O
N A COLD MORNING
, during the third day of rehearsals at the Haymarket, halfway through a scene in which Ellen Ternan, playing Rose Ebsworth, has been embraced by her grieving friend Clara Burnham, played by her sister Maria, Ellen abruptly stepped out of character and her sister’s embrace, crying out:
‘Please, Maisy,
careful
, or I’ll end up wearing pigeon pie!’
It was the first moment of spontaneous performance Dickens had seen from Ellen Ternan, but it was also not part of the script. Though part of him was intrigued and amused, Dickens was weary and simply lost his temper.
‘Damn you, Miss Ternan!’ he said tersely, holding up the script as if it were holy writ. ‘We have ten days left—what are you doing?’
In answer, and not without hesitation, she reached inside her coat and produced a small glossy black bird. It oinked.
‘They are great mimics, sir,’ said Ellen Ternan, unsure of what else to say, holding the bird in her cupped hands as though it were some sort of offering.
‘She’s always collecting dying birds and trying to save them,’ said Maria. ‘She picked up this starling at the entrance of the Haymarket.’
‘Its wing seemed a bit broken, Mr Dickens,’ said Ellen Ternan. ‘And I thought I must keep him warm.’
‘A
bit
?’ said Dickens. ‘Well, we must be grateful it is not a lot.’
He reached down into the now quiet ball of shiny fluff that she held before him.
‘I’ll have a starling,’ he said softly, retreating into recitation while pushing a finger first under one wing, then the other, slowly unfolding each in turn and inspecting the bird. ‘It shall be taught to speak nothing but “Mortimer”, and—’
Dickens looked up from the starling and for the first time looked into her eyes. He was startled. It was not their colour, which after he could not remember.
‘And,’ he repeated, losing his way, stumbling, ‘and…’
‘And give it to him, to keep his anger still in motion,’ said Ellen Ternan.
‘
Henry IV
,’ said Dickens, intrigued.
‘Hotspur,’ smiled Ellen Ternan, for whom the Bard was as familiar as bedbugs.
Dickens stared at her for a moment. Later he found the memory of that moment irreducible to words.
‘People forget Shakespeare was an actor first,’ he said finally, when, frightened by those eyes, he had dropped his gaze back to the bird in her hands. ‘And a writer only second. That is the secret of his genius. He had no sense of himself and existed only through his imitations of others.’
There, Dickens thought with an odd shock: I have given you the secret of myself. He stroked the bird, and he felt they both were paralysed with terror. He, who impressed countless thousands without effort, felt clumsy and awkward as he tried to make conversation with a young woman scarcely more than a child, whereas she felt emboldened.
‘An eagle for an emperor,’ said Ellen Ternan, continuing the game of quotation, ‘a kestrel for a knave, and—’ she paused; when Dickens lifted his eyes, for a second time she dared to look him directly in the face. ‘A starling,’ she smiled, ‘a mimic for a writer.’
He turned away, somewhat flustered. Spotting a small pine box that was being used as a prop, he picked it up, as much to rid himself of the nervous energy that was suddenly surging through him as for any other reason. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and formed a nest with it in the box, then placed the injured starling in its crinkled folds.
That evening, as he rode to dinner in a carriage with Catherine, he put his hand high up on his wife’s skirted thigh. She turned and looked at him oddly, then pulled her leg away.
During what remained of the fortnight’s rehearsals, Dickens spent an increasing amount of time in the proximity of Ellen Ternan. To be alone in her company was more difficult, but he contrived moments when others were absent and he unexpectedly present, when by seeming accident he bumped into her. At such times she found him delightful. She found him kind, always helpful, ever merry, and she never wondered why he was always finding her.
He thought her funny and lively; her forceful character, which so clearly irritated her mother, charmed him. Her straightforward judgements and strongly held opinions, and her interests in books and theatre and politics, seemed liberating after Catherine’s professions of inescapable ignorance and stupidity and sullen silences. He saw that Ellen Ternan could also be childish, petulant and obstinate, that her feelings and ideas were sometimes shallow and foolish, but what irritated him in his wife delighted him in Ellen Ternan, and he excused that in which it was impossible for him to delight, for what did such trivialities matter? And not for a single moment did he think what his actions might mean—for, as long as he had no conscious intention, he was sure he could do no wrong.
