“Oh, is he a writer, too?”
“Bless you, no! He teaches the flute to young ladies. And when he is not teaching, he repairs every kind of musical instrument. His front parlor is so full of old fiddles and frets that there is hardly anywhere to sit. And the dear man charges next to nothing.”
“That does not sound very commercial, Lottie!” I said, wondering how their romance had flourished under such ill conditions.
“That’s what Fred says. He says, ‘You must take him in hand, Lottie, as you did with our esteemed papa.’ I have tried, Dodo, but somehow I could not make Tom more businesslike without making him less himself; and although that is very admirable, I had begun to think we would wait forever to be able to marry. But thanks to Fred’s generosity, it’s now possible.”
“Alfred has given you money? Oh, I am so glad.” (I had been about to suggest he do that very thing.)
“My dear Dodo, don’t tell me you didn’t know? Fred is a bad boy to keep secrets from his wife. I will tell him so. Indeed I will.” She got up as if she would admonish him immediately.
I caught her arm. “Oh, please do no such thing. Alfred is still so—delicate—since Alice passed away. I do not think he could cope with the slightest scolding. Even from his favorite sister.”
She laughed. “Very well, as you ask me, Dodo, I shall simply tell him my news. But I think you are to be congratulated, too, are you not?”
I blushed. “What do you mean?”
She scanned my face. “You are expecting another child; tell me I’m right.”
“Sshh. Alfred doesn’t know.”
“What is it that I don’t know?” Alfred emerged eagerly from his study, pen in hand. “Hallo, Lottie dear.” He bent to kiss her. “Well?”
She and I exchanged glances.
“That I am to be married!” cried Lottie. “Thanks to you, Tom is able to see his way forward, and has at last been convinced that he will not be dragging me down to a life of misery by offering me his hand. He’s found a shop with such a commodious set of rooms above it that his parents can move in with us straightaway. I can cook and care for everyone—and we’ll all be perfectly snug.”
“Capital! Capital!” Alfred beamed. He loved making people happy. “Let’s have some char! A toast to Tom and Lottie!”
I rose to pull the bell, but Alfred had already done so. He was walking around the drawing room now, waving his quill, jotting things on his hand. “We must have a splendid dinner to honor the occasion. Lottie will bring Tom and the aged parents, and we’ll invite O’Rourke, the Evanses, and Miss Brougham. A splendid eightsome! How about next week—Tuesday, say? I shall order a rib of beef from the butcher, and Dodo shall make her very finest custard tart.”
The thought of custard tart made me feel ill, but I took deep breaths, and the sensation disappeared. Alfred talked on about oysters and asparagus, parsnips, roasted potatoes, and horseradish sauce, and above all, his favorite, cheese on toast. “We shall use our new dining table—and the Venetian glass flower holders I sent for only last week. It’ll be capital!”
For once, I wanted him to leave the room so I could speak to Lottie in confidence. But perversely he seemed in the vein for company, complaining, “I am run ragged by this Boy of mine.”(He was writing Edward Cleverly.) When Bessie came up with the tea, he immediately took the tray and asked her to bring Kitty to entertain the company. “My daughter comes on in leaps and bounds, Lottie. She has four teeth now. She can take a man’s finger off in one bite. Wait till you have children of your own—you’ll find they are cannibals of the worst order!”
“Kitty is a delightful child. I won’t hear a word against her. After all, I am her godmother-in-chief.” Lottie’s dark eyes danced.
“So you give her the gift of love, do you?” He put his pen sideways in his mouth, poured three cups of tea with a flourish.
“It’s all I have. But it’s the best, after all.”
“And here is the Infant Phenomenon herself!” Alfred sped to the door where Bessie was holding Kitty out to him. He took her and held her aloft over his head. She screamed with excitement, that high-pitched scream that pierces the brain. “My heart positively bursts with love for her, Lottie! I dote on her more than anyone in the world.”
“Except Dodo, of course,” added Lottie.
“Aha! Of course.” He made a comical face, as if caught out in some misdemeanor. “Apologies, dearest wife. Have some tea. Have some cake. Have some Humble Pie.” He put Kitty down on the rug and passed me a plate with a large slice of Madeira cake. He was confident, cheery. The lost boy had vanished.
