The Frightened Man (26 page)

Lang wanted horrors. This would be horror, indeed - meaningless, dehumanizing death, and his own failure to do anything about it.

He went out again to Hector Hench-Rose to ask for a character letter. Hench-Rose surprised him by being abject, ashamed of his behaviour of the other day and pathetically ready to do anything Denton wanted. Denton thought it odd - Hench-Rose was now wealthy, presumably powerful or about to be, with a parliamentary seat at his bidding, an estate, tenants, forelock-tugging ghillies, as Denton imagined them - but Hench-Rose seemed desperate for Denton’s approval. Odd, very odd - a need to have the world without exception approve of him? Or something special about Denton? Or was he, as Denton was with Atkins, caught in some snare of pride? Denton, at any rate, liked him better for his discomfort; the truth was, he had felt more comfortable with Hench-Rose the modestly poor ex-officer than Hench-Rose the wealthy baronet.

‘My distinct pleasure, old man,’ Hench-Rose said as he scrawled a note under the letterhead of the Metropolitan Police. ‘Want me to order the populace to cooperate or ask them? Asking’s probably better - flies and vinegar, and so on. Hmm?’ Hench-Rose proposed supper, promised no jokes, but Denton said he couldn’t, had too much to do. A drink at the club? Would Denton consider an expedition for salmon in February? Denton’s thought had been that the one thing he needed, money, and the one thing Hench-Rose had, money, was the one thing he couldn’t ask Hench-Rose for, although he suspected that Hector would have started flinging notes on the desk if he had asked for them. But Denton couldn’t ask.

Chapter Sixteen

The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children was in Hackney Wick, the Lea running almost at its back, although Denton wasn’t to realize that the river was there until almost the end of his visit. It was a wet, raw day, a fine drizzle boring down like somebody’s bad intentions, drenching and chill. It smudged distance as if a fog, and as Denton and Mrs Striker jogged through unfamiliar streets in a mouldy cab, he thought that this might be one idea of hell, going on endlessly towards a dimly glimpsed nowhere in the damp discomfort of the grave.

‘I’d like a hot drink,’ he said, when neither of them had spoken for several minutes.

‘A lap robe would do.’

He grunted. They were crawling through mean streets where nothing else seemed to move. It was as if the entire city had died. He shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat. ‘Poor people around here,’ he said. ‘Not enough money to buy a louse a wrestling jacket.’

‘Your grandmother? Definitely Irish.’

‘Scotch and proud of it. Worshipped John Knox, believed a blow was healthy for a child, saw the world as good or bad, white or black, all choices made on principle.’

‘Hard to live with?’

He hesitated. He had been talking for the sake of talking; now he had to think about what to say next. ‘It sounds peculiar, but she wasn’t. Sure, she whacked us now and then, but she was protective.’

‘Against the world?’

‘Against my father.’ It came out slowly, an intimate admission, painful. ‘She used her hands; he used a piece of firewood.’

‘On you?’

‘Until I was as big as he was. Then he tried it and—’ He shrugged himself into the coat again, shivered. ‘We fought.’ His shoulders were trembling with cold, perhaps with memory. He wondered what she would do if he moved closer to her for warmth. ‘I joined the army when I was fifteen.’

‘I wouldn’t think they’d take you so young.’

‘I lied. I was big for my age. My grandmother signed the paper.’ He smiled. ‘She could read and write. That’s Scotch, not Irish.’

‘Was that her way of protecting you?’

He looked out at the wet house fronts, an ironmonger’s shop, a scene of water and soot and lifelessness. He had never told anybody this story. ‘It was for my sister.’ He felt the fine drizzle on his cheek, realized his trousers were getting damp. ‘She was fourteen. She didn’t have a dowry. I got a hundred dollars for enlisting.’

‘For her?’

‘There was somebody would marry her if she could bring some money. My grandmother told me to do it.’

Janet Striker was silent, staring, too, at the bleak, blackened bricks. Then she said, ‘Because of your father?’

The question surprised him, an insight straight to his secret self. He had his hands in his overcoat pockets, his long legs stretched out; he moved, a kind of squirming, acutely uncomfortable. ‘My mother died,’ he said uncertainly, almost stammering, ‘when we were kids. Fever. Josie never had a proper mother. My grandmother—’ The memory was acutely painful.

