The Bohemian Girl

Chapter TWELVE
‘Actually, they were kind of sweet - more like a church social than an orgy.’
Janet Striker chuckled. ‘What on earth is a church social?’
‘My God, don’t you have those here, either? They’re gatherings, socializings, in the church or arranged by the church so people can meet.’
‘I don’t think the Church of England do that sort of thing.’
‘We were Congregationalists. Sometimes there were box lunches - each woman would make a lunch and then they’d be auctioned off - you got to eat with the woman, sort of a picnic—Why are you laughing?’
‘I can’t picture you at such a thing.’
‘Well, I was a kid. In Maine, before the war.’
‘It sounds so awful!’
‘Well, they weren’t. Anyway, the wild Bohemians were nicer to me than most of the toffs I’ve met, and a good deal more innocent. ’
‘Not as clean, I’ll wager.’
‘It was dark. But they did give me that one fact - Mary Thomason had modelled for an older man, an RA.’
‘“Man”, they said man?’
‘RAs are men, aren’t they?’
‘Oh, of course. Naturally. And they said “RA” and didn’t mean just any older artist, but somebody actually with the initials after his name?’
‘No, she didn’t say that, and it was only the one woman, no “they”. And she was about half-asleep and not, I think, the brightest star in the firmament. It isn’t much, is it?’
‘Every bit helps.’
‘But what does it help?’
They were eating in the Three Nuns in Aldgate High Street because she had insisted she wanted to work late despite being on half days. He thought she was trying to avoid him, not see him every day. Something would have to be worked out soon, he thought; he hated running after her, hated more not being with her. ‘Why won’t you live with me?’ he said.
‘Because I’m not a whore any more.’
‘Oh, Jesus, Janet—!’
‘Don’t ask me, then.’
‘Playing around with trunks isn’t enough!’
‘That’s too bad about you.’ She smiled. ‘That’s what an Irish maid used to say to me when I was little.’
‘You mean I’m not thinking about your side of it.’
‘That’s part of what I mean. What did you mean, “Playing around with trunks”?’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘I’m glad you noticed.’
‘I meant that trying to find Mary Thomason is a mug’s game. I’m grateful to you for going after the trunk, but it’s all too distant and too long ago, and while it’s something we do together, it isn’t like the real thing! Plus Mary Thomason is a distraction; I’ve got better things to think about.’
‘Your book. And me, I suppose. I should be flattered that I’m one of your worries, Denton, but I’m not. I don’t want to be a worry, least of all yours.’
‘And then there’s Albert Cosgrove. I had another letter today - three, all told. One pleading, two threatening. He’s come entirely unglued.’
‘Threatening what?’
‘Oh, mostly noise. Having a tantrum.’
‘You’d think the police could find him.’
‘The police have better things to do. They’re keeping their watchers on me because of the letters, but the truth is they don’t know where to look for him. Or how.’ He hesitated, pushing a rather grey-looking green bean around his plate. ‘I think he saw us together,’ he said finally.
‘You and me?’
‘I think when you took the trunk away in the cab. He mentioned the cab and the house in the latest letter.’
‘But the police were supposed to have been watching!’
‘“The Lady Astoreth likes not rivals.”’
‘Don’t talk mysteries to me, Denton.’
‘That’s what he wrote in his letter. Something about seeing me at my door with - pardon me - my “painted harlot”, and then, “The Lady Astoreth likes not rivals.”’ He speared the bean. ‘My grandmother used to read the Book of Revelation. Cosgrove sounds like it.’
‘And the Lady Astoreth?’
‘Something he’s invented or heard about.’
‘One of his demons?’
‘Maybe.’ He chewed the bean. ‘I bawled Markson out for not finding him. I wanted him to put a guard on you. He says they don’t have the men. I told him to take them off me; he wouldn’t do it.’
‘I can take care of myself perfectly well.’
‘You could put Cohan to watching you.’
‘I’ll do nothing of the kind.’
‘He could take care of Albert Cosgrove with one hand.’
‘Denton, it isn’t me your man is after. It’s you.’
‘We don’t know that. I don’t know it, anyway. He’s unpredictable. To say the least.’
She put a hand over his. ‘I’m sorry - but I won’t have somebody trailing about after me. Concentrate on your book. When it’s done, we’ll worry about him. He’s more pathetic than dangerous. You can’t blame him for wanting his manuscript back. Why not give it to him?’
‘It’s police evidence now. Anyway, I don’t know where to find him. Atkins suggested an ad in The Times - “Will Albert Cosgrove please give Mr Denton a place to return his novel?” A child wouldn’t fall for that one.’ He put his free hand on top of hers. ‘I don’t like his knowing about you.’
‘He doesn’t know my name or anything about me.’
‘He’s a clever bastard. I don’t like it.’
She smiled at him. ‘“That’s too bad about you.”’ She squeezed his hand. ‘You do your work. Forget everything else.’
That was Tuesday. He didn’t see her the next two days and didn’t hear from her. He had four more letters from his nemesis, but there was nothing in them that helped the police. Denton tried to do as she had said; he worked the entire day, blotting out Mary Thomason, blotting out Albert Cosgrove. The Thomason business was pretty well over, he thought. It galled him that Guillam would do nothing, but it was finally not worth fighting.
