by Lynne Truss
Tennyson leaned toward Julia and whispered (loudly enough for everyone to hear), ‘Perhaps the boot’s on the wrong foot here, Julia. Perhaps he should be paying us! Eh?’
She smiled nervously, and offered Lorenzo more tea.
Sensing his audience slipping a little, Lorenzo regathered it expertly. ‘Imagine my position. I have before me the greatest names of the age,’ he said, ‘and I myself am nothing, nothing. The greatest living poet, sir; the greatest painter, photographer and actress. Such heads. I tell you frankly, my fingers itch to find the secret of that greatness. Science begs on its knees.’
Mrs Cameron interjected. She hated to see a nice man wasting his time. ‘I think I can speak for Mr Tennyson here, Mr Fowler. He refuses consistently to sit for me, and I am one of his oldest friends. The simple fact is, he will not allow such an intrusion, it is anathema to his –’
But Alfred interrupted.
‘Julia, you are too hasty,’ he said.
Julia blinked hard. What?
‘But Alfred –’
‘I think I may be allowed to do what I like with my own head?’
‘But Alfred, my dear –’
‘It is quite a different matter from your damned silly photographs, Julia!’ he snapped. Agitated, he jumped to his feet and walked up and down, while Julia stared at him. Mr Fowler and the Wattses, suddenly wishing they were invisible, all studied the pattern on the carpet.
‘You must come to Farringford this afternoon, Fowler, and meet my boys too,’ declared Alfred. And then, deliberately avoiding Julia’s hurt expression, he fidgeted for a handkerchief in his pocket, making one of Emily’s new embroidery silks fall out. Julia, with a little gasp, saw it fall.
It was the blue one.
She sniffed.
Why was this always happening?
But worse was to come. As he stooped to pick it up, Alfred peered closely at Mrs Watts for the first time and saw the orchids on her collar. Julia watched his face and Ellen’s, as he recognized the flowers. Ellen coloured.
‘You look remarkably well this morning, Mrs Watts,’ he said with a big smile. ‘Does she not, gentlemen? Is she not a very beautiful young woman?’ The other men agreed loudly. Ellen, glad of the attention, beamed at them all.
All plain women will know how Julia felt at this moment. It is a bit like being hit in the face with a sack of wet sand.
‘Alfred!’ Julia called to him. He was heading for the door.
‘Oh, I meant to mention it, Julia,’ he said. ‘When I came through my gate this morning, I noticed that your garden has an infernal smell of paint.’
Julia stood up, too, although her legs were shaky. Suddenly, she felt very old. ‘I must consult my husband, I do hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said, and vacated the room before the first sob of anguish escaped her. What a terrible morning! She burst through the back door and ran to her glass house, her heart thumping. In the space of a couple of hours, she had been rejected by Alfred in every way conceivable – as a friend, as a benefactor, as a photographer, as a woman, and lastly (most cruel blow of all) as an aesthete.
‘What I wouldn’t give!’ she cried. ‘Alfred, I would give anything, but I don’t know what you want!’
She sat completely still for ten minutes, her face a perfect picture of misery. In fact, had she only prepared a photographic plate in advance, she could have got her ‘Absence of Hope’ picture right there, on the spot.
While her guests ate warm biscuits in her drawing room, she trailed back to the house, and was met in the hall by Mary Ryan.
‘A parcel has come from Mrs Prinsep, madam.’ The maid indicated a small box, which had been opened.
‘A dozen copies of the Westminster Quarterly,’ she reported, puzzled.
Mrs Cameron dried her eyes with a corner of shawl. She blew her nose on it too. Such a robust spirit this woman had. Her Hope was not as big as Ellen’s, but her Benevolence was prodigious.
‘A dozen copies, my dear Mary? Twelve? Then all is not lost, Mary. All is not lost, after all!’
