CHAPTER FIVE
HIS HAND HURT HIM. If he wrote with it, moving the pen calmly with no flourishes, then he did not feel even a mild discomfort, but when he stopped writing, when he moved his hand about, he could, on turning a door handle, for example, or shaving, feel an excruciating pain in his wrist and the bones which ran towards his little finger. Lifting a sheet of paper was a form of mild torture now. He wondered if this were a message from the gods to keep writing, to wield his pen at all times.
Every year as the summer approached he felt the same persistent dull worry which led eventually to panic. As transatlantic travel became easier, and more comfortable, it also became more popular. As time went by, his many cousins in America seemed to develop many more cousins of their own, and his friends many more friends. In London all of them wished to visit the Tower and Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery, and over the years his name had been added to the list of the great local monuments, essential to see. As soon as the evenings lengthened and the swallows returned from the south, the letters began to arrive, letters of introduction and what he called letters of determination from the very tourists themselves, certain that their visit to the capital would lack all due shine were they to miss the famous writer and not receive the benefit of his company and counsel. Should his gates be locked to them, their letters implied – indeed, they often insisted and implored – then they would not get full value for their money, and this he discovered meant more and more to his compatriots as the century came to an end.
He remembered what he had written in his notebook the previous year; it was a scene which had been on his mind since then. Jonathan Sturges had told him of a meeting in Paris with William Dean Howells, now almost sixty. Howells had told Sturges that he did not know the city, all of it was new to him, and every sensation came to him freshly. Howells seemed sad and brooding, as if to suggest that it was too late for him in the evening of his life when he could do nothing except take in the sensations and regret that they had not come to him when he was young. Then, in response to something Sturges had said, Howells laid his hand on his shoulders and exclaimed: ‘Oh you are young, be glad of it and live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do – but live.’ Sturges had acted out the lines, making them into a strange and plaintive appeal, a sudden burst of drama, as though Howells were speaking the truth for the first time.
Henry had known Howells for thirty years and corresponded with him regularly. Whenever Howells came to London, he behaved as though he were at home there, as though he were a well-travelled cosmopolitan gentleman. Henry was amazed then by his response to Paris, the sense Sturges got from him that he had not lived at all and that it was too late for him now to begin to do so.
Henry wished that London made his American guests express themselves as Howells did. He wished that the visits instilled awe or regret, or caused them to understand the world and their place in it as never before. Instead, he listened as they told him and each other that there were towers in the United States too, and that some of their own correctional institutions compared rather favourably in size, if nothing else, with the Tower of London. And, in addition, their own Charles River seemed to serve its purpose more efficiently than the Thames.
Nonetheless, as each summer came around, watching London through his visitors’ eyes interested him; he imagined himself as them, seeing London for the first time, just as he imagined the lives he could have lived when he went to Italy or on his return visits to the United States. A new streetscape, even a single building, could fill him with thoughts about who he might have become, who he might be now had he stayed in Boston or spent his days in Rome or Florence.
For him as a boy and for William, and perhaps even for Wilky and Bob and maybe even Alice, the reasons given for moving from Paris to Boulogne or from Boulogne back to London, or from Europe in general back to the United States, never seemed as solid as their father’s own restlessness, his great agitation, which they knew but never managed to understand. The finding of a haven only to be uprooted after a time, or the arriving, as his family did throughout his boyhood, at an unfortunate lodging, not knowing how long it would take his father to announce that they would soon have to depart, made him long for security and settlement. He could not think why his family had translated themselves from Paris to Boulogne. He must have been twelve or thirteen then, and there may have been a crisis on the stock exchange or a failure of some leaseholder to pay rent or an alarming letter about dividends.
In the time they lived in Boulogne, Henry walked with his father on the beach. On one of those occasions, it was a windless and calm day, the beginning of summer, with a long sandy expanse and a wide sweep of sea. They had been to a cafe with large clear windows and a floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that for Henry gave it something of the charm of a circus. It was empty save for an old gentleman who picked his teeth with great facial contortions and another gentleman who soaked his buttered rolls in his coffee, to Henry’s fascinated pleasure, and then disposed of them in the little interval between his nose and chin. Henry did not wish to leave, but his father wanted his daily walk on the beach and thus he had to abandon his delight in observing the eating habits of the French.
His father must have talked as they went along. The image in his mind now, in any case, was of him gesticulating, discussing a lecture or a book or a new set of ideas. He liked his father talking, especially when William was elsewhere.
They did not paddle or walk too near the waves. His memory was that they walked briskly. His father may even have carried a stick. It was a picture of happiness. And for a stranger watching, it might have remained like that, an idyllic scene of a father and son at ease together in the late morning on the beach in Boulogne. There was a woman bathing, a young woman being watched by an older woman on the beach. The bather was large, perhaps even overweight, and well protected from the elements by an elaborate bathing costume. She swam out expertly, allowing herself to float back with the waves. Then she stood facing out to sea letting her hands play with the water. Henry barely noticed her at first as his father stopped and made as though to examine something on the far horizon. Then his father walked forward for a while, silently, distracted, and turned back to study the horizon once more. This time Henry realized that he was watching the bather, examining her fiercely and hungrily and then turning away, observing the low dunes behind him, pretending that they also interested him to the same intense degree.
As his father turned away once more and began walking towards home, he sounded out of breath and did not speak. Henry wanted to find an excuse to run ahead and get away from him, but then his father turned again, the expression on his face vivid, the skin blotched and the eyes sharp as though he were angry. His father was now standing on the shore, trembling, watching the swimmer who had her back to him, her costume clinging to her. His father made no further effort to seem casual. His stare was deliberate and pointed, but no one else noticed it. The woman did not look behind, and her companion had moved away. It was important, Henry knew, for him to pretend that this was nothing; there was no question that this could be mentioned or commented on. His father did not move, and seemed unaware of his presence, but he must have known he was there, Henry thought, and whatever this was, this keen-eyed drinking in of the woman bather, it was enough to make his father not care about Henry’s presence. Finally, as he turned and set out on the journey home, his father stared back regularly with the look of someone who had been hunted down and defeated. The woman, once more, swam out to sea.
HENRY LOVED the softness of the colours on the beach near Rye, the changing light, the creamy clouds moving across the sky as though with a purpose. He had spent the last few summers here, and this summer in particular, as he walked briskly, trying for once to enjoy the day without making plans, he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this – calm work, calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light. Before he left London, he had purchased the bicycle which now lay waiting for him in the lane that led to the beach. He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to move slowly.
He wished every morning when he stood on his terrace that he could find some way to catch this picture of beauty and keep it close to him. The terrace was paved and curved like the prow of a ship and it overhung a view both as pure and as full of change as an expanse of sea. And below was Rye, the most un-English of English places, red-roofed with meandering streets and clustered buildings, an Italian hill town with cobbled streets, its atmosphere sensuous, but reticent also and austere. He walked the streets of Rye almost every day now, studying the houses, the old shops with small-paned windows, the square church tower, the weathered beauty of the brick. Back home, his terrace was his opera box, from where he could survey all the kingdoms of the earth. His terrace, he thought, was as amiable as a person, perhaps even more so. He wished he could buy this house; he knew that he had already begun to resent the owner’s plans to retake the cottage at the end of July.
In June there was hardly any night at all. He lingered on the terrace as a slow mist came over the valley and a mild, gauzed darkness fell. Within a few hours there would be hints of the beginning of dawn. His only visitor in these days of industry and indolence wrote once again to confirm his arrival and departure. Oliver Wendell Holmes junior was an old friend, become now a distant one, part of a group of associates, young men he had known in Newport and Boston, who had become eminent in their thirties and were now leading influences on the age. When they came to England, they appeared mysterious to him, so confident, so adept at finishing their sentences, so used to being listened to, and yet they seemed to him, compared with men of their kind in England and France, oddly raw and boyish, their brashness a kind of innocence. His brother William had all of that too, but it was only one half of him; the other half was made up of a deep self-consciousness where all his rawness and freshness had been buried in irony. William knew the effect which his own deliberate and complex personality could have, but this was something that their contemporaries, who held power in the literary world in the United States, or in the law, knew nothing about. They remained natural, and this, for Henry, was a matter of enormous interest.
