LYNNE TRUSS

Tennyson’s Gift

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One: HATS ON

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Part Two: Hats Off

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Part Three: Hats In The Air

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Appendix

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One HATS ON

One

A blazing dusty July afternoon at Freshwater Bay; and up at Dimbola Lodge, with a glorious loud to-do, the household of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron is mostly out of doors, applying paint to the roses. They run around the garden in the sunshine, holding up skirts and aprons, and jostle on the paths. For reasons they dare not inquire, the red roses must be painted white. If anyone asked them to guess, they would probably say, ‘Because it’s Wednesday?’

‘You’re splashing me!’

‘Look out!’

‘We’ll never get it done in time!’

‘What if she comes and we’re not finished?’

‘It will be off with our heads!’

The smell of paint could probably stop an engine on the Great Western; so it is no surprise that it stops the inquisitive Reverend Dodgson, who happens to be sidling by the house at this moment, on his way up the lane from the sparkling afternoon sea. In fact the smell wafts so strongly through the tall briar hedge that it almost knocks his hat off. He pauses, tilts his head, and listens to the commotion with a faraway, satisfied smile. If you knew him better, you would recognize this unattractive expression. It is the smirk of a clever dysfunctional thirty-two-year-old, middle-aged before his time, whose own singular insights and private jokes are his constant reliable source of intellectual delight.

‘O-O—Off with our heads?’ he muses, and opens a small notebook produced with a parlour magician’s flourish from an inside pocket.

‘Off with our h—heads?’ He makes a neat note with a tiny pencil.

‘H-H-H—Extraordinary.’

It is a very warm day, but Dodgson’s only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a real mid-Victorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice. Dodgson is a sober dresser always, and today he is on a mission of importance. The only thing that worries him is the straw hat – a larky addition which seemed a good idea at the time. He takes off the hat and studies it. He doesn’t know what to do.

The trouble with the Poet Laureate – on whom Dodgson plans shortly to call – is judging the etiquette. Will the fashionable summer hat be a help or hindrance? Tennyson is well known for his testiness; he is a great sore-headed bear of a man who expects his full due as Top Poet. Yet at the same time he has extreme short sight and filthy clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of stale pipe tobacco. Does it matter, therefore, what a supplicant wears? Dodgson tucks the hat carefully under his arm, touches his neat hair with one hand, and then the other, and replaces the hat. A small curl on his large temple lies exactly as it should. There never was such a fastidious fellow as Dodgson when it comes to attire. It has often been remarked. When he touches his hair like that, he does it with such concentration that he seems to be checking he still has his head fixed on.

‘The Poet Laureate? Oh, very good, Dodo. Why not drop in on Her Majesty, too?’ his Christ Church colleagues sniggered supportively, before he left Oxford for the Isle of Wight. Was this sarcasm? Did they think, perhaps, that he was making it up?

But yes, he is proud of it. The object of this smooth-faced stammering non-entity is indeed Alfred Tennyson, the greatest wordsmith in the land, the man who claims – with justice – to know the rhythmic value of every word in English except ‘scissors’. The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write In Memoriam before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it. And if Dodgson is vain of the acquaintance (and inflates it), it is understandable. He forged this relation single-handed, Tennyson offering him no encouragement of any kind. A lesser man would have given up long since, and pushed off back to his Euclid.

But when Dodgson sets his heart on befriending a fellow of celebrity or talent, he forgives all bad-tempered rebuffs, however pointed those rebuffs might be.

‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?’ Christina Rossetti once demanded in Chelsea. (He soon overlooked this outburst of hot-blooded Latin temperament.)

‘What was your name again?’ asked John Ruskin at Coniston, a clever remark worthy of the foremost critic of the age, at which Dodgson smiled indulgently.

‘I’ll set the dog on you,’ quipped Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Yes, between unequals in the social arena, the proverbial ‘nothing ventured’ is quite correct, and Dodgson proves it tirelessly. ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again,’ Dodgson is pleased to repeat to himself sometimes. It shows he knows Shakespeare as well as maths.

And now, this undaunted fellow carries under his arm a manuscript of a new book for children, about a girl called Alice. And he is bearing it like a great magical gift up the lane to Farringford, Tennyson’s house, two hundred yards further from the sea. He feels like a knight returning with the Holy Grail; positive that his king will be terrifically impressed.

‘You’re not going to show Tennyson your silly book?’ they said, those Oxford know-nothings. (Dodgson just can’t stop remembering their jibes somehow.)

‘N—Not exactly,’ he replied.

No, the idea was to reacquaint himself breezily with Tennyson (‘Dodgson? Is it you? Well met, my dear young fellow!’). And then, after some pleasant bread and butter on the lawn, a chat about the latest American poetry, and a kind offer of dinner and bed from Tennyson’s saintly wife Emily, Dodgson would humbly ask permission (ahem) to dedicate his little book of nonsense to the laureate’s sons. ‘To my very dear and very close friends Hallam and Lionel T,’ was the modest idea, although of course every reader would guess at once the full name of these famous children, and be tremendously envious of the author’s sky-high literary connections.

‘It’s not much to ask,’ Dodgson told his amazed collegiate cronies.

‘Want to bet?’

‘It’s no more than asking a person to p—pose for a ph—ph’

‘Photograph?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean it doesn’t cost them anything, yet it profits you?’

‘W-W—Well, I w—wouldn’t–.’

‘Best of luck,’ they had laughed, interrupting.

‘I’ll have you know, I am a gr—great friend of L—Lionel T-T—,’ he began. But nobody was listening. They all knew Dodgson’s Lionel Tennyson story, and thought it a lot less flattering than Dodgson did. Evidently the poet’s glamorous ten-year-old younger son once agreed to correspond with Dodgson, but imposed an interesting condition: that he could first strike Dodgson’s head with a croquet mallet.

‘More paint here!’

‘Slap it on, jump to it!’

Back in Freshwater, outside Mrs Cameron’s house, Dodgson wonders what on earth is going on. After weeks of drought, the hedgerow is singed brown; it crackles as he presses his body close to hear. Perhaps Mrs Cameron has ordered her grass to be painted green, so that it will look fresh and emerald from an upstairs window. Knowing of his fellow photographer’s boundless and misguided devotion to aesthetics, such lunatic set-dressing is certainly possible. Mrs Cameron is forever making extravagant gestures in the cause of Art and Friendship, both with capital letters. She is a bohemian (at the very word Dodgson shudders), with sisters of exceptional beauty and rich husbands. She hails from Calcutta, and burns incense. While Dodgson takes pictures only of gentlemen (and gentlemen’s children), Mrs Cameron poses shop-boys and servants for her dreamy Pre-Raphaelite conceits. In short, in terms of exotic personality, she is quite off Dodgson’s map. He has heard that she will sometimes run out of the house, Indian shawls trailing, stirring a cup of tea on its saucer! Out of doors! If in London, she will do this in the street! And sometimes, she gives away the photographs she takes, the act of a madwoman!

‘You will be visiting Mrs Cameron, sir?’ the carter at Yarmouth asked Dodgson that morning, recognizing photographic gear as he loaded it aboard, straight from the mainland ferry.

‘Oh no,’ replied Dodgson. He glanced around nervously, to check that this terrifying woman was not in sight; was not actually bearing down on him with a cup of tea and a spoon.

‘Not for w-w-w—’

The word refused to come.

‘Watering cans?’ suggested the carter.

Dodgson shook his head, and made circular gestures with his hands.

‘Weather-vanes?’

A strangling noise came from Dodgson’s throat. This was always happening.

‘Windmills?’

‘Worlds,’ Dodgson managed, at last.

‘Very wise, sir,’ said the carter, and said no more.

At Farringford, Emily Tennyson sorted her husband’s post. Thin and beady-eyed in her shiny black dress, she had the look of a blackbird picking through worms. She spotted immediately the handwriting of Tennyson’s most insistent anonymous detractor (known to the poet as ‘Yours in aversion’) and swiftly tucked it into her pocket. Alfred was absurdly sensitive to criticism, and she had discovered that the secret of the quiet life was to let him believe what he wanted to believe – viz, that the world adored him without the faintest reservation or quibble. To this comfortable illusion of her husband’s, in fact, she was steadily sacrificing her life.

