During one of those evenings with Gosse, he told him in passing how he had acquired Lamb House, mentioning the iron-monger Mr Milson as a ferryman waiting to take him across the water to ideal
seclusion, managed happiness. He then told Gosse of Howells’s visit, and how his financial circumstances due to new possibilities for American publication had been transformed, as though he
were being handed a coin by an old friend to put under his tongue and assist him on his journey to Hades.
‘Rye,’ Gosse laughed, ‘is indeed a death, especially on weekdays in the winter, but I daresay at weekends as well.’
‘If I were Poe,’ Henry said, ‘I could write about one of those characters who is travelling to an unknown house whose door is a door into the grave.’
‘You will long for London, and that will settle it, and you will escape with the mere fright which rural life offers the unwary,’ Gosse said.
H
ENRY HAD
promised Collier’s a new story as part of Howells’s interceding on his behalf, and, having consulted his notebooks and spoken more
to Gosse about the problem of credibility in the modern ghost story but without telling him what his plans were, he set to work. This time he would frame the story, use the first-person voice as a
narrative left behind by the protagonist and now retrieved to be read to a weekend party at a country house. He longed, as he dictated, to frighten the Scot, and watched him carefully as he began
his tale so that he could note thereafter any shift in his countenance, any paling of his skin.
His narrator’s voice would be prim and factual; seeping gently from her tone would be a sort of goodness, a readiness to appreciate each new person and each new experience as a reward sent
to her in exchange for her quick intelligence and sensitivity. He sought a tone of voice full of calm acceptance, resigned competence, mingling authority with a devotion to duty, an orderly
attachment to making the best of things; someone who would not complain and for whom shrillness would be among the cardinal vices. He wanted a voice that every reader would automatically believe
and trust, but also a literary style redolent of fifty years earlier – our heroine was an avid reader – broken intermittently by simple vivid sentences.
It was the story which had lain in his notebooks for more than two years, and had come to him over that time in flashes and moments, but nothing close to a form or a way to begin had inspired
him until now, when he knew that he would need such a story, firm and frightening and dramatic, for his new editor at Collier’s, something that would grip the readers and make them want more.
This was the vague tale told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury of two children in a large house left by their guardian in the care of a governess detailed not to contact the guardian under any
circumstances.
It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself,
the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she
noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and
self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.
The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming
vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on
retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room
dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.
He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did
not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and
manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed
anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her
isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.
This longing, he knew, would in time come to him too as the garden door creaked, or the branches of the trees beat against the window as he read by lamplight, or lay awake in that old house, and
in one of those seconds before worthier thoughts could surface, the first thought would be to welcome what was coming now to break the sad, helpless monotony of the self, to feel a moment of
desperate hope that it was come at last, whatever it was. Even in its darkest shape, it would offer the same moment of pure, sharp release as a flash of lightning offers to the brittle air in a
dried-up landscape.
He worked. He moved everything slowly and deliberately towards excitement. He began the sentences simply, declaratively, so that the fright of what she saw seemed to harden the governess’s
diction, forced her into bald, true statement. The person looking in through the window was the person who had appeared to her. He was the same. His face was close to the glass and his stare into
her face was deep and menacing until she realized something that she would never cease to believe: the added shock of certitude went through her fiercely that it was not for her he had come. He had
come for the children.
As he laboured on the story, he did not think in any detail about the children. He gave them names and allowed their governess superlatives with which to describe them. Slowly, however, it
became apparent to him that he had imagined for them strange private selves, which, while giving nothing away, maintained a strong resistance to the governess. She did not recognize it, and yet,
whatever he had done with her words, he had handed young Miles and little Flora minds of their own.
Each time he came to describe the appearance of the ghost, or the ethereal and menacing presence of Peter Quint, none of this mattered. The scene itself, the emptiness of the house, its newness
for the governess, and then the invasive figure, utterly real to her, and seemingly real also to the children and the housekeeper Mrs Grose, made him shiver as he began to conjure it up. He watched
McAlpine for signs of interest, but none came. He knew that asking McAlpine if he found these scenes in any way disturbing would be a breach of decorum. Most of the time, however, he did not think
about McAlpine, and even the sound of the Remington made no difference. Most of the time he concentrated on the voice itself, the governess’s vivid version of each thing witnessed. His main
task was to prevent the reader from asking why the governess did not contact the children’s guardian; he sought to offer enough detail and swift movement and further development to preserve
the fiction that she was alone and must act alone. He set out to cajole the reader into becoming her eyes and ears and thus entering into her spirit, inhabiting unquestioningly her
consciousness.
The story appeared in Collier’s in twelve weekly instalments. He had no difficulty meeting the deadline. He knew what had to happen and sometimes he lingered softly over the fresh fright
he was causing to the governess, enjoying the darting logic of her mind, making sure that he signalled again and again that the children knew everything and nothing. They were the least dependable
pair, Miles and Flora, that he had ever invented; they had learned to withstand it all, save the obvious danger, and at times as he worked he was not sure himself what that was.
