He was still holding his coat. He did not see a coat cupboard or a hook and he carefully draped the coat over a banister and began his tour of the house.
Well, he would get used to it. He would come to be more relaxed. He did not convince himself that this was entirely true.
In the dining room, he inspected the James notebook that had been put on display. What elegant handwriting! To say nothing about the play of language. Together, they made Melrose feel he should never write another word. Instead of words, he’d use smoke signals.
From there he went into what was probably a sitting room and was ranging over the bookcase when he heard a throat being cleared and turned around.
The woman—ah, he had forgotten the cook!—stood there, as round as a pudding, starched and clean to the point of purification, a relic of the old days.
“You’re Mrs. Jessup?”
“Yes, sir. I am sorry, sir, that I didn’t open the door for you. I was out in the garden.”
“That’s all right. I’m very pleased you’re staying on, especially since my last cooking experience occurred that time I tried to boil the neighbor’s cat. I was four.”
Mrs. Jessup laughed. “You’re making that up, sir, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be too sure. Have you come to ask if I want tea?”
“Indeed I have.”
“Thank heavens. I certainly do.”
“And would you want it in here, sir, or in the dining room?”
“Oh, this room will do nicely.”
She took herself off.
Melrose thought he should take his case upstairs and unpack, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to sit in this pleasant room and look at these books, most of which, not surprisingly, were by Henry James. He wondered if they were first editions. Would the Trust leave such valuable books around for tenants to filch or visitors to cart away? Probably not, probably just later copies. He took down one of them—The Wings of the Dove—looked at the copyright page and saw that this indeed appeared to be a first edition. He opened the book somewhere around the middle. Here were Kate Croy and Milly Theale. He tried to remember the story. Didn’t Kate set her poor lover on rich Milly in the expectation that the doomed girl would leave her fortune to the man? What manipulation! What maneuvering!
What a perfect horror of a story. But there was always the element of violence in James’s novels. The torture of Charlotte—who? He couldn’t think of the last name: Stant?—in The Golden Bowl. The Ververs might just as well have tossed acid in her face as send her off to the States where she would never have the joy of London society or the prince again. And the worst punishment of all was that everyone knew what was going on, except poor old Charlotte. And yet no one would speak of it. As with all of James, it was one thing to be gliding smoothly over the frozen lake’s surface; but quite another when the hatchets were brought out to break the ice.
The Portrait of a Lady. The dreadful, dreaded Gilbert Osmond. Talk of torture! And of course there was The Sacred Fount. Melrose had never really thought about this side of James. Violence muffled by the most exquisite and civilized conversation.
He wondered about this all the while his tea was brought, poured, drunk.
Not that it had anything to do with the murder of Billy Maples.
A young man—worldly, rich, and handsome—decides to take up residence in an ancient port town in what had once been the home of a famous writer. A house he could inhabit only by going through the venerable, no doubt exacting, National Trust. He himself had not been subjected to such scrutiny, since it was arranged by a Scotland Yard superintendent:
“You mean,” Melrose had said to Jury, “they’re taking me on such short notice and without digging up my past and so forth?”
“They can’t afford to be picky.”
Melrose wasn’t sure he’d liked the sound of that.
He looked around the room as if it might offer up some clue as to Billy’s behavior.
Scones, raspberry jam, clotted cream. He looked at the tea tray that had been set before him and sighed. Putting a spoonful of jam on a scone, he could almost sympathize with his aunt’s devotion to the afternoon ritual. Except Agatha did not partake of the silence that should surround it. As was this silence. Melrose sat back with a deep sense of contentment. Except for the long case clock ticking away and a small clatter coming from the kitchen, there was nothing to be heard. The rain had stopped; the sun shone wetly on the garden wall. A writer’s house, pure and simple.
