Tennyson's Gift (23 page)

‘Did Julia tell you about the exciting phrenologist?' asked Watts.

‘Ah yes. I was very pleased for her. It seems that Julia need no longer bark at her sitters to keep still and hold their expression.'

‘Really? Why not?' Watts could remember no talk of this.

‘Mr Fowler can mesmerize people, can he not? He practises animal magnetism. From what I have read about phrenology – which is all nonsense, of course – he can isolate an abstract emotion on the sitter's head. Thus Hope, Benevolence, Love, Friendship, Caution – each will be written on the sitter's face if the organ is excited. All Julia needs do is take the picture! All you need do, my dear fellow, is paint it! There's a moral there, somewhere, Watts, if only we search hard enough!'

Watts, however, looked pole-axed. Cameron couldn't see why.

‘I thought you would be pleased, Mr Watts. In your own work, surely, Mr Fowler's intervention will be a help? You could stop using anchors and broken lyres, and other such emblematic fol-de-rol. He comes to dinner this evening. I am sure he will confirm what I say.'

Watts felt giddy. He saw his whole life unravel before his eyes. ‘No,' he said. ‘Oh no, no.' He felt for a chair, and sat down. ‘My work is art, Mr Cameron, not trickery, not –' he struggled for the right word – ‘psychometry!'

Cameron was happy enough to drop the subject. ‘Then think no more about it,' he said, and clapped Watts on the back.

Cameron climbed into bed, picked up a small volume of Pindar, arranged his white hair across the pillow and fell instantly asleep. Watts observed him in genuine admiration. If he had seen Bellini making with the hog's bristle, or Michelangelo with his big mallet, he could not have been more impressed. Conscious of his own amateur (but aspiring) status as Great Victorian Snoozer, he lay on a convenient chaise-longue and watched the rain pelt on Mr Cameron's bedroom window. Outside it was growing dark early. The panes rattled in the wind. He tried to count the gusts, and in a minute or less, he was happily impersonating ‘Homer sometimes nods'.

Dressing for dinner, Ellen was – as usual – in a more animated state than her husband. Lorenzo Fowler had been asked to dine at Dimbola Lodge, and was expected shortly. She tried everything in her wardrobe twice, then a third time, and finally sat down on a heap of clothes with her wedding dress uppermost.

‘What's fiddle-de-dee in Gaelic?' she asked Mary Ryan, who had been sent to help.

‘Fiddle-de-dee isn't English, madam.'

‘No, you're right,' said Ellen. ‘It isn't.'

She didn't know what was wrong, but her feelings were all jangled together. She wanted to see Lorenzo; she wanted to share him with her friends. She had asked for his help in an important project, and nothing must interfere with its success. But on the other hand, she had spent so many hours dreaming of that exceptional moment when, in the dark, he reached out to touch the rim of her hat! Blushing again, she fanned herself with a glove, tried it on, and discarded it. She thought of Mr Dodgson's funny book. More than ever, she felt like little Alice.

Once you have glimpsed the glorious garden through the little pokey hole, nothing will prevent you from striving to see it again.

‘May I ask you something, Mrs Watts?' asked Mary Ryan, to Ellen's surprise. She was pinning Ellen's golden hair.

‘Of course, Mary. What is it?'

‘I wondered if you could tell me what Mr Fowler said about me, at the lecture, about my marriage, and all.'

Ellen's eyes swivelled shiftily.

‘At the lecture? At the
public
lecture?'

‘Yes, madam.'

Ellen turned around to face her.

‘Did you see me there, Mary?'

‘Oh madam, sure but I didn't know it was yourself. Nobody did. But then didn't I see you again the other night in the trousers and Mr Fowler kissing his hand farewell from the window? And also, don't I iron your clothes and find boys' ones in the wardrobe? And isn't Mary Ann in love with you?'

Ellen listened with a mixture of horror and excitement. This maid knew her secret! Her innocent secret! Her guilty secret! She tried both ways of putting it. Both sounded all right.

She went straight to the real issue.

‘Did he kiss his hand?'

‘Oh he did that.'

Ellen tried to pull herself together.

‘Things are not as they seem, Mary. Mr Fowler has agreed to help me in a device. Subterfuge was a necessity.'

‘Honest to God, madam, I'd never have mentioned it. But aren't I busting to know what Mr Fowler said about me grand weddin' chances! And you were there! Couldn't you tell me?'

‘Do you really not remember, Mary?'

‘Not a blind, blessed thing. One minute he's looking in me eyes, the next I'm waking up again laughing.
Anything
could have happened!' Mary laughed. Ellen studied her in the glass. She was very pretty when she cheered up a bit. She was only sixteen, after all.

‘Then I'll tell you, Mary. He made you very confident in yourself, and you declared your own intention to marry well. He wasn't fortune-telling. He asked you about yourself, and you gave him your genuine opinion.'

Mary seemed disappointed. ‘So it was
my
idea, the marrying? Then I'll not be married at all?'