Ten
No phrenology was done that morning, but Lorenzo felt invigorated nevertheless by his meeting with the Dimbolans: as if he had just done the blindfold test and successfully untangled the history of a really tricky head – a wife murderer turned archbishop, say, with a strong aptitude for woodwork and gaming. What he failed to notice, however, was that while he grew sticky with excitement about getting his hands on the heads of these Freshwater people, most of these Freshwater people were pretty keen to get their hands on him.
‘He is Lancelot!’ exclaimed Mrs Cameron to her husband, later. ‘I shall pose him with Mary Ann as the Lady of Shalott! Such human passion! Can’t you imagine him singing “Tirra Lirra” on the river?’
‘I believe I have found a model for Physical Energy, my dear,’ confided Watts to his wife. ‘Mr Fowler is a magnificent specimen. How do you think he would look with no clothes on?’
‘I can’t quite define it,’ said Ellen less elevatedly (and to herself). ‘But I would just like to get my hands on him, that’s all.’
Only Tennyson saw no practical application for the phrenologist in his own work. But then he never was a head-hunter; he was always the head hunted. Many years ago, his miserable brother Charles had written a derisive poem about phrenology, which began,
A curious sect’s in vogue, who deem the soul
Of man is legible upon his poll.
Give them a squint at yonder doctor’s pate,
And they’ll soon tell you why he dines on plate.
After such a strikingly bathetic start to the genre of the Phrenology Poem, most Victorian poets agreed the wisdom of conserving their candle for something else.
Once outside in the garden, Lorenzo had run straight into Tennyson.
‘I meant it, come to tea with us, Fowler,’ he boomed. ‘Bring your charming daughter. I suppose she is charming? I mean to say, if she isn’t, don’t bring her. However, I will insist the boys are present, so that you may conduct your examinations in full view of everybody, as though in a spirit of – well, teatime fun!’
Teatime fun was not something Tennyson had ever experienced; in fact the word ‘fun’ was so new to his vocabulary that he paused for a moment to repeat it to himself, fun-fun-fun, weighing its poetic value (which was short).
Lorenzo bowed. ‘It will be a pleasure. And will we have the delight of meeting your wife?’
Tennyson frowned. ‘Emily? Why ever not?’ He paused. Here was a point, actually. How was he to break the news to Emily? She had been so nervy in the past few days. A few random memories suddenly converged in his mind. Count Cavour in the shrubbery. Her hand guiltily in the teapot. Eating bits of paper torn from Punch.
‘But she’s not mad, you know,’ he said.
‘I didn’t say she was.’
‘As sane as anyone in this house.’ ‘Good.’
‘It’s the boys I’m worried about.’
‘Understood.’
‘Well, as long as that’s clear to you, Mr Fowler. Emily is not mad, not mad, not mad. I can’t tell you how often I have to reassure her on the subject.’
Julia knew nothing of this fresh arrangement, otherwise she would have insisted on organizing it and providing some food. No, at the termination of Lorenzo’s informal lecture, she had wiped her eyes again and hurried to Farringford for the second time that day, possibly wishing (as she ran along, panting and sweating, with her shawls a-flap) that some clever engineer would soon get around to inventing the safety bicycle. A dozen copies of the perfect-gift periodical lay in a basket across her arm. There was also a hammer and some nails, and some paste made from flour and water. Myopic pompous ingrate though Alfred was, he would certainly find his review before the day was out. He would rejoice in the Westminster’s good opinion, if the effort killed her.
Arriving at the house, she first established that Alfred had not returned, and that Emily was lying down upstairs. Then she made twelve quick decisions, dist
ributing the copies in cunning places and completing the task in as many minutes. She paused for breath on the lawn, adjusted her lace cap (which was always getting askew), and departed for Dimbola Lodge again. Today she would photograph Mary Ann in the pose of Friendship, which oddly she now knew to be a small organ of the brain positioned just back from the ear. Perhaps Mr Fowler could stimulate that organ in some of Julia’s acquaintance, she thought. ‘Then we might be getting somewhere.’ Dodgson meanwhile kept to his room at Dimbola, dreaming of the quiet life in Oxford. This morning he had seen Lorenzo Fowler enter the house, but no sign of the red-headed daughter, thank goodness. Dodgson was relieved. The last thing he needed was to be separated from his wits again by that demon in infant form.
