‘‘Will you walk, Alice?’’
‘‘I will.’’
Katharine held my elbow as we made our way into Jephson Gardens. The lanes were crowded with families taking the air and the waters. It was a fine winter’s day, the Gardens filled like a great tankful of feather-tailed fish, the sky above watching with its cold, clear, mordant expression. Even Katharine was mollified. We had managed a compromise; she had not inflicted London on me; she had satisfied all my miserablist complaints and negations; surely nothing else could go wrong.
‘‘What do they take us for, d’you suppose?’’ I asked meaning how would we be ‘classed’? Not English and not ‘rawly’ American, for we’d lived here too long for that. No, they would have difficulty placing us: perhaps German? No, too darkly colored. Spanish perhaps? No, too plainly attired. Well, then, French, yes, French. Blue stockings, that would be it! We began chattering in French but soon gave it up. We were after all Americans, so why not play up to it? ‘‘Why not indeed?’’ we agreed, tut-tutting and drawling out, ‘‘Why, would you look at that!’’ and giggling in the way of Daisy Miller and her ilk.
I’d begun to feel elated at being out and about among other living beings. But special; different; American. Katharine was looking sceptical – was I suggesting a superiority? I denied it. ‘‘Yet we are our own creations,’’ I began gesticulating, ‘‘our own ‘artworks’: we can make ourselves up as we go along.’’ Speechifying; full of myself. ‘‘While they’’ – nodding at our English counterparts – ‘‘in their established European mold can’t be like us. They are a bundle of other people’s histories, creatures of circumstance – they can never be newborn, poor things.’’ Katharine pulled my elbow closer against the stares and titters.
‘‘Here we are,’’ she posed in her teacherly way, ‘‘brilliant and refreshing and all that, but living in King Arthur’s Court.’’
And what was the effect of that? she wondered.
‘‘I guess,’’ I ventured, ‘‘as Henry would have it, ‘‘we Americans are apt to be rather innocent and so liable to being spoiled.’’
Katharine stopped so abruptly we were bumped into on all sides.
‘‘Does that make us Little Red Riding Hoods?’’ she challenged, hands on hips; ‘‘while they are all wicked wolves with ‘fangs’ of corruption?’’ Her eyes were tearing with cold but behind that there steamed a hot fury:
‘‘Alice,’’ she said tightly, ‘‘it sometimes surprises me that your dear brother, who is ever the one for complexifying all manner of quite straight-forward situations, chooses to simplify this matter of the comparative British and Yankee characters.’’
I pointed out the inconsistency in her argument: previously she’d accused Henry and me of being prone to crash under the weight of our internal contradictions, and wouldn’t it be better to be more focused and less paradoxical and always going all about the houses?
‘‘And anyway,’’ I finished up with my hands on my hips: ‘‘what saves us is our ability to see our ‘paradoxes and complexifyings’ as hilariously funny – so there!’’ She opened her mouth fishlike but nothing emerged.
*
It was New Year’s eve. ‘‘Did I ever tell you,’’ I said conversationally, ‘‘I once asked my father for permission to commit suicide.’’ Katharine looked as if she might be sick.
‘‘And how did he reply?’’
‘‘He granted it of course – shrewdly.’’
‘‘Explain yourself.’’
‘‘He understood that in the granting of it I would be discouraged. The child who is told to ‘go ahead and jump off a cliff’ knows perfectly well it must, therefore will not.’’
‘‘Oh,’’ she cried: ‘‘but it would take an iron nerve to test the child so.’’
I agreed. ‘‘Yet he went further still.’’
‘‘What more could there be?’’ she asked incredulously.
‘‘He asked me to do it in ‘a perfectly gentle way’ in order ‘not to distress my friends’.’’
She gasped.
Was it not absolutely brilliant of him? I asked.
Before leaving at the end of the week she knelt before me as I sat in the rocker. ‘‘Do you plan to propose?’’ I inquired.
She shook her head. ‘‘This is serious, Alice. Promise me,’’ she whispered.
‘‘What?’’
‘‘You know.’’
Did I know? Of course I did.
‘‘Why?’’ I asked.
