The Beautiful Child (9 page)

It was not a long journey, but the whirling snow, the occasional gaps in the black sky where stars showed through as if burned there by smouldering blankets of dark cloud and the repetitive lines of trees – were they here in Henry James's time? I wondered, or were they planted after the Great War, a memorial to the platoons of soldiers who had lost their lives? – all provided a timeless quality at once restful and unnerving. I knew I was
en route
to Lamb House; but not as an ordinary visitor. It was as the passenger of the old man who drove me that I came; and he, surely, was a revenant from the days of
The Golden Bowl
and
The Wings of the Dove.
Mary Weld it was who had thrilled to the melodious tones of the Master as he dictated his impossible sentences, pausing only to lean against an escritoire, head in hands, when the correct word fled his mind and had to be coaxed back into existence; Mary Weld, or her niece, would supply the answer to our puzzle, and I would be left with the choice, as the present-day Miss Weld had put it, to broadcast or destroy the evidence surrounding the unfinished story.

A bitter cold had invaded the car, and I found myself shivering and then beginning to cough, always a dangerous sign for me in the winter. What was I doing here? Would it not have been better to allow the earnest reader from Paddington Basin to declaim Theodora's completion of the story and await the reactions of my celebrity book-panel partners. Miss Bosanquet, after all, had announced herself as a novice writer – and none are more ambitious than they when it comes to attention-grabbing prose, unreliable narrators and all. Very likely, with her long pre- and post-mortem acquaintanceship with the Master, she had half guessed already how Hugh Merrow fared with his clients; probably she had been amused, as I had, by the painter's declaration of hope that he could ‘keep it up', when, with the benefit of hindsight, she had known perfectly well that he could not. No, Miss Bosanquet had been seriously let down – by McGill's impatient wave to the nervous bookseller, who had stepped from his stool in response, the budding author's manuscript tucked under his arm – and by my shake of the head, which indicated, as I had intended it to, that this parlour game had been a flop. If we had left her to expound on her ending – and if we had kept away from the acute psychological riddle posed by Henry James's inability to complete the story – I would surely not be in this ancient car now, shaken like a bag of bones as icy puddles were crossed and owls hooted uncannily overhead. I would not, dear reader, have been afraid.

For I was afraid as I had never been: I, Professor Jan Sunderland, creator of literary quizzes, editor of the definitive edition of M.R. James's ghost stories, was on my way to quiz the other James, discover his darkest secrets, open myself up to the tossing of volumes by poltergeists who lurked ahead of me, preparing for my arrival. Worst of all, I must subject myself to the pious ramblings of Miss Weld (or whatever her name was now). I must be on my guard, on this terrible night in a freezing house, not to betray the frivolous reason for my presence. I must demonstrate that I had come for the sake of literature, not to satisfy the vulgar appetites of television book shows. But I knew my chattering teeth and rheumy, weeping eyes would surely give me away as a desperate publicity seeker, a failed author in search of his character.

But my apprehensive thoughts were soon brought to a halt. For now I recognized the steep hill leading to the house where the Master had made himself – at first so happily – at home.

Let me continue with this account without placing your idea of what happened next before me. Permit me, I implore you, to show some originality in the spinning of this narrative (though there is nothing original left to say, and I prefer a revisionary version of an old tale to any effort by my students to ‘make it new', I must confess). This time, however, I must beg for the sympathy and understanding of my audience – should I survive to tell the tale. And the reason, as any fraudster will know, is my insistence that what took place on that mist-coiled, bone-chilling night is actually what did happen. No auto fiction this; the story of Mary Weld gives us the true meaning of fear – of horror, yes – but more of a fear that transforms, paralyses, takes shadows for friends and a man as no more than twisted bedclothes. It was this fear that propelled me from the old car which had finally coughed itself silent; and it was horror, maybe, that had me shaking as I looked upwards and saw her there, in the window of Lamb House, old, with papery skin hanging like rows of dead pearls at her neck, her eyes closed in the cold white rays of a New Year moon.

This, surely, could not be the great-niece who had written to me – but the very question is meaningless; for there was no age she could have belonged in, the old lady I glimpsed above. All I know is that the iron gate swung open, and it was possible to walk alongside the Garden Room, where the Master loved to compose in summer, his secretary smiling, scooping up his falling words like so many buttercups in a meadow. A man, taller than myself, waved me to walk through into the frosted garden. His gloves were white and slightly too small for his hands is what I noticed as the car struggled bronchially, finally took the plunge and set off back down the hill towards ersatz Edwardiana and 1930s villas, with council houses and bungalows running in neat suffocating blocks beyond the fringes of the town. Was this normality? I no longer knew the period of history, the meaning of architecture which had so interested me once – for me, as the iron gate swung shut behind me, there was no dwelling other than this one anywhere. For I had entered the Master's world – every line of Lamb House spelled out his secrets and his own appalling fear.

I followed the tall man, whose face I had not yet seen. I knew only that I disliked him intensely – but I could not say why. His way of walking was slow, carefully thought out as if some unadmitted enemy lurked at corners; and when he at last turned to me at the top of the stairs, I had to hold my breath to prevent myself from calling out in disgust at the man's features. What was it in the bland expanse of closely shaved cheek or in the small, impudent eyes which seemed to dismiss me and any right I might have to enter the precincts, and how did I know (which I overwhelmingly did) that this man was the source of James's terror? But the knowledge held me in a vice; and we both stood immobile in our different positions until a quavering voice called from somewhere down the corridor ‘Smith!' – so we both turned like automata and proceeded in the direction of the command. The manservant Smith, if this was he – didn't look round at me as he went, and I dreaded him doing so, for my entire body – or so I experienced it – shrank, each sense mortified, and forbade me to catch him up. If I found myself a shorter distance from his back I had to slow my own walk to stay a safe distance from the man. Then at the far end of a passage, leading off the first floor of the house, a door opened and a woman walked out. She was gracious, copper-haired. She came towards me with a smile.

