The Bohemian Girl

Chapter EIGHT
He was at work again next morning by eight, hard at it still at three that afternoon, grateful for the eyeglasses that made hours of writing possible. He felt harried by the need to get the book out of his head and on paper - the more so because of Cosgrove’s theft of the outline, as if irrationally he believed that Cosgrove might replicate it. Atkins, when he had first seen the glasses - Denton, of course, had forgotten he had them on - had blinked once and raised his thin eyebrows a fraction of an inch. Joker though he was, Atkins had a sense of tact. Later, when Denton, in pacing around his bedroom, passed the mirror, he saw the strange face, its huge nose topped by the spectacles that enlarged the eyes behind them. He looked like somebody on the stage. Somebody definitely comic.
At four, when his back hurt and his wrist was sore, Atkins appeared in the bedroom door.
‘Mrs Striker’s below with a box. Cab waiting at the door.’
Denton jumped up, struggled into a coat. When he turned to Atkins, the soldier-servant tapped between his own eyes. When Denton didn’t get it, Atkins made circles around his eyes with thumbs and fingers.
‘Oh - dammit—’ He pulled the glasses off, threw them on the desk and started out of the door.
‘Collar and tie, Colonel,’ Atkins murmured from the stairs.
Why did it matter? Why did such trivialities matter? But he put on a collar and tie.
Of course.
She was standing at the far end of the long sitting room, wearing the same or another equally awful hat and a dark coat. At her feet was a small trunk. She smiled when she saw him. ‘I’ve found Mary Thomason’s trunk.’
He stared at her. ‘How?’
She laughed. ‘It’s rather a tale.’
‘Atkins - take her coat, Mrs Striker’s coat—Want tea? Or coffee? There’s sherry—’ He had thought he would never get her here; now she was here under her own steam, and he didn’t know how to behave.
‘I have a cab waiting,’ she said as she handed over her coat. She kept the hat on.
‘Send it away. We can get another when—’
She shook her head. ‘It’s one thing for a woman to go to a man’s house and leave the cab waiting in front. It’s another for her to send it away. I don’t give a damn, but you’re a public sort of man.’
‘You know I don’t care about that -’ he hesitated, finished lamely - ‘stuff.’
‘Then you’ve lost whatever common sense you had. I’ll stay twenty minutes, no more.’ She glanced at Atkins. ‘Tea, if you can have it here in ten.’
‘At once, madam.’
Denton frowned, aware that Atkins was doing his perfect-servant turn, waved him away. He went closer to her. ‘I’m having a hard time realizing you’re really here.’
‘Do you want to hear my story or don’t you?’
‘Have you opened it?’
‘All in good time.’ She sat in the chair across the small fireplace from his; he perched on the arm of his own. She said, ‘Alf found me last evening. You remember Alf, the carter - St Pancras Road? Well, I’d written “To hear something to your advantage” on the card I left for him, and my address—’
‘You never left me your address.’
‘Perhaps I had nothing of advantage for you. At any rate, he turned up last evening. Alf lacks teeth and had been into gin somewhere, and he looked as if he might have been carrying sacks of coal - a sort of overall and a cap with a flap down the back - not awfully well washed, shorter than he ought to be, perhaps from bending. But agreeable in the way of men who say what they think you want to hear.
‘So I asked him if he remembered picking up a box from a house in Fitzroy Street in August. He didn’t, nor did he remember the brother, but he remembered Hannah well enough - mostly her scones - and then it came back to him. More or less. The long and the short of it was that if he sent the box off somewhere, he’d have a receipt for it. So back to St Pancras Road we went.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did. What have I better to do? He lives there, under the railway arch. It was as filthy as you’d expect. I’ve seen worse. He keeps his receipts impaled on a nail driven in from the outside - several nails, actually - and he went through them pile by pile, as apparently there’s no order to them - he smashes one on whatever nail he’s near. He found it at last, by the date. The signature was illegible - presumably the brother’s - intentionally so? But there it was, a receipt for one small trunk sent by rail to Biggleswade, “Hold until called for.”’
‘My God, you’re a wonder!’
‘It was getting on for dark by then. I stepped outside where I could see and asked him if he’d let me have the receipt for a few days. Alf was shocked at the very idea. Could I rent it for a few days? Alf said it would upset his record-keeping something fierce, not to mention morality, but two-and-six turned out to be the price of his record-keeping and his scruples. He was casting about for something else to sell me by then, but I had the receipt and I simply walked away to the telegraph office at St Pancras station, where I sent a telegram to the left-luggage office at Biggleswade to ask if the item number of the receipt had been picked up.’ She grinned. ‘They wired back this morning that it hadn’t.’
Denton slid down into his armchair. ‘Mary Thomason never got there.’
‘The trunk hadn’t been retrieved, at any rate. So this morning, I went and got it.’
He looked down at the trunk. It was shaped like a loaf of bread, perhaps two feet long, cheap wood partly covered with pressed tin and held together by oak slats. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I stopped at a locksmith’s on my way here and had it unlocked. But I haven’t looked inside.’
