The Master

CHAPTER EIGHT

HE WATCHED HIS FRIEND the novelist moving towards the window in the drawing room, but did not suggest to her that she might be more comfortable where he had originally placed her. She sought a position with her back to the light. He wondered if she remembered that two, or even three, of her heroines had entered rooms in this way and sat happily and deliberately with their backs to a large window so that the company might view them in the most flattering light.

Once seated, however, Mrs Florence Lett did not seem to care about her face as she wrinkled her brow and grimaced. She could not utter a sentence without making passionate changes to her expression, smiling and frowning, and puckering up her rather perfect nose. He wondered how her face had withstood so many changes in its weather. Soon, he thought, there would be a landslide, something would have to give. In the meantime, he enjoyed her talk of her time in Italy, her next book, her charming daughter, the slowness of the train to Rye, her sorrow that she could stay only a short time, and back again to her beautiful daughter, aged six, who was being fêted in the kitchen by the staff, her daughter’s education and inheritance, and then back to Italy and the death, by suicide, of Henry’s great friend, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson.

‘In Venice,’ she said, ‘they spoke of you and why you departed so abruptly and why you have not returned. He is an artist, I told them, a supreme artist, not a diplomat, but they long to see you. Venice is sad, it was always sad, but more so now, and people whom I don’t think ever knew Constance claim to miss her. Poor Constance, you know I could not walk in those streets. I had to turn back, I don’t know what you will do.’

Slowly, the door opened and Mrs Florence Lett’s daughter came quietly into the room. Her mother was in mid-sentence and did not stop. The little girl studied the room, her expression placid. She was wearing a long blue dress. Henry noticed also the intensely soft blue of her eyes and her clear fair skin. In that moment, as she stood there, respectful of her mother’s conversation, he thought her immensely beautiful. From the sofa, he put out his arms to her and, without any further consideration, she came stealthily towards him and embraced him, sitting herself on his lap and putting her arms around him.

‘We’ve all gone to see her grave, of course,’ his visitor continued. ‘With some graves you know that the person is at rest, that their lying there is part of nature. But I did not feel that at all with poor Constance, although that graveyard is the most perfect place. She would have loved it. But I don’t feel she is at rest. I don’t feel that at all.’

Henry listened as Mrs Florence Lett held forth. He did not speak to the girl on his lap, and he presumed that she would, after a few moments, move across the room towards her mother. Clearly, however, she had found comfort as gradually her arms fell limp and she settled into sleep. He did not know if feeling at ease with strangers was an aspect of the child’s charm, but he decided not to ask her mother.

By the time the child woke, the light in the room was fading, the maid had taken away the tea and Mrs Florence Lett had exhausted a large number of subjects. The girl smiled at him as she opened her eyes. He felt enormously touched by her as though her coming to him with all the confidence of a child to a parent brought with it a trust and a good luck. He smiled as she stood up.

When Mrs Florence Lett did not comment on what had just occurred, he said nothing either. He would have given anything to spare the little girl embarrassment. She had come to him so naturally. As they were leaving and the servants came to say goodbye to her, it was clear that she had made a great impression during her visit to the kitchen and the pantry. The child now became shy for the first time and clung to her mother who spoke to her carefully and firmly, encouraging her to offer a withdrawn, half-willing smile and a small wave before she left.

When he returned to the drawing room and the sofa where he had been, he felt a residue of the child’s angelic presence in the atmosphere. Since his return from London a few days earlier he had been trying to work, forcing himself to remain in his study for the daylight hours, neglecting his correspondence, and inviting nobody to see him. Mrs Florence Lett had outwitted him, announcing by telegram that she was coming, making clear that she required no reply, and then arriving as she said she would.

Now, as the lamps were lit in Lamb House, he went back to his desk and began to think over what she had said about Venice. He had a letter in front of him from Mrs Curtis, the owner of Palazzo Barbaro, whose hospitality he had enjoyed so many times. She used the same words about the city. She wrote about its sadness, and about the streets close to the building from whose second-floor window Constance Fenimore Woolson had flung herself.

Her death, like that of his sister Alice, lived with Henry day after day. Images of her came and went, sometimes of her inert body lying broken on the street below her window, and sometimes a detail, the way her lips moved quietly as he spoke to her, how desperately, despite her bad hearing, she tried to follow what he was saying. He saw her in the sunlight of Bellosguardo, maybe her happiest time, under a parasol wearing white and smiling at him, as though she were sitting for a cleverly arranged portrait and offering him, as she did so much, her full, proprietorial approval before he even spoke. She had been, he supposed, his best friend, the person outside his own family who had been closest to him. He still could not believe she was dead.

AMONG THE objects which Lady Wolseley had encouraged him to purchase for Lamb House was an old map of Sussex that testified to the changes of relation between sea and land in his corner of the coast. It gave him pleasure to think that Rye and Winchelsea belonged to shifting ground, the endless mutation of the shore. The lines here were not ordained or set in stone, but open, he liked to think, to suggestion. Sometimes, when he walked slowly up and down the bright space of his garden room, or sat upstairs in the drawing room looking out at the light, he fancied that with one stroke of his pen, or the sound of his voice, the river could change its course, the sea come rushing in, or a new, small indentation appear on the coast.

