Bohemian Girl, The (22 page)

His first look at her suggested to him that perhaps she would. She was at least as old as he, probably older, but with the most beautiful posture he had ever seen in a woman; she stood straight, not affecting the buttocks-out curve of the new corsetry. A former ‘beauty’, she still had magnificent facial bones, a figure as slender as a girl’s. Her pale hair, partly silver that blended into its original gold, was piled high on her head. She wore a dress of very pale beige with touches of apricot, her slender arms covered in lace, a jabot of the same cascading down her front to below where a vulgar eye might have imagined her to have a navel. She was holding his friend’s letter of introduction.

‘I am so pleased we can have this talk,’ were her first words. She seemed able to speak almost without moving her lower jaw; her accent was odd and to him unidentifiable, reminiscent of Ruth Castle’s when she was well into the champagne. She raised the letter a few inches. ‘I am unacquainted with the current baronet but knew his father, I think. Such a gentle man.’

‘I wanted to speak to you about your son, ma’am.’

‘About Struther, yes, poor dear. Have you come to apologize? Oh, I do hope you have come to apologize.’ Her tone was sad, her voice lovely.

‘Apologize, ma’am? For what?’

She sat. Her back was wonderfully straight; he doubted that her shoulders had ever touched a chair back. Her sadness seemed to expand to include pity, as if she knew that Denton was the sort who couldn’t help himself and therefore might -
might
- be forgiven
.
‘For seducing my poor boy. For forcing him to this unfortunate incident that the police say took him to East London.’

‘Ma’am, it’s not I—’

The sadness in her voice grew metallic. The metal, he thought, was steel. ‘I know how you have worked to seduce him! I know how you have played upon his sensitive nature! I have seen the copies of your
books
-’ she made the word sound like a synonym for excrement - ‘which you inscribed to him. Oh, sir, though I feel distaste for saying it -
for shame
!’

‘I haven’t inscribed any books to him, ma’am.’

She sighed ‘You are a practised liar, too, I see.’

‘Any books inscribed to your son are forgeries.’

‘Do you dare to suggest that my son is a
forger
? You are pathetic as well as untruthful.’ The sadness fled; only the steel was left. ‘Leave me.’

‘He did ask me to inscribe books to him as Albert Cosgrove. Why did he call himself Albert Cosgrove?’

‘He did nothing of the sort.’ She looked away. ‘Although pseudonyms are not unknown among literary artists.’

Denton was still standing; he saw no hope of being asked to sit. ‘Your son is mentally unbalanced, Lady Emmeline.’

‘How dare you!’

‘He’s dangerous - what he did in Bethnal Green is one step shy of violence—’

‘You go too far, much too far—’

‘Against a woman—’

‘We shall sue you - there is no escape—’ She seemed to have heard what he had said, at last, for she hissed, ‘A
woman
! Do you mean the trollop who lured him to her squalid room? I warn you, Mr, Mr -’ she made a gesture that rendered Denton’s name worthless - ‘we shall learn everything and we shall sue you and see you broken. Justice will be on our side. I had thought you had some spark of decency, that you had prevailed upon
a baronet
to write a letter so that you might confess your crimes, but you -
you are contemptible
.’

‘Lady Emmeline, your son is not sane!’

She somehow managed to sit still straighter. ‘You are speaking of the nephew of a duke!’ Her bizarre accent made it come out as ‘the nivioo of a juke’.

‘The dangerous “nivioo of a juke”, I think, ma’am.’

She stood. Her nostrils flared ever so slightly - as extreme a sign of passion as she allowed herself, he supposed - and she said, ‘Leave my house, you
vulgar
little man!’

He bowed. ‘Vulgar I am, ma’am. Little, I ain’t.’ He headed for the door. There seemed no point in staying.

‘His mama implied that you had lured her poor boy to your room. I suppose she thinks you provided the red paint, too.’

