Bohemian Girl, The (4 page)

‘Yes, but take it off, the most memorable thing about you is gone, you’re nobody!’

Denton had started in on it as soon as he had come through his front door. ‘He could have been following me all day. Probably was!’

‘Master of disguise, you mean? Popping in and out of beards and Inverness capes? Bit
Strand Magazine
, isn’t it?’

‘You’re the one who said he was a rum one!’

‘So he was. But like you pointed out, General, black bowlers is tuppence a hundred.’

‘Well, red moustaches aren’t. And at New Scotland Yard! Hell’s bells, that’s brazen.’

He had shouted his way up the stairs and into the sitting room, had shucked himself out of his overcoat and tossed it at Atkins, thrown his hat at a table and flung himself into his armchair before Atkins managed to say, ‘You got a telegram. Telegram from
her
, eh? On the sideboard.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you say so?’

Atkins muttered something that sounded like ‘Just listen to yourself’ and wandered away with the coat. Denton tore the telegram apart and read:

His heart jumped, even though the message was as impersonal as a military order. He tried to remember his own message to her. Had it been as heartless? Had he started them off wrong? He threw himself down again. He remembered her choice once before of an ABC - a shop of the Aerated Bread Company, cheap and faceless. Five tomorrow - twenty-four hours more, good God.

Returning, Atkins said, ‘You’ve a parcel, too.’ He was standing now behind Denton’s chair; next to him, Rupert was cleaning his private parts. Atkins handed Denton a battered package. ‘From the garden of Central Europe.’ He had been holding it with both hands; Denton took it, found why: it was heavy. Atkins wasn’t leaving, his posture said; he wanted to see what was in the package. To make sure that he did, he held out his pocket-knife, already open.

The package was tied with heavy string that had been stuck down with sealing wax in six places; the paper, brown, cheap, had been so battered in its travels that it looked like lizard skin, but the string had held everything together. The stamps were triangular, green and purple, now peeling. Denton cut the string, then enlarged a tear in the front of the package to reveal something like a tea box, which the knife made quick work of - the small nails in the lid could be prised up - and Denton dumped the contents into his chair: a tied packet of envelopes with British stamps, the name Striker in the upper left corners (his heart lurched); two objects wrapped in the same brown paper and tied with the same string, one long, one short, both heavy; and, in a separate envelope, a photograph and a sheet of embossed notepaper. ‘From Colonel Cieljescu,’ he said.

‘The Transylvanian Napoleon.’

‘Now, now—’ Colonel Cieljescu had subjected Denton to long, almost nightly monologues about ‘culture’, most of which Denton hadn’t understood because he didn’t know Central European history, but the gist of it had been that English was a barbaric language and America was a desert. ‘I think it was the Colonel who got us sprung from that hole.’

‘Katya said it was God’s will.’

‘Yes, but the Colonel had the keys. Somebody left the doors open, and if you tell me it was an angel, I’ll fire you.’ He pocketed the letters from Janet Striker, then tore open the two heavy wrappings: one was his Navy Colt, the other his derringer.

‘Must be he don’t fancy antiques,’ Atkins said.

Denton pulled out the note. Under an embossed double eagle and the name of the prison where they had almost starved was the date in blue ink - three weeks before, a month after their ‘escape’ - and a message:

Denton picked up the photograph. A large man in uniform, recognizably the Colonel, was sitting in the passenger seat of a motor car, recognizably Denton’s Daimler 8. The man was smiling. Beside him, a driver, less clear, sat with both hands grasping the wheel as if to keep it from flying away.

Denton burst into laughter. ‘It’s our motor car! He sent back my guns and he kept the car!’

Atkins looked over his shoulder. He groaned. ‘That’s Katya beside him. That’s
Katya
!’

‘God works in mysterious ways.’

