The Beautiful Child (4 page)

Then there was my rollicking hostess and her bitter-looking husband. What were they making of this strange deposition? I wondered. Could it join the list of Summer Reads on television? Or would it be held over until the festive season when horror takes possession of the bookshop shelves and people gaze into the black hole of a seasonal despair? Was it a ghost story anyway?

‘Is this meant to be frightening?' my
bête noire
demanded. She was faultless when it came to picking up the concerns or anxieties of those around her. My hostess rolled her eyes, as Salome (so I named my overdressed enemy) went on relentlessly. ‘I mean, is this Miss Bosanquet trying to act out the part of the governess in
The Turn of the Screw?
Is the disappearing servant supposed to signify her hysteria – or what?'

As I was handing a silent if reluctant compliment to the mini-clad, high-booted nightmare, I saw in the bay window the sight I had tried to persuade myself over the past evening and morning that I would never see. McGill's hand – a largish white hand with a faint nicotine blush – landed on my sister-in-law's lap. It wriggled up to the knee and sat there, as if awaiting instructions.

‘Surely,' said my Jane Eyre at Lowood lookalike, ‘Miss Bosanquet was simply about to inform us that, as a member of the Institute of Psychic Research, she was more able than most to recognize a manifestation from the other side. If our reader would kindly continue, I am positive we shall understand what Miss Bosanquet saw – or didn't see …'

It was then, looking over to the pale secondhand book dealer, that I felt sympathy – if only in the most superficial sense – with the typist's reaction to the disappearing Russell Noakes. Oh, I saw the preservationist of the ex-amanuensis's manuscript all right: his mousy hair, white at the sides, his unappealing, fusty corduroys – but I saw for the first time, too, that the curved window seat with the looped curtain, which had on the previous evening almost entirely concealed my niece Lou, was definitely not occupied by her now. The unpleasant realization that McGill's surreptitious and then increasingly obvious movements had released the curtain from its sash shocked me, just as the poor typist must have been when confronted by the sudden desertion of Lamb House by Noakes. Where could Lou be? It would have been most unlike her to stay in bed all morning … and she had wanted to continue the ‘exploration', as she named it, of a possible ghost story to surpass Henry James's own.

‘Miss Bosanquet was told to go to Rye to recover a manuscript left by her predecessor, Mary Weld,' said Mr Bell Street – and, seeing no objection to his continuing the reading, he lifted the recently deposed pages, shifted on the reproduction art deco stool that formed his podium and cleared his throat.

‘Why don't we accept the sad truth about Miss Bosanquet,' came McGill's unwelcome but unfortunately authoritative voice from the bay-window seat. ‘It is a known fact that dear Theodora, despite her university education, believed in spooks. She sent you a book, Stephen, did she not?
The Earthen Vessel
by Pamela Grey, one of those tiresome spirit-seekers who made up to Sir Oliver Lodge after the Great War. What we need to know is whether our aspirational amanuensis found anything new by the Master during her visit to Lamb House.'

If we had not been joined at precisely that point by a couple, both middle-aged and fair-haired, who tiptoed into the long vaulted dining-room, thus disturbing proceedings radically (tiptoeing, to my mind, is invariably aggressively meant), I daresay I would have found myself rising and going over to confront McGill. He would have been doubly confounded, I have no doubt, at my reminder that an audience had gathered to hear a new ghost story spun from an old one; and by my intended air of stupefaction at seeing his hand on my sister-in-law's knee (for there it remained, I am sorry to say).

As it was, introductions were noisily conducted by our hostess. Mike and Jasmine had driven down from Edinburgh and been delayed by heavy snow. Mike taught creative writing at Manchester, Jasmine mumbled something about being on a PR trip for her novel – but either I misheard her or her reference to spiritualism in Brontë, a paper entitled ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!' appeared to be the chief reason for her invitation to this East Sussex crenellated ghastliness. She and her husband had arrived with the impeccable bad timing found in inferior writers: you could see she was a gusher of an unstoppable stream of consciousness, while Mike lay silent around a crushing and final full stop.