Take ‘Yours in aversion’. Since this correspondent first wrote to him, he had become one of Tennyson’s favourite self-referential stories (‘The skulking fellow actually signed himself Yours in aversion!’), but Alfred didn’t know the half of it; he had no idea the skulker had continued to write. Emily had a large drawer of unopened ‘Yours in aversion’ letters in her bureau upstairs. She would never let Alfred know of their existence – not while there was breath in her body, anyway. Afterwards, very well, he could find out then. It was only fitting that after her death he would discover the lengths to which she had gone in the wifely defence of his equanimity.

In general, however, the illusion that everybody loved Alfred Tennyson and found no fault in his poetry was quite easy to sustain day by day. It just meant narrowing one’s circle of friends to a small, scarcely visible dot, cancelling the literary reviews, and living in a neo-Gothic bunker in the farthest corner of the Isle of Wight. If people still insisted on visiting (and they did; it was astonishing), Emily’s terrible hospitality soon put a stop to that. One of her favourite ruses was to make a note of all who fidgeted during the two-and-a-half-hour readings of Alfred’s beloved Maud, and then deliberately tell them the wrong time for breakfast. When that gallant hero of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi, had visited Farringford in the spring, he obligingly planted a tree in the garden while the household sheltered indoors; but was he asked to stay for tea or dinner afterwards? He was not. Ironically in the circumstances, he was not offered so much as a biscuit.

Thus was Alfred, the greatest, touchiest and dirtiest living poet, protected from the unnecessary hurt of point-raisers, and family life sealed off from interruption. Luckily, Alfred’s eyesight was so execrable that he missed all sorts of nuances in everyday intercourse, including the yawning and snoozing of his Farringford guests. In fact, he could read Maud to a library full of empty sofas. It made little difference to him, actually.

Emily tore up some review magazines helpfully forwarded by Tennyson’s old Cambridge chums, and made a neat pile of the pieces. A maid would dispose of them later. But talking of maids, what had become of Sophia? Emily frowned. Sophia had been sent to Dimbola Lodge three hours ago. Had she never returned? Emily was just reaching to ring the bell when she saw the maid run through the garden, worriedly plucking flowers from her hair and followed by a small boy carrying a dark wooden box, clearly of Indian origin. Emily signalled to her through the window, and the maid – still pinning her hair into place – raced indoors.

‘Oh, Sophia, Sophia, I am disappointed.’

‘I do apologize, madam.’

‘Did Mrs Cameron make you pose again? What was it this time? Flora? Ophelia?’

‘Titania, madam.’

‘Titania!’

‘We tried to do the ass head with some dusters and wire, but we gave up in the end, although the butcher’s lad seemed happy enough to wear them.’

‘The butcher’s lad!’

‘He came by with some chops, and Mrs Cameron said –’ ‘Don’t tell me.’

Emily sighed. Sophia looked wretched. The boy rubbed his ear.

‘Are you the butcher’s lad?’ Emily asked the question quite kindly.

‘I am.’ The boy looked hopeful, suspecting a tip.

‘Well, what am I supposed to do with you?’ she snapped. ‘Isn’t life complicated enough?’

Emily needed some good news, but she had a feeling she wasn’t going to get any. She sat down in preparation.

‘Did Mrs Cameron accept my gift of the writing paper?’

‘No, madam,’ said Sophia. ‘She said it was far too good, and that you must keep it.’

‘And this box, Sophia? Dare I ask?’

‘It is for you, madam –’

Emily groaned.

‘– She had it only yesterday, shipped all the way from Mr Cameron’s estates in Ceylon. She said it would look perfection on the new sideboard.’

‘What new sideboard?’

Sophia bit her lip.

‘The one which will follow shortly,’ she admitted.

Emily slumped back in her chair, and dismissed the maid. She was not a well woman, and the bombardment of presents from Mrs Cameron made her weaker than ever. Last week Julia had sent – admittedly on different days – a leg of Welsh mutton, an embroidered jacket, a child’s violet poncho, and six rolls of bright blue wallpaper decorated with a frieze of the Elgin Marbles. This level of generosity was intolerable, more than her frame could stand. Emily reached for the box and sniffed it. Just a day it had spent at Dimbola, and already it smelled so strongly of photographic chemicals that it might have been blown up the road by an explosion.

Inside the box was a long and unnecessary missive from Julia, written in her usual breathless style – full of praise for poetry and beauty and exclamation marks – and ending with her regular plea that Alfred should sit for a photograph. Emily sighed at this. Alfred would refuse, of course; it was a point of principle never to give anything of himself away.

Every day brought requests of some sort, and Emily shook her head at the stupidity of them all, especially the ones requesting money. Did these people know nothing of the world? And what was this? The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had written from Oxford, in his usual tiresomely pompous prose, mentioning a ‘small favour’ he wished to ask. Emily laughed rather nastily at his letter, and put it in her pocket with ‘Yours in aversion’. She would deal with it later. But a ‘small favour’? Dodgson was not a man to trust with a favour of any dimensions; experience had taught her that.

She must keep him away from Alfred, she resolved. Alfred’s new volume Enoch Arden had just been published, and it would make or break his reputation. And sadly, it was not one of Alfred’s best. Parodies were bound to ensue. Mr Dodgson was a gifted parodist, albeit an anonymous one, like the rest of the vile cowardly breed. Just two weeks ago, Punch had shockingly included a parody of Alfred’s In Memoriam, and Emily was so surprised by its appearance that she tore out the page at the breakfast table, panicked what to do next, then stuffed it into her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it.

Alfred had seemed perplexed, as well he might.

‘Why did you do that, my dear?’ he asked. ‘Why are you masticating a page from Punch?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said lamely. She thought quickly. ‘Perhaps my anaemia craves the minerals in the ink!’

So to sum up, Emily was jumpy. The last thing she needed was this treacherous Oxford stammerer hanging about. The only favour the Tennysons had ever asked of Dodgson – that he keep to himself a photograph of Alfred taken in the Lake District – he had ignored. The photograph subsequently appeared as a popular carte de visite, published by a studio in Regent Street. Alfred was outraged. ‘Whose picture was it?’ he barked at everybody. And when they didn’t know what to say, ‘It was mine,’ he answered. ‘Quite obviously, it was mine.’

Today was Wednesday. Alfred would return this afternoon from London, and Emily was glad. She was very proud of Alfred, despite his touchiness, insensitivity and meanness, and despite even his tragic standards of personal hygiene, which were remarked by almost everyone they met. Truly Alfred Tennyson was the dirtiest laureate that ever lived. But there was more to a man than a washed neck or clean fingernails. That her lord was unacquainted with the soap and flannel did not make him a lesser poet or a lesser husband. As he once cleverly blurted to a fellow who had impudently criticized a dirty collar, ‘I dare say yours would not be as clean as mine if you had worn it a fortnight!’

Emily folded her hands and smiled. ‘There’s glory for you,’ she thought. She was pleased to reflect that she was well prepared for Alfred. As a matter of routine, he would ask three questions as he whirled dramatically through the door in his black cloak and sombrero, to which his wife’s dutiful answers must always be the same.

‘Did you check the boys for signs of madness, Emily?’

‘Yes, dear. I did.’

‘Is there an apple pie baked for my dinner?’

‘Yes. Cook has seen to it.’

‘Is anyone after my head?’

‘No, dear, nobody. As I have told you before, Alfred, that’s all in your imagination.’

Back at Dimbola, a clattering of pans and a smell of lobster curry issued from the kitchen, and from Mrs Cameron’s glass house an occasional steam-whistle shriek marked the success or failure of the latest coating of a photographic plate.

‘You nudged my elbow!’

‘No I didn’t!’

Dodgson’s curiosity could resist the commotion no longer. Removing the boater, he pushed his head into the briar to see what on earth was happening. And there he saw a beautiful garden, in which maids and boys were slopping white paint onto red roses as fast as they possibly could. To someone who had only recently completed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this scene came as a bit of a shock, obviously.

Nobody noticed him, with his head poking through the hedge. Of course they didn’t. They were absorbed in their strange work. Even when the door of Mrs Cameron’s studio opened suddenly and a glass plate came skimming out, breaking against the trunk of a tree, the unflappable rose-painters paid no heed.

‘Oh, dear,’ piped a small voice near to Dodgson – too near to the hedge for him to see the body it came from. What was this? A little girl? At an educated guess, somewhere between eight years old, and eight and two months? With a dear little fluting voice? Dodgson pushed himself closer, despite tell-tale cracking and snapping.

