Bohemian Girl, The (30 page)

I don’t know what they did except paint pictures. I know when I’m not wanted. They stayed to themselves. They paid their money; that was what mattered to me.

The three of them reached the house, and Denton stopped asking questions.

The house was stone, certainly old, much smaller than the farmer’s. One chimney had fallen in. It had a stone privy and a lower stone building, perhaps a smokehouse, whose roof had collapsed. Inside, it was dead and cold. If Himple and Crum had left any traces, the farm women had erased them: there were signs of vigorous cleaning in the sparkling windows, the swept hearth. The kitchen had no sort of modern stove, but a series of shelves, almost terraces, took up much of a vast fireplace, with places to shovel in coals and cook over them on iron plates. It would have been a brutal place for one person to have to cook, he thought - perhaps a factor in their leaving.

Behind the house, a low hill sloped up to the clean horizon, the oak copse off to its right. At the top of the slope was a building that looked like a cathedral without a steeple - the stone barn. The farmer pointed at it. ‘When it rained, the milord painted up there.’

Denton insisted on seeing it. They trudged up the slope into the wind. The thin spray was threatening to turn to snow. The barn loomed over them until, when they were right under its walls, it wrapped them in its shadow and seemed to freeze them. Doorless, it had an earth ramp up to the opening for wagons.

The inside was vast. Pigeons flew in the rafters, the sound restless and irritating. Smaller birds, swallows and sparrows, flew in and out of the vertical slits that were meant to aerate the hay the barn had once held. It must have been, Denton thought, a horrible place to paint in, maybe another reason they had left. The light was bad except near the door; it was cold; the pounded dirt floor made the place smell like a grave.

Denton walked around the inside, taking stock of the farming implements left there to decay, most of them broken, antiquated, speaking of some misplaced sense of thrift - a culture where nothing was ever thrown away. One corner of the building was taken up by four horse stalls whose plank floors had fallen in, the oak boards now porous and spongy, although once they had held the weight of animals as huge as those down at the farm. He walked along the edges of the stalls, bending to look under the boards where he could, seeing nothing. Along the outside of the stalls, ancient straw still lay in a damp pile, the fibres broken short, the pale amber long since turned to brown and black as it had moulded and declined towards earth. Partway along, where the pile ended and the dirt floor began, he scraped his toe over the earth, pushed some of the straw back. It was compacted into clumps almost like horse dung. He moved more of it with his foot and exposed uneven earth.

‘Take him outside and keep him busy for a bit, could you?’ he said to Heseltine.

Heseltine looked uneasy. He didn’t like to lie and didn’t invent very well. After several seconds, he said, ‘I’ll ask him to point out what things the milord painted.’

Alone, Denton went back to the decayed hay. He moved more of it with the side of his boot and then went to an untidy heap of broken tools and rattled around in it until he found a wooden hay fork with one broken tine. He began to move the hay with it; the easy swaying motion coming back to him as he moved along, pitching it deeper up the pile. When he was done, he had cleared an area about ten feet by six. He got down on his hands and brushed wisps of hay out of his way, studying the dirt and even, close to the wooden wall of the old stalls, bending close to sniff it. Satisfied, he took the fork and pitched the hay down again until it lay as it had before.

They walked back down to the farm compound and shook the farmer’s hand and paid him. He gave them the sly grin that meant he thought they were idiots, city pigeons ripe for the plucking. When they came down from their rooms, nonetheless, their buggy was outside, the horse in the shafts, its coat brushed and sleek. One of the younger women gave them a sack, rather heavy. Heseltine peeped in, said it was bread and cheese and apples and a bottle of wine. ‘It’s like the hotelier who gives one a free drink when one’s paid several pounds too much.’

‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

When they were rocking up the road behind the horse’s trot, true snow blowing in from Denton’s side, Heseltine said, ‘What did you find in that barn?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Are we pushing on to Paris?’

Denton was driving, enjoying the feel of the reins between his fingers, the almost electric connection with the horse. ‘Not this trip, I think.’

