response to his endless voice.
“It was presumably present Comma, a fine purple peach.”
His voice went on, but my mind was growling: Peaches are not purple, Mr. James. There’s too much of the letter P, Mr. James. But of course I kept on going, never saying a word. At least, I was cautious enough for that.
The very next day, Mr. James came back with his corrections inked over the words from the day before. It was as if he had overheard the distaste in my mind for his alliteration, for he had changed that purple phrase, though it took a double negative to get him out of trouble, and he had kept most of the P’s, had even added to them: “It was not, no doubt, a fine purple peach, but it might pass for a round ripe plum . . .”
I felt a surge of pride, my judgement exonerated.
4
“The Awkward Age”
December 1907
. . . the quite incalculable tendency of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and develop and cover the ground when conditions happen to favour it.
—Henry James
Preface to “The Awkward Age” The New York Edition, volume 9
A telegram from my aunt Emily arrived, announcing she was to arrive in Rye the next day. She said she happened to be visiting with a friend and hoped to come over to spend the afternoon. Mr. James had asked for an entire morning’s work. That meant that the afternoon would be mine, and I could take her to all the sights in Rye. But, oh dear, she wanted to meet Mr. James and see where I was working. I could not have that happen. He would seem such a strange sort of person for Aunt Emily’s niece to be spending time with.
Aunt Emily had always held high aspirations for me. Oh, not marriage and social position as the other aunts on my father’s side did. No, Emily was my dearest aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law. And I think I was always her favourite, too.
I am not sure why I was special to her, because I was the wildest of all the cousins. Perhaps she liked me because I had most needed her help, or perhaps it was because I was quite different from what was expected. But whatever the reason, my aunt Emily always took notice of me, though I do not believe she understood me any better than any of the other aunts did, and there were plenty of other aunts, all of them aunts by marriage. My mother had only suitably business-minded brothers, six of them. They all were married, and Aunt Emily was married to the youngest, my uncle Ras, and lived in a big house in Kensington. As much as she liked me, not even Aunt Emily seemed to understand what I thought or cared about, even while I was young and still living with my father. No one understood why I enjoyed repairing bicycles. And I am sure that no one at home ever read one of Mr. James’ novels, for they hardly read any books at all.
“Home”: What a strange-sounding word now, after all these years settled in London with Lady Rhondda—my Margaret—and with the Second Great War more than a decade behind us. Where was my home then, in those days when I first went to Rye? I was startled then if Mr. James suggested I go home on the days when his struggle to find the right words overcame him, when it appeared to me that he had spent too much time away from his dictation and had lost the thread.
Even then, I thought it strange to call my boarding house and its cramped, cold room “home.” When forced to return home to that room, I was miserable; it was noisy and through the thin walls I heard voices, but those were voices of no one I knew or wanted to know. I felt quite lonely there. On cold winter days, that room was dark and even damp, and the old wall-paper was yellowed, greasy, while the one low-browed window opened only onto an unkempt patch of grass and the alley with its cans for cinders and rubbish.
When I was young, I used to have a lovely room in our old, brown house across the road from my grandfather’s big house filled with Bosanquet uncles and aunts and cousins in Swansea, the older, more fashionable part of the Isle of Wight. My father was the youngest boy of eight. His eldest sisters, my aunts Bessie and Bert, were much older. I am sure they never approved of me, especially when I wanted to go to university, for they had very definite ideas about what a young lady—a well-behaved young niece—should be, and whatever that was, I was not that. I wish I had met my father’s younger sister, Georgie. She was most unusual. I had always heard that she’d never married, wore her hair cut off very short, rode horses, raised dogs, and was not at all like the other sisters. But she never came to visit.
At first we lived near my Bosanquet grandfather, and I grew up believing the Bosanquets to be the busiest, most energetic of families, with our golf games at dawn, cricket before luncheon, croquet tournaments in the afternoon heat, and tennis round robins at tea-time.
My father was happy and busy in those days, when he was assistant vicar in a big, popular church. I don’t remember his being at home often, fortunately not enough to notice much about me. I was an ungainly girl afraid to make many friends. My older cousins across the road, Queenie and the boys, fascinated me, but often they were busy, and so I would read or play alone with my cats; we always had two or three feline generations, mother and daughter and granddaughter, and they were my best friends.
My mother and father liked it best when I was quiet. When my father was home, he was usually doing something in his study, and my mother was often in her room with the door closed. She always rested after lunch, every day of her life, a real rest, not a few minutes of sitting down with her eyes closed. No, she went up to her room (and of course she and Papa never slept in the same room in those less-demanding times) and had several private hours without interruption. By unspoken agreement, the household protected her. Everyone told me to keep quiet and be good; even then, my mother’s health was not strong.
Her room was cool and dark in the early afternoon, even in summer. She had the shades drawn and the curtains closed, doubly dark there in her cave of shadow and bed and dresser. She always slept under a cover of some sort, a soft knitted pink blanket in winter and, in summer, the most beautiful coverlet—crisp and white, made of embroidered linen and lace, an impossible dream of a bed cover. When I was young, my mother seemed to me a very silly woman, but I understand, now that I am older than my mother was when she died, that she wanted only to have beautiful things always around her, that she wanted her life to be beautiful, too, and so she made a little ritual, I realise now, of going up to her darkened room at the same hour every day.
“For a little bit,” she would announce at the luncheon table. “I’ll go up now for my little rest, for a few minutes. I always feel so much better after I’ve had my rest. Please forgive me. Perhaps you both should take a rest as well. I think it’s best for us to save our store of energy, while we can,” and so, with a coy wave, up she would go.
I always felt a little lost when my mother was sleeping in the middle of the day. I had too much energy to lie down at midday when I was young. The maid could not persuade me to stop playing and rest for a few minutes even if she promised to look at a picture book with me, but once I was old enough to read for myself, I would take my book and disappear outside, and no one could pull me back, even for meals. And then when I got my first bicycle, oh heavens, I was free at last to go wherever I could imagine, flying down those sandy lanes, my long legs out on each side, my short hair loose, blown back by the breeze I had created.
Though I understood even then that my mother was not well and needed rest to save her energy, nevertheless, her door was closed all too often when I wanted her. There were some good days when she would be in her sitting-room by the window, writing letters or painting with a tiny brush some water-colour scene on stiff paper the size of my hand. She and Papa wrote and illustrated a story book for me, a rhyming version of “The Three Bears,” but it was such a
