Tennyson's Gift (9 page)

Freshwater Bay was very popular this afternoon, and Dodgson was the most popular thing about it. On all his summer seaside holidays, four o'clock was his regular story-time with children on the beach, and by the time Ellen and Lionel located him, he was seated on a rock (conveniently low) telling the story of the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle to a group of six children, all so enthralled by the underwater curriculum that they were
currently practising reeling, writhing, drawling, stretching and (best of all) fainting in coils. Daisy made sure that when she fainted in coils, she made contact with Mr Dodgson's boots, which made him extremely uncomfortable.

Ellen's heart leapt when she saw him more closely; for this (as she had hoped) was her very own dear Mr Dodgson, who had adored her once! But she was afraid to disturb the story, so she waited beside a barnacled breakwater with Lionel, just listening to his words, and catching the sun on her face. Waves lapped and seagulls flew; maids giggled behind bathing machines. Ellen watched the bright faces of Dodgson's eight-year-old admirers. They were entranced.

The children groaned, and Lionel laughed before he could stop himself.

‘It's very funny, this,' Ellen said, suddenly performing a little pirouette. ‘Don't you think he might write it down? It would make a splendid entertainment for Dimbola Lodge. I would play little Alice, of course. In fact, that would be rather fitting, because my first name is Alice, did you know that?'

Lionel clearly wasn't interested.

‘Isn't it fun eavesdropping?' she said, ‘Like something out of Shakespeare. Do you know those children?'

‘I know
of
them,' conceded Lionel. ‘I wouldn't count them as friends.'

Without much grace, he pointed them out. They included Daisy and her cousin Annie (both enraptured); and on the end
of the line, sitting up straight, and trying not to look interested in the story except from a scientific point of view, was Jessie Fowler.

‘Oh, I ought to have told you!' said Lionel, prompted by the sight of Jessie. ‘Tonight the great Lorenzo Fowler gives a demonstration of phrenology in the parish hall. The carter told me. It was arranged terribly quickly. Father says we children can't attend, of course; but Mrs Cameron's Mary Ann will be going, and Mary Ryan too, and our gardener, and the coachman. I've asked them to tell me all about it. I wish I could go. Will you be allowed to go, Mrs Watts?'

‘I don't suppose so.'

It was alarming to realize that even though he called her Mrs Watts, he lumped her in with the children.

‘Is he famous, this Lorenzo Fowler?'

‘Jessie says he's the most famous phrenologist that ever lived. That's Jessie with the orange hair. She's a phrenologist, too. She's very stuck up, and disapproves of everything, including ham-and-egg pies and narrow waists. She's awful. I hate women who talk too much about what they know. What do you think?'

Ellen perused the child.

‘Well, she shouldn't wear yellow.'

‘But on the other hand,' added Lionel. ‘She seems to like me, so she can't be all bad. She told me this morning that she helps in her father's demonstrations, but I don't believe her. She just wants me to find her fascinating because I'm so fantastically good-looking.'

Jessie, who had been all this time pretending not to be eight, suddenly gave way to a childish impulse. At the sight of the truly gorgeous Lionel behind Dodgson's back, she smiled and waved, flapping her hand furiously, as if it was something stuck to her, and she wanted to shake it off.

‘Lionel!' she yelled.

At which, of course, Dodgson looked round. And seeing both Lionel and Ellen, stopped his story abruptly, in mid-sentence.

‘L-L—Lionel, my dear friend!' he exclaimed. (Lionel groaned.) ‘And can this really be Mrs Watts with you? The brightest star of Drury L-L—?'

‘It is a pleasure to meet you again, Mr Dodgson,' said Ellen, extending her hand. ‘I have never forgotten your kindness to me when I made my first appearance on the stage. And now you tell stories about little Alice. I was reminding Lionel that Alice is my first name – you remember that, of course, Mr Dodgson.'

Dodgson made no comment. He was rather overcome.

‘You are very brave to return to Freshwater,' Ellen continued, her self-esteem swelling as she felt herself adored. She could be very grown-up and condescending when it came to talking with fans, and she was a finely made young woman. Like Maud in the poem, she was not seventeen, but she was tall and stately.

