It was Russell Noakes: he was the owner of that small face, of course he was; and he ran – I always remember him running – to greet me as if my absence had been brief instead of the thirty-five years that had elapsed since I left Rye for the last time. It had been a sad, half-demented period when the Master was ill and rambled in his dictation, and we had known for some months that he must return to London, to his doctors – and the illness that would finally carry him away. The diminutive ‘houseboy’, as my colonially raised predecessor Mary Weld had labelled Noakes – this on the occasion of my ‘taking over’ as guardian of the words of Henry James – seemed as unaware of the passage of time as I was acutely conscious of it. The railings in front of the house had been stripped away as part of the recent war effort, and though the Master’s one-time residence had been acquired by the National Trust there was no evidence of renovation – though on the upper floor from which Noakes had espied me a pot of white paint balanced vertiginously on a window sill and a brush more reminiscent of a child’s small paintbrush than of the serious, sensible utensil required for beautifying the exterior of a fine building such as this poked out of a milk bottle at its side.
What do You think about The Beautiful Child (2012)?
