The Master

by Colm Toibin

  SINCE THE elevation of Lord Wolseley to his position as Commander of Her Majesty’s Forces, and since their return from Ireland in triumph, Lady Wolseley had grown more imperious with Henry, but she seemed gentle now, quite polite with the dealers. He had never known her to keep her voice down, but in the dusty old shops, as she studied the new arrivals or asked for old maps, her new obsession, to be presented to her, she seemed demure, and indeed seemed more so as the winter progressed. Nevertheless, she was full of certainty about what was worth buying and what was not, and she had a firm picture in her mind of each portion of Lamb House. He had to battle with her constantly due to her enthusiasm and her lack of patience, and on a few occasions he had to be careful to keep secret his longing for an object which she had casually dismissed.

  Lady Wolseley provided him with a secret guide to London, to the hidden places from which he could fill and furnish Lamb House; she offered him also a version of London at its most densely packed, most resonantly inhabited. Each object he fingered and handled possessed a wondrous history which would never be known, suggesting England to him in all its old wealth and purpose.

  In these months he worked hard, writing articles and stories, but on days when he had fulfilled his contract with himself and written his allotted number of words, keeping his Scot busy all morning, he would decide suddenly to go to the dealers again, mingle once more with the dust and the left-over objects, the untidy sold-off heritage, move from one shop to another aimlessly selecting a frame or a chair or a set of cutlery, but not buying, waiting until he was in a more decisive mood, or in the company of Lady Wolseley.

  One afternoon, in the hour between four and five when the light became ambiguous and faded, he found himself in an antique shop in a Bloomsbury street which he had visited only once with Lady Wolseley. He remembered the dealer vividly for his extraordinary pair of eyes. The dealer had managed then to exert a sort of coercion on Lady Wolseley and her friend without speaking; he had succeeded in putting subtle pressures on them, managing also to throw a shadow of solemnity over the occasion by a mere glance. Henry recalled his slim light fingers, with neat nails, touching objects on his counter at moments, briefly, nervously, tenderly. He had noted Lady Wolseley’s huge resistance, silent also, to making any purchases, even though the owner had shown them some perfect pieces, including a French tapestry, small but splendid, and some old velvet brocade, with a texture which both the dealer and Lady Wolseley agreed was almost impossible to find nowadays. She bought nothing, but studied certain objects at such length that the dealer’s wise, patient gaze took on a hint of irony. Outside, she said the prices were too high, even though money had been barely mentioned, and said she believed that the owner, many years in business, should no longer be encouraged.

  Henry had been thinking for some time about purchasing one object, something useless and perhaps overpriced, and certainly expensive, something that would catch his eye, an object he would want to have with him, close to him, which would have a meaning beyond its value. The French tapestry was something he thought of, the scene it depicted took its bearings from one of the Italian masters, Fra Angelico or Masaccio, and the pink threads running through the cloth had held their tone. He thought he would examine it again now, discuss it further with the dealer and perhaps decide to buy it without consulting Lady Wolseley, who, he knew, never changed her mind.

  He found the door of the shop open and went into the lamp-lit interior, closing the door noiselessly behind him. It was typical, he thought, of the dealer’s strange tact to allow a customer to enter thus. The front part of the shop was narrow and cluttered, but he remembered that down some steps was a much longer room leading to a large storeroom with stairs to a loft. He idled for a while waiting for the owner to appear and then began to study a teacup which he thought might be Sèvres. Having casually examined several other objects, he walked to the back of the shop until he had a full view of the store below. There, huddled over a chaise longue, discussing its covering and testing its strength, were Lady Wolseley and the dealer. Feeling for a second like a trespasser, he moved back into the shadows and waited. He had not expected to find Lady Wolseley there and he thought it might be better if she were left in peace. This was her territory; he had not sought permission. He believed now that it would be wholly proper for him to remove himself silently and forthwith from the shop.

  Just then, however, another customer opened the door and did so noisily. He was a well-dressed gentleman in early middle age who seemed to have as much trouble closing the door as he had had opening it. The dealer, when he came up the stairs, seemed to ascertain immediately that the two gentlemen had come separately and were not connected. He appeared surprised by the two arrivals, but quickly covered this up with fond recognition for Henry and something less than that for the more recent arrival. This time he seemed more clever than before, more foreign, more deeply intelligent and fine-featured; his dark eyes shone with a clever penetrating warmth. It was clear that he did not know that Henry had already observed Lady Wolseley and Henry watched him as he calculated smilingly what he should do. The dealer asked Henry if he could possibly wait for one moment and then made his way back down the steps. Henry heard words murmured below as he saw his fellow shopper take hold of an old silver bell with a carved wooden handle. He waited then for Lady Wolseley to appear, wondering what he, the intruder, could possibly say to her.

  As soon as the shop owner reappeared, Henry noticed a tinge of concern in his expression. He was soon followed by Lady Wolseley at her most regal, and, he could not help feeling, at her most loud.

  ‘I was not aware that you ventured out alone,’ she said. ‘Are you lost?’ She smiled a glittering smile and let out a short laugh.

  He bowed to her and noticed as he lifted his head that she knew the other gentleman. Both she and the dealer seemed anxious about his presence. When Henry looked towards him, he saw that in those seconds between his bow and his turning of the head, something urgent and almost alarmed had passed in glances between Lady Wolseley and the gentleman.

  ‘Most of the objects in here are beyond your means,’ she said to Henry. Both of them knew instantly that the remark, although meant as a joke, was too brusque and too sharp.

  ‘A poor man can always look,’ he said, waiting for her to retrieve the situation and wondering how she would do so.

  ‘Come then and I will show you,’ she said. She led him down the stairs, calling for another lamp.