‘Then you did find something in the barn.’

‘I’m not sure.’

The truth of it was, he wanted to think. He was sure the earth had been disturbed along the stable wall where the hay had lain. If it had been, if it wasn’t simply some effect of the hay’s lying on it, was it something the farmer had done? Or something the two visitors had done? He couldn’t imagine what, except the obvious. Bending over the apparently loose dirt, smelling its mouldy odour, he had had a sudden sense of disorientation; some of it was the evening spent with people whose language he didn’t know, a severe reminder of his foreignness. He had told Janet Striker he was an outsider, but he had not meant that he was an alien being; there, bending over small clods of dirt, he had quite simply thought he was meddling in a different world.

At any rate, to dig there himself was impossible. The English police couldn’t do it, either, he thought; they were as foreign as he, would be even more precise about not stepping on somebody else’s toes. It would be a job for the French themselves, but to bring them to it would be an extraordinary task.

He was having the rare experience of believing that he might best let sleeping dogs lie. And he wanted to go home, to be an outsider in a place he understood. And to see Janet Striker, who might have ended her absence already.

The next morning at Waterloo, they made their way through the station and hesitated outside by the cab rank. It was a small awkwardness: two men who didn’t know each other very well yet had shared several days together, neither easy with any show of sentiment.

‘I can drop you,’ Denton said.

‘Oh - no, thanks. I’d rather - I have an errand or two to run.’

‘Well, then.’ Denton held out his hand. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’

‘Oh, not at all. It’s I who should—I feel so much better. I mean to say, getting away rather clarified things.’

‘Good.’

‘I truly enjoyed it.’

‘Some memorable food, anyway.’

‘No, no, all of it - the sense that—Life goes on. There are other lives, very different lives to mine, and they’re utterly indifferent to me and my - history. I’m truly grateful.’

Heseltine shook his hand again. Denton motioned for a cab and the front one in the rank trotted forward the few steps to him.

Heseltine said, ‘A friend, an acquaintance really, said he thought I could find something managing a plantation in Jamaica. He has relatives there. I value your opinion - what d’you think?’

Denton’s flash of thought told him that ‘managing a plantation’ in Jamaica was probably as much like being the overseer of the slaves in the old American South as you could hope to find, but he knew he shouldn’t say that, and he muttered something about the climate.

‘Yes, well, it’s hot.’

American slaves had once been threatened with being ‘sold to the Indies’. It had been meant as a death threat, not from heat but from disease. He said, ‘I think you can do better.’

Heseltine blushed and shook his head. Denton got into his cab and waved as it clip-clopped away.

The snow that had been falling on Normandy had already disappeared from London; new weather had blown in from the west while he had slept on the overnight Channel steamer. The sky was bright blue, splotched with white clouds that looked like some sort of meringue that had been twisted into rounds and curls; when they passed across the sun, the streets were suddenly bereft, almost grim, but in the returning sunlight colour shone and he felt cheered. When they got to Russell Square, he felt his tension rising and knew it was worry about
her
: would she be back? Or would there be some final letter from her,
I have decided to move away
? When they turned into Guilford Street, he was angry that she could have this effect on him; when they turned into Lamb’s Conduit Street, he had thrown himself back and was rubbing his lips with a hand, hopeful, anxious, eager to forgive. But forgive what?

‘You look a sight,’ Atkins said when he opened the door. ‘Been sleeping in that suit, have you?’

‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘No offence intended, General, only trying to lighten the prodigal’s return. Sincere apologies, truly—’

They were going up the stairs, Denton’s Gladstone bag bumping against Atkins’s calves and then the treads with the sound of a small boat bumping a dock. At the top, Denton ripped off his hat and overcoat and went straight to the table where the mail lay. He went through it quickly, waiting for Atkins to say something like
Nothing from her, don’t get your hopes up
, but Atkins, once cautioned, was wise. He simply gathered up the coat and hat and the valise and carried them up the stairs.

