The Bohemian Girl tds-2

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘I thought you were in Liverpool.’

  ‘I was. I couldn’t stand any more of it, so I took a few days off.’ John was sitting low on his spine, arms folded, the wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. His costume — an almost threadbare velvet jacket in olive green, once apparently belonging to a game-keeper, corduroy trousers much bagged from the rain, thick boots — proclaimed the artist. So did the earring, the almost black beard.

  ‘Liverpool isn’t London?’ Denton said.

  ‘The Liverpudlians believe that only Greece, Rome and dead people in fancy clothes can be proper subjects for art. They’re astonished and censorious that I could think the gypsies in the fields or the workers at the docks could interest me. They display the very best taste of the eighteen-fifties.’ He sighed heavily and looked over at Denton, who was beginning a negotiation with a waiter about the choucroute garni. John said, ‘My sister said she’d seen you. Gwen was rather taken with you. She likes older men.’

  ‘I’m certainly one of those.’

  ‘She said you were looking for a girl.’

  ‘Not what you think.’ Denton passed over the leather envelope that held the drawing and told the waiter he’d have the chicken pie.

  John took the drawing out and looked at it. His head came back as if his eyes were too close to it. ‘Right piece of shit, isn’t it,’ he said.

  ‘Gwen said Burlington House.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You don’t recognize her? She was in her first year at the Slade.’

  ‘Might. I used to drop into the drawing classes, might have seen her. Dreadful piece of work, this.’ He put his head forward and brought the drawing up almost to the brim of his hat. ‘The remarques are more interesting.’

  ‘The little drawings in the corners?’

  ‘Not awfully well done, but they’re Slade work, which is something. ’

  ‘Different hands did the head and the little things?’

  ‘Oh, of course. The girl might have done the remarques, in fact — they look about right for first-year work. But she didn’t do the head — that’s Academy stuff, somebody immensely pompous and outdated. Bit odd, putting remarques on somebody else’s drawing, more so when the drawing’s of you. Little mementoes.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Who the hell knows? One’s a doorway; means nothing to me. The other-’ John laughed. ‘Christ on a crust, it’s Himple!’ He laughed again. ‘Sir Erasmus Himple, RA — one of the great old turds of Burlington House. The drawing is his Lazarus. It’s obvious. I have a friend who insists that it looks like a man preparing to let out a colossal fart. That look of intense stupidity — the open mouth, the rolling eyes — old Himple said it shows Lazarus at the moment of realizing he’s alive again. I suppose one could wake with a fart, eh?’

  ‘“His Lazarus”?’

  ‘Himple put a painting of the raising of Lazarus into the last exhibition. Huge thing — took up most of a wall. He described it as his “chef-d’oeuvre” and made much of the fact that his Lazarus is young and his Jesus is a Jew. And indeed, the Christ has a nose like Shylock in a burlesque, but everybody else in the painting is as English as Boadicea, so it looks as if the Jew of Malta has wandered into a palace garden party. Himple is unmatchable — a genus unto himself.’

  Denton was turning over the name — Himple. Somebody else had mentioned Himple. Who was it? He was eating chicken pie, bending to look over John’s shoulder at the drawing. ‘I thought maybe the man in the drawing was screaming.’

  ‘Well, he could be. One’s never quite sure with Himple. You know, on closer inspection, I think that Lazarus looks a bit like the woman in the big drawing? And I wonder if she was perhaps the model for Lazarus’s sister, who’s shown in the painting as tripping over the ground as if she’s weightless, one hand extended like a hostess introducing the dustman to the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘I should have a look at the painting.’

  ‘It’s worth the trip, if only for the comic effect.’

  ‘But why would Lazarus look like a woman?’

  ‘The girl in the drawing was a model?’

  ‘Now and then, they say.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘For Lazarus and the sister?’

  ‘Well, it’s like old Himple to want to show a family resemblance. He likes to be authentic, you know — brothers and sisters always look alike, right?’ He laughed. ‘Like Gwen and me.’

  Denton looked more closely at the little drawing. ‘And Lazarus is what she’d look like as a man?’ He was thinking of the brother who had picked up Mary Thomason’s trunk from her lodging house.

