The Beautiful Child (11 page)

She was tired; she would continue the next day with the extraordinary story of Lamb House; she bade me good-night and hoped I would sleep well. The door in the panelling of the tiny room swung aside to let her pass. And I – my policy of total exposure being essential for the further recounting of this exploration of the aspirations and terrors of Henry James – stood for a moment rooted to the ground, the icy fear which had gripped me at first sighting of the manservant Mr Smith returning to keep me there several minutes.

I remembered Miss Bosanquet and her account of entering the powder closet from the drawing-room, and after twiddling about with catches and snibs concealed in the skirting-board I found myself free – in a cold, unlit room that smelt of damp and mice, admittedly, but free.

The body, even in a state of paralysis, demands food, and I hurried down the main staircase (I had no wish to bump on the service stairs into either of the Smiths) and made my way to the back of the house. To find the kitchen was encouragingly easy. There was even a smell of something like vegetable broth – what my high-stepping young ladies at Media Mansions would doubtless call minestrone – and this was exactly what I needed: a good hearty soup on the bleakest and most dreary night of the year. I went through a green baize door, saw the kitchen with its old-fashioned great pans lying before me, several chairs pulled out from the table and a figure at the above ladling and stirring. This was a woman in the long black skirt and white apron of female servants at the turn of the twentieth century; her hair was up in a bun and could be seen even at a distance to be shockingly greasy and unkempt; she muttered as she poured the soup into tin plates. Russell Noakes, willing and good-humoured as Miss Bosanquet had described him, smiled at me as I came in a few steps and paused as a shaft of rank-smelling steam obscured my entrance. Then the little fellow danced up to me, all of his five feet expressing eagerness to make me at home. Yet once again I found myself unable to move either backwards or forwards. A terrible sense overtook me that suspicions which had lain dormant for the span of our frivolous ‘Henry James Parlour Games' at Media Mogul Villas were now about to be confirmed. My head felt it was going to burst. And I prayed, while dodging young Russell's proffered plate of stew gone rotten over incalculable lengths of time in a filthy kitchen, that I would be proved wrong – and would then be able to leave the famous writer's house in Rye and, if necessary, walk back to the sham palace we had all taken in the expectation of passing a jolly New Year.

But it was not to be. The woman at the stove turned but did not see me, and in her surprise at feeling a presence – and dismay at sensing a ghostly visitor – she dropped the ladle into the malodorous mixture on the range. She gave a groan; perhaps she had half expected to find a denizen of our times here who would rescue her, or so her sound of despair told me – some magical solution was prayed for but did not materialize. For standing before was a woman transformed, hideous but recognizable – my Salome of the January sales, she who had shown the greatest scepticism of all our theories, the high-booted, impossibly short-skirted friend in Prada.

‘Fanny, you can go home now,' the minuscule Russell informed the woman I had – yes I admit it – fancied in a previous incarnation at Digital Towers.

‘You're expected here at 8 a.m. to do the breakfast,' Russell went on as Fanny/Salome and I stood, she still unaware of me, by the black dirt-encrusted stove.

It was clear that these words were all the maid expected. ‘And the Master says you're to bring the children' were the houseboy's last words, as she walked to the kitchen door, briefly passing me. Again, I suffered the intolerable sensation of being there but not seen. Then she was gone.

I cannot give a clear account of the rest of that terrible night. Here I was, in the house made real to me long before I came here by the words of James's biographer Leon Edel – and by Miss Bosanquet's charming booklet, published by the Hogarth Press in 1924, a straight-forward admission to the House of Genius, with its considerate Master, eight secretarial tables and all. Long before my first visit – the local estate agent in Sandwich had advertised the house for rent by a suitable couple (ha! what would they make of the present incumbents, now I had begun to see the powers which had taken over here) – a couple who would know the works of the previous occupant of Lamb House, be aware of the guests who had thronged the great man's drawing-room and show the garden, a particular favourite of James, who liked to look out of his window and see an English gardener at work. I had visited, as a prospective tenant, and my credentials had been good. I was a Professor of English at-University, after all and had produced, in the distinguished American periodical
Raritan,
an essay on James's Anglophilia, but I'd had no intention of leaving my home town. In reality I simply wanted to view the house and be taken seriously while I was doing so.

I will not dwell on the unpleasant effect on one's nerves it can have to revisit a delightful location and find it fallen into – if this is not too fanciful an expression – evil hands. Lamb House, on that night when it became clear to me that the spirits which haunted it had taken control of the place entirely, restricting and dictating all movement, curtailing a freedom without which we can none of us breathe or function – Lamb House, on that night of the New Year Full Moon, was as sly, malignant and corrupt as its vile spirit inhabitants. No prayer or mantra could save the incoming traveller: to abandon hope was the only option available – and on doing so, I had little doubt, one would fall for ever into the grip of the cook and butler, the Quint and Jessel (as I now saw) who had terrorized the children in James's masterpiece
The Turn of the Screw.
They had continued, after becoming a part of their master's removal to the country, to exercise their dreadful talents in the house at Rye; and our little party in the Edwardian house down the road – devoted as it was to the study and (faintly ridiculous) worship of James simplified for a television arts programme – was a prime target for them. We were a danger to the ghostly couple, as they prowled the house and its environs for new victims. Children, innocent and unaware, would never grow up here – there must be dozens of Mileses and Floras who had not gone beyond seven or ten years of age.

