The Dickens Boy

by Tom Keneally

  The next morning, we were driven a few blocks along Macquarie Street to meet up with Sir Charles, who our coachman told us everyone called ‘Slippery Charlie’, yet who seemed too ordinary a man for such a romantic nickname. I was ready for someone arduous and loud, but Sir Charles was dressed in sober morning suit and black neck cloth. He announced his grief at the guvnor’s passing quite elegantly, and then invited us to join him at the breakfast table. Firstly he wanted to persuade us that had our father ever visited New South Wales he would have agreed that it had a much saner and companionable balance than the neighbouring colony of Victoria, with its Customs Houses along the Murray River to gouge revenue out of anything, from a cowhide to a jug of milk to a shovel the New South Welshmen might try to export across that mighty barrier. He told us we would be meeting the New South Wales governor, one Lord Belmore, whom he described as an Ulster landlord, but not a bad chap. He also confided that Lady Belmore was sickly and wanted to be back in Fermanagh at the family estate, and that Belmore himself wanted to pursue his political career. Lord Belmore would preside over the memorial service at the Anglican cathedral later in the day.

  We were asked by Sir Charles of the tractability of the natives, and I spoke of the reliability of the Momba darks as Fred Bonney would have wanted me to, but only when invited. Fred Trollope spoke about the fact there should be some legal sanction against selectors who took up good acreage, not because they intended to farm it but to make the original leaseholder – him – pay them out. It was, opined Trollope, a form of legalised blackmail. That sort of thing had not yet occurred at Momba, I said – when pressed by Sir Charles – but it was bound to. It had happened at Poolamacca Station, said Alfred, where a notorious duffer had claimed six hundred acres of creek-front land in full knowledge that he could not sustain it as a farm but was waiting to be paid off so that he could do it again somewhere else.

  By the way Sir Charles leaned forward, we began to get that elation the innocent too easily acquire when the powerful so much as listened: that we had a hand in changing grand policy.

  After conversing with the premier, we were taken to the splendid drive of Government House and ushered into the sandstone mansion by a young subaltern of the Inniskilling Fusiliers. I thought of the photograph we had of Lieutenant Walter Dickens looking solemn and boyish, his neck emerging thin from an ample gilt collar as if the uniform was borrowed, and desperately grasping his undrawn sword by its handle with his left hand.

  The youngish governor was tall and good-looking, with a casual rather than official polish.

  ‘Oh, my heavens, how I wish this meeting were occurring on less sad terms,’ he said to all three of us as he wrung our hands. Then, addressing Alfred and me, he added, ‘When your father fell to the floor, British letters fell! Nations lie hostage to his loss.’

  So much for Trollope senior’s ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’!

  ‘I saw your father read his Dombey material one night in Belfast just – well, confound me, it was all of four years ago. He left nothing unexpressed!’

  Though Alfred and I had been predisposed to suspect this Ulster landlord, having been raised in the household of a radical, he seemed a thoughtful fellow, without superciliousness. He praised Australian claret to us and said we would be drinking it at dinner, as a fine substitute for Bordeaux.

  We went for a walk on open sward above the brilliant harbour when Lord Belmore said suddenly, ‘Of course, both you Dickens children will say a few words this afternoon? Just a memory or two of your father. I am sure the colonials will be delighted, as many read your father’s books as a cure for homesickness and will feel his loss very severely. Even the most ordinary household memory of yours will console them.’

  I was overtaken by a rush of panic which revealed itself in a stupid blush. Knowing what a test speaking would be for me, Alfred tried to excuse me from the burden, saying, ‘I will certainly be able to accommodate that.’

  ‘And Mr Edward?’ asked Lord Belmore.

  ‘I . . .’ I began, but could not find a verb to follow.

  ‘Remember the day you and I went rowing with him and he stole my hat,’ suggested Alfred. ‘Just tell people about that.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Lord Belmore chimed. ‘Just an anecdote. As if you were talking to one person.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Alfred assured me. ‘As if to one person.’

  ‘I . . . I suppose I can do that, sir,’ I told the governor, though I wondered if I could.

