I waited until she bit into her afghan before I did the same. Catching the crumbs in her hand, she said, “I didn’t think about Grace much. I didn’t give her nearly enough thought. She was always laughing.” Mrs. Watts pulled a face. Always laughing. I understood this was a criticism. “It was like being around someone who is permanently pissed.”
She reached for another cigarette and struck a match. Her smoker’s face concentrated. “So, how is Tom? The silly old bugger. It’s been so long. Have you seen him recently?”
The cat clawing at the armchair caught her attention so she did not have any sense of my reeling backwards. I quickly composed myself and made a decision. “He was fine when I last saw him,” I said. “But that was some years ago, Mrs. Watts. I live in Brisbane now.”
“Well, I’m over it all now. It’s all water under the bridge, isn’t it? I have my own problems.”
She paused, and I suppose it was for me to ask what those problems might be, but I was not interested. Instead I asked her what Mr. Watts had done at the Standards Association.
“Same as the rest of us,” she said. “Clerical work and what have you. I was a secretary. Tom was in publications.”
Then, perhaps it was because I did not know what to say to this woman that I thought to ask her, “Do you know what a mayfly is, Mrs. Watts?”
She gave me a puzzled look and I thought I would explain.
“The female larvae lie in mud at the bottom of a river for three years. Then they transform into winged insects, and as they fly from the water into the air they are impregnated by the waiting males.”
Mrs. Watts’ puzzled look turned into a frown.
“It is a story your husband told us kids.”
“Tom did, did he? Well, Tom told lots of stories.” She glanced at the plate between us. “Here, have another afghan. There’s plenty more where that lot came from.”
I knew that as soon as I left, Mrs. Watts would invite that big gray cat back into the room and the two of them would sit and watch television. That was one thing I had to get used to after I was reunited with my dad. The television. He hooted at it. He pointed at it. He got cross with it. He and the television laughed with one another as I tried to sleep in the next room. I did not say anything, because I understood that the television and my dad were close friends.
I looked over at the lace curtains. I could not imagine a young scholarship girl from the island living next door alone, and in a room like this. I looked out at the world. It was so silent out there. Mr. Watts once told us kids that silence was the first language he was born to. In a playful mood he told us how he’d stood on a rubbish bin and smashed its sides with a broom handle for something to do. He was five years old, and nothing resulted from his attack on the bin. Silence returned to fill the gaps in the shattered world. I understood there were no parrots where Mr. Watts was from. There was no wild shrieking that at the most unexpected moment can tear open your heart. There was just all this empty life where lantern blossom hung waiting to be admired and dogs prowled the street in search of an audience.
Sitting in the dead air of Mrs. Watts’ living room, I thought, Grace must have seen that sky and those same slow-moving clouds. She must have had this same deathly drag on her heart that I felt.
I got up to leave.
“I suppose you know about his theater thing,” Mrs. Watts said quickly.
I suspect it was her trump card. She wanted me to stay.
She crouched down on that bad hip of hers to ferret in a low bookcase until she yanked a scrapbook free. She slapped the dust off it and handed it to me. The scrapbook was filled with theater programs, reviews, and photographs of Mr. Watts playing various characters. I looked over the program covers—An Inspector Calls, Pygmalion, The Odd Couple, Death of a Salesman. These are just the ones I remember. There were so many of them, and so many photographs of Mr. Watts in costume. It was clear these productions were by an amateur theater group—there was the raised hand clasping the dagger, the flourishes of cape, and the insane glint in the eye of the jealous, the tormented, the dangerous, the vengeful—all those cheap and easy emotions that amateur theater is drawn to. I kept turning the pages.
“That’s Tom in The Queen of Sheba,” June Watts said. “And that’s her there. Queen bloody Sheba. The director had some funny ideas about that script.” At that moment our eyes fell upon the same detail. “Oh look. You were asking about that. I remember now. The director thought Tom should wear a red clown’s nose and the Queen of Sheba should stand in a trolley pulled by Tom to show some meeting of minds had been achieved. Don’t ask me how or why…”
Mr. Watts and Grace looked so young. Without the help of June Watts I wouldn’t have recognized them. But what was strange was Grace. She was smiling. I had never before seen her smile.
I must have been taking too long with the scrapbook because Mrs. Watts suggested I take it. When she saw me hesitate, she said, “It means nothing to me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, what am I going to do with it?”
“It’s very kind of you,” I said.
She shrugged.
“It’s just sitting there. And there’s just me and Mr. Sparks here.”
She meant the cat.
She saw me glance at my watch. “You have to go. All right,” she said, and she painfully picked herself up off the floor.
As we stood at the door to say our good-byes she said, “My husband was a fantasist. I didn’t know this when I married him.”
“Mrs. Watts, can you tell me what happened to Grace? Do you know why she was taken to the mental hospital?”
“Queen of Sheba. She couldn’t snap out of it,” she said. “Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Take your pick.”
She frowned out at the street.
“Watch yourself. They’ll skin you for your clothes.”
