Chapter Nine
After night fell, he lit the gas in his room and
on the stairs, and then, the loaded Colt in his hand, he went down
and lit a lamp in the long room. He felt only a little dizzy, still
weak but clearer in his mind. After sitting for a few minutes in
his chair, he went down to the ground floor and lit the gas there
and opened the front door. A different constable was standing out
by the street but came hurrying when he saw Denton.
‘Something wrong, sir?’
‘Only putting my head out for air.’The evening was
cold, hazy with vapour that was condensing on the stones and
starting to drip from the eave. ‘Still somebody in the back?’
‘Yes, sir. Bit dark back there, I expect.’
Denton went through the corridor that ran along
Atkins’s part of the house, lighting the gas, speaking a few words
with the constable out there before going upstairs again. He tried
sitting to read, found his eyes not focusing on the page, got
himself water, then thought about a drink of some sort and rejected
it. The arm hurt, but not unbearably; Bernat had brought him a
black silk bandanna for a sling, and it eased the pain.
He got a lantern from the old kitchen, climbed back
to the bedroom, legs a little rubbery, got the Colt and then went
on up to the next floor and then the attic. ‘Getting back on the
horse,’ he muttered to himself. The attic was deeply shadowed. He
shone the feeble light around, feeling unsteady, hating his own
nerves. The skylight had been re-glazed and nailed shut. The
Flobert pistols were put away. The dumb-bell and the rowing machine
looked like grotesque animals, casting huge shadows. He
shivered.
Back on the floor below, he locked the attic door
and went down to his bedroom and undressed and got into his bed and
tried to go to sleep. Fifteen minutes of racing brain later - worry
about Atkins, a new awareness of his arm, visions of the attacker’s
mad eyes, his smell - he was dressing to go out. The after-effect
of the laudanum, he supposed, was an insomniac tenseness and sense
of hurry. And, perhaps, dreams. The idea of repeating the nightmare
about his wife decided him that he wouldn’t sleep yet.
Doing buttons one-handed was difficult, and he was
tempted not to put his left arm through his coat sleeve, but he
made himself do it, hearing his grandmother’s voice, ‘If it hurts
bad, it must be good for you.’ He put the arm through Bernat’s
black sling. A necktie gave him far more trouble and he finally
abandoned it, pulling the tie through itself and letting it bulge
above his waistcoat like a stiff ascot.
‘The glass of fashion,’ he muttered, aware for once
of where the quotation had come from. He put his right arm into the
sleeve of an overcoat, drew the left side over his sling and
buttoned a button to hold it, then pushed the Colt revolver into
the right-hand pocket. It made a mighty bulge, but he wasn’t going
without it. He might be getting back on the horse, but he was
nonetheless afraid that his attacker would come back.
‘Going out, sir?’ the constable said again, exactly
like the first time. He was an older man than the first, heavily
jowled and pretty well girthed. He sounded parental, as if Denton
was to account to him for his movements.
‘Tired of being cooped up.’
‘Wet, sir.’ The damp air had by then produced a
fine drizzle. He moved past the constable, waiting to be stopped -
the idea was absurd, but Denton felt as if he were doing something
underhanded - and moved away as quickly as his still-wobbly legs
would allow. Walking lasted only as far as the corner; he knew he
couldn’t make it much farther.
He went by cab to Mrs Castle’s famous house,
commended to him by Harris, the house otherwise known simply as
Westerley Street. Other houses stood in Westerley Street, but only
the one was known by the street’s name; more than one of her
clients, drunk or sober, had said that it must be awkward actually
to live in that street. But all the cabs knew the way, and
they all knew what a man meant if he said ‘Westerley Street’.
Denton had no idea what they thought if a woman said it.
As higher-class houses went, it was a little
shabby, but that seemed to be a sign of its authenticity. Mrs
Castle herself was always soberly and tastefully dressed, if not in
fact sober and tasteful; she always had champagne at hand and loved
to talk politics or racing or what she called ‘sosigh-tih’. A
certain shabbiness of speech, as well - the odd dropped H, the even
odder dropped final G - went with the patchily worn carpet or faded
chair. It was said that she had been the mistress of a personage,
had chosen to be a madam rather than a milliner afterwards, knew
that the best houses were sometimes the worst kept and kept hers
accordingly.