Janet Striker made a face. ‘And Jarrold-known-as-Cosgrove has been sent off to Mama’s country house with two male nurses. Detective Sergeant Munro is keeping me up to date.’

Denton scowled. ‘Some house arrest - hard time in a stately home. Couple of medical men to look in weekly, presumably with lunch laid on. Hard on them, too.’

Janet Striker laughed. ‘No good being angry.’

‘He’s getting off as good as scot-free. I’d tan his hide for him.’

They were eating at Pinoli’s in Wardour Street. He was in ‘informal’ evening clothes - short black jacket with silk revers, white waistcoat, white tie - and she was in a new suit of a dark-green wool tailored to an almost masculine cut, the jacket thigh-length like a frock coat, the skirt box-pleated at the front and back to accommodate her long stride. ‘I like that dress,’ he said.

‘It isn’t a dress; it’s a suit. You look like a successful manufacturer. ’

‘Good a disguise as any.’

‘I thought you enjoyed being an outsider.’

‘It’s no good if you have to work at it. Working at it is Bohemian, isn’t it - the Slade kids in their rags?’

She laughed. ‘I’d never take you for a Bohemian.’

A week had gone by. The book’s end was in sight, if he could keep up the pace. She’d spent a night at his house; a meeting at her hotel had proved less happy - he’d taken a room overnight, had come to her room. It had seemed ‘sordid’, in her word. He had had to admit it had been pretty scatty. He said, ‘We have to make some better arrangement.’

‘We will.’ She had a small, ridiculous hat perched on her forehead; it looked like a soldier’s pillbox, except that instead of a chinstrap it had a ribbon that went around the back of her head. She said, ‘I keep feeling that that thing is falling off into my food.’

‘It’s perky.’

‘“Perky”! Mrs Cohan has an idea for a kind of homburg with a fancy band.’

‘
Mrs
Cohan. Wife to the Stepney Jew-Boy?’

‘They live in the same house as I did, two floors down. She sews - six days a week, making shirts to sell for three-and-six apiece, for which she gets fourpence each. He has no job, as you know. And they’re good people, Denton! She does magnificent embroidery - in Poland, she did wedding dresses and court gowns. She’s going to make me more dresses. We’re thinking along rather Janey-Morris-y lines.’

Denton looked blank.

‘William Morris’s bride. The original Pre-Raphaelite woman.
No
corset and her hair unbound. Ruth Castle told me about her when I was a beginner.’

‘You’ll be a sight on Oxford Street.’

‘I shan’t wear them on Oxford Street. I’ll wear them at home, and this sort of thing -’ she pulled at one lapel of her jacket - ‘when I’m out.’

‘Now who’s planning to wear a disguise?’

‘Well—There’ll be a real me and a pretend me, and the real one will live at home - if ever I get a home again. I’m so sick of hotels!’

‘I don’t know much about women’s clothes.’

‘Do you know much about women? Yes, of course you do. I think you mean you don’t
care
about women’s clothes.’ She sipped wine.

‘I care about you.’

They stumbled along. Cohan finished getting the weeds and brambles out of the back garden. He and Atkins started to plan what they’d plant in the spring. Mrs Striker moved to another hotel. When Denton said to Cohan that he understood he was a priest descended from Aaron, Cohan said, ‘I am not beink a very good Jew.’ Nonetheless, when Denton told him what Fred Oldaston had said about Mrs Franken and her two whorehouses, Cohan had looked severe and said he didn’t need work that much.

Denton continued to write, the end now in sight. One day, Atkins reminded him that he was supposed to go to a party at his publishers - the launching of the book of ghost stories that Lang had told him about. He groaned, said he wouldn’t go, but he did go, because Janet Striker told him he should. And because he couldn’t be with her that evening.

