The Master

by Colm Toibin

  By luncheon, Henry had summoned the doctor to call in the afternoon and had sent an urgent telegram to Mrs Ticknor. He was thus able to greet Lily’s friend Ida Higginson, who, he appreciated, had known all her life only the most orderly domestic rituals which Boston could provide, and a friend from Eastbourne who had come for the day, as though his household was in good health and perfect harmony. He knew that Lily Norton would not be indelicate enough to mention the matter to anyone save her Aunt Grace who would be too interested in the news to be fully deprived of it. He was glad he had not confided in her or in anyone else. He explained to the company that the butler was not well and hoped they would not be offended by the parlourmaid serving luncheon with the assistance of young Burgess Noakes.

  As luncheon came to an end, Mrs Smith having once more miraculously cooked a meal, Burgess indicated to him that Mrs Ticknor had arrived, and he asked that she wait for him in the front sitting room. He knew that this would prevent him from showing his guests around the garden, but he easily arranged that, since he had work that could not wait, in the shape of a novel appearing as a serial, Miss Norton should take her fellow guests on a walk through Rye, with which she had become thoroughly acquainted.

  Once they had happily and innocently departed, he went to Mrs Ticknor and told her of his plight. He emphasized that it could not, would not, continue. He wished to dismiss both of them. He would settle generously with them, he said, but he could no longer employ them. Mrs Ticknor, he hoped, could make arrangements for them, but he would not help her in that, he said.

  Mrs Ticknor said nothing, her face betrayed no emotion. She simply asked where her sister was and if she could speak to her. As they moved into the hallway, they saw the parlourmaid let the doctor into the house. Henry sent Mrs Ticknor to the kitchen, and, having briefed the doctor, dispatched him in the care of the parlourmaid to the room behind the pantry where, he understood from Burgess Noakes, Mr Smith lay.

  That evening as he dined with Lily Norton and his friend from Eastbourne, the conversation ranged over political and literary matters. Lily was at her most persuasively charming and intelligent. Considering her insistence on raising the issue of Constance Fenimore Woolson the previous evening and her insinuation that he had abandoned her friend and left her to her fate in Venice, he wondered if she, too, Lily Norton, had been abandoned, or if she lived in fear of such an eventuality. Her not marrying, not being allied with someone who could offer her greater purpose and scope for all her flair and charm, was, in his view, a mistake and would likely seem more so as time passed. As he looked at her across the table, it occurred to him that the re-creation of herself, her deliberate broadening of her effect, could have atrophied other qualities more endearing to a potential suitor. Constance, he thought, might have written a very good novel about her.

  The doctor returned in the morning and professed the case hopeless. Mr Smith, he said, remained drunk because the daily intake of alcohol over so many years had made him so. Once the supply was withdrawn, he would suffer enormously. Mrs Ticknor returned with her husband and told Henry that his generosity was appreciated and indeed would be needed as the Smiths did not have a penny. They had saved nothing. They had spent all their income on drink and in fact owed money to several suppliers in Rye. Mrs Ticknor was brisk in her tone and her husband stood beside her, clearly embarrassed, his cap in his hands.

  The Smiths were, as their goods were gathered, he thought, simply two saturated and demoralized victims with not a word to say for themselves, even Mrs Smith moved in silence to her doom, avoiding his glance. He knew that they would not find work again, and that, when his payments had run out, and their close family could no longer manage them, they would face the abyss. The Smiths, he thought, who had come with him so faithfully through so many years, were lost. But he knew that he would have given anything to get them out of the house.

  He wrote to his sister-in-law about the episode, but mentioned it to no one else. It was, he said, a perfect nightmare of distress, disgust and inconvenience. He realized that everyone in Rye would soon discover the fate of the Smiths. Even though they were disliked, the speed of their dismissal, he knew, would cause people to observe him closely as he walked through the town.

  This episode and the enervating weeks that followed as he lived servantless and ate in a local hostelry filled him with an unhappiness that only work could cure. In the mornings he sat at the wide south window of the drawing room which caught all the early sunshine and he read over the previous day’s work. The window overlooked the smooth green lawn and he loved to watch George Gammon at work under the shade of the old mulberry tree. Later, as he took his stroll in the garden, he would enjoy being protected from the world by the high garden walls of Lamb House.

  CHAPTER NINE

  March 1899

  NOTHING CAME TO HIM simply now. Nothing he saw and heard in this, his first journey out of England in five years, came as new and fresh experience to be wondered at and treasured. In Paris he met Rosina and Bay Emmet, the daughters of Ellen Temple, Minny’s sister. Both had been born after Minny’s death and had known her merely from the few photographs which had been taken and as a shadowy absence. The girls were not alike. Rosina was prettier and more outspoken; Bay was small and somewhat stocky, more quietly confiding and trusting than her sister. Her ambition as a painter was already clear from her keen observation of the work in the galleries and the life in the street, the latter seeming to both girls to rival the former for its artfulness and beauty.

