Tennyson's Gift

by Lynne Truss

  Him, and ourselves, and it.

  Don’t let him know she liked them best,

  For this must ever be

  A secret kept from all the rest

  Between yourself and me.

  Ellen put it down. She felt her age had doubled since last night, and with the new-found authority of sadness (which suited her), she tore Mr Dodgson’s poem in pieces. ‘A secret kept from all the rest between yourself and me,’ she recited. ‘It will certainly be that, Mr Dodgson. It will certainly be that.’

  Watts opened the door. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, coolly.

  ‘I am,’ said his little wife, in a grown-up voice. As she looked at him now, she could never imagine being in awe of him again.

  He walked away, but she recalled him.

  ‘Come back!’ she cried, using a professional diaphragm technique which would soon come in handy again. ‘Come back, I have something important to say.’

  This sounded promising; Watts turned.

  ‘What is it?’

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows. It was lucky she knew Mr Dodgson’s book by heart.

  ‘Keep your temper,’ she said.

  It was a fine day; the effect of last night’s storm had been to break the hot weather, and today small clouds scudded inland over the Needles and across the chalk. At the bay, seaweed in ugly heaps had appeared on the sand, stirred up by last night’s waves, and was now stinking like sulphur, making little girls run squealing, holding their noses. Julia loved the seaweed smell, for it was similar to her photographic chemicals, which betokened freedom and happiness, and a chance to do something beautiful in an otherwise humdrum life. In the confusions of the last few days she had taken few photographs; when her guests had all departed she would again have the leisure but not the subjects. It was annoying how things always worked out that way.

  But she must hurry to Alfred. There were so many things to say. He would be walking on the down this fine morning, and she must tell him she was sorry for the review, and that of course he must sit for her only if he wished it in his heart. Second, that Ada Wilson was a threat to Emily (though she still did not believe it). Also, she would take the opportunity of returning the wallpaper – and let him toss it from the cliff if he wanted. So with the wallpaper in her arms, she toiled up the steep path to Tennyson’s favourite walk, and was only half-way when she spied the tiny black figures and counted them. They were three. The upright one with the hat – a bit like a chimney-stack – was certainly Alfred; her heart leapt at that. The little box-shaped one was Emily (her heart subsided again). But who – dear God – was the third?

  Back at Farringford, Lionel roamed the garden. He examined the Garibaldi tree, which alas, had not budged overnight; and though he pushed it hard with his good foot, it stood firm. Still pinned to it was a copy of the Westminster Quarterly, but it was drenched and ruined. Not for the first time, Lionel wished he could be sent away to school like other boys. At Freshwater, it was not much fun being a child, when all the interesting imaginative games were played exclusively by the grown-ups.

  ‘Lionel!’ He turned to see Jessie and a strange woman approaching the house.

  Lionel gave them a cool wave, and sauntered towards them.

  He was well aware that Jessie thought him handsome. He expected to work his charm on the woman too.

  ‘Remember, Jessie,’ Lydia whispered. ‘We must not alarm Lionel by asking too directly about Ada. He is only a child.’

  Jessie nodded in a grown-up fashion. How awful it must be, she thought, to have people regard you as only a child.

  ‘This is my Mama,’ said Jessie proudly. ‘Are your folks about?’

  ‘I’m afraid my Father and Mother are on the cliff,’ he explained, showing a good profile as he turned to point.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lydia. This was all a bit delicate. How do you ask a ten-year-old boy whether a maniac has called, without alarming him?

  ‘Are your parents well?’ she asked, at last.

  Lionel thought about it.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he answered candidly. ‘But then they never are.’

  He giggled, and Jessie joined in.

  ‘We wondered whether anyone strange has been here,’ Lydia continued. But again Lionel was obtuse. ‘Define strange,’ he said, wistfully.

  At this point Jessie interceded. She couldn’t see the point of all this pussyfoot.

  ‘We are looking for Ada Wilson; she’s dangerous,’ she snapped.

  ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ said Lionel. ‘She’s gone with my parents on their walk.’

  Lydia handed her umbrella and hat to Jessie, and hitched up her skirts.

  ‘Which way did they go?’