‘Oh dear,’ repeated the little girl, disconsolate, ‘I do believe I’ve quite forgotten.’ Seeing more clearly into the sun-filled garden of Dimbola Lodge, Dodgson discovered a sight so pleasant to his eager spying eye that for a giddy moment he wished he might push his head right through the flowery bank (though of course without his shoulders, his head wouldn’t be much use). A leggy barefoot girl of eight, her thick hair flowing, her skirt pinned up, and heavy angel wings of swan feather attached to her tiny shoulders, stood just two yards before him, staring uncertainly at a rose bush dripping white paint to the earth. And there she pouted, confused – an irresistible image of innocence and poultry cunningly blent.

‘Mary Ann!’ she cried, at last. Her wings flapped a bit, which was so nice to see that Dodgson whimpered in the hedge.

No answer.

‘Can you remember? Are we painting red roses white, or white roses red? Mary Ann!’ she shouted. ‘I want Mary Ann!’

‘Now what’s all this?’ snapped an older girl, an Irish servant of about sixteen in a dull dress and white apron. She looked quite severe, with her dark hair pinned tight against her head, as if it had deserved punishment by restraint.

‘As you well know, Miss Daisy, Mary Ann will be in the mistress’s glass house at this minute – why, isn’t she there all day every day? And like as not she’s pretending to be Mary Madonna, or a Hangel, or anybody else from the blessed Bible who never got their hands dirty doing her fair share of chores around the house.’ Mary Ann’s modelling duties were clearly rather unpopular with the Irish girl.

‘But I say good luck to her,’ she continued. ‘Oh yes I do. Her with her moony long white face, not that I’d take that face off her if it was offered, even with the neck and the hair and the arms thrown in –’

‘But what about the roses, Mary Ryan?’ interrupted the little girl.

Mary Ryan smiled.

‘Well, you’re a goose, so you are. Is it really so difficult? What colour do you have there in your little pot?’

‘Oh,’ said the girl in a small voice, suddenly downcast. (Like all children, she hated to be told off.) ‘White.’

The girl pouted again and changed the subject. ‘Does Mrs Cameron ask you to be Mary Madonna sometimes, Mary Ryan?’

Clearly this was not the right thing to ask. Mary Ryan pursed her lips and emptied her paint pot over the honeysuckle. She probably wasn’t supposed to do that, but at least she didn’t dump it over Dodgson.

‘Does she?’ urged the child. ‘She took my picture! Can I see pictures of you, Mary Ryan –’

‘No you can not!’ spat out Mary Ryan. ‘And you just be careful with those wings, Miss Daisy Bradley, that’s all. The mistress ordered them all the way from Mortlake, and if you’ll not be crushing them feathers all this time, I don’t know what you are doing.’

At which the little girl, sensing that the fun was over, ran indoors.

Mary Ryan, left alone, wiped her eyes with her apron and let out a little scream. ‘Mary Ann this! Mary Ann that! How I love thee, Mary Ann!’

And picking up her pinafore, she turned on her heel. Unabashed at his eavesdropping, Dodgson stepped back from the scene, brushed his clothes for dust and twigs, and reassured himself there was nobody about. He was never embarrassed when people betrayed private emotions in front of him; having no emotions himself (or none to speak of), he was just very, very intrigued. Sometimes he made notes for use later on. He had no idea why one maid should begrudge another maid her chance to star in Mrs Cameron’s photographs – especially when, in his own opinion, the photographs were dreadful, too big, and shockingly out of focus. Glancing up at the windows of Dimbola, he caught the eye of a white-bearded old man smiling from ear to ear – Mr Cameron, presumably. The old man waved in a jolly sort of way, as though deranged. Dodgson studiously ignored him; you never knew where that sort of thing might lead.

‘But I must contrive to meet this Daisy,’ he decided, and produced his small notebook again. He wrote down her name. He also wrote it in letters down the page – D-A-I-S-Y-B-R-A-D-L-E-Y – ready for an instant acrostic poem, which he could sometimes complete in five minutes or less. Twelve letters! Excellent! Three stanzas of four! Two stanzas of six! What a charming child, to have such a convenient name, numerologically speaking! With several days planned at Freshwater Bay, there was plenty of time to make friends with the little girls, and get their addresses, and campaign for their photographs, and send them love poems. But he had discovered it was a great advantage to know names in advance, without asking.

‘I love my love with a D because she is D-D—Daring,’ he mused. ‘I hate her because she is Demanding. I took her to the sign of the Dr—Dromedary, and treated her with Dumplings, Dis-sss—temper and D-D—Desire. Her name is Daisy and she lives –’

Indeed, he was just envisaging the scene on the gusty beach – the little girl paddling with a shrimp net; himself nearby pretending not to notice her, but doing fascinating bunny-rabbit tricks with a pocket handkerchief to ensnare her attention (it never failed) – when he heard the approaching trundle of the Yarmouth cart, and looked up to see Tennyson, the great literary lion of the age, dressed as usual in copious cloak and broad hat, holding a book of his own poems directly in front of his face for better reading, but evidently catching a vague myopic passing blur of Dodgson nevertheless.

There was no time to hide, no time to frame a polite greeting before – ‘Allingham!’ boomed the laureate, as the cart passed Dodgson (pretty closely). Dodgson jumped.

Allingham? He glanced behind him, but could see nobody.

‘Allingham, we dine tomorrow at six! Come afterwards – not before, there’s a good fellow – and I shall read my Enoch Arden, and explain it to you, line by line! We shall confound the critics!’

And before Dodgson could voice a word of protest, the poet had passed by. The rush of air pulled Dodgson’s boater from his head and left it dusty in the road.

This was not the welcome Dodgson had anticipated. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could he make a visit now? He picked up his hat again, and touched his head carefully with each hand in turn. Still there, still there; still Dodgson, not Allingham. He looked up at the old man, who now appeared (no, surely not) to be dancing with glee.

On the breeze, Dodgson smelled the ozone from the sea, the scent of roses, fresh lead paint, hot buttered toast and potassium cyanide, all mixed together with the lobster curry. He looked up the lane towards Tennyson’s home, and then back to the blue sizzling bay, where children would soon be packing their shrimp nets. Salty and sandy, and with their hair in pretty rat-tails, they would head home for tea at the nearby hotels.

Absently, he flicked through his manuscript.

Dear oh dear, how late it’s getting …

Mary Ann, Mary Ann, fetch me a pair of gloves …

I shall sit here, on and off, for days …

You? Who are you?

As he pondered Mrs Cameron’s interesting corner of the Isle of Wight, another glass plate whizzed across her garden and broke with a shattering sound like someone falling into a cucumber frame. At Freshwater Bay, he reflected, whichever direction you went in, the people were mad.

‘Which way?’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Wh-Wh—Which way?’

Two

When Lorenzo Fowler woke on Thursday morning to the sound of waves and seagulls, and the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave, he had trouble initially guessing where he was. He normally woke to the sound of London traffic and coster boys. Freshwater Bay had been an impulsive decision, prompted by little Jessie complaining of the fug of Ludgate Circus (‘Pa, this heat!’) and accomplished with a spirit of ‘What are we waiting for?’ that had ‘yankee’ written all over it.

Lorenzo as a caring father needed no other incitement than his little daughter’s cry. She was a pale, freckly child with orange ringlets, and he still felt guilty at transplanting her to England – such a backward land in terms of diet, clean water and fresh air. So at her first complaint, he shoved a few heads in boxes, packed his charts and silk blindfold in violet tissue, selected some hot, progressive Fowlers & Wells pamphlets (subjects included anti-lacing, temperance, tobacco, octagonal architecture and hydropathic cholera cures) and took the earliest train to the New Forest.

Even in a mercy dash, it seemed, a phrenologist did not travel light. For phrenology was Lorenzo Fowler’s lifelong pursuit, and after thirty years he was not so much proud of this highly dodgy profession as still busting the buttons of his fancy satin waistcoat. Some people grow tired of fads, but not Lorenzo Fowler. For him, phrenology was the fad that would not die. Talk to him ignorantly of phrenology as the science of ‘bumps’ and he might throw back his magnificent head to laugh (baring his excellent white teeth) before genially setting you straight for half an hour, dazzling you with his specialist vocabulary, and at the end of it selling you a special new demountable model of the brain for the knock-down rate of two and nine.

