The Master

by Colm Toibin

  The letters from Constance, who was now established in Venice, suggested that she was changing her habits. She wrote about the Venetian lagoon and her exploration of the outer islands and small wayward places, hidden from the tourists, her journeys by gondola. But she also began to write about the people whom she was meeting,mentioning the names of friends of his in Venice – Mrs Curtis and Mrs Bronson, for example – and adding the names of others, such as Lady Layard, suggesting that she was part of their circle, or at least regularly invited to their houses and quite pleased to accept their hospitality.

  Thus he began to believe that his old friend, whom he admired so much for her distance from things and her self-sufficiency, seemed to have entered willingly into the life of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, having allowed herself to be taken up by its richest and most socially ambitious hostesses. When she wrote to him to say that she and Mrs Curtis had been dutifully searching for a pied-à-terre for him, he became alarmed. He minded dreadfully that Constance was discussing his plans with people whom she did not know as well as he did. The tone of her letters and a letter he received from Mrs Curtis suggested that Constance had come close to making clear how well she knew him and how much she had seen of him in the past decade. He knew how easily and quickly this would be misconstrued.

  As far as possible, he had lived an undisturbed life. He neither gave offence, he believed, nor took it easily. Publishers irritated him, and there was a theatre producer called Augustin Daly whose dealings had enraged him, and magazine editors required constant patience which often ran out; also, a payment not coming and being promised and still not arriving, or a book not printed in time, or a book not selling at all, or his work being maliciously handled in the newspapers, these could prey on his mind especially when night fell. But once a measure of time had passed, they became minor matters which took up very little time or energy. He forgot about them and did not harbour grudges.

  Now, the idea of Constance in Venice, spending her evenings in the palazzi of the Grand Canal and discussing him freely, despite the stubborn reticence on which she prided herself, began to prey on his mind. A further letter from her describing her fellow lodgers at Casa Biondetti, including Lily Norton whose father and aunt were close friends of Henry and William, filled him with foreboding. He worked on his play and lived, he enjoyed telling Constance, the life of a hermit in London. He did not mention going to Venice or taking rooms there until he was pressed to confirm his interest by both Constance and Mrs Curtis, who now seemed to him to be working in tandem.

  Twice, with the help of Constance, he had managed to inhabit the hill above Florence with almost no one knowing he was there. The road to Bellosguardo was steep and narrow and winding, and those who wished to visit would have to make an effort and have precise directions. It seemed that Constance had other ideas for him in Venice. It was not that he had ever imagined the possibility of living there in secret, but now that his association with Constance had been made public he foresaw a social round in which they would both be included. He imagined her listening with barely disguised impatience with her good ear to the oft-told tales of Daniel Curtis, or Mrs Bronson’s accounts of her exploits with Browning. He imagined her turning to him and in a single, biting glance hinting at her contempt for the company. She would also, and this was what concerned him most, be ready to conspire on his behalf with his old friends now that she had joined their society. These conspiracies would be well intentioned, but they would interfere crucially with his inviolable need to make his own arrangements and do as he pleased. Slowly, in the weeks after he received the news that she and Mrs Curtis had been searching for an apartment on his behalf, he felt a powerlessness that he had not felt since he was a child.

  In July he wrote to Mrs Curtis to correct Miss Woolson’s misconception that he was looking for a flat in Venice. He realized, he said, that he had been toying with the affections of the watery city, but wondered if he had expressed himself clumsily to Miss Woolson in appearing to intimate that he might come to live in Venice. In fact, he had no plans to do so, he wrote, needing to live in London for all sorts of practical reasons. Every time he came to Venice, he said, and no doubt the next time would be the same, he cherished the dream of having a modest pied-á-terre, the dream being more vivid, he wrote, when he was on the spot, fading once he had returned home. He thanked Mrs Curtis for all her trouble, adding that while he had the fondest hope of going to Italy that winter, he had learned by stern experience not to make hard and fast plans.

  He knew that his letter would be shown to Constance and he imagined her response. In England, they had come, in strange and subtle ways, to depend on each other. Even though there were matters which they never discussed, other things, including what they were writing and their relationships to editors and publishers, were shared. He knew how much she loved his confidences, such as they were, and later in solitude went over, he imagined, every detail he had told her. She would know now that he did not intend to take a place in Venice, but also that he seemed inclined not to visit in the coming winter, despite his promises to her that he would. She was to be left to her own devices in Venice among people, especially the idle rich, whom he knew she would come to despise.

  Perhaps they could meet in the spring, he thought, in Geneva or Paris, but he did not think he would come to Venice. He had an image of her studying him critically as he arrived at the salon of Mrs Curtis and alluding sharply later to his charming behaviour as he enjoyed the hospitality of the Anglo-American society there, whose members viewed him as a valuable prize.

