Tennyson's Gift (13 page)

He ran his fingers across Herbert's fine white neck, making him shudder. ‘You have a large Organ of Marvellousness, too – which means you love novelty and adventure,' he announced to the hall, and then he leaned forward and whispered in Herbert's ear. ‘Luckily I have Marvellousness large as well. Perhaps we should get together.'

He placed his big hands on Herbert's narrow shoulders. And then he let him go.

‘I must explain something now,' said Lorenzo. ‘This boy seems sad when I tell him what I read in his head. But I think he should be grateful. He is much too young to have made a bad marriage. There is no sign of a beard on his cheek. The motto of the Fowlers is
Self Made or Never Made,
and I stand by it, young sir. The findings of phrenology are lessons, not prescriptions. Man can, and must, overcome any failing in his nature. How else will he ever be perfect? Now that you know yourself, sir, you must never allow yourself to marry in the hope of being able to work a reform after marriage. You are lucky to receive this warning. It is a lesson many people wish they had been taught!' But Dodgson noticed how the boy still looked glum, even while the hall cheered and laughed Lorenzo for his wisdom.

Lorenzo turned again to his people, and pressed his hands together. ‘When you leave here tonight, I want you to write your own epitaph in legible characters on a slip of
paper. Make these epitaphs as flattering and eulogistic as possible. Then spend the remainder of your lives endeavouring not only to reach the standard you have raised, but to go far beyond it.'

Jessie looked up at him in admiration as the crowd threw hats in the air. She felt a lump in her throat. What a man!

‘And now!' said Lorenzo. The audience held its breath, while Jessie stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. Lorenzo grinned, and looked directly at
Dodgson in the back row.

‘And now!' he repeated, ‘We have time for the last, but most special, demonstration of the evening.' He pointed at Dodgson. ‘Would you come forward, please, sir? It has not escaped my daughter Jessie's attention how closely you have followed proceedings this evening!'

Dodgson felt his body jerk with the shock. Trapped and sick, he wanted to shut up like a telescope. Jessie ran straight to the back row and pointed to him and the audience turned round to look. ‘Go wan then!' they heckled. ‘Wouldn't you guess it ud be an overner tho?' (They were disappointed. The star turn was someone from the mainland.)

Should he run? Should he shout ‘Fire'? Miserably Dodgson stumbled to the front and took his seat in a chair beside Lorenzo. Up close, he could see that the man wore a small amount of theatrical make-up. His big pliable hands smelled of sandalwood and other people's hair oil. Dodgson realized he had at last discovered something other people had that he did not wish to share.

‘If I may ask your forbearance, ladies and gentlemen, I will ask my assistant Jessie to tell you her first impressions of our friend's head here. For at this point it is my great pleasure to ask Jessie Fowler – the Infant Phrenologist! – to take her very first public reading!'

Dodgson blinked in horror as the crowd cheered.

‘May I ask your name, sir?'

Dodgson clenched his fists, swallowed hard and got it out. ‘Dodgson,' he said.

‘Mr Dodgson,' said Jessie, stepping forward with a big threatening smile. (She got a round of applause.) ‘I thought we might start with the base of your cranium, where I perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that the Organ of Philoprogenitiveness is considerably enlarged.'

She said ‘Organ of Philoprogenitiveness' as if it was ‘Bread and butter'. Which in a way, of course, it was.

Dodgson fought for breath. ‘We ought to explain, Jessie,' added Lorenzo, ‘that Philoprogenitiveness is the love of children.'

‘It is, father. It is a great addition in a parent, and I have always been glad to know that you have it substantial, Pa.'

The audience laughed at the cute, pre-rehearsed joke, but Dodgson felt weightless in his distress. Jessie had climbed on a stool behind his chair. He could feel her breath on his ear. He could smell her clothes. And then, gently, Jessie laid her small warm fingers on the back of Dodgson's skull and massaged it. The unprecedented intimacy of this contact with an eight-year-old girl – in front of a hundred people – made Dodgson want to scream like a railway engine.

