The Master

by Colm Toibin

  ‘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.’

  ‘Perhaps it explains why you have come back here,’ Gosse said.

  ‘To England?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Close to the scene of where it happened. The lectures say that a child can take in everything, hold it but not absorb it in what they call the unconscious.’

  ‘Why is not William here then?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I do not know,’ Gosse said. ‘It is a mystery.’

  ‘Perhaps you will understand when I say that I do not wish to discuss it again,’ Henry said.

  For several days he could not work and found when he woke in the morning that he suffered from a great regret at having told Gosse the story, until he put the episode out of his mind so that he might continue making his plans in peace.

  SOME DAYS, Henry believed, he wrote too much and too quickly, working his Scot too hard. Once the stories were published, he paid little attention to them, revising them once for book publication and then forgetting about them. However, when his new collection Embarrassments appeared and Gosse had much to say about one of the stories, he read it over so that he could discuss it further with his friend. It was one of his ghost stories, called ‘The Way It Came’, and it seemed to him now too thin to survive even as a potboiler. Gosse wanted to discuss the technique of the first-person voice, how very difficult it was to make it convincing. He was, Henry thought, too polite and tactful to allow himself to stray from the general point to the particular story. But, as the conversation between them about the story proceeded over a few meetings and began to irritate him, a second matter raised by Gosse began to interest him profoundly. Gosse insisted that, since most readers did not fully believe in ghosts, then most ghost stories could not fully be credible. They needed, he said, both to be ghost stories and to have a rational explanation at the same time; they needed to be both frightening and within the bounds of the possible, he insisted.

  Henry disagreed. He believed that a story should be able to suggest anything at all, including the most outlandish matter, but he was, nonetheless, interested in Gosse’s argument, although it was too vehement and too eager to impose rules on subjects which, in Henry’s opinion, required great latitude. Privately, Henry was appalled by ‘The Way It Came’ and regretted collecting it in a volume, knowing that it might have been better to let it sink. He quite resented Gosse for noticing it.

  During one of those evenings with Gosse, he told him in passing how he had acquired Lamb House, mentioning the iron-monger Mr Milson as a ferryman waiting to take him across the water to ideal seclusion, managed happiness. He then told Gosse of Howells’s visit, and how his financial circumstances due to new possibilities for American publication had been transformed, as though he were being handed a coin by an old friend to put under his tongue and assist him on his journey to Hades.

  ‘Rye,’ Gosse laughed, ‘is indeed a death, especially on weekdays in the winter, but I daresay at weekends as well.’

  ‘If I were Poe,’ Henry said, ‘I could write about one of those characters who is travelling to an unknown house whose door is a door into the grave.’

  ‘You will long for London, and that will settle it, and you will escape with the mere fright which rural life offers the unwary,’ Gosse said.

  HENRY HAD promised Collier’s a new story as part of Howells’s interceding on his behalf, and, having consulted his notebooks and spoken more to Gosse about the problem of credibility in the modern ghost story but without telling him what his plans were, he set to work. This time he would frame the story, use the first-person voice as a narrative left behind by the protagonist and now retrieved to be read to a weekend party at a country house. He longed, as he dictated, to frighten the Scot, and watched him carefully as he began his tale so that he could note thereafter any shift in his countenance, any paling of his skin.

  His narrator’s voice would be prim and factual; seeping gently from her tone would be a sort of goodness, a readiness to appreciate each new person and each new experience as a reward sent to her in exchange for her quick intelligence and sensitivity. He sought a tone of voice full of calm acceptance, resigned competence, mingling authority with a devotion to duty, an orderly attachment to making the best of things; someone who would not complain and for whom shrillness would be among the cardinal vices. He wanted a voice that every reader would automatically believe and trust, but also a literary style redolent of fifty years earlier – our heroine was an avid reader – broken intermittently by simple vivid sentences.

  It was the story which had lain in his notebooks for more than two years, and had come to him over that time in flashes and moments, but nothing close to a form or a way to begin had inspired him until now, when he knew that he would need such a story, firm and frightening and dramatic, for his new editor at Collier’s, something that would grip the readers and make them want more. This was the vague tale told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury of two child
ren in a large house left by their guardian in the care of a governess detailed not to contact the guardian under any circumstances.

  It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself, the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.

  The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.

  He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.

  This longing, he knew, would in time come to him too as the garden door creaked, or the branches of the trees beat against the window as he read by lamplight, or lay awake in that old house, and in one of those seconds before worthier thoughts could surface, the first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of desperate hope that it was come at last, whatever it was. Even in its darkest shape, it would offer the same moment of pure, sharp release as a flash of lightning offers to the brittle air in a dried-up landscape.

  He worked. He moved everything slowly and deliberately towards excitement. He began the sentences simply, declaratively, so that the fright of what she saw seemed to harden the governess’s diction, forced her into bald, true statement. The person looking in through the window was the person who had appeared to her. He was the same. His face was close to the glass and his stare into her face was deep and menacing until she realized something that she would never cease to believe: the added shock of certitude went through her fiercely that it was not for her he had come. He had come for the children.

  As he laboured on the story, he did not think in any detail about the children. He gave them names and allowed their governess superlatives with which to describe them. Slowly, however, it became apparent to him that he had imagined for them strange private selves, which, while giving nothing away, maintained a strong resistance to the governess. She did not recognize it, and yet, whatever he had done with her words, he had handed young Miles and little Flora minds of their own.

