The Bohemian Girl

Chapter FOURTEEN
‘His mama implied that you had lured her poor boy to your room. I suppose she thinks you provided the red paint, too.’
Janet Striker made a face. ‘And Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove has been sent off to Mama’s country house with two male nurses. Detective Sergeant Munro is keeping me up to date.’
Denton scowled. ‘Some house arrest - hard time in a stately home. Couple of medical men to look in weekly, presumably with lunch laid on. Hard on them, too.’
Janet Striker laughed. ‘No good being angry.’
‘He’s getting off as good as scot-free. I’d tan his hide for him.’
They were eating at Pinoli’s in Wardour Street. He was in ‘informal’ evening clothes - short black jacket with silk revers, white waistcoat, white tie - and she was in a new suit of a dark-green wool tailored to an almost masculine cut, the jacket thigh-length like a frock coat, the skirt box-pleated at the front and back to accommodate her long stride. ‘I like that dress,’ he said.
‘It isn’t a dress; it’s a suit. You look like a successful manufacturer. ’
‘Good a disguise as any.’
‘I thought you enjoyed being an outsider.’
‘It’s no good if you have to work at it. Working at it is Bohemian, isn’t it - the Slade kids in their rags?’
She laughed. ‘I’d never take you for a Bohemian.’
A week had gone by. The book’s end was in sight, if he could keep up the pace. She’d spent a night at his house; a meeting at her hotel had proved less happy - he’d taken a room overnight, had come to her room. It had seemed ‘sordid’, in her word. He had had to admit it had been pretty scatty. He said, ‘We have to make some better arrangement.’
‘We will.’ She had a small, ridiculous hat perched on her forehead; it looked like a soldier’s pillbox, except that instead of a chinstrap it had a ribbon that went around the back of her head. She said, ‘I keep feeling that that thing is falling off into my food.’
‘It’s perky.’
‘“Perky”! Mrs Cohan has an idea for a kind of homburg with a fancy band.’
‘Mrs Cohan. Wife to the Stepney Jew-Boy?’
‘They live in the same house as I did, two floors down. She sews - six days a week, making shirts to sell for three-and-six apiece, for which she gets fourpence each. He has no job, as you know. And they’re good people, Denton! She does magnificent embroidery - in Poland, she did wedding dresses and court gowns. She’s going to make me more dresses. We’re thinking along rather Janey-Morris-y lines.’
Denton looked blank.
‘William Morris’s bride. The original Pre-Raphaelite woman. No corset and her hair unbound. Ruth Castle told me about her when I was a beginner.’
‘You’ll be a sight on Oxford Street.’
‘I shan’t wear them on Oxford Street. I’ll wear them at home, and this sort of thing -’ she pulled at one lapel of her jacket - ‘when I’m out.’
‘Now who’s planning to wear a disguise?’
‘Well—There’ll be a real me and a pretend me, and the real one will live at home - if ever I get a home again. I’m so sick of hotels!’
‘I don’t know much about women’s clothes.’
‘Do you know much about women? Yes, of course you do. I think you mean you don’t care about women’s clothes.’ She sipped wine.
‘I care about you.’

They stumbled along. Cohan finished getting the weeds and brambles out of the back garden. He and Atkins started to plan what they’d plant in the spring. Mrs Striker moved to another hotel. When Denton said to Cohan that he understood he was a priest descended from Aaron, Cohan said, ‘I am not beink a very good Jew.’ Nonetheless, when Denton told him what Fred Oldaston had said about Mrs Franken and her two whorehouses, Cohan had looked severe and said he didn’t need work that much.
Denton continued to write, the end now in sight. One day, Atkins reminded him that he was supposed to go to a party at his publishers - the launching of the book of ghost stories that Lang had told him about. He groaned, said he wouldn’t go, but he did go, because Janet Striker told him he should. And because he couldn’t be with her that evening.
