Serial Monogamy (18 page)

“S
o, remind me again. Do we know if this meeting with the Ternans really took place?” Al has actually picked the paper up off the porch and spread it out on the dining room table to give himself more space to read. The girls are upstairs, supposedly dressing for ballet.

“Ana. Goli. We have to leave in fifteen minutes,” I call to them before I answer. “Katey Dickens' account says she came upon her mother crying and Catherine explained that Dickens had told her she had to pay a call on Mrs. Ternan. Katey told her not to, but she didn't say whether her mother followed that advice. Some assume Catherine didn't go; others think she did what she always did—”

“And obeyed her horrible husband.”

“Her magnetic and charming husband.”

“Well, she certainly dealt with Mme de la Rue. You make her sound wily.”

“Everyone always describes Catherine as a doormat, fat and tired and depressed after all those babies, and
always compliant. But she must have found some ways to resist him, just occasionally to have her own way.”

His cellphone, sitting on the table beside him, rings. He picks it up.

“Hello…Sure…Yeah, okay. Four then.”

He seems in a hurry to get off the phone.

“Who was that?”

“Just David.”

“What did he want?”

“We're scheduling a squash game for this afternoon.”

“But they're coming over tonight. I'm doing something special for Becky's birthday.” Since I had been feeling better, we had actually managed to reinstate our family parties and that night was our turn. For months, Becky had helped with shopping, cooking and babysitting; I wanted to surprise her with a cake, make her the centre of attention for a change.

“Yeah. I guess I had forgotten that. Well, that doesn't stop us from playing squash.”

“But if your game is at four, they're supposed to come over at five. We're starting early.”

“Okay, well, maybe David and I will be a bit late.”

“Was that really David on the phone?”

There's a pause as Al digests what I'm asking.

“I've told you it's over.”

“Actually, I think you just said it doesn't matter. And I shouldn't worry.”

“It doesn't matter because it's over.”

“Okay.” I wait a bit. “Where is she?”

“She's transferred out of the department. I think she has a new boyfriend somewhere.”

“So, what happened? Who broke it off in the end?”

“Nothing happened. It was kind of mutual. This just took priority.” He gestured around the dining room and kitchen beyond it. “I guess my way of looking at it changed.”

“How so?”

“I realized…Clearly, it wasn't fair to make her wait…”

“Just on the off chance I might die?” I ask with a smile.

“No. Until you were better, obviously. But it didn't feel…I mean, she's young. I guess what was going on here made me more aware of the age difference between us.”

“She doesn't understand cancer?”

“Well, she's afraid of it. She was afraid of the situation. She was kind of panicky and that wasn't particularly helpful.”

“What did she have to fear?”

“Getting blamed for breaking up a marriage, and somehow that would be much worse if you were sick. I don't know, maybe she just couldn't deal with the spectre of death or something. I mean, it's real grown-up stuff we've been going through.”

“And why should she have to deal with it?” I agreed. “I think that's the problem with May–December relationships. You're out of sync on so many issues. When they start,
he's the wise, sexy older man, she is the sweet young thing. He's forty-five to her twenty-five or whatever. She wants a glamorous adult life, career, family, the things the wife has. He wants youth, so they think they want each other. But they're at cross-purposes. He wants to be young and she wants to be old, or at least older. She wants to stop living in a basement apartment. He wishes his knees didn't creak whenever he bends down.”

“My knees don't creak…”

“No, it's your back you need to look out for. Anyway, I think a big age difference can come back to haunt a relationship later on.”

He smiles at me gently. “Yes, I'm sure you're right.”

I reach over and kiss him. “Trust me. She'd have got bored and wanted you to go clubbing Saturday nights.”

“I would have wound up in a retirement home supporting an aging trophy wife,” he replies. “Yeah. I suppose if they had lived today, Dickens would have just divorced Catherine and Nelly would have been a trophy wife. Much less drama all round.”

The cellphone rings again and Al picks it up.

“Yeah. Sharon just pointed that out too. Shall we try for three then?”

