The Bohemian Girl Part 25

To their left, farm buildings - a stone house, stables and two stone barns - enclosed a courtyard, its harsh urine-and-manure smell meeting them before they reached it. The farmer, if there was one, was away; the woman who came to the house door was heavy, suspicious. She wore the wide white collar and lace cap, and Denton thought she looked about as quaint as a London cab driver. Heseltine yammered at her - le meelor key pent came into it a lot - and she stayed back in the shadow of her doorway as if she were trying to hide. She had a habit of looking away out of the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was set, unhappy. He supposed her favourite word was non non.

'She says that there was a milord who painted near here, but I'm having the devil's own time getting details out of her.'

'Ask her if there were two men.'

More gabbling, then, 'She wants to know who we are.'

'Tell her we're both meelors and we're looking for our pal the meelor key pent.'

More talk, and Heseltine said, 'I told her the young one is your son.'

'Oh, good grief.'

'I had to tell her something. She thinks we're from the customs. There's a lot of smuggling here.'

Denton looked around at the drab landscape. 'Tell her my son has run away from home and I'm trying to find him because his mother's heartbroken.'

Heseltine spoke in French; the woman answered. He said in English, 'This is not a sentimental woman.'

'She doesn't care about the grieving mother?'

'She's worried about her cows.'

'Give her some money.'

They had been standing there for several minutes. Denton s.h.i.+vered despite his ulster. The wind had risen, bringing an edge to the cold. The wrangle went on and on until a big, red-faced man drove a herd of milk cows past them and through a gate into the farmyard. Denton got a glimpse of hoof-pounded mire; he had a memory of the Chicago stockyards. When the man came back, he pushed the woman into the house and pulled the door closed and said something in French so aggressively that Denton knew he had asked what they wanted.

Suddenly, both the questions and the answers became short. Le meelor key pent had been there, not here - a big arm, with a hand like a slab of beef, gestured behind them at the distant house and barn. Yes, with another man. Yes, yes, they were gone. What was it worth to them to see where they had lived? It was clear even without translation that he didn't care who they were so long as they paid.

'Tell him yes, we'll pay to see where they stayed. Tell him we'll pay for a place to stay tonight, too - clean, no bugs.'

Something in that caused an explosion of red-faced resentment. Heseltine said, 'It was suggesting they aren't clean. He says they're as clean as the angels.'

'Tell him about last night.'

Heseltine spoke, then pulled up a sleeve and showed his bites. The farmer was thrown into loud laughter, displaying dreadful teeth, and was suddenly as good-natured as he had been surly. He clapped Heseltine on the shoulder. It was so comical to him that he had to go inside and tell his wife.

'He says he'll put the horse in the barn and do something or other with the buggy; I couldn't follow it. He wants a hideous amount for us to spend the night - I could stay at Brown's in London for what he wants to charge us, but-' He looked around at the dour scene, now falling into darkness.

'Beggars can't be choosers.'

'We're hardly beggars.'

But they were each given a room with a tiled floor and a bed piled high with feather-filled quilts. Overhead were hand-adzed oak beams. A water pitcher, a basin, a chamber pot, a candle. A painted armoire that could have been one year or five hundred years old and held somebody else's clothes, both male and female - had he taken away some couple's bed? No other light, no heat.

And then the food.

The ill-tempered housewife was apparently used to feeding a dozen ravenous people; two more made no difference. They sat down at a huge table with the red-faced farmer at one end and an empty chair at the other - the woman never sat until they were almost done - and three younger men and two women between them on benches on each side. Heseltine sat at the end of one bench, Denton opposite him. Three younger women, really girls, helped the unhappy wife serve a meal that, if not quaint, was authentic and enormous and superb: a dish made with freshly killed chickens and beans and pork; another of what he took to be wild rabbit in a dark gravy; part of a pike that must have weighed a dozen pounds when it was caught; home-made sweet b.u.t.ter, home-made pot cheese; a dark, pudding-like thing he decided was made from congealed blood; haricots and endive and potatoes the size of cricket b.a.l.l.s; three rough breads that had been baked that afternoon and, an oddly Germanic touch, a sweetened bread with gooseberry jam. They began with a soup that might have made a meal in itself, thick with dried peas, rich with carrots and onions and flavoured with rosemary. After the soup, the other dishes began to appear, Denton thinking each one would be the last. Gla.s.ses of both beer and wine were put in front of him.