I looked out at the same stark street but didn’t see another soul.
I thanked her for the afghans and the scrapbook. I was in a hurry to get back to town but realized I had one last question.
“Mrs. Watts, is there someone by the name of Miss Ryan?”
“Eileen Ryan. Why yes. She used to live at the end of the street.” She turned to point out the house, then seemed to catch herself. “Why do you ask?”
I ignored the question. “Does she have a big rambling garden?”
“She did years ago. Yes. But she’s dead now. She was blind, you know. Eileen Ryan.” She looked at me. “How do you know that name? Tom used to mow her lawns for her.”
I HAD A FRAGMENT. The acting part of Mr. Watts. So, what about it? The fact he enjoyed acting gnaws away with its questions of sincerity. Especially when I think about Mr. Watts’ classroom gestures. The stare to the back of the room. His eyes rolling up to the ceiling. The studied pose of a man thinking and considering. Was this Mr. Watts, or an actor playing Mr. Watts the schoolteacher? Who was it that us kids saw in the classroom? A man who genuinely thought Great Expectations to be the greatest novel by the greatest English writer in the nineteenth century? Or a man left with only a morsel who will claim it the best meal of his life?
I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see. I have no idea of the man June Watts knew. I only know the man who took us kids by the hand and taught us how to reimagine the world, and to see the possibility of change, to welcome it into our lives. Your ship could come in at any time, and that ship could take many forms. Your Mr. Jaggers might even turn out to be a log.
I had hoped to get more from my visit to Mrs. Watts. I guess I was hoping to have heard stories. I had the scrapbook, and it answered the mystery about the red nose. Otherwise, Mr. Watts was as elusive as ever. He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill. We needed a teacher, Mr. Watts became that teacher. We ne
eded a magician to conjure up other worlds, and Mr. Watts had become that magician. When we needed a savior, Mr. Watts had filled that role. When the redskins required a life, Mr. Watts had given himself.
MR. DICKENS WAS EASIER TO UNDERSTAND than Mr. Watts. For one thing, more of his life is available and on show. Shelves of libraries are given over to the life of Dickens and his works. An interest in Dickens is more easily rewarded than any effort at playing Mr. Detective and investigating the life of Mr. Watts. The contents of Dickens’ life have been ransacked and sifted over by experts, and I was well on my way to becoming one of them.
For a long time all I knew about this dead man was what Mr. Watts told us kids, and what I could glean from a sneaked look at the back cover of Mr. Watts’ copy of Great Expectations. Mr. Dickens looked exactly how I would have wanted him to look. I was reassured by his beard. It wasn’t tidy, but as with Mr. Watts’ own beachcomber’s variety it did look inevitable and therefore right. I also liked his narrow frame contained by a waistcoat. I had an idea he would be kind. His crinkly, warm eyes supported that idea. And so do his many articles on the poor and orphaned, which I pored over in the British Library on Euston Road in London.
Spread before me were all the fragments of life that had gone into the making of Great Expectations. I could magpie through all his personal papers. I could study his own handwriting. I could look at the same things he had looked at—the stone-cold streets, the soaring ambition of the buildings, the vagrants, the drunks, the muddy banks of lives stuck and in decline—and trace the view back to the imagined one.
At first, hardly a day passed when I did not congratulate myself on landing here in Mr. Dickens’ city. I also loved the sweet feeling of privilege, which never failed me, as I presented my ID card to a bored guard in black uniform sitting behind a clear desktop.
You enter a room lined with long desks, and lamplight that is not too bright or too dim, but just right. Everything was just right. I loved the fact you could call up anything—in my case, papers, books, and articles on and by Dickens himself—and within the hour that material would be found in the bowels of this great library. For the first few months of this I felt blessed.
There were, however, times when I wished I had someone to share what I had found. That Dickens, like Mr. Watts, was not quite the man I thought he was. The man who writes so touchingly and powerfully about orphans cannot wait to turn his own kin out the door. He wants them out in the world. He worries that home will smother their ambition. He wants them carving their own way by dint of hard work.
So his son Walter is packed off to India before he is seventeen and dies aged twenty-two. Sydney dies in the navy in his twenties. Francis joins the Bengal Mounted Police, but affected by a stammer he flees to the wilderness and dies in Canada aged forty-two.
Alfred and Plorn, Dickens dispatches to Australia. Edward’s his favorite, “his darling Plorn.” “I need not tell you that I love you dearly and am very, very sorry in my heart to part with you. But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne.” Australia, his father decides, will sort him out and flush out his natural abilities.
ONE MORNING I delayed my daily trip to the British Library to visit the old Foundling Hospital in Brunswick Square. These days it is an orphans museum. It is very grand. You mount a wide sweep of steps. Inside, its walls are covered with painterly scenes of the orphanage; in some, the mothers line up to hand their babies over. I remember my own mum holding her arms out to me. I remember the slow open and close of her airless mouth. I remember feeling torn apart. Yet on the faces of the mums in the paintings I could find no trace of distress. You see the same slightly bored faces at a supermarket checkout. How easy it is, these paintings report, to hand over your child. In the gallery upstairs I found a more accurate picture in the form of glass cabinets filled with buttons, acorns, hairclips, pennies with holes drilled—tiny, pathetic keepsakes mums left behind for their babies to remember them by. A pointless exercise, it turns out, because the first thing the orphanage did was to change the baby’s name. With a different name their old history would end and a new one would begin. Pip could become Handel.