  Each time he came to describe the appearance of the ghost, or the ethereal and menacing presence of Peter Quint, none of this mattered. The scene itself, the emptiness of the house, its newness for the governess, and then the invasive figure, utterly real to her, and seemingly real also to the children and the housekeeper Mrs Grose, made him shiver as he began to conjure it up. He watched McAlpine for signs of interest, but none came. He knew that asking McAlpine if he found these scenes in any way disturbing would be a breach of decorum. Most of the time, however, he did not think about McAlpine, and even the sound of the Remington made no difference. Most of the time he concentrated on the voice itself, the governess’s vivid version of each thing witnessed. His main task was to prevent the reader from asking why the governess did not contact the children’s guardian; he sought to offer enough detail and swift movement and further development to preserve the fiction that she was alone and must act alone. He set out to cajole the reader into becoming her eyes and ears and thus entering into her spirit, inhabiting unquestioningly her consciousness.

  The story appeared in Collier’s in twelve weekly instalments. He had no difficulty meeting the deadline. He knew what had to happen and sometimes he lingered softly over the fresh fright he was causing to the governess, enjoying the darting logic of her mind, making sure that he signalled again and again that the children knew everything and nothing. They were the least dependable pair, Miles and Flora, that he had ever invented; they had learned to withstand it all, save the obvious danger, and at times as he worked he was not sure himself what that was.

  He knew that his working conditions were the most perfect he would ever have. The Scot was silent and dutiful and accurate. Speaking out the sentences gave them a greater force and stability than when he wrote them in longhand. Seeing them in a fair copy that evening gave them an immediate authority. He always knew what to do, what emendations to make, and what deletions. And this flat in Kensington would soon be lost to him; he would sublet it or allow the lease to go, but it would no longer be his, and every day he moved about the rooms, alert to their atmosphere as though he would have a vital need to remember them. He had no visitors during the day, no disturbers, merely his shopping expeditions alone or with Lady Wolseley and his consultations with Edward Warren, who was dealing with the work at Lamb House. He dined out with relish now, and accepted invitations with delight. Soon, it would all be over, a part of the past. He would be leaving London.

  As he worked each morning, drawing out the scenes in their full drama and fright, scenes of his own came to him in sharply packed shocks and forced him to hesitate and finally stop. On one of these mornings, as he dictated the scene where Flora was discovered having left her bed, her governess believing that she had lied when she stated that she had seen nothing, he found that he was about to use the name Alice in place of Flora. He corrected himself before he spoke. His story, so real to him now and rich and urgent, had been interrupted not by something ghostly, but by a memory which came in all its ache and concrete detail. It did battle with his tale of horror and it won. It took him over; he had to stop and move into his bedroom and stand alone by the window. And then he had to go and tell McAlpine that he would not need him any more that day. This, he thought, was the only time he detected a note of surprise on the face of his amanuensis, but it disappeared quickly and McAlpine arranged his things and left without any questions or comments.

  Alice must have been five or six in the scene which had come to him. They had returned to Newport, or perhaps gone there for the first time, and she had been for some days under the care of Aunt Kate while their parents were absent and Aunt Kate had, Alice felt, imposed too much restraint on her small self, far more than was normal. When this was pointed out to her by the child, Aunt Kate had refused to budge, had insisted that her instructions be followed until Alice had become annoyed. She began, Henry remembered, by calling on her brothers for support, but they did not heed her, and then she pouted and sulked. Then, having learned that she would have two more days of this new regime before the return of her parents, she set about obeying Aunt Kate in every possible way, becoming a shining example, if Newport needed one, of an obedient girl.

  No one else, save her brothers and Aunt Kate, noticed what she did to her aunt in the months that follow
ed. Aunt Kate could not complain because Alice’s assault on her was too sporadic in its timing, and too comic in its tone, and it was, in any case, done behind her back much of the time. If Aunt Kate smiled or greeted a visitor warmly, her little niece stood by her skirts smiling grotesquely in imitation of her. All her particularities of speech, her ‘Oh my gosh’ and ‘well, well, well’, became natural parts of Alice’s speech, but exaggerated. Alice would often be found staring at her aunt cheekily, but would never do so for long enough to cause her mother to notice. She often followed her aunt for no reason, tip-toeing behind her, trying to mimic the gait of a middle-aged spinster lady.

  Aunt Kate herself did not see the extent of Alice’s efforts to undermine her and exact revenge, and Alice’s parents passed the summer in happy contemplation of their children’s innocence and lack of any form of hiddenness and mendacity. William enjoyed it most, and encouraged it, but the impulse came from Alice alone. It must have come into her mind as soon as she woke, and it never seemed to leave her mind as long as she was awake. It ended merely because Alice grew tired of it.

  This was the world he made for Miles and Flora, his two innocent and beautiful and abandoned children. Their private selves remained apart; they made sure that their ability to maintain a distance from sweet duty was not apparent. He gave his story everything he knew: his own life and that of Alice in the years when they were alone in England; the possibility which haunted his family all their lives that the threatening black shape would return to the window and make their father shudder and howl with fear; and the years he was now facing in an old house to which he would soon go, like his governess, full of hope, but full also of a foreboding which he could not erase.