by Lynne Truss
Alfred was still so mentally enfeebled by his terrible luck at missing the monarch that he didn’t at first appreciate the full force of Mrs Fowler’s news.
‘You seem pale, Alfred,’ said Emily. ‘Yet I am safe and sound! I think this is a special occasion. Come, we shall have some tea.’
Jessie and Lionel cheered.
‘And we shall cut the plumcake!’
Jessie, unaccountably, found herself cheering alone.
But meanwhile Tennyson remained silent. He knew there was horror lurking in Mrs Fowler’s innocent words. He just had to pin it down. Slowly he made a calculation. After the Queen left the room, the Westminster was still there; and The Train. Which meant – which meant –
As he finally fell in, the sound that escaped him was a suitable combination of gasping and drowning. The Queen, at this minute, rattling towards East Cowes, held the sexual ravings of Orson S. Fowler in her commodious black silk lap. Had Alfred been asked that morning the worst potential mishap that could befall Orson’s time bomb, he might have pictured Lionel reading it, or Emily. Now, however, Queen Victoria would hop into her four-poster tonight at Osborne House, and scream the place down. He was ruined. It was all up.
All he could do was pray. No one would notice. He closed his eyes.
‘Almighty God,’ he began. ‘Save me from this and I will –’ He paused. What bargain could he strike with the almighty? After all, he was already such a Christian man. He opened his eyes for a clue, and spied his dear friend Julia being brave about the Elgin Marbles wallpaper, while adjusting her bothersome lace cap. He closed his eyes again. In his heart of hearts, he knew what he had to do.
Two days later, Julia Margaret Cameron sat at her window in her quiet time, while Mary Ryan read to her from Maud. She had heard about Mary Ryan’s stout and loyal speech to Lorenzo Fowler, and was so heartened by it that she promised the girl more starring parts in the photographs from now on, and also less water-carrying, which was a relief. Mary Ann, who had thought herself rather clever to pass on the story to her mistress, now cleaned silver in the exile of the kitchen, and couldn’t quite work out what had happened.
Mary Ryan always read beautifully. She had a poetic soul. Julia listened to her now while watching Tennyson’s gate, with tears rolling from her eyes.
‘Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
On a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.’
The air had taken a chill this morning. Julia shivered. Ah, yes. To faint in the light of the sun she loves; to faint in his light and to die. She wiped her cheeks with her shawl.
‘Oh Mary. Mr Tennyson is a very great man.’
Kindly, Mary took her hand and squeezed it.
‘He is so.’
‘He has a great gift.’
‘Is that the same?’
‘He makes the sun come out.’
‘I know.’
Julia was so taken with this thought that she didn’t straight away notice the Tennyson gate swing open, and her darling Alfred appear, waving his hat at her window. Just like the vision of Emily on the cliff, it would be like a dream coming true.
‘Come into the garden, Julia!’ he called.
She looked down.
‘Come into the garden,’ he called again. And then she properly saw him, stark and black amongst her white roses, and her heart filled with joy.
She flung open the sash. ‘Alfred!’
‘I have a note from the Queen, my dear. All is well! All is very well indeed!’
He produced the letter from his pocket, and held it close to his eyes.
‘She says she was never more happily diverted than by the reading matter she obtained from my house – that it made her think more than ever of her poor dear Albert!’
‘Alfred, I am so glad she loved Enoch Arden. It is a great poem, full of loss.’
Alfred frowned. Enoch Arden? Who mentioned Enoch Arden? He scanned the note again, puzzled.
‘Oh yes, here it is! Yes, she says thank you for the book of poems too.’
Julia had never seen him so playful or so handsome. She scurried from her bedroom and ran downstairs, reaching the garden just as he plucked a white rose – at last, a white rose! – and held it to his face. Her heart broke.
‘I’m so glad you came to tell me,’ she said. ‘And I hope you have forgiven me, Alfred. It’s just that, well, I would give anything, and when –’
‘I have decided to sit for you, Julia.’
Julia caught her breath and adjusted a shawl. She looked around at her lovely roses. The day was so very beautiful. The soul of the rose went into her blood.
‘Sit for me? Oh, but Alfred! Only if your heart desires it.’
‘I will sit for you –’ and here he made a special, enormous effort, so difficult that you could almost hear his soul creak – ‘with pleasure.’
‘You will?’
‘I will.’
He removed his hat and bowed his amazing, famous, enormous head before her.
She reached out, as if to touch it.
‘It’s all for you,’ he said.
