The Master (17 page)

‘I can remember every moment of that month. Better than I can remember yesterday,’ Holmes said.

They both were silent then; Henry did not know how soon he could take his leave without being rude. Holmes cleared his throat as though to speak and then stopped again. He sighed.

‘It is as though time has moved backwards for me,’ Holmes said, turning towards Henry to make sure he was paying attention. ‘Once that summer was over, I could, as I said,
remember it perfectly, but during those long days, with all that talk and all that company, it was as though there existed a great curtain around everything. I felt sometimes as if I were under
water, seeing things only in vague outline and desperately trying to come up for air. I do not know what the war did to me, save that I survived. But I know now that fear and shock and bravery are
merely words and they do not tell us – nothing does – that when you experience them day in day out, you lose part of yourself and you can never get it back. After the war I was
diminished and I knew this; part of my soul, my way of living and feeling, was paralysed but I could not tell what part. Nobody recognized what was wrong, not even myself most of the time. All that
summer I wanted to change, to cease watching and standing back. I wanted to join and become involved, drink up the life that was offered to us then as those wonderful sisters did. I longed to be
alive, just as I long for it now, and the time passing has helped me, helped me to live. When I was twenty-one and twenty-two normal feelings dried up in me and since then I have been trying to
make up for that, as well as live, live like others live.’

Holmes’s voice was almost angry now, but oddly distant and low. Henry knew how much it had taken for him to speak like this, and he knew also that what he said was true. Once more they
remained silent, but the silence was filled with regret and recognition.

Henry did not think he could say anything. He did not have a confession of his own. His war had been private, within his family and deep within himself. It could not be mentioned or explained,
but it had left him too as Holmes described. He lived, at times, he felt, as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully
imagined.

He thought that Holmes had said all that he wanted to say, and he was ready to remain a while as a tribute to his candour and let Holmes’s confession settle. But slowly he realized, by the
way Holmes faced him, and by Holmes’s filling his glass with brandy as though the night were long, that his guest had something else to say. He waited, and finally when Holmes spoke again his
tone had changed. He was back to his role as judge, public figure, man of the world.

‘You know, finally,’ Holmes said, ‘
The Portrait of a Lady
is a great monument to her, although the ending, I have to say that I did not care for the ending.’

Henry stared at the encroaching night and did not reply. He did not wish to discuss the ending of his novel, but nonetheless he was pleased and satisfied that Holmes had finally mentioned the
book, having never referred to it before.

‘Yes,’ Holmes said, ‘she was very noble and I think you caught that.’

‘I think we all adored her,’ Henry said.

‘She remains for me a touchstone,’ Holmes said, ‘and I wish she were alive now so that I could find out what she thought of me.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Henry said.

Holmes took a sip of his drink.

‘Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill?’ he asked. ‘Gray says she asked you several times.’

‘I don’t think ask is the word,’ Henry said. ‘She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.’

‘Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.’

‘Nothing could have saved her,’ Henry said.

Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’s tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.

‘When she did not hear from you she turned her face to the wall.’ Holmes spoke as though it were a line he had been planning to say for some time. He cleared his throat and
continued.

‘When finally she knew no one would help her she turned her face to the wall. She was very much alone then and she fixed on the idea. You were her cousin and could have travelled with her.
You were free, in fact you were already in Rome. It would have cost you nothing.’

By the time either of them spoke again it was night, and the darkness seemed strangely grim and complete. Henry told the servant that they would not need a lamp as they were ready to retire.
Holmes sipped his drink, crossing and recrossing his legs. Henry could hardly remember how he got to bed.

I
N THE MORNING
Henry was still considering at what point he should have spoken to defend himself, or when he should have ended the discussion. Clearly,
the matter had been festering in Holmes’s mind throughout the years and clearly he had discussed it with Gray and the two lawyers were at one on the subject and at home accusing people of
things. Now Holmes would be able to tell Gray what had been said.

At breakfast, Holmes was calm and steadfast as though the night before he had delivered a difficult but considered judgement and now thought better of himself for having done so. He arranged
that he would return the following weekend, and, as he did so, Henry worked out how he would cancel these arrangements. He did not wish to see Holmes for a long time.

I
N THE WEEK
that followed he worked hard, even though the pain in his hand had become at times excruciating. He avoided the terrace and left the desk
only to eat and sleep. He wrote to Holmes after a few days to say that in order to meet a deadline he was hard at work on a story and could not, unfortunately, entertain him for a weekend. He
hoped, he said, to see him in London before Holmes departed for the United States.

For some days then he basked in the solitude his letter had won him, but he could not stop going over the conversation with Holmes in his mind; he began to compose letters to Holmes, but did not
even get as far as writing them down. He believed that the accusation was unfair and unfounded and Holmes’s discussing the matter so coldly and finally was outrageous.

He could not be sure what his cousin in her final months had written to Gray. He was aware that Gray had kept her letters, and he too in his apartment in London had stored away those letters
which Minny had written to him in the last year of her life. He knew that she had accused him of nothing, but he now wished to know what terms she had used all those years before in her expressed
desire to go to Rome. Slowly, he stopped working. His waking hours were consumed with memories of his early days in London and Italy and his receipt of these letters. He imagined finding them again
– he knew perfectly where they were stored – and unfolding and rereading them, and he thought about this so incessantly that he knew he would have to travel to London. Like a ghost, he
would enter his apartment in Kensington, flit through the rooms until he came to the cupboard where the letters were, and he would read them, and then he would return to Rye.