Thus William Dean Howells could fall for Paris, having built no defences against the sensuous world, defences that any European man of his age would assiduously and carefully have developed. Howells was ready to be seduced by beauty and prepared to feel deep regret that beauty had passed him by in Boston. Henry loved the yearning openness of Americans, their readiness for experience, their eyes bright with expectation and promise. As he worked on his novels of English morals and manners, he felt the dry nature of the English experience – sure of its own place and unready for change, steeped in the solid and the social, a system of manners developed without much interruption for a thousand years. On the other hand, these educated and powerful American visitors seemed so shiny, so ready to be new, so sure that their moment had come that now, as he sat on his terrace in the twilight, he felt their force, how much could still be done with them, how little attention he had paid them in recent years. He was glad then that he had invited Oliver Wendell Holmes to stay at Point Hill and he vowed that he would see him in London also if he could. He who had come to dread these interruptions found himself rather interested in this one.
When he began to picture Holmes, to place him against the background of when he had first known him, he remembered the aura of certainty and dependability which lay about his friend. Even at twenty-two Holmes had believed that the world he inhabited was a world in which he would thrive. He was formed like a planing machine to gorge a deep self-beneficial groove through life. He made sure that when fresh experience came his way it was rich and rewarding and gave him pleasure. As he learned to think, however, his mind became like a stiff spring. He was caught thus between the venal and the exacting and it made his presence nervous and exciting. He had found a public voice, a way of holding himself and forming sentences and formulating policy and judgement, to ensure that the personal and the carnal would be held in check and not have to be on parade. He could be pompous and intimidating when he pleased. Henry had known him too well to be affected by this, yet, at William’s instigation, he had paid enough attention to Holmes’s role as a judge to be deeply impressed by him at the same time.
From William, too, he learned about aspects of Holmes which Holmes was careful never to display to him. Holmes loved, it seemed, to talk lightly of women to his old friends. This was something which offered William considerable amusement, especially when he learned that Holmes never alluded to such matters when Henry was present. In company, William insisted, Holmes also loved to refight the battles of the Civil War and explain his wounds to the assembled listeners.
‘When it gets late,’ William said, ‘Holmes becomes like his father, the old doctor and autocrat. He enjoys his own often-told anecdotes and loves a listener.’
William expressed incredulity that Holmes, in his meetings with Henry over the previous thirty years, had never mentioned the Civil War.
‘It’s all day long and then through the night, William went on, bullets whizzing and rifles and men charging and the dead lying everywhere and the wounded beyond description. And, indeed, his own wounds, even when there are ladies present he discusses his wounds. The only wonder is that he did not die of them. Surely he has shown you his wounds?’
Henry remembered that this conversation had taken place in William’s study. He could see William enjoying his own tone, allowing himself freedoms with his brother that he normally reserved for his wife.
Henry remembered with satisfaction how the conversation had ended.
‘What then do the two of you talk about?’ William asked. He seemed to want real information, a factual response.
Henry hesitated and looked into the distance, then focussed his eyes carefully on a number of leather-bound volumes on a far shelf, and quietly responded, ‘Wendell is formed, I fear, to testify simply and solely about himself.’
HE WAITED on his terrace after supper as night came down. Holmes, he remembered now, generally spoke to him about his career, his colleagues, new cases, new developments in law and politics and then new conquests he had made among the British aristocracy. He gossiped about old friends and boasted about new ones, speaking freely and solemnly. Henry loved his worldliness, his practised, clipped sentences and then a sudden burst of something else when he allowed himself to use words and phrases which hardly belonged to the law or the war, but more to the pulpit or the essay. Holmes loved to speculate, argue with himself, explain his own logic as though it were a side in a battle with opposing forces and much interior drama.
Henry did not mind what Holmes said. He saw him seldom and knew that what connected them was simple. They were part of an old world, fully respectable and oddly Puritan, led by the enquiring, protean minds of their fathers and the deeply cautious, watchful eyes of their mothers. They both had a sense of their destiny. More precisely, they belonged to the group of young men who had been to Harvard and who had known and loved Minny Temple, had sat at her feet and sought her approval and whom she haunted as they grew into middle age. In her company, they remembered, their experience had meant nothing, nor their innocence either, as she demanded something else from them. She elated them, and they felt a strange and insistent nostalgia when they recalled the time when they knew her.
She was Henry’s cousin, one of six Temple children, left as orphans when their parents died. For Henry and for William, the idea of the Temples not having parents made their cousins interesting and romantic. Their position seemed enviable, as all authority over them was vague and provisional. It made them appear free and loose, and it was only later, as each of them struggled in various ways, and indeed suffered, that he understood the unrecoverable nature and the deep sadness of their loss.
There was, between the time when he envied them and the time when he pitied them, a long gap. When he first reencountered Minny Temple aged seventeen, not having seen her for some years, the sentiment was still very much one of admiration, even awe. He instantly knew that she, among her sisters, would be special for him and that she would remain so. There were many words to describe her: she was light and curious and spontaneous and she was natural – that was important – and, perhaps, he felt, her lack of parenting gave her a sort of ease and freshness; she had never had to reflect anyone, or seek to become like anyone, or fight against such influences. Maybe, he later thought, in the shadow of so much death, she had developed what was her most remarkable feature – a taste for life. Her mind was restless; there was nothing she did not want to know, no matter on which she did not wish to speculate. She managed, he thought, to combine a questioning inner life with a quick sense of the social. She loved coming into a room to find people there. More than anything else, he remembered her laugh, its suddenness and its richness, but also its lightness, the strange, touching, ringing sound of it.
She had not, when she struck him first with all her moral force, appeared so ethereal. She came to Newport with one of her sisters and they seemed to him beautiful and clear-eyed and free, being looked after lightly at the time by their aunt and uncle. On that first visit Minny had argued with Henry’s father. Henry had never known a time when people did not argue with his father. As soon as he could listen, he had witnessed William and his father in deep discussion which involved raised voices and heated divergence of views. Most male visitors and some female ones too seemed to come to the house specifically to argue. Freedom of all sorts, and especially religious freedom, was his father’s great subject, but he also had many others; he did not believe in confining himself, it was one of his principles.
Minny Temple sat in the garden and at first listened silently to Henry’s father, who was addressing most of his remarks to William, nodding at times in the direction of Henry and the Temple sisters. There was a jug of lemonade and some glasses on the low garden table, and it might have been an ordinary, easy summer gathering of cousins amusing themselves at the feet of the older generation. Everything his father said had been uttered many times before, but despite this William grinned in encouragement as his father began now to discuss women and their deep inferiority and the need for them to remain not only subservient but patient.
‘By nature,’ he spoke quickly and emphatically, ‘woman is inferior to man. She is man’s inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect and his inferior in physical strength.’
‘My father has many convictions,’ William said amiably. He smiled at Minny, but she did not return his smile. Her gaze was still and serious. She sat up straight, seeming unrelaxed as if poised to speak. His father noticed her discomfort, and looked at her impatiently. For a few moments, the group was silent, waiting to see if she would say something. Her voice was low when she eventually began so that the old man had to strain to hear her.
‘Perhaps it is my very inferiority,’ she said, ‘which causes me to wonder.’
‘Wonder what?’ William asked.
‘Do you really wish to know?’ she asked. She almost laughed.
‘Say it out,’ the father said.
‘Very simply, sir, I wonder if what you are saying is true.’ Suddenly, her tone was direct and clear.
‘Do you mean you don’t agree with it?’ William asked.
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ Minny said. ‘If I had meant that I would have said it. I meant what I said. I wonder if it is true.’ A sharpness had entered her tone.
