Tennyson's Gift Read online

  Mary Ann looked blank. Admittedly, it was her forte. Shrugging mutely, she gave up the tussle with the knitting, and with a pair of shears, cut herself free.

  ‘What do it mean then, ma’am?’ she said at last.

  ‘It means that he will get Alfred’s photograph again, Mary! And why not? He’s got everybody else! The man has already photographed Faraday, Rossetti, he’s even got the Archbishop of Canterbury! So he’ll get my Alfred. How does he do it? He has no connections, no reputation, no sisters in useful houses, and his pictures are flat, small and boring, and have no Art.’

  Julia paced. ‘I can’t bear to think of it. I wait here, day after day, week after week, year after year, hoping that Alfred will give me something, anything! He does not even come to see the roses! I would give anything! And now they are sending back my presents! Oh, Mary! If he would only pose for me, Mary –’ She sobbed and sat down. With the letter crumpled in her hand, she looked like a woman in a Victorian melodrama with sobering news from the landlord. ‘Oh Mary, if he would only pose for me!’

  ‘And how was your morning on the beach, my dear? Did you make any little child friends?’ asked Lorenzo, trimming his beard at a mirror.

  Jessie took off her pink bonnet (pink! for a red-head!), plonked it on the Manchester Idiot, and burst out laughing.

  ‘What would I want with little child friends?’ she asked. ‘They’re all such sillies.’

  ‘As you like, dear,’ said Lorenzo. He was an easy-going chap. He had recently located the Organ of Human Nature, and discovered – by happy accident – that on his own head it was massive.

  ‘Well, except a girl called Daisy, she was all right, quite clever. Quite arresting to look at, and good fun. She said she could borrow some wings for me, if I wanted, but I can’t see the point. Perhaps I’ll ask her to tea. Her father is a clever man, but do you know, she’d never heard of phrenology or vegetarianism or the perfectibility of the human brain through the exercise of memory. So I told her, if he hasn’t taught you any of that, he obviously hasn’t taught you much.’

  ‘Not everyone’s as clever as you, Jessie. Actually, I sometimes think I’m not as clever as you. How old are you again?’

  ‘I’m eight.’

  ‘Good heavens.’

  Jessie poured some tea, and handed it to him. ‘Would you like me to help you with your grooming, Pa? That’s your best suit, isn’t it? Where are we going?’

  ‘I must visit the hall I have booked for tonight. You remember the carter from Yarmouth?’ ‘Pa! It was only two days ago!’

  ‘Well, he has already told everyone arriving from the mainland that I’m here. Interest is growing. News travels fast. I may have to send to Ludgate Hill for more merchandise. You can return to the beach with Ada this afternoon.’

  Jessie pouted. While Lorenzo went scouting the venue, the Infant Phrenologist would be left at home again, to re-read Hereditary Descent: its Laws and Facts Applied to Human Improvement, Familiar Lessons on Phrenology for the Use of Children in Schools and Families by Lydia F. Fowler (her mother). Jessie sighed. She hated it when Lorenzo left her alone with Ada. Ada was quiet and broody, and unnaturally sensitive to childish insult. Also, Jessie hadn’t even the consolation of other Victorian children, that if her father wasn’t at home, at least he would be indulging gross unnatural vices, such as smoking and drinking, or tightening himself in a lady’s corset.

  ‘Oh Papa, there was something I needed to tell you. Did you know the poet Albert Tennyson lives in Freshwater?’

  ‘I did.’ (Lorenzo did not correct her on the ‘Albert’. The tantrum could last for hours.)

  ‘I asked everybody on the beach what his head was like, but of course nobody knew how to describe it. They said he usually wears a hat! But apparently he’s got big puffs under his eyes, indicating the Organ of Language. Of course, I had to tell them about Language; they only knew about the eye-bags. Oh, and they also said, if you drop in at the house, don’t expect tea. Wasn’t that an odd thing to say? One of the boys, called Lionel – I think he’s the poet’s son – did a comic impression of him, rubbing his hands together. And he kept moaning, ‘I am a very poor man! I am a very poor man!’ Everybody laughed. There’s another boy called Hallam, apparently, but he’s very shy. Also there was a clergyman sitting on the wall, who looked surprised and made a note. I don’t miss much, do I?’

