The Bohemian Girl tds-2

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘And that was the end of it? A note and a shilling?’

  ‘Why, no, there was her brother. Next, I mean. In her note, she said that her brother would come for her things, and the brother would bring another note from her as his bona fides. And so he did.’

  ‘And what sort of man was he?’

  ‘Why, somewhat like Mary. One could see the family resemblance. Bigger, to be sure, manly, rather poorly spoken, I fear — taking after the father, I suppose. Mary spoke like a gentlewoman. But he had the aforementioned note, and he gathered up her things, and that was the end of it.’

  Denton leaned forward. He was sitting on a chair with a horse-hair seat, very high in the middle, and he risked sliding off if he didn’t keep his balance. ‘And her things?’

  ‘She wasn’t wealthy in the things of this world. He brought a little trunk and a man to carry it, and he put her things in it and away they went.’ She waved the other arm towards Euston.

  Denton asked more questions about the brother, but she had told them what she knew. As for the man who carried the trunk, she said, ‘My maid, Hannah, dealt with him.’

  Mrs Durnquess said she was fatigued then and would she excuse them, and she pulled on a tasselled cord that hung from a cast-iron arm up near the moulding. Janet Striker tried one or two more questions, but they’d got what there was to get; half a minute later, they were out in the corridor. Slow, thumping footsteps announced the Irish maid, who appeared in a narrow doorway, sleeves pushed up again, face red. ‘Going, are you,’ she said.

  Denton gave her a shilling. ‘We’re looking for Mary Thomason.’

  ‘Who’s that, then? Oh, the little thing that was up in Seven. She’s been gone for ages.’

  ‘Going on three months, I think,’ Janet Striker said.

  ‘And me the only servant in the place, it seems like years.’

  Denton gave Janet a look that meant that he wanted to do this one himself, and turning back to the maid he said, ‘Your name is Hannah.’

  ‘And what if it is?’

  ‘Hannah, Mrs Durnquess says you dealt with Mary Thomason’s brother.’

  ‘Sure, there was no “dealing with” him. He come, he got what he wanted, he left.’

  ‘What did he take?’

  ‘And how would I know? He brought a box with him; I suppose it was heavier when he left than when he walked in. He didn’t fill it with nothing of ours, you may be sure.’

  ‘Did you stay with him while he got the things?’

  ‘Not me. Haven’t I got plenty else to do than watch somebody fill a box? He emptied the room of her stuff, that’s all I know. Little enough she had, poor thing. A lot of art stuff. When the brother was gone, it was gone. I got the work of cleaning the room, of course, but she’d left it pretty good.’

  ‘Did she have friends in the house?’

  ‘If she did, I never saw them. Madam don’t like visitors, and she don’t like to-ing and fro-ing between the rooms. She hears the footsteps over her head, she raises the roof. Of course, I’m the one’s supposed to set it right.’

  ‘Did you ever have to set Mary Thomason right?’

  ‘Her? No, she wasn’t the sort. Quiet.’

  ‘And the brother? Did he ever visit her?’

  ‘Never saw him before. Little cock o’ the walk, if you take my meaning. Fancied himself, I thought — couldn’t be bothered to carry the box, but brought a man to do it.’

  ‘And where did they go?’

  ‘You think I have the time to watch folk off the premises? They went, that’s all, and good riddance. He give me tuppence. A great gentleman, I don’t think.’

  ‘And the man? Did he help the brother pack up her things?’

  ‘Not him. Half drunk he was, and the brother wouldn’t have him in the room at all. I had to take him to the kitchen to keep him from skulking about and doing who knows what. He wasn’t a bad sort, oney in my way, and a bit deep in the beer for the time of day.’

  ‘Do you know the man?’

  ‘Me? Know some layabout that pushes a cart? I’m a decent girl.’

  ‘He didn’t give you a name.’

  ‘Oh, he did, like he expected me to shine it up and put it on the mantel for a keepsake. “Alf ”. If he’d had more front teeth and a clean shirt he’d have been about half the man I’d care to spend five minutes with.’

  ‘Old or young?’

  ‘Born old and got older quick, would be my guess. A lot older than me, I can tell you.’

  ‘Did he say where he could be found?’

