The Bohemian Girl

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.

CHAPTER NINE

He slept a few hours in the early morning, woke and went back to his desk. The mood of the night, somewhat dissipated in daylight, faded as he bored in on his work.

Atkins, who was going to church (Denton was surprised to find it was Sunday) and apparently thought Denton should, too, made disapproving noises with dishes and clothes hangers.

‘Stop that racket.’

‘Being as quiet as I can.’