At six on a blustery afternoon, he went up the creaking stairs that led to Gweneth and Burse and through ‘reception’, which was simply a part of the corridor that connected the offices. The party was in the room where they packaged the books, swept more or less clean and provided with a table where sherry and several platters of things in jelly stood. He looked around from the doorway, seeking somebody to kill the time with before he could decently leave. He was wearing an old morning coat, which Atkins had said ‘would do’ because it was still early and he wasn’t going on anywhere, but most of the other men - and they were mostly men - were in some form of evening dress.
Standing near the outer wall, where windows looked down into Bell Yard, was Henry James, who was undoubtedly going on to dinner somewhere, to judge by his formal evening clothes and the fact that he was an aggressive diner-out. As Denton looked his way, James raised his eyes, recognized him and nodded. James was tallish, rather heavy, with shrewd, hard eyes; only a few years older than Denton, also American, but he had sat out the American Civil War while Denton had fought it - a divide that was to separate their generation for the rest of their lives. Denton felt towards him the faint resentment the soldier feels for men who haven’t served, then a counter-balancing remorse for his own prejudice; James, on the other hand, seemed to feel something the reverse, so the two were always pleasant to each other out of guilt. As writers and as men, they were very different, yet they always gravitated towards each other.
‘I read your latest with considerable interest,’ James said as soon as Denton was close, ‘and, I think, with satisfaction, although that is hardly a word that honours a work, I suppose, when heard by the author, or am I presuming to impose my own sensibilities on someone else’s, hardly unheard of in the world of books.’ He chuckled. Denton said something vague; he was never good at accepting praise, worse at giving it when it came to other people’s books. James was le ma?tre to his sycophants, but Denton couldn’t pretend to worship at his shrine. James put his fingers and thumb around Denton’s arm just above the elbow as if measuring it. He moved in closer and said in a low voice, ‘Do they do you pretty well at this publishers?’ He looked around the room.
Do him pretty well? Denton said, ‘We mostly get along.’
‘I’m never entirely confident of my publishers, whoever they be. The matter of royalty is vexing, constantly vexing, offered at a certain level and then haggled over as if the Man of Galilee had driven the money-changers out of the temple and into the publishing office.’ He shook Denton’s arm a little. ‘What do you think of these people who call themselves “agents”? They assure me they can lever better terms from the publishers, their letters sometimes quite impertinent, but then they confess they require some of it for themselves, a situation that I must admit gives me unease, not because I am naive in the ways of business, because I am not, but rather the opposite, for no one can have hovered about books for as long as I without learning that the income to be made from a book is finite and represents a sum that can be divided into only so many pieces without, like the crow in the Aesop’s fable - or is it the monkey? how one’s memory plays tricks - dividing it into nothingness. I wonder if these would-be “agents” are not simply opportunists who think authors are fools.’
Denton admitted that he had had some letters from would-be agents himself and was tempted.
‘Exactly. But one doesn’t want to be the first to step into this perhaps inviting pool and find it to be not sweet water but something unsavoury, perhaps in fact corrosive.’ James stood with his head slightly bent, still holding Denton’s arm, his bright eyes scavenging the room like those of some intelligent bird, a pied crow that, if its tongue were split and it were taught to talk, would say malicious things. It was as if James were always on the lookout for scandal or at least its potential, James’s idea of the world of fiction, at least in Denton’s view, being very close to gossip. Such an approach was not Denton’s, just as James’s ambience was not his. As if guessing his thought, James shook his arm again and said, ‘Our work is very different, yours and mine, yet both are to be admired. That is rather a conundrum. I have been thinking about it a good deal for a preface. The house of fiction has many windows, has it not?’
‘For us to look out of ?’ Denton laughed. ‘I’d have said it was a house that had many doors.’
‘Aha, you shift my metaphor. Perhaps a separate entrance for ladies, at least, if not a separate house. No, I was thinking of the way we see and what we see and then what we do with what we see, each from his own window. Tell me now, what do you make of the vulgar concept of “the plot”? People who don’t know any better are forever asking me where I get my plots, as if I bought them with my shirts at a guinea a dozen. You don’t worry yourself greatly over “the plot”, surely?’
