Bohemian Girl, The (5 page)

She put her hand in his arm.

They turned into Aldersgate and walked towards St Paul’s, then diverted towards the tangle of Little Britain. He suggested dinner but she said she couldn’t. She never gave explanations. ‘Couldn’t’ might simply mean that she wouldn’t. He had thought that he might be able to whisk her off to the Café Royal, a place he liked and in which he felt comfortable, but of course she wouldn’t. Perhaps it was the scar, which ran from cheekbone to chin, that was behind that ‘couldn’t’.

As if tuned to his thought, she said, ‘You saw the scar.’

‘Of course.’

‘The doctors wanted to operate again and hide it somehow. I don’t think they really knew what they’d do.’

‘Now you’ll have the money.’

‘That isn’t the point.’

‘No, of course. But don’t you—’

‘The women are afraid of it. It’s got hard for me to talk to some of them. They see it and they think, “That’s what could happen to me, some man,” and they don’t want to be reminded of that part of their lives, and they stay away from me. If I were going to stay, I’d tell the doctors to have a go, but I’m not. I don’t give a damn what other people think.’

‘Least of all men.’

She hesitated. ‘Most men.’

‘Me?’

‘You’re always the exception. That’s why I—’ She teetered on the edge of saying it, and he stopped so that she’d stop, too, but she pulled her hand away from his arm and he saw that he’d lost the moment.

‘Janet—’

‘Don’t - please—’

‘Janet, I want—’

‘Don’t tell me what you want!’ She backed away. A man going by had to veer around her, looked at them angrily. She paid no attention. ‘You’re moving too fast.’

‘For God’s sake, Janet, I’ve been away six months! Things didn’t just stand still for me; I—’

‘Don’t tell me!’ She looked her worst then - red-faced, gaunt, absurdly dressed. She had told him once that she’d been a pretty girl, the reason her mother had ‘got a good price’ for her, but nearly five years in a prison for the criminally insane had worked on her like a holystone. Now, in her late thirties, she could never be thought ‘pretty’, seldom even handsome. But her face was passionate and intelligent, contorted now with her fear of him. ‘Don’t draw me in!’

‘Janet, I want to be with you.’

She made an impatient gesture with her right hand, as if she were pushing away a child or an animal. ‘Oh, I wish I’d never met you!’

‘You don’t mean that!’

Two people coming towards them separated and went around, both pretending not to see them. She waited for them to go on and said, sagging, ‘No, I don’t mean that. But I wish I did!’ She started off in the direction they had come. ‘Don’t follow me! I mean it. Give me a day - two days—’

‘I don’t even know where you live.’

He had followed her a few steps despite what she’d said; they had both stopped again. She waited, looking down at St Paul’s as if expecting the dome to tell her what to say. ‘I’ll write to you.’

‘If you write, it’ll be too easy to say you don’t want to see me. I want us to meet.’

‘Yes. Yes, that was cowardly of me.’ She held up a hand as if to push him off. ‘I’ll write to you where and when.’

And she strode away.

He looked after her. He was enraged and saddened, the two feelings wound together. She was ugly, he told himself; she was cold; what sort of hold could such a woman have over him? But it was no good. The hold was real.

He turned his head back towards St Paul’s in time to see a figure change its course and disappear into what seemed a solid wall. The movement had been furtive, he thought; Atkins’s ‘rum type’ came to him. The change of direction, the movement could have been those of somebody following him, thinking himself seen and dodging into a doorway.

It was what his anger needed. Feeding on it, he charged down Little Britain Street and found a gap where the figure had disappeared. He came into a wider lane, blue-grey sky darkening overhead. He saw openings to his left and ahead, chose the second, plunged on, his long legs like scissors cutting up the distance.

Ahead was a cul-de-sac; another opening, barely an alleyway, opened to his right. He turned into it and found his way blocked fifty feet on by a wooden gate higher than his head. It was another small courtyard, grimy windows looking down on him, a single doorway up two feet off the pavement with no steps to it, above it a gallows-like beam meant to hold a block and tackle. The place felt unused and dusty, as if he’d opened a door on it that had been locked for decades. Not even a pigeon.

