The Master

CHAPTER TEN

AS ROME BECAME MORE MODERN, he wrote to Paul Bourget, he himself became increasingly antique. He had fled from Venice, from the memories and echoes that had settled in its atmosphere, and had at first refused all Roman invitations and offers of shelter. He lodged instead in a hotel close to Piazza di Spagna and he found himself in his early days in the city walking slowly as though the heat of high summer had come in May. He did not at first climb the Spanish Steps, nor make a pilgrimage to any site further than a few streets from his hotel. He tried not to conjure up memories deliberately, nor to compare the city of almost thirty years earlier with the city of now. He did not allow any easy nostalgia to colour the dulled sweetness of these days. He was not disposed to meeting himself in a younger and more impressionable guise and thus feeling sadness at the knowledge that no new discoveries would be made, no new excitements felt, merely old ones revisited. He allowed himself to love these streets, as though they were a poem he had once memorized, and the years when he had first seen these colours and stones and studied these faces seemed a rich and valuable part of what he was now. His eye was no longer surprised and delighted, as it once had been, but neither was it jaded.

It was enough for him to sit at an outdoor cafe under a great awning and study the plasterwork on a wall as it moved out of shadow, the ochre colour suddenly becoming vivid and brilliant in sunlight, his own spirit seeming to brighten as well at the idea that something as simple as this could empty his mind of the shadow of Venice which continued to hover over him. It was easier to be old here, he thought; no colour was simple, nothing was fresh, even the sunlight itself seemed to fall and linger in ways which had been honoured by time.

In Venice, he had avoided the streets between the Frari and the Salute, keeping as much as he could to the other side of the Grand Canal, in case he should happen on the street where Constance had fallen to her death. On one of the nights before he fled the city, he had believed himself close to the Rialto Bridge as he made his way confidently back to Palazzo Barbaro without considering the danger he was in. He realized later that he should have simply turned back and retraced his steps and then found his way comfortably to the bridge. Instead, each turn he made led either to a blind alley or an opening onto the water or, more ominously, to a turning to the right which could only take him closer to that dreadful street which he had hoped that he would never again have to stand in. He felt that here in the silence of the night he was being led along, as though someone were guiding him and he was too weakened by guilt not to follow. He had loved this Venice which shut early and became still and empty; he had often enjoyed being the lone walker, the one who might easily take a wrong turning, allowing luck and instinct as much as skill or knowledge to guide him, but now he knew that not only was he lost but that he had come close to the site of her death. He stood still. Ahead was a blind alley which he had already tried, which seemed to lead to the water but did not. To his right was a long narrow street. He could only turn back, and as he did he felt an urge to speak to her out loud, with a sense that her spirit, so restless and independent and courageous, would inhabit these streets for as long as time lasted. She did not settle for an easy life, he thought, and now, whatever part of her remained was as yet uneasy and uprooted.

‘Constance,’ he whispered, ‘I have come as close as I could, as near as I dared.’

He imagined the choppy sea out at the lagoon, and the nothingness that was there, wide water and the night. He imagined the wind howling out there in the void and the chaos of water, the place where there was no light, no love, and he saw her there, hovering over it, having become its equal. And he knew then to turn, to walk slowly back whence he came, step by guarded step, concentrating, making no mistakes until he reached a place that he could recognize, the palace where he was a guest, his books, his papers, his warm bed. That night he knew that he would leave Venice as soon as he could and go south and not return.

THE WEATHER in Rome was perfect; the very air glowed with lovely colour as his daily strolls began, daringly, to take in the Corso and stretch as far as Saint John Lateran and Villa Borghese where the new grass was knee-deep. Everything was radiant with light and warmth. The city smiled at him and he learned not to scowl in return as more tourists crossed his path and more insistent invitations arrived at his hotel. When he had visited Rome first, he thought, he was in his twenties and free to do as he pleased, make new friends, wander at will, ride out on the Campagna from Porta del Popolo along the old posting road to Florence in the mild midwinter, the country rolling away into slopes chequered with purple and blue and blooming brown. He had become like the eternal city itself: he was dented by history, he had responsibilities and layers of memory, he was watched and examined and in much demand. And now he would have to show himself in public. Just as the streets of the old city were cleaner and better lit, he, too, would put on a brave face, cover up old wounds and erase old scars and appear at the correct time, attempting neither to disappoint those who viewed him nor to give too much of his own secret history away.

The Waldo Storys and the Maud Howe Elliotts, each believing that he had spent his first days in Rome held in the other’s captivity, now set about enticing him gently and firmly into their own particular Roman cage. The Waldo Storys inhabited the large apartment of William Wetmore Story at the Barberini and wished Henry to write a biography of the old half-talented but most serious-minded sculptor; Maud Howe Elliott and her artist husband required nothing more from him than that he would be a regular and unannounced visitor at Palazzo Accoramboni, mingle with their guests, and admire the view from their rooftop terrace as much as they admired it themselves.

Neither party lived in Rome for the pleasure it offered the solitary resident and, since neither party was skilled at imagining pleasure in which they themselves did not regularly indulge, his need for solitude seemed to both an almost scandalous excuse, not to be countenanced. After four or five days he gave in and found himself accepting their hospitality on alternate evenings. In England, he had watched with interest as the heir, on the death of his father, took over the great house, as though its comforts and contents were created for him alone. Now he watched the new generation as they adapted the city to their own uses, young Waldo Story putting in the same hours as his father at the chisel and hammer, meeting even less the public demand, sweetly spoiling even more blocks of pure white marble, and Maud Howe Elliott, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, following in the steps of her aunt Mrs Luther Terry who had offered hospitality to artists and New Englanders alike two decades earlier at the Odescalchi Palace.

They were neither Romans nor Americans, but their manners were perfect and their habits well formed. They collected old friends and pleasing and distinguished visitors with skill and some kindness, having already collected as much antiquity as would tastefully fit into their palaces. Maud’s husband, John Elliott, was a painter and, like his compatriots, was talented while lacking real ambition and fire. Both he and Waldo Story and their friends were bohemians in their studios, but in the company of their servants they knew how to give orders. In Rome, with a private income, it was more respectable to be a dilettante than in Boston where such things were frowned upon. For them, Henry was not only a fellow New Englander who also spoke Italian and had made his home in Europe, but an artist who had chronicled and given some significance to their peculiar aura, the strange dilemma and drama of their presence in Europe. They liked him too much, he felt, and were in any case not in the business of taking offence, to mind the tone of his novels, the sense of defeat and deceit which poisoned the lives of so many of his American characters in Europe. They had enough reverence for the past to include the 1870s in their area of interest, and since he had known Rome in those years, he could become part of the precious and thinly populated universe to which their parents had introduced them.

Thus he found himself on a warm May evening in the last year of the nineteenth century standing with a jolly group on a flowered terrace on the roof of Palazzo Accoramboni, overlooking St Peter’s Square. They watched the dying rays of the sun and admired the Roman domes and rooftops, and beyond, the Campagna with its aqueducts encircled by the Albine and Sabine hills. He did not need to speak but merely nod in assent as his fellow guests pointed out Castel Sant’Angelo and the dark masses of trees marking the Pincio and Villa Borghese. They spoke in a sort of wonder and excitement. They were mainly young and their light summer clothes played beautifully against the early roses and pansies and lavender which their hosts had trained with such New World enthusiasm to grow in abundance on their terrace. The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their moustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished. This was, he thought to himself, a group in which his sister Alice would have felt most uneasy and uncomfortable, but which all her friends would have adored.

The group in which he stood took in the scene, allowing themselves suddenly to become quiet if they so pleased and treating each other with familiarity. He knew that some of them bore proud American names and therefore had a deep sense of their own status which spread almost naturally to those with whom they were travelling. They did not need to establish their credentials by asking questions of the famous author; they managed to suggest that here on this rooftop in one of the grandest private apartments in the city, they were both modestly equal to anything which might come their way and strangely impervious to it. He was relieved that no one among the company saw fit to enquire if he were close to completing another novel, or if he were doing research for one, or what he thought about George Eliot. They listened to him briefly as he pointed out a local monument, in the same spirit as they listened to each other.

