by Vanessa Tait
He nodded at her; embarrassment was the first thing on his face. She tried to smile in return, and nod, as if all this still remained in the realms of the ordinary. But something in her own face, in the way she had frozen herself in the doorway with her hand twisted behind her, caused Mr Dodgson to look at her again.
Mary felt herself pinned to the door; she felt his gaze strike her. They stared at each other, locked together, Mary aware of her face hanging down below her eyes and the blood draining from it.
Only now did Mr Wilton skirt round him, his feet crunching on glass, and walk away.
Mr Dodgson came towards her. In one hand he still held a fragment of the brown paper that had contained the glass funnels. ‘What are you, what are you doing?’
‘I just . . . I just came outside.’
‘Did you . . . did you know that man?’
‘No! Well, I may have seen him, at the store. At Elliston and Cavell.’
‘Elliston and Cavell?’
‘Yes. He is employed there.’
‘Employed? What is he doing here?’
‘I don’t know!’
Mr Dodgson squinted into her face. ‘You did know him. And he knew me!’ He shuddered, visibly. A kind of horror overtook his face. ‘I think it better, Miss Prickett,’ he said, the glass still glittering on his shoulders, ‘that we take no further notice of each other in public.’
‘No further notice,’ said Mary. ‘No.’
Mr Dodgson’s head was reared back on his neck as far as it could be, but Mary thought she saw something like shame pass over his features too.
And then the same blank look fell over his face, the one that she had seen after the incident with Alice.
‘As I said. No more notice.’
He turned from her, back to the shattered glass. And then he swerved away again, as if he did not know where he was going.
Chapter 29
The whole of Oxford had been in preparation for the royal wedding for weeks: flags, banners and bunting stretched across every street in celebration of the marriage of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra.
Mary had stayed indoors, in her room. That her pain was insignificant to the universe was brought home to her in every ironmonger’s cry, in every tap of every hammer that put up every gas lamp on every wall.
Marriage! the whole world seemed to cry. But not for you.
God had said no – once again.
There was no sense in anything. No one watching or guiding her. No need to be good.
Mr Dodgson and his brother Edwin had come to the Deanery to pick up Alice on the night of the Illuminations. Alice had been sitting by the door in her red cape and beret for half an hour, waiting, kicking her foot against the chair.
‘Let us go,’ said Alice.
The taste of desolation was in Mary’s mouth. She swallowed. If she could leave here, go to a different country . . .
‘Well,’ she said, putting on her bonnet.
‘Oh, are you coming with us?’ said Mr Dodgson.
Mary flushed. She had tried to refuse, but the Dean had insisted that she accompany them. ‘The Dean has said so, yes.’
Outside, instead of the usual darkness, they found heat and light and bursts of noise. The ancient walls of the college had lost their substance, while the air seemed more substantial, pregnant with smoke and smell.
Three enormous stars and a giant replica of Cardinal Wolsey’s mitre, fired by twelve hundred jets, hung along the walls of Christ Church. A glass transparency of the Prince of Wales’s emblem shone out.
Alice walked in between Mr Dodgson and his brother, holding on to their hands. Mary walked behind. People loomed up and vanished just as quickly.
All of Oxford was a darkroom: night turned into day, shadows into light, faces into dark.
‘That emblem is just like the one I have in my crest book,’ said Alice. ‘Only bigger, and brighter too. When I get married I should like to have my initials blazing on the top of Tom Quadrangle.’
‘I am sure the Dean could see to it,’ said Mr Dodgson.
Mr Dodgson’s brother frowned. ‘The path to God is not by upholding vanity.’
‘Wouldn’t it be grand to be a princess? Mama says Prince Leopold is near my age; she says that I am bound to meet him.
Mama says that Her Majesty the Queen will come to stay again with us and she will bring him. Though I don’t know when, now that the Prince of Wales has returned to London.’
Mary stared at her shoes. The ground was littered with the remains of food from the street vendors: the crusts of meat pies, curls of glistening eels, pickled whelks. Crowds of people passed them on all sides.
