Dictation (3 page)

For ten minutes Miss Bosanquet lingered and pondered, lingered and pondered—and there
was
the question of the umbrella, was there not? So when she returned to the Master's rooms and dared to rush in, unexpectedly caressing the hand of the departing Miss Baker on the other side of the door ... but no! It could not be Miss Baker, despite all. Miss Bosanquet was astonished to see that the Master, in the interim following her own departure, had received a guest, and the guest (impossible not to recognize him) was the renowned Mr. Joseph Conrad; and
therefore,
she instantly calculated, the manuscript the putative Miss Baker had been carrying pertained not to the Master, but to Mr. Conrad. Here was the proof: the folder was already in the grip of Mr. Conrad's nervously pinching fingers, and why was he pinching it in that strange way, and glaring at the two ladies as if they might do him some obscure harm?

It was done. It was inescapable. These women were not supposed to have met, and by the grace of God had eluded meeting—yet here they were, side by side: he almost thought he had seen them fugitively clasping hands. A baleful destiny works through confluences of the commonplace—that damnable umbrella! He pinched the folder Miss Hallowes had freshly delivered (she was punctual as usual), and pinched it again, pressing it hotly against his ribs—a shield to ward off that avidly staring Miss Bosanquet, who had the bright shrewd look of a keeper of secrets. What disadvantageous word, product of a supernal critical mind, had the Master confided in her? What fatal flaw—he was doomed to flaw, to sweat and despair—was she privately rehearsing, fixed as she was on this newest burden of his toil? That his tales were all Chinese boxes and nested matrioshkas, narrators within narrators, that he was all endlessly dangling strings, that he suffered from a straggle of ungoverned verbiage? In Miss Bosanquet's confident ease in the presence of the Master, he divined James's sequestered judgment—sequestered for the nonce, but might he not one day thrust it into print?
Mr. Conrad is to be greatly admired, but so flawed as not to be excessively revered.
Miss Bosanquet, who understood reverence, gave it all away in her long sharp look. And poor Miss Hallowes, with her little worshipful eyes (he sometimes suspected that he was worshiped by Miss Hallowes), what dour elements of his own sequestered view of the Master was
she
giving away? He wished they would vanish, the two of them!

But the Master came forward, and in his most expansively seigneurial manner introduced Miss Bosanquet to Miss Hallowes. "An unprecedented hour," he pronounced, "unforeseen in the higher mathematics, when parallel handmaidens collide. Can you hear, my dear Conrad, as thunder on Olympus, the clash of the Remingtons?" And when they were gone, Miss Bosanquet brandishing her retrieved umbrella, and Miss Hallowes in her dreadful shoes following as if led by an orchestral baton, he asked, "And do you find your Miss Hallowes satisfactory then?"

"Quite satisfactory," Conrad said.

"She discerns your meaning?"

"Entirely."

"Miss Bosanquet—you see how lively and rather boyish she is—yet she is worth all the other females I have had put together. Among the faults of my previous amanuenses—not by any means the
only
fault—was their apparent lack of comprehension of what I was driving at. And Miss Bosanquet is admirably discreet."

"One must expect no less."

"Miss Hallowes, I take it, you deem a
bijou."

"Indeed," said Conrad, though he remarked to himself that Jessie more and more believed otherwise.

***

"Do give me your arm, or I shall never fit you under," Miss Bosanquet urged. "It's a wonder you haven't brought your own. Miss Hallowes, you're waterlogged!"

"I surely did set out with one, but the wind turned it inside out and swept it halfway into the square, and I couldn't go after it because Mr. Conrad so dislikes unpunctuality—"

"What a felicitous misfortune! The stars have favored us, Miss Hallowes—had you been delayed by a single minute, it's not likely that you and I should be splashing along arm in arm ... I should so value half an hour with you—may I ask whether you have some immediate obligation—"

"I must look in on my mother, who hasn't been well."

"I plead only for half an hour. Shall we duck into the nearest Lyons and get out of the wet? I believe I am acquainted with every tearoom in the vicinity. I frequently bring Mr. James his morning crullers."

Miss Hallowes thought guiltily of her mother; but she was not so punctual with her mother as she was with Mr. Conrad. "It
would
be a pleasure to dry off my feet."

