I shall miss you, my dear, but I am most happy to know that you are well and enjoying yourself. If you were not my cousin I would write to ask you to marry me and take me with you, but as it is, it wouldn’t do so I will have to console myself, however, with the thought that in that case you might not accept my offer.
He read on: ‘If I were, by hook or by crook, to spend next winter with friends in Rome, should I see you at all?’ And then, in one of the last letters he received from her: ‘Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.’
He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her, and she was careful never to ask outright. If she had insisted on coming, he forced himself to complete this thought now, he would have stood aside or kept his distance or actively prevented her coming, whatever was necessary. He had himself, in that year, escaped into the bright old world he had longed for. He was writing stories and taking in sensations and slowly plotting his first novels. He was no longer a native of the James family, but alone in a warm climate with a clear ambition and a free imagination. His mother had written to say that he must spend what money he needed in feasting at the table of freedom. He did not want his invalid cousin. Even had she been well, he was not sure that her company, so full of wilful charm and curiosity, would have been entirely welcome. He needed then to watch life, or imagine the world, through his own eyes. Had she been there, he would have seen through hers.
He went to the window and looked down at the street. Even now, he felt that he had every right to leave her behind, to follow the path of his own talent, his own nature. Nonetheless, her letters filled him with sorrow and guilt, and added to these a sort of shame when he realized that she must have spoken to others, to Gray at least, about his refusal to entertain her. Holmes’s phrase ‘she turned her face to the wall’ echoed in his mind now and did battle with his sense of his own ruthlessness, his own will to survive. And finally, as he turned back into the room, he felt a sharp and unbearable idea staring at him, like something alive and fierce and predatory in the air, whispering to him that he had preferred her dead rather than alive, that he had known what to do with her once life was taken from her, but he had denied her when she asked him gently for help.
He sat on a chair in his living room for most of the afternoon, letting his thoughts sink and glide and come to the surface again. He wondered if he might burn these letters, if nothing good could come of them in the future. He put them aside for the moment and returned to the cupboard where he had found them and rummaged there until he discovered the red notebook he had been looking for. He knew what he was seeking, it lay in the opening pages, written a few years earlier; its outline was fresh in his mind but its details were not. He carried the notebook into the better light of the living room.
During the time since Holmes’s visit and in the midst of all his worry and suffering, his interest in the picture of a young American woman slowly dying, which he had noted down, had intensified. It was the story of a young woman with a large fortune on the threshold of a life that seemed boundless in its possibilities. She would come to Europe so that she could live, live passionately and intensely if only for a short time.
He read through his notes about a young Englishman, penniless, clever, handsome, who is in love with someone else, but whose task becomes to save the American girl, love her, help her to live, despite the fact that he is hopelessly compromised, a matter of which the dying girl knows nothing. His intended, penniless as well, also befriends the girl.
As he read his notes, he was horrified by the sheer callousness of the story. The young man pretending to love the girl, and perhaps get her money, his love a sort of treachery, and his real love watching over this, knowing that she could marry if they could get the money. The story, he thought, was vulgar and ugly, and yet it came to him powerfully now.
He took the letters in his hand again, looked at Minny’s trusting, clean handwriting, the hand of someone who expected only good from the world. He saw her clearly coming to Europe for her last look at life. He gave her money, he imagined her as having inherited a fortune, and saw too his hero, one part of him full of love and pity for her, and the other part hardened and needy and ready to betray. The story was vulgar and ugly only if the motives were so, but what if the motives were mixed and ambiguous? Suddenly, he sat up straight and then stood and walked to the window. He had, in that second, seen the other woman, had caught a sharp view of her strange moral neutrality, how much she was sacrificing in letting the dying girl know love, how much she was gaining also and how careful she was, in her practical way, never to allow the two to appear on opposite sides of the weighing scales.
He had them now, all three of them, and he would embrace them, hold on to them and let them improve with time, become more complex and less vulgar, less ugly, more rich, more resonant, more true not to what life was, but to what it might be. He crossed the room again and gathered up the letters and the notebooks and brought them to the cupboard and put them brusquely on a shelf and closed the cupboard doors. He would not need them again. He would need to work now, apply his mind. He would, he determined, travel back to Rye and be ready again, when the call came, to explore one more time the life and death of his cousin Minny Temple.
CHAPTER SIX
HIS HAND DID NOT IMPROVE. He held it now as though it were a foreign object placed in his care, unpleasant and unwelcome and, at times, venomous. He could write in the mornings, but by noon the pain was too intense along the bone running from his wrist to his little finger and the muscles and nerves and tendons around it. If he did not move his hand he felt no pain, but writing now, especially if he stopped to think and then resumed the work, caused him unbearable agony and he would have to put the pen down.
In pure frustration, then, he would read over the last few pages and make mental notes for emendations. He would discover that his mind had raced forwards, and he had continued his narrative effortlessly in his own head, constructing whole sentences, word for word. He found that he could put in an imaginary full stop and then finish another sentence. He did not speak them aloud, nor did he even whisper them, but they came to him complete and he did not have any difficulty remembering what the previous sentences had contained, or how each had begun. Now as he sat at his desk he wanted to write to William about this phenomenon but realized sharply that he could not write a letter, indeed had not written any serious letters for some time, so carefully was he preserving the energies of his right hand for the novel then being serialized each month, whose chapters, pain or no pain, he could not fail to deliver. In the few hours of the morning when he could work painlessly, he devoted himself to his fiction, but as time went on even these few hours were proving difficult.
William, who delighted in modern inventions, had written to him of the advantages of the stenograph, insisting that dictating was faster and easier, and if he concentrated sufficiently hard, produced seamlessly better results. Henry was sceptical about this and uneasy about the costs. Also, he was content with his own solitude, his own tight control over the words on the page. But when the pain extended to his entire arm and when, morning after morning, he had to bear the torture in order to keep the series running and the printers supplied with fresh pages, he knew that he could not go on. He was exhausted.
He would use a stenographer for his correspondence, he thought, and there was a good deal pending. He worried about his privacy, but assured himself that there was nothing in his correspondence which was entirely private. If he found such matter, he would instantly erase it. The stenographer recommended to him was a Scot called William McAlpine, who seemed efficient and trustworthy and competent as he arrived at the flat each morning, but these were minor characteristics beside his silence, his dourness and his lack of apparent interest in anything other than the task in hand.