The Master

by Colm Toibin

  Henry pointed out that he had never lacked faith in his brother’s purchases nor sent him advice not sought for. He added that his joy at the prospect of getting the house had shrivelled under his brother’s warnings, but would, he was sure, rebloom. It was such a rare joy for him to want anything as he wanted Lamb House, he wrote, and he expected his brother to understand this.

  He finished the letter late at night and, without reading it over, sealed the envelope and left it in the hall to be posted early in the morning. Alice, his sister-in-law, he was sure, had meant her offer kindly, and William’s advice had not been ill-intentioned, but they both suffered from a need, he felt, so deep-seated as to be well beyond their understanding, to have him act on their advice. And they would find it easier to spend time under his roof, had it been purchased on terms suggested by them.

  When William wrote again apologizing for rubbing his brother up the wrong way, as he himself put it, he offered money from the Syracuse sinking fund which could in case of need be taken out. This merely added to Henry’s resentment which had also been smouldering over William’s refusal to accept definitely the offer of the flat in Kensington, and further resentments at his decision to go to Germany before he came to England. William was so proud of himself as a practical man, a family man, a man who did not write fictions but gave lectures, an American man plain in his habits and his arguments, representing gruff masculinity against his brother’s effete style; his refusal to take Henry’s flat seemed lacking in all common sense.

  What Henry did not consider during this correspondence was his brother’s reason for being in Nauheim. Although William had written to say that he had a bad heart and Henry had made sympathetic references to this, it did not seem to him that his brother’s health might be in any serious danger. When, however, he met his brother from the train in early October, not having seen him for seven years, he was shocked at how much William had been weakened, although he sought to give no sign that this had been his first impression.

  William had descended from the train looking as though he had woken from a deep sleep. He did not see Henry and stood waiting for his wife to step onto the platform before searching for him among the small crowd. As Burgess Noakes rushed to procure his luggage, William saw Henry and moved towards him, discarding instantly the pose of an old man and becoming enthusiastic in his movements. His face was thinner, Henry saw. When they had embraced and been joined by Alice, they walked back to supervise the loading of the luggage onto the wheelbarrow. William insisted on carrying one of the cases while Alice argued that he should not, and Henry pointed out that there was more room on the wheelbarrow and that Burgess Noakes was a champion athlete, much stronger than he looked. Burgess took the case, put it on the wheelbarrow and moved ahead.

  William then stood and looked at Henry and smiled again. He had, Henry saw as if for the first time, an extraordinary face. His expression was open and perceptive, his eyes roved about as though he needed to take in the many competing aspects of the scene in front of him before making up his mind. His considerable and sparkling intelligence was close to charm in the way it manifested itself. His gaze was both provocative and amused; in his eyes and in the lines of his face there were signs of compassionate judgements and complex distinctions that he was clearly in the habit of making with great confidence and wit and clarity of thought. He did not look like an American, nor indeed like a member of the James family. He had developed a physiognomy entirely his own. Alice, Henry felt, was easier to place, handsome and well-groomed, her kindness not masking her intelligence nor diminishing it, demonstrating only that her sympathy would always come first. Before they were halfway up the hill, he felt that they had come as parents might, the father slightly distracted and withdrawn and the mother all smiles. He was glad that he had written to them so sharply about his purchase of Lamb House so that it would now be beyond their criticism, as he hoped he himself might be, during their stay.

  It was apparent that Alice had decided that she would like Rye from the start, and put care into her remarks so that they would not sound too gushingly enthusiastic and undiscriminating. She spoke about how beautifully old the town seemed, about how private Lamb House was, like a country house in the town, she said. William assented to this as they stood in front of it. The garden, Henry explained, was not at its best, they must come in the summer for that, and the recent weather had not helped. Immediately on entering the house he showed William the study he might use, then accompanied his guests to their bedroom, stopping at the room their daughter would sleep in when she arrived. Then he took them to view the dining room, the downstairs sitting room, the garden room, soon to enter its period of hibernation, and the kitchens. He introduced them to the staff and then led them upstairs once more to see his own room, saving the largest room, the drawing room, for last, presuming that William and Alice, so used to the proportions available in Cambridge and Boston, would perceive the other rooms as small.

  He showed them the house as though they were prospective buyers; and they managed to make positive and supportive remarks. Over supper that evening, it struck him that were the Smiths to reappear, drunken and slatternly, Alice would have something cheerful to say about the quality of the service at Lamb House and William would nod in manly agreement.

  AFTER LUNCH the next day, when the dishes had been cleared, Alice James closed the door of the dining room and asked Henry if she and William could speak to him, uninterrupted, on a matter of some importance. Henry found Burgess Noakes in the hallway and asked him if he could ensure that they were not disturbed in the dining room. When he came back into the room, Alice was sitting with her hands joined at the table and William was standing by the window. Their expressions were serious. Had a lawyer appeared at that moment to read a long and complicated will, Henry would not have been surprised.

  ‘Harry,’ Alice said, ‘we have been to see another medium, a Mrs Fredericks.We have been a number of times. I went alone at first and I am absolutely certain that she did not know who I was or anything about me.’