  John stirred. He found a pencil in a pocket, searched through others until he found a folded piece of cartridge paper, on one side a list of some sort. He smoothed it out on the table and began to draw with quick, sure strokes. To Denton, it was like theatrical magic: one moment, blank paper, the next a face very like Mary Thomason’s but male.

  ‘I’ve cut his hair for him. Or we could have him with a beard, like Lazarus.’ He made another sketch just as quickly, and the same young face appeared with a short beard, even the slight scantiness of the youthful hair shown. The economy of line was remarkable, and all at once Denton understood ‘the Slade look’. He told John as much, praised his ability.

  ‘I’ve thought of doing portraits in Trafalgar Square — sixpence a head. I’d make a fortune.’

  ‘Can I keep those?’

  John slid the paper over the tablecloth. ‘You can tell your grand-children you own an original Augustus John.’ He took the paper back and dashed off a signature, shoved it over again.

  ‘You’re not lacking in confidence, anyway.’

  John laughed. ‘Not on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’ He sighed. ‘I mean to get very drunk and possibly find myself a woman. That sound like a programme that would interest you?’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘I think Gwen wondered if you were attached to anybody just now.’

  ‘I am, actually.’

  ‘Oh.’ John slid down on the banquette again. ‘It’s just as well. Gwen’s really interested only in her art. Everything else is “secondary”, as she puts it. I wish I had her concentration. You heard I was married?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Hard on the concentration. Gwen’s quite right, actually. She’ll wind up a nun of art. I’ll wind up a bigamist. Or a trigamist. I can’t live without women. Half a dozen of them, if I could afford them. Oddly, having only one is surely more distracting than two or three — they could entertain each other. Isn’t that so?’

  Denton had ordered coffee. He sipped. ‘I was married once. It was distracting, yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She killed herself.’

  John seemed to ponder this. He put his eyebrows up, then cocked his head, frowned. He said, ‘I came to London to cheer myself up, and I’m not being cheered. It’s time to get drunk.’ He wandered away.

  Denton remembered that he had meant to ask about Wenzli, the man who had put down the deposit on the ‘little Wesselons’. He also remembered who had first mentioned Himple — Henry James, at the dismal party at his publishers. Something about Himple’s having gone away.

  Maybe he had come back.

  ‘Mary Thomason as a young man, with and without beard.’ He spread the piece of paper on his desk. Janet Striker, his dressing gown held closed at her throat, bent to look at it. It was Atkins’s evening off.

  ‘We should look at the painting,’ she said.

  He put his hand on her buttock. She flinched.

  ‘I’m taking liberties,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll get used to it.’

  ‘I hope not.’ He tried to make it a joke, but it wasn’t.

  It was the same skittishness. He wondered when she would end it.

  The Raising of Lazarus was indeed an enormous painting, the figures life-sized, the landscape so expansive that it was impossible to take in the whole thing at once.
A printed note said that the actual site of the Apostle John’s account was shown, sketches for it made in the Holy Land by the artist himself. The clothes, mostly cloaks and shifts, were ‘archaeologically authentic’, but the faces were, as Augustus John had said, as English as Spotted Dick. Despite the seriousness of the subject — a man raised from the dead, after all, a miracle by the Messiah — there was something terrifically lightweight about it.

  ‘Like Handel played on the tin whistle,’ she murmured.

  He actually knew who Handel was. ‘They’re all play-acting,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, that is it, isn’t it. He’s posed them all. As if it’s a studio photograph that went on too long. It is frightful, isn’t it.’

  He went closer and studied Lazarus. There was no mistaking that face now. With the memory of the drawing and John’s sketches in his head, he thought of Lazarus as ‘Mary’s brother’. He said, ‘Himple used her for the sister and her brother for Lazarus.’

  ‘If they really look so much alike, he could have used either to model both.’

  A lot of handsome young men filled the crowd that followed Jesus. Denton said, ‘Either Jesus or the artist favours the good-looking ones.’

  ‘Mmm, boys. Yes, I suppose. That might cast another light on the brother.’