He noticed that his group was being observed by a young man who stood alone at a distance while ostensibly taking in the same scene. Soon, he observed that he himself was, from time to time, being watched by this figure who differed significantly from the young men who stood in the group. He had none of their easy-going manners, their mixture of confidence and tact. His gaze was too sharp, his pose too uncomfortable. He was, Henry noticed, remarkably good-looking, but it was as though his blond and big-boned handsomeness put him on guard and made him self-conscious. The tense aura he had created around himself meant that no one, among the growing numbers who had gathered to watch the sunset, came close to him or spoke to him. Henry concentrated on looking away and joined in the general marvelling over the glory of the dying light. Yet when he turned back the young man was staring at him openly in a way which made him determined to avoid him during the rest of the evening. He looked indeed like someone who would be quite prepared to ask about work in progress and future plans and have strong views on the question of George Eliot, but there was also something strangely soft about the man’s face which worked against the intensity and tactlessness of the gaze and this made Henry feel further a need to keep away from him. The fact that he was an artist went without saying. As Henry descended the stairs from the rooftop to the apartment below, he wished to know nothing more and made sure that he kept his eyes averted from the young man for the rest of the evening. He was much relieved when he later found himself in the street, not having spoken to him.

A few days later, however, a more intimate gathering was held at the Elliotts’ at which the young man was introduced to him as the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Andersen had shed the posture and gaze of the earlier meeting and replaced them, as though with another work in hand, with an almost ironic politeness and then, as they sat down to eat, a concerned silence, listening to anyone who spoke, nodding gracefully but adding nothing. It was only when he stood up to take his leave that something of his former intensity appeared. As soon as he was on his feet, he studied each person, his expression almost hostile, and then turned briskly to go. At the doorway he lingered again, acknowledging Henry’s glance with a short bow.

His Roman friends, he realized, did not tire of each other’s company; they managed most evenings in the time before they would scatter for the summer to hold an event, however small, in which they could entertain each other. He was extended an open invitation, and he allowed such social occasions to become part of his routine in Rome. He was careful when he joined them not to dwell too much on his earlier life in the city, not to remark too often on how little or how much had changed or how things had been done in these streets, these very rooms, in the 1870s, even if he thought these matters might be of interest to the younger generation, resident and visitor alike. He did not wish to be regarded as a fossil, but he also wanted to keep the past to himself, a prized and private possession.

When Maud Elliott alerted him to a special dinner she was planning, however, he understood from her tone that she and her husband and the Waldo Storys cared a great deal for the past, for the city during the time when their parents were in their prime. She was giving a dinner in honour of her Aunt Annie, formerly Miss Annie Crawford, daughter of the sculptor Thomas Crawford, and for many years the Baroness von Rabe, and now a widow. Henry had not seen her for a very long time, but he knew from others that her flinty and formidable presence, her bad temper and her hard intelligence and flaring wit had lost nothing over time. He noticed that the Elliotts were expending a great deal of energy on the evening in question, the meal to be held on the terrace under the pergola; they were planning toasts and speeches and were behaving as though uniting their elderly aunt with her old friend would be one of the highlights of the Roman season.

THE BARONESS took in the company sharply, her thin hair elaborately combed and her skin like bottled fruit. When one of the young men asked her about the changes she had witnessed in Rome, she pursed her lips, as though she had been approached by a ticket collector, and spoke loudly.

‘I don’t go in for change. It is not one of my subjects. I have always taken the view that noticing change is a mistake. I notice what is directly in front of me.’

‘And what do you notice?’ one of the young men asked archly.

‘I notice the sculptor Andersen,’ the Baroness said, nodding in the direction of Henrik Andersen who was seated nervously on the edge of a chaise longue, ‘and I should say that noticing him, despite my advanced years and my gentle upbringing, gives me nothing but satisfaction.’

Andersen sat watching her, like a rare, sleek animal, as all eyes turned on him.

‘And I notice you too, Baroness, with equal pleasure,’ he said.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ she replied and stared at the sculptor until he blushed.

When Maud Elliott, once supper had ended, asked him to speak, Henry was tired of the brittle old lady who enjoyed the wine more than was entirely necessary and felt free to comment on many matters and several people with a frankness which gave way to a brusqueness as the evening wore on. He took pleasure as he began his speech in the idea that she could not interrupt him. He spoke, as he had not intended to, about the Rome he came to a quarter of a century earlier not because he wished, he said, to become nostalgic or mark the changes, but because on these occasions with old friends and some new faces, as the summer season was soon to begin, it was time to light a candle and go through the house and take stock, and this was what, in the Roman context, he proposed briefly to do. No one who had ever loved Rome as Rome could be loved in youth, he said, will want to stop loving her. It was not only the colours and the manners which were all new to him when he had sojourned in the city in his own twenties, but the shadows of certain former presences in the studios of the American artists, notably that of his compatriot Nathaniel Hawthorne who had a decade before that found so much inspiration in the city and offered so much in turn. It was in this city in the rival houses of the Terrys and the Storys that he had first met the actress Fanny Kemble, that he had encountered Matthew Arnold, that he had first imagined some of the characters who would people his own books, figures for whom Rome was the ground of their making and their undoing, a place of exile but also a place of refuge, a place of beauty and, in the small world of Anglo-American life, a place of immense intrigue. Even the names of the palaces would be enough, he said, to conjure up a sense of nobility, of dedication to art, and indeed to hospitality. For a young man from Newport, he said, the apartment of the Storys in Palazzo Barberini or the Terrys lodged in Palazzo Odescalchi, or even Caffé Spillmann on Via Condotti, were places of glory, long held and treasured in the memory, and he wished to raise a glass not only to the Baroness, whom he had first met in those years when American beauty flourished in Rome, but to the old city itself which he had never ceased to love and hoped that he would never cease to visit.

When he sat down, he noticed that the sculptor Andersen, who had been watching him, had tears in his eyes, and he noticed him further as he listened patiently to the Baroness von Rabe discuss the merits of her brother the novelist Marion Crawford and those of Mrs Humphrey Ward.

‘They have, of course,’ she said, ‘a very great talent, and they are popular with the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic. And they treat Italian subjects very beautifully, perhaps because they understand Italy, and their characters are so refined. I and many others have enjoyed reading their work. They will endure, I think.’

The Baroness, in finishing, looked at Henry as though daring him to contradict her. Clearly, he had displeased her, and she seemed uncertain whether she had made herself disagreeable enough. He sat with her as she made up her mind that she had not.

‘I read several articles by your brother William, and then a whole book of his,’ she said. ‘It was given to me by an old friend who knew all of you in Boston, and in a note he said to me that your brother’s style was the very model of clarity, not a word wasted, and no nonsense, every sentence beginning and ending in exactly the right place.’

He listened as though the Baroness were describing a very large and delicious meal she had devoured, nodding regularly. No one else was paying any attention to them except Andersen who smiled at Henry when he glanced at him; his expression seemed to make clear that he understood what was taking place. Henry, Andersen’s eyes said, had all his sympathy. The Baroness was not yet finished.

‘I remember you when you were young and all the ladies followed you, nay fought with each other to go riding with you. That Mrs Sumner and young Miss Boott and young Miss Lowe. All the young ladies, and others not so young. We all liked you, and I suppose you liked us as well, but you were too busy gathering material to like anyone too much. You were charming of course, but you were like a young banker collecting our savings. Or a priest listening to our sins. I remember my aunt warning us not to tell you anything.’

She leaned towards him conspiratorially.

‘And I think that is what you are still doing. I don’t think you have retired. I wish, however, that you would write more clearly and I’m sure the young sculptor, who is watching you, I’m sure he wishes the same.’

Henry smiled at her and bowed.

‘As you know, I do my best to please you.’

As others began to distract the Baroness and absorb her attention, Henry moved towards Andersen.