  Sometimes when they spoke he heard Minny Temple’s voice. He envied them their lack of self-consciousness, their unawareness that their American voices, so filled with enthusiasm, were not as original as they imagined, nor as uncomplicated by history as they supposed.

  He was old enough at fifty-six to be able to deplore things with full conviction, and Bay Emmet playfully insisted that he was imitating Dr Sloper from Washington Square on his tour of Europe with his unfortunate and ill-educated daughter. He deplored the girls’ accents and corrected them regularly as they moved from one museum to another. When Rosina, for example, admired the jewels in a Parisian shop window, Henry immediately corrected her.

  ‘Jew-el, not jool.’

  And when she agreed that American girls did not nowadays speak out their vowels distinctly, he replied:

  ‘Vow-els, not vowls, Rosina.’

  Soon, both sisters, obviously enjoying their cousin’s reprimands, began to find new outrages to commit against his fastidious ear. They reminded him now, more than at any other time, of the dead aunt who loved such an encounter and would relish the response a new remark could cause. The girls managed to stand their ground not by arguing with him, but by mocking him gently, dropping any consonant which came their way and using a modern idiom certain to irritate him. When Bay announced one morning that she needed to go upstairs to fix her hair, Henry asked her, ‘To fix it to what, or with what?’

  Paris was more splendid than he had ever seen it, but he sensed something behind the splendour of which he disapproved. He was careful not to discuss this with the Emmet girls. He loved how innocently alert they were to colours and vistas and textures; he enjoyed how they pointed out details to him and to each other, and how happily they bathed in the city’s grandeur. A few times, when Bay Emmet grew silent and took no further part in jokes, and seemed to be absorbing the scene in a sort of reverie, and could grow easily irritated at any interruption, he felt the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson tugging at the air around them, serene and inward-looking, as sensitive to suggestion and shadow as Minny Temple had been to flourish and light.

  His cousins thus brought ancient memories to life. Sometimes, so fascinated were they by their surroundings, they did not notice his darkening memories. He found their indifference to him charming, a relief, and he wondered if some of his old friends, who demanded his attention too much and monitored too closely what he said and did, might be encouraged to follow the example of the Emmet sisters.
r />   He realized, as he travelled south, having left the girls to their European tour, that he could live easily without many of his friends. He would enjoy irregular correspondence, and, indeed, would treasure hearing of their lives and activities. But as he spent a night in Marseilles, knowing that the next day he would be in their grasp, he recognized that he could quite blissfully have passed by the abode of Paul and Minnie Bourget and not have seen his friends at all. The height of fame and wealth had given Bourget a twenty-five-acre estate on the Riviera on a terraced mountainside with a park of dense pine and cedar, complete with magnificent views. It had also given him an inordinate interest in his own opinions which, exacerbated by anti-Semitism, had become unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian.

  There was another guest on the estate, a minor French novelist. Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus, was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets’ prejudices on the matter. He could sense that the Bourgets’ luxury and exquisite taste and the superior nature of their daily routine were connected with the hardness and hatreds of their illiberal politics. The English, he thought, were softer in their views, more ambiguous in the connections between their personal circumstances and their political convictions.

  He knew Bourget, he felt, as though he had made him. He knew his nature and his culture, his race and his type, his vanity and his snobbery, his interest in ideas and his ambition. But these were small matters compared with the overall effect of the man, and the core of selfhood which he so easily revealed. This was richer and more likeable and more complicated than anyone supposed.

  In return for all Henry’s attention, he knew, Bourget noticed nothing. His list of Henry’s attributes, were he to make one, would be simple and clear and inaccurate. He did not observe the concealed self, nor, Henry imagined, did the idea interest him. And this, as his stay with the Bourgets came to an end, pleased him. Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling. At times, he knew, the blankness was much more than a mask. It made its way inwards as well as outwards, so that, having left the Bourgets’ estate, and travelling on towards Venice, the possibility of future meetings with his former hosts had quickly become a subject of indifference to him.

  HE HAD NOT forgotten how much he loved Italy, but he feared that he had grown too old and stale to be captured once more by it, or that Italy, under pressure of time and tourism, had lost its golden charm. He sat still in the train carriage during the three-hour delay at Ventimiglia, watching the stuffy, scrambling, complaining crowd, led by a party of affluent Germans. He would have given a great deal to have stood up and walked sturdily over the border, his baggage coming behind him on a wheelbarrow pushed by Burgess Noakes. He felt an immense impatience to leave France behind him and be brushed now by the wings of Italy. The manners in Italy were open and fresh; all the refinement was hidden and taken for granted. When finally he found himself sitting in an armchair close to the window of his hotel in Genoa basking in the Italian air and the revival of Italian memories, he felt relieved and happy.

  ONCE HE HAD arrived in Venice and night fell, he knew that neither tourism nor time had harmed the city’s mixture of sadness and splendour. He made his way from the railway station to the Palazzo Barbaro along side-canals by gondola, swerving and twisting through the dimly recognized waterways. These journeys had a gravity attached to them, as though the passenger were being led theatrically to his doom. But then, as the vessel was let float softly and slacken in pace, and gently bumped against a mooring post, the other side of Venice appeared – the raw sumptuousness, the shameless glitter, the spaces so out of scale with actual need.

