The Beautiful Child (12 page)

I must have fainted – and when I regained consciousness I saw the drawn, papery features of Mary Weld. We were in the little powder room; she had placed a blanket under me, and I dimly perceived that a fire of sorts had been laid in the minuscule grate; a bunch of twigs fizzled damply, extruding a strong smell of neglected woodland, and a solitary pine cone lay against the bars. Otherwise the strange, repellent atmosphere of Lamb House was as it had been before I walked along the corridor and found myself in the Master's bedroom. And whether it was my imagination or not I could not tell – this time the faint aroma of stale alcohol lingered even here, growing stronger with the rising of the wind and the accompanying rush of hail and snow down the narrow – and obviously unswept – chimney. I coughed: the fire that failed to prosper could at least ignite my lungs; and it was only when a beaker of water was handed down to me that I was able to prop myself on one arm. Oh, I did not examine my hands: my memory of the oneiric horror of my visit to the chamber of the author of
The Turn of the Screw
was still close for me, and I dreaded the return of his fear – for this it was, I was sure: it was connected to the evil story and the evil servants who had administered to him at the time of writing his terrifying novella – and I looked up at the desk where Miss Weld now sat, custodian of Henry James's nightmares, keeper of the flame where I and so many others had worshipped over the years. Last night she had been tired, exhausted by her great age and her dreadful secrets; today, I realized, she was the young and fresh-faced amanuensis I had seen in early photographs of James at weekend house parties or strolling alone by the side of pleached trees, with Mary Weld always a few paces behind. The ancient lady had gone – or had been expected and therefore dreamt up my me – and as her descendant began to speak, I felt the first rays of a January sun as it succeeded the hail and snow and came slanting in through the window in the drawing-room, the concealed door having been left ajar. I prepared myself to listen; and I fought down the return of the sensation which rose in me time and again in waves of a freezing terror that would never release me until I knew the truth behind the Master's inability to complete the tale.

‘We tried three times to bring
The Beautiful Child
to life,' began Mary Weld; and as she spoke I pulled myself in to a sitting position, from head to feet occupying the entire floorspace of the tiny cabinet. ‘But however hard we tried, the games the servants had played with the children had finally removed their breath – their spark – even their last consciousness had been irrevocably altered by the instructions they, puppet-like, obeyed.'

‘The children? Both of them?' I said, my own voice so low I could hear the mounting gusts of wind as they came to batter the long windows of the drawing-room. ‘Was it not one perfect child the author wanted, to satisfy the painter and his clients?' And I thought, as Miss Weld looked at me across the desk with an unbearable compassion, that all the research and meticulous attention to the text in the world never can bring back the past with accuracy. There is always someone – in this case, another child – who has not been mentioned or becomes a lost footnote in a dead biographer's tome.

‘Fanny – you saw her in the kitchen earlier.' And as I shuddered at the memory of my smart, modern student transformed to a slattern – ‘Fanny brought her children with her on certain days, Professor, when there was no one to care for them, a sadly frequent occurrence. As I informed you – and you should remember this, for it is of great significance – they were twins – a boy and a girl. Of outstanding beauty, and four years old as I remember well, for their birthday fell on the 2nd of July 1901, the day the Smiths were released from employment at Lamb House by their master' – and now it was her turn to shudder – ‘the day Mr and Mrs Smith, spectral in their appearance, as Mr James wrote in a letter to Mrs William which was first dictated to me: he was too distracted, you understand, to hold a pen – the day they left here for good. Not before –' she added in a grim tone which transformed itself to currents of icy fear down my back and legs – ‘not before they had caused the deaths of the children they first humiliated and abused.'

‘And – and how did they …' I heard my voice falter. I coughed, and the fire, properly alight at last, devoured the pine cone like a black fruit.

‘They caused one child to kill another,' Mary Weld said. Her tone was moderate, she might have been explaining the rules of a harmless game, such as four-year-old children play when they find themselves in a strange house alone. There was no heart in the woman, despite her hatred for the manservant and his wife, I realized: she felt for only one person in the world, and that was her employer, the man with the ‘melodious voice', Mr James.

‘But …' I struggled with the knowledge that Miss Bosanquet also had been in love with the Master. Would both typists defend Henry James's actions – or lack of them – to the end? ‘But …' I said, and continued in as reasonable a manner as could be expected, that I would very much like to know how the double deaths had come about – and how the owner of this distinguished building, the great Henry James, had permitted the children to go unsupervised for what must have been a good length of time without trying to save them from the consequences of their ghastly game? The unwelcome thought, that composition – novel-writing if you like – is prone to remove humane considerations from the practitioner was impossible to ignore.

‘Mr James was waiting for his friend Mr Bailey Saunders to arrive for luncheon on the 2nd of July that year, when the … the accident took place,' Mary Weld replied. ‘He was apprehensive that Mr Saunders, who was a man of very slender talent, would exhaust him and fail to leave at a civilized hour. Mr James's true friend Mr Anderson was due to arrive from Italy the next day. He wished, naturally, to keep as fresh as possible.'

‘So had you been … taking dictation that morning, Miss Weld?' I asked while feeling myself to have entered the works of Arthur Conan Doyle rather than the imaginative sphere of Henry James. ‘He was tired already. Perhaps … he failed to hear the cries of the children … ?'