Dickens’ world seemed charged. It was the play, he told his friends as he had convinced himself—it was charity, it was the opportunity to help others combined with the joy of raising the production to a far more elevated level than he had ever anticipated. And his friends marvelled at his rediscovered energy, at the amount of time and attention
he gave every aspect of the resurrected production, and particularly at the care he was lavishing on rehearsals. When at the end of the first week’s rehearsal the starling vanished, presumably having gathered its strength and flown away, Dickens could not withhold the feeling that there was something liberating in the omen.
Yet he was enraged at the sheer lack of generosity his own wife showed towards the production.
‘Why waste all this time on something that was working perfectly well before?’ Catherine asked her husband one morning. She stood before him in his study with a vase of flowers. ‘Look at these,’ she said. ‘Begonias and dahlias and all these beautiful annuals for your desk.’ And when he didn’t look up, she said, her tone suddenly cold, ‘These Ternan women—if they are such good professionals, why do you need to be bothering rehearsing them so much?’
When Catherine stepped forward to place the vase down on the desk, her back, which had been bad since the birth of their second daughter, gave a sharp twinge. She stumbled and then dropped the vase, and flowers and water went spilling over a neat pile of writing.
Dickens leapt up and away from the puddling water. Frantically trying to rescue his pages, he muttered under his breath how she could not even keep house properly and it was no wonder that he was embarrassed to take her out into society.
But you haven’t borne ten children, she wished to reply as she awkwardly got her balance back. You don’t know what it does to you. You grow heavy, your memory
wanders, your body leaks, your back burns. But she said none of it.
‘I’m sorry, Charles,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘I’m so sorry.’
As she mopped the table with her crinoline, she continued apologising. He shook a wet book that had been open on his desk. He asked her, was she that stupid? She wasn’t. It was Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, dedicated to Dickens by the great historian himself. She knew he pored over it incessantly, once telling a visitor he had read it five hundred times. She stood there, not knowing what to do. She understood none of it. Surely he would be sick of the book by now.
Her mind seemed to be twisting into something so painful she had to hit her forehead with a fist in a vain attempt to reset the terrible clockwork of her life. She watched mute as her husband rang for a servant to come and clean up, then grabbed his coat and stormed out.
She realised she had never understood him. He was unstoppable, undeniable, he bent the world to his schemes and dreams as surely as he did his characters. And she knew that her part, henceforth, would be the fat and hopeless housekeeper, the hysteric, the invalid, the harridan and the virago.
Yet hadn’t he, in every book and speech and utterance, said it was all about family and hearth and home? And hadn’t she broken her body giving him children and trying to please him? Hadn’t she loved him, and in his books wasn’t such love always triumphant? She could not understand why in
his home he had come to despise that same love as stupid.
And as she returned to gathering the strewn flowers, Catherine finally understood that she had been his invention as surely as any of the blurred pages on the desk, as much as any of those dull creatures he passed off as women in his books. He had made her stupid. He had made her that boring woman of his novels; she had become his heroine in her weakness and compliance and dullness.
Only now, having lived with her, he no longer liked that woman and wanted her gone. And she knew he would remake her with his wit, with his tongue, with his cruel names, and to the world she would be ridiculous and heartless. The world, she realised, was whatever Charles wanted. She had no defence.
She tried to rearrange the flowers. Larkspur, dahlias, cornflowers, sweet pea, begonias and baby’s breath. She had gone in lockstep with it all—the ivy-clad cosy old house, the horde of children, the servants who had to be comical, him telling the world in his articles and speeches of their delightful Christmases, the endless merry times at the huge dinners for many. She had stuffed the mutton with oysters, made sure the cock-a-leekie was just as he liked it and the croquettes of chicken not lacking in imagination and the spiky pigeon feet poking perfectly like winter birch trees from the top of the pie. She had played along with all the games and the charades and leapfrogging. And yet, for everything good that had happened, so much more had for so long been ebbing out of her.
