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Wanting

Page 8

by Richard Flanagan


  The strange journey to where Dickens would find us and we began a week later when he travelled by railway from Gad’s Hill up to London. A man with a collapsing Stilton for a head entered Dickens’ carriage. He sat down, opened a newspaper, then almost as soon as it was fanned out, folded it back up and turned to the passenger next to him. He spoke as though reporting an advertisement for chamber pots.

  ‘Douglas Jerrold is dead.’

  Dickens was stunned. Why, he had seen his good friend only the week before, and though Jerrold had said he had been sick, he had put it down to the inhaling of fresh paint from his study window.

  It had been a wretched enough morning already. Katy had bought a bonnet and Catherine had felt it perfectly fine. He liked seeing his daughters look as splendid as she did in the bonnet, but the cost! the cost! His children had no idea about money—they were as spendthrift as his own father had been, and, he feared, perhaps as doomed.

  He had shouted at Katy, who had shouted back, and then Catherine shouted, then it seemed that there could be nothing said unless it was by shouting. Then he had stopped and in a whisper begged for them all to stop, to stop such madness as this, to stop falling apart, to come together once more as a family. But it was a speech, words, and no one cared a fig for it, and Catherine was weeping again and Katy was standing at her side, glowering at him.

  All he could do was try to steady himself by returning to work, to some new project in which he might once more bury himself alive. But Little Dorrit was done, the last instalment at the printer, and he had no project before him other than Household Words.

  By the time Dickens saw Wilkie at the Household Words office, his thinking had made several leaps. Knowing there was no private income in Jerrold’s family, Dickens proposed to Wilkie that they stage some benefit performances of The Frozen Deep for the widow and her children. After all, its initial run of just four performances had caught the attention of London, and had not he and Wilkie both been met frequently with requests to reprise the play from every section of society, up to and including the Queen herself?

  And so it was that on the fourth of July, a command performance of The Frozen Deep was given at a new, larger venue—the Royal Gallery of Illustration—for Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their family; among the other guests were King Leopold I of Belgium, Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and his fiancée, Princess Victoria, and even such luminaries as Hans Christian Andersen. This was followed by three additional performances at the same venue over the next few weeks. Dickens was once more Wardour, and his performance an even greater sensation.

  ‘If that man would go upon the stage,’ exclaimed Thackeray in the foyer afterwards, ‘he would make £20,000 a year!’

  But for all the success The Frozen Deep enjoyed, despite the expensive ticket prices, insufficient funds were raised to sustain Mrs Jerrold. Dickens, emboldened by his success, his spirits raised by once more playing Wardour, decided to stage a further series of performances in a much larger venue that would hold an audience big enough to raise the money needed. He settled on the Manchester Free Trade Hall, a magnificent new building which could seat two thousand people.

  If the size solved one problem, it created another. Dickens became convinced that his amateur actresses would not be able to project their voices sufficiently loudly and dramatically in such a cavernous theatre. Engaging and charming as his daughters and servants were in a small space, where their dramatic failings somehow created a kind of domestic charm, in a great theatre he feared that they would simply be viewed as mediocre, even ludicrous. He would need to find professional actresses.

  The working entrance to the Haymarket Theatre was a furtive door protruding into a side alley, from which the summer morning heat was raising a chutney of odours. With the toe of a boot, Dickens flicked aside the oyster shells splattered with bird droppings that were piled over the entrance steps. A filthy urchin, clad in only a torn waistcoat, rode a pig past, chattering in some gibberish Dickens took to be Gaelic, with two other semi-naked children walking alongside. A starling flew out of a hole above the door, to the shrill sound of hungry fledglings, as Dickens entered the dark and rather grim hall. He made his way towards the distant sound of music and dancing feet, to that place he loved above all others, where hearts can be at once disciplined and undisciplined, that world where, given a mask, lies speak the truth.

