Wanting

10

DICKENS STOOD ON THE STAGE which would soon transport him to the Arctic, and looked around that marvellous magic theatre. The Manchester Free Trade Hall was as remarkable as anything else in that great shock-city, which, with its huge factories, foundries and mills, its slums, its misery and its riches, was the wonder of the modern world. The theatre had every modern appliance and device. Far above him, a gasman sat on the trapeze fly at his table, operating the best set of gas borderlights and footlights Dickens had seen, while to his left on a perch was the very latest theatrical innovation, a limelight.

Two men stood by that large box of burning lime, their job to keep its fire burning with a giant pair of bellows, prevent the temperamental machine from exploding, while all the time moving its dazzling cone of brilliant white light hither and thither around the stage. Dickens had only heard of this amazing contrivance, and now here he was, about to play within its extraordinary glow.

He stood a desk johnny at centre stage, had the limelight lit and focused on the man’s face. The limelight’s power was extraordinary. It washed colour out. It accentuated wrinkles, jaws, lips. It was clear to Dickens that his make-up would need to be stronger, more pronounced, to take full advantage. He went to the back of the stalls and had the johnny drop and raise his head, move his face in and out of the light, carefully observing the effects of light and shadow, the way in which one might seemingly move like the Devil himself between night and day, the new spaces it opened up for his portrayal of the dying Wardour.

Dickens walked back onto the stage and stood in the brilliant white light. As was the fashion now, the auditorium would be unlit during the performance. He looked down at the pits and was delighted to realise he could see nothing.

He felt a hitherto unknown power and disguise in the white brilliance in which he was bathed, and he realised that what had begun as an amateur theatrical was now going somewhere unexpected and extraordinary. Some of his fellow writers disapproved—Thackeray had said that any vanity is deemed honourable just so long as charity can be named its beneficiary.

Damn Thackeray, thought Dickens. He has posterity. I only have tonight. Damn him! Damn them! Damn them all! He, who was buried, would be resurrected. He, who was dying, encased in pewter, in ice, would now live—if only for a moment—in the blinding white of limelight. And, secure in that dazzle-shaft, with the world beyond finally unseeable, he vowed to imbue Wardour with all he had, to allow his own soul finally to walk naked.

Much to everyone’s relief, the opening night saw a full house. Dickens’ performance was staggering in its intensity and effect. Watching from backstage, Wilkie Collins was overwhelmed. In the wings he could see hardened carpenters trembling and stagehands weeping, and out in the theatre the audience of thousands swam in tears. Wilkie, eyes also moist, leant across to John Forster.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he whispered. ‘But there’s something strange, something not right in the performance.’

Forster looked at him, perplexed. His great friend was triumphant, had risen to a new height—what could be better?

‘Something terrible,’ hissed Wilkie. ‘Can you not see it? It is not acting—it is metamorphosis.’

‘Come, Wilkie!’ cried a stranger’s voice. ‘It is your cue about to happen.’

And there at their side was a bearded and wretched maniac, not Dickens but Richard Wardour, possessed. He grabbed at Wilkie and, fetching him into his arms, carried him back out onto the stage, where Wilkie was greeted by Maria Ternan as the love of her life, Frank Aldersley, whom she had thought dead.

After the performance, Dickens called on the Ternans in their dressing room to congratulate them. Ellen Ternan had been struck by the attention and deference shown to this man, of whom she had, on their first meeting, thought so little that she blubbered in front of him. She had heard of him, of course, and she had read The Pickwick Papers and some of his other books—who hadn’t?—but she had been unprepared for the way the world parted and bowed wherever he went. She felt more important than the royal family once in Manchester. They were lodged in the grand Great Western Hotel; the company was given their very own dining and sitting rooms, where, with her sister Maria, Ellen Ternan had on their first night perhaps a little more brandy than she should, an adventure to which Dickens made a light but pleasing allusion.

After he had left their dressing room, Ellen Ternan noticed on her dressing table a small book Dickens had been carrying in his hand. She looked at it—why, it was a notebook! Perhaps, she thought, Mr Dickens’ own notebook! She would not open it; private things, her mother had taught her, were just that. But then, she reasoned, what if it weren’t Mr Dickens’? How was one to know without opening it? And so that night she took it with her to bed. Its spine was tight, the pages dun-coloured. It opened like a wounded fledgling hoping to be healed.

