Tennyson's Gift: Stories From the Lynne Truss Omnibus, Book 2

  This daily checking for madness, for example, she conducted in the following fashion: ‘What day is it, Hallam?’ ‘Tuesday, Mother?’ he lisped.

  ‘Lionel?’

  ‘Oh Tuesday, too, I’d say.’

  ‘Does either of you happen to know the name of the Prime Minister?’

  ‘No idea,’ they chorused.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said, and packed them off to play.

  Her boys were very beautiful, she thought, and she would keep their hair curly against all objections for as long as she could – possibly until the day they left her house to be married. Other boys were sent off to school, but Emily employed a succession of governesses to teach her boys at home. As she often argued to Alfred, this only sounds like an expensive option, but in fact it was completely free. Each governess would stay about a year before realizing she was never going to be paid. And then she would leave, and another would replace her.

  As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Emily decided that she felt very well. She might even take a turn in the garden. So vigorous were her spirits, in fact, that when she first discovered a copy of the Westminster Quarterly perched on the umbrella stand next to the peg where Alfred’s best hat was hanging, she simply removed it and tore it up. Only when she found another copy suspended from the door-knocker, and another attached to the collar of Alfred’s favourite wolf hound, did she start to suspect that things were dangerously out of the ordinary. Three copies of the Westminster? How? Why? Was this another bad dream like the wallpaper? She sat down and fanned herself. It suddenly seemed very hot. How could she bear it if things ran this much out of control?

  ‘So listen, Jessie, I want you to be on your very best behaviour.’

  ‘You got it, Pa.’

  Lorenzo looked down at his little girl, determinedly marching beside him in her little purple bonnet and lace-up boots, and he felt a surge of pride. He paused and kissed her hand.

  ‘If I could bottle this moment,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I could become a millionaire.’

  ‘What shall we talk about at Farringford, Pa?’

  ‘Between ourselves, Jessie, I have made an agreement with Mr Tennyson that I will check his sons for signs of madness.’

  ‘What?’

  Jessie stopped and adjusted a boot. She was a very independent little girl.

  ‘Yes, the Tennysons are all mad, you see,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Tennyson’s father used to spend an hour and a half each day choosing which peg to hang his hat on. So naturally, the present Mr Tennyson worries now that Hallam and Lionel are chips off the old block.’

  Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

  ‘Lionel’s not mad,’ she said flatly. ‘But I can’t speak for Hallam. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.’

  ‘Nor has anybody. They say he’s very shy.’

  ‘What about their mother? Does she have to be mad, too, for the boys to have caught it?’

  ‘She doesn’t have to be. Mr Tennyson says she has nothing to do with the black blood of the Tennysons. He was suspiciously emphatic on the point.’

  ‘So you believed him?’

  ‘Not for a second.’

  ‘Good for you, Pa.’

  Lorenzo rubbed his hands.

  ‘My, I am really looking forward to this. If that old lady isn’t a tile or two short of the full dome, I promise you, Jessie: I’ll eat the hat shop on Ludgate Hill.’

  To her increasing disbelief and concern, Emily found three more copies of the Westminster before the Fowlers arrived. One was peeking from under the hall carpet; another was on the seventh step of Alfred’s special stairs; and the third was in the fireplace. It was the wallpaper dream, only worse. Where could these things be coming from? Who could be doing this to her? She wanted to scream. Help! Help!

  Yet she must appear normal, at all costs. Waiting therefore in a relaxed family tableau before the fireplace – boys at her skirt – for Alfred to deliver his new friends into her presence, she gripped her sons’ necks so tightly they started to see stars.

  ‘Mother!’ whimpered Hallam, as his legs gave way beneath him.

  ‘Quiet!’ she snapped.

  Lionel broke free, and waved something.

  ‘Look what I found inside one of Father’s shoes,’ he said, producing copy seven of the Westminster. She gasped, snatched it from him, and just as Alfred entered with his Americans, hurled it with considerable force across the room so that it landed behind a sofa. The Fowlers saw it fly. They looked at each other. Alfred, of course, saw nothing but a blur. ‘But it had a review of father’s new book,’ Lionel started to say, but he managed only ‘But it had –’ before Emily, in desperation, stamped smartly on his foot.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, moving forward with as much grace as she could, while Lionel yelled with pain and fell over backwards holding his leg.

