Wanting (20 page)
‘Mr—how do I say this? The child never ate insects all the years she was with me.’
‘She has reverted to type,’ said Mrs Trench, who now joined them.
‘Did she,’ asked the Warden, ‘hide her true nature from you? All those years? Is what we see below the truth of these people?’
They stared for a few moments without speaking at the mud-spattered, bedraggled girl. Lady Jane’s vision began blurring, and she turned to face the Warden.
‘She struck me as…’ said Lady Jane, but some certainty, some conviction, was missing from her voice, from the words spilling from her mouth. She brushed her eyes with a kid-gloved finger. ‘At least, initially, that is, she—she appeared intelligent, seemed—’
‘Intelligent?’ said the Warden, as though it were a matter to ponder. He seemed deeply understanding, and his understanding was somehow terrifying and impossible for Lady Jane. He smelt of smoke and sounded like clanging iron. ‘No,’ said the Warden finally. ‘Never that.’
‘Rat cunning, more like it,’ said Mrs Trench.
‘Animal instinct,’ said the Warden, ‘highly honed. As Mrs Trench—much experienced with the savages—has alluded to. Do we commit Rousseau’s fallacy? Thinking rat cunning equates with humanity or civilisation? No. Why? Because when rewarded, the child pretended to one thing. But here we see that they are capable of the grossest deceit. Precisely
because
progress is impossible, they regress quickly.’ He looked Lady Jane in the eyes and his thin lips slowly formed a pained smile of knowing compassion. ‘Is this painful for you to hear? I know, Ma’am. How can it
not be? But to us here at St John’s Orphanage, they are all God’s children. Wherever they come from, Ham or Abraham, it matters not.’
The Warden believed in God’s love and pity. A terrible love. A most terrifying pity. And against all that belief and all that love and all that pity, against all the questions already answered, even a spirit as indomitable as Lady Jane’s faltered.
She swung back to the swirling glass and the sight of Mathinna beyond, so buffeted by waves of memory and emotion she thought she might sink beneath them. How she longed again to hear the tinkling of the bell as the child made her way around the house. For arms wrapping around her legs and waist, grabbing and holding her. Why had she pushed the child away when she had secretly longed to be so grabbed and held?
And then she could no longer hold down that deep buried feeling. She could no longer deny the memory of her three miscarriages. She could not forget her grief, and then the cruel awakening to her barren body, her loneliness, her inescapable sense of shame as a woman, her desperate desire for a child, her pride that rescued her and then crushed her and made her move relentlessly and constantly, desperately seeking to raise herself and her husband forever after, as though they might somehow escape the gravity of her grief.
Until that day on Flinders Island when she had seen Mathinna dance in a white kangaroo skin, Lady Jane had deluded herself that it was science, reason, Christianity;
that the ruse of a noble experiment might somehow bring her the mystery that other women took for granted, but she never admitted what it really was that she longed to know: the love of a mother for a child.
She wished to rush down to the filthy courtyard, grab Mathinna and steal the frightened child away from all this love and pity, this universal understanding that it was necessary that she suffer so. She wished to wash and soothe her, to whisper that it was all right, over and over, that she was safe now, to kiss the soft shells of her ears, hold her close, feed her warm soup and bread. She wished to be the mother she had tried so hard never to appear, to put her nose in Mathinna’s wild hair and comfort and protect her, and revel in her difference and not seek to destroy it, because in that moment she knew that the destruction of that difference could only lead, in the end, to the terrible courtyard below, and the white coffins below that.
Then this thought was replaced by a different voice that whispered how all these things were regrettable but unavoidable, that somehow the stinking hammocks and rats and cold mud and burnt children were for a necessary purpose. It made no sense. But finally her head succeeded in steadying her reckless heart. And Lady Jane recognised the truth of what she was being told: that her great experiment was the most ignominious failure, and that she must not suffer the further humiliation of taking Mathinna home to England. At that moment, everything in that room, in St John’s, smelt to her of wet stone.
She turned away from the window and the sight of that filthy, bedraggled figure. She took a deep breath. None could ever underestimate her courage.
