The Beautiful Child (13 page)

I lifted the telephone receiver and found myself giving the number (Rye 1) to an operator whose accent and courtesy informed me that I could not escape the first years of the twentieth century so easily. I was connected after what seemed an age – and this filled with the voices and sounds so movingly described by Marcel Proust in his
Temps Perdu
lyrical descriptions of the young women at the telephone switchboard. I confess that hearing my former foe, the brash young woman I had nicknamed Salome, brought tears of relief to my eyes. For I had seen what a writer's powerful imagination could do, and I had feared the girl would be stranded in the basement kitchen of Lamb House in eternity, that she would continue for ever as a maid called Fanny whose two children had suffered torture and finally death at the hands of the butler and the housekeeper, Mr and Mrs Smith.

‘How're you doin'?' came in Salome's maddening American mockney. ‘When're you comin' back, Jan?'

I stepped back into the hall like a man newly in love. The sun had been replaced by scurrying clouds, but I had no fear of walking back drenched to the skin if necessary. I understood that those I had left in the mock Detmar Blow confection a few miles down the road from the Master's home in Rye might be transformed in one way or another – and I was ready for it. Those who were no more than innocent participants in a New Year's Eve quiz game would have left by train for London, I reckoned; those guilty of the crimes of cupidity, exploitation and betrayal manifested by the great author's protagonists might at first be unrecognizable. But, as I say, I was well prepared for my battle – and if it was to be waged against the man of genius I had taught and revered all my adult life, so be it. People, as I now knew, were more important than characters in books.

The storm caught me as I panted up the last stretch of cobbled hill to the virtual reality of my hosts' Big Brother nightmare. Hailstones the size of the proverbial golf ball took their aim at my head (I am, unfortunately, bald). A mean deluge of icy rain came down to soften the after-effects of being shot at by an amateur sniper – for this was how my mind registered the attack. But the more liquid form of ice caused the greater discomfort, trickling and then pouring down my neck after penetrating the collar of my coat. That I myself might be unrecognizable to the guests I had left behind did occur to me – but Salome, dear Salome of the discount and the vintage revival, had known my voice, and I prayed she would be there to greet me on arrival.

I must have been about fifty yards from the house when I saw, through the spectacular shower of rock-hard ice balls which still descended on me and around me, that a woman was in the front garden (this replete with the dreary shrubs deemed essential to those horrific institutions the care home and the prep school) and that she held a bundle in her arms.

Exhausted as I was, I increased my pace – and as I came nearer I saw the car and its ancient driver. It was the car that had ferried me to the infernal torture chamber of the Master's house. And the woman – yes, she was Mrs Archdean, formerly Jasmine – pulled open a door at the back of the vehicle and climbed in. She saw me as I skirted an obstreperous rhododendron, and she leant forward and tapped the driver's shoulder. Then the ghostly chariot coughed into life and lurched down the steep street leading away from us and towards the centre of Rye – and Lamb House.

‘So they will all go there,' I said aloud, and my lips froze as I spoke. And they will never return, I thought. They will be his for ever. And I wept hot tears and knew that, like the rain which came down still, they would turn hard and freeze. I, like the rest, would never get back to real life. And as I saw the black glass of the windows in the media money-spinners' palace I knew they had already gone: young Lou, whose baby had been taken in order to finish the story; her mother Mary or Madame Merle; the dreadful McGill who was the spoiled, petulant Gilbert Osmond, a fop who feigned love for young Isabel Archer and married her for her money …

The house was as empty as I had known it would be. The stool where the middle-aged bibliophile from Paddington had stood to read aloud from Miss Bosanquet's diary had been kicked over. Remains of the fancy array of canapés the media gang prefer to wholesome food lay abandoned on the dining table. Flung on to an armchair were the maid Fanny's clothes – it was as if a sudden eviction order had emptied the media centre, which, like its occupants, had turned out to be a figment of a third-rate imagination.

I stood in the hall and gazed up at the staircase which had led me to Lou's room. Thunder had come to join the evil orchestra of gale and gust, and an ecliptic darkness fell, leaving the unlit house as black as its imitation Gilbert Scott windows. I turned to find my way back to the front door, but I was afraid I would stumble. I waited and was glad the lightning which now came right in to the vaulted hall had not been waiting also – for me, for its final, fatal strike.

The figure at the top of the stairs could only just be made out in the dark. It was coming down – that I knew – it had a face, I knew, a face that was the Master's and also mine, and yet it belonged to neither of us.

It reached the bottom step. The house was silent now, the thunder had gone and the rain and hail had ceased.

It came across the hall to me. I took the hand in mine and ran my finger across the soft, yielding gap where once its third and fourth digits had been. The figure covered his face now with his other hand, and we stood there together in the hall.

The fire came in a red glow. I thought at first it must be emanating from electrical equipment: the ‘Camera! Action!' I had grown used to in my television lectures on Henry James and his world would come next and ghosts would disperse – I would believe I was waking from a dream.

