The Master

by Colm Toibin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Indeed,’ Henry replied.

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

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

  ‘You have written articles?’

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

  ‘But you are acquainted with influential editors?’

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

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

  Henry hesitated.

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

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

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

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

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