Thursday evening he was alone in the house. It was Atkins’s half day; he was off somewhere pursuing his moving-picture idea. Denton ordered what proved to be a soggy supper in from the Lamb, ate it with his own wine for contrast, and fell asleep in his armchair afterwards.
At nine, somebody was at his front door.
He woke, groggy, displeased, waited for Atkins to get the door, remembered the man was out and fumbled in an overcoat pocket for the new Colt before going down himself. He cursed his own caution: Albert Cosgrove had made him afraid in his own house. Clever little bastard. He backed off the night bolt and turned the lock and stayed behind the door as he opened it a few inches, willing it to be Cosgrove so that he could end things.
‘Telegram, sir.’
Denton looked around the door. A bicycle was leaned against the railing. An almost toothless man the size of a large child was standing on the top step. ‘Telegram for Denton.’
He shifted the revolver to his other hand and took the envelope, realized he had no money and made the man wait on the step while he ran up the stairs, then up to his bedroom; he swept coins from his bedside table, ran down again, passed too much money out of the door.
He ripped open the envelope as he went more slowly back upstairs. Leaning into his sitting room, he held the yellow oblong to the gaslight.
AM AT WESTERLEY STREET PLEASE COME TO ME STOP JANET
He pulled his braces over his shoulders as he ran again to his bedroom, pulling on the old jacket in which he had been working. The Colt went back into his overcoat pocket, a hat - any hat - on his head. Rupert was in the lower hall when he went out.
‘Hold the fort,’ he told the dog.
The ride to Westerley Street seemed interminable, the damp streets unusually clogged, but it was early still by London’s nighttime standards.
‘Can’t you hurry?’ he called up to the driver.
‘This is London.’
It had got colder. The horse’s breath showed, and wisps of steam from its back. To a man who wanted to move quickly, the London streets seemed like a garish part of hell: grinning faces, too-bright colours, hooves and wheels and footsteps, crowds on buses and crowds on the pavements, a crush of people and animals and vehicles slowly going nowhere. He had an image of going on like this for ever, like a dream in which the destination is always lost.
‘Ah! She’s waiting for you in her ladyship’s room.’ Fred Oldaston was a former boxer who manned the door at Westerley Street. He actually dragged Denton through the doorway and was pulling his overcoat down over his shoulders as he talked. ‘Oh, you ain’t dressed - well, no matter. The missus is strict about it, you know—’ He gave Denton a little push on the shoulder to set him moving.
He passed through the first public room, where several young women sat about, one or two with men. They smiled; he passed on, turning right into Mrs Castle’s reception room, where she lounged on a sofa and drank champagne and received her clientele.
‘Oh, God, Denton, you look absolutely déclassé. Go on through the little door there before somebody sees you - go on, go on—!’
She was not yet even moderately drunk but certainly annoyed.
The door was at first hard to find, covered with William Morris paper to match the walls. He found the dark-swirled china knob by feeling for it and let himself through. On the other side was a room so different in its simplicity and its calm greens and blues as to have been in another world. Against the far wall, sitting on a dark-green love seat, was Janet Striker.
‘What is it?’ He went towards her.
She held up a hand to ward him off. ‘I’m all right now.’
‘Janet, what’s happened?’
She looked quite normal, except that she didn’t smile. ‘He’s been in my rooms,’ she said. ‘You were right.’
‘Tell me.’ He tried to sit beside her but she wouldn’t give him room, and he fetched a chair that was too small for him. ‘Janet, what is it?’
‘I sent for the police. I’ve talked to them. They didn’t understand, of course. It sounds silly.’ She put a hand on his sleeve without looking at him. ‘I worked late again - I’m trying to leave things right, clean up the files and old letters and - stuff, you know. I got home—’ She laughed unpleasantly. ‘My home. My two wretched rooms. I opened the door and thought I was in the wrong place. Everything. Everything, Denton! Smashed, ripped - he’d poured red paint on things - on my piano, the only thing I cared about—!’ A kind of spasm took her chin and neck from the clenching of her jaw. Her eyelids reddened, but no tears came. ‘He found the scissors and cut my clothes.’ She laughed again, the same harshness. ‘I don’t own a stitch except what I have on! Everything gone - cut up, red paint poured on it. Clothes I’d haggled over and spent days looking for at the markets, haggled with a pushcart man! You knew they were somebody’s cast-offs, didn’t you - you didn’t think I dressed like this because I wanted to!’ She put her face in her hands. He touched her shoulder; she shrugged him off. He bent forward so far his knee almost touched the floor, the little chair tipped on its front legs. ‘Janet - Janet, it’s all right—’
‘It isn’t all right with me!’
‘Janet - the clothes don’t matter; you’ll get more clothes—’
‘He poured paint on my piano - on the keys!’ And now she wept.
For a piano. Between her sobs, she said, ‘You don’t know. I saved - for months to buy that - piano. And it’s only an old Clementi, a hundred years old, it’s junk you wouldn’t give a child to play, but it’s what I can afford!’ She raised her head and sat back, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. ‘Or could afford. I’ll have money soon, and money is happiness, am I right?’
