Tennyson's Gift (18 page)

‘Oh yes, but she doesn't understand. Ada says that if I don't eat meat I'll grow up a simpleton and dullard. Yet I keep explaining that my farinaceous family is full of alert, energetic people who never miss a trick. Look at Uncle Orson, I said, the most productive brain in the whole United States, and moreover the world's greatest expert on martial love!'

‘Marital, Jessie.'

‘Yes, marital. Why doesn't she examine the evidence that's right before her eyes?'

‘Perhaps because her intelligence is clouded by animal fat.'

Jessie looked puzzled, and then guffawed.

‘Can I tell her you said that, Pa? I can't wait to see her face!'

It was quite true that the Fowlers defied the usual dumpy phlegmatic fate of the vegetarian. Somehow their blameless lifestyle – meatless, drinkless, smokeless, and disencumbered by the vile fashion of corsetry – had not only sharpened their wits, but given them an abnormally large appetite for other base, animal activities. Both literally and metaphorically, they were full of beans. Uncle Orson, back in Boston, was the prophet of so many popular health movements that he was on the verge of losing his mind keeping up with them all. He promoted all progressive notions with the same total enthusiasm. When he became consumed by a passion for gardening, for example, he sent packets of seeds (free) to any part of the United States.

As for marital love, Uncle Orson was not so much afroth on this subject as a human egg-white beaten to a stiff meringue. Reportedly, he saw sex in everything. Given the opportunity, he might even have seen it in G. F. Watts.

Intercourse summons all the organs and parts of the system to its love-fest,
wrote the lathered Orson.
It compels their attendance, and lashes up their action to the highest possible pitch. The non-participant female … is a natural abomination.

Orson's latest pamphlet – an abstract from his projected hundred-thousand-word book
Creative and Sexual Science –
Lorenzo had read quietly to himself a couple of times (no more) and then hidden in the lid of his portmanteau. True, every so often he retrieved it, to refresh his memory. He particularly liked the expression ‘lashes up their action to the highest possible pitch', which made his cheeks warm under the bushy beard. To be strictly honest, he had taken a quick perusal of the pamphlet again in bed last night, after Ellen's visit.

Orson had wanted to send five thousand copies, to be sold from Ludgate Circus at a penny each. But England was not yet ready for all this lashing up, Lorenzo decided. And let's be frank here, the Isle of Wight never would be.

‘I have an appointment at Dimbola Lodge this morning, Jessie. Will you come?'

She put down her knife with a clunk.

‘To see Mr Dodo? No fear.'

‘But Jessie –'

‘I only touched his
head,
Pa!'

‘I know. But sometimes that's enough, Jessie. Sometimes that's enough.'

At the breakfast table at Farringford, Emily opened a note from Julia and some embroidery silks fell out.

‘Alfred,' she said, flatly.

He picked up the silks and poked them in his pocket. He continued reading
Enoch Arden,
his tragic fisherman poem. Although the book was scarcely off the presses, he was already considering emendations. ‘Under the palm tree' in line 494 would be yards better as ‘Under
a
palm tree', he thought. He practised ‘Under the palm, under a palm, under the palm, under a palm,' while tapping time with a spoon.

Emily smoothed her hair and composed herself for the letter, but when she resumed it, she felt all the hope drain again from her body.

‘You read it, Alfred. I can't.'

Alfred sighed, put down his book and scanned the letter, holding it three inches in front of his eyes.
Receiving the American phrenologist this morning (Tuesday),
Julia said;
you are both invited to meet him.
He read the note first upright, then sideways, then upright again. It was important that he keep this news from Emily. He wanted to consult this phrenologist on the urgent matter of the boys' inherited madness. He played for time.

‘I wish she wouldn't cross her letters,' he said. ‘Her handwriting is bad enough without it.'

‘What does she say?'

‘Oh. Nothing.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘Just will I sit for her. The usual thing. And please accept these lovely silks, bought when last in London. The blue is quite a rare shade, she says.' Emily felt like a heel.

‘Am I wrong to be so agitated, Alfred? I had a dream about the wallpaper last night, in which you were papered all over with it, and wore a big hat made of it, and the boys were
eating
it. And I was being papered to the wall. When I awoke, I could still smell the paste.'

Alfred patted her hand.

‘Don't worry, Emily. You're not mad.'

‘I didn't say I was.'

‘Did you check the children?'

‘Yes.'

She opened another envelope. Inside, mysteriously, was a copy of the
Westminster Quarterly,
a publication she had cancelled several years ago. What on earth was going on? Opening it, she found a review of Alfred's new volume. She snapped it shut again, and thought fast.

‘Mmm?' said Alfred, noticing a sudden movement.

Emily nearly burst into tears. What could she do? A review! a review! Help! Help! She couldn't eat this one, it was too big. And besides, the minerals in the ink of
Punch
had actually done her frail digestion no good whatsoever. She decided to divert his attention.

‘Oh look,' she said, pointing a bony finger at the window. ‘Alfred, who's that? Who's that – at the Garibaldi tree? Can it be – er, who's the other one? Not Garibaldi – you know. Count Cavour!'