Denton tried to think about it. He lacked James’s interest in criticism, seldom worked in such terms. ‘I suppose I begin with situation,’ he said. He thought of the book he was trying to finish, the husband and wife and the ghostly child. ‘Or an exchange. Some kind of interaction.’
‘Aha! Very good. Interaction. Mmm. And then “the plot” comes along like a child’s wooden toy that gets pulled on a string, mechanically bobbing its head and wagging its tail. Yes. I quite agree. Although I begin rather differently; how matters not.’ His eyes had continued to dart about, even though his head was down and he and Denton might have seemed to be discussing secrets.
Denton thought about how they must look, then reminded himself that they were the only Americans there. The outsiders. It might have been the title of a Jamesian novel. He said, ‘I’d have said that you and I stand on the outside of the windows with our noses pressed against the glass, not that we were looking from the inside out.’
James let go of his arm. His little smile seemed almost apologetic. ‘You are made of even harder stuff than I. I fear it’s important to me to be safely inside.’ He prepared to move off. He pulled down a cuff and touched his white necktie. ‘I see Edmund Gosse over there. I must ask him about someone to paint my portrait. My publisher insists upon a portrait frontispiece for a collected works. I was to have been painted by Himple, RA, but he suddenly decamped for places unknown. I suppose this was “artistic” of him, but it leaves me in what Americans of our generation call “a pickle”. I have waited for him for months. Really, one should be able to be “artistic” and still maintain some regularity to one’s life.’ He gave Denton his small smile and a glance from his sharp eyes, up through his brows. ‘Thank you for your most helpful comments about our craft.’
Denton was able to get away twenty minutes after that. He had smiled at Lang and avoided Gweneth, the publisher who thought he had cheated them out of the motor car.
Atkins had circled a small article in the military-affairs page of The Times. Denton found it open on his morning tray:
END OF AN OFFICER’S TRIAL
‘Compassion’ Cited in Guilty Verdict
The court-martial proceedings against Lieutenant Aubrey Heseltine, Imperial Yeomanry, ended yesterday with a verdict of guilty to a lesser included charge. The reduction in charge, from Withdrawal in the Face of the Enemy to Failure to Obey a Lawful Order, was the result, a spokesman for the court-martial board said, of consideration for Lieutenant Heseltine’s medical condition. He is said to be suffering from a nervous disorder.
The officer was sentenced to loss of three months’ pay, loss of emoluments and privileges, and return of his commission to the Crown without compensation. He is not to use the rank or wear the King’s uniform again in any circumstances.
Several witnesses spoke to his medical condition and to his good conduct before the incident at Spattenkopje which led to the charge.
‘Poor devil,’ Denton muttered.
‘If he’d been other ranks, they’d have shot him.’ Atkins was pouring tea. ‘Bloo-ha! Discipline! Make an example of him!’ Atkins had turned himself into a fat general of about seventy. ‘My hat!’
‘I’ll go see him.’
‘You finish that book, General. There’s bills to pay.’
‘I can finish the book and go see him.’ He bit into a piece of toast. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Today, you mean? The usual. Mrs Char coming to do the rooms.’
‘Good time for me to be out of the house. Don’t let her into my room.’
‘Cleanliness is next to godliness.’
‘God isn’t an author.’
He thought he needed a reason to visit Heseltine - he could hardly show up and say something like I thought as you’d been found guilty, I’d drop by - so he put one of the photographic copies of Mary Thomason’s drawing into a leather case and carried it along. And it would be an opportunity to try the art dealer, Geddys, again. Or hadn’t he promised Munro to leave Mary Thomason to the police? Meaning to Guillam and his little empire. Who had done nothing.
A sleety rain was coming down. He put on a pair of heavy tweed trousers he’d had since his first winter in London, a single-breasted wool coat that matched nothing but its own waistcoat, and another of the high collars that he despised.
