The Bohemian Girl

Chapter SIX
It was raining again the next day as he made his way down the Embankment to meet Janet Striker. A telegram had come from her at noon:
BANDSTAND GARDENS CHARING CROSS BRIDGE 5 PM STOP STRIKER
Not immediately clear, the meeting place had been sorted out with the help of a Baedeker’s, the sense that her knowledge of London was better than his, awareness that she too was a walker; he had wondered if she walked the city at night when she couldn’t sleep or when she had to escape (her mother, her life). Then the connection to streetwalker, her past, although she had told him she had tried the streets only once, too naive to know how or where, and had been pulled towards Mrs Castle’s whorehouse on Westerley Street.
He had set down almost forty pages that day. Work blotted out concern.
He was walking on the river side and crossed over the street when he reached the plaque that celebrated the engineer who had tamed the London sewers and built the Embankment. Ahead, he could see the bandstand, white and a green that was turning black in the gloom, a pointed roof with a flagpole where no flag was flying. An omnibus clopped by in the roadway, water splashing around the horses’ hooves; he saw movement on the bridge, shapes, but little that suggested life, rather some city of shades, that Homeric hell where there is no fire but only the absence of what we take to be human.
He saw her first as a black blot in the shadow of the bandstand. The blot took on a shape, skirted and therefore female, something widening it above - a rain cape. Another hideous black hat. He felt anger at her: she seemed to offer so little for him to have come this far for.
‘You’re here,’ he said. He had come up three wooden steps. Under the white ceiling, no rain fell, but the floor was wet, puddles lying in low places.
‘Of course.’
She was leaning against a white railing; a furled umbrella stuck out at an angle. ‘You’re very wet.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I took a cab. It’s a poor place to have picked for a rainy day. I thought we’d walk.’
‘Well—’
‘No. It was raining when I sent the telegram; I knew better. Maybe I thought you wouldn’t come.’
He leaned one shoulder against a post. The bottoms of his trouser legs were drenched. He shook water off his hat and put it back on.
‘Have you been working?’ she said.
‘All day.’
‘Something new?’
He told her about Cieljescu and the novel.
‘What’s it about?’
‘Oh—’ He wanted to hurry things, caught himself. ‘A marriage. A man and a woman.’
‘Are they happy?’
‘Of course not. What sort of novel would that be?’ She didn’t smile. He said, ‘They destroy each other, but they don’t see that that’s what they’re doing. They’re always - undermining - it’s worse than undermining, it’s going to each other’s weaknesses. It’s like a long mutual siege.’
‘What’s it called?’
He chewed his lips. He didn’t like titles, which always sounded stupid to him. ‘It used to be called The Machine. Now it’s The Love Child.’
‘You didn’t say they have a child. More than one?’
‘No, no, no children. It’s a - it’s what they, mmm, nourish in each other. Books always sound so stupid when I talk about them.’ He looked away down the Embankment, chewing his lower lip. ‘What I saw was that when things go bad, it isn’t one of them or the other. It’s both of them. A bad marriage is a conspiracy between two people to destroy themselves. So it’s something they give birth to and then encourage and - nourish. So the husband begins to see - he thinks he sees - a child, a boy. He sees him out a window. Then the boy is older; he sees him again. Then the next time, the boy is nine or ten, there’s something wrong with him, some look, some expression - he seems sly, his eyes too wide apart. And so on. They’re raising a monster child and they don’t know it.’
‘Does she see it?’
‘Oh—’ He tried to smile away his embarrassment. ‘At the end, he thinks she does. She sets fire to herself and he thinks something made her do it. The trouble with talking about a book when you’re working on it is that then you don’t want to work on it. It sounds so foolish!’
She waited several seconds and then said, ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. And what I said. Like you and your book, I don’t like talking about it.’ She drew a pattern with the tip of her umbrella. ‘I went to see Ruth Castle.’ Ruth Castle was the madam who owned the house on Westerley Street where Janet had once worked. ‘Ruth is a wise woman, a good woman. She’s drinking a lot now, but she has a good head on her shoulders. We talked for ages.’
‘Well?’