There was no name on the inside cover, but Ellen Ternan recognised the handwriting from notes he had scrawled on her script, and so she turned to the next page and the next and the next until she had flicked through the entire book. There were all sorts of lists and titles and queer phrases. ‘Undisciplined heart.’ She licked a page. It was plain as pease pudding. ‘New ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground as Wardour, with surprising force and brilliance.’ There was no tale skewering the pieces into a real meal.

She read a few things—she guessed they were for Mr Dickens’ next novel. They were mostly gloomy, though there were one or two funny conversations and many curious sentences. ‘The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.’ Odd names of people. ‘Miriam Denial.’ ‘Verity Happily.’ ‘Mary McQuestion.’ Strange maxims. ‘You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is—can you pay?’ All up, it seemed rather queer, almost boring, and it was a wonder if Mr Dickens could make anything of it and would want it back at all.

She found him the following evening, alone in the manager’s office an hour before the performance, at work on his prompt copy.

‘Mr Dickens!’

Dickens looked up. He already had on the new make-up he had devised that day to better use the limelight. It accentuated his goatish face.

‘Why, you could be Lucifer himself, Mr Dickens!’

He suddenly reared up, threw a finger either side of his forehead, and with a ghastly face gave a roar. Ellen Ternan leapt back squealing, and would have fallen onto a table behind her had not Dickens grabbed her by the wrist.

‘I am sorry, Miss Ternan,’ he apologised. Ellen Ternan looked down to where her wrist was held in the great author’s firm grasp. ‘A joke. A poor joke.’

‘Nevertheless, even Lucifer does not get the better of me,’ said Ellen Ternan. She wrested her wrist free. ‘I am an Englishwoman.’

‘How remarkable,’ said Dickens. ‘I mistook you for an Italian vase.’

She no longer knew what to say to one so famous, so instead she just looked him in his eyes. They were dark, and the strange make-up only amplified their blackness. She felt at once frightened by him and drawn to him. In the hope he would take her seriously, she felt obliged to say something serious.

‘I liked what you said to Mr Hueffer about the government and the war,’ she said, referring to when Dickens had taken exception to a comment made by the manager of the Free Trade Hall about the importance of winning the war in the Crimea. She had to admit, she found him rather handsome. ‘About how a highly decorated English general might be a complete fool, but his misadventures will always be a success, most particularly when they are a disaster for which words like gallantry are invented. That did make me laugh.’

Dickens smiled. Ellen Ternan smiled back, and produced from behind her back his notebook, waving it in front of him while shaking her head as though admonishing him.

‘Ruin ought be, if ruin must come, ruinously worthwhile,’ she said, not knowing this was not playing. She placed the notebook on the dressing table and slid it across to him. Just as she went to withdraw her hand, he reached out and the tips of their fingers touched. Dickens neither picked the book up nor moved his fingers away.

‘It is not going well,’ said Ellen Ternan. Her body was conscious only of his touch. But this time she did not pull her hand away. She looked up.

‘The war,’ she said, ‘I mean.’

‘Wars,’ he said, ‘rarely do.’

She felt as though lightning were passing through her body and, at the same time, utterly foolish for feeling that way.

‘Lady Franklin must be so very grateful. And Mrs Jerrold.’

And having named other women who had secured some form of favour from the great man, Ellen Ternan could not resist the hope that she, too, might find herself part of that company. She was trying to keep her breathing contained. Dickens slowly withdrew his hand and the notebook, and then—but did she imagine it? And if he did do it, she wondered, did he mean anything by it?

For, as he lifted the notebook, he traced the slightest line down her index finger with his own. And where he traced the line, her finger burnt, and there was about that burning something shameful and something wicked and something altogether wonderful.

Dickens talked about the play as if nothing had happened, but still her finger burnt and burnt and she was unsure if anything had or hadn’t happened. And though her burning finger assured her something had, all she knew with certainty was that she wished to stay with him, have him guide her, just be in his company till the day ended and beyond.

He sought her comments on his performance.

She told him it was very powerful, but that if he were to say his lines a little slower and let them breathe with pauses, it might be astonishing. She was not quite sure why he would care to know her thoughts at all, but seeing him look so intently at her, she picked up courage and continued.

‘Let your face and hands tell the audience what it is you feel. Pull the people into you, sir, with every movement, pull them in as if you might hug them, and then and only then let your words fire into them like a cannon pressed to the heart. I have known it, sir, that when you hold a moment for so long—then count three beyond that before saying anything more—that it can work fulsomely well.’

She didn’t quite know what fulsomely meant, but felt it was better that something worked well in a fulsome manner than unsupported by such a brace. As she spoke, she waved her arms and hands about as if in illustration of her argument.