‘You haven't missed much,' shrilled our party-giver, as the probability of this couple having been invited to meet me with an eye on future culture programmes began to sink in. ‘And may I introduce Mr … Mr Paddington …'

It was annoying to find oneself laughing along with Doug McGill at this clanger. Not many people, after all, knew or remembered Henry James's housekeeper to have been a Mrs Paddington: she had replaced the appalling Mr and Mrs Smith after the débâcle of a luncheon party in 1902. My irritation was increased when I saw that our shared laughter appeared to have lent confidence to McGill's hand, which had now crept behind the bay-window seat and gripped my sister-in-law by the waist. The antiquarian bookseller, however, appeared to have seen and heard nothing, neither misnomer nor the sight of his patron McGill's scandalous behaviour. He had come here to read; and even Jasmine's cooing and long-winded refusal of a Bloody Mary followed by the mock-reluctant acceptance of the drink would not shake him from his determination.

Given Miss Bosanquet's uniquely maddening style, both self-congratulatory (‘I can pride myself on being the possessor of a finely tuned consciousness second only, I may hazard, to that of the great Henry James') and making extraordinary claims of the psychic results of the Master's ‘slow, deliberate voice' as it ‘played over her', I have here taken the liberty of synopsizing her account of the visit to Lamb House (the first part at least: I was unaware then that there was more). As it is, the events described are obviously incredible – however, McGill it was who sent for the rare bookman from west London in order to entertain us over the festive season; and McGill it will be who suffers the scorn and disbelief of the audience collected here on a day of rapidly worsening weather: fog and probably snow are forecast. As their reactions, like the climate, were likely to become increasingly unfavourable, my ex-colleague Professor McGill was certain to absent himself from our little circle; and my sister-in-law would no longer be the recipient of his inappropriate advances. Together we would go in search of Lou, who must, I feared, be suffering from some sudden reminder of her father's recent demise – or possibly, as her pallor betokened yesterday, she did, unlike the ludicrous suffragette-cum-spiritualist Theodora Bosanquet, actually convince herself – poor Lou – that she had seen her father's ghost.

As I rose to my feet, eyes still firmly fixed on the window seat and on dear Mary's flustered, embarrassed expression at the actions of McGill, a couple of women's voices rang out. Salome, my Prada-robed horror, spoke first, then Jasmine, who was fast gathering a status only just below Salome in the hatred stakes. ‘Can she explain how she gets these messages from the Other Side?' followed by Jasmine's announcement that a fictionalized biography of Henry James, with Miles and Flora as the children he had always longed to have – ‘Can we discuss a Channel Four programme now planned?' – was aired raucously.

I did my best. Miss Bosanquet received her instructions from the Master by means of a machine not so dissimilar to her famous Remington, an Ouija board. (At this, Jasmine insisted on opening her ‘Jane!' paper, but our hostess demanded patience, while Stephen from Bell Street simply stood on his dais and looked as if he had forgotten entirely how to move.)

I explained as best I could how ‘planchette', as this form of communication with the spirit world is known, actually works – if one can put it that way, of course. The letters are arranged on a flat surface, an ‘arm' of wood swings round and points to them, forming sentences that are answers to the players' requests.

‘And what did Miss Bosanquet want to know?' demanded Salome. (Whether she expected a quick, efficient guide to shop-opening times one can barely surmise.)

So here we discovered the truth; and, despite all my pleas, there was no halting McGill's plan. He had only to begin, ‘Henry James, according to Miss Bosanquet, dictated several novels in the decades after his death … ‘ for the whole room, with its trembling Water-ford glass chandelier, its highly polished mahogany tables that reflected the excited faces of the listeners and the Persian carpets which each, in time-honoured country-house tradition, supported the slumbering figure of a Labrador or German Shepherd, to become as quiet as a nursery finally preparing for bedtime.

‘He instructed Miss Bosanquet to go to Lamb House and find his one unfinished story,' McGill said in a voice intended to thrill an after-dinner audience.

When the cries of excitement had died down, all eyes turned to Stephen – and at last, driven by the hunger for stories, the promise of suspension of disbelief maybe, the sheer need to believe that a great writer has a hidden manuscript he wishes to share, the room grew dark in the early winter afternoon and the words fell as softly and unobtrusively as the snow.

