Bohemian Girl, The (41 page)

When they were out on the street, Janet Striker said, ‘I hope you don’t believe she’ll do what you told her to.’

‘No. She thinks Mary’s a victim, and she’ll side with her. Still, it was worth a try.’

Walking down Fitzroy Street, Janet said, ‘You thought all along she was the one?’

‘Since I thought there had to be somebody, yes. She seemed the likeliest. I’d rather it was Geddys - I don’t like him, and I like her - but I’ll take what I can get.’

‘You going to tell Munro?’

‘Mmm. Maybe. Not yet.’

She squeezed his arm. He told her he wanted to walk, to help his recovery; they went on down Charlotte Street. The bad leg dragged and had to be favoured, with much use of the walking stick, but he got around well on it now, not as fast as he used to but well enough. At Oxford Street, she suggested they stroll along past the shops. ‘If you’re not too tired.’

‘Being tired isn’t the problem; it’s being
slow.
’ They turned into Oxford Street. ‘You have shopping to do?’

‘I come to places like this to look. To see what I’m not missing, perhaps. Mrs Cohan is making curtains at the moment; I’m shopping for ideas.’

‘Which you won’t buy?’

‘She knows the remnant houses in the East End. We’ll go there when I know what I want. She has fantastic taste. One of her places has bolts of old Liberty silks and cashmeres, magnificent things that are out of fashion. I intend to surround myself with it.’

The shop windows were full of coronation goods, the coronation itself still almost two months off. They saw coronation chocolates, coronation cakes, the Coronation Tea Set with Spirit Lamp and Kettle, coronation platters and plates and bone china cups with portraits of the new king and queen. A coronation corset was being advertised.

‘The Socialists say that the coronation is a trick, a very large piece of advertising for capitalism and the Empire,’ she said.

‘What do you know about the Socialists?’

‘I go to the Reading Room. I read about everything! Because I know nothing, Denton - nothing! I’m as ignorant as that Irish girl, except I can write a ladylike hand.’

‘Atkins has got himself into the truss business. They’re going to call it the Coronation Model if they can get it ready in time.’

They stopped at a window where a portrait of the king was displayed on a carved easel and surrounded with velour draperies. She said, ‘A fairly common type in a whorehouse.’

‘Kings?’

‘Fat men with stinking cigar breath and plenty of money to pay people to do things that humiliate them.’

‘You don’t have respect for your new sovereign?’

‘None.’

They turned back at Oxford Circus. She said, ‘What would you think of my attending University College?’

‘If it’s what you want to do.’

‘I’m so ignorant. Truly, I don’t know anything. I might even take a degree. Would you mind?’

‘If you became learned? Of course not. A degree in what?’

She hesitated as if she feared his answer. ‘Economics,’ she said. ‘I so like having money.’ They both started laughing.

April turned into May, May into June. Heseltine had been dead six months, Erasmus Himple even longer. Mary Thomason and Arthur Crum or whoever they were had vanished.

The Boer War stumbled to an end. Janet Striker moved into her house, with the Cohans to take care of her. Atkins’s vegetable garden produced baby lettuces and early peas and threatened courgettes. Denton rowed on the river every other day from a boathouse above Hammersmith Bridge. The first time, he had worn old trousers and a shirt without a collar but had been surprised to see that most of the men who were serious about it wore some costume of the sort Janet Striker had given him. They seemed unembarrassed by the mid-calf trousers and the collarless shirts, even by the little caps. They looked distinctly silly to him, but he had long since resigned himself to a culture in which the well-off wore different kinds of clothes for every activity and didn’t feel ridiculous in them. Thereafter, he carried his rowing clothes in a little satchel, changed in the boathouse with the rest and rowed in what he called ‘my funny duds’. Warmer weather proved their value: he sweated buckets - so much so that he had to buy two more outfits.

