The Beautiful Child (8 page)

‘Oh,' Mrs Archdean returned with her eyes on her husband, ‘I should wish her as much as possible like her supposed father. If that counts as a condition you must be merciful to it, for it's my only one.'

Captain Archdean faced the speakers in an attempt to combine the air of confessed and cheerful eccentricity with the fact of something more inward, a real anxiety for the fate of the image he had projected, or perhaps, still more, his wife had; then he made a point that served as a refuge for his modesty. ‘It's not a little girl, you know, who would naturally look like me.'

Merrow conscientiously demurred. ‘I beg your pardon – there's nothing she might more easily do. But Mrs Archdean, I judge,' he continued, ‘dreams of a little girl in your likeness, while you dream of a little boy in hers.'

‘That's it,' the Captain genially granted. ‘One sees little boys like their mother.'

‘Well, the thing is so fundamental,' said our friend, ‘that you really must settle it between you.'

The remark produced a pause, slightly awkward, to which Mrs Archdean, again a little impatiently, made an end. ‘Oh, I could of course do with such a possession as little Reggie.'

‘There it is!' her husband exclaimed. ‘It's of that picture that one can't not think.'

‘I see – yes,' Merrow returned. ‘But I'm afraid I myself can't think of it much more. When once I've done a thing – !'

Captain Archdean looked at him harder. ‘You prefer something different?'

Merrow waited a moment, during which their companion again spoke. ‘Is it really quite impossible for you to decide?'

He still wondered. ‘Why, you see you're both so handsome – !'

‘Well then,' the Captain laughed. ‘Make him resemble us both!”

‘You'll at any rate really think of it?' said his wife. ‘I mean, think of which will be best.'

Her fine young face quite terribly pleaded, and there was no use his pretending to ignore the fact of the recognition of feeling in her. He felt her to know him, to have seen him. He again answered her inwardly and for himself before speaking – and speaking differently – to her ear and to her husband's. He found himself trying to see in her what she must have been as a child, and he so far made it out that he held for a moment the vision of something too tenderly fair. Yes, he had painted children, but he had never painted the thing that – say at eight years old – she would have been. ‘It will take much thought, but I'll give it all I can.'

‘And about what will be the age – ?'

‘Well, say about eight.'

This made them at once eager. ‘Then you'll readily try?' They spoke in the same breath.

‘I'll try my very hardest!'

They looked at each other in joy, too grateful even to speak. It was wonderful how he pleased them, and he felt that he liked it. If he could only keep it up!

I
t would be hard to describe the silence that descended that day on the post-Lutyens ‘country-house dining-room' nightmare which was to be our home until the end of the festivities – and I am in any case averse to descriptive writing (as was Thomas Hardy): my students are always surprised to be informed that none of the great Wessex novels contain any descriptions of the landscape at all – so I will say simply that the windows that once looked out on marshland and gentle snow-fall were now adorned with outer frames, of freezing snow and ice, giving one the impression of being trapped inside a particularly sickening set of Christmas cards.

But the silence – I must confess I missed my high-booted, mini-skirted foe at that moment of realization: the moment, that is, when it becomes clear that poor Hugh Merrow, the artist in the aborted story who hopes only too frantically that he will be able to ‘keep it up', was clearly inspired by his own progenitor, Henry James. What the disappointed revellers in the media monstrosity would make of it all I could easily surmise, but Salome – the delightfully outspoken Salome – I needed her here to counteract the silence, which lay like cotton wool – or indeed like a further blanket of snow – all around us. And the fault lay entirely with myself, Professor Jan Sunderland: I, the Jamesian, the parser of his erotic verbs, the setter of this flat, tasteless quiz, for who by now, having listened to the self-absorbed, wispy-haired bookseller reading to us with quiet satisfaction, who could give a damn, now the promised fragment had been aired, what the sex of the couple's child would turn out to be? Boy/girl/hermaphrodite, what did it matter? We are over a century on from the drawing-room simpering and sniggering the tale would once have brought in its wake; now it seems merely to toll the death knell of the Master as he struggled to put in shape the New York edition of his work – and by no means necessarily improve the great novels and stories that had formed his lifetime struggle against the obvious, the trivial, the banal. Whatever the motives of this great writer may have been in deciding to call a halt to
The Beautiful Child,
we must respect – and indeed, we do respect – the writings of those impelled to try to understand the Master and to riddle out his secrets despite the triumph of his bonfire, which destroyed so many records of his private life.

No, Ms Cynthia Ozick, your essay ‘Henry James's Unborn Child' is quite ludicrous in its claim that the choosing of an ideal offspring for the childless couple in the story brought James ‘too close to the birth canal' and his abrupt cessation of the tale marked his refusal to be a mother. Tosh, indeed!

Meanwhile, I must give my thanks to my hostess – I have reviled her so far, I know – for seeing my predicament and, perhaps as only one who has been a television celebrity can do, changing the mood and encouraging guests to believe, however wrongly, that they are actually having a good time. It was when, looking around the room with her glassy blue-eyed stare, and chuckling behind a flashing smile – all this succeeded by a policewoman's frown as a new game show was announced and prizes were offered ‘up to ten thousand pounds! Tonight!' – that I saw the door of the little high-tech pantry open behind her and a hand poke forward: a child's hand, I thought, as it barely reached our media lady's sequinned midriff. It held an envelope; surprised at the jogging of the paper against her body, our entertainer took it; and the hand disappeared from sight.

