by Lynne Truss
‘So what be aall this tork o marryin?’ she asked Mary Ryan, who had just returned from shooing Lionel Tennyson out of the pantry. (The servants had a rota for this job.)
‘Marrying?’
Mary Ann spluttered in disbelief.
‘Be you forgooat?’ she exclaimed. ‘When old me nabs ketch’d you in yon traance, zee what you zed o ticin a townser!’
Mary Ryan looked perplexed, as well she might.
‘What do you say, Mary? Can we start again at “marrying”?’ she suggested, without facetiousness.
But Mary Ann had started to enjoy herself, repeating the story of Mary Ryan’s wiggled Self Esteem, in a dialect so impenetrable that alas for the consequences, it left the exact contents to be guessed at only vaguely.
Mary Ryan picked up only that she had discussed her marriage prospects with Lorenzo Fowler in front of a room full of people. But why? Had he predicted she would marry well? Why couldn’t she remember?
Meanwhile Mary Ann kept jabbering and mangling, with considerable gusto. It was not often she spoke her thoughts aloud, which was just as well. It was like hearing the Rokeby Venus speak in the accents of a Tyneside shipbuilder.
‘Thee wast querken like a wold zow then, bwoy!’ she said. ‘The whole show wudn’t nowhere near what twas puted to be, but “I know my worth” zes shee. If thee gits vound out, there’ll be a pretty piece o work! An I dooan’t gee noohow. Them towner rantipikes be no count at all anyways, swap me bob.’
Mary Ryan recognized the last bit. ‘Swap me bob’ meant ‘So help me God’, but goodness knew what the other stuff entailed. Rantipike? What was a rantipike? But one thing was certain. She must consult Lorenzo Fowler as soon as possible.
Mary Ann had changed the subject. ‘Have ye zid the wold cappender about y’ere lately? A was here yes’day smaamen over the back door wi tar but I han’t zid nothen on en zunce.’
Mrs Cameron put her head round the door. ‘Is all well?’ she asked.
‘Mary Ann has caught her hair in the mangle again, madam,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘Shall I cut it all off to save us the trouble every day of saving it?’
Mrs Cameron looked shocked, and then burst out laughing. Mary Ann, temporarily unable to raise her neck from waist-height, gaped with astonishment.
‘You are a bad girl, Mary Ryan,’ said Mrs Cameron.
Mary Ann tried to extricate herself but couldn’t.
‘Swap me bob!’ she said.
Ellen and Tennyson continued their walk on the cliff.
‘Does your husband work on any canvases here in Freshwater?’
‘I am sure he will ask you to pose again, sir,’ said Ellen. ‘Otherwise, I have high hopes for “Take Care of the Pence and the Pounds Will Take Care of Themselves”, a new painting in which coins of small denomination are tucked up in Crimean hospital beds, while bank notes exercise in the fresh air, with a set of Indian clubs.’
Tennyson tried to picture it.
‘I was joking,’ added Ellen quickly.
‘Oh,’ said Tennyson gravely. ‘A joke. But not a disrespectful one, I hope? It sounded slightly disrespectful. Watts is a very fine painter, my dear, even if sometimes a little misguided by his enthusiasm for simple verities.’
She didn’t argue. But she had to admit that this walk was putting her right off Tennyson. He’d told her to say ‘luncheon’ instead of ‘lunch’, and was fiercely emphatic about it, even though London fashion had now swung quite the other way. Why were people always telling her off? Surely she made it clear often enough that she didn’t like it. They walked on.
‘Will you take me down to your special cove today?’ she said.
‘I will if you desire it. But it’s a steep climb, my dear. Do you think you can manage?’
‘Of course, sir, lead the way,’ she said. But then she remembered the modest size of her Caution, and wondered whether she was muddling foolhardiness with firmness again.
‘My only fear, sir,’ she added, ‘is that, were I to slip, I would knock you down ahead of me.’
Alfred frowned, and then had an idea.
‘Then you shall go first!’ he said.
