The Master

by Colm Toibin

  WILLIAM RETURNED to Harvard that September to continue his studies, but Henry did not follow him. His parents remained preoccupied with Wilky but were much relieved when, on a further assault on Fort Wagner which, fortunately, had been evacuated just before the attack, Bob survived unscathed.

  Henry remained in his room as Wilky recovered and Bob stayed with his regiment. His mother’s response to his seclusion and his silence became sweeter once Wilky began to declare that he wished to return to the army as soon as he himself rather than his doctors felt that he could. His mother at mealtimes talked a great deal about the sacrifice and bravery of her two younger sons, but her tone was bitter rather than proud.

  ‘They have both seen things which no one of their age should see. They have both witnessed horrors and felt horrors, and I do not know now how they will ever settle down without being haunted by sights that none of us will ever be able to imagine. I wish they hadn’t joined. That’s all I can say. And I wish the war had never started.’

  Aunt Kate nodded, but Henry senior stared passively and vaguely into the distance, as though his wife had made some mild observation. As soon as each meal was over, Henry returned to his room. His mother began, once more, to worry about his back, bringing him cushions and making him lie down rather than sit when he was reading.

  He did not know what to tell them when his first story, written in the French style about an adulterous woman, was accepted by the Continental Monthly in New York. It would be published anonymously, so he knew that he could keep the news from them if he wished. He waited for a day or two, but then, on finding his father in the library alone, he decided to reveal his secret. Within an hour his father had read the story and expressed his disapproval of its contents, less than uplifting, he thought, and dramatizing the baser motives. Then his father wrote to William, who sent Henry a note mocking him and wondering how he came by his knowledge of adulterous French ladies. Finally, his father moved around Newport spreading the news of his son who was about to publish a story in the French style.

  WILKY WENT back to his regiment, but was judged too unwell to continue, and so he returned home once more, determined on improving so that he could see the war out and be there for the victory. Nothing dimmed his enthusiasm. It became Henry’s habit, in this interlude as Wilky waited to rejoin his regiment, to sit with him silently reading while Wilky dozed or lay still without speaking. One night as he quietly prepared to return to his own room, leaving Wilky peaceful, he was confronted in the corridor by his Aunt Kate. She whispered to Henry that she had left some sweet-cake and some milk for him in the kitchen. Just as he was about to tell her that he did not want any cake or milk, he noticed her face darkening and her brow furrowing, and he understood that she wanted him to follow her to the kitchen.

  On tiptoe the two of them moved down through the house. In the kitchen, she began to whisper something about Wilky’s recovery until she closed the door and then could talk out loud.

  ‘He’s mad to go back to the war,’ she said. ‘As though he didn’t have enough injuries, enough suffering.’

  ‘He remains idealistic about the cause,’ Henry said.

  Aunt Kate pursed her lips disapprovingly.

  ‘He’ll never settle now, once this war is over. He is like all of the Jameses, except for you,’ she went on. ‘Headstrong, full of foolish enthusiasm.’

  She studied his face to see if she had gone too far, but he smiled at her, amused, signalling that she could say more if she wished.

  ‘They were all the same, your father’s family. If they had one drink, then they had thousands of drinks. One night’s gambling led to them losing every penny. One page of theology and then …’ She stopped and shook her head and sighed.

  ‘And half of them died young, you know, leaving your cousins orphans, the Temple girls and poor Gus Barker. Of course, the old father, old William James of Albany, was as rich at that time as Mr Astor, but the Astors were all good at business, level-headed people, and the Jameses, once the father was dead, were good at gambling and drinking and dying young and running headlong towards foolish causes. Every time I listen to Wilky talking about going back to fight, I see the Jameses writ large, always ready to do something foolish. And William wanting to be a painter one day and a doctor the next. You’re the only one who takes after our side of the family, you’re the only solid one.’

  ‘But I studied law last year and changed my mind,’ Henry said.

