The Beautiful Child (3 page)

‘Evil,' put in the soberly dressed girl who had been jotting furiously on her pad. ‘We expected a story of …'

‘Spirits,' put in my hostess's sceptical and not very appealing husband, the owner of the Media Mansion. ‘Which reminds me … What would you all say to a shaker of Bloody Marys? Isn't it better than going out for a walk in the marsh in this kind of weather?'

I suppose I can say that I expected a roar – or a sigh, given the affected manners of most of the participants in this search for a further turn of the tormentor's screw – a cry, anyway, of agreement at their host's suggestion of a good strong drink. Yet – and I expect any reader worth their salt could have foreseen this – the entire room now hung on the words of Stephen and his tale of old books. Faith in the authenticity of his and Miss Bosanquet's testimony was unshakeable. It says a lot about the power of stories and the need for narrative – something of the kind.

‘The child,' McGill said, rather pedantically I thought. Why must he answer every question? What is the sense of making a bunch like this into a tutorial group for undergraduates? Academics are like that. But I had no desire to halt the momentum of the strangest tale I ever heard told any more than Professor McGill did. It was just that he felt his duty lay in the expounding of theories to anyone he saw.

‘Last night we were told there was no child,' said the serious one in grey – and for a moment I saw her as Jane Eyre, escaped from her bad education and the following addiction to shopping. ‘So is there – or isn't there, please?'

‘In a way.' McGill hedged his bets.

‘But whose child was it – if it did exist?' demanded my stand-in for a governess. ‘And what sex was it anyway?'

‘Oh yes,' said the soft-voiced Stephen, and now he held the crumpled pages up nearer to his eyes. ‘Miss Bosanquet's account with inform us …'

‘Of the gender?' insisted the leader of our surprising new group.

‘Oh, that was for her predecessor to decide,' Stephen replied. Then he began to read.

I
t was a question of revisiting the past, I suppose, and finding it so utterly – so irredeemably – different from the present that only the sight of a small face peering from a window in the house I had once known so well could return me to my years as amanuensis to the great Henry James.

It was Russell Noakes: he was the owner of that small face, of course he was; and he ran – I always remember him running – to greet me as if my absence had been brief instead of the thirty-five years that had elapsed since I left Rye for the last time. It had been a sad, half-demented period when the Master was ill and rambled in his dictation, and we had known for some months that he must return to London, to his doctors – and the illness that would finally carry him away. The diminutive ‘houseboy', as my colonially raised predecessor Mary Weld had labelled Noakes – this on the occasion of my ‘taking over' as guardian of the words of Henry James – seemed as unaware of the passage of time as I was acutely conscious of it. The railings in front of the house had been stripped away as part of the recent war effort, and though the Master's one-time residence had been acquired by the National Trust there was no evidence of renovation – though on the upper floor from which Noakes had espied me a pot of white paint balanced vertiginously on a window sill and a brush more reminiscent of a child's small paintbrush than of the serious, sensible utensil required for beautifying the exterior of a fine building such as this poked out of a milk bottle at its side. It was a shame, really, that the years of my absence from the house, which ran from a period of Edwardian opulence to the era of austerity following the cessation of hostilities, had used the former home of the world's greatest writer so badly. I knew, of course, that an infinitely inferior author, E.F. Benson, had been owner after the Master's death of this shrine to imagination and perseverance. But somehow Lamb House had not benefited from his occupancy: the place was, quite simply, a wreck.

So this account, penned by one who has suffered the fears and dangers of a haunting, may dwell, despite my best intentions, on the changes visible in my own appearance, thanks to the passing years; and perhaps because the dwarf-like Noakes, on leaping from the front door and maintaining a steady trot as he came up to me, hand outstretched, exclaimed that I was just as he remembered me, so that I suffered an overwhelming sense of the atmosphere of those past days and saw myself this time – and to my indescribable horror – as a revenant.

Readers of this slim pamphlet will need to know what took me more than a third of a century to try to forget; and what, at the same time, my dreams were unable to resist portraying. Those who become engrossed in the story (if any) will find their chief interest lies in the fact of the presence of the Master at every twist and turn in the tale: both the conceiver and the subject of this odd sketch, his heroism and – I fear to confess – his occasional cowardice haunt the pages more surely than any spectre got up by a mediocre writer. (T. Bailey Saunders, inexplicably a friend of James, comes to mind, but he is not yet ready to be explained.)

So I address those ‘Jamesians' who survive the efflorescence of the second rate since the War and know the Master and revere him – though in either department they cannot and never will equal my expertise in identifying a sentence from a novel or a line from a much-maligned drama,
Guy Domville,
a play that caused James much grief.

