The Beautiful Child (10 page)

By the summer of the year following (1902) it was possible to perceive that Mr James's health was declining rapidly. He complained of shortness of breath – and we no longer took walks together across the marsh (this quite a relief to me, I must confess, as a most unpleasant fellow writer, Ford Madox Hueffer, took pleasure in following us on our peregrinations. HJ and I went so far on one occasion as to hide in a ditch to escape his attentions! Perhaps selfishly I also welcomed the time off supplied by Mr James's lack of desire to walk; and thus – the summer was by turns violently rainy or unpleasantly sultry – I took to spending more time in Lamb House and its environs than I had been accustomed to do.

Before I continue I should explain that I had been from the very first surprised – even dismayed – by Mr James's choice of servants for his country residence. Little Russell Noakes, almost a dwarf but agile and helpful at all times and much jested about and liked by Mr James, caused no problems at all. As, indeed, was the case with Fanny … poor red-nosed Fanny, always sniffing about one injustice or another (she lived with her mother down the hill at Rye, if I remember correctly). Fanny would moan and talk as long as she was permitted to; and Mr James being deep in thought, I saved him as often as I could from her unwanted interpolations. I recall that I would from time to time smile at the probable reaction of Miss Petheridge in her secretarial agency in Victoria (it was she who had found me my place with Mr James) if she had been informed of the time I took over Fanny's chronic difficulties (she had twins, a boy and a girl, about four years old, always ailing and frequently brought to Lamb House owing to lack of care at home), a job for which I had most certainly not been hired.

Nor did I consider it to be my place to report any misdeeds or questionable actions on the part of a staff member at Lamb House. Little Russell's day off was his own business and not that of his Master, even if he did return home like the unreliable Bobby Shafto, without so much as a bunch of blue ribbons after gambling his wages away at the fair. I kept myself to myself and felt grateful – increasingly so by the summer of 1902, I must say – for the comfortable little cottage where Mr James had found me a reasonably well-appointed pair of rooms and a friendly uninterfering landlady, a sister of Dr Skinner. There was a tacit understanding between us that Mr James's health or daily habits would not be discussed, and a plate of scones and a workmanlike pot of tea was usually shared between us in an amicable silence.

That summer, though, I found myself tested to my furthest limits by Mr and Mrs Smith, the cook and butler at Lamb House. It was just over a year that I had been there, and, to be frank, I had found myself surprised at their lack of charm. This is more polite than they deserved: Mrs Smith had a permanently heightened colour and wore dresses so – presumably – carelessly donned that a button or belt could always be seen to be missing, she was rotund, not to say mountainous, and the effect was altogether unsavoury. And Mr Smith, well, Professor, you have already seen Mr Smith I believe. He showed you in and enabled you to find me here.

Please do not interrupt, Professor. You must know that those who serve Henry James, in either fiction or fact, are immune to the vagaries of life: the mistakes and accidents, the mortal illnesses that come to carry us off to another world. For Mr James, however, every friend was a friend for life – and for longer if they figured in his novels.

Mr Smith was even less appealing than his wife. As you have noted, he had a peculiarly unpleasant gaze, both cunning and malevolent, s and it was hard for me to understand why they were so treasured. They had been sixteen years in Mr James's service – not all at Lamb House, certainly not: the first complaints I heard shortly after my arrival came from Mrs Smith, who informed me that De Vere Gardens, where they had looked after Mr James, had all the advantages (near shops, being in London, etc. etc.), while Lamb House, packed with guests as it frequently was in summer, demanded too much work, and the emptiness of the house in winter brought depression and a desire to escape the marsh.

I cannot explain why I failed to notice the obvious affliction of the Smiths; all I can say is that I found them both so repulsively unpleasant that I would not allow myself any speculation about their state of mind. Why should I become involved in the couple's lives when my connection with the place was entirely due to Mr James? I it was who acted as amanuensis to the great man; it was my happy fate to accompany him as he composed, like a pianist with a world-renowned singer. This is how I saw our relationship: he dictated and I followed, sometimes as he was apt to point out himself, with an uncanny sense of what he was about to say, before he said it. There are other parallels with a musical experience – for to toil at a desk and find Mr James's melodious voice float over one was akin to finding oneself a small but vital part of an orchestra.

The first time I seriously wondered if I should speak to Mr James on the subject of the Smiths, I concluded that I should not; and to this day I rue the decision. If I had come out with my suspicions – even, as they became, my accusations – I might have obviated the need for urgent medical attention demonstrated by my employer on the day of the fatal luncheon party. The whole awful business could have been swept away – or under the carpet at least, until Mr James's special friend Mr Anderson left Lamb House, and the writer T. Bailey Saunders, a man of many words (and a great moustache to conceal or promote them), had departed on his bicycle for a trip down the coast. But I said nothing; and Mr James, I am sorry to say, became exposed to the curiosity of the county, only just succeeding in his attempt to refuse the local constabulary the opportunity to publicize the squalid event even further.

The two accounts are therefore not connected, though they became so with the chaos of the Smiths' departure, and I feel to this day that Mr James believes me partly culpable for their dismissal. Not fair, I know; but one must remember that he had seemed ever since my first days at Lamb House to like the unprepossessing pair quite inordinately. ‘I owe a great deal to Mr and Mrs Smith,' Mr James would say, and he would smile reminiscently, as if (highly improbably as I believe they were illiterate) it was they who created some part of his fictions or had transcribed them (also highly improbable).

The staff at Lamb House – Fanny, Russell Noakes and Ned the gardener – were paid on Fridays, in guineas, and these I distributed at the end of the day. They went in a black Gladstone bag where I stored Mr James's sentences – those that were imponderable, at least, and in need of his scrutiny in an evening's reading and checking.