‘Of course it’s true.’ The old man’s eyes displayed his anger now. ‘A man is physically stronger than a woman. That much is clear, that much is true, if true is the word you want. And in passion a man is stronger, as I have said. And in intellect. Plato was not a woman, nor Sophocles, nor Shakespeare.’
‘How do we know Shakespeare was not a woman?’ William interjected.
‘Does what I have said satisfy you, Miss Temple?’ the father asked.
Minny did not answer him.
‘It is a woman’s job,’ he went on, ‘to be submissive. To see to her needlework and her cooking and her preparation to become the sleepless guardian of her husband’s children. We judge a woman by her obedience and her attention to duty.’
His voice had become rancorous and he was obviously annoyed.
‘Thus spake our father,’ William said.
‘Is that settled then?’ the old man asked Minny.
‘Not at all, sir. Nothing is settled.’ She smiled at him. Her expression was almost condescending as she continued. ‘Very simply, I do not know if being physically weaker than man means we understand less, or live less intelligently in the world. You see, I have the evidence close at hand which is my own weak mind, but I do not think it is weaker than anyone else’s.’
‘Women must live in Christian humility,’ Henry senior said.
‘Is that in the Bible, sir, or is it one of the Commandments, or did you learn it at school?’ Minny asked.
By suppertime the news had spread. Mrs James, Aunt Kate and Alice had been alerted to the outrage which had occurred.
‘She will not mind women cooking for her and keeping house for her,’ Henry’s mother said to him as they met in the hallway. ‘She has not been disciplined and she has not been cultivated, and we must pity her because her future will be grim.’
IN THE SUMMER of 1865, the Civil War over and his first two stories published, Henry prepared to spend the month of August with the Temples in New Hampshire. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had refused an invitation to Newport, agreed to go to North Conway, where the Temples were staying, once he discovered that there would be abundant female company. He was to travel with Henry, and John Gray, also fresh from the Civil War, was to follow. Henry wrote to Holmes to tell him that Minny Temple, after superhuman efforts, had ferreted out a single room, the only one in the area, and that the wretch who owned the room had, despite Minny’s protests and her charm, refused to furnish the room with two beds.
They would, Henry told him, pull the fellow’s own bed out from under him. In the meantime, Minny had her eye peeled for another bed, or indeed another room. Holmes seemed thrilled at the idea of an enemy who could be made to hand over his bed to his visitors. As they travelled to North Conway, he listed the tactics they could use, mentioning several technical terms and placing himself in the foreground as leader and hero and placing Henry, two years younger than he and not a veteran of any war, merely as a decoy. He did not seem to mind when Henry fell asleep.
They were to go for supper, as invited, at the house where the Temple girls were being chaperoned by their great-aunt, who looked, in Henry’s opinion, like George Washington. But first, on arrival at North Conway, they set out to find directions to their lodgings, and, after several wrong turns, they discovered a large and surly landlord who managed instantly to express his dislike for people who were not born and bred in North Conway and its immediate surroundings. Neither Holmes’s uniform, which he was wearing, nor his moustache, seemed to impress him. The landlord did not look at Henry. One bed, he said, that’s what he had told the lady, and one bed it was, but the room had a nice clean floor and you could sleep a whole regiment there, he added insolently as he gave them the key.
The room was bare, except for a washstand, a jug and basin, a closet and a small iron-framed bed covered by a strangely beautiful coloured quilt out of keeping with the spartan decor. They left their luggage at the door, as if unsure that they were going to stay.
‘I believe we should call for reinforcements and attack him forthwith,’ Holmes said.
Henry tested the bed, which sagged in the middle.
‘Perhaps it is the sort of room which benefits from its inhabitants remaining outdoors,’ Henry said.
He picked up a small lamp from the floor.
‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that every moth in New Hampshire has visited this shrine. It looks as though it came with the founding fathers.’
‘Is your cousin Minny wise?’ Holmes asked.
‘Yes, she is,’ Henry said.
‘In that case, I am sure she has found us another room.’
Henry went to the small window and looked out. The day was still bright and the smell of pine filled the air.
‘In the meantime,’ he turned to Holmes laughing, ‘I don’t mind if you don’t, as the lady said when the puppy dog licked her face.’
‘It is, I fear, going to be a long month,’ Holmes said.
MINNY AND TWO of her sisters were sitting on chairs on the back lawn when their cousin and his friend arrived. Henry was deeply conscious now of what Minny must look like to Holmes. She was not beautiful, he thought, until she spoke, or until she smiled. And then she managed a sympathy for her company and exuded a deep seriousness and a high good humour at the same time. Henry instantly thought that Holmes preferred her two sisters, Kitty and Elly, who were more conventionally pretty, more polite and shy than their sister.
As soon as they sat down, Henry noticed that Holmes became a military man, a Civil War veteran who had seen many battles and come close to death. Suddenly, military tactics were no longer a joke. The three Temple girls, whose brother William had been killed in the war, and their great-aunt stared at the soldier sadly and admiringly. Henry watched Minny carefully to see if all Holmes’s talk impressed her as much as it seemed to, but she gave nothing away.
After supper the two young men walked back to their room, happy with the news that Minny had found them other quarters to which they could move when John Gray arrived. Holmes was in good spirits; he had enjoyed the girls’ company and knew that he had a receptive audience, young and graceful and cheerful, for the duration of his stay. He made jokes and laughed, working out further methods of unsettling the landlord and winning the battle for the extra bed.
Neither of them had discussed how they would actually sleep, whether one of them would try the floor, or whether they would sleep head to toe, or alongside each other. Henry knew that Holmes would decide, and he lingered at the window while he waited for him to do so. Holmes, in the meantime, made brave efforts to light the lamp.
When it was lit, the room, in all its spareness and its shadows, seemed larger, more inviting; the quilt took on a new radiance. Holmes became serious, as though he were concentrating hard on a difficult subject. He moved to the basin with a bar of soap and a towel he had taken from his bag. He poured water from the jug into the basin and then quickly undressed until he was naked. Henry was surprised at how large-boned and strong Holmes seemed, almost fleshy in the quivering, shadowy light. For a second, as his friend remained still, he could have been a statue of a young man, tall and muscular. As Henry watched him, he forgot his moustache and his craggy features. He had never imagined he would see him like this. He supposed undressing as Holmes had done meant nothing to someone who had been a soldier for so long. Yet surely he knew that it was different, in the silence of the night in this strange, bare room, to undress completely in front of his friend? Henry studied his strong legs and buttocks, the line of his spine, his delicate bronzed neck. He wondered if Holmes would put his underwear back on before he went to bed. He too began to undress, and he was almost naked when Holmes opened the window and flung out the dirty, soapy water. Holmes replaced the basin and walked naked to the bed, moving the lamp close to him.
Henry did not know if Holmes was watching him as he stood, naked now, at the basin. He was acutely conscious of himself, lacking the ease and confidence which Holmes had just displayed. He washed himself slowly, and when Holmes spoke to him he half turned to find his friend lying in the bed with his hand behind his head.
‘I hope you don’t snore. We had a way of dealing with people who snored.’
Henry tried to smile and turned away. When he had dried himself and thrown the water out of the window, he knew that he would have to turn and that Holmes was now nonchalantly and casually watching him. He was embarrassed and still did not know if Holmes expected him to lie naked in the bed beside him. He was unsure if he should ask if this was the plan.
‘Can you put out the lamp?’ Henry asked.
‘Are you shy?’ Holmes asked, but he did not put the lamp out.
Henry turned and moved slowly towards the bed with his towel hanging loosely over his shoulder, half covering his torso. Holmes’s eyes were amused and involved. As Henry dropped the towel, Holmes leaned over and turned off the lamp.
They lay side by side without speaking. Henry could feel the bone of his pelvis hitting against Holmes. He wondered if he could suggest moving to the bottom of the bed but somehow, he understood, Holmes had taken control and silently withheld permission for him to make any suggestions. He could hear his own breathing and sense his own heart beating as he closed his eyes and turned his back on Holmes.