  ‘Through the green gate, I expect. Father always goes that way.’

  ‘May Jessie stay here with you?’

  Lionel pursed his lips, and shrugged his assent. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, without much enthusiasm, and led his little guest indoors. Tennyson’s second son may or may not have inherited the black blood of the family, but he was certainly a splinter off the old door-post in other ways.

  Lydia Fowler picked up her heels and sprinted towards the cliff.

  ‘I’ll show you a parody Mr Dodgson wrote of father’s poetry,’ said Lionel, as they walked indoors.

  ‘A poem by Mr Dodgson?’ remarked the little girl, sardonically. ‘That will be fun. Perhaps we could give each other smallpox as well.’

  And where was Lorenzo? Lydia’s husband was at Dimbola, to take his apologetic leave of Mrs Cameron (who was not there) and offer Ada’s old job to Mary Ryan (who was). The house was otherwise deserted: the Wattses had left, and Mr Dodgson was on board a coach to Shanklin (unbelievably) for another seaside holiday, and another batch of little girls.

  But what a bombshell for Mary Ryan. She was astonished at Mr Fowler’s offer, and blushed a vivid pink. She shut the drawing room door behind her, and begged him to lower his voice. It would be terrible if Mary Ann heard anything of this – so it was unfortunate that when she shut the door, Mary Ann was lurking outside, and got her hair caught in the jamb.

  They stood in the drawing room looking at each other, Mary Ryan and Mr Fowler. Mary Ryan didn’t know what to say. Lorenzo, on the other hand, could think of plenty.

  ‘You have such well developed Individuality, Mary,’ explained Lorenzo. ‘How can you stay here, away from the world? You have such spirit, it should not be squandered. And you have a desire for a good marriage, too. But whom will you meet if you stay here? We, the Phrenological Fowlers, can offer you travel and glamour, even trips to the United States of America. Really, Mary, you must leave Mrs Cameron and come with us. We could take you this very day!’

  Mary hesitated. It was true she loved the sound of travel and glamour. And it was true that she felt frustrated at Dimbola Lodge. There comes a point when ministering to gloomy high-brows gets a bit samey. Also, her photographic modelling career was rubbish.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face crumpled with indecision.

  But it was then that Lorenzo Fowler – for all his experience in flattery, and for all his enormous Human Nature – made a bad move.

  ‘We could take you away with us today,’ he repeated. ‘Mrs Cameron is a delightful employer, no doubt, but how can I forget what you said at my lecture – that you stay here only for indebtedness, not gratitude.’

  Mary looked at him.

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I would never say such a thing.’

  ‘In your trance you said it, Mary. And anything said when mesmerized comes from the heart of hearts.’

  Mary coloured up. She felt ashamed. Was she really not grateful to Mrs Cameron? Was she really such a bad, unchristian girl?

  Lorenzo felt her slipping away, but didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Please don’t condemn yourself for your lack of gratitude, Mary. It is the most natural thing in the world. We phrenologists have discovered scientific evidence that gratitude s
carcely exists. See these earlobes of mine, for example?’ And he thrust his face towards her.

  Mary struggled, she bit her lip, she looked quizzically at his earlobes. Finally, she spoke. Her mind was made up.

  ‘Thank you for your offer, Mr Fowler. I will always remember it. And I am sure I will never have another to match it. But perhaps my Individuality is too strongly developed for my own good. For, if only to prove to you that gratitude is not an accident of the earlobe, but a proper Christian virtue, I will remain with Mrs Cameron, who has been so kind to me. Without her kindness, I would probably be dead. Matrimonially, I shall take my chances here. Travel and glamour I hereby renounce.’

  She sank in a chair. Such a big articulate speech was rarely required of the maids at Dimbola Lodge, but she always had it in her, and it came out very well indeed.

  Lorenzo, who should really have applauded, was disgruntled, and left the room. Opening the door, he released Mary Ann, who sprang back, and then rushed in. Her mouth was agape like a big ‘O’.

  ‘Mary Ryan! Harken to you! Lor a massey!’ she laughed in amazement, with her hands on her hips.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Just wait till Mrs Caameron hear this, buoy!’ exclaimed the stupid girl. ‘Mary Ryan, if you doan’t need your head examined!’

