Bohemian Girl, The (13 page)

She was putting on her coat. She turned her head and looked at him. He knew instantly that he’d said the wrong thing. She said, her voice low, ‘Don’t ever tell me what I should and should not do. And don’t tell me what’s “unwise”.’ She had her hand on the doorknob. ‘I shall take it back late on Monday and say it’s the wrong trunk.’

He had moved to her. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry—’

She shook her head. Going down the stairs, she said, ‘Please get a photo of that drawing made on Monday, and perhaps I can show it at the Slade. I’m going on half days at the Society now - dwindling down to the end like a candle.’ He told her he wanted to talk more to her, but she had rattled him and he babbled. She, on the other hand, was calm, seemed to have forgotten her flare-up.

Atkins was already standing by the lower door. Denton said, ‘I’ll see Mrs Striker into the cab.’

When she was inside the hansom, he held it by putting his hands on it and leaning in. ‘Janet, I want to
see
you.’ He waited for some response, got only her steady eyes and then a turn away. He backed to the pavement and called up ‘Drive on!’ to the man behind.

Denton lingered in the cold lower hall, angry with himself. He stared at his dreadful Scottish paintings.
Fool, you damned fool, you treated her like a woman!
Atkins was in the sitting room when he went up, collecting the tea things; he must have been doing so for several minutes - rather a long time for two cups - so as to talk.

Knowing what was expected, Denton said, ‘Well?’

‘Resourceful lady.’

‘I meant the trunk.’

‘Well, the brother did his part, else the box wouldn’t of got to Biggleswade.’

‘Biggleswade’s north. The girl told her landlady she was from the west.’

‘Girls lie.’ He made a face.
Like Katya
, he meant.

‘Granted, but why? She has her studies; she has a room; she writes me a note but doesn’t send it; then she leaves London. That all makes sense, more or less. Her brother collects her things; all right, that’s sensible. Then the trunk goes north instead of west and she never collects it.’

‘She’s dead. I mean, that’s what’s likely, let’s be honest. Somebody done her the harm she feared. Not a cheerful thought, but a sensible one.’ Atkins grinned. ‘Maybe Albert Cosgrove did her in.’

‘Oh, shut up.’

He woke during the night feeling at first feverish and heavy, then anxious. The bedcovers were like lead, and he pushed them back, then used his drawn-up legs to shoot them to the foot. It had got warm. He pulled off his nightshirt and lay there naked, feeling the air on his hot skin.

A dream had made him anxious. Worse than anxious - near panic. He knew the dream. Back in the house he’d built in Iowa. Seeing his wife through the window, walking towards the pasture. The horrifying sense of the inevitable, the terrible. But the dream hadn’t gone on to his finding her body as it usually did, the lye jug beside her. That was the way it always ended, but not tonight. Tonight’s had ended with seeing her through the window, as if seeing her that way was seeing it all, suffering it all, leaving him to wake with the anxiety of knowing what was to come and not being able to stop it.

He got up and walked to the window. The dream wasn’t all of it. It was also that damned man, whoever he was, Albert Cosgrove, who had written him the letters, broken into the house behind, broken into even his own house.

With more coming - that was the sense of the dream:
There’s more to come.

He saw his own reflection in the glass, a double laid over the dim bulk of the house behind. There was a man out there who wanted to be his double - to
be
him. That was it. Circling, watching, stealing bits of him, trying to become him.

Denton shuddered.

He knew what it was to concentrate on someone else so fiercely that the mind seemed to detach itself and fix. But his ‘someone elses’ were inventions - the characters in the unfinished novel. He knew that he partly lived in it. He carried on conversations in his head, saw faces, rooms, vistas. But he knew that that world was not real. And this novel was about his own marriage, his dead wife, their harrowing of each other, so it was that much more like inhabiting a second self. But he was - he smiled in the darkness -
sane.
The man who wanted to be him, he was sure now, was not. Denton himself was Albert Cosgrove’s novel, or at least the central character in the novel Cosgrove apparently couldn’t write, couldn’t create, and so Cosgrove’s concentration went into imitating -
stealing him.

And it would get worse. And when it didn’t succeed, because it couldn’t, would Cosgrove do what Denton had done with a book that went wrong - turn on it and destroy it?

