The Master

by Colm Toibin

  IN VENICE, he found rooms belonging to his friend Mrs Bronson in a dark, damp palazzo. The fact that Browning had once inhabited these rooms did not brighten them or rid them of cold, despite Mrs Bronson’s certainty that their history made all the difference. He took to dining alone before taking a walk through the haunted streets of the city. Once night fell and the Venetians had returned home, they did not venture out again. Venice was misty and strange and, for the first time in his life, he wondered what he was doing in the city which he loved so much. He could easily have gone to England instead. The story was now clear in his mind and he had soaked up enough of the faded palaces where his heroines would live and the sense of old secrets and heroic attachments in these shadowy, bejewelled, inhospitable buildings, once full of sweet romance and high-toned gaiety, and now repositories of gloom and cobwebs, so many of them inhabited by the unsettled and the infirm.

  One evening, having passed the Frari and crossed a bridge which led towards the Grand Canal, he caught a brief glimpse of a woman in an upstairs room with her back to a lighted window. She was in conversation; something about her hair and her neck made him stand his ground in the empty street. As the talk became more animated, he could see her shrugging and gesticulating. She was, as far as he could see, younger than Constance and much darker, and her shoulders much broader, so that it was not her physical presence which brought Constance into his mind. He found, as he moved away, that he hungered to be in that room where the woman was talking, he longed to hear her voice and follow whatever it was she was saying. And slowly, as he walked through the dark streets with lives hidden away in the buildings on either side, he realized that even though his time at Bellosguardo had lasted a mere three weeks, he missed the companionship, he missed his life with Constance Fenimore Woolson. He missed the mixture of sharpness and reticence in her manners, the American life she carried with her so abundantly, the aura which her hours alone gave her, her furious ambition, her admiration for him and belief in him. He missed the few hours every day they spent together, and he missed the lovely silence which followed it and came before. He decided that he would either return to England or go back to Florence. He wrote to Constance outlining his dilemma, half-realizing that she would read his letter as an appeal of sorts.

  Constance replied immediately and briskly offered him his own quarters on a lower floor of Casa Brichieri-Colombi which looked through a single door and three arches to the Duomo and the city. He could work in peace there. While all of Florence was richly and intricately displayed for the pleasure of those residing at Bellosguardo, the opposite was not the case. Bellosguardo remained apart from the city of palaces and churches and museums. Walking back there at night was, when he had moved a few streets away from the river, like walking towards any hill town in the Tuscan countryside. Constance inhabited the large apartment above him, and they shared domestic staff and the kitchen and garden. There was no one else living in the house. This time they did not even discuss the need for discretion about his presence in the city. It was known to very few that he was living under the same roof as Miss Woolson and it was mentioned to no one. Henry wrote to William merely to say that he had taken rooms on Bellosguardo. He wrote to Gosse insisting that he was alone and working. He wrote to Mrs Curtis of the beauties of Bellosguardo and his happiness at the view. He did not state that this came courtesy of Constance.

  Nor did he mention to anyone that in the time he had been away, much to the Bootts’ alarm and the alarm of her doctor, Constance had entered into a deep melancholy and had taken to her bed where she had suffered, as Francis Boott told him, more than anyone could imagine. He could see signs of it when he arrived, despite her efforts to disguise it. She was happy for him to dine in Florence so that she could be alone in the evenings. Her deafness appeared to irritate her, and once they had been together a short time, she seemed compelled to withdraw.

  But as the weather softened and spring came, Constance became happier. She loved her vast house and the garden that was now beginning to blossom, and she took daily pleasure in the old city beneath her without ever feeling tempted to walk much outside the confines of this small territory. Thus she guarded her privacy and respected his, and in the six weeks he stayed with her, they never appeared together in public.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Rhoda Broughton asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I do not understand,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Dear Francis,’ Henry said.

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

  She sounded slightly bitter, almost irritated.

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

  She sighed and then nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Since the death of my sister,’ Henry said, ‘my financial problems have greatly decreased. So it would not be impossible.’
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  ‘To lease a floor in Venice, a pied-à-terre?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps two pieds,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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