Tennyson's Gift

by Lynne Truss

  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.’

&n
bsp; 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!’

  Searching the house for her husband, Ellen discovered the canvas of ‘Choosing’ erected on an easel in his bedroom. She was touched. George hadn’t told her he was bringing it. ‘I’d swear those violets are getting bigger,’ she said aloud, peering closely, and then passed on in her search, making calls at all the favourite sofas and window seats where her lord usually chose to make himself comfortable. She finally found him in Cameron’s room, which, to judge from the rhythmical rise and fall of facial hair, seemed to have been converted temporarily into a sort of Dorm of Prophecy.

  Ellen tiptoed to her husband’s side. She had to admit it: Watts always looked lovely when he was asleep. She knelt beside him and studied his face – his strong nose and excellent temples, his large eyes and fine lids. It melted her heart. Ever since she first met Watts at Little Holland House, she had longed to hold that noble face in her young hands, stroke its features, make it smile for joy.

  ‘I love you, George,’ she whispered in his ear.

  He made no move.

  ‘And after tonight, who knows? You may feel free to love me too. I would do anything.’

  She reached out her hand, and laid it tenderly on his beard. Her fingers caressed it, and lightly she laid her cheek on his chest. Her husband did not wake.

  Tennyson normally loathed the business of going out to dinner, but tonight was different. For one thing, he had an excellent review to celebrate. For another, Emily was in bed and not much company. And for another, there would be no apple pie at home, for obvious reasons! So Julia’s invitation could not have come at a more suitable moment. As he gave his hair its first brush for a fortnight (and large particles of greasy loam fell on his shoulders), he rehearsed the review in his mind. He was particularly pleased with the sections refuting his previous critics.

  ‘George Gilfillan should not have said Alfred Tennyson was not a great poet,’ was a sentence which, to his mind, displayed an admirable combination of elegance and sagacity. Likewise, ‘Mr Ruskin displayed considerable botanical ignorance when he questioned the rosiness of daisies in Tennyson’s masterpiece Maud.’

  He wondered whether to take the review with him, or merely quote it from memory. Better to take it, so that everyone could see.

  He popped in to see Emily before he left. She lifted her head for an instant, but it sank back again under its own weight. Her Christian forbearance had rarely withstood more demanding tests than today.

  ‘What do you think of my fine review, my dear?’

  He performed a short Irish jig, by way of expressing his own opinion of it.

  ‘It makes my birthday complete, Alfred,’ she said, wanly.

  ‘Birthday? Was it your birthday? Oh.’ He couldn’t think what to say. ‘Happy’ and ‘Birthday’ would have been quite adequate, but they weren’t the sort of words he knew.

  ‘Did you get any presents?’ he managed at last.

  ‘Well, the silks from Julia at breakfast. But that seems a very long time ago now; at least a year or two, I’d say.’

  Alfred came close and gazed into her haggard face.

  ‘You certainly look like you’ve aged a year or two,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not coming out. People would feel tired just to look at you!’

  Emily smiled. ‘I pray for strength.’

  Alfred showed her his hands, turning them from backs to palms to backs again.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Go on,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Your wife has planned some entertainment for us tonight, I believe,’ said Julia, meeting Watts on the stairs. ‘I have made a little podium in the drawing room, and a curtain. There is nothing like tableaux vivants to aid digestion.’

  Watts was pleased to discover his host in such a good mood, but he didn’t like the sound of this entertainment.

  ‘I hope it will be nothing improper,’ he whispered. ‘Ellen once entertained us at Little Holland House, and I can’t tell you –’

  ‘George, please don’t worry. We will also ask Mr Fowler to give a demonstration of phreno-magnetism. We will do that while we eat. I always think it absurd to leave all the conversation to the pudding. Astonishingly, my husband has agreed to sit for Mr Fowler. He wants to know whether the Organ of Mirthfulness can be stimulated and held. In which case, he says, I can take pictures of people looking cheerful instead of sad and morbid! Have you ever heard of such a thing?’

  Watts tried to make an objection, but Julia loved talking about her husband, and could not be stopped.

  ‘Charles is always full of mirth, of course, he hardly needs the good man’s fingers making it worse. Do you know his favourite jest, George? It concerns a horse entering a hostelry – a horse! – and the tapster inquiring, “Tell me, why do you have such a long face tonight?” He laughs for hours. But I don’t think that’s so very funny, do you, George? Why the long face? Because a horse has a long face, I say, it can’t help having a long face. But Charles just won’t listen once he’s away with his laughing.’