At six on a blustery afternoon, he went up the creaking stairs that led to Gweneth and Burse and through ‘reception’, which was simply a part of the corridor that connected the offices. The party was in the room where they packaged the books, swept more or less clean and provided with a table where sherry and several platters of things in jelly stood. He looked around from the doorway, seeking somebody to kill the time with before he could decently leave. He was wearing an old morning coat, which Atkins had said ‘would do’ because it was still early and he wasn’t going on anywhere, but most of the other men - and they were mostly men - were in some form of evening dress.

Standing near the outer wall, where windows looked down into Bell Yard, was Henry James, who was undoubtedly going on to dinner somewhere, to judge by his formal evening clothes and the fact that he was an aggressive diner-out. As Denton looked his way, James raised his eyes, recognized him and nodded. James was tallish, rather heavy, with shrewd, hard eyes; only a few years older than Denton, also American, but he had sat out the American Civil War while Denton had fought it - a divide that was to separate their generation for the rest of their lives. Denton felt towards him the faint resentment the soldier feels for men who haven’t served, then a counter-balancing remorse for his own prejudice; James, on the other hand, seemed to feel something the reverse, so the two were always pleasant to each other out of guilt. As writers and as men, they were very different, yet they always gravitated towards each other.

‘I read your latest with considerable interest,’ James said as soon as Denton was close, ‘and, I think, with satisfaction, although that is hardly a word that honours a work, I suppose, when heard by the author, or am I presuming to impose my own sensibilities on someone else’s, hardly unheard of in the world of books.’ He chuckled. Denton said something vague; he was never good at accepting praise, worse at giving it when it came to other people’s books. James was
le maître
to his sycophants, but Denton couldn’t pretend to worship at his shrine. James put his fingers and thumb around Denton’s arm just above the elbow as if measuring it. He moved in closer and said in a low voice, ‘Do they do you pretty well at this publishers?’ He looked around the room.

Do him pretty well? Denton said, ‘We mostly get along.’

‘I’m never entirely confident of my publishers, whoever they be. The matter of royalty is vexing, constantly vexing, offered at a certain level and then haggled over as if the Man of Galilee had driven the money-changers out of the temple and into the publishing office.’ He shook Denton’s arm a little. ‘What do you think of these people who call themselves “agents”? They assure me they can lever better terms from the publishers, their letters sometimes quite impertinent, but then they confess they require some of it for themselves, a situation that I must admit gives me unease, not because I am naive in the ways of business, because I am not, but rather the opposite, for no one can have hovered about books for as long as I without learning that the income to be made from a book is finite and represents a sum that can be divided into only so many pieces without, like the crow in the Aesop’s fable - or is it the monkey? how one’s memory plays tricks - dividing it into nothingness. I wonder if these would-be “agents” are not simply opportunists who think authors are fools.’

Denton admitted that he had had some letters from would-be agents himself and was tempted.

‘Exactly. But one doesn’t want to be the first to step into this perhaps inviting pool and find it to be not sweet water but something unsavoury, perhaps in fact corrosive.’ James stood with his head slightly bent, still holding Denton’s arm, his bright eyes scavenging the room like those of some intelligent bird, a pied crow that, if its tongue were split and it were taught to talk, would say malicious things. It was as if James were always on the lookout for scandal or at least its potential, James’s idea of the world of fiction, at least in Denton’s view, being very close to gossip. Such an approach was not Denton’s, just as James’s ambience was not his. As if guessing his thought, James shook his arm again and said, ‘Our work is very different, yours and mine, yet both are to be admired. That is rather a conundrum. I have been thinking about it a good deal for a preface. The house of fiction has many windows, has it not?’

‘For us to look out of ?’ Denton laughed. ‘I’d have said it was a house that had many doors.’

‘Aha, you shift my metaphor. Perhaps a separate entrance for ladies, at least, if not a separate house. No, I was thinking of the way we see and what we see and then what we do with what we see, each from his own window. Tell me now, what do you make of the vulgar concept of “the plot”? People who don’t know any better are forever asking me where I get my plots, as if I bought them with my shirts at a guinea a dozen. You don’t worry yourself greatly over “the plot”, surely?’