Soon, Andersen wrote back and in his awkward handwriting and with his bad spelling announced that he would, indeed, come to visit. Despite the brevity of the letter and the rudimentary epistolary style, his voice was there in the sentences, rushed, undisciplined, serious, nervous, sincere. Henry held the letter close to him, finding that he did not want to part with it, until he forced himself to leave it aside. But he could not stop himself studying his garden, placing Andersen’s ample frame in a chair under the wide-spreading old mulberry tree, imagining both of them in the languid sunlight. In the dining room as he ate alone he placed Andersen opposite him and allowed the two of them to linger over the wine before ascending to the drawing room. He did not mind if Andersen’s talk would be scattered or boastful. He wished for him to come before the summer was over, to share the long bright evenings with him, to keep all other company at bay so that he could enjoy his friend and so that Andersen could see life on a smaller scale.
It would be simple, he decided, to renovate the small studio which formed part of his property and gave onto Watchbell Street. As he wrote to Andersen and arranged the date of his coming, he began to imagine his friend, having seen how splendidly Henry managed to work in the garden room in the summer months, realize that the studio could so easily become a place for his labours during a part of his year. He found a key for the studio and examined its contours and saw how with close consultation between Andersen and the architect Warren, work could begin on making it a modest and stylish place for a sculptor to spend his days. He imagined his own solitary happiness, as he set about creating new work, knowing that not far away the sculptor Andersen was working in stone. He knew that his mind was moving too quickly and that the picture he drew for himself of their joint industry belonged to the realms of the unlikely, but this vision also allowed him to live his days with a sweet edge to them and allowed him to make other plans with a happier grace.
As the time for Andersen’s arrival approached, despite the fact that he had promised to stay merely three days while he was en route to New York from Rome, Henry constantly dreaded his departure and prepared for the moment when he would meet him from the train while working out how best to entertain him during his time in Rye. This must be, he thought, how others felt, how his father must have felt in the time after he met his mother, or how William felt waiting for Alice to become his wife. He wondered if this state of bewitched confusion came to him more deeply now because of his age, and because of Andersen’s short stay, and because of the impossibility of his imaginings. As he walked through Rye, or took his bicycle through the summer countryside, he watched people at random, wondering if they had ever experienced such tender longing, such rapturous tightening of the self in anticipation of another’s arrival.
Andersen’s decision to stay a short time was, despite his dreaming, not only a sentence of disappointment but a way for him to experience again, but more sharply now, the sense of doom which came with longing and attachment. As if to ward off the ache which fresh disappointment might bring, he went over the time in Paris with Paul Joukowsky more than twenty years earlier. He had gone through that night so many times in his mind. It lived with him in its drama and its finality. He remembered circling and circling, presuming that he would move away soon, return in the misty night to the grim sanctuary of his Paris flat.Yet he had moved closer. He had stood on the pavement as night fell and the mist became rain, and even thinking about it now made him afraid but also excited at what might have been. He had waited there, staring up at Paul’s window which was etched in lamplight, desperately holding himself back from crossing the street and making himself known. For hours he had stayed there, his long vigil ending in defeat. For years, it had come to haunt him at unlikely moments, as it haunted him now.
BURGESS NOAKES was, by this time, used to visitors, especially in the summer months, and the rest of the staff, since the departure of the Smiths, were in constant readiness to receive the small stream of old friends and family who came to stay at Lamb House. Burgess Noakes was not by nature curious; he took things as they came. Now, however, just before the arrival of Hendrik Andersen he began to appear in front of Henry, embarrassed and slightly stuck for words, to ask various questions about Mr Andersen’s habits and preferences.
On the day when Andersen was to be met from the train, Henry noticed Burgess Noakes hovering about the breakfast room and later standing idly at the door of his study. He observed that Noakes was dressed more carefully than usual and had a new haircut and seemed more sprightly in his movements. He smiled at the idea that his own vague and uneasy hopes and dreams had become palpable in his household. At seven o’clock, Noakes was waiting for him at his front door in semi-military pose, his wheelbarrow at the ready like a cannon waiting to be fired.
ANDERSEN BEGAN talking as soon as he alighted from his carriage. He wished to point out several people with whom he had shared his compartment and, as the train departed, he saw them off with many waves. Burgess Noakes, having taken control of Andersen’s baggage and placed it in his wheelbarrow, kept his eye firmly on Henry, placidly studying him, and never once, as far as Henry could ascertain, cast the smallest glance at their visitor, and avoided him when they arrived at Lamb House as though he might bite.
Andersen moved around the house offering casual glances as if what he saw were familiar to him. Even the bust of Count Bevilacqua in the corner of the dining room did not receive more than a cursory inspection. Travelling seemed to have unsettled him so that he did not, he insisted, wish to go to his room and change his clothes, nor did he wish for any refreshment, nor a seat in the garden, nor a seat anywhere else. It was as if he had recently been wired for electricity and all the switches had been turned on. He was all buzz and blazing lights as he told Henry of his work and who in New York he was to see about it and what they might say and what they had already said. The names of dealers and collectors and city planners mingled with those of millionaires and society ladies. Paris and New York and Rome and London were all mentioned as places where there was much admiration, he said, for him and hunger for his work.
Henry had, since he came back from Italy, been deep in daily contemplation of a number of projects, knowing that at least two of them would require an immense effort. The work would be at first like breathing on glass in its uncertainty and its delicacy; he would hope that he could see a pattern before the breath was cleared away. And then the labour involved would be rigorous beyond anything he had ever done. As he listened to Andersen he felt a wry sense of satisfaction that he knew about difficulty and the shame of failure. He would remain dumb now, hoping that his friend would grow calm, trying not to interrupt him or compete with him, but instead feeling happy that he had arrived even if Andersen did not appear to have yet realized that he had done so.
IN THE MORNING, when he found that Andersen had not risen, Henry went to the garden room after breakfast and began the day’s work. The Scot did not seem to notice his hesitations, his need to have whole sentences repeated, nor did he show any sign or make any comment when Henry began to dictate fluently and fast, as fast as the machine could move, so that nothing would be allowed to distract Henry, not the possibility that his guest was still in bed, or at his ablutions, or having a very late breakfast, or ready to appear at any moment. He had found this before when he had guests, that it was easy to disappear into his workroom and discover a strange and powerful concentration, fierce in its attention to each sentence, as a way of shutting them out, or enjoying the idea that he would soon see them, or both. He worked with added vigour and seriousness as a way of showing himself that he could. Thus he worked all morning until he saw that he had tired the Scot out and until he knew that he would find Andersen somewhere in his house or garden waiting for him.