The Bohemian Girl tds-2

by Kenneth Cameron

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 t
hem 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Next day, he met Janet Striker in front of University College in Gower Street on a walk in the now-flowerless gardens near the college entrance. People, most of them students, were going around them. She had already been to the offices of the Slade.

  He said, ‘I had a with Munro about her. The divisions and the coroner have never heard of Mary Thomason. That means she didn’t report anybody trying to hurt her, and her corpse hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘Good, because we’re going to talk to her landlady.’

  ‘You got her address?’

  ‘The Slade people wanted to be helpful. It wasn’t easy — the fact is, it was months ago, and she seems to have made very little impression, and students leave all the time. I did learn that she was on a list to do modelling, so she probably needed money.’

  ‘In the-Without her clothes on?’

  Janet Striker laughed. ‘No, clothed. Nude models are a separate species, it seems.’

  ‘Why did they think the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women wanted her? Did you suggest she was wayward?’

  ‘No, I suggested we were interested in starting an art class for our women. They didn’t question that — even gave me the names of other students who might want to teach.’

  ‘Had she told them she was leaving?’

  ‘A note, purportedly after she’d gone home. Somebody brought it by, they thought — they didn’t remember. I asked about her friends. They knew nothing, of course — it’s only an office. They suggested I see a man named Tonks who teaches drawing. Of course he isn’t here just now. Shall we go?’

  ‘You seem eager enough to enter into my project.’

  ‘I told you, it’s something we can do together.’

  That sounded encouraging. ‘You can enter into my life, but I can’t enter into yours?’

  She looked away as if something had caught her attention along Gower Street. ‘Maybe there’s something in that.’ She clutched his arm. ‘Let’s go — it’s raining.’

  ‘Not like last night.’ He was glad for a cue to mention it, afraid that the emotional intensity, the kiss, the dinner, would be allowed to slip away. She glanced at him, grinned, flushed. She squeezed his arm. ‘We’re going to Fitzroy Street. Do you know Fitzroy Street?’

  ‘Why did you smile just now?’

  ‘Because we’re both thinking about last night.’ She laughed. ‘What a pair of fools we are.’

  Number 22 Fitzroy Street was a tall house that came right to the pavement, its brick blackened, a sign advertising rooms in a front window. Despite the remains of a broken urn that had fallen off the doorstep and lay next to it, and despite the roar and horse-piss smell of Euston Road hard by, the house had a look of stubborn respectability in the blind face it turned to the street — no wrappings of food put out on the windowsills to stay cool, no broken panes patched with paper, no views through uncurtained windows into student squalor. Beside a bell, a handwritten slip of paper said ‘Mrs Durnquess’.

  ‘The Slade keep her name on a list. She’s some sort of preferred haven for new students — her record is good, I suppose. The woman I dealt with said that Mrs Durnquess was “trusted by the parents”, whatever that means. I can’t imagine that parents with a girl at the Slade know much of what goes on, unless they live in Euston Square.’

  She rang the bell. Thirty seconds after a second ring, an adolescent with an Irish accent opened the door. Without waiting to hear what they wanted, she said, ‘No rooms — all gone.’

  ‘I want to see Mrs Durnquess, my girl.’ Janet Striker’s voice could have gone through steel.

  ‘Oh, yes, ma’am. Didn’t look properly at you, I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’ll git her direct.’

  ‘May we come in?’

  ‘Oh, oh, sure you may, ma’am, I’m all to sixes and sevens today — forgive the mess the students make please, ma’am — and sir — I’ll just git-’ She was off down the corridor that ran the depth of the house. A door on their left had once led to a front parlour, Denton supposed, now rented to somebody trustworthy enough to keep the front window curtains closed. On their left, a staircase ran to the upper floors, once-figured carpet climbing it wearily, held back from collapse by tarnished rods. The banister and newel showed signs of many collisions. The place smelled of boiled meat.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Denton murmured.

  ‘I live in worse.’

  The Irish maid appeared again at the far end of the corridor, waving them towards her. Her hair hung down in sweaty curls from a grubby cap. She was fastening her sleeves, which had been unbuttoned when she opened the door, as if they had been rolled up. ‘Miz D will see you in her parlour,’ she said, and, pointing at the last of the doors, vanished.

