Bohemian Girl, The (38 page)

‘Joan of Arc.’

‘Yes, well—But why would a man masquerade as a woman?’

‘Perhaps he prefers to be a woman. Perhaps he wants to be a woman. Or perhaps it’s simply a wonderful disguise.’

‘Even if he has sex with men - the baths, Himple - that doesn’t mean he wants to be a woman.’

‘Not
that
crazy, mmm? What sane man would be a woman if he had a choice?’

‘He’d have had to wear a wig. Where’s the wig?’

‘She’d have worn the wig when she left Fitzroy Street. Then got rid of it when she became a man.’

‘But—’ Atkins, who had appeared in response to a jingling bell, followed her pointing finger to a fat eclair. Denton asked for coffee and said when Atkins was gone, ‘What would make such a thing worth it?’

She shook her head. She ate, then pulled the fork between her teeth to scrape the chocolate off. ‘Living another life.’

‘Something to hide.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘She wrote to you that somebody might be about to hurt her. Might that mean she was afraid she was about to be found out?’

‘Well, I’ve told you, I don’t think that letter was really for me.

It was to scare Wenzli, wasn’t it? And why would somebody hurt her?’

‘Well, if she was really a man—If Mary Thomason had a man - a man who wasn’t
so
, who wasn’t a puff, a man like Wenzli or Geddys - interested in her, then being found out could mean - outrage? Disgust? If they were, you know, physically involved—’

‘A man with a man? Oh, I see what you mean - the other man thinks he’s a girl - there could be a certain amount of play - like Wenzli—’

‘Kissing and so on, even well beyond that—’

‘But surely, the man would find out when he—’

‘Mmmm.’ She scraped chocolate and cream off her plate, licked the fork with a voluptuous extension of her tongue. ‘Mmmm.’ She put the fork down. ‘Perhaps that was the point Mary and Wenzli had almost reached.’

He shook his head. He watched her eat the eclair. ‘This is a long tale to have built on some missing rags.’ He accepted coffee from Atkins. ‘It would be so complicated!’

‘To the contrary, it’s simplicity itself. A double life isn’t necessarily like something in a Pavilion farce - going in and out of doors in different identities. It’s mostly a matter of keeping your lies straight - like being married and having an affair. You’d want your wits about you, is all.’

‘Not with separate identities - names, clothes, places to live—’

‘It wouldn’t have been that way. Mary was the identity; her way of life was the principal way. But sometimes he -
he
- was somebody else. Perhaps only occasionally.’

‘To do what?’

‘Something difficult, don’t you think?’ She smiled, but only a little. ‘Like making a middle-aged man fall in love with you?’

He shook his head again. ‘Let’s not tell Munro yet.’

‘Let’s not.’

Ten days later, Munro told him that the French expert had said that the bones were human and almost certainly male. He speculated that they belonged to a man in middle age but couldn’t be certain. However, one tibia had an old fracture.

‘We checked with Himple’s medical man. He’d broken a leg as a boy, falling off a wagon. The French are having local police ask after Himple and Crum at every place he posted letters from.’

Munro again demanded a copy of the drawings that Augustus John had made. A few days later, he sent a note to say that Mrs Durnquess had told Markson that John’s drawing was very like the young man who had come to get the trunk; the maid had agreed. Meanwhile, the CID, now accepting the probability of a crime, had found Himple’s bank and asked what arrangements he’d made for money while he travelled. He had carried a letter of credit, was the answer, and had used it in three places, for a total of more than three hundred pounds. The CID had also interviewed several of the young men who had been picked up in the raid on the Mayflower Baths. Two of them recognized the John drawing as somebody they called ‘Eddie’. He’d been at the baths off and on, but they hadn’t seen him, they thought, in a year. Several more of them recognized a photograph of Himple; he was ‘a regular’.

Munro had more copies of the drawing made and sent to France. After another week, the word came back that two people at the banks where the letter of credit had been used thought that John’s drawing was like the man who had cashed a letter of credit as Erasmus Himple, RA.

‘So he’s a forger as well as a murderer. Dear God.’ Denton was still shocked. ‘I was so sure he would turn out to be the victim!’