  She paused for breath.

  ‘I hate to cast a dour note, Julia,’ interjected Watts, ‘But I think we should take care of Mr Fowler. He is hardly the artistic equal of the company tonight. He is a mere showman, after all. He hardly shares our elevated aims. In fact I am surprised you have already included Mr Tennyson in his company twice.’

  They stood in the hall now, and Ellen, unseen at the top of the stairs, stopped to listen, when she heard Lorenzo’s name.

  ‘But Mr Fowler is a fine man, George,’ exclaimed Julia below. ‘This morning you were talking of asking him to pose as Physical Energy. Your little wife is such an enthusiast too!’

  ‘But I have learned more of him now,’ hissed Watts. ‘And I fear the man may be a positive scoundrel. He is most certainly a purveyor of low ideas which could contaminate our art. As for Ellen’s enthusiasm, as you call it, I shall forbid it at once. As you well know, my little wife’s ideas are quite low enough already.’ And they passed on through to the drawing room, out of Ellen’s hearing.

  Dismayed, Ellen sat on the top step. She had been told off before, but she had never heard such a hurtful opinion from her husband’s lips. Low ideas? Little wife? A tear tumbled down her face. She wanted to drag herself along the ground to hide in a chink in the wall. How could Watts be so cruel? Now she knew how that little cockney sparrow must have felt, when its head got squashed.

  Was this her husband’s true evaluation of her? Her face dissolved in anguish, as she realized how foolish she had been. She had been living under a massive delusion, no doubt engendered by that damn enormous Hope of hers. For she always thought (stupid!) that she had done Watts a favour by marrying him – that this enormous act of unlikely charity (lovely young woman with dull old man) made him somehow beholden to her. But what nonsense this now appeared. Apparently Watts thought the favour had gone quite the other way. In his eyes, she was not a princess condescending to love him, but a tiresome child to be fathered.

  Wretched and weeping, she stood up, gathered her gown and ran to her room, her eyes blind with tears. But almost at once, she heard a crash, and found that her elbow had knocked a vas
e from a stand, breaking it to fragments. Mary Ryan ran to meet her.

  ‘Oh madam,’ she said kindly, surprised to find Ellen sunk to the floor, sobbing over the pieces. ‘Don’t take on. Isn’t it only a silly pot that’s broken?’

  ‘If only you knew, Mary. It is more than a pot that’s been broken tonight.’

  The Irish girl patted her shoulder, and gathered the pieces into her apron. Mrs Watts suddenly seemed like quite a little girl.

  ‘And what’s this? A little key, is it?’

  Ellen picked up the key, and sniffed. She looked at it closely, and felt some comfort. She remembered how Watts had posed her once for a drawing of Hope trapped inside Pandora’s box, when the lid was slammed and all the bad stuff got out. This key! She had been meant to find this key! She must not despair! She realized they were outside Mr Dodgson’s room.

  Mary Ryan nudged her. ‘Mr Dodgson has not opened his door all day,’ she said. ‘You don’t think –?’

  ‘Mr Dodgson?’ Ellen whispered at the door. She put the key in the lock. It fitted!

  Downstairs, Julia thought about all that Watts had said. Of course phrenology was not to be bracketed with high art and high poetry, it was probably irreligious, too. But as Watts ought to accept by now (he had mentioned Haydon’s ignominy frequently enough), sometimes it was the midget you paid to see at the Egyptian Hall, not the heroic paintings.

  ‘George, you are unbearably stuffy tonight, and I won’t listen to another word.’

  ‘Stuffy?’

  Upstairs they heard a crash, but Julia shrugged. She didn’t care.

  ‘Mr Fowler is my guest this evening. His little girl will eat with my boys and be introduced to us later. Alfred is in the best of spirits, and if we can persuade Mr Dodgson to unlock his door, we will have an evening of exceptional lions! Personally, I can’t wait. I just can’t wait. And if you’ll only be honest about it, George, neither can you.’

  Ellen opened Dodgson’s door to find, not Hope exactly, but something like it: Mr Dodgson absorbed in some origami. In fact, he was concentrating so hard upon its puzzles and folds that he hardly noticed rescue was finally at hand. On his chair were already grouped the letters shaped meticulously from paper – HELPIAMLOCKE – and he was just finishing the DIN, and considering how to hang them in the window with cotton and safety pins. A captive rarely looked less agitated. In fact, he saw at once that Miss Terry was in far greater distress than himself.