‘Find me some shirts with soft collars,’ he snarled to Atkins.
‘Not proper.’
‘To hell with “proper”. I feel as if I’m wearing a slave collar.’
‘Have to get them made special, Colonel - cost you.’
‘And worth it.’
He pulled on an unfitted tweed ulster that billowed around his legs, something else he had bought years before. It had the virtue of keeping the rain off, but it was as heavy as the flock of sheep it had come from. Only as wide as his shoulders at the top, it expanded to yards of circumference at the skirts.
‘If the wind is blowing, I’ll sail away over the rooftops of London,’ he said as he went down to the front door. ‘I’ll send you a postcard from Paris.’
‘If you’d had me when you bought that garment, you’d not have bought it.’ Atkins handed him a soft tweed hat. ‘This hat’s really for shooting, mind.’
‘Maybe I’ll shoot somebody, then.’ He didn’t, however, take the new revolver, the danger supposedly over now that Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove was in his luxurious detention.
He wanted to walk, but it was too foul a day - sleet blowing in sheets from the west, wet slush piling up along the edges of pavements; part of a newspaper came pelting down the street, head-high, and he backed out of its path. His elastic-sided boots were soaked by the time he reached Russell Square, and he gave in and waved over a cab.
Albany Court was deserted, its plane trees bare now, the old man who stood nominal watch at the gate huddled in a kiosk. He merely waved Denton through, not willing to suffer a wetting. Heseltine’s ‘man’ - what was his name? Jenkins? Jenks? - opened the door. He was freshly shaven but his skin was blotchy, splashes of red on his nose and cheeks like stains. It was early in the day; he seemed sober. He even seemed to remember Denton.
‘Mr Heseltine isn’t well, sir.’
‘I just thought he might like to look at something.’ Denton lifted the leather case a few inches.
‘I’ll just see.’ Jenks - the name was certainly Jenks; he was sure now - made a slow about-face and felt his way across the room. Presumably he was drunk, after all. Denton wondered if it suited Jenks best to have Heseltine ‘ill’, confined to his room, not out and about where he could check the level of the sherry and ask questions.
‘Coming right out, sir. Tea? Or coffee? It’s morning. Isn’t it?’
‘Nothing, thanks. And yes, it’s morning.’
Heseltine appeared, again in a long dressing gown, a common wool scarf at his throat instead of collar and tie. They shook hands. Heseltine said, ‘You heard, I’m sure.’ He seemed quite calm.
‘I’m sorry it turned out as it did.’
‘It could have been worse.’ Heseltine took a cigarette from a box, offered Denton one, then stood with his unlighted. ‘There comes a point during the court martial when you say, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and you realize that the worst is happening. That you’re already there, already prepared.’ He struck a match. ‘My father was heartbroken. For me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘He’s a clergyman. Had I told you that? Quiet little village, rather quintessentially English, quite out of date. He believes in goodness. Is a good man himself. He said, “Come home. All will be well.”’ He lit the cigarette.
‘Will all be well?’ Denton murmured.
Heseltine tried to laugh; the voice sounded cracked.
‘I thought you might like to see this.’ Denton opened the clasp on the leather envelope. ‘It’s a drawing of the young woman who wrote the note you found in your painting.’ He looked towards the Wesselons.
‘Wherever did you get it?’
‘Probably somebody she modelled for did it.’ He handed the drawing over. Heseltine looked at it, perhaps more out of politeness than real interest. Denton watched his eyes travel over the drawing, then down to the corners where the two miniatures were. For an instant, something happened to his face - a gathering between the brows, a dipping of the head to look more closely - and then there was an almost visibly conscious recovery that included a glance at Denton. ‘Very nice,’ he said. He handed the drawing back.
‘I thought you’d seen something.’
‘Oh, no. The little sketches are hard to see. The head is quite well done.’
‘Some of the students at the Slade recognized her, anyway.’
‘What’s happened to her?’