‘I thought that your speech was magnificent,’ the sculptor said. Henry was surprised at how American his accent sounded.

‘And I do not know what the old lady was saying to you, but I think that you are a very patient listener.’

‘She spoke,’ Henry said quietly, ‘as she promised not to – of old times.’

‘I loved what you said about Rome. It made us all wish we had been here then.’

Andersen had been leaning against the wall, but now he stood to his full height. The expression on his face was almost solemn and, although he commanded a view of the entire room, he directed his attention only to Henry. After a few moments, he moved his mouth as though he wished to speak but clearly thought better of it. In the shadowy light of the apartment, he veered between displaying a vulnerability, an extraordinary, half-blank handsomeness and a strangely thoughtful introspection. He swallowed nervously before he whispered.

‘Obviously, you love Rome and you have been happy here.’

It was close to a question and he watched Henry, waiting for a response; Henry merely nodded, conscious of the mixture of strength in the frame and a kind of weakness, like sadness, in the eyes of the sculptor.

‘Do you have a place you go to, I mean a monument or a painting in Rome that you love and visit regularly?’ the sculptor asked him.

‘I have been going almost daily to the Protestant cemetery which I suppose is in itself a work of art, an important monument, but perhaps you meant-’

‘No,’ Andersen interrupted him, ‘that is what I meant. I asked you the question because whatever it is, I should like to accompany you there. Even if it is your habit to go alone, I would ask you to make an exception.’

Henry could see an earnestness breaking through the shyness with some resolve and determination. He had expected another tone altogether, intense perhaps, but ironic as well, and rather more easy and worldly. This moved him with its sincerity, its lack of any reserve.

‘I should like to do this soon,’ Andersen said.

‘Tomorrow at eleven, then,’ Henry said simply. ‘We can meet at my hotel and set out together. Have you not been to the cemetery before?’

‘I have been there, sir, but I should like to go again, and shall look forward to tomorrow.’

Andersen gazed at him for a moment, having noted the name of the hotel, and did not smile and then bowed and made his way artfully across the room.

IN THE MORNING Andersen, Henry saw, was nervous and shy. He did not speak when Henry appeared, merely offered his customary bow. Henry could not tell how alert he was to his own handsomeness, a handsomeness which, when he smiled, gave way to an astonishing clear-eyed beauty. As they made their way by cab to the old walled graveyard near the pyramid, Andersen’s expression managed to be both searching and tenderly hesitant at the same time. Even though he spoke like an American, he did not have the calm and confident manners of one. Henry wondered if his seeming indifference to his own appeal, his lack of brashness and his intense presence arose simply from his Scandinavian origin. Yet when Andersen alighted from the cab and turned and waited for him at the gate, there was an aggression in his movements which belonged to someone more confident than he seemed when he smiled or spoke or allowed his face to rest.

For Henry the cemetery, more than any of the city’s monuments or works of art or famous buildings and thoroughfares, was the place where art and nature had most sonorously and resonantly combined, and now, in the shade offered by the gnarled, thickgrowing black cypresses and the well-worn paths and the carefully tended flowers and shrubs, it was a place of comfort, of great warm peace. As they walked directly towards the pyramid itself and the grave of the poet Keats it seemed to him that Andersen’s shyness and reticence had cast a spell on them both which could not be easily broken in this most solemn of places.

He was not sure if Andersen was aware of the story of Keats’s last days in the city, or even if he knew that the gravestone, which was not inscribed with the poet’s name, marked his final resting place. Henry felt acutely the sculptor’s presence; he liked being beside him, the silence broken by birdsong, with only cats for company; and the sense of the dead, including the tragic young poet, deeply at rest, protected in warm, rich earth. And the air all around, the clear sky and the secluded spaces of the cemetery, proclaiming that with rest came the end of sorrow; and this rest seemed to him now, on a May morning in Rome, suffused with love or something close to it.

They walked quietly and at random through the graveyard. Andersen held his hands behind his back, and read each inscription and then remained as though at prayer. Henry was his guide only in that he moved when Henry moved and stood still when Henry stopped.

‘The names never cease to interest me,’ Henry said. ‘The sad names of the English who died in Rome.’

He sighed.

Andersen shook his head briefly and turned to study the skinny tan-coloured cat which hovered behind him, tail in the air. Henry looked around too, as the cat purred lazily and narrowed its eyes and then moved against the back of Henry’s legs, pushing the full weight of its bony body against him, rubbing itself, and then moving nonchalantly away to find a spot in sunlight and settle there.

‘The cat knows what it wants,’ Andersen said. His laugh was loud and sudden, almost shrill, and it made Henry want to walk away. Instead, he turned and smiled and edged along the pathways until they reached Shelley’s grave at the back wall of the cemetery where the birdsong was at its most vibrant.

Now that the silence between them had been restored, he felt that the sadness he had spoken about meant nothing against the act of completion which the spirits all around them had undergone. Here in this cemetery, which they began to stroll around once more, the state of not-knowing and not-feeling which belonged to the dead seemed to him closer to resolved happiness than he had ever imagined possible.

Andersen must have believed, Henry thought, that this lingering at certain graves and not at others was, with the exception of the graves of the poets, quite without a plan. He seemed puzzled as Henry made his way purposefully, there being no direct path, to the grave of Constance Fenimore Woolson whose name, Henry believed, could have meant nothing to him. This spot had been his final destination on each of his earlier visits; now he almost regretted having come here once more, knowing that he would have to say something about the grave and make sure that it was understood. He was relieved for a moment when Andersen’s attention fell on the carved stone angel over the tomb of William Wetmore Story, which Story had carved himself, and went towards it to study it more closely. Andersen touched the white wings and the face, stood back to contemplate them, his face suddenly hardened in concentration. As his friend moved around the angel a second time, Henry saw to the right the grave of John Addington Symonds and thought, as he did on each visit to this hallowed ground, about how the Wetmore Storys and Symonds and Constance had loved Italy, they had that much in common, that they had lived in beautiful places believing that the light and the views and the grand rooms were worth all the years of exile, the loss of their native countries. Constance, he thought, would allow herself to meet the others irregularly; the wealth and social ambition and soft art of the Wetmore Storys would bore her as much as Symonds’s sexual obsessions and purple prose. The tablet with her name engraved on it was a model of decorum compared with the elaborate tomb of the Storys. In the evenings, he smiled to himself, she would wish to be alone. Her America was not theirs, her Italy was more modest and her art more ambitious. But she would have known how to write about them.

He glanced up and saw that Andersen was watching him.

‘Constance was a great friend,’ he said. ‘I knew the Storys of course and was in touch with poor Symonds, but Constance was a great friend.’

Andersen looked down at the tablet and must have seen, Henry thought, that Constance was one of the recent dead. He made to speak, but clearly thought better of it. Henry sighed and turned away, realizing that he should not have taken someone he knew so little to such an intimate place. But more important perhaps, he felt that he should not have spoken just now, as the saying of her name had brought tears to his eyes. He turned away and tried to regain control but found that he was being held by the sculptor, his shoulders cupped against Andersen’s chest and Andersen’s hands reaching around to grasp his hands and hold them as firmly as he could. He was surprised at Andersen’s strength, the size of his hands. He immediately checked that there was nobody in view before allowing the embrace to continue, feeling the other man’s warm, tough body briefly holding him, wanting desperately to allow himself to be held much longer, but knowing that this embrace was all the comfort he would receive. He held his breath for as long as he could and kept his eyes closed and then Andersen released him and they walked quietly back to the cemetery gate.

IN THE CAB as they travelled to Andersen’s studio in Via Margutta, he wondered how he would tell Andersen about how he had lived. As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written, each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

Andersen suggested that before making a tour of where he worked they eat lunch in the small restaurant below his studio. Almost as soon as he entered the small and, for him, familiar space, being welcomed with friendly gestures by the proprietor and his wife, he became talkative and engaged. Henry was surprised not only by how much the sculptor knew about him, but by how freely now he relayed the information. He was also surprised at how unselfconsciously Andersen spoke to him about his own talent and how fluently he could quote those who had come to admire it.