  ‘I think you’ve met Lionel,’ she indicated the squawking child rolling on the hearth rug. ‘Such a madcap!’

  ‘Emily, is there a bird in the room?’ said Alfred.

  Emily laughed nervously. ‘A bird?’ she repeated. ‘No, no.’ She looked at Jessie Fowler, who stared back. ‘Although very possibly a bat,’ she added. ‘You know how it is.’

  Alfred merely grimaced and led the way to the garden, while Lionel regained his composure and hopped along behind. He stuck his tongue out at Jessie, who stuck her tongue out in return.

  Lorenzo gripped Jessie’s hand tightly, and gave it an excited squeeze. Already secrets and violence! Here was definitely something to tell the folks at home.

  Things went relatively well for the rosy picture of mental health at Farringford until, seated in the garden, Lorenzo asked about the Wellingtonia.

  ‘Garibaldi planted it,’ said Tennyson, airily. ‘He just turned up in April, and we didn’t know why, so we put him to work with a shovel.’

  Everyone laughed politely, as though it was a joke, although actually this version of events was pretty close to the truth.

  ‘But I have been meaning to ask about Count Cavour, my dear,’ Tennyson added. ‘You saw him the other day from the window, but he never came in.’

  Lorenzo butted in, assuming this was a joke as well. ‘Did he come to mow the grass, Mrs Tennyson? Should we check that the man in the wide-awake tending the roses is not King Victor Emmanuel?’

  The laughter continued, but Emily looked uncomfortable.

  ‘I didn’t say I saw Count Cavour.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Alfred gripped her arm. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re not mad, Emily.’

  ‘I never said I was.’

  ‘But you pointed out of the window, and I got up to look.’ Emily smiled at her guests. ‘It must have been a joke,’ she explained. Alfred spluttered. ‘Well, if it was, it’s the first one you ever made!’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to see the tree itself, it is very fine,’ said Emily. Alfred agreed that this was a good way to change the subject and led the way.

  ‘Tell Mrs Tennyson about your fascinating experiences in phrenology, Mr Fowler,’ Alfred urged, but strangely Lorenzo could not be drawn. For once in his life, a Phrenological Fowler preferred not to have an audience. On this occasion it was far more interesting to have a spectacle. Never before had he seen a woman more tightly wound up than Emily Tennyson. Not only was she hallucinating about North Italian politicians, but she was craning her head in all directions, as though anticipating an ambush in her own garden.

  ‘Hello, what’s this?’ said Alfred. They had reached the Wellingtonia, and Alfred now leaned forward to pluck a small pamphlet from the trunk (where it was nailed).

  Emily yelped in alarm. The Westminster! They all looked at her. What could she do?

  ‘Alfred. You’re right!’ she blurted, desperately. ‘I did see Count Cavour! I remember now! He came by gig!’ The others said nothing. Alfre
d turned back to the pamphlet and reached out his hand.

  ‘He was dressed in a patriotic flag!’ she added, conclusively.

  At which Alfred turned away from the tree, to say ‘I knew you saw him really!’ – thereby leaving Westminster copy eight safe for the meantime from discovery.

  Copy number nine was an easier one. While the men went for a little game of croquet and the women drank tea, Emily asked little Jessie about herself, and noticed that the child was flicking through yet another manifestation of the Westminster. ‘It was attached to the seat of my chair,’ Jessie explained, as Emily took it gently from her.

  ‘Do you like games?’ Emily asked this strangely serious little girl.

  ‘Not much,’ admitted Jessie.

  ‘Well, here’s one anyway. See if you can bury this periodical in that flower bed using only a teaspoon.’

  Unsurprisingly, the child was not excited by the suggestion. ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Very well, I’ll do it myself!’ snapped Emily. And to Jessie’s astonishment, that’s precisely what she did.

