Free The Beautiful Child by Emma Tennant Page B

McGill about the agonies James had suffered in trying to complete what had seemed a rich and amusing tale – and had she taken a feminist route to understanding it, to explain his failure to empathize with the childless wife, for all his protestations to the contrary? Would one’s students in future, with their fascination for their own ‘space’ and their Facebooks and the virtual identity of almost everything, insist on assuming the names of the characters invented by an author? How is one supposed to react? Must there be a charade, when all that is needed in understanding a work is a combination of intelligence and scepticism rarely found in the young these days? I knew I had offended the false Isabel Archdean. Perhaps I should go back in and sit with her amongst the glass-topped tables and the
objets de vertu,
all suspiciously like the junk you see displayed on a Brighton stall at the Saturday Market. As an encouraging mentor I should press ‘Jasmine’ for her story. This could be incorporated into James’s
Beautiful Child.
How much more post-postmodern could you get? I didn’t of course. The letter was only a few lines long and written in an old-fashioned hand.
    Dear Professor Sunderland,
    I write to inform you that my great-aunt Mary Weld expressed a wish shortly before her death that any scholar interested in the facts surrounding the uncompleted tale
The Child
(or
The Beautiful Child,
or
Hugh Merrow)
should meet a descendant able to provide details of the strange happenings at Lamb House, Rye, in the summer of 1902.
    I am the one to have been entrusted with the task. You will be admitted by the entrance to the Garden Room at ten minutes to midnight and should make your way to the powder room leading from the drawing-room, where I will await you. I give an undertaking that what I am about to divulge was known to nobody other than my aunt; and that it will devolve on you and no one else to spread – or bury – the truth about Henry James.
    The letter was signed Philippa something-or-other; the Weld name had evidently been subsumed by the years, owing to marriages and succession of the male line. But I believed her.
    And as I made my way from the pretentious structure hired by my media partners and out into the snow I believed the niece of the Master’s amanuensis, the colonial Miss Weld, even more wholeheartedly than before.
    For a car, circa the first decade of the twentieth century – a Hispano Suiza, perhaps, or a Packard (I am no expert in these matters) – stood in the circular driveway. An old man sat at the wheel. He waved to me, and I climbed in. We set off for Rye.

    It was not a long journey, but the whirling snow, the occasional gaps in the black sky where stars showed through as if burned there by smouldering blankets of dark cloud and the repetitive lines of trees – were they here in Henry James’s time? I wondered, or were they planted after the Great War, a memorial to the platoons of soldiers who had lost their lives? – all provided a timeless quality at once restful and unnerving. I knew I was
en route
to Lamb House; but not as an ordinary visitor. It was as the passenger of the old man who drove me that I came; and he, surely, was a revenant from the days of
The Golden Bowl
and
The Wings of the Dove.
Mary Weld it was who had thrilled to the melodious tones of the Master as he dictated his impossible sentences, pausing only to lean against an escritoire, head in hands, when the correct word fled his mind and had to be coaxed back into existence; Mary Weld, or her niece, would supply the answer to our puzzle, and I would be left with the choice, as the present-day Miss Weld had put it, to broadcast or destroy the evidence surrounding the unfinished story.
    A bitter cold had invaded the car, and I found myself shivering and then beginning to cough, always a dangerous sign for me in the winter. What was I doing here? Would it not have been