The Bohemian Girl

looked at the letter again. ‘The bit about seeing you in good health — that sounds like he’s been looking at you.’

‘You mean you think he’s your man with the red moustache?’

‘I don’t like him, Colonel.’

He wrote until two; by then he had set down forty-one new pages as if he had been taking dictation. He was reluctant to stop, but he was at the point again where to do more was to put tomorrow’s work at risk. Better to use the time to accept Mr Heseltine’s invitation to the Albany.

He wore one of his American hats, decidedly too wide in the brim for London, the choice deliberate to counter the snobbery he thought he was going to find in Aubrey Heseltine. So were the boots — old, polished but deeply wrinkled, brown rather than black, what he supposed Henry James would call ‘louche’. Going out, he opened the box to take the derringer without thinking, but the box was empty, and he remembered that Atkins had wanted it.

Atkins stopped him at the front door. ‘Going to rain.’ He held out an umbrella.

‘I’m not English.’

Atkins draped a mackintosh over his left arm. ‘The rain will be.’

He walked quickly to Russell Square (he’d take today’s writing to the typewriter with tomorrow’s), strode along beside the Museum, ducked into Greek Street and down to Old Compton Street, then zigzagged into Brewer Street and so behind the Cafe Royal at the Glasshouse Street end, giving a regretful glance at the cafe, where he wanted to be sitting with Janet Striker, drinking the milky coffee. He dodged across Regent Street to Piccadilly, a cacophony of horse-drawn buses and cabs and a surprising number of motor cars (many more, he thought, than a year ago — the world was speeding up), and strolled to the entrance to Albany Court. Only men lived in that odd collection of buildings called the Albany. Denton, as an American, thought that he would never understand such places, where men sequestered themselves in gated and guarded byways that had for him a feel of monastic sterility. ‘Here,’ these places said, ‘lives masculine Privilege; avert your eyes and pass on.’ Maybe it was a residue of their (irrationally named) public schools. Boys together, and so on. Perpetual boys?

‘Heseltine,’ he barked at the attendant. ‘I’m expected.’

‘Name, sir?’ The man looked old enough to be Denton’s father, frail enough to be on sticks; he moved with a maddening slowness. If he was the guardian, the Albany could have been easily breached — except that this was Piccadilly, and the real guardian was respectability, and habit, and the horror of ‘scenes’.

He was passed in and directed, and he strolled down the court, feeling its sense of comfort and pleasant isolation, disliking it for the same reason that he disliked having a servant. He was a democrat.

To his surprise, then, Aubrey Heseltine opened his own door. There was no mistaking him for a servant — wrong clothes, wrong manner. Aubrey Heseltine was younger than Denton had expected, shyer than he had expected, pretentious — if he was — out of unsure-ness. He was a type: almost emaciated, not much chin, prominent cheekbones with cheeks like planed surfaces, high colour, tall. Handsome in his way. ‘Neurasthenic’, to use a fashionable word.

‘Oh, do come in,’ he said as soon as he understood who Denton was. Denton’s wide hat and old boots seemed to have no effect on him. He moved about, muttering and making quick, incomplete gestures, said his man was out, apologized, said the place wasn’t his, only borrowed, stammered, blushed, then stood in the middle of the room and looked stricken.

Denton found himself pitying him. Something was very wrong with him. Damaged, Denton thought, not knowing why he thought so. He looked away to relieve the younger man’s embarrassment. The room was almost shabby, much lived in, Georgian without being distinguished: a fireplace with a simple mantel, two deeply set windows in one wall, what had once been called ‘Turkey’ carpets on the floor, a great many books that filled three walls, and a single framed picture between the windows.

‘Is this “the little Wesselons”?’ When Heseltine looked puzzled, Denton said, ‘That’s what you called it in your note.’ It didn’t take much to puzzle Heseltine, he thought; the young man was either injured somehow in the mind or terribly distracted.

‘Did I? How affected that must have seemed to you. Oh, I am sorry. It’s what the chap, Mr Geddys, in the shop called it — “a little Wesselons”.’

‘Well — it is little.’ Denton went to it. Inside a tarnished gold frame almost three inches wide was an oil no bigger than his hand. ‘Is it a Wesselons?’

‘Oh, yes, yes — he assured me. There’s a signature. Of sorts. There in the corner. And the name on the brass plate — Andreas Wesselons, 1623 to 1652. It’s a sketch, really, an oil sketch. Of a lion. In a menagerie.’

‘Dutch?’

‘Yes — all that brown. Somebody important at the time had a menagerie. Wesselons made these sketches — the animals — quite a famous painting, one of them — of the lion, actually. This is a sketch for it.’

The brushwork looked as if it had been quickly laid on, the tracks clear in the thick paint, yet the animal was almost alive. Enormous vigour. Denton said, ‘And the envelope you sent to me was in the back.’

‘Yes, yes — behind.’

‘Could you show me exactly where?’

‘Oh, yes, yes-’ Heseltine snatched the painting from the wall and turned it over. Denton thought his hands were shaking. The twisted wire by which it hung was almost black with corrosion. ‘In this corner,’ Heseltine said. He pointed at the lower left. ‘Tucked in between the canvas and the stretcher. There’s room, you see.’ He sounded hurt, as if Denton had suggested that the envelope couldn’t possibly have been there; in fact, Denton could see that the small envelope could have easily been tucked way down where most of it would have been masked by the wide frame.

‘Odd that somebody in the shop didn’t find it.’

‘I thought that, too! Yes, oh, yes. But they didn’t. If they had — well, it wouldn’t have been there, would it?’ He stood there, staring at Denton with his hurt eyes, the painting in both hands, and he said as if it had just occurred to him, ‘Won’t you sit down?’

Denton picked an overstuffed chair with a worn red cover. He put his hat on the floor next to him. Heseltine, after replacing the painting, sat on the edge of a straight chair. He said, ‘Should I not have sent the envelope to you?’

‘No, of course you should.’

‘It was addressed to you.’

‘Of course. But you didn’t open it.’

‘No!’ It was like a groan of pain. ‘No, I swear I didn’t!’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest you had. I just wondered if you knew what was in it.’

‘No!’

Denton was afraid the young man was going to weep. He became gentle. ‘Could I ask you a question?’

‘Yes. Of course. Should you like tea? Coffee?’ Heseltine looked around vaguely. ‘My man is out.’

‘The date on your note to me was some weeks ago. How long had you had the painting then?’

‘Oh — oh, let me see — I got to London in August. The twelfth.’ He gave a sudden, unexplained laugh. ‘The Glorious Twelfth. Do you shoot? I used to. Now I can’t-The noise upsets me.’

It came to Denton slowly: the twelfth of August was the opening of grouse season, a very big event in the lives of sporting people. He waited for the young man to go on; when he didn’t, he murmured, ‘So you got to London on August twelfth.’

‘Yes.’

‘And bought the painting? I mean, how long after did you buy the painting?’

‘Oh-The date would be on the receipt. If I still have it. They could tell you at the shop. In the arcade. It was — oh, a while ago.’

‘It’s now the twenty-sixth of September. You sent me your note and the envelope on August twenty- ninth.’

‘Oh.’

‘So, it must have been pretty soon after you bought it.’

‘Yes, it was while I was hanging it. My man was hanging it, I mean. He, mmm, brought it to my attention. I put it in an envelope and wrote that silly note the same day. “Little Wesselons”!’ He laughed a bit hysterically. ‘Ass.’

Denton waited several seconds for him to get calm. ‘The letter inside the envelope was dated more than two