Bohemian Girl, The (18 page)

Gwen John walked next to him as if he had become her responsibility. Denton said, ‘I expected to see your brother at the Café Royal.’

‘He’s in Liverpool.’

Despite himself, Denton laughed. It seemed a strange place for Augustus John, with his earrings and his gypsy hats. She said, ‘He took a job teaching. He got married, you know.’ It seemed to make her cross; perhaps this was simply her manner, as she and her brother’s wife were, she said, old friends. Still, she said, ‘Ida’s had to give up her painting. I could never do that.’

‘Gave it up to be a wife?’

‘She’s going to have a child.’

They were heading for Charlotte Street. They were all good walkers, and, despite their sometimes overstated idea of themselves as ‘different’, as decorous as the middle class they despised but from which they’d sprung. They stepped aside for other pedestrians, shushed each other when somebody got boisterous, guided an old woman through the Oxford Street traffic. Their goal was a big house that must have once been somebody’s prize. Now a rooming house, it had a studio at the top, he was told, although they weren’t going that far: their destination was a big, seemingly unfurnished room on the third floor

A cheer rose as they came in, the dozen or so people already there clearly eager for these older,
real
artists to validate their gathering. The room, he found, was not quite bare (his first sense had been that it was empty except for the dim figures), the walls partly covered with pinned-up drawings ‘from the life’, the floor with pillows made from the sort of bright scraps the women wore. Two crates were holding up a board with a jug of beer, a large bottle, and a dozen or so mismatched cups and glasses. Denton found it politic almost at once to pay for a second pitcher of beer, which somebody fetched from ‘the Fitz’, apparently the local. He was offered a glass, only slightly grubby, with something from the bottle that was brown, sweetish and disgusting, ostensibly Madeira.

‘Are you the chap looking to identify a girl from some dreadful drawing?’ a plump young woman said to him after he’d been around the room once.

‘News travels fast.’

‘Gwen’s told us. I’m Caroline. This is my room.’

‘You’re at the Slade?’

She guffawed. ‘Can’t you tell?’ She waved at the walls. ‘Let’s see your horrible drawing.’

She didn’t recognize it, but she put her hand through his arm and led him through the crowd, now pretty well filling the space. One or two of the young men were lolling on the pillows now (in the left ear of one of them, a glint of gold - homage to Augustus John); other men and women were sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, most of them smoking cigarettes. There was a lot of talk, some laughter. Denton found himself bending down, then squatting as people looked at the drawing. There was only one gas lamp, but candles seemed to be everywhere, the photographic print gaining several spots of wax.

‘Oh, I know her,’ a small girl with a cat’s face said. She had furry eyebrows and light-brown hair that was very like a mane. ‘She was in first-year drawing. Tonks made her weep. Of course, Tonks makes everybody weep.’

From across the room, a young man called, ‘He never made me weep!’

‘You just turned white as a sheet instead, Malcolm.’

‘My sheet’s grey.’ More laughter.

Three other girls crowded around. He had lost Caroline. They remembered Mary Thomason - called by one of them first Thomas then, no, was it Tomkins? - but they knew nothing about her. She had been ‘very private’, ‘young, that’s what I kept thinking, she seemed like a child’, ‘really quite stand-offish - you’d never have found her at something like tonight’.

‘Well, nobody ever invited her.’

‘She was stand-offish.’

Denton said, ‘Has anybody seen her in the last two months?’

They talked that over, decided they hadn’t, although they were vague about the idea of two months. They were sure she hadn’t come back for the new term, but most of them had been gone for the summer. They called to others in the room. Nobody had seen Mary Thomason for a long while. One rather languid young woman got up off a cushion and came over to him. She had a cool, appraising stare that he decided was really laziness. ‘She was doing some modelling, if that matters.’

‘Posing?’

They laughed. ‘We call it modelling. It’s extra money.’

‘How did you know she was doing it?’

‘We used to chat. She had something new - a hat, I think. She said she’d made some money modelling for a painter and bought the hat. She didn’t say which one. There are hundreds.’

‘Thousands!’ another girl said. People laughed again.

The languorous girl leaned against the wall. ‘She said she’d been modelling for an RA. She said he was “good”. I don’t think she knew good art from fried plaice.’