‘What you say accords with common sense,’ she said slowly, stumbling over the words as though it were a confession extracted by some terrible means. ‘I can see that she is simply reverting to her animal nature.’
‘It is what we have worked with before,’ said the Warden gently. ‘There are places for all in our colony’s kitchens and sculleries, Ma’am. But you cannot raise gazelles from rats.’
Lady Jane could see that whatever magic Mathinna had possessed as a small girl on Flinders Island had now vanished. Now she was no longer pretty but dirty and unattractive, no longer delightful and happy but spiteful and miserable. In truth, thought Lady Jane, she has under my care only gone backwards, and can only degenerate further. The dance had left the dancer.
Watching Lady Jane’s carriage return, seeing her enter Government House alone, Sir John hoped he would be seen as callous by more than just his wife. It would help—if only in a small way—restore his standing with the colonists, and with that, he might find some small measure of pride restored. He despised himself for it and despised humanity for it. He recognised it as a conclusive argument for his return to something for which he was in every other respect congenitally unsuited—by weight, by age, by character—the white world of polar exploration. It was the only emptiness he knew greater than himself.
The day after they sailed from Van Diemen’s Land, when there was enough sea between them and the child, in an act that was composed equally of contrition and cunning, Sir John made a gift to his wife of a painting of Mathinna done by the convict Bock shortly before the fateful ball.
She was wearing her favourite red dress, and the picture was marred only by one detail: her bare feet. For Mathinna had, typically, kicked off her court shoes for the sitting and Bock had painted her barefooted. Because it was a watercolour, he did not feel he could paint shoes over the feet, and when, on Lady Jane’s instructions, Bock painted a copy with shoes, it had somehow lost the delightful spontaneity of the original. And so the paintings had been rolled up and stored away and forgotten, until Sir John had the original searched out and framed.
‘It really is a fine likeness of the child when she was at her most admirable,’ he said as the wrapping paper fell to the floor. ‘Predating her rather sorry decline.’
Lady Jane wanted to scream.
With a piece of shaped timber, the framer had achieved more in a moment than she had with her previously invincible will over the last five years. His oval frame neatly cut Mathinna off at her ankles and finally covered her bare feet.
Lady Jane stepped out of the dimness of their cabin into the intense daylight of the quarterdeck. There was a beautiful freshness about the sun, the ship, the wind, the sea. It was as though the world had been born anew. The freshly washed decks steamed; the light broke the sea into a million diamonds.
She turned and strode to the stern. With an uncharacteristically violent motion, she threw the painting in the wake of the ship. It dipped and rode the air as it fell. For a moment it seemed as if it might fly. Then it smacked into the sea, tearing on impact. It quickly drifted away, face down. When she turned, Sir John was standing behind her, black streaks across his forehead as the wind blew his long greased hairs into writhing question marks.
It was 1844. The last pair of great auks in the world had just been killed, Friedrich Nietzsche born, and Samuel Morse sent the first electrical communication in history. It was a telegram that read:
What hath God wrought
.
‘I loved her,’ said Lady Jane.
D
ICKENS STOOD ON THE STAGE
which would soon transport him to the Arctic, and looked around that marvellous magic theatre. The Manchester Free Trade Hall was as remarkable as anything else in that great shock-city, which, with its huge factories, foundries and mills, its slums, its misery and its riches, was the wonder of the modern world. The theatre had every modern appliance and device. Far above him, a gasman sat on the trapeze fly at his table, operating the best set of gas borderlights and footlights Dickens had seen, while to his left on a perch was the very latest theatrical innovation, a limelight.
Two men stood by that large box of burning lime, their job to keep its fire burning with a giant pair of bellows, prevent the temperamental machine from exploding, while all the time moving its dazzling cone of brilliant white light hither and thither around the stage. Dickens had only
heard of this amazing contrivance, and now here he was, about to play within its extraordinary glow.
He stood a desk johnny at centre stage, had the limelight lit and focused on the man’s face. The limelight’s power was extraordinary. It washed colour out. It accentuated wrinkles, jaws, lips. It was clear to Dickens that his make-up would need to be stronger, more pronounced, to take full advantage. He went to the back of the stalls and had the johnny drop and raise his head, move his face in and out of the light, carefully observing the effects of light and shadow, the way in which one might seemingly move like the Devil himself between night and day, the new spaces it opened up for his portrayal of the dying Wardour.