When he finally went back to his study, leaving Lottie dandling Kitty on her knees, I plucked up courage. “Kitty likes you,” I said.
“Well, I like Kitty,” she replied.
“I suppose you’ll be having one of your own before the year is out?” I ventured.
“I suppose we shall, if nature takes its course. I’d be sad if not. Children are such a blessing.”
“Yes.”
But she must have picked up some reluctance in my voice because she looked at me with that same birdlike expression Alfred had when he thought I’d said something strange. I tried to explain: “I really do love Kitty. And I suppose I’ll love the new one as much. But are there ways, do you know, of preventing more?”
Lottie raised her eyebrows. “Why do you think I should know, Dodo dear? You are the married woman after all.”
“But I am ignorant, and you are worldly wise.”
“Am I? Well, I do not have any experience, of course”—she colored—“but I hear the tittle-tattle from the ladies’ maids and I believe that there are such things. But why don’t you ask Fred? He’s the fount of all knowledge.”
“He won’t talk about it—and so here I am, with child again only twelve months on!”
“Oh, Dodo, you don’t need to worry! Fred adores children! You see how he loves Kitty. And he was the same with our brother.” She smiles. “When we were children, it was always Fred who kept Sydney amused. I think he must have walked him over every inch of London, taking him to the Punch and Judy, or to watch the knife grinders, or see the sailing ships come into the sugar wharf. He’d always contrive to find a halfpenny from somewhere to buy them some beer—and he’d wheedle stale buns from the muffin men by singing a comic song or telling them a story, right then and there on the street corner! Sydney would come home full of all their adventures. He thought Fred was the best brother anyone could have.” She gave me her birdlike look again. “And as for money, well you and he must have the means to bring up a whole regiment. You surely don’t need to be anxious about just one more?”
I felt ashamed. Of course I didn’t need Lottie to tell me how lucky I was. I had a hardworking and home-loving husband who was amusing and affectionate and kind, and who provided me with all the money I required. I did not have to scrimp and save as she did, or share my house with aged parents and a room full of musical instruments. Yet every day I sensed that Alfred’s feelings towards me were less intense than they once had been, and the more I thought, the more I felt that motherhood was the cause of it. “Alfred may love children,” I said, with a certain asperity, “but he doesn’t have to carry them inside him for nine months and nurse them for goodness knows how long afterwards! I know it is our women’s lot—but I feel so very despondent when I’m carrying, and no doubt I shall be looking excessively fat before the month is out. Is it so selfish to want a breathing space? A chance for Alfred and me to be sweethearts again?”
Lottie looked at me, her head still cocked to one side. “But Dodo dearest, you and Alfred are not sweethearts anymore. You must acknowledge the change.”
The change. It was always in my head: my increasing stoutness, Alice’s slim beauty. Too much of a change, too soon. “Yes,” I said, “but at least I should like to keep my looks. I should like to keep something of my attractiveness.”
“Oh, Dodo,” she said, setting Kitty down and lightly brushing my
curls from my cheeks. “You are still the prettiest woman I know—if a little stouter than you used to be. I am sure Alfred loves you quite as much as when you first met. Only married people often do not say so.”
Maybe that was all it was, I told myself. Maybe I was expecting our love would go on as it had done in the heady days of our courtship. But with every day that passed, I was forced to realize that I was not the center of his universe. He had his friends, his work, his Public. And now he had Kitty.
10
I HAVE HARDLY FINISHED DRESSING AFTER MY FITTING when Wilson arrives at the door. “A message for you, madam.”
I don’t recognize the writing. Another well-wisher perhaps. I open it. It is folded and I see the name at the bottom first. A wide, loopy scrawl: Alfie. I can’t believe it. I turn back to the beginning, my heart pounding. He writes in a formal way, as if I were his lawyer, not his mother; as if he is being careful with every word, in case they betray him. He expresses sorrow at Alfred’s death, he proposes that now we should be reconciled; that I should meet his wife and daughter and “mend bridges that have broken.” I never broke them, but it is enough that my son should want to see his mother again. I am buoyed up with joy. I make haste to the desk and sit down to pen a reply.