By then, Caroline had brought out a parlour guitar and was singing in some other language, sitting on the floor. This evolved into a form of charades when one of the men draped a shawl over himself and said he was John Singer Sargent’s Spanish dancer. People started to make references that Denton didn’t understand. He knew it was time to go.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said to Gwen John, whom he found near the door.

‘Did you learn anything?’

‘A little. She was modelling for somebody.’

She shrugged. ‘We’re going to get thrown out soon.’ The charades had got noisy.

‘I’m going.’

‘Wise man.’

He put out his hand. ‘I hope we meet again.’

‘Perhaps.’

Her steady, genderless gaze reminded him of somebody else. Only when he was in the street did he realize the somebody was Janet Striker.

‘Actually, they were kind of sweet - more like a church social than an orgy.’

Janet Striker chuckled. ‘What on earth is a church social?’

‘My God, don’t you have those here, either? They’re gatherings, socializings, in the church or arranged by the church so people can meet.’

‘I don’t think the Church of England do that sort of thing.’

‘We were Congregationalists. Sometimes there were box lunches - each woman would make a lunch and then they’d be auctioned off - you got to eat with the woman, sort of a picnic—Why are you laughing?’

‘I can’t picture you at such a thing.’

‘Well, I was a kid. In Maine, before the war.’

‘It sounds so awful!’

‘Well, they weren’t. Anyway, the wild Bohemians were nicer to me than most of the toffs I’ve met, and a good deal more innocent. ’

‘Not as clean, I’ll wager.’

‘It was dark. But they did give me that one fact - Mary Thomason had modelled for an older man, an RA.’

‘“Man”, they said man?’

‘RAs are men, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, of course. Naturally. And they said “RA” and didn’t mean just any older artist, but somebody actually with the initials after his name?’

‘No, she didn’t say that, and it was only the one woman, no “they”. And she was about half-asleep and not, I think, the brightest star in the firmament. It isn’t much, is it?’

‘Every bit helps.’

‘But what does it help?’

They were eating in the Three Nuns in Aldgate High Street because she had insisted she wanted to work late despite being on half days. He thought she was trying to avoid him, not see him every day. Something would have to be worked out soon, he thought; he hated running after her, hated more not being with her. ‘Why won’t you live with me?’ he said.

‘Because I’m not a whore any more.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Janet—!’

‘Don’t ask me, then.’

‘Playing around with trunks isn’t enough!’

‘That’s too bad about you.’ She smiled. ‘That’s what an Irish maid used to say to me when I was little.’

‘You mean I’m not thinking about your side of it.’

‘That’s part of what I mean. What did you mean, “Playing around with trunks”?’

‘You’re changing the subject.’

‘I’m glad you noticed.’

‘I meant that trying to find Mary Thomason is a mug’s game. I’m grateful to you for going after the trunk, but it’s all too distant and too long ago, and while it’s something we do together, it isn’t like the real thing! Plus Mary Thomason is a distraction; I’ve got better things to think about.’

‘Your book. And me, I suppose. I should be flattered that I’m one of your worries, Denton, but I’m not. I don’t want to be a worry, least of all yours.’

‘And then there’s Albert Cosgrove. I had another letter today - three, all told. One pleading, two threatening. He’s come entirely unglued.’

‘Threatening what?’

‘Oh, mostly noise. Having a tantrum.’

‘You’d think the police could find him.’

‘The police have better things to do. They’re keeping their watchers on me because of the letters, but the truth is they don’t know where to look for him. Or how.’ He hesitated, pushing a rather grey-looking green bean around his plate. ‘I think he saw us together,’ he said finally.

‘You and me?’

‘I think when you took the trunk away in the cab. He mentioned the cab and the house in the latest letter.’

‘But the police were supposed to have been watching!’

‘“The Lady Astoreth likes not rivals.”’

‘Don’t talk mysteries to me, Denton.’

‘That’s what he wrote in his letter. Something about seeing me at my door with - pardon me - my “painted harlot”, and then, “The Lady Astoreth likes not rivals.”’ He speared the bean. ‘My grandmother used to read the Book of Revelation. Cosgrove sounds like it.’

