all.’
She retrieved his card, looked at it, and put it down in front of him with the pencil. ‘Put her name and the other man’s name on it. You’ll hear from me if I learn anything.’
That was that. When he was done writing, he found himself looking at the straight parting in her dark hair, her attention entirely on something she was reading. There were no goodbyes.
He visited Atkins in the hospital on his way to the Paris boat train. The sergeant’s head was wrapped in cotton, most of it on the top and back but one wrap coming around the forehead as if to hold things together. His face looked small, rat-like, rather old.
‘Still, you’re alive,’ Denton said.
‘Take more than that to kill me.’ The voice was small. He had had concussion and his eyes looked strange. ‘Bastard hit me from behind.’
‘Dr Bernat says you’re on the mend.’
‘Old biddy wants to keep me in here a week.’
‘It’s necessary, Atkins. You’ve been wounded.’
‘Most soldiers die in hospital, not the battlefield — ever hear that?’
‘This isn’t a soldier’s hospital. It’s where you need to be.’
‘Feels like a soldier’s hospital to me.’ It was a ward, with a long range of beds down both sides and an aisle up the middle. Coughs, sighs, the sounds of other visitors swept up and down the big room.
‘The soldier’s hospitals I saw,’ Denton said, ‘they laid them on the ground. In the rain.’
‘Yes, well, that was a war.’ Atkins sighed. The short visit was tiring him out. ‘And he almost killed you. What a bastard.’
‘I’d better go.’
‘Paris, eh?’ Denton had already told him about Wilde’s funeral. ‘Funny how things turn out. Five years ago he was king of the hill; now he’s got you going to his funeral.’
‘That’s a come-down, I admit.’ Denton was smiling. ‘Do what the doctor tells you.’
‘Yes, yes — ’course-’ Atkins was drifting into sleep. Denton asked a nurse if that was a sign of anything, and she said it was a sign he’d stayed too long.
Paris at the beginning of that December was wet with a cold downpour. During the night, a wind had come up, and Denton’s ship had rolled and tossed, and between the rolling and his arm he got little sleep. He went to the Hotel des Anglais, where he had stayed before with Emma Gosden; it was her hotel when she was in Paris. Had he chosen it because of her, or had it been simple laziness? Or had he really come to Paris hoping to see her? To make it up? He had a delicious, partly sexual moment of dreaming of meeting her, finding her glad to see him, and their going off somewhere together — the south, maybe Italy, and the hell with Mulcahy and Stella Minter and-
He slept for an hour and then had the French idea of a breakfast and read a London newspaper and looked at the rain. The funeral was across Paris, the interment miles out in the suburbs somewhere; he would have to make an early start. Still there were hours to fill. He was not one for museums or shops. He wondered what he was one for. Work, probably. Except his work had come to a halt, something deeply wrong with the book he was writing — the woman, he had to admit it was the woman; she was all wrong. He was all wrong, that meant.
He sat in an armchair with the newspaper over his lap and watched the Parisian rain and thought off and on about Emma Gosden. Hell of a day for a funeral. His mind kept swinging back to Mulcahy and Stella Minter. He was sure that the man who had attacked him and the man who had killed Stella Minter were the same; why wouldn’t the police see it, too? Guillam did see it, he thought, but wouldn’t admit it out of orneriness — no, out of pragmatism, a black sailor on remand being better than an unknown on the loose. Anyway, Guillam wasn’t really part of the Minter investigation.
He thought about Emma Gosden and getting together — would she do that-?
He’d have to see Sergeant Willey when he got back, try to make the City Police get going on finding Mulcahy or Mulcahy’s corpse. He’d have to-
He’d have to start minding his own business, he thought. Drop it. Rewrite your novel and make some money. He’d have Bernat’s bill to pay now, Atkins’s hospital bill, plus the household bills he hadn’t yet paid-
He went up to dress and found that Maude hadn’t packed black gloves, and the hat was the wrong one but would do. The concierge supplied gloves, although they were too small, but there was no time to buy others because with one thing and another, Denton was late by then and had to hurry out and ask for a cab. To his surprise, the rain had stopped. The streets were still wet and shining, very noisy, nervous. Out on the boulevard, the number of motor cars astonished him; he had never seen so many, never a third so many, in London. When the boy came back with a horse-drawn cab for him, he was sorry he hadn’t told him to get a motorized one; it would have been a spot of interest in a gloomy day.
He had paid the boy and was standing there, reaching up with his good hand to grasp the rail beside the cab door, when another drew up behind his and a female foot appeared, then the edge of a skirt, then an elegant woman in, he thought, the latest Parisian fashion. It was only when she was on the pavement that he realized she was Emma Gosden.
His hand froze on the handrail. It was the unexpectedness of it, of actually seeing her in Paris, the fantasy of a few hours before made flesh. She looked wonderful, probably in a new gown, something of the real — that is, the expensive — Paris, where funerals and knife wounds didn’t enter. It was he who didn’t belong, not she; she was of the place. As he looked at her, his heart announcing itself with great thumps, she turned her head and saw him. Her entire body gave something like a quiver, a start; he thought she might have been ready to take a step away from him or even a step towards him. Her right hand, her free hand, the hand not holding her purse, moved upwards; if it had continued, the gesture would have been a greeting.
Even a welcome.
Then the hand stopped, then dropped the few inches to where it had been. Inches. But the gesture told him everything: more than anything she had said that last evening, more than her anger or his, more than the return of his hat and coat, more than her silence since, the few inches of movement told him that it was definitively over.
Then a man came out of the hotel and she turned to him with a smile. They walked away, she on the man’s arm. Denton thought he might be younger than she, impressively good-looking.
The church service for Wilde was grotesque. Denton counted fourteen people, including himself. He wouldn’t have recognized Wilde’s old lover, Alfred Douglas, except that he was apparently the head mourner and so greeted the others, who slipped into St-Germain-des-Pres like fugitives. The fourteen, all men, seemed to Denton to be a collection of odds and ends from anywhere, dressed for a funeral but gathered there apparently by coincidence. Nothing connected them to the Wilde of legend — no green carnations, no hint of aestheticism, no witty remarks. The church itself was cold and damp, puddles collecting on the floor from their coats and umbrellas; in another chapel, a better-attended funeral mass was punctuated by tears and a female voice that moaned like a hurt dog. The sounds of their grief threw the silence of Wilde’s mass into relief, only the voice of the young Irish priest audible. Denton, depressed by what he was taking part in, tried to think about Emma Gosden and found only a sense of emptiness.
The flowers he had ordered through the Hotel des Anglais looked showy and vulgar, and the card, which should have said they were from the Cafe Royal writers and artists, said, ‘Form the writters and artistes du Cafe Royale.’
After the service, the others got into four carriages that were nominally the official vehicles and followed the hearse; Denton, wanting to be by himself, came after in a cab, clopping miles into the wet suburbs. If the mass had been grotesque, the graveside service was ludicrous: the rain pelted down, its noise blurring the spoken words; umbrellas hid every face; the priest’s hands shook from the cold. Finally, it was over; what was left of a great and sometimes awful man went into the ground, Denton thinking at the last, as he dropped wet clods on the coffin, that Wilde had been the emblematic man of the century’s last years — brilliant, duplicitous, too arrogant to survive.
He would say later that, although it had had a month to run, the nineteenth century had ended on the day of
