The Bohemian Girl

Chapter ELEVEN
When he finally stopped in late afternoon his knees cracked when he stood. He felt dimly light-headed, as if he’d drawn in lungfuls of tobacco smoke. He expected to totter when he walked. It was almost five o’clock.
‘I’m thinking of going out later,’ he said to Atkins. The soldier-servant had picked up the photographic copies of the drawing that they’d found in Mary Thomason’s trunk; despite his telling Munro that the Mary Thomason business was over, he wanted to find somebody to identify the drawing. Ever hopeful, or stupidly persistent? Or obsessed? Or cracked?
‘Best do, unless you want supper from the Lamb.’
‘You could do eggs.’
‘Now, Colonel, we’ve been through this. I don’t mind the odd rasher and eggs at breakfast or a light lunch, but we agreed I don’t cook in the evening.’
‘We did, yes. I thought you might take pity on me.’
‘Got to draw the line somewhere. Give an employer an inch, he’ll take a you-know-what.’
Denton stretched, then bent to touch his toes. He poured himself sherry, sat, said to Atkins, ‘Have some yourself, if you like.’
Atkins shook his head. ‘I’m thinking. Might have stumbled on a new business interest.’ He had been standing there since Denton had come downstairs; pretty clearly, he had something on his mind. Denton hoped it was not about Mrs Striker; he didn’t have time for morals just then. He needn’t have worried, however, because Atkins surprised him by saying, ‘What d’you know about the kinema?’
‘Nothing. What’s there to know? And isn’t it cinema?’
‘We say kinema.’
‘We?’
Atkins cleared his throat and looked at the ceiling. This was a learned behaviour, the source East End melodrama - Making a Reluctant Suggestion. ‘Pal of mine has bought himself a kinema machine.’
Denton made a face at the sherry. He could guess what Atkins was leading up to. Atkins had a weakness for new technologies, what he called ‘business opportunities for a chap with vision’, into which he’d put small amounts of money, hoping for a big return that never materialized. ‘What happened to the vacuum cleaner?’
Before they had gone off to Transylvania, Atkins had got involved in a hand-pumped machine that looked like an oversized clyster and had been supposed to replace the broom. Now, Atkins said, ‘The enterprise died while we was away and I wasn’t here to manage it. Boon to women, but they complained they was getting muscles like a barrel-lapper from using it. Two housemaids developed elbows and had to have medical attention. Under threat of lawsuit, the firm dissolved.’
‘So now it’s cinema.’
‘Yes, well, yes - chap has a first-class Polish picture-taking machine, needed a bit of cash to grease the skids, as it were. Him and me are thinking of making what’s called a kinema picture.’
‘You’re going to make a moving picture?’
‘Something up to date and educational, yes.’
Denton put his chin in his hands. ‘What?’
‘The war. The Boer War, that is.’
‘It isn’t over yet.’
‘As good as. Anyway, it don’t have to be over. Point is to show it. Thrilling.’
‘The war’s been on for more than three years. How long will your picture last?’
‘I say five minutes, but my pal says we can’t get that much film in the machine, so maybe it’ll be two. I think five would be a sensation. ’
‘Makes the war a little compressed.’
‘Well, the high points. You know.’ Atkins cleared his throat again.
‘We thought we’d borrow some uniforms here and there, pick up some rifles at the markets. Can’t tell a Martini from a Baker at any distance, after all. Blank charges. Dozen men, maybe, let them run about, shoot off the rifles, they can be British troops one day, Boers the next - put the Boers in old clothes and Oom Paul beards and soft hats, can’t beat that for convincingness.’ When Denton said nothing, he added, ‘We’re looking for a cannon. Put a quarter pound of black powder in the snout, let the Boers run about, huge explosion - that’s the siege of Mafeking. Well?’
‘There’s a reason you’re telling me this.’
‘I, mm, thought you might allow us to, ah, make use of the front door.’
‘As what? Pretoria?’
Atkins chuckled the way adults chuckle at small children. ‘As the scene of the housemaid and the soldier. Idea of my own. Stunned my pal. I said, let’s put in something that the people watching will understand is like themselves. Well - The Soldier’s Farewell, eh? Our front door - pretty housemaid - there’s one up the street who’d be a marvel for it - soldier in his uniform - she waves - off he goes - eh? Then all the scenes of the war. Then - The Soldier’s Return! Our front door - the maid, looking out - he appears! - has a stick - limps - embrace! I call it a frame - around the picture. What d’you think?’