  Venice was laden down with old voices, old echoes and images; it was the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. Five years earlier, having sorted out the affairs of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, he had left the city believing that he would not return. It was as if both he and Constance had risked too much in their gamble with Venice, and she had lost everything while he had lost her. Venice’s resonance for him now was no longer vague and historical; the violence and cruelty which matched the beauty and grandeur were no longer abstract. They were represented by the violent death of his friend. As guest of his hosts the Curtises in Palazzo Barbaro, he worked on a new story in one of the rooms at the back, with a pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched. He knew that just a few rooms away glowed the Grand Canal. If he stood on the balcony, as he had done so many times, he could study the domes and scrolls and scalloped buttresses and statues forming the crown of the Salute, the wide steps like the train of a robe. He could look up to the left and allow himself to be dazzled by Palazzo Dario covered with the loveliest marble plates and sculptured circles, exquisite and compact and delicate.

  In that turning of his head from the Salute to Palazzo Dario, his eye was caught each time by the gloomy Gothic windows of Casa Semitecolo and this was when Venice ceased to be spectacle for him, when it abandoned its guise as vast pageant and became real and hard and filled with horror. It was from the second story of this building, five years earlier, that Constance Fenimore Woolson had flung herself onto the pavement.

  HE HAD FIRST met her early in 1880 in Florence when he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. He was thirty-seven; she was forty. She had had a letter of introduction from Minny Temple’s sister Henrietta. While she had read everything he had written, he had read nothing by her. He had met many American women travelling in Europe with letters of introduction to him. Such letters, if gathered together, he thought, would produce a hefty volume, but they would not be as tedious as many of their bearers, who included a number of lady novelists who wished that they had written Daisy Miller and were anxious to tell him that they were on the point of doing something quite as good.

  Constance’s deafness in one ear interested him as much as it seemed to irritate her. It pointed to something he might otherwise not have noticed so quickly. She possessed an extraordinary amount of reserve and self-sufficiency and seemed anxious neither to please him nor impress him. She lived, to a degree which he believed unusual, in her own mind. He was not surprised, as he showed her the sights, that she wished to avoid tourists, but he was fascinated by her lack of interest in Anglo-American society in Florence and her refusal to be introduced to his friends and associates in the higher echelons of Florentine society. She needed her evenings to herself, she said flatly; she could not happily absorb the company of so many people, no matter how rich and important they were.

  He was unable to tell whether her responses to churches and frescoes and paintings were truly original. Nonetheless, the freshness of her intelligence, her likes and dislikes, and her ability to be puzzled and confused, made him interested in accompanying her through the city in the mornings. Two years later, when she read The Portrait of a Lady, she noticed, she intimated to him softly, his skill at displaying an American woman full of openness and curiosity and ideas of her own in Italy for the first time being quietly but firmly directed by a connoisseur, a man of slender means who had studied beauty. He had used that sense of her, attached it, as it were, to his other prior claimants, and written it sometimes on the very same day that he wandered in the city with his new American friend. So that Isabel Archer saw what Constance Fenimore Woolson saw and may indeed have felt what she felt, if only he could have fully divined what Constance felt.

  She teased him about the tameness of his background; his being a native of the James family caused her much amusement, as did Newport and Boston and his European wanderings. She, the grand-niece of James Feni
more Cooper, had access to an America he would never know. Both in Ohio and Florida, she told him, she had been on familiar terms with the wilderness. And just in case, she smiled at him menacingly, he thought that she was a roughneck, she should point out that, while he was the first of his family to set foot in Italy, her great-uncle had lived in Florence and written a book about it.

  Added to her background was her strange and busy independence. She saw him in the mornings, but in the afternoons she walked in the hills above Florence for hours, and at night she wrote and read. Each day, when they met, she had a new perspective on the city, a new experience to recount, and a fresh eye with which to view what he had arranged for her to see.

  He did not mention her in letters to his parents or his sister Alice or brother William. In those years, they were all too ready to respond to the slightest hint of an amorous adventure which might lead him to marriage. He knew that every line of his letters was carefully analysed in case some clue might be offered about where his heart lay. For his relatives in Boston, hungry for news, his heart remained as hard as he could make it.

  Constance and Henry met when their paths crossed in Rome and then in Paris. They corresponded over the next few years and read each other’s work. Sometimes, he was preoccupied with his own writing or with other correspondents, but often when he had written her a letter he discovered that his old enjoyment of her company had been stirred again; he found himself writing another letter to her before he received a reply. He feared that she was confused by this sudden interest after a long silence and he knew that she was wary. She had become his most intelligent reader and, after he had extracted a promise that she would destroy his letters, a most trusted and sharp-witted confidante. And when she came to London, as she did when they had known one another for more than three years, she became his steadfast and self-contained and secret best friend.