Appendix
NEITHER MRS CAMERON NOR G. F. WATTS produced an ‘Absence of Hope’. But Watts’s curiously pessimistic painting ‘Hope’ – in which a blindfold figure on a buoy listens to the last string on a broken lyre, and doesn’t look especially cheered up by it – became his best-known work. At one time, it was as famous as Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, and it brought solace in unlikely places. After their defeat in the 1967 war, Egyptian troops were distributed with reproductions of ‘Hope’. What they made of this peculiar choice of consolation prize is not recorded.
Mrs Cameron, meanwhile, decided that the phrenological route to perfect abstract expressions was not the only one, and to generate the right demeanour for her picture ‘Despair’ she simply locked the sitter in a cupboard.
JESSIE FOWLER became a famous phrenologist in her own right. She continued to help her parents in their lifetimes, and then pressed on alone, back in New York, writing widely on such arcane matters as ‘The Psychology of Arkansas’. She became an expert on child psychology. She never married.
Meanwhile, Lorenzo – that ‘prince of mental scientists’ – lived to his eighties. Despite a stroke three years earlier, he accepted a model skull at the Phrenological Centenary in Queen’s Hall, during a programme which included music from the Aeolian Ladies Orchestra, and a blindfold examination by Jessie. Back in Boston, Orson Fowler continued to hoe a lonely row, and was publicly reviled for such publications as Private Lectures on Perfect Men, Women and Children, in Happy Families, which included chapters on ‘Just How Love-Making Should be Conducted’ and ‘Male and Female Electricity’. His Sexual Science at the Boston Public Library today has the obscure shelf-mark ‘Inferno’, and cannot be traced. Presumably, it was burned.
THE MARRIAGE of Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts did not survive many months. Ellen returned to her family home, where she received many visits from C. L. Dodgson. In the divorce proceedings, some years later, a difference of temperament was mentioned. In her chirpy memoirs, however, Ellen suggests that ‘a difference of occupation’ would have been nearer the mark. Bumping into Watts one day in a street in Brighton, she records, ‘He told me I had grown!’ Outside a jeweller’s shop in Bond Street, she once saw Tennyson in his carriage. ‘How very nice you look in daytime!’ he remarked. ‘Not like an actress.’
ALFRED TENNYSON sat for umpteen portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron. She took over 1,200 images in all, and is r
ightly regarded as a great pioneer photographer. In terms of exposure and aesthetic composition, her solemn big-head pictures are unparalleled.
Dimbola Lodge still stands, with its view of the sea intact, and is currently under renovation as a museum. Of her portraits of Tennyson, the poet’s favourite showed a profile, in which the full glory of his unwashed neck is visible for the world to gaze on in perpetuity. He named it ‘The Dirty Monk’, and once wrote beneath it a characteristic imprimatur, ‘This I like best of all my portraits, except one by Mayall.’
FARRINGFORD also still stands, as a hotel, with a pitch-and-putt on the lawn and croquet mallets in the hall. On Saturday nights is held a dinner-dance, to be avoided at all costs. Through some meteorological mishap, the Garibaldi tree is a gaunt bare trunk, but it is still sturdy and very tall, and pierces the horizon like a needle. Until recently, Alfred’s study was reached by way of an entertaining sign in Gothic script, ‘Tennyson’s Library and Colour Television’. The base of his spiral staircase was blocked by a fruit machine.
MARY RYAN, though not a natural actress, appeared in photographs after this time, and made an amazingly good marriage as a result. Henry Cotton spotted her in Mrs Cameron’s ‘Prospero and Miranda’ at the Colnaghi Gallery, and fell in love. They were married in 1867. Henry Cotton was later knighted. Mrs Cameron celebrated their love by posing them, rather thoughtlessly, as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.
ENOCH ARDEN sold extremely well, as did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. One of these works has survived rather better than the other in the national memory, but no simple moral is to be deduced from this. A late flurry of bad feeling between Dodgson and Tennyson took place in 1870, when Dodgson applied to the poet – with extreme niceness – for his permission to read a bootlegged copy of a poem called ‘The Window’.
There is a certain unpublished poem of yours, called ‘The Window’, which it seems was printed for private circulation only. However it has been transcribed, and is in my hands in the form of MS. A friend, who has had a MS copy given to him, has in his turn presented me with one. I have not even read it yet & shall do so with much greater pleasure when I know that you do not object to my possessing it. What I plead for is, first, that you will make me comfortable in possessing this copy by giving your consent to my preserving it – secondly, the further permission to show it to my friends. I can hardly go so far as ask leave to give away copies of it to friends, tho’ I should esteem such permission as a great favour.
