by Colm Toibin
CHAPTER SIX
February 1897
HIS HAND DID NOT IMPROVE. He held it now as though it were a foreign object placed in his care, unpleasant and unwelcome and, at times, venomous. He could write in the mornings, but by noon the pain was too intense along the bone running from his wrist to his little finger and the muscles and nerves and tendons around it. If he did not move his hand he felt no pain, but writing now, especially if he stopped to think and then resumed the work, caused him unbearable agony and he would have to put the pen down.
In pure frustration, then, he would read over the last few pages and make mental notes for emendations. He would discover that his mind had raced forwards, and he had continued his narrative effortlessly in his own head, constructing whole sentences, word for word. He found that he could put in an imaginary full stop and then finish another sentence. He did not speak them aloud, nor did he even whisper them, but they came to him complete and he did not have any difficulty remembering what the previous sentences had contained, or how each had begun. Now as he sat at his desk he wanted to write to William about this phenomenon but realized sharply that he could not write a letter, indeed had not written any serious letters for some time, so carefully was he preserving the energies of his right hand for the novel then being serialized each month, whose chapters, pain or no pain, he could not fail to deliver. In the few hours of the morning when he could work painlessly, he devoted himself to his fiction, but as time went on even these few hours were proving difficult.
William, who delighted in modern inventions, had written to him of the advantages of the stenograph, insisting that dictating was faster and easier, and if he concentrated sufficiently hard, produced seamlessly better results. Henry was sceptical about this and uneasy about the costs. Also, he was content with his own solitude, his own tight control over the words on the page. But when the pain extended to his entire arm and when, morning after morning, he had to bear the torture in order to keep the series running and the printers supplied with fresh pages, he knew that he could not go on. He was exhausted.
He would use a stenographer for his correspondence, he thought, and there was a good deal pending. He worried about his privacy, but assured himself that there was nothing in his correspondence which was entirely private. If he found such matter, he would instantly erase it. The stenographer recommended to him was a Scot called William McAlpine, who seemed efficient and trustworthy and competent as he arrived at the flat each morning, but these were minor characteristics beside his silence, his dourness and his lack of apparent interest in anything other than the task in hand.
Thus as Henry dictated his letters, McAlpine sullenly and dutifully took down his words in shorthand and presented him later with a clean typed copy. Soon, Henry began to dictate directly to the stenograph and he wondered sometimes whether McAlpine or his brand-new machine took the greater interest in the words he spoke.
His hand, he informed his friends, had been relegated to permanent and incompetent obscurity. Gradually, his stenographer became as omnipresent and strangely transparent as the very air itself, especially once Henry discovered that the practice of dictation could fit the company of fiction as much as, if not more than, the art of letter writing. As his hand healed, he began to write some of his own letters at night when his typist had retired, and used the new machine and its silent master during the day for the creation of serious narrative.
At the beginning he was careful not to broadcast his new method too freely, but soon he regretted telling anyone at all, as those who learned that he was now talking his words into a machine, that the art of fiction had become industrialized, took a dim view of his decision and, indeed, of his future. He assured them that he could be trusted not to be simplified by any shortcut, or falsified by any facility, that, in short, his commerce with the muse had been in fact assisted by the arrival of the machine and the Scot.
He loved walking up and down the room, beginning a new sentence, letting it snake ahead, stopping it for a moment, adding a phrase, a brief pause, and then allowing the sentence to gallop to an elegant and fitting conclusion. He looked forward to starting in the morning, his typist punctual, uncomplaining, seemingly indifferent as though the words uttered by the novelist equalled in interest and importance his previous work in the commercial sector.
He felt now that all of his working life had been leading up to this loud freedom, and after a few months he knew that he would not be able to return to pen and paper, to unmechanical solitude. Wherever he would go the Scot would have to come too, with the large, unwieldy typewriter, which soon replaced the stenograph, in tow. The typewriter would have to be carried and the Scot would have to be fed. Thus moving would require trouble and expense. His days of channel-crossing and railways and hotel life had come to an end. The call of other climates and glamorous cities was drowned somewhat by the dutiful click of the typewriter and the sound of his own voice.
IN THESE YEARS he had written so much, and in so much dramatic detail, about houses, that his friend the architect Edward Warren offered to make him drawings of Gardencourt or Poynton, Easthead or Bounds, houses he had described room by room, full of carefully created atmosphere, treasured ornament and faded tapestry. They could, Warren said, make special architectural editions of his books. Henry, each time he visited Warren’s house, studied a drawing he had made of the garden room at Lamb House in Rye, viewed from the street, admiring the English essences, old brick and the sense of weathered comfort.
Henry dreamed of having a house of his own outside London; he imagined himself each evening seated in the rich glow of a lamp in an old panelled room, the floorboards darkly varnished and covered in rugs, the fire alight, the burning wood oozing and crackling, the heavy curtains drawn, a long day’s work completed and no social duties looming.
