Bohemian Girl, The (36 page)

Denton ate the soup, then the toast and anchovy paste, then some of the biscuits. The soup, with enough salt, was edible but peculiar. The sharp saltiness of the anchovies was welcome after the stodge they’d fed him at the nursing home. When he was done, he tried to stand. ‘I can’t even get out of my own chair!’

‘Don’t mind my saying so, but you ain’t trying.’

Denton gave him a look of hatred. ‘I can’t bend this damned leg. What’s your brilliant idea?’

‘Stick it out in front of you and get up on the other one.’

The left leg was weak and his bullet wounds screamed, but he did it, the left thigh now vibrating like a plucked string. He stood looking down at Atkins. ‘You’ve appointed yourself my domestic scold?’

‘That’s the plan.’

Denton hobbled partway down the room and turned to the left and then left again into the room they never used. Most of the blind wall that was shared with the next house was books; on the street side was a single tall window; to his left as he stood in the doorway was a wall with a fireplace, coal burning in the grate. Opposite it, a divan he’d never seen before had been made up as a bed. ‘I’d prefer my own room.’

‘When you can go up and down.’

A big stack of mail stood on a table. Atkins said, ‘Lots of bills and invitations. Give you something to do.’

Denton felt too tired to respond. He’d given up the morphine, had refused chloral hydrate or laudanum. He was wondering, as he settled in the bed, if he should ask Atkins for some of the headache powders, and while he was wondering he fell asleep.

It was a struggle during the night to get from his rooms to the toilet that was tucked behind the alcove and across the side corridor. Atkins heard him and ran upstairs, trailing an unbelted robe behind him, Rupert plodding and breathing heavily behind that. The nursing home had had bedpans, not lavatories. Life was suddenly more complicated, more frustrating. Still, he fell again into deep sleep as soon as he was back in the bed.

The next two days were elaborations on struggle and frustration. The simple had become complex, the difficult impossible. He complained that he was getting his exercise simply by living, but Atkins chivvied him into limping up and down the long room, back and forth, then doing the leg exercises. After the first set, Atkins holding Denton’s feet and pushing the legs for Denton to push back, Atkins said, ‘You’re using that leg, you know.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. I can feel it. You ought to try putting more weight on it when you walk.’

‘Hurts like hell.’

‘Not the end of the world, I daresay.’

The meals continued to be enormous, the chicken soup a major part through the first breakfast; by then, Denton had had enough of it and ordered that he wasn’t to be faced with it any more. The second morning, there were kidneys and bacon and eggs and buttery rolls, and Denton complained about too much food.

‘Got to fatten you up, Colonel. Prodigal son come home, and so on. Fatted calf time.’

Denton read his mail and tried not to wonder what Janet Striker was finding in Normandy. All sorts of people had written to him about the shooting - his editor, Lang, nervously, Henry James a bit pompously but in fact rather touchingly. Denton was still at the stage of feeling a stranger in his own house, still catching up with the world that had passed him by. The good wishes of people he hadn’t seen for several months now seemed insubstantial.

At tea, to make conversation, he said to Atkins, ‘What’s happened with your moving picture?’

‘Oh, rather a tale, that. Interesting, amusing, and a delight to both adults and children.’

‘Good. Amuse and delight me.’

Atkins was eating bits of Denton’s toast and sipping tea from an oversized cup. He smiled. ‘Bit of a long story.’

‘I have lots of time.’

‘Well, then—Well, you disappeared from the scene when we was making pictures up in Victoria Park. I’d learned from earlier adventures and got us a permit to shoot blanks in the muskets. Gave us permission to “perform patriotic manoeuvres with rendered-safe firearms”, for which we had to pay for a policeman to watch over us. Also had to provide him with lunch, the which he thought should be a banquet. Anyway, we got through that all right, and then we finished with the pictures of the soldier’s return down at your front door again.’

‘Why didn’t you make that and the farewell at the same time? More efficient!’

‘What, and have to cut up the film and paste it back together? Not likely, General! No, we did it all in the order it would play, see? Then we have the film what they call “processed”, meaning the pictures come out, and then we bang it back in the camera and project it on a sheet. Did I mention that the camera was also the projecting machine? Well, it was.