He tried to smile at her, but the smile was crooked and unconvincing because he was thinking she could be in trouble if somebody eventually came looking for the trunk. There was, too, a hesitation about looking into somebody’s privacy - more pointed, perhaps, because somebody had been looking into his. ‘You’re a wonder,’ he said again.
Atkins came in with a tea tray, which he put on a folding cake stand that he produced from the shadows of the room like somebody doing a magic trick. He put it down near Janet Striker with a perfect-servant flourish, poured her a cup of tea, and then faded back down the long room, hardly pausing as he opened the doors of the dumb waiter before disappearing down his stairs.
Denton took a cup of tea, then put it aside and bent forward and pulled, using the trunk’s hasp as a handle. Inside, a folded dress was visible, filling the interior, white with a narrow yellow line in the fabric, wrinkled bits of ruffle and lace showing; the fabric looked much washed. When he didn’t move to take it out, Janet Striker lifted it in both hands and put it on the chair in which she’d been sitting, then thought better of it and shook the dress out, turning it so that it fell from her hands as if it were being worn. She held it against herself. ‘Rather jeune fille. Appropriate, then. Summer dress, cotton, not awfully well made. She wasn’t as tall as I.’
Smudges of something black marked part of the skirt. She held it up. ‘Charcoal, don’t you think? From drawing. Meaning she’d worn it and not laundered it. Or it didn’t wash out.’
Under the dress were a couple of petticoats, a very plain nightgown with long sleeves, a small hat, also white, fairly new. ‘Rather virginal,’ Janet Striker said.
‘Maybe her mother bought her clothes for her.’
‘I’d say they almost look too young for a woman going somewhere like the Slade. But who knows.’ She pulled out three pairs of drawers, the sort that tied at the knee. Unembarrassed, she said, ‘The new style, anyway.’ She tossed them aside to reveal a brown cloak very worn around the bottom, also a pair of grubby wool mittens and a heavy cardigan, much ravelled at the cuffs and stretched and bagged all over. Janet fingered a few pairs of white stockings. Denton leaned over to see to the bottom - a single pair of shoes, very worn; a stack of handkerchiefs; a narrow box about six inches long; a pasteboard box that the shoes might have come in; and an imitation-leather folder so wide that it had had to be put in at an angle. Denton took the narrow box and pulled off the lid. ‘Why does a young woman have something called “The Princess Depilatory”?’
‘Women have hair, like men. Sometimes they want to get rid of it.’
He looked up at her. She was smiling. Underarms and legs, he supposed she meant; women were still so completely covered that, despite a tendency for skirts to creep up an inch or so, no hair was ever seen except on their heads. One famous writer was supposed to have abandoned his wife on their wedding night when he’d found she had pubic hair.
‘Is it something she’d want with her?’
‘She left in a hurry, didn’t she?’
He lifted out the imitation-leather folder. It was made to hold prints or drawings, tied with a limp cotton ribbon. ‘What’s in the shoe box?’
She had it in her hands. ‘Drawing pencils, India ink, charcoal - a soft eraser - pen nibs, some metal thing with a plunger, like a perfume atomizer - some reddish sticks of something, also white—’
The folder held about twenty sheets of what artists called ‘cartridge paper’, cheap stuff used for sketching. Most of the drawings were, he thought, classroom work: a clothed model, a still life of jugs and dishes, hands and noses and heads; a male nude, his privates hidden in a sort of sling; a piece of statuary. Three of the sheets were different - one a drawing of a house with rather formal shrubbery, one of a front door with urns and an upside-down cone that had once been used for extinguishing torches. The third was on different paper, heavier and textured, a drawing of a female head. Two much smaller drawings, one in ink over the original pencil lines, took up the two lower corners. The paper was wrinkled, as if it had been crushed and then smoothed out again.
‘What are the little ones?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t you see that on etchings sometimes, little scenes like that?’
He wished he had his new glasses. What he could make out was some sort of arched stonework on the left side and a male head on the other. ‘What’s he doing?’
‘Screaming? Shouting? Not enjoying himself, certainly.’ She was standing next to his chair now. He was acutely aware of her, a smell of soap. She reached across him and took the drawing to turn it over. On the back had been written in pencil, now smudged, ‘Mary 3 aug OI.’ Janet said almost eagerly, ‘It has to be her!’
‘Lot of Marys out there. Self-portrait?’
‘The style’s very different from the other stuff. Somebody else drew it, I think. Denton, it has to be her.’
They wrangled over it. Finally Denton put the drawing back in the trunk and said, ‘Is that everything?’
‘There’s a sketchbook.’ She leafed through it. ‘More Slade stuff, I expect. Half of it still unused.’
‘I think it’s a self-portrait. She didn’t have much money for models. Look at the clothes. One dress.’
‘And one she wore when she went away. Two dresses - wealth, to some people.’