This is an extract from the whole letter. A shorter reply came from Emily Tennyson.
DEAR SIR,
It is useless troubling Mr Tennyson with a request which will only revive the annoyance he has already had on the subject & will add to it.
No doubt ‘The Window’ is circulated by means of the same unscrupulous person whose breach of confidence placed ‘The Lover’s Tale’ in your hands.
It would be well that whatever may be done by such people, a gentleman should understand that when an author does not give his works to the public he has his own reasons for it.
Yours truly,
EMILY TENNYSON
Dodgson insisted on an apology, but did not receive one. The friendship was at an end.
DAISY (Margaret Louisa) grew up to be a prolific novelist. She became Mrs Woods, and was seen by Dodgson in 1833, acting Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Her father, the Dean of Westminster, officiated at Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1892.
WATTS was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Tennyson after his death, and it stands in the Close at Lincoln Cathedral. It shows a stooped figure with a big dog, looking down at his open hand with a puzzled expression. It is known to locals as ‘The Disappointed Cabbie’.
After his separation from Ellen Terry, Watts continued to paint excellent portraits and bad walls, still perversely preferring the latter. In the 1870s he bought a house of his own at Freshwater, which presumably surprised everyone. His second marriage was to another energetic woman, who built him a stunning Arts and Crafts chapel at Compton in Surrey. Mrs Cameron took a photograph of the second Mrs Watts with her sisters, all in their shifts. As if to make up for the Maud reference hidden in ‘Choosing’, the subject for the photograph was ‘The Rosebud Garden of Girls’.
Despite his general good luck, Watts’s most famous statement remains ‘Often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of time’, and photographs show a man who appears to have had his backbone removed. He is due a revival, however, especially since he missed out so badly by not joining the Pre-Raphaelites (who didn’t want him). On hearing that Watts was about to tackle the walls of a country house, William Morris is supposed to have commented, ‘A coat of whitewash would soon set that right.’
In 1875, THE CAMERONS departed from Freshwater Bay. Mr Cameron announced a desire to see his estates in Ceylon, possibly to check that Julia had not given them away. Mrs Cameron died in Ceylon in 1879, looking at a sunset from her deathbed. Her last word was ‘beautiful’.
Mr Cameron, twenty years her senior, miraculously survived her. Surrounded by his sons as he lay dying, he declared himself happier than Priam. A minister, waiting outside, sent in a message, offering to read the Bible to him. Mr Cameron considered the proposal. His last words therefore were, ‘If you think it would be any comfort to him, let him come in.’
About the Author
LYNNE TRUSS is one of Britain’s best-loved comic writers and is the author of the worldwide bestsellers Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Talk to the Hand. Her most recent book is Get Her Off the Pitch! She reviews for the Sunday Times and writes regularly for radio.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Praise
From the reviews of Tennyson’s Gift:
‘A comic novel of subtle distinction … A richly entertaining book, and at times a very moving one’
The Times
‘An enormously entertaining novel, with some terrific writing throughout … a fast-moving farce which allows her sideswipes at the foibles of the famous. It is a delicious confection with some marvellous one-liners’
Sunday Telegraph
‘[A] wonderfully inventive jeu d’esprit … This epic of the Isle of Wight’s literary apogee is virtually the perfect summer book. No deck-chair will be complete without it’
Independent
‘A rollicking read. It is mischievous, light-hearted and fun, and it certainly made me want to find out more about the Freshwater circle’
Literary Review
By the same author
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seedr
Making the Cat Laugh:
One Woman’s Journal of Single Life on the Margins
Tennyson’s Gift Going Loco Tennyson and His Circle
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation
Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life
(or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door)
A Certain Age: Twelve Monologues from the Classic Radio Series
Get Her Off the Pitch: How Sport Took Over My Life
FOR CHILDREN
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference
The Girl’s Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can’t Manage Without
Apostrophes!
Twenty-Odd Ducks: Why, Every Punctuation Mark Counts!
Celebrities seem to come like misfortunes —
it never rains but it pours.
LEWIS CARROLL, Diaries, October 1863
There is a terrible truthfulness about
photography that sometimes
makes a thing ridiculous.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The action takes place at Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, in the last week of July 1864
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Ro
ad
Hammersmith
London W6 8JB
Visit our authors’ blog at www.fifthestate.co.uk
Love this book? www.bookarmy.com
This Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2010 1
Published by Profile Books in 2004 and in paperback in 2007
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books in 1996
Copyright © Miraculous Panda 1996, 2004, 2007
Lynne Truss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-00-735527-3
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-43757-3
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)