‘Miss Ternan,’ began Dickens.

‘Nell,’ she said. ‘Everyone calls me Nell.’

‘Nell,’ he said. ‘Very well, then.’ And in his imagination he had the overwhelming sense of those same arms, naked, wrapping around his neck, and those same hands rising up through the hair at the back of his head as if about to join in prayer. ‘You had better call me Charles.’

She smiled.

‘On account of your Old Curiosity Shop, sir. Little Nell.’

By the second night, people were being turned away in their hundreds. That afternoon Dickens and Ellen Ternan met for tea in the hotel dining room. Mrs Ternan was to come, but excused herself at the final moment because she had been contacted by an old friend, with whom she had once worked in theatre and who was now married to a cotton magnate.

‘A Cottonopolis contessa,’ said Ellen Ternan. ‘Now there is an invitation no one can say no to!’

And in this way, Ellen Ternan and Charles Dickens were for a third time alone together. Rather than cakes, Ellen Ternan ordered cherries, which the waiter assured her were the finest, all the way from Kent. But neither ate as they talked theatre, about which Ellen had several very funny stories new to him; politics, in which her views were not as disillusioned as those of Dickens, who could see very little prospect of any good arising, but felt the fight for sane progress must never be quit; literature, in which she shared with him a great love of the masters, Fielding and Smollett. Thackeray she enjoyed, but she secretly pleased Dickens—who was frequently beset by that most sincere of literary emotions, jealousy—when she said the great man struck her as a Clydesdale running in the Derby.

Then they laughed about things that had taken place over the last few days, he made many jokes, until, without reason, the conversation froze, and it became as impossible to talk as only a moment before it had been easy. After a silence that neither could fill, he spoke to her in a way that was halting and awkward.

‘For a long time I felt I degraded myself, giving in to what life had brought me. These last few days have…well, I can see, Nell, I can see I was wrong.’

None of what he said made any sense to Ellen Ternan. More from a sudden nervousness than any appetite, she placed a cherry she had been rolling in her fingers into her mouth, sucked the flesh for a moment as if it were a sweet, and then delicately rolled the still pulpy pit to her lips’ edge, took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it in a bowl.

Dickens stared at that spent stone with its wet threads of red flesh. He envied its good fortune. With a sudden movement, as unexpected to him as it was to her, he scooped the pip up and swallowed it. Looking back up, his eyes caught hers.

She burst out laughing and he joined in, giggling at the absurdity of it. And at that moment he felt no shame, though he wished terribly that he might feel shame, or fear, or at least concern. But to the contrary, he felt intoxicated.

Not long after Ellen Ternan returned to her room, there was a knock at her door and a messenger with an envelope. Inside it was a card with hotel letterhead and a message in the distinctive hand she now knew as that of Dickens. ‘Dear Miss N,’ it began.

Ellen Ternan read and reread the card. She did not burn it. She did not really understand it. It made no more sense than his mysterious words over tea. It confused her and excited her and pressed on her. She knew it meant something, something large and ominous, but what that large and ominous thing was eluded her thinking.

Was this not a personal communication from the most famous writer in all of England addressed to her—Nelly Ternan? And was that not the most marvellous and extraordinary and remarkable thing, and was it not that this most famous writer in England thought her interesting and clever and inspiring?

She held the card close to her chest, longing to run into the room next door and tell Maria, but something warned her against that action. It was the most marvellous, extraordinary, remarkable thing—yet instead of telling her sister, she hid the card away at the bottom of her carpet bag. Was it those words ‘Burn this card’? She could not say. It was not age; after all, several of her friends—perfectly respectable—had married at fifteen and sixteen, some to men three times their age. No, it was something else. Mr Dickens was married. She hid it—why did she hide it? She did not know, only that doing this, if nothing else, was wise.

That night, Dickens was once again Wardour, and Wardour was even more possessed, demonic, remorseful, redeemed. Once more, he sacrificed himself for love. The sobbing of the front rows could be plainly heard.

As he played the role, Dickens was more than ever determined to behave nobly and selflessly, like Wardour. It could not go on! He must cut himself adrift from Ellen Ternan, no matter the cost, the anguish, the misery, the waking death that would be his life henceforth.

‘It was the greatest performance of the play that I could have imagined,’ Wilkie told Dickens after. ‘You literally electrified the audience.’

He could not know that, as the applause rained down and down at the play’s end, a strange sensation grew and grew in Dickens until it was the most terrible fear. He was advancing down a narrow tunnel, through the blackness of that overwhelming noise, to a place from where he would never return.