In Rome he had observed that Andersen’s clothes fitted in perfectly there with that of his associates, seeming neither too casual nor too narcissistic. Now, however, when Andersen stood up to greet him from his seat in a corner of the drawing room upstairs, Henry noticed his black suit, his white shirt and his bow tie the same light blue colour as his eyes. Andersen looked like a man who had spent much of the morning preparing himself for this interview.
As they ate lunch it became obvious that the weather would not hold and thus any possible excursion on foot or by bicycle would have to be postponed. He wondered for a moment what Andersen did on rainy days in Rome until he recalled that rainy days there were few and, in any case, irrespective of the weather, Andersen went to his studio. When Henry mentioned rainy days in Newport, Andersen spoke of his dreadful memory of them, the sense of being trapped in a small house, watching all day to see if it might clear and knowing so often as evening settled in that it would remain wet and soon become dark as well. Even still, he said, the memory of it made him shiver. He laughed.
Before lunch was over, the rain had begun to wash against the windows of Lamb House in great sheets, making the dining room appear dark and the garden inhospitable. Henry watched Andersen’s spirits visibly sink. Were Henry alone now, he would have a most profitable afternoon’s reading and would allow a single volume to transport him to suppertime and beyond, but Andersen, as far as he could discover, did not read and it was, anyway, unimaginable that he had travelled all this distance to bury himself for an afternoon in a book.
The previous evening, Henry had mentioned the empty studio in Watchbell Street and found over lunch that Andersen was anxious to see it, if they could find an umbrella and brave the rain. Henry wished that it were some distance away so that an excursion there could be time-consuming and require preparation. Instead, it was merely a few steps beyond the front door, and once Burgess Noakes appeared with umbrellas, watching Andersen now as though he were about to make a sketch of him, all three made their way briskly to the abandoned building nearby, Henry carrying the key.
He did not know, but should, he realized, have guessed, that the roof of the old studio leaked in two or three places. Once he had opened the door, the three of them stood at the door as water dripped copiously onto the cement floor. The light in the studio was scarce and disheartening and there were gathered in the corner a good deal of scrap and a number of old bicycles, and these, with the sound of the rain, somehow added to the sheer dreariness of the space. None of them seemed inclined to venture too far inside and they remained at the entrance in silence. Henry had spoken about this as a possible studio for a sculptor which would be especially suitable in the summer months when the Roman heat made that city unbearable, and could be used in the winter to store works with a view to showing them to the London galleries. Now, it looked like a leaky shed used to store rusting bicycles and Henry knew that his friend, occupied with plans for his future success in the vast cities of the world, was in possession of a large and ambitious imagination which had no mercy on such dingy and shabby spaces. Even Burgess Noakes in the demented way in which his eyes darted from a drip to its final destination and then to his employer and then to his employer’s guest, seemed part of a plot to ensure that Hendrik Andersen would never set foot in Rye again.
Henry and Andersen spent the afternoon in desultory conversation and, when the rain finally cleared, their walk through Rye and into the countryside also had a desultory air. Andersen’s mind was on his journey and on his stay in New York and Henry sensed that if his friend could slip away to London without causing a major break in whatever decorum he felt existed between them, he would do so instantly.
As they sat in the drawing room before supper was served, Andersen began to speak about his ambitions. When he said that what he really had in mind was to design a world city, Henry found himself asking in mild exasperation if he was planning to do so in miniature. In the heat of his expoundings, Andersen did not appear to entertain the possibility that the question had been asked sarcastically or even maliciously. He explained that no, he had in mind a genuine world city, a place of great buildings and monuments, which would include the best architecture and statuary of each civilization. It would be an adventure in harmony and human understanding, a place where mankind could come together symbolically, where all the episodes of civilization were represented, where princes and potentates and artists and philosophers could gather, where the best of all human endeavour was on display.
As Andersen spoke, his voice full of excitement, the final rays of the sun hit against the old brick of the garden wall; Henry found their worn texture, the crumbling russet colour, and the clear bright green of the creepers after the day’s rain enormously comforting. He nodded regularly at Andersen. When they moved to the dining room, he placed himself facing the French windows so that he could witness the dusky light giving way to shadows under the trees. Andersen was now talking about the support he would need for this project and the support he already had. It would be easy for him to continue all his life, he said, making single pieces of sculpture such as Henry and others had admired, but he wished now, before he was much older, to embark on an integrated project which would take years to complete and which would make a difference to mankind.
‘Mankind,’ Henry found himself saying, ‘is a very large business.’
‘Yes,’ Andersen said, ‘and mankind is made up of many false divisions and false conflicts. Mankind’s achievements have never before been brought together in one place that is a living city and not a museum, a place where beauty and human understanding could thrive.’
Henry’s mind was half filled with the work of the morning. He had found a fictional character who interested him, a serious-minded journalist, sensitive, intelligent and talented, being offered a project close to the project which the Storys had offered him in Rome – to write a biography of their father leaving at his disposal all available material. He had this morning described such a figure coming to Lamb House after the death of a writer very like himself, standing in the very study in which he was then dictating, and taking possession of the papers and letters there. But the journalist as he imagined him was also as close to himself as he could make him, and thus he set out to dramatize his own self haunting the space he would leave when he died. Just now for one second he had a view of that figure of the journalist walking the dimly lit narrow streets of Venice, avoiding something, but he put it aside, not knowing how he could use it. No one reading the story, he thought, would guess that he was playing with such vital elements, masking and unmasking himself.
It would read like a simple ghost story, but for him, as he had worked, conjured up his own death and made a character who seemed all the more real to him now as the day waned, the story had a strange power. It gave him an idea for further work, but some part of him was still shuddering in the wake of having created it in the first place. Compared with the city which Andersen was inventing, it was both nothing and everything. In its detail and its dialogue, its slow movement and its mystery, it stood against abstraction, against the greyness and foolishness of large concepts. But it stood singly and small and unprotected, barely present; it would take up a small space in a great and monumental library in a city where reading in solitude would not be part of his friend’s magnificent dream.