The Beautiful Child (2 page)

Or so, at least, he thought. I was unsurprised to see the loud-voiced member of the sofa sorority clamber to her feet and come over to McGill, even going so far as to grab him by the lapel of his distinctly fusty dinner jacket (we were staying in a country house where all the old standards were maintained, and I imagined the retired professor searching anxiously for a tuxedo before rushing to take the train down for the bank holiday).

‘So it
is
about children and evil,' insisted the young woman. ‘It's just one further turn, then?'

‘Oh yes,' said McGill in a tone suggesting that he was taken hostage and must supply this information in return for a rapid escape.

‘And what was the child?' McGill's assailant was clearly delighted at being the sole member of the group to hear fresh news. ‘A boy or a girl?'

‘Oh, neither,' replied McGill with a smile.

‘Neither? You mean, the child didn't know?' came back to him. ‘What on earth are you saying?'

But Douglas McGill, with my sister-in-law on his arm, had by now pushed out of the room into the hall, and the door closed firmly behind him.

As may be imagined, I didn't sleep particularly well that night. Our hosts, once breakfast had been dished up (they were a couple retired from media careers, lives of Rolling Stones, women's page editor on the
Telegraph),
were not slow to notice the lack of enthusiasm at the suggestion of either a trip to the sea or to Rye or Sandwich, if we were more in the mood for viewing quaint little houses. Or – in the case of Mary and Lou, who had by now joined me at the breakfast table – the simple sybaritic experience of a new oystery down near the erstwhile home of Joseph Conrad.

‘Honestly, Lou, it would do you good,' came from the couple who had been kind enough to suggest a New Year's visit, in return (I must confess) for agreeing a merger with a showbiz literary agency they were about to set up. I – and Mary – would share our knowledge of books, plays and the like with out hosts and in return become shareholders in the company. What could be easier, for my sister-in-law and myself at least? We had lived and breathed literature all our lives, and the older you get in the writing business the more you realize how pathetically little people know about the gems of our civilization. With the exception of Douglas McGill – who could now be seen crossing the hall and making for the dining-room – not one person last night on the sofa by the fire could have identified a page of a classic's prose or correctly named an author.

As if he had read my mind McGill began his day with a reference to Ford Madox Ford and the extraordinary efforts made by Henry James, out on a walk with his secretary, to avoid bumping into him in the meadows near Rye. ‘It can't be too far from here,' McGill enthused, while Mary filled a cup with coffee and went over to the window to join him. ‘It does amuse, the thought of the Master crouching in a runnel, feet stuck in the bog. Worthy of the pencil of Max Beerbohm, one might find oneself thinking.'

‘Max Beerbohm preferred to depict people in drawing-rooms or at parties,' said Lou from her place at table. ‘I don't think he ever went outdoors if he could help it.'

‘You're right,' Douglas concurred. He marched forward to greet Lou then stopped dead in his tracks. ‘My dear girl …' and it seemed at first that the garrulous professor was all of a sudden deprived of speech. ‘My dear Lou, are you in good health this morning? Are you all right?'

‘Come, come, Professor,' our hostess said, in the hope, perhaps, of defusing the look of surprise on my niece's face. ‘This is hardly the way to greet a young lady in a country house. When we're here we all revert to being Edwardians, you know. Knickerbockers and flappers apart, of course, we stick to exquisite manners.'

‘I must apologize,' McGill said. ‘But …' and here he looked across at the daughter of his late best friend, his features still showing concern. ‘It's just that, Lou, I have never seen you so pale – do forgive me please.' And now, as Lou, further embarrassed by the arrival in the breakfast room of the outspoken leader of last night's sofa brigade, lowered her head and appeared to examine her uneaten toast and marmalade, McGill found himself supported in his comments by our hostess (whose frank stares at the girl were far from the Edwardian etiquette just recently prescribed).

‘Lou looks as if she has seen a ghost,' the lady of the (media) manor ruthlessly went on. Then, to Lou herself, ‘My dear, why don't we go for a long walk together – through the marshy meadows, if you like, where poor Henry cringed in a ditch rather than get caught by Ford Madox Ford and engaged in conversation …'

‘But perhaps she did see a ghost,' said a quiet voice. A smallish man in an ancient tweed jacket had entered the dining-room behind McGill, but the arrival of last night's Ladies of the Couch, a general outburst of talk and the appearance of two further jugs of coffee had obscured him.

Ah, I thought to myself, as this nondescript figure made his way over to McGill and stood looking anxiously up at him (the Professor was at least a foot taller). Here is the story Douglas wishes to entertain us with over the New Year. And – I must admit now, though I was later to change my mind with greater emphasis than has ever occurred to me in my life – my additional thoughts on the subject were hardly illuminating. Good God, are we going to be treated to a watered-down version of
The Turn of the Screw?
I said to myself and barely concealed (for which I must express my regrets to my hostess) the most elephantine of yawns.

As may be imagined, it took an unsurprisingly long time for cups of coffee to be drunk, for toast to be buttered and for the ladies to suppress their innate desire to gossip through everything. Lou, with my assistance, found a window seat where she could sit half-hidden by long looped-back curtains. Mary, blushing slightly, was beckoned to by Douglas McGill and took the next chair to his at the table. Stephen – that was all I heard of the name of the antiquarian bookseller invited by the Professor to bring his ‘evidence' of a haunting – stood on a stool provided by the hostess (he would otherwise have been invisible). And finally, to the accompaniment of a soft curtain of snowflakes beyond the dining-room window, the audience fell quiet.

In this great Edwardian house, with all its expanse of glass and imitation oak furniture and its overbearing arrangements of framed photographs and gleaming pianos, my fifteen-year-old niece Lou was the only member of the audience to recognize the name of the author of the paper about to be read out.