  ‘What are you saying — Himple liked young men but used Mary as a model? Or her brother? I told you that James said that Himple had “decamped”. I wonder if we can find him to ask some questions. ’

  She turned back before they left the gallery. ‘It’s so huge. Can you imagine having that on your wall?’

  ‘It would cover a lot of cracked plaster.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Denton wrote to Erasmus Himple, RA, but had no answer as yet. On her own initiative, Janet Striker went to the Reading Room and brought back what there was in the obvious sources about Francis Wenzli, the artist who had put down a deposit on the Wesselons. Wenzli was apparently a few years younger than Denton, the latest in a line of minor, originally Austrian painters who had emigrated to England to escape Napoleon. The current incarnation, according to an article on ‘Our Contemporary Artists’ in Pearson’s, was a society portraitist and landscape painter who specialized in country houses.

  ‘It appears he can put both your wife and your country place on the wall for you,’ Denton said to Atkins. ‘And you, yourself, if you’ve a mind.’

  ‘Maybe he gives discounts for quantity, like the insurance men — “Family Rates Our Speciality”.’

  Denton was getting ready to go out, his work day over. His brain felt blurry. He thought that if he didn’t finish the damned novel soon, he was going to take a rest. However, he didn’t say this to Atkins; Atkins liked his employer to be busy making money. Denton said, ‘How’s the moving-picture business?’

  ‘We’re doing what they call “casting”. Theatrical term. My pal, the one who owns the camera, worked for Dan Leno, he calls it casting — like casting about. Trolling for pike, more or less. Thinking of hiring Cohan as a Boer.’

  ‘How’s the housemaid?’

  Atkins made a rude noise. ‘Getting full of herself. Wants her young man to be hired for the soldier. Says she won’t kiss anybody else. Her young man looks a bit like a rat and is about the size of a kid just out of skirts. I told her if she didn’t shut it I’d hire the parlourmaid from Number 17 instead, who’s her worst enemy.’ He shook his head. ‘Not the walk in the park I thought it’d be. You going out?’

  ‘To talk to that painter, Wenzli. Sent him a note; he, at least, answered.’

  ‘Sounds a bit rum. Pushing for a knighthood, they say.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Gossip in “Society Talk”.’ This was a column in the new magazine that Frank Harris was editing. Denton suggested it was odd reading for Atkins.

  ‘Learning from my betters.’

  Wenzli wasn’t Augustus John’s sort of artist, certainly. He lived in Melbury Road in Kensington — ‘the artistic environs of the late President of the Royal Academy, Lord Leighton’ as Pearson’s had it — but kept a studio in St John’s Wood that had been ‘at one time the artistic demesne of Mr Bourke’, which meant nothing to Denton, but once inside it he thought he understood: it was a studio for an artist who wanted to live like a stockbroker.

  Wenzli was already there, in fact was waiting for him. He hadn’t been working — there was no paint on him, no smock, no paint-loaded palette. He was wearing a grey sack coat and waistcoat, rather too-light fawn trousers, a high collar, had somewhat the air of a dandified military officer in mufti. Bearded, moustached, he gave the sense of having just been let go by the regimental barber, who might be still snapping his cloth out of sight somewhere.

  A butler had opened the door, ushered Denton into a building in the style called Queen Anne, and up to a first-floor studio the size of a provincial city’s railway station. The ceiling was more than twice his own height away; carpets covered the floor; a fireplace with a Gothick chimney-piece big enough to have parked a cab in took up part of one wall; easy chairs stood here and there; and, on a marble-topped table that could have sat twelve, the tools of the trade were set out, as if to prove that in fact an artist was here somewhere. Near it stood an easel ten feet tall, on it a six-by-four canvas filled mostly by two young girls and a dog. The artist himself stood in front of it as if prepared to defend it.

  ‘I’m Denton.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. You wrote for an appointment.’

  Actually, Denton had mailed his card, with ‘Re: Mary Thomason’ pencilled on the back; Wenzli had sent him a note telling him to see him at his studio, not his home.