‘Aren’t you rather young to be thinking of marriage?’ said Edwin.
‘I am eleven,’ said Alice.
‘I have heard of some engagements as young as eleven,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘It is not unusual.’
Edwin grimaced. ‘I shall never get married. I intend to dedicate my life to God.’
The smoke from the Illuminations got in Mary’s nostrils and in her mouth and choked her.
She had known all along that it would turn out this way.
She had been mistaken; she had revealed herself, the gaping thing at the centre of her, and now she was paying for her mistake.
She had lost Mr Wilton, and for nothing.
Sometimes at night she took out the Belgian lace from its drawer by her bed. She let its bumps and nubs graze her cheek, inhaled its damp smell.
He had proposed, and she had laughed. And still he had loved her enough to be stirred into a fever, into a rage! She saw him dark and brooding now, she saw him striding across somewhere wild.
Mr Dodgson couldn’t love as much in eighty years as Mr Wilton could in a day.
Now she would be a spinster; she would live in the Deanery for the rest of her days. Watching Mr Dodgson and the Liddells living out their lives while she . . . while she – Mary closed her eyes, a lump in her throat – grew older day by day and new lines crept their way across her face. Every night the same and every morning too, until she was an object of pity, even to her own mother.
Mr Dodgson was talking on. ‘It’s a pity that I wasn’t able to get the Prince to sit for me! Prince Edward would have looked fine in my photograph book. A charming man, if a little ordinary. But he had the most delicate of hands, each finger tapered to a point.’
How, after the other day, could he continue in such a pleasant voice? He seemed unchanged by the affair, while she was ruined. There was something unfathomable about him. He was like a series of locked cabinets, with only one door open at a time.
They turned into St Aldate’s. All along the street gas jets fired the shapes of stars and crowns, and down the side of one tall building in three-foot-high letters of flame ran the words May They Be Happy.
‘Oh, I do like that very much! May They Be Happy,’ said Alice.
‘May They Be Happy? Is that a question?’ said Mr Dodgson.
‘I should think the Prince and Princess ought to be happy,’ said Alice.
‘Happiness is not an assumption that ought to be made,’ said Mary. She looked away, up into a house with a pyramid of candles in its window, their flames slanted in the breeze.
They turned up on to St Giles’. Even though they were a hun dred paces away from the bonfire, Mary already felt the smoke in her nostrils. A cloud of angry sparks juddered above the roof tops. As they drew nearer, the fire itself was barely contained, blasting out boiling air, belching smoke. Only the men who fed it stayed close, outlined in black, gripped with a feverish motion as they worked to condemn faggot after faggot to the flames.
They went through the outer part of the crowd to get a better view. When the bodies got more closely packed they stopped, but Alice wanted to go on.
‘A shower of sparks may come down on your dress,’ said Mr Dodgson. ‘Or they may land on your hat and then your hair would catch on fire, like in “Harriet and the Matches”.’
‘I want to
go nearer,’ said Alice.
Mary’s cheeks were hot and her eyes stung. But Alice slipped out of the men’s hands and led them all towards the fire, weaving in and out of the crowd, until they were out in front of the semicircle of people. Mary could feel the heat all down the front of her. The fire flung its arms towards them and instantly retreated, then again pushed out some unspeakable part of itself with a manic crackle until she could hardly hear or speak.
‘Let us go,’ said Mr Dodgson.
‘Please, Mr Dodgson.’ Alice shouted at him above the snapping flames. ‘One more minute.’
The fire bullied and belched, a monster of tongues served by the outlines of the poor blackened people. The protruberances of Mary’s face were rubbed by heat; her nose, her lips, her chin.
Alice twisted round, her own cheeks glowing orange. She was saying something to Mr Dodgson but Mary could not make it out. She had snatched her beret off in the heat and her hair was an awkward shape. She looked coarse, ugly even, the light exaggerating some parts of her, hollowing out others.
Mr Dodgson put a hand up to his neck, another on Alice’s shoulder as he bent down to listen.