Of course, for practising the craft of head-feeling, all you needed were a pair of hands, a good spatial sense, and a map of the mental organs fixed firmly in your mind. But Lorenzo Niles Fowler was more than a phrenologist. He was also showman and evangelist, whose personal belief was that the market for phrenology had never been so vigorous, not even in its heyday in his native United States. Why, already on this trip to the Isle of Wight he had used a cursory reading to pay the carter from Yarmouth, telling him, ‘Such a large Self Esteem you have! And what Amativeness!’ Gratified by this mysterious, flattering talk from an exotic foreigner, the normally morose carter had gladly waived the fee when he dropped his passengers at the Albion Hotel, right on the edge of the bay. Lorenzo smiled. It worked every time. Tell people they have abnormally large Amativeness (sexuality by a fancier name) and they are well disposed to phrenology – and phrenologists – for ever after. It’s just something they happen to enjoy hearing.

Jessie was awake and dressed already, playing with heads in the chintzy sitting room. She was eight, and precocious, and though the scene might strike an outsider as altogether gruesome, she was happy enough, having known no other dollies in her life save these big bald plaster ones with nothing below the neck. Poor kid. She had no idea how it looked. Not only were there detached heads all over the floor, but she had on a thick dress of red tartan – a tragically bad choice when you consider the ginger hair.

‘Pa?’ said Jessie. ‘Oh there you are, Pa! Ada and I breakfasted already, but we made them save you some brains!’

‘My favourite!’

This was the Fowlers’ daily joke. It was funny because they were vegetarians as well as phrenologists – and looking on the bright side, at least it was generally dispensed with quite early in the day.

‘Brains! Ha ha, ho ho!’ laughed Lorenzo, slapping his knees, while the nun-like Ada, their British maid, wordlessly unpacked some pamphlets from a trunk, and tried not to count how many times she’d heard this one before. You have to look at it from Ada’s point of view. A family of American freaks that delighted in brain jokes? No, the gods of domestic employment had not exactly smiled upon Ada.

‘Test me on the heads, please, Pa! Ada can’t do it, she’s too silly. She’s too British!’

‘Try not to be rude about Ada, dearest,’ said Lorenzo, while he blindfolded his horrid little daughter, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘Tight enough? Not too tight? We are guests in this country, Jessie,’ he continued, as he secured the strings with a dainty bow at the back of the little girl’s well formed head. He was a big man with deft fingers. His hands were always warm.

‘We have a duty to behave with the very best of manners. In particular we should lead the way in courtesy to the lower orders.’

‘But what if our hosts are all sillies and nincompoops like Ada?’ asked Jessie.

Ada left the room, and slammed the door.

‘Well, I agree, dearest,’ said Lorenzo. ‘That sometimes makes it hard.’

Lorenzo had brought a selection of plaster heads on holiday, the way another man might bring a selection of neck ties. Spreading them on the rug in a semi-circle, he handed them one by one to the blindfolded Jessie, who sat with her legs out straight, bouncing her calves alternately up and down.

‘Take your time,’ he said, as her little hands swarmed over the polished plaster. But his breath was wasted. Time was something Jessie clearly did not need.

‘It’s too easy, Pa,’ pouted the little girl.

‘No, it is not. Phrenology is a high science.’

‘Well, this one’s the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five, I know that.’

‘Very well. I take away the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five. But first tell me about him. How do you ascertain his idiocy, Oh little clever one?’

‘But it’s so obvious! The flat, short brow, indicating no reflective or perceptive qualities! A cat could tell you that! I mean, if a cat had the Organ of Language, which of course it doesn’t. A cat has a large Organ of Secretiveness!’

Jessie never stopped showing off. It was one of the reasons why she had so few friends. (The other reason was that she never minced words about other people’s cranial deficiencies.)

She picked up another head, felt it quickly, and cast it aloft. ‘You can take away the Manchester Idiot, too, Pa, while you are about it.’

Lorenzo caught the head before it fell to the floor. Jessie was getting over-excited.

‘Now, now, child,’ he said. ‘These things cost money.’ He handed her another. ‘Who’s this?’

Jessie whooped. ‘It’s the Montrose Calculator! Papa, you brought the Montrose Calculator! With the enormous Organ of Number!’

‘What’s the story we tell about the Montrose Calculator, Jessie?’

‘That when asked how he could calculate the number of seconds a person had been alive, he’d say’ (and here she assumed a terrible Highlands accent) ‘I dinna ken hoo I do’t. I jest think, and the ainsa comes inta ma heed!’

He patted her shoulder, partly to congratulate her, partly in the hope of slowing her down.

‘That’s enough for now,’ he said, but ‘No! One more! One more!’ she pleaded, and blindly reached out her chubby arms. How could he resist his darling? Especially when she looked so lovely – so right – in that violet blindfold? Lorenzo opened a special, individual box, and handed her a new head.

‘Who’s this, Pa?’ she asked in a lowered tone, her face tilted upwards as she eagerly mothered the head in her lap, like something run mad by grief in a Jacobean tragedy. Lorenzo smiled but said nothing. His ruse had worked; the little girl was intrigued. The original owner of this head was no murderer, or idiot, or cunning boy.

‘Is he an artist, Papa?’

‘He is, you clever child. What makes you say so?’

‘He has Constructiveness and Ideality very large. Who is he, Pa?’ She stroked the head, as though smoothing away its cares. ‘He seems to lack Firmness completely, what a shame. I’ve got enormously big Firmness, haven’t I?’

Lorenzo smiled. It was true. There was no denying it.

‘Can we feel my enormously big Firmness later, Pa?’

Jessie removed her blindfold to look at the name on the base.

‘Benjamin Robert Hay-don,’ she read. She stuck out a lip. ‘Haydon. Who’s he?’

‘Mr Haydon was an English painter of great historical canvases and murals, Jessie, who killed himself before you were born.’

‘Killed himself?’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘Oooooh.’

Lorenzo felt very proud. This kid was such a chip off the old block.

‘Was he famous?’ she asked.

‘Famous, but poor. Artistically, some might have called him rich – but no, I’m lying. To be honest, even artistically Haydon was very, very poor. In other words, a useful case for lecturing purposes! He was also a phrenologist, Jessie – from the earliest days of our great science, when few people believed.’

Jessie was intrigued. Her whole life revolved around the heads of dead people, and mostly odd, sad, idiotic or self-slaughtering ones at that. Any other eight-year-old would have changed the subject to Humpty Dumpty or twinkle-twinkle-little-star, but Jessie wanted the full grisly biography. She knew as well as her father did: this stuff would be dynamite on stage. ‘So why did he kill himself?’

‘Indebted. Disappointed. Nobody wanted his paintings, except a back view of Napoleon –’

‘Did you bring Napoleon? I love doing Napoleon!’

‘– Except a back view of Napoleon on St Helena,’ continued her father (whose Organ of Firmness was more than equal to Jessie’s), ‘which he was obliged to paint again and again, some twenty-three times.’

Jessie tried hard to imagine the disappointment that drove Benjamin Robert Haydon to kill himself. It didn’t work. After a short pause, she tried again.

‘That’s silly,’ she said, at last. ‘To kill yourself just because you have to keep doing the same thing, again and again.’

‘I agree,’ said Lorenzo. He had been doing the same thing, again and again, since 1834. He absolutely loved it. He looked out of the window to the deserted morning bay, with its bathing machines drawn up on the sand, its cheerful patriotic flags straining in the stiff breeze. He cracked his knuckles. ‘But luckily for us, my darling, there are a lot of very confused and unhappy people out there.’

As Jessie had said, it was hot in London. Queen Victoria had already quit for Osborne, this being the first and last period of history when the Isle of Wight had a fashionable cachet, and well-appointed people longed – positively longed – for an invitation to East Cowes. The centre of London stank, and even in the relatively rural Kensington setting of Little Holland House, it was hot enough to broil lobsters without putting them in pans. On Thursday evening, the renowned, long-bearded painter G. F. Watts and his pretty young wife Ellen were sticky and agitated, and had reached the usual point in their near-to-bedtime arguments when the noted painter pleaded ‘Stop being so dramatic!’ – which was a reasonable enough entreaty until you considered that the wife in question was that glory of the London stage, the sixty-guineas-a-week juvenile phenomenon, Miss Ellen Terry.

