Wanting

by Richard Flanagan

  Would not the men, he now asked, if starving, have fallen prey to scurvy? And does not scurvy finally annihilate the desire to eat and, in any case, annihilate the power? Having readied and teased the reader with his trail of false leads and tempting possibilities, Dickens sprang his trap and revealed what he believed was almost certainly the truth behind the mystery.

  ‘Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.’

  He paused, his attention momentarily distracted by an odd thought.

  ‘We believe every savage to be in her heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.’

  Realising his error, he crossed out her and wrote above it his. But did these words not sum up his own folly so many years before? And that odd thought took on the form and name of a woman, and Dickens muttered two words.

  ‘Maria Beadnell.’

  And how that name irritated him, angered him, enraged him, reminded him of his wretched origins and the myriad humiliations he had determined never again to suffer. Before he had become Charles Dickens the brilliant, the beneficent and the virtuous genius of letters, he had been Charles Dickens the impetuous, the overly earnest and the not infrequently foolish unmarried youth.

  Maria Beadnell. Then, he had presented himself to her banker father as an inferior. He never made that mistake again. His answer to hierarchy was his own uniqueness. He had even refused invitations from the Queen herself. He entered society now at his pleasure, on his terms.

  Maria Beadnell, his first love, the mistaken impulse of his once undisciplined heart. And these words, undisciplined heart, constantly came back to him—a warning, a fear, the terror of who he might really be. He saw them in dreams inscribed upon the walls of unknown houses, found them appearing unbidden in his writing.

  Maria Beadnell and her vile family had treated him as little better than a corpse to play with, to feast upon for their own amusement. Yet looking back, he reasoned that it was his rightful punishment for having given in to his passions rather than keeping them firmly under control. After all, wasn’t that control precisely what marked the English out as different from savages?

  ‘Answer me, undisciplined heart!’ he went so far as asking in one novel. But it never did. And so instead he bound and chained it, buried it deep, and only such severe disciplining of his heart allowed him his success, prevented him from falling into the abyss like his debtor father, like his wastrel brothers; from becoming, finally, the savage he feared himself to be.

  Determined to banish these loathsome thoughts from his mind, Dickens attempted to return to Dr Rae and the cannibals, but it was impossible. For now he only had one thought, and that thought one name. And after twenty-five years, Maria Beadnell—now Mrs Winter, married, Dickens presumed, to some acceptable dreariness—had written to him, and they had met at a dinner conveniently and respectably staged at a friend’s home.

  Love—what of it?

  He looked at her withered flesh, her thin lined lips, her bull neck dissolving into the lines of her bosom, crazed as old varnish. She had grown broad and was constantly short of breath, panting like an aged spaniel. Dickens turned to the other guests and said, with a smile and not without ambiguity:

  ‘Mrs Winter is a friend of childhood.’

  Once, he had mistaken Maria Beadnell’s dull emptiness for enigmatic mystery. And now she, where once contemptuous of him in youth, was flirtatious in middling years—with her ‘Charlie this’ and ‘Charlie that’—how vile it all was! How repellent human beings could be! Fat and dull and full of phlegm, which she provoked into lava-like rumbling with her attempted coquettish giggle, the result was that he caught her cold and lost whatever affection he once had for her.

  A few years before, he had even put her in the story that was so much his own, David Copperfield, casting her as the one whom David marries: Dora Spenlow. And as he sat there in his study that dark morning, attempting to rescue Sir John, there arose within Dickens another bitter memory he found unbearable: it was while writing this tale of his idealised life, of his unrequited love finally requited, of reshaping the world to just what he wanted it to be, that his ninth child was born and he had named her Dora.

  How strange, how eerie he found it, then, when a few months after killing Dora in David Copperfield, his own little Dora would die. He had the horrid sense that the world warped to his fancy, but only to mock him in the cruellest way possible.