At one point, Heseltine met his eyes and widened his own, smiling, shaking his head. Heseltine was keeping up what seemed to be a pretty good flow of conversation in French. A couple of the younger women looked rather flushed when they talked to him; so did he.

The women, Denton thought, were daughters or daughters-in-law; the men were sons, or husbands of the women. They were not a cheerful lot, certainly not talkative: farm work was hard, they seemed to say, and food was fuel. But what fuel! They stoked it in and reached for more; the women, although diffident, ate their share.

Why, he thought, did Himple and Crum ever leave? did Himple and Crum ever leave?

After the older woman had sat and eaten quickly, when the men were done and were leaning back, when desultory talk had started, the women cleared off the dishes and the meats and brought a bowl of apples and a kind of cake made of apple slices and tasting of yeast, then three kinds of cheese. Denton had loosened his waistcoat; now he made a face at Heseltine. A bottle appeared. Heseltine said it was apple brandy, the local speciality.

The sons and the women drifted away. The farmer sat on, insisting that they sit with him. His face got redder. So did Heseltine's. So did Denton's, he supposed. Denton found himself talking about farming, the talk curving down the table to pa.s.s through Heseltine, then back, but Denton and the farmer looked at each other and it was as if they were speaking the same language. Then they were drinking the apple brandy, and the farmer, standing now, flaming-faced, shouted, 'Ah-ee spik anglais.h.!.+ Sheet! G.o.d-dam! Ha-ha-ha! Sheet! G.o.d-dam you! Ha-ha-ha!'

And then Denton was in the big bed, under the warm feathered quilts, the rough sheets cold, then warming to his cold skin, the wind outside rattling the gla.s.s in the windows but unable to touch the comfort within.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

He had no hangover next morning. It was remarkable. He was no stranger to hangovers and he was sure he deserved one, but when he had splashed icy water on his face and swabbed out his crotch and his armpits, then pulled on his wool all-in-ones, he stood by the window and realized that he felt wonderful. The day was going to be dark, he could see; it would rain. Still, he felt content - at peace, even. A knock at his door produced one of the youngest girls with a pitcher of hot water. He shaved, washed himself again, dressed and went down to the central room where they had eaten. The farmer was there already. He got up from the table and came to Denton, muttered a question, then peered closely into an eye, clapped Denton on the shoulder and laughed. Later, Heseltine explained that the man believed that apple brandy never left a hangover; he would have been disappointed if Denton had had one.

People came and went. Children's voices sounded somewhere, the kitchen or some room beyond it. There was no repeat of last night's feast; rather, men took bread, one a piece of cheese as well, and went out. Heseltine explained that they would come back to eat when the milking and the morning ch.o.r.es were done. Denton understood that routine.

He was given hot milk and a small cup of coffee. The bread was pushed towards him, a hand waved at a bowl of eggs in the sh.e.l.l, presumably boiled, the platter of cheeses. He thought, I could live here. I could live here. He thought, He thought, This is the way we should live This is the way we should live, and then was ashamed of himself, remembering the brutal labour of farming and the price you paid for such plenty. And you didn't earn it alone: you needed those sons and daughters.

They walked out into a bl.u.s.tery morning with flecks of moisture flying in the air to strike their faces like sea spray. Frost glittered on the stones. The farmer insisted on showing them his castle: the house, huge, one end of it unused and derelict; the yard, ankle deep in dung and the mud made by cow urine. Chickens strode across the mire, several climbing the head-high dungheap in one corner. Along each side of the house's back door, heavy boots were ranged under the eave, the same foul mud caked on them. The wife didn't allow anybody to track dirt inside: the men and women, Denton remembered, had worn home-made, heavy slippers in the house. The women wore pattens outdoors but left them inside the door.

