The Master

by Colm Toibin

  He remembered how each afternoon the three of them would walk by the lake, Aunt Kate having ensured that Alice had rested enough in the morning.

  ‘The geography book never mentioned,’ Alice said on one of these walks, ‘that lakes have waves. The whole of poetry will have to be rewritten.’

  ‘Where shall we start?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I shall write to William,’ Alice replied. ‘He will know.’

  ‘You must rest every day, my dear, and not write too many letters,’ Aunt Kate said.

  ‘How else shall I let him know?’ Alice asked. ‘Walking is more tiring than writing letters and all this fresh air shall, I fear, be the death of me.’

  She smiled condescendingly at her aunt, who did not seem amused, Henry noticed, at the mention of death.

  ‘Lungs love hotels,’ Alice said. ‘They long for them, especially the lobby and the stairs, but also the dining room and the bedroom, if it has a nice view and a shut window.’

  ‘Walk slowly, my dear,’ Aunt Kate said.

  Henry watched Alice as she tried to think of a further remark which would amuse him and annoy Aunt Kate, and then, as they continued walking, she became briefly contented in her silence and in their company.

  ‘The heart,’ she then continued, ‘prefers a nice, warm train and the brain, of course, cries out for an ocean liner. I shall convey all of this to William as soon as I return to the hotel, and we must walk fast, aunt, dear, slow walking is anathema to the memory.’

  ‘If Dorothy Wordsworth,’ Henry said, ‘had let her brother know such things, then his poetry would, I think, have been much improved.’

  ‘Was Dorothy Wordsworth not the poet’s wife?’ Aunt Kate asked.

  ‘No, that was Fanny Brawne,’ Alice said and smiled mischievously at Henry.

  ‘Walk slowly, my dear,’ Aunt Kate repeated.

  That evening, as she came down to dinner, Henry noticed how carefully Alice had dressed and done her hair, and he knew that things might have been different for her if she had been a great beauty, or not an only girl, or if her intelligence had been less sharp, or her childhood more conventional.

  ‘Could we move around the world staying in nice hotels, just we three, and writing letters home when some very witty remark is made by one of us?’ Alice asked. ‘Could we do this for ever?’

  ‘No, we could not,’ Aunt Kate said.

  Aunt Kate took on the role, Henry remembered, of a stern but benevolent governess caring for two orphaned children, Henry obedient and considerate and reliable, and Alice flighty but also ready to do what she was told. And all three of them were happy in those months as long as they put no thought into what would happen to Alice when she returned home.

  No one watching them could have guessed that Alice was already a strange and witty invalid. Alice came close in their company to recovery, but Henry knew even then that they could not travel from city to city with her for ever. Behind the smiling face and the figure who came so happily down the stairs of the hotel to meet them in the lobby each morning, there was a darkness ready to emerge when the time came. By then Alice’s doom was somehow written into every aspect of her being, and, despite those days of equilibrium and happiness in Geneva, what was ahead for her had the shape of a story which now puzzled him and fascinated him, of a young woman who appeared to be light and ambitious and dutiful, but who would soon hear shrill sounds in the night and see frightening faces at the window and allow her daydreams to become nightmares.

  The worst time for her was the period before and just after William’s marriage, when she had her most severe nervous breakdown, an aggravated recurrence of her old troubles. In England, years later, she told him that most of her had died then, that in the hideous summer of William’s marriage to a woman, pretty and practical and immensely healthy, whose name, most cruelly, was also Alice, Alice James went down to the deep sea, and the dark waters clouded over her.

  Yet, despite her fearful and debilitating maladies, she maintained a strange mental energy; nothing she did was predictable, or without deliberate ironies and contradictions. When her mother died the family watched her closely, believing this would surely cause her final and complete disintegration. Henry stayed on in Boston, imagining ways he could help her and help his father. But Alice had no more attacks; she became, as plausibly as she could, the competent, dutiful and loving daughter, organizing the domestic life of the house with a light spirit and communicating with the rest of the family as though it were she who held things together. Before he left for London, he saw her one day standing in the hallway of the house as a visitor took leave, her arms folded and her eyes bright as she told the guest to come again soon. He watched her smiling warmly and then almost sadly as she closed the door. Everything about her in those moments, from her stance, to the expressions on her face, to her gestures as she turned back to the hallway, was borrowed from their mother. She was making an effort, Henry saw, to become the woman of the house.

  Their father died within a year and once he was buried her act fell apart. She had developed a close friendship with Katherine Loring, whose intelligence matched hers and whose strength equalled her weakness in its intensity. Miss Loring accompanied her when Alice decided to come to England to avoid being cared for by her Aunt Kate, an act of defiance and independence and also, of course, a cry to Henry for help. She would live for eight more years, but they were spent mainly in bed. It was, as she often said, only the shrivelling of the empty pea pod which awaited completion.