The moon was casting a bluish light into the empty bedrooms as I stumbled down the first-floor passage and, thinking myself courageous indeed, flung open their doors. I was conscious, in a way I had never known before, of a vast exhaustion as it crept over me, bringing with it a deep cold that penetrated as far as the bone. Why the place was unfurnished, I could not even speculate – for it was impossible to know, as with so many ‘historic' homes in England, which era we were in. Even to think of poor Salome transformed to a drudge was unbearable to me then.

At last I reached the final bedroom in the passage – it opened out on to the principal landing of the house and would boast a fine view of the garden and the hills beyond had not the snow turned to sleet, eddying like a giant white brush, obscuring all details of either; and I turned the handle and looked in. There must be some exhibition, I thought, to do with Henry James and his artefacts, for this room at least had been prepared carefully – or artfully, perhaps, in expectation of a paying visitor. A four-poster bed was made up, with linen sheets and large plumped pillows; a mahogany cupboard stood open, displaying a selection of tweed jackets, knickerbockers and the like; and a small table by the side of the bed was laid out, perhaps in readiness for a writer's thoughts before breakfast, with pen, a blotter and a leather paper-holder with discreetly engraved address inscribed on each letter.

My exhaustion turned to gratitude. Someone somewhere knew I needed comfort – and, beyond that, compliments on my intimate knowledge of the work of the Master were clearly in evidence. A glass of fresh orange juice on the small painted commode on the far side of the bed showed consideration for my recent hideous experiences. Breakfast would be brought as soon as it was light, I had no doubt; and the small library on shelves either side of a fireplace in which a controlled blaze gave out much-needed warmth demonstrated that my invisible host knew all that had been written about him and his great fictions since the time of his death.

I wanted desperately to sleep; but first, going to the bookcases, I pulled out a volume, circa 1970 I would say – and the words I had sought almost jumped out at me, causing me to back towards the four-poster and surrender myself to its goose-feather-filled expanse. They were the words of my hero, Leon Edel, the biographer who knew more about James than any other. Something told me, as I fell back into the soft, embroidered pillows, that by scanning these words I would understand what had caused my fear.

The fire crackled; a bell rang somewhere, perhaps summoning one of James's guests to breakfast – Lily Norton, maybe, or Hendrik Andersen, the handsome young sculptor proffered by daring literary types as the actual lover of the Master, when Edel would most certainly deny the possibility, insisting always on James's total chastity. Then there was silence, comfortable country-house silence … I lay even further back between the curtains hanging from the four-poster, and finding the book an unpleasant weight – my frozen bones and state of exhaustion were doubtless the cause of an unprecedented rejection of a work on the subject of Henry James – I succumbed to the necessity of sleep.

But what a sleep it proved to be! I knew I was not awake – but I was fully aware, also, that some foreign force had taken over my mind, my vitals, my heart. I was powerless, as my new occupants feasted on my porous, vulnerable identity to banish them or find the strength to eject them forcefully from what I had always recognized as my self.

It started with the sounds of someone breaking into the room. I opened my eyes – but I remained unconscious and, worst of all, cognizant that I could make no move against my enemy. He – maybe two of them, for I heard barked orders on the far side of the door – was pressing his shoulder against the mahogany portal which only a short time earlier had appeared the most welcoming, reassuring sight to greet my eyes since the whole Lamb House nightmare began. As I lay in the high-masted ship that was the Master's bed I heard the undeniable sound of someone – maybe the same someone – bearing down on the lock and bolt from the passage outside.

What came next was, as I see now, the turning point in the dreadful assault: the lock (or perhaps another part of the ingenious door furniture which had protected the room's inhabitant from the outrage of burglary or personal attack) gave with a sickening crunch – and the massive door swung open.

Is it possible to become drunk without drinking? Are there occasions when a disturbed mind leaves its impression in a receptive brain, even a century after its sufferings at the hands of a missionary of the Devil? I cannot know; but, as the terrible figure approached me I knew myself to be fighting hallucinations and strange dreams, and I smelt the alcohol as it swirled around me. I tried to rise from the bed, but I was giddy and fell back on the bolsters. Two fireplaces, two of everything my eye fell on, brought greater confusion – even my own hand, pale and lifeless on the counterpane, rose up to me in double digits. I had been poisoned, and the whisky smell grew unbearably strong, so that I gagged and then cried out like a child, as the aura intensified and the awful figure came up closer to where I lay.

For who was this man, and why did he seem so familiar? I could not face the recognition I now experienced – and pushed away – and was yet one more time anaesthetized by the strong spirits that were distilled all around me. I knew that the opening of the door would all too abjectly signify the end: in the grey, grizzled figure who now gloated down at me I would find the agent of Henry James's shame.

I saw myself: grey, grizzled, with hands covering my face. The hands dropped, and I saw the face was mine but not mine; on the left hand two fingers were missing.