Both Rye and Winchelsea seemed almost foolishly placed now. He loved telling his visitors how Winchelsea was practically destroyed in the thirteenth century by a huge storm which cast up masses of beach, until it was clear that the future of the town was precarious. And thus the town was moved, the old one left like a ghost, he liked to tell his guests, or like an old family down to its last member, holding only memories and fading treasure while a usurping family thrived. But the success of this new enterprise was to be short-lived also. When there is a battle between the sea and the land, he would continue, it is generally the sea which emerges victorious and the land which melts away. Rye and Winchelsea, the new Winchelsea that is, were ready to be great ports with great plans and dreams. But then, in the centuries that followed, the land won, and slowly and slyly a modest plain where sheep now grazed began to form between these towns and the sea, pushing the sea back gently but effectively.

If the first Winchelsea suffered death by drowning, the second was left high and dry. He would talk as though this were a hard fact to accept. This plain, this strange addition to the land, he would say, put there by a quirk of nature, gave him a satisfaction, as though he had been personally involved in helping things along. It added to the mystery of Rye, and to his engagement with it – the sea had once come right to its front door, and now it had withdrawn, leaving only sea light and sea gulls and a flat plain, an ambiguous loan which the water had made to Sussex and its inhabitants.

To this world, from which the ocean had so politely withdrawn, he had moved, in his own gentle and polite way, creating space for his work to flourish and his sleep to come easy. He now had a household, much larger than any his parents had ever dreamed of, and the smooth running of his small empire was a matter of care and pride and worry and high expense.

From London, where they had served him loyally, he had transported the Smiths, Mrs Smith to cook and her husband to function as butler. In Rye, he had employed Fanny the parlour-maid, pretty and quiet and careful, and in Rye too he had found a treasure called Burgess Noakes, gnome-sized and not pretty, but making up for it in punctuality and the desire to please. Burgess was young, and this was his first serious employment, which meant that he had developed no bad or slovenly habits. He could be trained as both houseboy and valet without being made to feel that the duties of the former might be less dignified or worthy of his attention than those of the latter.

Henry had spoken to the boy’s mother, who went to great lengths to explain how willing he was and clean and well spoken and mature for fourteen and how sad she would be to part with him. When the boy was finally produced, the discrepancy between his scamp-like face and frame and the boundless eagerness of his gaze made Henry immediately warm to him. He gave no sign of this, however, merely explaining to the mother, as the boy listened, that Burgess Noakes would be employed for a brief period so that his suitability could be tested, and after that period they could discuss the terms of his employment, as appropriate.

Henry enjoyed being known in Rye. As he walked the streets, he took pleasure in greeting all whom he recognized with courtesy and courtliness. He was often accompanied by his dog Maximilian, or by the Scot, who had found lodgings in Rye and become an assiduous walker and cyclist, or by whatever guests were staying at Lamb House. The idea of residing in a small and traditional English community belonged to his dreams; he found himself, especially in the presence of American guests, deeply proud of his acceptance in Rye and his knowledge of its denizens, its topography and history.

When visitors came by train, as they generally did, Henry met them personally at the station. Burgess accompanied him, skilfully pushing a wheelbarrow which served to ferry the guest’s luggage up the hill to Lamb House. Henry marvelled at some of Burgess’s social instincts on these occasions. He stood apart with the wheelbarrow in readiness when the train stopped at Rye station. He did not intrude for one moment as Henry and his guest indulged in greetings and preliminary observations, but negotiated effectively with the train’s porter, establishing which luggage belonged to Mr James’s guest without having to consult its owner. He made sure, however, that the traveller saw the luggage as it rested on the wheelbarrow. Then he moved easily behind Henry and his visitor as they made their way up the hill.

The house was, in its own small way, perfect and beautiful, even to those who only knew it from the outside. Its secret, however, was its garden, which was private, secluded, rich with ancient plantings and cultivated with care and taste.

As soon as he leased the house, Henry had retained George Gammon, a local gardener, part-time. Every day he had some discussion with him about changes which might be made, new plantings and seasonal adjustments, but mainly they spoke about what was blooming now, or likely to bloom soon, how different this year was to last year, and how much work could be soon completed. Both of them then took in the walled space in its detail and its totality. He enjoyed how George Gammon let the silence linger, adding nothing further, and waited until Henry decided it was time to go back to his work before moving away himself.

The Smiths did not take to Rye. During the ten years they worked for him in Kensington, living in servants’ quarters in his apartment, they dealt with the same merchants each day and frequented the same establishments. They knew many other servants in the immediate environs. For them, a few streets of Kensington represented a village in which they were fully at home. Each morning, Mrs Smith, her expression respectful, but trying also, in a pained and shy way, to be alert and intelligent, took her day’s orders from the novelist. When he was working, these orders were for plain, well-cooked food served with silent discretion by Mr Smith. Sometimes, when there was company, he gave the Smiths several days’ notice and discussed the dishes at some length with the wife. When he was away he did not know what the Smiths did, but he presumed that they took as full a possession of his apartment as they dared and developed many bad habits.

When he was in residence, however, they were quiet and careful and cautious, and pleased with their employer who was generally, he thought, undemanding. When they had been working with him for six years and knew that he was going abroad after the death of his sister, Mrs Smith had approached him about a personal matter. Later, he realized how much discussion must have taken place between them before they agreed on this course of action. She visibly shook as she spoke. The request was unusual, and most employers, however benign, would have instantly refused, would have been concerned indeed at its forward nature, but he was struck by the energy Mrs Smith put into her speech and her fearful sincerity. He also, of course, understood her great need.