‘And the Lady Astoreth?’

‘Something he’s invented or heard about.’

‘One of his demons?’

‘Maybe.’ He chewed the bean. ‘I bawled Markson out for not finding him. I wanted him to put a guard on you. He says they don’t have the men. I told him to take them off me; he wouldn’t do it.’

‘I can take care of myself perfectly well.’

‘You could put Cohan to watching you.’

‘I’ll do nothing of the kind.’

‘He could take care of Albert Cosgrove with one hand.’

‘Denton, it isn’t me your man is after. It’s you.’

‘We don’t know that.
I
don’t know it, anyway. He’s unpredictable. To say the least.’

She put a hand over his. ‘I’m sorry - but I won’t have somebody trailing about after me. Concentrate on your book. When it’s done, we’ll worry about him. He’s more pathetic than dangerous. You can’t blame him for wanting his manuscript back. Why not give it to him?’

‘It’s police evidence now. Anyway, I don’t know where to find him. Atkins suggested an ad in
The Times
- “Will Albert Cosgrove please give Mr Denton a place to return his novel?” A child wouldn’t fall for that one.’ He put his free hand on top of hers. ‘I don’t like his knowing about you.’

‘He doesn’t know my name or anything about me.’

‘He’s a clever bastard. I don’t like it.’

She smiled at him. ‘“That’s too bad about you.”’ She squeezed his hand. ‘You do your work. Forget everything else.’

That was Tuesday. He didn’t see her the next two days and didn’t hear from her. He had four more letters from his nemesis, but there was nothing in them that helped the police. Denton tried to do as she had said; he worked the entire day, blotting out Mary Thomason, blotting out Albert Cosgrove. The Thomason business was pretty well over, he thought. It galled him that Guillam would do nothing, but it was finally not worth fighting.

Thursday evening he was alone in the house. It was Atkins’s half day; he was off somewhere pursuing his moving-picture idea. Denton ordered what proved to be a soggy supper in from the Lamb, ate it with his own wine for contrast, and fell asleep in his armchair afterwards.

At nine, somebody was at his front door.

He woke, groggy, displeased, waited for Atkins to get the door, remembered the man was out and fumbled in an overcoat pocket for the new Colt before going down himself. He cursed his own caution: Albert Cosgrove had made him afraid in his own house.
Clever little bastard
. He backed off the night bolt and turned the lock and stayed behind the door as he opened it a few inches, willing it to be Cosgrove so that he could end things.

‘Telegram, sir.’

Denton looked around the door. A bicycle was leaned against the railing. An almost toothless man the size of a large child was standing on the top step. ‘Telegram for Denton.’

He shifted the revolver to his other hand and took the envelope, realized he had no money and made the man wait on the step while he ran up the stairs, then up to his bedroom; he swept coins from his bedside table, ran down again, passed too much money out of the door.

He ripped open the envelope as he went more slowly back upstairs. Leaning into his sitting room, he held the yellow oblong to the gaslight.

He pulled his braces over his shoulders as he ran again to his bedroom, pulling on the old jacket in which he had been working. The Colt went back into his overcoat pocket, a hat - any hat - on his head. Rupert was in the lower hall when he went out.

‘Hold the fort,’ he told the dog.

The ride to Westerley Street seemed interminable, the damp streets unusually clogged, but it was early still by London’s nighttime standards.

‘Can’t you hurry?’ he called up to the driver.

‘This is London.’

It had got colder. The horse’s breath showed, and wisps of steam from its back. To a man who wanted to move quickly, the London streets seemed like a garish part of hell: grinning faces, too-bright colours, hooves and wheels and footsteps, crowds on buses and crowds on the pavements, a crush of people and animals and vehicles slowly going nowhere. He had an image of going on like this for ever, like a dream in which the destination is always lost.

‘Ah! She’s waiting for you in her ladyship’s room.’ Fred Oldaston was a former boxer who manned the door at Westerley Street. He actually dragged Denton through the doorway and was pulling his overcoat down over his shoulders as he talked. ‘Oh, you ain’t dressed - well, no matter. The missus is strict about it, you know—’ He gave Denton a little push on the shoulder to set him moving.