Wanting

2

ON HEARING THE NEWS of the child’s death from a servant who had rushed from Charles Dickens’ home, John Forster had not hesitated—hesitation was a sign of a failure of character, and his own character did not permit failure. Mastiff-faced, full-bodied and goose-bellied, heavy in all things—opinion, sensibility, morality and conversation—Forster was to Dickens as gravity to a balloonist. Though not above mimicking him in private, Dickens was immensely fond of his unofficial secretary, on whom he relied for all manner of work and advice.

And Forster, inordinately proud of being so relied on, decided he would wait until Dickens had given his speech. In spite of Forster’s ongoing arguments that recent events excused Dickens from the necessity of addressing the General Theatrical Fund, he had been unwavering that he would. Why, even that very day Forster had called on Dickens at Devonshire Terrace to urge him one last time to cancel the engagement.

‘But I’ve promised,’ said Dickens, whom Forster had found in the garden playing with his younger children. He had in his arms his ninth child, the baby Dora, and he’d lifted her above his head, smiling up at her and blowing through his lips as she beat her arms up and down, fierce and solemn as a regimental drummer. ‘No, no; I could not let us down like that.’

Forster had swelled, but said nothing. Us! He knew Dickens sometimes thought of himself more as an actor than a writer. It was a nonsense, but it was him. Dickens loved theatre. He loved everything to do with that world of make-believe, where the moon might be summoned down with a flourish of a finger, and Forster knew Dickens felt a strange solidarity with the actor members of the troupers’ charity, which he was to address that evening. This attraction to the more disreputable both slightly troubled and slightly thrilled Forster.

‘She looks well, don’t you think?’ Dickens had said, lowering the baby to his chest. ‘She’s had a slight fever today, haven’t you, Dora?’ He kissed her forehead. ‘But I think she’s picking up now.’

And now, only a few short hours later, how splendidly Dickens’ speech was going, thought Forster. The crowd was extensive, its attention rapt, and Dickens, once started, as brilliant and moving as ever.

‘In our Fund,’ Dickens was saying to the crowded hall of actors, ‘the word exclusiveness is not known. We include every actor, whether he is Hamlet or Benedict: this ghost, that bandit, or, in his one person, the whole King’s army. And to play their parts before us, these actors come from scenes of sickness, of suffering, aye, even of death itself. Yet—’

There was a stuttering of applause that stopped almost before it started, perhaps because it was felt bad taste to draw attention to Dickens’ being there just two weeks after his own father’s death. A failed operation for bladder stones had left the old man, Dickens had told Forster, lying in a slaughterhouse of blood.

‘Yet how often it is,’ continued Dickens, ‘that we have to do violence to our feelings, and hide our hearts in carrying on this fight of life, so we can bravely discharge our duties and responsibilities.’

After, Forster took Dickens aside.

‘I am afraid…’ Forster began. ‘In a word,’ said Forster, who always used too many, but now realised there was one he did not wish to utter.

‘Yes?’ said Dickens, eyeing somebody or something over Forster’s shoulder, then looking back, eyes twinkling. ‘Yes, my dear Mammoth?’

His casual use of Forster’s nickname, his presumption all this was just banter, the pleasure of the performer at the success of a performance—none of it helped make poor Forster’s task any easier.

‘Little Dora…’ said Forster. His lips twitched as he tried to finish the sentence.

‘Dora?’

‘I am,’ mumbled Forster, wishing at that moment to say so many things, but unable to say any of them. ‘I am, so, so sorry, Charles,’ he said in a rush, regretting every word, wanting something so much better to say, his hand rising to emphasise with its customary flourish some point never made, then falling back to the side of his body, his big body that felt so bloated and useless. ‘She was taken with convulsions,’ he said finally.

Dickens’ face showed no emotion, and Forster thought what a splendid man he was.

‘When?’ asked Dickens.

‘Three hours ago,’ said Forster. ‘Just after we left.’

It was 1851. London’s Great Exhibition celebrated the triumph of reason in a glass pavilion mocked by the writer Douglas Jerrold as a crystal palace; a novel about finding a fabled white whale was published in New York to failure; while in the iron-grey port of Stromness, Orkney, Lady Jane Franklin farewelled into whiteness the second of what were to be numerous failed expeditions in search of a fable that had once been her husband.