Mary couldn’t tolerate it. Every word they spoke to each other might be a jibe against her. She stared at the fire, letting the flames burn themselves on to her retina. When she looked back at Alice, she was burned out, a glaring yellow gap.
St Aldate’s was now so crowded they could hardly walk. Throngs of people were jostling and shouting and shuffling past one another, so many that after five minutes they turned into Bear Lane, hoping to escape. But the narrow street was even fuller than the broader one, although quieter. There was only the sound of scuffling and a murmured apology as someone stepped on another’s toe or a lady’s hat was knocked off.
Mary was behind Mr Dodgson, who was behind Alice.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked Alice.
The lane smelt of cabbages. Unwashed necks and feet.
‘Am I hurting you?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Alice. ‘Though it is cramped in here. And I can feel the whole of you pressing on my back.’
‘Yes. We are nearly out.’ Mr Dodgson’s voice was high and tight.
‘I can feel your breath on my ear,’ Alice said. ‘It is making my skin into goosebumps. Could you please breathe somewhere else?’
‘I could try, if you would prefer me to expire,’ said Mr Dodgson.
They all moved forward in tiny steps, almost in unison but not quite. Mary’s breasts were crushed against the back of Mr Dodgson’s coat. The breath squeezed out of her. If she pushed herself harder on him, she might hurt him.
She pushed harder. Mr Dodgson did not say anything. She pushed harder still, her eyes closed and a lump in her throat. The bones of her chest ground into his shoulder blades.
He did not turn round. But his body was very still.
‘Why, I think I could lift my feet up and still be carried along, you are pushing on me so tightly,’ said Alice.
‘Alice, for pity’s sake try to move forward!’ said Mr Dodgson.
‘I cannot help it.’
‘Put your feet down and do not press on me so!’ Mr Dodgson’s voice came out as a thin line, urgent.
Mary found herself falling down, very slowly, in the darkness. Down down down. Would the fall never come to an end?
Alice’s voice, annoyed. ‘I can hardly help pushing on you, in this squash.’
Down down down, there was nothing else to do.
Chapter 30
No more notice of each other, Mr Dodgson had said. But that was impossible when he came so often. When he came nearly every day. To Mrs Liddell, with infuriating good humour, he suggested more boat trips, more picnics. With Alice, in the afternoons, he played games of croquet, puzzles, doublets. It was only Mary he would not look at, or say anything to. The change was so marked she felt as if she alone were in Siberia while the rest basked in the sun.
But there was still something that caught at her, that did not rhyme. At night she saw his face again and was certain that she had not invented his intimacies, his stares, his touch. Some mystery lay at the bottom of it.
One day the family went on a boating trip with Mr Dodgson and Lord Newry, all the way to Newnham. Mary could not stand the idea of their chatter and laughter; she pleaded a headache, which she did not have, though oppression hung over her like a cloak, blocking out the sunlight.
As soon as the house was quiet, she got up and went to Alice’s bedroom. She opened Alice’s wardrobe, with its ranks of shiny shoes and jutting dresses, its smell of lavender. She was searching for something but she did not know what. She went through Alice’s pockets, turned over all of her shoes.
Nothing.
Her eyes fell upon a wooden box that sat on the dressing table. Mr Dodgson had given it to Alice. She tried to prise open the lid.
It was locked!
Something must be in there.
Where did a child keep a key? At the bottom of her drawers. Mary hurried over. Alice’s clothes were crisp, like so many leaves of paper. Mary’s hands were red-knobbed, grappling. She found the key at the bottom, as she had thought, made to look like an ornate twig, threaded on to a red ribbon.
She turned it in the lock. It fitted perfectly: the lid sprang open.
But there was nothing inside but childish treasures: a pressed maple leaf, a shell. The drawing that Mr Dodgson had given her that he had made of the Illuminations. He had copied ‘May They Be Happy’ and adorned it with garlands. Underneath he had drawn two hands holding formidable birches with the words ‘Certainly not.’
