Tennyson's Gift (10 page)

And so the girl continued, from memory, closing the book.

Mrs Cameron interrupted.

‘That last part again, Mary, please. I think I heard you touch on the ideal title for this very wonderful picture of Mr Watts, whose noble brow has never shone to such advantage. But I must respect Il Signor's concentration, which is profound, and is a lesson to us all!' (It was true. Mentally, Watts was no longer in the room.) ‘Again, Mary! But quietly. Let me hear the lines once more!'

Mrs Cameron clapped her hands for joy.

‘That's it!' she exclaimed. ‘Tho'
much is taken much abides!
That's
it!'

Watts, hearing the cry, was recalled from his reverie.

‘It is?' he said thankfully, standing up, and removing his crown. ‘Much as I love to labour for the muse, Julia, I am profoundly glad to hear it.'

He looked at her.

‘Is something amiss, my dear?'

And Mrs Cameron, her picture ruined, watched him with her eyes like saucers, all aghast.

Several minutes after the Ulysses disaster, Mrs Cameron had prepared another plate by coating it with collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether), washing it in water, and then sensitizing it in a bath of silver nitrate and glacial acetic acid. This chemical stuff had been a bugger to learn, as you can imagine. She removed the plate carefully between two blackened fingers, peered closely, remarked, ‘Perfectly satisfactory, just a few hairs and scratches,' and then sneezed on it violently. She threw it out of the door.

The next plate was ruined when it cracked and broke being taken out of the camera; the next when the door to the chicken house flew open unexpectedly during the exposure; the third reached its required seven minutes without mishap, but Mr Watts was found to have moved some inches, due to falling asleep; another plate was dropped on the floor during another tricky process involving pyrogallic acid. The worst hold-up of all, however, was not technical but artistic, when Mary recommenced her reading of
Ulysses,
and mentioned that the king sat ‘among these barren crags' – an optional point, thought Watts; but Mrs Cameron, who groaned and smacked her forehead when she heard it, felt bound to represent the
rocks, and sent the gardener to find a craggy-looking sack of garden rubbish for Mr Watts to stand on. Watts begged to be excused: he could not stand on a bag of rubbish. And so she had him lolling – which suited him more – and finally, a plate was exposed, developed and fixed.

At which point, with the picture printing on to coated paper in the late afternoon sunshine outside, the accumulated stress overcame Mrs Cameron and she began to cry out, ‘Oh! Oh!', shaking her hand and running on the spot.

‘What is the matter, Julia?' asked Watts. ‘Have you pricked your finger?'

‘I haven't pricked it yet. But I soon shall, George, it is only a matter of time, and then potassium cyanide will pass into the cut and course through my bloodstream and then I shall die! Oh! Oh! And nobody will miss me – least of all Alfred Tennyson, the biggest ingrate who ever lived! Oh! Oh!'

‘You mean you may give your life for your art, Julia?' asked Watts, patting her hand. ‘But wouldn't that be a splendid thing to do? I think so often these days of poor old Haydon, you know.'

‘Haydon? Why?'

‘I'm not completely sure. But he haunts my dreams with a telescope, Julia; he never quite leaves me alone. He seems to blame me for having a patron and a comfortable life, when he struggled alone in the hard, hard world of bills and debt and children. But that's not my fault, is it? He even begrudges me Ellen – although I'd better not go into that.'

‘Oh the dear talentless man,' agreed Mrs Cameron. Kind-hearted soul that she was, she immediately forgot her own troubles, thinking of someone else's. ‘Of course we bought his sensational journals when they were published after his death. Charles and I read them in the evenings aloud, and cried a great deal, especially the bits about his brain being too big and driving him mad.'

‘I know,' agreed Watts morosely. ‘Those journals were a cracking read.'

‘Yes, but Alfred must never know I read them, George! You know how he disapproves of morbid curiosity – which is odd in him, really,' she reflected, ‘when he has done so much to make morbid his own middle name.'

And at the thought of dear old Alfred ‘Morbid' Tennyson, Mrs Cameron sighed and slumped, and stared at his special gate with eyes forlorn.

‘Julia?'

‘Yes, George.'

‘You don't suppose it
was
my fault, do you? That Haydon took his life? It wasn't because I was getting all the decent walls?'

Mrs Cameron was amazed by the question.

‘I am sure he never blamed you, George. But I think it shows the greatness of your heart that you think in such terms.'

She paused. A thought had struck her.

‘Are there not plenty of walls to go round?'

‘Alas, no, Julia. A good public wall is worth a thousand pounds a foot. And before Haydon made a point of demanding some, there were virtually no walls at all.'

‘No walls at all? I see. Well, no wonder he was such a champion of the Elgin Marbles – there's walls for you. Speaking of which, you didn't see whether the Tennysons had hung that exquisite wallpaper I gave them? I've asked so many times now, I can't –'

She trailed off. Watts looked nonplussed. He was not a man on whom wallpaper made an impression.