  He knew that it was a signal for the gentleman to go and was not surprised to hear the front door of the antique shop being shut once more. As Lady Wolseley ordered the lamp to be placed on an Italian cabinet, he wondered who the gentleman was and why they had not been introduced, and why the strain in the room had been so palpable and the encounter, considering Lady Wolseley’s great social experience, so badly managed. Could Lady Wolseley, he wondered, have come close to compromising herself in an antique shop in London on an ordinary winter’s afternoon? And what form would such a compromise take? And in what way was the dealer implicated? Both Lady Wolseley and the dealer now began to extol the virtues and beauties of the cabinet, Lady Wolseley agreeing vehemently with each phrase the dealer uttered, repeating some of them for emphasis, both of them insisting that a price could not even be mentioned, it would cause shock or scandal, it had better remain unknown to the current visitor who loved beauty but had limited means.

  As they both spoke, and then as the dealer fell silent and the conversation was carried by Lady Wolseley, Henry was sure that he had understood perfectly the outlines of the scene just witnessed but not its meaning. Lady Wolseley had arranged to meet a gentleman here, but that alone meant nothing, as she moved freely in London and had taken Henry shopping without the smallest hesitation. The strain had arisen from her unwillingness to greet the gentleman or introduce him. Henry could make no sense of this, could not fathom why she had not either ignored the man totally or made light of knowing him. The conversation which resumed betwee
n Lady Wolseley and the dealer seemed to gather up silences and fill them noisily. He realized that he had witnessed a strange London moment whose essences belonged to others and would be kept from him no matter how much he speculated and how long their awkward loitering in the antique shop went on.

  While walking up the steps towards the front part of the shop, his eye was caught by the tapestry, which had been moved since his last visit. Now it seemed even more rich and more beautiful. His two companions stopped behind him. He presumed that they too would see the pure delicacy of the colouring, the bright threads working against the faded, the texture suggesting a vast realm long gone.

  ‘Is it eighteenth century?’ he asked.

  ‘Look a little and perhaps you’ll make out,’ Lady Wolseley said.

  He looked again as the dealer brought the lamp nearer.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he asked her, wondering if she remembered seeing it on their previous visit.

  ‘I don’t think “like” is quite the word,’ she said. ‘It’s flawed. It’s been restored, some of the work is recent. Can’t you see?’

  He studied it more carefully, following the pink and yellow threads which seemed to him faded too, even though they stood out against the rest of the work.

  ‘It was made to fool us all,’ Lady Wolseley said.

  ‘It’s quite striking, quite beautiful,’ Henry said as though he were speaking to himself.

  ‘Oh, if you don’t see the restoration in all its vulgarity, then you need me even more than you know,’ Lady Wolseley said. ‘You must under no circumstances ever venture out alone again.’

  He would, he thought, return to buy the tapestry once a suitable length of time had elapsed.

  HE WAS LOSING London; he put himself down for the Reform Club, joining the long list, knowing it would take many years and much attrition before his name would be at the top. He loved imagining a London life in the comfort of the Reform Club, the care and attention of the staff, and the vast city at his disposal. He had, he mused to himself, been exposed to London all his life, having been taken here at the age of six months on one of his father’s early quests for eternal wisdom, earthly satisfaction and something nameless and numinous which would always manage to evade him.

  He knew, because his Aunt Kate had told him many times throughout his teenage years, that they had rented a cottage near the Great Park of Windsor and were the most fortunate of families, possessing two healthy boys whose daily antics held their parents and their aunt in thrall, and having enough money for Henry senior to pursue his private interests among the most famous minds of the age, to search for truth, and, if it could not be found, to make the journey towards it memorable and serious and worthwhile. Henry senior was interested in goodness, in the great good plan which God had set for man; each of us, he believed, must learn to decipher this plan, and live as though no one had ever lived before. His task, in reading and writing and talking and bringing up his children, was to reconcile the essential newness and goodness of each member of the human species with the darkness which lay all around and lurked within.

  As Henry prepared to leave London, Edmund Gosse became a regular visitor, making sure as much as he could that he was not disturbing Henry, or outstaying the welcome which was generally extended to him. He had been reading one of the few copies of the writings of Henry James senior to have made its way across the Atlantic and he had also become interested, for reasons of his own, in childhood experience, especially experience in infancy, which he believed, as a result of a series of lectures he had attended, could affect behaviour more than was previously imagined. He became fascinated by the account he read by Henry’s father about a central experience in his life which had occurred in the house he had rented in the Great Park of Windsor.

  His father had written of what happened to him in that cottage near the Park as a moment of revelation and exhilaration; he mentioned it often and Henry remembered that his mother’s face darkened each time the subject was rehearsed. Aunt Kate’s face darkened too, but it was she who had several times recounted the story to Henry, and there was, he remembered, in her expression a sense of satisfaction that the story could be told again and to as concerned and attentive a listener as young Henry.

  Gosse had not known that Henry was an infant in the house when it happened. He had raised the subject merely to ask if it had affected Henry’s father’s subsequent behaviour. When he discovered that Henry and William were present, then he asked Henry, in a hushed and urgent tone, to tell him everything he knew about it, promising that it was neither for publication nor for dissemination. Henry pointed out that he was an infant and had no memory of it, and that his father’s account was in the book.

  ‘But it must have been spoken about in the family?’ Gosse asked.

  ‘Yes, my Aunt Kate spoke of it to me, but my mother disliked the subject.’

  ‘Your Aunt Kate was present when it occurred?’ Gosse asked.

  Henry nodded.

  ‘How did she describe it?’ Gosse asked.

  ‘She was a great story-teller, so one cannot be sure of her veracity,’ Henry said.

  ‘But you must tell me what she said.’

  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, n
or 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.’