‘The cat knows what it wants,’ Andersen said. His laugh was loud and sudden, almost shrill, and it made Henry want to walk away. Instead, he turned and smiled and edged along the pathways until they reached Shelley’s grave at the back wall of the cemetery where the birdsong was at its most vibrant.

Now that the silence between them had been restored, he felt that the sadness he had spoken about meant nothing against the act of completion which the spirits all around them had undergone. Here in this cemetery, which they began to stroll around once more, the state of not-knowing and not-feeling which belonged to the dead seemed to him closer to resolved happiness than he had ever imagined possible.

Andersen must have believed, Henry thought, that this lingering at certain graves and not at others was, with the exception of the graves of the poets, quite without a plan. He seemed puzzled as Henry made his way purposefully, there being no direct path, to the grave of Constance Fenimore Woolson whose name, Henry believed, could have meant nothing to him. This spot had been his final destination on each of his earlier visits; now he almost regretted having come here once more, knowing that he would have to say something about the grave and make sure that it was understood. He was relieved for a moment when Andersen’s attention fell on the carved stone angel over the tomb of William Wetmore Story, which Story had carved himself, and went towards it to study it more closely. Andersen touched the white wings and the face, stood back to contemplate them, his face suddenly hardened in concentration. As his friend moved around the angel a second time, Henry saw to the right the grave of John Addington Symonds and thought, as he did on each visit to this hallowed ground, about how the Wetmore Storys and Symonds and Constance had loved Italy, they had that much in common, that they had lived in beautiful places believing that the light and the views and the grand rooms were worth all the years of exile, the loss of their native countries. Constance, he thought, would allow herself to meet the others irregularly; the wealth and social ambition and soft art of the Wetmore Storys would bore her as much as Symonds’s sexual obsessions and purple prose. The tablet with her name engraved on it was a model of decorum compared with the elaborate tomb of the Storys. In the evenings, he smiled to himself, she would wish to be alone. Her America was not theirs, her Italy was more modest and her art more ambitious. But she would have known how to write about them.

He glanced up and saw that Andersen was watching him.

‘Constance was a great friend,’ he said. ‘I knew the Storys of course and was in touch with poor Symonds, but Constance was a great friend.’

Andersen looked down at the tablet and must have seen, Henry thought, that Constance was one of the recent dead. He made to speak, but clearly thought better of it. Henry sighed and turned away, realizing that he should not have taken someone he knew so little to such an intimate place. But more important perhaps, he felt that he should not have spoken just now, as the saying of her name had brought tears to his eyes. He turned away and tried to regain control but found that he was being held by the sculptor, his shoulders cupped against Andersen’s chest and Andersen’s hands reaching around to grasp his hands and hold them as firmly as he could. He was surprised at Andersen’s strength, the size of his hands. He immediately checked that there was nobody in view before allowing the embrace to continue, feeling the other man’s warm, tough body briefly holding him, wanting desperately to allow himself to be held much longer, but knowing that this embrace was all the comfort he would receive. He held his breath for as long as he could and kept his eyes closed and then Andersen released him and they walked quietly back to the cemetery gate.

IN THE CAB as they travelled to Andersen’s studio in Via Margutta, he wondered how he would tell Andersen about how he had lived. As an artist, he recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written, each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

Andersen suggested that before making a tour of where he worked they eat lunch in the small restaurant below his studio. Almost as soon as he entered the small and, for him, familiar space, being welcomed with friendly gestures by the proprietor and his wife, he became talkative and engaged. Henry was surprised not only by how much the sculptor knew about him, but by how freely now he relayed the information. He was also surprised at how unselfconsciously Andersen spoke to him about his own talent and how fluently he could quote those who had come to admire it.

He listened to Andersen as lunch was served; the sculptor’s face seemed to change as much as his personality had changed. His eyes had lost their softness and sympathy and his expression became more focussed as he reacted to each thing he himself said, adding to it in a torrent of explanation and contestation. His earlier silences, Henry realized, had been part of a great withholding which was now being released. In the dim light of the restaurant, Henry relished the sight of him across the table, his young face moving in rapt animation, so restless and ambitious, so ready for life, so raw.

Henry had imagined that Andersen’s art would be exquisite and finely wrought, made slowly and deliberately, but now, as the sculptor stood up from lunch, his cheeks flushed, it struck Henry that his work might just as easily be distinguished by its lack of discipline. He had no means by which to judge him. Although the Storys and the Elliotts included Andersen in their gatherings, they had not spoken of him privately. As he went up to Andersen’s studio, Henry remembered when he came to this city first, when he visited the studios of so many artists who had failed or prospered as the years went by. Now all these years later he was here again, led by a young sculptor who was full of protean innocence, who was so tentative in some ways and so overbearing in others, so full of mixtures and so mysterious. He watched Andersen ascend the stairs ahead of him, studying his strong white hand holding the banisters, the wonderful open agility of his movements, and dreamed that he could stay in Rome for a while longer than he had planned and come here every day to the studio of his new young friend.

There was a sense of frantic work in the large studio, a great deal of it half-finished by an artist in love with the classical tradition, the classical body, a sense of work done for public and triumphant display. He wondered if this was merely how Andersen’s work began, full of roaring and rhetorical disproportion, and then if the sculptor set out, with subtlety and an eye for telling detail, to refine it. As he moved from piece to piece, he expressed his opinion that his friend had a large talent and expressed also his awe at so many figures and torsos, asking himself if Andersen now planned to work on the faces, or if he would choose to leave them blank and anodyne. He was led to the work which seemed most in progress, a large statue of a naked man and woman holding hands. He marvelled out loud at its scale and ambition as Andersen stood proudly beside it as though he were going to be photographed.

As the day wore on, Henry learned much about Hendrik Andersen. Some of it astonished him, especially the news that the Andersen family had, on arriving in America, settled in Newport in a house a few streets away from where the Jameses had lived, and that the sculptor still viewed Newport as his American home. When Andersen began to speak of his older brother and the burden of being a second son, Henry informed him that he, too, had spent his youth in the shadow of his brother William. Andersen seemed to know this already and wondered aloud if this had brought him and Henry together, asking many questions about Henry and William and, often before Henry had finished responding, comparing the answers with his own experience with his brother Andreas. As the conversation went on, Henry discovered that Andersen knew a lot about Henry’s family. He mentioned that his own father had the same love for alcohol that Henry’s father had shown in his youth, a matter which was never discussed in the James family but which must have been trumpeted in Newport loudly enough for it to have reached the ears of Hendrik Andersen.