  ‘And then I accompanied her,’ William said, ‘and all in all we have had four sessions with her.’

  ‘We thought to write to you,’ Alice said, ‘after the first session with her, but then as they went on we decided we would wait until we came to England. Harry, your mother has been in touch with us.’

  ‘She spoke through Mrs Piper,’ William interrupted, ‘we know that, but there was something more personal in her message this time.’

  ‘Is she at rest? Is my mother at rest?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Harry, she is at rest, she is simply watching over us all,’ William said, ‘through the mysterious gauze between her state and ours, in the vast white radiance that lies beyond.’

  ‘She wishes you to know that she is at rest,’ Alice said.

  ‘Has she said anything about my sister?’ Henry asked.

  ‘No, nothing about Alice,’ William replied.

  ‘About Wilky or my father?’ he asked.

  ‘In none of the sessions did she allude to the dead,’ William said.

  ‘What did she say then? To whom did she allude?’ Henry asked.

  ‘She wishes you to know that you are not alone, Harry,’ Alice said.

  She looked at him gravely as he took this in without speaking.

  ‘Her consciousness has not been extinguished, then,’ he said.

  ‘She is at rest, Harry,’ Alice said. ‘She wishes you to know that.’

  William moved across the room and sat at the table. Henry could see more clearly now that he had lost flesh around his jaw; his eyes were sad but seemed to shine as he spoke.

  ‘Our medium described this house. There were things she could not have known about. Yesterday when we walked through these rooms it was all confirmed for us.’

  ‘Harry,’ Alice said, ‘she described that statue over the mantelpiece.’

  All three of them examined Andersen’s statue of the young count.

  ‘An
d there is something even stranger in the front room,’ Alice went on, ‘it is a painting of a deserted landscape.’

  Henry stood up suddenly and walked across the room.

  ‘I don’t know if you noticed me studying it yesterday,’ Alice said. ‘Harry, I did so because she described it in detail. She said that it meant something very special to you, but when I asked you about it yesterday, you said nothing.’

  ‘It belonged,’ Henry said, ‘to Constance Fenimore Woolson. It is the only object of hers in this house. I brought it from Venice.’

  ‘Mrs Fredericks described these rooms,’ Alice said, ‘the windows, the colours, but these two objects – the statue and the painting – she said were special. We have to believe her, Harry, we have to believe her.’

  Henry moved towards the door and opened it. He stood in the hallway for a moment until the appearance of Burgess Noakes made him retreat once more into the dining room. William and Alice sat at the table watching him.

  ‘I need some time alone,’ he whispered.

  They both stood up.

  ‘We did not mean …’ Alice began.

  ‘Nothing,’ Henry replied. ‘Nothing. Give me a day or two to think. This is a great shock and I promise we will return to the matter when I am ready to accept the idea that my mother’s voice is calling to us.’

  IN THE AFTERNOON, he walked for miles and when he returned he made his way quickly and silently to the garden room but he could neither read nor write and he was cold. He wished above all that William and Alice might go now, having carried the message. At supper, however, as soon as he sat down, he felt an immense warmth towards them. He realized that his brother and sister-in-law, operating in unison, had saved many anecdotes about mutual friends until now. He watched William being funny and judicious and deeply informative on the rise of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the lives of John Gray and Sargy Perry, old before their time, he said, and William Dean Howells, whom he admired still. William told stories, moving towards pure malice before saving the moment with a remark which was so well phrased as to cause his brother a pure and self-forgetful delight.

  That night when he had retired he wished his sister Alice were in the house with them too; he would have enjoyed her acid version of this formidable couple in their soft-spoken intimacy, a pair who were ostensibly offering an open smile while, in fact, operating like a great fortress built to repel all intruders. He wished he knew how to introduce the subject of his sister, and her contempt for mediums and her belief that seances were pure nonsense. Her diary, he was aware, had not spared her brother and sister-in-law.

  Their dabblings in the occult were, for Alice, the grossest sort of idolatry. She had made this clear to them, but no one had ever told them that she had unmercifully mocked them by sending them, when they asked for a lock of her hair to use at a seance, hair belonging to a dead friend. She had cackled in glee at the solemnity of their reports from these sessions, but now, he recognized, despite the passing of the years, that William and his wife still could not be told of her trick, so elaborate and deeply serious was the system of protection they had wound round themselves and how firm their belief. He was still not sure what he himself believed. It was easier, he felt, to listen and make as little comment as possible.

  WILLIAM FOUND his small downstairs study congenial and discovered a sheltered spot in the garden which caught the sun in the morning where he could sit reading. William and Alice went on walks in the vicinity, taking the dog Maximilian with them, and became known very quickly in several Rye establishments where they had coffee in the afternoon and bought cakes to take back to Lamb House. William walked slowly, but managed to suggest that it was deep thought that made him so deliberate in his movements. At first Henry attached no importance to the fact that Alice never let him out of her sight. If William were in the garden, she was at a window overlooking the garden; if he were in his makeshift study, she was across the hall with the door open. If he prepared to go for a walk, Alice immediately fetched her coat, even if Henry himself were to accompany him, or if he gently indicated that he wished to go alone. After a while, however, such watchfulness on her part, such attentive shadowing of her husband, seemed to Henry almost perverse and he noticed William being irritated by it. Since Alice was known for her tact, since she had a reputation for being neither perverse nor irritating, this display of solicitude, both obvious and without respite, was unlike her. Henry, once he began to notice it, longed for it to stop.