Had Billy fancied himself a writer, then? No. There had been no hint of that from the people Jury had talked to. Melrose couldn’t imagine any writer keeping his mouth shut about his work for long. He would be passing around pages and even paragraphs to his friends while talking their ears off. Billy Maples would certainly have said something about it. It could of course have been a secret ambition, but to realize it he would surely have had to be deluding himself if he thought it would help to live in a dead writer’s house.
He turned and looked at the books behind him, James’s collected works, and felt fairly numbed by them. Characters tumbled through his mind, people so meticulously drawn that not a hair, not a pore, went unaccounted for.
The clock chimed and he realized he’d been holding the same scone in his hand for a quarter of an hour. Pleased to know he could master such a state of inertia, he thought he should move about a bit, as a man on a long railway journey decides to leave his seat and move up and down the aisle. He didn’t get up.
He set his cup in the saucer, thinking them rather fine to be trotted out for anyone who happened to be a tenant here. He sat for another few minutes. He thought he should take his case up and unpack and rose, then sat back down. The chair was by now molded to his contours. Was he going to invest insensate objects with sense? That was more the Poe school of thought than the Henry James one.
Melrose reached behind him and pulled out a collection of James’s stories, one that included “The Lesson of the Master.” He remembered this story because he had found it rather menacing: a renowned writer advised the narrator, an up-and-coming one, never to marry, as the demands of marriage would weaken his writing arm considerably. He would begin to write for money, which is what the older writer had come to, seeming to blame his wife for much of this as she had encouraged the inclination to write slick books for which he was handsomely compensated.
But James had done something rather horrible here. At the end, after the successful writer’s wife dies, he turns right around and marries the girl whom his young writer friend had sacrificed for the sake of his writing. Melrose wondered what the “lesson” actually was. Was it merely self-serving? He closed the book and thought about it. Then he closed his eyes.
“I beg your parden, sir…”
The cook was hovering over him. “I believe you must’ve fallen asleep. I’m sorry to bother you, but I must be chugging along now.”
Melrose was stunned that he’d gone to sleep. He never slept in the afternoon. Not that he hadn’t tried when Agatha was there. “Oh, Mrs. Jessup. I expect I just nodded off.”
“The trip probably tired you.”
The trip had been less than an hour and a half.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’ve got to be somewhere at six-thirty, so I’ve left your dinner in the fridge and on the hob, all except the chop, which will be no trouble for you at all. It’s marinating now. Then the veggies are all done, and you only need to pop them in the oven to heat up. Or the microwave…” She went on.
Pull up a chair, thought Melrose. In the time she was explaining what he was to do—and he could hardly keep a straight face, seeing himself with that marinated chop—the meal could have been cooked and eaten and the two of them could be telling each other their life stories over coffee and brandy.
“That’s perfectly all right, Mrs. Jessup. I’ll just poke about on my own. Dinner will be no problem.” Especially since he meant to go to the Mermaid Tavern right up the street and order it.
“Well, then.” And she turned to go.
“The gentleman who lived here before…” He watched her hand fall away from her coat.
“Mr. Maples, you mean. I still can’t believe it.”
“Sit down for a moment, would you?”
She sat and looked vacantly out of the window.
“I read about that in the paper,” said Melrose. “One never knows whether newspapers give the whole story. Still, it did seem very peculiar.”
“It was that, indeed. I’ll never understand it.”
He felt she said this as one who, for some reason, should. The topic had certainly stilled her, as if now she had no place to be at six-thirty. “He lived in London, did he?”
“In Chelsea, yes. Sloane Street.”
“Seems a bit strange, doesn’t it, a chap like that taking on a National Trust property.”
“No stranger than you, sir.” Then she seemed to realize this was impertinent and apologized.
He was a bit jolted by that response. But he smiled and said, “Not at all.”
She blushed and hurried on. “I mean, you’re to be here for such a short time, I was told.”
“That’s perfectly true.” He smiled. “Favor for a friend.”
