He tried to recount to Gosse how his aunt had told him the story. It was an afternoon in late spring, she always began, warm for the time of year, and bright, and once they had eaten and retired from the table her brother-in-law had remained there alone, rapt in thought as was his habit. Often, she said, he would move blindly from the table to reach for pen and paper and write obsessively, discarding some of the pages he read over by making them into a ball and flinging them fiercely across the room. Often he would search for a book, standing up suddenly and walking too fast across the room dragging his wooden leg behind him as though it were a burden. He could be very excited by the book’s meaning or message. There was a battle going on, Aunt Kate used the same words each time, between his own sweetness and the heavy puritan hand which his father, old William James of Albany, had placed on his shoulder. Everywhere he went, she said, Henry James senior saw love and the beauty of God’s plan, but the old puritan teaching would not let him believe his eyes. Daily, within him, the battle went on. He was restless and impossible, but he was also, in his searching, innocent and easily enraptured. His first great crisis had come in his youth when his leg had had to be amputated after a fire; now in the late spring in London, he was awaiting his second visitation.

‘My Aunt Kate,’ Henry said, ‘was very dramatic in her delivery. She told me that they had left him reading. The day was mild and they had taken us young boys for a walk. He was alone when the attack came; it appeared suddenly from nowhere, like a huge obscure shape in the night, an angry, broken, pecking bird of prey, squatting in the corner ready to take him, all black spirit, yet palpable, visibly there, hissing, come for him alone. He knew why it had appeared, she said; it had been sent to destroy him. From that moment, he was reduced to the state of an infant terrified and then terrified again until he believed that it would never go from him, whatever it was. When they found him, he was curled on the ground, his hands over his ears, whimpering, calling for them. William and I were two and a half and one, and were in turn terrified by the sight of his fear and the sound of his whimpering voice. Aunt Kate brought us instantly away. William, she said, was pale for days afterwards and would not sleep without his mother in the room. Neither of us, of course, has any memory of it.’

‘There is no guarantee of that,’ Gosse said. ‘The memory may be locked within.’

‘No,’ Henry said sternly. ‘Nothing is locked within. We have no memory of it. I am certain of that.’

‘Go on, please continue,’ Gosse said.

‘My aunt told me that my mother had to lift him from the ground, believing at first that he had been attacked by felons, and then she had to listen to his description of what he saw, telling him all the while that there was no black shape, no strange figure squatting in the corner, that he was safe. She could not stop his tears, nor could she fully ascertain what had happened. Soon, she realized that he was not talking about an animal or a thief; what had happened had occurred in his mind, his imagination. It was a dark vision and she did now as she had done in the first year of their marriage when he had nightmares. She found a pair of scissors and slowly and gently began to cut his fingernails, talking to him softly and making him concentrate on the motions of the scissors. Then he became calm and she took him to their room and stayed with him.’

‘But she left you alone?’ Gosse asked.

‘No, of course not,’ Henry replied. ‘My aunt looked after us. When we were in bed that night and my father had finally calmed down, she sat with my mother and they did not know whom to consult or what to do. My father, once she began to comfort him, became silent, his eyes vacant, his mouth open. He did not stop making low whimpering sounds or uttering phrases which sounded like gibberish. They were away from home and knew no one other than my father’s distinguished friends, and they did not know if they could call on Carlyle or Thackeray and ask them how the patient, if that was the word, could be treated, or indeed if such dark and terrifying moments were common to men who teased out the meanings of things to the exclusion of professional or domestic duties.’

‘So what did they do?’ Gosse asked.

‘My father slept that night, as did we, but the two women watched over us, aware that life would change now. My mother knew what it was, my aunt told me, and she always believed it no matter what else was said. She believed that the devil had visited a philosopher, but it was a devil my father had imagined, or come to see in his own dreamlife which merged oddly with his reading life in those months. My mother believed in the devil, but knew that only he could see it, and to him it was utterly real, a face that lurked on the other side of the glass of every window he approached. No one else could see it because no one else had been delving into thoughts and beliefs in which darkness itself, and devilry, would be banished from our concept of the world. That was my father.’

‘But what did your mother and aunt finally do?’ Gosse asked.

‘They had, Aunt Kate said, two children and a house to take care of and they only saw what was there. The doctors insisted he be quiet, neither read nor write, and not think, if he could help it, nor make visits. What Aunt Kate remembered most from these months was that every time my mother came into the room, my father stretched out his arms as though he were an infant seeking to be lifted. He lived in fear that what he had seen would return; he scoured the corners of rooms and the window with his eyes. He lived in a world beyond them; even his speech seemed impaired.’

‘Did your aunt say how this affected you and your brother?’ Gosse asked.

Henry sighed. He did not know why he had agreed to tell his friend the story.

‘On one of those days when he seemed most helpless, it seems I began to walk,’ Henry said. ‘It came suddenly and surprisingly, and soon, I was an eager and confident little walker. It was as though I had changed places with my father. Slowly they understood why I had been so quick to learn. I wished to follow William everywhere he went; I watched William with hungry eyes in case he moved, and now if William went outside, or crossed the room, I followed him and clung to him, much to his annoyance. I had not, apparently, smiled or laughed easily, but now that I could walk I laughed at anything William did which seemed to me even mildly funny. It was, Aunt Kate said, a difficult household as the English summer began.’

‘I can imagine,’ Gosse said. ‘How extraordinary!’

‘In the end, of course,’ Henry went on, ‘it was all forgotten, or placed in history, as you know, as an important moment in my father’s climb towards the peaks of knowledge and wisdom.’

‘But did it seem like that to them?’ Gosse asked.

‘No.’ Henry smiled. ‘No, Aunt Kate said it never seemed like that to herself or her sister. And to their horror, my father began to describe his dark ordeal to all visitors and then to strangers.

And thus, as you must have read, in a watering place, he met a lady, a certain Mrs Chichester, and he described to her his squatting, hissing beast. Mrs Chichester responded immediately: what had happened to him had happened to others and was a sign that he had come close to understanding the great plan, God’s dream for man, she said, and he must read the Swedish philosopher Swedenborg who understood these things as no one else did. During that time, it seems, my father took any new suggestion as vastly superior to the previous suggestion. In London he read two books by Swedenborg, even though he had foresworn reading, and in one of these books he found that what had occurred to him that afternoon was called a vastation, and nothing he ever heard again convinced him that it was not so. This vastation, it seemed, was a step on the road to the full understanding that God made us in his likeness, and that our urges and appetites, our thoughts and feelings are profoundly sanctified. Thus my father became happy again, and, filled with Swedenborg, believed it his mission to spread the truth to all mankind, at least to the English-speaking variety, and indeed, mainly in America, not, I should add, that any of them paid much attention.’