Dan Simmons - Drood

“Yes,” said Clow.

We were interrupted by the arrival of the waiter, who recognised me and greeted me effusively. Realising that Clow was at a loss to choose from the menu items, I ordered for both of us.

“Yes,” I continued, “even though Mrs G— is still quite young, she and her daughter have been in my employ for many years. In truth, ever since Harriet—that is her daughter—was a small child. How old are you, Mr Clow?”

“Twenty-six, sir.”

“Please do me the honour of calling me Wilkie,” I said expansively. “And you shall be Joseph.”

The thin-faced young man blinked rapidly at this. He was obviously not accustomed to crossing class barriers.

“You realise, Joseph, that I have nothing but the highest regard for Mrs G—, and nothing but absolute respect for my obligation to look out for her and her delightful daughter.”

“Yes, sir.”

The wine arrived, was approved, and I made sure that Clow’s glass was filled to the brim.

“When she told me of her affection for you, Joseph, I was surprised.… I admit to being surprised, since Caroline… Mrs G—… has not spoken so highly of any gentleman during all the years she has been in my employ. But her feelings and amibitions are of the highest priority to me, Joseph. Of this you can be sure.”

“Yes, sir,” Clow said again. He looked like a man who had been struck on the head by one of his heavier plumber’s instruments.

“Mrs G— is a young woman, Joseph,” I went on. “She was little more than a girl when she came into my service. Despite her many duties and responsibilities in my household, she is a young woman still, of an age very similar to your own.”

In truth, Caroline would be thirty-eight on her next birthday on 3 February, less than two months away.

“Of course her father’s dowry is considerable, and I would be more than pleased to add to it,” I said. “This is in addition to her modest inheritance, of course.” Her father had died in Bath in January of 1852 and there was no dowry, no inheritance, and I had no intention of adding a ha’penny to those cumulative zed sums.

“Well, sir… Wilkie, sir… it was only a late dinner because Mrs G— said I’d worked so hard to get the plumbing done, sir,” said Clow. Then the food began arriving, his eyes widened at the quality and quantity of it, and our conversation grew even more one-sided as I continued filling his glass and pressing my strange, subtle, seemingly selfless, and totally insincere point.

MY MOTHER WAS ALSO COMPLAINING and making demands on my time at this point. She had begun suffering, she said, from various indeterminate but excruciating pains. One resisted the urge to tell her that at age seventy-seven, indeterminate (and perhaps even occasionally excruciating) pains were part of the price of longevity.

My mother had always complained and my mother had always been healthy: healthier than her husband, who had died young; healthier than her son Charles, who was racked for years with stomach pains that would turn out to be cancer; healthier, certainly, than her poor son Wilkie, who suffered from a rheumatical gout that periodically blinded him with pain.

But Mother was complaining and asking—almost demanding— that I spend several days around Christmas with her down in Tunbridge Wells. This was impossible, of course, and not for the least reason that Caroline was also demanding that I spend Christmas or several days around Christmas at home with her and Carrie. This was also impossible.

The premiere of No Thoroughfare had been set for Boxing Day—the day after Christmas.

On 20 December I wrote to my mother:

My dear Mother,

I scratch one line—in the midst of the turmoil of the play—to say that you may rely on my coming to you on Christmas Day—if not before.

The delays and difficulties of this dramatic work have been dreadful. I have had to write a new 5 th Act—which has been completed to-day —and the play must be performed on Thursday next, with a Sunday and Christmas Day between!

If I can write again, I will. If not, let us leave it that I certainly will come on Christmas Day. And, if I am not wanted on the next Monday’s or Tuesday’s Rehearsal that I come before. Your much-bothered son has hardly got a minute he can call his own. But the writing of the play is at last complete—so my principal worry is at an end. How I shall enjoy a little quiet with you!

Send me a line between this and Christmas Day. I have got your heart-burn lozenges—and some chocolate for you which Charley brought from Paris. Can I bring anything else which will go into my hand-bag?

Yours ever afftly WC

Charley proposes crossing to you from Gadshill on Friday in

Christmas week.

As it was, I spent part of Christmas Day afternoon and evening with Mother in her cottage in Tunbridge Wells—she spent most of our time together complaining of her nerves and her heartburn, and also of ominous strangers in the neighbourhood—and then I returned to London on the earliest possible train the next morning.

Fechter was his usual first-night ruin in the hours before the curtain opened. His vomiting due to stage fright was almost continuous in the last two hours, so that his poor dresser was absolutely worn out from running to and fro with his basin.

Finally I suggested a few drops of laudanum to calm the anxious actor. Unable to speak, Fechter answered by putting out his tongue. The colour of it had turned, under the nervous terror that possessed him, to the metallic blackness of the tongue of a parrot.

Once the curtain went up, however, Fechter found his voice and stride as the unspeakable villain Obenreizer.

I should report that I felt no anxiety whatsoever. I knew that the play was to be a triumph, and it was.

On 27 December I wrote—from the offices of All the Year Round at No. 26 Wellington Street:

My dear Mother,

I have a moment to tell you that the Play last night was an immense success. The audience were delighted—and the actors were excellent.

I have got the proofs which you sent me back quite safe.

Charley is, I suppose, with you today.

If you can write, tell me how you are, and what day next week I may come back to you? I sincerely hope and trust you are not suffering so much as when I was with you.

Love to Charley.

Ever yours affly

WC

The night of the play was the only Thursday of 1867 on which I had been forced to miss my weekly excursion to King Lazaree’s subterranean den. But I had made prior arrangements to make up for it on that Friday, 27 December—which is one reason I wrote to Mother from Dickens’s rooms at the magazine, since I had told Caroline and Martha both that I would be spending the night there—and Detective Hatchery had been kind enough to shift his night of work for me from Boxing Day to the Friday following.

CAROLINE G— WANTED marriage. This I would not consider. Martha R—, on the other hand, wanted only a baby. (Or babies, plural.) She made no demands for marriage, since the fiction of “Mr and Mrs Dawson”—her world-travelling merchant of a husband who rarely spent time at his home on Bolsover Street—was sufficient for her.

It was about this time, during the success of No Thoroughfare and near my completion of The Moonstone, and especially after a second secret meeting with Mr Joseph Clow at a slightly less expensive London restaurant, that I began considering the possibility of agreeing to Martha’s wishes.

The first two weeks of 1868 were quite frenetic for me and I suspect that I was happier then than at any time in my life. My letters to Mother (and scores of other friends and associates) were not exaggerations; No Thoroughfare was indeed—despite Charles Dickens’s long-distance dismissal of it—a bona fide success. I continued making at least bi-weekly visits to Gad’s Hill Place, enjoying the meals with Georgina, Charley and Katey (when Charley was there), Dickens’s son Charley and his wife, Bessie (who were there often), Dickens’s daughter Mamie (who was always there), as well as such occasional visitors as Percy Fitzgerald or William Macready and his lovely second wife.