Denton shook his head. ‘I’ve reported it to the police. Nothing else to be done, I guess.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that young woman. Rather looking for things to think about, you know. I wondered - you’ll find this the morbid thought of a disappointed man, I suppose - I wondered if she put the note in the painting so it would be found.’
‘And you found it.’
‘Not by me. Somebody else. It sounds rather daft now I say it. I thought she might have meant it for the person who was trying to “hurt” her - isn’t that what you told me? Put in the back of the painting like that, it could have been for somebody at the shop. Or - I told you somebody else had been going to buy the Wesselons.’
‘In an envelope with my name on it?’
‘Yes, that’s rather the sticking place, isn’t it. Well, it was just a thought. Not much of one, as it turns out.’
Heseltine didn’t seem really to care. If Mary Thomason had once had some interest for him, even some idea that he might achieve something by helping her, it was gone. They chatted in a desultory way for a few more minutes. Denton said, ‘How’s Jenks been behaving? ’
‘Oh, he’s atrocious. I shall have to get rid of him.’ But he had said that before. He came to the door with Denton and paused, fingers on the knob as if he meant to hold it closed. ‘My father wants me to come home.’
‘It might be the best thing.’
‘It sounds absurd, but I can’t face those people.’ He put his hand on the doorknob. ‘I may go away.’
‘Going someplace for a few years might not be the worst idea - Australia, Canada, the States. Put it behind you. Everybody west of the Mississippi is putting something behind him.’
‘I’ve lost my nerve.’
The rain had turned away from sleet but was still coming down. Denton pulled the hat brim lower and took the few steps along Piccadilly to the arcade and moved into its welcome shelter. What Heseltine had said about the note and the painting didn’t seem convincing, but it did suggest one or two possibilities. He had promised Janet he would talk to Geddys, anyway - how long was it since he’d tried and been told Geddys was travelling? Turning into Geddys’s shop, he saw Geddys standing there looking more than ever the gnome - some bent, malicious creature standing guard over a cave full of valuable, probably stolen things.
‘I was in a while ago,’ Denton said. ‘I came back, but you seem to have been travelling.’ Geddys gave no sign of recognition, but Denton thought that in fact he remembered him. ‘About a note that was left with a painting. A Wesselons sketch of a lion.’ He wondered if Geddys had been away at all.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Mary Thomason.’
‘Oh, yes, I recollect.’
‘Mr Geddys, you told me that you didn’t know where Mary Thomason lived.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Her landlady says you sometimes saw her home.’
‘Did she.’
Denton waited for more. Apparently there was to be none. He said, ‘I’ve reported this to the police since I was here. Have they been to talk to you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I could make sure that they do.’
Geddys looked up at him, his neck twisted to one side. He said, ‘I don’t get what you’re about. You’ve no authority to come in here asking questions.’
‘Why did you lie to me?’
‘That is offensive.’
‘Look, Geddys, it’s me or the police. They’re a good deal more offensive than I am. Why did you lie to me?’
‘Please leave my shop.’
‘You saw the young woman home a number of times. Why did you want to hide that from me? What was going on?’
‘I’ll have a constable called if you don’t leave.’
‘Was there something between you?’ Geddys was ready to make a battle of it, but Denton jumped in. ‘She wrote me that she was afraid somebody was going to hurt her. She’s disappeared. You lied about how well you knew her. What do you think the police will make of it?’
Geddys licked his lips. ‘I don’t wish to be involved.’
‘But you are involved. You involved yourself by lying to me. What was going on between you?’
Geddys turned away and walked the few steps to the front of the shop. He bent to arrange something in the front window. ‘Do the police have to come into this?’ His voice was a whisper.
‘I don’t have to call them specially, if that’s what you mean.’ Geddys began to examine small objects on a low table. ‘She was a very - captivating girl. I became a little - interested in her.’ He looked up quickly. ‘But nothing happened! I swear it. I’ll swear it to the police. Yes, I took her home in a cab several times when the weather was bad. It was a chance to help her. But nothing happened!’ He finished moving the things and straightened. ‘I’m a coward. Look at me - you think it would be easy to offer yourself to a young woman if you looked like me?’ He walked to the shop window again, stood looking out past the paintings and bric-a-brac that were exhibited there. ‘That’s all there was to it.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘A man like you wouldn’t understand. But I’d never have hurt her, never.’
