“What do you see?” he asked her.
She put a thumb on her chin and scrutinized his face in every detail. “I see a man who feels set upon.”
“That’s it,” he said. “So hemmed in by people who want a bit or a piece or a pence of him—that he’s exhausted from want of air.”
“A beleaguered man.”
“Who wants to be left alone.”
“Yes. I see him, too,” she said, with a hand so lightly on his shoulder that he couldn’t feel it through his coat. “Now close your eyes.”
He hesitated. What a simple request, to shut one’s eyes. Yet it had been so long since he’d trusted anyone through and through, at least without satisfying his own curiosity first, gaining assurances, wanting to suggest terms, if not dictate demands. In his earliest writing days, when he was only “Boz,” agreements were made of handshakes and blind faith. Everything was complicated now, involving more people, more paper, more lawyers and grubbing, money-changing hands than he’d ever imagined. And still, he felt exposed and unprotected. But Eleanor engendered trust and faith, and seemed to want nothing in return. So he closed his eyes and waited.
The slide of a drawer opening, creak of a closet door, unlatching of a steamer trunk. Dickens guessed, from the clanks and dings and subtle whooshes of air, that she was rifling through props and costumes. Eleanor was humming to herself, soft and lilting, the singing voice he remembered from her stage debut. He liked the happy sound of her hands at work, with a periodic pause to exclaim some small victory under her breath. Whatever she was searching for, she was finding.
Soon his hat slid from his head, replaced with the stretch, wiggle, and tug of a headpiece over his scalp, all the way to his ears and down to his neck, his hair tucked underneath it.
“May I look?” he asked.
“No, not yet.”
The flat of a hand, or something like it, pressed against his forehead and then the sides of his face.
“Now may I?” he pleaded, impatient.
“Hmm. Just one more thing.”
A rummaging on the dressing table in front of him tickled his ear, the light jingle of tangled necklaces, the sorting of metal buttons, brooches, rings. He could see in his mind’s eye a small open box spilling over with trinkets.
“Yes!” she said. “This will do the trick.”
A pair of spectacles came to rest on the bridge of his nose, and the barest wind of her fingers looped them behind his ears.
“There,” she said. “Now you may look.”
Dickens opened his eyes slowly, fully expecting some version of himself thinly disguised. But there was an old man staring back at him, seventy at least, with a blotchy bald scalp at the top and prodigious tufts of unruly white hair sticking out at the sides. Thick woolly muttonchops stuck to his cheeks and jowls. The little gold-rimmed spectacles changed the nature of his nose entirely, which now seemed to have lived much longer than he had, the way old noses droop and hook. Wiry white eyebrows sat over the glasses like a pair of old terriers and sunk his eyes into a beady, hard gray. His skin seemed sallow in spots, where it wasn’t mottled like marble. His forehead, maybe from the weight of the well-made wig, sported furrows like a field in winter. The whole face turned downward and mean, animated more by shadow than light. A scowl settled naturally on his lips.
“Uncanny,” he said. “Why, I hardly know myself.”
“Yet you’re the same man on the inside.”
He stood and leaned closer to inspect his reflection in the mirror, turning his head one way, then the other, admiring his clever new disguise. “But now able to walk the streets of London free from the critics, creditors, and hangers-on that plague my every hour!”
Eleanor returned his hat to his head. She stood back, pleased with the effect, but with a look of wanting perhaps one more thing. She put her hands at the plaited waist of her skirt and searched the room. Her eyes sparked when she spotted a silver claw-and-ball–handled cane leaning against the wall. She handed it to him with a flourish, like a knight’s squire.
“Your cane, sir.”
“Perfect,” he said, hunching his shoulders into a full stoop when he took hold of it. The rosewood cane seemed to become part of him, a natural extension of his wizened frame. Taking his first rickety steps as the new old man he’d become, he hobbled across the room, then stopped and shook his cane.
“Oh, Miss Lovejoy,” he said, cackling like a crotchety old griper. “This takes me back to my theatrical days!”
Carried away, he stepped grandly onto a hemming stool, spreading his arms wide. “Oh, to be young and on the stage, playing with fire, sitting on babies, falling off scaffolding … and all with no harm or injury, in fact, the coroner need never be called!”
