Bohemian Girl, The (6 page)

‘Did I? How affected that must have seemed to you. Oh, I am sorry. It’s what the chap, Mr Geddys, in the shop called it - “a little Wesselons”.’

‘Well - it
is
little.’ Denton went to it. Inside a tarnished gold frame almost three inches wide was an oil no bigger than his hand. ‘Is it a Wesselons?’

‘Oh, yes, yes - he assured me. There’s a signature. Of sorts. There in the corner. And the name on the brass plate - Andreas Wesselons, 1623 to 1652. It’s a sketch, really, an oil sketch. Of a lion. In a menagerie.’

‘Dutch?’

‘Yes - all that brown. Somebody important at the time had a menagerie. Wesselons made these sketches - the animals - quite a famous painting, one of them - of the lion, actually. This is a sketch for it.’

The brushwork looked as if it had been quickly laid on, the tracks clear in the thick paint, yet the animal was almost alive. Enormous vigour. Denton said, ‘And the envelope you sent to me was in the back.’

‘Yes, yes - behind.’

‘Could you show me exactly where?’

‘Oh, yes, yes—’ Heseltine snatched the painting from the wall and turned it over. Denton thought his hands were shaking. The twisted wire by which it hung was almost black with corrosion. ‘In this corner,’ Heseltine said. He pointed at the lower left. ‘Tucked in between the canvas and the stretcher. There’s room, you see.’ He sounded hurt, as if Denton had suggested that the envelope couldn’t possibly have been there; in fact, Denton could see that the small envelope could have easily been tucked way down where most of it would have been masked by the wide frame.

‘Odd that somebody in the shop didn’t find it.’

‘I thought that, too! Yes, oh, yes. But they didn’t. If they had - well, it wouldn’t have been there, would it?’ He stood there, staring at Denton with his hurt eyes, the painting in both hands, and he said as if it had just occurred to him, ‘Won’t you sit down?’

Denton picked an overstuffed chair with a worn red cover. He put his hat on the floor next to him. Heseltine, after replacing the painting, sat on the edge of a straight chair. He said, ‘Should I not have sent the envelope to you?’

‘No, of course you should.’

‘It was addressed to you.’

‘Of course. But you didn’t open it.’

‘No!’ It was like a groan of pain. ‘No, I swear I didn’t!’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest you had. I just wondered if you knew what was in it.’

‘No!’

Denton was afraid the young man was going to weep. He became gentle. ‘Could I ask you a question?’

‘Yes. Of course. Should you like tea? Coffee?’ Heseltine looked around vaguely. ‘My man is out.’

‘The date on your note to me was some weeks ago. How long had you had the painting then?’

‘Oh - oh, let me see - I got to London in August. The twelfth.’ He gave a sudden, unexplained laugh. ‘The Glorious Twelfth. Do you shoot? I used to. Now I can’t—The noise upsets me.’

It came to Denton slowly: the twelfth of August was the opening of grouse season, a very big event in the lives of sporting people. He waited for the young man to go on; when he didn’t, he murmured, ‘So you got to London on August twelfth.’

‘Yes.’

‘And bought the painting? I mean, how long after did you buy the painting?’

‘Oh—The date would be on the receipt. If I still have it. They could tell you at the shop. In the arcade. It was - oh, a while ago.’

‘It’s now the twenty-sixth of September. You sent me your note and the envelope on August twenty-ninth.’

‘Oh.’

‘So, it must have been pretty soon after you bought it.’

‘Yes, it was while I was hanging it. My man was hanging it, I mean. He, mmm, brought it to my attention. I put it in an envelope and wrote that silly note the same day. “Little Wesselons”!’ He laughed a bit hysterically. ‘Ass.’

Denton waited several seconds for him to get calm. ‘The letter inside the envelope was dated more than two months ago.’

‘What did it say?’

‘It must have sat sat in the back of the painting - or somewhere - for several weeks before you found it.’

‘I was in the war.’

That meant South Africa - fighting the Boers, a war that had gone on far too long and had reached a vicious stage where the British army was building concentration camps. It probably explained Aubrey Heseltine. Denton had seen young men like this after the Civil War, young men who were never the same, young men whose lives had been taken over by war. ‘Are you on leave?’ he said.