He was believable, Denton thought. He didn’t entirely believe, but he wasn’t any longer sure that Geddys was lying, either. An older man, something like infatuation - was some sort of purity possible here? Remembering what Heseltine had suggested, he said, ‘Mr Geddys, who else might have looked at the back of the Wesselons?’
‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Because she put the note there? She probably put it there so she wouldn’t forget it.’
‘But she did forget it.’ Or did she? Perhaps Heseltine’s theory was not so entirely wrong. ‘How many other people worked in the shop when Mary Thomason was here?’
‘Only one.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘A woman.’ Geddys put his hands behind his back, stared out at the empty arcade. ‘An older woman. She and Mary got along, neither friends nor enemies - you know. But the Wesselons was out here in the shop; Alice had no reason to come out here and handle it.’
‘But you did.’
‘Well, of course I did! I owned it!’ He turned his head towards Denton but didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Please leave. I’ve nothing more to say.’
‘Who was going to buy the painting? Somebody was going to buy it and then didn’t want it.’
‘The Wesselons? I can’t tell you that.’
‘I think you’d better.’
‘I have a responsibility to my clients.’
‘Do you want to tell the police about that?’
Geddys whirled on him, his face reddening, his head tilted on the neck, then strode to the back and came out with a large ledger. He opened it on one hand, turned pages with the other, read until he found what he wanted. ‘Francis Wenzli put down a guinea on it. He never came for it. I wrote to remind him that the painting was here, and he sent back my note with a scribble on it to the effect that he was no longer interested.’ He slammed the book. ‘Rude of him.’
‘Who’s Francis Wenzli?’
Geddys looked at him as if he were simple. ‘The painter.’
‘You didn’t give him back his deposit?’
‘He didn’t ask for it.’ Geddys shrugged. ‘I’d lost the sale, after all.’
Denton went over some of it again, but Geddys wanted him gone. The story didn’t change. A couple of hard detectives might get more - Denton thought there might be more to ask about the relationship with Mary Thomason - but he wasn’t going to get it today. He could come back another time. Or put Guillam on him, ho-ho.
He had missed lunch. The rain was steady now, the wind slacked off; Piccadilly seemed dispirited - the tops of the buses empty, the horses plodding with their heads down, black umbrellas everywhere. He realized he was hungry. His watch told him it would be the low period at the Café Royal, but he could at least find something to eat there, and he might, too, find somebody who could tell him who Francis Wenzli was. Not Frank Harris: Harris was one of the nighttime habitués. Oddly, he thought of Gwen John, and not without interest. He set off for the Café Royal.
Inside the door of the Domino Room, shaking the rain off his ponderous overcoat, he looked for a familiar face. The room was all but empty, waiters leaning against the backs of chairs, arms folded. A single pair of long legs stuck out from a banquette half-hidden by a gold-and-green pillar - somebody either asleep or telling the world with his posture to go to hell.
It was the latter. Denton saw a big, dark hat, the glitter of a gold earring.
‘Hullo, sheriff. What the hell are you doing here at this hour?’ It was Augustus John, Gwen’s brother, astonishingly cheeky for a near-boy of twenty-three. Denton slid into the banquette and said, ‘I might ask you the same thing. I like your hat.’
‘Bought it off an Aussie I saw in the street.’
‘I thought you were in Liverpool.’
‘I was. I couldn’t stand any more of it, so I took a few days off.’ John was sitting low on his spine, arms folded, the wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. His costume - an almost threadbare velvet jacket in olive green, once apparently belonging to a game-keeper, corduroy trousers much bagged from the rain, thick boots - proclaimed the artist. So did the earring, the almost black beard.
‘Liverpool isn’t London?’ Denton said.
