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.