Wanting (21 page)

She found him the following evening, alone in the manager’s office an hour before the performance, at work on his prompt copy.

‘Mr Dickens!’

Dickens looked up. He already had on the new make-up he had devised that day to better use the limelight. It accentuated his goatish face.

‘Why, you could be Lucifer himself, Mr Dickens!’

He suddenly reared up, threw a finger either side of his forehead, and with a ghastly face gave a roar. Ellen Ternan
leapt back squealing, and would have fallen onto a table behind her had not Dickens grabbed her by the wrist.

‘I am sorry, Miss Ternan,’ he apologised. Ellen Ternan looked down to where her wrist was held in the great author’s firm grasp. ‘A joke. A poor joke.’

‘Nevertheless, even Lucifer does not get the better of me,’ said Ellen Ternan. She wrested her wrist free. ‘I am an Englishwoman.’

‘How remarkable,’ said Dickens. ‘I mistook you for an Italian vase.’

She no longer knew what to say to one so famous, so instead she just looked him in his eyes. They were dark, and the strange make-up only amplified their blackness. She felt at once frightened by him and drawn to him. In the hope he would take her seriously, she felt obliged to say something serious.

‘I liked what you said to Mr Hueffer about the government and the war,’ she said, referring to when Dickens had taken exception to a comment made by the manager of the Free Trade Hall about the importance of winning the war in the Crimea. She had to admit, she found him rather handsome. ‘About how a highly decorated English general might be a complete fool, but his misadventures will always be a success, most particularly when they are a disaster for which words like gallantry are invented. That did make me laugh.’

Dickens smiled. Ellen Ternan smiled back, and produced from behind her back his notebook, waving it in front of him while shaking her head as though admonishing him.

‘Ruin ought be, if ruin must come, ruinously worthwhile,’ she said, not knowing this was not playing. She placed the notebook on the dressing table and slid it across to him. Just as she went to withdraw her hand, he reached out and the tips of their fingers touched. Dickens neither picked the book up nor moved his fingers away.

‘It is not going well,’ said Ellen Ternan. Her body was conscious only of his touch. But this time she did not pull her hand away. She looked up.

‘The war,’ she said, ‘I mean.’

‘Wars,’ he said, ‘rarely do.’

She felt as though lightning were passing through her body and, at the same time, utterly foolish for feeling that way.

‘Lady Franklin must be so very grateful. And Mrs Jerrold.’

And having named other women who had secured some form of favour from the great man, Ellen Ternan could not resist the hope that she, too, might find herself part of that company. She was trying to keep her breathing contained. Dickens slowly withdrew his hand and the notebook, and then—but did she imagine it? And if he did do it, she wondered, did he mean anything by it?

For, as he lifted the notebook, he traced the slightest line down her index finger with his own. And where he traced the line, her finger burnt, and there was about that burning something shameful and something wicked and something altogether wonderful.

Dickens talked about the play as if nothing had
happened, but still her finger burnt and burnt and she was unsure if anything had or hadn’t happened. And though her burning finger assured her something had, all she knew with certainty was that she wished to stay with him, have him guide her, just be in his company till the day ended and beyond.

He sought her comments on his performance.

She told him it was very powerful, but that if he were to say his lines a little slower and let them breathe with pauses, it might be astonishing. She was not quite sure why he would care to know her thoughts at all, but seeing him look so intently at her, she picked up courage and continued.

‘Let your face and hands tell the audience what it is you feel. Pull the people into you, sir, with every movement, pull them in as if you might hug them, and then and only then let your words fire into them like a cannon pressed to the heart. I have known it, sir, that when you hold a moment for so long—
then
count three beyond that before saying anything more—that it can work fulsomely well.’

She didn’t quite know what fulsomely meant, but felt it was better that something worked well in a fulsome manner than unsupported by such a brace. As she spoke, she waved her arms and hands about as if in illustration of her argument.

‘Miss Ternan,’ began Dickens.

