Part 31 (1/2)

Denton looked into his face, then put his left hand on a shoulder. 'Help me along, then.'

He didn't know how to sit down into a soft, deep chair. Now he found that if he put the right leg out in front of him and bent the left leg, he could fall backwards and land more or less in a sitting position; the left leg trembled from the effort. He said, 'Do you know how embarra.s.sing this is?'

'We'll practise that,' Atkins said. 'I'll get the tea.'

He had made an effort. There were three kinds of biscuits, toast, anchovy paste, clotted cream, and a tureen of soup from which he lifted the lid. Steam rose and a remarkable odour drifted Denton's way. 'It doesn't smell like the nursing home, at least,' Denton said. He wasn't sure what it smelled like.

'Mrs O'Cohen's speciality. Chicken and a lot of other stuff. She cooks ”kosher”, if you know what that is. I don't, so don't ask.' He ladled out a bowl. 'Good for what ails you.'

'They've been feeding me a lot of Bovril.'

'Rare beef is what you need. Increase the blood. I've got a bit downstairs in the ice-cave would delight a cannibal. Thought I'd grill it on some coals.'

'It'll taste.'

'Wood coals, General. Not a green recruit, you know.'

Denton ate the soup, then the toast and anchovy paste, then some of the biscuits. The soup, with enough salt, was edible but peculiar. The sharp saltiness of the anchovies was welcome after the stodge they'd fed him at the nursing home. When he was done, he tried to stand. 'I can't even get out of my own chair!'

'Don't mind my saying so, but you ain't trying.'

Denton gave him a look of hatred. 'I can't bend this d.a.m.ned leg. What's your brilliant idea?'

'Stick it out in front of you and get up on the other one.'

The left leg was weak and his bullet wounds screamed, but he did it, the left thigh now vibrating like a plucked string. He stood looking down at Atkins. 'You've appointed yourself my domestic scold?'

'That's the plan.'

Denton hobbled partway down the room and turned to the left and then left again into the room they never used. Most of the blind wall that was shared with the next house was books; on the street side was a single tall window; to his left as he stood in the doorway was a wall with a fireplace, coal burning in the grate. Opposite it, a divan he'd never seen before had been made up as a bed. 'I'd prefer my own room.'

'When you can go up and down.'

A big stack of mail stood on a table. Atkins said, 'Lots of bills and invitations. Give you something to do.'

Denton felt too tired to respond. He'd given up the morphine, had refused chloral hydrate or laudanum. He was wondering, as he settled in the bed, if he should ask Atkins for some of the headache powders, and while he was wondering he fell asleep.

It was a struggle during the night to get from his rooms to the toilet that was tucked behind the alcove and across the side corridor. Atkins heard him and ran upstairs, trailing an unbelted robe behind him, Rupert plodding and breathing heavily behind that. The nursing home had had bedpans, not lavatories. Life was suddenly more complicated, more frustrating. Still, he fell again into deep sleep as soon as he was back in the bed.

The next two days were elaborations on struggle and frustration. The simple had become complex, the difficult impossible. He complained that he was getting his exercise simply by living, but Atkins chivvied him into limping up and down the long room, back and forth, then doing the leg exercises. After the first set, Atkins holding Denton's feet and pus.h.i.+ng the legs for Denton to push back, Atkins said, 'You're using that leg, you know.'

'I'm not.'

'You are. I can feel it. You ought to try putting more weight on it when you walk.'

'Hurts like h.e.l.l.'

'Not the end of the world, I daresay.'

The meals continued to be enormous, the chicken soup a major part through the first breakfast; by then, Denton had had enough of it and ordered that he wasn't to be faced with it any more. The second morning, there were kidneys and bacon and eggs and b.u.t.tery rolls, and Denton complained about too much food.

'Got to fatten you up, Colonel. Prodigal son come home, and so on. Fatted calf time.'

Denton read his mail and tried not to wonder what Janet Striker was finding in Normandy. All sorts of people had written to him about the shooting - his editor, Lang, nervously, Henry James a bit pompously but in fact rather touchingly. Denton was still at the stage of feeling a stranger in his own house, still catching up with the world that had pa.s.sed him by. The good wishes of people he hadn't seen for several months now seemed insubstantial.