‘Well, sir, it’s you,’ a big man said as he opened
the door to Denton.
‘Hello, Bull.’ Fred Oldaston had fought
bare-knuckled as the Lancashire Bulldog for fourteen years and had
been the first Englishman to take Denton into a public house. He
had also - same evening - taught Denton how to put a thumb into a
man’s eye while punching him. Now fifty and two stone heavier than
when he had fought, he was Mrs Castle’s conscience: ‘I keep them
honest,’ he had said, meaning the clients. Now, he murmured, ‘Hurt
your arm?’ as he closed the door behind Denton.
‘Somebody stabbed me, in fact.’
‘Fighting with knives, bad business, best stay out
of it.’
‘I didn’t have much choice.’
Oldaston took his coat and pointed through a
fringed and swagged doorway. ‘You know the route. Something to
drink?’
‘I’d pass out.’ He went through the drapes and into
a large parlour that was a couple of decades out of date, too much
furniture and too much darkness, and that smelled of cigars and
good perfume and coal fires. A man in evening dress was sitting in
a corner with two women, one of whom looked expectantly at Denton;
he passed on to a room beyond where a large table lamp with a globe
painted with cherubs cast a glow the colour of a sunset. Mrs Castle
was sitting where she always sat, in a large armchair surrounded
with cushions, so that it was not possible to stand right next to
her; the walls, surprisingly after the décor in the other rooms,
were covered with a William Morris paper, but the rest was like the
parlour - velvet and lace, a bulbous piano with paisley hanging
from it like melting icicles, a sideboard big enough to have served
as a back bar.
‘Well, here you are, then,’ she said. She held out
a hand. ‘I ’eard you’d been ’urt. They say ’e tried to kill you,
that true? The black silk thing is ever so elegant.’
Denton squeezed her hand and sat down. She was
probably in her forties but looked both older and younger, her face
well preserved but weary, her abundant hair her own, her voice
firm, her figure overstated but good. He thought her attractive but
had never got any encouragement from her. ‘A bad cut is all,’ he
said.
‘But in your own house, my dear.’ She had firmer
control of the H that time.
‘You seem to know all about it.’
‘Well, friends of friends in the press, you know.’
She sipped champagne. She was one of those drinkers who are always
one or two drinks gone but who never seem drunk; one day, he
supposed, it would all crash down on her. ‘Can I call somebody for
you?’ she said.
‘It’s you I came to see.’
‘Oh, I’m flattered. Poor old me.’
She started to tell him some long story about HRH,
whom she actually did know, although not absolutely recently. A lot
of it was about horses, and Denton’s mind wandered. He watched,
through the doorway, two or three more men in evening dress come
in, then several women from another direction. The sound of male
voices rose, then a woman’s, singing. Denton realized that one of
the men was Hector Hench-Rose. When he sensed that Mrs Castle’s
voice had changed tone, he knew that her story was over, and he
smiled and nodded. When she stopped to pour herself more champagne,
he said, ‘Maybe you can help me.’
‘My dear, I’d be delighted. Anything.’
‘I’d like to talk to somebody who knows the girls
who work the street around the Minories.’
‘You’re ’urtin’ my feelin’s, my dear. Not going to
be loyal to Westerley Street?’
‘Business. Writer’s business.’
‘What then, somethin’ about that killing? Is this
about your arm?’
‘I’d like to find somebody who might help me talk
to some of the girls.’
Mrs Castle smoothed her gown. ‘I don’t know
anybody in that end of town, I’m sure. Bit of a ragtag and
bobtail there, little of everythin’. I never hire from there, you
know, they don’t ’ave the style.’ She looked hurt. ‘Cow-girls and
goose-girls.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘Surprised you’d think it of me.’
