damp, riding the trill excitement of clanging iron and sudden whistles past trembling platforms.
Though virtually none of what Ellen wore was hers, from the moment she walked down into the lobby of the Great Western Hotel that morning with her sisters and drew admiring glances, it felt as if the marble silk crinoline dress she had borrowed from her sister Fanny, with its beautiful sloping shoulders and elegant trim of lace ruche, had been made just for her, as though the long burgundy mantilla her mother had worn when she was younger and which now draped over her shoulders had always belonged to her.
She felt a perfect balance between this glorious costume and her life, her soul and the world. She was aware of the looks she was getting, but she had grown up on the stage and welcomed the attention. She smiled, as much with pleasure at her own appearance as with happiness, when she caught sight of a bearded face on the opposite platform suddenly bobbing up and smiling as their eyes caught—Mr Dickens! And at that moment, the noise grew intolerable and the platform began shaking as a locomotive rolled in, its coupling rod slowing, an oil-blackened engineer leaning out, his white eyes shining like lamplights as the great machine trundled between them.
As the train cut off the sight of the young woman, a large, heavy man turned to Dickens and, leaning down into his ear, more yelled than whispered:
‘In a word, the love of dress is the ruin of a vast number of young women.’
‘Repression may well be the only lasting philosophy,’ said Dickens. ‘But, dear Mammoth, it is not the basis I propose to tell others to live their lives upon.’ He was standing at the centre of a small party he had assembled for an outing to what was being billed as the greatest art exhibition in history, a show so large a building at Old Trafford had been erected especially for it, along with a new railway station for the visiting crowds.
‘I beg for colour,’ said Dickens, smiling and slightly bowing to the approaching Ternans. ‘I crave colour in these cast-iron days.’ He held out his hand and walked forward to the elegant ensemble. ‘For a moment I thought it was the Empress Eugenie herself,’ he said, taking hold of Ellen Ternan’s hand, knowing full well—because she had told him—how she modelled her fashion on that of the young French monarch.
Perhaps it was the freedom of the wondrous steel hoops as opposed to the miles of petticoats his wife wore to keep her dresses puffed out, perhaps it was her youth, or perhaps, he wondered a little fancifully, it was her marvellous spirit, but she moved so freely and lightly, so nimbly and quickly, with her waist so fine. He recalled hearing how a woman had died wearing just such a skirt after she brushed against a candle and the dress went up like a hayrick, but now it was he who was burning. Realising he was not charming but staring, Dickens dropped Ellen Ternan’s hand, made a small leap like a startled bird, and hastened to divert attention from his momentary lapse.
‘Mrs Ternan! What delights await us!’ And then he spoke to Maria, he passed compliments to Fanny, and in the end a frustrated Ellen burst out—
‘Mr Dickens! Do you or do you not like my pomegranate mantilla?’
‘Red,’ said Forster, unable to contain himself. ‘And a dark red, at that, is not pomegranate.’
‘I am told it is the traditional colour for brides in India,’ said Ellen Ternan, wrapping a curl of her blonde hair around an index finger and not bothering even to look at Forster, but eyeing Dickens and smiling as she spoke. ‘Its virtue could not be more widespread.’
As they made their way into the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, Dickens was reminded of some fabulous cross between the most modern railway station and the wonder of Ali Baba’s cave. It was the spectacle of it all, the crowds, the human heat of the thing that excited Dickens far more than the endless old masters, the illustrious moderns, the sixteen thousand works of genius racked row above row, room after room.
Forster became dizzy viewing and was about to resort to the refreshment room for some boiled beef and bitter when they stopped by an old master’s painting of Leda and the Swan, hung, as were all the salacious old masters, on the highest row.
‘It is believed to be a copy of a lost Michelangelo original,’ said Wilkie, passing to Ellen Ternan the opera glasses he had brought along to better admire the loftier works.
‘I never really understood this myth,’ said Mrs Ternan. ‘A bad thing that somehow is seen to be good.’
A young man missing both legs and clad in rags trundled up beside them in a cut-down wooden barrel on wheels, which he paddled along with rudely bandaged hands. He reminded Dickens of a Russian samovar and interested him rather more than the paintings.
‘Harmony and discord is what it means,’ said Forster, who felt the need to offer commentary on everything. Wilkie raised his eyes and moved on to the next gallery. ‘But mostly discord,’ continued Forster. ‘As a result of Zeus’s crime, Leda conceived two eggs, and out of each egg were born two babies: one was Helen of Troy and I can’t remember the others. Trojan war follows, destruction of a people. And so on. That’s what it means.’ And with that he disappeared to the refreshments room.
The samovar suddenly sneezed violently and Maria Ternan was caught up in the dreadful spray. Without waiting to apologise, he swung his barrel around and rolled away. Mrs Ternan and Maria and Fanny moved off to the other end of the room.
Through the jittery glass Ellen Ternan first saw two pairs of babies, each just hatched from an egg, and then her gaze rose above them to a subservient swan happy in the embrace of a serene and naked young woman. It wasn’t as Forster had said at all, she thought. Everybody and everything in the painting—the babies, the swan, the world—all seemed to exist in awe of the naked woman. Ellen Ternan blushed, and the childlike colour it brought to her open face caught Dickens’ eye as she passed the opera glasses to him.
‘I could eat those babies,’ said Ellen Ternan.
They were now by themselves. In the solitude that the odd tumult of a crowd offers, Dickens opera-glassed and, lost with distant thoughts, was momentarily unguarded. She could hear him sucking his tongue.
‘She would be seven now,’ he said.
‘Who?’ asked Ellen Ternan.
Dickens brought the glasses down and looked at her, embarrassed.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Our daughter, Dora. When she was born she was so fresh you half expected to find eggshell on her crown.’
‘I haven’t met Dora,’ said Ellen Ternan.
Dora was something Dickens didn’t talk about, not even with Catherine. It wasn’t reducible to risible anecdote or ridiculous dialogue. Against her death he seemed to be able to offer neither defence nor explanation. But that day he found himself telling the short story of her life brickfaced, with few words, ending with him leaving her sick that fateful day of his speech to the General Theatrical Fund.
‘We have in our lives only a few moments,’ said Dickens, but then he stopped. Words for him were songs, a performance. But he was not singing or performing now. ‘A moment of joy and wonder with another. Some might say beauty or transcendence.’ He swallowed. He had been talking about Dora, but now he realised it was about something else. ‘Or all those things. Then you reach an age, Miss Ternan, and you realise that moment, or, if you are very lucky, a handful of those moments, was your life. That those moments are all, and that they are everything. And yet we persist in thinking that such moments will only have worth if we can make them go on forever. We should live for moments, yet we are so fraught with pursuing everything else, with the future, with the anchors that pull us down, so busy that we sometimes don’t even see the moments for what they are. We leave a sick child in order to make a speech.’
He stopped talking, put the opera glasses to his eyes, then took them away. He looked not at Ellen Ternan, but straight ahead at the wall.
‘The thing is,’ he said, but he said no more.
It was then Ellen Ternan told him something no one had. It was as if she had heard something beyond his words. It felt like an absolution.
‘You’re not to blame,’ said Ellen Ternan.
9
ON HEARING THE DOOR creak open—the vice-regal mansion’s ramshackle nature meant it moved up and down and sideways, and, in consequence, everything was loose or jammed or, improbably, often somehow both—