He pulled the nightgown over his head and pushed his arms into the sleeves of a robe. He lit the gas and sat at his desk and tried to write.

He slept a few hours in the early morning, woke and went back to his desk. The mood of the night, somewhat dissipated in daylight, faded as he bored in on his work.

Atkins, who was going to church (Denton was surprised to find it was Sunday) and apparently thought Denton should, too, made disapproving noises with dishes and clothes hangers.

‘Stop that racket.’

‘Being as quiet as I can.’

‘You’re making noise fit to raise the dead. If you’ve something to say, say it!’

Atkins lifted Denton’s empty plate to the tray with the care of somebody taking an egg from a nest. ‘My grandmother banged the pans about when she was crossed,’ he said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean - you come by noise-making honestly? Go to church!’

‘It isn’t church, it’s chapel.’

Denton looked at him over the tops of his new eyeglasses. ‘Katya went to
church
.’

‘I’ve moved beyond Katya. I don’t want to hear about her.’

‘Give my regards to the saints.’

Before Atkins could do so, Denton heard a knock at the front door; a minute later, Atkins was beside him again.

‘You know anything about a Son of Abraham’s on our doorstep saying he’s come to dig up the garden?’

Thinking of his work, Denton stared at him. ‘No. Don’t bother me. Wait - yes. Mrs Striker said something about—Hell, she gave me a name.’

‘Cohan. Sounds Irish to me, but he looks about as Irish as the Levite that crossed over the road. Right, he mentioned Mrs Striker’s name.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’

‘Thought I’d get right to the point. You want him to dig up the garden, or not?’

‘Yes, yes, put him to work. Have we got a spade?’

‘Probably. We had good intentions back there, once.’ Atkins put on a pious face. ‘You sure you want him working on the Lord’s Day?’

‘If he’s a Jew, that was yesterday. Go away!’

Denton worked until noon and could do no more. The penalty for having worked part of the night. Atkins, by his own choice, had Sunday off until late evening. Denton found a couple of eggs, scrambled them on the gas ring in the alcove off his sitting room: part pantry, part kitchen. A year before, somebody had waited in there to kill him. He wondered if Albert Cosgrove had been in there, too, handled the cutlery, opened the cupboard, inhaled the air.

Denton prowled his house, restless now. He tried to read and found nothing interesting. He thought he would go out, but where? Not to find Janet Striker, certainly; he didn’t know where she lived, and she wouldn’t be in her office today. Munro wouldn’t be at New Scotland Yard. He looked out of the rear window, saw a dark-haired man, foreshortened, digging up the weeds. He went at them as if they were his worst enemies. Denton went down and introduced himself.

‘All one to me. I got lots of this muck to keep me busy.’ He was overweight, shorter than Denton but broad, with shoulders and arms that filled his threadbare coat like a sausage its skin. He wore a cloth cap, filthy rat-catchers; his nose was mashed to his face, his ears battered. Small eyes glared at Denton as if the world were a perpetual challenge.

Denton said, ‘You’re a prizefighter.’

‘I was, and proud of it! Never knocked off my feet I wasn’t. I may not have won every time the bell rang, but nobody ever knocked me down. Just you ask! Ask them wot the Stepney Jew-Boy did.’ He had a definite accent.

Denton flinched. ‘Jew-Boy?’

‘Jew-Boy. When I started fightink, they’d shout “Jew-Boy” at me to insult me, they did. I thought, I’ll give you Jew-Boy, I will, so I called myself Jew-Boy and beat the livink tar out of the first six gentiles I fought. Then I was the Stepney Jew-Boy for good.’

Denton studied him. ‘What’s a prizefighter want to spade up a back garden for?’

‘Am I still a prizefighter? Do I look twenty again? Or do I look canny enough to’ve got out with my brains intact when I was thirty-five? How old you think I am?’

‘Forty.’

‘And four. How many prizefighters you think are still at it at forty-four without they’re hearink bells nobody else can hear? Judas Cripes, give me some credit for intelligence, please do. I’m forty-four and I ain’t fought in nine years and I got no job! That’s why I’m diggink up your back bloody garden!’

Denton asked what he was to pay him, and he said he and Mrs Striker had settled on three shillings a day, for which she’d paid two days in advance because he’d been ‘caught short’ when he talked to her.