He listened to Andersen as lunch was served; the sculptor’s face seemed to change as much as his personality had changed. His eyes had lost their softness and sympathy and his expression became more focussed as he reacted to each thing he himself said, adding to it in a torrent of explanation and contestation. His earlier silences, Henry realized, had been part of a great withholding which was now being released. In the dim light of the restaurant, Henry relished the sight of him across the table, his young face moving in rapt animation, so restless and ambitious, so ready for life, so raw.

Henry had imagined that Andersen’s art would be exquisite and finely wrought, made slowly and deliberately, but now, as the sculptor stood up from lunch, his cheeks flushed, it struck Henry that his work might just as easily be distinguished by its lack of discipline. He had no means by which to judge him. Although the Storys and the Elliotts included Andersen in their gatherings, they had not spoken of him privately. As he went up to Andersen’s studio, Henry remembered when he came to this city first, when he visited the studios of so many artists who had failed or prospered as the years went by. Now all these years later he was here again, led by a young sculptor who was full of protean innocence, who was so tentative in some ways and so overbearing in others, so full of mixtures and so mysterious. He watched Andersen ascend the stairs ahead of him, studying his strong white hand holding the banisters, the wonderful open agility of his movements, and dreamed that he could stay in Rome for a while longer than he had planned and come here every day to the studio of his new young friend.

There was a sense of frantic work in the large studio, a great deal of it half-finished by an artist in love with the classical tradition, the classical body, a sense of work done for public and triumphant display. He wondered if this was merely how Andersen’s work began, full of roaring and rhetorical disproportion, and then if the sculptor set out, with subtlety and an eye for telling detail, to refine it. As he moved from piece to piece, he expressed his opinion that his friend had a large talent and expressed also his awe at so many figures and torsos, asking himself if Andersen now planned to work on the faces, or if he would choose to leave them blank and anodyne. He was led to the work which seemed most in progress, a large statue of a naked man and woman holding hands. He marvelled out loud at its scale and ambition as Andersen stood proudly beside it as though he were going to be photographed.

As the day wore on, Henry learned much about Hendrik Andersen. Some of it astonished him, especially the news that the Andersen family had, on arriving in America, settled in Newport in a house a few streets away from where the Jameses had lived, and that the sculptor still viewed Newport as his American home. When Andersen began to speak of his older brother and the burden of being a second son, Henry informed him that he, too, had spent his youth in the shadow of his brother William. Andersen seemed to know this already and wondered aloud if this had brought him and Henry together, asking many questions about Henry and William and, often before Henry had finished responding, comparing the answers with his own experience with his brother Andreas. As the conversation went on, Henry discovered that Andersen knew a lot about Henry’s family. He mentioned that his own father had the same love for alcohol that Henry’s father had shown in his youth, a matter which was never discussed in the James family but which must have been trumpeted in Newport loudly enough for it to have reached the ears of Hendrik Andersen.

‘We are brothers,’ Hendrik laughed, ‘because we have older brothers and drunken fathers.’

Henry watched him with interest, observing the livid colours of his cheeks, his nervous talking and the way he moved from one subject to another, paying no attention to the response or lack of one. Henry’s suggestion that he should take leave of the sculptor was met with an insistence that he stay, making Henry agree that they stroll together through the old city and find a place where they could perhaps take some refreshment. Before they left, Andersen took him through the studio again. On seeing the figures once more, Henry wondered if Andersen was not interested in creating a single, individual likeness. The bodies done in marble and stone had a fleshy presence, the generic bottoms and bellies and haunches sculpted with enormous confidence and zeal. He expressed once more his admiration and his hope that he would return to the studio to see each piece completed.

HE SAW Hendrik Andersen almost daily, meeting him alone or in the company of others, and as he learned more about him, he was struck by how close the sculptor was, in his background and his temperament, to the eponymous hero of his own novel Roderick Hudson, which he had published more than twenty years earlier. While the American colony in Rome knew him as the author of Daisy Miller, the more serious among them, including Maud Elliott and her husband, had also read The Portrait of a Lady. They knew the difference between the former, a popular tale light in its tone and impact, and the latter, more subtle and daring in its construction and its texture. None of them, however, as far as he could make out, had ever read Roderick Hudson, even though it portrayed a young impoverished American sculptor in Rome, with all of Andersen’s talents and indiscretions, with his passionate and impetuous nature. Both Hudson and Andersen made clear to anyone who knew them their ambitions and dreams. Both of them were doted on by a worried mother back at home, and both, once installed in Rome, were watched over by an older man, a lone visitor, who appreciated beauty and took an interest in human behaviour and kept passion firmly in check. As Henry saw Andersen and tried to make sense of him, it was as though one of his own characters had come alive, ready to intrigue him and puzzle him and hold his affections, forcing him to suspend judgement, subtly refusing to allow him to control what might now unfold. Andersen had been taken up, much as Roderick Hudson had, by people with money who believed in him, and thus he had never compromised his art or flirted with commerce. His work was a set of large, energetic gestures, commensurate with his dreams. The slow, sly systems used to write a novel, the building of character and plot through action and description and suggestion were of no interest to him, just as he did not seek, through careful observation and calm effort, to sculpt a living face. Had he been a poet, he would have written Homeric epics, and now, as a sculptor, he talked to Henry about his plans for large monuments.

Henry listened with interest most of the time, having prolonged his stay in the city, and managed to think about Andersen’s charm and his shortcomings in equal measure when he was alone in a way which offered a golden tinge to those hours and that solitude. He wondered what would become of Andersen. In wanting, like his Mallet in Roderick Hudson, to help him and advise him, to take the measure of who he was and what he would amount to, he managed, he hoped, to disguise longings which he did not entertain with much ease or equanimity.

The idea that he had published certain books which no one had read now, and which no one saw reason to allude to, added to a feeling that he belonged somehow to history, just as Andersen and his associates gave their loyalty to the future. It was this feeling that, in the end, made him prepare with a heavy heart to go home, but he also felt, as soon as he made his plans, a tenderness for Andersen and a longing to see him in England. This tenderness arose also from an impression which grew in him the more he saw Andersen – and sometimes in these weeks he saw him twice a day – that the young sculptor’s silences and his intense conversation both seemed to spring from a desperate need for approval and a loneliness which the creation of monumental sculpture could do nothing to assuage. He knew also that his own involvement with Andersen, the way he listened and studied the sculptor’s words and movements, had interested Andersen enormously, but that Andersen, in turn, had watched Henry hardly at all, had chosen to believe him as not in need of close observation. He had never, for example, alluded to the scene in the Protestant cemetery and had seemed to presume that the novelist’s solitude was an essential aspect of his art. What he had taken from Henry was Henry’s interest in him; he had opened himself for regular scrutiny, as a church opens its doors for prayer. He was both puzzled and fascinated by himself. His prodigious talent and his grandiose ambitions, his origins, his fears and his daily tribulations emerged as subjects for conversation, innocent and unguarded and undisciplined and endearing. He talked but did not listen; he grew silent, Henry noticed, because he knew the effect his silences had on others. And he was deeply and instinctively alert, Henry saw, to how these changes in himself – how soft his eyes could become in their expression, for example, or how strong and imposing he could seem in other circumstances – drew people towards him as they drew Henry now. And then,when they were close, Andersen did not know what to do with people save that he did not want to lose them. He wanted their full attention, their reverence, and perhaps their love, and when he was sure he had these, he was gently indifferent to them.

Once winning fame as a sculptor came into question, however, he was like a wild animal searching for food; he was ruthless, and he cared more than anything for the chaotic hunting ground of his studio, working on his huge figures, showing them off, smoothing out their haunches and loins and torsos, but never allowing them a face, having no interest, none at all, in what a face might conceal or disclose, just as his own face managed most of the time a wonderful blankness, a pure, bland beauty which made Henry interested all the more in gazing at him and being in his company and made his efforts to picture the face, when he was away from him, all the more intriguing and time-consuming and exasperating.