  He did not hear from her as summer went into autumn. He presumed that she was offended and he imagined also that she was working, as he was. With all his correspondents, he allowed for large intervals in which he did not write to them. But the silence between Kensington and Venice was of a different order. Eventually in late September she wrote, but the tone was distant and chilly, the letter merely informing him that she had moved from Casa Biondetti, where she had been very well looked after, to more private quarters, where she could be alone, in Casa Semitecolo nearby. She mentioned almost in passing that she was exhausted, having written and re-written her latest novel, and hoped for nothing now except a bookless winter. Affectionately yours, she wrote, and then signed her name. He read the letter over, knowing that she would have chosen every word carefully. He looked at the mention of the bookless winter and considered it, but it was only later that he understood its ominous implications.

  HE SPENT December in further dispute with the theatre producer Augustin Daly, who had behaved insolently and returned his play Mrs Jaspar. There was much correspondence about the matter, and for a number of weeks near Christmas the row with Daly filled a good deal of his waking life. His Christmas and New Year in London, however, were quiet and reflective as he rewrote his play.

  One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.

  How had she died? What occurred to him now and caused him suddenly to freeze was the suspicion that she had not died of any illness. She was strong, he thought, and perfectly healthy and he could not imagine her succumbing to an ai
lment. She had finished her book, and that would have left her, as it always did, forlorn. He knew that she hated the winter, and the winter in Venice could be especially dark and severe. He thought in cold fright about his own refusal to come to Venice and his not letting her know this directly. He was sure that his not having made arrangements to see her must have depressed her deeply. And thus, as he stood at the window, it struck him that she might have killed herself. And that was when he began to shake and had to move towards an armchair in his study, where he sat frozen, making himself go over and over the facts of her existence during the previous year.

  Some time later he was interrupted by Smith with a second telegram. He opened it hastily. It was from Constance’s niece, who, having been in Munich when she heard the news, had now arrived in Venice. She confirmed the news. As he put the telegram aside, he made the decision that he would not now go to Venice. He would be helpless there, and the idea of her inert body, the physical fact of her corpse, and her dead face masking and unmasking its own history as the light allowed, filled him with horror. He did not want to see her body, or to be close to her coffin, which was, the telegram told him, to be interred a week later in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

  He remained in his flat all day and told no one what had happened. He wrote to Constance’s doctor, who was also a friend, in Italy, expressing his shock, still not sure how she had died. It was all, he said, ghastly amazement and distress. He had not even known she was sick, he said, and had a dismal, dreadful image of her being alone and unfriended at the last, someone who had had intrinsically one of the saddest and least happy natures he had ever met. As he finished the letter, an image of her face in all its complex life, her eyes shining, her expression brilliantly intelligent and receptive came to him. He allowed himself to cry before going to the window again and staring down at the scene below, at people who meant nothing to him moving on the street.

  In the morning he knew that, although he had not dreamed about her, her spirit, the questing essence of who she was, had made itself known to him during the night, and he wanted, as soon as he woke, to close his eyes and go back to sleep to avoid the cold fact of her extinction. No one whom he knew had read his work as carefully, had tried to know him as clearly. No one had her mixture of ambition and sharpness, vulnerability and melancholy, unpredictability and bravery. No one had her great sympathy, and it became a heavy burden in the hollow of himself to imagine that sympathy coming to the end of its endurance.

  He received no further news, and as every hour went by, he imagined a different scenario, following its path and working out its implications. He began to veer between definitely not going to Rome for the funeral and setting off immediately; several times he sent Smith to book and unbook a passage to Italy. And then, having prevaricated for several days, he opened The Times to find the news that Constance had jumped to her death from the window of the house where she lived in Venice. It was, the paper said, suicide. At once, he began to reassure himself that he was not at fault. He had owed her nothing, he thought, he had made her no promises that were binding. They had not been lovers; they were not related by blood. He owed her only his friendship, just as he owed it to many others, he told himself, and all of the others knew that when a book was being written, his blinds were down, he was not available. All of his friends knew not to make demands on him, and Constance knew that too.

  Henry wrote to John Hay, a mutual friend who was already in Rome. He told Hay that he had, in fact, been ready to travel, to stand by her grave in the Protestant cemetery, but once the nature of her death had been confirmed, he had collapsed before the pity and the horror of it, he wrote, and he could not travel now. She had always been, he added, a woman so little formed for positive happiness that half one’s affection for her was, in its essence, a kind of anxiety.

  He resisted the thought that came to him when he had written the letter and was alone. It had a heavy crushing force, and he held it from him for as long as he could. He allowed himself to think that Constance had not lightly taken up his time, nor had she lightly allowed her own emotions to become so focussed. She had been subtle enough and nervous enough to make her demands silently, but they were all the clearer and more emphatic for that. He now had to face the idea that he, in turn, had sent her powerful and subtle signals of his need for her. And each time it became apparent to him what effect they were having, he retreated into the locked room of himself, a place whose safety he needed as desperately as he needed her involvement with him.