‘Why?’ she said.

‘Because—I’m still looking for Mary Thomason.’

‘Well, it isn’t a she, at least.’

‘No, of course not.’

The valet and the housekeeper, Mrs Evans, said that of course the John drawing wasn’t Himple; it was the young man known as Arthur Crum.

After another week, Munro said, ‘He’s skipped. Absolutely skipped. The trail’s cold - the last time he was seen was six months ago in Nice. He’s beaten us.’

By then, they were into April. Denton wanted to be out, walking in the city. Flowers were blooming; birds were arriving in flocks; some of the days were warm, almost summery. Janet Striker was waiting to move into her own house, with the Cohans to take care of her; she was living partly in his old bedroom, partly in a hotel. He was now sure that her concern for appearances was some irrational personal quirk: she had explained that it was all right for her to sleep on the floor above him so long as he couldn’t climb the stairs.

A doorway was being cut through the garden wall. He didn’t know what she made of the people who could look into the garden from the nearby houses. Perhaps she meant to wear a disguise when she used the new door.

Missing her, wanting to be out and about, he was restless. He was gaining his weight back, but his strength was coming more slowly. One night when she was staying at her hotel and he was lying awake - the nursing-home insomnia had returned - he got out of bed and limped on his stick to the foot of the stairs. He looked up them. They seemed endless.

‘The hell with it.’ He put his left foot on the first stair, grasped the banister in his left hand and pulled the right leg up. It was all right. He went another step, then another. He had to balance on the bad leg and the stick while he moved the good leg, but he was getting used to that; his shoulders were stronger. He went up another step. His breathing was heavy. And so he went up to the landing, made the turn, and pushed and pulled his way up to his bedroom.

He limped about, lit the gas, sat in his desk chair and let his pulse and his breathing recover. There was some scent of her in the room. His desk surprised him with its neatness; she must have straightened it, had probably been working at it on something of her own.

When he had explored the room - it had been more than three months since he had seen it - he went out to the corridor and looked at the closed door to the attic. He had the notion that if he could use his rowing machine, he could build the strength of his leg faster. The rowing machine, a huge contraption of cast iron that Atkins had rightly said was never coming down once it had been got up there, was in the attic.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’

He opened the door, lit the gas at the bottom of the stairs. When he put his left foot on the first step, he thought that he was probably doing something stupid, but he didn’t change his mind. He thought,
I’ll go to the first landing today and then come down. I can sleep in my bedroom and try it again tomorrow.
When he got to the first landing, he was trembling, but he didn’t go back, after all. Five steps up was another landing, and then four steps to the attic. He would go to the next landing.

There was no gas to light here. On the third step, in the near darkness, he put the tip of the stick too close to the edge of the tread, and when he swung the bad leg up, the stick slipped. He went down hard on his left side, twisting as he went, wrenching his left shoulder, and then crashing down the stairs to the landing below. He hit his head on one of the steps and he lay there, dazed.

Atkins came pounding up from below. ‘Good on you,’ he said when he saw Denton.

Rupert came behind Atkins and stared.

‘I think I’ve hurt myself.’

‘Well, sit up, let’s have a look at you.’

‘What the hell’s the good? Jesus Christ, I can’t even climb the stairs!’

Atkins helped him sit up against the wall, then went down and got an oil lamp and looked at Denton’s head, then had him work his shoulder. ‘No real harm done, I think, Colonel.’

‘All right, help me down to my bed.’

Atkins held the lamp up. He looked into Denton’s eyes. ‘I think you better try it again, Colonel.’

‘And fall again!’

‘You know what they say - get back on the horse or stop riding. Be that much harder the next time if you don’t do it now.’ Atkins bent and put a hand under Denton’s arm and helped him up, then put the stick in his hand. ‘You slipped in the dark, that’s all. We’ll fix that.’ He went up the stairs with the lamp.

For seconds, Denton hated Atkins. Then he recognized that Atkins was taking a risk for him - if he fell again and hurt himself, it would be Atkins’s fault.

