Part 10 (2/2)

'Oh, shut up.'

He woke during the night feeling at first feverish and heavy, then anxious. The bedcovers were like lead, and he pushed them back, then used his drawn-up legs to shoot them to the foot. It had got warm. He pulled off his nights.h.i.+rt and lay there naked, feeling the air on his hot skin.

A dream had made him anxious. Worse than anxious - near panic. He knew the dream. Back in the house he'd built in Iowa. Seeing his wife through the window, walking towards the pasture. The horrifying sense of the inevitable, the terrible. But the dream hadn't gone on to his finding her body as it usually did, the lye jug beside her. That was the way it always ended, but not tonight. Tonight's had ended with seeing her through the window, as if seeing her that way was seeing it all, suffering it all, leaving him to wake with the anxiety of knowing what was to come and not being able to stop it.

He got up and walked to the window. The dream wasn't all of it. It was also that d.a.m.ned man, whoever he was, Albert Cosgrove, who had written him the letters, broken into the house behind, broken into even his own house.

With more coming - that was the sense of the dream: There's more to come. There's more to come.

He saw his own reflection in the gla.s.s, a double laid over the dim bulk of the house behind. There was a man out there who wanted to be his double - to be be him. That was it. Circling, watching, stealing bits of him, trying to become him. him. That was it. Circling, watching, stealing bits of him, trying to become him.

Denton shuddered.

He knew what it was to concentrate on someone else so fiercely that the mind seemed to detach itself and fix. But his 'someone elses' were inventions - the characters in the unfinished novel. He knew that he partly lived in it. He carried on conversations in his head, saw faces, rooms, vistas. But he knew that that world was not real. And this novel was about his own marriage, his dead wife, their harrowing of each other, so it was that much more like inhabiting a second self. But he was - he smiled in the darkness - sane. sane. The man who wanted to be him, he was sure now, was not. Denton himself was Albert Cosgrove's novel, or at least the central character in the novel Cosgrove apparently couldn't write, couldn't create, and so Cosgrove's concentration went into imitating - The man who wanted to be him, he was sure now, was not. Denton himself was Albert Cosgrove's novel, or at least the central character in the novel Cosgrove apparently couldn't write, couldn't create, and so Cosgrove's concentration went into imitating - stealing him. stealing him.

And it would get worse. And when it didn't succeed, because it couldn't, would Cosgrove do what Denton had done with a book that went wrong - turn on it and destroy it?

He pulled the nightgown over his head and pushed his arms into the sleeves of a robe. He lit the gas and sat at his desk and tried to write.

CHAPTER NINE.

He slept a few hours in the early morning, woke and went back to his desk. The mood of the night, somewhat dissipated in daylight, faded as he bored in on his work.

Atkins, who was going to church (Denton was surprised to find it was Sunday) and apparently thought Denton should, too, made disapproving noises with dishes and clothes hangers.

'Stop that racket.'

'Being as quiet as I can.'

'You're making noise fit to raise the dead. If you've something to say, say it!'

Atkins lifted Denton's empty plate to the tray with the care of somebody taking an egg from a nest. 'My grandmother banged the pans about when she was crossed,' he said.

'What's that supposed to mean - you come by noise-making honestly? Go to church!'

'It isn't church, it's chapel.'

Denton looked at him over the tops of his new eyegla.s.ses. 'Katya went to church church.'

'I've moved beyond Katya. I don't want to hear about her.'

'Give my regards to the saints.'

Before Atkins could do so, Denton heard a knock at the front door; a minute later, Atkins was beside him again.

'You know anything about a Son of Abraham's on our doorstep saying he's come to dig up the garden?'

Thinking of his work, Denton stared at him. 'No. Don't bother me. Wait - yes. Mrs Striker said something about-h.e.l.l, she gave me a name.'

'Cohan. Sounds Irish to me, but he looks about as Irish as the Levite that crossed over the road. Right, he mentioned Mrs Striker's name.'

'Why didn't you tell me that?'