‘B—brave?' queried Dodgson.

‘Yes. Lionel told me as we walked from Farringford that he once offered to strike your head with a croquet mallet.'

‘Oh! Ha ha,' said Dodgson uncomfortably, patting Lionel on the shoulder. ‘He didn't mean it, I'm s—sure.'

‘I did, though,' said Lionel, pulling a face.

‘Ha ha! Youth, youth.'

They all looked at the sand for a moment.

‘But Miss Terry,' he began again. ‘I am so very pleased to see a fr-fr—' He rolled his eyes, and tried again. ‘Fr-fr—'

‘Frog?' suggested Lionel.

Dodgson waved away the very idea. He pointed at the children. ‘Fr—' he continued.

‘Phrenologist?' Lionel tried again. ‘Fracas?' said Ellen.

‘Frigate?'

‘I know! I know!' said Ellen, getting carried away. ‘Fretful porpentine!'

Dodgson took an exaggeratedly deep breath, mainly to shut them up.

‘Friend,' he blurted, at last.

Ellen looked abashed. He had called her Miss Terry; he had called her a friend. She couldn't remember the last time anyone had been so nice to her.

Dodgson caught his own mistake.

‘But I apologize. I must call you Mrs W-W—'

Lionel let him wallow.

‘Mrs W-W—'

‘Miss Terry will suffice, I think,' interjected Ellen, ‘just between ourselves. I know from my own experience that the other title is sometimes hard to say.' She looked at the little girls on the beach – particularly Daisy, who was studying Dodgson with big round purposeful eyes – and felt suddenly overcome with sadness.

‘I have been fancying myself little Miss Terry all afternoon, Mr Dodgson – at about the same age as these pretty girls here, in fact. And I can barely express how much pleasure it has given me.'

While all this childish excitement was taking place at the bay, Ellen's husband was engaged in a far more serious and elevated pursuit. In a small circle of light in a darkened shed, he sat stiff-backed on an upturned tea-chest, trying very hard not to move. His whole body ached from the effort, and it was a strange way to spend a Friday afternoon. His hair was brushed from his face, to reveal his excellent temples. He had been most emphatic on this point.

‘Can you see my excellent temples, Julia?'

‘They are displayed to great advantage, Mr Watts!'

Taking photographs by the fashionable wet-collodion process was a tricky, smelly, neck-straining business, and took an unconscionable amount of time, especially the way Julia preferred to do it, with dim light and slow exposures. Watts's beard was spread dramatically over the bodice of a grubby white muslin shift, belted at the waist. He sat completely still, with an expression fixed and glassy. Underneath his tunic, where realistically he should have sported bare legs and sandals, he wore tweed trews and thick boots. They made him very hot.

‘These trews, Julia –' he had begun.

‘Forget them!' she said. ‘They will not be visible in the picture!'

‘Oh. I see. Oh, very well.'

Not only was it stifling in this makeshift studio, but there was a strong smell from the fresh seaweed coiled round his neck, yet Watts was a fairly happy man. How charming to see someone else slaving for art, for once. How pleasant, too, to slip away from the tiresome child-wife, who had been in a peculiar mood ever since leaving London. The last time he saw her she was skipping off like a little girl through the garden at Farringford, without a thought for the etiquette of tea with one's elders. The trouble with Ellen, he reflected, was that she could be so many different sizes in the course of a single day.

‘Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, hm?' barked Mrs Cameron, nodding to him encouragingly, as she walked briskly up and down in her red velvet dress (such energy she had, she was the sort of woman who seemed to run at breakneck speed just to stand still). Watts could feel the sweat starting from his brow. Also, was he imagining it, or could he really remember mentioning a turd at teatime to Mrs Tennyson?

‘Forty-five, forty-six!'

Watts had been in Freshwater just three hours, and already Mrs Cameron had dressed him up and got him to work, photographically speaking. Mrs Cameron was deeply fond of Watts, and the reason was not hard to find. Here was a man who knew how to accept her presents, to repay hospitality with humble thanks and words of praise for her kindness. This was a simple matter to Watts, for early in life he had learned the confoundedly simple social lesson that ‘How can I ever repay you?' released you from any obligation to cough up ninepence. Amazing, but true.
Throw no gift again at the giver's head
was a foolproof precept for a cheap life in good company. And of course he would sit for Julia. Did it cost him anything?

