Free The Beautiful Child by Emma Tennant Page A

in my life was when I realized she was bringing it over to me now, my Maîtresse d’Hôtel, with the look of a conjuror about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, as I sat paralysed in the snowbound room, with its glittering crystal teardrops and night-blackened window panes. The first experience of true terror I have ever undergone was when I knew – somehow, but she backed up my hunch, oh yes she did! – that the letter was for me. I held my outstretched arm blindly upwards, as if to fend her off. But – ‘Professor Sunderland, this is for you’ – and her voice rang out like a circus whip. ‘Do tell us what is inside!’
    Here we were, the assorted guests at a harmless Christmas party, a party where a slightly unusual entertainment had been promised to take account of the bookish nature of some of those participating and to introduce to the works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ greatest author a selection of young girls more likely to be aficionados of ‘chick lit’ than connoisseurs of
The Golden Bowl.
Douglas McGill had promised a ghost story more chilling than
The Turn of the Screw.
And what had happened? The uncompleted short story had about as much potential for provoking terror as one of James’s successors at Lamb House’s literary efforts, E.F. Benson. McGill, who had obviously believed the exciting account from the Bell Street pedlar of Miss Bosanquet’s visit to his father all those years ago – the manuscript in a chest and all the rest – was the sole member of our ill-assorted group who appeared satisfied by the words he had just read out. McGill, I was not displeased to see, appeared as bored as the others by the whole concept – ghosts, story – even Henry James himself, for he closed the Leon Edel volume he carried with him – a biography of the Master where brief mention of
The Beautiful Child
is made – and he closed it with an air of finality I had not seen demonstrated at any class or lecture. It had been his idea, though: he had made a fool of himself, the elderly satyr, and returning his hand to poor Mary’s knee, as he now proceeded to do, he had the air of a dejected suitor. There may be nothing worse than failing to enthral an audience, as the Master knew so well. For those who ‘can’t keep it up’ the outcome is bitter indeed.
    Now I must decide. I had every reason to suppose that Digital Towers – or whatever this web-obsessed Edwardian pile is called – may be infinitely more haunted – yes, that is the term for the experience I suffered on the upper landing – than one could at first have thought possible. Do I tell my sister-in-law about the hand? Should I inform the young woman known as ‘Jasmine’ that I am surprised at her taking Mrs Archdean’s name, when the recent reading was presumably the first time the relatively uncommon surname had been heard here?
    Or should I simply leave, slip away from a house party turned sinister where I – so it seemed – had been singled out for whatever unpleasant prank the hosts wished to visit on me. I knew the humiliation of the television reality-show victim. Surely it was time to go.

    I took the letter into the hall and ran my thumbnail along the thick, cream-coloured paper until the envelope fell open and my name came up at me – this on thicker paper still, like (I couldn’t help thinking) an insect embalmed in a chemical solution: long dead and almost unrecognizable.
    But the letter was for me all right. I could hear the voices in the opulent drawing-room, of the audience just subjected to the Master’s unfinished effort,
Hugh Merrow
or
The Beautiful Child,
and I thought I could pick out the mousy, rather aggressive woman who had introduced herself before the reading as Mrs Archdean. Sighing, discontented – was she going to try to tell us her own ending, had she contrived to learn from