Her sister was ill, she told him, and would undergo an operation. She needed a place to convalesce. The patient could not look after herself during this brief time, and she had no one else to care for her. Since Mr James would be in Italy for several months and the apartment would, they supposed, be empty, she wondered if there was any possibility that her sister could move into the guest room and be cared for there. She would be gone, of course, before Mr James returned.

He was glad that he did not ruminate on the matter or seek advice. He made up his mind in that second and told Mrs Smith that, provided she and her husband could meet all her sister’s expenses, then her sister could stay, but the apartment must be empty and silent when he returned from Italy. Once he had spoken he watched his cook trying to contain herself, trying to say thank you, but trying also to go back to her husband with the news as quickly as possible. She walked nervously backwards, thanking him all the while, before turning and fleeing the room.

He did not mention her sister to Mrs Smith in the days before his departure. He had made the conditions clear and thought it would be indelicate to bring them up again. Nor did he care to see Mrs Smith again in her importuning role. During his time in Italy, therefore, he presumed that Mrs Smith’s sister was causing him no personal expense and that all traces of her would be gone on his return.

As soon as he came through the door two months later, however, he knew that a sick person was being ministered to in his apartment. He was interested when Mr Smith, who met him in the hallway, made no reference to this fact. When he asked Mr Smith, barely disguising his impatience, kindly to tell his wife that Mr James wished to see her in his study, Mr Smith managed to suggest that this was a normal request which could be conveyed without much concern.

Mrs Smith seemed braver than at any other time he had seen her. She stood before him quite in possession of herself. Yes, she said, her sister was still here, and suffering from cancer and she, Mrs Smith, was awaiting Mr James’s advice about what to do.

Had it been a novel, his character would have said something very dry indeed to Mrs Smith, but Henry was aware that her sister lay stricken in a nearby room and that Mrs Smith had a heavy responsibility which he now shared, since the sick woman was under his roof.

‘Does the doctor come?’ he asked.

‘Sir, he has been here.’

‘Could you make sure that he comes again and soon, and that I have a chance to speak to him?’

The doctor was gloomy and curious. When he wished to know the status of Mrs Smith’s sister in the household, Henry insisted that they stick to medical matters. It was clear, the doctor said, that the lady would need a further operation, but after the operation she would need a great deal of care and he did not know if such care would be forthcoming.

‘It costs money, this care. It all costs money.’

When Henry opened the door for him, Mr Smith was hovering in the hallway.

‘Could you see to the operation and let me know what care will be needed subsequently?’ he asked brusquely.

‘It will all cost, you must know that, sir,’ the doctor said before he departed.

Sometime over the next two weeks, as the patient underwent her operation, Henry realized that Mr Smith was drinking. He waited until both Smiths were absent and the housemaid out on a chore before he went into the kitchen and found an empty bottle of whisky and some empty bottles of sweet wine and sherry. Later, he checked through the household accounts but found no evidence that these bottles were acquired at his expense. He felt foolish for snooping in the kitchen and determined that he would not do so again. If the Smiths wished to purchase alcohol, they were free to do so as long as it did not interfere with their work. Mr Smith seemed glazed, so to speak, especially in the late afternoon and early evening, but perhaps this effect was caused as much by the pressures of his sister-in-law’s illness as by the alcohol.

The news from the hospital once the operation had been declared successful was that the patient would require twenty-four-hour nursing care for at least one month. As far as he could ascertain, Mrs Smith’s sister, until she was well, had nowhere else to go. Since no guests of his own were due to arrive, he would have difficulty, he thought, passing the guest room each day knowing that it was vacant while Mrs Smith’s sister, already familiar with the room, was suffering neglect elsewhere. Mrs Smith’s difficulty would be even greater. He knew that she must be preparing herself for a final onslaught on his pity and decided that he could not bear the aura of preparation in the household before she would approach him, her manner full of abject and grasping humility. He decided to inform her forthwith that he would take her sister into his guest room and pay for her nursing care on the proviso that his own quarters were not disturbed nor his routine affected. Her face, as she listened to the news, seemed to suggest that her fear of him was greater than ever.

The Smiths were grateful. Once her sister had recovered and returned to her employer Mrs Smith even made a brief, formal speech to tell him so. Perhaps more significant, however, was the fact that his involvement in the sister’s welfare seemed to tie him into the fate of the Smiths. Clearly, should either of them need medical care, or any other sort of care, it would be their employer’s responsibility. He paid them reasonably well, and they had no expenses, Mr Smith wearing his master’s cast-offs and Mrs Smith having no interest in finery, and this led him to presume that they were, as good provident people, saving most of their income towards a happy and easy retirement.

His agreeing to help them in time of need did not result in better service; nor, on the other hand, did the Smiths’ work worsen in any radical way. Mrs Smith still took her instructions every morning and obeyed them as best she could. Mr Smith still appeared to be drinking, but no dreadful loss of decorum was immediately apparent, and it was only when he was scrutinized that his speech and his gait in the latter half of the day seemed laboured. Nonetheless, a certain change took place. Mrs Smith was now capable of discussing with Mr Smith a matter which had nothing to do with the household in the presence of their employer. She knew that Henry treasured silence, and she must have known, too, that he expected her and her husband to discuss private matters only in their own quarters. Yet Henry could not correct her; she had, in the days when he had offered her sister charity, won some invisible battle with him which allowed her to make herself at home in such subtle ways in the household. Looking after her sister, exercising mercy and pity, had shortened the distance between him and Mrs Smith.