‘The Liverpudlians believe that only Greece, Rome and dead people in fancy clothes can be proper subjects for art. They’re astonished and censorious that I could think the gypsies in the fields or the workers at the docks could interest me. They display the very best taste of the eighteen-fifties.’ He sighed heavily and looked over at Denton, who was beginning a negotiation with a waiter about the choucroute garni. John said, ‘My sister said she’d seen you. Gwen was rather taken with you. She likes older men.’
‘I’m certainly one of those.’
‘She said you were looking for a girl.’
‘Not what you think.’ Denton passed over the leather envelope that held the drawing and told the waiter he’d have the chicken pie.
John took the drawing out and looked at it. His head came back as if his eyes were too close to it. ‘Right piece of shit, isn’t it,’ he said.
‘Gwen said Burlington House.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You don’t recognize her? She was in her first year at the Slade.’
‘Might. I used to drop into the drawing classes, might have seen her. Dreadful piece of work, this.’ He put his head forward and brought the drawing up almost to the brim of his hat. ‘The remarques are more interesting.’
‘The little drawings in the corners?’
‘Not awfully well done, but they’re Slade work, which is something. ’
‘Different hands did the head and the little things?’
‘Oh, of course. The girl might have done the remarques, in fact - they look about right for first-year work. But she didn’t do the head - that’s Academy stuff, somebody immensely pompous and outdated. Bit odd, putting remarques on somebody else’s drawing, more so when the drawing’s of you. Little mementoes.’
‘Of what?’
‘Who the hell knows? One’s a doorway; means nothing to me. The other—’ John laughed. ‘Christ on a crust, it’s Himple!’ He laughed again. ‘Sir Erasmus Himple, RA - one of the great old turds of Burlington House. The drawing is his Lazarus. It’s obvious. I have a friend who insists that it looks like a man preparing to let out a colossal fart. That look of intense stupidity - the open mouth, the rolling eyes - old Himple said it shows Lazarus at the moment of realizing he’s alive again. I suppose one could wake with a fart, eh?’
‘“His Lazarus”?’
‘Himple put a painting of the raising of Lazarus into the last exhibition. Huge thing - took up most of a wall. He described it as his “chef-d’oeuvre” and made much of the fact that his Lazarus is young and his Jesus is a Jew. And indeed, the Christ has a nose like Shylock in a burlesque, but everybody else in the painting is as English as Boadicea, so it looks as if the Jew of Malta has wandered into a palace garden party. Himple is unmatchable - a genus unto himself.’
Denton was turning over the name - Himple. Somebody else had mentioned Himple. Who was it? He was eating chicken pie, bending to look over John’s shoulder at the drawing. ‘I thought maybe the man in the drawing was screaming.’
‘Well, he could be. One’s never quite sure with Himple. You know, on closer inspection, I think that Lazarus looks a bit like the woman in the big drawing? And I wonder if she was perhaps the model for Lazarus’s sister, who’s shown in the painting as tripping over the ground as if she’s weightless, one hand extended like a hostess introducing the dustman to the Prince of Wales.’
‘I should have a look at the painting.’
‘It’s worth the trip, if only for the comic effect.’
‘But why would Lazarus look like a woman?’
‘The girl in the drawing was a model?’
‘Now and then, they say.’
‘There you are.’
‘For Lazarus and the sister?’
‘Well, it’s like old Himple to want to show a family resemblance. He likes to be authentic, you know - brothers and sisters always look alike, right?’ He laughed. ‘Like Gwen and me.’
Denton looked more closely at the little drawing. ‘And Lazarus is what she’d look like as a man?’ He was thinking of the brother who had picked up Mary Thomason’s trunk from her lodging house.
John stirred. He found a pencil in a pocket, searched through others until he found a folded piece of cartridge paper, on one side a list of some sort. He smoothed it out on the table and began to draw with quick, sure strokes. To Denton, it was like theatrical magic: one moment, blank paper, the next a face very like Mary Thomason’s but male.