It was a wild invention – but it worked. While Alfred leapt to the window, squinting for more uninvited Italians of the Risorgimento invading the tranquillity of his house and garden, she tore out the review, and looked round frantically for a hiding place. It wasn't easy. She didn't have a cleavage, and her pockets were already full of anonymous letters. In desperation – and just as Alfred looked round – she took the lid off the teapot and stuffed the pages inside.

Breakfast at Dimbola on this Tuesday morning was an altogether more jolly affair. Ellen in particular was in excellent spirits. For some reason she kept patting her husband on the back of the head, and then feeling the back of her own.

‘When that I was and a little tiny boy, With a hey, ho the wind and the rain,'
she trilled, happily contemplating another day of fine blue skies and seagulls over white cliffs. ‘Does it
ever
rain in Freshwater?' she asked, not expecting an answer. ‘Jove knows I love, but who?' she continued, tweaking her husband's nose in an unseemly manner. ‘Lips, do not move! No man must know! Ha! I really can't think why I objected to Twelfth
Night,
you know, George, it is a capital play. Wonderful speeches.
What is your parentage?'

Watts was taken aback by the question. He exchanged glances with Mrs Cameron. Both of them knew that George's sire was a piano tuner. It was not something to be mentioned over breakfast.

‘Don't you know anything, George? If I say “What is your parentage?” you say “Above my fortunes but my state is well.” It's very appropriate. You know, in your case.'

‘Have you spoken with Mr Dodgson today, Mrs Watts?' asked Julia, trying to slacken the pace.

‘I did see him yesterday but he was still Lewis Carroll. He said persons over a mile high should leave the court, so I made an exit, no applause. But I'm sure Mr Fowler will set us all straight. I have such a firm belief in phrenology. It's a science, you know, yet it's about people. Isn't that a marvellous combination? I learned – um, somewhere – that Mr Fowler was the man who discovered Human Nature. And guess where it is located? Above Comparison! Isn't that tidy? Human Nature is above Comparison! There's one for your canvases, George. I'm surprised you never thought of it.'

Only the arrival of devilled kidneys slowed Ellen down. She attacked them as though her last proper meal had been at Christmas.

Julia looked at her and wondered at the unfairness of life. How could Lewis Carroll write a book about this silly girl? How could Watts think of marrying her? And worst of all, how could Alfred prefer her company? What would this girl ever do for Alfred Tennyson? What
could
she do that would compare with the magnificent gesture of the
Westminster
review? She hugged herself to think of Alfred reading it at this very minute.

‘I hope your walk with Alfred yesterday was not too tedious, my dear?' asked Julia. (Naturally, she hoped the opposite.)

‘Oh no.'

‘I expect he drifted off a great deal? He sometimes forgets his companion, I find. Those of us who love him – and know him very, very, very well – learn to forgive him. Much as I admire the man, I must admit that when there is a masterpiece stirring in his brain, he takes no account of the special claims of female company.'

Ellen struggled to understand the tenor of these questions. Surely Julia didn't want to know that Alfred had been boorish? She was his friend, wasn't she?

‘Not at all, he was
most
attentive,' she reassured the older woman.

‘Really?'

Ellen took a swig of tea.

‘Oh yes, most attentive. No drifting off at all. He pointed out cormorants and such, named the flowers, explained geology. Oh, and he took particular pains to teach me to say “luncheon” instead of “lunch”.'

‘That was well done,' observed Watts.

‘And he gave me these,' she added, pointing at the tiny blue orchids. Proud of her booty, she had attached them to her collar with a cunning little silver brooch in the shape of a rose.

Julia peered at the flowers with her mouth open, and then – rather alarmingly – clutched her chest and flailed her legs in the air. Thank goodness she was sitting down at the time. She seemed to be suffering a kind of seizure.

‘He
gave
them to you?' she squeaked, ‘Alfred? Gave them to you
as a present?'

Ellen realized she was stretching things a bit here, but it was too late to admit she'd picked them herself.

She shrugged.

‘Don't you think they go with my eyes?'

Dodgson still sat in his upstairs room, staring out of the window. He hated to admit it, but much of his post-traumatic stress had now passed. In a very boring life, this Freshwater episode was, by far, the most interesting thing that ever happened to him. To slip into his own book! A lucky man. But now he was recovered, and the occasional glimpse of a rabbit darting down a hole made him a bit dizzy, nothing more. He could now behold the Dimbola cat without thinking it hailed from Cheshire.

‘It has p-p-p—
passed,'
he said, as if to prove it.

It felt rather a shame. While he'd been mad, everyone had been so nice to him. Mrs Cameron had been quite wonderful, bringing him nice drinks and sheets of paper and small oriental ornaments to cheer him up. These knick-knacks he had now packed carefully in his portmanteau, in case she changed her mind. A lacquer box of considerable value was among them; it would stand as a useful prop at home, when he posed little Oxford girls in mandarin pyjamas with parasols and chinoiserie screens.