Because he was excited and preoccupied in the months before his move to Rye, he had no memory of the Smiths’ response to the news. As they were growing older, he thought they might enjoy the peace of a small town and the larger facilities of Lamb House. In any case, they made no overt protest, and he made sure that they would not be overburdened by the move, that their main task in these months should be the moving of themselves and their possessions to their new quarters at Rye. One or two of his friends, he knew, had noticed Smith’s efforts to disguise the fact that he was drunk as he served dinner, but he believed that once away from the noisy pressures of London, Smith could be spoken to and guided to sobriety.

He discovered, as soon as they were installed in the house, that there was a problem. The Smiths were sleeping in the servants’ quarters in the attic. Because there was only one staircase, they had to pass through the first floor of the house, where his study and sleeping quarters were, to get to their room. The floorboards in their room squeaked; one of them especially, which lay directly over his bed, seemed to move in and out of place every time one of the Smiths stepped on it. At night, during those first weeks at Rye, the Smiths ascended to their room at a normal hour, but they did not settle; they moved up and down irregularly, pacing the floorboards, becoming briefly quiet, then agitated once more, indifferent to the repose of their employer who lay below them. Sometimes he could hear their voices, and a few times he heard the sound of a heavy solid object falling to the floor.

Warren the architect was consulted. The floor, he said, was in good condition; a new set of floorboards would make no difference. The Smiths should be told, he said, to move more quietly, or their sleeping quarters should be relocated to the ground floor. There was, he pointed out, a small room off the pantry which would have space for their bed and could be made suitable for them by creating a larger window and putting up some sensible wallpaper. Thus the Smiths took up residence in a room off the pantry.

The shopkeepers of Rye did not warm to the Smiths; the butcher did not understand her notes, and took no pleasure in her remonstrances when the cuts he sent were not the cuts she ordered. The baker did not bake the bread she required, and did not find it amusing when she had to return to him on discovering that his rival baker did not produce such bread either, nor any other bread which was to her taste. The grocer did not like her London manners, and soon the list of orders had to be delivered to the grocer by Mr Smith, his wife’s presence being unwelcome.

The Smiths discovered that Lamb House stood alone in Rye. Around it were smaller and more modest houses which had a parlourmaid and perhaps a part-time cook, but not a couple who had the standing of the Smiths. The houses with like-minded servants were the manor houses and great houses in the countryside, but these servants did not wander in the town as their peers had wandered in Kensington. The Smiths quickly ascertained that there was no one else like them in Rye, that there were to be no casual daily greetings and exchanges of news. Soon, in the shops, they were met with coldness or mild hostility, unlike Burgess Noakes, who was received with warmth and affection everywhere he went.

Mr and Mrs Smith retreated into Lamb House, Mrs Smith priding herself on never leaving its precincts and never having visited most of Rye ’s best-known monuments. In the kitchen, the pantry and the pantry garden she reigned supreme. When she took her orders, she managed a new tone which emphasized her steely competence and willingness to carry out her duties, but did not spare her employer signs of resentment.

In Kensington Henry had often had guests, but, though he cared about the quality of his own hospitality, the evenings when he entertained were mild distractions. Now, in Rye, he cared a great deal more about his guests, wrote many letters inviting friends to see his new abode, and awaited their arrival and their response to the house with some excitement. Thus the decor and daily cleaning of the guest rooms were essential, as were the quality of the food and the service, which would now include breakfast and luncheon. Mrs Smith was unaccustomed to many guests. At first when it was a novelty he explained to her who was coming and what their needs would be, but soon it became clear to Mrs Smith that there would be a constant stream of guests at Lamb House, and it would be her job to cook for them and ensure their comfort.

The morning meetings during which he gave her instructions became tense. Nothing she actually said made the difference; merely the set of her face, the silences and the slow, soft sighs. He paid no attention to her new attitude, he told her who was coming and what should be done and did not wait for any response. But after a while she began to detain him with sour comments, alluding to the increased cost of caring for guests, or the dreadful butcher, or the nuisance that was Burgess Noakes. A note of belligerence crept into her voice when more visitors were due. He could not contain his own longing to see old friends and members of his family and found it shocking and irritating that Mrs Smith should express her ill feeling against his guests in such clear terms.

Her husband, in the meantime, had developed a controlled gait and wooden movements, which many guests mistook for an old-fashioned formality, but which Henry knew to be ordinary drunkenness. He wished he could mention the matter to the Smiths, that he could approach them as Mrs Smith had once approached him, asking for their help, insisting that Smith should cease his drinking. But he did not have the courage to make such demands. He knew, in any case, that in her denials of her husband’s intoxication, Mrs Smith’s vehemence would come to the fore and he did not wish to face that.

Burgess Noakes, on the other hand, grew more obliging and willing as time went on. He missed nothing and forgot nothing. He did not learn to smile, but he soon knew the names and habits and needs of every guest, and seemed also to know if a telegram warranted an interruption of his master when he had company or whether it should be deposited on the hall stand. He trod the floorboards of his attic room with the utmost discretion.

Burgess greeted Mrs Smith’s regular banishing of him from the kitchen with indifference. When he was not attending to his duties, he wandered into the depths of Rye where he began to perfect the art of bantam-weight boxing, at which he soon became a champion. He returned home happily, however, and always at the appointed hour, exuding a pride at his position in Lamb House and seeming to know everything which occurred within its confines. As Henry began to suspect Mrs Smith of joining her husband in drink, he knew that if he should ever require an account of the Smiths’ personal habits, he would merely have to consult Burgess Noakes.