  ‘Jessie, it sounds as though the seaside entertainment was endless.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Pa.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Lorenzo patted her on the head, which he knew she loathed.

  ‘And what of this clergyman? What sort of head did he have?’

  ‘Massive, Papa, I meant to say! All number and logic at the front; all love of children at the back. I’ve never seen a head like it! It seems he’s here to photograph little girls, like me, just my age. He sat on the wall doing corny tricks with a pocket handkerchief, and I have to tell you, it was quite shocking how quickly Daisy and the others were swarming around him, giving him their personal details, and letting him pin up their skirts.’

  Lorenzo stopped preening. He needed to hear that last bit again.

  ‘He pinned up their skirts? With what?’

  ‘With some safety pins he just happened to have with him. I know what you’re thinking, Pa. That’s what I thought, too. Perhaps he is one of those fiendish pedagogues! Is that what I mean?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Well, whatever it’s called, perhaps you should lecture on the dangers of it while we are here. These people need us, Papa. They need us badly.’

  Meanwhile, at Dimbola Lodge, what an effort it was to sit still! Even with a lovely garden to look at, with stark white roses weeping for love and worthiness beneath, Mrs Cameron wondered how people achieved this stillness, the way she frequently commanded them. Reining in all this energy was enough to make your brain ache, yet others seemed to take to it. Mary Ann was virtually a human statue, of course, but then she was also pretty gormless. Charles Hay Cameron, the beauteous old husband in the next bedroom (a student of the sublime in younger days), not only lay perfectly still for hour after hour, but also smiled all the while, even when asleep.

  Such a smile the old man had! It was quite remarkable. In fact it delighted his wife sometimes to reflect that whereas many people have seen a man without a smile, only the highly privileged have seen a smile without a man.

  Alfred was something else entirely – a vigorous walker with fine stout calves, who strode on the cliff despite being dangerously shortsighted. On the days when he chose to visit, he would burst through Mrs Cameron’s Gothic garden gate (installed specifically for the purpose), full of new poetry composed on his bracing cliff walk, or fulminating at some anonymous critic or parodist, or banging on about the railway, blinking against the sun and shouting hellos to whoever was about, and getting their names wrong. Mrs Cameron lived for these moments. She would glimpse his hat, and the sun came out. And if he was accompanied by his wife Emily – pushing that devout fragile lady in an invalid perambulator –Mrs Cameron found it easy to mask her disappointment by raining presents and compliments on the poor saint until she grew so exhausted she had to be wheeled home, limp like a broken puppet.

  From the bottom of her soul Mrs Cameron loved and admired Emily Tennyson, but somehow this did not stop her entertaining treacherous mental visions of clifftop disaster. In fact she rehearsed the happy scene in her mind quite frequently. It went like this: Alfred paused on his blustery walk to hurl himself to the ground and examine a tiny wild orchid, leaving Emily’s perambulator temporarily brakeless and rudderless. The wheels began to turn. No! Yes! The black carriage gently trundled off (‘Alfred!’), gathering bumpy and unstoppable speed (‘Alfred!’), lucklessly veering cliffwards to a perpendicular drop. Yes! Yes! Yes! ‘Hoorah!’ yelled Julia, involuntarily.

  Alfred wasn’t coming today. Perhaps (some hope) he had gone home to supervise the hanging of the wallpaper. Perhaps Queen Victoria had dropped in, as Al
fred often remarked she had promised to do. Having once been summoned to Osborne, Alfred entertained a vain hope that the visit would be returned, since Her Majesty had expressed a wish to hear In Memoriam recited by its author; and Emily even kept a plum-cake ready, in case, and a pile of laundered handkerchiefs for the inevitable royal blub. When Julia invited Alfred to dinner, he often made the excuse, ‘But what if Her Majesty called while I was out?’ It was funny the first time, but by now it was wearing thin.

  Julia consulted her clock. Ten minutes to go. She dismissed Mary Ann, and told her to get into her cheesecloth as soon as possible – she could feel a photograph coming on. ‘Don’t forget the lily,’ she barked after. ‘Think some religious thoughts!’ And then, folding her hands, and closing her eyes,

  Julia Margaret Cameron completed her hour of inactivity by reciting from Tennyson’s Mariana.