Watts was fed up; Ellen was fed up. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen, so they both had their reasons. But it was a bit rich to call Ellen ‘dramatic’ in the derogative sense, even so. ‘Dramatic’ had been a continual reproach from this weary grey-beard husband ever since that overcast day in February when foolishly they wed. Ellen wished ‘artistic’ carried the same force of accusation, but somehow it didn’t. Yelling ‘Don’t be so artistic!’ – though perfectly justified when your dreamy distant husband seriously calls himself ‘England’s Michelangelo’ and affects a skullcap – never sounded quite as cutting.

On the other hand, theatricality was certainly in the air. ‘Drrramatic, am I?’ demanded Ellen in a deep thrilling voice (the sort of voice for which the word timbre was invented). She clutched a tiny butter knife close to her pearly throat, with her body leaned backwards from the waist. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and Watts was at a loss, as usual. He stroked his beard. He adjusted his skullcap. Something was clearly ‘up’.

‘I only said Mrs Prinsep is very kind!’

Ellen groaned and whinnied, like a pony.

‘But she is our host, my patron. Really, Ellen, surely you see how lucky we are to live at Little Holland House! I hope I may live peacefully here for the remainder of my life.’

‘Painting huge public walls when they fall available, I suppose?’ she snapped. ‘For no money?’

‘Yes, painting walls. What insult can be levelled at the painting of walls? You make it sound trivial, Ellen. Yet when I beat Haydon in the Westminster competition –’

‘I know, you told me about Haydon and the Westminster competition, you told me so many times!’

‘Well, then you know that the poor man died at his own hand. Painting walls is of significance to some people, my dear. My designs for the Palace of Westminster were preferred to his, and Haydon was shattered, poor man. Walls let him down! Walls collapsed on him!’

Ellen narrowed her eyes.

‘But on the main point, my dear,’ continued Watts, ‘Why – why – should I want to earn an independent living from my art when we can abide here quite comfortably at someone else’s expense?’

And then Ellen screamed. Loud and ringing from the diaphragm, exactly as Mrs Kean had trained her. Watts ran to the door and locked it. This wayward Shakespearean juvenile was always transforming the scene into some sort of third act climax, butter knife at the ready. (The effect was only slightly ruined by the knife having butter on it, and crumbs.)

Watts collapsed on one of Little Holland House’s many scented sofas. He had married this young theatrical phenomenon in all good faith, assured by his snooty patrons that she would thank him for his protection; he had been in love with her profile, her stature – in short, her beauty with a capital B! But within five months he looked back on that marriage with confusion and even horror. This beauty was a real person; she was not an ideal form. She expected things from him that he could not even name, let alone deliver. This regular money argument, for example: it always went the same way. Here they were, comfortably adored and protected, and Ellen had to show off about it.

‘If you would let me work, George –’ she would say. And then all this sixty guineas nonsense would be rolled out again. Watts did not want sixty sullied guineas a week. He did not want to paint lucrative portraits, either. No, Watts was the sort of chap who loses his invoice book down the back of the piano and doesn’t notice for four and a half years. Watts wanted to live with the Prinseps, conceive great moral paintings of an edifying nature, sip water over dinner, and be told with comforting regularity that he was the genius of the age.

The sad thing was that when he married Ellen, he assumed she wanted the same release from her own career. After all, her career was the theatre. But he had learned that while you can take the child out of the theatre, it is a more difficult matter to extract the theatre from the child. She still dressed up quite often. She danced in pink tights. A couple of times she had sat next to him at dinner, dressed as a young man, and he had talked to her for two hours without in any way piercing her disguise, or noticing the absence of his wife.

‘My dear,’ he began, ‘If you continue with this, I shall have a headache.’ But she drew away from him and took a deep breath, so he gave up. If experience was to be trusted, Ellen would probably forge into a famous speech now, and – ah, here it was. ‘Make me a willow cabin.’

Make ME a weell-ow cabin

(so Ellen began, in the thrilling voice again, with fabulous diction)

at yourrr gate!,

(emphatic, with a little stamp of the foot)

And call-ll-ll

(this bit softly cooed) uppon my SOUL (a plaintive yowl of longing)

with-in the HOUSE!

(no nonsense)

Such a shame it was from Twelfth Night, Watts reflected, as the recital progressed. Watts had been rather touchy about Twelfth Night ever since he painted a huge allegorical picture for the wall of a railway terminus on the theme ‘If music be the food of love’ which had too much delighted his critics. A naked Venus with a bib at her neck sat down to a hearty lunch of tabors, fiddles and bagpipes. He still didn’t see what was so damned roll-on-the-floor funny about it. The bagpipes – the exact size of an Aberdeen Angus – looked particularly delicious. Venus burped behind her hand. The knife and fork were four feet long.

Meanwhile, Ellen continued:

Writeloyalcantonsofcontemned love

(breathless, fast)

And sing them … LOUD!

(long pause)

even in the dead of night

(airy, throwaway)

Halloooooooo your name to the Rreverrberrrate hills

(welsh R-rolling)

And make the babbling ‘gossip’ of the air

(an arch curtsey to Mistress Gossip, that rare minx)

Cry out!

(sharp)

‘Olivi-aaaaa!’

Watts liked Shakespeare, but only as stuff to read in bed. All this prancing about was too tiring. Acting was the lowest of all arts. Still, he thought Ellen’s performance was going rather well, and he had in fact just got his eyes closed, the better for listening to the poetry with, when the emotional undercurrent turned abruptly again and his wife burst into tears. She flung down the butter knife and left the room.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Watts asked, jerked awake. It was all beyond him. Settling back on his sofa, with skullcap pulled over his eyes, he thought hard about what he had just heard from Ellen’s lips. Yes, he thought hard. But on the other hand it would be fair to say that the expression ‘sub-text’ meant even less to Watts than to any other Victorian luminary you could mention. So what preoccupied him now was not the underlying tenor of Ellen’s theatrical performance, in particular its expression of tortured young female longing. Instead it was the following: should the ‘babbling gossip of the air’ wear a hat? Should she sit on a gold-trimmed cloud, to indicate the airiness of her babble? And pondering these important questions Il Signor Michelangelo Watts arranged himself comfortably – though unconsciously – in a well-practised foetal position.

If it was hard to keep up with Ellen’s stormy emotions, it was also impossible to contain them. The temperament of Mrs Watts was alarmingly dissimilar from Watts’s own. For his own part, any vexation might be healed by the gentle removal of whatever thorn was temporarily in his paw (usually a big bill for buckets of gouache, which the Prinseps paid with their usual handsomeness); whereas Ellen turned hell-cat when offered assistance, especially in the form of Watts’s edifying proverbs. Alas, he was a man who dearly loved a verity. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure,’ was the sort of thing. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ the great allegorical painter now consoled himself, for instance – and was instantly preoccupied conceiving an enormous fresco for Covent Garden Market, of tough root vegetables turning their ungreased backs, perhaps, on a bunch of spouting poets with long hair and big shirts.

Ellen had let her nose go red, which was too bad. Such a ruddy child was quite wrong for the Victorians’ popular aesthetic of alabaster flesh. In ‘Choosing’, his latest portrait of her, Watts had allowed her a certain pinky flush, to reflect the surrounding camellias, but he now believed this a profound mistake, and intended to overpaint with a light green at the earliest chance. Overhearing two grand comic novelists at Little Holland House discussing the flesh tones in the picture, he had been quite wounded by their remarks.

‘Know what she’s been doing,’ said one great comic novelist, nudging with his elbow.

‘Very good, I must remember that,’ said the other. Dickens and Trollope, someone said they were.

Despite its lovely pinkness, then, ‘Choosing’ had few happy associations for Watts. For one thing, it had been a tremendous bother to get the violets into the picture (in Ellen’s awkwardly raised left hand), and in any case the allegory failed. Not since ‘Striking a Careless Pose’ (in which a tall king cuffed a young servant who had dropped something), had one of G. F.’s notions misfired so badly. Ellen was supposed to be choosing between the big scentless showy camellia and the humble perfumed violet, yet it was quite clear from the composition of the picture that her preference for the camellias was pretty strong already. Meanwhile the humble symbolic violets were so extremely shy and retiring that whatever they represented in the picture (marriage? humility? Watts?) got no look-in whatsoever.

‘So she’s choosing the big red flowers?’ said Watts’s devoted fans and perpetual support, Mr and Mrs Prinsep, when they first saw the picture. ‘Good for her! Mm, you can smell them, Il Signor, you can, really.’