Detached observers might assume that where Dodgson was concerned, the Fowlers owed an apology. After all, their antics had deranged a complete stranger – and while he was on his holidays, too. But the Fowlers saw it quite the other way about. Dodgson had many reasons to apologize to them. For one, he was a pervert. For another, he had ruined their show. Most important of all, however, he had interfered with their takings. Lorenzo was therefore not the ideal person to minister to Dodgson in his current fragile state.
‘Sir!’ shouted Lorenzo, catching the invalid logician weakly buffing his lens with a cloth. Dodgson dropped the lens on his bedroom carpet, and gaped. Such violence of manner in a gentleman’s bedroom went well beyond decent practice. But worse was to come. With a flourish, Lorenzo shut the door behind him, and locked it.
‘Mr F-F—! I must pr—protest.’
Dodgson looked round in panic. The room seemed a lot smaller with Lorenzo in it.
‘Have you come to ap-p—pologize? I’m much b—better now.’
Lorenzo laughed.
‘Apologize? No, I have come to tell you that I know exactly what you’re up to.’
Dodgson thought quickly. What was he up to? Only failing to get Tennyson’s blessing for his book, as far as he could see. At worst, he was pilfering a few bits of bric-à-brac. There was nothing deserving this kind of beastliness.
‘I don’t think it’s any of y—your business,’ he declared.
‘It’s the business of any decent man,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Every American has a God-given duty to defend the weak!’
Dodgson was completely baffled. He sat down and pushed a lock of hair behind his ear. Not for the first time, he wished he had a big bushy Moses beard like every other Victorian man of consequence. He was sure it was his smooth chops that did for him.
‘And what’s this?’ said Lorenzo, lighting on the picture of Daisy.
‘A present,’ explained Dodgson, lamely.
Lorenzo read the inscription and his jaw dropped to his chest. It appeared to concern a proposed elopement between Dodgson and little Daisy Bradley.
‘You are a fiend, sir!’ said Lorenzo. ‘I can tell you at once that you will go nowhere with this child!’
And Dodgson blinked in amazement as the phrenologist left the room and locked the door behind him.
While all this was going on, Ellen strolled in the garden with Alfred.
‘Why won’t you pose for Mrs Cameron?’ she asked. ‘It would make her so happy.’
‘Happy? But, my dear, Mrs Cameron’s happiness in this matter is neither here nor there.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Consider what she does when she has a person’s photograph. She exhibits it, she gives copies to anybody who calls. She gives away albums.’
‘She has a generous nature.’
‘And I have a desire for seclusion. Why do you think I live on the Isle of Wight?’
Ellen thought this was a proper question, and answered it.
‘Because the Queen likes it? And she once said she might visit you? And then you might get a knighthood?’
Alfred conceded the point. ‘Yes, but aside from that. I simply will not accept that, just because I am a poet, people should know what I look like –’
‘Well, everyone knows what I look like.’
‘Take this point, my dear,’ interrupted Alfred. ‘On a walking holiday last year, my companion shouted “Tennyson!” in the hotel, and the price of our simple lodging was doubled at once. Already visitors come to our house, pushing their noses at the windows, frightening Emily, disturbing the boys. People send me their poetry to read. They want to intrude on my private life in a most unseemly manner. I fear for this development, my dear, especially if the railway comes to Freshwater. Even in death I will not be safe. For there is a fashion for writing lives of poets, publishing their diaries and letters.’
‘Yes, but that’s to show how important they are,’ urged Ellen. ‘Poets are dreadfully important.’
But Tennyson would not be cajoled. ‘But such scoundrels might tell the world that a man was mad, or dirty, or worse! And he has no defence! You may have seen my poem on the subject, entitled “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters”?’
‘To whom?’ asked Ellen. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite –’
‘No, it’s called “To—”. A blank, you know. It’s a poetic tradition, protecting people from exactly the presumptuous intrusion to which I respond.’