On the left side of the yard stood stone stables with five huge Percherons in them, a warm place that smelled like brewer's mash and urine; along the entire back ran the barn, Norman (or so Heseltine said), slashes like arrow slits high in its stone walls, raftering like a church. The farmer smiled at it all, smug with the pride of possession.

They walked up a cow track to the house where Himple and Crum had stayed. It was a quarter of a mile off, no road to it; on their right, a field of beets lay grey-green, the topmost leaves glinting with frost, the wind gusting through them and changing the colours like water. As they walked, Denton asked questions and Heseltine translated the answers that came back: the milord and the servant came here in the summer; the oak leaves were big; we were cutting hay the second time. They took the house for the summer but they didn't stay, they were city folk. The milord painted pictures; we'd see him and his easel up here on the horizon. You can see the coast from up there. We supplied them with milk - one of my daughters carried a pail up every morning - and cheese and gammon and vegetables. Sometimes one of my daughters would cook, not always; they asked each time. I made sure they paid her well.

In the beginning, the servant went into Caen and came back with a buggy-load of artificial food. (Denton took this to mean canned goods.) They left some behind; we had to use a chisel to open them; it wasn't worth it; we sold them back to somebody in Caen.

They kept to themselves. The servant spoke good French, better French than I do, but he didn't have much to say. The milord smiled when he saw us. He knew a few words. We weren't their kind of people. Sometimes we didn't see them for days.

When they left, they gave me five days' notice. I made them pay another month, because of my losses. They left early one morning in a buggy. Both of them? Both of them? You think one of them stayed to help on the farm? You think one of them stayed to help on the farm?

Denton was thinking of Mary Thomason. 'Ask him if there was ever a young woman with them.' He got his answer without translation: the farmer laughed the haw-haw roar of double entendre double entendre, meaning, Denton guessed, that they weren't that sort of men.

Denton had given Heseltine one of the photographic copies of the drawings that Augustus John had done. Yes, that was the servant, only he had no beard when he got here. He grew it while he was here. Not much of a beard. He wasn't much of a man, really. A day on the farm would have killed him.

I don't know what they did except paint pictures. I know when I'm not wanted. They stayed to themselves. They paid their money; that was what mattered to me.

The three of them reached the house, and Denton stopped asking questions.

The house was stone, certainly old, much smaller than the farmer's. One chimney had fallen in. It had a stone privy and a lower stone building, perhaps a smokehouse, whose roof had collapsed. Inside, it was dead and cold. If Himple and Crum had left any traces, the farm women had erased them: there were signs of vigorous cleaning in the sparkling windows, the swept hearth. The kitchen had no sort of modern stove, but a series of shelves, almost terraces, took up much of a vast fireplace, with places to shovel in coals and cook over them on iron plates. It would have been a brutal place for one person to have to cook, he thought - perhaps a factor in their leaving.

Behind the house, a low hill sloped up to the clean horizon, the oak copse off to its right. At the top of the slope was a building that looked like a cathedral without a steeple - the stone barn. The farmer pointed at it. 'When it rained, the milord painted up there.'

Denton insisted on seeing it. They trudged up the slope into the wind. The thin spray was threatening to turn to snow. The barn loomed over them until, when they were right under its walls, it wrapped them in its shadow and seemed to freeze them. Doorless, it had an earth ramp up to the opening for wagons.

The inside was vast. Pigeons flew in the rafters, the sound restless and irritating. Smaller birds, swallows and sparrows, flew in and out of the vertical slits that were meant to aerate the hay the barn had once held. It must have been, Denton thought, a horrible place to paint in, maybe another reason they had left. The light was bad except near the door; it was cold; the pounded dirt floor made the place smell like a grave.