  It was only four o’clock and already Emily felt she could drop from exhaustion. Her head swam. Her whole body was so tensed for action that she tasted acid in her mouth. Besides which, the atmospheric pressure seemed to be rising, as if there would soon be a storm. Copy number ten was stuck to the tray on which the maid brought the tea; Emily upset the milk with a karate chop to the jug, and sent back for more. ‘Bring a different tray, I never liked that one!’ she added, twitching. It was clear by now that Alfred need have taken no pains to hide his phrenological intentions from her. Lorenzo could have put the boys in straitjackets this afternoon, shaved their girly hair, and ordered a black maria for their removal to Carisbrooke, and she would have noticed nothing.

  As it was, however, Lorenzo was just examining Hallam’s head and proclaiming a massive healthy intellect when Alfred, suddenly aware of a discomfort in his hat, took it off and looked inside it. It was copy number eleven.

  ‘Look, Emily,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ And Emily, pulling out all the stops of her ingenuity, snatched the hat, turned her back on the company, and promptly vomited inside it. She gave it back to him.

  ‘Emily!’ he said. He was very fond of that hat. It was the final straw.

  ‘I do apologize to your guests, Alfred,’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Please do help yourself to some food, but I think I must lie down indoors. This heat, you know.’

  ‘You have all our sympathy,’ said Lorenzo, standing up to bow. She made a last desperate scan of the tea-table – no sign of another copy! she even checked in the teapot! – and took a few feeble steps towards the house. But she had gone only a few yards when the words ‘What’s this?’ assailed her ears for the very last time that day.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Lorenzo. For he was just cutting a piece of apple pie for Jessie (Alfred’s favourite) when his knife made contact with a papery thing. Copy number twelve of the Westminster Quarterly had been baked inside an apple pie. Lorenzo broke open the crust, and pulled out the magazine, which emerged in a shower of crumbs.

  ‘It’s the new Westminster Quarterly, my dear,’ called Alfred, delightedly, cleaning it against his waistcoat. ‘Emily, however did it get here? Do you think there may be a notice of Enoch Arden?’

  But as he turned to see what his dear wife had to say on the matter, her skinny body fell to the grass, twitched once and lay still.

  Alfred shrugged, and opened his review.

  ‘She’s not mad, you know,’ he remarked.

  Lorenzo put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Nobody said she was.’

  Eleven

  That evening the weather broke. It was still Tuesday – a day of great events; and it was far from over yet. For the first time in several weeks, rain fell softly on the West Wight, and Mrs Cameron danced in her rose garden, under a small ornamental umbrella, intoxicated by the elements. The earth exhaled rich, dank odours in the rain, and as her skirt grew sodden at its hem she sniffed the peculiar stewed-apple scent exuded by her beloved briar rose. Stewed apple? Was this a pathetic fallacy of some sort? No, it was just the authentic smell of damp briar rose. As Alfred might have said, ask any botanist.

  Anyway, what with Alfred’s surprise apple pie, what could be more apt? Yes, she decided, stewed apple was Alfred’s particular wonderful smell – if you didn’t count the tobacco smoke, the dog hair, and all the other unmentionable ones brought about by not washing. ‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating! The eating of the proof is in the pudding!’ And she did a little twirl of victory beside the Tennyson gate.

  Her husband watched her from his bedroom window, Watts at his side. Two great sage beards together – Watts’s wiry and deceptively virile; Cameron’s soft and white, like flax on a distaff.

  ‘She is a strange woman,’ observed Cameron. ‘But I would not exchange her for all the cracked pots in Staffordshire.’

  Watts looked impressed. It was a sentiment that did the old man credit.

  Watts coughed. ‘Julia is in great spirits,’ he explained, ‘because we have news from Farringford that Mr Tennyson has received a good review. He found it in an apple pie, and it is accounted a miracle. Mrs Tennyson is said to have fainted.’

  ‘A good review for Enoch Arden?’ said Cameron. ‘I am surprised the very church bells don’t clamour!’ And then he made an oddly un-sage-like ejaculation, which sounded suspiciously like ‘tee-hee’.