That his guests should be content with their stay and wish to return to Lamb House meant much to him. He enjoyed letters that mentioned past and future visits. He had no close companions in the town or locality; there could be no easy outings for a few hours in the evenings. Thus his visitors were important. He found the waiting for them, the sense of expectation before a visit, the most blissful time of all. He alerted everyone that he spent the morning hours in his study. Having left his guest at breakfast, he loved going there, knowing that they would come together again in the afternoon. In the meantime he would have several hours of solitude or dictation with the Scot. He also relished the days after a guest had departed, he enjoyed the peace of the house, as though the visit had been nothing except a battle for solitude which he had finally won.

Soon, however, his contented solitude could turn to loneliness. On grey, blustery days in the first long winter, his study in Lamb House, and indeed the house itself, could seem like a cage. Both he and the Smiths had been removed from their natural hinterland. He had his work, but he knew that they became, by the end of each day, quietly and effectively intoxicated.

He was not sure of the extent of Mrs Smith’s drinking. She ran her kitchen smoothly; her cooking, as it were, did not falter. Her appearance in the morning, however, grew more slovenly and her response to the news of more visitors increasingly bellicose. Her hair hung dangerously close to where the pots and pans might be. Nor did the state of her fingernails invite confidence. He wondered if she knew why he had suspended soup when there were visitors, and gravy too, as well as any of the more runny sauces. Mr Smith could not be counted on to serve them safely.

As he served dinner, Smith managed not to stagger on the way into the room with each dish, but once he turned to leave the room he could not exercise the same control. Henry formed the habit of placing his principal guest facing away from the door. He noticed that once guests at the table saw Smith stagger or falter then they could not stop watching him. His aim was to prevent the matter from becoming a subject for discussion at the dinner table, or among the guests later. He did not want it known in London nor among his small circle of American friends that he employed drunken servants.

Burgess Noakes began to assist Smith, opening doors for him, urging him silently towards stability. Henry hoped that the problem would right itself, or even remain as it was. He did not want to take action because he knew what the action would have to be. He tried not to think about the Smiths.

ONE AFTERNOON, from an upstairs window, he saw Mrs Smith’s sister approach the house. He heard her being let in and supposed that she was in the kitchen with her sister. He had not met her since the time she had spent in his apartment and though he had seen little of her then he had formed an impression of a solid and sensible person. He decided he would speak to her, and, on descending the stairs, and finding Burgess Noakes in the hallway, he asked Burgess to inform Mrs Smith’s sister that he wished to see her when she had a moment. He would wait in the front sitting room.

Mrs Smith’s sister soon arrived accompanied by Mrs Smith. While the former was a picture of respectability and good grooming, the latter was even more slovenly than usual and wore the brazen expression to which he had become accustomed.

‘I am glad to see you well, madam,’ he said to Mrs Smith’s sister.

‘I am very well, sir, much recovered, and many thanks to you for all your kindness.’

Mrs Smith watched him and studied the back of her sister’s head with the attitude of someone who had been much put out.

‘Are you visiting the area?’ he asked.

‘No, sir, I am married to the gardener at the Poet Laureate’s. We live in the gardener’s cottage there.’

‘The Poet Laureate?’

‘Mr Austen, sir, at Ashford.’

‘Of course, of course, Alfred Austen.’ He had thought for a moment that she was working for Lord Tennyson.

He was about to ask if he could see her alone when he realized that he had clearly interrupted a difficult conversation between Mrs Smith and her sister, from which Mrs Smith was still smarting. While the sister was doing what she could to disguise this, Mrs Smith continued to glower at both of them.

‘I expect we shall see more of you then?’ he asked.

‘Oh I don’t wish to disturb you, sir.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘You find your sister well?’

He looked at her plainly and made no effort to assist her when she lowered her gaze and said nothing. She had taken in the meaning of his question; he now left time for the implications of her failure to respond to become clear to the three of them. When he felt that this had been achieved, he decided that he did not wish to see her alone, that enough had been said. He smiled warmly and bowed to her as she left the room, paying no attention to Mrs Smith. He now knew where to find Mrs Smith’s sister should he need her.

ALICE, his sister, would have laughed uproariously at his predicament; she would have made him describe the Smiths in detail. But she would also, he thought, have become imperious and demand that he take action forthwith. Alice, his sister-in-law, was the most practical of the family. She would calmly and cleverly work out a way of getting rid of the Smiths. He could not tell her, however, because he could not bear a letter from William on the subject. Nor was there anyone in London to whom he could turn. All of his English friends would, he thought, have dismissed the Smiths at the first sign of inebriation and sullenness.

He began to have imaginary conversations with Constance Fenimore Woolson. She would have been fascinated by the scenes in the kitchen, and indeed in the room off the pantry. She also would have known what to do; she would have worked out some way to convince the Smiths to go without rancour, or to reform. He thought about her calm grace, her easy warmth, her mixture of curiosity and sympathy; and he thought about her last days in Venice, the days before she hurled herself from the window. He sighed and closed his eyes.

