Tennyson’s Gift. Lynne Truss
Can I see pictures of you, Mary Ryan –’
‘No you can not!’ spat out Mary Ryan. ‘And you just be careful with those wings, Miss Daisy Bradley, that’s all. The mistress ordered them all the way from Mortlake, and if you’ll not be crushing them feathers all this time, I don’t know what you are doing.’
At which the little girl, sensing that the fun was over, ran indoors.
Mary Ryan, left alone, wiped her eyes with her apron and let out a little scream. ‘Mary Ann this! Mary Ann that! How I love thee, Mary Ann!’
And picking up her pinafore, she turned on her heel. Unabashed at his eavesdropping, Dodgson stepped back from the scene, brushed his clothes for dust and twigs, and reassured himself there was nobody about. He was never embarrassed when people betrayed private emotions in front of him; having no emotions himself (or none to speak of), he was just very, very intrigued. Sometimes he made notes for use later on. He had no idea why one maid should begrudge another maid her chance to star in Mrs Cameron’s photographs – especially when, in his own opinion, the photographs were dreadful, too big, and shockingly out of focus. Glancing up at the windows of Dimbola, he caught the eye of a white-bearded old man smiling from ear to ear – Mr Cameron, presumably. The old man waved in a jolly sort of way, as though deranged. Dodgson studiously ignored him; you never knew where that sort of thing might lead.
‘But I must contrive to meet this Daisy,’ he decided, and produced his small notebook again. He wrote down her name. He also wrote it in letters down the page – D-A-I-S-Y-B-R-A-D-L-E-Y – ready for an instant acrostic poem, which he could sometimes complete in five minutes or less. Twelve letters! Excellent! Three stanzas of four! Two stanzas of six! What a charming child, to have such a convenient name, numerologically speaking! With several days planned at Freshwater Bay, there was plenty of time to make friends with the little girls, and get their addresses, and campaign for their photographs, and send them love poems. But he had discovered it was a great advantage to know names in advance, without asking.
‘I love my love with a D because she is D-D—Daring,’ he mused. ‘I hate her because she is Demanding. I took her to the sign of the Dr—Dromedary, and treated her with Dumplings, Dis-sss—temper and D-D—Desire. Her name is Daisy and she lives –’
Indeed, he was just envisaging the scene on the gusty beach – the little girl paddling with a shrimp net; himself nearby pretending not to notice her, but doing fascinating bunny-rabbit tricks with a pocket handkerchief to ensnare her attention (it never failed) – when he heard the approaching trundle of the Yarmouth cart, and looked up to see Tennyson, the great literary lion of the age, dressed as usual in copious cloak and broad hat, holding a book of his own poems directly in front of his face for better reading, but evidently catching a vague myopic passing blur of Dodgson nevertheless.
There was no time to hide, no time to frame a polite greeting before – ‘Allingham!’ boomed the laureate, as the cart passed Dodgson (pretty closely). Dodgson jumped.
Allingham? He glanced behind him, but could see nobody.
‘Allingham, we dine tomorrow at six! Come afterwards – not before, there’s a good fellow – and I shall read my Enoch Arden, and explain it to you, line by line! We shall confound the critics!’
And before Dodgson could voice a word of protest, the poet had passed by. The rush of air pulled Dodgson’s boater from his head and left it dusty in the road.
This was not the welcome Dodgson had anticipated. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could he make a visit now? He picked up his hat again, and touched his head carefully with each hand in turn. Still there, still there; still Dodgson, not Allingham. He looked up at the old man, who now appeared (no, surely not) to be dancing with glee.
On the breeze, Dodgson smelled the ozone from the sea, the scent of roses, fresh lead paint, hot buttered toast and potassium cyanide, all mixed together with the lobster curry. He looked up the lane towards Tennyson’s home, and then back to the blue sizzling bay, where children would soon be packing their shrimp nets. Salty and sandy, and with their hair in pretty rat-tails, they would head home for tea at the nearby hotels.
Absently, he flicked through his manuscript.
Dear oh dear, how late it’s getting …
Mary Ann, Mary Ann, fetch me a pair of gloves …
I shall sit here, on and off, for days …
You? Who are you?
As he pondered Mrs Cameron’s interesting corner of the Isle of Wight, another glass plate whizzed across her garden and broke with a shattering sound like someone falling into a cucumber frame. At Freshwater Bay, he reflected, whichever direction you went in, the people were mad.
‘Which way?’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Wh-Wh—Which way?’
When Lorenzo Fowler woke on Thursday morning to the sound of waves and seagulls, and the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave, he had trouble initially guessing where he was. He normally woke to the sound of London traffic and coster boys. Freshwater Bay had been an impulsive decision, prompted by little Jessie complaining of the fug of Ludgate Circus (‘Pa, this heat!’) and accomplished with a spirit of ‘What are we waiting for?’ that had ‘yankee’ written all over it.
Lorenzo as a caring father needed no other incitement than his little daughter’s cry. She was a pale, freckly child with orange ringlets, and he still felt guilty at transplanting her to England – such a backward land in terms of diet, clean water and fresh air. So at her first complaint, he shoved a few heads in boxes, packed his charts and silk blindfold in violet tissue, selected some hot, progressive Fowlers & Wells pamphlets (subjects included anti-lacing, temperance, tobacco, octagonal architecture and hydropathic cholera cures) and took the earliest train to the New Forest.
Even in a mercy dash, it seemed, a phrenologist did not travel light. For phrenology was Lorenzo Fowler’s lifelong pursuit, and after thirty years he was not so much proud of this highly dodgy profession as still busting the buttons of his fancy satin waistcoat. Some people grow tired of fads, but not Lorenzo Fowler. For him, phrenology was the fad that would not die. Talk to him ignorantly of phrenology as the science of ‘bumps’ and he might throw back his magnificent head to laugh (baring his excellent white teeth) before genially setting you straight for half an hour, dazzling you with his specialist vocabulary, and at the end of it selling you a special new demountable model of the brain for the knock-down rate of two and nine.
Of course, for practising the craft of head-feeling, all you needed were a pair of hands, a good spatial sense, and a map of the mental organs fixed firmly in your mind. But Lorenzo Niles Fowler was more than a phrenologist. He was also showman and evangelist, whose personal belief was that the market for phrenology had never been so vigorous, not even in its heyday in his native United States. Why, already on this trip to the Isle of Wight he had used a cursory reading to pay the carter from Yarmouth, telling him, ‘Such a large Self Esteem you have! And what Amativeness!’ Gratified by this mysterious, flattering talk from an exotic foreigner, the normally morose carter had gladly waived the fee when he dropped his passengers at the Albion Hotel, right on the edge of the bay. Lorenzo smiled. It worked every time. Tell people they have abnormally large Amativeness (sexuality by a fancier name) and they are well disposed to phrenology – and phrenologists – for ever after. It’s just something they happen to enjoy hearing.
Jessie was awake and dressed already, playing with heads in the chintzy sitting room. She was eight, and precocious, and though the scene might strike an outsider as altogether gruesome, she was happy enough, having known no other dollies in her life save these big bald plaster ones with nothing below the neck. Poor kid. She had no idea how it looked. Not only were there detached heads all over the floor, but she had on a thick dress of red tartan – a tragically bad choice when you consider the ginger hair.
‘Pa?’