  A voice answered his knock. The open door showed a room chock-a-block with furniture, perhaps all the ‘good’ pieces of the entire house, the rest left for the tenants. A chesterfield sofa was assumed to double as a bed. The walls were covered with paintings, cows much in evidence, the frames jammed against each other. On the shore of this sea of clutter, a vast woman sat where she could get the light from a window. Her black dress and cap aimed for austerity; her huge excess of flesh argued indulgence. ‘I am Mrs Durnquess,’ she said. ‘I don’t get up.’

  ‘Not at all.’ Janet Striker walked into the room as if she owned it and presented a card. ‘I am Mrs Striker of the Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women. This is one of our patrons, the well-known man of letters, Mr Denton. Our business is beneficent, Mrs Durnquess: we seek the whereabouts of one of your tenants.’

  ‘My tenants’ whereabouts are here, or they aren’t my tenants. I am ever so particular.’ Her accent suggested to Denton a forced gentility, but he was poor on the English of the English; anything with a dropped H was to him ‘Cockney’, most else ‘genteel’.

  ‘We hoped you could help us.’

  ‘I’d be ever so happy to help you, Mrs — mmm — Strickers — I don’t have my right glasses on — and at once when I am apprised who the person might be.’

  ‘A young woman named Mary Thomason.’

  The fat face pouted. Some delicacy had been denied it. ‘Gone,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ Janet sounded to Denton as forced as the landlady; he’d never heard her put on the full gloss of the middle class before. ‘As we feared. Gone from our ranks, too — oh, not as one of our clients, not one of the women. Rather, a volunteer. A helper.’

  ‘Gone.’ Mrs Durnquess sighed. ‘Not like some, not folded up her tents like the Arabs in the middle of the night and as quietly stole away down Fitzroy Street. No, she was a good and honest girl; she paid her rent and a week ahead, but she has gone.’

  ‘May I ask when? We have missed her since August.’

  ‘It was August. Won’t you sit down, Mrs mmm, and you, sir. I stand so little any more, but I know it is fatiguing. The Queen Anne side chair is quite comfortable, or the Récamier. Yes, it was Augu
st. She left me a note and a shilling, and she disappeared.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  The head, topped with grey sausage curls that might not have been entirely real, bobbed up and down. ‘Her father. An accident at the works. I have only the haziest idea of what a works may be, and it suggests a level of society not of the best, but she was a good, sweet girl with manners well above that station.’

  ‘She told you in the note that her father had had an accident? And so she was going home to be with him? And where was home?’

  Mrs Durnquess waved an arm from which flaccid muscle hung like dough. ‘The west.’

  ‘Cornwall? Devon? Wales?’

  ‘Mary was an artist and suffered the artist’s flaw of inspecificity, though it is inspecificity that makes them artists. Many of my tenants are artists, or artists in embryo. When the late Mr Durnquess passed away — also an artist, twice accepted annually at Burlington House but not, alas, an RA — I was left with only this house and his paintings.’ A fat little hand waved at the walls. ‘I survive by renting rooms that were formerly my domestic haven to students in that great cause — Art.’

  ‘Ah.’ Janet glanced at Denton. ‘Mr Denton has spoken with her employer.’

  ‘The man Geddys? Hmm-hmm. I never approve of older men and younger women. Not to suggest that there was anything. I disapprove of speculation, especially on that score. But-’ She raised her tiny, blackened eyebrows. ‘He saw her home from work more often than perhaps a gentleman ought to have done.’

  ‘Could she have run off with him?’

  ‘Oh!’ It was a breathy little yelp. The thought of running off had a very strong effect. ‘To Gretna Green? I hardly think. I had required to speak with him in January and reminded him that we must appear to be upright and to be upright. People, I said, must not be given cause for scandal. I required to know what his seeing her home meant.’ She pulled herself up a little, sniffed. ‘He was — is — a very smooth man, if made somewhat unattractive by a physical affliction. I told him I was not subject to flattery or sham. He took my meaning and said quite forthrightly that he saw Mary home because she was in his employ and she was a naive, sweet creature in a city full of risks. I gave him what I refer to as the benefit of the doubt. It is true, after all, that a child like Mary was vulnerable, to put a point on it.’