Dear Alfie,
What a delight to receive your letter! Of course you may come and see me. Almost any time is convenient, but please let me know so that I can prepare for you. You will have to take me as I am, very dull and quite changed from when you saw me last. As, of course, you will be too. You were still a boy when I left, and now you are a man. And Caroline, I regret, is not known to me at all. I shall be delighted to meet her, and my little granddaughter too.
Your loving Mama.
I am in a kind of delighted confusion at the thought of seeing him again. I imagine what he will be like, and what he will think of me in return.
I read the letter again and, dull though it is, I am excited to think that maybe this is but the prelude to overtures from the others. I think about them all, of course, in the long quiet hours at my disposal—wondering if Alfie’s stammer is cured, if Eddie’s hair still sticks up like the Fretful Porpentine, and whether Lou is as mouselike as ever. And I worry about Georgie on the high seas, and pray for his safe return every night. But to see them in the flesh! That is so different.
I am all too aware that I have not been the mother I should have been. It is assumed that if you’ve had eight children, you must be full of motherly feelings, and must never for a moment have felt dismay, anger, or despair at the prospect of caring for them. But when I married Alfred, all I could think of were the blissful days we would have together as husband and wife. And as time went on I would happily have settled for a small family such as my own in Chiswick.
Lottie’s inquiries on my behalf had not provided a solution. There were indeed devices that could be used, she said: douches and pessaries—unfamiliar words that made us both giggle. Unfortunately she had no suggestions as to how I could obtain these items, and as I did not know, either, I was obliged to do without. I despaired of talking to Alfred on the subject since he had decided, in his mercurial way, that children were, in every respect, a Good Thing. He ignored my hints as if he did not understand what I meant. So I was obliged to settle into my fate with as good a grace as I could manage. And of course I did love the babies when they came, with their plump little fists and feathery hair, and their wide-eyed way of looking at the world.
It is hard to recall now, at this remove, how each of my children looked and behaved as infants—which ones talked early and which ones walked late, and what amusing things they said and did as they struggled to make sense of everything around them. Alfred was always most delighted with them at this early stage, and had all their likenesses taken when they were still in skirts, sketches and drawings done by London’s finest artists as a favor to us both. I wanted to bring the pictures with me when I left Park House; but I dared not ask Alfred, and I doubt Sissy will part with them now that he is gone.
I particularly liked the pencil studies done by our old friend Charley Evans: Kitty and Louisa demure as anything; three of the boys reading under the robinia tree; Ada propped up with pillows on the yellow sofa; and Georgie lying in a hammock, half-asleep. My especial favorites were done when we holidayed together in Yarmouth—the girls with their skirts tucked up, the boys in their short breeches; everyone barefoot, hair blowing in the wind. It took Charley merely a few quick strokes to catch a look or gesture, and I marveled at it. So did Alfred, though I think he was envious. A stroke or two is worth a thousand words, eh Dodo? he said one day as he watched me admiring Charley’s quick fingers. You clearly married the wrong man! Of course I told him that I had not, that nothing made me so happy as being wife to the One and Only. His face broke into a smile and he gave me one of his sudden kisses, before jumping up and chivvying the children into line and marching them along the beach in search of seashells. I can see them all now, Alfred in front with his straw wide-awake hat and short linen jacket, walking at his usual cracking pace, gathering children of all ages in a long tail behind him, which strung out longer and longer until the ones at the back stopped completely and sat down and howled. And I watched Alfred turning, and running back and lifting the littlest one upon his shoulders and taking the next one by the hand, and jigging and dancing along to the edge of the waves. I couldn’t hear him but I knew he was singing. I couldn’t hear them but I knew they were laughing. I watched them till they were only black shapes against the shimmering waves, as the sun grew low in the sky.
Alfred and I loved Yarmouth. We took a house there year after year, usually with the Evanses, sometimes with John and Rachel Hemmings. Once O’Rourke and Clara came, the brief summer they had together. And dozens of people would come down to visit us for a week at a time—Lottie and Tom, Muffin, Cousin George, with Lily and the twins—and any friend Alfred had recently made. Alfred himself would get up at dawn and walk along the coast for miles. He’d come back with his hair stiff with salt, and his complexion ruddy and shining. I’ve had a capital idea, he’d say. I think this will be the best ever! Then he’d go straight away into the room he’d put aside for writing, the room facing the sea, with a pale blind drawn half across the window to keep out the sun. He always worked every morning, strict hours, with a slice of seed cake and a glass of water at eleven o’clock and luncheon with the rest of us at two. And when he wasn’t working, he was answering letters.