  Outside his study, Dickens could hear his younger children running up and down the corridor, squealing and crashing into walls. He went and shut the second door he had specifically built for the purpose and returned to his desk. The sounds of his family were now distant and muted, but he had lost his train of thought altogether.

  He put down his quill, stood and went to a bookcase and searched for several minutes, all the time wondering why he had ever wanted Maria Beadnell. Now he thanked God for her father’s prejudice against the lowly. He had a wife, the women of his books, the periwinkles of his nights. It was enough—it had to be.

  Dickens’ eyes roamed the shelves until finally he found Sir John Franklin’s Journey to the Polar Sea. After two passes through the book, he found the pages he vaguely remembered; they were, he could now see, even more admirably suited to his purpose than he could have hoped. Whatever the truth of the book, it revealed Franklin as an infinitely better writer than poor old Dr Rae. Sir John Franklin, Dickens recognised, was surely as fine a creation of Sir John Franklin’s own pen as Oliver Twist was of his.

  There were several passages in which Sir John recounted how, when utterly reduced by starvation at the nadir of his celebrated 1819 expedition, with eleven of his twenty men dead, there was a level of decency they never abandoned. Rather than countenance the thought of cannibalism, Sir John had eaten his own boots. Dickens felt cheered. That was an Englishman. Stout heart, stewed boots, decency dressed up as diet.

  Feeling the pump was now primed, he began to narrate the story: how, when Franklin’s first expedition was starving, the Iroquois hunter Michel conceived ‘the horrible idea of subsisting on the bodies of the stragglers’, probably even killing one or two expeditioners to this end, and how Sir John Richardson then marvellously shot the devil through the head—‘to the infinite joy,’ Dickens now wrote, ‘of all the generations of readers.’

  His pen was once more moving in accordance with his fancy, his spirits rising with its life-giving flow. This is what he did! Who he was! He lived and found and knew himself only in story, and in this act of writing Dickens sensed himself becoming joined to Sir John’s doomed journey, and to that strange frozen world that held all their mysteries. He thought of how such great spirits as these would always endure stoically to the end, as would he in his marriage. Sir John would not make the error that the Iroquois Michel was condemned to because of race, that error of passion Dickens himself had once made because of youth. Had he not yearned to bite into Maria Beadnell’s thighs as keenly as the Esquimaux had wanted to feast on old Sir John’s gentlemanly drumsticks? But the mark of wisdom and civilisation was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it. Otherwise, one was no better than the Iroquois Michel or an Esquimau.

  The heart of the matter was obvious. The words of a savage could not be taken as the truth, ‘because he is a liar’. Besides, it was clear that cooked and dissevered bodies among this or that tattoo’d tribe proved only one thing.

  ‘Such appropriate offerings to their barbarous, wide-mouthed, goggle-eyed gods,’ he wrote, feeling rather persuaded himself now on the matter, ‘savages have been often seen and known to make.’

  Dickens was worked up now, coming in for the end, music swelling in his ears. His hatred of his long ago inability to rise above his passions somehow became the same thing as the disappointment he felt women had been to him through his life—his mother, Maria Beadnell, his wife, the periwinkles—and he thought of the womanless Sir John with a mom
entary envy.

  ‘The noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader himself, under similar circumstances,’ he now wrote, ‘outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.’

  He rounded it off with the dying fall of a requiem service, a tempered oration on why the dead deserve defending and cherishing—God knew, when his time came, he would. He would burn his letters in a bonfire; it would take most of the day. He would create a real double-world stranger than any of his fictions, more convoluted than any plot. He would bind friends to his secrets. He would demand confidences be kept beyond the grave.

  And he would pay the cost, immense and crippling, of his ultimate failure to discipline his own great undisciplined heart. It would be the price of his soul.