Eight
Unluckily for her friends, Mrs Cameron never stopped to consider why she gave presents all the time; why she flattered, helped, donated and worshipped to such an embarrassing degree. Perhaps she spent her whole life compensating for being the only unattractive sister in a family of beauties. While Tennyson’s family were all mad, and Ellen’s all flighty, and Dodgson’s all boring, Julia’s were all knockdown dazzlers who caused breaches of the peace in London shopping districts. It wasn’t easy being nicknamed ‘Talent’ in these circumstances. To be called ‘Talent’ when your sisters include ‘Beauty’, ‘Dash’ and ‘Eyebrows’ sounds a bit like a codeword for ‘Ugly’.
Whatever the cause, however, Julia might reasonably have asked, ‘What’s so wrong with giving presents?’ In fact, she asked it repeatedly, because her benevolence was treated like an impediment or a club foot. Why weren’t people just grateful? But when anyone said ‘You shouldn’t have!’ to Julia Margaret Cameron, they usually meant it. On receiving a prayer book from her, Thomas Carlyle is supposed to have said, ‘Either the devil or Julia Cameron has sent this!’ Such bad grace bewildered and hurt her, but did not put her off. When she met with rebuff, she deduced that the present was at fault, and conceived a better one. Thus was she caught in an ever-tightening spiral, requiring more and more profligate ingenuity.
For Julia would not learn. She had Benevolence so enormous that her lace cap wouldn’t fit her head properly and was always falling off. Items were returned with polite demurrals; high-quality wallpaper was not hung; she was rhetorically lumped together with the father of lies; and worst of all, those inferior persons who were objects of her charity simply forgot their debt and took their luck for granted. She just couldn’t understand it. If an allegorical picture of Mrs Cameron were attempted, she often thought it would have to depict ‘More Kicks than Ha’pence’.
Look at the ungrateful Mary Ryan, snatched from poverty (and a dirty gypsy mother) on Putney Heath, and reared by Mrs Cameron at her own personal expense. ‘You are too good, Julia,’ friends said. ‘The girl is inexpressibly fortunate.’ Yet the girl herself was blind to the claims of charity. She was sullen, she refused to be beautiful in any useful photographic way, and she whined about her position in the household – was she a maid or a daughter? Why had she been educated if she was meant only for housework? Why was that dullard Mary Ann given all the nice jobs? Mrs Cameron was exasperated by such ungrateful talk. Mary Ryan was now joking about cutting off Mary Ann’s lovely hair!
‘Doesn’t she realize that without my intervention, she might be dead of neglect?’ Mrs Cameron railed bad-temperedly at Mary Ann, in her quiet time. Mary Ann, instead of speaking, tilted her very best ‘Eve Repentant’ profile, knowing how well a picture of feminine humility broke Mrs Cameron’s heart. She was looking particularly soulful these days, because she was in love. Ever since the lecture, she had dreamed of young Herbert – such an exotic young creature, with such an unusual figure!
Julia’s old white-beard husband kept aloof from such upsets, although he pitied her when she stormed into his bedroom, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘Thrown back in my face,’ she would cry, pacing up and down. ‘Thrown back in my face.’ Generally supportive in a wry, ironic, bedridden kind of way, he would nevertheless gently warn her when he thought she expected too much from Mary Ryan, or when her grand, unlikely presents overstepped the mark. The Elgin Marbles wallpaper for Farringford was a case in point.
‘Perhaps you went too far, my dear, although acting as always from the best intentions?’ her husband suggested. ‘And the mutton was a lovely idea, Julia, except that the Farringford estate is over-run with sheep. See the white fluffy things on the downs?’
She sat on his bed, and slumped, helpless.
‘I shall knit you a muffler, Charles,’ she said.
‘If it gives you pl
easure, Julia.’
This was non-committal without being rude, and was his usual, well-practised response. As Julia had complained to Mr Watts, it avoided saying thank you and thereby implying an obligation.
‘See, Charles, I have converted the vegetable plot into a lawn overnight! You said you wished we had more grass!’ Julia would declare.
Or, ‘While you were asleep I redecorated your bedroom! You said you preferred a darker shade!’
And rather than discouraging her by saying, ‘You’re mad, Julia,’ he would smile. ‘If it makes you happy, my dear.’
