Free The Master by Colm Tóibín Page B

of him. The story was told and retold, and everyone in the family,
including their mother, who was normally careful and reticent, believed that it merited recounting to every visitor.
    Alice must have been eight or nine at the time. She had been placed beside the novelist and Henry knew that this could not have been easy for her. She would have been nervous about every gesture
that she made, every morsel of food touched by her knife and fork. She would have spent the meal wondering what the great man thought about her. Henry knew that on these occasions her pulse would
have been faster, her efforts to impress would have been complex and self-conscious and laborious.
    He never remembered her wearing crinoline in those years, but the story centred on this. Thackeray turned to her and studied her attire.
    ‘Crinoline!’ he said. ‘I never would have guessed. So young and so depraved!’
    The remark, which might have been meant kindly, would have come as a sudden blow to his sister. In the moments that followed she would have felt only shame, as though a secret, dark part of her
had been exposed. He imagined the suddenness of the remark, saw his sister’s incomprehension, her attempt to smile. Henry alone understood the full cruelty of it, but he did nothing to
silence the rest of them as they paraded the story in front of everyone who would listen, happiest if Alice were in the room to hear the story of her own humiliation at the hands of one of the most
distinguished novelists of the age.
    William was the eldest and the least vulnerable. No amount of travelling or disruption seemed to make any difference to him. He was strong and popular among his schoolmates. He was certain of
his entitlement to be part of the next game. He loved shouting and noise; he loved loud companions. He loved banging doors and playing sport. No one noticed the bookish part of him, and he may not
even have noticed it himself until he began to argue fearlessly with his father. He did so with such relish and exuberance that by his early teens he was doing to words and phrases and opinions
what he had done previously to fences and well-tended lawns.
    Alice tried to be sophisticated for William, a woman of the world, a French diarist of the eighteenth century. Their mother one day spoke of how deeply affected Ned Lowell had been by the Boston
portrayed in Howells’s new novel. Alice clearly wanted to say something, and they all turned to her. She could not begin. Her face was flushed.
    ‘Oh, the poor dear!’ she stammered out. ‘If he is so affected by a novel, one wonders how he feels about the Sack of Rome, or indeed his own wife’s
flirtations.’
    Once more, the table stopped. Their mother made as though to stand up, and moved her chair back. The others looked at Alice in surprise. William did not smile at her. She kept her eyes down. She
had misjudged the moment, and they had learned how strange an impression she might make if she were to be let loose on the world.
    That image of her stayed with him; the gap between her inner life in all its confused privacy and the life which had been mapped out for her intrigued him. As the long winter in London began to
soften and the days lengthen, he worked on no novels, instead taking notes for stories and making some tentative beginnings. His sister’s premature death haunted him, and the details of her
strange life came to him when he least expected them, adding to his sense of unrecoverable past.
    He remembered one night also when his sister must have been eighteen or nineteen. He had come back to the house with news of some sort, a lecture he had heard which would interest his father, or
something he had published. He had walked in the door full of bright expectation to be met by his Aunt Kate who immediately alerted him to the fact that his sister was not well.
    As he sat downstairs, he could hear Alice calling out. Both parents ministered to her, and Aunt Kate regularly ascended the