Tennyson's Gift (27 page)

Ellen fell back in alarm. ‘Mr Fowler, come quickly. She's done something with this knife!' ‘Jessie!' he yelled.

‘I hate you, Pa. I love you. How could you do it?' Jessie's voice sounded a bit funny. She dropped the knife and it clattered at her feet.

Outside, in the garden, Julia caught up with Alfred Tennyson, as the wind lashed the trees above their heads, and the rain fell on their faces like – well, you know, God's angry tears or something. For a man who hotly resisted accusations of the pathetic fallacy, these stormy conditions were just too bad.

‘Alfred!' yelled Julia above the wind.

‘It's no good, Julia. My mind is made up.'

‘Alfred!'

They could have gone on like this, but fortunately Julia thought of sheltering in the glass house, where at least they could hear each other speak. And so they entered Julia's hallowed place, where Alfred had never stepped before, and the conflicting emotions Julia had demanded from Mr Watts as Ulysses were as nothing to the feelings now fighting in her own breast like cross winds tearing at a sail.

‘I can't believe you would leave me, Alfred,' she wailed. ‘Just because I have never spoken to you of my feelings, you must surely know what they are.'

‘Julia, I think we should discuss this tomorrow. Or perhaps, even better, we should never discuss it at all. It pains me to see you like this.'

‘It pains you!'

‘It's a figure of speech, Julia. It means I don't want to talk about it. And that such passion in a plain dumpy woman is ugly and absurd.'

Julia gaped. Alfred on the defensive was clearly a very dangerous man. He was still very angry.

‘Correct me, Julia, but you seem to believe that I owe you something. I don't, and nor does Emily. We did not ask you to move here. We did not ask you for the wallpaper or the ponchos. We don't even know what a poncho is. We do not need your permission to settle our own affairs and enjoy the success that my talent has earned me, away from constant outrageous requests for photographs and dedications!'

Julia looked around. There was something about the setting. She never thought she would see Alfred in her glass house. She had wanted it so much that it had nearly broken her heart.

‘Sit for me, Alfred,' she said quietly.

‘You do not listen, madam!'

‘But I do, Alfred. I do. And each word you speak pains me a great deal more than it pains you. But tell me, will your friends see the review in the
Westminster?
Will they be pleased and impressed?'

Alfred tugged his cloak. ‘Yes, they will.'

‘And will your enemies choke on their breakfast?'

‘I sincerely hope so.'

‘I really didn't want you to know this, Alfred, and I would never have told you for my own sake, but you simply need to know. I wrote that review. Sara used her influence with the editor to print it.'

Tennyson stood up impatiently. Why was he listening to such silly invention?

‘And why would you do that?' he snapped.

‘Because I love you,' she said. ‘And because I wanted you to have a present from me that did not demand thanks. That way your usual brutal disregard for my feelings could not hurt me.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Oh Alfred. Your blindness is such a curse. Why do you think the review disputes with George Gilfillan and John Ruskin? Who else but your closest friends would know your tiresome preoccupation with their trifling passing comments?'

‘They were a lot more than passing comments. They were wounds, Julia,
wounds.'

‘All right then. Look at it another way. How do you think the review got into the apple pie?'

He heard what she was saying. He sat thinking for a while, and the more he thought, the angrier he got.

‘So do you expect thanks now? Is that why you do these stupid extravagant things, for the thanks? Well, you won't get any. Do you know what you have done, you silly woman?'

‘Yes thank you,' said Julia. ‘I thought I was doing you a favour, when in fact I have done one for myself.'

‘I don't understand,' he said.

She drew a deep breath. ‘I could tell the world the review was mine, Alfred. Your reputation would never recover.' ‘You wouldn't.' She raised her eyebrows.

‘Julia. Julia, you are a nice person. In all the turmoil this evening, you seem to have forgotten.' ‘Sit for me, Alfred. I love you.'

They sat in the dark, and the rain lashed the windows. ‘I love you,' she repeated. ‘Remember the
Westminster.
Sit for me.'

Dodgson rushed in to the dining room.

‘It's Daisy Bradley!' he shouted. ‘They say she's gone m-m—missing!'

Jessie dropped Haydon's head, and it smashed on the edge of the podium. Blood trickled from her fingers' ends.

‘I love you, Pa,' she said, and Lorenzo screamed as he ran to catch her in his arms.

