Tennyson's Gift (21 page)

While all this was going on, Ellen strolled in the garden with Alfred.

‘Why won't you pose for Mrs Cameron?' she asked. ‘It would make her so happy.'

‘Happy? But, my dear, Mrs Cameron's happiness in this matter is neither here nor there.'

‘It isn't?'

‘Consider what she does when she has a person's photograph. She exhibits it, she gives copies to anybody who calls. She gives away albums.'

‘She has a generous nature.'

‘And I have a desire for seclusion. Why do you think I live on the Isle of Wight?'

Ellen thought this was a proper question, and answered it.

‘Because the Queen likes it? And she once said she might visit you? And then you might get a knighthood?'

Alfred conceded the point. ‘Yes, but aside from that. I simply will not accept that, just because I am a poet, people should know what I look like –'

‘Well, everyone knows what
I
look like.'

‘Take this point, my dear,' interrupted Alfred. ‘On a walking holiday last year, my companion shouted “Tennyson!” in the hotel, and the price of our simple lodging was doubled at once. Already visitors come to our house, pushing their noses at the windows, frightening Emily, disturbing the boys. People send me their poetry to read. They want to intrude on my private life in a most unseemly manner. I fear for this development, my dear, especially if the railway comes to Freshwater. Even in death I will not be safe. For there is a fashion for writing lives of poets, publishing their diaries and letters.'

‘Yes, but that's to show how important they are,' urged Ellen. ‘Poets are dreadfully important.'

But Tennyson would not be cajoled. ‘But such scoundrels might tell the world that a man was mad, or dirty, or worse! And he has no defence! You may have seen my poem on the subject, entitled “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters”?'

‘To whom?' asked Ellen. ‘I'm sorry, I didn't quite –'

‘No, it's called “To—”. A blank, you know. It's a poetic tradition, protecting people from exactly the presumptuous intrusion to which I respond.'

‘I see.'

‘I shall quote to you what I wrote. Stand back, my dear.' She did so. She folded her hands.

Tennyson ahem-ed, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He opened his eyes again. ‘I'm starting in the middle,' he explained. She nodded. He closed his eyes, and from deep within him his poetry-reading voice erupted with such force that around Ellen where she stood, lilies shivered on their stalks. Tennyson had a mournful, barking recital manner reminiscent of an expiring moose.

Ellen put her hands together to clap, but Tennyson pressed on. Maids pegging washing in the kitchen garden beyond had popped their heads over the wall, to see the cause of the commotion. The laureate did seem very passionate about all this.

Ellen clapped now, and Tennyson let out a long breath. ‘You won't hear anything better than that on the subject,' he said.

‘I am sure I won't. But don't you agree that fame has its price, Mr Tennyson?'

‘It has
a
price,' he agreed, ‘but I firmly believe that no one can make you pay it.'

Watts stood back from his canvas, after explaining its emblems and symbols to an impressed phrenologist. Watts hoped soon to broach the subject of Lorenzo modelling for him. For his own part, Lorenzo was definitely warming to the old goat, but he still couldn't quite see the attraction for Ellen. The man had a head so flat at the back it suggested he'd been struck with a frying pan.

‘It is a very beautiful picture,' Lorenzo agreed. ‘The brash camellia, the humble violets, a lovely conceit.'

‘Thank you.'

‘If you could just show me the humble violets again. I can't quite –' ‘There.'

‘Oh yes. No. Is that –?' ‘There.'

Lorenzo clapped him on the back, slightly too hard so that Watts dropped his palette.

‘Got it!' he said.

‘It's no fun down here without Mr Dodgson,' pouted Daisy, her shrimp net limp in her hand.

Jessie looked at her pityingly. They were paddling in rock pools, as usual, under the eye of their respective maids.

‘Daisy, tell me you're not serious,' she said. ‘That man gives me
cholera.'

Daisy huffed, and stamped her foot in the water, splashing them both.

‘You don't understand about Mr Dodgson and me,' she said. ‘It's very special. I think he really loves me. We're planning to run away. I've already packed a little bag.'

