Tennyson's Gift (34 page)

‘I wrote them twice a week for a year, Mrs Tennyson. A hard thing not to notice.'

Letters? Instinctively, Emily felt in her pocket, and produced the latest ‘Yours in aversion'.

‘Is this you?'

‘Yes.'

Emily could scarcely believe it. She had always pictured ‘Yours in aversion' as a failed, impoverished poet expiring from the strength of his own body odour somewhere near Hungerford Stairs, with dandruff and no coals.

Emily looked at the letter and shook her head in disbelief. ‘I have read none of these letters since the first,' she told Wilson, in firm tones. ‘Anonymous letters are vile and cowardly, Wilson. I have – I have thrown them all away.'

‘What?' Though Wilson stood behind her, Emily could tell she had struck home.

‘And now,' said Emily, ‘I will dispose of this one also.' Wilson reached forward to grab it from her hand, but Emily cast it in the air.

Caught by the wind, it soared away uphill like a child's kite. Wilson yelped.

‘You beast!' she screamed, and scampered after her handiwork.

Emily laughed and slapped her knees. How stupid Wilson was. Alfred was right: the girl had not deserved the wages she had not been paid.

At which point, with Mrs Cameron toiling towards her just fifty yards off, Emily's invalid carriage started trundling downhill, brakeless and without a rudder.

‘Alfred!' called Emily, as she felt the wheels begin to turn.

‘Alfred!'

But the carriage was travelling quite fast now, downward and seaward, straight towards Julia, across the grass and chalk (‘Alfred!'), gathering speed and bumping from wheel to wheel.

Julia, who heard the cry downwind, looked up and saw a sight which filled her with a mixture of panic and euphoria, guilt and elation. She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. For this was exactly the picture she had conjured jealously for herself a hundred times, Emily freewheeling towards a certain doom – except that sprinting over the hill behind came Lydia Fowler, waving and yelling.

‘I'm coming,' shouted Lydia, pushing past Tennyson, who still gazed out to sea, impervious. ‘Stop that carriage! Let me through, I'm a professor!'

‘And I'm coming too!' yelled Julia.

Emily's carriage was bouncing and veering now like india rubber as it gathered speed, and it was hard to guess exactly the path it would take, but as it closed on Julia it swerved to the right, directly towards the cliff edge. Julia froze. Her heart drummed in her chest. What could she do? Well, she could get rid of this wallpaper for a start. And so it was that with fantastic presence of mind, Julia heaved the wallpaper into the air. It flew, it arced, and time stopped. And then it landed in front of the lady's wheels, just ten feet from the edge. The runaway carriage stopped with a jerk, its black-clad passenger shot out with a scream, and the rest was a blank, because Julia – understandably in the circumstances – collapsed in a dead faint.

When Alfred was finally roused to the situation, it was mostly under control. Lydia, with typical efficiency, had restored Emily to her carriage, revived Julia's unconscious form with a practised slap, and restrained the would-be murderess by wrapping her in wallpaper, which was the only material to hand.

‘Very good quality stuff,' she remarked, as she worked.

‘Well, I'm glad somebody thinks so,' said Julia.

Alfred was nonplussed by the presence of so many people on his cliff at once, but considering that two of them had helped save the life of his dearest Emily, decided to be big about it. He produced some embroidery silks from his pocket which helped tie the wallpaper more securely around the prisoner. And then, having decided definitely in favour of ‘gable', he suggested they all walk home.

‘She wanted to kill me, Alfred.'

Tennyson didn't know what to say. He looked around at the clouds and sky.

‘Well, Emily. She couldn't have chosen a finer day.'

As they walked back across the down from their adventure, they little knew how they were spotted from afar by a lady in a fine carriage, bowling away from Farringford. It is always a nuisance to call on the off-chance and find the whole family from home, but it is even more of a nuisance if you are Queen Victoria and have popped in for an edifying recital of
In Memoriam,
to remind you of your poor dear dead Albert. It is worth remembering here that the Tennysons had lived in hopes of such a visit for ten years. As has been mentioned before, they even kept a plum-cake on the off-chance (or they thought they did – Lionel and Hallam had eaten it).

‘The Queen came, father,' said Lionel, as the solemn bedraggled party made their way indoors. Lydia laughed.

‘No, it's true, Ma,' said Jessie. ‘She was here ten minutes ago, you just missed her. Why is Ada done up like the Elgin Marbles? Is it a game?'

‘The Queen?' said Tennyson, blankly. ‘The Queen? No, no.'

He sank into a chair, and allowed a small sob to escape him.

‘I hope you were courteous, Lionel,' said Emily.

‘I gave her a copy of
Enoch Arden,
father, and she seemed very pleased to have it. And I also suggested that you would be glad to read it to her.'

‘Well done, boy.'

Alfred was torn between a desire to hug the boy, and to hack his own head off with a ceremonial axe.

‘But there was a strange thing,' Lionel added, in that handsome nonchalant way of his. ‘When I left the room to get the book for her, there were three copies of that brown review thing over there on the piano. And when I came back, there were only two.'

‘She has taken your excellent review, my dear!'

Alfred and Julia exchanged glances. On the walk back from the cliff, she had explained about not expecting thanks for the review. She had explained that she was sorry. But now that Queen Victoria would read Julia's handiwork, and be terribly impressed, she felt prouder than ever of her perfect gift.

