The Master

by Colm Toibin

  Neither of them spoke about their private lives, their hidden selves. He spoke to her about his work and his family and she made observations which were personal in that they belonged to a very particular mind; they seemed like confidences no matter how general or vague the subject. She did not talk about her work to him, but he learned by implication and accident that the completion of each of her books brought with it a nervous collapse of which she lived in dread. The winters were not kind to her; dark days and low temperatures made her depressed so that there were times when she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anybody else, could not work, and could, as far as he could discover, see no hope, although she was desperate for him not to know the scale and depth of her suffering. She, who had been ready for his friendship and company, could be silent and withdrawn. He had never met anyone who shared to such a degree this readiness and its very opposite. He knew that he could trust her, that he could remain close to her while becoming distant, if he needed. She had a way of abruptly leaving his side as though she feared he was about to dismiss her and could not tolerate the pain and the humiliation of that. Nothing she did with him was simple; he was amazed and often concerned that he did not fully know her, could not fathom if these brisk gestures at parting were aspects of her vulnerability or her need to be alone, or her fear, or all of these things.

  ONE EVENING in London in February 1884, Henry went with Mrs Kemble to see the Italian actor Salvini in Othello. It was a fashionable evening and a fashionable production and there were people there who were richer than Mrs Kemble and her escort, with titles and also beauty, neither of which Mrs Kemble nor her escort possessed, but there was no couple more fashionable in the audience, more noticed and observed, than the great actress accompanied by the author of The Portrait of a Lady.

  Mrs Kemble was imperious with him, and he complimented her regularly on her wit, and listened to her with admiring attention, having seen her first on the stage when he was a mere youth. She knew that everyone around them wished to hear what she was saying and thus she alternated between a raised voice and a whisper. She nodded to some people and spoke briefly to others, but she stopped for nobody. Instead she proceeded through the throng to their box, making it clear from the manner of her gaze that no one was free to join them.

  In the moments before the lights were dimmed, Henry saw Constance Fenimore Woolson take her seat. It was typical of her not to mention to him, although he had seen her a few days earlier, that she planned to come to the theatre. In the time that she had been in London, they had never once ventured into this world together. Her sortie into fashionable London life, when no one else was alone, took him aback. Constance looked worn and preoccupied, not like a distinguished bestselling novelist from an old American family who had travelled the world. Viewed from his box, she could have been a lady’s companion or a governess. He did not know if she had seen him.

  As he watched the tale of jealousy and treachery unfold on the stage, more intimate versions of the same matters came to him sharply. He could easily pretend that he had not seen her. But if she had seen him – and she generally, he felt, missed nothing – and if she had even the slightest intimation that he had sought to ignore her, he knew how deeply wounded she would be, and how private and hidden the hurt would remain, and how skilled she would be at silently nursing it over the London winter.

  At the interval, he excused himself to Mrs Kemble and made his way through the crowd, finding Constance in her seat checking the text of Othello. In that one instant as he stood above her and she glanced up, he saw that she did not know what to do, and when he spoke, he realized that she could not hear him. He smiled and signalled to her to follow him. He knew, as they made their way towards the box, that Mrs Kemble was directing a hostile gaze at him and his companion.

  As he introduced her, Constance seemed even more forlorn than when he had seen her taking her seat. What he caught now, as she tried to speak to Mrs Kemble, was what he caught before the play began – a loneliness and melancholy which seemed to outweigh the other qualities she was at pains to emphasize. Mrs Kemble, on the other hand, had never suffered from loneliness, and, as soon as she saw that Henry planned to invite his friend into their box, she turned rudely away from them, staring at a point in the far distance with the help of her glasses.

  HE CONTINUED to meet Constance over the next two years as she lived outside London and to correspond with her. He watched her, especially after his sister Alice had arrived in England, going to great lengths not to be a burden, not to depend on him for anything, and to make regular mention of her plans for travel and work, her famous independence. He was not allowed to pity her, nor was he allowed to know her fully, except as a set of passionate contradictions underlined by two essential truths: she was immensely clever and she was lonely.

  Her hearing deteriorated and when he spoke, she had to study his face and watch his lips so that she could follow what he was saying. Her face took on a worried gravity, and this became intense if he ever mentioned plans, where he might go soon, when he might travel. In these years, he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. Slowly, he became aware that when he told her of his intentions, she went home and brooded about them. A few times, he noticed her surprise and mild irritation when she discovered that he had changed his mind and not discussed the change with her. He came to understand that his presence was powerful for her, and that everything he said and wrote was contemplated by her at length in private. To her he was a mystery, even more so than she was to him, but she put more thought and energy, he believed, into solving the mystery, or at least attempting to divine its properties, than he ever did.

  When she began to arrange to leave England and return to Florence, he convinced her that she should know some people there, friends of his, and enter into society, however limited, in the city. She smiled and shook her head.

  ‘I have seen enough Americans in America,’ she said, ‘and enough English in England, and I do not believe that the Italians will take much interest in me. No, I would rather work than take tea, would rather walk in the hills than dress in the evening.’