But what was the problem with this Elgin Marbles wallpaper, you ask? Well, obviously, it had the Elgin Marbles on it. As with so many of Julia’s presents, the wallpaper was a gift inadequately thought through. Where would it hang at Farringford? Did it accord with the Tennysons’ usual taste? What did it say about how Julia perceived her friends?
‘She thinks we belong in the British Museum,’ said Emily.
Yet Julia had such a powerful vision of Alfred’s pleasure on receiving this imaginative gift (‘Julia, what a kind person you are’) that she had been unable to resist it. She had little idea what discord it would sow between Alfred and Emily, who were now scarcely on speaking terms. Lord Elgin and his wallpaper were now touchy subjects at Farringford. Lionel Tennyson had noticed (with delight) that even if you dropped the words ‘Parthenon’ or ‘Great Russell Street’ fairly innocently into a conversation, you would get some very sour looks.
‘Let’s burn the damn stuff,’ Alfred had said.
‘But how would Julia feel? She is such a good friend, Alfred.’
‘Would you rather we hung it on the walls and let it look at us?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then.’
Emily was glad that Julia could not ensnare Alfred’s better nature by the gift of a few baubles; but at the same time horrified by the possibility that he simply had no better nature to ensnare.
‘It must be frustrating for Julia,’ she sympathized, but only half-heartedly. It was quite comical, actually, from Emily’s point of view. That Julia openly adored Alfred did not impress him; he regarded it as only natural. That her unreturned attentions made her unhappy was nothing to him. The stream of votive presents were an amusement (‘What’s it today? A teapot!’); now that Emily had started sending things back, he was puzzled, nothing more.
Emily ordered that the wallpaper be piled at the base of Alfred’s little spiral staircase – the special escape route built on the corner of his library so that he could avoid meeting invaders and invited guests. Emily felt he had been passing her the problem and forcing her to solve it; this seemed like a good passive way of handing it back. Every time he ran down his stairs, he would have to vault six rolls of wallpaper.
This was only fair. Emily protected her husband from so much that was unpleasant, she refused to protect him from well-meant gifts as well. Another letter from ‘Yours in aversion’ had arrived this morning, and she put it in her pocket unopened, as always. She was glad now, anyway, that she never warned Alfred about the imminent arrival of Mr Dodgson. By some unknowable stroke of good fortune, the dreadful fellow had not shown up.
The great delight at Dimbola Lodge was the discovery that they had a new genius in their midst. To add to the greatest living poet and the greatest living painter, Julia could now lay claim to the greatest living nonsense writer (Edward Lear always gave her the cold shoulder anyhow). So while Dodgson took beef tea in sips and continued to mislay his reason, the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was read by everybody, even old Mr Cameron, who particularly approved the Cheshire Cat, and the philosophical discussion between the King, Queen and executioner about whether a head can be beheaded when it is not connected to a neck.
‘I could quite happily think about this logical point for a week or more, Julia, if I were not excited with unexpected presents.’
All Mrs Cameron’s former dislike of Dodgson – based only on reputation – was now swept away by her enthusiasm for Lewis Carroll. ‘I refuse to believe Mr Dodgson was overcome by the size of his own organs,’ she said. ‘The sheer imaginative effort of writing this book could break the constitution of any man. But I do wish the poor fellow would recover himself,’ she added. ‘I want to know why a raven is like a writing desk.’
Watts grew cross and grumpy, but Julia barely noticed. All weekend, everything was Alice this, and Alice that. Il Signor got almost no attention. Julia’s behaviour was quite insensitive, and her noisy trilling about Alice was causing him a headache. On Sunday he had set up his easel and begun work on the recolouring of Ellen’s portrait (‘Choosing’), but nobody asked him why the rosy cheeks were turning pale. Every time he sat down to instruct Julia on the Italian masters, too, she would think of some other mad coincidence that brought the world of Alice closer to her own existence.
‘How extraordinary, George, that I painted my roses on Wednesday! You see, that is the sort of thing that may have set him off. As we both know, George, genius must always be treated with delicacy.’
Watts winced.
‘In that case, could you call me Il Signor?’