‘You know better.’
‘Well - poverty is misery, I can tell you that.’ She wiped her eyes and sniffed. She looked at him as if she saw him for the first time, as if only now she understood that he was there. She leaned forward and put a hand behind his neck, pulled them together, her face hot and damp against his. ‘Well, now you’ve seen me cry,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think you did.’
‘I’ve been known to.’ She kissed his ear. ‘I’d like you to take me to bed.’
‘Yes - yes—’
She pulled away. ‘No. Not here.’
‘Come home with me.’
‘Not that, either. I shall stay here tonight in Ruth’s extra room. I know it seems quixotic, Denton, but I want to stay here. This is my haven - this knocking shop is the closest I have to a home.’
‘But you can’t go to bed in it with me.’
‘We’ve both been in the beds in this house too often as it is.’
She stood and shook her hair back and walked up and down, looking at herself in a mirror and trying to fix what she saw with her fingers and the handkerchief. She poured herself water from a carafe that stood by the sofa, drank it. She said, ‘There’s sherry and whisky over there if you want it.’ She smiled at him. ‘Will that chair hold both of us?’
‘It really doesn’t even hold me.’
She pulled him over to the sofa. ‘Hold me for a bit. Then you must go home.’ She looked into his eyes; they kissed; she put her head back. ‘I just wanted, as you say, to be with you for a little.’ She moved a few inches away. ‘Now you should go home.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘I’m going to take one of Ruth’s laudanum pills and slip into the land of dreams for a while. I used to do it rather too much. But not in a long time.’ She leaned into the curved back of the sofa, which rose towards the ends in great loops like bows. ‘He painted “Astoreth” on the wall. I take it to mean that I’d been paid a visit by his demon.’ She exhaled shakily. ‘What sort of demon takes an interest in old clothes and a lot of odd bits picked off the rubbish tip? It makes me question the demon’s judgement.’ She looked shrewdly at him. ‘It was meant for you, you know.’
‘Partly.’
‘And part for me? Yes, perhaps. “See what I can do.” Be careful, Denton.’
‘Will you be safe here?’
‘Between Fred, Ruth, the girls and the clientele, I shall be safer than in the Tower of London. Go home now.’
‘Can I come back tomorrow?’
She frowned. ‘I’ll come to you. When do you stop working? Four? By then I’ll have begged or borrowed some clothes. I’ll come to you. Four?’
He held her again, kissed her and slipped out of the little door. In her receiving room, Ruth Castle was now surrounded by men, two or three with women of the house. Everybody was in formal dress. There was a smell of cigars and alcohol and perfume. Denton was impressed by the fact that he hadn’t heard them from the inner room - nor they he, therefore.
‘Denton, you look a fright - I’ve seen better-dressed navvies. Do go away.’ Mrs Castle looked to the sleek, well-dressed men. ‘When he’s properly turned out, he’s quite one of my favourite people.’ Her voice was nasal, easily mocking; she dropped the H in ‘he’, perhaps intentionally. The received wisdom was that Ruth Castle had been a child from one of the rookeries who had been plucked out, bathed and raped by a wealthy man who had kept her for several years before sending her off to a house. From there, she had continued to rise - a ‘personage’, a marriage (or at least the honorific ‘Mrs’), her own house.
She held out a hand, which he kissed, something he’d have done with nobody else. She pulled him close. ‘Take care of her,’ she murmured. The sour breath of champagne washed over him.
‘I mean to.’
‘You’d better.’ She shoved him off. ‘Now take your awful suit away.’
Seeing Oldaston again as he went out, he said, ‘You ever know somebody called the Stepney Jew-Boy?’
‘Jew-Boy Cohan? Haven’t heard that name since Hector was a pup. Yes, I remember him well - mind, I never fought him, too small for me by a couple of stone.’
‘He says he was never knocked down.’
‘That’s a fact. Very tough. But not fast enough. He could take a terrific blow, but he couldn’t move his hands quick. Mind, he won fights, quite a deal of them. But lost, too.’
‘He’s looking for work, if you hear of anything.’
‘No! Well, that’s the pugilist’s life in a nutshell. He addled?’
‘No - seems quite sharp.’
‘Tell you what I’d do if I was him - go to Mrs Franken. She’s a Jewess herself, nothing wrong with that. She might have something in my line of work. She has a couple of houses, you never know.’
Atkins was waiting at home. He’d found Janet Striker’s telegram beside Denton’s armchair. And he’d read it, of course, so there was no point in pretending nothing had happened, some gain perhaps in telling him.
‘I think I’ll keep carrying that derringer,’ Atkins said.
‘You have Rupert.’
‘All very well for you to say. You’re sitting on an arsenal.’
‘Don’t shoot yourself.’
‘Oh, ha-ha. Thirty years in the British army and I never so much as pinched my thumb in a breech. So your loony’s turned dangerous. Well, you said he would. Now what?’
‘A good citizen would wait for the police to catch him.’
‘Yes, but what are you going to do?’