‘Nell,’ she said. ‘Everyone calls me Nell.’

‘Nell,’ he said. ‘Very well, then.’ And in his imagination he had the overwhelming sense of those same arms, naked, wrapping around his neck, and those same hands rising up
through the hair at the back of his head as if about to join in prayer. ‘You had better call me Charles.’

She smiled.

‘On account of your
Old Curiosity Shop
, sir. Little Nell.’

By the second night, people were being turned away in their hundreds. That afternoon Dickens and Ellen Ternan met for tea in the hotel dining room. Mrs Ternan was to come, but excused herself at the final moment because she had been contacted by an old friend, with whom she had once worked in theatre and who was now married to a cotton magnate.

‘A Cottonopolis contessa,’ said Ellen Ternan. ‘Now there is an invitation no one can say no to!’

And in this way, Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens were for a third time alone together. Rather than cakes, Ellen Ternan ordered cherries, which the waiter assured her were the finest, all the way from Kent. But neither ate as they talked theatre, about which Ellen had several very funny stories new to him; politics, in which her views were not as disillusioned as those of Dickens, who could see very little prospect of any good arising, but felt the fight for sane progress must never be quit; literature, in which she shared with him a great love of the masters, Fielding and Smollett. Thackeray she enjoyed, but she secretly pleased Dickens—who was frequently beset by that most sincere of literary emotions, jealousy—when she said the great man struck her as a Clydesdale running in the Derby.

Then they laughed about things that had taken place over the last few days, he made many jokes, until, without reason, the conversation froze, and it became as impossible to talk as only a moment before it had been easy. After a silence that neither could fill, he spoke to her in a way that was halting and awkward.

‘For a long time I felt I degraded myself, giving in to what life had brought me. These last few days have…well, I can see, Nell, I can see I was wrong.’

None of what he said made any sense to Ellen Ternan. More from a sudden nervousness than any appetite, she placed a cherry she had been rolling in her fingers into her mouth, sucked the flesh for a moment as if it were a sweet, and then delicately rolled the still pulpy pit to her lips’ edge, took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it in a bowl.

Dickens stared at that spent stone with its wet threads of red flesh. He envied its good fortune. With a sudden movement, as unexpected to him as it was to her, he scooped the pip up and swallowed it. Looking back up, his eyes caught hers.

She burst out laughing and he joined in, giggling at the absurdity of it. And at that moment he felt no shame, though he wished terribly that he might feel shame, or fear, or at least concern. But to the contrary, he felt intoxicated.

Not long after Ellen Ternan returned to her room, there was a knock at her door and a messenger with an envelope.
Inside it was a card with hotel letterhead and a message in the distinctive hand she now knew as that of Dickens. ‘
Dear Miss N
,’ it began.

I wish you to know that you are the last dream of my soul. In my degradation, the sight of you has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I have known you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it
.

Burn this card
.

C
.

Ellen Ternan read and reread the card. She did not burn it. She did not really understand it. It made no more sense than his mysterious words over tea. It confused her and excited her and pressed on her. She knew it meant something, something large and ominous, but what that large and ominous thing was eluded her thinking.

Was this not a personal communication from the most famous writer in all of England addressed to her—Nelly Ternan? And was that not the most marvellous and extraordinary and remarkable thing, and was it not that this most famous writer in England thought her interesting and clever and inspiring?

She held the card close to her chest, longing to run into the room next door and tell Maria, but something warned her against that action. It
was
the most marvellous, extraordinary, remarkable thing—yet instead of telling her sister, she hid the card away at the bottom of her carpet bag. Was it those words ‘Burn this card’? She could not say. It was not age; after all, several of her friends—perfectly respectable—had married at fifteen and sixteen, some to men three times their age. No, it was something else. Mr Dickens was married. She hid it—why did she hide it? She did not know, only that doing this, if nothing else, was wise.