Chasing spooks.

He decided to take his ghosts to some place that served alcohol.

He woke from troubling dreams to taste the once-familiar sourness of hangover. A voice was calling. The bed shook and he realized it was he who was shaking or being shaken. He opened his eyes.

‘Profuse apologies, General, but you like to be up by half-seven.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Pushing eight. I brought tea and a headache powder.’

‘I was out late.’

‘Hardly news.’

Denton heard the tray clatter on the desktop. His breath was foul; his head ached, but not at that level that suggested real calamity. He sat up - the room didn’t swim.

What had he done? In fact, he remembered it quite well. The Criterion, the Princess Louise, the Lamb. He reviewed the evening: no gaps, no horrors, a certain amount of sordid boozing.

‘There was one thing,’ he said aloud.

‘Only one?’ Atkins handed him the cup of tea.

‘Don’t be cute when I’m like this; my temper’s short. Yes, only one. When I got home, I could see a light in the house beyond the back garden. Where you saw the red moustache before.’

‘Certain fact?’

‘Not the drink nor the lateness, no. It was a quarter of one - I remember looking at my watch.’

‘House’s supposed to be empty. Somebody looking this place over for an entry, could be.’ Atkins had been given a bad knock on the head by somebody who had broken in the year before. ‘I think I’d like the derringer until this is settled, if you don’t mind.’

‘Mmm.’ He did mind, but he understood. ‘Time I bought myself another pistol, I think.’

Later, Atkins presented a raw egg with Worcester and lemon, which he dutifully drank down despite feeling better by then. The headache remained - to have lost it entirely so early would have been to miss the point of the lesson - and a slight imbalance if he moved too fast, but he could work and think. And worry about Mrs Striker, who might well send him a note saying she never wanted to see him again.

In the middle of the morning, he broke from his work to go up to the attic, where he pushed the hundred-pound weight off his chest fifty times and rowed on the contraption for fifteen minutes before shooting twenty shots with the Flobert pistols. When he was done, he unlocked the skylight and put his head out. He meant to look down at the rear of the house behind his own. Regrettably, the roof was in the way.

He had a panic fear of heights that was not quite great enough to keep him from going out. Last year, somebody had got into his house this way; now, going out, he saw how reckless the man had been. The centre of the roof was flat, but around it were cascades of slate down to the eaves, interrupted only by four multi-flued chimneys. He all but crawled to the edge of the flat part, then held a chimney as a child holds its mother and looked down. To his relief, he could see what he wanted: the house behind had a cellar entrance that was reached by a door seemingly flat on the ground, actually angled down from the foundation wall. There was also a rear entrance at ground level, probably giving directly on the kitchen and pantry.

Not a problem getting in for anybody with some tools.
He meant himself as well as the man Atkins had seen; he was thinking of breaking into the house and looking for signs that somebody had in fact been there. A moment’s thought showed him what a bad idea he had had. If he found anything, he would then have to tell the police; they would have him for breaking and entering - enough to test even Munro’s indulgence of him.

He crawled back to the skylight, slipped in and locked it, his heart pounding.

The morning’s letters were on his desk when he reached it: two more invitations he would refuse, another letter from a publisher promising better terms than he was getting from his current firm, one from somebody who offered ‘to increase his income substantially by representing his works to publishers in a competitive fashion, for a small percentage’. That was new, he thought - every writer he knew made his own arrangements. Or took what was on offer; few were in any position to bargain.

And another letter from the man (or woman?) calling himself-herself ‘Albert Cosgrove’:

No return address.

‘Mad as a hatter,’ Denton said.

When Atkins came upstairs again, Denton showed him the letter. Atkins said, ‘Raving lunatic.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man, of course. Not a woman’s hand.’

‘Some of it sounds a little, mmm, romantic. Excessive.’