She looked up at him. It was the first time really since he’d come up the steps. ‘You frightened me, Denton. You wanted too much all at once.’
‘Six months?’
‘People don’t pick up where they left off after six months.’
‘I’m sorry if I hurried you. But, you know, I didn’t want to pretend. To court you, woo you, all that - degrading stuff.’
She played some more with the umbrella tip. ‘What are we talking about?’ Before he could say anything, she raised the umbrella as if to parry something he was about to do. ‘Don’t use that word. Don’t sentimentalize. I’m not sentimental; neither are you. Neither of us knows what “love” is.’
‘I was going to say - we could get married.’
‘Never. Never, never. I’ll go on the street again before I’d do that. You’ve picked the wrong woman, Denton. I need space around me. I need emptiness - nobody else with me. It’s the only way I can deal with - perhaps with myself, much less the rest of you.’
‘Then - what?’
‘Then whatever we make of it. Time, Denton, it takes time; don’t hurry me and don’t hurry yourself. It’ll come clear or it won’t. You said you want to be with me; yes, I want to be with you, I saw that yesterday, I saw the possibility of it - I never thought I would, never thought there was room for anybody but myself. But I’m not going to promise you anything. I can’t promise you anything. I don’t want to trick you.’
‘I’m not going to court you, Janet.’
‘Thank God for that, then.’ She straightened. ‘Let’s walk.’
‘So what you’ve said is that you’re not shutting me completely out.’
‘Denton, I’ve let you in deeper than anybody in my life! Don’t you understand?’
He put a hand out, touched the rain cape. It was the tentative move a man makes to see if he can go further; she must have recognized it for what it was, but she neither protested nor encouraged him; their eyes locked; he kissed her; she surprised him with a kiss that was passionate but short, and she said again, ‘Let’s walk.’
When they came down the few wooden steps, he saw a solitary figure farther along the Embankment turn away and look at the river.
‘Man’s following me,’ he said. ‘He’s a policeman. I know the rubber raincoat.’
‘What have you done?’
He laughed without humour. ‘It’s a long tale.’ He began to tell her about Albert Cosgrove.
They walked for an hour, then, finding themselves in Oxford Street, went on and turned into Church Street and to Kettner’s. She surprised him again by making no objection to dinner; he had thought that she didn’t want to be in public with him, but there was nothing to that. They were both hungry, ate hugely of the French food, drank a bottle of wine, laughed. It can be like that, first a kind of ultimate talk on which futures hang, then lightness, even light-headedness, an emotional exhaustion, even with things left unsaid.
They talked about other things. She told him she was leaving the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women. She was going to put her mother in a better home; she wanted to find herself a new place to live. She would remain, however, aggressively independent: his hint that she might live with him made her briefly angry.
So much had happened that he was confused about what he had told her and what he hadn’t. He realized only afterwards, when she looked confused by something he said, that she knew nothing about the mystery of the letter found in the Wesselons. He told her now about the note in the painting, the young woman named Mary Thomason; about Aubrey Heseltine, the art dealer, Geddys.
‘What have you done about the woman?’
‘Went to see Munro - it seems like weeks ago. It’s not his bailiwick. ’
‘Did you go to the Slade?’
‘Where Geddys said she was a student? No. I’m sure they wouldn’t talk to me - give information about a woman to a man who isn’t a relative, even a friend?’
‘They’d give it to me. I’d tell them she had applied to the Society for clerical work and we lost her address.’
‘Would you? When?’
‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, tomorrow, yes—’
‘Off on another wild hare together, Denton?’
‘The last one did all right, didn’t it?’
She touched the scar on her face. ‘Is there a monster this time?’ She had told him once that she believed that all men hated all women.
‘I hope not.’
She smiled. ‘Well, it’s something we can do together while we’re - coming towards each other.’
She wouldn’t let him see her home. There was no repetition of the kiss, which, he was sure now, had been a mark of punctuation, not a statement. He saw her into a hansom and watched it roll away into the rain. So, he saw, did his police follower, now a thin man in a baggy tweed.
Time, she had said. Taking their time was ludicrous for two people of their ages. It was all of it ludicrous - men, women, kissing, emotional exhaustion, waiting. But probably inescapable.