Watts judiciously stifled his impatience. The relationship between an artist and his patrons is an unequal one, despite the flattery on both sides. The patrons flatter the artist (calling him ‘Il Signor’, for example) because they can afford to be generous; the artist flatters the patrons because he likes eating, and lying down in the forenoon.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the red flowers are mere ostentation. I abominate red flowers. They should all be painted white. No, Ellen, representing Woman in the Abstract, chooses between the superficiality of the scentless camellia and, ahem, the sincerity of the humble perfumed violets.’

‘Does she?’ they said, eager to understand. ‘Oh. But what violets? Where?’

‘There.’ He pointed.

‘Oh yes. I mean, no. Sorry, I can’t quite –’

‘There.’

‘Oh yes.’

There was a short pause, while the Prinseps conferred sotto voce, and Watts looked out of the window at the fields, pretending he couldn’t hear.

‘Perhaps he should make the violets bigger, what do you think?’

‘Dare one suggest it?’

They looked at each other, and then at Watts, who was now biting his nails. They decided against.

‘It is a stupendous picture, Il Signor!’ Mrs Prinsep exclaimed, making Watts smile broadly with relief. ‘A great success! You are a genius, and we are privileged to sit at your feet. Come! Let us dine from the best fowl the capital can provide, and you our master shall taste the liver wing!’ But this was all a month ago, and from Sara’s adulation Watts must return bathetically to the present scene, in which the returned Ellen sank to her knees, clutching his trousers like a waif. His artistic reverie had changed nothing, apparently. Here was all the trouble with marriage, in a tiny shell: when you got back from your mental wanderings, the little wife was invariably still there.

‘Are you still acting?’ he whispered, at last.

‘How could I choose Viola?’ she whimpered. ‘Of all the heroines!’

He didn’t know what to say.

‘But the pose was quite lovely, nevertheless. You have a decided talent, my dear. And the moral of that is, waste not want not, for tomorrow I will sketch you in that exact position for my projected masterpiece, “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Hope”.’

Ellen sniffed.

‘Ah,’ he continued, warming up at once (he loved talking about art). ‘You make no remark? Of course. But think, if you will, of the supreme challenge of depicting the Absence of Hope! For you see, if I merely leave Hope out, it won’t do at all! Critics will argue with justice that my picture equally well represents “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Railway Carriages” or “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Soup”!’

Ellen nodded to show she understood, though secretly she thought the absence of hope was a challenge to everybody, and Watts was the usual cause of it.

She rallied a little. ‘I don’t know why, Viola just came out,’ she snivelled. ‘But the point was, I wanted to do Lady Macbeth or Lady Ann or something. I want you to take me seriously! I want it dreadful bad!’

‘I see. And the moral of that is –?’

‘That I want you to take me seriously. I’m your wife and I love you.’

‘And Viola won’t do?’

‘No. Because she’s too much like me. Viola loves an older man, and he doesn’t see her for what she is.’

‘I know. The Duke Orsino. And the moral of that is –?’

‘Whereas, you see, I don’t want to watch and wait like Viola. I am not patience on a monument. George, we have been married five months.’

‘Ah.’ Watts winced at the use of his name. ‘Could you not call me Il Signor? The Prinseps call me that.’

She seemed calmer now, and Watts took her hand. He was a kind man by inclination, but unfortunately if an allegorical picture of G. F. Watts were to be considered, it would show ‘Inclination Untutored by Practice and Doomed to Disappointment’, for he had spent his first forty-seven years unmarried, depending largely on the generosity of patrons, and letting other people pay for the luxury of his high-mindedness. In short, he had never been made to care. His most vivid emotional engagement had been, in childhood, with a small caged cockney sparrow, which he tragically murdered by trapping its head in a door.

Watts never recovered from the guilt or the grief of that accident. His emotion on the subject of that little squashed bird made Alfred Tennyson’s great In Memoriam look like nothing. It had hindered him for years; disqualified him from happiness. This complex of emotions had now stretched a dead hand into his marriage, too. For whenever he thought about touching his wife in a marital way, the ghost of poor wronged Haydon (for whose suicide Watts was really not responsible) rose up and cried, ‘Remember Westminster!’ thereby throwing him completely off his stride.

‘Let’s go to Freshwater,’ said his wife brightly, as if she had just thought of it (she hadn’t). ‘I want to leave London dreadful bad. Let’s go tomorrow. I could pose for you there, and for your friend Mrs Cameron, who is beginning to like me a little, I think. You know how well I pose. You know how well I embody an abstract when I set my mind to it. Mrs Cameron needs sitters for her photography. The summer is too hot for London, especially considering your headaches.’

Watts looked unconvinced, so Ellen continued with her list of reasons, realizing she needed to butter him a little.

‘You could paint Mr Tennyson again – it must be months since the last time – and then Mrs Cameron could take your photograph, making you look so very handsome, my dear! You have such excellent temples, George! And then we can all pose for each other and never stop having fun and larks!’

Ellen was accustomed to getting her own way. Her drop-dead prettiness had a miraculous effect on men of all ages, turning princes and politicians into fawning servants at the merest wiggle of her prominent but tip-tilted nose. This quality was to be her great salvation in life: that a childhood spent portraying Shakespearean nobility had led her to expect slavish devotion as her due. She need only turn the full force of her ingénue good looks on Il Signor, and like all other mortal men he felt privileged to kiss the hem of her gown, or carry her picnic hamper that extra mile up Box Hill. Beauty has power but no responsibility. It is terribly unfair, but there you go.

‘Would you?’ was generally Ellen’s way of saying ‘thank you’. ‘Would you really?’ she said, as she strode ahead of her puffing volunteer minion. Once at Little Holland House, the First Lord of the Treasury pointed out that the wheel of Ellen’s carriage was running badly. ‘Oh please don’t feel you have to do anything about it,’ she had assured the astonished prime minister, and although everybody else laughed like rills down a mountainside, Ellen was puzzled. She was quite sure she hadn’t meant it to be funny.

How could Watts deny her a trip to the Isle of Wight? What was good enough for the Queen must be good enough for his princess. ‘I don’t know about the larks,’ he said, ‘but I agree it is a good plan. What a shame Mrs Prinsep cannot accompany us, she would love to see Julia. I have never known sisters so fond and close.’

‘Except mine,’ objected Ellen.

‘What? Oh yes, well, the Terrys,’ said Watts, in a tone that suggested the emotional closeness of Terrys did not count.

‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it will be refreshing to see Mrs Cameron, and she is bound to make us welcome. You know how Mrs Cameron loves to give, give, give!’ (‘Which is fortunate,’ thought Ellen, ‘when you prefer to take, take, take.’)

‘Such selfless generosity,’ he continued, as though reading her mind, ‘is not within the means of all of us. Poor men must rely on the currency of talent to buy their friends. And I am a very poor man, Ellen, I never misled you about that. A very poor man. Yet I esteem Generosity above all other human traits, above Faith and Hope and Discretion and Fortitude and Purpose –’

‘George,’ said Ellen quietly. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘I apologize, my dear. Ah, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round!’

He slapped his knees and stood up, his wife’s emotional outburst now forgotten.

‘Do you know, I feel quite restored already. Where’s that new bucket of gouache? I believe I can feel an allegory coming on!’

Three

‘I don’t suppose they’ve hung that lovely wallpaper at Farringford yet,’ said Julia aloud.

It was Friday midday at Dimbola, and Julia Margaret Cameron was having her ‘quiet time’ – a daily hour by the clock when she eschewed all household duties (including photography) and sat at her westward-facing bedroom window scanning the chalk downs for a sight of Alfred. Ah, Alfred, Alfred! She could hardly wait to see his reaction when he found all her roses had been painted white. The servants had assumed it was one of her artistic whims (‘Mr Il Signor Flipping Watts is behind this!’), but it was a valentine to Alfred, of course. A white rose means ‘I am worthy of you’. And if Alfred didn’t know that, then at least he would recognize the reference to the flower garden scene in Maud.

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;

And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’

The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

Julia loved Maud. She had bought copies for everyone. She had posted them indiscriminately to people she hadn’t even met. When she saw Watts’s ‘Choosing’ picture of his wife for the first time, she recognized at once that Ellen’s attire was an exact replica of Maud’s in the poem:

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

Come hither, the dances are done,

In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

Queen lily and rose in one;

Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,

To the flowers, and be their sun.

It was not surprising that silly little Ellen had not endeared herself to Mrs Cameron, when everyone fell at her feet in this nauseating way, and geniuses painted her in the exact guise of Alfred’s ideal woman. Julia did most things precipitately; and thus she had rushed into a decision about Ellen – that she was a spoiled child, hopelessly unserious, whose background was not only common, but very possibly Irish.

