Their dabblings in the occult were, for Alice, the grossest sort of idolatry. She had made this clear to them, but no one had ever told them that she had unmercifully mocked them by sending them, when they asked for a lock of her hair to use at a seance, hair belonging to a dead friend. She had cackled in glee at the solemnity of their reports from these sessions, but now, he recognized, despite the passing of the years, that William and his wife still could not be told of her trick, so elaborate and deeply serious was the system of protection they had wound round themselves and how firm their belief. He was still not sure what he himself believed. It was easier, he felt, to listen and make as little comment as possible.
WILLIAM FOUND his small downstairs study congenial and discovered a sheltered spot in the garden which caught the sun in the morning where he could sit reading. William and Alice went on walks in the vicinity, taking the dog Maximilian with them, and became known very quickly in several Rye establishments where they had coffee in the afternoon and bought cakes to take back to Lamb House. William walked slowly, but managed to suggest that it was deep thought that made him so deliberate in his movements. At first Henry attached no importance to the fact that Alice never let him out of her sight. If William were in the garden, she was at a window overlooking the garden; if he were in his makeshift study, she was across the hall with the door open. If he prepared to go for a walk, Alice immediately fetched her coat, even if Henry himself were to accompany him, or if he gently indicated that he wished to go alone. After a while, however, such watchfulness on her part, such attentive shadowing of her husband, seemed to Henry almost perverse and he noticed William being irritated by it. Since Alice was known for her tact, since she had a reputation for being neither perverse nor irritating, this display of solicitude, both obvious and without respite, was unlike her. Henry, once he began to notice it, longed for it to stop.
Suddenly, one afternoon, when they had been with him for ten or eleven days, he understood why his sister-in-law watched William with such care. He himself was in the drawing room upstairs after breakfast; he had been reading, when he chanced to go to the window, as he often did in the days when his brother was seated in the garden. William was obviously in pain and Alice was with him, standing over him, as he held his hands on his chest and closed his eyes in a sort of agony. Henry could not see her face, but could discern from her movements that she was unsure whether William should move or stay still. Henry stood back as his sister-in-law turned preparing to hold William in her arms. He then went downstairs as quickly as he could to the garden.
Henry learned in the days that followed that William’s heart was damaged, that his reason for going to Nauheim was not to avoid his brother’s hospitality. William was ill. Alice had been watching him in case he had a sudden heart attack, having been told that such an attack could be fatal. William was not yet sixty.
The next day on the train to London to see the best heart specialist in England, William insisted on reading and taking notes, refused to have a blanket placed over his knees and promised them both that if they should look at him one more time with pity or worry or the slightest interest beyond the normal, then he would expire on them immediately and leave his money to a dogs’ and cats’ home.
‘And I should warn you both that the hauntings will not be normal. No medium will be required. I will pounce directly.’
Alice did not smile, but stared out the window, stony-faced. Henry wondered if the story of his sister and the lock of her hair might lighten their journey, but realized that it might have precisely the opposite effect. While William could joke about such matters, he did so from a serious perspective. The aura his brother and his sister-in-law created, in which such a story could not be told, seemed to have strengthened with William’s illness.
Dr Bezly Thorne, the most recommended among Harley Street doctors who dealt with delicate hearts, was, William thought, far too young to know of such matters, but he was soon persuaded by Henry and Alice that this new doctor was uncontaminated by out-of-date remedies and was fully conversant with the new ones.
‘I dislike young people, all of them,’ William retorted, ‘medical or non-medical, conversant or non-conversant, from the bottom of my heart.’
‘Your heart indeed,’ Alice said drily.
‘Yes, I know, my dear, the part that is fully intact.’
Dr Thorne asked to see the patient alone, and when he emerged after a few minutes from the bedroom in which William lay resting in Henry’s flat in Kensington, he remarked that Alice and Henry would now find Professor James much chastened, ready to rest, ready to maintain a strict diet with no starch, and ready, since the doctor had advised it, to be really ill, to be gravely and precariously ill, so that he should become better.
‘My instructions are clear,’ Dr Thorne said, ‘he is to live. I have told him so. And in order to do that he must act precisely as he is told, and he must stay in London until I say he can move. He can read if he pleases, but he cannot write.’
They agreed to remain in Henry’s flat in Kensington and in the days that followed, as William began his diet, and Alice awaited the arrival of their daughter Peggy, Henry and Alice had much time to converse.
William’s ill health had not softened Henry’s resolve that his own circumstances were closed to criticism. His sister-in-law, whose scent for what was suitable for discussion was, he thought, refined in the extreme, thus kept matters general, rarely even mentioning the attributes of her own children unless Henry specifically asked. One evening, however, when Peggy, who had arrived from France, had gone to bed and William was sleeping, Alice raised the matter of her own sister-in-law, now dead seven years. She did so carefully, her tone serious and considered. She spoke of Alice’s dislike for her and reminded Henry that, at the time of her wedding, Alice had taken to her bed.
Henry became uncomfortable. His sister’s memory was, as the years went by, increasingly tender for him; her suffering was something he was prepared to talk about only with sorrow and much sympathy. If there had been a battle between the two Alices, the one who was speaking now had plainly been the victor and he realized, as she spoke, that the spoils of victory included a right to discuss the vanquished one freely. His sister-in-law, he saw, mistook his relationship with his sister, thought that Alice James, on her arrival in England, had posed the same problem for Henry and that her peculiar nature could be spoken of between them as though Henry and his sister-in-law would take the same measure of it. Alice’s tone was matter of fact.
‘Alice James,’ she said, ‘might have found something more useful to do with her wit than direct it inwards at herself.’
Henry was tempted to stand up and excuse himself. He had presumed that his silence might have been enough to hush his sister-in-law on the subject.
‘And,’ Alice went on, ‘she always managed to find some lucky person to take care of her and listen to her. Your poor Aunt Kate was not receptive enough, and that is why she came to England.’
It became apparent to Henry that his sister-in-law might be conscious of his discomfort, and that this was the thing that was encouraging her to go on. The idea was so unlikely that he watched her with interest, scarcely believing his own impression. Now, as if to confirm to his satisfaction the truth of his idea, instead of wishing to end the conversation or change the subject or leave the room, he wanted Alice to continue for as long as she pleased while he remained as coldly unreceptive as he could manage.