When summer came, he spent time wandering in the villages of the Suffolk coast, delighting in the names – Great Yarmouth, Blundeston, Saxmundham, Dunwich – which suggested a gnarled legacy, an ancient history. He thought that a stone cottage on this coast, something simple and closely connected with the surrounding sea-faring culture, would be ideal for him. As he moved from place to place, his typist and his Remington in tow, oscillating between bad lodgings and expensive hotels, he hoped that this would be his last incoherent summer, but he knew that this patched-up, hand-to-mouth, unhoused way of life would continue, intolerably, to be his lot until he could put a hand on a lovely refuge of his own, for which, as time went by, he thirsted more and more.
In the Suffolk villages he asked anyone he had occasion to meet, explaining his needs and desires, proffering his address in London as a sign of his seriousness. A few times he was encouraged to look at a property, but nothing he saw came close to his dream; they were, in their own innocent way, all of them hideous, available to him merely because no one else wanted them.
Similarly in Rye he made clear his desire to find permanent lodgings. He had made friends with the local blacksmith who had partly graduated to the title of ironmonger and was much at his entrance on the lookout for fresh faces for idle chatter. On one of his strolls in Rye, Henry stopped at the door of Mr Milson, who after the first meeting greeted him instantly as Mr James, and knew him as the American writer, having his walk in a Rye he was slowly growing to admire and love. Upon his second or third conversation with Mr Milson, during his time as a resident of Point Hill, he observed that he longed for a permanent spot in the area, in the countryside, or indeed in the town itself. Since Mr Milson enjoyed talking, and since he was not interested in literary matters, and since he had not been to America and knew no other Americans, and since Henry’s knowledge of ironmongery was rudimentary, the two men discussed houses, ones which had been for rent in the past, others which had been put on the market or sold or withdrawn, and others, much coveted, which had never been bought or sold or rented in living memory. Each time he visited, once they had initiated their subject, Mr Milson showed him the card on which Henry’s London
address was inscribed. He had not mislaid it, he had not forgotten, he insisted, and then enticingly would mention some great old house, perfect for a bachelor’s needs, but sorrowfully would have to admit that the house remained firmly in its owner’s hands and seemed unlikely to leave them in the foreseeable future.
Henry viewed his conversations with Mr Milson as a form of play, just as his conversations with fishermen about the sea, or the farmers about the harvest, were forms of polite relaxation, a way of drinking in England, allowing its flavours to come to him in phrases, turns of speech and local references. Thus even when he opened the letter which arrived at his London address, having noticed that the handwriting on the envelope was not that of someone accustomed to writing letters, and even when he saw the name Milson as the sender, he was still puzzled by its provenance. Only when he read it a second time did he realize who it was from and then, as though he had received a blow in the stomach, he understood what the letter said. Lamb House in Rye had fallen vacant, Milson told him, and could be had. His first thought was that he would lose it, the house at the quiet corner at the top of a cobbled hill whose garden room Edward Warren had drawn so lovingly, the establishment he had glanced at so achingly and covetously on his many tours of Rye, a house both modest and grand, both central and secluded, the sort of house which seemed to belong so comfortably and naturally to others and to be inhabited so warmly and fruitfully by them. He checked the postmark. He wondered if his ironmonger was freely broadcasting the news of this vacancy to all comers. This was, more than any other, the house he loved and longed for. Nothing had ever come easily, magically like this. He could do what he liked, he could send a cable, he could take the next train, but he remained sure that he would lose it. There was no purchase, however, in thinking, or regretting or worrying; there was only one solution and that was to rush to Rye, thus ensuring that no omission on his part could cause him not to become the new inhabitant of Lamb House.
Before he left he wrote to Edward Warren, imploring him to come to Rye also as soon as he could to inspect the inside of the house whose exterior he had so admired. But he could not wait for Warren and he certainly could not work, and on the train he wondered if anyone watching him would know how momentous this journey was for him, how exciting and how potentially disappointing. He knew that it was merely a house; others bought and sold houses and moved their belongings with ease and nonchalance. It struck him as he travelled towards Rye that no one, save himself, understood the meaning of this. For so many years now he had had no country, no family, no establishment of his own, merely a flat in London where he worked. He did not have the necessary shell, and his exposure over the years had left him nervous and exhausted and fearful. It was as though he lived a life which lacked a façade, a stretch of frontage to protect him from the world. Lamb House would offer him beautiful old windows from which to view the outside; the outside, in turn, could peer in only at his invitation.
He dreamed now of being a host, having friends and family to stay; he dreamed of decorating an old house, buying his own furniture and having continuity and certainty in his days.
AS SOON AS he went in through the door he sensed an air of sombre comfort. The downstairs rooms were small and cosy, and the rooms upstairs stately and filled with light. Some of the oak panelling had been covered with modern wallpaper, but could, he was assured, be easily restored. Two rooms opened onto the garden, which was well tended and decorously planted, if rather too large for his needs. The guest room had once housed George I and would, he knew, be suitable for family and friends. As he walked about the house, opening doors and having doors opened for him, he did not speak, remaining fearful that if he expressed too much enthusiasm someone else with a prior claim on the lease would appear at the front door and loudly insist that he leave.