‘Starving artist?’
Janet picked up the drawing, studied it and put it down again. ‘She, or whoever did it, must have thought better of it - balled it up and then tried to smooth it out.’
‘Didn’t like it, maybe, but couldn’t part with it. Because it was her own face? Or because somebody else did the drawing and she valued the person?’ He picked it up again. The face was pretty, young, the hair almost unkempt, rather shaggy over the forehead and down the sides of the face. ‘Is the hair “Bohemian”?’
‘I don’t meet many artists in my line of work.’ She moved away from him. ‘I have to go.’
‘I know you got the box for me, but—It wasn’t wise. There could be trouble if anybody ever comes looking for it. Promise me you’ll never do such a thing again.’
She was putting on her coat. She turned her head and looked at him. He knew instantly that he’d said the wrong thing. She said, her voice low, ‘Don’t ever tell me what I should and should not do. And don’t tell me what’s “unwise”.’ She had her hand on the doorknob. ‘I shall take it back late on Monday and say it’s the wrong trunk.’
He had moved to her. ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry—’
She shook her head. Going down the stairs, she said, ‘Please get a photo of that drawing made on Monday, and perhaps I can show it at the Slade. I’m going on half days at the Society now - dwindling down to the end like a candle.’ He told her he wanted to talk more to her, but she had rattled him and he babbled. She, on the other hand, was calm, seemed to have forgotten her flare-up.
Atkins was already standing by the lower door. Denton said, ‘I’ll see Mrs Striker into the cab.’
When she was inside the hansom, he held it by putting his hands on it and leaning in. ‘Janet, I want to see you.’ He waited for some response, got only her steady eyes and then a turn away. He backed to the pavement and called up ‘Drive on!’ to the man behind.
Denton lingered in the cold lower hall, angry with himself. He stared at his dreadful Scottish paintings. Fool, you damned fool, you treated her like a woman! Atkins was in the sitting room when he went up, collecting the tea things; he must have been doing so for several minutes - rather a long time for two cups - so as to talk.
Knowing what was expected, Denton said, ‘Well?’
‘Resourceful lady.’
‘I meant the trunk.’
‘Well, the brother did his part, else the box wouldn’t of got to Biggleswade.’
‘Biggleswade’s north. The girl told her landlady she was from the west.’
‘Girls lie.’ He made a face. Like Katya, he meant.
‘Granted, but why? She has her studies; she has a room; she writes me a note but doesn’t send it; then she leaves London. That all makes sense, more or less. Her brother collects her things; all right, that’s sensible. Then the trunk goes north instead of west and she never collects it.’
‘She’s dead. I mean, that’s what’s likely, let’s be honest. Somebody done her the harm she feared. Not a cheerful thought, but a sensible one.’ Atkins grinned. ‘Maybe Albert Cosgrove did her in.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He woke during the night feeling at first feverish and heavy, then anxious. The bedcovers were like lead, and he pushed them back, then used his drawn-up legs to shoot them to the foot. It had got warm. He pulled off his nightshirt and lay there naked, feeling the air on his hot skin.
A dream had made him anxious. Worse than anxious - near panic. He knew the dream. Back in the house he’d built in Iowa. Seeing his wife through the window, walking towards the pasture. The horrifying sense of the inevitable, the terrible. But the dream hadn’t gone on to his finding her body as it usually did, the lye jug beside her. That was the way it always ended, but not tonight. Tonight’s had ended with seeing her through the window, as if seeing her that way was seeing it all, suffering it all, leaving him to wake with the anxiety of knowing what was to come and not being able to stop it.
He got up and walked to the window. The dream wasn’t all of it. It was also that damned man, whoever he was, Albert Cosgrove, who had written him the letters, broken into the house behind, broken into even his own house.
With more coming - that was the sense of the dream: There’s more to come.
He saw his own reflection in the glass, a double laid over the dim bulk of the house behind. There was a man out there who wanted to be his double - to be him. That was it. Circling, watching, stealing bits of him, trying to become him.
Denton shuddered.
He knew what it was to concentrate on someone else so fiercely that the mind seemed to detach itself and fix. But his ‘someone elses’ were inventions - the characters in the unfinished novel. He knew that he partly lived in it. He carried on conversations in his head, saw faces, rooms, vistas. But he knew that that world was not real. And this novel was about his own marriage, his dead wife, their harrowing of each other, so it was that much more like inhabiting a second self. But he was - he smiled in the darkness - sane. The man who wanted to be him, he was sure now, was not. Denton himself was Albert Cosgrove’s novel, or at least the central character in the novel Cosgrove apparently couldn’t write, couldn’t create, and so Cosgrove’s concentration went into imitating - stealing him.
And it would get worse. And when it didn’t succeed, because it couldn’t, would Cosgrove do what Denton had done with a book that went wrong - turn on it and destroy it?
He pulled the nightgown over his head and pushed his arms into the sleeves of a robe. He lit the gas and sat at his desk and tried to write.