‘I cannot bear to live another day,’ she said. ‘I beg that it might not be asked of me.’
The words helped him as he walked slowly back through Kensington to his own chambers. He had always feared that when the end came for her it might be what she had dreaded most, that all her talk
of wanting to die might turn out, in her last days, to have been mere bravado. He felt relieved that his sister had meant what she had said. He had watched her, knowing that in her place he would
be terrified, but she was different. She did not flinch.
In the reaches of the night, Katherine Loring told him, she sank into a gentle sleep. As he began another day’s vigil by her bed, he wondered about her dreams and hoped that the morphine
made them golden and took away all the darkness and fear that had clouded her life. He willed her to be happy now. But he could not stop himself wanting her to go on breathing, despite everything,
not to let go. He could not imagine her dead, having watched her dying for so long. The doctor, when he arrived, asked leave not to treat her, as she was in need of no further medical
assistance.
For Henry, now almost fifty, this was his first death. He had not been present when his mother died nor his father. He had sat by his mother’s dead body, but he had not witnessed her last
breath. He had described dying in his books, but he had not known about this, the long day waiting as his sister’s breath grew shallow, then seemed to fade, then rose again. He tried to
imagine what was happening to her consciousness, her great barbed wit, and he came to feel that all that was left of her was her fitful breath and her weakened pulse. There was no will and no
knowledge, merely the body moving slowly towards its end. And this to him made her even more pitiful.
Always, he had the image of the house of death as a silent place, still and watchful, but now he knew that there was no silence in this house because the sound of his sister’s breathing,
the changes in its levels of intensity, filled the air. Her pulse flickered and briefly stopped but still she did not die. He wondered if his mother’s death had been like this. Alice was the
only one who would know, the only one he could have asked.
He stood up and touched her as her breathing became easy and regular, her sleep peaceful. And this lasted an hour. She was still not ready to go, and he wondered who she was now, what part of
her existed in these last hours? As her breathing stopped, he watched in alarm. He was unprepared, despite those days and nights of vigil. She took another breath, laboured and shallow. He wished
once more that his mother was here to sit by him, hold his hand as Alice finally slipped away. Miss Loring now began to time her breathing, just one breath every minute, she said. As the end came,
Alice’s face seemed clearer in a way that was strange and oddly touching. He stood up and went to the window to let in some light and when he came back to the bed she had drawn her last
breath. The room was finally still.
He stayed by her body, knowing that lying peacefully in death was what she had craved to do. She looked beautiful and noble, and he believed, after all his earlier doubts, that if she could see
herself as her body awaited cremation, she would feel a grim delight at what she had become. It meant a great deal to him that her ashes would be returned to America to rest beside her parents in
the cemetery in Cambridge. It consoled him that they would not bury her in England, would not leave her far from home in the wintry earth.
Her dead face changed as the light changed. She seemed young and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. He smiled at her as she lay still, her face pale and drawn, yet exquisite and fine.
He remembered her anger at being left a life interest in a shawl and other worldly goods by her Aunt Kate. Both he and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they
lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had both recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into
exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.
CHAPTER FOUR
O
NE EVENING AS HE RODE
along in a rattling four-wheeler to go to dinner, an idea came to him for a story whose drama would reside in the peculiar and
intense affection between an orphaned brother and sister. He did not immediately have a picture of the pair nor imagine anything about their direct circumstances. What came to him was vague and
scarcely distinct enough to write in his notebook. The brother and sister were involved in a union of sympathy and tenderness which meant that they could read each other’s feelings and
impulses. They did not control each other, however; rather, they understood each other too well. Fatally well, he thought, and wrote that in his notebook without any idea of a plot or an incident
which could illustrate it. Maybe it was too much, but the idea of a fused self stayed with him. Two beings with one sensibility, one imagination, vibrating with the same nerves, the same suffering.
Two lives, but close to one experience. Both of them, for example, acutely aware of their parents’ passing, the irrevocable loss involved haunting both of them with an almost paralysing
pathos.
Often, ideas came like this, casually, without warning; often, they occurred to him at moments when he was busy with other things. This new idea for a story about a brother and sister developed
with a sort of urgency, as something that he barely needed to write down. He would not forget it. It stayed fresh and clear in his imagination. Slowly and mysteriously, it began to fuse with the
ghost story told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and slowly he began to see something fixed and exact as though the processes of imagination themselves were as a ghost, becoming more and
more corporeal. He saw the brother and sister, lonely and abandoned somewhere, banished siblings in a loveless old house, both of them operating with one mind, one soul, equal in their suffering
and unpreparedness for the great ordeal which was to come their way.
Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking
now. He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to
return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.
In the idleness of the afternoon sometimes he let his gaze wander through his notebooks again. One day he almost smiled to himself when he saw a few lines, which had seemed so promising less
than three years earlier that he had allowed them to fill his workday and his dreams alike, the very lines which were the cause of the months of lethargy and pain and disappointment through which
he now was emerging. He forced himself to read them to the end:
Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, and who was taken almost forcibly out of the monastry and brought back
into the world to keep his family from becoming extinct. He was the
last
– it was absolutely necessary for him to marry. Adapt this somehow or other to today.
His eye moved quickly to the list of names, ghost names taken from obituaries and death notices, names for characters and places, names which could lie inert in his notebooks or could still be
used; he could spend day after day giving life to them.
Beague Vena (Xtian name) – Doreen (ditto) – Passmore – Trafford – Norval – Lancelot – Vyner –
Bygrave – Husson – Domville.