She replaced it all, carelessly tearing the leaf in half as she did it, back in the box and the key back in the drawer.
She closed her eyes. May They Be Happy blazed behind her eyelids. The Prince had taken his Princess Alexandra on honeymoon, the paper had told her.
The house was very still. She could hear only the wind in the trees and the shout of an undergraduate in the quadrangle.
She found she was crying again. She dragged her hand across her nose. She ought not to have left her handkerchief behind in her room.
She looked at her pocket watch and then out of the window. No sign of the Liddells returning.
She could not face the exile of her floorboards and the cold little picture of Jesus. She sat down on the floor, the wool of the rug warm under her fingertips.
The upper floor of Alice’s doll’s house was at the level of her eyes. The beds were unmade, the piano on its side and the chairs upturned. She pulled away the house’s facade, and saw, in the bedroom, a pile of letters tied together with pink ribbon, so tall it reached up to the ceiling.
She reached in, scattering the tiny inhabitants on to their backs.
The letters were written in purple ink; she knew immediately they were from Mr Dodgson. She pulled on the ribbon. Mr Dodgson had sent Alice so many letters in the preceding months; perhaps there would be something more in them about Mary. She wanted to see herself talked about, even if it was in the worst way.
My darling Alice,
This really will not do, you know, sending one more kiss every time by post: the parcel gets so heavy that it is quite expensive. When the postman brought in the last letter, he looked quite grave. ‘Two pounds to pay, sir!’ he said. ‘Extra weight, sir!’ (I think he cheats a little by the way. He often makes me pay two pounds when I think it should be pence.) ‘Oh, if you please, Mr Postman!’ I said, going down gracefully on one knee (I wish you could see me go down on one knee to a postman – it’s a very pretty sight). ‘Do excuse me just this once! It’s only from a little girl!’
The childish sentiment grated on her, rubbed at her skin until it was raw.
‘Only from a little girl?’ he growled. ‘What are little girls made of?’ ‘Sugar and spice,’ I began to say, ‘and all that’s ni—’ but he interrupted me. ‘No! I don’t mean that! I mean what’s the good of little girls when they send such heavy letters?’ ‘Well, they’re no
t much good, certainly,’ I said, rather sadly.
Mary crumpled the letter in her hand. Mr Dodgson loved
Alice, she knew that. But reading the letters was like listening to the man talk privately. Like eavesdropping.
My own darling,
It is all very well for you and Edith to unite in millions of hugs and kisses, but please consider the time it would occupy your poor old very busy friend, even during the holidays! Try hugging and kissing Edith for a minute by the watch, and I don’t think you’ll manage it more than 20 times a minute. ‘Millions’ must mean 2 millions at least.
20)2,000,000 hugs and kisses
60)100,000 minutes
12)1,666 hours
6)138 days (at twelve hours a day)
23 weeks
I couldn’t go on hugging and kissing more than 12 hours a day and I wouldn’t like to spend Sundays that way. So you see it would take 23 weeks of hard work. Really, my dear child, I cannot spare the time.
Mr Dodgson kissed her, she had seen it often. She was a child, it was quite safe to go about kissing children. But a girl who was almost grown! And now Alice was almost grown.
When a little girl is hoping to take a plum off a dish, and finds that she can’t have that one, because it’s bad or unripe, what does she do? Is she sorry or disappointed? Not a bit! She just takes another instead and grins from one ear to the other as she puts it to her lips! This is a little fable to do you good; the little girl means you – the bad plum means me – the other plum means some other friend – and all that about the little girl putting plums to her lips means – well, it means – but you know you can’t expect every bit of a fable to mean something!
Outside, a carriage pulled up. She must go, she had said she was not feeling well, she must get back to her room. She rose to her knees and gathered the pages together, smoothed out the crumpled one.
Downstairs the front door opened. A man’s voice, more than one. She must fold the letters exactly as they had been, else Alice would notice.
You lazy thing! What? I’m to divide the kisses myself, am I? Indeed I won’t take the trouble to do anything of the sort!
