The Bohemian Girl

‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘Mr Denton, is this Striker woman the same one who was put in an institution by her husband some years ago? Great scandal — hospital for the criminally insane — did she do this to her own premises? Is she at it again?’

He bit his tongue. ‘You’re asking the wrong man.’

‘Mr Denton — Mr Denton-!’

He pushed his way through them. ‘I’ve got work to do-Sorry-Let me pass, please-’ He was almost free of them when a florid man his own height blocked his way. When Denton tried to go around, the big man put a hand on his chest. Denton looked down at the hand, up at the man’s eyes. He said, ‘I’ll give you three seconds to take that hand away.’ The man flushed, dropped his hand. The others hooted.

Mostly, the newspapers judged that either there was no story to be told, or the story was about powerful people whom they didn’t discuss in the public press. The Times reported nothing. Another paper buried a short piece headed ‘Peer’s Relative Pleads’ on an inner page. Only the Daily Mail attempted to make a story of it, raking up Janet Striker’s past and her connection to Denton through the violence of a year before but suggesting no other link. It did quote ‘a gentleman close to the said Jarrold’s legal counsel’ who had said that ‘Jarrold was a loyal reader of Mr Denton’s well-known works’, but he had offered no other explanation for the attack on Janet Striker’s rooms than ‘the great stress felt by a sensitive nature’. Denton frowned at a single sentence near the end of the piece: ‘A source close to New Scotland Yard expressed concern at the possible connection between the American novelist, a guest in this country, and recurring acts of violence.’

Guillam.

‘Damn Guillam!’ he shouted.

‘Sue him. We’ve strict laws of libel this side of the water, Colonel.’

Denton flung the paper back at Atkins. ‘I don’t know how you can read that trash.’

‘Down here in the lower classes, we don’t know any better.’

‘Oh, dry up.’

‘There’s tea made. Want some?’

‘Ever occur to you that we were better off in prison, Sergeant?’

‘Book going badly?’

‘No, it’s going like a house afire — when I can get away from these damned distractions. Bring me tea, yes. Upstairs.’ He went up and worked until evening. The stack of manuscript had grown thick, that already typed representing at least half of the book in its neat pile on the corner of the desk. He was able now to spend most of the day writing new material, then take the typed part to bed to correct before he went to sleep. Janet Striker had got herself a room in a small private hotel in Bayswater. Her piano, minus the lid — it had gone off to the Yard with its fingerprint — had been carted down to Collard and Collard ‘successors to Clementi and Company’ for repair. If she was dismayed by the newspaper’s raking up of her old life, she didn’t say so, murmuring only that she would stay away from him for a few days while the newspapermen cooled down, at her legal counsel’s advice — she dared do nothing that might threaten the resolution of her lawsuit.

‘And I’m to stay away from you, I suppose.’

‘I suppose.’

It didn’t seem to him a very good reason, but neither did her concern with propriety or with his public self. She was, he thought, making excuses, and not because of the sex itself. Unless she was pretending (and there was always the knowledge that she had been a prostitute, that dissembling might be habit), sex came easily and rather happily to her. It was, rather, that he was a man. She believed men hated women. All men, all women: there seemed to be no exceptions. She had been raped by a man, abused by a man, humiliated by a man, institutionalized by a man. Men had paid her to invade her. Why, then, should she trust him? Why should she run to have him invade her — although he hated that notion of it, that one of them invaded and the other let it be done: surely it was a mutual wanting, the desire to become one? Or was that a man’s self-congratulation?

One day, he feared, she would go away. Perhaps she would write him a letter; perhaps she would simply go, and he wouldn’t know how to find her. Once she had money, she could go wherever, be whatever she wanted. Her present skittishness, as he thought of it, might be prelude to something more permanent. It wasn’t coyness that was keeping her away from him; it was fear — of the maleness she believed hated her femaleness — and perhaps a bleak sense that it was too late for her, or perhaps that he was the wrong one. Or she was the wrong one. Better a life alone than one that rested on a bad bargain — he knew that feeling.

So he shared his bed with the typed page.

The next day, he went to complain to Munro about the ‘source close to New Scotland Yard’ that had been quoted in the Daily Mail. ‘That’s Guillam!’ he all but shouted at Munro. ‘What the hell is he doing messing in the Jarrold business?’

Munro was busy and tired. His expression suggested a stomach ailment. He looked at Denton through splayed fingers and said, ‘The Jarrold business is Guillam’s business. Jarrold’s fallen into Guillam’s pocket.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that Georgie Guillam knows how to work the system.

I told you — his new office is a catch-all. He persuaded somebody that house arrests are his.’

‘That’s because of me! It is because of me, isn’t it?’

Munro shrugged. ‘I told you he doesn’t forget. Yes, maybe he saw your name on it and thought there’s something in it for him. Nothing I can do about it. It’s out of CID. You want to complain, complain to Georgie.’

‘Oh, hell!’

‘Yeah.’

He got his friend Hector Hench-Rose — his baronetcy still so new it sparkled — to write him a letter of introduction to Lady Emmeline, Struther Jarrold’s mother. Jarrold was said to be under medical supervision in Sussex; the mother, Denton thought, might be amenable to a serious chat about her son.

His first look at her suggested to him that perhaps she would. She was at least as old as he, probably older, but with the most beautiful posture he had ever seen in a woman; she stood straight, not affecting the buttocks-out curve of the new corsetry. A former ‘beauty’, she still had magnificent facial bones, a figure as slender as a girl’s. Her pale hair, partly silver that blended into its original gold, was piled high on her head. She wore a dress of very pale beige with touches of apricot, her slender arms covered in lace, a jabot of the same cascading down her front to below where a vulgar eye might have imagined her to have a navel. She was holding his friend’s letter of introduction.

‘I am so pleased we can have this talk,’ were her first words. She seemed able to speak almost without moving her lower jaw; her accent was odd and to him unidentifiable, reminiscent of Ruth Castle’s when she was well into the champagne. She raised the letter a few inches. ‘I am unacquainted with the current baronet but knew his father, I think. Such a gentle man.’

‘I wanted to speak to you about your son, ma’am.’

‘About Struther, yes, poor dear. Have you come to apologize? Oh, I do hope you have come to apologize.’ Her tone was sad, her voice lovely.

‘Apologize, ma’am? For what?’

She sat. Her back was wonderfully straight; he doubted that her shoulders had ever touched a chair back. Her sadness seemed to expand to include pity, as if she knew that Denton was the sort who couldn’t help himself and therefore might — might — be forgiven. ‘For seducing my poor boy. For forcing him to this unfortunate incident that the police say took him to East London.’

‘Ma’am, it’s not I-’

The sadness in her voice grew metallic. The metal, he thought, was steel. ‘I know how you have worked to seduce him! I know how you have played upon his sensitive nature! I have seen the copies of your books — ’ she made the word sound like a synonym for excrement — ‘which you inscribed to him. Oh, sir, though I feel distaste for saying it — for shame!’

‘I haven’t inscribed any books to him, ma’am.’

She sighed ‘You are a practised liar, too, I see.’

‘Any books inscribed to your son are forgeries.’