‘I didn’t. I only thought you might know somebody
who did. Know that area, I mean.’
He had to apologize again, then wheedle her out of
her mood, if it was genuine. She became roguish, then suddenly
confiding. She really did know, or know of, all sorts of people,
all sorts of stories. She seemed to be coming to some point,
perhaps even a name, when Hector Hench-Rose came in with a very
young woman, laughing and red-faced and rather tipsy for that early
in the night.
‘Denton!’ he shouted, in case anybody in that part
of London had missed his name. ‘Saw you when I came in! How’s that
arm? I thought you had one foot in the grave, the way the papers
went on. This is Yvonne, who’s a charmer, ain’t you? Ah, Mrs C,
handsomer every time I see you.’ He kissed Mrs Castle’s hand and
accepted a glass of champagne and proceeded to tell her all about a
lot of police business that was almost certainly confidential.
Yvonne stared into space, laughing when she thought she was
supposed to, pulling at her clothes as if she had dressed too fast.
Other people wandered in and out; an organ started to play a waltz
a couple of rooms away. When Hench-Rose had finished his gossip,
Mrs Castle looked at an ormolu clock and said, ‘Supper room’s
open.’
‘Aha!’ Hench-Rose stood. He winked at Denton. ‘Join
us? Little sustenance? I’ve a mind to visit the last act at the
Palace of Varieties in Greenwich - care to join me?’ He didn’t wait
for an answer, but in the doorway he called back over his shoulder
with another shout of laughter, ‘Making rather a night of it!’ He
was married, with several children; his wife was said to be
shy.
‘Janet Striker,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘Mrs Janet
Striker.’
Denton let his expression ask the question.
‘The person you want, my dear. ’Ench-Rose can be an
exhausting soul, can’t he. Thought he’d never come to the point.
Gave me a chance to think, though. Mrs Janet Striker. The Society
for the Improvement of Wayward Women.’
‘Sounds awful.’
‘It is awful. But she ain’t. Tough as tripe,
but a lady, and not your mealy-mouthed do-gooder. She understands
the lives the girls live. She tries to find other work for them,
get them off the street, which is like tryin’ to bail the
Serpentine with a fish fork, but she means well. I wouldn’t
send you to most of the hypocrites in that line, but Janet
Striker’s a woman who—’ She smiled, cat-like, disingenuous. ‘You’ll
have to meet her to see what she is.’ She rested her chin on the
fingers of one hand and stared at him. ‘I’m not sure she’ll take to
you, Denton.’
‘That’s flattering.’
‘She doesn’t think much of men.’
‘And she’s a Mrs?’
‘All the more reason.’
‘What’s her husband like?’
‘He isn’t like anything - he’s dead.’ She raised
the champagne bottle out of the bucket and found it empty. ‘Tell
them to send in another as you go out, will you, my dear?’ she
said. She was tired of him.
This time, when he got home to bed he stayed there.
A pleasant languor had overcome him in the cab. He took one of Dr
Bernat’s powders and crawled between the sheets and fell off the
edge of the world.
The Society for the Improvement of Wayward Women
had an address in Aldersgate. The street was commercial but not
prepossessing; the building was grim but not impressive; the office
was as squalid as a land company in the Dakotas in mud season.
Generations of heads had left hair oil in a smear above the chair
rail; thousands of hands had left dirt on the doorjambs; God knows
what had chipped the grey-green paint that covered the walls. It
was not a setting where he expected to find women, but everybody
there was female - a rather sullen, plain woman who guarded the
outer office; a younger, morose woman behind a typing machine
inside; and, in the far corner between two windows, Janet
Striker.
Her look of weariness reminded him of Mrs Castle’s,
although it had been earned in another school, he thought. She had
a face that had once been unmarked perhaps, was now frankly
guarded, any stock of pity or sentimentality expended. Her hair,
very dark, was pulled tight back over the top of her head and wound
in flat circles that hid her ears like some peculiar helmet. She
wore greys and browns, both dark, not so much nun-like, however, as
business-like, the dress years out of fashion and mended down near
the hem. If a man, she’d have been a manufacturer, he thought, of
something entirely practical, shovels or water closets. Or perhaps
a policeman; there was, in her steady, appraising look, something
of Guillam.