  Watts enjoyed the company of Julia’s ancient husband Charles. Man to man, they could talk abstractions tirelessly, for hours by the clock. ‘Trust is the mother of deceit’ they might sagely concur, and apply the precept to Jane Austen and the Greek dramatists. The last time they had enjoyed such a seminar, however, their theme had been ‘Marriage is the tomb of love’ – but they had been obliged to cease this manly discussion when Watts, unaccountably, burst into tears.

  As a man sensitive to metaphor, Watts was well aware that if marriage was generally the tomb of love, his own marriage was the Great Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. But what could he do? He had the will to change it, but not the imagination. What made married people happy? He didn’t know. That helpful expression ‘full intimacy’ had not been quite helpful enough. On his wedding night he had gathered all his courage, and then confided in Ellen his guilty childhood story of the little cockney sparrow whose head he shut in a door.

  How he wept as he remembered the tragedy of the little bird. ‘I killed the thing I loved!’ he sobbed. ‘I never told anyone this before!’ and she felt very sorry for him. Once this was off his chest, however, things continued to run weirdly when he went on to explain how badly he felt about old Haydon, who had slashed at his throat with a razor after first failing to put a bullet in his brain. ‘Remember Westminster!’ had made its first, fateful appearance. And then, having whipped up rather unusual wedding-night emotions in his beautiful young bride, he rolled over and went to sleep. That was it. Full intimacy, G. F. Watts-style.

  Cameron, on the other hand, did not regard marriage as the tomb of love; very much the reverse. Julia’s great spirit inspired him perpetually. It was like watching waves roll in, or an avalanche tumble – thrilling, just so long as you stood to one side and hung on to your hat.

  On top of this, their children had been a great success – some of them were still quite young and hanging around the house, he believed. He had seen some recent photographs. Oh yes, there was much about life at Dimbola Lodge to amuse Mr Cameron. He even volunteered for occasional photographic modelling duty, although it was true that he ruined most sessions by cracked up laughing. ‘Well, you must admit this is funny,’ he would say, indicating his monkish garb and all the maids clustered round him in smocks with their hair down. But nobody else could see the comical side. So he just wiped his eyes and recomposed himself. He was the man who gave the lie to the old adage about laugh and the world laughs with you.

  ‘Did Julia tell you about the exciting phr
enologist?’ asked Watts.

  ‘Ah yes. I was very pleased for her. It seems that Julia need no longer bark at her sitters to keep still and hold their expression.’

  ‘Really? Why not?’ Watts could remember no talk of this.

  ‘Mr Fowler can mesmerize people, can he not? He practises animal magnetism. From what I have read about phrenology – which is all nonsense, of course – he can isolate an abstract emotion on the sitter’s head. Thus Hope, Benevolence, Love, Friendship, Caution – each will be written on the sitter’s face if the organ is excited. All Julia needs do is take the picture! All you need do, my dear fellow, is paint it! There’s a moral there, somewhere, Watts, if only we search hard enough!’

  Watts, however, looked pole-axed. Cameron couldn’t see why.

  ‘I thought you would be pleased, Mr Watts. In your own work, surely, Mr Fowler’s intervention will be a help? You could stop using anchors and broken lyres, and other such emblematic fol-de-rol. He comes to dinner this evening. I am sure he will confirm what I say.’

  Watts felt giddy. He saw his whole life unravel before his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh no, no.’ He felt for a chair, and sat down. ‘My work is art, Mr Cameron, not trickery, not –’ he struggled for the right word – ‘psychometry!’

  Cameron was happy enough to drop the subject. ‘Then think no more about it,’ he said, and clapped Watts on the back.

  Cameron climbed into bed, picked up a small volume of Pindar, arranged his white hair across the pillow and fell instantly asleep. Watts observed him in genuine admiration. If he had seen Bellini making with the hog’s bristle, or Michelangelo with his big mallet, he could not have been more impressed. Conscious of his own amateur (but aspiring) status as Great Victorian Snoozer, he lay on a convenient chaise-longue and watched the rain pelt on Mr Cameron’s bedroom window. Outside it was growing dark early. The panes rattled in the wind. He tried to count the gusts, and in a minute or less, he was happily impersonating ‘Homer sometimes nods’.