That night, Dickens was once again Wardour, and Wardour was even more possessed, demonic, remorseful, redeemed. Once more, he sacrificed himself for love. The sobbing of the front rows could be plainly heard.

As he played the role, Dickens was more than ever determined to behave nobly and selflessly, like Wardour. It could not go on! He must cut himself adrift from Ellen Ternan, no matter the cost, the anguish, the misery, the waking death that would be his life henceforth.

‘It was the greatest performance of the play that I could have imagined,’ Wilkie told Dickens after. ‘You literally electrified the audience.’

He could not know that, as the applause rained down and down at the play’s end, a strange sensation grew and grew in Dickens until it was the most terrible fear. He was advancing down a narrow tunnel, through the blackness of that overwhelming noise, to a place from where he would never return.

11

S
EVERAL MONTHS AFTER
the Franklins departed, the authorities once more grew concerned about keeping Van Diemen’s Land free of black rebellion. This terrifying prospect was embodied in the only native who remained: a twelve-year-old child who had largely ceased to talk and who, in a way she had learnt in Crozier’s cabin and refined in the company of the other children at the orphanage, had become absent from her life.

‘Some even believe she cast a Satanic spell over the previous Governor,’ said Montague, as the new Governor scanned the memorandum recommending Mathinna be sent back to what remained of her exiled people on Flinders Island.

‘I am an Anglican,’ said the new Governor, throwing sand over his quickly scrawled signature, ‘and thus I am relieved of the burden of having to believe in anything.’

Since so many others had left them forever, the Wybalenna natives were excited to have one child return. The arrival of Mathinna was an event. They posted lookouts on Flagstaff Hill, they rushed to the beach waving when the sloop berthed, and they began shouting when they saw the ship’s tender being lowered with a skinny black child sitting in its bow. They put their arms around her when Mathinna stepped out of the boat. It was like being the black princess of Hobart all over again. It was like the theatre plays that sometimes came to Hobart and to which Lady Jane had taken her. Only now she was both the actor and the audience.

Mathinna showed neither joy nor happiness till she realised no one would make her wear clogs on the pain of beating if she didn’t. She took off the heavy pine slippers. The skin of her feet was soft and white and flaky. The ends of her toes looked as if they had been wrapped with wet dough. She scrunched them back and forth in the wet sand of the Wybalenna beach. Behind her, waves roared. The air smelt of tea-tree and salt and life. In front of her, fairy wrens darted in the flotsam, brilliant blue in the glistening bull kelp.

She threw the clogs into a tea-tree grove.

The crowd laughed and roared approval. But she was outside of their excitement and squealing and questions. She had not returned with the albino possum that shat musket balls. She had not come back to them with laughter. She dug her toes further into the sand. She was aware of the gritty rub and rasp of life. But she was a blind
woman staring. Shoving her feet deeper and deeper, she knew it was true: she could feel nothing.

After a short time, the excitement of the Wybalenna natives evaporated. They found Mathinna strange. She saw the whites as her kin, not them.

‘Mathinna left us,’ said Gooseberry, ‘and she still gone.’

The girl found the few Aborigines she met on her return dirty, ignorant and indolent. She showed no sign of shock when she discovered the rest were dead, all buried in Robinson’s cemetery, and Robinson himself gone to Australia with his tame blacks to bring his protection to the Port Phillip Aborigines.

‘Them strangers to me,’ she told Dr Bryant, the man who now ran the settlement, in front of several of those she so maligned. ‘Just filthy strangers.’

She simply did what she always now did: cast her mind adrift, and very soon it was floating above the cemetery, looking down at the other Aborigines who had taken her there, looking at herself—no longer a beautiful child in beautiful clothes, but now a broken bough of a girl clad in a grubby brown petticoat and ripped blue pullover.

Occasionally the spindly girl said something because she had to, and, floating above, she could understand that she spoke in a manner that was neither white nor black, but in a strange way with strange words that made no sense to anyone. Who was this girl? Why did she talk this way, why this strange wavering voice?