As she sat in her bedroom now, all around were testimonials to her impulses. The house itself had been bought on a whim – two houses, in fact, joined together with a castellated tower, and all overgrown with ivies and roses. She had bought it, obviously, to be nearby to Tennyson in case he ever needed a leg of mutton in a hurry, or a loan of a violet poncho. The small window in which she sat was not a natural bay, but had been flung out one night when the fancy took her, and had ever since rested on stilts. In her room were intricate Indian pelmets to remind her of life in Calcutta. Yes, the sound of sawing never really left off at Dimbola Lodge, and the god of Carpentry smiled on Julia Margaret Cameron just as broadly as the gods of Art and Friendship.

Moreover, on her back this morning she wore half a cherry-red shawl, having given the other half to a shopkeeper at Yarmouth two days ago who happened to admire it. ‘What a lovely X,’ was the wrong thing to say to Julia Margaret Cameron, as her friends had long since recognized. In fact visitors to Dimbola were now careful not to exclaim over any object that was not actually bolted to the walls or holding up the ceiling.

At her feet, primly knitting a length of chain-mail with outsize needles, sat Mary Ann Hillier, the local girl (employed on impulse, of course) who posed so well in religious mufti, with her face tilted up to a sublime, framing light. Mary Ann had an unvaryingly stupid countenance, unfortunately, which properly captioned would be ‘What?’ or ‘Huh?’ Yet Mrs Cameron discovered great spiritual depth in Mary Ann’s vacant, open-mouthed expression, and appended all sorts of poetic tags to it. One of her latest shimmering Mary Ann pictures was called ‘The Nonpareil of Beauty’, which had been such a hit with the other servants that below stairs Mary Ann was now known as the nail-paring.

Mary Ann ignored their jibes; she knew she was invaluable. Where would Julia’s photography be without Mary Ann? Mrs Cameron could hardly rely on Farringford to provide decent photographic subjects – it was the general talk of Dimbola that Emily drove all the Carlyles and Ruskins away with her terrible meals; if not, Tennyson sent them scarpering for the ferry soon afterwards by guzzling all the port, blowing smoke in their faces, and reciting Maud till they fell off their chairs.

A railway had been mooted, to bring more people to Freshwater, and Tennyson opposed it with every inch of his body. A visitor once averred in his hearing that a railway link would be ‘dandy’, but Tennyson dismissed this as the opinion of an ignoramus.

‘That man clearly has no idea how one thing leads to another,’ he declared. It was Charles Darwin.

Mrs Cameron had a wistful fleeting vision of a carriage-load of celebrities descending on Freshwater, and then regained control of herself. She grabbed a piece of paper and made a note for more photographic subjects featuring those only constant and reliable resources: Mary Ann, a pool of light, a lily and a cheesecloth shift.

‘The Angel at the Sepulchre’ (she wrote),

‘The Angel Just Outside the Sepulchre’,

‘The Angel on Top of the Sepulchre, Looking Down’,

‘The Angel at the Sepulchre Saying Move Along Now Please, There’s Nothing to See.’

She put a line through the last one on grounds of blasphemy, but was generally satisfied. The important thing when there were no lions around was to make do.

Up in London, of course, her sister Sara Prinsep had lions galore. Little Holland House abounded in lions. It even had a resident lion (couchant, of course) in the person of the eminent painter G. F. Watts. Sara knew how to tame these large-bearded luminaries. You had to flatter them senseless, and then give them big slabs of meat for their dinner. She was a great success, the hostess with the mostest. In fact it was the mark of a very poor day if the amiable Thoby Prinsep inquired over his teatime bread and butter, ‘Who’s for dinner tonight?’ and his wife replied, ‘Oh, just some Rossettis, you know, left over.’

The trouble, as Julia saw it, was that whereas Sara only knew how to feed these lions, Julia could lend them immortality. Life could be terribly unfair. But as Julia was always telling that wretched Irish servant Mary Ryan when she whined about not being photographed as much as the favoured Mary Ann, ‘The beautiful are dearer to God’s heart, that’s all, Mary. We who are not beautiful have an obligation to serve, and to receive the charcoaled end of the joss-stick.’ At which the actually not bad-looking Mary Ryan would turn away with her eyes narrowed like letter boxes, and hum ‘Oh God our help in ages past’.

Julia rested her hand on Mary Ann’s head, and the girl looked up beatifically – light from the window striking her features in that thrilling Bellini-ish way that it always did. It was quite a knack the girl had, and it did not go unrewarded with privilege. While the other servants were expected to wear their hair tidy and pinned, Mary Ann wore hers free and flowing. Its tresses, shining gold and silver mixed, spilled over her shoulders like a stream in torrent. And right now, the stupid girl was steadily knitting it into the chain-mail while it was still attached to her head.

‘I fear Alfred does not come today, Mary Ann. He is late! He is late!’ said Julia. Mary Ann said nothing. She was wondering whether to unpick three inches of chain-mail. She tugged at the attached hair, but the stitches merely tightened, holding her more securely in place. Still she held her tongue. She had learned from experience that when she opened her mouth and spoke, her Isle of Wight accent rather ruined the Pre-Raphaelite effect. When you owned a profile suggestive of angels and madonnas, it was daft to undermine it with ‘Our keerter went to Cowes wi’ a load o’ straa.’

Meanwhile, on the train to Brockenhurst, a single lion was on its way. G. F. Watts had fallen asleep over his old pocket edition of Tennyson’s poetry and was warmly dreaming, his great domed forehead resting lightly against the window glass and his tired eyelids pressed gently on tired eyes. All around (interestingly) the languid air did swoon. Ellen studied him from the seat opposite, and folded her arms. She found it odd to be married to a man so attached to the horizontal, when her own body sang with energy, vigour and bounce. She had heard many times that Julia and Sara’s father was ‘the biggest liar in India’. How peculiar, she reflected, that these women were now so fond of the biggest lie-er-down in England.

On his lap, the Tennyson lay open at The Lotos-Eaters, a poem that endlessly delighted Watts and infuriated Mrs Cameron – concerned as it was with becalmed sailors succumbing to a lifetime of postprandial snooze, ‘propt on beds of amaranth and moly’ (whatever that was).

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

It was the line about ever climbing up the climbing wave that particularly appealed to Il Signor. He felt he knew the sensation, and that he had learned to ride waves not fight them. Also, ‘There is no joy but calm’ had always been his personal motto until Little Miss Act Five Scene Two Terry had kicked the ottoman from under him. The Lotos-Eaters was a great poem, all right. Besides which, on train journeys it always helped lull him to sleep.

In his dream, however, things were less reassuring. He was still in a railway carriage, but Ellen was dressed prettily in a red coat and feathered hat like the child in John Everett Millais’s painting ‘My First Sermon’. This seemed perfectly natural. Outside the window, the landscape (which should have been Hampshire) was all cliffs and wind and wild flowers, alternating with long stretches of blue coastal sea. Another of the passengers was the dead painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who studied Watts through the wrong end of a telescope and whispered ‘Remember Westminster’. It was very unsettling. Meanwhile the sound of the carriage wheels was saying, over and over, a passage from Maud:

‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’

‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South,

Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’

Ellen watched him as he twitched in his seat, merely remarking to herself that it was the most animated she had seen him in a considerable time. She returned to her own reading matter, but could not concentrate. Watts had given her a book of proverbs to digest on the journey, bought at Waterloo for the knockdown price of threepence. Watts did not notice that a knockdown present gave his wife very little gratification; he always loved to tell her how little his presents had cost. It was another area in which they would never see entirely eye to eye.

She flicked through the book of proverbs idly.

‘It is a silly fish that is caught twice by the same bait.’

‘Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs.’

‘Cheese digests everything but itself.’

So many picture opportunities for her dear husband! How would he manage Northamptonshire’s borrowed legs, she wondered. The section on Gratitude included the interesting commandment, ‘Throw no gift again at the giver’s head’ – which was a precept which came just in time for Ellen, since the ungrateful young woman was just about to hurl this ghastly book straight at her nodding spouse.