Eleanor’s eyes kindled to each word. She clapped and laughed.
“And applause, yes!” he exclaimed. “Because we have given every man, woman, and child an hour or two to forget the real world, and let them rejoin it with their sense of wonder restored. Never mind the press of people, the poking umbrellas, and irreconcilable cabs. We are all players in the great pantomime of life!”
“Bravo!” she shouted. “Bravo!”
Dickens took off his hat and bowed deeply, like a great tragedian basking in the admiration of the house. When he straightened up, a thought struck him with blunt force.
“Why, perhaps India’s not a bad idea after all.”
“India?” she asked with an inquisitive smile.
“India, indeed! A Shakespearean troupe!” He gestured with his cane across the room, as if an entire continent lay before him. “It is a vast, untapped market!” He pointed his cane at her emphatically. “And you, Miss Lovejoy! With your dazzling debut on the stage? Why not join our company as well, and at last have the actor’s life you’re meant for?”
Eleanor gazed up at him, playing along. She pressed her hands to her flushed cheeks, melodrama perfected. “India! But how ever will we live?”
“Ah. On love and art alone!”
“A rich diet, indeed!” she said. “But still, India’s such a long way.”
“But just imagine, will you?” he said, stepping off the stool toward her, his hat to his chest. “A sea of lovestruck admirers, all done in by the incomparable beauty and talents of one Miss Eleanor Lovejoy, the greatest actress ever to grace the Indian stage … or whatever it is we perform on in India.”
She curtsied and laughed, bright fearless notes. Her whole being glowed like a chandelier with a thousand crystal facets. Stunned by her luminance, he stepped even closer, very quiet. Every detail in sharp focus. Twinkling eyes, downy hair at her temple, the soft-pointed chin. Eleanor didn’t flinch, didn’t blush. A sudden seriousness had come down on them like a curtain.
“But no one in all of India…” he whispered, “more done in than I.”
Eleanor stumbled backward, catching herself on the edge of the dressing table. All the light drained from her face. Dickens had an instinct to reach out to her, offer a hand or an elbow to brace against. She turned sharply away, joined her palms together, and pressed them to her lips. He stepped back, too, having blundered where he had no business to. It was a whim, a fancy, a fool notion that had invaded his imagination before he had time to defend against it. His own brazenness mortified him, but it was too late to offer amends. There was no making a joke of it, no taking it back.
“I’ve said the wrong thing, Miss Lovejoy,” he said, gripping the brim of his hat. “I’m so sorry.”
Eleanor closed her eyes and lowered her chin, one hand against the scalloped trim of her collar. Her fingers trembled, whether from anger or repulsion, or even fear, he couldn’t tell. He waited to be reproached, without moving or speaking. It was what he deserved. At last, she opened her eyes slowly and raised her gaze to his.
“No,” she said. “India is a beautiful dream. But I am not at liberty … to dream.”
Dickens nodded with sorry eyes. Sorry to have tripped, unthinking, into a moment that pierced their
lighthearted bubble. Of course she was right. There was no liberty between them at all. He had not kept his marriage a secret, from her or from anyone else. And had no intention of betraying his wife any more than he already had. He didn’t understand the kinship he felt toward her, or gratitude maybe, or some ineffable affinity of nature and qualities. Eleanor could never be more to him than this, but in her presence, “this” felt like everything.
“Nor am I,” he said. “At liberty to dream.”
“Of course,” she said. “We are, neither of us—”
“Timothy, is it?” he blundered, before she could finish or he could think better of asking.
Eleanor startled. “You know him?”
“Of him, perhaps,” he said, stuttering apologetically, once again embarrassed that he had snuck, uninvited, into the secret corners of her life. It wasn’t like him to hunt and pry, and yet he couldn’t help himself. Eleanor opened her mouth to explain, but Dickens shook his head and held his hand up to stop her. “No. I’m sorry. It’s not my business at all. I don’t want to know anything about him. Except … do you love him very much?”
“I do,” she said, without hesitation, but considered her next words with care. “Though I confess a certain distance between us.”