‘Of course, George. Just say the word. But I feel sure the way to jolt him out of this state is to bring Alice alive for him in some way – perhaps little Daisy. What do you think? We could do tableaux! Ellen says that before his breakdown, he always stammered, people supplied his words for him. Now he speaks fluently, but nonsense. The human mind is fascinating, hm?’
Watts shrugged and stared out of the window toward the bay, where he saw Ellen approaching with Tennyson, just in time for tea. Ellen really was very beautiful. It was such a shame he couldn’t do anything about it.
‘Haydon came to me again in the night,’ Watts confided.
Julia said, ‘Did he, dear?’ but she had followed his gaze to Alfred and the pretty girl, and was not really listening. It was truly irritating that Mrs Watts was the living Maud. Julia loved Alfred better than anybody, and he was always rotten to her because she was not young or pretty.
‘Yes. The poor dead fellow was shaking his fist at me and pointing to the place where he cut his throat.’
‘Don’t take it to heart,’ she said, still preoccupied. ‘It was really not your fault. It was the yankee midget, as I told you before. Live for the present, George.’
‘But Julia –’
Ellen and Tennyson arrived at the front door, and Julia recovered herself with a great effort.
‘And what a coincidence that we have a Mary Ann in the house when there is one in Alice, too!’
Watts gave in. Was there any profit in pointing out that half the maids in England were called Mary Ann? Probably not.
‘Fancy,’ he clucked.
‘What’s that, George?’
‘Mary Ann, fancy that. What an uncanny coincidence. Ellen’s first name is Alice, too, did you know? Another accident which isn’t one really.’
‘No?’
‘No, she tells me that Dodgson met her and admired her when she was only eight. She has concluded that the child in the book is her.’
‘Little Alice is Mrs Watts!’ Julia exclaimed in disbelief, as she watched Ellen arrive at the front door and remove her bonnet.
‘Oh I don’t think so, not Mr Dodgson too,’ she muttered. ‘That silly girl can’t inspire everybody.’
After tea, Ellen was commissioned to sit upstairs with Dodgson for an hour, to see if there was anything she could do. Mary Ann came with her. They found him sitting morose in a high-backed chair beside an open sashed window, dressed in a heavily embroidered Indian shirt and a purple fez, evidently some inappropriate gifts from Julia. His gaze was far out to sea, and he hardly looked around when the others entered. His demeanour reminded Ellen of the mad scenes she had seen in Shakespeare – people are always mad when there is a crashing shore nearby, it seemed. If she dared, she would put her orchids in Dodgson’s hair and tousle it a little.
But what really i
mpressed her was that Dodgson, in this big shell of a chair, reminded her of the Mock Turtle on the sand in Alice, which she had read again that morning. So she sat on a low stool, quietly, and listened to the distant breaking waves, wondering who would play the Gryphon to complete the picture.
Mary Ann spoke up, with a big effort to sound normal.
‘This here young lady,’ she said, ‘she wants to know your history, she do.’
Dodgson looked at Ellen, and then at the sea again, and then turned back. Demented or not, he certainly looked unhappy – as you would, too, if you were remembering that you were a real turtle once.
‘I’ll tell it to you,’ he said. ‘Sit down both of you, and don’t speak a word until I’ve finished.’
Since they were already both sitting down, they did not move. They glanced at each other, and Ellen put her finger to her lips. She had a plan to remind him of his normal self.
‘Once,’ he said, with a deep sigh, ‘I was a real t—’
‘Turtle?’ Ellen prompted.
Dodgson bit his lip, and looked back out of the window. Biding for time, he wiped a tear with the back of his hand.
‘When we were little, we went to school in the sea,’ he continued. ‘The master was an old turtle. We used to call him T—’
‘Tortoise?’ she interrupted.
Dodgson sobbed, as though a bone was in his throat, and tried again.
‘You may not have lived much under the sea, and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster –’
‘No, but I would love to see a Lobster Quadrille!’ said Ellen.
Dodgson put his hands to his head and closed his eyes. This wasn’t supposed to happen. When he opened them again, the little girl was still sitting at his feet, with her chin in her hands, her big childish eyes gazing up at him. ‘Alice?’ he said. ‘Is it you, Alice?’