Jessie sat down on a rock.

‘Jessie?'

The girl did not reply.

‘Jessie? Speak to me.'

At two o'clock Emily Tennyson rose from her nap, and read the note sent by Alfred in the care of Julia's gardener's boy. Some Americans were coming to tea, apparently – an odd proposition from Alfred, since Americans were precisely the sort of people she was usually expected to shield him from.

In fact, if Americans turned up at the house, the Tennysons had a well-oiled routine for dealing with them. Emily would greet them hurriedly, leave them in the hall, and disappear to the dining room, immediately below Alfred's library. There she would take a long-handled broom and bang the ceiling with it three times. Re-emerging in the hall with telltale ceiling plaster on her hair and shoulders, she would point the way upstairs to Alfred's study, and then listen for Alfred's scuffle as he ran down his secret staircase, threw open the garden door and hared across the lawn to the cliffs.

People sometimes objected that they had travelled six thousand miles to see the Poet Laureate, to which Emily would always riposte (though only mentally) that oddly enough, Alfred would not have crossed Lombard Street to meet
them.

So she made the arrangements for tea (with food, this time), and got surprisingly busy. She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place. To Alfred, she always tried to show her more feeble side, because it reminded him of his mother. To his friends, she emphasized the sacrifices she willingly made for her lord, so that they agreed in secret she was too good for him. To her children, she played the rewarding role of domestic saint.

This daily checking for madness, for example, she conducted in the following fashion: ‘What day is it, Hallam?' ‘Tuesday, Mother?' he lisped.

‘Lionel?'

‘Oh Tuesday, too, I'd say.'

‘Does either of you happen to know the name of the Prime Minister?'

‘No idea,' they chorused.

‘Excellent,' she said, and packed them off to play.

Her boys were very beautiful, she thought, and she would keep their hair curly against all objections for as long as she could – possibly until the day they left her house to be married. Other boys were sent off to school, but Emily employed a succession of governesses to teach her boys at home. As she often argued to Alfred, this only
sounds
like an expensive option, but in fact it was completely free. Each governess would stay about a year before realizing she was never going to be paid. And then she would leave, and another would replace her.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Emily decided that she felt very well. She might even take a turn in the garden. So vigorous were her spirits, in fact, that when she first discovered a copy of the
Westminster Quarterly
perched on the umbrella stand next to the peg where Alfred's best hat was hanging, she simply removed it and tore it up. Only when she found another copy suspended from the door-knocker, and another attached to the collar of Alfred's favourite wolf hound, did she start to suspect that things were dangerously out of the ordinary. Three copies of the
Westminster?
How? Why? Was this another bad dream like the wallpaper? She sat down and fanned herself. It suddenly seemed very hot. How could she bear it if things ran this much out of control?

‘So listen, Jessie, I want you to be on your very best behaviour.'

‘You got it, Pa.'

Lorenzo looked down at his little girl, determinedly marching beside him in her little purple bonnet and lace-up boots, and he felt a surge of pride. He paused and kissed her hand.

‘If I could bottle this moment,' he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I could become a millionaire.'

‘What shall we talk about at Farringford, Pa?'

‘Between ourselves, Jessie, I have made an agreement with Mr Tennyson that I will check his sons for signs of madness.'

‘What?'

Jessie stopped and adjusted a boot. She was a very independent little girl.

‘Yes, the Tennysons are all mad, you see,' said Lorenzo. ‘Tennyson's father used to spend an hour and a half each day choosing which peg to hang his hat on. So naturally, the present Mr Tennyson worries now that Hallam and Lionel are chips off the old block.'

Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

‘Lionel's not mad,' she said flatly. ‘But I can't speak for Hallam. I don't think I've ever seen him.'

‘Nor has anybody. They say he's very shy.'

‘What about their mother? Does she have to be mad, too, for the boys to have caught it?'

‘She doesn't have to be. Mr Tennyson says she has nothing to do with the black blood of the Tennysons. He was suspiciously emphatic on the point.'