‘Mrs Cohan. Wife to the Stepney Jew-Boy?’
‘They live in the same house as I did, two floors down. She sews — six days a week, making shirts to sell for three-and-six apiece, for which she gets fourpence each. He has no job, as you know. And they’re good people, Denton! She does magnificent embroidery — in Poland, she did wedding dresses and court gowns. She’s going to make me more dresses. We’re thinking along rather Janey-Morris-y lines.’
Denton looked blank.
‘William Morris’s bride. The original Pre-Raphaelite woman. No corset and her hair unbound. Ruth Castle told me about her when I was a beginner.’
‘You’ll be a sight on Oxford Street.’
‘I shan’t wear them on Oxford Street. I’ll wear them at home, and this sort of thing — ’ she pulled at one lapel of her jacket — ‘when I’m out.’
‘Now who’s planning to wear a disguise?’
‘Well-There’ll be a real me and a pretend me, and the real one will live at home — if ever I get a home again. I’m so sick of hotels!’
‘I don’t know much about women’s clothes.’
‘Do you know much about women? Yes, of course you do. I think you mean you don’t care about women’s clothes.’ She sipped wine.
‘I care about you.’
They stumbled along. Cohan finished getting the weeds and brambles out of the back garden. He and Atkins started to plan what they’d plant in the spring. Mrs Striker moved to another hotel. When Denton said to Cohan that he understood he was a priest descended from Aaron, Cohan said, ‘I am not beink a very good Jew.’ Nonetheless, when Denton told him what Fred Oldaston had said about Mrs Franken and her two whorehouses, Cohan had looked severe and said he didn’t need work that much.
Denton continued to write, the end now in sight. One day, Atkins reminded him that he was supposed to go to a party at his publishers — the launching of the book of ghost stories that Lang had told him about. He groaned, said he wouldn’t go, but he did go, because Janet Striker told him he should. And because he couldn’t be with her that evening.
At six on a blustery afternoon, he went up the creaking stairs that led to Gweneth and Burse and through ‘reception’, which was simply a part of the corridor that connected the offices. The party was in the room where they packaged the books, swept more or less clean and provided with a table where sherry and several platters of things in jelly stood. He looked around from the doorway, seeking somebody to kill the time with before he could decently leave. He was wearing an old morning coat, which Atkins had said ‘would do’ because it was still early and he wasn’t going on anywhere, but most of the other men — and they were mostly men — were in some form of evening dress.
Standing near the outer wall, where windows looked down into Bell Yard, was Henry James, who was undoubtedly going on to dinner somewhere, to judge by his formal evening clothes and the fact that he was an aggressive diner-out. As Denton looked his way, James raised his eyes, recognized him and nodded. James was tallish, rather heavy, with shrewd, hard eyes; only a few years older than Denton, also American, but he had sat out the American Civil War while Denton had fought it — a divide that was to separate their generation for the rest of their lives. Denton felt towards him the faint resentment the soldier feels for men who haven’t served, then a counter-balancing remorse for his own prejudice; James, on the other hand, seemed to feel something the reverse, so the two were always pleasant to each other out of guilt. As writers and as men, they were very different, yet they always gravitated towards each other.
‘I read your latest with considerable interest,’ James said as soon as Denton was close, ‘and, I think, with satisfaction, although that is hardly a word that honours a work, I suppose, when heard by the author, or am I presuming to impose my own sensibilities on someone else’s, hardly unheard of in the world of books.’ He chuckled. Denton said something vague; he was never good at accepting praise, worse at giving it when it came to other people’s books. James was le maître to his sycophants, but Denton couldn’t pretend to worship at his shrine. James put his fingers and thumb around Denton’s arm just above the elbow as if measuring it. He moved in closer and said in a low voice, ‘Do they do you pretty well at this publishers?’ He looked around the room.
Do him pretty well? Denton said, ‘We mostly get along.’
‘I’m never entirely confident of my publishers, whoever they be. The matter of royalty is vexing, constantly vexing, offered at a certain level and then haggled over as if the Man of Galilee had driven the money-changers out of the temple and into the publishing office.’ He shook Denton’s arm a little. ‘What do you think of these people who call themselves “agents”? They assure me they can lever better terms from the publishers, their letters sometimes quite impertinent, but then they confess they require some of it for themselves, a situation that I must admit gives me unease, not because I am naive in the ways of business, because I am not, but rather the opposite, for no one can have hovered about books for as long as I without learning that the income to be made from a book is finite and represents a sum that can be divided into only so many pieces without, like the crow in the Aesop’s fable — or is it the monkey? how one’s memory plays tricks — dividing it into nothingness. I wonder if these would-be “agents” are not simply opportunists who think authors are fools.’
Denton admitted that he had had some letters from would-be agents himself and was tempted.
‘Exactly. But one doesn’t want to be the first to step into this perhaps inviting pool and find it to be not sweet water but something unsavoury, perhaps in fact corrosive.’ James stood with his head slightly bent, still holding Denton’s arm, his bright eyes scavenging the room like those of some intelligent bird, a pied crow that, if its tongue were split and it were taught to talk, would say malicious things. It was as if James were always on the lookout for scandal or at least its potential, James’s idea of the world of fiction, at least in Denton’s view, being very close to gossip. Such an approach was not Denton’s, just as James’s ambience was not his. As if guessing his thought, James shook his arm again and said, ‘Our work is very different, yours and mine, yet both are to be admired. That is rather a conundrum. I have been thinking about it a good deal for a preface. The house of fiction has many windows, has it not?’
‘For us to look out of?’ Denton laughed. ‘I’d have said it was a house that had many doors.’
‘Aha, you shift my metaphor. Perhaps a separate entrance for ladies, at least, if not a separate house. No, I was thinking of the way we see and what we see and then what we do with what we see, each from his own window. Tell me now, what do you make of the vulgar concept of “the plot”? People who don’t know any better are forever asking me where I get my plots, as if I bought them with my shirts at a guinea a dozen. You don’t worry yourself greatly over “the plot”, surely?’
Denton tried to think about it. He lacked James’s interest in criticism, seldom worked in such terms. ‘I suppose I begin with situation,’ he said. He thought of the book he was trying to finish, the husband and wife and the ghostly child. ‘Or an exchange. Some kind of interaction.’
‘Aha! Very good. Interaction. Mmm. And then “the plot” comes along like a child’s wooden toy that gets pulled on a string, mechanically bobbing its head and wagging its tail. Yes. I quite agree. Although I begin rather differently; how matters not.’ His eyes had continued to dart about, even though his head was down and he and Denton might have seemed to be discussing secrets.