limping up and down the long room, back and forth, then doing the leg exercises. After the first set, Atkins holding Denton’s feet and pushing the legs for Denton to push back, Atkins said, ‘You’re using that leg, you know.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. I can feel it. You ought to try putting more weight on it when you walk.’
‘Hurts like hell.’
‘Not the end of the world, I daresay.’
The meals continued to be enormous, the chicken soup a major part through the first breakfast; by then, Denton had had enough of it and ordered that he wasn’t to be faced with it any more. The second morning, there were kidneys and bacon and eggs and buttery rolls, and Denton complained about too much food.
‘Got to fatten you up, Colonel. Prodigal son come home, and so on. Fatted calf time.’
Denton read his mail and tried not to wonder what Janet Striker was finding in Normandy. All sorts of people had written to him about the shooting — his editor, Lang, nervously, Henry James a bit pompously but in fact rather touchingly. Denton was still at the stage of feeling a stranger in his own house, still catching up with the world that had passed him by. The good wishes of people he hadn’t seen for several months now seemed insubstantial.
At tea, to make conversation, he said to Atkins, ‘What’s happened with your moving picture?’
‘Oh, rather a tale, that. Interesting, amusing, and a delight to both adults and children.’
‘Good. Amuse and delight me.’
Atkins was eating bits of Denton’s toast and sipping tea from an oversized cup. He smiled. ‘Bit of a long story.’
‘I have lots of time.’
‘Well, then-Well, you disappeared from the scene when we was making pictures up in Victoria Park. I’d learned from earlier adventures and got us a permit to shoot blanks in the muskets. Gave us permission to “perform patriotic manoeuvres with rendered-safe firearms”, for which we had to pay for a policeman to watch over us. Also had to provide him with lunch, the which he thought should be a banquet. Anyway, we got through that all right, and then we finished with the pictures of the soldier’s return down at your front door again.’
‘Why didn’t you make that and the farewell at the same time? More efficient!’
‘What, and have to cut up the film and paste it back together? Not likely, General! No, we did it all in the order it would play, see? Then we have the film what they call “processed”, meaning the pictures come out, and then we bang it back in the camera and project it on a sheet. Did I mention that the camera was also the projecting machine? Well, it was.
‘We rented a former scraps and findings shop just off the Whitechapel Road and had a couple of signs made, “The Boer War — Fascination in Moving Pictures! Villainous Boer and Courageous British Hero! Patriotism Personified!” And so on. Even brought in benches from a Methodist mission that went bust over the way — unheard of, sitting down for a moving picture. Great sensation.
‘So we were prepared to open on a Friday — “open” is what they say in the theatre world, I suppose from the curtains, which we didn’t have — and I was standing outside, ready to take the money of the gathering horde, when up come three fellas with very serious expressions, one of which turns out to be a legal type who slaps a paper into my hand and says, “You’re out of business.” Then the other two chaps go in and seize the picture machine and carry it out under the watchful eye of two constables they’ve brought for the purpose.
‘Well, you can imagine the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The housemaid had invited her entire family, which was as rum a lot of human beings as you’d never hope to meet, and my chum was tearing his hair out in handfuls and saying we was ruined. I, however, read the piece of paper and found we were being injuncted against by the courts for violating the patent of some American who claimed that our machine was a fiddle copied from his.
‘And so it was. What my chum and partner hadn’t found out when he bought the machine was that the Pole that made it had nicked the idea. But I said to myself, Not so fast, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, where does it say they can seize our moving picture along with the machine? So I went to the chap that had sold me the insurance — you remember, you’d advised me to get insurance — and they sent a young fellow that was a clerk in a law office. But, by the time we got it to court, the Yanks had already shipped the machine to the States and had destroyed the film — burned our moving picture all to ashes.
‘The long and the longer of it was that the Yanks settled out of court for illegal destruction of a creative property not their own; my chum ran off with the housemaid; and I made back my expenses, plus three pounds, seven shillings punitive damages, in loo of one per cent of the net profit of the American company on all future moving pictures. A bird in the hand, says I.’
‘I think you did handsomely.’
‘One per cent of future profits is one per cent of nothing.’
‘You never know.’
‘I should of took the long view, you’re thinking.’
‘Not at all’
‘Moving-picture business is too risky. The Yanks wanted to hire me — said I had get-up.’ Atkins laughed. ‘The day I leave your employ, General, it’ll be for a good deal more than running about Victoria Park with a musket.’ He nibbled another piece of toast. ‘Now I’ve got my eye on the truss. You have any idea how many trusses are sold in this country every year? Met a chap who’s invented a pneumatic truss. Latest thing. What do you think?’
‘Did you ever see your moving picture?’
Atkins chewed, thought, shrugged. ‘I saw it made.’
Later that evening, a telegram came from Janet Striker:
YOU WERE CORRECT. FRENCH POLICE INFORMED. HOME SATURDAY.
‘They
‘You’re sure they were human.’
‘I wanted to believe they weren’t! I’d got a very nice young man named Emile to dig. I told him we were looking for buried money. It gave him something to look forward to. When he found the first bone, he said it was a cow. It seemed to me too slender to be a cow, so I had him dig farther along, where the feet might be. Well.’ She gave him a partial smile. ‘It was a very human foot, with a lot of the skin still intact.’
‘What did you tell the farmer?’
‘I’d given him twenty-five francs; for that, I didn’t think I had to tell him anything. My story was that I wanted to paint where my friend the milord had painted. I set myself up at the door of the barn with a chair and a watercolour block and my paints and tried to look artistic while Emile did the digging.’
‘You paint, too?’
‘I can do anything that my mother thought would make me more saleable — insipid watercolours, insipid piano music, insipid talk — but nothing remotely useful. I learned accounting on a course at the People’s Palace, but in order to take it I had first to do a course in arithmetic. It was humiliating!’
‘And the police, the French police?’
‘Very suspicious — of me. I finally told them to wire Munro at New Scotland Yard and he’d explain everything. Of course he didn’t. But I looked respectable — meaning I looked as if I had money — and so they didn’t toss me into the lock-up. They did want to know why we were digging in a barn, and I told him them the truth, which of course they thought was a fantastical improvisation. Emile confused things by saying we were digging for treasure. However, the main point was that we’d found human remains, and after the second day they let me come home.’
‘Do you think it was Arthur Crum?’
‘How would I know? I was so sickened by what I saw — I’ve seen a lot in the East End, Denton; I’m not easily made queasy — but the thought that those scraps of white leather and long bones were human-!’
‘
‘Yes, the skin, what was left of it, looked white.’
‘I’d have thought it would be brown.’
‘Don’t quibble.’
She had returned late in the morning, had come straight to his house. She looked remarkable — a travelling costume in a green so dark it was almost black, her hair done in a new way, a mannish hat like a homburg, a single peacock’s sword slanting down from it. She could wear clothes with a masculine cut — often a lesbian uniform —