  5

  THE PROTECTOR FELT that the vice-regal inspection of Wybalenna had begun particularly well. The beach was covered with Aborigines to greet the Governor, Sir John Franklin, and his party as they landed, leaping and capering with exuberance and shouting exclamations of wild joy. It may not have been elegant or civilised, but it was not without good effect. Lady Jane Franklin was particularly taken with a small black girl dancing in a children’s corroborree staged in welcome on the brilliant white sand. The child wore a long necklace of some beauty around her neck and a large white kangaroo skin over one shoulder. She stood out not because of her simple but striking costume, nor her diminutive size, nor her big dark eyes. Rather it was a certain, indefinable attitude.

  Lady Jane was unable to bear children; if pressed, she told her friends it had never been a burden, but was, in an odd way, a relief. This was untrue, but over time, like all evasions, it created its own truth. She came to avoid children, and as she grew older—she was now forty-seven—this had transformed into a general unease. There was in them something that she lacked, and which, in her heart, she found terrifying. As if the more of them, the less of her. As though she were dying in proportion to their living.

  For their noise and their laughter reverberated too loudly in the empty halls of her memory. She never forgot a younger Sir John asking why she was so white, and herself unable to say anything of that small red stain, for shame and fear. She closed her book, looked up, and told him she agreed with Wordsworth after all, that the sublime was ever to be found in the solitary.

  ‘Is that not so?’ she had demanded, her voice breaking shards.

  He agreed. He always agreed. More pregnancies ended abruptly. She made life, yet it left her. No one knew. Her life grew incommunicable. There were no death notices in The Times. No commiserations, no conversations, no wearing of black. The grief had nowhere to go but inside her. And then time ran out: her body changed. And so now, watching the little Aboriginal girl on the beach, Lady Jane was shocked to sense some intolerable weight dissolving, to feel an unnameable emotion rising.

  The child was slightly out of time with the others, but Lady Jane noticed how it was in a way that drew attention to her and her dance, and it somehow seemed only to enhance her performance. Lady Jane was possessed of an overwhelming urge to touch the little girl.

  ‘Why, look,’ said Lady Jane, turning to her aged and corpulent husband, ‘you almost wish to hold the little wild beast and pet her.’

  It was an unexpected observation for them both. She resolved not to let such feelings frighten her. For Lady Jane, what saved the child from being a child was that she was a savage, and what saved her from being a savage was that she was a child.

  Presuming the Governor’s wife more interested in artefacts than individuals, the Protector explained how the child’s necklace was made out of hundreds of tiny, vivid green seashells, threaded on several yards of possum sinew, then wrapped around her neck a number of times. When he went on to say that the necklace had belonged to the child’s mother, who had passed away some years before, and the white kangaroo skin to her father, who had died only the week before, Lady Jane was all the more taken.

  ‘The dear little waif,’ she said.

  ‘Leda,’ said the Protector. ‘Her name is Leda. Seven years of age. Youngest on the island.’

  ‘And what eggs, Mr Robinson,’ Lady Jane smiled, ‘do you expect her to bring forth for posterity?’

  ‘Eggs?’ asked the Protector, slightly confused. ‘I meant the child, not a chook.’

  ‘You must protect her from swans,’ said Lady Jane, making small mischief.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ said the Protector, whose knowledge of classical mythology extended little beyond the names contained in his battered copy of Carswell’s Classical Names & Almanac.

  ‘Leda,’ said Lady Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ smiled the Protector. ‘A beauty in the ancient world.’

  ‘The ancients believed that, in order to rape the beautiful Leda, Zeus transformed into a swan.’

  ‘Marvellous tale, of course,’ laughed the Protector, utterly appalled by the story, by Lady Jane’s frank language and, above all, by the exposure of his own ignorance. ‘The divine ancients!’ he sighed. ‘Such stories! Mind you,’ he quickly added, as the children ran past them at the dance’s end, ‘we prefer to call her Mathinna.’

  Lady Jane, who never normally touched children, reached out and took Mathinna by her arm. The child wheeled around grinning, till she saw the white woman who had caught her.

  ‘You dance beautifully,’ said Lady Jane.