'Thought I'd get right to the point. You want him to dig up the garden, or not?'

'Yes, yes, put him to work. Have we got a spade?'

'Probably. We had good intentions back there, once.' Atkins put on a pious face. 'You sure you want him working on the Lord's Day?'

'If he's a Jew, that was yesterday. Go away!'

Denton worked until noon and could do no more. The penalty for having worked part of the night. Atkins, by his own choice, had Sunday off until late evening. Denton found a couple of eggs, scrambled them on the gas ring in the alcove off his sitting room: part pantry, part kitchen. A year before, somebody had waited in there to kill him. He wondered if Albert Cosgrove had been in there, too, handled the cutlery, opened the cupboard, inhaled the air.

Denton prowled his house, restless now. He tried to read and found nothing interesting. He thought he would go out, but where? Not to find Janet Striker, certainly; he didn't know where she lived, and she wouldn't be in her office today. Munro wouldn't be at New Scotland Yard. He looked out of the rear window, saw a dark-haired man, foreshortened, digging up the weeds. He went at them as if they were his worst enemies. Denton went down and introduced himself.

'All one to me. I got lots of this muck to keep me busy.' He was overweight, shorter than Denton but broad, with shoulders and arms that filled his threadbare coat like a sausage its skin. He wore a cloth cap, filthy rat-catchers; his nose was mashed to his face, his ears battered. Small eyes glared at Denton as if the world were a perpetual challenge.

Denton said, 'You're a prizefighter.'

'I was, and proud of it! Never knocked off my feet I wasn't. I may not have won every time the bell rang, but n.o.body ever knocked me down. Just you ask! Ask them wot the Stepney Jew-Boy did.' He had a definite accent.

Denton flinched. 'Jew-Boy?'

'Jew-Boy. When I started fightink, they'd shout ”Jew-Boy” at me to insult me, they did. I thought, I'll give you Jew-Boy, I will, so I called myself Jew-Boy and beat the livink tar out of the first six gentiles I fought. Then I was the Stepney Jew-Boy for good.'

Denton studied him. 'What's a prizefighter want to spade up a back garden for?'

'Am I still a prizefighter? Do I look twenty again? Or do I look canny enough to've got out with my brains intact when I was thirty-five? How old you think I am?'

'Forty.'

'And four. How many prizefighters you think are still at it at forty-four without they're hearink bells n.o.body else can hear? Judas Cripes, give me some credit for intelligence, please do. I'm forty-four and I ain't fought in nine years and I got no job! That's why I'm diggink up your back b.l.o.o.d.y garden!'

Denton asked what he was to pay him, and he said he and Mrs Striker had settled on three s.h.i.+llings a day, for which she'd paid two days in advance because he'd been 'caught short' when he talked to her.

'So you'll be back in the morning.'

'You think I'd take money for work I wasn't goink to do? Yas, I'll be here in the mornink. And I don't steal and I don't lie and I didn't kill Christ. Good day to youse.'

The day yawned ahead of him - a Sunday, little doing. He decided to go out, if only to walk himself into exhaustion.

The air beyond his front door was cool, clear - he thought that if he could have got up high, he could have seen all the way down the Thames to the North Sea - with a sky the clear blue of a bottle with the sun behind it. The light was glaring, but even so the day was too cool for sitting about, perfect for walking. Stopping often to look back for Albert Cosgrove, he walked, first to Holborn and Chancery Lane, then along Fleet Street and Cannon Street, turning west again along the river at Billingsgate Market, now only residual fish smell and gulls and a great many cats, and a memory of the days when the fishwives had been there and 'Billingsgate' was a term for creative insult. He picked his way through small, silent streets to Soho, turned along Old Compton Street and, on an impulse, having nowhere to go, found his way again to the Albany, where he lingered at the entrance before going in and walking slowly to the door of Heseltine, the man who had found Mary Thomason's letter. If he objected to be called on on a Sunday, he could always turn him away.

He offered his card to the bottle-nosed man who opened the door.

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