‘I see.’
‘I shall quote to you what I wrote. Stand back, my dear.’ She did so. She folded her hands.
Tennyson ahem-ed, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He opened his eyes again. ‘I’m starting in the middle,’ he explained. She nodded. He closed his eyes, and from deep within him his poetry-reading voice erupted with such force that around Ellen where she stood, lilies shivered on their stalks. Tennyson had a mournful, barking recital manner reminiscent of an expiring moose.
‘For now the Poet cannot die,
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him ere he scarce be cold
Begins the scandal and the cry:
“Proclaim the faults he would not show:
Break lock and seal: betray the trust:
Keep nothing sacred: ‘tis but just
The many-headed beast should know.”’
Ellen put her hands together to clap, but Tennyson pressed on. Maids pegging washing in the kitchen garden beyond had popped their heads over the wall, to see the cause of the commotion. The laureate did seem very passionate about all this.
‘Ah shameless! For he did but sing
A song that pleased us from its worth;
No public life was his on earth,
No blazon’d statesman he, nor king.’
Ellen clapped now, and Tennyson let out a long breath. ‘You won’t hear anything better than that on the subject,’ he said.
‘I am sure I won’t. But don’t you agree that fame has its price, Mr Tennyson?’
‘It has a price,’ he agreed, ‘but I firmly believe that no one can make you pay it.’
Watts stood back from his canvas, after explaining its emblems and symbols to an impressed phrenologist. Watts hoped soon to broach the subject of Lorenzo modelling for him. For his own part, Lorenzo was definitely warming to the old goat, but he still couldn’t quite see the attraction for Ellen. The man had a head so flat at the back it suggested he’d been struck with a frying pan.
‘It is a very beautiful picture,’ Lorenzo agreed. ‘The brash camellia, the humble violets, a lovely conceit.’
‘Thank you.’
‘If you could just show me the humble violets again. I can’t quite –’ ‘There.’
‘Oh yes. No. Is that –?’ ‘There.’
Lorenzo clapped him on the back, slightly too hard so that Watts dropped his palette.
‘Got it!’ he said.
‘It’s no fun down here without Mr Dodgson,’ pouted Daisy, her shrimp net limp in her hand.
Jessie looked at her pityingly. They were paddling in rock pools, as usual, under the eye of their respective maids.
‘Daisy, tell me you’re not serious,’ she said. ‘That man gives me cholera.’
Daisy huffed,
and stamped her foot in the water, splashing them both.
‘You don’t understand about Mr Dodgson and me,’ she said. ‘It’s very special. I think he really loves me. We’re planning to run away. I’ve already packed a little bag.’
Jessie sat down on a rock.
‘Jessie?’
The girl did not reply.
‘Jessie? Speak to me.’
At two o’clock Emily Tennyson rose from her nap, and read the note sent by Alfred in the care of Julia’s gardener’s boy. Some Americans were coming to tea, apparently – an odd proposition from Alfred, since Americans were precisely the sort of people she was usually expected to shield him from.
In fact, if Americans turned up at the house, the Tennysons had a well-oiled routine for dealing with them. Emily would greet them hurriedly, leave them in the hall, and disappear to the dining room, immediately below Alfred’s library. There she would take a long-handled broom and bang the ceiling with it three times. Re-emerging in the hall with telltale ceiling plaster on her hair and shoulders, she would point the way upstairs to Alfred’s study, and then listen for Alfred’s scuffle as he ran down his secret staircase, threw open the garden door and hared across the lawn to the cliffs.
People sometimes objected that they had travelled six thousand miles to see the Poet Laureate, to which Emily would always riposte (though only mentally) that oddly enough, Alfred would not have crossed Lombard Street to meet them.
So she made the arrangements for tea (with food, this time), and got surprisingly busy. She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can’t lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place. To Alfred, she always tried to show her more feeble side, because it reminded him of his mother. To his friends, she emphasized the sacrifices she willingly made for her lord, so that they agreed in secret she was too good for him. To her children, she played the rewarding role of domestic saint.