‘As for Haydon, however,' continued Mrs Cameron, ‘it was the American midget that killed him, George, metaphorically speaking. Everyone knows that. He could not endure it that all the visitors to his terrible last exhibition preferred to go next door and see that yankee short person, what was his name –?'

‘Colonel Tom Thumb.'

‘– Yes, that's him. Losing out to a freak, it was so undignified, for a man of his high artistic aims.'

Watts considered. He supposed this must be true. The indignity must have been frightful.

‘Actually, I heard the freak was good,' he said at last.

‘He was. We went twice.'

‘Oh.'

‘We bought the book.'

‘And Haydon's pictures were bad?'

‘They stank, George. They reeked. His talent was never close to yours, whatever you may think. You are England's Michelangelo! Haydon was just a dauber on a very large scale. People only kept asking for his “Napoleon on St Helena” because it was a back view, you know, and because they felt sorry for him. And another thing. Despite all his devout talk and perpetual prayer, it must never be forgotten that Haydon used his own face as a model for the countenance of Our Lord. I fear I can never forgive him for that.'

‘It was a bit presumptuous, I suppose –'

Mrs Cameron snorted.

‘– But perhaps no other head was available, Julia.' Mrs Cameron considered the argument for a moment and rejected it.

‘There is always a head available, George. We both know that.'

Back at the Albion Hotel, Jessie folded her arms and assumed an expression which in an older person might have been deemed murderous. It had been a horrible day. Those nincompoops Daisy and Annie had mooned around Mr Dodgson, letting him write them poems and draw funny pictures on the sand with a stick. Daisy had even let Mr Dodgson pin up her
skirt again, pretending that she had no safety pins of her own. (She had lots, in fact. Jessie had seen them. Jessie had even equipped her with a dozen of her own.)

Her face was nearly purple with emotion. If Watts had seen her, he would have been prompted to pronounce that old infallible dictum, ‘Short folk are soon angry.'

‘I love my love with a D!' said Jessie, spitting out the words. ‘Because he is a Darling Doggie Dumb-Dumb Dodo! Argh!

Pah! Pooh!'

Jessie had expected a bit more attention for herself, that was the sum of it. Dodgson had been absorbed elsewhere, and although she disapproved of him, the rejection stung her. She had yet to learn the sad fiscal lesson of the plain female, that if you don't pay compliments to the male gender, you don't get any back. Lionel Tennyson had virtually ignored her, preferring to chat with a pretty woman fully double her age (Ellen, who was indeed sixteen). To cap it all, Ada had abandoned her, disappearing behind the bathing machines in a sneaking manner the moment Lionel turned up. Ada ought to be a bit more grateful to Pa and me, Jessie thought. We picked her up when she was virtually destitute, and we can just as easily drop her again.

She kicked a table leg.

‘The trouble with everybody,' said Jessie aloud, ‘Is that
they've got no Organ of Gratitude.'

She pursed her lips, pulled her folded arms more tightly to her chest, and let the words revolve in her mind.

Ha! No Organ of Gratitude at all, some people; What some people need sharpening up is their Organ of Gratitude.

Hardly knowing what she was doing, she started to feel her own head, to check that her own Organ of Gratitude was of decent size and health. But she stopped again. Hold on a minute, she thought, where is the Organ of Gratitude? She knew where Benevolence was. Also Acquisitiveness, which
in her own case was substantial. But Gratitude? Where ought it to fit in? Was it a higher emotion, or a baser one? Animals were supposed to feel gratitude. But wasn't it a cornerstone of human relations? Weren't good people benevolent so that others could be grateful? Puzzled, she ran to Lorenzo's charts and scanned them for an answer. It wasn't there.

Jessie took several deep breaths and searched again. It still wasn't.

‘Christopher Columbus!' she whispered. For suddenly it was as plain as day: Nobody had yet discovered the Organ of Gratitude! Phrenology had been going for seventy years, and nobody had located one of the most fundamental organs. And then, one day, a small lisping infant asked the question, ‘Where ith gwatitood Daddy?' and revolutionized science.

It sounded like a great myth; she could already visualize the pamphlet. ‘How Jessie Fowler located the Organ of Gratitude, Unaided by a Grown-up – Chapter One: Out of the Mouths of Babes.'

As you may see, the scientific implications of this breakthrough were not lost on Jessie. In phrenological terms, her discovery on this Friday afternoon in Freshwater Bay was a landmark. It was like being the first person ever to say, ‘Yes, this River Nile is all very well, and yes it's got some very snappy crocodiles in it, but
where does it come from, then?
Don't you think somebody ought to head up country in a pith helmet and find out?'

Back at Dimbola, Mr Watts was invited to remove his smock and see the first signs of the finished picture entitled ‘Tho' Much is Taken, Much Abides'. He was quite glad to get the
smock off. Its last inhabitant had been an artisan involved in cleaning mackerel (representing King Lear), and if his nose did not deceive him, it had not been washed in between.