He knew that his working conditions were the most perfect he would ever have. The Scot was silent and dutiful and accurate. Speaking out the sentences gave them a greater force and stability
than when he wrote them in longhand. Seeing them in a fair copy that evening gave them an immediate authority. He always knew what to do, what emendations to make, and what deletions. And this flat
in Kensington would soon be lost to him; he would sublet it or allow the lease to go, but it would no longer be his, and every day he moved about the rooms, alert to their atmosphere as though he
would have a vital need to remember them. He had no visitors during the day, no disturbers, merely his shopping expeditions alone or with Lady Wolseley and his consultations with Edward Warren, who
was dealing with the work at Lamb House. He dined out with relish now, and accepted invitations with delight. Soon, it would all be over, a part of the past. He would be leaving London.
As he worked each morning, drawing out the scenes in their full drama and fright, scenes of his own came to him in sharply packed shocks and forced him to hesitate and finally stop. On one of
these mornings, as he dictated the scene where Flora was discovered having left her bed, her governess believing that she had lied when she stated that she had seen nothing, he found that he was
about to use the name Alice in place of Flora. He corrected himself before he spoke. His story, so real to him now and rich and urgent, had been interrupted not by something ghostly, but by a
memory which came in all its ache and concrete detail. It did battle with his tale of horror and it won. It took him over; he had to stop and move into his bedroom and stand alone by the window.
And then he had to go and tell McAlpine that he would not need him any more that day. This, he thought, was the only time he detected a note of surprise on the face of his amanuensis, but it
disappeared quickly and McAlpine arranged his things and left without any questions or comments.
Alice must have been five or six in the scene which had come to him. They had returned to Newport, or perhaps gone there for the first time, and she had been for some days under the care of Aunt
Kate while their parents were absent and Aunt Kate had, Alice felt, imposed too much restraint on her small self, far more than was normal. When this was pointed out to her by the child, Aunt Kate
had refused to budge, had insisted that her instructions be followed until Alice had become annoyed. She began, Henry remembered, by calling on her brothers for support, but they did not heed her,
and then she pouted and sulked. Then, having learned that she would have two more days of this new regime before the return of her parents, she set about obeying Aunt Kate in every possible way,
becoming a shining example, if Newport needed one, of an obedient girl.
No one else, save her brothers and Aunt Kate, noticed what she did to her aunt in the months that followed. Aunt Kate could not complain because Alice’s assault on her was too sporadic in
its timing, and too comic in its tone, and it was, in any case, done behind her back much of the time. If Aunt Kate smiled or greeted a visitor warmly, her little niece stood by her skirts smiling
grotesquely in imitation of her. All her particularities of speech, her ‘Oh my gosh’ and ‘well, well, well’, became natural parts of Alice’s speech, but exaggerated.
Alice would often be found staring at her aunt cheekily, but would never do so for long enough to cause her mother to notice. She often followed her aunt for no reason, tip-toeing behind her,
trying to mimic the gait of a middle-aged spinster lady.
Aunt Kate herself did not see the extent of Alice’s efforts to undermine her and exact revenge, and Alice’s parents passed the summer in happy contemplation of their children’s
innocence and lack of any form of hiddenness and mendacity. William enjoyed it most, and encouraged it, but the impulse came from Alice alone. It must have come into her mind as soon as she woke,
and it never seemed to leave her mind as long as she was awake. It ended merely because Alice grew tired of it.
This was the world he made for Miles and Flora, his two innocent and beautiful and abandoned children. Their private selves remained apart; they made sure that their ability to maintain a
distance from sweet duty was not apparent. He gave his story everything he knew: his own life and that of Alice in the years when they were alone in England; the possibility which haunted his
family all their lives that the threatening black shape would return to the window and make their father shudder and howl with fear; and the years he was now facing in an old house to which he
would soon go, like his governess, full of hope, but full also of a foreboding which he could not erase.
Alice was dead now, Aunt Kate was in her grave, the parents who noticed nothing also lay inert under the ground, and William was miles away in his own world, where he would stay. And there was
silence now in Kensington, not a sound in the house, except the sound, like a vague cry in the distance, of his own great solitude, and his memory working like grief, the past coming to him with
its arm outstretched looking for comfort.
CHAPTER SEVEN
T
HE PHOTOGRAPHS CAME
as he had asked for them; one was close-up and detailed, showing in relief the monument to the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts
Regiment being led by Colonel Shaw, and the other taken from a distance, showing the Boston Common and Saint Gaudens’s monument in the corner. Henry carried the photographs to the window to
study them in a better light and then went back to the table and found William’s letter calling the new monument a glorious work of art, simple and realistic. He could hear the certainty in
William’s voice. William had given the official address on the unveiling of this memorial to the 54th Regiment, the first black regiment of the American army, in which their brother Wilky had
served. He had spoken for three quarters of an hour, and then been, as he put it, toted around for two hours in a brake at the tail end of the procession. It was, he wrote to Henry, an
extraordinary occasion for sentiment with everything softened and made poetic and unreal by the time which had passed.