The Bohemian Girl

else.’

That was Tuesday. He didn’t see her the next two days and didn’t hear from her. He had four more letters from his nemesis, but there was nothing in them that helped the police. Denton tried to do as she had said; he worked the entire day, blotting out Mary Thomason, blotting out Albert Cosgrove. The Thomason business was pretty well over, he thought. It galled him that Guillam would do nothing, but it was finally not worth fighting.

Thursday evening he was alone in the house. It was Atkins’s half day; he was off somewhere pursuing his moving-picture idea. Denton ordered what proved to be a soggy supper in from the Lamb, ate it with his own wine for contrast, and fell asleep in his armchair afterwards.

At nine, somebody was at his front door.

He woke, groggy, displeased, waited for Atkins to get the door, remembered the man was out and fumbled in an overcoat pocket for the new Colt before going down himself. He cursed his own caution: Albert Cosgrove had made him afraid in his own house. Clever little bastard. He backed off the night bolt and turned the lock and stayed behind the door as he opened it a few inches, willing it to be Cosgrove so that he could end things.

‘Telegram, sir.’

Denton looked around the door. A bicycle was leaned against the railing. An almost toothless man the size of a large child was standing on the top step. ‘Telegram for Denton.’

He shifted the revolver to his other hand and took the envelope, realized he had no money and made the man wait on the step while he ran up the stairs, then up to his bedroom; he swept coins from his bedside table, ran down again, passed too much money out of the door.

He ripped open the envelope as he went more slowly back upstairs. Leaning into his sitting room, he held the yellow oblong to the gaslight.

AM AT WESTERLEY STREET PLEASE COME TO ME STOP JANET

He pulled his braces over his shoulders as he ran again to his bedroom, pulling on the old jacket in which he had been working. The Colt went back into his overcoat pocket, a hat — any hat — on his head. Rupert was in the lower hall when he went out.

‘Hold the fort,’ he told the dog.

The ride to Westerley Street seemed interminable, the damp streets unusually clogged, but it was early still by London’s nighttime standards.

‘Can’t you hurry?’ he called up to the driver.

‘This is London.’

It had got colder. The horse’s breath showed, and wisps of steam from its back. To a man who wanted to move quickly, the London streets seemed like a garish part of hell: grinning faces, too-bright colours, hooves and wheels and footsteps, crowds on buses and crowds on the pavements, a crush of people and animals and vehicles slowly going nowhere. He had an image of going on like this for ever, like a dream in which the destination is always lost.

‘Ah! She’s waiting for you in her ladyship’s room.’ Fred Oldaston was a former boxer who manned the door at Westerley Street. He actually dragged Denton through the doorway and was pulling his overcoat down over his shoulders as he talked. ‘Oh, you ain’t dressed — well, no matter. The missus is strict about it, you know-’ He gave Denton a little push on the shoulder to set him moving.

He passed through the first public room, where several young women sat about, one or two with men. They smiled; he passed on, turning right into Mrs Castle’s reception room, where she lounged on a sofa and drank champagne and received her clientele.

‘Oh, God, Denton, you look absolutely declasse. Go on through the little door there before somebody sees you — go on, go on-!’

She was not yet even moderately drunk but certainly annoyed.

The door was at first hard to find, covered with William Morris paper to match the walls. He found the dark- swirled china knob by feeling for it and let himself through. On the other side was a room so different in its simplicity and its calm greens and blues as to have been in another world. Against the far wall, sitting on a dark- green love seat, was Janet Striker.

‘What is it?’ He went towards her.

She held up a hand to ward him off. ‘I’m all right now.’

‘Janet, what’s happened?’

She looked quite normal, except that she didn’t smile. ‘He’s been in my rooms,’ she said. ‘You were right.’

‘Tell me.’ He tried to sit beside her but she wouldn’t give him room, and he fetched a chair that was too small for him. ‘Janet, what is it?’

‘I sent for the police. I’ve talked to them. They didn’t understand, of course. It sounds silly.’ She put a hand on his sleeve without looking at him. ‘I worked late again — I’m trying to leave things right, clean up the files and old letters and — stuff, you know. I got home-’ She laughed unpleasantly. ‘My home. My two wretched rooms. I opened the door and thought I was in the wrong place. Everything. Everything, Denton! Smashed, ripped — he’d poured red paint on things — on my piano, the only thing I cared about-!’ A kind of spasm took her chin and neck from the clenching of her jaw. Her eyelids reddened, but no tears came. ‘He found the scissors and cut my clothes.’ She laughed again, the same harshness. ‘I don’t own a stitch except what I have on! Everything gone — cut up, red paint poured on it. Clothes I’d haggled over and spent days looking for at the markets, haggled with a pushcart man! You knew they were somebody’s cast-offs, didn’t you — you didn’t think I dressed like this because I wanted to!’ She put her face in her hands. He touched her shoulder; she shrugged him off. He bent forward so far his knee almost touched the floor, the little chair tipped on its front legs. ‘Janet — Janet, it’s all right-’

‘It isn’t all right with me!’

‘Janet — the clothes don’t matter; you’ll get more clothes-’

‘He poured paint on my piano — on the keys!’ And now she wept.

For a piano. Between her sobs, she said, ‘You don’t know. I saved — for months to buy that — piano. And it’s only an old Clementi, a hundred years old, it’s junk you wouldn’t give a child to play, but it’s what I can afford!’ She raised her head and sat back, dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief. ‘Or could afford. I’ll have money soon, and money is happiness, am I right?’

‘You know better.’

‘Well — poverty is misery, I can tell you that.’ She wiped her eyes and sniffed. She looked at him as if she saw him for the first time, as if only now she understood that he was there. She leaned forward and put a hand behind his neck, pulled them together, her face hot and damp against his. ‘Well, now you’ve seen me cry,’ she said.

‘I didn’t think you did.’

‘I’ve been known to.’ She kissed his ear. ‘I’d like you to take me to bed.’

‘Yes — yes-’

She pulled away. ‘No. Not here.’

‘Come home with me.’

‘Not that, either. I shall stay here tonight in Ruth’s extra room. I know it seems quixotic, Denton, but I want to stay here. This is my haven — this knocking shop is the closest I have to a home.’

‘But you can’t go to bed in it with me.’

‘We’ve both been in the beds in this house too often as it is.’

She stood and shook her hair back and walked up and down, looking at herself in a mirror and trying to fix what she saw with her fingers and the handkerchief. She poured herself water from a carafe that stood by the sofa, drank it. She said, ‘There’s sherry and whisky over there if you want it.’ She smiled at him. ‘Will that chair hold both of us?’

‘It really doesn’t even hold me.’

She pulled him over to the sofa. ‘Hold me for a bit. Then you must go home.’ She looked into his eyes; they kissed; she put her head back. ‘I just wanted, as you say, to be with you for a little.’ She moved a few inches away. ‘Now you should go home.’

‘I don’t want to.’