At tea, to make conversation, he said to Atkins, 'What's happened with your moving picture?'

'Oh, rather a tale, that. Interesting, amusing, and a delight to both adults and children.'

'Good. Amuse and delight me.'

Atkins was eating bits of Denton's toast and sipping tea from an oversized cup. He smiled. 'Bit of a long story.'

'I have lots of time.'

'Well, then-Well, you disappeared from the scene when we was making pictures up in Victoria Park. I'd learned from earlier adventures and got us a permit to shoot blanks in the muskets. Gave us permission to ”perform patriotic manoeuvres with rendered-safe firearms”, for which we had to pay for a policeman to watch over us. Also had to provide him with lunch, the which he thought should be a banquet. Anyway, we got through that all right, and then we finished with the pictures of the soldier's return down at your front door again.'

'Why didn't you make that and the farewell at the same time? More efficient!'

'What, and have to cut up the film and paste it back together? Not likely, General! No, we did it all in the order it would play, see? Then we have the film what they call ”processed”, meaning the pictures come out, and then we bang it back in the camera and project it on a sheet. Did I mention that the camera was also the projecting machine? Well, it was.

'We rented a former sc.r.a.ps and findings shop just off the Whitechapel Road and had a couple of signs made, ”The Boer War - Fascination in Moving Pictures! Villainous Boer and Courageous British Hero! Patriotism Personified!” And so on. Even brought in benches from a Methodist mission that went bust over the way - unheard of, sitting down for a moving picture. Great sensation.

'So we were prepared to open on a Friday - ”open” is what they say in the theatre world, I suppose from the curtains, which we didn't have - and I was standing outside, ready to take the money of the gathering horde, when up come three fellas with very serious expressions, one of which turns out to be a legal type who slaps a paper into my hand and says, ”You're out of business.” Then the other two chaps go in and seize the picture machine and carry it out under the watchful eye of two constables they've brought for the purpose.

'Well, you can imagine the weeping and wailing and gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth. The housemaid had invited her entire family, which was as rum a lot of human beings as you'd never hope to meet, and my chum was tearing his hair out in handfuls and saying we was ruined. I, however, read the piece of paper and found we were being injuncted against by the courts for violating the patent of some American who claimed that our machine was a fiddle copied from his.

'And so it was. What my chum and partner hadn't found out when he bought the machine was that the Pole that made it had nicked the idea. But I said to myself, Not so fast, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, where does it say they can seize our moving picture along with the machine? So I went to the chap that had sold me the insurance - you remember, you'd advised me to get insurance - and they sent a young fellow that was a clerk in a law office. But, by the time we got it to court, the Yanks had already s.h.i.+pped the machine to the States and had destroyed the film - burned our moving picture all to ashes.

'The long and the longer of it was that the Yanks settled out of court for illegal destruction of a creative property not their own; my chum ran off with the housemaid; and I made back my expenses, plus three pounds, seven s.h.i.+llings punitive damages, in loo of one per cent of the net profit of the American company on all future moving pictures. A bird in the hand, says I.'

'I think you did handsomely.'

'One per cent of future profits is one per cent of nothing.'

'You never know.'

'I should of took the long view, you're thinking.'

'Not at all'

'Moving-picture business is too risky. The Yanks wanted to hire me - said I had get-up.' Atkins laughed. 'The day I leave your employ, General, it'll be for a good deal more than running about Victoria Park with a musket.' He nibbled another piece of toast. 'Now I've got my eye on the truss. You have any idea how many trusses are sold in this country every year? Met a chap who's invented a pneumatic truss. Latest thing. What do you think?'

'Did you ever see your moving picture?'

Atkins chewed, thought, shrugged. 'I saw it made.'

Later that evening, a telegram came from Janet Striker: YOU WERE CORRECT. FRENCH POLICE INFORMED. HOME SAt.u.r.dAY.

'They were were bones, Denton. Bones and some leathery-looking stuff I suppose was skin. I'm afraid I felt a bit faint.' bones, Denton. Bones and some leathery-looking stuff I suppose was skin. I'm afraid I felt a bit faint.'