He wondered, as he prepared to leave the city, if he had placed too much emphasis on the dullness and provinciality of his life at Lamb House. Andersen had nodded in approval when he explained his need for such a life and his wish to return to it, but Andersen, he knew, had not left Newport and come to Rome in search of dullness and provinciality. He was actively admired in their circle in a manner which would not be part of daily life in Newport or Rye. This, he felt, would be the challenge for the sculptor in the years ahead – the possibility of failure and neglect and solitude. The idea of how he might rise to this challenge charged Henry’s imagination. He imagined Andersen’s face become haunted by the slow concentration of work, his eyes more inward-looking, his conversation more hesitant and subtle, and his sculpture smaller in scale and more intricate and delicate, more worked on and worried over. And in the years when this transformation took place, he believed, it might not finally matter to Andersen who admired him or where he lived.

On one of the nights before Henry’s departure there was a gathering at the Elliotts’ of twenty or more people, all of whom were known to Henry. He was careful to arrive and depart on his own, and enter into general discussion with many of those present while keeping a distant eye on Andersen. He eventually found time alone with him but they were interrupted by the arrival of Maud Elliott who began to allude to the friendship between them. She came from a distinguished family of alluders, he thought; her mother and her aunt and her uncle the novelist usually succeeded in breaking silence on most matters and did not have many unspoken thoughts. The raised eyebrow and the pointed remark ran in their family, he thought, as Maud Elliott drove Andersen away by asking him if he had ever had a friend as attentive as Mr James. Now that she had Henry in a corner, she made clear that he was hers until she had finished.

‘I’m sure his mother wants him back in Newport, in fact I know she does, but we intend to keep him here. Everybody wants him. That is what is so lovely about him. I believe you have been a daily visitor to his studio.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘I rather admire his industry.’

‘And what we might call his genius perhaps? You must have known about him before you came to Rome. I believe his fame has spread.’

‘No, I met him in your house for the first time.’

‘But you had heard about him? He certainly had heard about you.’

‘No, I had not heard about him.’

‘Oh I thought you would have heard about him from Lord Gower who so admired him when he visited Rome.’

‘Lord Gower remains unknown to me to this day,’ Henry said.

‘Well, he is a writer on many subjects and an enthusiastic collector. So enthusiastic indeed that he adored our young sculptor, saw him every day and wished to keep him.’

Her voice became confiding and conspiratorial.

‘I’m told he wished to adopt him and make him his heir. He is tremendously rich. But Andersen would not have him, or did not wish to be adopted, or both, so he will not be inheriting all Lord Gower’s money. Perhaps he is waiting for a better offer, or a more interesting one. He has not a penny of his own. Like one of your heroines, he is more interesting, perhaps, because he has turned down a lord. But I think in the end, if he is not careful, we will have to compare him to Daisy Miller. He flirts, does he not? In any case I cannot see him returning to New England.’

‘Perhaps a spell there would improve us all,’ Henry said. He smiled.

‘Mr Andersen says,’ Maud Elliott went on, ‘that you have invited him to Rye.’

‘Perhaps, since you have been so kind,’ Henry replied, ‘I should extend the invitation to you as well.’

THE NEXT DAY he called at Andersen’s studio to find that another large piece was in production, a set of naked garlanded figures, both male and female, to represent the spring. Andersen was at his happiest under such conditions, sure that the work would shortly find a sponsor, and fresh from the physical exertion of the morning. As Henry walked around, his eye was caught by a small bust which he had not noticed before, it was rather more placid and modest in its style than the surrounding work. It was, Andersen told him, a bust of the young Count Bevilacqua and had been much admired. There was, Henry saw, something raw and clumsy about the piece, but also, perhaps because of the quality of the stone and its size, it could easily have been a piece of archaeology, something buried under one of the streets on which they walked. Immediately, he wished to take it with him and pay handsomely for it as a token of these weeks with his new friend. Once Andersen understood that he not only admired it but planned to buy it, he noticed him quicken with pride and ambition. Selling his work, making his mark on the world, Henry understood, seemed to mean more to him than any number of friendships. He darted about the studio in excitement and embraced Henry warmly once a price had been agreed, holding him with strong affection. He promised that he would come to England as soon as he could. He discussed how the piece would be packaged and sent and how soon it might arrive. What Henry noticed more than anything was how unable he was to conceal his pure delight.

They had supper together that evening in Andersen’s local restaurant to celebrate Henry’s purchase. Andersen, he saw, had dressed almost formally for the occasion and as soon as they sat down and a candle was lit at their table he adopted a tone which was new. His expression became interested and deeply involved as he asked questions and listened with care to the answers about how Henry lived, why he was in England and why he travelled less as the years went on. Henry was almost amused at the seriousness of his manner as he put the same boyish energy into his interrogations as he had put into his previous silences and monologues. It was only when Andersen attempted to draw out from Henry things about his father and mother that Henry ceased to be amused and wished instead to turn the conversation back to less intimate matters. As the sculptor began to rail against his own father, after a slight provocation from Henry, Henry was almost pleased although he viewed the sculptor’s tone as too personal now and too petulant and too ready to discuss freely what Henry believed were deeply private matters.When they left the restaurant he was happy that Andersen would accompany him as far as his hotel, the night being warm and the streets of old Rome at their most seductive. This would be their last evening alone with one another, as both had agreed to attend a large gathering at the Storys’ apartment on Henry’s last night, which would fall on the morrow.

It struck him that he had not himself changed in the twenty-five or thirty years since he had strolled like this in Rome at night. He had never discussed his parents or his ambitions with anyone; his talk in all the years had been finely balanced and controlled; he approached his work even then with consistency and care. Andersen was not like that, and now, it occurred to him that Andersen would not change either. He would remain all his life innocent and confusing, charming and open. As they grew silent, Henry wanted to turn to his friend to say that he should take as much from life as it would offer him, that he was young still and should want everything and live as much as he could. As they reached the foot of the Spanish Steps, he was inclined for a second to point out to him the window of the room where the poet Keats had died, but he knew that such an invocation of death and suffering would break the spell of now. When Andersen, at the door of the hotel, stood back having embraced him, he could not help watching his smile intensely, trying to hold it in his mind, knowing how much he would need to remember it when he returned to England.

WHEN HE ARRIVED at Rye, being met by a cheerful Burgess Noakes, complete with wheelbarrow, he saw the town as if through Andersen’s eyes. He realized how very small it would seem and how drained the colours. The spaces in Lamb House seemed like hallways or ante-rooms compared with the living quarters in Roman apartments, and even the garden, which he had spoken of so proudly to his new friend, seemed reduced, confined. He watched Burgess unpack as he set about repossessing his own house, wondering what it would seem like to Hendrik Andersen.

He did not write to Andersen until the small bust arrived, although he composed many letters to him in his mind, telling him how fresh he remained in his thoughts, and how satisfying, now that both he and the weather had settled, the English afternoon could be, and how magnificent, now that he had become accustomed to its proportions, was his own private, walled garden. He knew that none of this would interest Andersen very much, but he had difficulty finding a tone and a subject matter both warm and restrained.

When the bust was unpacked, however, and a broad base for it was constructed in the corner of the room at the chimney piece, and it rested there happily and easily, he could write to Andersen expressing his delight with the piece and praising its charm, knowing that such praise would interest his friend, being able to picture Andersen as he hungrily took in the words. For his own part, speaking to Andersen from such a distance about his work being tenderly unpacked and lifted and laid bare and having it constantly before him as an admirable and much-loved companion and friend gave him pleasure. Telling Andersen that his piece of sculpture was so living and human, sympathetic and sociable, adding that it would be a lifelong attachment, was easier than telling Andersen that he himself was in Henry’s thoughts all day, that sometimes when he worked he would pause, wondering what the cause was of a strange glow of happiness or warm expectation which came over him, and realizing it was the afterglow of his time in Rome and his hope that Andersen would come to visit him in Rye.