  Suddenly, one afternoon, when they had been with him for ten or eleven days, he understood why his sister-in-law watched William with such care. He himself was in the drawing room upstairs after breakfast; he had been reading, when he chanced to go to the window, as he often did in the days when his brother was seated in the garden. William was obviously in pain and Alice was with him, standing over him, as he held his hands on his chest and closed his eyes in a sort of agony. Henry could not see her face, but could discern from her movements that she was unsure whether William should move or stay still. Henry stood back as his sister-in-law turned preparing to hold William in her arms. He then went downstairs as quickly as he could to the garden.

  Henry learned in the days that followed that William’s heart was damaged, that his reason for going to Nauheim was not to avoid his brother’s hospitality. William was ill. Alice had been watching him in case he had a sudden heart attack, having been told that such an attack could be fatal. William was not yet sixty.

  The next day on the train to London to see the best heart specialist in England, William insisted on reading and taking notes, refused to have a blanket placed over his knees and promised them both that if they should look at him one more time with pity or worry or the slightest interest beyond the normal, then he would expire on them immediately and leave his money to a dogs’ and cats’ home.

  ‘And I should warn you both that the hauntings will not be normal. No medium will be required. I will pounce directly.’

  Alice did not smile, but stared out the window, stony-faced. Henry wondered if the story of his sister and the lock of her hair might lighten their journey, but realized that it might have precisely the opposite effect. While William could joke about such matters, he did so from a serious perspective. The aura his brother and his sister-in-law created, in which such a story could not be told, seemed to have strengthened with William’s illness.

  Dr Bezly Thorne, the most recommended among Harley Street doctors who dealt with delicate hearts, was, William thought, far too young to know of such matters, but he was soon persuaded by Henry and Alice that this new doctor was uncontaminated by out-of-date remedies and was fully conversant with the new ones.

  ‘I dislike young people, all of them,’ William retorted, ‘medical or non-medical, conversant or non-conversant, from the bottom of my heart.’

  ‘Your heart indeed,’ Alice said drily.

  ‘Yes, I know, my dear, the part that is fully intact.’

  Dr Thorne asked to see the patient alone, and when he emerged after a few minutes from the bedroom in which William lay resting in Henry’s flat in Kensington, he remarked that Alice and Henry would now find Professor James much chastened, ready to rest, ready to maintain a strict diet with no starch, and ready, since the doctor had advised it, to be really ill, to be gravely and precariously ill, so that he should become better.

  ‘My instructions are clear,’ Dr Thorne said, ‘he is to live. I have told him so. And in order to do that he must act precisely as he is told, and he must stay in London until I say he can move. He can read if he pleases, but he cannot write.’

  They agreed to remain in Henry’s flat in Kensington and in the days that followed, as William began his diet, and Alice awaited the arrival of their daughter Peggy, Henry and Alice had much time to converse.

  William’s ill health had not softened Henry’s resolve that his own circumstances were closed to criticism. His sister-in-law, whose scent for what was suitable for discussion was, he thought, refined in the
extreme, thus kept matters general, rarely even mentioning the attributes of her own children unless Henry specifically asked. One evening, however, when Peggy, who had arrived from France, had gone to bed and William was sleeping, Alice raised the matter of her own sister-in-law, now dead seven years. She did so carefully, her tone serious and considered. She spoke of Alice’s dislike for her and reminded Henry that, at the time of her wedding, Alice had taken to her bed.

  Henry became uncomfortable. His sister’s memory was, as the years went by, increasingly tender for him; her suffering was something he was prepared to talk about only with sorrow and much sympathy. If there had been a battle between the two Alices, the one who was speaking now had plainly been the victor and he realized, as she spoke, that the spoils of victory included a right to discuss the vanquished one freely. His sister-in-law, he saw, mistook his relationship with his sister, thought that Alice James, on her arrival in England, had posed the same problem for Henry and that her peculiar nature could be spoken of between them as though Henry and his sister-in-law would take the same measure of it. Alice’s tone was matter of fact.

  ‘Alice James,’ she said, ‘might have found something more useful to do with her wit than direct it inwards at herself.’

  Henry was tempted to stand up and excuse himself. He had presumed that his silence might have been enough to hush his sister-in-law on the subject.

  ‘And,’ Alice went on, ‘she always managed to find some lucky person to take care of her and listen to her. Your poor Aunt Kate was not receptive enough, and that is why she came to England.’

  It became apparent to Henry that his sister-in-law might be conscious of his discomfort, and that this was the thing that was encouraging her to go on. The idea was so unlikely that he watched her with interest, scarcely believing his own impression. Now, as if to confirm to his satisfaction the truth of his idea, instead of wishing to end the conversation or change the subject or leave the room, he wanted Alice to continue for as long as she pleased while he remained as coldly unreceptive as he could manage.