Mr. Wiggins was a master—superbly skilled and completely thorough, equipped with all the tools of the trade, yet possessing a genius for improvisation, patient but demanding, exacting of himself but forgiving of others. Nelly had known his kind before; you depended on them absolutely. The dresser who could somehow change a twenty-year-old into an old man with a dash of greasepaint or fix a badly torn hem during the interval; the character actor who could understudy every role in Shakespeare. Or, in Mr. Wiggins' case, the gas man who could create any number of dramatic effects by careful adjustment of the valves.

He was busy setting up when they arrived at the Free Trade Hall that afternoon, muttering to himself as he darted to and fro about the stage experimenting with the jets.

“All satisfactory, Wiggins?” Charles called out from the back of the hall.

“No, Mr. Dickens, not satisfactory in the least, but I'll fix it. How do you do, Miss Ternan? I trust you had a smooth trip to Manchester.”

“Very well, Mr. Wiggins. The trip was perfectly agreeable, thank you.”

In truth, the trip was nerve-racking, as it was one of those rare occasions when they travelled together by rail. Both had become more or less accustomed to taking a train alone or with other companions—Charles made the short trip from Gad's Hill to his office or over to Peckham all the time; Nelly went shopping in town from time to time—although an unexpected jolt or sudden braking was still enough to leave either of them clutching the armrest. However, when they sat together, alone once more in a first-class carriage, they were reminded more forcefully of the accident four years previously and both found themselves squeezing the other's hand and counting the minutes until they would arrive. Nelly was attending as much of this reading tour as they could manage, but usually she only ventured out to venues in or around London, meeting him there. He had wanted them to travel together to Manchester for sentimental reasons: it was the hall where they had performed together in
The Frozen Deep
twelve years before. She had made an early start from Peckham, changed trains at Victoria and headed to St. Pancras, where she simply met him in the carriage on the Manchester express. Once they arrived in Manchester, he left their compartment ahead of her carrying only a grip, leaving her to find a porter and
make her own way to the Mitre, where they registered separately for their separate rooms. They washed up and met in the lobby at three, proceeding to the hall where Mr. Wiggins was still fussing with the position of the jets.

She followed Charles to the front of the auditorium, where he fairly leapt up the few short steps to join Wiggins on the stage. Nelly always noticed that he was invigorated by the prospect of a reading, an effect that could be counted on to last until he took his bow; in the dressing room afterwards he would be exhausted.

“The red, Wiggins. Is it the right red? I thought it looked a little faded in London.”

“I bought a new medium today, Mr. Dickens. Had the devil of a time finding the right fabric here, but I think it will do the trick.”

“Good, good. We want it nice and bloody.”

“Sure enough, Mr. Dickens. Should be good and bloody tonight if I can just get the jets operating properly. The supply seems erratic.”

“Erratic. That will never do. Well, we will leave you to it. Just a quick word backstage and we'll go to dinner,” he said, holding out a hand to Nelly to help her up the steps.

And so, they were back in a theatre. Wiggins would spend the afternoon fiddling with the gas supply and Charles would spend it prowling backstage, discussing details with his manager, Mr. Dolby, eating dinner
abnormally early and drinking precisely two glasses of water one hour before the curtain would rise.