Soon, Andersen wrote back and in his awkward handwriting and with his bad spelling announced that he would, indeed, come to visit. Despite the brevity of the letter and the rudimentary epistolary style, his voice was there in the sentences, rushed, undisciplined, serious, nervous, sincere. Henry held the letter close to him, finding that he did not want to part with it, until he forced himself to leave it aside. But he could not stop himself studying his garden, placing Andersen’s ample frame in a chair under the wide-spreading old mulberry tree, imagining both of them in the languid sunlight. In the dining room as he ate alone he placed Andersen opposite him and allowed the two of them to linger over the wine before ascending to the drawing room. He did not mind if Andersen’s talk would be scattered or boastful. He wished for him to come before the summer was over, to share the long bright evenings with him, to keep all other company at bay so that he could enjoy his friend and so that Andersen could see life on a smaller scale.

It would be simple, he decided, to renovate the small studio which formed part of his property and gave onto Watchbell Street. As he wrote to Andersen and arranged the date of his coming, he began to imagine his friend, having seen how splendidly Henry managed to work in the garden room in the summer months, realize that the studio could so easily become a place for his labours during a part of his year. He found a key for the studio and examined its contours and saw how with close consultation between Andersen and the architect Warren, work could begin on making it a modest and stylish place for a sculptor to spend his days. He imagined his own solitary happiness, as he set about creating new work, knowing that not far away the sculptor Andersen was working in stone. He knew that his mind was moving too quickly and that the picture he drew for himself of their joint industry belonged to the realms of the unlikely, but this vision also allowed him to live his days with a sweet edge to them and allowed him to make other plans with a happier grace.

As the time for Andersen’s arrival approached, despite the fact that he had promised to stay merely three days while he was en route to New York from Rome, Henry constantly dreaded his departure and prepared for the moment when he would meet him from the train while working out how best to entertain him during his time in Rye. This must be, he thought, how others felt, how his father must have felt in the time after he met his mother, or how William felt waiting for Alice to become his wife. He wondered if this state of bewitched confusion came to him more deeply now because of his age, and because of Andersen’s short stay, and because of the impossibility of his imaginings. As he walked through Rye, or took his bicycle through the summer countryside, he watched people at random, wondering if they had ever experienced such tender longing, such rapturous tightening of the self in anticipation of another’s arrival.

Andersen’s decision to stay a short time was, despite his dreaming, not only a sentence of disappointment but a way for him to experience again, but more sharply now, the sense of doom which came with longing and attachment. As if to ward off the ache which fresh disappointment might bring, he went over the time in Paris with Paul Joukowsky more than twenty years earlier. He had gone through that night so many times in his mind. It lived with him in its drama and its finality. He remembered circling and circling, presuming that he would move away soon, return in the misty night to the grim sanctuary of his Paris flat.Yet he had moved closer. He had stood on the pavement as night fell and the mist became rain, and even thinking about it now made him afraid but also excited at what might have been. He had waited there, staring up at Paul’s window which was etched in lamplight, desperately holding himself back from crossing the street and making himself known. For hours he had stayed there, his long vigil ending in defeat. For years, it had come to haunt him at unlikely moments, as it haunted him now.

BURGESS NOAKES was, by this time, used to visitors, especially in the summer months, and the rest of the staff, since the departure of the Smiths, were in constant readiness to receive the small stream of old friends and family who came to stay at Lamb House. Burgess Noakes was not by nature curious; he took things as they came. Now, however, just before the arrival of Hendrik Andersen he began to appear in front of Henry, embarrassed and slightly stuck for words, to ask various questions about Mr Andersen’s habits and preferences.

On the day when Andersen was to be met from the train, Henry noticed Burgess Noakes hovering about the breakfast room and later standing idly at the door of his study. He observed that Noakes was dressed more carefully than usual and had a new haircut and seemed more sprightly in his movements. He smiled at the idea that his own vague and uneasy hopes and dreams had become palpable in his household. At seven o’clock, Noakes was waiting for him at his front door in semi-military pose, his wheelbarrow at the ready like a cannon waiting to be fired.

ANDERSEN BEGAN talking as soon as he alighted from his carriage. He wished to point out several people with whom he had shared his compartment and, as the train departed, he saw them off with many waves. Burgess Noakes, having taken control of Andersen’s baggage and placed it in his wheelbarrow, kept his eye firmly on Henry, placidly studying him, and never once, as far as Henry could ascertain, cast the smallest glance at their visitor, and avoided him when they arrived at Lamb House as though he might bite.

Andersen moved around the house offering casual glances as if what he saw were familiar to him. Even the bust of Count Bevilacqua in the corner of the dining room did not receive more than a cursory inspection. Travelling seemed to have unsettled him so that he did not, he insisted, wish to go to his room and change his clothes, nor did he wish for any refreshment, nor a seat in the garden, nor a seat anywhere else. It was as if he had recently been wired for electricity and all the switches had been turned on. He was all buzz and blazing lights as he told Henry of his work and who in New York he was to see about it and what they might say and what they had already said. The names of dealers and collectors and city planners mingled with those of millionaires and society ladies. Paris and New York and Rome and London were all mentioned as places where there was much admiration, he said, for him and hunger for his work.

Henry had, since he came back from Italy, been deep in daily contemplation of a number of projects, knowing that at least two of them would require an immense effort. The work would be at first like breathing on glass in its uncertainty and its delicacy; he would hope that he could see a pattern before the breath was cleared away. And then the labour involved would be rigorous beyond anything he had ever done. As he listened to Andersen he felt a wry sense of satisfaction that he knew about difficulty and the shame of failure. He would remain dumb now, hoping that his friend would grow calm, trying not to interrupt him or compete with him, but instead feeling happy that he had arrived even if Andersen did not appear to have yet realized that he had done so.

IN THE MORNING, when he found that Andersen had not risen, Henry went to the garden room after breakfast and began the day’s work. The Scot did not seem to notice his hesitations, his need to have whole sentences repeated, nor did he show any sign or make any comment when Henry began to dictate fluently and fast, as fast as the machine could move, so that nothing would be allowed to distract Henry, not the possibility that his guest was still in bed, or at his ablutions, or having a very late breakfast, or ready to appear at any moment. He had found this before when he had guests, that it was easy to disappear into his workroom and discover a strange and powerful concentration, fierce in its attention to each sentence, as a way of shutting them out, or enjoying the idea that he would soon see them, or both. He worked with added vigour and seriousness as a way of showing himself that he could. Thus he worked all morning until he saw that he had tired the Scot out and until he knew that he would find Andersen somewhere in his house or garden waiting for him.

In Rome he had observed that Andersen’s clothes fitted in perfectly there with that of his associates, seeming neither too casual nor too narcissistic. Now, however, when Andersen stood up to greet him from his seat in a corner of the drawing room upstairs, Henry noticed his black suit, his white shirt and his bow tie the same light blue colour as his eyes. Andersen looked like a man who had spent much of the morning preparing himself for this interview.

As they ate lunch it became obvious that the weather would not hold and thus any possible excursion on foot or by bicycle would have to be postponed. He wondered for a moment what Andersen did on rainy days in Rome until he recalled that rainy days there were few and, in any case, irrespective of the weather, Andersen went to his studio. When Henry mentioned rainy days in Newport, Andersen spoke of his dreadful memory of them, the sense of being trapped in a small house, watching all day to see if it might clear and knowing so often as evening settled in that it would remain wet and soon become dark as well. Even still, he said, the memory of it made him shiver. He laughed.

Before lunch was over, the rain had begun to wash against the windows of Lamb House in great sheets, making the dining room appear dark and the garden inhospitable. Henry watched Andersen’s spirits visibly sink. Were Henry alone now, he would have a most profitable afternoon’s reading and would allow a single volume to transport him to suppertime and beyond, but Andersen, as far as he could discover, did not read and it was, anyway, unimaginable that he had travelled all this distance to bury himself for an afternoon in a book.