Dickens walked back onto the stage and stood in the brilliant white light. As was the fashion now, the auditorium would be unlit during the performance. He looked down at the pits and was delighted to realise he could see nothing.
He felt a hitherto unknown power and disguise in the white brilliance in which he was bathed, and he realised that what had begun as an amateur theatrical was now going somewhere unexpected and extraordinary. Some of his fellow writers disapproved—Thackeray had said that any vanity is deemed honourable just so long as charity can be named its beneficiary.
Damn Thackeray, thought Dickens. He has posterity. I only have tonight. Damn him! Damn them! Damn them all! He, who was buried, would be resurrected. He, who was dying, encased in pewter, in ice, would now live—if
only for a moment—in the blinding white of limelight. And, secure in that dazzle-shaft, with the world beyond finally unseeable, he vowed to imbue Wardour with all he had, to allow his own soul finally to walk naked.
Much to everyone’s relief, the opening night saw a full house. Dickens’ performance was staggering in its intensity and effect. Watching from backstage, Wilkie Collins was overwhelmed. In the wings he could see hardened carpenters trembling and stagehands weeping, and out in the theatre the audience of thousands swam in tears. Wilkie, eyes also moist, leant across to John Forster.
‘It’s wonderful,’ he whispered. ‘But there’s something strange, something not right in the performance.’
Forster looked at him, perplexed. His great friend was triumphant, had risen to a new height—what could be better?
‘Something terrible,’ hissed Wilkie. ‘Can you not see it? It is not acting—it is metamorphosis.’
‘Come, Wilkie!’ cried a stranger’s voice. ‘It is your cue about to happen.’
And there at their side was a bearded and wretched maniac, not Dickens but Richard Wardour, possessed. He grabbed at Wilkie and, fetching him into his arms, carried him back out onto the stage, where Wilkie was greeted by Maria Ternan as the love of her life, Frank Aldersley, whom she had thought dead.
After the performance, Dickens called on the Ternans
in their dressing room to congratulate them. Ellen Ternan had been struck by the attention and deference shown to this man, of whom she had, on their first meeting, thought so little that she blubbered in front of him. She had heard of him, of course, and she had read
The Pickwick Papers
and some of his other books—who hadn’t?—but she had been unprepared for the way the world parted and bowed wherever he went. She felt more important than the royal family once in Manchester. They were lodged in the grand Great Western Hotel; the company was given their very own dining and sitting rooms, where, with her sister Maria, Ellen Ternan had on their first night perhaps a little more brandy than she should, an adventure to which Dickens made a light but pleasing allusion.
After he had left their dressing room, Ellen Ternan noticed on her dressing table a small book Dickens had been carrying in his hand. She looked at it—why, it was a notebook! Perhaps, she thought, Mr Dickens’ own notebook! She would not open it; private things, her mother had taught her, were just that. But then, she reasoned, what if it weren’t Mr Dickens’? How was one to know without opening it? And so that night she took it with her to bed. Its spine was tight, the pages dun-coloured. It opened like a wounded fledgling hoping to be healed.
There was no name on the inside cover, but Ellen Ternan recognised the handwriting from notes he had scrawled on her script, and so she turned to the next page and the next
and the next until she had flicked through the entire book. There were all sorts of lists and titles and queer phrases. ‘
Undisciplined heart
.’ She licked a page. It was plain as pease pudding. ‘
New ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground as Wardour, with surprising force and brilliance
.’ There was no tale skewering the pieces into a real meal.
She read a few things—she guessed they were for Mr Dickens’ next novel. They were mostly gloomy, though there were one or two funny conversations and many curious sentences. ‘
The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else
.’ Odd names of people. ‘
Miriam Denial
.’ ‘
Verity Happily
.’ ‘
Mary McQuestion
.’ Strange maxims. ‘
You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is—can you pay?
’ All up, it seemed rather queer, almost boring, and it was a wonder if Mr Dickens could make anything of it and would want it back at all.