The butler – as I assumed him to be – disappeared down a narrow corridor, and I was left alone with the woman who would dictate my future life.

The woman in the closet (it was no more than seven feet square) stood facing me as I struggled to make sense of my surroundings and the strange personage I knew I must confront. I guessed, of course, that this tiny room had been the hiding place for the unfinished story – and I tried desperately to remember what the messenger from Paddington had read out from Theodora Bosanquet's account of coming in here. She had entered, I saw, from the drawing-room, not from a passage, as I had done; and the realization that Lamb House might in fact conceal many such rooms and even stories by the Master, abandoned out of shame, as he would put it, was dizzying indeed. Why had I been taken in here other than to inform my guide of the content of Miss Bosanquet's packet – the assumption being, of course, that ‘Mr James' as his amanuenses invariably called him, had confided the reason for abandoning the tale to Miss Bosanquet, Miss Weld's successor? And how could I answer the inevitable question, when the fear that had gripped me on first approaching the house still paralysed my vocal chords and brought beads of sweat to my face and hands? How could I find a way out – back to the cosy banalities of my media friends – and away from the smell of death which, in my state of hysteria, I was sure I could identify?

Oh, it emanated from my inquisitor – there was no doubt about that. I could hardly look – and she stood only a few paces away, after all, so it was difficult
not
to look at this – this mutant, this woman who was crone, mature female and young lady fresh out of Cheltenham College all at the same time. Old – she was as old as the ancient figure who had gazed down at me when I walked along the lawn by the side of this apparently decorous and innocent building; and she was, like the Snow Queen, both a myth and the truth. As a young woman she would ensnare me and carry me through white fields and up into the sky. As the copper-haired woman who had greeted me silently as I walked along the passage behind the manservant Smith, she would inform me in a low resonant tone of her request for an answer to the impossible question. As a young girl, she would hang on my reply. And of course I had none – frivolously I had neglected to ask myself what the Master's sudden desire to complete
The Beautiful Child
actually signified at such a time since its conception and its commencement over half a century after his death? Was the subject matter, possibly, now considered permissible where once its selection would have caused offence? But, if so, why had he come through the Ouija board to demand of the elderly Miss Bosanquet that she take his dictation one last time? If he didn't know what would befall him – or his reputation, at least, on the unearthing of the tale – why did he force poor Theodora to travel in bitter winter weather to the home where once he had lived unmolested by press or gossips, Lamb House in Rye? And, if he was in fact in some kind of heavenly sanctuary beyond the stars, how had he condoned the ghostly appearance of Mary Weld – for this, I had no doubt, was who and what stood before me. A phantom, a mirage – but, as I knew, an important presence in the little household in the Sussex town where Henry James invented his great, late fictions. By the time Miss Bosanquet took the post of secretary typist all the important works had been written. And Mary Weld had been responsible, in the case of
Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl
and the first pages of
The Beautiful Child,
for transcribing the words of the Master. It occurred to me for the first time that it was I who had come here to ask questions, not she; and as my brain cleared I saw that the fear I had suffered had obscured the ordinary fact of Miss Weld's great-niece – yes, copper hair and all, she was of our age – and that I must ask her urgently to explain HJ's reasons for abandoning the tale of a painter who could not, even if he had really wanted to, complete the task expected of him.

I
came to Lamb House to work for Mr James in April 1901. I knew there had been a male typewriter named McAlpine, who had preceded me in London, and at first I was nervous that his skills had been much superior to mine – for I found a note in his handwriting in the Green Room desk here which boasted that ‘the Screw had turned' one morning when his employer asked him to go faster; and he mentioned a total of words per hour which was infinitely greater than mine. Whether this alleged slowness of McAlpine had caused HJ to dismiss him I do not know; but he has always shown great respect in his dealings with me, and in the six years in which I had the privilege of transcribing his work – including corrections for the New York edition of his
œuvre,
along with two major novels – we seldom disagreed over anything. I had learnt not to suggest a word for Mr James, on the rare occasions he stopped in mid-flow and agonized over the correct one, and I believe my tactful silences were in fact a help to him as he composed – while I, in turn, gained a few moments of rest as the unspoken deliberations went on. Except on the occasion of a story for which, he informed me, he had been given the foundations by his friend the writer Paul Bourget; a story entitled first
The Child,
then
Hugh Merrow
and lastly
The Beautiful Child.
With this tale nothing seemed to go right; it felt, even as I typed, to be somehow uneasy, as if a certain kind of object was continually being forced into the wrong-sized receptacle – I cannot, unfortunately, put it more clearly than that. I showed no impatience while words were fought for and abandoned – and I was frequently asked to ring the bell for coffee – but even when he resumed and selected the phrase that was needed for the tale he would go back over my typed pages in the late afternoon and announce they must be thrown away or amended so radically that we had to start the next day right from the beginning. It was not my habit to make enquiries into the reasons for Mr James's decisions – and though I privately felt he had nothing to lose by jettisoning this piece of work (he was concurrently writing another story,
The Beast in the Jungle,
and had begun his great novel
The Wings of the Dove)
he seemed determined to make
The Beautiful Child
his priority. I thought this a wrong decision but of course said nothing to that effect.