He entered the hall that evening to thunderous applause; he had been getting rave reviews from Aberdeen to Plymouth on what was being billed as a farewell tour. He stood at a lectern against the simple backdrop of a deep purple cloth. No more paraphernalia was needed to set the scene. The dramatic tones of the reader—and the impressive effects produced by Mr. Wiggins—would do the rest. The gas man began by bathing the whole stage in a warm yellow light, a jovial hue that flattered the reader's complexion and made the audience comfortable. It depended on a perfectly even row of footlights all set to a medium flame with a pale yellow fabric mounted in the cylinders in front of them, as well as the same colour on the winglights that illuminated the sides of the scene. Mr. Dickens began with a reading from
The Pickwick Papers
, the passage where Sam Weller gives evidence in the suit that Mr. Pickwick's landlady has brought against him for breach of promise. It was always well received, and as usual that night it had the audience laughing themselves silly. Charles was a good-enough performer he never gave in to the temptation to laugh at his own material; he was as fully in control as ever, except that Nelly could not help but notice he was having some problem pronouncing the word
Pickwick
. It kept coming out
Pigwig
. He also, when rendering Sam's comic habit of confusing
V
s and
W
s, often confused the two letters himself so that the joke was somewhat obscured.
It was hard to say if the audience noticed any of this, since they were already laughing at every word the reader spoke and Charles seemed unaware of his mistakes. At the interval, Nelly rose quietly from her aisle seat in the third row and slipped out a side door. She walked a short piece along an alleyway that ran the length of the building and knocked quietly at the stage door. The watchman opened the door to her, tipped his hat and let her in. In his dressing room, Charles was as ebullient as he always was in the midst of performance, entirely involved in the minute details of gratifying laughter or an annoying cougher in the front row as he sipped a small brandy, the only refreshment he took during the performance. She had come to realize that he drew his sustenance from the audience itself: “They loved the Pickwick, Nelly. Just loved it,” he said joyously as she entered. He did not mention that the title had seemed to trouble his tongue but moments before and she did not point out his mistake to him. She sat with him until the five-minute call and then returned to her seat.

After the interval, he was to perform the passage from
Oliver Twist
in which the thieving Bill Sikes becomes convinced that the prostitute Nancy has betrayed him to the police and brutally murders her. A scene of graphic violence without redeeming sentiment until Sikes himself is killed, it had been a bold choice for a public reading and Charles had tried it out on colleagues in London before he dared perform it on tour. The professional consensus had been that its emotional pitch took his public reading to a
more exalted level and he was encouraged to go forward with it. It had proved a spine-chilling success with audiences but Nelly thought the violent emotions of the passage were increasingly unhealthy for him. He felt every part as though he himself were experiencing a character's lovesick longings, bitter shame or murderous rage. In this case, he built himself to such a fever pitch with Nancy's murder that Nelly could see him shaking as he read. As she witnessed his fevered condition night after night, she had urged him to reconsider the length of the tour or at least cut that passage from his repertoire, but he vowed it was now so renowned that to drop it would be tantamount to abandoning the stage altogether. She had begged, she had pleaded, but to no avail, and as she sat in the audience waiting for the second act to begin she had to recognize that he could not imagine living a life without his public.

As he stepped on stage again, he seemed in perfect control, however, untroubled by the slips that had plagued his reading earlier. By the time he reached Nancy's murder, he was in full cry, building as chillingly as ever toward the violent act. As Sikes began his battery, Wiggins, on cue and to gasps from the audience, pulled the wire that spun the cylinders into a new position and now washed the scene in a ghastly blood red with purple hues coming in from the winglights. The new fabric he had found in Manchester had done the trick. The effect was startling, but the deep red light made it almost impossible to make out anything but the vague outline of the reader's face.
It was always contorted by this point in the drama, but while the audience gasped and cried, Nelly still peered anxiously through the odd, unpleasant dimness trying to see what effect the reading was having on the reader that night. Wiggins pulled his magic wire again and the red gave way to an eerie blue as the murderous Sikes found himself pursued by visions of Nancy's ghost. Now Nelly could see that contortions rippled across Charles's face. Still his voice did not falter and he built unrelentingly to the crescendo as the desperate Sikes falls from a rooftop and inadvertently hangs himself in a dangling rope. The audience cheered. Then, in the postscript intended to give an overwrought audience some breathing room before they would break into thunderous applause and finally leave the theatre, Wiggins switched back on his gentle yellow light and Nelly saw the truth. Charles stood there exhausted, soaked in sweat, his face ashen. Most alarming of all, his left eyelid twitched without ceasing.

She rose from her seat and rushed out into the alleyway as the audience broke into applause. They screamed for more, but he never gave an encore. Nelly ran to the stage door and pounded on it, pushing past the watchman and running now toward the wings, where Mr. Dolby stood with a towel waiting to receive the reader as he left the stage. She elbowed the manager aside, and as Charles staggered toward her, she caught him in her arms. It was no embrace; he collapsed, dragging her to the floor with the weight of his stricken body.