The Master (34 page)

He worked hard at his story of Shelley’s papers and Claire Clairmont and the American visitor. He believed that returning to this beautiful house and idyllic setting had been slightly
improper, that he had appealed to Constance’s mercy when she had none left to give. She knew, as he did, that he would leave, that this would be a respite for him, from his full solitude, or
his London life, or his other travels. But for her the season, the house and his steady presence would make this time the most gratified and beguiling of her life. Her happiness, such as it was,
came, he believed, from the perfect balance between the distance they kept from each other and their need for no other company. She dressed carefully, mainly in white. She paid attention to the
decor of the house and the state of the garden, and watched over the kitchen with a fastidious eye.

One afternoon as they met on the terrace for tea, Casa Brichieri-Colombi was visited unexpectedly by a lady novelist of the English persuasion, Miss Rhoda Broughton, whom he had known in London
for many years. She had said, in a letter sent from London, that she would call, but had not specified a date. She expressed much wonder at meeting him and embraced him warmly.

‘I knew that you were in Italy,’ she said, ‘I was told so by friends in Venice, but I did not know you were in Florence.’

Henry watched her as she settled herself into a wicker chair, having rearranged the cushions, talking all the while in her customary scatterbrained tone which could deceive the unwary into
believing that she was foolish.

‘And both of you here!’ she said. ‘How lovely! I could travel in Italy for years and see neither of you and now suddenly I have you both.’

Henry smiled and nodded as the servant served Miss Broughton more tea. That she never seemed to listen to others and appeared to notice nothing save her immediate comfort was, he knew, a high
pretence. She tended, in fact, to miss nothing. He presumed that she knew all along that he was living under Miss Woolson’s roof; he was determined that she should depart from Casa
Brichieri-Colombi doubting the veracity of that knowledge.

They discussed various people in Venice whom Miss Broughton had seen, and then the conversation turned to the pleasure of leaving London.

‘I always dreamed of living in Florence,’ Constance said.

‘And now you do,’ Miss Broughton said. ‘And now you do. How lucky you both are to have such a beautiful house.’

Miss Broughton sipped her tea as Constance stared sharply into the distance. Henry wished he were writing now, feeling that he would be able, in the privacy of his room, to come up with a proper
reply. He needed to think quickly and did not know if he could manage a complete denial.

‘Of course, Miss Broughton, I am merely visiting just as you are. Miss Woolson is the lucky one.’

When he looked at Constance, he saw that his remark did not seem to have interested her.

‘Where are you staying?’ Rhoda Broughton asked.

‘Oh, I’ve been wandering a great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Venice, as you know, and may go on to Rome. Florence is marvellous, but there is too much society for
a poor writer.’

‘I was not even aware that you had come to Florence,’ Rhoda Broughton said again.

Henry thought that she sounded even less convincing the second time and felt that they had discussed the topic of his whereabouts quite enough. Miss Broughton had now, fortunately, left him an
opening. By bowing to her drily he was able to intimate that her not being aware may have, in fact, been part of his plan. As she was absorbing the implications of this, Constance changed the
subject.

S
INCE HE
did not wish his new story to be read directly as the story of Claire Clairmont and her great-niece, and did not feel that moving the scene
from Florence to Venice was sufficient, he made the dead writer American, one of the pioneers of American writing. He knew as he set this down that he could have been referring to James Fenimore
Cooper, and as he concentrated on his American adventurer, he realized that he was using moments of his own return visit to Florence, his own intrusion, also. He began to understand, as he drafted
the story, the irony of the case. If he were looking for an exiled spinster who kept papers and was related to a pioneer of American writing, then he had one upstairs, albeit one of great
independence.

He wondered what would happen if he abandoned the spinster’s offer of marriage, if he could make the story’s denouement true to the strange, nuanced, open-ended and infinitely
interesting life he was sharing now with Constance Fenimore Woolson, if he could make his adventurer begin to need, or half-need, the domestic life of a lodger with an intelligent and reserved
woman who was lonely, but not willing to be preyed upon. She would ask him for nothing as obvious as marriage; what she wanted was a close and satisfying and, if necessary, unconventional
attachment with loyalty and care and affection as well as solitude and distance.