  ‘There are two charming and very serious people I should like you to meet,’ he said, ‘people who do not themselves enter very freely into society. I do not wish you to live at the mercy of the entire Anglo-American colony.’

  ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I long for nothing more than to meet your friends.’

  In writing to ask his friends to administer some social comfort to Miss Woolson on her return to Florence, Henry was taking a risk he had not taken before, having introduced her to no one in England. He understood that his old friend Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie had brought a private income and the best of Boston reserve and refinement to Bellosguardo above Florence. In their tastes and habits they were simple people. Had they been less simple, he believed, the father’s talent as a composer and the daughter’s as a painter might have lifted them to great heights. They lacked the steel of ambition and dedication and they replaced it with exquisite taste and select hospitality. He knew that they would warm to an American novelist with the manners and pedigree Constance possessed.

  The chance that they would not like each other was small. Lizzie, now aged forty, had recently married a bohemian painter, Frank Duveneck, and thus Francis Boott, who had been devoted to his daughter, would have time and energy to dedicate to a new friend. The real risk he incurred in introducing Constance to the Bootts was that they would like each other more than they liked him, that they would, as evening settled over Bellosguardo, discuss his case, and come to conclusions about him that would require further discussion, until he became one of the subjects which bound them together.

  He did not flatter himself. He knew how careful Constance would be at firs
t, how reticent and cautious, and he knew how much old Francis Boott would like conversation with a new friend to be general, confining himself if he could to rare old coins and old damask and long-forgotten Italian composers. Nonetheless, he knew that Lizzie Boott, whom he had first met in Newport twenty-five years earlier, had longed for him to marry and had conveyed her wishes to him and to his sister Alice, with whom she regularly corresponded, as her father corresponded with William. Once Constance had arrived in Florence, Henry realized, and been sent into their care, the Bootts would know what no one else knew: how much he had seen of Constance and how significant a presence she was for him; and they would wonder at how strange it was, considering their closeness to Henry and his family, that no one had mentioned this previously. It was not impossible that they might wish to discuss this with Constance.

  WHEN SHE HAD settled in Florence and had, as he learned, seen a great deal of Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie, he received a letter from Constance which surprised him in its frankness, its personal tone. Being with the Bootts, she said, in their quarters in Bellosguardo, was delightful yet, on the third or fourth visit something had struck her, however, and stayed with her; she had to wait until she had unpacked her books before she could finally be sure about it. The rooms in the house on Bellosguardo, she wrote, were precisely described in The Portrait of a Lady. The chamber in which she was regularly entertained was, indeed, brimming with arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and contained the hangings and tapestries, chests and cabinets and pictures, brass and pottery, not to speak of the deep and well-padded chairs, which filled the main reception room of Gilbert Osmond in that novel.

  And not only that, she wrote half-accusingly, but the old man himself had been perfectly described in the book. He had, indeed, a fine, narrow and extremely modelled and composed face, and yes, its only fault was that it ran a trifle too much to points, which were emphasized by the shape of his beard. Sometimes, she said, when the father and daughter spoke it was as though Gilbert Osmond and his daughter Pansy were having a conversation. ‘You have introduced me to two of the characters from your books,’ she wrote, ‘and I am grateful to you, but I wonder if you have plans to include me in the sequel.’

  He did not reply for some weeks, and when he did, he failed to mention her observations about his novel and the Bootts. He ended his letter coldly, being certain that she would not fail to notice it, and believing that this, coupled with his delay in writing, might remove the discussion of sources for his novels to the realm of the unspoken, where he and she normally wandered freely as treasured citizens.

  He remained deeply curious, however, about her relationship with the Bootts and Frank Duveneck. An idea came into his mind about an elderly American gentleman of private means and cultivated manners in Europe with his daughter. Both of them would, in his story, marry; the daughter first and the father some time later out of loneliness. Their partners, it came to him, could be two people who have secretly known each other, or have come to know each other now. He was doing, he understood, what Constance had suggested – placing her close to his other characters, the father and daughter from The Portrait of a Lady, to see what would happen. He put the idea for the story aside, not wishing to satisfy her speculation as to why he might have introduced her to the Bootts, and also believing that what he saw when he travelled to Florence might be more interesting than anything he might imagine.

  Constance had rented her own house on Bellosguardo, Casa Brichieri-Colombi, which looked over the city and had ample space and beautiful gardens. But when Henry arrived in December, having extracted a promise from Constance and the Bootts that no one in Florence would be informed of his presence, Constance had not yet taken possession of it and was still staying in an apartment close to the Bootts, across a small square from Casa Brichieri-Colombi. She offered him the house, which lay empty, and he accepted.

  Thus he found himself living in what was to be, in fact, her future home, seeing her almost every day, allowing her to direct his domestic arrangements, while none of his other friends in Florence was aware that he was in the city. The Bootts knew, but were preoccupied by the imminent birth of Lizzie’s child. This did not, however, prevent Francis Boott from ascending Bellosguardo to visit him.