‘Mr Dodgson, may I ask if you have any children of your own?' began Jessie. But he heard it only as in a dream. Jessie, who had been all set to ask what the name ‘Daisy' meant to him, had already lost her first client, as Dodgson's conscious psyche simply snapped under the strain. His body twitched and whiplashed beneath her hands.

‘Pa!' she cried in horror, and Lorenzo leapt forward to assure the audience everything was under control. But the good people of Freshwater stood up and gasped, with their hands to their mouths, as Dodgson reeled and writhed in his chair. No one had ever seen anything like it. Dodgson reeled and writhed, he stretched and drawled; and finally – some might say inevitably – he fainted in coils.

Freshwater Bay is easily located on a map of the Isle of Wight. Imagine the island as a pair of pursed lips – the kiss-me mouth of Lillian Gish comes to mind – and Freshwater is on the bottom lip, to the far left, a small imperfection in an otherwise smooth line of high chalk cliff. There is an apocryphal story told of a Russian tsar, asked by his engineers to indicate on a map where a major railway track should be plotted. With a loud exclamation of ‘Do I have to do
everything?',
he took a ruler and drew a straight line – through hills, forests, churches, whatever. And so the railway was built exactly as he drew it, but where his fingers accidentally overlapped the ruler's edge, there came two kinks, which the engineers faithfully replicated. Freshwater Bay is like the kink of a tsar's fingertip. For no observable reason, the chalk dips dramatically for the tiny bay, and then quickly rises up again to lordly heights, as if embarrassed about the lapse.

It is named Freshwater because the River Yar rises here, not far from the sea, and flows perversely in the other direction, across flat land, to the northern coast at (of course) Yarmouth. If the sea defences were knocked down at Freshwater Bay, the waters would merge, and the West Wight become a tiny island of its own, as perhaps it once was. But in 1864 a small isthmus keeps the Isle of Wight in one piece, and that highly insular poet Tennyson is obliged to put up with it, here at the quiet limit of the world. From his windows at Farringford, he can survey the Afton Down, which he says dates back four hundred million years. From the top of his cliff, he can look to the Needles, stately in their lucid mist. He appreciates grand views. It has been shrewdly observed by modern critics that in Tennyson's poetry, there is no middle distance – things are either big and far, or small and near. Had Victorian ophthalmology been more advanced, the history of English poetry might have been quite other.

Three days after the phrenology lecture, at half past three on Monday, Ellen stood on Tennyson's cliff and watched the laureate point his face at the warm wind and the sea's horizon, his big heavy eyes closed thoughtfully as though he were listening to what the waves were saying six hundred feet below. She recognized the posture and expression from Watts, of course, who had a knack of falling into such a reverie without warning, usually in the middle of a railway terminus. It was whisper-of-the-Muse time – all very worthwhile and pretty on a clifftop with a poem coming on; not so useful if you were racing for an express.

Perhaps she should tweak the laureate's nose, while stamping on his foot and shouting, ‘Wake up'. (It usually worked for Watts.) But no, she could just imagine all the tiresome recriminations afterwards, if he fell off the cliff and she trailed home without him, carrying his hat. ‘Where's Alfred?' they would ask. And she would sit down in a huff, ‘Don't
start.'

The grass up here was tough and springy, and it mingled with abundant tiny flowers – blue orchids which took the modest course of choosing survival over display. ‘They must have Caution pretty huge,' she said to herself, and twiddled with one, attempting to pull it out. She would like an orchid, and Alfred was unlikely to offer her any. If she just took one while he had his eyes closed, he would never be the wiser.

