Tennyson's Gift (30 page)

‘What?'

‘I've got an idea,' he said, and scampered to the hall.

‘Miss Wilson, what an unexpected pleasure.'

But Emily had only just stepped forward to greet her ex-employee when she was almost knocked down by Dodgson. To his enormous relief, he had spied the little girl in her night dress. He ran towards her and fell at her feet.

‘Daisy!' he exclaimed.

‘Eek,' said Daisy. ‘Get off!'

‘You
scoundrel,'
said Tennyson, rising.

‘Shall I do it, father?'

Dodgson looked around. What was happening? Lionel had leapt on to a convenient chair and had raised a croquet mallet. Dodgson looked up at Tennyson.

‘Yes, do it,' said Tennyson.

So Lionel Tennyson struck Dodgson on the head with a croquet mallet, as he had so long hoped to do. As Dodgson keeled over on the hearth rug, Tennyson and Emily broke into spontaneous applause.

‘I never require you to check the boys for signs of madness again, my dear,' said Alfred, with his broadest smile, patting his breathless son on the shoulder. ‘If that was not the act of a sane mind, I really don't know what is.'

That night, Watts informed Ellen they were going home. He sent her a little note, by means of Mary Ryan, advising her to pack her bags at once. Now, with the Irish maid offering her bits of things to decide on – and surreptitiously returning the purloined Herbert hat to its rightful place – Ellen sat amid the debris of her ransacked wardrobe, and felt pretty glum. Perhaps it was time to accept that the marriage was over. The Haydon extravaganza had gone down quite badly. Her satin wedding dress had been ruined in the rain.

Damn this small Caution; damn this big Hope. She felt terribly confused. She wanted Watts to love her; but if she was honest, she wanted Lorenzo Fowler to love her too. If only Watts had set up house with her, the marriage might have been different. If they had taken up an independent life, they would have stood a chance. But Watts was a poor man. Haydon had lived an independent life, and look what happened to him. All that remained of him now was a moral tale, a set of gloomy diaries, and a plaster head in fragments.

‘The Absence of Hope'? It was all Watts really desired, of course; to depict moments of desolation and spiritual defeat. How stupid she had been to think she could turn him into Mister Cheeryble just by effort and example. It was as pointless as re-writing ‘The Two Voices' as ‘The Three Voices', or trying to pose for a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph (‘Wait! I come to thee! I die!') with a grin from ear to ear. It was just no good. It did not accord. Despite all his wife's best efforts, Old Greybeard's doomy life force had prevailed. ‘And the moral of that is?' Watts seemed to whisper in her ear. All too easily, she thought of the apt motto. Let the cobbler stick to his last.

Of course, the considerable shock of Lydia Fowler's arrival was still negotiating its way through Ellen's nervous system, and many, many hours would pass before it settled. The great magnetic Fowler kiss was unlike anything previously seen in polite society, and as a spectacle of raw marital desire, it uptipped this little virgin quite. Lorenzo and Lydia had seemed clamped together, locked in place, their bodies humming the same tremendous note in a major key. ‘Goddess,' Lorenzo said, and Ellen nearly swooned with longing.

She fingered her Herbert costume, and considered putting it on again, but her Herbertian adventure seemed so paltry now. Compared with rowing around the Needles in a night storm to join the man who worshipped you, dressing up as a boy for a bit of strained flirtation with someone else's husband was very small potatoes. It hadn't helped, either, that Lydia had handed everyone a copy of Uncle Orson's explicit pamphlet before bidding goodnight and gathering child and husband back to her omnicompetent skirts. Ellen had read it at once, and a lot of matters of an unmentionable physical nature had finally fallen into place. ‘Full intimacy', for example, covered all sorts of things between a man and wife, but it had nothing to do with dead pets.

Somewhat feverish at the recollection, Ellen now found herself alone at bed-time letting down her hair, and unbuttoning the top bit of her nightie. Up to now, Ellen's sexual frustration had been to her a puzzling sensation, something like a faraway itch, or a door opening to the garden but nobody coming in. But after Lorenzo said ‘Goddess', the world changed; she saw it differently, and she felt the full, bitter force of missing out on the action. At the Albion Hotel, at this very minute, Mr and Mrs Fowler would doubtless be engaging in vigorous marital relations precisely as prescribed by O. S. Fowler. Ellen had the mental picture of a battering ram, flames, cheers, and boiling oil – which was odd, really, because there was nothing alluding to medieval siegecraft in the book. Watts, by contrast, would be lolling in the next bedroom by himself, feebly wiping his dribbling brushes on a linseed rag.

Ellen made up her mind. Five months was long enough to wait for marital love, whatever the quality. What would she lose now by forcing the issue? Nothing. She undid another button and stepped into the corridor. It was time to take the bull by the horns. It was time to forget Westminster.

‘George?'

She rapped lightly on his door.

‘George?'

‘Mm?'

There was a scrabbling noise in the room, but before her husband could say, ‘Wait!' Ellen entered on exaggerated tiptoe, getting ready to pull her nightie over her head. But it was a mistake. Oh dear, this was a mistake. As the door swung open, Watts leapt to his feet in embarrassment –

‘George! But –'

‘No!'

‘How could you?'

‘Leave this room at once!'

– and Ellen had returned to the corridor pole-axed with astonishment within thirty seconds.