As he waited for the train, he dreaded meeting anyone he knew and having to pretend that he had business in London.

He dreaded speaking at all, so that even telling the servants that he would be leaving, and speaking with the cab driver and the purchasing of his ticket, had an enervating effect on him. He
wished he could be invisible now for a day or two. He recognized, and this pressed down on him most as he travelled towards London, that the letters might yield nothing, might fill him with further
uncertainty. He might not know, having read them again, any more than he knew now.

It struck him forcefully as he made his way from the station how calm his life had become once more after the disaster of his play. This was the first time since then that the equilibrium he had
worked so intensely to achieve had disappeared. He began to feel that when he opened the cupboard in the apartment in which he kept his cousin’s letters something palpable would emerge, and
he tried to tell himself that this imagining was too much, too feverish, but it was no use.

He found the letters easily, and was surprised at how flimsy and brief they were, how the folds of the paper seemed to have corroded the ink on both sides and made some of her writing illegible.
Nonetheless, they were from her and they were dated. He allowed his lips to move as he read:

I shall miss you, my dear, but I am most happy to know that you are well and enjoying yourself. If you were not my cousin I would write to ask you to marry me and take me with you,
but as it is, it wouldn’t do so I will have to console myself, however, with the thought that in that case you might not accept my offer.

He read on: ‘If I were, by hook or by crook, to spend next winter with friends in Rome, should I see you at all?’ And then, in one of the last letters he received from her:
‘Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.’

He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her, and she was careful never to ask outright. If she had insisted on coming, he forced himself to
complete this thought now, he would have stood aside or kept his distance or actively prevented her coming, whatever was necessary. He had himself, in that year, escaped into the bright old world
he had longed for. He was writing stories and taking in sensations and slowly plotting his first novels. He was no longer a native of the James family, but alone in a warm climate with a clear
ambition and a free imagination. His mother had written to say that he must spend what money he needed in feasting at the table of freedom. He did not want his invalid cousin. Even had she been
well, he was not sure that her company, so full of wilful charm and curiosity, would have been entirely welcome. He needed then to watch life, or imagine the world, through his own eyes. Had she
been there, he would have seen through hers.

He went to the window and looked down at the street. Even now, he felt that he had every right to leave her behind, to follow the path of his own talent, his own nature. Nonetheless, her letters
filled him with sorrow and guilt, and added to these a sort of shame when he realized that she must have spoken to others, to Gray at least, about his refusal to entertain her. Holmes’s
phrase ‘she turned her face to the wall’ echoed in his mind now and did battle with his sense of his own ruthlessness, his own will to survive. And finally, as he turned back into the
room, he felt a sharp and unbearable idea staring at him, like something alive and fierce and predatory in the air, whispering to him that he had preferred her dead rather than alive, that he had
known what to do with her once life was taken from her, but he had denied her when she asked him gently for help.

He sat on a chair in his living room for most of the afternoon, letting his thoughts sink and glide and come to the surface again. He wondered if he might burn these letters, if nothing good
could come of them in the future. He put them aside for the moment and returned to the cupboard where he had found them and rummaged there until he discovered the red notebook he had been looking
for. He knew what he was seeking, it lay in the opening pages, written a few years earlier; its outline was fresh in his mind but its details were not. He carried the notebook into the better light
of the living room.

During the time since Holmes’s visit and in the midst of all his worry and suffering, his interest in the picture of a young American woman slowly dying, which he had noted down, had
intensified. It was the story of a young woman with a large fortune on the threshold of a life that seemed boundless in its possibilities. She would come to Europe so that she could live, live
passionately and intensely if only for a short time.

He read through his notes about a young Englishman, penniless, clever, handsome, who is in love with someone else, but whose task becomes to save the American girl, love her, help her to live,
despite the fact that he is hopelessly compromised, a matter of which the dying girl knows nothing. His intended, penniless as well, also befriends the girl.

As he read his notes, he was horrified by the sheer callousness of the story. The young man pretending to love the girl, and perhaps get her money, his love a sort of treachery, and his real
love watching over this, knowing that she could marry if they could get the money. The story, he thought, was vulgar and ugly, and yet it came to him powerfully now.

He took the letters in his hand again, looked at Minny’s trusting, clean handwriting, the hand of someone who expected only good from the world. He saw her clearly coming to Europe for her
last look at life. He gave her money, he imagined her as having inherited a fortune, and saw too his hero, one part of him full of love and pity for her, and the other part hardened and needy and
ready to betray. The story was vulgar and ugly only if the motives were so, but what if the motives were mixed and ambiguous? Suddenly, he sat up straight and then stood and walked to the window.
He had, in that second, seen the other woman, had caught a sharp view of her strange moral neutrality, how much she was sacrificing in letting the dying girl know love, how much she was gaining
also and how careful she was, in her practical way, never to allow the two to appear on opposite sides of the weighing scales.

He had them now, all three of them, and he would embrace them, hold on to them and let them improve with time, become more complex and less vulgar, less ugly, more rich, more resonant, more true
not to what life was, but to what it might be. He crossed the room again and gathered up the letters and the notebooks and brought them to the cupboard and put them brusquely on a shelf and closed
the cupboard doors. He would not need them again. He would need to work now, apply his mind. He would, he determined, travel back to Rye and be ready again, when the call came, to explore one more
time the life and death of his cousin Minny Temple.