Whether this was part of the game or not I could not know. But as I in turn looked around the bright room with its postage-stamp black windows and drooping chandelier, I realized I had seen the hand before – or felt it, rather, on my journey up to find my niece Lou. It was smooth – and, as I had now seen, small, with a gap where the third and fourth fingers had been.

I believe the first moment of real fear I have suffered in my life was when I realized she was bringing it over to me now, my Maîtresse d'Hôtel, with the look of a conjuror about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, as I sat paralysed in the snowbound room, with its glittering crystal teardrops and night-blackened window panes. The first experience of true terror I have ever undergone was when I knew – somehow, but she backed up my hunch, oh yes she did! – that the letter was for me. I held my outstretched arm blindly upwards, as if to fend her off. But – ‘Professor Sunderland, this is for you' – and her voice rang out like a circus whip. ‘Do tell us what is inside!'

Here we were, the assorted guests at a harmless Christmas party, a party where a slightly unusual entertainment had been promised to take account of the bookish nature of some of those participating and to introduce to the works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' greatest author a selection of young girls more likely to be aficionados of ‘chick lit' than connoisseurs of
The Golden Bowl.
Douglas McGill had promised a ghost story more chilling than
The Turn of the Screw.
And what had happened? The uncompleted short story had about as much potential for provoking terror as one of James's successors at Lamb House's literary efforts, E.F. Benson. McGill, who had obviously believed the exciting account from the Bell Street pedlar of Miss Bosanquet's visit to his father all those years ago – the manuscript in a chest and all the rest – was the sole member of our ill-assorted group who appeared satisfied by the words he had just read out. McGill, I was not displeased to see, appeared as bored as the others by the whole concept – ghosts, story – even Henry James himself, for he closed the Leon Edel volume he carried with him – a biography of the Master where brief mention of
The Beautiful Child
is made – and he closed it with an air of finality I had not seen demonstrated at any class or lecture. It had been his idea, though: he had made a fool of himself, the elderly satyr, and returning his hand to poor Mary's knee, as he now proceeded to do, he had the air of a dejected suitor. There may be nothing worse than failing to enthral an audience, as the Master knew so well. For those who ‘can't keep it up' the outcome is bitter indeed.

Now I must decide. I had every reason to suppose that Digital Towers – or whatever this web-obsessed Edwardian pile is called – may be infinitely more haunted – yes, that is the term for the experience I suffered on the upper landing – than one could at first have thought possible. Do I tell my sister-in-law about the hand? Should I inform the young woman known as ‘Jasmine' that I am surprised at her taking Mrs Archdean's name, when the recent reading was presumably the first time the relatively uncommon surname had been heard here?

Or should I simply leave, slip away from a house party turned sinister where I – so it seemed – had been singled out for whatever unpleasant prank the hosts wished to visit on me. I knew the humiliation of the television reality-show victim. Surely it was time to go.

I took the letter into the hall and ran my thumbnail along the thick, cream-coloured paper until the envelope fell open and my name came up at me – this on thicker paper still, like (I couldn't help thinking) an insect embalmed in a chemical solution: long dead and almost unrecognizable.

But the letter was for me all right. I could hear the voices in the opulent drawing-room, of the audience just subjected to the Master's unfinished effort,
Hugh Merrow
or
The Beautiful Child,
and I thought I could pick out the mousy, rather aggressive woman who had introduced herself before the reading as Mrs Archdean. Sighing, discontented – was she going to try to tell us her own ending, had she contrived to learn from McGill about the agonies James had suffered in trying to complete what had seemed a rich and amusing tale – and had she taken a feminist route to understanding it, to explain his failure to empathize with the childless wife, for all his protestations to the contrary? Would one's students in future, with their fascination for their own ‘space' and their Facebooks and the virtual identity of almost everything, insist on assuming the names of the characters invented by an author? How is one supposed to react? Must there be a charade, when all that is needed in understanding a work is a combination of intelligence and scepticism rarely found in the young these days? I knew I had offended the false Isabel Archdean. Perhaps I should go back in and sit with her amongst the glass-topped tables and the
objets de vertu,
all suspiciously like the junk you see displayed on a Brighton stall at the Saturday Market. As an encouraging mentor I should press ‘Jasmine' for her story. This could be incorporated into James's
Beautiful Child.
How much more post-postmodern could you get? I didn't of course. The letter was only a few lines long and written in an old-fashioned hand.

Dear Professor Sunderland,

I write to inform you that my great-aunt Mary Weld expressed a wish shortly before her death that any scholar interested in the facts surrounding the uncompleted tale
The Child
(or
The Beautiful Child,
or
Hugh Merrow)
should meet a descendant able to provide details of the strange happenings at Lamb House, Rye, in the summer of 1902.

I am the one to have been entrusted with the task. You will be admitted by the entrance to the Garden Room at ten minutes to midnight and should make your way to the powder room leading from the drawing-room, where I will await you. I give an undertaking that what I am about to divulge was known to nobody other than my aunt; and that it will devolve on you and no one else to spread – or bury – the truth about Henry James.

The letter was signed Philippa something-or-other; the Weld name had evidently been subsumed by the years, owing to marriages and succession of the male line. But I believed her.

And as I made my way from the pretentious structure hired by my media partners and out into the snow I believed the niece of the Master's amanuensis, the colonial Miss Weld, even more wholeheartedly than before.

For a car, circa the first decade of the twentieth century – a Hispano Suiza, perhaps, or a Packard (I am no expert in these matters) – stood in the circular driveway. An old man sat at the wheel. He waved to me, and I climbed in. We set off for Rye.