  ‘You had no enthusiasm for the law. You did it to get away from here and with all the war madness going on, you were right. If you had stayed, they’d have joined you up and you would be limping around here with half of you amputated.’

  Her voice was harsh now, and her eyes sharp, almost wild. In the dim lamplight she resembled a drawing of an old woman, both wise and mad. She stopped speaking and let her mouth and jaw settle. She watched him, waiting for a response. When he did not speak, she began again.

  ‘You’re the consistent one, the one who’ll know how to mind himself. At least we have you.’

  BY THE TIME his son’s first story had appeared in print, Henry senior had grown restless once more and decided, he said, to move his family definitively to Boston. Henry was happy to leave Newport. He kept his stories secret now, letting his family see only the reviews he was writing for the periodicals – the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, the Nation. Without any of them knowing, he worked slowly and carefully every day on the story of a boy who goes to war, leaving his mother and his swee heart behind. When he began he was involved in a pure and artful invention, as though he were writing a ballad which Professor Child might collect. He established the difficult, proud and ambitious mother; John, her courageous and light-hearted son; and Lizzie, the sweetheart, innocent and pretty and flirtatious. He created each scene with deliberation, reading over each morning what he had written the previous day, constantly erasing and adding. He tried to work quickly so that there would be speed and flow to the narrative and, on one of these days, in the family’s new rented quarters on Beacon Hill, something occurred to him which shocked him but did not cause him to stop.

  ‘On the fourth evening, at twilight, John Ford,’ he wrote, ‘was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent friends pressing about with helping hands.’

  John was too ill to be moved, and his injuries were too severe for him to be visited by his sweetheart Lizzie. As he wrote, Henry felt that he was closest to what concerned him in his waking life and most of his dreams: the fate of his injured brother. His father could not blame him for immorality nor William mock him for writing about a world he did not know. Suddenly an image came to him and he held his breath for worry that he might lose it: ‘When Lizzie was turned from John’s door, she took a covering from a heap of draperies that had been hurriedly tossed down in the hall: it was an old army blanket. She wrapped it round her and went out onto the veranda.’

  He wanted to go into the shed behind the pantry and look for the blanket he had taken from Wilky, but then he remembered that they were in Boston now and not Newport and that the blanket would surely have been thrown out or left there in the move. He began to summon up the smell of the blanket, its aura of the battlefield and the army: ‘A strange earthy smell lingered in that faded old rug, and with it a faint perfume of tobacco. Instantly, the young girl’s senses were transported as they had never been before to those far-off Southern battlefields. She saw men lying in swamps and puffing their kindly pipes, drawing their blankets closer, canopied with the same luminous dusk that shone down upon her comfortable weakness. Her mind wandered amid these scenes …’

  The feeling of power was new to him. This raid on his own memories, this parading of an object so close to him, so deeply part of his own personal store that no one might ever know where this moment in his story came from, made him believe that he had done something daring and original.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  June 1898


  HE WATCHED HIS FRIEND the novelist moving towards the window in the drawing room, but did not suggest to her that she might be more comfortable where he had originally placed her. She sought a position with her back to the light. He wondered if she remembered that two, or even three, of her heroines had entered rooms in this way and sat happily and deliberately with their backs to a large window so that the company might view them in the most flattering light.

  Once seated, however, Mrs Florence Lett did not seem to care about her face as she wrinkled her brow and grimaced. She could not utter a sentence without making passionate changes to her expression, smiling and frowning, and puckering up her rather perfect nose. He wondered how her face had withstood so many changes in its weather. Soon, he thought, there would be a landslide, something would have to give. In the meantime, he enjoyed her talk of her time in Italy, her next book, her charming daughter, the slowness of the train to Rye, her sorrow that she could stay only a short time, and back again to her beautiful daughter, aged six, who was being fêted in the kitchen by the staff, her daughter’s education and inheritance, and then back to Italy and the death, by suicide, of Henry’s great friend, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson.