  She laughed. The laughter transformed her; he could see the robust farm girl she had been a year or two before. She pushed some hair back from her forehead. ‘I give him a cuppa tea and one of me scones and he tried to — ’ she glanced at Janet — ‘to what you’d call take a liberty with me, and he said if I was lonely I could always find him in the arches behind St Pancras station. I laughed in his face! I’d have to be dead lonely because there was nobody left on God’s green earth before I’d go prowling for the likes of him!’

  Denton said she had a hard row to hoe, and he gave her another coin. She showed them out, and he heard her footsteps clumping back towards the rear of the house. On the pavement, he said to Janet Striker, ‘Well?’

  ‘My very thought.’

  ‘At least we know that Mary Thomason’s gone.’

  ‘To “the west”. Not very helpful.’

  ‘I think I’ll go looking for Alf.’

  ‘My very intention.’

  They were walking towards Euston Road. At the corner, Janet Striker swung round and looked back at the house. ‘At the Society, we tell girls who’ve taken to the street that they’d have a better life in service. You see a girl like Hannah, you wonder.’

  ‘She’d be better off back on the farm.’

  ‘Oh, aye, except for the starvation.’

  They crossed Euston Square and turned towards the Midland Railway station. The great medieval bulk of the station hotel loomed above the other buildings, its towers and walls like one of Ludwig’s wilder fantasies. Denton said, ‘“The arches behind St Pancras”. Where the rail lines cross St Pancras Road, I think.’

  She took his arm. ‘I go to Old St Pancras Church sometimes. Bits of it were put up not so long after the Romans left.’

  ‘I didn’t know you go to church.’

  ‘No, I expect not. You don’t?’ So they talked, wading painfully through their ignorance of each other. Church-going, the war news, did he have old friends, ‘being political’ — were these issues worth testing each other on? Odd and unpredictable, the doors one opens to try to find the other person.

  He told her more about Albert Cosgrove, muted the encounter in the dark house, the knock on the head. Reminded, by a roundabout linkage, of his back garden, he said, ‘Dammit — I promised Atkins I’d get somebody to dig. Sorry — not your concern-’

  They turned down St Pancras Road, and the crash and rumble of Euston Road fell away. Here, the traffic was mostly carts and wagons, the odd bus, a cyclist dodging in and out. She said, ‘Do you really need somebody to do physical work?’

  ‘I don’t think a woman would do.’ He thought she meant her Society.

  ‘Would you take a Jew?’

  ‘I’d take a Hottentot.’

  ‘If a man named Cohan shows up at your door and says I sent him, put him to work.’

  The street seemed to grow older as they walked, brick changed here to stone. Denton was aware of the plain-clothed policeman following them. Felt a stab of annoyance, wondered if it was because of something to do with Mary Thomason — hardly, as he’d gone to the police about her — or Janet Striker, or simply the fact of being watched. For whatever reason, he was tired of that presence always back there.

  Ahead, the railway tracks crossed above them on a stone roadbed held up by massive arches, the central one open for the road itself, the others turned into small factories, machinists’ works, the odd rag-and-bone shop. They asked at only two of them b
efore a red-faced man in a soft cap shouted ‘Alf the carter?’ over the rumble of iron tyres on macadam. ‘Cross under, third arch on the right. Though he might be out jobbing.’

  He was. The arch was boarded up; set into the boards were a window that might have come out of a demolished house — six over six, the glass wavy, one pane replaced with wood — and a door with six panels and the remains of a fanlight over it. Next to it, a bell that also might have come out of a house had been nailed to an upright; it had been made to jingle when a rope was pulled — thoughts of Mrs Durnquess and Hannah inescapable here — but was now sounded by grasping the flexible metal of its support and giving it a shake.

  ‘Alf’s out jobbing,’ she said. She took out a card, wrote on the back. ‘Let’s see what that brings.’ She put the card in the crack between the door and its frame.

  ‘You’re taking over my pursuit of Mary Thomason?’

  ‘You said you were trying to finish a book.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for you to get pulled in.’

  ‘I’ve pulled myself in.’ She turned him back towards Euston Road. ‘Really, I think the one we want is the brother, not toothless Alf.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’

  ‘There are the directories.’

  ‘And a thousand Thomasons, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Hannah didn’t like him.’