  And suddenly embarrassed by the odd spontaneity of it all, Lady Jane dropped Mathinna’s arm. The child ran off and the Protector began talking about the new cemetery they were to inspect. But the mix of spirit and tragedy in one so young intrigued Lady Jane.

  Certainly her pity, when aroused, was a profound and terrible emotion. Or perhaps she simply found the idea of watching the children preferable to looking at a cemetery. For whatever reason, she insisted the children return and perform one more dance.

  Watching Mathinna again, Lady Jane felt she understood the child. She imagined her grief, her needs, her dreams. Afterwards, Lady Jane set a fierce pace as they walked up the hill to the graveyard, leaving Sir John huffing and puffing some distance behind. The Protector, running back and forth between the two, although relieved to find them as one in support of his work, did notice that Lady Jane’s mind seemed elsewhere. She was thinking of Mathinna’s dancing, her slow way of moving, so distinct and so poignant.

  ‘One might almost say,’ she said to Sir John when he finally caught up to her at the cemetery gate, ‘her body thinks.’

  Sir John’s body, on the other hand, gave no more appearance of an active intelligence than a well-tended pumpkin. Yet Lady Jane had long sensed there was within him some mechanism or spirit, some passion, waiting to be set in motion. In private she had at first called him Bear, because that was how she imagined him: a great bear in hibernation. But over a decade into their marriage, she was still waiting for him to awaken, as she fluttered moth-like around his eminence.

  Small as he was large, Lady Jane might perhaps have been beautiful had she chosen to highlight her features. But it was as if she retreated from them. And if that were not exactly the case, it was true that her nature was permanently at odds with itself. Her desire for conformity and approval, which she had inherited from her mother, the daughter of impoverished gentry, was at war in her with the vitality and belief in self that she learnt from her father, a northern midlands mill owner. Like her mother, she had married to better herself, settling on an ageing polar explorer who was, at the time, being lionised by London society as the nation’s greatest since Drake and Raleigh; like her father, she came to see that Sir John’s dullness, as with coal, was only good if it could be burnt to power something larger.

  She talked to him of history, landscapes, picturesque ruins and her sensation of vertigo when, as a child, she gathered with vast crowds of the lowliest of London to watch Byron’s funeral parade and thought she might fall forever. He replied with reports of navigation, Admi
ralty regulations, auroras, and how delightful reindeer tongues were to eat when properly cooked, the skin peeling off like a sock. They had nothing in common other than a respect for ritual. The prospect of eating something redolent of feet notwithstanding, she liked his seriousness, which she mistook for an achievement in which she might share.

  But he was boredom from the beginning, and if it was difficult to square the romance that surrounded his name with the torpor of his company, it was clear that he was malleable and that she could become the principal creator of his reputation. She resolved to be both his muse and his maker.

  Lady Jane’s aspirations came from the same source as her shame and her energy: her father. Intimacy between herself and Sir John she had discouraged from early in their marriage. It disgusted her, his sounds and flesh and face, and reminded her of all that she had devoted her life not simply to forgetting but to burning out of her being with experiences of a higher nature. Occasionally he forgot himself and was captive to his basest urges: at such times she believed herself exemplary in her tolerance of the revolting bestiality that is man. She endured his clumsy dull repetitions, the finger exercises of one tone-deaf to flesh. She came to see men as weaker—depraved, certainly—and in servitude to an uncontrollable animality, which was only the more mocking in her case because it had never resulted in a living child.

  And so she believed in him: because she had no other choice, because she was already ageing, and because after her initial disappointment with both his dreariness and his lack of vigour, she found him unexpectedly amenable to being dragged along in the wake of her ambitions and passions. His chief virtue, she came to realise, was endurance. It was this that had enabled him to survive the horrors of the Arctic in his famed expeditions of 1819 and 1821, and it was this that made him go along without demur or comment with all her dreams and plans. He was her dancing bear.