  Before the memorial service we were fitted out with morning suits and silk hats of the kind the guvnor despised as funerary pomp. After gathering with parliamentary and civic notables in the bright afternoon sunlight, we progressed into a vaulted church behind Belmore in his governor’s rig with sword and gaiters and cocked hat, and the bishop and attendant clergy. As Alfred and I walked towards the front of the cathedral, worthies in the pews craned to see our father’s face living on in ours. Here, it struck me that this was a far more intense funerary ceremony than the guvnor would have tolerated in the Abbey.

  I averted my eyes from those faces avid with solemnity. But I felt a sudden tremor when I saw Connie’s neat and pretty face turned to me from one of the pews, her sister and parents arrayed beside her. Her face meant more than the multitudes of features. Her gaze was straight and had no whimsy in it, and her mouth was appropriately pursed. These good people must have travelled the week to get here and would need a week to travel back! They had travelled as far to this memorial service in fact as anyone on earth should be required to. People were grateful to relatives who came a day’s journey to an English funeral. Athwart, I felt like singing. Athwart! Athwart!

  After the organ stopped, as always the air felt shocked into silence broken only by the scuffle of feet. Then, in his great cape and mitre, the bishop declared that the Lord was the resurrection and the life, that none of us has life in himself and none becomes his own master when in doubt and in death. ‘Oh God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day, our brother Charles. We thank you for giving him to us, to his family and his friends throughout the world, to know and love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage.’

  We, in our seats in the front row, answered responses and listened to the reading from the Book of Lamentations. The choir sang a plangent old dirge magnificently, and then as the bishop read from the Gospel of John, ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions’, the imminence of my having to speak drummed in me like a pulse.

  So now, without mentioning the fact that the guvnor had been a lacklustre attender of the Anglican church, the bishop dared compare the many mansions in heaven to the many mansions of the mind from which the immortal Mr Dickens had made his work, giving us tales and characters that were exemplary of all that was noblest and basest in humanity, and angels sang in his work, and what was demonic in the hearts of men and women was brought low. He expressed the hope that we should tell people in England that the Anglican communion in the distant colonies of Australia were unanimous in their applause of and grief for the death of our irreplaceable father. Alfred looked across at me and winked improbably, and punched his fist a little like an exhortation to courage.

  It was now Governor Belmore’s turn to speak. Tall and courtly in his black and silver uniform, he declared that Australia was made up of a number of congregations, that as divided as it might recently have been by the sad attack upon Prince Alfred, it was united in admiration for the late Charles Dickens. He had seen the great writer sub specie perform a reading in Belfast four years before, and as immediate as were the characters and illuminations of his books when read, incidents when recounted and acted out by Dickens convinced the audience of the depths and colour of the novels of Dickens the writer. He was the inheritance of all peoples, and in the great universal equality of death still shone with the constancy of a great star. Lord Belmore said it was his duty to signify the commiserations of the people of New South Wales to the Dickens family, and in particular to the two sons who were
present, and to call on Mr Alfred Dickens to express some sentiments about his father’s death.

  I watched Alfred as he rose from our pew and stepped forward into the echoing stone spaces before climbing up the marble step of the choir. I wondered, would I be able to do that? As he scanned the assembled crowd his face seemed to fill with blood and he frowned. Was he about to complain that no one mentions Mother, I wondered nervously. Worse still, might he say, ‘No one mentions the girl’?

  After acknowledging His Excellency and His Lordship the bishop, he said, ‘I am the sixth child of Mr Charles Dickens, and of my mother, Mrs Catherine Dickens, who, through God’s mercy, has been spared to grieve her husband. My brother Walter, born four years before me, died as a young man after serving to suppress the Bengali mutiny. My little sister Dora perished at the age of ten months, suddenly and without warning, and my father held her in his arms all night. But now he is reunited with Dora and with poor Walter, so Walter has now enjoyed the reunion that death previously denied him.’