The previous evening, Henry had mentioned the empty studio in Watchbell Street and found over lunch that Andersen was anxious to see it, if they could find an umbrella and brave the rain. Henry wished that it were some distance away so that an excursion there could be time-consuming and require preparation. Instead, it was merely a few steps beyond the front door, and once Burgess Noakes appeared with umbrellas, watching Andersen now as though he were about to make a sketch of him, all three made their way briskly to the abandoned building nearby, Henry carrying the key.

He did not know, but should, he realized, have guessed, that the roof of the old studio leaked in two or three places. Once he had opened the door, the three of them stood at the door as water dripped copiously onto the cement floor. The light in the studio was scarce and disheartening and there were gathered in the corner a good deal of scrap and a number of old bicycles, and these, with the sound of the rain, somehow added to the sheer dreariness of the space. None of them seemed inclined to venture too far inside and they remained at the entrance in silence. Henry had spoken about this as a possible studio for a sculptor which would be especially suitable in the summer months when the Roman heat made that city unbearable, and could be used in the winter to store works with a view to showing them to the London galleries. Now, it looked like a leaky shed used to store rusting bicycles and Henry knew that his friend, occupied with plans for his future success in the vast cities of the world, was in possession of a large and ambitious imagination which had no mercy on such dingy and shabby spaces. Even Burgess Noakes in the demented way in which his eyes darted from a drip to its final destination and then to his employer and then to his employer’s guest, seemed part of a plot to ensure that Hendrik Andersen would never set foot in Rye again.

Henry and Andersen spent the afternoon in desultory conversation and, when the rain finally cleared, their walk through Rye and into the countryside also had a desultory air. Andersen’s mind was on his journey and on his stay in New York and Henry sensed that if his friend could slip away to London without causing a major break in whatever decorum he felt existed between them, he would do so instantly.

As they sat in the drawing room before supper was served, Andersen began to speak about his ambitions. When he said that what he really had in mind was to design a world city, Henry found himself asking in mild exasperation if he was planning to do so in miniature. In the heat of his expoundings, Andersen did not appear to entertain the possibility that the question had been asked sarcastically or even maliciously. He explained that no, he had in mind a genuine world city, a place of great buildings and monuments, which would include the best architecture and statuary of each civilization. It would be an adventure in harmony and human understanding, a place where mankind could come together symbolically, where all the episodes of civilization were represented, where princes and potentates and artists and philosophers could gather, where the best of all human endeavour was on display.

As Andersen spoke, his voice full of excitement, the final rays of the sun hit against the old brick of the garden wall; Henry found their worn texture, the crumbling russet colour, and the clear bright green of the creepers after the day’s rain enormously comforting. He nodded regularly at Andersen. When they moved to the dining room, he placed himself facing the French windows so that he could witness the dusky light giving way to shadows under the trees. Andersen was now talking about the support he would need for this project and the support he already had. It would be easy for him to continue all his life, he said, making single pieces of sculpture such as Henry and others had admired, but he wished now, before he was much older, to embark on an integrated project which would take years to complete and which would make a difference to mankind.

‘Mankind,’ Henry found himself saying, ‘is a very large business.’

‘Yes,’ Andersen said, ‘and mankind is made up of many false divisions and false conflicts. Mankind’s achievements have never before been brought together in one place that is a living city and not a museum, a place where beauty and human understanding could thrive.’

Henry’s mind was half filled with the work of the morning. He had found a fictional character who interested him, a serious-minded journalist, sensitive, intelligent and talented, being offered a project close to the project which the Storys had offered him in Rome – to write a biography of their father leaving at his disposal all available material. He had this morning described such a figure coming to Lamb House after the death of a writer very like himself, standing in the very study in which he was then dictating, and taking possession of the papers and letters there. But the journalist as he imagined him was also as close to himself as he could make him, and thus he set out to dramatize his own self haunting the space he would leave when he died. Just now for one second he had a view of that figure of the journalist walking the dimly lit narrow streets of Venice, avoiding something, but he put it aside, not knowing how he could use it. No one reading the story, he thought, would guess that he was playing with such vital elements, masking and unmasking himself.

It would read like a simple ghost story, but for him, as he had worked, conjured up his own death and made a character who seemed all the more real to him now as the day waned, the story had a strange power. It gave him an idea for further work, but some part of him was still shuddering in the wake of having created it in the first place. Compared with the city which Andersen was inventing, it was both nothing and everything. In its detail and its dialogue, its slow movement and its mystery, it stood against abstraction, against the greyness and foolishness of large concepts. But it stood singly and small and unprotected, barely present; it would take up a small space in a great and monumental library in a city where reading in solitude would not be part of his friend’s magnificent dream.

‘We need,’ Andersen said, ‘more than anything to spread word of this project.’

‘Indeed,’ Henry replied.

‘I wondered, since you have become acquainted with my work, if you have thought of contributing an article about it to some journal?’Andersen asked.

‘I am afraid I am a mere story-teller,’ Henry said.

‘You have written articles?’

‘Yes, but now I labour at the humble business of fiction. It is all I know, I’m afraid.’

‘But you are acquainted with influential editors?’

‘Most of the editors I have worked with are well and truly dead or well and truly enjoying their retirement,’ Henry said.

‘But you would write about my works and my plans if the journal could be found which was interested?’ Hendrik asked.

Henry hesitated.

‘I could, I imagine,’ Andersen continued, ‘find someone in New York who might be interested.’

‘Perhaps we should leave art criticism to the art critics,’ Henry said.

‘But if an editor could be found who would like a description of my work?’

‘I will do what I can for you,’ Henry said and smiled. He rose from the table. It was already dark outside.

THE FOLLOWING morning, when he had finished his breakfast, he sat in the garden for some moments waiting for the arrival of McAlpine. Already the sky was cloudless; he carried his chair to the corner of the garden which caught the sun at this time. Andersen was still asleep, as far as he knew, but had said, in any case, that he wished to breakfast in his room. When the Scot arrived, they moved into the garden room and set to work immediately. He had looked at the typed pages from yesterday before he went to bed and made his corrections to them; now, within an hour, he would complete a story, and, as the sun moved hauntingly across the garden, and the day became warm, he started on another story, the scale even smaller than the one before, the effect almost defiantly minuscule and unportentous. He dictated with his usual mixture of certainty and hesitation, stopping briefly and darting forward again, and then going to the window, as if to find the word or phrase he sought in the garden, among the shrubs or the creepers or the abundant growth of late summer, and turning back deliberately into the cool room with the right phrase in his head and the sentence which followed until the paragraph had been completed.

By the time they sat down for lunch the day was sweltering. Andersen was wearing a white suit and had a straw hat at the ready as if he were preparing to go boating. They discussed how the afternoon might be spent, and when Andersen learned how close they were to the sea and how easy it would be to go to the strand by bicycle, he insisted that he had no greater wish than to bathe in the salt water and walk in his bare feet on the sand. His enthusiasm was a lovely relief as he refrained from mentioning any of his plans to win fame as a sculptor throughout the meal. Once lunch was over, they changed into clothes more suitable for both cycling and lounging on the beach and then set out on the two well-oiled bicycles Burgess Noakes had fetched from the shed behind the kitchen. They rode slowly down the cobbled hill and then set out for Winchelsea, the breeze from the sea cool and salty in their faces. Andersen, with his bathing costume and towel tied to the carrier, was in high good humour as he pedalled hard along the flat road and down the hill at Udimore to the sea.

When they left their bicycles and walked along the sandy path through the dunes, Henry noticed the haze of heat which made everything vague and the horizon barely visible. The mild exertion and the closeness of the sea seemed to have changed Andersen’s mood, had made him quiet. When finally they reached the water’s edge, he stopped and looked out to sea, narrowing his eyes against the light, briefly and affectionately putting his arm around Henry.

‘I had forgotten about this,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure where I am. I could swim to Bergen, I could swim to Newport. If my brother was here now…’

He stopped and shook his head in wonder.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if I close my eyes and open them, I can imagine a stretch of sand and the light like this and I’m in Norway and I must be five or six years old, but Newport can be like this too on a summer’s day. It’s the air, the sea breeze. I could be home now.’

