Wanting

Dickens walked back onto the stage and stood in the brilliant white light. As was the fashion now, the auditorium would be unlit during the performance. He looked down at the pits and was delighted to realise he could see nothing.

He felt a hitherto unknown power and disguise in the white brilliance in which he was bathed, and he realised that what had begun as an amateur theatrical was now going somewhere unexpected and extraordinary. Some of his fellow writers disapproved—Thackeray had said that any vanity is deemed honourable just so long as charity can be named its beneficiary.

Damn Thackeray, thought Dickens. He has posterity. I only have tonight. Damn him! Damn them! Damn them all! He, who was buried, would be resurrected. He, who was dying, encased in pewter, in ice, would now live—if only for a moment—in the blinding white of limelight. And, secure in that dazzle-shaft, with the world beyond finally unseeable, he vowed to imbue Wardour with all he had, to allow his own soul finally to walk naked.

Much to everyone’s relief, the opening night saw a full house. Dickens’ performance was staggering in its intensity and effect. Watching from backstage, Wilkie Collins was overwhelmed. In the wings he could see hardened carpenters trembling and stagehands weeping, and out in the theatre the audience of thousands swam in tears. Wilkie, eyes also moist, leant across to John Forster.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he whispered. ‘But there’s something strange, something not right in the performance.’

Forster looked at him, perplexed. His great friend was triumphant, had risen to a new height—what could be better?

‘Something terrible,’ hissed Wilkie. ‘Can you not see it? It is not acting—it is metamorphosis.’

‘Come, Wilkie!’ cried a stranger’s voice. ‘It is your cue about to happen.’

And there at their side was a bearded and wretched maniac, not Dickens but Richard Wardour, possessed. He grabbed at Wilkie and, fetching him into his arms, carried him back out onto the stage, where Wilkie was greeted by Maria Ternan as the love of her life, Frank Aldersley, whom she had thought dead.

After the performance, Dickens called on the Ternans in their dressing room to congratulate them. Ellen Ternan had been struck by the attention and deference shown to this man, of whom she had, on their first meeting, thought so little that she blubbered in front of him. She had heard of him, of course, and she had read The Pickwick Papers and some of his other books—who hadn’t?—but she had been unprepared for the way the world parted and bowed wherever he went. She felt more important than the royal family once in Manchester. They were lodged in the grand Great Western Hotel; the company was given their very own dining and sitting rooms, where, with her sister Maria, Ellen Ternan had on their first night perhaps a little more brandy than she should, an adventure to which Dickens made a light but pleasing allusion.

After he had left their dressing room, Ellen Ternan noticed on her dressing table a small book Dickens had been carrying in his hand. She looked at it—why, it was a notebook! Perhaps, she thought, Mr Dickens’ own notebook! She would not open it; private things, her mother had taught her, were just that. But then, she reasoned, what if it weren’t Mr Dickens’? How was one to know without opening it? And so that night she took it with her to bed. Its spine was tight, the pages dun-coloured. It opened like a wounded fledgling hoping to be healed.

There was no name on the inside cover, but Ellen Ternan recognised the handwriting from notes he had scrawled on her script, and so she turned to the next page and the next and the next until she had flicked through the entire book. There were all sorts of lists and titles and queer phrases. ‘Undisciplined heart.’ She licked a page. It was plain as pease pudding. ‘New ideas for a story have come into my head as I lay on the ground as Wardour, with surprising force and brilliance.’ There was no tale skewering the pieces into a real meal.

She read a few things—she guessed they were for Mr Dickens’ next novel. They were mostly gloomy, though there were one or two funny conversations and many curious sentences. ‘The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.’ Odd names of people. ‘Miriam Denial.’ ‘Verity Happily.’ ‘Mary McQuestion.’ Strange maxims. ‘You can have whatever you want, only you discover there is always a price. The question is—can you pay?’ All up, it seemed rather queer, almost boring, and it was a wonder if Mr Dickens could make anything of it and would want it back at all.

She found him the following evening, alone in the manager’s office an hour before the performance, at work on his prompt copy.

‘Mr Dickens!’

Dickens looked up. He already had on the new make-up he had devised that day to better use the limelight. It accentuated his goatish face.

‘Why, you could be Lucifer himself, Mr Dickens!’

He suddenly reared up, threw a finger either side of his forehead, and with a ghastly face gave a roar. Ellen Ternan leapt back squealing, and would have fallen onto a table behind her had not Dickens grabbed her by the wrist.

‘I am sorry, Miss Ternan,’ he apologised. Ellen Ternan looked down to where her wrist was held in the great author’s firm grasp. ‘A joke. A poor joke.’

‘Nevertheless, even Lucifer does not get the better of me,’ said Ellen Ternan. She wrested her wrist free. ‘I am an Englishwoman.’

‘How remarkable,’ said Dickens. ‘I mistook you for an Italian vase.’

She no longer knew what to say to one so famous, so instead she just looked him in his eyes. They were dark, and the strange make-up only amplified their blackness. She felt at once frightened by him and drawn to him. In the hope he would take her seriously, she felt obliged to say something serious.

‘I liked what you said to Mr Hueffer about the government and the war,’ she said, referring to when Dickens had taken exception to a comment made by the manager of the Free Trade Hall about the importance of winning the war in the Crimea. She had to admit, she found him rather handsome. ‘About how a highly decorated English general might be a complete fool, but his misadventures will always be a success, most particularly when they are a disaster for which words like gallantry are invented. That did make me laugh.’

Dickens smiled. Ellen Ternan smiled back, and produced from behind her back his notebook, waving it in front of him while shaking her head as though admonishing him.

‘Ruin ought be, if ruin must come, ruinously worthwhile,’ she said, not knowing this was not playing. She placed the notebook on the dressing table and slid it across to him. Just as she went to withdraw her hand, he reached out and the tips of their fingers touched. Dickens neither picked the book up nor moved his fingers away.

‘It is not going well,’ said Ellen Ternan. Her body was conscious only of his touch. But this time she did not pull her hand away. She looked up.

‘The war,’ she said, ‘I mean.’

‘Wars,’ he said, ‘rarely do.’

She felt as though lightning were passing through her body and, at the same time, utterly foolish for feeling that way.

‘Lady Franklin must be so very grateful. And Mrs Jerrold.’

And having named other women who had secured some form of favour from the great man, Ellen Ternan could not resist the hope that she, too, might find herself part of that company. She was trying to keep her breathing contained. Dickens slowly withdrew his hand and the notebook, and then—but did she imagine it? And if he did do it, she wondered, did he mean anything by it?

For, as he lifted the notebook, he traced the slightest line down her index finger with his own. And where he traced the line, her finger burnt, and there was about that burning something shameful and something wicked and something altogether wonderful.

Dickens talked about the play as if nothing had happened, but still her finger burnt and burnt and she was unsure if anything had or hadn’t happened. And though her burning finger assured her something had, all she knew with certainty was that she wished to stay with him, have him guide her, just be in his company till the day ended and beyond.

He sought her comments on his performance.