Bohemian Girl, The (31 page)

‘I’d never hurt her!’

‘That’s not what she’s afraid of. The world is full of women, my dear, and you picked one of the tetchiest. Well, that’s you - if you’d picked somebody else, you wouldn’t be yourself. So you must take the consequences.’ She lit a cigarette and stared at him, drawing in the smoke.

‘Meaning that I leap through whatever hoops she holds up for me.’ His impatience with Ruth Castle had attached itself to Janet, too.

‘That’s your way of looking at it, not hers.’ She exhaled the smoke and put her head back while it dissipated in the room. ‘Denton, she isn’t
doing
anything to you. She’s trying to do something
for
herself. She doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as love. She doesn’t trust men. She doesn’t believe she deserves anything, good or bad. She’d make a fine nun if only she’d knuckle under to the idea of a God who’s a very demanding old man.’

‘She’s told you everything?’

‘Janet doesn’t tell anybody “everything”. Until you came along, she was going to win her lawsuit and take her money and go away somewhere that nobody knew her, and she was going to be self-sufficient. No men, no women, no fears, no hopes. Now you’ve spoilt all that.’

‘I don’t think I’ve spoiled anything. God knows I didn’t mean to.’

‘Hell is paved with good intentions. Let her be, Denton. She’ll come back.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She always does what she says. She’ll come back. You may not like what she tells you when she comes back, but she’ll tell you to your face and she’ll be honest.’

‘You know what she’s going to say, then.’

‘I know nothing. But I know
her
. You must wait, and then you must listen, and then you must either try not to make a fool of yourself in your delight, or you must live with a loss.’ She put the cigarette out in a small China tray. ‘Now I want you to go. I have to dress, and I’ve the accountant coming. Be a man, Denton.’

He made a hollow laughing sound in his throat. ‘That’s what a woman who was throwing me over said to me once.’

‘Well, it’s good advice. Go away. Don’t forget your hat. You look quite nice, by the way.’

She rang a bell and the middle-aged maid appeared and led him back through the house. In one of the rooms, a young woman in a sleazy wrapper looked at him with a kind of horror and hurried away. The maid handed him his umbrella and opened the door.

He gave her a coin. She bent her knees an inch or two, a symbolic curtsey. Perhaps the coin was too small.

The clouds that had looked like meringues when he had come out of Waterloo station had darkened and congealed and now lay over London in layers, with darker streaks lower down that slanted on a diagonal towards the docks. Ahead of him in the gaps between the houses and the leafless trees, a sliver of blue still showed, closing as he watched it and becoming a pale grey with tendrils of darker colour hanging over it like vines.

He was angry, but in a sullen way now, angry with her and with himself. He wanted activity, action. He tried to rehearse what he would say to Munro - the journey, the farm, the barn, the hay—

He heard sound behind him, its meaning unclear - breathing? Scuffing feet? Then he was hit a stunning blow in his right lower back, and sound exploded around him. The sound hammered again and he felt an agony in his right shoulder, and he was falling forward. His face hit the pavement. His right arm had been useless to stop the fall; the left one was caught under him. He tried to speak, raising his head, rolling to his left side in a slow, seemingly drunken turn.

He couldn’t hear. He knew his mouth was open; was he making sound? He tried to raise his right arm to protect himself.

Ten feet away, Struther Jarrold was holding a revolver in both hands. Black-powder smoke drifted between them. On his face was a look of ecstatic glee. His mouth was open and moving, but Denton heard nothing. He knew that Jarrold was going to put another bullet in him and finish him, and then a big man in a checked overcoat put his arms around Jarrold from behind and lifted him off his feet. Denton’s head struck the pavement again.

‘Can you hear me?’

‘How are we this morning?’

‘If you can hear me, blink your eyes.’

‘Mr Denton? Can you hear me, sir?’

He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry as sand. A huge shadow was cast on the ceiling by the man bending over him. He knew the man, he was sure. He had an accent. A beard. A kindly eye. He tried to say the name: Bernat.

‘Try to drink a little. Your mouth is dry. I keep telling them to give you water but they don’t. Here - drink - drink—’

He felt the coolness in his mouth; then he choked. He tried to cough, tried to sit up. Pain grabbed his back across the kidneys like a huge hand.

She cast a shadow on the ceiling, but it was very pale because the room was full of light. Her eyes were huge. Her hair was different.

‘Janet.’

‘My God.’

He felt her hand on his forehead, then the back of her fingers against his cheek. He tried to sit up, and pain pushed him back like a big hand. He made a sound, half scream, an animal.

‘Don’t try to move. You can’t move; you’re strapped down.’

The room was bright. The air smelled of carbolic. Something smelled fetid. He guessed it was himself. He said, ‘Don’t let them get me. They’ll try it again.’

He heard her say, ‘I know,’ and he passed into blackness, not understanding what it was she knew.

He slept. The dreams came back, but they were wispy, as if they’d lost their power. He had to repeat some of the old tasks, but he kept waking out of them and then going back to them or other tasks like them. When he woke again, the light was different and Dr Bernat was there. Bernat made him drink from a tube.

‘Something is lying on my leg.’

‘No.’

‘Right leg.’

‘You were shot.’

Did he remember that? The feeling of fear clutched him; his heart tried to stop beating. Shotgunned in the back - the hole, wet, meaty—

He had made the animal noise again, and Bernat was clucking at him, wiping his forehead and telling him not to agitate himself.

‘What’s the matter with my leg?’

‘A piece of bullet went close to the spine. It is all well now. We took it out. You will be all fine. Sleep, my friend.’

They woke him now to put the bedpan under him and to change the metal tube that went up inside his penis. He could roll his head and see other tubes, red India rubber, dropping away from him on both sides of the bed. They were draining the wounds, Bernat said.

She came back. She smiled down at him. He said, ‘I don’t want you to see me like this.’

She said, ‘My dear, I’ve been seeing you like this for weeks.’

Weeks?

When she was gone, he told them he didn’t want any visitors. No, she was not to visit him any more. No, he wouldn’t see the police. Keep them all away.

‘What’s that music? I hear music!’

‘It’s almost Christmas. You must sleep, Mr Denton.’

They woke him for morphine injections. He tried to stop them, but Bernat said he would be in too much pain. He remembered the men from the war who had come to like the morphine more than their wives or their children. He said he wanted to do without it, but he couldn’t.

They moved him again, this time to a nursing home. Bernat explained what had happened to him: he had two entry wounds and no exit wounds, the big, soft-lead bullets staying inside his body. One had gone in below his shoulder blade and nicked his lung, ending against a rib. The other had entered between his kidney and his spine and had broken into three pieces. The shoulder injury had gone septic, then the lower one, and they had been almost four weeks draining the wounds, waiting for him to conquer the sepsis, thinking for a while they would lose him.

‘You are a very tough cut of beef, Mr Denton.’