  HE REMEMBERED this as he waited for her at Liverpool, on her arrival in England, and he knew that her stubborn sense of purpose and preference, and her considerable inheritance from her father’s estate, would, with the aid of Miss Loring, delay this completion for some time. He resolved not to entertain the idea that she would disturb his solitude and the fruitfulness of his exile. Nevertheless, he was frightened when he saw her, carried from the ship helpless and ill. She could not speak to him as he approached; she closed her eyes and turned her face away in distress when she thought he was going to touch her. It was clear that she should not have travelled. Miss Loring supervised the moving of Alice to suitable quarters and the finding of a nurse. She rather depended on the invalid state of his sister, Henry came to feel, as much as Alice depended on her.

  She did not wish Miss Loring to leave her sight. She had lost her family and she had lost her health, but her will joined now with her intense need to have Katherine Loring to herself. Henry noticed Alice’s deterioration verging on hysteria when Miss Loring was absent, and her taking quietly, almost happily, to her bed once Miss Loring promised to stay with her and minister to her. He wrote to his Aunt Kate and to William about this strange pair. He tried to make clear his gratitude to Miss Loring for her devotion, so generous and so perfect, but he knew that this devotion depended on Alice remaining an invalid. He was unhappy at the connection between them, the way it revelled in the unhealthy. He disliked Alice’s abject dependence on her steadfast friend. Sometimes, he even believed that Miss Loring did his sister harm, but he could not see who, instead, would do her good and eventually he became resigned to Miss Loring.

  Miss Loring stayed with Alice most of the time, caring for her, tolerating her, admiring her as no one ever had. Alice specialized in strong opinions and morbid talk, and Miss Loring seemed to enjoy listening to her as she expressed her views on death and its attendant pleasures, on the Irish question and the iniquity of the government, and on the nastiness of English life. When Miss Loring was away, however briefly, Alice became sad and indignant that she, who had sat at the table of her brothers and her father, the greatest minds of the age, was now left to the shallow mercies of an English nurse whom Miss Loring had employed.

  Henry visited her as often as he could, even when she and Miss Loring took lodgings outside London. Sometimes he listened to her with wonder and fascination. She loved elaborate jokes, taking something small and odd and making it seem, by force of her personality, enormously funny.
Mrs Charles Kingsley’s devotion to her late husband was a topic she relished and she was apt to tell the story over and over with indignant mockery, demanding her visitors’ agreement that it was worth the retelling quite before she had finished.

  ‘Did you know,’ she would say, ‘that Mrs Charles Kingsley was devoted to her husband’s memory?’

  She would stop as though that were enough, there was no more to be said. And then, by a toss of her head, she would make clear she was ready to continue.

  ‘Did you know that she sat with his bust beside her? When you visited Mrs Charles Kingsley, you had to visit her husband too. Both of them glowered at you.’

  Alice glowered herself as though pure evil were being described.

  ‘And what’s more,’ she went on, ‘Mrs Charles Kingsley has her dead husband’s photograph pinned to the adjoining pillow on her bed!’

  She would close her eyes and laugh drily and at length.

  ‘Oh a good night’s sleep for Mrs Charles Kingsley! Can you think of anything more grotesquely loathsome?’

  And then the doctors. Their visits and prognostications filled her with both contempt and glee, even when she was told she had cancer. One tiny foolish remark from a doctor provided conversation for days. She declared one day that she had been visited by Sir Andrew Clarke and his ghastly grin, as though the latter were a well-known appendage of his. And then, gasping, she would tell her story of how a friend, years before, had been kept waiting by Sir Andrew who announced himself upon arrival as ‘the late Sir Andrew Clarke’.

  ‘So I said to Miss Loring as we waited for Sir Andrew that I would bet money he would make precisely the same exclamation all these years later on coming into the room.“Hark,” I said, the door opened and a florid gentleman came in, complete with his ghastly grin, and the phrase “the late Sir Andrew Clarke” fell from his lips, as though he were saying it for the first time, followed by a very ripe burst of hilarity from the same Sir Andrew, rather too ripe indeed.’

  She watched herself expectantly for signs of dying, appearing as fearless in the face of mortality as she was fearful in the face of all else. She disliked the clergyman who lived in the apartment below and discussed her dread that he might, should she take ill in the night, minister to her at the end before he could be stopped.

  ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘opening your eyes for the last time and seeing this bat-like clergyman.’

  She stared proudly into the distance as she spoke.

  ‘It would spoil my post-mortem expression which I have been practising for years.’

  She laughed bitterly.

  ‘It is terrible to be an unprotected being.’

  AS TIME WENT ON, he understood that his sister would not ever leave her bed and he discovered that Miss Loring took the same view. She vowed to remain with Alice to the end. This constant talk of ‘the end’ disturbed him, and sometimes when he watched the two of them together, the permanent patient and her companion, so cheerful and bustling and brisk, he felt an urgent need to be away from them, to cut short his stay, to return to his own hard-won solitude.