  ‘In Venice,’ she said, ‘they spoke of you and why you departed so abruptly and why you have not returned. He is an artist, I told them, a supreme artist, not a diplomat, but they long to see you. Venice is sad, it was always sad, but more so now, and people whom I don’t think ever knew Constance claim to miss her. Poor Constance, you know I could not walk in those streets. I had to turn back, I don’t know what you will do.’

  Slowly, the door opened and Mrs Florence Lett’s daughter came quietly into the room. Her mother was in mid-sentence and did not stop. The little girl studied the room, her expression placid. She was wearing a long blue dress. Henry noticed also the intensely soft blue of her eyes and her clear fair skin. In that moment, as she stood there, respectful of her mother’s conversation, he thought her immensely beautiful. From the sofa, he put out his arms to her and, without any further consideration, she came stealthily towards him and embraced him, sitting herself on his lap and putting her arms around him.

  ‘We’ve all gone to see her grave, of course,’ his visitor continued. ‘With some graves you know that the person is at rest, that their lying there is part of nature. But I did not feel that at all with poor Constance, although that graveyard is the most perfect place. She would have loved it. But I don’t feel she is at rest. I don’t feel that at all.’

  Henry listened as Mrs Florence Lett held forth. He did not speak to the girl on his lap, and he presumed that she would, after a few moments, move across the room towards her mother. Clearly, however, she had found comfort as gradually her arms fell limp and she settled into sleep. He did not know if feeling at ease with strangers was an aspect of the child’s charm, but he decided not to ask her mother.

  By the time the child woke, the light in the room was fading, the maid had taken away the tea and Mrs Florence Lett had exhausted a large number of subjects. The girl smiled at him as she opened her eyes. He felt enormously touched by her as though her coming to him with all the confidence of a child to a parent brought with it a trust and a good luck. He smiled as she stood up.

  When Mrs Florence Lett did not comment on what had just occurred, he said nothing either. He would have given anything to spare the little girl embarrassment. She had come to him so naturally. As they were leaving and the servants came to say goodbye to her, it was clear that she had made a great impression during her visit to the kitchen and the pantry. The child now became shy for the first time and clung to her mother who spoke to her carefully and firmly, encouraging her to offer a withdrawn, half-willing smile and a small wave before she left.

  When he returned to the drawing room and the sofa where he had been, he felt a residue of the child’s angelic presence in the atmosphere. Since his return from London a few days earlier he had been trying to work, forcing himself to remain in his study for the daylight hours, neglecting his correspondence, and inviting nobody to see him. Mrs Florence Lett had outwitted him, announcing by telegram that she was coming, making clear that she required no reply, and then arriving as she said she would.

  Now, as the lamps were lit in Lamb House, he went back to his desk and began to think over what she had said about Venice. He had a letter in front of him from Mrs Curtis, the owner of Palazzo Barbaro, whose hospitality he had enjoyed so many times. She used the same words about the city. She wrote about its sadness, and about the streets close to the building from whose second-floor window Constance Fenimore Woolson had flung herself.

  Her death, like that of his sister Alice, lived with Henry day after day. Images of her came and went, sometimes of her inert body lying broken on the street below her window, and sometimes a detail, the way her lips moved quietly as he spoke to her, how desperately, despite her bad hearing, she tried to follow what he was saying. He saw her in the sunlight of Bellosguardo, maybe her happiest time, under a parasol wearing white and smiling at him, as though she were sitting for a cleverly arranged portrait and offering him, as she did so much, her full, proprietorial approval before he even spoke. She had been, he supposed, his best friend, the person outside his own family who had been closest to him. He still could not believe she was dead.

  AMONG THE objects which Lady Wolseley had encouraged him to purchase for Lamb House was an old map of Sussex that testified to the changes of relation between sea and land in his corner of the coast. It gave him pleasure to think that Rye and Winchelsea belonged to shifting ground, the endless mutation of the shore. The lines here were not ordained or set in stone, but open, he liked to think, to suggestion. Sometimes, when he walked slowly up and down the bright space of his garden room, or sat upstairs in the drawing room looking out at the light, he fancied that with one stroke of his pen, or the sound of his voice, the river could change its course, the sea come rushing in, or a new, small indentation appear on the coast.

