The Beautiful Child (6 page)

My heart beats as I go over to the Remington, my haunted machine, my conduit to what I have described to my late employer as the Outernet, the great web beyond the stars where the dead can communicate with the living. The Master will respond via the Ouija board, as always: when I have typed the unfinished tale and placed it on my (and his) beloved typewriter he will instruct me to prepare for dictation.

Then I will begin.

But even as I assume the careful listening stance of a devoted amanuensis, something tells me I may rebel and round off the story myself.

Yet such heresy is unthinkable, even after fifty years. I will, as ever, take down the words of the Master; and I shall obey his instructions to the letter, as he would of course anticipate from his devoted secretary, Theodora Bosanquet.

‘I
sn't it time we went to Lamb House? I'm bored.' The tall young woman kicked her horribly wedge-heeled platform numbers up in the air while remaining seated, a feat I attributed to the pelvic-floor exercises one had overheard her discussing with the Sales Babes – as I had christened the absent girls from God-knows-where. ‘I mean, there's been no trace of a ghost unless you count a stupid dwarf who is probably still alive and drawing his pension! What is the point of this Bosanquet woman anyway? She's fainting all over the place when all she has to do is find a half-baked Henry James story. Obviously, the “Master” knew it was no good, so he abandoned it. Worse things have happened at sea!'

Part of me couldn't help admiring Miss Harrods Couture for not giving a damn if she offended our hostess (evidently she had, for a throat-clearing, watch-consulting and rattling of ice cubes in readiness for further bullshots became suddenly loud) – but I also felt a moment of pride when my Jane Eyre student spoke up and said she didn't think this was the right time for a visit to the house up the steep hill in Rye. ‘We need to know that story' came in her – slightly maddening – quiet voice. I wasn't even sure whether Salome had heard her. But I had hardly looked over at the bay window with its distinctly Turneresque light effects between bouts of all-obliterating snow – with another soft voice coming in agreement – when it became clear that my sister-in-law was still there on the window seat. The curtain that had previously shielded Lou from the gaze of the Armani army now virtually concealed all of her mother. Of Doug McGill there was no sign.

‘It is essential that we understand the story Henry James was trying to write,' Mary was saying, as Salome raised her dramatically blackened eyebrows and muttered disagreement, if I picked up her half-Estuary, half-ladies'-finishing-school accent accurately.

‘There's not too much to understand' came the voice of a man as he emerged from the pantry, cocktail shaker in hand. ‘James was unable to crack the problem of the central couple's economic situation. He had
The Wings of the Dove
in mind, where a corrupt journalist fakes love for an heiress in order to set up his girlfriend in the style to which she has become accustomed …'

‘He was a paedophile,' Salome barked back at the now-recognizable Mike who, visibly affected by the contents of the shaker, swayed over to the window seat and lowered himself down next to Mary. ‘He'd be in gaol today. He was lucky to get away with it then.
The Child
…
The Beautiful Child
– for Christ's sake, what does that point to except a lascivious old man jerking off on a hot summer day … No wonder he gave it all up in July! Or maybe the typist, poor bitch, Theodora …'

‘Mary Weld took dictation from James in 1902 and continued to do so for a further five years,' my almost inaudible student put in doggedly.

‘Well, I'm going anyway,' Salome announced. And, with a toss of her head one couldn't help admiring – this was no Anna Karenina, no Tess of the d'Urbervilles, surely more of a Lucrezia Borgia – she swung down from the table she had taken since the mass emigration of the M&S bargain-basement-hunters and clattered out of the room.

‘But the snow, the snow,' our media hospitality provider shouted after her in exasperation. ‘Please, please …'

We all heard the front door, a particularly unconvincing ersatz mahogany one complete with fake old brass knocker, as it crunched shut behind her. Only Mike's slurred tones rose above the wall of silence and surprise that followed Salome's departure; and if I was the sole occupant of the dining-room to gaze in even greater amazement at the Manchester Marxist's next pronouncement then I feel sure that my degree of shock was high enough to compensate for the lack of interest of any of the others gathered there.

‘What did Mr and Mrs Archdean offer the artist Merrow for his portrait of the imaginary child? James did not specify. Here we find an unsuccessful attempt to write a petit-bourgeois tale where the fascination the artist clearly feels for the future mother of the not-yet-depicted child replaces the harsh realities of the artist's life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Who here knows what the income of, say, John Singer Sargent was at that time? I can tell you …'

Before Mike could finish his sentence I had made rapidly for the door. In the hall I saw McGill as he hurried to resume his position on the window seat.

But for once I didn't care. For the scene I had so recently left – Lou's room and her silent, exhausted shake of the head when I pressed her to tell me how she was – still mystified and baffled me. As did Jasmine, wife of Mike, as she stood by the fireplace, head low, while appearing to look right through me when I attempted to draw her into a conversation. ‘Of course we have met,' she had said at last, after shooting, as I saw, a protective angry glance at the pale figure in the four-poster. And at last, but still hesitatingly, she held out her hand to me – in a quaint, old-fashioned way.

‘Isabel Archdean,' this mysterious visitor to Lou had then introduced herself. ‘Have you come with a message from Mr Merrow? When can he begin the portrait?'

Now I am sitting as far from the secondhand book-dealer as I can get – on the window seat and unpleasantly close to both McGill and the man I had known as ‘Mike'. A silence fell that was more demanding of attention than before – only a flurry of snow coming down the chimney brought a little gasp of fear from my poor Jane Eyre.

