Free The Beautiful Child by Emma Tennant

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