  Up on the windy cliff, with no idea of the interest they were causing, the Tennysons proceeded in their usual manner.

  ‘Emily, listen,’ said Alfred

  He marked a place in his book.

  ‘With blackest moss the flower-plots

  Were thickly crusted, one and all:

  The rusted nails fell from the knots

  That held the pear to the gable wall.’

  ‘What of it?’ asked Emily, leaning over to pick an orchid. ‘It’s Mariana again. You changed peach to pear, I know that.’

  ‘I am considering further emendations, my dear. “Garden wall” to “gable wall”. It is a great improvement?’ Emily shrugged. ‘What do you think, Wilson?’

  They both turned to the strange woman in black, who had hardly spoken.

  ‘I think I’d like to take you for a little walk by ourselves,’ she said. ‘Poetry and fresh air never did mix.’

  ‘Good idea!’ boomed Tennyson, and turned to survey the blue of sea and sky, while Wilson, with a mad laugh, kicked off the brake of Emily’s carriage, and pushed it fast in the direction of the cliff edge.

  The carriage had been built for this clifftop terrain, but it was murder nevertheless. Its big wheels bucked and slithered at the best of times, and now Wilson was pushing it much too fast.

  ‘Hold on, Wilson,’ commanded Emily. The bumping was making her teeth dance, and her brain bounce in her head. ‘No, you hold on,’ sneered Wilson. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not respectable to beg. I’m sure you told me that, Mrs Tennyson. I’m sure you mentioned it many times.’

  The invalid carriage came to a halt in a little hollow, and Emily caught her breath. Something was wrong here. Wilson was much weirder than she remembered.

  ‘Alfred!’ she called. But either the wind was too loud, or her voice was too soft, because he could not hear. And as for seeing her, there never was a man to whom ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ more aptly applied. Currently, he was whispering ‘garden-gable-garden-gable’ to himself, oblivious.

  ‘Wilson?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Tennyson.’

  ‘Is there something you wish to say to me?’ Wilson laughed again.

  Emily turned to look at her. ‘I wish you’d stop laughing in that sinister way, and start explaining yourself. Look, Mrs Cameron is coming towards us. We will discuss any grievance you have when we return to the house, but at present, I wish to speak with my friend, even though – oh no, how can I bear it? – she is bringing me another roll of that infernal wallpaper.’

  ‘Are you telling me you did not receive my letters?’ said Wilson, nastily. ‘Letters?’

  ‘I wrote them twice a week for a year, Mrs Tennyson. A hard thing not to notice.’

  Letters? Instinctively, Emily felt in her pocket, and produced the latest ‘Yours in aversion’.

  ‘Is this you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Emily could scarcely believe it. She had always pictured ‘Yours in aversion’ as a failed, impoverished poet expiring from the strength of his own body odour somewhere near Hungerford Stairs, with dandruff and no coals.

  Emily looked at the letter and shook her head in disbelief. ‘I have read none of these letters since the first,’ she told Wilson, in firm tones. ‘Anonymous letters are vile and cowardly, Wilson. I have – I have thrown them all away.’

  ‘What?’ Though Wilson stood behind her, Emily could tell she had struck home.

  ‘And now,’ said Emily, ‘I will dispose of this one also.’ Wilson reached forward to grab it from her hand, but Emily cast it in the air.

  Caught by the wind, it soared away uphill like a child’s kite. Wilson yelped.

  ‘You beast!’ she screamed, and scampered after her handiwork.

  Emily laughed and slapped her knees. How stupid Wilson was. Alfred was right: the girl had not deserved the wages she had not been paid.

  At which point, with Mrs Cameron toiling towards her just fifty yards off, Emily’s invalid carriage started trundling downhill, brakeless and without a rudder.

  ‘Alfred!’ called Emily, as she felt the wheels begin to turn.

  ‘Alfred!’

  But the carriage was travelling quite fast now, downward and seaward, straight towards Julia, across the grass and chalk (‘Alfred!’), gathering speed and bumping from wheel to wheel.