‘The Beautiful Child,'
the wispy little bibliophile on the raised stool read out. And so, finally, he began.

I
T WAS ONLY
for a moment that Merrow failed to place them, aware as he was, as soon as they were introduced, of having already seen them. That was all they at first showed, except that they were shy, agitated, almost frightened: they had been present to him, and within a few days, though unwittingly, in some connection that had made them interesting. He had recovered the connection even before the lady spoke – spoke, he could see, out of the depths of their diffidence and making the effort, he could also see, that the woman, in the delicate case, is always left by the man to make. ‘We admire so very much your portrait at the Academy – the one of the beautiful little boy. We've had no one to introduce us to you, but we thought you would perhaps just let us call. We've – a – been wondering. We were so struck.'

‘We were most awfully struck,' said the young husband, who was as ‘nice-looking' in his way as she in hers – and indeed their ways were much the same. He gained confidence from his wife's attack.

‘Oh, I'm sure I'm happy to see you. You've – a – been wondering?' Yet he hardly liked, Hugh Merrow, to take the words out of their mouths. ‘Struck' he had seen they were, struck with his picture of happy little Reggie Blyth, six years old, erect in a sailor-suit, so struck that their attitude in front of it, three days before, was what had made him remember them – he having been really as much impressed with it as they, poor dears, had been with his work. He had gone back to the exhibition, just open, to look at a couple of things by friends to which he had apparently not done justice on varnishing day or at the private view, admonished thereto by an apparent perception of the failure in the friends themselves, whom he had since met and to whom, with an amenity altogether characteristic of him, he wished to make it up. Moving through the rooms on his way out he had not denied himself the pleasure, nor avoided the imprudence, of passing within eyeshot of his own principal performance, partly for the joy of again seeing himself so luckily hung. If either of the two friends to whom he wished to make it up had chanced to be there with a different motive – they were hung so much worse – they might easily have had their revenge by accusing him of hovering greedily where he could catch compliments. They would indeed have been justified in the sense that he had, indubitably, slackened pace at the sight of the pleasant – oh, the peerless! – young couple who were so evidently lost in admiration. Their attention had affected him, at a glance, as so serious and so sweet that instinctively, with the artist's well-known ‘need' of appreciation, he had treated himself to the bare opportunity of picking up some word that would further express it. And he had been to that extent repaid that a remarkable expression, on the young woman's lips, had reached his ear. ‘Oh, it kills me!' – that was what she had strangely sighed: yet without turning off and rather as if she like to be killed. Merrow had himself turned off – he had got rather more than he wanted. He winced for compunction, as if he had pushed too far, and it served him right that what she had said needn't in the least have been a tribute to the painter. He guessed, in fact, on the spot the situation: it was a case of a young husband and a young wife deprived by death of a little boy of whom Reggie Blyth, extraordinarily handsome, blooming with life and promise – under a master-hand certainly – too poignantly reminded them. Reggie, clearly, resembled their child, brought him back, opened their wound; in spite of which they were still fascinated – they had seemed fairly to devour him. But their interest had been in him, not in Hugh Merrow: so that on their thus reappearing their proper motive immediately presented itself. What they had been ‘wondering', as the wife said, was, inevitably, whether they mightn't perhaps persuade him to paint their little dead boy. They would have photographs, perhaps some other portrait, some domestic drawing, or even some fatuous baby bust, and their appeal to him – from which it was natural they should hang back – would be on behalf of these objects and of such suggestions and contributes as they might otherwise make.

That, as I say, had quickly come to him – with the one contradictory note indeed that mourning was not their wear; whereby the death of the child would not have been recent. He saw it all, at any rate – and partly from habit, for he had been approached repeatedly for a like purpose, such being the penalty of a signal gift: but he saw it disappointedly as he had seen it before and the qualification of his welcome to the errand of these visitors cost him the greater effort as the visitors themselves were unmistakeably amiable. They were visibly such a pair as would always be spoken of in the same way – ‘Oh yes, the young Archdeans; charming people.' He was in possession of their name through the presentation of their card before their entrance. They were charming people because in the first place they could feel – which was an aptitude one seemed, in the world, to encounter less and less; and because in the second, as husband and wife, they felt so together – were so touchingly, so prettily, as he might call it, united in their impulse. The tall young man, all shapely straightness of feature and limb, erectness that was not stiffness, with his simple but sensitive face, his rich colour, his pleasant clothes, his lapse of assurance, had been as much taken by their idea, Merrow knew, as the bereaved mother herself, whose type, equally fortunate, equally a thing of achieved fineness, though not on the present occasion a thing of better balance, added the light that made the painter inwardly exclaim as he read their story and looked from one to the other, ‘What a beautiful child it must have been!' That stuck out for him, awake as he was to the charm of beauty, harmony, felicity, of everything that made for ‘race' – what beautiful children they ought to have! He had seen so many of the mismatched and misbegotten that his eyes rested with a sudden surrender on this appearance of forces – if they could be called forces. He was in fact so held that while Mrs Archdean continued to explain, he quite lost, for the instant, the sense of her words. He was thinking that she was ever so delicately and dimly pretty, that her mouth was as sweet as her eyes, and her nose as handsome as her hair; and he was thinking other things besides. They were charming people partly because happy conditions had produced them, easily, goodly, generous English conditions, current London plenitudes, such as would operate, in turn, by the fact of their own happiness, which couldn't fail to be always decorative, always at least enhancing to the general scene, by mere casual presence.