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 ailment. 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 carefuclass="underline" 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.