‘Goodnight,’ he said.
‘Goodnight,’ Holmes replied. Holmes did not turn but lay flat on his back. To make sure that he did not fall out of the bed, Henry had to move closer to him, but then moved away, keeping near the edge, yet still touching Holmes, who lay impassive.
He wondered if he would ever again be so intensely alive. Every breath, every hint that Holmes might move, or even the idea that Holmes too was awake, burned in his mind. There was no possibility of sleeping. Holmes, he thought, must have his arms folded on his chest, and there was no sound from him. His very immobility suggested that he was lying awake and alert. Henry longed to know if Holmes were as conscious as he was of their bodies touching, or if he lay there casually, unaware of the mass of coiled heat which lay up against him. The following day they would move to other rooms, so it would not be like this again for them. It had not been planned, and Henry had put no thought into it until he had seen Holmes by lamplight moving naked at the washstand. Even now if there was a choice, if another bed became available, he would go there instantly, creep out of here through the darkness. Nonetheless, he felt his powerlessness as a kind of ease. He was content not to move or speak, and he would feign sleep if he needed to do so. He knew that his remaining still and his silence left Holmes free, and he waited to see what Holmes would do, but Holmes did not move.
Since leaving Boston with Holmes he had felt a strange lack of tension and this had remained with him all evening. He knew what it was. William was not with them, having gone on a scientific expedition to Brazil. His older brother’s absence had, he knew, lightened things for him, removed a source of pressure which often became oppression, however mild. Holmes was William’s friend, a year older than William, yet Holmes had none of William’s ability to undermine him, or allow him to feel that every word he said, or every gesture, would be open to censure, or correction, or mockery.
Now suddenly Holmes moved towards the centre of the bed. His movement seemed to Henry like an act of will and not the unconscious movement of a man in his sleep. Quickly, without leaving himself time to think, Henry edged his way closer to Holmes, and they lay thus without stirring for some time. He could feel Holmes’s breathing presence, his large bony frame, close to him now, but he was careful to keep his breathing as shallow and quiet as he could.
When Holmes turned away from him, as he did now as suddenly as he had turned before, Henry realized that it would be his fate to lie here through the night, his mind racing, with this figure beside him, who was perhaps unaware of him, used to the company of men at close quarters. Holmes had, he now believed, fallen asleep. Henry did not know whether he was disappointed or relieved, but he wished he too could fall unconscious so that he would not have to think again until morning.
After a time, however, he became sure that Holmes was not sleeping. As they lay back to back he could feel the carefully tensed presence against him. He waited, knowing it was inevitable that Holmes would turn, inevitable that something would occur to break this silent, slow, deadlocked game they were playing. Holmes, he felt, was as consciously involved as he was in what might happen.
He was not surprised then when Holmes turned and cupped him with his body and placed one hand against his back and the other on his shoulder. He knew not to turn or move, but he sought to make clear at the same time that this did not imply resistance. He remained still as he had done all along, but subtly he eased himself more comfortably into the shape of Holmes, closing his eyes and allowing his breath to come as freely as it would.
He dozed and woke briefly and dozed again. When he woke finally, the room was bright with sunshine, and what surprised him now, with Holmes already awake, was how unafraid his friend was to catch his eye or come close to him again. He imagined that what had happened between them belonged to the secret night, the privacy that darkness brought. He knew that this would never be mentioned between them, nor mentioned by either of them to anybody else, and so he presumed that daylight would make all the difference to them. Also, he knew enough about what Holmes had been through in the war to know that he had stared evenly at death, had suffered painful injuries, and, more importantly, at the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two had learned a steely fearlessness. Henry had not supposed that this fearlessness could make its way so completely into the private realm, but it did so now in this rented room in New Hampshire in the bright morning.
By eleven the two men were washed and dressed, their luggage repacked, their landlord paid, and they were ready to present themselves at the court of the Temple sisters. They sat once more on the chairs on the back lawn and made plans for walks and outings. As the tea was served and the conversation began, Henry felt as though he had been dipped in something; what had happened lingered as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived now in every moment and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It came to him so powerfully as he drank his tea and listened to his cousins that he had to remind himself that it was not still in progress, and a new day had begun with a new day’s duties.
As time went by, he noticed that Minny was remaining apart from the plans and seemed unusually quiet and reserved. He spoke to her alone when the others were busy with further talk and laughter.
‘I did not sleep,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I did not sleep.’
He smiled at her, relieved that her distance from them was something which could be rectified.
‘And did you sleep?’ she asked.
‘It was not easy,’ he said. ‘The bed was not comfortable, but we managed. Despite the bed perhaps, rather than because of it.’
‘The famous bed!’ She laughed.
WHEN JOHN GRAY arrived that afternoon, Henry noticed that Holmes, who, even in the short time away from other soldiers, had lost some of his military glow, now continued his role as the veteran of a war, and Gray did everything possible to complement that role and take it on, indeed, himself. They were led to an old farmhouse a few miles from the Temples ’ quarters where each of them was given an attic room by a friendly young farmer’s wife. The floorboards creaked and the beds were old and the ceilings were low but the fare was reasonable and the husband, when he appeared, offered to ferry the young gentlemen through the neighbourhood should they require transport. Indeed, he added in a friendly, earnest tone, should they require anything at all, he would provide it if he could at the most reasonable rates in all of North Conway.
Thus began their holidays, the two men of action settling into the world of easy civilian life. It was a little realm of relaxed and happy interchange, of unrestricted conversation, with liberties taken while delicacies were observed, allowing the discussion of a hundred human and personal things as the American summer drew out to its last generosity.
Henry basked in the afterglow of his introduction to North Conway. It played for him the part of a treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place each time he returned to it. He watched his friends, waiting for a pattern to emerge, conscious that he wanted his two fellow guests to appreciate Minny Temple as he did, to differentiate her from her two sisters, sweet and charming as they were, knowing that Minny was the glittering spirit among them. He found himself silently promoting her, attempting also in various small ways to quicken their appreciation of her. When he saw Holmes engaging with her, he felt deeply implicated in what passed between them, and wanted nothing more than to witness their growing interest in one another.
Gray’s tone was dry; in his regiment and in his own domestic setting he had obviously been listened to a good deal, and his study of the law now added to his language a Latinate vocabulary of which he grew fonder as the days went on. He had much to say about books, and each day would cross his legs and clear his throat and talk to the ladies about Trollope, how droll and excellently drawn his characters were, how fascinating his situations, how strong his grasp of the rich public life of his country, what a pity no American novelist had emerged who could compete with him.
‘But does he,’ Minny interjected, ‘does he understand the real intricacies of the human heart? Does he understand the great mystery of our existence?’
‘You have asked two questions, and I will answer them separately,’ Gray said. ‘Trollope writes with precision and feeling about love and marriage. Yes, I can assure you of that. Now, the second question is rather different. Trollope, I believe, would take the view that it is the function of the preacher and the theologian, the philosopher and perhaps the poet, but emphatically not that of the novelist, to deal with what you call “the great mystery of our existence”. I would tend to agree with him.’
‘Oh, I don’t agree with either of you then,’ Minny said, her face bright with excitement. ‘When you close The Mill on the Floss, for example, you know much more about how strange and beautiful it is to be alive than when you read a thousand sermons.’
Gray had not read George Eliot and when presented with a copy of The Mill on the Floss by an enthusiastic Minny he flicked through the pages judiciously.
‘She is,’ Minny said, ‘the person in the world I most adore, the person I would most like to meet.’
Gray looked up quizzically, suspiciously.
‘She understands,’ Minny went on, ‘the character of a generous woman, that is, of a woman who believes in generosity and who feels keenly how hard it is, practically, to,’ she stopped for a moment to think, ‘why, to live it, to follow it out.’
‘Follow “it” out?’ Gray asked. ‘What’s the “it”?’
‘Generosity, as I said,’ Minny replied.
