The Bohemian Girl

step. His breathing was heavy. And so he went up to the landing, made the turn, and pushed and pulled his way up to his bedroom.

He limped about, lit the gas, sat in his desk chair and let his pulse and his breathing recover. There was some scent of her in the room. His desk surprised him with its neatness; she must have straightened it, had probably been working at it on something of her own.

When he had explored the room — it had been more than three months since he had seen it — he went out to the corridor and looked at the closed door to the attic. He had the notion that if he could use his rowing machine, he could build the strength of his leg faster. The rowing machine, a huge contraption of cast iron that Atkins had rightly said was never coming down once it had been got up there, was in the attic.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

He opened the door, lit the gas at the bottom of the stairs. When he put his left foot on the first step, he thought that he was probably doing something stupid, but he didn’t change his mind. He thought, I’ll go to the first landing today and then come down. I can sleep in my bedroom and try it again tomorrow. When he got to the first landing, he was trembling, but he didn’t go back, after all. Five steps up was another landing, and then four steps to the attic. He would go to the next landing.

There was no gas to light here. On the third step, in the near darkness, he put the tip of the stick too close to the edge of the tread, and when he swung the bad leg up, the stick slipped. He went down hard on his left side, twisting as he went, wrenching his left shoulder, and then crashing down the stairs to the landing below. He hit his head on one of the steps and he lay there, dazed.

Atkins came pounding up from below. ‘Good on you,’ he said when he saw Denton.

Rupert came behind Atkins and stared.

‘I think I’ve hurt myself.’

‘Well, sit up, let’s have a look at you.’

‘What the hell’s the good? Jesus Christ, I can’t even climb the stairs!’

Atkins helped him sit up against the wall, then went down and got an oil lamp and looked at Denton’s head, then had him work his shoulder. ‘No real harm done, I think, Colonel.’

‘All right, help me down to my bed.’

Atkins held the lamp up. He looked into Denton’s eyes. ‘I think you better try it again, Colonel.’

‘And fall again!’

‘You know what they say — get back on the horse or stop riding. Be that much harder the next time if you don’t do it now.’ Atkins bent and put a hand under Denton’s arm and helped him up, then put the stick in his hand. ‘You slipped in the dark, that’s all. We’ll fix that.’ He went up the stairs with the lamp.

For seconds, Denton hated Atkins. Then he recognized that Atkins was taking a risk for him — if he fell again and hurt himself, it would be Atkins’s fault.

‘All right. Just don’t laugh.’

Six minutes later, weak, panting, he sat on the top step with the darkness of the attic behind him. He grinned at Atkins. ‘All right — now how do I get down?’

‘You stay up there. I’ll brew us up some tea. Going on four, anyway — breakfast soon. I’ll bring it up.’ He looked back from the landing. ‘Take some exercise while you’re about it.’

After that, he was able to labour down the front stairs and so outdoors, and he began to walk in the streets again. First to the Lamb and back, then down to Guilford Street, then to Russell Square, always with a pistol in his pocket and Cohan, borrowed from Janet Striker, behind him. One day he dragged himself up to the attic again and rowed in the contraption, which had to have its springs set at the weakest so he could move the oars. It was the kind of exercise he wanted, but getting up there wore him out.

She was living in a hotel again, waiting for the work on her house to be finished. Many afternoons, they sat together in the long room. One day she said, ‘I’ve been reading your Henry James.’

‘My Henry James.’

‘He seems to me sometimes very right about women. You don’t like him? Or you do like him, what does that shake of the head mean?’

‘We’re very different.’

‘Denton, say what you mean.’

Denton moved uncomfortably. ‘People call him a genius. I’m not a genius.’ He didn’t want to say anything else, but she was waiting. ‘He can do a lot of things that I can’t.’

‘And you can do things that he can’t?’

Again, he was uncomfortable. He said, ‘One, maybe.’ He started to go back to his book, raised his eyes to her. ‘I can deal with the life most people know.’ He had let his own book fall on his crossed legs; he raised it, lowered his eyes to it, and again raised them to say, ‘His characters never have to worry about making a living, unless they’re bad and want the money that the good ones have. I’ll admit, this frees James to be high-minded about moral decisions, but he just doesn’t understand that for most of the world, making a living is the great reality. And the interest — the drama, the excitement, whatever you call it — comes from the struggle to survive and to make moral decisions. And the farther down the income ladder you climb, the harder the decisions are.’

‘Like Cohan, who wouldn’t take a place with the Jewish madam.’

‘Yes, just like that.’ He settled the book again and looked down and started to read.

She said, ‘Where do writers get their ideas from?’

He chuckled. ‘That’s just what James and I talked about. From everywhere.’

‘From people they know?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I don’t want you ever to write about me. Even if we. .’ She left it hanging. He knew she meant If we go our separate ways, and he didn’t say that if they did, that would be exactly when he’d be likely to write about her. The truth was, he was wondering if he would ever write again; his mind was empty, as if Jarrold’s bullets had gone through his brain and not his back.

He carried the manuscript of the new book down to the publishers himself. He had pretty well forgotten it while he was in the nursing home, certainly had had no desire to work on it. Once home, he had stared at the pile of typed sheets and felt vaguely repelled by it, but he had at last begun to read. The typewriter had done the final copy; still, it had to be gone through once more. Reading it after so long was actually helpful; the months away freshened his eye.

‘It’s damned good,’ he said to Diapason Lang.

‘It’s months late.’

‘I suppose I should have put a clause in my contract about being shot.’

‘Oh, my dear fellow-’ Lang looked anguished. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It’s only — Gwen’s so particular-’

‘He got the insurer’s money for the motor car.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, he did.’ Lang looked at the pile of paper, craned his neck to read the title page, read the title, The Love Child, and murmured, glancing at his picture of the maiden being visited by the nightmare, ‘Title’s a bit risque.’ He peeled back the top sheet as if to make sure the rest of the pages weren’t blank. ‘When can we expect the next one?’

‘What next one?’

‘We always look forward to your next one! And, of course, there’s the, ah, clause in the contract.’ He seemed to want Denton to help him say what had to be said. ‘The clause that we are to be offered your next book.’

‘You have my next book.’ Lang looked startled. ‘This one is the replacement for the one I couldn’t write a year ago. The Transylvania book was therefore the “next book”.’ He smiled, because he’d been thinking about it. ‘The Transylvania book was written under a letter agreement, you’ll remember, that made no mention of a next book.’

Lang stared at him, said that it couldn’t be so, said that they didn’t do things that way, said excuse me and hurried out of the office and came back, his pale face almost pink, with the letter agreement. ‘Well, yes,’ he said, ‘of course we didn’t mention a next book, but-’ He looked hopeful. ‘It was understood as a gentleman’s agreement.’

Denton had brought with him the letters from other publishers that he’d been getting since he’d returned in