Once night fell and the fire was blazing and the lamps glowing and he was alone, he came face to face with what had happened to his friend. She had planned her own death, he came to believe, having calculated for some time the possibilities. Her novel was finished and he knew that often, when she had completed a book,she did not think that she would write again. The winter was sad and damp in Venice where she moved between dark solitude and people she could easily begin to dislike.
And for the sake of something hidden within his own soul which resisted her, and because of his respect for convention and social decorum, he had abandoned her there. He was the person who could have rescued her, had he sent her a sign.
She planned her death, he thought, as she would plan a book, full of uncertainty and nerves, but also with ambition and a relentless physical courage. The influenza she suffered in those weeks, which he heard about from her doctor, would merely have added to her strength of will. She had decided, he knew, that she would be happier at rest, and she was prepared to do extreme violence to herself, to smash her bones and her head against the hard ground, to achieve her aim. Her restless curiosity, the pure honesty of her response, the practical nature of her imagination, all these came to him now, as what she had been powerfully visited him in the London winter, when her death had ceased to be news, until he knew that he would have to go to Venice where she died and from there travel to Rome where her broken body lay in the ground.
She came to him forcefully, palpably, in the days before he travelled. The woman he had kept at arm’s length was replaced by a woman of possibilities, a phantom he dreamed about. His parents were dead, his sister had been dead two years; William was far away, and he cared very little about the London society to which he had once paid so much attention. He could do as he pleased; he could have lived at Bellosguardo sharing a household with Constance, or he could have encouraged her to find adjoining houses for them in some English coastal town.
Now he thought about her dead body, and the rooms she had filled with the passion of her aura, her books, her mementoes, her clothes, her papers. She preferred these rooms to most people; rooms were her sacred spaces. He began to imagine her rooms in Venice, at Casa Biondetti, and those at Casa Semitecolo, and her rooms at Oxford before she left England. He longed now for those spaces as though he had known them and had reason to miss them. He saw her figure, so tidy in its movements, flitting across these rooms, and as he did so, he came to understand something of his initial resistance to going to Venice when she died, or going to Rome for her funeral. He would have had to walk away from her, he would have had to enact their separation. From a relationship that had been so tentative and full of possibility, he would have had to face her absence in all its finality. She had no further use for him.
This feeling that he had been brusquely and violently rejected somehow brought him closer to her. Now the prospect of seeing her rooms in Venice, looking at her papers, staying in the atmosphere she had created, began to intrigue him. He longed for her company and wondered, as the day of his departure for Italy came near, if he had always longed for it, but if only now, when it had no implications, could he allow himself fully to indulge the idea.
In Genoa, as he waited for Constance’s sister Clara Benedict, he wrote to Kay Bronson and asked her to secure for him the rooms which Constance had occupied the previous summer at Casa Biondetti at the same terms. He wished also that the padrone would cook for him as he had for Miss Woolson, remembering how happy his friend had been with the fare. He was not surprised when he received word that the rooms were free. Somehow, with Constance guiding him, he had been sure all along that they would be. She was now two months dead.
THE AMERICAN consul came with them to break the seal which the authorities had put on her apartment at the time of her death. Tito, who had been her gondolier, waited below for them. Mrs Benedict and her daughter stood in silence as the door into the house of death was unlocked. They seemed to Henry hesitant about stepping in. He stood behind them, trying to believe that her spirit was not in these abandoned rooms, merely her papers, her belongings, her left-overs, her gatherings, for she had been a collector of objects. He felt more sharply now that she had planned it all and foreseen it. In her love of detail, she would have been able to predict the arrival of the consul to break the seal, the boat waiting below, and she would have been able to imagine also the three others waiting to enter her room – her sister Clara Benedict, her niece Clare and her friend Henry James.
This, he thought, was her last novel. They all played their assigned roles. He watched as the American women stood in her bedroom afraid to approach the window to the small balcony from which she had jumped. Constance would have been able to conjure up their stricken faces and would have known, too, that Henry James would have studied the women, observing them with cold sympathy. She would have smiled to herself at his ability to keep his own feelings at a great distance from himself, careful to say nothing. Thus the scene taking place in this room, each breath they took, the very expression on their faces, each word they left said and unsaid, all of it belonged to Constance. It was pictured by her with wry interest during the time when she knew she would die, Henry believed. They were her characters; she had written the script for them. And she knew that Henry would recognize her art in these scenes. His very recognition was part of her dream. No matter where he looked or what he thought, he felt the sharpness of her plans and a sort of sad laughter at how easy it was to manipulate her sister and her niece and how delicious to direct the actions of her friend the novelist who, it seemed, had wished to be free of her.
The Benedicts did not know what to do; they employed Tito to ferry them from one part of the city to another; soon they spoke of him fondly. They sought comfort in Constance ’s friends; but when they heard that she had been found alive when she fell, that she had moaned as she lay dying, they were inconsolable. They cried each time they entered her rooms until Henry felt that if Constance could witness this, or if she had included it in her imagined vision, she would regret what she had done. She would never have been so hard.
Her sister and her niece remained helpless in the face of the practical. At first they did not wish to disturb Constance’s papers and seemed happy to leave everything in situ. They appeared not to believe that she was dead; and touching her things, they thought, would be a way of consigning the woman who had possessed them to oblivion.
After several days, when all had been grief and confusion, softened by the ministering of Constance’s circle of friends, with many lunches and dinners and gatherings to distract and console the sister and niece, Henry arranged to meet them at the apartment, to which he had now been given a key. Constance had kept a great deal of paper, half-finished and unpublished work, letters, fragments, notes. He had touched nothing on his early visits to the apartment, but he made a mental map of the terrain. He knew that should there be a battle between him and the Benedicts over what should be kept and what should be destroyed, he would lose the battle. As he waited for them, he determined to avoid even the slightest skirmish.
When he heard their key being turned, he shivered. Their voices seemed like interruptions. This was the first time he had heard an ordinary conversation between them which did not centre on Constance’s suicide and their own shock and sadness. Once they entered the bedroom where they found him standing at the window they became silent and serious.