Author, Author

by David Lodge

  ‘Well, yes, sir, there is,’ she said, twisting the strings of her apron a little nervously. ‘I was wondering whether you’ve ever thought of getting a house-boy.’

  ‘A house-boy?’ he echoed her with some surprise. ‘Do we need one?’

  ‘It would be useful, Mr James. Someone to run errands and do odd jobs around the house – helping Alice with polishing the knives, for instance. Cleaning boots. Bringing in the coals. There’s all manner of things to be done in a big old-fashioned place like this. I don’t like to ask George Gammon to do much – he’s got his work cut out in the garden.’

  ‘That is true,’ he acknowledged. His friend Alfred Parsons, a landscape painter who was also expert at designing gardens, had produced a comprehensive plan for the improvement of the Lamb House acre-and-a-half which would keep Gammon fully occupied for years. But he suspected there was another reason for the suggestion. Smith’s drinking had got worse since the move to Rye – he seemed to pine for the bustle and noise of London, and missed the electric light and other modern conveniences of De Vere Gardens. He was frequently ‘poorly’, a euphemism for drunk or recovering from drink. To cover his delinquencies Mrs Smith had to perform many of her husband’s duties, and pass on some of her own to the parlourmaid or the housemaid, so there was probably some stress in the lower ranks of his little crew which a boy might relieve.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘How much would I have to pay a house-boy?’

  ‘Four shillings a week, sir,’ Mrs Smith said promptly. ‘And his meals. But he wouldn’t live in.’

  ‘You sound as if you have someone in mind, Mrs Smith,’ he said.

  She blushed. ‘Well, yes, sir, I have. Mrs Noakes who lives round the corner in Watchbell Street, a very decent woman, lost her husband recently and is left with six young children. She’s desperate to find some work for her eldest, Burgess.’

  ‘Burgess? An unusual name. How old is he?’

  ‘Fourteen, I think, sir. A nice lad.’

  Henry thought for a moment. ‘Very well, Mrs Smith, you may invite Mrs Noakes to bring her son for an interview one day.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Mrs Smith still lingered. ‘You wouldn’t like to see them now, by any chance?’

  ‘Now? My goodness, are they in the house, then?’

  ‘They’re sitting in the kitchen, sir. Sarah Noakes brought him early and asked me to ask you. She’s that desperate.’

  He sighed. ‘Very well, I suppose I might as well get it over with. I promise nothing till I’ve seen the boy, mind you.’

  ‘No, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll fetch them straight away.’

  He detained her as she turned to leave. ‘You’re sure that four shillings is enough?’

  ‘It’s the usual rate round here,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘You can always raise the wages if he gives satisfaction.’

  ‘Very true.’

  A few moments later, Mrs Noakes entered the room with her son, curtsied and thanked him effusively for seeing them.

  ‘This is Burgess, sir, my eldest. A very willing boy, sir. You won’t regret having him to work for you.’ She thrust her son forward. The boy gave a shy smile and looked down at his boots. He was slightly gnome-like in appearance, with a snub nose, plump cheeks, a deep upper lip, and a head of dense wavy hair, but his most salient feature was his extremely small stature.

  ‘He’s very small, Mrs Noakes.’

  ‘Small, but strong, sir. My poor dear husband was the same.’

  ‘Is he really fourteen?’

  ‘Nearly,’ Mrs Noakes said, evasively.

  ‘And he’s left school?’

  Mrs Noakes shrugged. ‘He’s had to. I’ve got five younger ones to feed.’

  ‘Can you read and write, Noakes?’ he asked the boy.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Noakes.

  ‘Can he, sir?’ Mrs Noakes echoed rhetorically. ‘If ever I needs to write a letter, Burgess does it for me. He has a lovely neat hand. And he reads the newspaper to me beautiful.’

  ‘Does he – does he do the police in different voices?’ he said with a chuckle.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ Mrs Noakes looked puzzled, as well she might.

  ‘Nothing – nothing. A literary allusion. As you may know, I am an author by profession—’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mrs Smith said.’

  ‘And so I require a certain degree of peace and quiet in the house and garden when I am at work, or reading. Are you a quiet boy, Noakes?’

  ‘Quiet as a mouse,’ Mrs Noakes cried.