‘‘Because your remains will be hung in a tree where the harpies will peck at your flesh and you will stand no chance of an after-life. There will be nothing gentle in it.’’
I snorted; such threats, as she knew perfectly well, mattered not a fig to me. But would I promise?
‘‘I cannot,’’ I said at last, proclaiming ‘‘Any one who spends her life as an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide at a moment’s notice.’’
‘‘In that case I cannot go,’’ she declared, adding: ‘‘And I must.’’
‘‘Why must you?’’
‘‘Because if I don’t, I shall be forced to discontinue you myself.’’ She stood, reached for the paperweight on my desk and waved it over me. She was nothing if not clear of purpose, my Katharine. So, grudgingly, I promised.
Wardy tries to cheer me up with feeble bits of holly she has purloined from the Park; while Mrs Hussey the landlady tries to fatten me up with a pudding which immures me in such squalid indigestion I can only hope that I may fizzle out before next daylight. Which sets me thinking once again: is it not my right to dispose of my body when life – the pain of it – becomes intolerable?
But you promised, Alice.
Katharine, my straight-talking, straight-playing Katharine.
I took out the commonplace book she’d given me for a Christmas present. (I’d given her a new-fangled haversack Wardy had found with a belt that went around the waist.) Holding the small, leather-bound thing, soft as a glove, in my lap I slid a hand inside. The paper felt smooth as skin, inviting, reassuring. Once you’ve written something, anything – so it seemed to say – the name of a washerwoman, the address of a new spa therapist, a new diet – the latest dead – it will cease to be daunting: only begin. Marks upon a page. Diary writing: a female occupation:
‘I think if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens or rather doesn’t happen, I might lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me …’
But was it possible to commit myself to something other than mere silly scraps? I could, I supposed, begin by using the ‘scribbler’ to try and fathom why the ‘act of living’ had become too much for Clover and Ellen et al. And why, paradoxically, that same ‘act of living’ continued to be for me – a wretched, reverberating volcanic mouse with a jangling fluttering body enclosed between four walls – still (in spite of my threat) the most interesting state of all. Before long I began to imagine stories and settings: characters speaking, plotting, prevaricating, forming attachments and unforming them; hopeful, beautiful, kind, scathing, sardonic, disappointed: sentence piled upon sentence, clause within clause, language woven like fabric, light yet warm and so shimmering with suggestion they made you gasp. What twaddle, I then thought. Better to expect nothing, I counselled myself wisely. It is only a bundle of sewn-in pages: a book you can make a mess of, a book in which you can write anything at all, even your own dimwitted thoughts, since no one will bother to look at it, a book to be thrown away at the end. So I open the cover, slowly, and place my chip of lead-pencil upon the clean, fleshlike first page …
V. LONDON (Again)
(1891–1892)
Fifty-nine
And then she died. But not just yet. First she must undergo (must she?) further pressings and pummellings and palpatings. She has grown quite thin, her face more like something found on the desert floor picked over by wolves and illuminated from within. Her eyes, th
ose flat orbs the dusty grey of cats’ fur, appear by some process to have become clarified, like gin.
‘‘Decorative at last in death,’’ say I.
‘‘Please …,’’ entreats Katharine, who has rushed over from America.
Henry, not to be undone, has scurried back from the Continent.
She should have considered it inhuman to have remained away, I hear her tell him, adding rather unnecessarily: ‘‘Alice is, really, too ill to be left.’’
The trio are awaiting the ‘great’ Sir Andrew Clark, FRCS, eminent London physician, surgeon and doctor to the Prime Minister William Gladstone, the Author Henry James and now the Sister Alice who has gone into pie and appears to be flaking away. He is already an hour late – but hark! here he comes, the door flies open and in he steps, a veritable bouquet on legs, ‘‘The late Sir Andrew Clark!’’ he booms – a joke he has used too many times before. ‘‘How he adores an entrance,’’ whispers Henry. Perhaps, I think, he will cast him in his next play.
But to the point. He has ‘endowed’ me with cardiac complications, a spinal neurosis affecting my legs, a delicate embroidery of the most distressing case of nervous hyperesthesia, and rheumatic gout of the stomach. ‘‘Well,’’ I manage to drawl, ‘‘there’s a panoply of miseries that ought to satisfy the most inflated pathologic vanity. However,’’ I add, ‘‘there is nothing new in it, they have been with me for years.’’ He smiles thinly, pulls up a chair and arranges himself in it so that his florid face is on a level with mine. Now, I think, with not a little excitement.