Usually, he rowed downriver, now and then as far as Battersea, then back up against the current, with or against the tide; if he felt strong, he went on past Hammersmith as far as Mortlake before turning back. He loved the pull of the oars, the feeling of power returning in his shoulders. He could lift a hundred pounds again, although only a few lifts without a rest as yet; he had gained back more than twenty of the lost pounds; when he walked, the bad leg had to be favoured but he put the stick aside; he rarely looked behind him any more, although he went on carrying the Colt in the street until the weather got too warm for heavy fabrics and overcoats, and then he carried the derringer, which was easier to hide in light clothes.

The bad leg seemed better when he rowed, delivering force to push the sliding seat back. The boat was not a rowing shell but a kind of long skiff, double-ended, narrow, the interior an intricate crossing of narrow planks and ribs every two inches, the whole thing varnished to a warm, glowing brown. He found himself holding his own with other rowers, knew that his long-postponed urge to row had been correct.

The coronation had been scheduled for 26 June. The city was brilliant with bunting; the newspapers were burbling with patriotism; a kind of hysteria had gripped people of all classes - the Socialists were right: the selling power of the coronation was enormous. Even the sweatshop workers saved to buy a Britannia-ware coronation spoon. There hadn’t been a coronation, after all, in sixty-some years.

On 24 June, the king had an attack of appendicitis. The coronation was put off.

As Denton passed through the city on what should have been the great day, he got a sense of vaguely nasty resentment. It was as if a child’s treat had been denied. The marketing of the crown had created a huge appetite whose denial led to tantrums. There seemed to be an unusual amount of bickering in the underground station. Men whose uniformly black business clothes had been brightened by patriotic colour in the buttonhole were funereal again. People scowled. Although it was the most beautiful day so far of a beautiful summer, the only comment Denton overheard was ‘What a day!’ It was not meant happily.

Changed into his ridiculous costume, he stood on the wooden ramp that sloped down to the water, momentarily leaning on the long, spoon-bladed oars. The water glittered. It was still hardly eight o’clock; the sun was not yet hot, and a soft breeze was blowing upstream, bringing with it what he thought was a smell of the sea. ‘What is so rare as a day in June?’ he muttered, then reminded himself that an American had written that.

He glanced around him, the habit still there, looking for the shadow that never grew solid - Jarrold was still in the institution in Devon, would always be so. The derringer had been left in the valise; a pistol out on the river seemed absurd. Standing in the sun in that glorious weather, he thought,
I’m still afraid.
He shook the idea off. There was no reason for anybody to follow him now. He was out of it - it was all a police matter now, and already an old one, at that.

The case was open, but Mary Thomason and Arthur Crum were gone. The old man at the Albany gate thought he might have seen somebody who looked like the drawings of Crum, but he couldn’t tell them more than that. Munro had got an exhumation order, despite Heseltine’s father’s anguish; the local coroner had found damage to the back of the skull ‘consistent with a blow or a fall’. But the trail, as Munro had said, was dead cold.

The boat, as always when he first got into it, felt like an uneasy eggshell, yet when he was seated it was secure enough that he could rock his hips and feel no loss of balance. He started downriver slowly, the incoming tide only a ripple against his bow.

Working his shoulders, he increased his power without upping his tempo; after turning around at Battersea, he raised the beat, his legs working, the boat seeming to fly over the water. On he went upstream, past Putney and Hammersmith and then, feeling glorious and strong and exultant in the day, past Mortlake.

There was bunting on houses and boats along the bank. It had been meant to be a holiday; some people were apparently going to make it one, anyway. A steam launch chugged past, flags flying, heading for Hampton Court; other rowing boats, always recalling water insects, darted back and forth. He went on up the river, his beat slower now, making himself a tourist looking at houses and boats and people, seeing himself as part of the spectacle.

Up past the little village of Strand-on-the-Green. He had been there - why? - of course, to visit the valet, Brown. He looked over his shoulder, searching out Brown’s house, which he remembered for its steep roof and bright blue trim. And, yes, there it was, a low concrete wall meant to keep the river out separating its back garden from the tidal mud, a flagpole flying the Union Jack; in the garden, flowers along each side, multi-coloured, pastel, the stuff of art. And as if called up by that idea, on the green of the little lawn, a woman in a white dress, sitting at an easel.