‘Theodora Bosanquet,' began my niece, ‘was the successor of Mary Weld as amanuensis to Henry James – his typewriter, as the job was known in those days.'

There was bound to be laughter at this – and, sure enough, from the direction of the low pouffe where the ladies had finally settled themselves, it came. ‘Typewriter – I must say I wouldn't have liked to be known as that,' exclaimed the Leader of the Yamamoto-clad Pack. ‘It would make one feel like a machine.'

Lou, I was glad to see, paid no attention to this witty comment and continued with the facts. Miss Bosanquet had entered the employment of Mr James in the autumn of 1907 at Lamb House, Rye. She had mastered – here I saw McGill smile at the use of a word so strongly connected to the famous author, and his young antiquarian friend looked flustered as he ruffled his pages, waiting to read – she had learnt to type at speed on the Remington within little more than seventeen days of the commencement of her employment there.

‘So what did she look like?' demanded not one of the ladies, as you might expect, but the hostess in charge of this great architectural disaster herself. ‘How did she go down with the great man then? Most men have affairs with their secretaries. Could she have tempted one such as Henry James to fall for her charms?'

‘Yes, do tell us – it's her ghost we're going to be told about, aren't we?' (This from one of the young ladies of the night before. More soberly dressed than the rest, perhaps she wanted to be seen as intelligent. McGill, I noted, gave her a patronizing smile.)

‘Miss Bosanquet was in her early twenties when she was engaged by James to take dictation of his novels,' Lou said. ‘You ask what she looked like, and I expect you'd like to know what she wore?'

‘Yes, yes,' said several of the pouffe-seated harpies. Clearly Lou's sarcastic tone had been lost on them, and they envisaged Edwardian corsets, huge skirts and flower-and-fruit-laden hats: a ghost in fancy dress with no resemblance to the young woman who worked so assiduously for the great writer until his death in 1916.

‘Miss Bosanquet favoured tweed jackets and skirts,' Lou said solemnly. ‘Her appearance was described by Mr James as boyish.'

‘Oh, that explains it!' cried my tasteless hostess. For the first time I wished we hadn't agreed to do business with her: I could see the woman would make a travesty of anything she got her hands on, and I dreaded
The Turn of the Screw
which she had proudly said would be put on as a ‘counter' to the Aldeburgh Festival next summer.

‘Henry James was bi, no?' This query came on the minuscule screen of what must undoubtedly have been the smallest and most expensive mobile phone ever made. (I, as a Luddite, as I believe we're called by the denizens of this Brave New World, took some time to realize I had been texted – the difference between the usual process and this one being that Miss Harrods Couture herself still held the gadget in her outstretched hand. The words showed black against the grey background.)

‘Bi,' she shouted at me and, receiving no answer, directed her attentions to Douglas McGill. ‘Bi usually means gay, no?'

But the good professor, I was unsurprised to see, refused to be drawn. I wondered at a lack of cancellation of the whole event, once it was known who and what the other guests had turned out to be – but then I remembered that the modest young antiquarian, with his rare books in Bell Street in Paddington and his earnest desire to contribute to the study of English literature, could not have been put off – without a charge of unkindness laid at McGill's door, certainly. And McGill was a warm-hearted man.

‘Yes, Miss Bosanquet herself entrusted this account of the dictation she received from Henry James to my uncle at the bookshop,' our guest reader now informed us. ‘As late as 1963 – indeed it was at the time of the Lady Chatterley trial, as my uncle recalled, his friend Theodora Bosanquet deposited with him the latest novel from the voice of the Master …'

‘The year 1963?' Even McGill, who had presumably been unaware of this claim, was unable to conceal his incredulity. ‘My dear Stephen, as you must know as well as anyone, Henry James died in 1916. How can you possibly believe that Miss Bosanquet was not also the possessor of this knowledge? Was she …' and here McGill's voice faltered, as if he had become suddenly aware of the possibility of forgery, of plagiarism, of some kind of damaged goods being on offer here: shocking even to customers of so low an intellectual calibre as the Pouffe and Ottoman Ladies and (I regret to say) as our own hosts in the Media Fortress.

Stephen, in his battered jacket and with his wispy brown-grey hair now more disarranged than ever, did, all the same, hold out against the professor's charge, implicit only at this stage, of dishonesty. ‘Miss Bosanquet continued to take dictation from Henry James for decades after his death,' the bookseller said bravely – but in so low a voice that there was a general scramble from low floor seating to a table surrounded by hard chairs, so the opulently furnished drawing-room of the mock castle resembled, all of a sudden, a school room.

‘A gay ghostwriter, a woman known as a typewriter – what more can be coming our way?' cried our hostess delightedly. ‘Next we'll be told that the books from another world will be bound in ectoplasm.' And after a spurt of hearty laughter she proceeded to ask in the most serious of tones whether this Miss Theodora had also a haunted Remington which conveyed the deathless prose of the Master as proof that genius cannot die – something in that vein at least.

But the ladies, I noted, now hung on the words of the antiquarian from Bell Street and began to scribble on notepads – as if a book club meeting or readers' group was under way and they could discover the meaning of life as well as (just possibly) finding a future husband – though on this occasion, with the exception of McGill and myself, no bachelors were in evidence.

‘Yes,' said Stephen, whose confidence had grown, I was pleased to see, since the interest of at least six ladies had become clear to him. ‘The Remington was succeeded, after the death of the great writer, by an Ouija board. Miss Bosanquet transcribed his tales and novels from this – in her flat in Chelsea,' Stephen added modestly, as if the proof of an earthly abode would convince his listeners of the reality of his strange account.

‘But what of the child?' the leader of the newly baptized Literary Ladies pressed him. ‘We were told that something more corrupt …'