  After twice getting lost, he came upon the backstage, a confusion of beams, bulkheads, ropes and rollers, and such a mixing of gaslight and daylight, of long shadows and short shadows, that none of the natural laws of the universe seemed any longer to apply. And sitting amidst it all, striped by the shadows, was a young blonde woman silently sobbing.

  ‘Why, goodness gracious, Mr Dickens, when you said soon, I did not realise it meant this very morning in the midst of rehearsals!’

  Dickens turned to see a sturdy but not unattractive woman.

  ‘Mrs Ternan, I knew you would be busy, but I have a proposal that I wished you to hear as soon as possible.’

  He looked back to the crying young woman, whom he now recognised as one of Mrs Ternan’s pretty daughters; he had admired her on stage the evening before.

  ‘I’m afraid Ellen here feels that she is undone in the final scene when she must appear in the ripped dress. She feels it leaves too much of her leg revealed. You see, Mr Dickens’—and at the mention of his name, Dickens swung around to face Mrs Ternan—‘I have trained my daughters to be respectable and actresses, and not to view the two as incompatible. They are not common players.’

  ‘Mr Cornford of the Regent’s Playhouse spoke very highly of both the character and ability of your family, Mrs Ternan.’

  When he had watched Ellen Ternan, who to Dickens looked a pretty sixteen, perform as Hippomenes in a play called Atlanta, he had thought she seemed competent. Her calves were also rather attractive. But he understood from Mr Cornford that one of her sisters was outstanding and her mother was much respected, and that all four female professionals were reliable, respectable and, not least importantly, available on the dates the Manchester Free Trades Hall was booked.

  ‘If you wished, I could speak with the manager about costuming…’ Dickens’ eye strayed back to the girl. Her large eyes a piercing blue. Her stockings very thin. Her legs—

  ‘Oh, I need not worry, Mr Dickens. I will have my way and my daughter will not be cheapened; her name and our name will not be so easily lost.’

  From the high gallery windows, with their little strip of sky, there fell a strong beam of light. Dickens felt its unexpected warmth, its nourishing goodness.

  ‘No one will speak to the manager,’ said the girl suddenly. ‘I simply shall play my role as I see fit’—she lifted her head up high with a flourish as she spoke—‘and that shall be that.’

  ‘Ruin ought be, if ruin must come, ruinously worthwhile,’ said Dickens, knowing he was now playing and not quite able to restrain himself.

  Mrs Ternan feared business was being lost.

  ‘And your proposal, Mr Dickens?’

  But the girl appeared not to be listening when he replied. She was watching his hands. They darted about like the wings of a wild bird in a cage.

  7

  ONLY LATER, when he was dying in the resolute black of an Arctic winter, turpentine oozing from the compressed planks of the Erebus in which he lay, did Sir John come to see how difficult governing a part-prison, part-bazaar might be. His openness, his indecision, his lack of guile, his absence of secret agents, his ignorance of the necessity of compromise, his patrician disdain for the dark arts of inclusion and exclusion, of favour and persecution, had in Van Diemen’s Land doomed him finally to derision and contempt.

  Leading the starving remnants of his expedition, he had the previous month reconnoitred to the south, but, failing to find any recognisable landmark in that terrible white, they had returned to winter in their two ships, to make their one startling discovery: the Terror already crushed between floes and sunk, only
a snapped mast left on the ice as evidence of what once had been.

  On finally taking off his frozen boots in Crozier’s cabin in the Erebus, three toes had come off with Franklin’s stocking. They amputated his leg twice, once below the knee and once above, but the gangrene had him.

  Outside, the wind roared and necklaces of ice danced through the air. Inside, death seemed welcome, if only because it might relieve him of his own insufferable stench. He understood little of people generally and had, in society, tended to leave them to his wife, who assured him she did. In this, too, he could now see he was mistaken. She simply lacked his humility.