She had his card between her fingers. Denton was
watching her eyes but taking in the fact that she had a telephone
on the wall, wondering whatever for and then thinking it might be
for calling the police. He didn’t know why he thought that -
something fortress-like about the office, he thought. Warrior
women.
‘What is it you want, Mr Denton?’ Her voice was
soft, surprisingly low, genteel.
He was still standing. There was no offer of a
chair. There were no chairs, in fact, except in the outer room,
where they were lined up around the walls like those in a clinic
for the poor. He said, ‘I’m hoping you could help me.’
‘We’re not here to help men, I’m afraid.’ She put
his card down towards him as if giving it back.
‘It’s about your, uh, particular area.’
‘This is an office that tries to help women find
their way out of prostitution. As men are the reason they get into
it, I doubt I can help you.’
‘I’d have said women get into prostitution for the
money.’
‘Yes - and men have the money. When you’re
starving, you sell what you can.’
It wasn’t an argument he wanted to get into. The
view that marriage itself was a kind of prostitution had once
shocked him, now seemed fairly sensible - dramatized by Shaw but
hardly original. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not here to argue.’
‘We’re busy here, Mr - Denton; please don’t take up
our time.’
He felt himself flush. ‘It’s about a girl who was
murdered, ’ he said too quickly.
‘That’s a police matter. Are you with the
police?’
‘I—’ He fought his irritation. ‘May I sit down and
explain this to you?’
‘Do you mean will somebody fetch you a chair? No.
There’s nobody to do that here. We don’t have time,
sir.’
So, standing like a schoolboy at the teacher’s
desk, he ran through the high points of the story of Mulcahy and
Stella Minter. He wasn’t going to go into the attack in his house
because she didn’t need to know that to understand, but she said,
pointing at his sling with a pencil, ‘What happened to your
arm?’
He sighed. ‘Somebody attacked me in my house. The
man who killed her, I think.’
‘What’s this to do with us?’
‘I was told you might be able to put me into
contact with some of the girls who knew Stella Minter. The other
young ones on the street. Somebody must know her
story.’
‘Surely that’s a police matter.’
‘The police are slow.’
‘You’re very foolish to take matters into your own
hands. Is this some male idea of revenge for the arm? You’d do
better to go to bed.’ She started to look at something on her desk
and then looked up again. ‘Who told you I might be able to put you
into contact with street girls?’
‘Do you know Mrs Castle?’
It was the first time she had smiled. ‘Mrs Castle
of Westerley Street? Of course, you must be one of her clients,
then. How I do loathe your sort.’ She said it quite casually.
‘Stella Minter was murdered in a horrible,
ugly—’
‘I know how she was murdered.’
‘Aren’t your - clients - frightened?’
‘Of course they are.’
‘Then why don’t you want to help get her murderer
off the street?’
‘The morning newspapers say that the police have
her murderer and he’s confessed.’
‘Do you know how easy it is to get a confession
from somebody who’s alone and terrified and probably brutalized,
Mrs Striker?’
She raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, not
looking at him, and he had the sense of her looking inward, for the
first time affected by something he’d said. He leaned a few inches
towards her over the desk. ‘The police don’t believe me about
Mulcahy. The City Police aren’t exactly bowled over by Stella
Minter’s death. It isn’t that they don’t care; they’ve got other
fish to fry. I’m willing to take the time to pursue it. I’m paying
a number of women to look for Mulcahy in the directories. I’d like
to look for Stella Minter, too - who she was, why her killer chose
her. I’m not trying to pick up young prostitutes, if that’s what
you think, Mrs Striker!’
She toyed with the pencil, then looked up at him.
‘What is it you want from us?’
‘Ask the - your clients - if they knew Stella
Minter. If they did, ask if they’ll meet with me - and you or
somebody else or a policeman, if you like - and tell me what they
remember about her. That’s all. I swear, that’s all.’