Minny also handed Gray a copy of the March issue of the North American Review which had a story by Henry called The Story of a Year. She told him that while she and her sisters had been forbidden to read Henry’s previous story, full, they were told, of highly French immorality, they had been permitted to read his new one. Over the previous days, Henry, a novice in the matter of publication, had waited for Holmes to say something about the story. He knew Holmes had told William that he believed the mother in the story was based on his mother and the soldier was based on him. Suddenly then, William had a new and interesting way to tease Henry. The Holmes family, he told him, was in a rage and old father Holmes was going to complain to Henry’s father. Later, William had confessed that he had invented most of this, except for Holmes’s original comments.
Holmes had said nothing. Now Henry watched Gray crossing the garden with a chair in one hand and the North American Review in the other to find a shady place in which he could sit and read the story. Henry was nervous about Gray’s response, but pleased also that the story could now be mentioned. He imagined Gray reading it with the sharp eye of a war veteran, finding not enough about the action of the war and finding too much about women. Watching him begin the story, and being able from the vantage point of another chair in the garden some distance away from him to see him proceed, was difficult, almost unnerving. After a while he could manage it no more, he had had enough, and he took a long walk that afternoon and did not come back until suppertime.
As soon as they were sitting down, Minny spoke.
‘So, Mr Gray, what did you think of the story? For me, it is so exciting having a cousin who is a writer, it is exciting beyond imagining.’
Henry realized, and he wondered if Minny did too, the effect her words would have on the two young men who had offered their lives for their country. For them, the war remained raw and fresh, and their very presence was a reminder to all of the great losses and heroism of their side. In her enthusiasm for Henry’s story, Minny now seemed to be lessening the importance, indeed the excitement, of having two soldiers at her table.
‘Interesting,’ he said, and seemed ready to leave it at that.
‘We all loved it and are so proud of it,’ Elly, Minny’s sister, said.
‘If it had not had his name on it,’ Gray said, ‘I would have guessed that the author was a woman, but perhaps that was part of your plan.’
He turned to Henry, who looked at him but did not speak.
‘He wrote a story, not a plan,’ Minny said.
‘Yes, but if you think about the war, or speak to those involved, or even read about it, I’m sure there are more interesting stories, ones that are more true to life.’
‘But this wasn’t about the war,’ Minny said. ‘It was about a girl’s heart.’
‘Are there not plenty of girls who can write such stories?’ Gray asked.
Holmes put his hands behind his head and began to laugh.
‘We cannot all be soldiers,’ he said.
The talk between the three visitors and the Temple sisters returned again and again to the war. Since the girls’ brother and their cousin Gus Barker had been killed, the two soldiers had to be careful not to gloat too much about their survival, or their bravery. Nonetheless, it was difficult to avoid discussing specific exploits and the extraordinary phenomenon of injured soldiers such as Henry’s brother Wilky and Holmes himself and Gus Barker who insisted, once recovered, on returning to the fray. Holmes and Wilky had lived to receive more injuries and survived them too. Gus Barker, however, had been killed by a sniper two years earlier, when he was barely twenty, at the Rappahannock River in Virginia. All of them grew silent now as his name and the place where he died were mentioned.
Henry had seen him on return trips to America during his childhood at his grandmother’s house in Albany, where he had also met the Temples, and later at Newport. As the others started again to talk about him, Henry’s mind wandered back to five years earlier when the Civil War seemed an impossible nightmare and the James family had returned to Newport from Europe so that William could study art.
One day in the fall of 1860 Henry had come into the studio to find his cousin Gus Barker standing naked on a pedestal while the advanced students sketched him. Gus was strong and wiry, red-haired and white-skinned. He stood immobile and unembarrassed as the five or six students, including William, worked on their drawings as though they did not know the model. Gus Barker, like the Temples, had lost his mother, and his orphanhood gave him the same mystery and independence. No mother could arrive to tell him to cease this display and put on his clothes forthwith. His form was beautiful and manly, and Henry was surprised by his own need to watch him, while pretending that his interest in Gus Barker, like that of the other students, was distant and academic. He studied William’s drawing closely so that he could then raise his eyes and study at some length his naked cousin’s perfect gymnastic figure, his strength, and his calm sensual aura.
It struck him all these years later that he had been thinking something which he could not tell Gray or Holmes or even Minny, that his mind during these few minutes had wandered over a scene whose meaning would have to remain secret to him. He simply did not suppose that Gray’s mind worked like that, or the mind and imagination of Holmes, or the Temple sisters. He did not even know if his brother William’s mind moved into areas that would always have to remain obscure to those around him. He thought about the result if he spoke his mind, told his companions as truthfully as he could what the name Gus Barker had provoked in his memory. He wondered at how, every day, as they moved around each other, each of them had stored away an entirely private world to which they could return at the sound of a name, or for no reason at all. For a second as he thought about this, he caught Holmes’s eye, and he found that he had not been able to disguise himself fully, that Holmes had seen through his social mask to the mind which had strayed into realms which could not be shared. Both of them shared something now, tacitly, momentarily, which the others did not even notice.
Gradually, then, over the days, Minny Temple made a choice. She chose subtly and carefully so that no one saw at first that she had done so, but what was not apparent to Gray or Holmes or her sisters became clear to Henry because she wished it to be clear to him. She chose Henry as her friend and confidant, the one she trusted most, could speak to most easily. And she may have chosen Holmes for something too because she never ignored him, or shone her light on the others more than on him. But she chose Gray as the one on whom she could have most effect, who most needed her. She paid no attention to his military talk and his gruff, practical comments and his clipped witticisms. She wished to change him, and Henry watched her gently cajoling him, without allowing herself to become offensive.
One day when she handed Gray lines of Browning to read, he held back and asked her to read them aloud.
‘No, I want you to read them to yourself,’ she said.
‘I can’t read poetry,’ he said.
Henry and Holmes and her two sisters did not speak; this, Henry knew, was a decisive moment in Minny’s fight to mould John Gray into a shape acceptable to her.
‘Of course you can read poetry,’ she said, ‘but you must first forget the “read” part and the “poetry” part and concentrate on the “I” part and find new credentials for it, and soon you will be a changed man and your youth will return. But if you really want me to, then I will read the verse aloud.’
‘Minny,’ her sister said, ‘you must not be abrupt to Mr Gray.’
‘Mr Gray is going to be a great lawyer,’ Holmes said. ‘He is learning to defend himself, I feel, so that he will in time learn to defend others more worthy of defence, perhaps.’
‘I long for you to read it aloud,’ Gray said.
‘And I long for the day when you will read it too, quietly and with emotion,’ Minny said taking the book.
HENRY BEGAN to imagine an heiress, recently orphaned, who had three suitors, a young woman whose patient intelligence had never been fully appreciated by those around her. He did not want to make her as beautiful as Minny was that August; instead, he made his heroine positively plain but for the frequent recurrence of a magnificent smile. He made two of the suitors military men; the third, who gave his name to the story, Poor Richard, whose manner was that of a nervous headstrong man, brought close to desperation by unrequited love, was a civilian. Richard adored Gertrude Whittaker, but she did not take him as seriously as she took the two Civil War soldiers. One of them, Captain Severn, was himself a serious and conscientious man, who was discreet, deliberate and unused to acting without a definite purpose. And Major Lutrell, on the other hand, who could play the part of Gray, was both agreeable and insufferable. All three began a siege to win Miss Whittaker’s love and marry her. In the end, she accepted none of them.
The story began for him in a small single moment in which Richard watches Captain Severn sinking into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own as they observe the progress of a lively dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Lutrell. So too at North Conway had this become for Henry and for Holmes a daily routine, as Minny continued her battle to soften Gray, to make him more conscious of his soul than his uniform, of his deepest fears and longings rather than of his self-protective army talk, suitably censored for ladies. Holmes began by believing that Minny did not like Gray, which pleased him, and then became aware with flashes of alarm that Gray was winning. Holmes’s alarm made a sound that Minny and her sisters and Gray were too distracted to hear, but which Henry picked up easily and stored and thought about when he was alone.
