The Frightened Man (17 page)

‘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.

Chapter Ten

Back in London, he climbed his stairs like an old man. The funeral had been hellish. It had all been a kind of comedy, but he found it sordid and humiliating for the dead man.
We all end up in a box, but it doesn’t have to be a Jack-in-the-box.

At the top of his stairs, he opened the door to his sitting room. He had expected nobody - Maude hadn’t come to the door, so Denton figured he’d decamped - but at the far end of the long room, just in front of the window through which his attacker had vanished three nights before, a mysterious figure could be made out, crouched, indecipherable, as if caught in some dubious act. The hair on the back of Denton’s head prickled, and he reached for his pistol, slow as he was to recognize the figure’s necromantic gown as Atkins’s tattered Indian robe, then to recognize Atkins’s face above the collar, and finally to understand that the seemingly disembodied helmet above the face was a black bowler resting on a swathing of bandage.

‘You gave me a start,’ Denton said.

‘Nothing to what you gave me, Colonel. I might of shot you.’ Atkins was coming forward, now holding up a hand with the derringer in it. ‘Copper brought this by.’

‘You’re supposed to be in hospital.’

‘Couldn’t lump it another day.’ Atkins took off the hat, revealed a kind of turban. ‘Shaved my head. I look like a bleeding fakir. So I had to wrap it in something, didn’t I? Old scarf of yours, hope you don’t mind.’ He put the hat on again. It sat about two inches above his forehead. ‘Reckon if I’d been wearing this hat when the bastard hit me, I’d never have had to go to the hospital in the first place.’

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, Atkins.’ Denton found himself smiling. He touched Atkins’s shoulder. ‘Glad you’re back. Where’s the boy servant - what’s his name? - Maude?’

‘Sent him packing. Wet behind the ears. Did you know the only experience he’d had was as a footman in some jumped-up manufacturer’s manse? Family hopped off to the Continent for a year, gave him his marching orders. Too young to be out alone. All right if I sit?’

‘Well, of course—’

‘Bit wobbly still.’ Atkins fell into the armchair and put the derringer on the table, which still showed the damage from the bullet Denton had fired, the flash mark a burn like a black teardrop. ‘I’ll stagger back downstairs presently.’

‘Like hell. You’ll take it easy until you’re fit. In the meantime—’ Denton, still standing, reacted away from more movement down the room. Atkins’s door had swung open and an indeterminate shape had appeared. Denton snatched at the Colt pistol. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Oh—’ Atkins turned, looked down the room. ‘I was getting to that.’

Denton stared into the gloom. Something that might have been a recently sheared sheep seemed to be standing there. ‘What the hell?’ he said.

‘Yes, well - he’s a comfort to me. Frankly, General, I’m jumpy. No point in denying it. Old soldiers know better than to fake the courageous. I still jump at shadows. Can’t stand for anybody to be behind me; I think that chap’s going to brain me again with the doorstop. So, see, I was glad to have Rupert’s company.’

‘Rupert.’

‘Prince Rupert. Loan of a friend who’s in the dog trade. Racing, and so on.’

Rupert didn’t look as if he did much racing. He was in fact, one of the fattest dogs Denton had ever seen. He was also big, ugly and enthusiastic. He had almost no tail, but the rump around the stump vibrated with what might have been joy. He was mostly black but with a white face, and mostly rounded, except for a head and muzzle that were oddly angular. His eyes were more like those of a pig than a dog, slightly slanted, rather smaller than you’d want if you were designing a dog, and pale blue. He went straight to Atkins and tried to hoist his bulk into Atkins’s lap. Atkins managed to push him down; he sat, staring at Atkins, his stump whisking the carpet. ‘Bull terrier in that head,’ Atkins said. ‘Intelligent breed.’

‘I see some Rottweiler in the rear end, myself. The middle looks like whale. But, if he’s a comfort—’ Atkins’s confession of fear had reminded him of his own nerves when alone in the house, the loading of the revolver. He shoved the revolver back into the overcoat pocket.

‘Pardon me saying it, Colonel, but it looks like you’re carrying an anvil in that overcoat.’

‘My revolver.’

‘So I saw. Your tailor would have a fit.’

‘It isn’t really a pocket pistol. But I’d as soon not get stabbed again.’

‘Hand over that coat and I’ll do something to fix it. Open the bottom of the pocket, is my notion - run the barrel down there, maybe sew something like a holster into the pocket to hold it upright. You’ll look like you’re carrying the blacksmith’s hammer instead of his anvil.’

‘The real way to carry it is on its own belt around your waist.’

‘Yes, well, that ain’t the fashion in London these days. Take what you can get, I say - hand over that coat.’

Denton, grateful, put the overcoat in Atkins’s lap and said, wanting to make some gesture, ‘You’d like the dog to keep you company for a while?’

‘Well - to stand watch, as it were, Colonel. Only until—’ He pointed at the layers above his scalp.

‘Dogs have to be fed, watered, walked, cleaned up after—’

‘I’ve done latrine duty before, General. He eases my mind, if you know what I mean.’

‘I think I’ll have the Infant Phenomenon back until you’re well. No, no - I’m not going to have you busting a seam somewhere by going back to work too early - no—’

Atkins made pro forma objections - no recent footman going to mess in his household, couldn’t cook, left a shocking amount of litter, no taste - but gave in easily enough. The man was exhausted, aching and nervous; even a boy on his first job would be a help.

‘But the dog,’ Atkins said with spirit, ‘
I
feed the dog! Because dogs cleave to them that feeds them.’

‘Well, don’t let him cleave too closely. He’s a loan, correct? Temporary? Until—?’ He, too, pointed at Atkins’s turban and hat.

Rupert grinned from one to the other and, with a satisfied sigh, collapsed at Atkins’s feet.