Thus as Henry dictated his letters, McAlpine sullenly and dutifully took down his words in shorthand and presented him later with a clean typed copy. Soon, Henry began to dictate directly to the stenograph and he wondered sometimes whether McAlpine or his brand-new machine took the greater interest in the words he spoke.
His hand, he informed his friends, had been relegated to permanent and incompetent obscurity. Gradually, his stenographer became as omnipresent and strangely transparent as the very air itself, especially once Henry discovered that the practice of dictation could fit the company of fiction as much as, if not more than, the art of letter writing. As his hand healed, he began to write some of his own letters at night when his typist had retired, and used the new machine and its silent master during the day for the creation of serious narrative.
At the beginning he was careful not to broadcast his new method too freely, but soon he regretted telling anyone at all, as those who learned that he was now talking his words into a machine, that the art of fiction had become industrialized, took a dim view of his decision and, indeed, of his future. He assured them that he could be trusted not to be simplified by any shortcut, or falsified by any facility, that, in short, his commerce with the muse had been in fact assisted by the arrival of the machine and the Scot.
He loved walking up and down the room, beginning a new sentence, letting it snake ahead, stopping it for a moment, adding a phrase, a brief pause, and then allowing the sentence to gallop to an elegant and fitting conclusion. He looked forward to starting in the morning, his typist punctual, uncomplaining, seemingly indifferent as though the words uttered by the novelist equalled in interest and importance his previous work in the commercial sector.
He felt now that all of his working life had been leading up to this loud freedom, and after a few months he knew that he would not be able to return to pen and paper, to unmechanical solitude. Wherever he would go the Scot would have to come too, with the large, unwieldy typewriter, which soon replaced the stenograph, in tow. The typewriter would have to be carried and the Scot would have to be fed. Thus moving would require trouble and expense. His days of channel-crossing and railways and hotel life had come to an end. The call of other climates and glamorous cities was drowned somewhat by the dutiful click of the typewriter and the sound of his own voice.
IN THESE YEARS he had written so much, and in so much dramatic detail, about houses, that his friend the architect Edward Warren offered to make him drawings of Gardencourt or Poynton, Easthead or Bounds, houses he had described room by room, full of carefully created atmosphere, treasured ornament and faded tapestry. They could, Warren said, make special architectural editions of his books. Henry, each time he visited Warren ’s house, studied a drawing he had made of the garden room at Lamb House in Rye, viewed from the street, admiring the English essences, old brick and the sense of weathered comfort.
Henry dreamed of having a house of his own outside London; he imagined himself each evening seated in the rich glow of a lamp in an old panelled room, the floorboards darkly varnished and covered in rugs, the fire alight, the burning wood oozing and crackling, the heavy curtains drawn, a long day’s work completed and no social duties looming.
When summer came, he spent time wandering in the villages of the Suffolk coast, delighting in the names – Great Yarmouth, Blundeston, Saxmundham, Dunwich – which suggested a gnarled legacy, an ancient history. He thought that a stone cottage on this coast, something simple and closely connected with the surrounding sea-faring culture, would be ideal for him. As he moved from place to place, his typist and his Remington in tow, oscillating between bad lodgings and expensive hotels, he hoped that this would be his last incoherent summer, but he knew that this patched-up, hand-to-mouth, unhoused way of life would continue, intolerably, to be his lot until he could put a hand on a lovely refuge of his own, for which, as time went by, he thirsted more and more.
In the Suffolk villages he asked anyone he had occasion to meet, explaining his needs and desires, proffering his address in London as a sign of his seriousness. A few times he was encouraged to look at a property, but nothing he saw came close to his dream; they were, in their own innocent way, all of them hideous, available to him merely because no one else wanted them.
Similarly in Rye he made clear his desire to find permanent lodgings. He had made friends with the local blacksmith who had partly graduated to the title of ironmonger and was much at his entrance on the lookout for fresh faces for idle chatter. On one of his strolls in Rye, Henry stopped at the door of Mr Milson, who after the first meeting greeted him instantly as Mr James, and knew him as the American writer, having his walk in a Rye he was slowly growing to admire and love. Upon his second or third conversation with Mr Milson, during his time as a resident of Point Hill, he observed that he longed for a permanent spot in the area, in the countryside, or indeed in the town itself. Since Mr Milson enjoyed talking, and since he was not interested in literary matters, and since he had not been to America and knew no other Americans, and since Henry’s knowledge of ironmongery was rudimentary, the two men discussed houses, ones which had been for rent in the past, others which had been put on the market or sold or withdrawn, and others, much coveted, which had never been bought or sold or rented in living memory. Each time he visited, once they had initiated their subject, Mr Milson showed him the card on which Henry’s London address was inscribed. He had not mislaid it, he had not forgotten, he insisted, and then enticingly would mention some great old house, perfect for a bachelor’s needs, but sorrowfully would have to admit that the house remained firmly in its owner’s hands and seemed unlikely to leave them in the foreseeable future.
Henry viewed his conversations with Mr Milson as a form of play, just as his conversations with fishermen about the sea, or the farmers about the harvest, were forms of polite relaxation, a way of drinking in England, allowing its flavours to come to him in phrases, turns of speech and local references. Thus even when he opened the letter which arrived at his London address, having noticed that the handwriting on the envelope was not that of someone accustomed to writing letters, and even when he saw the name Milson as the sender, he was still puzzled by its provenance. Only when he read it a second time did he realize who it was from and then, as though he had received a blow in the stomach, he understood what the letter said. Lamb House in Rye had fallen vacant, Milson told him, and could be had. His first thought was that he would lose it, the house at the quiet corner at the top of a cobbled hill whose garden room Edward Warren had drawn so lovingly, the establishment he had glanced at so achingly and covetously on his many tours of Rye, a house both modest and grand, both central and secluded, the sort of house which seemed to belong so comfortably and naturally to others and to be inhabited so warmly and fruitfully by them. He checked the postmark. He wondered if his ironmonger was freely broadcasting the news of this vacancy to all comers. This was, more than any other, the house he loved and longed for. Nothing had ever come easily, magically like this. He could do what he liked, he could send a cable, he could take the next train, but he remained sure that he would lose it. There was no purchase, however, in thinking, or regretting or worrying; there was only one solution and that was to rush to Rye, thus ensuring that no omission on his part could cause him not to become the new inhabitant of Lamb House.