Denton stared at him. ‘You mean you’re telling a story!’ he said.
‘We are? Well, now—’
‘I’m impressed. I’m more than impressed. Atkins, you really thought of that?’
‘Well—It isn’t as if I haven’t heard you talk about such things. A frame, I mean. Well, yes, I thought of it. Can we use the front door or can’t we?’
It was both the daftest idea Atkins had so far had and the likeliest, Denton thought, to work. It was laughable - Hampstead Heath was to be South Africa - and neither Atkins nor his pal knew anything about acting or photography or saying things with pictures, but the ‘kinema’, so far as Denton could tell, was a rough-and-ready thing that was being shown in empty shops and rooms, the pictures projected on a bedsheet and the audience paying a farthing to stand behind a rope. ‘Where are you going to show your picture, if it gets made?’
‘We’re looking at a butcher’s shop that went bust in Finsbury. I say we ought to go south of the river - more people, less competition - but my pal says closer is better.’
‘You’d be wise to buy some insurance.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Running around shooting off guns, things could happen. Not to mention some householder who says he was so frightened by what he thought was a Boer invasion that he fell off the stepladder and is suing for a painful neck.’
Atkins put his lower jaw to one side. After some seconds, he said, ‘I’m glad we had this talk. Makes me think.’ He started for the back, turned around, thanked Denton again. ‘I’m grateful. The scales are falling from my eyes. You’ve got a head for these things. Invaluable.’
Denton thought he’d best take advantage of Atkins’s mood. ‘One thing.’
‘Sir?’
‘The lady who was here - Mrs Striker. A very private matter.’
‘I never thought otherwise.’
‘Not a word.’
‘I’m hurt you’d think it of me.’
A little later, Atkins brought up an almost high tea, lavish by the standards he usually set. ‘This’ll hold you until you get to the Criterion or some such posh spot for dinner.’ It was Atkins’s way of saying that Denton had told him something useful.
It was in fact to the Café Royal and not the Criterion that he made his way. He liked the Café Royal, its rather disorderly Domino Room, whose high-styled décor was so at odds with many of the patrons. Gold and blue-green, with caryatids near the ceiling and gilded pillars that evolved into acanthus trees as they grew upwards, it expressed an already dated idea of French archness. Upstairs, the Café Royal was fairly grand; down here at ground level, it was part bistro and part Bohemian hangout. The chicken pie and the milky coffee were famous, as were the shouting matches, the models, the touts, the odd fistfight, the philosophizing and pontificating that came and went through the place like a tide.
The waiter knew him. Or seemed to know him. The waiters were mostly Italian, rather cynical, given to ironic facial expressions. He never knew what they were really thinking.
‘Has Mr Frank Harris come in yet?’
The waiter eyed the room with one raised eyebrow, then shot out an arm. At the far end, towards Glasshouse Street, Denton picked out the dark head of Frank Harris. Harris was an editor, the magazines changing every few years under him like post horses, his notoriety remaining constant - hard-drinking, sensual, bellicose. Denton kept looking at him until his moving gaze - Harris always seemed to be looking for something better than he had - came his way. Denton waved. He said to the waiter, ‘The chicken pie and the red wine.’
‘A bottle, sir?’
‘A glass.’
The Café had been founded by a Continental. It had gone through a number of managers; the most recent, disgusted with the low tone of the Domino Room, had left it and opened what he thought a proper restaurant next door. The Domino Room, impervious to elevation, had gone its disreputable way.
‘By God, you’re back.’ Frank Harris had a loud voice, a shrewd eye and a moustache almost as big as Denton’s. He banged his own drink down on the table as he sat. ‘Why didn’t you join me up there?’
‘I don’t like that end of the room. Always seems cold.’
‘Yah! I hear you made a lot of money on your trip to wherever it was.’
‘Transylvania. Whoever told you that?’
‘Writing about motor cars, really! I heard you cleared a thousand pounds on the American serial pub.’ In fact, he’d got more than that for the articles, expected still more now that they were collected into a book, but he wouldn’t tell Harris that.
The chicken pie appeared. Denton cut into it. Inhaled, ate. Harris said, ‘I know that dish is famous, but I’m damned if I can see how hard-boiled eggs and chicken can go together. It’s like an English idea of French food. Speaking of money, want to invest some?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve an idea for a new mag. Make a fortune.’