“I appreciate you keeping me on, sir. It’ll just give me some time to find another place before the permanent tenants move in.”
“Perhaps they’ll want you to stay, too.”
“I don’t think so, sir. People who take up tenancy here, it’s not usual for them to have staff.”
They were getting wide of the mark and he inched the talk back to Billy Maples. “Did he strike you as”—what stupid question was this going to be, as the type who’d get himself murdered?—“as a person who was terrifically fond of Henry James’s books?”
She thought about this. “I do know he liked reading these ones. Well, I’ve tried reading them, several times. I can’t make any sense out of them, either.”
Melrose liked the “either.” It was as if the murder of Maples and the words of Henry James were of equal weight.
“Was he a very sociable person? Given this”—Melrose looked round the room, gestured to take it all in—“this house and this small town, I’d think he was somewhat reclusive.”
“To tell the truth, sir, yes, he did like society. He sometimes went back to his London flat for a day or two here and there. As I see it, he was a bit spoiled. I think he was used to having things done for him. Maybe that was the reason for Mr. Brunner—that was his assistant, though I don’t know what needed assisting—but Mr. Brunner was the one he spent his time with. You’d think a rich and handsome man such as he, Billy Maples, quite the London playboy, I shouldn’t wonder, would have a string of lady friends after him but I never saw one.”
She didn’t go on, perhaps because what she was saying was so disapproving, so Melrose fell back upon the subject of James. “Could he have been writing something himself, say, a book about Henry James?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think so, sir. Never saw him writing anything but the odd letter. If he was doing such a big project as a book, I expect he’d’ve mentioned it.”
The long case clock chimed the half hour.
“Oh, good heavens, it’s gone half-six. I must go.” She rose and so did Melrose, who helped her with her coat. “That was an excellent tea, Mrs. Jessup. Thank you.”
“’Twas nothing. Now for supper you just take that chop from the marinade and slip it in the oven for about thirty minutes. But you’ll want to check it after twenty, as that oven’s always been kind of dodgy.”
He smiled. “It won’t fool me.”
She laughed merrily and went out.
Melrose wandered.
He wandered into the next room where hung a series of portraits of James at various periods in his life. They were all by John Singer Sargent and all wonderful, especially the last and justly famous. Sargent had caught the intellectual power of the man. Just looking at it, Melrose felt bathed in acuity, intelligence. James’s quick bright eyes, his domed forehead. Melrose felt his own forehead to see if there was any resemblance. He guessed not.
He sat himself down in a Windsor chair and stared at it. What is it that brought this young man here? Come on, you saw him every day. Was it something of a spiritual search, and if so, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be chosen for that sort of pilgrimage. Or maybe Melrose was dead wrong about that.
Melrose sighed deeply. He was tired of trying to work things out for himself. You’re restraining a laugh, Mr. J., aren’t you?
He sat in the chair, looked at James through narrowed eyes and chewed at the corner of his mouth. Of course…
A spiritual guide? James himself had joined the Anglican Church, but leaving out the church just for the sake of argument. Why wouldn’t you make a spiritual guide?
Melrose sat for a few more minutes and then, fed up with feeling like a rhetorical question, he slapped the chair arms and rose and went to the stairs, where his coat lay over the bannister.
He looked at his suitcase and decided that he could unpack later; right now he wanted to walk the cobbled streets of Rye.
TWENTY-THREE
It was a dreamy little town, stone streets no wider than lanes, shining now with rain and the ghostly light of dusk drawing in. The days were getting a little longer.
As long as he was here on the Sussex coast, he should do something touristy, take a walk back through history: Battle of Hastings and the whole 1066 thing. On second thought, he might overload his mind if he started with all that—it was already threatening to short-circuit on Henry James—and if there was anyone who could cause an electrical meltdown it was James.
He was walking up Mermaid Street to the tavern, looking at the life going on behind lit windows, a life blurred and indistinct seen through the leaded glass.