Tennyson leaned into the wind. The thing about this man, she realized as she watched his cloak furl and crack behind him like a flag, was that he was rather like a cliff himself. His large white face looked hewn and shaped by centuries of rain and landslip; and all his life (even when it was quite unnecessary) he seemed to defy a gale, staunch on his stocky Lincolnshire legs, with his chest puffed out. Here was a man who would never discover a sheltered place in the world and then relax in it. Tennyson was a walking personification of the verb ‘to buffet'. When Watts was cut up by a review, Ellen had observed that he would mend again by teatime. But Tennyson went all to tatters, and displayed his wounds perpetually, even to people who strenuously desired not to see them. Perhaps his Approbativeness needs looking at, thought Ellen (who was now fully up to speed in phrenological jargon). Tennyson's Approbativeness must be the size of a baby gnat.

Watts had been asked to come, but had declined. You would never get Watts up here, so far from anything upholstered. Though he loved the elements, he preferred to paint them indoors, out of his own head, and since he started visiting Freshwater he had tried the cliff walk only twice. The first time he was sick, and the second time his hat blew off. (How Tennyson kept his big hat on, incidentally, while striding through gales on his daily walk, was a marvel to all who knew him.)

But Ellen was glad Watts stayed at home. It gave her time to reflect on the phrenology lecture, and her little adventure as Herbert. Appreciating for the first time the variety in the shapes and sizes of the human head, she suddenly understood why hatters went mad. As for her own head, large Hope and small Caution, that was Ellen's destiny – and she thought (as obviously she was destined to) that this was excellent news. And hang the consequences. Watts was always posing her as Hope in some grisly picture or other (‘Hope is a Good Breakfast but a Bad Supper'; ‘There is Hope from the Mouth of the Sea, but None from the Mouth of the Grave'). What a lark that he had been right all along.

But in other ways her adventure in male disguise had backfired horribly. For one thing, Lorenzo had guessed at once the game she was playing (the young Herbert's hat stuffed with luxuriant hair); and for another, she had felt terribly discouraged by Lorenzo's other pronouncement, about her tendency to love blind. ‘Do not expect to reform your spouse's character after marriage,' Lorenzo had said. Too late, too late for that.

Reappearing at Dimbola – having used the commotion of Dodgson's collapse as a cover for flight – she found she had not been missed, least of all by her husband. A cup of tea had been poured for her, in fact. So she drank it cold, and listened to Mrs Cameron announcing her latest plan for a theatrical evening in the garden, a selection of tableaux vivants, possibly from
Twelfth Night.
It was curious how Mrs Cameron did not seek Ellen's professional advice on theatrical matters. A less resilient person might suspect that Mrs Cameron didn't like her.

‘Oh, there is nothing like Twelfth
Night
for tableaux vivants,' sighed Julia, leaning back in her chair.

‘I would have thought
A Midsummer Night's Dream
more apt,' said Ellen.

‘I didn't say there was nothing more apt,' snapped Julia, ‘I said there was nothing like it.'

Watts snoozed over a volume of verse, and when he woke to find his wife sitting beside him, he said happily, ‘Ellen. Oh yes. Do you know, I was just telling Julia. When I resided with Lord and Lady Holland in Italy, you know they refused to allow me the merest personal expense? “You are our
guest,
Il Signor,” they insisted, “Take some more soup, you eat like a little bird,” they said. “And no more talk of such nonsense. Your purse is nothing to the matter here.” Julia agreed with me, such generous sentiments are very fine. Between friends, especially
where one is very poor,
there should never be talk of money.'

Ellen rolled her eyes. She noticed that Watts was wearing a new velvet skullcap – a present, no doubt, from Julia, who had noticed that George was balding, his Organ of Veneration quite naked to the elements.

‘Sixpence a pint!' boomed Alfred, unexpectedly.

Ellen turned to find him smiling. Amazingly, his clifftop reverie had finished before hers.

‘This air,' he explained, gesticulating with his cloak. ‘Worth sixpence a pint!' And playfully he scooped armfuls of it towards her, as though he would knock her flat with the force. Ellen laughed. A game at last! She pretended to gather the sixpenny pints in her skirt, weighing the material in her hands, as though loaded with heavy logs. ‘That's at least five shillings' worth! Ten shillings! A guinea!' she said gaily, staggering.