Atkins snatched his knife from Denton’s hand and turned for the stairs. ‘I’m sure there’s an explanation. She was to me an angel!’ He strode away, and Denton heard him mutter as he closed the door, ‘The bitch—’

Denton found himself filled again with something that felt good - contentment, perhaps, even happiness. At once, with the two pistols in his lap, he read Mrs Striker’s letters. Written weeks before, they were about trivia - her job with the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women, her alcoholic mother, the weather, her piano - but they delighted him. More than that, the
fact
of them delighted him. The last letter was dated well after they had left the prison, so she had gone on writing even when he hadn’t. Never intimately, never warmly, always signing herself ‘your friend’, but
she had written
.

He loaded the derringer - .41 black-powder Remington, wildly inaccurate but horrific at a foot or two - and put it in its old place in the box on the mantel, then took the Colt up to the attic and laid it in its case. Somebody in Transylvania had screwed the balls out and dumped the gunpowder and cleaned it. Closing the lid on it now, he thought, was like closing a coffin - the pistol, which he had picked up on a Civil War battlefield and carried through his early years in the West, which he had used to kill the man who had been threatening to slash Janet Striker’s throat only six months before - the pistol had earned a rest. Obsolete, big, it had become a relic. He loved the Colt, but sentiment has its limits.

Downstairs again, he clapped his hands together and walked up and down his bedroom. It was all right. Everything would be all right. Her message had seemed curt because that was the nature of telegrams. The ABC could be quickly got over. Or out of. He was back, he was free, he was going to see her. What were twenty-four hours after all these weeks?

He put the photograph and Cieljescu’s letter in an envelope to go to his publisher, Gweneth; if that didn’t settle the matter of the motor car, the hell with him.

On the second morning back, Atkins said as he presented his coffee, ‘Garden’s a jungle.’

‘What, out back?’

‘Yes, that one. I thought I’d hang your suits out there. What a hope! Need a map to find the garden wall.’

‘Start weeding.’

‘My hat.’ Atkins was many things but not a gardener. He poured Denton’s coffee and said, ‘Find us somebody with a strong back and a deal of patience.’

‘Aren’t there gardening agencies?’

‘There’s everything; this is London. You want an egg? I had one. Quite good. Or a kipper.’

‘Why do you buy kippers? You know I don’t like them.’

‘I do.’

‘Poached, on toast, bacon.’

‘If you care, the parlourmaid next door but one says the madam there complains that the seeds from our weeds are spoiling her garden.’

‘I’ll get somebody - dear God, we just got back!’

‘Middle-class respectability. Weeds not respectable. Preserve with your toast?’

‘Is that the same as jam? Yes, jam.’

Atkins padded off downstairs - he affected Prince Albert slippers in the house - with Rupert puffing behind him. Until his breakfast came, Denton worked on the novel, a writing tablet in his lap, the words coming faster than he could move the pen. It would be all right now: the book was still in his head, perhaps with a vividness it had lacked when first created, needing only to be set down. He hurried because he didn’t want to forget it, yes, but he hurried also because money, finally, was the issue, not art: without the novel, he would come on hard times in eight or ten months. With it, he could look ahead a year and a half, time to write something else.

Atkins brought the first mail of the day at ten - bills (how could there be bills when he hadn’t been there?), four dinner invitations he’d refuse - then lunch at twelve from the public house next door, the Lamb. At two, he was back with more mail, this time including an answer from Aubrey Heseltine:
Would Mr Denton care to drop by Albany 134-B tomorrow between two and five?
Mr Denton supposed he would.

At four, he stopped. He had written thirty-seven pages. If it hadn’t been Janet Striker he was stopping for, he’d have gone on. And on, although he knew it was better to stop, better to leave some water in the bucket for tomorrow.

He accepted Atkins’s advice about clothes. Atkins of course knew without his saying so that he was going to meet Mrs Striker; Atkins wasn’t above doing archaeology in his wastebasket. A dark frock coat, grey waistcoat, subdued necktie. He rejected lavender although told the colour was ‘immensely fashionable’. A soft hat, but with a narrower brim than he really liked.