Denton walked around the inside, taking stock of the farming implements left there to decay, most of them broken, antiquated, speaking of some misplaced sense of thrift - a culture where nothing was ever thrown away. One corner of the building was taken up by four horse stalls whose plank floors had fallen in, the oak boards now porous and spongy, although once they had held the weight of animals as huge as those down at the farm. He walked along the edges of the stalls, bending to look under the boards where he could, seeing nothing. Along the outside of the stalls, ancient straw still lay in a damp pile, the fibres broken short, the pale amber long since turned to brown and black as it had moulded and declined towards earth. Partway along, where the pile ended and the dirt floor began, he sc.r.a.ped his toe over the earth, pushed some of the straw back. It was compacted into clumps almost like horse dung. He moved more of it with his foot and exposed uneven earth.

'Take him outside and keep him busy for a bit, could you?' he said to Heseltine.

Heseltine looked uneasy. He didn't like to lie and didn't invent very well. After several seconds, he said, 'I'll ask him to point out what things the milord painted.'

Alone, Denton went back to the decayed hay. He moved more of it with the side of his boot and then went to an untidy heap of broken tools and rattled around in it until he found a wooden hay fork with one broken tine. He began to move the hay with it; the easy swaying motion coming back to him as he moved along, pitching it deeper up the pile. When he was done, he had cleared an area about ten feet by six. He got down on his hands and brushed wisps of hay out of his way, studying the dirt and even, close to the wooden wall of the old stalls, bending close to sniff it. Satisfied, he took the fork and pitched the hay down again until it lay as it had before.

They walked back down to the farm compound and shook the farmer's hand and paid him. He gave them the sly grin that meant he thought they were idiots, city pigeons ripe for the plucking. When they came down from their rooms, nonetheless, their buggy was outside, the horse in the shafts, its coat brushed and sleek. One of the younger women gave them a sack, rather heavy. Heseltine peeped in, said it was bread and cheese and apples and a bottle of wine. 'It's like the hotelier who gives one a free drink when one's paid several pounds too much.'

'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.'

When they were rocking up the road behind the horse's trot, true snow blowing in from Denton's side, Heseltine said, 'What did you find in that barn?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Are we pus.h.i.+ng on to Paris?'

Denton was driving, enjoying the feel of the reins between his fingers, the almost electric connection with the horse. 'Not this trip, I think.'

'Then you did find something in the barn.'

'I'm not sure.'

The truth of it was, he wanted to think. He was sure the earth had been disturbed along the stable wall where the hay had lain. If it had been, if it wasn't simply some effect of the hay's lying on it, was it something the farmer had done? Or something the two visitors had done? He couldn't imagine what, except the obvious. Bending over the apparently loose dirt, smelling its mouldy odour, he had had a sudden sense of disorientation; some of it was the evening spent with people whose language he didn't know, a severe reminder of his foreignness. He had told Janet Striker he was an outsider, but he had not meant that he was an alien being; there, bending over small clods of dirt, he had quite simply thought he was meddling in a different world.

At any rate, to dig there himself was impossible. The English police couldn't do it, either, he thought; they were as foreign as he, would be even more precise about not stepping on somebody else's toes. It would be a job for the French themselves, but to bring them to it would be an extraordinary task.

Not enough evidence. There had never been enough evidence.

He was having the rare experience of believing that he might best let sleeping dogs lie. And he wanted to go home, to be an outsider in a place he understood. And to see Janet Striker, who might have ended her absence already.

The next morning at Waterloo, they made their way through the station and hesitated outside by the cab rank. It was a small awkwardness: two men who didn't know each other very well yet had shared several days together, neither easy with any show of sentiment.

'I can drop you,' Denton said.

'Oh - no, thanks. I'd rather - I have an errand or two to run.'

'Well, then.' Denton held out his hand. 'Thanks for helping me out.'

'Oh, not at all. It's I who should-I feel so much better. I mean to say, getting away rather clarified things.'

'Good.'

'I truly enjoyed it.'

'Some memorable food, anyway.'

'No, no, all of it - the sense that-Life goes on. There are other lives, very different lives to mine, and they're utterly indifferent to me and my - history. I'm truly grateful.'