O
NE MORNING
in Florence, when the maid had come, and he had opened a letter from Katherine Loring about the health and general welfare of his sister
Alice, he began to discuss Alice with Constance.

‘Life has been difficult for her,’ he said. ‘Life itself seems to be the root of her malady.’

‘I think it’s difficult for all of us. The gap is so wide,’ Constance said.

‘You mean between her imagination and her confines?’ Henry asked.

‘I mean between using our intelligence as women to the full and the social consequences of that,’ Constance said. ‘Alice has done what she had to do, and I admire
her.’

‘She really has done nothing except stay in bed,’ Henry said.

‘That’s precisely what I mean,’ Constance replied.

‘I do not understand,’ he said.

‘I mean that the consequences get into the marrow of your soul.’

She smiled at him softly as though she had uttered a pleasantry.

‘I’m sure she would agree with you,’ he said. ‘She is blessed in having Miss Loring.’

‘She seems to be a ministering angel,’ Constance said.

‘Yes, we all need a Miss Loring,’ Henry said.

As soon as he made the last remark, he regretted it. The very sound of the name Miss Loring suggested a spinster skilled only in the art of caring for others. He had meant it as a joke, or a
sign of gratitude, or a way of reducing the intensity of their exchange, but he knew, as it hung in the air, that it had come out as a flippant expression of his own need, as though that was what
he required from Constance. He turned to her now, preparing a statement which would take the harm out of what he had just said, but he observed that she did not seem to have noticed it, or taken it
on board. He was sure, nonetheless, that she had heard him. She remained placid as she resumed the conversation.

B
ETWEEN HIS
departure from Florence and her death, they continued to correspond and meet. Once when they were both staying in Geneva, living on opposite
sides of the lake but meeting daily, Alice James began to detect their familiarity. Henry is somewhere on the continent, she wrote to William, flirting with Constance. When he returned, he found
his sister more truculent than usual, difficult, almost angry, accusing him of neglecting her while he gallivanted with a she-novelist.

Constance left Florence, having found, or so she said, the interruptions and invasions of Florentine society too much for her. She moved to London once more where she established herself with
her customary zeal, placing solitude and hard work high on her list of needs. She travelled in the east with spirit and independence and sent him regular accounts of herself, using a tone both
playfully ironic and distant. When she returned to England to live in Cheltenham and subsequently in Oxford, her power of lonely industry, Henry wrote to Francis Boott, was as remarkable and
admirable as ever.

They remained close, aware always of each other’s whereabouts and preoccupations. When Alice James began to die and Constance was in Oxford, Henry kept her in touch with news of his
sister’s condition. Both ladies, in the early months of 1892, sent one another short, brittle, witty messages. Constance stayed in England for a year after Alice’s death before finally
deciding to return to Italy and live in Venice.

By that time, the two novelists had developed a strange, unstructured and contented way of remaining close. They became connoisseurs of the twenty-four-hour meeting in provincial English places,
staying in separate small hotels, taking walks together and having supper with each other. She could, on these occasions, be brilliantly difficult and combative, begging to differ with him on books
of the day or sights they had seen, and ready to tease him about his addiction to refinements. He wondered if they were to be studied by a disinterested spectator how they would emerge. They were
both Americans who had been away from America for many years. Neither of them had known the compromises which marriage brought, or the cares of parenthood. Neither of them had attended to a child
crying in the night. They might, he felt, be mistaken for a brother and sister. But then he watched her delighting herself with the workings of her own wit, the mistress of a hundred cases or
categories into which she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals, and whole buildings and cities, and her memories and his observations. And he knew, as she smiled at him, that nobody would imagine that
his friend, so darkly ebullient now and funny and charming, was in the company of her brother. Just as they were a mystery to each other, he felt, they would remain a mystery to the thin slice of
society that managed to notice them.