  Though Lady Jane would later show an ability for intrigue first awakened in her by the Van Diemonians, at the time she cultivated everything that was opposed to her nature: meekness, servitude, altruism. She was not a raconteur nor yet one taken with stories, be they in a foolish novel or tripping off the tongue of the woman sitting next to her at dinner. Still she tried, for she was in her own soul, as she was in everything, an inescapable self-improver in whose mind Van Diemen’s Land and her own ambitions had become one.

  Nowhere, Lady Jane had realised on arriving in that colony not yet forty years old, could be more ripe for reform and enlightenment. Her mind ran with ideas for projects and ventures and organisations. The island was prospering as never before, a flood of convict slave-servants tending its ever-growing flocks of sheep, which produced ever more wool for the booming textile mills of Britain. Its people—those not in chains, at least—were ready for a Golden Age, and when the history of that age came to be written, Lady Jane was determined that she and Sir John would be at its head.

  The island of which her husband was effectively monarch at first seemed to Lady Jane a delightful plaything, which Sir John might remake after the image of countless London parlour conversations. And at the beginning he had restructured the convict system in line with the most enlightened thinking, founded learned and scientific societies, and held soirées where matters intellectual, philosophical and scientific were discussed at extraordinary length. His supporters said he never slept, his critics that he had never awoken.

  The young daughters of the free settlers, who had loved Government House for the opportunity to dance the night away to the military band, were at first mystified, then angered, when they arrived to discover the ballroom given over to yet one more solemn discussion on the emerging science of mesmerism or the beneficial applications of magnetism to agriculture.

  Through her husband, Lady Jane had set about with great enthusiasm founding hospitals, charities and schools, leading the society away from the simple making of money and towards the reason of an enlightened Old World.

  ‘Do you think you could procure for me a pretty little design for a glyptotech?’ she wrote to her sister in London, using the fashionable Greek word for a building to house sculpture. ‘The island needs its own Ancients and Mythology. I can think of no better way of beginning than with a few rooms of small size, though good proportions, to hold a number of pictures and a dozen casts of the Elgin and Vatican marbles. Expense is an important object, or I shall never in this money-loving colony get the means of erecting it. Could you arrange to have casts made of the Theseus, Ilyssus, Torso and Horse’s Head at the British Museum, also the Apollo Belvedere, Venus de’ Medici, and the Dying Gladiator?’

  ‘Lady Bluebottle would do better filling her dance card with admirers than the island with the French ideas of the petticoaterie,’ her husband’s secretary, Montague, sniffed to his Hobart Town friends when recounting her ambition. But in her presence, of course, he only smiled and praised her initiatives.

  ‘Other women seek flowers,’ she once told Montague, in whom she correctly sensed piqued influence, ‘but I contend for laurels.’

  And for a time, her laurels pleased the upper echelons of the island, for, though in various ways dependent in their prosperity and power on the dreary misery of the many, they had nevertheless acquired the habit of defending themselves by garlanding themselves with culture.

  For the leaders of Van Diemen’s Land weren’t objectionable because they had dull poets, pompous naturalists and bad watercolourists, but because, having them, they couldn’t keep quiet about it. They recited grating verse, hung their walls with brutal brushwork, gloated about their learned societies and assured each other their several amateur scientists were daily making extraordinary discoveries.

  Above all else, they boasted of the couple who seemed to them to embody all that they saw as most splendid and special about themselves: the reputedly dashing new Governor and his wife. They were interesting people, celebrated people who were abreast of the latest fashions of thought, respected people who knew the right people in England, remarkable people who would make greatness of this colony, marvellous people who were exactly the right motley to throw over the mediocrity that really ran the island.

  And so they flattered and feigned to the vice-regal couple, and only the women convicts at the Female Factory gave definite expression to what the unfree felt: as Lady Jane lectured them on morality as the basis of all life, they turned their backs and, as one, flicked up their skirts and waggled their dirty arses. Beyond the immediate halo of power, in the outer rings of society, most convicts and ticket-of-leave men paid them no heed. In their sly grog shops and knock-houses, life went on as it had, with their banned songs and wild grog sweetened with sugar; in the backblocks and the forests, in the kitchens and stables and workshops and pits, luck and fate as ever determined whether they lived or died, were raped or flogged or freed, whether they found enough to eat or starved.