AMONG HIS family and most friends, his closeness to Constance was not generally known. Neither William nor his wife was part of the small group who had been in Florence in those months when he had shared a large house with Constance on Bellosguardo (and when, he presumed, their relationship had been much discussed). But those who knew continued to mention Constance in their letters to him, their references to her vague and mysterious; they regularly voiced their wonder at her death. But only one friend had asked him directly if he knew why she had committed suicide. Lily Norton was the charming daughter of his friend Charles Eliot Norton and the niece of one of his favourite Bostonians, Grace Norton. Lily had known Constance in Italy and, though being more than twenty years younger, had admired her and formed a great attachment to her.

He wrote to Lily as frankly and directly as he could. He explained that, as she knew, he had not been in Venice at the time, and had merely gathered information from others. Constance was out of her mind with fever and illness, he wrote, but that was not all. There was as well something that Constance managed to keep hidden from the wider world, and that was, he told his young friend, a condition of chronic and absorbing melancholy which was much sharpened by loneliness. He left it at that; Lily had been brave enough to ask, and now she should be brave enough to read the stark truth.

Lily Norton had never returned to the subject, but her Aunt Grace had mentioned in passing that her niece had been upset by the coldness and certainty of the tone in his letter. When Lily Norton accepted his invitation to Rye, and he knew that they would be alone for the first day, he wondered whether she would raise the subject of Constance. They would have, after all, many other things to discuss. Lily had become Europeanized. She would have, in the European way, many subjects on which to muse while studiously avoiding the dangerous. Discussion of her relatives alone, and their associates, should provide her and her host with several delightful hours. His interest in the Nortons, the Sedgwicks, the Lowells, the Dixwells and the Darwins, he imagined, could occupy at least one long meal, and perhaps a walk with his young friend through the streets of the town.

When he met her at the station, he realized quickly how formidable and interesting she had become. On alighting from her carriage, she saw him but did not smile. Her eyes were alert, her expression serious and self-conscious and beautifully placid. She had the air of a young duchess, someone who managed to be obeyed without ever having the need to be imperious. As soon as she started to walk towards him, however, Lily began to beam, her face opened out, as if she had suddenly and impetuously decided she was an American, one who knew how to play her natural and her created selves against each other to her host’s delight.

Lily briefly glanced at Burgess Noakes as he and the porter loaded her luggage onto his wheelbarrow; she took this in and suggested her approval for the enterprise without making a single gesture. Once in the house, she promised Henry that she would never say the word ‘pretty’ ever again, but she would have to point out that the house itself was very pretty and the gardens were immensely so, and even the little parlour he had offered her in case she wanted to write letters was pretty, and her room, well, that too. She smiled at him warmly and touched his shoulder, now she had stopped admiring everything. She was so glad to be here, she said.

As they sat in the garden taking tea, he studied her carefully. She exuded a mixture of a mobile mind and personal charm in a greater degree than the women of the earlier generations of her family on either side. She had inherited something of the horse-face of the Nortons, but in her it was improved and softened. She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of smiling before she spoke and often smiling while she listened. But when she abandoned her smile, and allowed her face its full elegant gravity, he saw a young woman whose tone and manners, her way of being both formal and friendly, were new to him. He looked forward to spending time with her.

He accompanied her through the town, proud of her glamour and enjoying her conversation, which ranged from the playful to the sharply observant. She knew how much he was watching her and how closely, in turn, they were both being observed by the townspeople. He admired her all the more for how deeply thoughtful she became as they moved along, how happy she seemed after a time to let silence reign between them and how easily now she let her face seem shadowy and meditative, her expression almost dark and forbidding, as though the mark of her ancestors had not left her.

She was over thirty now and something in her personality, something distant and ironic, suggested what her Aunt Grace had already told him – that she would not marry. She had a private income, not very large, but enough to allow her to wander freely in Italy and England and venture back to her homeland when it suited her, much as Constance Fenimore Woolson had done. He wished she had a great house to tend to, or a great name, and he sensed in her a kind of sorrow that she had settled for less, or perhaps settled for more, her independence. A few times, as they walked back towards Lamb House, her tone, the largeness of her judgement, the strange freedom in her phrases, and certain inflections in her accent, reminded him of his sister Alice. Both came from similar households where ideas were sacred, second only to good manners, where there was a pull between an ordered community who knew God and an idealism, a readiness to trust the spirit in all its flickering. Whereas all the restlessness within the Jameses had further unmoored Alice, Lily had inherited the calmness of the Nortons without sacrificing her sharp judgement. He would have given anything for his sister to have had Lily’s poise and equanimity.

Before dinner was served, he left Lily alone in the upstairs sitting room so that he might inspect the dining room. He found Burgess Noakes standing at an open dining-room door, his small face wrinkled in worry, his movements nervous. Burgess indicated to him that the cause of his concern lay in the dining room, and when Henry entered the room he found a large fresh purple stain on the tablecloth.

‘This should be replaced at once,’ he said.

‘She says it will do fine,’ Burgess said.

‘Mrs Smith?’ he asked.

Burgess nodded. ‘She won’t allow it be replaced, sir.’

When he opened the kitchen door, he saw Mr Smith at the large table resting his head on his arms. Mrs Smith was by the stove stirring a pot. When she saw him, she did not speak but shrugged to suggest her own powerlessness and indifference. He spoke as loudly as he could.

‘The tablecloth must be replaced instantly and the butler must resume his duties.’

