William was the eldest and the least vulnerable. No amount of travelling or disruption seemed to make any difference to him. He was strong and popular among his schoolmates. He was certain of his entitlement to be part of the next game. He loved shouting and noise; he loved loud companions. He loved banging doors and playing sport. No one noticed the bookish part of him, and he may not even have noticed it himself until he began to argue fearlessly with his father. He did so with such relish and exuberance that by his early teens he was doing to words and phrases and opinions what he had done previously to fences and well-tended lawns.
Alice tried to be sophisticated for William, a woman of the world, a French diarist of the eighteenth century. Their mother one day spoke of how deeply affected Ned Lowell had been by the Boston portrayed in Howells’s new novel. Alice clearly wanted to say something, and they all turned to her. She could not begin. Her face was flushed.
‘Oh, the poor dear!’ she stammered out. ‘If he is so affected by a novel, one wonders how he feels about the Sack of Rome, or indeed his own wife’s flirtations.’
Once more, the table stopped. Their mother made as though to stand up, and moved her chair back. The others looked at Alice in surprise. William did not smile at her. She kept her eyes down. She had misjudged the moment, and they had learned how strange an impression she might make if she were to be let loose on the world.
That image of her stayed with him; the gap between her inner life in all its confused privacy and the life which had been mapped out for her intrigued him. As the long winter in London began to soften and the days lengthen, he worked on no novels, instead taking notes for stories and making some tentative beginnings. His sister’s premature death haunted him, and the details of her strange life came to him when he least expected them, adding to his sense of unrecoverable past.
He remembered one night also when his sister must have been eighteen or nineteen. He had come back to the house with news of some sort, a lecture he had heard which would interest his father, or something he had published. He had walked in the door full of bright expectation to be met by his Aunt Kate who immediately alerted him to the fact that his sister was not well.
As he sat downstairs, he could hear Alice calling out. Both parents ministered to her, and Aunt Kate regularly ascended the stairs to hover near her room or join them briefly and then come back down to report to Henry in hushed tones. He could not remember precisely what term his aunt had used to describe Alice ’s trouble. Alice was having an attack, perhaps, or Alice was suffering from her nerves, but he knew that during the night both of his parents in turn had come to speak with him, and he had noticed their excitement at the new dilemma presented to them. Their nervous daughter and her strange illness deserved all their sympathy and attention.
That night, when her sobs did not die down in the room above, and he knew she was being held and comforted, Henry had noticed also that his mother, so often dismissed by Alice for her banal concern with the merely domestic, now was needed desperately by her daughter, and she seemed, in the dim light of the old parlour as she came down and sat with Henry, to derive a certain satisfaction in being so needed.
Nothing was as it seemed. He had an image for his story of a governess, a person full of sweetness and intelligence and competence, excited by the challenge of her new duties, her charges the boy and girl whom the archbishop had told him about. And he had an image also of his mother and his Aunt Kate, one of them carrying a lamp, entering the parlour where he sat, both appearing worried and exhausted, his mother’s lips pursed but her eyes all bright and her cheeks flushed, both of them sitting with him as Alice’s muffled cries came from upstairs, both women grim and dutiful in their chairs, more alive, more intensely involved than he had seen them for many years.
He had an image too of being in Geneva with Alice and Aunt Kate some years later, a time in which none of them dared say to Alice or to each other that her suffering seemed almost willed. They tried to name her malady, and the nearest her mother could come to describing it was to say that Alice was suffering from genuine hysteria. Her illness was incurable, Henry realized, because she looked after it and clung to it as though it were a visitor with whom she had fallen helplessly in love. In Geneva, during their tour of Europe, they must have seemed to onlookers, and at times even to each other, a picture of rare and dutiful New Englanders taking in the sights, observing the Old World with an intelligent and sensuous eye, the brother and sister travelling with their aunt in the time before they would settle. His sister had seemed to him at her happiest, her wittiest and her most hopeful.
He remembered how each afternoon the three of them would walk by the lake, Aunt Kate having ensured that Alice had rested enough in the morning.
‘The geography book never mentioned,’ Alice said on one of these walks, ‘that lakes have waves. The whole of poetry will have to be rewritten.’
‘Where shall we start?’ Henry asked.
‘I shall write to William,’ Alice replied. ‘He will know.’
‘You must rest every day, my dear, and not write too many letters,’ Aunt Kate said.
‘How else shall I let him know?’ Alice asked. ‘Walking is more tiring than writing letters and all this fresh air shall, I fear, be the death of me.’
She smiled condescendingly at her aunt, who did not seem amused, Henry noticed, at the mention of death.
‘Lungs love hotels,’ Alice said. ‘They long for them, especially the lobby and the stairs, but also the dining room and the bedroom, if it has a nice view and a shut window.’
‘Walk slowly, my dear,’ Aunt Kate said.
Henry watched Alice as she tried to think of a further remark which would amuse him and annoy Aunt Kate, and then, as they continued walking, she became briefly contented in her silence and in their company.
‘The heart,’ she then continued, ‘prefers a nice, warm train and the brain, of course, cries out for an ocean liner. I shall convey all of this to William as soon as I return to the hotel, and we must walk fast, aunt, dear, slow walking is anathema to the memory.’
‘If Dorothy Wordsworth,’ Henry said, ‘had let her brother know such things, then his poetry would, I think, have been much improved.’
‘Was Dorothy Wordsworth not the poet’s wife?’ Aunt Kate asked.
‘No, that was Fanny Brawne,’ Alice said and smiled mischievously at Henry.
‘Walk slowly, my dear,’ Aunt Kate repeated.
That evening, as she came down to dinner, Henry noticed how carefully Alice had dressed and done her hair, and he knew that things might have been different for her if she had been a great beauty, or not an only girl, or if her intelligence had been less sharp, or her childhood more conventional.
‘Could we move around the world staying in nice hotels, just we three, and writing letters home when some very witty remark is made by one of us?’ Alice asked. ‘Could we do this for ever?’
‘No, we could not,’ Aunt Kate said.
Aunt Kate took on the role, Henry remembered, of a stern but benevolent governess caring for two orphaned children, Henry obedient and considerate and reliable, and Alice flighty but also ready to do what she was told. And all three of them were happy in those months as long as they put no thought into what would happen to Alice when she returned home.
No one watching them could have guessed that Alice was already a strange and witty invalid. Alice came close in their company to recovery, but Henry knew even then that they could not travel from city to city with her for ever. Behind the smiling face and the figure who came so happily down the stairs of the hotel to meet them in the lobby each morning, there was a darkness ready to emerge when the time came. By then Alice’s doom was somehow written into every aspect of her being, and, despite those days of equilibrium and happiness in Geneva, what was ahead for her had the shape of a story which now puzzled him and fascinated him, of a young woman who appeared to be light and ambitious and dutiful, but who would soon hear shrill sounds in the night and see frightening faces at the window and allow her daydreams to become nightmares.