He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines – would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time: the two ambitious, patrician New Englanders, already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Minny, fresh and open to life, so inquisitive, so imbued with a boundless curiosity and charm and intelligence. And between them much that would have to be left unsaid and a great deal that would never be known. Already, on that lawn beside the house where the Temple sisters stayed that summer, there were secrets and unstated alliances, and already a sense that Minny Temple would escape them and soar above them, although none of them had an idea how soon this would happen and how sad it would be.
He had no memory of when he first knew she was dying. Certainly, that summer there was no intimation of any illness.
He remembered that some time later his mother had mentioned Minny’s being poorly, her tone disapproving, as though believing at first that Minny’s illness was a way of drawing attention to herself.
Their group met once more in his parents’ parlour in Quincy Street near the end of the following year; he recalled how surprising it was to find that Minny had been corresponding with both Gray and Holmes. His mother, he remembered, liked Gray and thought he was as nice as ever, nicer than Holmes, and reported later that Minny had told her she was quite disenchanted with Holmes and had talked to her of Holmes’s egotism, but also his beautiful eyes. Henry was surprised that Minny now seemed to be confiding in his mother.
He sat on his terrace now thousands of miles away and many years later. As the crescent moon appeared, he studied its strange, thin, implacable beauty, and sighed as he remembered William coming into his room with the news that Minny had a deposit on her lung. Henry was not sure that this was his first hearing of the news, but he was certain that it was the first time it was not whispered. Henry recalled his own depression in the months that followed, his own immobility, and he knew that he had not seen her, but was kept abreast of the news by his mother, who was keenly interested in the illness of everyone, but especially young women of marriageable age, and was now taking Minny’s illness seriously.
He tried to think when John Gray had told him first of Minny’s long letters to him. Gray had found them difficult, somewhat embarrassing, he said, confidential and feverish, but he had replied, and so she wrote to Gray over and over in the last year of her life. And in one of those letters she had written the words which Gray had repeated to him and which Henry thought now maybe meant more to him than any others, including all the words he had written himself, or anyone else had written. Her words haunted him so that saying them now, whispering them in the silence of the night, brought her exacting presence close to him. The words constituted one sentence. Minny had written: ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ That, he thought, was what she wanted when she was alive and happy, as much as when she was dying, but it was her illness, her knowledge that time was short, that made her desperate to formulate the phrase that summed up her great and generous quest. ‘You must tell me something that you are sure is true.’ The words came to him in her sweet voice, and as he sat on his terrace in the darkness he wondered how he would have answered her if she had written the sentence to him.
He asked himself if the intensity of her personality, and the sheer originality of her ambitions, placed against the dullness and banality and penury which surrounded her, might have unsettled her will to live. He felt this especially when her sisters married for security rather than love, and when Minny was forced to depend on their husbands for her upkeep as her lungs began to haemorrhage and her health began to fail. He remembered seeing her in New York for the last time two days before he sailed for Europe alone for the first time, and he made an effort then to disguise, as much as he could, his pure excitement, his boundless appetite for what was to come. They had agreed that the same journey would be the right thing for her and it was detestable that he was sailing off without her. Despite her illness and her envy, the hour they spent that day was bright, their talk all gaiety. They spoke of meeting in Rome the following winter, and of his plans in London, whom he would see, where he would visit. Her envy became extravagant only when he spoke of a possible visit to Mrs Lewes, her beloved George Eliot. She tossed her head and laughed at the enormity of her own jealousy.
It was clear that she was ill, and so apparent to them both that she would not recover that they did not mention it. Nonetheless, as he was leaving her, he asked her how she was sleeping.
‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.’
But then she laughed bravely and freely and her smile to him was carefully arranged so that there was nothing hollow or false about it. And then she left him.
IN ENGLAND when he came to visit Mrs Lewes on a Sunday afternoon at North Bank, having secured admission through the intervention of a family friend, he imagined Minny with him, asking George Eliot the questions that no one in Minny’s own circle wished to ask, or wished indeed to answer. He imagined her voice, awed now but slowly building in richness in the room. At the moment of departure he pictured his cousin standing up and being noticed by the novelist, having made an impression, and reaching out warmly to shake her hand, and being invited to return. In a letter, he tried to describe Mrs Lewes to Minny, her accent, the calm severity of her gaze, her strange ugliness, her mingled sagacity and sweetness, her dignity and character, her graciousness and remote indifference. It was easier, however, to write to his father about her; writing to Minny had now become like writing to a ghost.
MINNY DIED in March, a year after he had last seen her. He was still in England. He felt it as the end of his youth, knowing that death, at the last, was dreadful to her. She would have given anything to live. In the years that followed, he longed to know what she would have thought of his books and stories, and of the decisions he made about his life. This sense of missing her deep and demanding response made itself felt to Gray and Holmes as well, and also to William. All of them wondered in their nervous ambition and great, agitated egotism what Minny would have thought about them or said about them. Henry wondered too what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would inevitably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
It was not true to say that Minny Temple haunted him in the years that followed; rather, he haunted her. He conjured up her presence everywhere, when he returned to his parents’ house, and later when he travelled in France and Italy. In the shadows of the great cathedrals, he saw her emerge, delicate and elegant and richly curious, ready to be stunned into silence by each work of art that she saw, and then trying to find the words which might fit the moment, allow her new sensuous life to settle and deepen.
Soon after she died he wrote a story, ‘Travelling Companions’, in which William, travelling in Italy from Germany, met her by chance in Milan Cathedral, having seen her first in front of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. He loved describing her white umbrella with a violet lining and the sense of intelligent pleasure in her movements, her glance and her voice. He could control her destiny now that she was dead, offer her the experiences she would have wanted, and provide drama for a life which had been so cruelly shortened. He wondered if this had happened to other writers who came before him, if Hawthorne or George Eliot had written to make the dead come back to life, had worked all day and all night, like a magician or an alchemist, defying fate and time and all the implacable elements to re-create a sacred life.
He could not stop wondering how she would have lived, what she would have done. With Alice, the question of Minny was not to be raised, as his sister envied everything that Minny had possessed: her strange beauty and allure, her confidence, her deep seriousness, her effect on men. And later, Alice envied Minny her being dead.
Speculation about Minny did, however, interest William, and both he and Henry were certain in their discussion on the subject that she would not have known whom to marry, that her choice, had she lived, would have been too idealistic, or too impetuous, or too unnatural. Her marriage, both agreed, would have been mistaken, and this seemed to suggest that something in her complex organism had understood this, had known that her future as a penniless, clever woman was a sadly insoluble problem.
Both brothers had felt that, at some level, at most levels, narrow life contained no place for her. All her conduct and character, Henry thought, seemed to have pointed to this conclusion – how profoundly inconsequential, in her history, continued life might have been.
He often imagined her married to Gray or Holmes or William, how diminished she would seem, how marriage for her would be a battle that she would have to lose. In Poor Richard, he had sent her to Europe where she did not marry. In Daisy Miller, in which he had emphasized her brashness and bravery and careless attitude to conventions, she had died in Rome. In Travelling Companions, he had invented a marriage for her, dramatizing the Italian circumstances of her meeting with her consort. He did not follow her into the daily domestic routines managed in the shadow of a dull man.
It was when he read Daniel Deronda that something came into his mind which had not occurred to him before – the dramatic possibilities of a spirited woman being destroyed by a stifling marriage. By coincidence, at this time he happened also to read Phineas Finn by Trollope, mainly as a way of getting to sleep, and was struck too by the marriage of Lady Laura Kennedy and the sheer interest such an alliance had for the reader whose sympathies had been drawn to the brave, bright heroine confronting her destiny with the illusion of freedom.