Those last eight letters had been placed on the page in all innocence. He had no memory now of where the name had come from, nor indeed the exact
provenance of any of the names which came before it. Nor had he any real idea why that name had been used, and the others, left there, had not. The note and the name seemed distant now, and it
appeared extraordinary to him that his play had arisen from such unpromising beginnings and, once it was replaced by a new play by Oscar Wilde, had suffered an equally unpromising end.
H
IS PARENTS
dying, he thought, had brought with it a strange relief. It was the sense that it could not happen again, his mother’s body could lie
in repose only once, she could be consigned to the earth on only one occasion. And that occasion, in all its black brutal sorrow, had passed. With his parents dead and Alice gone, he had believed
that nothing could touch him. Thus his failure in the theatre remained a shock, something whose intensity and sharpness he had never thought he would have to deal with again. It was, he had to
admit, close to grief, even though he knew that such an admission was a kind of blasphemy.
He knew that he would suffer no further indignity at the hands of theatre audiences; he would devote himself, as he had pledged, to the silent art of fiction. If only he could work now, his days
could be perfect, full of the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages.
Not long after his return from Ireland, as he settled himself into a routine of reading and letter writing and the creation of domestic order, his young friend Jonathan Sturges came with news,
and he was soon followed by Edmund Gosse with the same news. It concerned Oscar Wilde.
Wilde had been much on Henry’s mind over the previous months. His two plays were still running at the Haymarket and the St James’s. Henry had no difficulty adding up the money Wilde
had been making. He wrote to William about it, noting one of the new phenomena of London life, the inescapable Oscar Wilde, suddenly successful rather than preposterous, suddenly industrious and
serious rather than someone busy wasting his time and that of others.
Both Sturges and Gosse offered information, however, which Henry did not pass on to William nor indeed to anyone else. Both his friends enjoyed knowing and telling fresh news and he allowed each
to feel that he was the first, partly because he was not sure that he wanted either of them to know that the antics of Oscar Wilde were matters much discussed under his roof.
Even before he went to Ireland, Henry had heard that Wilde had abandoned all due discretion. He was doing as he pleased in London and telling whomsoever he pleased about it. He was everywhere,
flaunting his money, his new success and fame, and flaunting also the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, a boy as deeply unpleasant as his father, in Gosse’s opinion, but rather
better-looking, Sturges allowed himself to admit.
Henry presumed that what was relayed to him by his two visitors was known to all. He knew that Wilde’s relationship with Queensberry’s son was common knowledge, but both Sturges and
Gosse appeared to feel that they and a mere few others knew the details, and the details, they insisted, were so appalling they could scarcely be whispered. Henry watched them calmly and ordered
tea for them and listened carefully to their delicate phrasing of matters which were not, to say the least, very delicate. Boys from the street, Gosse called them, but Sturges amused him more by
mentioning, sotto voce, young men whose abode was not very fixed.
‘He orders them as you would a cab,’ Gosse finally made himself clear.
‘For payment?’ Henry asked innocently.
As Gosse nodded gravely, Henry was tempted to smile, but he too remained grave.
It did not strike him as odd or shocking; everything about Wilde, from the moment Henry had first seen him, even when he had met him in Washington in the house of Clover Adams, suggested deep
levels and layers of hiddenness. Had Gosse or Sturges told him that Wilde went out every night dressed as a clergyman’s wife to give alms to the poor, it would not have surprised him. He
remembered something vague being told to him about Wilde’s parents, his mother’s madness or her revolutionary spirit, or both, and his father’s philandering or perhaps, indeed,
his
revolutionary spirit. Ireland, he supposed, was too small for someone like Wilde, yet he had always carried a threat of Ireland with him. Even London could not contain him with two plays
and many rumours all running at the same time.
‘Where is Wilde’s wife?’ he asked Gosse.
‘At home waiting for him, with unpaid bills everywhere and two young sons.’
Henry could not picture Mrs Wilde and did not think he had ever met her. He did not even know, nor did Gosse, whether she was Irish or not. But the idea of the two boys, who looked like angels,
Gosse had assured him, struck him forcibly. He imagined the two sons waiting for their monstrous father to return and was glad he did not know their names. He thought of them, both unaware of their
father’s reputation, yet slowly gathering an impression of him and longing for him now that he was away.
Despite the fact that he believed, as the gossip came his way, that he had the measure of Wilde, he held his breath and moved about the room in silence when Gosse told him that Wilde was suing
the Marquess of Queensberry in open court for calling him a sodomite.
‘It seems that he could not even spell the word,’ Gosse said.
‘Spelling, I imagine, was not ever his strong point.’ Henry stood at the window glancing out as though expecting Wilde or the marquess himself to appear on the street below.
Gosse managed to imply at all times that his information came from the highest and most reliable source. He suggested somehow that he was in touch with members of the cabinet, or the prime
minister’s office, or on certain occasions an informant close to the Prince of Wales. Sturges, on the other hand, made it clear that all he knew came from club gossip, or chance meetings with
informants who might not be entirely reliable. The visits of Gosse and Sturges never coincided during these frenzied weeks, which was fortunate, Henry thought, as each of them came bearing
precisely the same information.
Gosse began to call every day, Sturges merely when there was news, although once the trial opened Sturges came daily too. There was always some embellishment and some new piece of intrigue.
Gosse had met George Bernard Shaw who had told him of his meeting with Wilde, of his warning him not to bring the case against the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde had agreed, Shaw said, that it
would not be wise, and everything was settled until Lord Alfred Douglas arrived, brazen and petulant, as Shaw had described him, demanding that Wilde sue his father and attacking those who advised
caution, insisting that Wilde leave with him there and then. Douglas was red-faced with anger, Shaw said, a spoiled boy. The strange thing though was that Wilde seemed totally under his power,
followed him and appeared to give in to him. He melted under the heat of the young man’s anger.