  ‘Please let the boy answer for himself, Mrs Noakes.’ He looked Burgess Noakes in the eye. ‘Do you, for instance, whistle?’

  The boy thought about this question for a moment, and then replied: ‘Well, I does whistle – occasional, like – but I can stop m’self.’

  There was undoubtedly something rather engaging about him, unimpressive as his appearance was. They discussed the nature of his duties for a while, and Burgess Noakes professed himself able and willing to perform them. Henry asked if he had any questions to ask himself.

  ‘Will I be able to go to the club?’ he said.

  ‘What club is that?’

  ‘The Rye Athletic Club,’ said Mrs Noakes. ‘He’s in the Boys. Mad about it.’

  ‘I’m sure you can have some time off for recreation,’ Henry said. ‘You’d have to arrange that with Mrs Smith. And what sports do you pursue, Noakes?’

  ‘Football and boxing,’ said Noakes.

  ‘Boxing?’ He could not conceal his surprise. ‘Aren’t you a little small for that?’

  ‘Bantamweight,’ said Noakes.

  ‘Ah, yes. Bantamweight . . . In London this summer I saw the Fitzsimmons–Corbett fight, at the cinematograph,’ he said. ‘It was most exciting. Did you happen to see it?’

  Burgess’s eyes widened. ‘I wish I did!’ he said.

  ‘The cinematograph ain’t come to Rye yet, sir,’ said Mrs Noakes.

  ‘That was the heavyweight championship, was it not?’

  ‘Fitzsimmons is a light-heavy but he’s the best boxer in the world,’ said the boy, suddenly animated. ‘Dropped Corbett in the fourteenth, ’e did.’

  ‘Well, it was certainly satisfying to see the smaller and more skilful man win.’ It was time to draw the interview to a close, before the conversation became too technical. ‘Very well, Noakes,’ he said, ‘I will take you on a month’s trial.’

  He accepted Mrs Noakes’s tearful thanks, and directed them to make the necessary arrangements with Mrs Smith, whom he summoned with the bell. He looked at his watch: it was ten minutes before ten, the hour when he usually began work.

  He passed out through the French windows into the garden, with Tosca at his heels. It was a clear, crisp sunny September day. He took deep breaths of the salty air, and waved to MacAlpine who was standing at the foot of the Garden Room steps, smoking a pipe. He took a turn around the lawn, and greeted George Gammon, who was hoeing a flowerbed, and promised him crocuses, tulips and hyacinths in the spring. He waited, politely turning his back, while Tosca completed her toilet in the appropriate part of the garden, then quickening his step he made his way to the Garden Room. He had reached that point in The Awkward Age where Nanda was speaking to Vanderbilt in the garden of Mr Longdon’s country house, and he intended to base his description of this setting on his own garden. He looked forward immensely to the morning’s work.

  PART FOUR

  THE second day of 1916 at Carlyle Mansions is inevitably something of an anticlimax after the excitements of the first, though more telegrams and letters of congratulation arrive from home and abroad (and will continue to do so for days to come). Mrs James recognises the distinguished names appended to some of these messages – William Dean Howells, for instance, Logan Pearsall Smith, Ellen Terry – and permits Theodora, who calls to enquire if her services are required, to identify some of the less familiar: Jean Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the United States; the French Academician Paul Bourget and his American wife, Minnie; El
izabeth Robins, the actress and producer; Mr and Mrs Edward Compton, who produced and performed in Henry’s first play, and their son, Lieutenant Mackenzie, Royal Marines, who cables his congratulations from the British Legation in Athens and signs himself ‘Monty’.

  ‘You may know him better as Compton Mackenzie, the novelist,’ Theodora says.

  ‘Oh, you mean Sinister Street? Peggy told me not to read it because I would be shocked.’

