Read Bohemian Girl, The for Free Online Page B

breaking and entering - enough to test even Munro’s indulgence of him.
    He crawled back to the skylight, slipped in and locked it, his heart pounding.
    The morning’s letters were on his desk when he reached it: two more invitations he would refuse, another letter from a publisher promising better terms than he was getting from his current firm, one from somebody who offered ‘to increase his income substantially by representing his works to publishers in a competitive fashion, for a small percentage’. That was new, he thought - every writer he knew made his own arrangements. Or took what was on offer; few were in any position to bargain.
    And another letter from the man (or woman?) calling himself-herself ‘Albert Cosgrove’:
    Carissimo maestro
    What a delight and comfort to know you are back with us again! I exult to see you in good health! How I long to sit in your drawing room with you and ‘chew the fat’ as they say in your country like two old friends sharing the communion of literature and mutual creativeness. I think of our conversations on all topics of interest to men of letters. The city hums again with your presence! Even though I am not fit to clean the pens with which you create in so masterly a fashion, I entreat I beg you to send me your books suitably inscribed.
    I am yours for ever.
    Albert Cosgrove
    No return address.
    ‘Mad as a hatter,’ Denton said.
    When Atkins came upstairs again, Denton showed him the letter. Atkins said, ‘Raving lunatic.’
    ‘Man or woman?’
    ‘Man, of course. Not a woman’s hand.’
    ‘Some of it sounds a little, mmm, romantic. Excessive.’
    ‘That’s the lunatic part. Along with the conversations, which it sounds like he thinks he’s already had.’ Atkins looked at the letter again. ‘The bit about seeing you in good health - that sounds like he’s been looking at you.’
    ‘You mean you think he’s your man with the red moustache?’
    ‘I don’t like him, Colonel.’
    He wrote until two; by then he had set down forty-one new pages as if he had been taking dictation. He was reluctant to stop, but he was at the point again where to do more was to put tomorrow’s work at risk. Better to use the time to accept Mr Heseltine’s invitation to the Albany.
    He wore one of his American hats, decidedly too wide in the brim for London, the choice deliberate to counter the snobbery he thought he was going to find in Aubrey Heseltine. So were the boots - old, polished but deeply wrinkled, brown rather than black, what he supposed Henry James would call ‘louche’. Going out, he opened the box to take the derringer without thinking, but the box was empty, and he remembered that Atkins had wanted it.
    Atkins stopped him at the front door. ‘Going to rain.’ He held out an umbrella.
    ‘I’m not English.’
    Atkins draped a mackintosh over his left arm. ‘The rain will be.’
    He walked quickly to Russell Square (he’d take today’s writing to the typewriter with tomorrow’s), strode along beside the Museum, ducked into Greek Street and down to Old Compton Street, then zigzagged into Brewer Street and so behind the Café Royal at the Glasshouse Street end, giving a regretful glance at the café, where he wanted to be sitting with Janet Striker, drinking the milky coffee. He dodged across Regent Street to Piccadilly, a cacophony of horse-drawn buses and cabs and a surprising number of motor cars (many more, he thought, than a year ago - the world was speeding up), and strolled to the entrance to Albany Court. Only men lived in that odd collection of buildings called the Albany. Denton, as an American, thought that he would never understand such places, where men sequestered themselves in gated and guarded byways that had for him a feel of monastic sterility. ‘Here,’ these places said, ‘lives masculine Privilege; avert your eyes and pass on.’ Maybe it was a residue of their (irrationally named) public schools. Boys together, and so on. Perpetual