I came to Lamb House in 1907. My memoir, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the Hogarth Press, gives the details of my arrival as a day in October (I had to return to London for a few days as an aunt was ill and temporarily needed attention, so the exact date of the start of my employment is uncertain). I have described my slight surprise at the lack of interest Mr James demonstrated in his wardrobe – for I had expected a perfectly turned-out gentleman. But genius makes its own rules, evidently, even when it comes to the owner's dress sense or lack of it. I will not forget my surprise at the genial yellow of the checked waistcoat and the jacket which rode noisomely over it. (Astute readers of my slim volume of reminiscence will detect that I, too, Theodora Bosanquet, am a writer, though I lacked the courage in the Master's lifetime to confide my secret ambition to him.) The small leatherbound work in which I set out life at Lamb House in the early years of the twentieth century is not the sole constituent of my
oeuvre.
I have no intention of going down in history as a compiler of inventories. But readers appear more titillated by the number of secretarial tables set out ready for Mr James's inspiration in this delightful old house than in my memories. There were eight. I do not write to provoke criticism of an artist so revered, so – by the time I succeeded Miss Weld – so
worshipped,
one might say, by the discerning, the highly educated, the sensitive who made up the readership of the late Henry James. Some, the more vulgar you might say, can wonder at the need for these tables in every room and on each landing: surely, as the Master dictated his pieces, he could hold the proper word as a diver can hold his breath, admittedly only for a short amount of time – but for long enough to allow a gentle walk (out of the Garden Room and round the walled garden, say) and back again to continue dictation? But no – as only I know and instinctively understood from the very first day of my engagement at Miss Petheridge's Secretarial Bureau in London – there must on no account be any impediment to the Great Writer's flow. To lose his place, as one might put it, could endanger the whole delicately balanced vast construction of his sentences. To suggest a word at those rare times when the correct one had eluded him would be the equivalent of dropping a stitch in the knitting of a multi-coloured magnificent scarf. But here I digress – I wish only to emphasize that Miss Weld (who did not experience the good fortune, despite her wealthy family, of becoming, as I did, a graduate of University College) had clearly expected, on the occasion of my meeting her at Lamb House, an expression of astonishment at the carefully prepared tables, and I made none. ‘You will find Mr James's voice melodious,' this young woman had gone on to inform me. And I remember wondering briefly whether a secret passion had grown up, as the handsome Miss Weld traipsed after her employer on one of his more ambulatory days. But this thought was soon dismissed. No plot devised by the Master, either then or now, would be so banal as to incorporate the
amours
of a typist and her dictator.

So it was that I found myself back at Lamb House – or, rather, Lamb House with all the magic gone from it and the low-statured Russell Noakes running ahead of me while spouting his own life story. He had applied to the National Trust and had been appointed as caretaker. There was no news yet of refurbishment or the loving care the historic building would need. There was simply the memory of the distinguished residence to keep one going, with Noakes like a moving key on a typewriter as he jumped ahead from room to room. (The tables had all gone, of course; but the thought of eight bureaux groaning with the work of E.F. Benson was enough to make this far from regrettable.)

Now, as we entered the Green Room, where Mr James spoke his work in winter – there was less room than the Garden Room for pacing or walling up a complex much thought-over story, but it was, quite simply, warmer than downstairs – my dwarf guide stopped abruptly in his tracks and placed his finger on his lips. In the sudden silence the house seemed even colder and less inviting than before, and I found myself shivering, as if some part of me knew that we had entered dangerous territory.

‘I suppose all members of the old staff have not come back here to serve the memory of the late Master,' I asked in as jocular a tone as possible. ‘The housekeeper, Mrs Paddington – is she … still with us, or even perhaps in the pantry now, setting out the cakes?' I knew as I spoke that there was no question of finding dear Mrs Paddington here – she who had worked miracles with the tradesmen's books in reducing the Master's outgoings. Henry James was not rich. The housekeeper and butler in service at the time of Mary Weld's engagement, Mr and Mrs Smith, had apparently done the opposite, changing water, as it were, into wine, but Mary Weld, shocked by a certain episode at the start of her time here, would vouchsafe no more than that.

Russell Noakes shook his head and remained silent. Standing on the parquet before me, I was reminded of a surly child. ‘I've come to find something,' I continued to address the little houseman. ‘It will be in Mary Weld's desk – in her private study. Can you take me there, please?'

I turned my head to the right and left, as if demonstrating to an idiot that the object I sought must be in one clearly signposted direction.

But I must have closed my eyes, if only for a wink for – as I focused on the dear old room, with its panelling and the shy creeper for ever at the window and the noble fireplace against which the Master had leant so often, in his painful search for a missing word – I saw there was no one there now: Russell Noakes had gone. What was probably a scratching behind the wainscot had me hoping for a second that the kindly housekeeper was here after all – even that Noakes had run off to find her. Yet I knew I had heard no footsteps. The room had grown unbearably cold. I was alone in Lamb House, and a winter evening darkened in the sky before the fulfilling of a day.

T
he audience at my hosts' opulent rented château had changed during this brief reading by the young-old messenger from Bell Street. Most of the fashionistas, as I believe their strange race of banters and bulimics are known – both these terms supplied by my niece Lou on a previous trip to Canterbury to introduce her to the
Tales,
the tapestries and the treat (even if she had outgrown it somewhat) of Eggs Benedict at a pretentious little restaurant – most of the young ladies had gone, leaving a table and empty chairs. My hard-working Jane Eyre type, unsurprisingly, remained: after all, something new about Henry James might come out of our time together here, and she could bring it up at her book-club meetings: everyone, at least, had heard of
The Turn of the Screw.

The other ‘student' determined to stick out even the halting feeble-voiced reading from the visiting bibliomane
was
surprising: the flamboyantly dressed leader of the group that was now dispersed and hurrying frantically to London to visit the January sales: my
bête noire,
as I had privately named her, who now stared across the room at me with an intensity which, had I chosen to match it, could have resulted in a gaol sentence for sexual harassment.

And, yes, my sister-in-law was still here and allowing, so I perceived, the over-attentive Douglas McGill to shift his chair every few minutes nearer to hers (I decided to ignore this, but I confess I was not pleased).