It was the last body-blow of her visit to Freshwater, and it was conclusive. Her marriage was now definitely over. George Frederic Watts had deceived and betrayed his wife in the worst possible way. For no, she had not surprised him molesting a chambermaid, or a child, or her best friend, or even the St Bernard, as other disappointed wives have done throughout history. When she entered her husband's room on that black night in Freshwater Bay, she had surprised him counting an enormous pile of money.

Cameron sat up in bed and persuaded his wife that a further mercy dash to Farringford was out of the question. The hour was too late.

‘But they must be told of Ada Wilson,' she exclaimed. ‘Alfred has often mentioned an anonymous letter, but think how brave he has been, if the wicked missives have continued. Perhaps he did not wish to alarm Emily. Think of that, Charles. There is some good in the man, you must not deny it. I would give anything for this not to have happened to my dear, dear friends.'

‘I know you would. You would give anything to anybody. It is to the infinite glory of God that each time I wake up I find my bed still under my body. But you can inform them of this silly Ada business in the morning, Julia. Tell me, how many times have you visited Farringford today already?'

Julia nodded that he was right, as always. She had been there twice, and both times without benefit of wheeled propulsion. She was nearly fifty, and her legs were feeling the strain. She recollected this morning's first visit, when she tripped over the Elgin Marbles wallpaper in Tennyson's staircase. How much could happen in a single day.

‘I found the wallpaper, incidentally,' she told Cameron, absent-mindedly rubbing her shin at the memory of its discovery. ‘I brought a roll back with me, in fact.'

‘Did you?' He was amused. ‘Was that quite proper, do you think?'

‘Well, they don't want it. They have made that clear enough. Besides, I'm afraid I was hurt and angry, Charles; I believe I vowed to burn the stuff in the fireplace. But now that I look at it, it is so
very
fine I think I might give it to Mrs Fowler as a present. I would so like to have that lady's good opinion.'

‘My dear, as you know, I admire you in all things save your impulsively charitable first impressions.'

Julia said nothing.

‘But Julia, you surprise me. How can you take back a gift you have given? It is no longer yours. Aside from the propriety of the thing, if you don't return it, they will suspect the servants or the children.'

Julia bit her lip.

‘I was in a passion, Charles.'

‘I know.'

‘This has been a terrible day.'

‘No, no. There I must disagree. From the entertainment point of view, it was more than satisfactory.'

‘But you are right, Charles. I will return the wallpaper tomorrow. You are always right. That's why I love you.'

Cameron smiled and settled his head. He did not regard this as something requiring an answer, let alone a reciprocation.

Julia differed from him in this opinion, however. ‘I said I love you, Charles,' she repeated, with meaningful emphasis.

‘Good for you,' he said, comfortably.

Staggering hatless from Farringford in the direction of the sea, Dodgson decided it was time to make his excuses to Freshwater society and leave before lunch tomorrow. However much people begged him to reconsider, he would just have to disappoint them. His week's sojourn at this delightful holiday place had been at best a grim race against brain damage, and he considered it wise to quit while he – and his head – were still ahead.

There were just a few details to tidy up in the morning. For example, he would require Daisy Bradley to return his safety pins; and he intended to lend some photographs to Mrs Cameron (to demonstrate how photography should be done). As for Mr Tennyson, his own offences against the great man were still well beyond his power to comprehend, but the evidence of his own ringing ear told him that Tennyson was definitely offended. In retrospect he thanked goodness that at least Lionel had reached for the croquet mallet and not the mock-baronial axe above the mantel.

His other major task before leaving Freshwater was to detach
Alice
from little Miss Terry, who still unaccountably believed the work to be somehow their joint creation. Having finally accepted that Tennyson's answer was a No, he would instead dedicate the book with a poem to Alice Liddell, which was only fair – despite that ungrateful little girl's insistence on growing up and spoiling everything. Hopefully, other little girls would heed the warnings in
Alice
about getting so big suddenly that you fill the room, and your arm goes out of the window and your foot goes up the chimney. But in Dodgson's experience, there was no reasoning with the little angels once their grosser hormones kicked in and they stopped wearing the wings. Meanwhile, as the rain finally stopped, he was thinking of a clever poem for Ellen which he might slip into the book somewhere as a way of pretending to say thank you.

So he was just pacing along with his head down, practising rhymes, when he bumped into the rather arresting figure of Mary Ann Hillier, swathed in black, lighting up the dark with her moonglow profile and expression of infinite sadness. Such beauty was truly astonishing, he had to admit it. The Pre-Raphaelites would stripe themselves pink with envy. ‘Mary Ann?'

‘Meester Dadgson?' she said. Dodgson winced as the vision fled.

‘If you wants to go hooam I shall be gwine outlong in a minute or two,' she said. Which was nice of her, if not particularly nicely done. Nobody around here, he noticed, seemed to have much grace when they offered you a kindness.

They walked along in silence for a short while, but Mary Ann clearly had something she wanted to discuss.

‘Be you a-minding o that lecture t'other day?' she asked, as they walked along in the dark.

‘How could I forget it?' said Dodgson.

‘Waall, I caast eyes on a buoy, swap me bob, that tore my heart all to libbets!'

‘You d—did?' Dodgson wanted to ask what a libbet was, but he dared not disrupt the flow. Mary Ann seemed to be telling him she was in love, but he didn't see what he could do about it, and he was hardly in the mood for maids' confessions. Even at the best of times, in fact, such intimacies made him want to scratch vigorously at the rough skin on his elbows.