‘No, I’ve been—I’m invalided home. You reach a point—Then it’s no good going on. You’re no good. They don’t trust you any more.’

‘I was in the American Civil War.’

‘Then you understand.’

‘A little, maybe.’

‘You’ve seen it, then. You’ve seen them.’ His face twitched. ‘Boys. Men with families. My sergeant said we’d get them out. He told them that. Then he was dead.’ The right side of his mouth pulled down in a tic. ‘They shelled us. Our own guns. The line was cut. I sent a runner back—A boy, one of mine, he was eighteen, then he was just a tunic, you know, and one leg. A nice boy. Lancashire. I pulled them back. Against orders. I admitted it at the investigation. Why should they die like that from their own guns? That isn’t right, is it, Mr - Denton? Is it?’

Denton shook his head.

‘I’m on medical leave.’ The side of Heseltine’s face pulled down again. ‘But they’re going to court-martial me. For pulling back.’

The soldier in Denton wanted to judge him harshly; on the other hand, his older self said, nothing was proven yet. ‘Is it bad?’

Heseltine gave him the half-smile again. ‘They’ll cashier me.’ ‘You have dreams about the war?’

‘Yes.’

‘You remember all their names.’

‘Yes, yes—’

‘You don’t want to go out.’

‘No.’ He hardly voiced the syllable.

‘I shouldn’t have bothered you.’

‘I’m glad you came.’ Heseltine put his face in his hands, then sat up very straight. ‘I’m afraid you must think me weak.’

Denton stood. ‘Thank you for your help.’

‘I thought there might be - something—’

Something what, Denton wondered. Something more? Something for me? Something to be done? He said, ‘The envelope had a note asking for my help.’

‘I’m so glad I sent it on, then.’

‘Was there a woman at the shop where you bought the painting? ’

‘Only the man in the front, but I think in the back - where they framed and so on - I think there was someone else. But I - didn’t—’

‘I wanted to see if the sender of the note was all right.’

‘Yes, oh, you must! Yes, it’s so important to help people when they ask you for - protection - help—’ The side of his face pulled down. ‘Will you keep me informed?’

‘It’s been so long, I’m not sure it’s worth pursuing.’

‘But you must! Yes - please. I’d like to feel I had a part.’

So Denton took the name of the shop in Burlington Arcade where he’d bought the painting and promised that he’d report back, and each of them said again how important it was to follow things through and to help when help was asked for. As Denton was leaving, he said, ‘Why did you buy that particular painting?’

‘The Wesselons? Because - it was a bargain, he said; somebody else had put down money on it and then not taken it - and—It was the idea of the menagerie, the animal so far away from his own kind—’ He was looking at a bookcase, not at Denton, frowning in concentration. ‘He must have been a wretchedly unhappy animal, but he looks so stalwart! As if he’d come through. Do you know what I mean?’

Outside, the day was close. A dull sky suggested rain. The air smelled of horse dung and urine. The city’s clatter and hum filled Albany Court.

The old man let Denton out to Piccadilly. He made his way to Burlington Arcade and strolled through, looking at the shops and seeing nothing, wondering how many horrors and sufferings there were just then in London, and how an attempt to resolve one simply led to another.

He hadn’t intended to push things any farther that day. Or any day - he had enough without a possibly missing woman. He felt sluggish since he had seen Heseltine, drained of the hangover-derived energy that had driven him when walking. But, because it was raining and he was standing outside a shop that said in dull gold letters on black, ‘D. J. Geddys Objects of Virtue’, he went in.

The public part of the shop seemed small, over-filled with things that even Denton sensed were good - Oriental vases, Wedgwood, Georgian silver, several shawls, many enamelled and decorated surfaces, antique lace, mahogany end tables and tapestry fire screens; on the walls, oil paintings large and small, either safely pre-Victorian or intensely Royal Academy. Denton’s experience of art had been only with big Scottish paintings of sheep and hairy cattle - he had bought by the yard, not the artistry - and had left him indifferent to all of them.

‘May I help you, sir?’