‘That's up to you, Mary. That's the point.'

Mary finished the pinning.

‘You look very beautiful, madam,' she said. ‘I think it's a shame to hide this hair under a silly boy's hat.'

Ellen studied her own face in the glass. She turned to a profile, and tipped back her head.

‘My Caution is very small,' said Ellen, almost to herself. ‘But I have Hope, Mary. I have phenomenal Hope.'

Dodgson waited all day for Mrs Cameron's household to realize that a madman had locked him in his room. But what with all the uproar from Farringford, and now the excitement of the rain, it somehow never did. A couple of people tried the door, but when they found it locked, they assumed he had turned the key himself, in the cause of peace and quiet.

He resigned himself to his captivity with surprisingly good grace. Being trapped unnecessarily in a nice room with writing materials was very similar to his own voluntary everyday existence, actually. If there was ever a man who lived in his head it was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. In the time it might take a more active person to row up the Isis and back, Dodgson would construct a cracking full-length parody of a Tennyson poem –
Maud,
say – complete with funny illustrations and knock-em-dead puns.

He spent his day productively, therefore, first warming up with a few letters to ‘child friends' (meaning girls), a practice he maintained throughout his exceptionally boring life. These missives were condescending, yet also ingenious, and some he wrote cunningly back-to-front, while others were painstakingly composed of pictograms. Finding at luncheon that still nobody came (he heard a tray left outside the door), he devised a new system for logging and answering correspondence, and then addressed himself to a word puzzle with which to delight young minds. Lorenzo Fowler was wrong about Dodgson. He was not a pervert. He did not want to do unspeakable things to little girls. But he was – oh yes, he was – a very sad case.

His latest invention was a game in which the player must convert one word into another, changing a single letter each time. Thus, HEAD becomes TAIL if it progresses thus:

HEAD
HEAL
TEAL
TELL
TALL
TAIL

– which looks quite simple until you try to do it yourself. He was now busy converting COMB into HAIR, ELLEN into ALICE, and WINTER into SUMMER. Currently the last required thirteen variants (or ‘links') in between. How dull he was today!

It is no surprise that Dodgson should be captivated by the arbitrary nature of words, when you consider how often people wrongly anticipated what he was trying to say. Last night he had attempted to ask the maid for some water, and by the time they'd run the gamut from walnuts to whelks via wisteria, he had settled, fairly happily, for a walking stick.

‘Will we
ever
have such an amusing afternoon again, Pa?' asked Jessie, drawing lines on the condensation of the rain-lashed window, as the waves boomed into the bay beneath their sitting room at the Albion.

‘I honestly doubt it,' agreed Lorenzo, crossing his legs. He sat dressed for dinner in a resplendent waistcoat, which he now tugged a little. He was rather fond of fine clothes.

‘You should have seen the old lady digging with the teaspoon, Pa! And when she was sick in that hat, I thought I'd die!'

Lorenzo picked up his daughter and sat her on the arm of his chair. She gave him a brief hug.

‘This thing we are doing tonight, Pa; is it anything to do with the Organ of Gratitude?'

‘Oh yes, in a roundabout way. We are helping Mrs Watts in a delicate matter concerning her relationship with her husband. It's a grown-up thing. How's the costume? Have you practised?'

‘So what's that got to do with the Organ of Gratitude?'

‘We are a gift; a love-gift from a wife to a husband. We will see how much he loves her for it. Mr Watts is our only hope, Jessie. Everyone says he is gratitude personified, while nobody else here shows any signs of gratitude at all. We may have to give up the quest. It is possible that gratitude is an illusion.'

Jessie pulled a face and kicked a chair. She didn't know Mr Watts. But she had seen Mrs Watts on the beach, with Lionel, and she certainly didn't like her. Why should they help her with her marriage? One day Jessie would be grown up, and the world wouldn't know what had hit it.

‘Why don't you just give Mrs Watts the leaflet Uncle Orson sent? The one you keep in the lid of the portmanteau. That's all about what to do when you are married, isn't it?'

Lorenzo's nostrils flared dangerously, but he resisted an unprecedented impulse to box the ears of his favourite child.

‘Jessie,' he said firmly, ‘I absolutely forbid you to look at that pamphlet.'

Jessie slid off the chair.

‘I already read it, Pa. It's silly. What does “lashing up” mean? I noticed you'd underscored it. Does it involve ropes?'

Lorenzo sighed. So much for parental authority. He stood up, and reached for his jacket.

‘Have you got the head?' he asked, resignedly. Confining

Jessie to the childish realm was as pointless as expecting curtsies from a buffalo.

‘Head ready!' she saluted, and jerked her own head towards a hat-box.

‘Flag?' he asked.

‘Got it.'

‘Bread knife?'

‘Yes.'

‘Let's go.'

‘What about Mr Dodgson, Pa? Will he be there?'

‘Dodgson?' Lorenzo stopped in his tracks and then burst out laughing. ‘I'd forgotten all about him!'