No.

She sneezed. He reacted, but recovered himself.

‘Ignore me!' she said. ‘Just the chemicals, you know! Don't move! Hm? Stay still! Observe your map, George, with conflicting emotions! Big eyes! Big eyes!'

Watts complied with all this barked advice (delivered in a loud voice, as if sitting still had made him deaf), but he was convinced his crown was slipping, and that the picture would be ruined by the silvery ghost of his locomotive hat. But summoning up the required conflicting emotions of the old Ulysses was not too difficult, he found. On his knee was a crude outline of the Aegean, drawn on a pillow case. ‘Why? How? What? When? Where?' he therefore asked himself with genuine confusion.

He had no idea why Julia chose him for Ulysses. After all, he was hardly the heroic nautical type. One minute he'd been snoozing pleasantly in Tennyson's garden, the next he was planning one final heroic voyage toward death in a blacked-out chicken shed. But despite his shortcomings in the Greek hero line, he saw nothing inherently ridiculous in the situation. Where lesser aesthetes, for example, might have queried the choice of implement in his right hand – a small, three-pronged toasting fork, representing ten long years of epic maritime adventure – Watts thought it rather ingenious, and made a mental note.

‘A hundred and one, a hundred and two, a hundred and three.' The painter did not move his head – after all, he had his conflicting emotions to attend to, and he had selected a daring combination, comprising pensive and sublime in the upper cranial regions, with a bit of melancholy in the cheekbone area, and poetic firmness about the mouth. Knowing the action to be permissible, he blinked every thirty seconds. Mrs Cameron allowed her sitters to blink, partly because she grudgingly accepted the necessity, but mainly because she had found the effect of blinks on the final picture artistically
desirable. Blinking added a spiritual opaqueness to the eyes, which in turn added to the general air of sublimity. Her latest picture of Mary Ann – ‘Can I but relive in sadness?' – had the eyes so filmy and opaque that truly it made people yawn and stretch their arms just to look at it.

‘A hundred and forty-nine, hm? A hundred and fifty.'

Watts had no idea how long this would go on (it could go as high as five hundred if the exposure was seven or eight minutes), but he was already tired. He resolved that for his next sitting he would choose his own hero, and select a dead one. The corpse of Hector, perhaps; or the Morte d'Arthur – anything that would entail lying prone on cushions. Or he could embody that superb short sentence, ‘Homer sometimes nods.' Now his arm ached; the occasional whiff of ether snatched at his tonsils, and at his side, not improving matters in the least, that uppity Irish servant girl recited Tennyson's Ulysses, presumably to get him in the mood.

Such a lot of Tennyson one must endure suddenly! He gave her his attention for a moment. She had just reached the bit that went, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.'

‘Oh, dear,' thought Watts. ‘More dreary exhorting stuff. A chap who is capable of
The Lotos-Eaters,
too. Why does Ulysses not remain at home with his charming wife? It has taken him such a long time to get there, after all.'

‘A hundred and sixty, a hundred and sixty-one,' continued Mrs Cameron, nodding at him with her hands steepled together, praying him to be still. ‘A hundred and sixty-two – Don't move!' Watts could feel the crown sliding, and his emotions conflicted even more. His thoughts turned to Ellen again – before they left London she had casually mentioned the phrase ‘Patience on a monument', an absolutely splendid notion for a high-but-extremely-narrow wall he'd heard mentioned in the Clerkenwell area.

‘It
may be that the gulfs will wash us down,'
said the girl,
unheard by Watts. ‘Oh, this part is so
grand,'
she said, breaking off. ‘Do you not think so, madam? Is it not the grandest thing?'

‘It is by Alfred Tennyson, Mary,' said Mrs Cameron.

‘I know, madam. We learned it in the schoolroom – your sons and I, when you very kindly educated me above my station for no purpose. I know it word for word. In fact I feel that I know it as well as Mr Tennyson does himself.'

‘I wouldn't count on it,' muttered Mrs Cameron (the treachery of Mariana's peach was still fresh in her mind).