‘The half-written story
The Beautiful Child
had been abandoned once and for all that morning,' the secretary replied plainly. ‘He had thought, when Mr and Mrs Smith first showed him Fanny's two cherubs' – and here, I saw, the already prim lips of Miss Weld curled further into an expression of disapproval and disgust – ‘he had imagined that the gender of the winning candidate to be a sitter to the much-praised Hugh Merrow would be decided without any further doubt. He would not choose between the boy and the girl: he would use first one and then the other as models for the portrait. But as it was, he was left a problem as insoluble as the one he had suffered previously. “What shall I do, Miss Weld?” he cried to me when little Russell Noakes had run out of the house, eyes staring like a buck rabbit, to break the news of the children's game and its terrible end. Mr James was distraught. But neither I nor he could come up with the answer, though earlier in the day, when the Smiths brought the little angels into his study, it did seem that a solution had been arrived at. Finally, of course, this turned out not to be the case …'

‘Mr James did nothing,' I said.

‘He left the children to fight it out, as it were … for they must have believed there was still some competition between them. And there was,' Mary Weld said simply. ‘No real solution had been arrived at after all …'

There was an uncomfortable silence while I pondered the replies to my questions. Surely if a doctor or surgeon had been rushed to the house it might have been possible to save the lives of the two innocents? It seemed foredoomed, this dreadful occurrence; and the lack of composure in my silence (as for Miss Weld, she seemed perfectly as calm as before) must have showed only too clearly, for the worthy amanuensis now leant towards me with a confidential air. ‘You must have been aware in your studies of the great author, Professor, that the girls in his unsurpassable stories are likely to endure, despite the vicissitudes visited on them by the plot and manner of execution. Boys, on the other hand, are more frail: they are liable to heart attacks and nervous collapses and seldom survive the tale devised for them.'

I have to admit that I was flabbergasted by this. People – flesh and blood, children, no less, were seen to be less important than characters in books! Their lives, if not suitable for the telling of a tale, worthless! ‘Miss Weld …' I put in here, for a further silence had descended, and I knew myself damned if I did not voice my deadly serious objections. ‘Mary!' I continued, and returned to my own century as I spoke. ‘I came here with the expectation of discovering the truth behind an unfinished story by Henry James. I must demand that you …' – and here my voice did indeed falter again, and I felt the superiority of the woman on the far side of the desk from me – ‘I must insist on knowing exactly how they did die.'

Now the miniature fire, as if bursting with indignation, gave one last flare up into the sooty black of the chimney-piece before subsiding dead into the grate. The sound disturbed us both for a second or two, and then Mary Weld spoke. ‘You have heard, Professor, of Russian roulette,' came quietly now in a shaking voice. ‘Only one true cartridge is placed in the chamber of the gun. The rest are blanks.'

‘Yes, of course,' I said; but I felt the fear come to seize my legs and then creep upwards to my throat, as I tried to speak. ‘How … how could two four-year-old children play such a game? How …'

‘Mr and Mrs Smith taught them. The girl fired first, and the boy was shot in the hand.'

‘The hand?' I said.

‘Yes. He lost the two middle fingers of his left hand,' Miss Weld said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Then he aimed the gun at his sister.' At last there seemed to be a muffled sob, somewhere deep in Mary Weld. ‘She fell and then died by the banister, the last step from the ground. But she knew it was her turn and now with her last strength she pulled the trigger. She had a deadly aim, as very young children sometimes show. The bullet killed her brother instantly.'

To retrace one's steps in the wake of shock – a crisis, if you like, in the very fundaments of one's being – can be compared to the effect the rereading of a great classic can have on both the brain and the body's resilience. I recognized, as I pulled myself from my chair in the infernal cupboard where
The Beautiful Child
had languished for over a century – where first Miss Weld and then Miss Bosanquet had ensured the unfinished tale remained as hidden as the secret means of access to the closet and where I had encountered for the first time the lineaments of fear – the after-shudder that had come with the first devouring of the great Jorge Luis Borges or James Joyce. I had wanted more; yet I wished desperately to run from the seismic effect the new masters had brought with them – and I had considered myself to be safe with Henry James. I would not stand lost in any wasteland; I would not weep and howl; with the urbane, ever-considerate lord of Lamb House, I would be protected from the modern, while avoiding the charge – if, say, I had been teaching the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson – of marooning myself in the past.

I walked; I left the woman, now stooped and grey, at her desk in the powder room off the drawing-room; and one last glance over my shoulder showed her untouched by my departure and lifeless and ancient, a figure in a costume museum, made of no more than stuffing and rags. I felt the power return to my body as I went across the room with its panelled walls and windowpanes now bright and sparkling in an interlude of the sun. I half ran, to catch the minutes before snow and sleet descended once more. For I knew now that I must return to my guests and rescue those who were in need – or even in danger. The main staircase, for all its awful hauntings, existed only to carry me at speed down into the hall. And here – as grateful as I have ever been in my life for anything – I stopped by the door to the telephone room and then went in.

Before I recount the details of my return to the hired monstrosity where I feared my poor niece Lou must lie close to death in her four-poster and my sister-in-law Mary, her face now, in my new understanding, a mask of concupiscence as the odious McGill kept her close by him, I should explain briefly that the story of Mr and Mrs Smith on that day in early July has been spelt out by biographers and historians and needs little further from me. I must stress that servants of the dead greats receive little attention from those who write about the immortals: not included in the index, they are often overlooked altogether. The Smiths were a slight exception: it is true that they have no existence at the back of recent books about Henry James – but Leon Edel gives some space to the fact that the manservant and his wife were at Lamb House – and had been sixteen years with their master (who, as if to give a cautious reference in the event of their leaving his employ) described them in a letter to his sister-in-law as ‘a queer mixture of alcohol and perfection'. Mrs Smith's sister, called to come to Rye and pack up the belongings of her drunken sibling, was housekeeper to the poet laureate Alfred Austin. There was respectability, as well as excess, in the family, then – but more than that is not recorded, and the couple vanished into obscurity after their banishment on the 2nd of July.