‘‘The breast,’’ he intones.
My hand flies to it: instinctive, protective. The left breast , it transpires, contains a lump, a very lumpen lump which has been there for the past three months.
‘‘The breast,’’ he repeats; stops.
‘‘Doctor Clark, I should like to hear of it sooner rather than later.’’
‘‘Ah, yes, the pill without the sugar: a true austere and masculine Calvinist.’’
Masculine? What is the fool on about? I may have grown dry and sexless before my time but I have not actually changed sides. As for austerity, I much prefer the feminine science of life – intelligent and succulent – to any dry sapless husks of masculine reason. But sugar I can do without.
‘‘What news, Doctor?’’
He folds his hands high up over his chest, as if to protect himself from a blow, and twiddles his thumbs.
‘‘Miss James, the breast contains a lump.’’
‘‘I am aware of it. And the nature of the lump?’’
‘‘Tumorous.’’
‘‘Are they not synonymous?’’
He moues.
‘‘And malignant?’’ I inquire.
‘‘Oh, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.’’
‘‘And I, doctor, wouldn’t dream of jumping anywhere at present.’’
‘‘Ah ha.’’
The first order of business, they agreed – whatever the tumour’s fate (and mine) – was to get me away from Leamington. They agreed; yes, Katharine and Henry actually put their heads together: one pale and clean of outline as a new-laid egg, the other more like the nest of a sluttish bird. Was I pleased? I nearly wept. But what was to be done about William? Henry wanted to know.
‘‘Done?’’ I asked.
‘‘Shall he be told, Alice?’’ Katharine interpreted helpfully.
Having considered the matter I said: ‘‘Oh no – not poor Willy – he’ll fuss so – only tell him I have developed heart disease.’’
So having said my goodbyes to Leamington and a party of waving, tearing Bachelers, I was put in an invalid carriage on the Great Western Railway, along with Wardy and Louisa, the slavey from Leamington, and taken, by Katharine, to rooms at the South Kensington Hotel in Queen’s Gate Terrace, where we were neighbors with 15 pianos, 23 uproarious children, and an anxious Henry close by. ‘‘I’m sure my brother would considere it unaesthetic to die in an hotel,’’ I complained to Katharine. ‘‘In that case,’’ she reassured me, ‘‘we’ll have you carried down the back stairs while he’s at lunch or dinner.’’ Nevertheless, off she went to find us a house. Eventually a suitable one was found at 41 Argyll Road on Kensington’s Camden Hill, built in the ‘60s in revival style, with four floors, arched bay windows, balustrades, a scraplet of garden in back; and with the lease came a Mrs Thompson, cook.
Sixty
Henry, allowing himself a brief respite from me, had gone to Paris for a week. The ‘prodigy’ of his visit had not been the devoted Fenimore, however, but the young John Sargent: ‘‘tall, athletic, dark-haired, dark-bearded with vivid grey-blue eyes …’’
Katharine interrupted him to inquire: ‘‘Aside from being a remarkable physical specimen, what does he do?’’
‘‘Sargent? My dear Katharine,’’ he informed her, ‘‘aside from an agreeable penchant for society and the beau-monde, he does with colors what I attempt to do with words.’’
‘‘I see,’’ she translated: ‘‘you mean he paints.’’
Henry nodded.
I was more interested in knowing about the young American woman who’d disgraced herself by posing for Sargent.
‘‘Ah,’’ he cocked a devilish eyebrow: ‘‘the Gautreau scandal.’’ He went on to describe the painting as ‘‘etiolated as a plant starved of light, its colors mainly of peat and mud.’’ Against this background shone the figure’s unclothed flesh.
‘‘Surely you exaggerate,’’ said Katharine.
He denied it. ‘‘On the contrary, Mme Gautreau is half-stripped. The dress she wears is entirely sleeveless, of black satin, plunging to beyond the depths of decency, and held up by a single delicate gold-link strap’’- he was clearly enjoying himself – ’’the other having slipped off her shoulder.’’