On Friday 11th July I discovered that the small gold coins had vanished from my bag – there were three in all, and a half-sovereign, unnoticed by the thief, still languished in a fold of the lining.

It was a hot, airless day; and, seizing the bag, I went over to the french windows of the Garden Room. It was not what I should have done, I know: the theft needed to be reported to the authorities – and not least to Mr James. The unconsidered move then spelt out further ill fortune for me, as Mr Smith and his wife now approached the window from outside and waved at me with their usual expressions of friendship, an assumption that was totally unacceptable to me. The key (Mr Smith, as butler, had keys to every room and cellar in Lamb House, a fact which made me even more grateful to be lodged away with Dr Skinner's sister in town and not in a house where Smith could roam, if he so pleased, into every room) jiggled in the lock of the Garden Room french windows a few seconds longer, then turned and the Smiths stood facing me. This was a situation I found most undesirable – for I was certain it was they who had taken the money from my bag. If questioned, they would lay the blame elsewhere – and this they proceeded to do, but only after throwing me into confusion by implying that it was I who was somehow to blame for an action of which they had not been accused and – unless obviously guilty – could not be charged for.

‘So when is your departure, miss?' said Mrs Smith.

‘Yes, when are you going?' her husband now enquired. ‘We'll have Ned ready to take you to the station for the London train. At least, that is what the Master informed us … And here the rascal fell silent. He had come perceptibly closer to me – without apparently moving – and I was reminded of the childhood games I used to play with my brothers and sisters. Tom Tiddler's Ground or Grandmother's Footsteps.

I backed away – but I had reason much later to feel gratitude that this disgustingly cunning and scheming man had had the impertinence to come up so close. For I smelt his breath – it floated over me and around me – it was unspeakably vile, like the stink of the corpse of a decomposing animal, so I thought, and yet it came not from hedgerow, field or marsh – but from this man himself, from deep inside him, where he rotted physically and morally. The worst part was that he brought his wife – who now walked up to me with a mock-contrite air: she often, I noticed, assumed the guise of a maltreated woman, albeit with a carefully assumed abashed look on her face – to make his pleas and arrange his horrible satisfactions. It was impossible to stand there a minute longer – but, as if I defended my position at Lamb House in the face of the Smiths' certainty of my imminent departure, I continued to stand. It was I who could have been in the dock: without a word being said I stood accused of a theft and was now the unhappy possessor of the knowledge that the true criminals had reported my ‘crime' to our employer. The terrible couple had triumphed over me, and I no longer even knew what to say.

‘Miss Weld?' The impasse was eased by the arrival of Mr James at the Garden Room window. ‘I shall change my schedule for today,' he announced, and I feared his shortness of breath had worsened as a result of a recent excitement. ‘We shall have the story …' and here he glanced with evident happiness in the direction of his two foul servants. ‘No, let me put it this way. I consider the story of Hugh Merrow to be an important addition –'

‘The Beast in The Jungle,'
I found the courage to put in. ‘You have only a few pages more, Mr James, to complete it …'

My tone was unconvincing: perhaps my relief at finding I had not been dismissed by my employer (and, after all, he had confided in Mr and Mrs Smith for sixteen years and I had only been twelve or thirteen months at Lamb House) had given me an air of artificiality. But the Smiths had clearly not been believed, at least – and they must have known they had registered a false piece of information. I might tell Mr James, the man they referred to as Master; but I decided against this course of action – concord reigned in my hours of dictation, and I was sure I was not expected to leave the premises as they had forecast.

But I was not to rest quiet after my reinstatement (in my mind at least) as a valued member of the Lamb House entourage. For Mr James, who had never, in my knowledge at least, expressed an interest in poor Fanny the housemaid – it was I who performed various charitable actions to aid the wretched young woman – now proceeded to speak of her in the same breath as a recently embarked on and set aside short story.

‘I speak of
The Child
– you have the pages, Miss Weld!' continued HJ. ‘I have informed Fanny the housemaid that I shall need them before I recommence.'

‘The Child?'
I said, aware I sounded foolish – even, perhaps, giving fresh ammunition to the Smiths in their efforts to rob me and send me away from Rye.

‘Hugh Merrow
then' – and a hand was held out to me as if in supplication.
‘The Beautiful Child,
you have filed it somewhere, doubtless, Miss Weld. But first I must show you the beacon of my inspiration' – and with a nod Mr James indicated to the Smiths that they should leave the room. ‘Come out here with me. It is hardly raining at all.' And, still breathless, Henry James led me into the garden, green and damp as it was. We walked under poplars to the far wall, HJ panting, I am sorry to say, with his effort of walking even that short distance. Then, by a row of espaliered fruit trees against the wall, we saw them. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, playing happily by the side of a flower-bed with a pair of small shovels – ‘Mrs Archdean will be pleased indeed when her fondest wish comes true,' Mr James remarked. ‘A child deserving the brush of Hugh Merrow – and, if I may say so, the pen of Henry James.'

‘But' – in my attempt to conceal my anxiety I fairly shouted at my employer – ‘which of them will you choose, sir? The boy or the girl?' And there, Professor, is where he left me, for T. Bailey Saunders could be seen at the gates into the garden and there was little the Master disliked more than a lack of hospitality.

N
ow I saw Mary Weld in the extremities of old age. Her arm, as it reached to me for a farewell, was so transparently veiled in skin that the blue veins, like dark grapes, were clustered near the visible bone – and her face, propped like a marionette's on her other arm, appeared one-dimensional, a sheet of paper where too much had already been written and all was finally about to be erased.