‘I’m looking for a girl.’
‘Who isn’t? I could introduce you to Lotty over there - she’s quite nice, if you don’t let her talk.’
Denton, chewing, took from a pocket a photographic copy of the drawing that had been in Mary Thomason’s trunk. ‘That girl.’
Harris studied it. ‘The ethereal type. Missed her moment - would have been perfect for the Pre-Raphaelites. Although you never know, sometimes it’s these apparently angelic little females who just want to do it like rabbits. “There is no art to find the cunt’s construction in the face.”’
‘Is that a quotation? You English are always throwing quotations at me.’
‘I’m Irish, and it’s Shakespeare. I know more about Shakespeare than any man in England, were you aware of that? Truth.’ Harris put the photo of the drawing down. ‘Who is she?’
‘Student at the Slade.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?’ He turned almost completely around and shouted, ‘Gwen!’ The room’s growl of talk, counterpoint to everything that went on, continued. ‘GWEN!’ He turned back. ‘Gwen John - know her? Her brother’s Augustus, the rising star of English art.’
Denton allowed that he knew Augustus John by sight, had once had a desultory conversation with him.
‘Gwen’s twice the painter her brother is, but he’s got flash, and people get blinded by it. Ah, Gwen, me darlin’, here you are.’
A frowning, rather small young woman in multi-coloured scarves and kerchiefs was standing by the table. ‘I don’t like to be shouted at,’ she said in a husky voice.
‘Of course you don’t. The Café Royal’s rather out of your milieu, isn’t it, Gwen?’
She looked as if she might not answer him, then reluctantly said, ‘One of my friends wanted to come here for his birthday.’
‘Must have got a cheque from home. Gwen, this is Mr Denton, famous writer, trying to get a line on this face.’ He spun the drawing so that she could see it. ‘Ring any bells?’
Without bending, she looked down at the drawing. She seemed to have smelled something bad.
‘Slade girl, he says,’ Harris prompted.
‘Well, it isn’t Slade work, is it? Hard to find drawing that bad these days. You’re asking the wrong person.’
Before she could turn away, Denton said, ‘Why isn’t it Slade work?’
‘It’s stumped. Try Burlington House.’ She swirled away.
Harris looked after her and said in a musing sort of way, ‘You know, under all those rags, there’s quite a fine body? Not that that’s any more a sign of accessibility than the face. Mind, I’ve known skinny little things with no more tits than a tinker who wanted to be pounded like a piece of tripe. I once walked into a bookshop on a rainy day, nobody there but this animated broom-handle of a female about thirty; it took me about ten minutes to be f*cking her on a collected works of Richardson. She had a bush like—’
‘Harris, has it ever occurred to you that there’s more to life than sex?’
‘Good Christ, I certainly hope not! Where did you hear a thing like that?’
‘Made it up myself.’
‘What an idea!’
‘I wanted to know if you recognized the drawing, not to hear your sexual autobiography.’
‘Well, I don’t know her.’ He tapped the drawing. He sounded grumpy.
‘What’s “stumped”?’ Denton said.
‘Hmm? Oh, drawing technique - use a screw of paper to push the charcoal around, rub it out, get lights and shadows. Slade teaches the use of the line - stumping not allowed.’
‘And Burlington House?’
‘The RA - the Royal Academy. Really, Denton, you’ve lived here long enough to know that.’
‘I don’t understand art.’
‘Nobody does - except me, of course. Gwen and her crowd believe the RA’s the work of the devil. No telling them that thirty years ago the people who now hang their crap in Burlington House were sitting here and saying the same things about their betters. Today a rebel, tomorrow an academician. The awful truth is, none of them is awfully good - not good as the really good are good. Britain hasn’t produced a first-rate draughtsman since Rowlandson. You see, the trouble is—’
Denton concentrated on the chicken and let the words drown in the general hubbub. He glanced towards the table where Gwen John was sitting with several other young women and a couple of young men - late-adolescent boys, really - all the women swathed like her in gypsy-like bits and pieces of colourful cloth. The young men expressed themselves in long hair and collarless shirts with scarves; one wore the blue cotton jacket of a French working-man, possibly the badge of a summer in Paris. They certainly looked unconventional, he thought, probably the reason for the costume, at least among the women - the gypsy look just then was the Bohemian uniform, to judge from the young women he had seen near the Slade - but there was also the possibility that they dressed like this because it was cheap. Like Janet Striker, perhaps they didn’t have money for clothes: the problem was the same, the solution different. Theirs, he had to admit, was more attractive.