‘Oh, may I see it, too?' said Lydia. She went to have a look.

‘Ah yes, a copy of the
Westminster Quarterly,'
she said, picking it up. ‘And
The Train.
I don't know this, is it good? You are fortunate, Mr Tennyson, that the Queen did not pick up the wrong thing here! They are so alike!'

Alfred was still so mentally enfeebled by his terrible luck at missing the monarch that he didn't at first appreciate the full force of Mrs Fowler's news.

‘You seem pale, Alfred,' said Emily. ‘Yet I am safe and sound! I think this is a special occasion. Come, we shall have some tea.'

Jessie and Lionel cheered.

‘And we shall cut the plumcake!'

Jessie, unaccountably, found herself cheering alone.

But meanwhile Tennyson remained silent. He knew there was horror lurking in Mrs Fowler's innocent words. He just had to pin it down. Slowly he made a calculation. After the Queen left the room, the
Westminster
was still there; and
The Train.
Which meant – which meant –

As he finally fell in, the sound that escaped him was a suitable combination of gasping and drowning. The Queen, at this minute, rattling towards East Cowes, held the sexual ravings of Orson S. Fowler in her commodious black silk lap. Had Alfred been asked that morning the worst potential mishap that could befall Orson's time bomb, he might have pictured Lionel reading it, or Emily. Now, however, Queen Victoria would hop into her four-poster tonight at Osborne House, and scream the place down. He was ruined. It was all up.

All he could do was pray. No one would notice. He closed his eyes.

‘Almighty God,' he began. ‘Save me from this and I will –' He paused. What bargain could he strike with the almighty? After all, he was already such a Christian man. He opened his eyes for a clue, and spied his dear friend Julia being brave about the Elgin Marbles wallpaper, while adjusting her bothersome lace cap. He closed his eyes again. In his heart of hearts, he knew what he had to do.

Two days later, Julia Margaret Cameron sat at her window in her quiet time, while Mary Ryan read to her from
Maud.
She had heard about Mary Ryan's stout and loyal speech to Lorenzo Fowler, and was so heartened by it that she promised the girl more starring parts in the photographs from now on, and also less water-carrying, which was a relief. Mary Ann, who had thought herself rather clever to pass on the story to her mistress, now cleaned silver in the exile of the kitchen, and couldn't quite work out what had happened.

Mary Ryan always read beautifully. She had a poetic soul. Julia listened to her now while watching Tennyson's gate, with tears rolling from her eyes.

The air had taken a chill this morning. Julia shivered. Ah, yes.
To faint in the light of the sun she loves; to faint in his light and to die.
She wiped her cheeks with her shawl.

‘Oh Mary. Mr Tennyson is a very great man.'

Kindly, Mary took her hand and squeezed it.

‘He is so.'

‘He has a great gift.'

‘Is that the same?'

‘He makes the sun come out.'

‘I know.'

Julia was so taken with this thought that she didn't straight away notice the Tennyson gate swing open, and her darling Alfred appear, waving his hat at her window. Just like the vision of Emily on the cliff, it would be like a dream coming true.

‘Come into the garden, Julia!' he called.

She looked down.

‘Come into the garden,' he called again. And then she properly saw him, stark and black amongst her white roses, and her heart filled with joy.

She flung open the sash. ‘Alfred!'

‘I have a note from the Queen, my dear. All is well! All is very well indeed!'

He produced the letter from his pocket, and held it close to his eyes.

‘She says she was never more happily diverted than by the reading matter she obtained from my house – that it made her think
more than ever
of her poor dear Albert!'

‘Alfred, I am so glad she loved
Enoch Arden.
It is a great poem, full of loss.'

Alfred frowned.
Enoch Arden?
Who mentioned
Enoch Arden?
He scanned the note again, puzzled.

‘Oh yes, here it is! Yes, she says thank you for the book of poems too.'

Julia had never seen him so playful or so handsome. She scurried from her bedroom and ran downstairs, reaching the garden just as he plucked a white rose – at last, a white rose! – and held it to his face. Her heart broke.

‘I'm so glad you came to tell me,' she said. ‘And I hope you have forgiven me, Alfred. It's just that, well, I would give
anything,
and when –'

‘I have decided to sit for you, Julia.'

Julia caught her breath and adjusted a shawl. She looked around at her lovely roses. The day was so very beautiful. The soul of the rose went into her blood.

‘Sit for me? Oh, but Alfred! Only if your heart desires it.'

‘I will sit for you –' and here he made a special, enormous effort, so difficult that you could almost hear his soul creak – ‘with pleasure.'

‘You will?'

‘I will.'

He removed his hat and bowed his amazing, famous, enormous head before her.

She reached out, as if to touch it.

‘It's all for you,' he said.

NEITHER MRS CAMERON NOR G. F. WATTS
produced an ‘Absence of Hope'. But Watts's curiously pessimistic painting ‘Hope' – in which a blindfold figure on a buoy listens to the last string on a broken lyre, and doesn't look especially cheered up by it – became his best-known work. At one time, it was as famous as Holman Hunt's ‘Light of the World', and it brought solace in unlikely places. After their defeat in the 1967 war, Egyptian troops were distributed with reproductions of ‘Hope'. What they made of this peculiar choice of consolation prize is not recorded.