John Harwood: The Ghost Writer

The drawer was still locked, and there was no small brass key in any of the obvious places. Then I remembered that the tongue-or whatever the bit that worked the lock was called-had been nothing more than a plain metal tag with a slot cut in the front end of it. So I went around the house collecting and trying keys from other pieces of furniture until I found one that fitted.

The lock clicked over. Kneeling in the half-light, breathing mothballs and insect spray and the faint doggy smell of the carpet, I saw my uneasy reflection staring from the depths of the dressing-table mirror. Gerard is so like his mother.

The envelope and the photograph had gone. The only thing in the drawer was the book with the faded grey paper cover, mottled with reddish brown spots. The Chameleon -I still didn't know what a chameleon was but I recognised the word-A Review of Arts and Letters. Volume I, Number 2, June 1898. Edited by Frederick Ravenscroft. Essays by Richard Le Gallienne and G.S. Street. Poems by Victor Plarr, Olive Custance, and Theodore Wratislaw. I tried to open it and discovered that the pages were joined together at the edges. Except for one section. 'Seraphina: A Tale', by V.H.

LORD EDMUND NAPIER LIKED EVERYthing about him pleasant and agreeable, and since he was rich, handsome, unmarried, and possessed of a splendid town house in Cheyne Walk, the world made haste to oblige him. Indeed it had been hastening-with one disagreeable exception, as we shall presently learn-almost from the moment of his birth some forty years before the afternoon upon which we find him gazing at a blank space on the wall of his private gallery.

Though the main entrance hall and staircase of his house were adorned, as might be expected, with portraits of Napiers past, this gallery was known only to Lord Edmund's most intimate associates. It was a long, vaulted, panelled room, reminiscent in its proportions of a place of worship, but lit so as to draw in as much natural illumination as possible while excluding any direct glare. The merest glance around the walls, however, would reveal Lord Edmund to be, as the phrase goes, a devotee of the female form, lavishly and variously illustrated by over a hundred canvases running the length of the gallery on either side, and supplemented by numerous pieces of statuary in bronze, marble, jade, ebony, and other precious materials; all, I hasten to add, in the finest of taste; the finest, indeed, that money could buy. But to describe Lord Edmund as a worshipper at the shrine of Beauty would be, if not precisely untrue, at least a shade discourteous. A gentleman predestined to adorn the very pinnacle of society cannot but be conscious of his own perfections; and it would be fairer to say that Lord Edmund and Beauty had long been on intimate terms. And this, paradoxical as it may seem, was the source of a certain discontentment on his side, and the reason why the wall at the northern end of the gallery, farthest from the great double doors which opened onto its vaulted length, the very space in which the finest flower of his collection ought to have been displayed, remained obstinately blank. He had, over the years, tried any number of canvases in the place of honour, but none had ever quite sustained that pitch of perfection he had, almost unwittingly, come to require of its subject.

Lord Edmund himself could scarcely have accounted for his single state, which nevertheless remained a topic of lively interest to every fashionable hostess with marriageable daughters at her disposal. Many a matron had fancied her favourite as good as engaged to his lordship, only to discover, just as she thought him safely landed, that the catch had unaccountably slipped the net, and so adroitly as to leave her without even the consolation of an action for breach of promise. In truth his lordships heart had only ever been engaged on one occasion, and that many years ago, when he was but four and twenty. The match was impossible: Miss Eleanor Brandon, though undeniably beautiful and sweet-natured (and, it must be admitted, far more cultivated and better read than the youthful Edmund himself) possessed neither family nor fortune; worse, she nurtured artistic ambitions, accepting whatever was offered her in the way of scenery-painting and the like around the studios of Chelsea. She had, at the time of their meeting, an impoverished suitor some ten years older than herself, a portrait painter constitutionally incapable of fulfilling any of the few commissions offered him; to whom, nevertheless, she was on the verge of committing her affections. But youth and charm prevailed; so entirely that Edmund could not but be swayed by the force of her love for him. He did not-at least in retrospect-believe that he had explicitly pledged himself to her; but he did speak privately to his father, the earl, who forbade not only the match, but any further association with Miss Brandon.

Edmund was of age, and sole heir, and could have defied his parent, but severe financial constraint, and a great deal of unpleasantness, would certainly have followed. What was a fellow to do? He owed Miss Brandon, at the very least, the courtesy of an interview; but that would certainly upset her, and therefore him, so how could it benefit either? And if his father were to hear of it… no; a letter was the obvious thing; but it proved so devilish difficult to compose that he was forced to abandon the attempt. An emissary: now there was an idea; a good friend upon whose delicacy and discretion he could absolutely rely; indeed, he knew the very man for the task. But the very man was so far affected by Miss Brandon's distress as to charge his friend with cruel and unmanly conduct; which led, inevitably, to a breach between them, and left the matter still unresolved. Perhaps he really ought to see her, come what may… and if only his fathers temper, uncertain at the best of times, had not been so vile of late, he really thought he would have gone.

So the days stretched into weeks without anything decisive being done, until one afternoon, when he had just concluded a painful exchange with his father on the subject of his expenditure, and was about to set forth in search of new distractions, a footman informed them that there was a young person at the front door, refusing to accept that Edmund was not at home, and insisting upon an interview. With a sinking heart, he descended the stair, his father immediately behind him. Eleanor's pale, stricken face was terrible to behold; still worse, the momentary joy transfiguring her expression when she saw that it was he. She moved as if to embrace him; transfixed by the baleful presence looming at his back, he could only stammer and retreat, until the door was closed against her. That evening he learned that a young woman had flung herself off Battersea Bridge and drowned. It was Eleanor; and the coroners jury, hearing that she was with child, brought in a verdict of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.

EDMUND'S NAME WAS NOT CONNECTED WITH THE tragedy. He was sent immediately abroad, where he remained for some months until his father resolved to settle all outstanding differences between them by dying of apoplexy. At first, his conscience troubled him sorely, but like other young men of wealth and title he learned to subdue it through the strenuous pursuit of pleasure, until everything about him was once again pleasant and agreeable. Eleanor's face, overlaid by so many others, faded from his memory, until he had only the vaguest recollection of her appearance. By the time of his fortieth birthday, she had not crossed his mind for years.

He would have counted himself the most fortunate of men, were it not for a certain restlessness, a-not precisely boredom, but a feeling that the world had lost something of its charm. Often, of late, he had found himself neglecting the manifest delights of his gallery in favour of the empty wall, as if by sheer intensity of scrutiny he could divine, beneath the faint sheen of panelled oak, those lineaments of face and form which yet eluded him. Such was his absorption in this pursuit that he would wake, as it were, to find that upwards of an hour had vanished, leaving him restless and unsettled, incapable of responding to the voluptuousness all about him, seeking only to escape from gallery and house alike and lose himself in the great city, walking away the hours until it came time to return and dress for his evening engagements.