‘‘Or been pushed?’’ suggested Katharine.
Henry grinned, a rare event; and then it spread – an even rarer one.
‘‘But what of the young woman herself?’’ I inquired. ‘‘Tell us about the model, Henry.’’
‘‘Indeed,’’ Katharine pounced, ‘‘Why would a young American girl put herself into such a compromising position?’’
Henry turned from Katharine to me, me to Katharine. Was he feeling embattled? Impossible to tell. He told us what he knew about Amelie Gautreau or ‘Madame X’ as she was known: that she hailed from some backwater in Georgia, had been dragged over to the Continent by her battleaxe of a mother and had succeeded in snagging a rich Frenchman.
‘‘That is all very well, Henry,’’ I said, ‘‘but it doesn’t explain her motive in modelling for Sargent.’’
He shrugged. I pictured the girl arriving at the painter’s studio holding her arms clear of the brown afternoon dress she was wearing. ‘Will this do for my pose?’ she asks. Sargent does not reply, merely holds out what looks to Amelie like a long black drape or shroud. She laughs; he cannot be serious. Oh but he is, perfectly. Amelie makes a snorting noise through her nose as she disappears behind the partition. She is nineteen years old. A crude little Southerner, he thinks, smiling to himself.
‘‘I am concerned,’’ interrupted Katharine, ‘‘by the gap of privilege between them in terms of age and situation, not to mention sex.’’
Henry winced.
Back behind the curtain I see Amelie reach into her bag and begin applying a coating of lavender powder to her face, throat, arms, décolleté. Then there is rouge which, contrary to custom, she does not apply to her nose or cheekbones but to her ears. No jewelry, she decides, only her wedding ring. Here she pauses picturing her husband with his fists balled up and his face going puce forbidding her ever to pose again. Stuff him. Smiling defiantly, she raises a small tiara in the shape of a peacock to sit atop her piled-up hair. She is ready: half-naked but noble and proud.
Which pleases me. But perhaps I have been dreaming, or writing.
‘‘Alice? Are you awake? Are you in pain?’’ Katharine had rushed to one side, Henry the other.
‘‘Shall I go now?’’ Henry asked, straightening. His features seemed to shift about as if made of soft clay so that I could imagine a sculptor pressing, stretching, pulling together. Katharine, I sensed, was about to agree it might be a good idea, but I shot her a ‘look’.
‘‘No, Henry,’’ I told him: ‘‘do not go.’’
But there was Amelie stepping out from behind the partition. She is slender, full-bosomed, with white skin, auburn hair, dark eyes and a ridiculously long tip-tilted nose. Sargent, in spite of himself, catches his breath. She appears even more statuesque in the dress. A column of darkness, he thinks. Turning this way and that before the mirror she says, ‘‘Mother will have a fit.’’ And then she declares: ‘‘It will be the end of me. I cannot wear this.’’
‘‘Oh, but you will,’’ says Sargent.
‘‘Paris was scandalized,’’ Henry was telling us – ‘‘it was all quite delicious.’’
‘‘Delicious …?’’ charged Katharine.
‘‘But what of poor Amelie?’’ I demanded.
She was right, Henry acknowledged, on both counts. Her mother did have a fit, and it was the end of her reputation; though it would not stop her modelling, or the artist painting.
Amelie takes her pose. At some stage she allows her ‘carriage’ to droop. ‘‘I’m plum tuckered out,’’ she whines, using an expression she has learned not to use in polite society. Sargent wishes she wouldn’t open her mouth as it spoils the effect. Just then one of her straps slips off her shoulder and dangles along her arm. She reaches to replace it but Sargent orders her to stop: ‘‘Leave it as it is.’’ It is just the touch he needs, and to hell with the consequences. But it is her luminous flesh that is most astonishing; also, how her head is turned away offering up the whole wide, naked expanse of her bosom to the viewer. Take me, she seems to be saying: Do with me what you will. As for the dress, its very simplicity, its sleek blackness draws attention to her hour-glass figure and an absence of petticoats. Her thighs and belly are clearly traceable just beneath the fabric. No breathing space between dress and body. As if it has been painted on.
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