‘We rented a former scraps and findings shop just off the Whitechapel Road and had a couple of signs made, “The Boer War - Fascination in Moving Pictures! Villainous Boer and Courageous British Hero! Patriotism Personified!” And so on. Even brought in benches from a Methodist mission that went bust over the way - unheard of, sitting down for a moving picture. Great sensation.

‘So we were prepared to open on a Friday - “open” is what they say in the theatre world, I suppose from the curtains, which we didn’t have - and I was standing outside, ready to take the money of the gathering horde, when up come three fellas with very serious expressions, one of which turns out to be a legal type who slaps a paper into my hand and says, “You’re out of business.” Then the other two chaps go in and seize the picture machine and carry it out under the watchful eye of two constables they’ve brought for the purpose.

‘Well, you can imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The housemaid had invited her entire family, which was as rum a lot of human beings as you’d never hope to meet, and my chum was tearing his hair out in handfuls and saying we was ruined. I, however, read the piece of paper and found we were being injuncted against by the courts for violating the patent of some American who claimed that our machine was a fiddle copied from his.

‘And so it was. What my chum and partner hadn’t found out when he bought the machine was that the Pole that made it had nicked the idea. But I said to myself, Not so fast, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, where does it say they can seize our moving picture along with the machine? So I went to the chap that had sold me the insurance - you remember, you’d advised me to get insurance - and they sent a young fellow that was a clerk in a law office. But, by the time we got it to court, the Yanks had already shipped the machine to the States and had destroyed the film - burned our moving picture all to ashes.

‘The long and the longer of it was that the Yanks settled out of court for illegal destruction of a creative property not their own; my chum ran off with the housemaid; and I made back my expenses, plus three pounds, seven shillings punitive damages, in loo of one per cent of the net profit of the American company on all future moving pictures. A bird in the hand, says I.’

‘I think you did handsomely.’

‘One per cent of future profits is one per cent of nothing.’

‘You never know.’

‘I should of took the long view, you’re thinking.’

‘Not at all’

‘Moving-picture business is too risky. The Yanks wanted to hire me - said I had get-up.’ Atkins laughed. ‘The day I leave your employ, General, it’ll be for a good deal more than running about Victoria Park with a musket.’ He nibbled another piece of toast. ‘Now I’ve got my eye on the truss. You have any idea how many trusses are sold in this country every year? Met a chap who’s invented a pneumatic truss. Latest thing. What do you think?’

‘Did you ever see your moving picture?’

Atkins chewed, thought, shrugged. ‘I saw it made.’

Later that evening, a telegram came from Janet Striker:

‘They
were
bones, Denton. Bones and some leathery-looking stuff I suppose was skin. I’m afraid I felt a bit faint.’

‘You’re sure they were human.’

‘I wanted to believe they weren’t! I’d got a very nice young man named Emile to dig. I told him we were looking for buried money. It gave him something to look forward to. When he found the first bone, he said it was a cow. It seemed to me too slender to be a cow, so I had him dig farther along, where the feet might be. Well.’ She gave him a partial smile. ‘It was a very human foot, with a lot of the skin still intact.’

‘What did you tell the farmer?’

‘I’d given him twenty-five francs; for that, I didn’t think I had to tell him anything. My story was that I wanted to paint where my friend the milord had painted. I set myself up at the door of the barn with a chair and a watercolour block and my paints and tried to look artistic while Emile did the digging.’

‘You paint, too?’

‘I can do anything that my mother thought would make me more saleable - insipid watercolours, insipid piano music, insipid talk - but nothing remotely useful. I learned accounting on a course at the People’s Palace, but in order to take it I had first to do a course in arithmetic. It was humiliating!’

‘And the police, the French police?’

‘Very suspicious - of me. I finally told them to wire Munro at New Scotland Yard and he’d explain everything. Of course he didn’t. But I looked respectable - meaning I looked as if I had money - and so they didn’t toss me into the lock-up. They did want to know why we were digging in a barn, and I told him them the truth, which of course they thought was a fantastical improvisation. Emile confused things by saying we were digging for treasure. However, the main point was that we’d found human remains, and after the second day they let me come home.’