The Mermaid Tavern, now genteel and with its quite good restaurant, had once been a raucous, riotous pirate hangout. There was a famous gang—Hawkhurst? Hawksmoor? No, that was the architect. The gang had holed up in the Mermaid. The entire town, the entire coast around here had been the haunt of smugglers.
Melrose wondered if Henry James had been attracted by Rye’s piratical past. Probably. Some of his finer characters were emotional looters, that was certain. Look at Gilbert Osmond, on the surface a refined and worldly collector of artifacts. And people, and souls. It was the refinement, the gentility, the perfect calculation and calibrated behavior that made what he was doing so dreadful.
In the past few days, Melrose had read a great deal of James. In his coat pocket now, accompanying him to dinner, was “The Aspern Papers.” Talk about loot! Talk about spoilation! He hit his fist into his hand. It was so perfect!
“I beg your pardon?”
A voice at his elbow. Melrose must have bumped into this man.
“You were saying something?”
“Oh. I’m awfully sorry. One of those mental conversations.”
“It was getting out of hand” came the smiling rejoinder.
Melrose laughed and felt sheepish and for some odd reason turned up his coat collar.
The Mermaid Tavern being full and with no prospect of a table for a half hour, Melrose chose another, far less renowned eatery. The surroundings here were comprised of a lot of dark wood, softly lit with the pleasant tinkle of cutlery tapping on china.
He was shown a table by a hostess of questionable provenance, as the accent seemed to hover somewhere between Ste. Germain-des-Prés and Bermondsey. She handed him a menu and flitted away. There were few other diners and a menu fueled largely by wishful thinking and a very big freezer. (Could they really have enough chefs back there to prepare lobster broiled, boiled, scampi, or thermidor; pollo rostizado estilo Yucatán; and the far more mundane boeuf Burgundy?) This menu was a testament to optimism. He was surprised it didn’t offer escalloped peacock and ragout of brindled ocelot.
He could hardly wait to see the wine list!
And here it was, handed him by the hostess
, before she whisked the other place setting away.
The carte de vin lived up to the menu. There must have been a half dozen pages of offerings, running from the house plonk (cheap enough at five pounds for the half carafe) to a Vosne Romanée at a price that would purchase Sandringham.
Good lord! This was Rye! East Sussex! Not the Place Vendôme! Not the Ritz! It’d be hard to flog this list in Mayfair.
When the waitress came, a stout, Germanic-looking blonde, but with a beaming smile, he ordered the most elaborate dish on the menu, which he had to point to, since he couldn’t pronounce it. All he knew was poisson, and its preparation looked as if it had been choreographed by Tommy Tune.
“Will you be having wine, sir?”
“Oh, absolutely! I’ll have the Vosne Romanée.”
As if she used this wine for mouthwash, she didn’t blink an eye, wheeled on her heel, and marched off, presumably to get it. Melrose only wished Henry James were here. What would he make of this setup?
The wish being father to the thought, Henry took the seat opposite and answered the question: Well, it’s all perfect for you, dear fellow. I, however, am a man of simpler tastes. A good boiled potato and chop are all I require. Remember, there’s one in your oven. With that he used a small tool to cut off the end of his cigar.
Melrose waited, humming. He wished Jury were here to place a bet. He wondered if the expressionless couple one table over would like to place one. They looked as if they’d never had a drink in their lives. Well, that’s what life is like if you’re a teetotaler.
Ah! Here she came with a bottle in tow.
Breezily, the waitress said, “Sorry, but we just served our last bottle of that wine. Our sommelier—”
(How he loved that!)
“—said as how you might enjoy this in its place.” She turned the bottle so that he could peruse the label. “Not so pricey, neither.” She was delighted to give him this information.
It bore no resemblance to the Vosne (at least as he imagined that noble wine).
“This is a Beaujolais,” he replied, in good humor. Surely, he could outwit this raw country girl!
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