The Beautiful Child (5 page)

The key, after three fumbling attempts, fitted the lock of the chest. I had hardly the courage to look down at its meagre contents – but a glimpse afforded only a photograph of a woman in Edwardian bustle standing in this tiny room, holding a collection of papers. She wore an enigmatic smile. Next to her stood my much-respected late employer Henry James. He also held a bundle of papers; but his look, as he gazed at his typist, the one woman in whom he confided all his secrets, was far from enigmatic or contented. His look was one of pure horror, extreme anxiety. I scrabbled beneath the photograph and pulled out a sheaf of papers, typewritten and yellowing with age.

This is all I remember before the smell of the paint finally overcame me.

When I was next conscious I saw a man in gardening clothes who knelt by me in the Green Room – he must have dragged me in there and then gone for help, for a charwoman with her head turbaned like all working women in the 1940s and 1950s was trying to encourage me to sip from a mug of scalding tea.

A taxi was called from an ancient black telephone in the hall of Lamb House. It was a long wait, but the front door was open, the weather had changed and a gusty wind accompanied by a spatter of rain revived me.

On the train journey back to London I opened the sheaf of papers I had taken from the chest – the same papers as those held, as if in some game of cat and mouse, by the great writer and his secretary. I began to read – and it was only when we arrived at Victoria and the pages remaining were no more than a handful that I reluctantly made my way out and down the platform to find a cab that would bring me home.

God will give me strength in my pursuit of the truth.

I
f I were to pen a sketch of that evening at the Media Manor, the minutes succeeding Miss Bosanquet's arrival on the station platform, secret missive in hand (has it been understood, I wonder, that a secretary may originally have been regarded as a
secret-keeper?
I shall instruct my students to discuss), I would dwell on the short period during which our secondhand bookman paused and was handed a glass of water by our effusive hostess – for it demonstrated clearly the change in priorities amongst the listeners. Douglas McGill's hand, my first port of call when it came to looking around the room, had slid away from my sister-in-law altogether. A gold fountain pen now sat authoritatively between his first and second fingers. The Professor had been joined by the man I knew only as ‘Mike'; the taciturn dominie of Creative Writing. McGill was speaking in a low voice, but I heard him excitedly exclaim that Miss Bosanquet's deposition – along with something he referred to as ‘the fragment' – had famously disappeared some years ago, and if it had not been for the sharp eye of the bookseller from Bell Street it might have stayed ‘lost' for many years to come. ‘A disgrace for Harvard,' McGill concluded, while looking over at me in quiet triumph: did I not know about the ‘fragment' that had been lost or stolen?

Meanwhile, our friend from Paddington cleared his throat once more and asked if he should continue his reading.

‘Let's just go straight on,' insisted my old foe Salome. I suspected the sartorial show-off to have slipped upstairs during the recent reading to change into her Vivien Westwood ‘ironic parody' of a post-feminist prostitute: this, at least, I had overheard her whisper loudly as her intention to the Mistress of Ceremonies. But, owing to a bad memory and very little dress sense. I had no way of comparing and parsing the young woman's outfits. Not for the first time I wished Mary, ensconced on the window seat with a dreamy expression on her face – perhaps she missed McGill's hand: but I decided, as my students would say, not to go there – I wished my sister-in-law would look just once in my direction. Questions on how to proceed could then be analysed: as it was, I had no idea whether the demand that Stephen read straight on came from a genuine follower of Henry James or a disciple of Prada; and I had always imagined the latter.

So, as I knew only one way to attract the attention of the mother of my niece Lou, I looked quickly around the room before attempting to pronounce on the matter. The Jane Eyre student was still in place at the table, scribbling and looking up from time to time as if to refresh her impressions of the people in the much-reduced audience. She saw – I saw her seeing – Doug McGill, Mike and my sister-in-law Mary on the window seat in the bay window. Her gaze swept over Salome, who had taken to shooting her arm up in the air to command attention like a junior-school pupil; and she saw, of course, the host and hostess, who were now mixing bullshots in a small high-tech pantry off the drawing-room.

I regret it took some time for the absence of Jasmine to sink in. She was a pleasant enough little woman, I would be the first to allow – but she was eminently forgettable. The other absentee was Lou – Lou, the expert on all things Jamesian: I was eager to find her and hear her opinion on Miss Bosanquet's memoir.

I left the dining-room slightly surprised, I must own, to receive no questioning glances, no inquisitive eye contact from the media celebrity hosts; I must be of little importance to them, I was unable to resist concluding. For there may be a film ‘in development' or a series of detective television episodes with Henry James as a pudgy sleuth – but the day of the book, the true study of the ‘real right thing', is definitely over. Plot has replaced talent, sense of an ending, whatever you like to call it. In this 21st-century bogus Edwardian mansion the novels of James Joyce or Henry Green would be considered ‘unacceptable' and consigned to the bin.

These gloomy thoughts got me as far as the foot of the ornamental staircase leading upwards to the bedroom floor. Lou must be there – out of sorts or suffering from the new influenza which has graced us with a visit this year. Why her mother, still marooned by the sight of McGill, has not gone in search of her I cannot imagine; but I, her guardian and encourager since the death of her father, guiding her in a casual but earnestly intentioned way through the maze of Maisie and into the finer shadings of the mind of the dying heroine Millie Theale, will keep an avuncular eye on her for as long as it is necessary. In the event – God forbid! – that Mary remarries (not McGill, I almost spoke aloud in my prayer for the continuing status of my sister-in-law as a widow; please not McGill) it will be to me that poor Lou will turn; and I will not let her down or disappoint her.

The wide cedar-banistered staircase bore me up rapidly; and I was at the entrance to the long passage from which my own room and many others lead off before I had stopped my sad reflections of the state of the novel, its decline and the splendours of James's melodramatic tales, emerging as they do from a mass of adoring sentences and triumphant in their capture of both meaning and morality.