There were bills, there were notices, there were invitations, but there was nothing from Janet Striker.

He took a much-needed bath and announced that he was going to New Scotland Yard.

Atkins looked innocent but said, ‘Something you found in France?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I want to talk to Munro.’ He knew that Atkins wanted to be told about it, but this morning, for once, he didn’t want to talk to Atkins. He was hurt; he was angry; he wanted more action. He thought,
I should have dug up the damned barn while I had the chance.
Of course, he hadn’t had the chance - the farmer, cautious and fearful of novelty, would have stopped him - but he didn’t admit that to himself.

‘Get you a cab, then?’ Atkins said.

‘I’ll walk.’

‘Going to rain this p.m.’

Atkins provided an umbrella, and Denton, looking entirely proper in an old but beautifully cut frock coat, one of the hated high collars and a necktie the colour of strong Burgundy, took it without a word. He even wore a mostly waterproof bowler.

The sense of being imposed on, of being ill treated, stayed with him. She should have written. She should at least have done that much. She was playing some game. He turned right at the end of Lamb’s Conduit Street and, instead of heading for New Scotland Yard as he’d said, walked straight on towards Westerley Street and Mrs Castle’s. He cursed his own inconstancy.

He turned back twice, once lingered by a shop window, feeling irrationally that he was being followed, but there was nobody. What was the matter with him? It was the sense of ill-treatment, he thought.

Fred Oldaston was not on the door at Westerley Street. It was not yet noon; the door was opened by a middle-aged maid in a perfectly proper black dress and white apron. ‘I’m so sorry, sir, we’re not receiving,’ she said.

‘I need to see Mrs Castle.’

‘She’s not receiving callers yet, sir. If you’ll come back—’

He produced a card and insisted she take it in. Something about him impressed her - frightened her, more likely - and she held the door for him, then left him in the little entry where Fred usually sized up the clientele. She wasn’t gone long, gave no sign that anything unusual was happening; she took his umbrella, thrust it into a gold and blue ceramic cylinder, said only, ‘This way, please,’ and led him through the public rooms and into the one with the William Morris paper where Ruth Castle usually received the male world, and then through it and into the cool blue-and-green sitting room where he had met Janet Striker after her rooms had been invaded.

‘Please wait, sir.’

Waiting was the last thing he wanted to do. He wished now he had gone straight to Munro’s. At least Munro would have given him an argument, stirred him up. If Munro was no help once he did get to New Scotland Yard, he decided, he’d go right back to Normandy and do what he should have done yesterday, dig up the damned barn and the hell with it. Buy off the farmer. He’d need Heseltine again. Catch the evening train out of Waterloo, be in Le Havre at—

‘Do take off your coat, Denton, you’ll catch your death when you go out.’

‘Where is she?’

Ruth Castle had touched her cheeks and lips with red, but she looked worn at this time of the morning; he thought the veins in her cheeks were starting to show, and serve her right. But her figure was still good, evident in the floor-length wrapper she wore, a blue-grey shot silk with an elaborate ruffle up the front and around the back of the neck. She stared at him and then opened her eyes wide and sat down on the love seat and extended her arms up the curves on either side. ‘I do want you to be civil, Denton.’

‘Where is she?’ He was still sick of Ruth Castle.

‘Well, she isn’t here, if that’s what you mean. Nor is she in London, so you can’t rush off and bedevil her when she wants to be by herself. Give her some breathing room, Denton.’

‘She hasn’t even written to me!’

‘Why should she? What is it you expect - comments on the weather, the news of what other ladies are wearing? Billy-doos?’

‘Don’t mock me.’

‘Hard not to, my dear. Men in love are so mockable. Where have
you
been, one might ask.’

‘France. Business.’

‘Paris - that business?’ She laughed.

‘Ruth, look—’ He put his hat on a table and ran his hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry if I was rude. Yes, I suppose I’m a man in love. I don’t know what she wants from me. She’s avoiding me, isn’t she?’

‘She’s afraid of you.’