  She had been caught, as it were, in a large misunderstanding, not only in the snare of his solitary, sedentary exile, but also in the idea that he was a man who did not, and would not ever, desire a wife. Her intelligence surely should have warned her that he would, under the slightest pressure, even out of fear, pull back; but her need and the quality of her sympathy came to outpace her intelligence, he thought. Nonetheless, she had been careful: she had acknowledged his needs and his reticence and was ready to make space for them, but when she moved too close, became too public, he rejected her.

  He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone; his imagination, however, had stretched merely as far as his fears and not beyond. He had exerted control; what he had done made him shudder. Had he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself. If she had appealed to him to visit and he had refused, it might be easier for him now to feel simple guilt. But her appeals were all over and they would be for ever. He had let her down. He did not know if her friends in Venice, and friends of his, understood that this was the case and discussed it in the days after her death.

  He could not face the idea that Constance’s suicide had been planned for a long time. He wrote to others, to Rhoda Broughton, to Francis Boott, to William, saying to each in turn that Constance’s last act had been rash, a form of madness, a demented moment. He did not fully believe what he wrote, although each time he set it down, it seemed to become more plausible and definitive. He did not express to anyone his reservations about this version of how she ended. However, as some part of her spirit brushed through his rooms in the weeks after her death, he had a sense of her as the only person he had ever known who was fully skilled at deciphering the unsaid and the unspoken. There was no need even to whisper the words, or let them form fully in his mind; her fresh ghost understood that he knew, he knew well that she was not given to moments of insanity or sudden abrupt gestures, no matter what the pressures. She was a woman of great determination who made decisions carefully and rationally. She had an abiding dislike for shrillness and theatricality.

  Once night fell and the fire was blazing and the lamps glowing and he was alone, he came face to face with what had happened to his friend. She had planned her own death, he came to believe, having calculated for some time the possibilities. Her novel was finished and he knew that often, when she had completed a book,she did not think that she would write again. The winter was sad and damp in Venice where she moved between dark solitude and people she could easily begin to dislike.

  And for the sake of something hidden within his own soul which resisted her, and because of his respect for convention and social decorum, he had abandoned her there. He was the person who could have rescued her, had he sent her a sign.

  She planned her death, he thought, as she would plan a book, full of uncertainty and nerves, but also with ambition and a relentless physical courage. The influenza she suffered in those weeks, which he heard about from her doctor, would merely have added to her strength of will. She had decided, he knew, that she would be happier at rest, and she was prepared to do extreme violence to herself, to smash her bones and her head against the hard ground, to achieve her aim. Her restless curiosity, the pure honesty of her response, the practical nature of her imagination, all these came to him now, as what she had been powerfully visited him in the London winter, when her death had ceased to be news, until he knew that he would have to go to Venice where she died and from there travel to Rome where her
broken body lay in the ground.

  She came to him forcefully, palpably, in the days before he travelled. The woman he had kept at arm’s length was replaced by a woman of possibilities, a phantom he dreamed about. His parents were dead, his sister had been dead two years; William was far away, and he cared very little about the London society to which he had once paid so much attention. He could do as he pleased; he could have lived at Bellosguardo sharing a household with Constance, or he could have encouraged her to find adjoining houses for them in some English coastal town.

  Now he thought about her dead body, and the rooms she had filled with the passion of her aura, her books, her mementoes, her clothes, her papers. She preferred these rooms to most people; rooms were her sacred spaces. He began to imagine her rooms in Venice, at Casa Biondetti, and those at Casa Semitecolo, and her rooms at Oxford before she left England. He longed now for those spaces as though he had known them and had reason to miss them. He saw her figure, so tidy in its movements, flitting across these rooms, and as he did so, he came to understand something of his initial resistance to going to Venice when she died, or going to Rome for her funeral. He would have had to walk away from her, he would have had to enact their separation. From a relationship that had been so tentative and full of possibility, he would have had to face her absence in all its finality. She had no further use for him.

  This feeling that he had been brusquely and violently rejected somehow brought him closer to her. Now the prospect of seeing her rooms in Venice, looking at her papers, staying in the atmosphere she had created, began to intrigue him. He longed for her company and wondered, as the day of his departure for Italy came near, if he had always longed for it, but if only now, when it had no implications, could he allow himself fully to indulge the idea.

  In Genoa, as he waited for Constance’s sister Clara Benedict, he wrote to Kay Bronson and asked her to secure for him the rooms which Constance had occupied the previous summer at Casa Biondetti at the same terms. He wished also that the padrone would cook for him as he had for Miss Woolson, remembering how happy his friend had been with the fare. He was not surprised when he received word that the rooms were free. Somehow, with Constance guiding him, he had been sure all along that they would be. She was now two months dead.