They walked along by the line the water made against the sand. The waves were calm and the beach was almost deserted. Henry stood looking out to sea as Andersen changed into his bathing costume and, leaving Henry to guard his clothes, he became a moving version of one of his own sculptures, his torso richly smooth and white, his arms and legs muscular.

‘It will be cold,’ he said. ‘I can tell by looking.’

Henry watched him as he waded into the water, jumping to avoid each wave before diving under the water and swimming out, the strokes strong and firm. At times he disappeared under the waves, allowing himself to float in towards the shore, waving at Henry who stood fully clothed, enjoying the heat of the sun.

When Andersen had dried himself and changed back into his clothes they walked for miles along the strand, meeting almost no one. Both of them stopped regularly for no reason to look out to sea, studying the far horizon or a boat in the distance. Andersen listened when Henry explained how the land had been reclaimed, thus making inland towns out of places which had once been harbours.

‘If this was Newport,’ Andersen said, ‘we would be able to walk to the pier and watch them unloading the catch or preparing for a night’s fishing.’

Andersen began to talk then about the Newport he had first seen as a child, arriving from Norway with his parents, his two brothers and his sister. That was when he had heard of the James family, he said. He knew where they had lived and that the son had become a writer because everyone told him so. The Andersens, he said, had everything except money; his brother was so clearly a talented painter when he was a mere child, just as he too was precociously talented, just as his younger brother was a promising musician. Old Newport, the old ladies and the half-Europeanized families, believed in talent, he said, more than they did in money, but that was because they had plenty of money, or had inherited enough never to think about it. The Andersens, he said, might have seemed like that too when they went visiting or went to church, but at home they had no money, so money was all they thought about.

‘They bought us oil paint and easels,’ he said, ‘and pretended not to notice our patched clothes. They discussed great art with us in the late afternoon and we could smell their hot suppers being made knowing that we were going home to cold suppers or grim suppers.’

‘Rome,’ Henry said, ‘must have been a relief.’

‘If only Rome had beaches and salt water,’ Andersen said.

‘And if only Newport had the Colosseum,’ Henry replied, ‘and if only the Andersens had possessed a fortune.’

‘And if only the James brothers had had patches in their trousers,’ Andersen laughed and punched Henry freely and softly in the stomach before putting his arm around him.

They freewheeled homewards in the twilight, dismounting briefly when they came to Udimore and again as they approached close to Lamb House. They arranged to meet in the garden for drinks after dressing for the evening.

As Henry waited for Andersen to come down, the scale of the garden, its modest and guarded proportions, in the raw slanted light which came from the dying sun, appeared more natural, closer to the scale of the landscape they had been moving in, and strangely closer to their range of feeling, Henry thought, than the openness and grand vistas of Rome. It might be easier, he thought, now that the rain had lifted and now that Andersen had seemed to settle, for them to relax together, to enjoy one another.

When Andersen came down, his hair was freshly washed and still wet at the ends and his light skin had been reddened by the day’s sun. He smiled and made himself comfortable and sipped a drink and slowly examined the garden as though he had not seen it before. Henry had previously indicated the garden room to him as the place where he worked in the summer, but had not as yet invited him into the room. When he did so now, they walked slowly, drinks in hand, across the lawn.

‘This is where all your work is done,’ Andersen said when Henry had closed the door behind them.

‘This is where the tales are told,’ Henry said.

To the left of the entrance there was a wall of books, and when Andersen had studied the view and marvelled at the light, he walked over to inspect the books, not appearing to realize at first that all of them bore his host’s name. He took down one or two and then gradually it seemed to dawn on him that this large high bookcase contained the novels and stories of Henry James in all their editions from both sides of the Atlantic. He became agitated and excited as he took volumes down and looked at the spines and the title pages.

‘You have written a whole library,’ he said. ‘I will have to read them all.’

He turned and looked at Henry.

‘Did you always know that you would write all these books?’

‘I know the next sentence,’ Henry said, ‘and often the next story and I take notes for novels.’

‘But did you not once plan it all? Did you not say this is what I will do with my life?’

By the time he asked the second question, Henry had turned away from him and was facing towards the window with no idea why his eyes had filled with tears.

WHEN THEY HAD talked for a while after supper, Henry went to bed leaving Andersen downstairs reading one of his collections, insisting that he would finish at least a substantial number of the stories before he left Rye the next day. After a time he heard the stairs creak and he began to imagine Andersen’s tall frame, book in hand, arriving on the landing; he pictured him opening his door and going into his bedroom. Soon, he heard him cross the landing to go to the bathroom and then return to the bedroom and close the door.

As the floorboards creaked under Andersen’s feet, Henry imagined his friend undressing, removing his jacket and his tie. And then he heard only silence as perhaps Andersen sat on the bed to remove his shoes and his socks. Henry waited, listening. And now after an interval came further creaks as, Henry surmised, he must have been removing his shirt; he dreamed of him standing bare-chested in the room, and then reaching to find his night attire. Henry did not know what Andersen would do now. He wondered if he would not remove his trousers and his underwear and stand naked studying himself in the mirror, looking at how the sun had marked his neck, observing how strong he was, staring at the blue of his own eyes, not making a sound.

And then he heard another creak as though Andersen had briefly changed his position. Henry imagined the room, the dark green curtains and light green wallpaper, the rugs on the floor and the large old bed which Lady Wolseley had made him buy, and the lamps on small tables on each side of the bed which Burgess Noakes would have lit, having, as was his custom, turned the main light off in each bedroom. Henry, as he lay on his back with the book he was reading left to one side, his own lamp still switched on and shining, closed his eyes and envisioned his guest now, naked in lamplight, his body powerful and perfect, his skin smooth and soft to the touch, the floorboards creaking under him as, having inspected himself in the mirror one more time, he got into his night attire and crossed the room to fetch his book perhaps, and returned to the bed. Then there was silence. Henry could hear only his own breathing. He waited, not moving. Andersen, he thought, must be in bed. He wondered if he were lying in the dark, or if he had continued reading. He heard the sound of a cough or a clearing of his throat, but nothing else. He took up the book and found his place and resumed reading, concentrating as hard as he could on the words, turning the page in the silence which had now descended on Lamb House.

IN THE MORNING, under clear skies, they went for a stroll through the town as Burgess Noakes packed Andersen’s baggage and the Scot made clean copies of a number of stories which were ready to be sent to magazines. After lunch, the cases lying waiting in the hall and the train for London due within an hour, Henry and Andersen busied themselves with keeping the wasps from feasting on the desserts which they had taken on a tray into the garden with them.

Henry did not know how Andersen would remember his visit to Rye, or how genuinely he meant it when he said that he regretted the shortness of his stay and intended to return and remain longer at Lamb House very soon. He noticed in him a great restlessness which interested him but which he did not envy. He knew that in New York and later in Rome Andersen would attract friends and admirers with his good looks and his unsettling charm. Henry felt strangely protective of him and possessive. He imagined Andersen’s mother in Newport, the effort she had made to find a place for her children in the world, and how this one, this golden youth, guileless and mercurial and vulnerable and surely not a regular correspondent, might preoccupy her, how she might want him home, as Henry wanted him here. Andersen, Henry thought, was ready for everything, except homecoming in any form it might take. The idea of the clash between the son’s golden manners and his ambitions, so carefully refined by his Roman sojourn, and his mother’s needs and worries and longing fascinated Henry now as a possible drama.

Andersen, he saw, was not interested in drama; he was in love with the future. He was what he appeared to be – a young man happily waiting for a train. He was affectionate and grateful, but more than anything, he was looking forward to the journey.

Andersen held Henry by the hand and then embraced him as his luggage was hauled into the compartment.

‘You’ve been so good for me,’ he said. ‘It’s so important that you believe in me.’

He embraced Henry once more before turning and stepping into the train, awkwardly handing Burgess Noakes a small consideration as he edged past him. Henry and Noakes stood on the platform, Noakes remaining still while Henry waved as the train left Rye on its journey to London.