  Francis Boott’s exceptional cultivation was matched by his great mildness. He seemed incapable of giving or taking offence. When The Portrait of a Lady appeared and it was clear that he himself, his house and his daughter had been openly used in the book and that the cold villain of the novel had his very face, he made no protest to the author and seemed to be amused. He was an immensely proper resident of Florence, Henry knew, as he had been of Boston and Newport; as a host or guest, he was beyond reproach. He gave the impression, despite the mildness of his manners, that this extensive social propriety stood for other proprieties in which he also believed, but it appeared that he saw no reason to display his beliefs.

  The old man was wrapped in a shawl as he sat on an easy chair in the main sitting room of Casa Brichieri-Colombi. Henry noticed his slow-moving feline shape, his fine long fingers and his face, which despite his interest in good food, had become oddly ascetic with the years.

  ‘We have loved your friend, Miss Woolson,’ he said. ‘She has a rare charm and intelligence. Lizzie and I have become very fond of her.’

  ‘And she has become fond of you, I believe,’ Henry said.

  ‘She has a gentle wit, you know, and a lovely way of leaving our company as if her life depended on it. We always want her to stay longer, but she has work, my, does she have work.’

  Francis Boott’s eyes sparkled with pleasure as he spoke.

  ‘Of course we are fully conscious that she is merely our friend because of you. She admires you so very much. And trusts you.’

  As his friend crossed his legs again, Henry noticed how beautiful his shoes were and how slender his feet. Henry wanted to bring the subject back to Lizzie and her confinement but he had already, on Francis’s arrival, asked about her. Nonetheless, he tried again.

  ‘You will give Lizzie my best regards,’ he said.

  ‘I tell her everything, as you know,’ Francis said, smiling again. ‘We both worry about Constance. There are depths which neither of us have fully explored, but we have gained a great idea of her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘Constance is deep.’

  ‘And she suffers rather more perhaps than someone of her talent deserves to suffer,’ Francis said, knitting his brows. ‘But it is marvellous that she has met you and has known you. We both feel that too.’

  Henry stared at him blankly.

  ‘We both noticed the change in her over the past few weeks when your arrival was increasingly certain. You know, she grew much happier and wore lighter colours and smiled more. It was unmistakeable.’

  Francis Boott stopped and coughed and found a handkerchief and sipped the tea which had been brought for him. He gave the impression that he had said all that he had to say, that he had made himself clear. And then he suddenly spoke again, loudly at the beginning as though he were interrupting someone.

  ‘We wondered if you were happy here, in this house.’

  ‘Oh yes, I adore the house.’

  ‘With Constance so close and it being her house, or will be soon …’ Francis Boott let his voice taper off, but made sure that he could be heard. ‘No one knows that you are here, of course, so I don’t suppose there could be any scandal. Bellosguardo, despite everything, is a sort of bastion.’

  He tapped the edge of the chair with his finger.

  ‘No, the problem is – what will she do when you go? This is what Lizzie and I worry about. Not about you being here and seeing so much of her, but about your not, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘I will do my best,’ Henry said. He knew the remark sounded weak, but as it made Francis Boott smile at him warmly, almost radiantly, he did not correct himself.

  ‘I have no doubt you will. That is all we can do,’
the old man said.

  He finished his tea and stood up to take his leave.

  IN JANUARY, once Constance took possession of Casa Brichieri-Colombi, Henry moved down to Florence. His days were idle, his afternoons and evenings taken up with the society Constance contemptuously avoided. He was bored and often irritated by the excesses of the colony, but he had learned to disguise any such feelings and eventually, in any case, one evening such feelings fled. Seeing the Countess Gamba, who, it was known, had possession of a cache of Byron letters, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a great literary gossip, told Henry that her presence had reminded him of a story about another cache of letters. Claire Clairmont, Byron’s mistress and Shelley’s sister-in-law, had, Lee-Hamilton said, lived to be old. She had spent her declining years in seclusion in Florence with a great-niece. An American obsessed with Shelley, knowing that she had papers belonging to the two poets, laid siege to her, according to Lee-Hamilton. And on her death the man laid siege to her great-niece, a lady of fifty, until the great-niece invited the American to marry her if he wanted to see the papers.

  Lee-Hamilton told the story briskly, as a well-known piece of gossip, not realizing how closely he was being attended to, how the drama of the tale affected his listener.

  The implications and possibilities of this story filled Henry’s mind for some time afterwards. He took note, as soon as he went back to his quarters, of the picture of the two fascinating, poor and discredited old English women living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign city with the letters their prize possession. But as he considered the core of the drama, he saw that it lay in the hands of the American, who would come in the guise of both adventurer and scholar. The story of the three figures locked in a drama of faded memories and desperate need would take time and concentration. It could not be done in the mornings in Florence. Nor could he set his story in the city without everyone there believing that he was merely transcribing a story already known and often recounted. He would move the story to Venice, he thought, and, as more invitations came in, he decided he would move himself to Venice also, and work there on a story whose properties he came more and more to relish.