They were both gone now, his brother and sister. Alice had been first; she had succumbed to a cancerous lesion on the breast, a paradoxical ailment, given the gruesome memento she had received from that notorious killer. But when the diagnosis had come, she had seemed almost pleased. She said she welcomed an illness that had the good taste to be real and malignant. “All those years in bed with nothing wrong with me. It’s a relief to finally suffer in a way that people can understand.”
In the time that remained, she had rarely spoken of the Ripper investigation. When reference was made to the case, she changed the subject or announced she had a headache. And though Sargent would occasionally bring over his paintings for her to look at, she lost her interest in the fine arts. She ceased to follow the gallery shows and exhibitions or ask for the art-world gossip as she used to.
One incident during this period stood out for Henry. It had occurred one afternoon toward the beginning of her illness. She already understood the gravity of her condition, but the pain had not yet become debilitating, and the sickness seemed to make her, if possible, more alert than ever. They would spend some of their pleasantest moments together during this time, whiling away the hours, as she macabrely put it, awaiting the Angel of Death.
On this particular day, she was propped up in bed sipping a cup of tea in which she had added a generous quantity of brandy. Henry sat nearby reading the paper; he had taken his brandy without the tea. There was an air of mild debauchery in the air. Katherine was off visiting her sister’s family, and the siblings both felt free to drink not only earlier, but more than they normally would.
The girl, Felicity, had entered the room with the post. She had replaced Sally, who a few months earlier had taken a position as a downstairs cook in a grand establishment, where Archie, under the guise of being her brother, had been employed as well, possibly as assistant to the footman.
Alice had taken the letters from the girl and settled back to examine them. Although ostensibly occupied with his newspaper, Henry watched her out of the corner of his eye, as he often watched people when they were not aware of his doing so. On this occasion, he found his attention repaid. As he watched her flip through the post, he was struck by the sudden hardening of her features and the quick, almost brutal gesture with which she cut open one of the letters, glanced at the card inside, and then crumpled it in her hand. Later, when she went to do her necessaries, he reached under the blanket and found the crumpled card. It was an invitation to Sickert’s latest gallery exhibition. Across the top, in red ink, were the scrawled words “Please exert yourself and come—or I shall be desolate. WS.”
Her reaction had served as a cue. Walter Sickert would come to represent, for Henry, a private place in his sister’s emotional life. He would never know what the actual contents of that place consisted of; indeed, he had no wish to know, only that the place, heavily guarded and under lock and key, was there.
As for William, Henry had seen him at intervals since that exciting time, but these were short visits, hardly more than glimpses. William was much in demand by the scientific world and rarely available. Their longest time together had been a year ago, when his brother had made the crossing to consult a specialist on the Continent. He and his Alice had stopped over to stay with Henry in Sussex. The problem, William confided, was with his heart, an organ one thought nothing of, at least in the literal sense, until it failed. So much of life was like that.
In the final month of his brother’s life, Henry traveled to America to wait by his bedside. William had clung to his wife in those last weeks, never wanting her out of his sight, demanding that she read to him, bring him his papers, or take down his thoughts as the whim struck. It should have been trying—Henry could not have stood it—but William’s Alice was unstinting in her devotion. She did not complain and, indeed, seemed to enjoy these ministrations. It gave Henry pause. If only one could be certain to predecease one’s spouse, it might be worth all the bother to have a woman like that, constant and attentive, to ease the final passage.
It had all gone well enough, considering that it was death and the end. “He’s had more dire episodes than this,” his Alice had noted. Henry agreed. William’s fear had never been of death but of madness. He had always worried that he would succumb to another episode like the one he had suffered in his youth. It had not occurred. He had passed into the great unknown with dignity and quietness, rather in the manner one might have expected of a lawyer or a stockbroker.
His students flocked to the funeral. He was much loved, or at least in theory. Not that William wasn’t lovable, Henry thought, only that the many who claimed to love him had no idea what he was really like. But then, who could know another in any essential way? It was the great advantage of the writer to create characters and thereby know them fully. But with regard to real human beings, one saw only the outer shell.
The invitation to this evening’s event had come in a hand Henry recognized at once, though he had seen it only twice: on the card crumpled beneath his sister’s bedcover and, before that, in the reply to the invitation to his dinner party those many years ago.
“You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the Camden Town Group Show,” and scrawled in red ink at the top, words that mimicked those on the card to his sister: “Please exert yourself and come—for the sake of old times if nothing else. WS.” WS, not PW, thought Henry. Sickert was no one’s pupil now. He had forged a reputation of note, become an eminence in the art world.
Although Henry had not attended Sickert’s previous exhibitions, he was determined to go to this one. It was the lure of the past—not just the literal past referred to in the scrawled message, but the hidden, subjective past that lay buried with his sister. I must go, he thought, in reverence to her—oddly, since she had not wished to see the man again. But wasn’t that precisely the reason? Sickert had meant something of consequence or she would not have been so adamant about banishing him from her life.
There had been some difficulty persuading his friend to go. Sargent was resistant. The art world had changed, he said; the new people newer than they used to be. He feared being heckled or, at best, condescended to. Indeed, the crowd in the gallery did not seem congenial—young men with wispy beards, wiry little physiques, and sharp, unforgiving eyes. In the corner was Roger Fry, who had pilloried Sargent in the press the week before. Near the window was the wild female painter who, along with her sister, the supercilious Woolf girl, was like an Amazon, likely to throw a spear at you when you weren’t looking. Where were the artistic lions of yesteryear? Alphonse Legros had died. The bulwark had given way; the deluge had come.
Henry gazed around himself at the paintings in the gallery. There were half a dozen artists on display who called themselves the Camden Town Group. Some were conventional postimpressionists. Such a name. It sounded like a contradiction, but in fact, innovation had become formulaic. The tradition that Legros had championed—scrupulous schooling in the old masters—had been superseded by a rote taste for the primitive, the geometric, and the abstract. “Modern” was the term. Henry himself had been called it in one breath and castigated for not being enough of it in the next. The whole thing gave him a headache.
The paintings around him were not pleasant, and he could see that Sargent, for one, was put off. He peered at a group of canvases by Wyndham Lewis, who stood nearby, surrounded by an admiring throng. Lewis was the great star of the moment, acclaimed far beyond such elder statesmen as Sargent. It must rankle, to have such a young man eclipse you. It was a problem he didn’t have, Henry thought bitterly; he had never sold well enough to suffer eclipse. Of course, he was idolized by some, he reminded himself. The happy few, he thought, select, discriminating, but sadly few.