  He wrote two novels during Alice’s stay in England, which were saturated with the peculiar atmosphere of his sister’s world. He understood the dilemma of a woman in an age of reform pulled between the rules of her upbringing and the need to change those rules, but also, and, he thought, more crucially, the dilemma of a woman brought up in a free-thinking family which confined its free thought to conversation and remained respectable and conformist in every other way. When he came to write The Bostonians he had no difficulty imagining the conflict between two people who seek power over a third. Such a struggle had occurred briefly between him and Miss Loring until he had abandoned it and left the field to her. In the other novel, The Princess Casamassima, also written after Alice’s arrival in England, he wrote, at first without realizing, a double portrait of her. In one half she was the princess herself, subtle, brilliant and darkly powerful, recently arrived in London. The other half she must have recognized: she was Rosy Munniment, confined to her bed, ‘a strange bedizened little invalid’, a ‘small, old, sharp, crippled, chattering sister’, a ‘hard, bright creature, polished, as it were, by pain’.

  She read all his work, and expressed her great admiration for this new novel without mentioning the bedridden sister who is much disliked by the two main characters. In her diary she wrote of Henry’s industry and William’s success. It was not, she wrote, a bad show for one family, especially, she added, if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all.

  Thus, having moved to London, she began to die in earnest, she who had played at dying for so great a duration. She longed, she told Henry, for some palpable disease, and the arrival of her cancer she viewed with enormous relief. She was only forty-three. She dreamed she saw a boat being tossed on the sea, and passing under a great black cloud she saw her dead friend Annie Dixwell who had looked back at her. She was ready to go to her.

  Henry and Miss Loring watched over her as she weakened, her pain kept at bay by morphine. She seemed not to change at all and he wondered if she might slip away like this; die, as it were, without noticing. But her dying was not easy.

  One day he came into her room and was startled by the change in her. She was in distress, breathing with difficulty, and her pulse, Miss Loring said, was weak and erratic. A fever had made her quiet, but at intervals a hard cough began until she retched and retched and then lay back exhausted. When she tried to speak, the cough returned and shook her to pieces, and then she became silent. The doctor said that there was no reason why she could not go on like this for days.

  He watched her, desperate to offer any comfort. He was frightened for her, and believed that, despite everything she had said, she was frightened too. At every moment he expected she would go, and he waited knowing that she would need to say one last thing before sinking into death.

  And then another change came. In a few hours all the pain and discomfort seemed to cease, and all the coughing and even the fever abated, and the deathly look on her face took on a new intensity. She did not sleep. As he sat close to her, he wished his mother were here to talk to her now with words which would help her to let go, to ease herself out of the world. He tried to picture his mother in the room, he almost whispered to her to come now into the room, hover here, mother, help Alice with your tenderness. He wanted to ask his sister if she could feel their mother’s spirit in the room.

  It was clear that she would not last, yet Katherine Loring insisted that he not stay into the small hours and he agreed that there was nothing he could do. He prepared to leave. But before he did he saw her becoming restless again, unable to turn in the bed and struggling to breathe. And then she whispered and both he and Miss Loring looked at each other sharply. Slowly, with effort, Alice raised her voice so that they could now hear her clearly.

  ‘I cannot bear to live another day,’ she said. ‘I beg that it might not be asked of me.’

  The words helped him as he walked slowly back through Kensington to his own chambers. He had always feared that when the end came for her it might be what she had dreaded most, that all her talk of wanting to die might turn out, in her last days, to have been mere bravado. He felt relieved that his sister had meant what she had said. He had watched her, knowing that in her place he would be terrified, but she was different. She did not flinch.

  In the reaches of the night, Katherine Loring told him, she sank into a gentle sleep. As he began another day’s vigil by her bed, he wondered about her dreams and hoped that the morphine made them golden and took away all the darkness and fear that had clouded her life. He willed her to be happy now. But he could not stop himself wanting her to go on breathing, despite everything, not to let go. He could not imagine her dead, having watched her dying for so long. The doctor, when he arrived, asked leave not to treat her, as she was in need of no further medical assistance.

  For Henry, now almost fifty, this was his first death. He had not been present when his m
other died nor his father. He had sat by his mother’s dead body, but he had not witnessed her last breath. He had described dying in his books, but he had not known about this, the long day waiting as his sister’s breath grew shallow, then seemed to fade, then rose again. He tried to imagine what was happening to her consciousness, her great barbed wit, and he came to feel that all that was left of her was her fitful breath and her weakened pulse. There was no will and no knowledge, merely the body moving slowly towards its end. And this to him made her even more pitiful.

  Always, he had the image of the house of death as a silent place, still and watchful, but now he knew that there was no silence in this house because the sound of his sister’s breathing, the changes in its levels of intensity, filled the air. Her pulse flickered and briefly stopped but still she did not die. He wondered if his mother’s death had been like this. Alice was the only one who would know, the only one he could have asked.

  He stood up and touched her as her breathing became easy and regular, her sleep peaceful. And this lasted an hour. She was still not ready to go, and he wondered who she was now, what part of her existed in these last hours? As her breathing stopped, he watched in alarm. He was unprepared, despite those days and nights of vigil. She took another breath, laboured and shallow. He wished once more that his mother was here to sit by him, hold his hand as Alice finally slipped away. Miss Loring now began to time her breathing, just one breath every minute, she said. As the end came, Alice’s face seemed clearer in a way that was strange and oddly touching. He stood up and went to the window to let in some light and when he came back to the bed she had drawn her last breath. The room was finally still.