‘That’s the lunatic part. Along with the conversations, which it sounds like he thinks he’s already had.’ Atkins looked at the letter again. ‘The bit about seeing you in good health - that sounds like he’s been looking at you.’

‘You mean you think he’s your man with the red moustache?’

‘I don’t like him, Colonel.’

He wrote until two; by then he had set down forty-one new pages as if he had been taking dictation. He was reluctant to stop, but he was at the point again where to do more was to put tomorrow’s work at risk. Better to use the time to accept Mr Heseltine’s invitation to the Albany.

He wore one of his American hats, decidedly too wide in the brim for London, the choice deliberate to counter the snobbery he thought he was going to find in Aubrey Heseltine. So were the boots - old, polished but deeply wrinkled, brown rather than black, what he supposed Henry James would call ‘louche’. Going out, he opened the box to take the derringer without thinking, but the box was empty, and he remembered that Atkins had wanted it.

Atkins stopped him at the front door. ‘Going to rain.’ He held out an umbrella.

‘I’m not English.’

Atkins draped a mackintosh over his left arm. ‘The rain will be.’

He walked quickly to Russell Square (he’d take today’s writing to the typewriter with tomorrow’s), strode along beside the Museum, ducked into Greek Street and down to Old Compton Street, then zigzagged into Brewer Street and so behind the Café Royal at the Glasshouse Street end, giving a regretful glance at the café, where he wanted to be sitting with Janet Striker, drinking the milky coffee. He dodged across Regent Street to Piccadilly, a cacophony of horse-drawn buses and cabs and a surprising number of motor cars (many more, he thought, than a year ago - the world was speeding up), and strolled to the entrance to Albany Court. Only men lived in that odd collection of buildings called the Albany. Denton, as an American, thought that he would never understand such places, where men sequestered themselves in gated and guarded byways that had for him a feel of monastic sterility. ‘Here,’ these places said, ‘lives masculine Privilege; avert your eyes and pass on.’ Maybe it was a residue of their (irrationally named) public schools. Boys together, and so on. Perpetual boys?

‘Heseltine,’ he barked at the attendant. ‘I’m expected.’

‘Name, sir?’ The man looked old enough to be Denton’s father, frail enough to be on sticks; he moved with a maddening slowness. If he was the guardian, the Albany could have been easily breached - except that this was Piccadilly, and the real guardian was respectability, and habit, and the horror of ‘scenes’.

He was passed in and directed, and he strolled down the court, feeling its sense of comfort and pleasant isolation, disliking it for the same reason that he disliked having a servant. He was a democrat.

To his surprise, then, Aubrey Heseltine opened his own door. There was no mistaking him for a servant - wrong clothes, wrong manner. Aubrey Heseltine was younger than Denton had expected, shyer than he had expected, pretentious - if he was - out of unsure-ness. He was a type: almost emaciated, not much chin, prominent cheekbones with cheeks like planed surfaces, high colour, tall. Handsome in his way. ‘Neurasthenic’, to use a fashionable word.

‘Oh, do come in,’ he said as soon as he understood who Denton was. Denton’s wide hat and old boots seemed to have no effect on him. He moved about, muttering and making quick, incomplete gestures, said his man was out, apologized, said the place wasn’t his, only borrowed, stammered, blushed, then stood in the middle of the room and looked stricken.

Denton found himself pitying him. Something was very wrong with him.
Damaged
, Denton thought, not knowing why he thought so. He looked away to relieve the younger man’s embarrassment. The room was almost shabby, much lived in, Georgian without being distinguished: a fireplace with a simple mantel, two deeply set windows in one wall, what had once been called ‘Turkey’ carpets on the floor, a great many books that filled three walls, and a single framed picture between the windows.

‘Is this “the little Wesselons”?’ When Heseltine looked puzzled, Denton said, ‘That’s what you called it in your note.’ It didn’t take much to puzzle Heseltine, he thought; the young man was either injured somehow in the mind or terribly distracted.