Nonetheless, when he walked from the garden into the garden room, whose large bay window looked down the cobbled hill, and he caught a glimpse of how he would use this room, how he would work here every day in the summer, basking in its brave, airy properties, its great light, he was forced to let out a gasp. And he could not contain himself any further when he sought to leave the garden room and stood facing the walled garden, the walls full of ancient creepers and an old mulberry tree offering shade and the brick turned russet with age and weather. Walking around the house and garden was like filling in a form, the more ground he covered the closer he came, he was sure, to placing his signature at the end, staking his claim.
The owner was alerted to the name and nature of his prospective tenant and quickly assented to a twenty-one-year lease at favourable terms. Warren viewed the house with a professional eye and listed the improvements which could easily be made over the winter, making the house habitable by the spring. Henry sent several letters, courtesy of McAlpine, to friends and to his sister-in-law informing them of his new house. He added the terms of the lease – seventy pounds a year – in his own hand once McAlpine had left for the day.
STRANGELY, in the months which followed, he felt mainly fear, as though he had embarked unprepared on some vast and risk-filled financial speculation in which everything he owned could be lost. He had arrangements to make now, extra staff to engage, furniture and household goods to buy, an apartment in London to lease or keep. He also had to ensure his financial future now that he had made these steep commitments. But something other than mere arrangements filled him with a vague, unnameable foreboding. It took him weeks to understand what it was and then it came to him in a flash: when he walked into the upstairs rooms of Lamb House, and into the room where he himself would sleep, he believed that he had come into the room where he would die.
As he studied the lease, he knew that its twenty-one years would take him to the tomb. The walls of the house had witnessed men and women come and go for almost three hundred years; now it had invited him to sample briefly its charm, it had enticed him there and offered him its unlasting hospitality. It would welcome him and then see him out, as it had seen others out. He would lie stricken in one of those rooms; he would lie cold in that house. The idea both froze his blood and comforted him at the same time. He had travelled without hesitation to meet his own place of death, to remove its mystery, one of its unknown dimensions. But he would also go there to live, to spend long days working and long evenings by the fire. He had found his home, he who had wandered so uneasily, and he longed for its engulfing presence, its familiarity, its containing beauty.
HE GAINED strength that winter and early spring in the determination of practical matters. When Howells came to London, they spent a long morning together, the fog thick outside, discussing, among other matters, the American market for story and serialization. Howells’s visit and his calm advice, and his intervention on his return to the United States, which resulted in commissions and approaches from editors there, were part of the magic of the season.
Slowly, other things fell into place. Lady Wolseley discovered his new acquisition, and insisted on visiting it and offering advice. She was, he knew, a great and talented gatherer of objects; her taste was practical and she did not baulk at furnishing small rooms and intimate spaces. She knew the dealers and their shops, and over years she had instilled respect and fear in the best of them, while taking the measure of the worst. She had also read The Spoils of Poynton, as it had appeared in serial form, having had it sent to her from America, and she believed that the widowed Mrs Gareth, prepared to lay down her life for the carefully collected treasures of Poynton, was based on her.
‘Not the greed,’ she said, ‘and not the foolishness and not the widowhood. I have never gone in for widowhood. But the eye, the eye that misses nothing, can see how a Queen Anne chair can be restored, or a faded tapestry hung in the shadows, or a painting bought for the frame.’
She presumed that he had no money to spend, and she presumed that his taste equalled hers, and she got to know each room of his new house and its requirements in every detail. She thought Lamb House a perfect piece. She had wished t
hat she could carry it home, but since she could not, then she would console herself by taking him shopping in London, showing him corners and side alleys of the antiques trade and the old furniture trade. He learned, to his surprise, that the years when she collected most of her small treasures were the years when she and her husband had almost no money, had inherited nothing, and managed on his salary and her slight private income. Her eye, she said, was sharpened by penury.
As the days grew shorter, he moved through London with her, pushing open the doors of dimly lit shops presided over by watchful dealers who knew Lady Wolseley of old, some of them remembering ancient purchases of hers, bargains she had procured and objects she had added to her collection which had seemed at the time eccentric and part of her general wilfulness. This London, its shops all lit and its streets busy and its social life at its most rich and pressing, was a world which he had already begun to miss as he prepared to retreat into the safety and solitude of provincial life. He loved the late afternoon light and the freshness of the cold and he also loved, despite all his protestations, the promise of the evening. As he walked the streets with his acquisitive companion, he studied London fondly, and then, as they stood in the old storerooms and show rooms, conducted here and there by dealers who seemed the essence of decorum and discretion as though they were selling privacy itself, he imagined his new life and his new furniture, his newly painted walls or stripped-down wood, and he felt oddly light, happy that he was merely halfway towards his goal, that Lamb House in Rye remained for the moment in the realms of imagination.