Free The Master by Colm Tóibín Page A

adults, the joke that she was going to marry William became a kind of ritual.
    ‘Oh, she’s going to marryWilliam,’ Aunt Kate would say, and if William were there, he would come over to her, take her arm, kiss her on the cheek. And she would say nothing,
merely watch everybody, her eyes almost hostile before their smiles and laughter. Her father would lift her and hug her.
    ‘Oh, it won’t be long now,’ he would say.
    Alice, Henry thought, never believed that she was going to marry William. She was rational and even when she was in her teens her intelligence had at its core a brittle anger. Yet because the
idea that she would marry William had been spoken so many times, and because no outsider had presented himself as even vaguely plausible, the notion had entered surreptitiously but firmly into the
silent places of her soul.
    As he pondered and tried to shape the story of the two abandoned children told to him by the Archbishop, he found himself thinking about his sister’s puzzling presence in the world. He
went over the scenes where she had made clear to them her considerable intelligence and her raw vulnerability. She was the only little girl he had ever known, and now, as he began to imagine a
little girl, it was his sister’s unquiet ghost which came to him.
    He remembered a scene when Alice must have been sixteen. It was one of those long dinners with one or two guests, he remembered, and someone was talking about life after death, and meeting
members of their family after death, or hoping to, or believing they might. Then one of the guests, or Aunt Kate, had suggested praying to meet the loved ones in the next life when suddenly
Alice’s voice rose above all others and everyone stopped and looked at her.
    ‘One need pray for nothing,’ she said. ‘Reference to those whom we should meet again makes me shiver. It is an invasion of their sanctity. It is the sort of personal claim to
which I am deeply opposed.’
    She had sounded like Emerson’s aunt, someone steeped in the philosophy of life and death, someone who prided herself on the independence of her thought. It was clear to her family that she
had a sharp mind and a great wit but that she knew that she would have to conceal them if she wanted to be like the other young women of her age.
    Alice had friends and visitors and went on outings. She learned to be acceptable to the sisters of her brothers’ associates. But Henry observed her when a young man came into the room and
he noticed the change in her behaviour. She could not relax and her silences were full of force. She would become garrulous, talking a mixture of nonsense and paradox. There was a terrible
shrillness and uneasiness about her. He saw how these social occasions must exhaust her.
    Even family meals could be a trial for her, as Bob and Wilky learned to delight in teasing her and leaving her defenceless. These were the years of their father’s great restlessness, when
they crossed the Atlantic in search of something that none of them understood, a distraction from his father’s passionate and eager bewilderment. They were dragged from city to city, hotel to
apartment, tutor to school. They spoke French fluently and they knew themselves to be strange. It made all five of them stand apart from their generation; they knew both more and less than others.
More about opulence and history and European cities, more about solitude and uncertainty, more about standing alone and being independent. Less about America, and the web of connections and
affections being woven by their contemporaries. In these years, they learned to lean on each other, offer each other a private language, a containment, a coherence. They were like an old walled
city. No one, no matter how strong the siege, could break down their defences. And Alice, as she grew older, was trapped inside.
    Henry had no real memory of Thackeray’s visit to the family table in Paris, although he remembered other sightings