“You cannot propose to answer them all?” I said once, seeing the piles neatly stacked on the table he had placed by the window. Besides his correspondence with his friends and relatives, he had an ever-increasing number of letters from his readers. They wrote admiringly of his work, and he read them all with equal pleasure before sending a reply. It was as if he could not get enough praise.
“And why not? If so many good people take the trouble to write to me?”
“You are on holiday, Alfred.”
“Holiday? The One and Only is never on holiday! The One and Only is a slave to his Readers. They suck me dry. When I die, I shall be found a mere skelington, a bag of bones, sans hair, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything.” He laughed, not at all daunted at the thought.
Indeed, he loved work. Holidays were purgatory to him, unless he set himself tasks. While Charley and Mary Evans were quite content to sit with me in the garden or on the little folding stools we took down to the sea, Alfred was always on his feet, organizing games—except when the children half-buried him in the sand, or when he pretended to be asleep, before leaping up to frighten them. And if he sat down, he’d be in a reverie, staring out, not listening to what we were saying. I’d watch his lips move and his face twitch, and know he was rehearsing the words for the next Number.
One year the Evanses brought their niece, Sarah. She was a pretty girl of seventeen, who spent a good part of each day arranging her frock, bonnet, and parasol, and reading a small volume in a becoming position. She was a very reserved
young lady and would never even raise her eyes at Alfred. If he was in the company, she was quite tongue-tied. “She has read every one of his novels,” confided Mary. “So I think she is in awe of him.”
Alfred seemed to wake up to this fact after a few days. He started to make jokes across the dinner table, to draw the girl into the conversation.
“And what has Miss Evans done with herself today?”—passing the salt caster, so she had to raise her eyes.
A blush, a flutter of eyelids: “Nothing of importance.”
“Excellent. That is what we should all do. I only wish I could learn to do that myself! But I have a growing family to keep.”
She smiled and took the salt, but dropped it, so it rolled off under the table: “Oh dear! So clumsy!” She began to get up, flustered.
“Never fear, dear lady! The One and Only to the rescue!” Alfred dived down to get it, overturning his chair. The table rocked as he bumped about below us, grasping the ankles of everyone in the company so that the children giggled, and Miss Evans went quite pink.
“Eureka!” He emerged with the salt, his face equally pink. “No harm done. The Spice of Life restored.” He threw a pinch over his shoulder.
“Thank you. I am so sorry.”
“Not at all. But I see you have been taking lessons from my wife. She is excellent at dropping things.”
I laughed. She laughed, too, and I hated her for it. And for a moment I hated him for saying it, although it was true. I was very clumsy. But of course I was with child again. “She still has a lot to learn in the art,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me, surprised. “Dodo makes a joke!” And he came and kissed me, most heartily. Miss Evans lowered her eyes at this expression of marital ardor.
He flirted with her over supper every night after that, talking animatedly, his eyes brilliant in the lamplight. He told us of people he had encountered on his walks—sailors, fishermen, rope menders, boat builders—imitating the Yarmouth character to perfection. Miss Evans began by watching him from lowered eyelids, smiling to herself, then gradually unable to prevent herself from laughing out loud. And then he’d seize napkins and silver spoons and do conjuring tricks, making the spoons disappear and reappear in a way we could not fathom. Every night she became a little more animated in response, lifting her eyes more boldly across the table, and afterwards displaying herself to best advantage on the sofa with her silk slippers tucked under her and her ivory fan fluttering next to her cheek, as he sat in the big armchair and read out loud chapters from Miggs or Little Amy. It seemed to me that he directed his voice and expressions very much in her direction. Particularly where Miggs pays court to Prudence Eversure, when he moved in one bound from the armchair (prim Miss Eversure) to the floor (desperate, kneeling Mr. Miggs), altering his face and voice from high to low, from proud to despairing, in a pièce de résistance of comical acting. How we all laughed, but she more than any of us.
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