He came even with the house and went on, meaning to turn around at Kew, and he saw the woman only as a woman - white gown, straw hat, long hair - and then in an instant he saw everything, so startled that he caught a crab with his left oar and almost flipped the boat. Had she noticed? No; she was looking the other way.

He was rowing hard again, sweating, the sweat stinging his eyes. He turned almost too fast at Kew Bridge, backing with one oar, the gunwale coming within an inch of the water, and then he was pulling downriver again and moving to his right, bringing the boat in closer to the stairs that pierced the concrete dyke. He had picked out the high dormer of Brown’s house with its blue-trimmed window, the flagpole and the flag, and he kept his eyes on them until he was right at the shore and beached the boat at the foot of a flight of stairs. He got out clumsily, his bad leg trailing.

The mud was sticky and smelled bad. He grabbed the bow and pulled the boat up the gently sloping bank and tied it off in a ring set in the stone. For no other reason than vanity, he tossed the absurd little hat into the boat. He patted a pocket for the derringer and then remembered that it, too, was back at Hammersmith.

No matter.

Nothing mattered - only this: to climb these stairs, and cross this lawn and then the next and then to approach the woman who was painting at the easel in Brown’s back garden. He never took his eyes from her; she was looking partly upriver, must have seen him as part of her scene as he had rowed up. A bit of moving, anonymous colour.

He stepped over a clump of tall summer flowers and pulled his bad leg after and said, loud enough for her to hear, ‘Miss Mary Thomason, I think.’

Her head whirled.

‘Or is it Arthur Crum?’

She screamed and got up so fast the easel swayed and fell on the bright green grass. Lifting her white skirts, she ran, crying, ‘Ralph! Ralph, help me!’ Her yellow straw hat came off and drifted to the grass.

Denton cursed the leg and the bullet wounds. He moved as fast as he could, a man walking like a pair of compasses, huge strides, stiff. He could hear her screaming the name Ralph. She went through a doorway. The top half was mullioned glass; he could see her after she closed it, a terrified face, hands working frantically.

He didn’t try to be polite. His momentum carried him to within a few feet of the door, his weight coming on his right leg, which was clumsy but would carry it, and, as an extension of his long stride, he raised his good leg and kicked the door open and almost fell through it as his right leg lost its balance.

‘Ralph! Kill him - kill him—’

Through the door, he saw her within two yards of him and reached out. He was late in seeing motion to his right and behind him; too late, he turned, his right arm up, and caught an iron poker just above the elbow as it slammed down where his head was meant to be. The arm went dead, pain shooting to the shoulder. He saw the poker raised again. The face of Brown the valet was dark red, the eyes wide open with hatred. Denton forced himself in tight against the man and felt the poker swing behind him; he smashed his forehead into Brown’s face. Blood spurted. Denton had his left hand twisted into the man’s shirt then, pulling him close and using his head again to batter him, then kneeing him in the groin and hearing him howl. Denton swung him to his right and flung him into a wall. The valet collapsed down it to a sitting position. He put his hands in front of him.

Denton picked the poker up in his left hand. Brown’s eyes pleaded:
No more
. Denton hit him backhanded with the iron poker. The sound was like a hammer hitting a post.

The woman screamed. She turned and ran for a flight of stairs and up them. Denton followed as fast he could, reaching the bottom of the stairs only as a door slammed on the floor above. He started up, found it hard going without his stick, and he threw the poker aside and used a banister to pull himself up with his right hand. It was like rowing one-handed, the muscles bunching in his back, the blow on the upper arm aching.

At the top, a corridor ran the length of the small house, a door on each side. He saw but didn’t register the prettiness of it - rag rugs on the floor, watercolours on the walls, fresh flowers. His attention was on the closed door on his left. He tried the handle; it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. He pushed, felt a slight movement and heard the sound of scraping. She had pushed something against it from the other side.

He couldn’t kick this one open, and he couldn’t easily push it with his shoulder. Instead, he put his back against the door and turned the knob with his left hand. It was like pushing the sliding seat in the boat.