  Alfred nodded and committed himself to what people wanted to hear, talking about how Father used to like family and friends’ plays, especially on Twelfth Night, our eldest brother Charley’s birthday. He would devise parts for the children, and Alfred remembered a play in which he was required to be a page, and come on stage to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have been sent ahead by the Emperor to ask you to ready yourselves for his arrival.’ Instead, Alfred said, he walked onto the stage and, seeing family and friends, including Mr Thackeray, Lord Lytton and Mr Wilkie Collins, all there and silently looking at him, he believed the warning unnecessary and walked over and sat on Mr Collins’ knee. The congregation laughed at this enchanting tale, and I felt a surge of brotherly love. Alfred’s auburn sideburns and neat auburn moustache looked like a hope rather than an assertion of success and, in the light of his story, were poignant.

  ‘If God’s Kingdom grants our loved ones that which they most desire,’ he said, ‘then Father is now directing a play, you can be sure, and is taking a substantial role in it, in an even nicer theatre than the one behind Tavistock House, where he had some of the greatest painters of the day, Millais and Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, come by and paint the scenery for him.’

  After he’d concluded he came and hunched beside me, whispering in my ear, ‘Tell them you’re frightened, tell them you are terrified of talking. They’ll forgive you anything.’

  I heard my name called by the clergyman who was acting as master of ceremonies, and rose like a prodded beast might rise, empty of thought, with each nerve vibrating in a key of alarm. Like Alfred going to Wilkie Collins’ familiar lap, I contemplated standing right there, my back to the faithful, looking to the western rose window which, at the moment, was engorged with robust winter light. I spent a while contemplating it, like the crater of some friendly volcano I could pitch myself into. I made myself turn, and looked for Connie’s face, but realised I had no time to search the file upon file of human countenances raised to me.

  I forgot to nominate all the dignitaries and then began, ‘I am not . . .’ pausing as I saw Alfred make a ‘louder, please!’ gesture with his hands. I raised my voice. ‘I am not a good speaker, ladies and gentlemen. You must not think I am just because my father could speak and read to beat the rest of the world. Some gifts are not passed on.’

  There were actually a few kindly chuckles at this and I did wonder for a crazy second if I said it again it would double the sympathy of the cathedral congregation. ‘The Medway . . .’ I continued, then paused again and saw a few people glance at each other as the silence grew. ‘It is a river that flows close to Gad’s Hill.

  ‘My father was a boy of Kent, and liked to say he was a Kentish man since Gad’s Hill, the home he settled in, was north of the Medway.’

  There were nods and smiles from those with their own Kentish background. North of the River Medway, ‘Kentish men and women’. South, ‘men and women of Kent’.

  ‘My father greatly enjoyed taking a boat from Rochester Castle to Maidstone,’ I continued. ‘He would come home and say he had rowed it himself, so one day Alfred and I asked him to take us. We were given a set of oars each and Father acted as our cox. I remember as the sun grew strong he took Alfred’s boater away and claimed it as his, declaring he had seen Alfred’s blow overboard.’

  There was now reverent laughter in the church, and I began to wonder what I’d feared about facing an audience. ‘Seven miles down that lovely river and seven miles back. Then, as we landed, Father handed the boater back to Alfred, pretending he’d fetched it from the water.’

  Franker laughter still.

  ‘Alfred and I will always remember that day, and my father’s criticising our rowing in the quick, humorous way he had. My father might be a great writer to you, but to me he is the man who took us on adventures, whether they be on the water of the Medway or on the home stages of Tavistock House or Gad’s Hill. He was father and sometimes playmate to us. And for both, we are eternally grateful to him.’

  I could not think what else to say for a second but then declared, ‘I will tell my mother that you were all here, and were so generous in your feelings. I know she will be amazed and grateful to you . . .’

  I remembered where we were then and said, ‘And to God.’

  36

  After the ceremony I did not see the Desaillys, though I’d hoped to be greeted and indeed congratulated by Connie. It gratified and consoled me that everyone we spoke to said we had done our father great honour. Alfred and I were in a positive mood as we dressed in frockcoats for that night’s dinner at Government House, where the three of us were greeted by Lord and Lady Belmore.