He set to work. By then he had lived some years in England, he felt that he could see America more clearly, and he wanted more than anything to bring to life an American spirit who was fresh and free, ready for life and certain only of her own great openness to others and to experience. It was not hard to place his young lady in his grandmother’s house in Albany, the strange, cramped, old-fashioned rooms from which Mrs Touchett, bossy and rich, could rescue Isabel Archer and take her to England where so many of his heroines had longed to go. In England, he could easily surround her with his old and carefully wrought trio of suitors, the straight-talking serious one; the gentler, patrician one; and the one who would be her friend and the fascinated student of her destiny, being too unfit or ill or steeped in irony to be her lover.
He worked on the book in Florence and felt, as he woke each morning in his hotel on the river or later in rooms on Bellosguardo, that he had a great mission now to make Minny walk these streets, to allow the soft Tuscan sunlight to shine on her soft face. But more than that, he sought to re-create her moral presence more finely and more dramatically than he had ever done before. He wanted to take this penniless American girl and offer her a solid, old universe in which to breathe. He gave her money, suitors, villas and palaces, new friends and new sensations. He had never felt as powerful and as dutiful; he walked the streets of Florence and the quays and the steep, winding hill to Bellosguardo with a new lightness, and this lightness made its way into the book. It moved elegantly, easily and freely as though Minny herself were protecting him, presiding over him. There were scenes he wrote in which, having imagined everything and set it down, he was, at moments, unsure whether it had genuinely happened or whether his imagined world had finally come to replace the real.
Yet Minny was real for him throughout the years, more real than any of the new people he met and associated with. She belonged to the part of him he guarded most fiercely, his hidden self, which no one in England knew about or understood. It was easier to preserve her under English skies, in a land where no one cared to remember the dead as he remembered his cousin, where the flat present with its attendant order ruled. It was here he let her walk with the power and haunting resonance of an old song echoing through the years, sounding its sad notes to him wherever he went.
HE HAD FORGOTTEN, until he saw Holmes, how much his old friend loved the English; as soon as Holmes alighted from the train at Rye, he filled the air with stories of whom he had seen and how they were, how deaf Leslie Stephen had become since Julia had died, how Margot Tennant was not the same since her marriage, how charming his new friend Lady Castletown was and how grand. Henry did not even consider speaking, and he knew that if he had, he would have been interrupted immediately. Holmes was bright-eyed, almost fervid, and managed, despite the years, to look even more handsome than ever before, more gallant. Perhaps his time with Lady Castletown, Henry thought, had made him so.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said when he finally found a gap in Holmes’s narrative, ‘I’m afraid there are no lords and ladies at all in Rye. It will be very quiet. Indeed, it is very quiet.’
Holmes clapped him on the back and smiled as if he had just now noticed him. His elevation to the bench seemed to have made him less reserved, if anything. Maybe this was the way, Henry mused, eminent men in their fifties were behaving in America now, but then he pictured William Dean Howells and his brother William and understood that it was merely Holmes who was behaving like this. He tried to explain to Holmes that he had been working on not one but two novels and had not had much company over the previous months other than his servants. Holmes was extolling the landscape and too busy to listen and Henry was suddenly glad that he was staying at Point Hill for only one night. He knew from William and from Howells and others that Holmes had become a famous judge whose theories were discussed in the higher circles of law and politics as the theories of Darwin were discussed by scientists and the clergy. Henry remembered that he had asked William what these theories were and William had put it bluntly that Holmes did not believe in anything and had managed to make this view seem both reasonable and popular. His position was, William said, that he had no position. Howells, on the other hand, was not given to bluntness; he explained merely that Holmes had sought rather forcefully to apply the human and practical element rather than the historical or the theoretical or indeed the moral elements to law. Like Darwin, Howells said, Holmes had developed a theory of winners, but it was his pointed and plain rhetoric that won the day as much as anything else.
He had often wondered, Holmes now said as they made their way through Rye, if he should have come to England to live. He did not suppose, he added, that they would take him to their bosom if he planned to stay. Henry nodded in assent, but soon his mind was elsewhere.
They dined on the terrace, and having eaten they sat in repose watching the great plain below in the fading evening light. Holmes groaned and stretched his legs as though settling down for a long and relaxed evening while Henry wished it were an hour later and he could excuse himself. The talk between them was desultory as they carefully avoided the subjects which would divide them, such as William, with whom Holmes seemed to have quarrelled, and Mrs Holmes, who languished in Boston, and Henry’s novels, on which he knew that Holmes had views. The subjects which they could discuss, the gossip about private and public America, the law and politics, soon petered out. Henry found that he had asked too many questions about too many old friends and Holmes had replied too many times that he hardly saw them and knew very little about them. He suspected, he said several times, that Henry knew more about them than he did.
The twilight lingered and the two men grew silent until Henry felt that they would never think of anything to say again. He moved his chair so that he could study Holmes and saw him now in the gloaming as a deeply contented fellow, at home with himself, and he felt a mild distaste for the aura of good-humoured complacency which Holmes gathered around him.
‘It is strange how time goes,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry replied, stretching. ‘I used to think it went more slowly in England, but having lived here for so long I know that to be an illusion. I depend now on Italy as the place where time goes most slowly.’
‘I was thinking of that summer when we were all together,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘That glorious, heroic summer.’
Henry now expected Holmes to say that time had flown since then or that it seemed like yesterday and he wondered how he would respond to Holmes’s banalities. He was already preparing a missive to William, telling him that Holmes as a conversationalist had been laid low.
‘I can remember every moment of that month. Better than I can remember yesterday,’ Holmes said.
They both were silent then; Henry did not know how soon he could take his leave without being rude. Holmes cleared his throat as though to speak and then stopped again. He sighed.
‘It is as though time has moved backwards for me,’ Holmes said, turning towards Henry to make sure he was paying attention. ‘Once that summer was over, I could, as I said, remember it perfectly, but during those long days, with all that talk and all that company, it was as though there existed a great curtain around everything. I felt sometimes as if I were under water, seeing things only in vague outline and desperately trying to come up for air. I do not know what the war did to me, save that I survived. But I know now that fear and shock and bravery are merely words and they do not tell us – nothing does – that when you experience them day in day out, you lose part of yourself and you can never get it back. After the war I was diminished and I knew this; part of my soul, my way of living and feeling, was paralysed but I could not tell what part. Nobody recognized what was wrong, not even myself most of the time. All that summer I wanted to change, to cease watching and standing back. I wanted to join and become involved, drink up the life that was offered to us then as those wonderful sisters did. I longed to be alive, just as I long for it now, and the time passing has helped me, helped me to live. When I was twenty-one and twenty-two normal feelings dried up in me and since then I have been trying to make up for that, as well as live, live like others live.’
Holmes’s voice was almost angry now, but oddly distant and low. Henry knew how much it had taken for him to speak like this, and he knew also that what he said was true. Once more they remained silent, but the silence was filled with regret and recognition.
Henry did not think he could say anything. He did not have a confession of his own. His war had been private, within his family and deep within himself. It could not be mentioned or explained, but it had left him too as Holmes described. He lived, at times, he felt, as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully imagined.
He thought that Holmes had said all that he wanted to say, and he was ready to remain a while as a tribute to his candour and let Holmes’s confession settle. But slowly he realized, by the way Holmes faced him, and by Holmes’s filling his glass with brandy as though the night were long, that his guest had something else to say. He waited, and finally when Holmes spoke again his tone had changed. He was back to his role as judge, public figure, man of the world.
‘You know, finally,’ Holmes said, ‘The Portrait of a Lady is a great monument to her, although the ending, I have to say that I did not care for the ending.’
Henry stared at the encroaching night and did not reply. He did not wish to discuss the ending of his novel, but nonetheless he was pleased and satisfied that Holmes had finally mentioned the book, having never referred to it before.
‘Yes,’ Holmes said, ‘she was very noble and I think you caught that.’
‘I think we all adored her,’ Henry said.
‘She remains for me a touchstone,’ Holmes said, ‘and I wish she were alive now so that I could find out what she thought of me.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Henry said.
Holmes took a sip of his drink.