‘So you’ll be back in the morning.’

‘You think I’d take money for work I wasn’t goink to do? Yas, I’ll be here in the mornink. And I don’t steal and I don’t lie and I didn’t kill Christ. Good day to youse.’

The day yawned ahead of him - a Sunday, little doing. He decided to go out, if only to walk himself into exhaustion.

The air beyond his front door was cool, clear - he thought that if he could have got up high, he could have seen all the way down the Thames to the North Sea - with a sky the clear blue of a bottle with the sun behind it. The light was glaring, but even so the day was too cool for sitting about, perfect for walking. Stopping often to look back for Albert Cosgrove, he walked, first to Holborn and Chancery Lane, then along Fleet Street and Cannon Street, turning west again along the river at Billingsgate Market, now only residual fish smell and gulls and a great many cats, and a memory of the days when the fishwives had been there and ‘Billingsgate’ was a term for creative insult. He picked his way through small, silent streets to Soho, turned along Old Compton Street and, on an impulse, having nowhere to go, found his way again to the Albany, where he lingered at the entrance before going in and walking slowly to the door of Heseltine, the man who had found Mary Thomason’s letter. If he objected to be called on on a Sunday, he could always turn him away.

He offered his card to the bottle-nosed man who opened the door.

‘Mr Heseltine isn’t well, sir.’

‘Oh - I’ll call again—’

‘It might—Let me ask him, sir. It might do him good.’

The man was Denton’s age, grave, rather like a doctor who always had bad news. When he came back, he said, ‘Mr Heseltine asks if you’d forgive him not dressing.’

‘Of course.’

‘He hasn’t been well.’

‘I understand.’

Closer to, the man gave off a mixed odour of bad teeth and sherry. He kept his sombre bedside manner, however; Denton supposed it was the main reason for employing him.

‘Mr Denton.’

Heseltine was wearing a dressing gown and slippers, as if he’d just got out of bed.

‘I’m sorry you’ve been ill.’

‘Not ill. Just out of—’ Heseltine tried to smile, shrugged.

The man came in with a tray of glasses and a decanter and a plate of mostly broken biscuits - Atkins would have fed them to the dog. There was a slight rattle of glassware as the tray was put down, something like a hiccup, perhaps a grunt. ‘Sherry, sir?’

‘I’ll take care of it, Jenks.’

The man turned slowly and made his way out. Denton realized now that Jenks was thoroughly boiled. So, apparently, did Heseltine. ‘Jenks drinks anything that doesn’t have the cork cemented into the bottle. He’s quite incorrigible. I should let him go, but I’d have to find somebody else, and I just don’t have the go.’

‘Better than no man at all?’

‘In the morning, yes. After noon, no. But I—What do I care, really? If I had the taste for it, I’d spend my days like him.’

‘I only came to tell you about Mary Thomason - the woman whose note you sent on to me. I won’t stay.’

‘Oh, do! I don’t have many visitors.’ The wry semi-smile again. ‘What about the Thomason girl?’

Denton told him what had happened, ending with the fact that the trunk had never been collected; he didn’t say that he had it and had been through it.

‘So something terrible has happened to her.’ Heseltine looked as if he might burst into tears.

‘It’s nothing to do with you. It was all over, probably, before you ever found the note.’

‘Yes.’ Heseltine was looking at his full glass of sherry, which seemed to puzzle him. ‘I saw your name in
The Times
, Mr Denton. At least I supposed it was you. About somebody assaulted behind your house?’

‘I didn’t know it had been in the papers. Yes. Kind of a strange tale. Somebody seems to have been watching me.’

‘Why?’

‘I wish I knew. Or, I think I know, but I wish I understood.’ He told him in a few sentences about Albert Cosgrove, the letters, the man with the red moustache.

‘And he was in that house, writing some sort of thing that used your words?’

‘One of my paragraphs, anyway. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” But I don’t feel flattered.’

‘Soiled, rather, I should think. And he wanted all your books.’

‘Signed copies.’

‘Does an author sign many copies?’

‘To friends, sometimes. I’m not much for sending them to people to impress them.’

‘They’d be rather rare then, wouldn’t they? Maybe he’s tried to find them at the rare-book shops. You might try there to see.’