  Julia, who heard the cry downwind, looked up and saw a sight which filled her with a mixture of panic and euphoria, guilt and elation. She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. For this was exactly the picture she had conjured jealously for herself a hundred times, Emily freewheeling towards a certain doom – except that sprinting over the hill behind came Lydia Fowler, waving and yelling.

  ‘I’m coming,’ shouted Lydia, pushing past Tennyson, who still gazed out to sea, impervious. ‘Stop that carriage! Let me through, I’m a professor!’

  ‘And I’m coming too!’ yelled Julia.

  Emily’s carriage was bouncing and veering now like india rubber as it gathered speed, and it was hard to guess exactly the path it would take, but as it closed on Julia it swerved to the right, directly towards the cliff edge. Julia froze. Her heart drummed in her chest. What could she do? Well, she could get rid of this wallpaper for a start. And so it was that with fantastic presence of mind, Julia heaved the wallpaper into the air. It flew, it arced, and time stopped. And then it landed in front of the lady’s wheels, just ten feet from the edge. The runaway carriage stopped with a jerk, its black-clad passenger shot out with a scream, and the rest was a blank, because Julia – understandably in the circumstances – collapsed in a dead faint.

  When Alfred was finally roused to the situation, it was mostly under control. Lydia, with typical efficiency, had restored Emily to her carriage, revived Julia’s unconscious form with a practised slap, and restrained the would-be murderess by wrapping her in wallpaper, which was the only material to hand.

  ‘Very good quality stuff,’ she remarked, as she worked.

  ‘Well, I’m glad somebody thinks so,’ said Julia.

  Alfred was nonplussed by the presence of so many people on his cliff at once, but considering that two of them had helped save the life of his dearest Emily, decided to be big about it. He produced some embroidery silks from his pocket which helped tie the wallpaper more securely around the prisoner. And then, having decided definitely in favour of ‘gable’, he suggested they all walk home.

  ‘She wanted to kill me, Alfred.’

  Tennyson didn’t know what to say. He looked around at the clouds and sky.

  ‘Well, Emily. She couldn’t have chosen a finer day.’

  As they walked back across the down fro
m their adventure, they little knew how they were spotted from afar by a lady in a fine carriage, bowling away from Farringford. It is always a nuisance to call on the off-chance and find the whole family from home, but it is even more of a nuisance if you are Queen Victoria and have popped in for an edifying recital of In Memoriam, to remind you of your poor dear dead Albert. It is worth remembering here that the Tennysons had lived in hopes of such a visit for ten years. As has been mentioned before, they even kept a plum-cake on the off-chance (or they thought they did – Lionel and Hallam had eaten it).

  ‘The Queen came, father,’ said Lionel, as the solemn bedraggled party made their way indoors. Lydia laughed.

  ‘No, it’s true, Ma,’ said Jessie. ‘She was here ten minutes ago, you just missed her. Why is Ada done up like the Elgin Marbles? Is it a game?’

  ‘The Queen?’ said Tennyson, blankly. ‘The Queen? No, no.’

  He sank into a chair, and allowed a small sob to escape him.

  ‘I hope you were courteous, Lionel,’ said Emily.

  ‘I gave her a copy of Enoch Arden, father, and she seemed very pleased to have it. And I also suggested that you would be glad to read it to her.’

  ‘Well done, boy.’

  Alfred was torn between a desire to hug the boy, and to hack his own head off with a ceremonial axe.

  ‘But there was a strange thing,’ Lionel added, in that handsome nonchalant way of his. ‘When I left the room to get the book for her, there were three copies of that brown review thing over there on the piano. And when I came back, there were only two.’

  ‘She has taken your excellent review, my dear!’

  Alfred and Julia exchanged glances. On the walk back from the cliff, she had explained about not expecting thanks for the review. She had explained that she was sorry. But now that Queen Victoria would read Julia’s handiwork, and be terribly impressed, she felt prouder than ever of her perfect gift.

  ‘Oh, may I see it, too?’ said Lydia. She went to have a look.

  ‘Ah yes, a copy of the Westminster Quarterly,’ she said, picking it up. ‘And The Train. I don’t know this, is it good? You are fortunate, Mr Tennyson, that the Queen did not pick up the wrong thing here! They are so alike!’