‘Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill?’ he asked. ‘Gray says she asked you several times.’
‘I don’t think ask is the word,’ Henry said. ‘She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.’
‘Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.’
‘Nothing could have saved her,’ Henry said.
Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’s tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.
‘When she did not hear from you she turned her face to the wall.’ Holmes spoke as though it were a line he had been planning to say for some time. He cleared his throat and continued.
‘When finally she knew no one would help her she turned her face to the wall. She was very much alone then and she fixed on the idea. You were her cousin and could have travelled with her. You were free, in fact you were already in Rome. It would have cost you nothing.’
By the time either of them spoke again it was night, and the darkness seemed strangely grim and complete. Henry told the servant that they would not need a lamp as they were ready to retire. Holmes sipped his drink, crossing and recrossing his legs. Henry could hardly remember how he got to bed.
IN THE MORNING Henry was still considering at what point he should have spoken to defend himself, or when he should have ended the discussion. Clearly, the matter had been festering in Holmes’s mind throughout the years and clearly he had discussed it with Gray and the two lawyers were at one on the subject and at home accusing people of things. Now Holmes would be able to tell Gray what had been said.
At breakfast, Holmes was calm and steadfast as though the night before he had delivered a difficult but considered judgement and now thought better of himself for having done so. He arranged that he would return the following weekend, and, as he did so, Henry worked out how he would cancel these arrangements. He did not wish to see Holmes for a long time.
IN THE WEEK that followed he worked hard, even though the pain in his hand had become at times excruciating. He avoided the terrace and left the desk only to eat and sleep. He wrote to Holmes after a few days to say that in order to meet a deadline he was hard at work on a story and could not, unfortunately, entertain him for a weekend. He hoped, he said, to see him in London before Holmes departed for the United States.
For some days then he basked in the solitude his letter had won him, but he could not stop going over the conversation with Holmes in his mind; he began to compose letters to Holmes, but did not even get as far as writing them down. He believed that the accusation was unfair and unfounded and Holmes’s discussing the matter so coldly and finally was outrageous.
He could not be sure what his cousin in her final months had written to Gray. He was aware that Gray had kept her letters, and he too in his apartment in London had stored away those letters which Minny had written to him in the last year of her life. He knew that she had accused him of nothing, but he now wished to know what terms she had used all those years before in her expressed desire to go to Rome. Slowly, he stopped working. His waking hours were consumed with memories of his early days in London and Italy and his receipt of these letters. He imagined finding them again – he knew perfectly where they were stored – and unfolding and rereading them, and he thought about this so incessantly that he knew he would have to travel to London. Like a ghost, he would enter his apartment in Kensington, flit through the rooms until he came to the cupboard where the letters were, and he would read them, and then he would return to Rye.
As he waited for the train, he dreaded meeting anyone he knew and having to pretend that he had business in London.
He dreaded speaking at all, so that even telling the servants that he would be leaving, and speaking with the cab driver and the purchasing of his ticket, had an enervating effect on him. He wished he could be invisible now for a day or two. He recognized, and this pressed down on him most as he travelled towards London, that the letters might yield nothing, might fill him with further uncertainty. He might not know, having read them again, any more than he knew now.
It struck him forcefully as he made his way from the station how calm his life had become once more after the disaster of his play. This was the first time since then that the equilibrium he had worked so intensely to achieve had disappeared. He began to feel that when he opened the cupboard in the apartment in which he kept his cousin’s letters something palpable would emerge, and he tried to tell himself that this imagining was too much, too feverish, but it was no use.
He found the letters easily, and was surprised at how flimsy and brief they were, how the folds of the paper seemed to have corroded the ink on both sides and made some of her writing illegible. Nonetheless, they were from her and they were dated. He allowed his lips to move as he read:
I shall miss you, my dear, but I am most happy to know that you are well and enjoying yourself. If you were not my cousin I would write to ask you to marry me and take me with you, but as it is, it wouldn’t do so I will have to console myself, however, with the thought that in that case you might not accept my offer.
He read on: ‘If I were, by hook or by crook, to spend next winter with friends in Rome, should I see you at all?’ And then, in one of the last letters he received from her: ‘Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.’
He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her, and she was careful never to ask outright. If she had insisted on coming, he forced himself to complete this thought now, he would have stood aside or kept his distance or actively prevented her coming, whatever was necessary. He had himself, in that year, escaped into the bright old world he had longed for. He was writing stories and taking in sensations and slowly plotting his first novels. He was no longer a native of the James family, but alone in a warm climate with a clear ambition and a free imagination. His mother had written to say that he must spend what money he needed in feasting at the table of freedom. He did not want his invalid cousin. Even had she been well, he was not sure that her company, so full of wilful charm and curiosity, would have been entirely welcome. He needed then to watch life, or imagine the world, through his own eyes. Had she been there, he would have seen through hers.
He went to the window and looked down at the street. Even now, he felt that he had every right to leave her behind, to follow the path of his own talent, his own nature. Nonetheless, her letters filled him with sorrow and guilt, and added to these a sort of shame when he realized that she must have spoken to others, to Gray at least, about his refusal to entertain her. Holmes’s phrase ‘she turned her face to the wall’ echoed in his mind now and did battle with his sense of his own ruthlessness, his own will to survive. And finally, as he turned back into the room, he felt a sharp and unbearable idea staring at him, like something alive and fierce and predatory in the air, whispering to him that he had preferred her dead rather than alive, that he had known what to do with her once life was taken from her, but he had denied her when she asked him gently for help.
He sat on a chair in his living room for most of the afternoon, letting his thoughts sink and glide and come to the surface again. He wondered if he might burn these letters, if nothing good could come of them in the future. He put them aside for the moment and returned to the cupboard where he had found them and rummaged there until he discovered the red notebook he had been looking for. He knew what he was seeking, it lay in the opening pages, written a few years earlier; its outline was fresh in his mind but its details were not. He carried the notebook into the better light of the living room.
During the time since Holmes’s visit and in the midst of all his worry and suffering, his interest in the picture of a young American woman slowly dying, which he had noted down, had intensified. It was the story of a young woman with a large fortune on the threshold of a life that seemed boundless in its possibilities. She would come to Europe so that she could live, live passionately and intensely if only for a short time.
He read through his notes about a young Englishman, penniless, clever, handsome, who is in love with someone else, but whose task becomes to save the American girl, love her, help her to live, despite the fact that he is hopelessly compromised, a matter of which the dying girl knows nothing. His intended, penniless as well, also befriends the girl.
As he read his notes, he was horrified by the sheer callousness of the story. The young man pretending to love the girl, and perhaps get her money, his love a sort of treachery, and his real love watching over this, knowing that she could marry if they could get the money. The story, he thought, was vulgar and ugly, and yet it came to him powerfully now.
He took the letters in his hand again, looked at Minny’s trusting, clean handwriting, the hand of someone who expected only good from the world. He saw her clearly coming to Europe for her last look at life. He gave her money, he imagined her as having inherited a fortune, and saw too his hero, one part of him full of love and pity for her, and the other part hardened and needy and ready to betray. The story was vulgar and ugly only if the motives were so, but what if the motives were mixed and ambiguous? Suddenly, he sat up straight and then stood and walked to the window. He had, in that second, seen the other woman, had caught a sharp view of her strange moral neutrality, how much she was sacrificing in letting the dying girl know love, how much she was gaining also and how careful she was, in her practical way, never to allow the two to appear on opposite sides of the weighing scales.
He had them now, all three of them, and he would embrace them, hold on to them and let them improve with time, become more complex and less vulgar, less ugly, more rich, more resonant, more true not to what life was, but to what it might be. He crossed the room again and gathered up the letters and the notebooks and brought them to the cupboard and put them brusquely on a shelf and closed the cupboard doors. He would not need them again. He would need to work now, apply his mind. He would, he determined, travel back to Rye and be ready again, when the call came, to explore one more time the life and death of his cousin Minny Temple.
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