The man had materialized from a dark corner. He was small, so hunched that he was barely five feet, his neck dropped forward and down so that his face had to be turned to the side and up to speak. He had very thick glasses, a beard cut short, the upper lip shaved. He might have been sixty, suggested some near-human, faintly sinister creature, gnome or troll, with a nasty sense of humour kept bottled in, perhaps to come out as practical jokes. His voice was hoarse and very deep, coming out of his pigeon chest in a bass rumble.

Denton debated pretending to be a customer. What might he have been looking for? He knew nothing about ‘objects of virtue’. Not a field in which he could pretend.

‘Mr Geddys?’

‘The same.’

‘I’m trying to locate a woman named Mary Thomason.’

The name had a strange effect on Geddys, as if he’d been bumped. He rolled his head as if to get a better look at Denton, but the movement might have been a cover for something else. There
was
something wrong with his neck, Denton thought, almost as if he had been hanged. Unlikely, however. There was also something wrong with his expression - a false disinterest, perhaps. Geddys said, ‘Yes?’

‘I believe that perhaps she worked here.’

Geddys looked away from him. ‘I can hardly be expected to talk to a stranger about employees.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Denton. ‘
If
she worked here.’

Denton produced a card. ‘Did she?’

‘I don’t understand your interest.’

‘I want to know if she’s missing.’ He was irritated; he said deliberately, ‘I’ve already been to the police.’

Geddys looked at the card. He flicked it with a finger. ‘This is simply a name. You could be anybody. Are you a relative?’

‘Mary Thomason wrote me a letter, asking for my help. She missed an appointment with me.’ That wasn’t quite true, but he found himself wanting to squelch Geddys. ‘Is she missing?’

Geddys put the card down on a table. ‘She left us.’

‘But she did work here.’

‘For a while.’

‘What did she do?’

Geddys got cautious again, argued privacy, said that Denton could be anybody, his real feeling perhaps exasperation that Denton wasn’t a customer. Then they got as far as Geddys’s saying that Mary Thomason was young and naive and had framed prints and drawings for him when they were interrupted by a genuine customer, a lavishly got-up woman dripping ecru lace as if it were a skin she were shedding. Denton had to retire to a safe zone between two virtuous objects while they murmured about a ‘sweet bit of pavé’ in a case. But she didn’t buy, and she swept out with a vague promise to look in again, and Geddys smiled his ironic smile, twisting his head at Denton.

Then Denton had to go through it all - the little Wesselons, the note, his absence - leaving out only the things he didn’t see any point in telling. And Geddys admitted he had been annoyed that Mary Thomason had left him without notice, only a note instead of coming in one day in August pleading ‘a family crisis at home’. He was almost too voluble now, too helpful.

‘Where was “home”?’

‘I’ve no idea. She seemed more or less genteel.’

‘You didn’t know where she lived in London?’

‘Ask at the Slade.’

‘What’s the Slade?’

Geddys stared at him. ‘The Slade School of Art.’

‘She was an art student?’

‘So she said.’

He persuaded Geddys to find the precise date when Mary Thomason had gone away. Geddys had in fact kept her note. It was dated the same day as the letter to Denton that she or somebody had tucked into the back of Heseltine’s painting.

‘I don’t understand about the painting,’ Denton said.

‘Neither do I. Most irregular. If I’d known, I’d have stopped it.’

‘But why would she do it?’

Geddys sighed. ‘People, especially young people, do things beyond the comprehension of the mind of man. I hardly knew the young lady.’ He didn’t look Denton in the eye when he said that.

Other questions got only repetition, as of a well-rehearsed story, and the information that Mary Thomason had been clean, prompt, shy and inarticulate. No, she seemed to have no young men, no ‘followers’. No, he had no idea where she had lived, and would Mr Denton forgive him, but he had a business to manage.

Mr Denton didn’t forgive him, because Mr Denton didn’t entirely believe him, but Mr Denton left. Outside the arcade, it was still raining.

He took a cab to Victoria Street, was surprised to have the doorman at the Army and Navy Stores recognize him, the more so because he was only an associate member, and that because Atkins - an actual veteran of the British army - had got him in. He went directly to the gun department and bought a Colt New Pocket revolver in .32 nitro. It didn’t have the feel of the old Colt, but he knew it was quicker and more powerful, far faster to reload. It was smaller and with a shorter barrel, but it weighted his overcoat pocket like a bag of coins.