  ‘She only said, “My life is dreary,

  He cometh not,” she said;

  She said, “1 am aweary, aweary,

  I would that I were dead!”’

  For some reason not unconnected with Victorian morbidity, this recitation always made her feel much better.

  Four

  ‘Have some more tea,’ said Tennyson airily, by way of distracted greeting, not glancing up from his book.

  Looking around, Ellen was delighted by the idea of refreshment after such a long and dusty journey, but then kicked herself for falling for this terrible old chestnut. It was the usual thing. How could you take more tea, if you had taken no tea already? Yes, the Tennyson table was set for an outdoor repast, with plates and cups and knives, but drat their black-blooded meanness, it was just for show: there was nothing on the board save tableware. Not a sausage for a tired and thirsty theatrical phenomenon to wrap her excellent tonsils around.

  Nothing will come of nothing, as any true-bred Shakespearean juvenile will tell you. As she crossed the dappled lawn behind Watts, and surveyed the view of ancient downs beyond, Ellen wanted to jump on the table and render some funny bits from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it was a marvellous setting for theatricals. But instead she made her formal salutes to the older ladies and Mr Tennyson (who squinted at her rather horribly) and turned her thoughts inward, where at least they were safe.

  Yes, nothing will come of nothing; nothing will come of nothing. Wasn’t that a mathematical principle as well? Hadn’t a kindly mathematician once explained it to her? Yes, he had. That was in the days when she was adored, of course; when members of her audience threw flowers at the stage, and ‘came behind’ after. When her face glowed in limelight; when people looked right at her, instead of politely askance. This mathematician – it was all coming back – she had met after her very first performance. As the infant Mamilius in A Winter’s Tale, at the age of only eight.

  It all seemed so long ago now, and what was the point of the reminiscence? Oh yes, the mathematician. By means of some pretty, nonsensical example, this Mr Dodgson (for yes, it was he) had proved to her that whichever way you did the sum, the answer was nothing, nothing, nothing, every time.

  Ah, Mr Dodgson! Where was he now? If she had chosen to remain on stage, all London would be hers to command, and she would moreover pocket sixty guineas a week to spend independently on food and lodgings and full-priced books without proverbs in them. How mad of her to quit the stage for Old Greybeard here, with his borrowed home and empty flat pockets. And how cruel to her public. Mr Dodgson, for one, would be repining in the aisles. She looked at Watts, and gave him an encouraging smile, but her heart wasn’t in it. For thirty years among patrons and well-wishers this husband of hers had soaked up endless quantities of love, money, praise and time, yet still had none to give in return; did the multiply-by-nothingness principle apply to marriage, too? If it did, her continued love for him was like one of his terrible pictures: the triumph of hope over mathematics.

  It was a curious fact, remarked on by many visitors to Farringford, that whatever time you arrived for dinner, you’d missed it. The same, it now appeared, applied to tea. Emily Tennyson had long ago adopted the ‘every other day’ principle of home economics, and found that it suited well. Pragmatically, the poet’s boys hung around other people’s houses at teatime, eyeing the jam tarts – proof enough, surely, that they were not mad. Dimbola Lodge was a good spot for cadging food, which was why the boys were at Dimbola now, in all probability – sucking up to Mary Ann, and telling her how lovely she looked as ‘The Star in the East’ or ‘Maud is Not Seventeen, But She is Tall and Stately’. Hallam and Lionel (but particularly Lionel) had learned quickly that Mrs Cameron rewarded good looks with sweets, so the Tennyson boys spent much of their time away from home, carelessly showing off their charming profiles in her garden, and flicking their girly locks. Lionel was an absolute stunner.

  Mrs Cameron was however at Farringford this afternoon, to greet Watts and Ellen in a flurry of shawls and funny smells, and fervent greeting.

  ‘Il Signor! Il Signor!’

  Watts loved this kind of devotion, of course, and acknowledged it with a bow. He felt no obligation to return it.

  Though the Wattses were guests at Dimbola, Mrs Cameron had conceived this pleasant notion of meeting them at Farringford after their journey. For one thing, in the garden at Farringford the roses were not all half-dead (and dangerously flammable) from the recent application of paint. Also, Watts and Tennyson were mutual admirers, with matching temples and pontiff beards, and Mrs Cameron loved to witness their hirsute solemn greetings for the aesthetic buzz alone. ‘The brains do not lie in the beard’ was an adage with which she had always argued. And beyond all this was a more pragmatic reason for the Farringford rendezvous: it was an excuse to see Alfred in the afternoon, when he had somehow forgotten to come in the morning.