‘I’ve cut his hair for him. Or we could have him with a beard, like Lazarus.’ He made another sketch just as quickly, and the same young face appeared with a short beard, even the slight scantiness of the youthful hair shown. The economy of line was remarkable, and all at once Denton understood ‘the Slade look’. He told John as much, praised his ability.
‘I’ve thought of doing portraits in Trafalgar Square - sixpence a head. I’d make a fortune.’
‘Can I keep those?’
John slid the paper over the tablecloth. ‘You can tell your grand-children you own an original Augustus John.’ He took the paper back and dashed off a signature, shoved it over again.
‘You’re not lacking in confidence, anyway.’
John laughed. ‘Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’ He sighed. ‘I mean to get very drunk and possibly find myself a woman. That sound like a programme that would interest you?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘I think Gwen wondered if you were attached to anybody just now.’
‘I am, actually.’
‘Oh.’ John slid down on the banquette again. ‘It’s just as well. Gwen’s really interested only in her art. Everything else is “secondary”, as she puts it. I wish I had her concentration. You heard I was married?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Hard on the concentration. Gwen’s quite right, actually. She’ll wind up a nun of art. I’ll wind up a bigamist. Or a trigamist. I can’t live without women. Half a dozen of them, if I could afford them. Oddly, having only one is surely more distracting than two or three - they could entertain each other. Isn’t that so?’
Denton had ordered coffee. He sipped. ‘I was married once. It was distracting, yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘She killed herself.’
John seemed to ponder this. He put his eyebrows up, then cocked his head, frowned. He said, ‘I came to London to cheer myself up, and I’m not being cheered. It’s time to get drunk.’ He wandered away.
Denton remembered that he had meant to ask about Wenzli, the man who had put down the deposit on the ‘little Wesselons’. He also remembered who had first mentioned Himple - Henry James, at the dismal party at his publishers. Something about Himple’s having gone away.
Maybe he had come back.
‘Mary Thomason as a young man, with and without beard.’ He spread the piece of paper on his desk. Janet Striker, his dressing gown held closed at her throat, bent to look at it. It was Atkins’s evening off.
‘We should look at the painting,’ she said.
He put his hand on her buttock. She flinched.
‘I’m taking liberties,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I’ll get used to it.’
‘I hope not.’ He tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t.
It was the same skittishness. He wondered when she would end it.



The Raising of Lazarus was indeed an enormous painting, the figures life-sized, the landscape so expansive that it was impossible to take in the whole thing at once. A printed note said that the actual site of the Apostle John’s account was shown, sketches for it made in the Holy Land by the artist himself. The clothes, mostly cloaks and shifts, were ‘archaeologically authentic’, but the faces were, as Augustus John had said, as English as Spotted Dick. Despite the seriousness of the subject - a man raised from the dead, after all, a miracle by the Messiah - there was something terrifically lightweight about it.
‘Like Handel played on the tin whistle,’ she murmured.
He actually knew who Handel was. ‘They’re all play-acting,’ he said.
‘Oh, that is it, isn’t it. He’s posed them all. As if it’s a studio photograph that went on too long. It is frightful, isn’t it.’
He went closer and studied Lazarus. There was no mistaking that face now. With the memory of the drawing and John’s sketches in his head, he thought of Lazarus as ‘Mary’s brother’. He said, ‘Himple used her for the sister and her brother for Lazarus.’
‘If they really look so much alike, he could have used either to model both.’
A lot of handsome young men filled the crowd that followed Jesus. Denton said, ‘Either Jesus or the artist favours the good-looking ones.’
‘Mmm, boys. Yes, I suppose. That might cast another light on the brother.’
‘What are you saying - Himple liked young men but used Mary as a model? Or her brother? I told you that James said that Himple had “decamped”. I wonder if we can find him to ask some questions. ’
She turned back before they left the gallery. ‘It’s so huge. Can you imagine having that on your wall?’
‘It would cover a lot of cracked plaster.’