‘Did you understand what was going on?’

‘I don’t think anything was really—’ He trailed off. He couldn’t picture his sister as she was at that time; had he erased her? But he had ‘understood’ something about her - and about his father. He mumbled, so low he was never sure she heard him, ‘My father said things to Josie - he started touching her—’ He trailed off. ‘My grandmother said it was best for Josie to get married.’

She looked at him. ‘You could have been killed in the war.’ As if she distrusted the effect of her eyes, she turned her head towards the street and leaned back. ‘Did it work out for her?’

‘She had four kids of her own and raised my two, after—When I couldn’t. She seems content enough.’

‘And you? The army suited you?’

It made him laugh, part of it relief at the changed subject. ‘The army doesn’t give you a chance to say if it
suits
you. It was war. I went in a private and came out a temporary lieutenant, got shot at and paraded and marched and starved and rained on and thrown into battles like a piece of meat to a hungry dog. No, it didn’t suit me. But I did it, and it took me off the farm. The army showed me another way to survive than trying to grow potatoes out of rocks. The army’s a hard mother and a hard teacher, but there’s worse. Far worse.’

‘Were you ever wounded?’

‘Twice. A musket ball and a bayonet. Neither fatal. Obviously.’

They rode along. The horse’s hooves rang on the wet street, now wider, opening out into the newer, less impoverished neighbourhoods beyond Victoria Park. A few living beings appeared - a dog, a shopkeeper in a doorway, two women with a child. Janet Striker said, ‘And your father?’

‘He married again. He left the farm to his widow.’ Ahead, he saw a grey building, stone, neoclassical by suggestion but essentially ugly; he guessed it was the Humphrey Institution. ‘I never went back,’ he said.

‘And your grandmother?’

‘I hated my father. But after I’d knocked around a while—’ He stared at the ugly buildings along the cab’s slow progress. ‘Poverty drove him mad. He worked and worked—’ He made a gesture of futility. ‘My grandmother died while I was away. There was nothing for me to go back to.’ But there had been his sister - why hadn’t he gone back to her?

The cab pulled up opposite the building’s entrance, a set of double doors up two stone steps from the street. The doors looked as if they had been closed and locked when the building had gone up, closing in a prison for lifers. They got out and he paid the driver, a hopeless-looking man who neither smiled nor thanked him but wiped his wet nose on his sleeve and passed his whip over the horse’s back as if too tired to lift it higher, and the cab passed away into the drizzle like a phantom. Denton and Mrs Striker were left standing on the narrow pavement, the only living things to be seen in a square of which the Humphrey took up an entire side; inside an iron fence, five leafless trees reached up like blackened hands. There was a smell, familiar but unpleasant, that Denton couldn’t place.

‘Hell,’ he said.

‘Its entrance, anyway.’ She went up the steps and yanked a bell-pull. After several seconds, she said, ‘Somebody’s coming.’ She looked down at him, seeming to gauge him, to estimate just what he might be. ‘I think you’re a far better man than I first took you for,’ she said. The door opened.

The smell was laundry. Wet laundry, soap, steam. The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children operated a sizeable commercial laundry that took up the entire rear of the stone building and two sheds behind, as well; it was in the laundry that the wayward ones earned their keep.

‘Work is their salvation,’ the woman who met them said. ‘They scrub clean their souls.’ The words seemed to be quotations that she had by rote. Mrs Opdyke was a big woman in a black dress a few years out of fashion, the cut emphasizing her bigness, her chest and abdomen, as if she were some male figure of power whose belly was called a ‘corporation’, but within this was a less certain woman. She was tall, made taller by grey hair piled on her head in lustreless clumps like dirty wool, and she stooped as if her tallness was a burden. Keys jingled at her waist, suggested a saintly emblem - the keeper of the keys - that was belied by her wary eyes. Denton wondered if she was afraid for her job. ‘We would do them a disservice to indulge them.’ She meant the women.

‘How many live here?’ Mrs Striker said.

‘We have close to a hundred at any particular time.’ She bent her head to look at Mrs Striker; there was a sense of expecting contradiction. ‘But they don’t
live
here. They are permitted to await the birth of their babies here.’

‘And then—?’

‘And then they must make their peace with the world, as we hope they have made their peace with Him who sees all transgression.’