  ‘He didn’t tip her enough.’

  ‘More than that. Odd. Mrs Durnquess thought he was common; Hannah thought he was — what, getting above himself? Although he wouldn’t be the first to be common as dirt and treat a servant as if he were the Prince of Wales.’ They walked along, almost back to Euston now. ‘Still-’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t like the brother somehow.’

  ‘He’s a man.’

  ‘There is that.’ They walked on a few steps and he said, ‘I don’t like Geddys.’ He looked aside at her. ‘He lied to me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Saying he didn’t know where she lived. Mrs Durnquess said he’d seen her home and was “interested” in her. You deal with Alf; I’ll tackle Geddys again.’

  Opposite the corner of Judd Street, she said, ‘I’ll leave you here.’ ‘Dinner?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘I feel like one of those knights in an old tale who’s being set a test to prove himself.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m the one being tested. You don’t understand. ’ She walked away towards Euston station.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He was at work again next morning by eight, hard at it still at three that afternoon, grateful for the eyeglasses that made hours of writing possible. He felt harried by the need to get the book out of his head and on paper — the more so because of Cosgrove’s theft of the outline, as if irrationally he believed that Cosgrove might replicate it. Atkins, when he had first seen the glasses — Denton, of course, had forgotten he had them on — had blinked once and raised his thin eyebrows a fraction of an inch. Joker though he was, Atkins had a sense of tact. Later, when Denton, in pacing around his bedroom, passed the mirror, he saw the strange face, its huge nose topped by the spectacles that enlarged the eyes behind them. He looked like somebody on the stage. Somebody definitely comic.

  At four, when his back hurt and his wrist was sore, Atkins appeared in the bedroom door.

  ‘Mrs Striker’s below with a box. Cab waiting at the door.’

  Denton jumped up, struggled into a coat. When he turned to Atkins, the soldier-servant tapped between his own eyes. When Denton didn’t get it, Atkins made circles around his eyes with thumbs and fingers.

  ‘Oh — dammit-’ He pulled the glasses off, threw them on the desk and started out of the door.

  ‘Collar and tie, Colonel,’ Atkins murmured from the stairs.

  Why did it matter? Why did such trivialities matter? But he put on a collar and tie.

  Of course.

  She was standing at the far end of the long sitting room, wearing the same or another equally awful hat and a dark coat. At her feet was a small trunk. She smiled when she saw him. ‘I’ve found Mary Thomason’s trunk.’

  He stared at her. ‘How?’

  She laughed. ‘It’s rather a tale.’

  ‘Atkins — take her coat, Mrs Striker’s coat-Want tea? Or coffee? There’s sherry-’ He had thought he would never get her here; now she was here under her own steam, and he didn’t know how to behave.

  ‘I have a cab waiting,’ she said as she handed over her coat. She kept the hat on.

  ‘Send it away. We can get another when-’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s one thing for a woman to go to a man’s house and leave the cab waiting in front. It’s another for her to send it away. I don’t give a damn, but you’re a public sort of man.’

  ‘You know I don’t care about that — ’ he hesitated, finished lamely — ‘stuff.’

  ‘Then you’ve lost whatever common sense you had. I’ll stay twenty minutes, no more.’ She glanced at Atkins. ‘Tea, if you can have it here in ten.’

  ‘At once, madam.’

  Denton frowned, aware that Atkins was doing his perfect-servant turn, waved him away. He went closer to her. ‘I’m having a hard time realizing you’re really here.’

  ‘Do you want to hear my story or don’t you?’

  ‘Have you opened it?’

  ‘All in good time.’ She sat in the chair across the small fireplace from his; he perched on the arm of his own. She said, ‘Alf found me last evening. You remember Alf, the carter — St Pancras Road? Well, I’d written “To hear something to your advantage” on the card I left for him, and my address-’

  ‘You never left me your address.’

  ‘Perhaps I had nothing of advantage for you. At any rate, he turned up last evening. Alf lacks teeth and had been into gin somewhere, and he looked as if he might have been carrying sacks of coal — a sort of overall and a cap with a flap down the back — not awfully well washed, shorter than he ought to be, perhaps from bending. But agreeable in the way of men who say what they think you want to hear.