Heseltine shook his hand again. Denton motioned for a cab and the front one in the rank trotted forward the few steps to him.

Heseltine said, 'A friend, an acquaintance really, said he thought I could find something managing a plantation in Jamaica. He has relatives there. I value your opinion - what d'you think?'

Denton's flash of thought told him that 'managing a plantation' in Jamaica was probably as much like being the overseer of the slaves in the old American South as you could hope to find, but he knew he shouldn't say that, and he muttered something about the climate.

'Yes, well, it's hot.'

American slaves had once been threatened with being 'sold to the Indies'. It had been meant as a death threat, not from heat but from disease. He said, 'I think you can do better.'

Heseltine blushed and shook his head. Denton got into his cab and waved as it clip-clopped away.

The snow that had been falling on Normandy had already disappeared from London; new weather had blown in from the west while he had slept on the overnight Channel steamer. The sky was bright blue, splotched with white clouds that looked like some sort of meringue that had been twisted into rounds and curls; when they pa.s.sed across the sun, the streets were suddenly bereft, almost grim, but in the returning sunlight colour shone and he felt cheered. When they got to Russell Square, he felt his tension rising and knew it was worry about her her: would she be back? Or would there be some final letter from her, I have decided to move away I have decided to move away? When they turned into Guilford Street, he was angry that she could have this effect on him; when they turned into Lamb's Conduit Street, he had thrown himself back and was rubbing his lips with a hand, hopeful, anxious, eager to forgive. But forgive what?

'You look a sight,' Atkins said when he opened the door. 'Been sleeping in that suit, have you?'

'I'm not in the mood.'

'No offence intended, General, only trying to lighten the prodigal's return. Sincere apologies, truly-'

They were going up the stairs, Denton's Gladstone bag b.u.mping against Atkins's calves and then the treads with the sound of a small boat b.u.mping a dock. At the top, Denton ripped off his hat and overcoat and went straight to the table where the mail lay. He went through it quickly, waiting for Atkins to say something like Nothing from her, don't get your hopes up Nothing from her, don't get your hopes up, but Atkins, once cautioned, was wise. He simply gathered up the coat and hat and the valise and carried them up the stairs.

There were bills, there were notices, there were invitations, but there was nothing from Janet Striker.

d.a.m.n her.

He took a much-needed bath and announced that he was going to New Scotland Yard.

Atkins looked innocent but said, 'Something you found in France?'

'I don't know. That's why I want to talk to Munro.' He knew that Atkins wanted to be told about it, but this morning, for once, he didn't want to talk to Atkins. He was hurt; he was angry; he wanted more action. He thought, I should have dug up the d.a.m.ned barn while I had the chance. I should have dug up the d.a.m.ned barn while I had the chance. Of course, he hadn't had the chance - the farmer, cautious and fearful of novelty, would have stopped him - but he didn't admit that to himself. Of course, he hadn't had the chance - the farmer, cautious and fearful of novelty, would have stopped him - but he didn't admit that to himself.

'Get you a cab, then?' Atkins said.

'I'll walk.'

'Going to rain this p.m.'

Atkins provided an umbrella, and Denton, looking entirely proper in an old but beautifully cut frock coat, one of the hated high collars and a necktie the colour of strong Burgundy, took it without a word. He even wore a mostly waterproof bowler.

The sense of being imposed on, of being ill treated, stayed with him. She should have written. She should at least have done that much. She was playing some game. He turned right at the end of Lamb's Conduit Street and, instead of heading for New Scotland Yard as he'd said, walked straight on towards Westerley Street and Mrs Castle's. He cursed his own inconstancy.

He turned back twice, once lingered by a shop window, feeling irrationally that he was being followed, but there was n.o.body. What was the matter with him? It was the sense of ill-treatment, he thought.

Fred Oldaston was not on the door at Westerley Street. It was not yet noon; the door was opened by a middle-aged maid in a perfectly proper black dress and white ap.r.o.n. 'I'm so sorry, sir, we're not receiving,' she said.