What is the point of a book without pictures or conversation? Ellen tried to read Tennyson’s latest poem Enoch Arden (Watts knew better than to turn up at Freshwater without it). But she had trouble with that as well. Its story was the usual cheerless Tennyson stuff, but with slightly more event than one had learned to expect. It concerned a fisherman who undertakes a voyage, leaving his family, and stays away for umpteen years because shipwrecked on a desert island. Back at home, his wife waits and waits (years pass), and keeps putting off another suitor, but finally concedes that Arden will not return. And then, what do you know? Arden is rescued! He comes home, learns that his wife has remarried, and dies in grief alone. But he makes a friendly landlady promise to tell the whole story after his death, so that everybody can feel really guilty and morbid, including the kiddies.

Ellen huffed, and put the book back in her bag. The whole thing seemed bizarre to her. If she were shipwrecked abroad and returned to find George remarried, she would dance the sailor’s hornpipe and set up house with a parrot. Ellen was the least morbid person who ever lived. Those pink tights, for instance. She thought Watts had found her verve attractive; she hoped that was why he had asked her to marry him. But then as his first act as a married man he had asked her to pose for ‘Choosing’ and she was forced to realize the extent of his self-deception. Given the choice between the big showy camellia and the humble scented violet, Ellen had a decided floral preference, and the violets were in the bin. ‘Choosing’ was a blatant case of authorial wish-fulfilment. It was so funny it was almost sad.

She looked at Watts. In his dream, he was trying to talk to Haydon as though there was nothing between them, but Haydon was pale and accusing, with a long white finger and a jagged crimson slash at his neck. Ellen kicked him lightly on the shin. Her husband only frowned. Haydon was talking about gouache costing a thousand pounds a pint. Ellen decided on the ungrateful course proscribed by proverb, and with some force threw the book again at the giver’s head. Nothing.

In his dream, the railway carriage bucked in the air as though jumping a river. And at that point, Watts felt a terrible wrench to his face, as though someone were trying to pull his head off. He jerked, he saw an ungraspable vision of the absence of hope; and woke to discover that for some reason Ellen had fallen against him and grabbed his beard to steady herself.

Half an hour to go, and still no Alfred. Julia’s daily letters had been written (a servant chased the post-boy up the road), so the rest of the time was hers. But it went against the grain, this quiet time. She had promised her dear husband that she would sometimes take things easy, but temperamentally it was quite beyond her. Besides – as she often pointed out to him, as he lay in his bed with his beard spread across the counterpane, a volume of Greek verse under his hand – dear old Cameron took things quite easily enough for both of them.

‘Why do you write so many letters, Julia?’ Alfred had once inquired. ‘I would as soon kill a pig as write a letter. You write to your sisters every day. Do they reciprocate? I can’t believe they do.’

‘I write to my sisters because they are beautiful; ever since our childhood, I felt I owed it to them.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Alfred. Emily had intervened at this point.

‘All Alfred’s family are mad or morbid, or morbidly mad; isn’t that right, Alfred?’

‘Barking, the lot of them,’ boomed her lord. ‘That’s why we lost our inheritance, and I’m so beastly poor.’

Nobody said anything. Tennyson’s belief in his own crushing poverty was a sacrosanct delusion. ‘So we feel it better to remove ourselves as much as possible,’ continued Emily sweetly. ‘For the boys’ sake.’

Alfred had a thought.

‘Did you check the boys for signs of madness this morning

Emily?’

‘I did, my dear.’

‘Any signs of black blood at all? Gloom, or anything?’

‘None, dear. Nobody’s mad in our house. As I will never tire of saying.’

‘Well, you’re not mad, Emily.’

‘I never said I was.’

There was a pause.

‘Will you pose for me, Alfred?’ asked Julia.

‘No, I won’t,’ he replied.

Just then, Mary Ryan knocked and came in. Mary Ann tried to put down her knitting, but unfortunately she was more tangled up in it than ever. When she let go of it, it still hung in the air in front of her face.

‘Mrs Tennyson has sent back the Indian box, madam,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘She says she cannot accept it.’

Julia was astounded. ‘Cannot? But it’s a very beautiful box. I felt sure she would treasure it.’

‘There is a letter, too.’

Julia jumped to her feet, took the letter, and shooed Mary Ryan out of the room.

‘Do you know what this letter says, Mary Ann?’ she said at last, with passion in her voice.

Mary Ann said nothing.

‘It says that the box is too good for them. Well, I shall not give up. Too good, indeed.’ She continued to read.

‘Gracious!’ she exclaimed, and sat down. ‘Mrs Tennyson also informs me that C. L. Dodgson of Christ Church will be visiting Freshwater this week, that he may even have arrived already. Do you know what this means?’

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 Alfred 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.

Emily tried to recruit Julia to her cause.

‘Really, Alfred, you must forget Mr Gilfillan, he is of no consequence. And besides, to repeat bad criticism of yourself shows no wisdom. Yet you do it perpetually. What of the many fine words written in your praise? What of the kindness and approbation of the monarch? It is too vexing. The Chinese say that the wise forget insults as the ungrateful a kindness.’

Julia murmured her approval. ‘And apart from all that, you should be a man, Alfred, big fellow like you,’ she said. ‘People will say there’s no smoke without fire, if the cap fits!’

She tried to think of more suitable clichés. Watts beat her to it.

He opened one eye. ‘The more you tramp on a turd, the broader it grows,’ he remarked.

Julia patted his hand. ‘Thank you for that, Il Signor,’ she said. ‘There never was a man more apt with a vivid precept. We shall have dinner at Dimbola later,’ she added, in a comforting whisper. ‘With food.’

‘Kill not the goose that lays the golden egg,’ he said, and closed his eye again.

To Tennyson in full flow, however, all this talk of broadened turds was mere interruption.

‘He should not have said I am not a great poet,’ he continued. ‘And I shall prove it to you. Listen to this:

With blackest moss the flower-plots

[note the way “moss” and “plots” suggest the rhyme; a lovely effect, do you think you could do it?]

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

[“crusted” is a fine word here]

The rusted nails fell from the knots

[“knots” rhymes with “plots”, you see; “crusted” with “rusted”]

That held the pear to the garden wall –

‘Peach,’ interjected Mrs Cameron, dreamily.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Did I speak? Yes, I do apologize, Alfred, I did speak without meaning to. It’s just that the line is, That held the peach to the garden wall.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘I ought to know, Alfred! It’s your Mariana. I recite your Mariana to myself every day of my life! I make a point of it!’

‘You do?’ asked Emily, quickly. Julia gulped. She suddenly realized what she’d said.

‘Well, perhaps not every day,’ she laughed, hoping to make light of it. ‘And not because it means anything, of course.’

Tennyson huffed. He wanted to press on with the recital. But Emily was not to be put off.

‘But that’s very curious, Julia. Why do you recite Mariana? I can hardly think of anybody less like Alfred’s Mariana than yourself, my dear. She is all passivity and tranquillity. You do not die for love, surely, Julia? For whom do you wait, aweary, aweary, wishing you were dead? It is quite the antithesis of your lively character!’

Julia pulled a shawl tighter, and stirred a cup furiously, which was an odd thing to do, because there was nothing in it.

‘Well –’ she began, but Alfred huffed again. He had no idea what was going on.

‘She recites Mariana, my dear, because it’s a very fine poem, of course! What an absurdly simple question! I am surprised you could not guess it!’

And he flung himself back in his chair, quite satisfied. ‘Now, where was I?’ he said, and resumed his book. ‘At peach,’ insisted Julia, spiritedly. ‘Pear,’ he rejoined.

‘Peach.’

‘Pear.’

‘Peach.’

‘Stop!’ snapped Emily. ‘You must explain yourself, Alfred.’

Tennyson shut the book.

‘You are right, Julia. The word was “peach”. I changed it.’

‘You did? When?’

‘I don’t know. Recently. “Pear” sounds better, as I think you will agree.’

Emily silently practised peach-pear-peach-pear, and then pear-peach-pear-peach.

‘But you wrote Mariana in 1830, Alfred,’ exclaimed Julia. ‘That’s thirty-four years ago. Why don’t you leave it alone? Thousands of people have learned it as “peach”.’

‘She’s right,’ mumbled Watts, his contribution so unexpected that the others jumped. Tennyson blinked in confusion and looked behind him. He clearly had no idea where the noise had come from.

‘It is still my poem, Julia. I can do what I like. You might say that I like what I do, and I do what I like.’

‘But you gave Mariana to the world –’

‘I did no such thing.’

‘You published it, Alfred.’

‘That’s quite different.’

Tennyson scowled, and changed the subject. He looked away from the table altogether.

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