GRAVESEND IS WHERE I would have ended Great Expectations. Gravesend. And this is where I came one cold day in late May. I walked past benches filled with silent Indian men in colorful turbans, a layer of sadness dampening their cheeks. I saw them sneak a look at me, a young woman blacker than any they had ever seen. I saw their eyes and their wonder. What is she thinking? That black girl with the darting white eyes. What does she know about this landscape?
I could tell them the landscape from Great Expectations is gone, that its fabled marshes lie beneath motorways and industrial estates. I could tell them that the story has new custodians. These custodians were once a bunch of black kids, who I believe still wake in the early hours to remember another time, when they drifted between an island and a blacksmith’s, on the marshes in England in eighteen-hundred-and-something.
You have to work a bit harder in Dickens’ old neighborhood to see what he did. The emigrant ships are ghosts. The sight of bareheaded men and women waving handkerchiefs from the decks are history, bones in some cemetery on the other side of the world.
There is a nicely paved river walk, and if you walk in the same direction taken by the old emigrant ships, it is impossible not to think about departure. Leave. Go. Get away. Make yourself new.
There is the river, pointing the way out of this muddy world. As I wandered past the mission, where emigrants were rowed ashore to say a few prayers as insurance for their sea journey into the unknown, I found myself thinking back to the last time I was alone with Mr. Watts.
I had not thought about that conversation for years. Like so many things, I probably blocked it out. I wonder now, at that moment he turned away, if Mr. Watts had made up his mind to leave the island without me. Because it seems to me, thinking about it all these years later, that what I felt was a parting, a line drawn. I have called it a line, but maybe it is better to talk about a curtain. A curtain dropped between Mr. Watts and his most adoring audience. He would move on and I would shift into that burial ground occupied by figures of the past. I would be a small speck on a large island as he sat in Mr. Masoi’s boat motoring from one life to another. I knew that is what would happen, would have happened, because it had happened to me. The moment I left I never looked back.
THERE WAS THE LONG TRAIN ride back to London Bridge. I felt inexplicably downhearted. As if I had fallen backwards into myself. And I was back with mourning before that flood erased everything. I looked out the carriage window. The baby green leaves of spring growth made no impression on my glum mood. The singing conductor failed to win a smile from me.
When I left the station I had to drag myself up the steps to street level. This tiredness. Where had it come from? I knew what it was to climb steep tracks in the hills. What were a few flights of filthy steps lined with beggars and Gypsy kids whose eyes moved faster than any fish I ever saw?
I walked home wishing I had some other place to go. I climbed the stale carpet of the stairs in the boardinghouse and, opening the door to my bedsit, stood for a moment on the threshold, unable to enter.
There were the trappings of my life—the mounted photograph of Dickens, an article blown up to poster size announcing publication of Great Expectations in book form. There was my desk and that pile of paper known as my thesis. It had sat there all day waiting for me to get back from Gravesend with fresh material. It had sat there like Mr. Watts had once, with his secret exercise book, waiting for fragments. Well, I didn’t have any fresh material. All I had lugged back with me was this heaviness, which sat deep inside, in my bones, and which had come over me quickly like bad weather.
The only thing I could think to do was to get into bed. And there I stayed.
For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slow
ness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
I listened to the buses change down gear outside the boardinghouse. I listened to the hiss of tires on the wet road. I lay in bed listening to the woman downstairs get ready for work. I listened to her run the shower and the shrill whistle on her kettle. I waited for her footsteps on the path below my window, and as that brief contact with the world departed I shut my eyes and begged the walls to let me go back to sleep.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn’t usefully announce itself. No. What happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me.
ONE MORNING I woke and threw back the covers. I was up before the woman downstairs. I walked across to my desk. I was being urged to do something I had put aside for too long. I took the top sheet of paper from “Dickens’ Orphans,” turned it over, and wrote “Everyone called him Pop Eye.”
I wrote that sentence six months ago. Everything that follows I wrote over the intervening months. I have tried to describe the events as they happened to me and my mum on the island. I have not tried to embellish. Everyone says the same thing of Dickens. They love his characters. Well, something has changed in me. As I have grown older I have fallen out of love with his characters. They are too loud; they are grotesques. But strip away their masks and you find what their creator understood about the human soul and all its suffering and vanity. When I told my father of my mum’s death he broke down and wept. That is when I learned there is a place for embellishment after all. But it belongs to life—not to literature.
I HAD DECIDED to leave England, but had one more farewell task to perform. This involved a visit to Rochester, where Dickens pinched one or two landmarks for Great Expectations.