I think. I did not like how it portrayed what happened to bad little girls. Goldilocks looked terrified by the huge bears, and even the youngest bear frightened me when his little wooden chair burst under him, with the sharp splinters flying everywhere, the way my parents drew the story. I guess they thought I would laugh at his predicament. I don’t think Mama ever understood my fear of meeting strangers, or of the dark, and so I had to pretend to be strong and brave for her. No matter how hard I tried, I could never be the good little girl my parents had wanted.
Sometimes, though, my books would not be enough, and I would escape that quiet house to go across the road and find my cousins. I thought I must be a bit of a Bosanquet after all because I did like to run outside and play games, especially with my boy cousins, especially cricket, which was their favourite, too. Because I was tall and strong and fast, they always let me into their games. We felt that playing cricket was our birthright, for, as Bosanquets, we were extremely proud of being related to our famous cricketer cousin, T. A. Bosanquet, whom we admired much more than our philosopher cousin, Bernard Bosanquet.
As we grew older, the boy cousins became more uncomfortable when I came out to play, but I always believed that it was because I had grown taller and was faster than they were. I was proud of being chosen to be on my school teams, but my strength and fame at cricket only seemed to embarrass my mother. I remember her scolding me for rips in my play skirts and grass stains on my knickers. She would worry that I was playing too rough and too wild for a proper sort of girl. I tried to reassure her by bragging that they loved what I did at my school. Even Cheltenham Ladies College, the bastion of propriety and wealth that the family had packed me off to, could be happy with such an excellent cricket player.
But then at the end of my first year, when I came home from Cheltenham, I found things to be very much changed. My family had left our beautiful big brown house, left our cats and cousins, and moved to Dorset and a new house, the Hermitage it was called, and a new parish, Uplyme. My mother seemed even more tired, and there was a new baby brother.
They never explained to me what had happened, why the birth had been so difficult. Now, I wonder if perhaps my mother was too old. My parents always seemed old to me, and they had waited for a long time, even for me, and I was already ten when Louis was born. Perhaps something had gone wrong, for my mother was never well again, and poor little Louis—We all felt that there was something not quite right about him. Our house had to be kept absolutely quiet, for once the baby began to cry, there was no way to comfort him. We went through a succession of nurse-maids and other servants, who did not want to stay on. Louis was always the most beautiful and the most difficult child. Perhaps I did not help much either, since I moped about the new place, complaining, wishing to be back at my grandfather’s, back with my friends at school, anywhere but there.
In that regimented quiet, once again I found my only freedom in books. I read all the time, so that my parents could not say I was making too much noise. Instead, days would go by when no one heard a word from me.
I think it was like that, too, when I went to Rye, far from my family and friends once again. No matter how lonely I felt, I could still lose myself in books and, this time, in Mr. James’ library. As he looked over my shoulder, he saw me finishing book after book, and he would even suggest what I should read next, so that I might go ahead to his new stories, or look at a play he was going to revive, or even go back and see what his newly dictated prefaces were like. I was happy to think I had more, new, unpublished writings by Henry James to read.
After all this time, I can still remember the shock of pleasure I felt as a young girl when I read my first James story. That was one night when a more experienced girl at Cheltenham smuggled to me that strangely affecting ghost story, “The Turn of the Screw.” I remember turning the pages, slowly at first, mystified, then hungrily devouring the book, and eagerly seeking out all the rest—novels, novellas, stories, everything. When I had to leave school because my mother was very ill and needed me at home, I was glad I had books for comfort.
My mother was taken from us when I was twenty. It was Aunt Emily, her brother’s wife, who came to help. I think she must have felt sorry for me, a young girl left alone with a small brother and a bereft father. Of course, I thought that I was grown up then; after all, I had been in charge of myself and of our household for the long months of my mother’s illness. But I remember that during the time the different aunts stayed on with us after the funeral, it was Aunt Emily who could make me cry—her voice sounded so much like my dear mother’s—and she tried to comfort me, something my father never tried to do.
It was also Aunt Emily who was there and who knew what to do when I fell ill. A bad head cold suddenly turned terrifyingly worse—high fever, headaches, and then my ear was in excruciating pain until suddenly, with a feeling of intense pressure, then release, my eardrum burst. I was ill that time for several weeks and needed Aunt Emily to take care of the household and keep me from complete despair, but as things do, I got better, and she could return to her own family.
The next year, when I went to prepare for the exams for university, only Aunt Emily listened to me talk about what I was about to do. I wondered if she wished that she herself had gone to university, but of course when she was young, there had been no real opportunity. After I received my degree, I think she was proud, though of course she never said so. She only glanced at the piece of parchment I had tacked up on my bedroom wall; she touched the Latin words, then went on talking of her garden and the weather.
It was against my father’s wishes and the other aunts’ dire warnings that I shared a flat in London with my school friends and went to work with Miss Petherbridge in Whitehall. Even that outrage did not seem to faze Aunt Emily. She would invite me to dine with her and my cousins at Honiton Street, and though she never asked about my work and I never really spoke of it, I am sure that she knew. Her present for my birthday that year was a very smart leather belt, with a note indicating that I was to use it to look handsome when I was on the job. I was very pleased that she might approve of me, because all the other aunts were in a dither over my working at all. They were at my father like a flock of sparrows, but of course he did nothing, said nothing; soon enough, he had his new bride and their new house. My father was the last person to be concerned about me, about what work I was doing or even where I was living. Even before I was twenty-one, when I left to go to university in London, he informed me that I was to be on my own since I was so smart. From then on, I would have to make do with my mother’s inheritance; once he re-married, he and Annie would not send me any more funds.
Now, all these many years later, I see why writing this is so difficult. I can’t seem to stick in one place. I keep wanting to write as if I am talking to someone, but that feels too personal. I am afraid there are things I should not be saying, afraid there are people I will hurt, even though my father has been dead now for thirty years, and my poor dear aunts have been dry and dead even longer. My cousins, even the youngest ones, Queenie’s children and the others, have long given me up. I believe they think I am stranger than even my aunts thought; they whisper about me across the cocktail table whenever I attend family gatherings. So what do I care if I tell things that might hurt people’s feelings? And what do I care if I tell the truth? But I do care that it makes sense. I do care that I tell it well, and not this haphazard sort of unstructured writing—I suppose I can always return later and clean it up, but that was not the method I learnt at Mr. James’ knee, or should I say, at his elbow.
I did not mean to be writing about my father or even my aunt. I meant to be writing of those first days with Mr. James and how what I was doing there was unusual for a young woman, but now, all these years later, who could understand that? These days, young girls go into unrelated older men’s houses and do all sorts of things every day and night, and no one thinks anything of it. But in 1907, so soon after the Old Queen died, so soon after King Edward, that wild royal, had become the leader of the Empire, well, who knew what to think?
Certainly Aunt Emily did not. And that was why she came to Rye so soon after I began to work for Mr. James. She had decided I needed