I
remember only the light in an empty shuttered room in the house on the hill, the house with its swath of cobbles and proudly closed garden gate – a light I can swear I had never seen before: blue or
bluish
I suppose you could call it, a light that did not belong here, in the watery world of Sandwich or Rye. I had never seen it before – yet I had heard it described, this extra-terrestrial glow, by those who had died and come back: it was the light at the end of the tunnel, the light for ghosts as they go stealthily from room to room in places where once they had known life.

This must explain why I stood still, rooted to the spot as one might say. Yet what was I waiting for, after all? Russell Noakes, or at least his outer carapace, had vanished entirely. The room was miserably cold. I had no inkling of where to go next – or what I must find. I had to bring back
something,
I knew – but what? An unfinished story? The Master's instructions had been erratic on that airless morning in July: I could barely understand what – or whom – I must seek out. And I knew myself to be alone – more alone than I had ever been, even on days in the past when the Master had gone to Brighton or Hove or visited his neighbours in the downs above Firle. The lack of the important object I must retrieve from Lamb House grew as I shrank inside myself to the size of a small child. I knew myself on the edge of letting down the greatest genius two centuries had known or will ever know. Henry James had left a valuable memento of his fine dictating days here. He needed and wanted it now; it would complete his life, his record, his tally of the finest works ever written on either side of the Atlantic.

As I stood, by now nearer the long windows in the panelled room, I saw a shutter had been drawn back, as if by a hand uncertain whether the interior of the famous house should remain hidden from the human gaze or be exposed to the fullness of day. And as I approached the old flaky wood of the shutter I remembered a woman, young, splendidly aware of her colonial upbringing, quietly assured of her married future – and I saw my predecessor Mary Weld as her image burned for a few seconds before me. She had gone – no, there was no repeat of the diminutive house servant's comparatively lengthy visit to the once-gracious building – she had disappeared even in memory before I could ascertain either direction or intention on her part. But, vaguely, I suspected the chimney-piece to be my goal: I thought I saw a small door in the panelling right up next to it – and there, if you can skip the intervening moments while I heard the sound of my own footsteps as they dragged across the parquet to the tall marble mantelpiece and the (uncleaned) grate, dull and black and littered with the ashes of the last occupant's duration here – I arrived and found my fingernails could slip into a join between faded wallpaper and panel on the wall. I pulled – then pushed. It swung open, and I went in.

A small room – more of what the French would call a
cabinet
– lay before me. There was a meanly proportioned window – it was as if, I remember thinking, whoever had fitted this secret chamber behind the gloriously proportioned Green Room had considered any incoming light to be unnecessary for its purposes and so had skimped on both glass and design. The room
did
look out, it was true, but on an interior courtyard, the kind of yard that has no place in today's domestic arrangements, where clothes are hung to dry or where possibly, as an archway led directly out from the courtyard to the back drive of the house, horses were brought in and washed down. All very Jane Austen, you might say (she is an author on whom the Master has written, and I am in total agreement with him as to her considerable abilities) – but the world of
Persuasion
or
Pride and Prejudice
was far removed on that strange day from the neglected and unwelcoming Lamb House. There was – how can I describe it? – a raw, almost toxic feeling to the tiny room, but then, as I must confess it took me some time to realize, my sight was not the only sense affected when I pushed open the swinging panel and walked in.

Paint! I was so assaulted by the strength of the smell (and, I asked myself later, how did I
know
the colour of the paint to be white when neither can nor brush was visible?) – I was so
floored
by its almost living presence that I ran to the tiny window to lift the sill and lean out into the courtyard in a desperate quest for air.

As I went, my skirt, skimpy as it was (we were still in an age of wartime clothing coupons), brushed against the one piece of furniture in what I shall refer to as a store room, for it was nothing more. A box – a chest, I suppose you could call it – stood directly under the unopenable window. A key lay on the lid of the box, and it was this that I had shaken from its place to the floor. Owing to the exiguous proportions of the hidey-hole I was forced to kneel to retrieve it – for I knew I must unlock the box and find my way back, close to suffocation as I already was, into the house where I had once transcribed the works of the Master. I can swear with a hand on my heart that I have never known the terror and sense of helplessness caused by the smell of paint in an unaired room. I wondered, I admit, if I was in the process of losing my sanity.