Yet he brought away a sense of her, as someone with fixed opinions, hardened attitudes, and as Gosse continued to tell him more about Symonds, Henry began to work his imagination on Mrs Symonds, as though he were a portrait painter. She was, Gosse said, in no sort of sympathy with what her husband wrote, she disapproved of his tone when he wrote about Italy, the hyper-aesthetic manner he had developed appalled her, and then she loathed his entire concern with love between men. She was, to start with, Gosse said, of a narrow, cold, Calvinistic disposition, as morbid in her search for moral purpose as her husband was in search of ultimate beauty. One of them, Gosse said, seemed to aggravate the other so that as time went by Mrs Symonds increasingly craved the sackcloth while her husband longed for Greek love.

Gosse spoke idly of the Symondses and did not realize how Henry was taking this in. The story came to Henry, in any case, so quickly and easily that he did not have time to tell Gosse. He set to work.

What if such a couple had a child, a boy, impressionable, intelligent, alert to the world around him and deeply loved by both his parents? How would the child be educated? How would the child be taught to look at life? He listened to Gosse and asked questions and from the answers began to construct his story. His first ideas emerged later as too stark and so he abandoned the ambitions of the parents for their son – one wanting the child to serve the Church, the other, the father, wanting the child to become an artist. Instead he dramatized the idea that the mother merely wanted to save her son’s soul, and in order to do so she needed to protect him from his father’s writings.

He wondered at first if he should allow the child to grow up a lout and an ignoramus, as far away as possible from his mother’s hopes and his father’s ambitions. But as he worked, alone, away from Gosse’s conversation, he decided to deal only with the boy, and to make the time frame of the story short and dramatic. And he would bring in an outsider, an American, an admirer of the father’s work, one of the few who understood the father’s true genius. The father, he thought, could be a poet or a novelist or both. The American is very kindly received, he remains near the family for some weeks, weeks which coincide with the child’s illness and death. The American understands something which the father does not know – that during the night, as the child lay ill, his mother made up her mind secretly that it were better he should die, and she watched him sink, holding his hand, but doing nothing, allowing him for very tenderness to fade away. The American never imparts this information to the author he so much admires.

Henry wrote down the bones of the story one night after Gosse had departed and then worked steadily, daily. He knew that it would take prodigious delicacy of touch, and even then would probably be too gruesome and unnatural. Nonetheless, the story intrigued him, and he thought he would try it, for the general idea, corruption and Puritanism and innocence, was also full of interest and typical of certain modern situations.

Gosse, he remembered, had been frightened by the appearance of the story in the pages of the English Illustrated magazine. Most people would recognize the Symondses, he said, and those who did not would imagine that the subject was Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry told him that the story was now written and published; it did not cost him a thought who recognized themselves or others. Gosse remained nervous, knowing how much he had contributed. He insisted that writing a story using factual material and real people was dishonest and strange and somehow underhand. Henry refused to listen to him. In retaliation, Gosse began to refrain from providing him with his usual store of gossip. Soon, however, his friend forgot his objections to the art of fiction as a cheap raid on the real and the true, and began once more to tell Henry all the news he had picked up since their last meeting.

As Sturges told Henry that Wilde’s wife had travelled from Switzerland to tell her prisoner husband personally of his mother’s death, he mused once more on the fate of the children of a union between two opposing forces. He pictured himself and William at the window of the Hôtel de l’Ecu in Geneva when he was twelve and William thirteen and their time in Switzerland seemed to him an eternity of woe: infinite hours of dullness, the dingy streets, the courtyards and alleys black with age. He imagined Oscar Wilde’s two sons, their names changed and their fate uncertain, watching from a window as their mother departed. He wondered what they feared most now when night came down, two frightened children in the unforgiving city, its shadows steep and sombre, half knowing why their mother had left them in the care of servants and haunted by unnamed fears and barely grasped knowledge and the memory of their evil father who had been shut away.

CHAPTER FIVE

HIS HAND HURT HIM. If he wrote with it, moving the pen calmly with no flourishes, then he did not feel even a mild discomfort, but when he stopped writing, when he moved his hand about, he could, on turning a door handle, for example, or shaving, feel an excruciating pain in his wrist and the bones which ran towards his little finger. Lifting a sheet of paper was a form of mild torture now. He wondered if this were a message from the gods to keep writing, to wield his pen at all times.

Every year as the summer approached he felt the same persistent dull worry which led eventually to panic. As transatlantic travel became easier, and more comfortable, it also became more popular. As time went by, his many cousins in America seemed to develop many more cousins of their own, and his friends many more friends. In London all of them wished to visit the Tower and Westminster Abbey and the National Gallery, and over the years his name had been added to the list of the great local monuments, essential to see. As soon as the evenings lengthened and the swallows returned from the south, the letters began to arrive, letters of introduction and what he called letters of determination from the very tourists themselves, certain that their visit to the capital would lack all due shine were they to miss the famous writer and not receive the benefit of his company and counsel. Should his gates be locked to them, their letters implied – indeed, they often insisted and implored – then they would not get full value for their money, and this he discovered meant more and more to his compatriots as the century came to an end.

He remembered what he had written in his notebook the previous year; it was a scene which had been on his mind since then. Jonathan Sturges had told him of a meeting in Paris with William Dean Howells, now almost sixty. Howells had told Sturges that he did not know the city, all of it was new to him, and every sensation came to him freshly. Howells seemed sad and brooding, as if to suggest that it was too late for him in the evening of his life when he could do nothing except take in the sensations and regret that they had not come to him when he was young. Then, in response to something Sturges had said, Howells laid his hand on his shoulders and exclaimed: ‘Oh you are young, be glad of it and live, live all you can, it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do – but live.’ Sturges had acted out the lines, making them into a strange and plaintive appeal, a sudden burst of drama, as though Howells were speaking the truth for the first time.

Henry had known Howells for thirty years and corresponded with him regularly. Whenever Howells came to London, he behaved as though he were at home there, as though he were a well-travelled cosmopolitan gentleman. Henry was amazed then by his response to Paris, the sense Sturges got from him that he had not lived at all and that it was too late for him now to begin to do so.