‘Ever hear of the Russian ballet?’ Harris was saying. Denton had no idea how he’d got there from Rowlandson.
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘You’re impossible. Like talking to a cow. Did you know I was a cowboy once? In Kansas?’
‘I’ve heard you say so.’
‘Don’t you believe me? I was in Chicago, and these four cowboys came into a hotel where I was—’
Denton looked at the young artists again. Gwen John was looking at him, her right hand making quick movements over a small sketch pad. When she saw him looking, she gave an automatic, close-mouthed smile and went on.
‘So I left the hotel business and went into cattle-driving. Many adventures. I was younger then. You aren’t listening, are you?’
‘I’m tired.’
Harris got up. He was perfectly amiable. ‘I need an audience. If you have some extra money, let me know - I’ll put you on to a good thing.’ He strode away, heading back towards his end of the room.
Denton finished the last of the chicken pie, then the wine, and ordered coffee. A couple of minutes later, to his surprise, Gwen John came and stood by the table. ‘I want to apologize for being so abrupt,’ she said.
‘Oh - you weren’t. It was nothing.’
‘I can’t stand Harris. He’s wetter than a water meadow. Is he a friend of yours? I’m sorry if he is. I say what I think.’
She might have been all of twenty-two or -three, he thought, yet she had the settled sombreness of a middle-aged woman. She was not pretty, didn’t seem to care. He said, ‘Won’t you sit down?’
‘I’m with people.’ She looked back at them.
‘Would they recognize the girl in the drawing?’
‘Not if she’s at the Slade now. We’ve all been out for a while.’ She sat down. She didn’t want anything to drink. She looked at the drawing again and shook her head. ‘I was quite serious, actually, just didn’t say it very nicely - this was done by somebody with academic training. It’s good of its kind - quite good of its kind - but I don’t like the kind.’ She became suddenly almost accusing. ‘What’s your interest in her?’
‘She wrote me a letter, said somebody might hurt her. People write to me like that - they have an idea I’m some sort of—The newspapers have given people the wrong idea.’
‘Is it the wrong idea? You seem to be trying to help her.’
‘It’s a kind of obligation. I was away when she wrote - her letter was waiting for me—’ He wanted to change the subject. ‘I saw you drawing me. Was it the nose?’
‘You have a strong face.’
‘A strong nose.’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t care about pretty or handsome or that blather. It’s character I like.’ Then her friends came over and surrounded the table and said they were moving on. To his surprise, Gwen John said to him, ‘Why don’t you come? Some current Slade people will be there. Maybe they’ll recognize your drawing.’
He glanced at the others; they weren’t paying any particular attention to him. I’m too old, too different. ‘I’d be intruding.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Mark says you’re a serious writer.’ Mark was apparently one of the young men, ‘serious writer’ apparently a ticket to their world. She stood. ‘Coming?’
Well, he thought, maybe it would be an adventure, although he didn’t need an adventure. He’d just got back from an adventure. Thinking of Janet Striker, that a love affair is also an adventure, venturing into the landscape of her, her unmapped territory.
Out on Regent Street, there were introductions of a sort - this is Edna, this is Ursula, this is Gwen (a different Gwen), this is Tony, Mark, Andrew. They all began walking. They had pulled on an assortment of capes, outdated military overcoats, one bearskin coat so worn the pale hide showed through in patches. The boy in the French working-man’s jacket was now seen to be wearing rope-soled shoes, as well.
‘Is it a party?’ Denton said.
One of the young men - was it Andrew? - turned and said, ‘The Duchess of Devonshire’s evening salon.’ There was laughter.
Denton spent little time with young people. These seemed to him rather puppyish, innocent, the women apparently more mature than the men. There was no sense of who belonged to whom, if such arrangements in fact existed. They seemed rather jolly overall.
Gwen John walked next to him as if he had become her responsibility. Denton said, ‘I expected to see your brother at the Café Royal.’
‘He’s in Liverpool.’
Despite himself, Denton laughed. It seemed a strange place for Augustus John, with his earrings and his gypsy hats. She said, ‘He took a job teaching. He got married, you know.’ It seemed to make her cross; perhaps this was simply her manner, as she and her brother’s wife were, she said, old friends. Still, she said, ‘Ida’s had to give up her painting. I could never do that.’