"Oh, your poor swimming feet!" cried Miss Bosanquet—which struck Miss Hallowes as perhaps too familiar from someone she had met not twenty minutes ago; and yet Miss Bosanquet's body was warm against her, holding her close under the narrow shelter of the umbrella.

When they were seated and had a pair of brown china teapots and a sticky sugar bowl between them, Miss Bosanquet asked, as if they were old intimates, "And how
is
your mother?"

"She suffers from an ailment of the heart. My mother is a widow, and very much alone. It is not only illness that troubles her. She is very often sad."

"Then how providential," Miss Bosanquet said, "to have a daughter to lighten her spirits—"

"They cannot be so easily lightened. My mother is in mourning."

"Her loss is so recent?"

"Not at all. It is more than five years since my brother died. For my mother the hurt remains fresh."

"Your mother must be a woman of uncommon feeling. And perhaps you are the same, Miss Hallowes?"

So suddenly private an exchange, and in so public a place! Though the few windows were gray and streaming, the tearoom's big well-lit space with its rows of little white tables was almost too bright to bear. She felt uncomfortably surrounded and pressured, and Miss Bosanquet was looking at her so penetratingly that it made her ashamed. Through some unworldly distillation of reciprocal sympathy, Miss Bosanquet was somehow divining her humiliation, and more: she was granting it license, she was inviting secrets.

"Your brother," she said, "could not have been in good health?"

"He was entirely well."

"I take it that he was cut down in some unfortunate accident—"

"He was a suicide."

"Oh my poor Miss Hallowes. But how—"

"He shot himself. In privacy, in the first-class compartment of a moving train."

All around them there was the chink of cutlery, and a shaking out of mackintoshes, and the collective noise of mixed chatter, pierced now and then by a high note of laughter, and the pungent smell of wet wool. Miss Hallowes marveled: to have told
that
about Warren, how unlike herself it was! But Miss Bosanquet was taking it in without condemnation, and with all the naturalness and practiced composure of a nurse, or a curate; or even some idolatrous healer.

"I understand perfectly," Miss Bosanquet said. "Your mother can hardly have recovered from such a tragedy. She leans on you? She depends on you?"

"All that is true."

"And she has become your life?"

"Mr. Conrad is my life."

Miss Bosanquet bent forward; the hollows in her thin cheeks darkened; her thin shoulders hovered over her teacup. "We are two of a kind, Miss Hallowes. You with Mr. Conrad, I with Mr. James. In the whole history of the world there have been very few as privileged as you and I. We must talk more of this. I presume you are living with your mother?"

"I have a flat in the Blessington Road, but I often stop with her for days at a time."

"And how did you come to Mr. Conrad?"

"I was employed by a secretarial office, and he found me there. He seemed pleased with my work and took me on."

"My own beginning in a similar office was, I fear, a trifle more devious. I deliberately trained myself for Mr. James. Certain chapters of
The Ambassadors
were being dictated from a stenographer's transcription. I heard that Mr. James was dissatisfied and in need of a steady amanuensis, and I set myself to learn to type. It was a plot—I schemed it all. You will judge me a dangerous woman!"

"You are very direct."

"Yes, I am very direct. I think you must begin to call me Theodora. For a very few friends I am Teddie, but you may start with Theodora. And what am I to call
you,
Miss Hallowes?"

Miss Hallowes gave out a small worried cough. She hoped it did not mean she was catching cold. She said, "I'm sure it's time I ought to be off to my mother—"

"Please don't evade me. We have too much in common. We are each in an extraordinary position. Mr. James and Mr. Conrad are men of genius, and posterity will honor us for being the conduits of genius."

"I never think of posterity. I think only of Mr. Conrad, and how to serve him. The truth is—I am certain he is aware of it—he said it outright in a letter to Mr. Pinker, a letter that I myself typed—he is so often unconscious of me, he never realized—he told Mr. Pinker that were he to allow it I should work for him for nothing. And I should. Besides, Miss Bosanquet—"

"Theodora."

"—Mr. Pinker is also a conduit, as you put it. All Mr. Conrad's work passes through him."