  ‘Mr James admires it greatly,’ says Theodora, who has learned by now not to use the familiar ‘HJ’ in conversation with Mrs James. ‘And this note is from Ford Madox Hueffer, who published an excellent novel last year called The Good Soldier – better than Sinister Street, in my opinion, though it didn’t receive anything like the same attention.’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard of it,’ says Mrs James. She is impressed in spite of herself by both the quantity of the messages and the quality of the senders. Henry himself however seems to have lost interest in his honour. He closes his eyes with a bored expression when she reads out the messages to him, and brushes her hand aside impatiently when she tries to show him the names and signatures attached to them. Eventually she gives up this unrewarding effort, and tells Burgess to wheel Henry’s couch to the window in the sitting room, where the view of the passing boats, tirelessly cleaving the brown water of the Thames, and Burgess’s patient attendance, have their customary calming effect.

  The next day Mrs James’s daughter Peggy arrives, having set off from New York on Christmas Eve. That she was prepared to brave wintry seas and U-boat wolf-packs to see her dying uncle is a measure of her affection for him. They have had a special relationship ever since 1900, when she was left at a boarding school in England while her parents traipsed around the Continental spas in search of a cure for her father’s heart ailment. She spent two Christmases and other holidays at Lamb House during that time, and Henry used to meet her occasionally in London and take her out to theatres and museums and the cinematograph, doing his kind best to mitigate her homesickness. Sadly, she inherited the James family’s tendency to depression, and as a young woman suffered a nervous breakdown very like her Aunt Alice’s at a similar age, apparently triggered by her brother Billy’s marriage. Her recovery was helped by going back to England and enjoying Henry’s society again, and she was actually thinking of settling there when the war broke out and obliged her to return home. The uncle who waved her off on the boat train in 1914 was, in spite of his years, and his anguish about the war, a dapper, assured, alert man-of-letters. Now she sits beside the couch where he lies like a small beached whale, helpless, stricken, and confused, and sympathetically squeezes his limp hand. He seems pleased but unsurprised by her presence.

  ‘I’m very glad to see you, Peggy,’ he says. ‘I hope your father will be in soon. He is the one person in all Rome I want to see.’

  ‘He thinks he’s in Rome today,’ Mrs James explains superfluously. ‘Yesterday it was Dublin. Tomorrow it might be New York.’

  Mrs James is very glad indeed to see her daughter installed in the flat. At last she has an ally, a compatriot and a member of the family, to help in the management of the crisis. Peggy, for instance, completely supports her attitude to Theodora Bosanquet, and is outraged to learn that the secretary has been corresponding regularly with Edith Wharton. ‘The way that woman and her husband carried on before they got divorced was an offence to decent society,’ Peggy says fiercely. ‘Especially her flagrant affair with Morton Fullerton. We should have nothing to do with her.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ says Mrs James. ‘Though it appears that she has done Henry some favours in the past. She is of course very rich.’

  ‘We don’t need her money – or Miss Bosanquet’s interference,’ says Peggy.

  So poor Theodora is frozen out of the household even more pointedly than before. Edith Wharton, guessing from the paucity of information Theodora is able to transmit that something of the kind must have happened, writes to offer Theodora a job as her secretary. Theodora thinks it over carefully. At first glance it seems inviting, an opportunity to enter a glamorous cosmopolitan world of staterooms and motor cars and first-class hotels that she has so far only glimpsed from outside – it seems to be the very direction in which Lambert Strether’s injunction, ‘Live all you can,’ was pointing. But in the end she declines the offer. One interview with Mrs Wharton had been enough to give her the measure of that lady’s formidable personality. To be her secretary would mean being her slave, however cushioned by luxury, and their values are ultimately incompatible. Theodora is a convinced Christian with an interest in mysticism (the oriental as well as occidental traditions), and although less censorious of unconventional behaviour than Peggy James, is at heart just as unsympathetic to Mrs Wharton’s style of life. Accordingly she politely declines the post, pleading the inadequacy of her French, though in fact she is perfectly competent in the language. When the time comes – and it cannot be far off – that her employment by HJ is terminated, she believes she will have no difficulty finding work in some Government department for the duration of the war. Meanwhile she intends to stay at her post, even if she is prevented from doing anything useful. When Mrs James gives Theodora her monthly salary she returns the cheque on the grounds that she has not been allowed to earn it, but the old lady, evidently feeling some contrition for her behaviour, insists she accept the money.