I was walking along the runner – Persian, ugly, just the kind of carpet that would portray no figure, utterly bland, probably imitation, like the work of all the aspiring ‘novelists' of today – when I felt myself gripped just above the elbow. My wrist was grasped and for a few seconds held captive by a hand that, even as I shrank back from the encounter, insinuated itself further along the cuff of my shirt. It was a hand but a strange hand, I realized with growing horror, with perhaps two or more fingers missing. A smooth expanse of skin caused by their absence accounted for a weakness in the grip.

The corridor appeared to have grown very dark, in those seconds of my attack – as I was later to consider this event, for it was certainly no friendly approach; and why or how I convinced myself that the sudden increase of gloom in the passageway was my reason for failing to see my assailant I simply do not know.

I know only that a very faint tang accompanied the feel of the soft skin and barely palpable stumps of the ruffian on the stairs (it was my sole encounter to date with death, which accounts for the literary allusions and fancy language that presented themselves to me on this strange occasion) and I feared the loss of my sanity, for surely I had been obsessing about McGill's hand – was I jealous, did I desire poor Mary, was I an incestuous Claudius to her Gertrude? The tang, the trace of a smell, grew stronger as I stumbled towards the door which I knew would lead to Lou's room. Paint; oil paint – it faded almost as soon as it was recognized – then grew a little stronger as I grabbed the doorknob and went in. The hand – as if it had led me to my destination – slipped out of mine and disappeared.

Lou was lying in a four-poster bed, a phoney Jacobean four-poster it was, with curtains of some kind of chintz drawn back on both sides.

A woman stood near the fireplace. A fine log fire crackled behind her. The woman had the stooping stance of a Cranach nude, the slight air of apology, the fuzz of floating hair. At first, I confess, it was harder to put a name to her than it had been to identify the smell of fresh paint. But then – for she knew me, it seemed: she walked a few steps towards me and then stood still – it came back, her first name at least. Jasmine, wife of the unbearable Mike. I managed to blurt out a greeting.

Lou just lay there. One anguished look and I saw she was paler than ever, with dark circles that looked as if they had been crudely crayoned under her eyes.

N
ow I am safely in my flat in Old Chelsea, close to the watery Thames-scapes of Turner and Whistler and the other Theodore, Roussel, I am able to report on the pages found in a seaman's chest in what must have been, in those infinitely more gracious days, a Georgian powder room at Lamb House.

I feel immensely proud, I must confess, to have been entrusted with the task of encouraging the Master to finish the story – the only tale, in all his many productive years, which he failed to complete.

My predecessor Mary Weld had thoughtfully tucked into the long envelope her diary entries for the dates – all in July 1902 – when Henry James battled most manfully with
The Beautiful Child,
as his work in progress was named. A note in his dear, clear hand informs us of the eccentric
provenance
of the
conte.
He had been given the idea by a friend, Paul Bourget, of a story about a couple who wanted – or who
had wanted
– a child; who were aware that they could never have one now; and who approached a society painter and asked him to paint an imaginary child for them.

Oh, this material was perfect for the Master! As I read I was enchanted as always by the rich wit, the ironies and paradoxes, of a piece of writing accomplished at the height of his powers. The artist selected for the task of ‘bringing to life' a phantom offspring was also perfectly delineated: a touch obsequious, true, but a
real
artist, Hugh Merrow could have sprung from the pen of only one author, an author of genius: Henry James.

At first I did not spend time in wondering why this tale, unlike all the long, exhausting novels (to write, of course I mean, not to read: I have no sympathy for those who claim to have been excessively tried by the late novels,
The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors
or
The Golden Bowl).
But as I read on I did see that
The Beautiful Child,
clearly considered worthy of an effort as great as any other in his
œuvre
(for a tale, at least), demanded some explanation for its state of pre-adolescent immaturity. Why could the Master, so gifted when it came to children (fictional, naturally: it was always impossible to see Henry James as a father), be so totally at a loss when it came to solving the problem posed by
The Beautiful Child?
And what was this problem? Why, it was hardly a problem at all, and in any case it was one that had been settled easily in many instances, that is, the determining of the sex of the child to be portrayed. The Nandas, the Maisies, the Daisys – I knew them all, and it had not occurred to me once that their gender had been arrived at with difficulty: that the girls could have been conceived as boys and vice versa, and they had all been in a Middlesex of the mind until the final decision was taken. Sometimes, it was true, the author had plumped for one of each – the most famous example being Miles and Flora in
The Turn of the Screw.
But there were reasons for this: a boy goes away to school, and Miles's profanity, never given in detail, took place when he was a boarder. Flora, the girl, suffers her terrors in the supposed safety of the home.

I shall continue here with the incomplete story itself. I have retrieved it for the Master; and, as soon as he hears the click of my Remington he will know that this long-forgotten work will be legible and ready for his keen perusal. (I wish to make no comment on the level of typing skills demonstrated by my predecessor, Miss Weld: suffice it to say that typos, as they are known in our crude age of faceless typists in pools overseen by monstrous bosses – how far from dear Miss Petheridge's Secretarial Bureau! – appear to have been her speciality.) Had the story not lain buried all this time, to be rescued half a century later by one such as myself, the priceless words of the Master would have remained mangled and misspelt: an unthinkable fate for a justly celebrated writer, a man whose every word has been weighed and deliberated. One wonders, to let Mary Weld off the hook just a little, what exactly
was
going on in the summer of 1902? Doubtless the heat was partly responsible for the frequent errors – but Miss Weld enjoyed a colonial upbringing: surely the month of July in Sussex cannot have affected her work so drastically?