‘All right. Just don’t laugh.’

Six minutes later, weak, panting, he sat on the top step with the darkness of the attic behind him. He grinned at Atkins. ‘All right - now how do I get down?’

‘You stay up there. I’ll brew us up some tea. Going on four, anyway - breakfast soon. I’ll bring it up.’ He looked back from the landing. ‘Take some exercise while you’re about it.’

After that, he was able to labour down the front stairs and so outdoors, and he began to walk in the streets again. First to the Lamb and back, then down to Guilford Street, then to Russell Square, always with a pistol in his pocket and Cohan, borrowed from Janet Striker, behind him. One day he dragged himself up to the attic again and rowed in the contraption, which had to have its springs set at the weakest so he could move the oars. It was the kind of exercise he wanted, but getting up there wore him out.

She was living in a hotel again, waiting for the work on her house to be finished. Many afternoons, they sat together in the long room. One day she said, ‘I’ve been reading your Henry James.’

‘
My
Henry James.’

‘He seems to me sometimes very right about women. You don’t like him? Or you do like him, what does that shake of the head mean?’

‘We’re very different.’

‘Denton, say what you mean.’

Denton moved uncomfortably. ‘People call him a genius. I’m not a genius.’ He didn’t want to say anything else, but she was waiting. ‘He can do a lot of things that I can’t.’

‘And you can do things that he can’t?’

Again, he was uncomfortable. He said, ‘One, maybe.’ He started to go back to his book, raised his eyes to her. ‘I can deal with the life most people know.’ He had let his own book fall on his crossed legs; he raised it, lowered his eyes to it, and again raised them to say, ‘His characters never have to worry about making a living, unless they’re bad and want the money that the good ones have. I’ll admit, this frees James to be high-minded about moral decisions, but he just doesn’t understand that for most of the world, making a living is the great reality. And the interest - the drama, the excitement, whatever you call it - comes from the struggle to survive
and
to make moral decisions. And the farther down the income ladder you climb, the harder the decisions are.’

‘Like Cohan, who wouldn’t take a place with the Jewish madam.’

‘Yes, just like that.’ He settled the book again and looked down and started to read.

She said, ‘Where do writers get their ideas from?’

He chuckled. ‘That’s just what James and I talked about. From everywhere.’

‘From people they know?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I don’t want you ever to write about me. Even if we. . .’ She left it hanging. He knew she meant
If we go our separate ways
, and he didn’t say that if they did, that would be exactly when he’d be likely to write about her. The truth was, he was wondering if he would ever write again; his mind was empty, as if Jarrold’s bullets had gone through his brain and not his back.

He carried the manuscript of the new book down to the publishers himself. He had pretty well forgotten it while he was in the nursing home, certainly had had no desire to work on it. Once home, he had stared at the pile of typed sheets and felt vaguely repelled by it, but he had at last begun to read. The typewriter had done the final copy; still, it had to be gone through once more. Reading it after so long was actually helpful; the months away freshened his eye.

‘It’s damned good,’ he said to Diapason Lang.

‘It’s
months
late.’

‘I suppose I should have put a clause in my contract about being shot.’

‘Oh, my dear fellow—’ Lang looked anguished. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. It’s only - Gwen’s so particular—’

‘He got the insurer’s money for the motor car.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, he did.’ Lang looked at the pile of paper, craned his neck to read the title page, read the title,
The Love Child
, and murmured, glancing at his picture of the maiden being visited by the nightmare, ‘Title’s a bit risqué.’ He peeled back the top sheet as if to make sure the rest of the pages weren’t blank. ‘When can we expect the next one?’

‘What next one?’

‘We always look forward to your next one! And, of course, there’s the, ah, clause in the contract.’ He seemed to want Denton to help him say what had to be said. ‘The clause that we are to be offered your next book.’

‘You
have
my next book.’ Lang looked startled. ‘This one is the replacement for the one I couldn’t write a year ago. The Transylvania book was therefore the “next book”.’ He smiled, because he’d been thinking about it. ‘The Transylvania book was written under a letter agreement, you’ll remember, that made no mention of a next book.’