  ‘Your house and your studio are at different places.’

  ‘I must be free of distractions.’ Wenzli exhaled and relaxed the abdomen he had been holding in, now proved a rather soft-looking man, his belly slack but pouty, well-filled — not a nun for art. Denton said, ‘Mary Thomason.’

  ‘That was written on your card, yes.’

  ‘You know the name.’

  ‘Why, yes. She was my model once or twice. She had an interesting ambience.’

  ‘She’s disappeared.’

  ‘Ah. Oh.’ He seemed unsure whether to be surprised. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You knew that she had disappeared?’

  ‘I heard something or other.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  Denton studied the man’s face. There was an expression at the sides of the nose and around the eyes as if he might weep easily. There was also a hint of fear. Denton said, ‘What was your relationship with Mary Thomason?’

  ‘There was no “relationship”! What an improper question!’ Wenzli tried to straighten his back to assume the military pose again, but he stayed several inches shorter than Denton. ‘What are you driving at, sir?’

  ‘Before she disappeared, Mary Thomason wrote me a letter. She said she was afraid of somebody.’

  Wenzli flushed. ‘I was kindness itself to the girl. When I saw her, which was only — two or three times-’

  Denton looked around the studio. ‘This is a private spot. Very private.’ He turned back to the painter. ‘She came here?’

  ‘I work here!’

  ‘You put down a deposit on a painting at Geddys’s in Burlington Arcade. Where Mary Thomason worked.’

  ‘What can you be getting at?’

  ‘And then let the painting and the deposit go — immediately after she disappeared. Why did you do that, Mr Wenzli?’

  Wenzli started to pull in his belly again and gave it up. He managed to look stern, nonetheless. ‘I have work to do. You will have to leave.’

  ‘Did Miss Thomason model in the nude?’

  ‘There spake the voice of Mrs Grundy! And of ignorance; few real artists need the nude model. No, she did not. What you imply is libellous.’

  ‘Slanderous, I think.’ Denton picked up one of the brushes and spread the bristles with a thumb.

  ‘That’s an expensive brush!’ />
  Denton put it down and leaned back against the marble table. ‘You didn’t ask what I do or what I am, Mr Wenzli, so I assume you know. Did Mary Thomason ever mention my name?’

  Wenzli started to say something, hesitated. ‘She might have said something. Your articles on travel were very popular just then.’ He meant the articles about the motor car adventure, which Denton had turned into the book.

  ‘“The former American lawman”.’

  ‘That’s the reputation you have, I suppose. I really don’t see what this is in aid of.’

  ‘So that if you saw that Mary Thomason had written to me asking for protection, you’d know she was serious.’

  ‘Ah-why-What’s the point of all this? You must go, really-!’

  Denton went and stood quite close to him. ‘Her letter, in an envelope addressed to me, was in the back of the painting you were going to buy. There’s no question but that she put it there herself. There’s really only one reason for her to have done that that I can see, Mr Wenzli. She wanted you to find it.’

  ‘This is madness.’

  ‘You’d know my name; you’d read that she was afraid somebody was going to hurt her; you’d know she was serious. It was a warning. ’

  ‘But I never found it! I never found such a damned thing!’

  ‘Were you going to hurt her, Mr Wenzli?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Had things got to a certain point, Mr Wenzli? Despite yourself? Did you kiss her?’

  ‘This is infamous!’ Wenzli went to a bell-pull that hung beside the vast chimney-piece; it was heavy enough to have rung changes on cathedral bells.

  Denton said, ‘The police have been told about her disappearance.’ He paused an instant; so did Wenzli. ‘I think you’d do better to talk to me than to Detective Sergeant Guillam. He’s a right bastard.’

  Wenzli looked more than ever as if he might weep, but he was actually tougher than he looked. He said in a testy voice, ‘I’ll have you thrown out if you won’t leave.’

  ‘You and that butler couldn’t throw me out between you.’ Denton crossed his arms. ‘It’s the police or me.’ He walked down the studio to look at the portrait of the two young girls, then addressed them rather than Wenzli. ‘Did you kiss her? Was there more than that — touching-?’