She remembered how, only the day before, he had
said she was turning the children against him, saying such wicked things, that she never cared for them properly, that she was mentally disordered. She was stupid, she knew, her back burnt, her heart leaked. Try as she might, none of the flowers came together in any pattern as the world swam in a cruel whirlpool around her.
The front door slammed and Katy came into the study to find her mother alone, both she and the vase of flowers she held in disarray. She looked half-mad; she was gasping, as though she were suffocating. Oblivious to her daughter, Catherine summoned from some void deep within a terrible sound, not a woman’s voice, but some desolation far older. As though a thing infinitely precious had been stolen from her, she abruptly cried out—
‘
It hurts!
’
And then said no more.
That night, Dickens came to bed late and lay for some time on his back. Neither touched. When she was almost asleep, she felt him slowly, almost absent-mindedly unlacing her nightgown. She reached out to him. She brought his face into her breasts. He smelt the lavender oil with which she perfumed herself every evening. She did not feel his tears. He was recalling Danton:
You do not make a revolution with rosewater
.
Away with a shriek and a roar and a rattle from the town they now fled, burrowing at first among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into
meadows, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide. Fleeing through the hay, through the rock, through the woods, past objects almost in the grasp and ever flying from the traveller, Dickens felt a deceitful distance growing within him, while Ellen Ternan felt she was finally moving towards what life should be: joyous, exciting and so much fun.
On that train trip north in the month of August 1857, with
The Frozen Deep
’s large company and entourage taking several carriages, Dickens even had Mrs Ternan crying with laughter playing Conundrums, the answers for which he insisted on being passed window to window poised on umbrellas and walking sticks. When they were lost in the rushing wind he would run back and forth, pretending to tear out his hair in anguish, mimicking a lisping conductor by crying out, ‘What a conundwum! My! My! What a wetched conundwum!’
And if such innocence were tinged with a flirtatious frisson, what of it? Ellen Ternan might enjoy his attentions as the tribute she was discovering men would pay to youthful beauty. But that was all. And Dickens, for his part, might play, possibly even tease, perhaps indulge in a certain kind of romance that permitted no sense of romantic attachment, and it would end, because his disciplined heart demanded no less. Destiny’s darker edges were as Dickens was, dancing the sailor’s hornpipe just as the train swerved around a great bend and tossed him into a corner: something simply to laugh at. What blow or fall
could not be met and overcome with good humour? They were joyously alive and oblivious to everything, even as the world around them began to change by imperceptible degrees into something altogether different.
As the most famous Englishman of the age rolled around the floor of a train carriage, the eyes of those travelling with him were wet with tears of laughter. The train shrieked and cried louder and louder as it tore on resistless, until its way was strewn thickly with ashes and everything grew blackened. Around the train arose some strange charred forest from which humanity had simultaneously been exiled and was condemned henceforth to survive in.
Beyond the train windows, the filthy smoke writhed around battered roofs and broken windows and they could see into wretched rooms where want and fever hid themselves in many awful forms with death ever present, and Dickens turned away and tried not to think of what Wilkie had once said to him in an unguarded moment, that he lived as he acted, with a dead father in one pocket and a dead daughter in the other, unable to erase the image of either from his mind.
‘Never ever this late,’ Mrs Ternan was saying over and over, as she bustled Ellen and her two sisters into the smoke and noise of Manchester Railway Station two days later. ‘Who knows whether they’ll still be here?’
They strode through the crowd and, though Ellen’s preparations for the outing had delayed them all and cost
her a great deal of effort, to say nothing of her begging and pleading and more than a few moments of tears, she was now revelling in walking so purposefully through the carbon and sulphur haze, slightly sweet and somewhat damp, riding the trill excitement of clanging iron and sudden whistles past trembling platforms.