  All through January Henry’s state appears to be stable – ‘like a tired child’ is Alice’s descriptive phrase in a letter home, ‘but comfortable, tranquil’. He is physically weak but not in pain, and his delusions are gentle, kindly ones. He speaks of having tea with Carlyle and his father round the corner in Cheyne Row as if it happened yesterday. Sometimes, perhaps as a result of gazing at the tugs and barges and launches moving ceaselessly up and down the river beyond his window, he imagines he is on a ship, and once, on being told that Burgess Noakes is out on an errand, says: ‘How extraordinary that Burgess should leave the ship to do errands.’ He has addressed his servant by his first name ever since he came back from the war, but now he occasionally refers to him as ‘Burgess James’, as if he has mentally adopted him as a kind of son. Only when Burgess is absent for any considerable length of time does he become fretful. Sometimes his hand moves over the counterpane of his bed as if writing words in that extravagantly large loose scrawl that his family know so well from his letters.

  The days pass so quietly, and the routine of the household develops a rhythm so smooth and regular that the two James ladies feel able to venture out occasionally for some relief and recreation. One evening they go to see Peter Pan at the Duke of York’s. Mrs James has never seen it and is curious to do so, and Peggy is privately of the opinion that it is just about the only entertainment in the West End that can be relied on not to bore, offend or shock her mother. Alice is enchanted, and enthuses about the play to Edmund Gosse who calls next day to enquire about Henry. She mentions that she didn’t hear the line which Henry quoted on New Year’s Day about death being an awfully big adventure, and Gosse says it has been cut from the play because of the war.

  ‘I can understand that,’ says Peggy drily.

  ‘Barrie himself is dreadfully cut up about the death of George – you know, the eldest of the boys he adopted,’ says Gosse.

  ‘No,’ says Mrs James. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘I remember hearing something,’ says Peggy. ‘But please tell us, Mr Gosse.’

  ‘Ah. Well, they were Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’s boys – that’s George Du Maurier’s daughter, Sylvia,’ says Gosse, settling back in his seat. He enjoys telling stories like this one. Henry is asleep in his bedroom and they are having tea in the sitting room. ‘She married Arthur Llewelyn Davies, a barrister, and they had these five boys. Barrie met the two eldest in Kensington Gardens with their nanny, when they were quite little, and took a fancy to them. Used to tell them stories and play games of imaginary adventures – that was how he got the idea for Peter Pan, in fact.
He soon became a close friend of the family. He had no children himself, you see – but that’s another story . . .’

  ‘Wasn’t there a divorce?’ says Peggy.

  ‘Yes, a very painful business for Barrie . . . The Llewelyn Davieses became a kind of surrogate family for him, and everything was fine until Arthur got a dreadful cancer of the jaw when he was in his forties, and died after a ghastly operation failed. Then Sylvia died, of cancer too, just a few years later. So Barrie became guardian to the five orphans. Doted on them, sent them to Eton, Cambridge, everything . . . The eldest, George, was killed in Flanders last March. Sniper’s bullet. He was twenty-one. It happened just a week or so after Sylvia’s brother, Guy Du Maurier, was killed – on the same front. Guy was a professional soldier, a Lieutenant Colonel. Thank God poor Emma didn’t live to hear about it.’

  ‘Emma?’ Alice is bewildered by this stream of unfamiliar names.

  ‘George Du Maurier’s widow. She saw her two eldest daughters die before her – Sylvia and Trixy, both lovely girls. It would have been too cruel if she’d lived to hear about Guy and George Davies as well. But she passed away herself in January last year.’ He sighs and the ends of his grey moustache seem to droop even more than usual in sympathy with this sad story. ‘A tragic family, especially when you think how gay and vital they all were when they were young. I knew them well – so did Henry of course. But now it seems all families are potentially tragic . . . My own son, Philip, is in Flanders . . .’

  The two women murmur their sympathy.

  ‘He’s not fighting, thank God, he’s a doctor with an ambulance unit. But it’s dangerous work, near the Front.’

  ‘I don’t understand what this terrible war is about,’ says Mrs James.

  ‘I don’t think anyone understands what it was about orginally,’ says Gosse, ‘but now it’s quite clear what we’re fighting for – we must resist German aggression. Henry saw that very clearly from the beginning. It’s been marvellous, the support he’s given to this country in its hour of need. I was very honoured that he asked me to be his sponsor when he applied for British citizenship.’