  Both Rye and Winchelsea seemed almost foolishly placed now. He loved telling his visitors how Winchelsea was practically destroyed in the thirteenth century by a huge storm which cast up masses of beach, until it was clear that the future of the town was precarious. And thus the town was moved, the old one left like a ghost, he liked to tell his guests, or like an old family down to its last member, holding only memories and fading treasure while a usurping family thrived. But the success of this new enterprise was to be short-lived also. When there is a battle between the sea and the land, he would continue, it is generally the sea which emerges victorious and the land which melts away. Rye and Winchelsea, the new Winchelsea that is, were ready to be great ports with great plans and dreams. But then, in the centuries that followed, the land won, and slowly and slyly a modest plain where sheep now grazed began to form between these towns and the sea, pushing the sea back gently but effectively.

  If the first Winchelsea suffered death by drowning, the second was left high and dry. He would talk as though this were a hard fact to accept. This plain, this strange addition to the land, he would say, put there by a quirk of nature, gave him a satisfaction, as though he had been personally involved in helping things along. It added to the mystery of Rye, and to his engagement with it – the sea had once come right to its front door, and now it had withdrawn, leaving only sea light and sea gulls and a flat plain, an ambiguous loan which the water had made to Sussex and its inhabitants.

  To this world, from which the ocean had so politely withdrawn, he had moved, in his own gentle and polite way, creating space for his work to flourish and his sleep to come easy. He now had a household, much larger than any his parents had ever dreamed of, and the smooth running of his small empire was a matter of care and pride and worry and high expense.

  From London, where they had served him loyally, he had transported the Smiths, Mrs Smith to cook and her husband to function as butler. In Rye, he had employed Fanny the parlour-maid, pretty and quiet and ca
reful, and in Rye too he had found a treasure called Burgess Noakes, gnome-sized and not pretty, but making up for it in punctuality and the desire to please. Burgess was young, and this was his first serious employment, which meant that he had developed no bad or slovenly habits. He could be trained as both houseboy and valet without being made to feel that the duties of the former might be less dignified or worthy of his attention than those of the latter.

  Henry had spoken to the boy’s mother, who went to great lengths to explain how willing he was and clean and well spoken and mature for fourteen and how sad she would be to part with him. When the boy was finally produced, the discrepancy between his scamp-like face and frame and the boundless eagerness of his gaze made Henry immediately warm to him. He gave no sign of this, however, merely explaining to the mother, as the boy listened, that Burgess Noakes would be employed for a brief period so that his suitability could be tested, and after that period they could discuss the terms of his employment, as appropriate.

  Henry enjoyed being known in Rye. As he walked the streets, he took pleasure in greeting all whom he recognized with courtesy and courtliness. He was often accompanied by his dog Maximilian, or by the Scot, who had found lodgings in Rye and become an assiduous walker and cyclist, or by whatever guests were staying at Lamb House. The idea of residing in a small and traditional English community belonged to his dreams; he found himself, especially in the presence of American guests, deeply proud of his acceptance in Rye and his knowledge of its denizens, its topography and history.

  When visitors came by train, as they generally did, Henry met them personally at the station. Burgess accompanied him, skilfully pushing a wheelbarrow which served to ferry the guest’s luggage up the hill to Lamb House. Henry marvelled at some of Burgess’s social instincts on these occasions. He stood apart with the wheelbarrow in readiness when the train stopped at Rye station. He did not intrude for one moment as Henry and his guest indulged in greetings and preliminary observations, but negotiated effectively with the train’s porter, establishing which luggage belonged to Mr James’s guest without having to consult its owner. He made sure, however, that the traveller saw the luggage as it rested on the wheelbarrow. Then he moved easily behind Henry and his visitor as they made their way up the hill.