  ‘So I asked him if he remembered picking up a box from a house in Fitzroy Street in August. He didn’t, nor did he remember the brother, but he remembered Hannah well enough — mostly her scones — and then it came back to him. More or less. The long and the short of it was that if he sent the box off somewhere, he’d have a receipt for it. So back to St Pancras Road we went.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘I did. What have I better to do? He lives there, under the railway arch. It was as filthy as you’d expect. I’ve seen worse. He keeps his receipts impaled on a nail driven in from the outside — several nails, actually — and he went through them pile by pile, as apparently there’s no order to them — he smashes one on whatever nail he’s near. He found it at last, by the date. The signature was illegible — presumably the brother’s — intentionally so? But there it was, a receipt for one small trunk sent by rail to Biggleswade, “Hold until called for.”’

  ‘My God, you’re a wonder!’

  ‘It was getting on for dark by then. I stepped outside where I could see and asked him if he’d let me have the receipt for a few days. Alf was shocked at the very idea. Could I rent it for a few days? Alf said it would upset his record-keeping something fierce, not to mention morality, but two-and-six turned out to be the price of his record-keeping and his scruples. He was casting about for something else to sell me by then, but I had the receipt and I simply walked away to the telegraph office at St Pancras station, where I sent a telegram to the left-luggage office at Biggleswade to ask if the item number of the receipt had been picked up.’ She grinned. ‘They wired back this morning that it hadn’t.’

  Denton slid down into his armchair. ‘Mary Thomason never got there.’

  ‘The trunk hadn’t been retrieved, at any rate. So this morning, I went and got it.’

  He looked down at the trunk. It was shaped like a loaf of bread, perhaps two feet long, cheap wood part
ly covered with pressed tin and held together by oak slats. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘I stopped at a locksmith’s on my way here and had it unlocked. But I haven’t looked inside.’

  He tried to smile at her, but the smile was crooked and unconvincing because he was thinking she could be in trouble if somebody eventually came looking for the trunk. There was, too, a hesitation about looking into somebody’s privacy — more pointed, perhaps, because somebody had been looking into his. ‘You’re a wonder,’ he said again.

  Atkins came in with a tea tray, which he put on a folding cake stand that he produced from the shadows of the room like somebody doing a magic trick. He put it down near Janet Striker with a perfect-servant flourish, poured her a cup of tea, and then faded back down the long room, hardly pausing as he opened the doors of the dumb waiter before disappearing down his stairs.

  Denton took a cup of tea, then put it aside and bent forward and pulled, using the trunk’s hasp as a handle. Inside, a folded dress was visible, filling the interior, white with a narrow yellow line in the fabric, wrinkled bits of ruffle and lace showing; the fabric looked much washed. When he didn’t move to take it out, Janet Striker lifted it in both hands and put it on the chair in which she’d been sitting, then thought better of it and shook the dress out, turning it so that it fell from her hands as if it were being worn. She held it against herself. ‘Rather jeune fille. Appropriate, then. Summer dress, cotton, not awfully well made. She wasn’t as tall as I.’

  Smudges of something black marked part of the skirt. She held it up. ‘Charcoal, don’t you think? From drawing. Meaning she’d worn it and not laundered it. Or it didn’t wash out.’

  Under the dress were a couple of petticoats, a very plain nightgown with long sleeves, a small hat, also white, fairly new. ‘Rather virginal,’ Janet Striker said.

  ‘Maybe her mother bought her clothes for her.’

  ‘I’d say they almost look too young for a woman going somewhere like the Slade. But who knows.’ She pulled out three pairs of drawers, the sort that tied at the knee. Unembarrassed, she said, ‘The new style, anyway.’ She tossed them aside to reveal a brown cloak very worn around the bottom, also a pair of grubby wool mittens and a heavy cardigan, much ravelled at the cuffs and stretched and bagged all over. Janet fingered a few pairs of white stockings. Denton leaned over to see to the bottom — a single pair of shoes, very worn; a stack of handkerchiefs; a narrow box about six inches long; a pasteboard box that the shoes might have come in; and an imitation-leather folder so wide that it had had to be put in at an angle. Denton took the narrow box and pulled off the lid. ‘Why does a young woman have something called “The Princess Depilatory”?’