It was quite a scene. In fact Mr Cameron woke up at that moment, took a look round the darkened room and – not surprisingly – applauded vigorously. It was quite the best tableau he'd ever seen – Watts with his hand across his eyes, Ellen aghast, Lorenzo with the bleeding child, and Dodgson frozen in the doorway.

‘Very fine!' he called. ‘Mark my words. Put that on in Drury Lane and people would pay good money to see it, I assure you!'

Lionel Tennyson sat up in bed and laughed with delight. His beautiful little face was framed by hair curled in papers (at his mother's insistence), but he didn't mind. He hardly even noticed the discomfort in his foot, caused by his mother stamping on it so unexpectedly that afternoon. While Hallam slumbered inoffensively in an adjacent bed, Lionel held up a candle and continued to read a parody of his father's famous poem ‘The Two Voices'. The parody, published anonymously, had been sent to Lionel by Mr Dodgson a couple of years ago. But Lionel, rightly believing Dodgson to be rather
infra dig
at the time, had never got around to reading it.

‘The Two Voices' is not much read nowadays, but Lionel knew it very well indeed. Even though it was a grave and grown-up poem about the arguments for and against suicide, Lionel had known his father's poem since his earliest youth. The last-but-one governess had read it compulsively and had made both boys learn sections of it by heart. The children used to wonder, actually, whether she was quite all right in the head. At local children's parties, therefore, when games took place, other infants might lisp ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall', while the Tennyson boys were apt to fold their hands and begin,

They would conclude their recitals thirty minutes later, among a party of blubbing and demoralized kiddies, and parents in despair.

So there had been general relief when that gloomy governess had gone, and another had replaced her. Like Tennyson himself, she would have been outraged by Mr Dodgson's version, ‘The Three Voices', which concerned a chap determined, not to kill himself, but rather to be extremely cheerful at the seaside. But then a sea breeze carries his hat athwart the glooming flat (good Tennysonian words, ‘glooming' and ‘athwart'), where it is speared by the umbrella of a female philosopher whose aim is to make him see misery in everything. For someone who himself lived beside the sea, Lionel appreciated, if nothing else, the way Mr Dodgson set so many of his poems on the beach.

Lionel hugged himself. It wasn't that the parody was so very funny. It was that his father would be so very mad when he read it that he wouldn't know which leg to hop on.

There was no doubt about it. ‘The Three Voices' was dynamite. Dodgson had written doggerel stuff about dinner and hats! In fact Lionel was so engrossed in this wonderful fare that when a handful of pebbles rattled at his window, he ignored them. After all, it was a stormy night with sudden gusts. With any luck the Garibaldi tree would fall over, and do them all a favour. (Lionel had already loosened it secretly around the roots, to get it started.)

Another pebble hit the casement, however, and Lionel went to look. Outside, below, was Daisy Bradley, waving a small bag.

Lionel opened the window.

‘Daisy! It's ten o'clock!'

‘Lionel! What happened to your head?'

Lionel squirmed as he remembered the curling papers.

‘I'll come down,' he said. ‘Stay there.'

Down on the shore, Dodgson's boater had blown off, but no lady philosopher speared it. It bowled inland, spinning and scooping, and was never seen by a living soul again.

‘Daisy!' he yelled.

Behind him, battling with the breeze from the sea, were Mrs Cameron and Tennyson, and Watts and Ellen, all doing their best, though not really knowing where to start. Before Jessie passed out at Dimbola, she whispered to Lorenzo that Daisy might have headed for the bathing machines (Jessie was privy to Daisy's somewhat flawed domestic intentions), which was why the household's luminaries had now crowded to the bay in low tide and pitch dark, calling and peering, while Daisy's other family and friends searched inland.

Alfred was not much use on a search party. Each time he called, ‘Here she is! I have found the child!' he was discovered to be pointing at a big rock or a piece of old donkey blanket caught on a bush. But he felt that he needed to be there. He needed to come out and do something rugged and masculine after his frightful encounter with Julia in the chicken-house. Above all, he needed to feel good about himself again. Somehow or other, Julia's frank words (particularly ‘I love you') had knocked him quite off balance.

‘Daisy!' ‘Daisy!' they called.

Dodgson felt wretched, and not just about the loss of his hat. Everyone knew Daisy's disappearance was his fault. Jessie had told everybody about the safety pins before she fainted away; and they had all shaken their heads and said ‘Shame'. What could he do to redeem himself? Not take a picture, or write a parody, or sing a comic song. All his usual repertoire for ingratiation was useless in this company. So he must find Daisy. At all costs, he must find her before anyone else.