‘Do they understand transgression, do you think?’

‘We always say, show me a young woman who is weeping in her bed, and we will show you a soul yearning for its maker.’ Again, she seemed to be quoting somebody else.

‘And the infants?’ Denton said.

Mrs Opdyke glanced at him. She flinched, as if he had surprised her, perhaps the rarity of his maleness. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ she said. She had a big voice, big like the rest of her, but raspy, as if she had used it too much. ‘I caught your name but not your purpose.’

‘I’m looking for a young woman who gave birth here.’

‘Are you a relative? Her father?’ She seemed ready to disbelieve him. ‘An uncle?’

‘The young woman is dead. I’m trying to find what happened to her.’

‘It seems to me you already know what happened to her, if, as you say, she’s dead.’ She dropped her chin and looked at him over the top of silver-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you a policeman?’

‘Mr Denton is a famous author,’ Janet Striker said. ‘He is acting philanthropically.’

They were standing in a lobby that lay immediately behind the front doors, a long, bleak room almost without furniture but overseen by the life-size portraits of two elderly men in the fashions of the seventies. Denton had been wondering which of them was the founding Humphrey, had decided that the more severe and lifeless of the two probably was he, the other being altogether too ruddy and too plump. Now, he smiled at Mrs Opdyke, trying to look philanthropical.

‘We encourage good works,’ the woman said, but the idea of philanthropy seemed to worry her, and she frowned. ‘Many gentlemen are able to practise good works through us. Many.’ She turned to stare at the portrait that Denton had
not
chosen as that of the onlie begetter. ‘We were founded by a man. Men serve on our board and our inspection committee.’ She turned back to stare at Denton. ‘Good works are one route to bliss.’

Denton was confounded by this - not the idea, but
bliss
, which seemed to him dated and poetic and, anyway, unattainable - and he said weakly, trying to smile, ‘“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”’

Mrs Opdyke’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t see the aptness of that,’ she said. For the first time, she seemed stirred to something other than quotation, and her cheeks reddened. ‘Forgive me if I miss something, but the aptness of that escapes me, escapes me altogether. Is this intellectualism? ’ Before he could answer, she rushed on. ‘There is too much intellectualism. We don’t allow our girls to engage in it.’ She turned to Mrs Striker as if for support, common understanding. ‘Our charity is based on the founder’s ideas and is straightforward and simple - work and prayer. “Work to weariness, pray to tears.” We always say that to new intakes, and I say it to each as she leaves. Work and pray, work and pray, I tell them - your lives are over, you are ruined, pray for release, nothing more can be expected.’ She raised a hand towards the portrait. ‘Our founding philosophy.’

‘I was quoting scripture,’ Denton said.

‘Were you ironic? We detest irony. It is part of intellectualism. ’

‘The girl’s real name was Ruth,’ Mrs Striker said in the voice of somebody bringing a meeting to order. ‘But after she left here, she called herself Stella Minter.’

Some of the colour left the woman’s face and she seemed to slump back to her normal posture. Denton had the sense that she saw him as an enemy, even
the
enemy - because of the men who had got her women pregnant? Or, more likely, because of the founder and the all-male inspection committee? At any rate, she was far more at ease with Janet Striker, to whom she now said in a lower, almost confiding voice, ‘I don’t understand this gentleman’s interest. I have a duty to protect the, mm, the premises.’

Mrs Striker produced the two letters they had prepared, the one from Hench-Rose about Denton’s sterling character, one from her own organization. ‘He is above reproach,’ she said.

Mrs Opdyke removed her glasses to read the letters. Her eyes looked undefended, timid. ‘Well—’ she said. ‘Well.’ She read both letters twice, then folded them and handed them back. ‘Well - very well.’

‘What can you tell us?’ Janet Striker said.

‘I can’t say anything, standing here in public.’ Only the three of them were in the draughty hall; nobody else had passed through it; nothing suggested that anybody else even had access to it. ‘We must go to my office. I’m sure you will want to see the work rooms and other, other - facilities.’ She had replaced her glasses, now looked at the portrait of the founder as if hoping the subject might step down and order them to leave.

‘Who’s the other fellow?’ Denton said. He jerked his head towards the other, more severe figure that he had thought the founder.