  Alfred sat beside Lady Belmore at dinner in the long dining hall, and a wan Fred Trollope was to her left. She conversed well with them, asking them questions about their Australian careers. I heard her confide that she and ‘Dick’ had done eight circuits of New South Wales, but had been advised by the ministers of the state government not to go to the Western Division. Both Alfred and Fred Trollope reassured her that all appropriate vice-regal comforts were available along the Darling.

  I was seated next to Mrs Charles Cowper, who spoke with an Essex accent and had made Sir Charles the happy father of seven children. On my other side was an extraordinary and sumptuous woman in white silk who introduced herself as Mrs Wivenhoe, and told me her husband, Captain Wivenhoe, who was secretary to the governor, was away finding and organising the fitting-out of a suitable house in the Southern Highlands where Their Excellencies could spend their summers away from Sydney – Lady Belmore suffered the heat and humidity acutely.

  There was a trace of Sheffield in Mrs Wivenhoe’s voice, and she told me that in some ways she saw herself as an ordinary woman from an ordinary household of raucous children. She was not an innocent being like Connie, and was older by some years, but seemed permanently young, black-haired and blue-eyed and sweet of feature with an active intelligence in her eyes. She could see through me, I had no doubt, and I liked the fact that I was transparent to her. She placed a long-fingered, be-ringed hand of pure ivory on my dinner jacket sleeve when she spoke. One of her rings was a ruby. It was large enough to declare ‘I am here, and I glow.’

  She said, her eyes on me and wanting me to believe her, ‘I hope you understand how proud your father would have been of you two boys. It is easy to commemorate him as a marvel. But you and your brother commemorated him as a man.’

  From other lips this would have been a handsome sentiment. From hers it was close to intoxicating. I said thank you, and turned to Mrs Cowper, when she asked me, ‘You must surely be a little impressed by our harbour, Mr Dickens?’ I would soon discover this was nearly always the first question out of the mouths of Sydneysiders, as the citizen-denizens were called. I would also discover that you could not be too eloquent in praises of this body of water. Sydney folk were like the children of an exquisite mother, and expected to be congratulated on their good fortune. But it being the first t
ime I was asked, I answered all the more ponderously, because I wanted to get back to talking to Mrs Wivenhoe, though I politely tried to hide the fact. I wanted to provoke her to tell me things, so when I had the chance, I asked, ‘Your husband is seconded from a regiment in India?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, sitting upright like a sensible woman and squaring her shoulders. ‘We were stationed in Calcutta.’

  ‘My brother Walter died in Calcutta.’ It had been a matter of a second’s spurt of blood in his brain. It could happen to me. I could fall from my horse like a sack of potatoes. The sudden brain-burst had killed Dora, had killed Walter, and now Father. I would probably go that way. Not yet, oh God! Not while there were Mrs Wivenhoes to sit beside.

  ‘I heard your brother say that,’ she told me, ‘and a pang went through me. There are so many young officers lying in Park Street cemetery – young mothers, too, who died during childbirth. Some of the young men there don’t have a wife to see to their health. My husband has occasional fevers, but I take on the supervision of nursing and call the doctor early rather than late.’

  ‘Your husband is very fortunate,’ I said gallantly. Beneath the table, I was aware of her hip and upper leg being close to mine and could sense a movement in my blood. It was delightful. I felt wise and worldly and capable of chat.

  ‘That is very kind of you. Perhaps you could remind him occasionally – husbands are known to overlook these things.’

  Could Mrs Wivenhoe be overlooked?

  ‘You know . . .’ she began. ‘No, of course you don’t know what I was going to say. What a silly usage! What I was going to tell you is that I believe my favourite of your father’s books is Bleak House. I love Honoria Dedlock, how she writhes to avoid the scandal of her youth. And of course, like other women of humble origin, I love Esther Summerson. I do not say for a moment that my origins are tainted with disgrace as Esther’s are. But your father is telling us, “Look at this girl, for she is better than those who despise her.” It is a very daring and new and very kindly thing to do.’