  But then a great depression swept Europe, the market for textiles collapsed, the mills faltered, the free settlers could no longer get the prices they once had for their wool, and there was no longer gold flowing in abundance. The colony’s prosperity was halted and everyone in the colony understood the cause—His Bulkiness, Sir John, and his interfering wife, Lady Jane.

  The Franklins were for a long time oblivious. Sir John began a Van Diemen’s Land navy with the construction of six gunboats, and was rather excited at the prospect of ordering new cannon with powder and shot. It gave him the illusion he was a man of action, which he felt might compensate for his failure to be a man of intrigue. On his arrival, he had been astonished by the prosperity of the colony. He was received with feasting, balls and every form of public rejoicing. On entering the northern capital of Launceston, he was escorted by three hundred horsemen and seventy carriages, the streets were thronged with well-wishers, all enthusiastic. The tyrant Arthur, his predecessor, was gone. It was as if he were a liberator. He never understood, then or later, Montague’s advice.

  ‘No government,’ warned his secretary, ‘faces such dangers as a despotism when it seeks to reform itself.’

  And so, with the boom over, the island suffered and seethed and began planning its vengeance. The Franklins continued exploring, reporting and holding soirées. For Sir John and Lady Jane were keen observers of everything, save the people around them.

  Visitors, old colonists and prospective new free settlers alike sailing into the island’s capital, Hobart Town, were all momentarily buoyed by an initial enthusiasm, spirits raised by the journey up a splendid estuary full of picturesque wooded hills and romantic little bays that revealed nothing of the miserable lives of those who lived beneath the occasional wisps of chimney smoke rising from deep within the forests.

  And how correspondingly large was their disappointment, how their spirits then sank, when they finally came upon the bedraggled town that not so much rose as staggered drunkenly up the cove to the foothills of the great mountain beyond. It seemed to combine the worlds of the army barrack and the prison yard into a town at best monotonous and at worst monstrous.

  For the convicts, who were only then dragged up from the sour shitty holds of what had been slaving ships fitted for the far shorter run between Africa and the Americas, there was neither exhilaration nor disappointment. They had survived si
x months’ sailing from the Old World. It was enough to be alive. They took what measure they could of the strange, obscenely fresh air and the vivid, hard blue light, and determined only that they must go on.

  It was a walk of but five minutes from the New Wharf to the somewhat ramshackle vice-regal mansion that sat on a bluff to the immediate south. What had begun as a cottage had been extended, then covered over, then added to and covered over again. Much as the colony had grown from a few hundred souls desperate for survival to a society of forty thousand, skin upon skin the cottage grew, until a great onion of a building had arisen. The island’s capacity to transform everything into unreliable memory even before it happened, or in spite of it never happening, was already apparent in that crumbling edifice, which, though only thirty years old, was already a relic of magnificent decay.

  But when Mathinna finally arrived there the spring following the Franklins’ visit to Wybalenna, after a journey that had taken far too long, her eyes did not see the rising damp, the peeling paper, the cracked and patched plaster, the pitching building that left door and window frames rising and falling like so many winking eyes. She saw instead a palace of the type she had heard the Protector describe. Even its musty smells of dead huntsman spiders and stale possum piss she understood as being what the Protector had told her so much about: the fragrance of God.

  Mathinna Flinders—as she was entered in the ship’s log, for the captain, being only semi-literate, believed writing was above all an exercise in decoration and felt all his passengers needed a second name to balance their first—had taken ten days to sail from Flinders Island to Hobart Town at the southern end of Van Diemen’s Land, the ship’s progress consistently frustrated by bad weather and contrary winds blowing up from the southwest.

  ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ the captain, who was a keen Methodist, would ask Mathinna, as their sloop bobbed up and down with the remnants of the great swells that churned the seas beyond this or that safe harbour to wild white hells.

 

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