‘This ain’t the Wild West, General.’

He walked again to Lloyd Baker Street and dropped off the day’s work. As he had the day before, he behaved like a guilty man (what was it about the typewriter - she was a mouse), stopping to pretend to look at houses, trees, birds, then covertly looking back down the way he had come. Had he seen anybody? He couldn’t be sure. Nobody he saw twice, certainly - nobody he could run after. He told himself he was still disoriented from the trip and fled from the typewriter’s, first down Goswell Road, then Aldersgate, finally to the ABC on Barbican - fifteen minutes early, even though it was no good being early; she would be on time. He didn’t fancy sitting in the tea shop alone. He walked, thinking about the novel, about her, about Mary Thomason, who had sent him a letter and might be dead or married or living at home by now. Nobody following; he’d checked again and again. When he finally got to the ABC a second time, he was ten minutes late.

She was, of course, there. She was sitting at a far table, wearing as always an unattractive black hat, a dress that even he knew was years out of fashion - something about the widely puffed sleeves. She turned her head and saw him and he felt a pang of sadness for her: the knife slash down her face was now a red ribbon that seemed to have escaped from her hat. It was nothing she could or did try to hide; seeing him, she even seemed to turn the left side of her face more towards him as if to display it.

‘I’m late. I’m sorry I’m late. I didn’t want to be early.’

‘I was early.’

‘I came by before - maybe you were already here.’ It was a ridiculous conversation. He had known they wouldn’t pick up where they had left off six months before - that grudging and hard-won, only partial intimacy - but this was worse, almost like a first time. He sat, then got himself tea at her urging, some kind of supposedly edible bun, put it down on the table, where it sat, uneaten, for as long as they were there. He thanked her for her letters, explained about the package that had come the day before.

She hardly spoke. It became terrible - long silences, questions that got one-syllable answers. The trivial and the obvious. He said, ‘And your mother?’

Her mother had in effect sold her when she was seventeen; the husband was older, brutal, had put her in a mental institution when she had rebelled. She smiled with one side of her face - the unscarred side. ‘My mother is being seen to.’ She looked up from the teacup she was using to make overlapping rings on the tablecloth. ‘She is senile, and, as you know, a drunkard. I stood it as long as I could. She’s in a house with three other old women and a matron of sorts who cares for them.’ She put the cup down in its saucer. ‘She’s dying.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, don’t say things like that, Denton! I can’t be sorry; why should you? I’m sorry
for
her, but not
sorry.
’

He told her about Mary Thomason. She seemed uninterested. Her life was spent counselling prostitutes in how to get off the street, find work; she hadn’t much use, he supposed, for nice young women. She had been a prostitute herself, ‘never a very good one’. He tried to think of funny stories from his months away, but they fell flat. Out of nowhere, she said, ‘I’m going to be fairly well off.’

‘Money?’

‘The suit’s being settled.’

He remembered. She’d sued an Oxford college for her share of her husband’s estate after he’d changed his will and shot himself. The case had been going on for fourteen years. She said, ‘They tried to wear me out, but I got too expensive. I’m to get half the estate plus the pension that should have been my mother’s payment for turning me over to him.’

‘You can stop working.’

‘Can I? And do what? Become one of the women I despise? Go to live in Florence?’ She stared into the teacup, rubbed the rings she’d made with her finger. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Denton. I’m being unpleasant.’ She looked up. ‘You thought it would be different, didn’t you?’

‘I thought—’ She made him angry when she was like this. ‘Yes, I thought it would be different.’

‘So did I. I thought we would—’ She got up. ‘Let’s walk.’

It was still light outside, full daylight but of a colour that seemed ominous, a yellow-green; the air was sultry, wrong for late September. He wondered what he had done to spoil things; it couldn’t all be her doing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.