  Chairs from the banqueting hall had been arranged around a table on the wide green lawn, in the shade of the ilex, and if the furniture was a peculiar assortment, this only reflected the odd people sitting in it – Mrs Tennyson silent and gaunt in black, her beady eye alert for gentlemen of the Edinburgh Review lurking in the shrubbery, Watts already asleep with his head on the table, Mrs Cameron hatching benevolent schemes and waving her arms about, and Tennyson preoccupied, in his big hat, speaking in riddles.

  Ellen took off her own hat, patted her golden hair and sat down gingerly in a sort of throne at the head of the table. Her real impulse was to kick off her shoes, let her hair down and shout, ‘Bring me some tea, then,’ but in the company of this particular set of grown-ups, who often scolded and belittled her, she found herself too often at fault. They even disapproved of pink tights: she was clueless how to please them. So, her throat rasping for want of refreshment, she played a game of onesided polite conversation she had recently taught herself from a traveller’s handbook left by Mr Ruskin at Little Holland House. And nobody took the slightest notice.

  ‘My portmanteau has gone directly to Dimbola Lodge,’ she announced (with perfect diction, as though speaking a foreign language). ‘My husband and I will travel there later also. It is only a short walk. My parasol is adequate although the sun is strong. Are you familiar with the Dordogne? Our journey from London was comfortable and very quick.’

  No one said anything. Not a breath stirred. In the far distance, childish voices on the beach could be heard mingled with the crash of waves, piping like little birds in a storm. Watts emitted a snore, like a hamster.

  ‘The bay looks delightful this afternoon,’ she continued. ‘I hope there will not be rain. The Isle of Wight has the great advantage of being near yet far, far yet near. Rainbows are not worth writing odes to.’

  Nothing. Bees hummed in the shrubbery, and Watts made a noise in his throat, as though preparing to say something.

  At this stirring from the dormant male, Mrs Cameron signalled at Ellen to hush her prattling.

  ‘Speak, speak, Il Signor!’ urged Mrs Cameron, grandly.

  But Watts did not speak, as such. Rather, he intoned. ‘An American gentleman on the boat
to Leghorn,’ he said, ‘lent me without being asked eight pounds.’

  He resumed his slumber, and Mrs Cameron nodded shrewdly as though a great pronouncement had been made. Tennyson continued to read his own poetry silently, with occasional bird-like tippings of the head, to indicate deep thought.

  ‘At what time do we arrive at the terminus?’ Ellen persisted, her voice rising a fraction. ‘I have the correct money for the watering can. You dance very well, do you know any quadrilles? No heavy fish is unkind to children. Will you help me with this portmanteau, it is heavy. I require a view with southerly light. Please iron my theatrical costumes. This gammon is still alive. Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs. Phrenology is a fashionable science. Would you like to feel my bumps?’

  It was at this point, when Ellen was just beginning to think she would not survive in this atmosphere for another instant, that she spotted a dapper figure in a dark coat and boater dodge nervously between some trees in the garden. Behind him ran a little girl in a pinafore.

  ‘That man is behaving very curiously,’ she said aloud. But since this exclamation might have been just a further instalment of her phrasebook speech, no one glanced to see what she was talking about. Ellen, however, burned with curiosity.

  Tennyson looked up from his book, but luckily did not notice the intruder. So wary was he of fans and tourists (‘cockneys’) that he had once run away from a flock of sheep in the belief they were intent on acquiring his autograph. In fact, even after the mistake was pointed out, he still maintained that they might have been.

  ‘George Gilfillan should not have said I was not a great poet,’ he finally announced, in an injured tone.

  Emily sighed. She didn’t know who George Gilfillan was – indeed nobody knew who George Gilfillan was – but she had heard this complaint a hundred times. Gilfillan’s opinions of Tennyson’s poetry had somehow eluded her vigilance. Meanwhile, a hundred yards away, between the trees, the curious man had frozen to the spot, gazing at a pocket watch.