"And Mr. James's as well. But Mr. Pinker is merely a literary agent. Mr. Pinker is secondary. He is in fact tertiary. No one in future will know his name, I assure you. It isn't Mr. Pinker who is blessed to listen to the breathings, and the silences, and the sighs, and the pacings ... sometimes, when Mr. James and I have been at work for hours, he will quietly place a piece of chocolate near my hand, and will even unwrap the silver foil for me—"

"There are occasions when Mr. Conrad is worn out at the end of the day and he and I sit in opposite chairs in his study and smoke. Mrs. Conrad doesn't like it at all."

"Smoke? Then you are an advanced woman!"

"Not so advanced as you, Miss Bosanquet—but you are very young and more accustomed than I to the new manners."

"Theodora.
And I am past thirty. If by 'the new manners' you mean the use of our Christian names ... but look, our lives are so alike, we are almost sisters! It's unnatural for sisters to be so formal—have you no sisters?"

Miss Hallowes said gravely, "Only the two brothers, and one is dead."

"Then you will have a sister in me, and you may confide anything you wish. It's you who seem so young—have you never been in love?"

Miss Hallowes tried out her new little cough once more. It was not a cold coming on; it was recognition. Miss Bosanquet—
Theodora
—was entering a wilderness of strangling vines. In love? She believed, indeed she knew (and had declared it in Mrs. Conrad's hearing!), that Mr. Conrad's works were imprinted on her heart, and would remain so even after her death. The truth was she had loved him, mutely, for six whole years. Mr. Conrad never guessed it; he saw her, she supposed, as an enigmatically living limb of the Machine, and the operation of the Machine was itself enigmatic to him. But Mrs. Conrad, though simple and prosaic, had strong intuitions and watchful eyes, and ears still more vigilant. It had happened more than once that when Miss Hallowes and the family—it now included baby John—were at dinner, and if Miss Hallowes asked for the butter, Mrs. Conrad would turn away her head.

But she confessed none of this to, to ... Theodora.

She said instead, "You may call me Lilian, but please never Lily. And if you should ever write my name, you must write it with one
l,
not two."

"Then let me have your hand, Lilian."

Theodora reached over the sugar bowl and fondled the hand she had first touched on the other side of the Master's door. The palm was wide and soft and unprepared for womanly affection.

"Let us meet again very soon," she said.

***

When Lilian parted from her mother that evening, it was later than she had expected. She had stopped at a butcher's for lamb chops, a treat Mrs. Hallowes relished, and cooked them, and tried to turn the conversation from Warren. Her mother's plaints inevitably led to Warren, and then, predictably, to Lilian and the usual quarrel. Warren had been thirty-seven when he shot himself ("when he was taken," her mother said), exactly the age Lilian was now. To her mother this number was ominous. It signified the end of possibility, the closing down of a life. The dark fate of the unmarried.

"Thirty-seven! It's no good to be alone, dear, just look at your own poor mum, without another soul in the house. I'd be stone solitary if you didn't come by. And there you are, shut up all day long with that old man, and what future are you to get from it?"

"Mr. Conrad isn't old. He's fifty-three, and has young children."

"Yes, and don't I always get an earful, Borys and John, Borys and John. You talk as if they're yours, getting them presents and such. That'd be well and good if you had one or two of your own. Every year you've spent with Mr. Conrad is a year thrown to the winds. I truly think he's wicked, keeping you confined, using you up like that—"

"Mother, please—"

"It's not that I haven't looked into that book of stories you gave me this last Christmas, when what I really needed was a nice warm woolen muffler—"

"Mother, I gave you the muffler too, and a pair of gloves, don't you remember? And you've got your new tea cosy right there on the pot."

"—that wicked wicked
Heart of Darkness,
such a horrifying tale I never in my life could imagine. What must be in that man's mind!"

"It's a very great mind. Mr. Conrad is a very great writer. Posterity will treasure him."

Posterity.
How improbable: that formidable word, how it sprang out in all its peculiar awkwardness, not at all the kind of thing that fit her mother's kitchen—the very word Miss Bos ...
Theodora
... had uttered only hours before.

"Well, there you're right," her mother said. "The man has sons, that's the only posterity, if you want to say it like that, any normal person ought to care about. And when you lose one of your own, like our Warren—"