But the crackling and snapping, the whoosh of the flames as they spread through the deadly shrubs outside, soon convinced me that the blaze must have started in the attic, where faulty wiring in Edwardian times produced only too often a burnt-out shell for the proud owner. There was nothing artificial about the light the fire cast – and no special effects in the sudden ominous crunch when the hall itself succumbed to the thrusting flames. A lurid luminescence filled the house now. My companion had departed, a mass of falling paper from the library overhead obliterating his slow self-important walk up the stairs. Theses, scripts, new editions of the novels and stories, notes and summaries, first editions and the New York edition, American and English editions – all prepared, as I knew, for the six-parter about his life and the final exposition of his sexual proclivities as shown in the newly discovered (unfinished) story
The Beautiful Child.

The television programmes are due for transmission October next year. Some parts are already cast with well-known actors. The role of the Master has yet to be filled.

V
isitors to Lamb House will be pleasantly surprised by the tasteful décor and new panelling throughout the building; they will also be impressed by the cultured woodwork on display in Henry James's study, the small powder room (access through the main reception room: no more than two visitors at a time) where the author's unfinished short story
The Beautiful Child
was discovered, along with the diaries of Theodora Bosanquet and Mary Weld.

Those wishing to acquire the audio of the memoir by Professor Jan Sunderland should place an order in the ground-floor office, once the telephone room. Here it is also possible to search for Bosanquet and Weld on the internet and instigate a search for the relatives of the butler and housekeeper of Mr James's day, Mr and Mrs Smith.

Professor Sunderland's entry in Wikipedia can be found here, this taken up largely by his bibliography of Henry James. The conditions laid down by his estate include the proviso that the last paragraph of the memoir itself must be heard by any visitor to Lamb House interested in supernatural phenomena, both auditory and olfactory (
www.orgghostsense/beautifulchild
). The last passage of the Professor's memoir may be read online for a fee of £25.

We reproduce a part of it here:

My last visit to Lamb House took place on a winter evening just after Christmas 2011. The newly appointed curator, anxious to meet the last surviving scholar with a direct link to the epoch made famous by Henry James, invited me to wander where I chose in the now-restored and much-cherished retreat of the Master.

This I did, leaving the games of Hide and Seek, the dancing and carol-singing to those who knew nothing of the experiences I had suffered at Rye. To the young guests down in the Garden Room, now a media centre, literature was dead, along with the impossible convoluted style of the long-ago author. I was one of the very few to remember the passionate tone of Mary Weld when she spoke of her employer's melodious voice – and almost certainly the only biographer of the great man to have visited a certain bookshop in Paddington, a year or so after the fire at our rented house at Rye, and purchase Miss Bosanquet's ‘ending' to James's unfinished story. I regretted the outlay, of course, when I saw the mishmash received from the ‘other side': an amalgam of romantic novelette (Bosanquet) and frankly unbelievable verbal dithering supposedly from James himself. There was no solution to the problem; and if I may be so heartless as to point out that Fanny's twins died in vain, then this has been my sad conclusion.

It was just on midnight on Christmas Eve when, standing on the first-floor landing, I realized the house had become quiet: the guests, hoping for Christmas stockings, had left.

I knew the curator, who slept with his wife in a recently erected bungalow in the grounds, would be happy to unlock the door of the Garden Room so I could wander, one last time, in the place where Henry James had paced, the setting for his inspiration.

But, once there, I lingered – first in the well of the stairs and then, with a sudden sense of my own bravery in conquering fear, by the door of the four-postered room which had been the chamber of the Master.

I heard nothing but the patter of rain, and with the rain, released by the giving and contracting of the wall – who knows? – came the aroma of stale alcohol.

I turned and walked back to the stairs, then out through the hall into the garden. It was a dry evening – the downpour had left no trace – and stars twinkled frostily over the sleeping town.

F
rom 1896 on, owing to the onset of rheumatism, Henry James was forced to give up writing in longhand. From then onwards he dictated his novels to a secretary who took down his words directly on to a typewriter. The first typist who was with James in this fashion was Mary Weld, who worked with him from 1896 until 1904. Her successor was Theodora Bosanquet. It was she who made the observation that when James struggled with his own convoluted prose style that he ‘liked to be able to relieve the tension of a difficult sentence by glancing down the street, sometimes hailing a passing friend from his window, or watching a motorcar pant up the sharp little slope'. During these pauses Miss Bosanquet read a book.

In Rye Henry James was out of reach of most visitors. While he was there he spotted Lamb House, which was built in 1723 by the Mayor of Rye, James Lamb. It opens directly on to a quiet street in the ‘little old cobble-stoned, grass-grown, red-roofed town, on the summit of its mildly pyramidal hill', according to the National Trust, the organization that eventually took it over.

The early Georgian house is small, yet elegant, with a wide oak stair, brick walls (red bricks varied with black, giving a deep rose colour), and a nine-foot-high front door. It seemed the answer to his wish for a retreat between May and November. In September 1897 he signed a lease for Lamb House and moved there permanently in June 1898.

In 1900 he acquired the freehold for £2,000.

Not far off were Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford and the young American Stephen Crane, who provided the stimulus of other writers. It was here, at Lamb House, that Henry James wrote his three late masterpieces,
The Wings of the Dove,
1902,
The Ambassadors,
1903, and
The Golden Bowl,
1904, which earned him his nickname the Master.