Henry met her in Paris as she moved with her belongings from Oxford to Venice. Packing and preparing to leave had taken her months. She was tired and bewildered, and a pain in her left ear was
causing her immense misery. She made clear, on her arrival, that she would not be able to see a great deal of him. He could do the city alone, she said, and perhaps she could spend some time with
him in the evening. But she was not sure, she added, that she would be able to see him at all.

Despite her warnings, on the second of these evenings Constance seemed well enough to dine with him. He noticed that her movements were slow. She was forced to incline her right ear towards him
when he spoke so that she could hear him.

‘I had a letter from Francis Boott,’ she said, ‘who knew you were coming to Paris, but was under the impression that you were coming alone and that we had not been in contact
for some time.’

‘Oh yes,’ Henry said, ‘I wrote to him about my plans which were vague at the time.’

‘He was amused, I think,’ Constance said, ‘because I told him that we were going to meet here for a few days, and in the same group of letters came yours which stated that you
were going to Paris alone. He asked me if you could be alone and in my company at the same time.’

‘Dear Francis,’ Henry said.

‘I shall tell him that being partly invisible is merely a small aspect of my charm.’

She sounded slightly bitter, almost irritated.

‘Venice, of course,’ he said, ‘will be beautiful. Once you are established there, it will be a dream.’

She sighed and then nodded.

‘The hard part is the moving, but maybe staying can be harder,’ she said.

‘The great pity is that there are no hills aboveVenice,’ he said. ‘One has to be there, or not there. The advantage is that one can more easily find beautiful quarters than in
Florence.’

‘I dread going there now. I don’t know why,’ she said.

‘I have always thought,’ he said, ‘that I would like to spend some of each winter there, the quiet times when none of our compatriots blocks one’s path, and have my own
haunts there, my own routines, and not be anyone’s guest.’

‘It’s a dream,’ Constance said, ‘which everyone who goes to Venice has.’

‘Since the death of my sister,’ Henry said, ‘my financial problems have greatly decreased. So it would not be impossible.’

‘To lease a floor in Venice, a pied-à-terre?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps two pieds,’ he said.

She smiled and for the first time seemed relaxed, almost animated.

‘I don’t imagine you on the Grand Canal,’ she said.

‘No. Somewhere hidden,’ he said. ‘It does not matter quite where, as long as it is difficult to find, with many blind alleys on the way.’

‘Venice frightens me sometimes,’ Constance said. ‘The uncertainty of it, the possibility that I might lose my way every time I emerge.’

‘We will all do what we can to guide you,’ Henry said.

I
N THE FEW
years before he purchased the lease on Lamb House his London winters were easy; his routines when no one visited from the United States, when
the Londoners whom he knew respected his habits, suited him and made him unwilling to travel. There was something in the distant, throbbing energy of the city which made him cling to London, even
if it was a London whose news came to him second hand.

He loved the fixities of the morning, the familiar books, the hours alone fruitfully used, the afternoon slipping beautifully by. In London he dined out a few nights a week and spent the rest of
his evenings alone, weary and oddly restless after a certain hour, but slowly learning to manage the quietness and the silence and his own company.

The letters from Constance, who was now established in Venice, suggested that she was changing her habits. She wrote about the Venetian lagoon and her exploration of the outer islands and small
wayward places, hidden from the tourists, her journeys by gondola. But she also began to write about the people whom she was meeting,mentioning the names of friends of his in Venice – Mrs
Curtis and Mrs Bronson, for example – and adding the names of others, such as Lady Layard, suggesting that she was part of their circle, or at least regularly invited to their houses and
quite pleased to accept their hospitality.

Thus he began to believe that his old friend, whom he admired so much for her distance from things and her self-sufficiency, seemed to have entered willingly into the life of the Anglo-American
colony in Venice, having allowed herself to be taken up by its richest and most socially ambitious hostesses. When she wrote to him to say that she and Mrs Curtis had been dutifully searching for a
pied-à-terre for him, he became alarmed. He minded dreadfully that Constance was discussing his plans with people whom she did not know as well as he did. The tone of her letters and a
letter he received from Mrs Curtis suggested that Constance had come close to making clear how well she knew him and how much she had seen of him in the past decade. He knew how easily and quickly
this would be misconstrued.