Mrs Smith put the spoon down and moved towards the table. She stood stoically behind her husband and manfully grabbed his shoulders from above; she lifted him firmly and when he was standing straight she let him go. He had his usual glazed look as he acknowledged his employer’s presence in the kitchen, and then, in his stilted and forced way, he began to move towards the dresser in the corner.

‘In fifteen minutes, we will dine,’ Henry said. ‘I expect everything to be in order, beginning with the tablecloth.’

When he accompanied Lily Norton to the dining room, he saw immediately that the tablecloth had been replaced and the table reset to perfection. He situated Lily with her back to the door. He did not know whether Smith would serve their meal, or if Burgess Noakes or indeed Mrs Smith herself would take his place. When eventually Smith came in with the first course and began to pour the wine, it struck Henry more forcefully than ever that he was barely able to remain on his feet and could hardly see in front of him. It was a strange kind of drunkenness. Smith did not sway or stagger; it was rather the opposite – he walked straight as though along an invisible line; otherwise, he remained rigid. He was utterly silent. The alcohol seemed to have turned him into a block of wood.

Henry was careful not to look at Smith for too long; he attempted to make ordinary conversation even as Smith was pouring the wine. As far as he could ascertain, Lily Norton noticed nothing, yet he knew now that he would have to make arrangements for the Smiths’ departure. He had two further guests for luncheon the following day and Lily and one of the friends for dinner the next evening. Then he would take action, although he did not know how he would begin, or what form the action would take.

‘You know,’ Lily said, ‘I have not been in Venice since Constance died, but I have met others who have been there, and all of them say that there is something in that street, the place she fell. They all have to avoid it. And nobody can quite believe that she killed herself. It seems so unlike her.’

Her eyes lit calmly on him and then she glanced at the plate in front of her, as though some fresh thought had occurred to her. She looked up at him again.

‘I spoke at length to someone who knew her sister,’ she said. ‘The family are concerned that so many of her papers are lost, letters and diaries and other personal papers. And how she spent her last weeks is a mystery to everybody.’

‘It was,’ Henry said, ‘a sad affair.’

Smith opened the door and stood silently, peering into the room as though it were in darkness. Lily turned around and saw him. He was still for half a minute, his presence in the doorway a cross between a ghost and someone who has seen a ghost. Then he moved slowly towards the table to collect the plates. He picked them up in a set of muted and stylized gestures and left the room again without incident.

‘She was, of course, quite a sad person and very lonely,’ Henry said.

He knew as soon as he finished that he had spoken too quickly and brusquely.

‘She was a very talented novelist and a great lady,’ Lily Norton said.

‘Yes, quite,’ Henry said.

They waited without speaking for Smith to return. Henry realized that he could not change the subject now, Lily Norton’s tone somehow prevented that.

‘I think she deserved a better life,’ Lily said, ‘but it was not to be.’

In her last phrase there was no air of resignation or acceptance, but rather one of blame and bitterness. It struck Henry that she had planned this conversation, that what was happening in his small dining room was being quietly and effectively manipulated by her. At each moment he watched for Smith, hoping that no matter how drunk he was he would come to interrupt this strained talk between them which led so inevitably to strained silence.

‘All of us were there with her that summer,’ Lily continued, ‘she was so busy and so full of dreams and plans. All of us remember someone who was happy, despite her melancholy disposition. But it was shattered.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said.

Smith opened the door with Burgess Noakes in view behind him. Burgess was wearing a jacket which was much too large for him. He had the look of a tramp. Smith carried a plate of meat with the movements of someone who was about to expire. Burgess followed behind with other plates. Lily Norton turned and studied them, and in one second Henry watched her grasp what was happening at Lamb House. All her subtlety and self-control failed her. She seemed most sharply alarmed, and her smile when she turned away from the two servants was forced. Smith at that moment began to pour more wine into her glass but could not keep his hand steady. The other three watched him helplessly as he allowed some of the wine to spill and then, as he tried to correct himself, poured a quantity of wine directly onto the tablecloth. When he turned from the table, his movements became a set of doddering, staggering steps as he left the room, abandoning the serving of the meal to Burgess Noakes.

They ate in silence, the subject he wished to change now accompanied by another subject which could not be mentioned. He knew that if he asked Lily some particular question about her aunt or her plans, she would either laugh or become heated. He resigned himself to saying nothing; she would decide the flow of conversation.

Eventually, she spoke.

‘I do not think she would have come to Venice for solitude. It is not a place to be alone at any time, but certainly not in the winter.’

‘Yes, she might have been wiser to have moved,’ he said. ‘It is hard to tell.’

‘Of course Mrs Curtis and she both believed that you planned to take a pied-à-terre in Venice,’ Lily said. ‘I believe that they even searched for a while on your behalf.’

He saw where she was going and knew that it was essential to stop her.

‘I’m afraid they misunderstood my enthusiasm for its beauties and its pleasures,’ he said. ‘Yes, whenever I was there, I longed to hold the grand watery city, as it were, by owning a view, however modest. But these fancies can be entertained but briefly, I’m afraid. The rest is dull. It is called work and it makes demands.’

Her look was darkly pointed, but with a tinge of sympathy. She smiled.

‘Yes, I can imagine,’ she said drily.

IN THE MORNING he told Mrs Smith that he wished her husband to remain in bed where he would in the course of the day be examined by a doctor. Luncheon would be served by the parlour-maid with assistance from Burgess Noakes, who should be found a jacket which fitted him. He asked her if she could come out to the garden with him, knowing that Lily Norton was writing a letter in a room not overlooking the garden, and would not witness this scene. He wished to study Mrs Smith in clear daylight, and when he did so he saw that she could not continue in his kitchen, that she did not seem to have washed or changed her clothes in a very long time.