‘Do you think it was Arthur Crum?’

‘How would I know? I was so sickened by what I saw - I’ve seen a lot in the East End, Denton; I’m not easily made queasy - but the thought that those scraps of white leather and long bones were human—!’

‘
White
leather?’

‘Yes, the skin, what was left of it, looked white.’

‘I’d have thought it would be brown.’

‘Don’t quibble.’

She had returned late in the morning, had come straight to his house. She looked remarkable - a travelling costume in a green so dark it was almost black, her hair done in a new way, a mannish hat like a homburg, a single peacock’s sword slanting down from it. She could wear clothes with a masculine cut - often a lesbian uniform - without seeming to make any proclamation about herself: she
was
herself, the scar down her face worn now without apology or even powder.

‘You’re magnificent,’ he said.

‘You mustn’t say things like that.’ She had reddened. ‘Come, Atkins says you must exercise - walk up and down the room with me.’

‘Atkins is trying to kill me - he brought two dumb-bells down from the attic this morning and told me to start lifting them.’ He groaned as he got out of his chair. ‘Only ten pounds each, and I had trouble getting them off the floor. God, when will this be over!’

They walked the length of the room and back, then up it again to the window over the garden, where he stopped, then leaned against the window frame and looked out. ‘Somebody’s bought the house behind,’ he said.

‘Good for Atkins! He didn’t tell you.’

‘What didn’t he tell me?’

She smiled. ‘
I
bought it.’

She was a few inches shorter than he; he looked down into her eyes. It dawned on him what she meant: she had found a way to live, if not with him, then near him. He pulled her to himself clumsily, off-balance; he kissed her. She tipped her head back and said, ‘What did you think I’d gone away for, Denton? I had to decide about you. And I decided.’ She kissed him again. ‘There’s to be a door knocked in the garden wall. For those who want to visit.’ When he bent to kiss her again, she said, ‘And there’s to be a lock on my side of the door. For those who don’t want a visit.’

He said, ‘I wish we could go to bed.’

‘Who says we can’t?’

‘I’m so - so—’

‘Like hell.’ She led him back down the room to the short corridor that led to his ad hoc bedroom, then into it, where she took his stick and pushed him gently down. He lay on his elbows, watching her as she undressed - that always-renewed wonder. Naked, she came to the foot of the bed, then climbed him like a horizontal ladder and took him to a place he had feared he would never see again.

Munro came on the Monday about the middle of the day. Denton had been working with the ten-pound dumb-bells on his sitting-room floor, gasping and groaning as if they weighed a hundred; by the time Munro had been shown up, he was knotting a cord around a dressing gown.

‘By God, it’s good to see you standing.’ Munro seemed truly glad to see him; he even shook Denton’s hand.

‘I’ve a long row to hoe yet.’

Munro bent and picked up one of the dumb-bells. ‘About six stone’s worth, I’d say. Well, Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ Munro sat heavily. ‘You’ve heard from Mrs Striker, I suppose?’

‘She’s here, in fact. She’s staying upstairs.’ Denton smiled. ‘Where I can’t go. Can’t do stairs yet.’

Munro didn’t say
But she can
; probably he didn’t care. What he did say was, ‘She’s stirred up a hornet’s nest at the Yard.’

‘You should be grateful.’ Denton, for his part, didn’t say
You wouldn’t do it yourself.

‘A detective arrived from Paris this morning - last night, actually. Was practically waiting on the doorstep this morning. He’s very keen.’

‘What have they found?’

‘Well, you don’t think he’s going to tell me right off, do you?’ Munro laughed. He seemed in good spirits. ‘Lot of horse-trading to be done. Whose case, and so on. Matter of jurisdiction. He jabbered something about the Quai d’Orsay, which I found later means their foreign office. Bloody French haven’t forgotten Waterloo, I think. Anyway, he seems to be a good copper, and very keen when it comes to murder.’