‘Gave it up to be a wife?’
‘She’s going to have a child.’
They were heading for Charlotte Street. They were all good walkers, and, despite their sometimes overstated idea of themselves as ‘different’, as decorous as the middle class they despised but from which they’d sprung. They stepped aside for other pedestrians, shushed each other when somebody got boisterous, guided an old woman through the Oxford Street traffic. Their goal was a big house that must have once been somebody’s prize. Now a rooming house, it had a studio at the top, he was told, although they weren’t going that far: their destination was a big, seemingly unfurnished room on the third floor
A cheer rose as they came in, the dozen or so people already there clearly eager for these older, real artists to validate their gathering. The room, he found, was not quite bare (his first sense had been that it was empty except for the dim figures), the walls partly covered with pinned-up drawings ‘from the life’, the floor with pillows made from the sort of bright scraps the women wore. Two crates were holding up a board with a jug of beer, a large bottle, and a dozen or so mismatched cups and glasses. Denton found it politic almost at once to pay for a second pitcher of beer, which somebody fetched from ‘the Fitz’, apparently the local. He was offered a glass, only slightly grubby, with something from the bottle that was brown, sweetish and disgusting, ostensibly Madeira.
‘Are you the chap looking to identify a girl from some dreadful drawing?’ a plump young woman said to him after he’d been around the room once.
‘News travels fast.’
‘Gwen’s told us. I’m Caroline. This is my room.’
‘You’re at the Slade?’
She guffawed. ‘Can’t you tell?’ She waved at the walls. ‘Let’s see your horrible drawing.’
She didn’t recognize it, but she put her hand through his arm and led him through the crowd, now pretty well filling the space. One or two of the young men were lolling on the pillows now (in the left ear of one of them, a glint of gold - homage to Augustus John); other men and women were sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, most of them smoking cigarettes. There was a lot of talk, some laughter. Denton found himself bending down, then squatting as people looked at the drawing. There was only one gas lamp, but candles seemed to be everywhere, the photographic print gaining several spots of wax.
‘Oh, I know her,’ a small girl with a cat’s face said. She had furry eyebrows and light-brown hair that was very like a mane. ‘She was in first-year drawing. Tonks made her weep. Of course, Tonks makes everybody weep.’
From across the room, a young man called, ‘He never made me weep!’
‘You just turned white as a sheet instead, Malcolm.’
‘My sheet’s grey.’ More laughter.
Three other girls crowded around. He had lost Caroline. They remembered Mary Thomason - called by one of them first Thomas then, no, was it Tomkins? - but they knew nothing about her. She had been ‘very private’, ‘young, that’s what I kept thinking, she seemed like a child’, ‘really quite stand-offish - you’d never have found her at something like tonight’.
‘Well, nobody ever invited her.’
‘She was stand-offish.’
Denton said, ‘Has anybody seen her in the last two months?’
They talked that over, decided they hadn’t, although they were vague about the idea of two months. They were sure she hadn’t come back for the new term, but most of them had been gone for the summer. They called to others in the room. Nobody had seen Mary Thomason for a long while. One rather languid young woman got up off a cushion and came over to him. She had a cool, appraising stare that he decided was really laziness. ‘She was doing some modelling, if that matters.’
‘Posing?’
They laughed. ‘We call it modelling. It’s extra money.’
‘How did you know she was doing it?’
‘We used to chat. She had something new - a hat, I think. She said she’d made some money modelling for a painter and bought the hat. She didn’t say which one. There are hundreds.’
‘Thousands!’ another girl said. People laughed again.
The languorous girl leaned against the wall. ‘She said she’d been modelling for an RA. She said he was “good”. I don’t think she knew good art from fried plaice.’
By then, Caroline had brought out a parlour guitar and was singing in some other language, sitting on the floor. This evolved into a form of charades when one of the men draped a shawl over himself and said he was John Singer Sargent’s Spanish dancer. People started to make references that Denton didn’t understand. He knew it was time to go.
‘I want to thank you,’ he said to Gwen John, whom he found near the door.
‘Did you learn anything?’
‘A little. She was modelling for somebody.’
She shrugged. ‘We’re going to get thrown out soon.’ The charades had got noisy.
‘I’m going.’
‘Wise man.’
He put out his hand. ‘I hope we meet again.’
‘Perhaps.’
Her steady, genderless gaze reminded him of somebody else. Only when he was in the street did he realize the somebody was Janet Striker.