Dickens knew what she meant. The distance between him and Catherine, as in all marriages, was sometimes an inch, but other times the great expanse between hill and valley, ocean and desert. It was Dante’s dark forest, shrouded in shadow, the right path so often obscured. It was being together but feeling alone. Yes, he knew what she meant, and that was enough. He tugged and peeled off the bald wig and turned it in his hand.
“A door closes at times. Even between those who’ve loved well.”
Eleanor bowed her head, saying nothing.
Dickens turned back to his own image in the mirror. Even without the wig, he seemed very old still. “I feel ridiculous.”
“Don’t, please. I couldn’t bear it,” she said, her voice hushed to a prayer. “You’re like no one I’ve ever known. And were we free to love—”
“Yes, well, it was only a dream,” he said. “Forgive me.”
23
Humiliation makes its own haste. So Dickens thought as he fled the Folly, mortified by what he’d done. He pocketed the wig and spectacles and bolted across the little square to seek refuge at Furnival’s Inn. He winced when he peeled away the pasted-on eyebrows, but his pain was well deserved. It was a keen embarrassment; there was no comfort for it, and no one to blame but himself. His head jutted forth in front of his legs, hands buried deep in the silk lining of his coat pockets. He felt a great brooding coming on, and wanted to race away from it as fast as he could.
“Charley! Wait!” a familiar voice called from behind.
Dickens didn’t turn to acknowledge the voice or slow his pace one bit. He wanted it to recede, go away, give up. But his brother Fred soon appeared, trotting beside him, gasping for breath.
“How on earth did you find me, Fred? How does everyone find me?”
“I’m afraid I had to strong-arm Topping,” said Fred. “I practically had to sit on him.”
Dickens chuffed and quickened his step.
“It’s just that I’ve been hoping to speak to you, Charley. You see, I’ve a new scheme.”
“What a surprise.”
“But am a bit shy of capital.”
“Another surprise!”
“But this idea,” said Fred hopefully, “you’re going to love it. For it capitalizes on Christmas!”
Dickens halted his march, full stop. He turned to his brother, every muscle in his face like a rubber band pulled taut. “Have we not all capitalized on Christmas quite enough?”
“But it’s a card, Charley. A holiday card. To send only at Christmastime!”
The veins in Dickens’ neck pulsed at his collar. He jutted his nose close to his brother’s face and lowered his voice two registers. “What is Christmastime to you, Fred, but a time for paying bills with no money?”
Fred retracted his weak chin into his green-and-red-checkered cravat, and stared at his shoes. Dickens expected the usual pity and regret to rise up inside him; instead, he had to resist slapping his brother’s face. He’d been a good older brother, dependable and true, collected Fred from school when they were young, taken him in when a bachelor at Furnival’s, then as a family man at Doughty Street, taken him even once to Italy, where Fred ran into difficulties swimming in the sea and had to be rescued by local fishermen. Dickens had, over the years, come to believe that his father and mother had brought up a large family with a small disposition for doing anything for themselves, himself excepted.
Fred was the least able among them. Dickens had begged favors to find him employment, which never lasted more than a few months. When Fred stumbled upon a wife for himself, he fell quickly into debt, using his older brother’s good name at the bank. But when the bank came looking, it looked for him. Fred wasn’t the only one. Relatives far and wide, if they were relatives at all—some so distant he hadn’t heard of them—and even their friends traded on Charles Dickens’ name, wrote for money, sent bills, sometimes begged. He had been ever generous despite his own mounting debts, but never more so than with Fred. He invited him to parties and dinners, often providing the additional service of wiping specks of food from his coat. And was forever ready to hear any scheme of his at all, sprinkling in ideas of his own—how to better it, sell it, give it a twist, make it sing. Fred had no lack of ideas, but was fickle and doomed, with no apparent chance of seeing anything through. Whatever Dickens had felt before, this was now clear. His brother was a luckless, feckless poor fish. And a bottom-feeder at that.
But hardest to comprehend was Fred’s unrelenting good cheer.
“Good grief, Charley. Don’t you believe Christmas begins in the heart?”
Dickens grumbled and huffed. “Let us not be childish, Fred. Christmas begins and ends in the purse. Now, good day!”