‘I trust your guest is enjoying her stay,’ she said. ‘I trust everything is in order for her and there are no complaints.’

Her tone was almost insolent. When he understood that she was about to say something else, he stopped her by raising his right hand, and then he bowed gently and returned to the house.

He found Burgess Noakes and asked him to enquire urgently among the shopkeepers of Rye to discover the name of Mrs Smith’s sister who lived in the gardener’s cottage at Ashford. Soon, Burgess returned with the news that her name was Mrs Ticknor. As he turned towards his study, Burgess touched him on the shoulder, put his finger to his lips and guided him to the garden.

Henry watched amazed as Burgess checked that no one else could see them, his expression cautious and watchful. As Burgess led him to the outbuildings behind the kitchen, Henry wondered what his diminutive houseboy could possibly want him to see. Checking to ensure that Henry was following, Burgess motioned to him to enter one of the sheds and pulled back a stretch of canvas to disclose an enormous cache of empty whisky, wine and sherry bottles, which gave off a foul, sour smell.

By luncheon, Henry had summoned the doctor to call in the afternoon and had sent an urgent telegram to Mrs Ticknor. He was thus able to greet Lily’s friend Ida Higginson, who, he appreciated, had known all her life only the most orderly domestic rituals which Boston could provide, and a friend from Eastbourne who had come for the day, as though his household was in good health and perfect harmony. He knew that Lily Norton would not be indelicate enough to mention the matter to anyone save her Aunt Grace who would be too interested in the news to be fully deprived of it. He was glad he had not confided in her or in anyone else. He explained to the company that the butler was not well and hoped they would not be offended by the parlourmaid serving luncheon with the assistance of young Burgess Noakes.

As luncheon came to an end, Mrs Smith having once more miraculously cooked a meal, Burgess indicated to him that Mrs Ticknor had arrived, and he asked that she wait for him in the front sitting room. He knew that this would prevent him from showing his guests around the garden, but he easily arranged that, since he had work that could not wait, in the shape of a novel appearing as a serial, Miss Norton should take her fellow guests on a walk through Rye, with which she had become thoroughly acquainted.

Once they had happily and innocently departed, he went to Mrs Ticknor and told her of his plight. He emphasized that it could not, would not, continue. He wished to dismiss both of them. He would settle generously with them, he said, but he could no longer employ them. Mrs Ticknor, he hoped, could make arrangements for them, but he would not help her in that, he said.

Mrs Ticknor said nothing, her face betrayed no emotion. She simply asked where her sister was and if she could speak to her. As they moved into the hallway, they saw the parlourmaid let the doctor into the house. Henry sent Mrs Ticknor to the kitchen, and, having briefed the doctor, dispatched him in the care of the parlourmaid to the room behind the pantry where, he understood from Burgess Noakes, Mr Smith lay.

That evening as he dined with Lily Norton and his friend from Eastbourne, the conversation ranged over political and literary matters. Lily was at her most persuasively charming and intelligent. Considering her insistence on raising the issue of Constance Fenimore Woolson the previous evening and her insinuation that he had abandoned her friend and left her to her fate in Venice, he wondered if she, too, Lily Norton, had been abandoned, or if she lived in fear of such an eventuality. Her not marrying, not being allied with someone who could offer her greater purpose and scope for all her flair and charm, was, in his view, a mistake and would likely seem more so as time passed. As he looked at her across the table, it occurred to him that the re-creation of herself, her deliberate broadening of her effect, could have atrophied other qualities more endearing to a potential suitor. Constance, he thought, might have written a very good novel about her.

The doctor returned in the morning and professed the case hopeless. Mr Smith, he said, remained drunk because the daily intake of alcohol over so many years had made him so. Once the supply was withdrawn, he would suffer enormously. Mrs Ticknor returned with her husband and told Henry that his generosity was appreciated and indeed would be needed as the Smiths did not have a penny. They had saved nothing. They had spent all their income on drink and in fact owed money to several suppliers in Rye. Mrs Ticknor was brisk in her tone and her husband stood beside her, clearly embarrassed, his cap in his hands.

The Smiths were, as their goods were gathered, he thought, simply two saturated and demoralized victims with not a word to say for themselves, even Mrs Smith moved in silence to her doom, avoiding his glance. He knew that they would not find work again, and that, when his payments had run out, and their close family could no longer manage them, they would face the abyss. The Smiths, he thought, who had come with him so faithfully through so many years, were lost. But he knew that he would have given anything to get them out of the house.

He wrote to his sister-in-law about the episode, but mentioned it to no one else. It was, he said, a perfect nightmare of distress, disgust and inconvenience. He realized that everyone in Rye would soon discover the fate of the Smiths. Even though they were disliked, the speed of their dismissal, he knew, would cause people to observe him closely as he walked through the town.

This episode and the enervating weeks that followed as he lived servantless and ate in a local hostelry filled him with an unhappiness that only work could cure. In the mornings he sat at the wide south window of the drawing room which caught all the early sunshine and he read over the previous day’s work. The window overlooked the smooth green lawn and he loved to watch George Gammon at work under the shade of the old mulberry tree. Later, as he took his stroll in the garden, he would enjoy being protected from the world by the high garden walls of Lamb House.