She retrieved his card, looked at it, and put it
down in front of him with the pencil. ‘Put her name and the other
man’s name on it. You’ll hear from me if I learn anything.’
That was that. When he was done writing, he found
himself looking at the straight parting in her dark hair, her
attention entirely on something she was reading. There were no
goodbyes.
He visited Atkins in the hospital on his way to
the Paris boat train. The sergeant’s head was wrapped in cotton,
most of it on the top and back but one wrap coming around the
forehead as if to hold things together. His face looked small,
rat-like, rather old.
‘Still, you’re alive,’ Denton said.
‘Take more than that to kill me.’ The voice was
small. He had had concussion and his eyes looked strange. ‘Bastard
hit me from behind.’
‘Dr Bernat says you’re on the mend.’
‘Old biddy wants to keep me in here a week.’
‘It’s necessary, Atkins. You’ve been
wounded.’
‘Most soldiers die in hospital, not the battlefield
- ever hear that?’
‘This isn’t a soldier’s hospital. It’s where you
need to be.’
‘Feels like a soldier’s hospital to me.’ It was a
ward, with a long range of beds down both sides and an aisle up the
middle. Coughs, sighs, the sounds of other visitors swept up and
down the big room.
‘The soldier’s hospitals I saw,’ Denton said, ‘they
laid them on the ground. In the rain.’
‘Yes, well, that was a war.’ Atkins sighed. The
short visit was tiring him out. ‘And he almost killed you. What a
bastard.’
‘I’d better go.’
‘Paris, eh?’ Denton had already told him about
Wilde’s funeral. ‘Funny how things turn out. Five years ago he was
king of the hill; now he’s got you going to his funeral.’
‘That’s a come-down, I admit.’ Denton was smiling.
‘Do what the doctor tells you.’
‘Yes, yes - ’course—’ Atkins was drifting into
sleep. Denton asked a nurse if that was a sign of anything, and she
said it was a sign he’d stayed too long.
Paris at the beginning of that December was wet
with a cold downpour. During the night, a wind had come up, and
Denton’s ship had rolled and tossed, and between the rolling and
his arm he got little sleep. He went to the Hôtel des Anglais,
where he had stayed before with Emma Gosden; it was her hotel when
she was in Paris. Had he chosen it because of her, or had it been
simple laziness? Or had he really come to Paris hoping to see her?
To make it up? He had a delicious, partly sexual moment of dreaming
of meeting her, finding her glad to see him, and their going off
somewhere together - the south, maybe Italy, and the hell with
Mulcahy and Stella Minter and—
He slept for an hour and then had the French idea
of a breakfast and read a London newspaper and looked at the rain.
The funeral was across Paris, the interment miles out in the
suburbs somewhere; he would have to make an early start. Still
there were hours to fill. He was not one for museums or shops. He
wondered what he was one for. Work, probably. Except his work had
come to a halt, something deeply wrong with the book he was writing
- the woman, he had to admit it was the woman; she was all wrong.
He was all wrong, that meant.
He sat in an armchair with the newspaper over his
lap and watched the Parisian rain and thought off and on about Emma
Gosden. Hell of a day for a funeral. His mind kept swinging back to
Mulcahy and Stella Minter. He was sure that the man who had
attacked him and the man who had killed Stella Minter were the
same; why wouldn’t the police see it, too? Guillam did see it, he
thought, but wouldn’t admit it out of orneriness - no, out of
pragmatism, a black sailor on remand being better than an unknown
on the loose. Anyway, Guillam wasn’t really part of the Minter
investigation.
He thought about Emma Gosden and getting together -
would she do that—?
He’d have to see Sergeant Willey when he got back,
try to make the City Police get going on finding Mulcahy or
Mulcahy’s corpse. He’d have to—
He’d have to start minding his own business, he
thought. Drop it. Rewrite your novel and make some money. He’d have
Bernat’s bill to pay now, Atkins’s hospital bill, plus the
household bills he hadn’t yet paid—
He went up to dress and found that Maude hadn’t
packed black gloves, and the hat was the wrong one but would do.