With that he stomped away, leaving his baffled brother behind him.
24
Back in his rooms, Dickens skipped supper and wrote furiously through the night. He woke in the morning at his writing table, his cheek pillowing on a stack of new pages. He rolled them up, tied them with a string, slapped water on his face, and put on his coat and hat. On the way out the door, he spotted the rosewood cane leaning against the wall and, above it on a little shelf, the headpiece, eyebrows, and spectacles Eleanor had given him. He could think of no better day to put it to the test.
The desk clerk took the key from his hand, screwed up his jagged nose, and squinted through his glasses at the old man before him.
“Excuse me, sir, but it’s twopence for the museum! I didn’t see ya go up!”
Dickens leaned in. “It’s me. Scrooge.”
The clerk raised his glasses onto his head to examine the face under the bald headpiece, the eyebrows, the clothes, the man. “I see the resemblance, sir. Ya sure it’s you?”
“Who else would I be?”
“Well, I wouldn’ta known ya.”
“Exactly the point. I am hiding from my ‘admirers.’”
The clerk regarded the aspiring writer from No. 13 as if he were quite possibly losing his mind. “Oh, I don’t think ya need to worry, Mr. Scrooge. I may not exactly be the readin’ public, but I ’eard a most people, and I ain’t never ’eard a you.”
“Which is just the way I like it!” said Dickens, planting his hat onto his great bald head and marching out.
*
The warmish weather seemed to set all of London on edge, or all of him; he couldn’t tell which. It did not deter an abundance of Christmas trumpery and gimcrack all around—holly sprigs and evergreen garlands, flickering candles and faux-snow flocking. Holiday broadsides were now in open warfare, covering each square foot of bare brick, one pasted sloppily over the other, touting RIMMEL’S IMPERIAL MOSCOVITE PERFUME & TOILET VINEGAR; COCOA & CHOCOLATE (DELICIOUSNESS OF FLAVOR UNEXCELLED); A CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME
FEATURING DICK WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT, and just in time for the holiday, BALDWIN’S NERVOUS PILLS (CURES IRRITABILITY, MELANCHOLY & INSOMNIA)! Hanging boughs were tied with garish red bows. It was clear to Dickens that mistletoe and its brethren were being employed to merry-up the town and encourage the buying and selling of things that no one needed but could not live without. If this was Christmas in a new age of commerce and leisure, he wanted none of it.
Suffused with a sense of purpose, namely, to show Forster the pages clutched in his hand, he passed through town quickly, long determined strides, his cane galloping beside him. He crossed streets as necessary to avoid bell ringers and carolers in particular, with growing confidence his incognito appearance would protect him from any variety of pest. To be certain of it, he skirted the Strand to stay out of the fashionable main, and plunged into the twisted streets tucked behind it, the quickest shortcut to where Forster would be lunching, as he did every day, at precisely twelve o’clock. Dickens turned onto raucous Holywell Street, once notorious as a rag fair for secondhand clothing, now a bustling bazaar of book and broadside sellers. Gables of crooked timber-framed buildings lurched over the street; books were stuffed into sooty windows, filling every last crack, or spilled onto trestle tables outside. A few of the shops were legitimate, but most traded in indecency, cribbing, and the splicing, rearranging, and gluing together of books in any way that might sell them.
Dickens kept his gaze trained as near to the horizon, and as far away from the cheapjacks, mongers, and peddlers, as he could. He especially wanted no part of the hawkers, every ten steps, pushing their frivolous catchpennies—nothing but fabricated stories designed for ignorant people willing to be gulled of their coins for the likes of The She He Barman of Southwark or The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square. But midway down Holywell, something in the periphery caught his eye—a bookseller’s bulging bay window jammed tight with familiar titles, in fact, he thought, his own. He edged closer to it with the vague hope that this might signal a sudden revival of his reputation. Putting his scroll of pages in his left pocket, he leaned against the glass to get a good close look. They were books, indeed, but not his at all. Instead, volumes stacked end to end: Oliver Twits, Nicky Nickleberry, and The Pickwicks in Paris, all by the “The Inimitable Baz!”
Mr. Dickens and His Carol Page 11
