché - “wearing two hats”. When you do two things at once.’

‘Why was there no end to it?’

‘Oh, good Judas Priest, how would I know? It was a
dream.
’

‘For four weeks. What in your usual life do you do over and over again?’

He thought,
Try to hold on to Janet Striker
, but he wouldn’t say so. He wouldn’t violate her that way, display her for this man. He partly liked Gallichan now, let himself be interested by Gallichan’s interest in him, but she was out of it. He said, ‘For a long time, I - well, call it going around and around - over my wife after she died. But I thought that was over.’ He told him about the dream he’d had after his first night with Janet Striker, although he didn’t include her - the dream about the running horses and the bleached and beautiful horse bones.

‘You astonish me, Denton - you’ve believed in the potency of dreams all along.’

‘Dreams are like jokes. I do believe that. This one - “Stop beating a dead horse.”’

‘Why a horse?’

‘It’s a saying.’ He chewed his lip. ‘I gave her a horse. After we were married. A little mare, because she thought she wanted to ride, but it got to be more like a dog. She fed it sugar and petted it and it followed her around. After she died, I sold everything. All I had was debts. I sold her horse. It was too small for me; I couldn’t keep it. It started following me—I sold it to a dealer at auction. A lot of his horses wound up in the mines. There was a horse in my dreams.’ He was weeping.

He had a pair of crutches, and he could make his way down the corridor, dragging the dead leg with him, a sister at his side to keep him from falling. He’d lost thirty pounds. When he looked down at his body, he was aware of how vain he’d been about it, hard and muscled despite his age. Now the skin sagged around his knees and his belly, and his muscles were slack and his ribs showed. He thought of the horse in his dreams.

‘It was old. Terrible-looking beast. Horrible gait.’

‘What had it to do with the boxes?’

‘Nothing. It simply got me to where the boxes were. And the - figure - with the shotgun. And the girl who laughed at me.’ He’d remembered her a few days before. ‘There’s an American saying - “to get taken for a ride”. To get fooled. The horse took me for a ride, I suppose.’

‘Was the girl your wife?’

‘No, good God.’ Denton could almost laugh at the absurdity of that. ‘She was more like Mary Thomason. But she wasn’t Mary Thomason; she was—’ He told Gallichan about Mary Thomason and her brother and the drawing. When he was done, he said, ‘When Struther Jarrold shot me he shouted, “I did it, I did it!” He was pointing the revolver at me and looking deliriously happy and he said, “I did it, Astoreth.” Maybe the girl was this mad creation of his, Astoreth.’ He tried to pull himself up. ‘I need to talk to a detective named Munro at New Scotland Yard.’

‘When Jarrold shot you with your own gun, you mean.’

‘It wasn’t my own gun; I’d never shot it. It was just a gun I’d paid a couple of shillings for and kept in a drawer.’ He looked at Gallichan. ‘All right, it was my gun, in the legal sense. What are you trying to make of it?’

‘I’m only wondering what you make of it.’

‘I want to talk to Detective Munro.’

Gallichan got up and looked out of the window and made a face at what he saw of the day. He struggled into an overcoat and picked up his hat. ‘I don’t want you to become agitated.’

One day, he was able to make the muscles in his right thigh twitch. He found that he could make them twitch in a kind of order, going clockwise around the leg. He could move the toes and he could tilt the foot back about an inch when he was lying down. Then one morning he woke up with a partial erection. It was February. He announced to the doctor that he was feeling better. It was time to move things along. ‘I want to talk to Detective Munro!’

‘I’ve sent him a message.’

‘And I want to see Heseltine.’ In fact, he was hurt that Heseltine hadn’t tried to see him. ‘Have you been in touch with Heseltine?’

The doctor hesitated. ‘I’ll have a talk with Mrs Striker.’

When Janet Striker came next day, she told him that Heseltine was dead. ‘He killed himself a day or two after you were shot. I’m sorry, Denton.’

‘All this time—!’

‘The doctors didn’t want you to be upset. You weren’t rational that first month. Then I thought, what difference does it make now, and I did what they asked and kept quiet about it.’

‘But—’ The trip with Heseltine to Normandy was recent to him, the most recent thing he remembered except for being shot. His feeling was that he had seen Heseltine only a day or two ago, and suddenly the man was dead. Had been dead for months. ‘
Suicide?
’

‘Talk to Munro about it. I don’t know what happened.’

After she had gone, he lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling. Mary Thomason, the brother, Himple - all of that paradoxically seemed to him from some long-ago time. But Heseltine? He remembered the young man’s pleasure in the French countryside, his good humour about the bedbugs. His look of vitality when they had separated at Waterloo.

‘Heseltine wouldn’t kill himself,’ he said aloud.

Apparently she agreed. The next time she came, she confessed that she, Atkins and Cohan had been taking turns sitting at his door since he had been moved to the nursing home, and she’d warned the staff against letting anyone else in. ‘I thought somebody might try again.’

‘Why?’

‘You and Heseltine - I was afraid it wasn’t coincidence.’

‘What about yourself? You were in all that with me.’

‘I’ve changed hotels several times.’

He laughed. ‘You should talk to Dr Gallichan. You’re as crazy as I am.’

He wrote a letter to Heseltine’s father. The handwriting didn’t look like his own. He apologized for its being so late and explained that he’d been ill. He said that Heseltine had been a fine man. A few days later, the father wrote to thank him and to say that Heseltine had spoken of him and seemed to take strength from knowing him; was there anything of his son’s that Denton would like to have as a memento? Denton wrote back and said that he’d like to buy the little Dutch painting of the lion that had hung on his son’s wall. The father replied that no such painting had been found among his son’s effects. Would Denton like something else?

Munro and Sergeant Markson came and were solicitous and gentle, but he knew that Munro thought he was behaving badly. Munro, at least, should have been allowed to see him.