The concierge supplied gloves, although they were too small, but
there was no time to buy others because with one thing and another,
Denton was late by then and had to hurry out and ask for a cab. To
his surprise, the rain had stopped. The streets were still wet and
shining, very noisy, nervous. Out on the boulevard, the number of
motor cars astonished him; he had never seen so many, never a third
so many, in London. When the boy came back with a horse-drawn cab
for him, he was sorry he hadn’t told him to get a motorized one; it
would have been a spot of interest in a gloomy day.
He had paid the boy and was standing there,
reaching up with his good hand to grasp the rail beside the cab
door, when another drew up behind his and a female foot appeared,
then the edge of a skirt, then an elegant woman in, he thought, the
latest Parisian fashion. It was only when she was on the pavement
that he realized she was Emma Gosden.
His hand froze on the handrail. It was the
unexpectedness of it, of actually seeing her in Paris, the fantasy
of a few hours before made flesh. She looked wonderful, probably in
a new gown, something of the real - that is, the expensive - Paris,
where funerals and knife wounds didn’t enter. It was he who didn’t
belong, not she; she was of the place. As he looked at her, his
heart announcing itself with great thumps, she turned her head and
saw him. Her entire body gave something like a quiver, a start; he
thought she might have been ready to take a step away from him or
even a step towards him. Her right hand, her free hand, the hand
not holding her purse, moved upwards; if it had continued, the
gesture would have been a greeting.
Even a welcome.
Then the hand stopped, then dropped the few inches
to where it had been. Inches. But the gesture told him everything:
more than anything she had said that last evening, more than her
anger or his, more than the return of his hat and coat, more than
her silence since, the few inches of movement told him that it was
definitively over. Like something written by that silly old
woman Henry James - so much subtlety you think you’ve
died. The end of a love affair in a motion.
Then a man came out of the hotel and she turned to
him with a smile. They walked away, she on the man’s arm. Denton
thought he might be younger than she, impressively good-looking.
I’ve found somebody else. Be a man.
The church service for Wilde was grotesque. Denton
counted fourteen people, including himself. He wouldn’t have
recognized Wilde’s old lover, Alfred Douglas, except that he was
apparently the head mourner and so greeted the others, who slipped
into St-Germain-des-Prés like fugitives. The fourteen, all men,
seemed to Denton to be a collection of odds and ends from anywhere,
dressed for a funeral but gathered there apparently by coincidence.
Nothing connected them to the Wilde of legend - no green
carnations, no hint of aestheticism, no witty remarks. The church
itself was cold and damp, puddles collecting on the floor from
their coats and umbrellas; in another chapel, a better-attended
funeral mass was punctuated by tears and a female voice that moaned
like a hurt dog. The sounds of their grief threw the silence of
Wilde’s mass into relief, only the voice of the young Irish priest
audible. Denton, depressed by what he was taking part in, tried to
think about Emma Gosden and found only a sense of emptiness.
The flowers he had ordered through the Hôtel des
Anglais looked showy and vulgar, and the card, which should have
said they were from the Café Royal writers and artists, said, ‘Form
the writters and artistes du Café Royale.’
After the service, the others got into four
carriages that were nominally the official vehicles and followed
the hearse; Denton, wanting to be by himself, came after in a cab,
clopping miles into the wet suburbs. If the mass had been
grotesque, the graveside service was ludicrous: the rain pelted
down, its noise blurring the spoken words; umbrellas hid every
face; the priest’s hands shook from the cold. Finally, it was over;
what was left of a great and sometimes awful man went into the
ground, Denton thinking at the last, as he dropped wet clods on the
coffin, that Wilde had been the emblematic man of the century’s
last years - brilliant, duplicitous, too arrogant to survive.
He would say later that, although it had had a
month to run, the nineteenth century had ended on the day of
Wilde’s funeral. Privately, he would think that it had ended for
him with Emma Gosden’s gesture.