The twilight lingered and the two men grew silent until Henry felt that they would never think of anything to say again. He moved his chair so that he could study Holmes and saw him now in the gloaming as a deeply contented fellow, at home with himself, and he felt a mild distaste for the aura of good-humoured complacency which Holmes gathered around him.
‘It is strange how time goes,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry replied, stretching. ‘I used to think it went more slowly in England, but having lived here for so long I know that to be an illusion. I depend now on Italy as the place where time goes most slowly.’
‘I was thinking of that summer when we were all together,’ Holmes said.
‘Yes,’ Henry said. ‘That glorious, heroic summer.’
Henry now expected Holmes to say that time had flown since then or that it seemed like yesterday and he wondered how he would respond to Holmes’s banalities. He was already preparing a missive to William, telling him that Holmes as a conversationalist had been laid low.
‘I can remember every moment of that month. Better than I can remember yesterday,’ Holmes said.
They both were silent then; Henry did not know how soon he could take his leave without being rude. Holmes cleared his throat as though to speak and then stopped again. He sighed.
‘It is as though time has moved backwards for me,’ Holmes said, turning towards Henry to make sure he was paying attention. ‘Once that summer was over, I could, as I said, remember it perfectly, but during those long days, with all that talk and all that company, it was as though there existed a great curtain around everything. I felt sometimes as if I were under water, seeing things only in vague outline and desperately trying to come up for air. I do not know what the war did to me, save that I survived. But I know now that fear and shock and bravery are merely words and they do not tell us – nothing does – that when you experience them day in day out, you lose part of yourself and you can never get it back. After the war I was diminished and I knew this; part of my soul, my way of living and feeling, was paralysed but I could not tell what part. Nobody recognized what was wrong, not even myself most of the time. All that summer I wanted to change, to cease watching and standing back. I wanted to join and become involved, drink up the life that was offered to us then as those wonderful sisters did. I longed to be alive, just as I long for it now, and the time passing has helped me, helped me to live. When I was twenty-one and twenty-two normal feelings dried up in me and since then I have been trying to make up for that, as well as live, live like others live.’
Holmes’s voice was almost angry now, but oddly distant and low. Henry knew how much it had taken for him to speak like this, and he knew also that what he said was true. Once more they remained silent, but the silence was filled with regret and recognition.
Henry did not think he could say anything. He did not have a confession of his own. His war had been private, within his family and deep within himself. It could not be mentioned or explained, but it had left him too as Holmes described. He lived, at times, he felt, as if his life belonged to someone else, a story that had not yet been written, a character who had not been fully imagined.
He thought that Holmes had said all that he wanted to say, and he was ready to remain a while as a tribute to his candour and let Holmes’s confession settle. But slowly he realized, by the way Holmes faced him, and by Holmes’s filling his glass with brandy as though the night were long, that his guest had something else to say. He waited, and finally when Holmes spoke again his tone had changed. He was back to his role as judge, public figure, man of the world.
‘You know, finally,’ Holmes said, ‘The Portrait of a Lady is a great monument to her, although the ending, I have to say that I did not care for the ending.’
Henry stared at the encroaching night and did not reply. He did not wish to discuss the ending of his novel, but nonetheless he was pleased and satisfied that Holmes had finally mentioned the book, having never referred to it before.
‘Yes,’ Holmes said, ‘she was very noble and I think you caught that.’
‘I think we all adored her,’ Henry said.
‘She remains for me a touchstone,’ Holmes said, ‘and I wish she were alive now so that I could find out what she thought of me.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Henry said.
Holmes took a sip of his drink.
‘Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill?’ he asked. ‘Gray says she asked you several times.’
‘I don’t think ask is the word,’ Henry said. ‘She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.’
‘Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.’
‘Nothing could have saved her,’ Henry said.
Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’s tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.
‘When she did not hear from you she turned her face to the wall.’ Holmes spoke as though it were a line he had been planning to say for some time. He cleared his throat and continued.
‘When finally she knew no one would help her she turned her face to the wall. She was very much alone then and she fixed on the idea. You were her cousin and could have travelled with her. You were free, in fact you were already in Rome. It would have cost you nothing.’
By the time either of them spoke again it was night, and the darkness seemed strangely grim and complete. Henry told the servant that they would not need a lamp as they were ready to retire. Holmes sipped his drink, crossing and recrossing his legs. Henry could hardly remember how he got to bed.
IN THE MORNING Henry was still considering at what point he should have spoken to defend himself, or when he should have ended the discussion. Clearly, the matter had been festering in Holmes’s mind throughout the years and clearly he had discussed it with Gray and the two lawyers were at one on the subject and at home accusing people of things. Now Holmes would be able to tell Gray what had been said.
At breakfast, Holmes was calm and steadfast as though the night before he had delivered a difficult but considered judgement and now thought better of himself for having done so. He arranged that he would return the following weekend, and, as he did so, Henry worked out how he would cancel these arrangements. He did not wish to see Holmes for a long time.
IN THE WEEK that followed he worked hard, even though the pain in his hand had become at times excruciating. He avoided the terrace and left the desk only to eat and sleep. He wrote to Holmes after a few days to say that in order to meet a deadline he was hard at work on a story and could not, unfortunately, entertain him for a weekend. He hoped, he said, to see him in London before Holmes departed for the United States.
For some days then he basked in the solitude his letter had won him, but he could not stop going over the conversation with Holmes in his mind; he began to compose letters to Holmes, but did not even get as far as writing them down. He believed that the accusation was unfair and unfounded and Holmes’s discussing the matter so coldly and finally was outrageous.
He could not be sure what his cousin in her final months had written to Gray. He was aware that Gray had kept her letters, and he too in his apartment in London had stored away those letters which Minny had written to him in the last year of her life. He knew that she had accused him of nothing, but he now wished to know what terms she had used all those years before in her expressed desire to go to Rome. Slowly, he stopped working. His waking hours were consumed with memories of his early days in London and Italy and his receipt of these letters. He imagined finding them again – he knew perfectly where they were stored – and unfolding and rereading them, and he thought about this so incessantly that he knew he would have to travel to London. Like a ghost, he would enter his apartment in Kensington, flit through the rooms until he came to the cupboard where the letters were, and he would read them, and then he would return to Rye.