Dan Simmons - Drood

Caroline’s mouth moved twice before a word came out. “Lizzie…”

“Carrie, of course, shall stay with me,” I said. “This has already been arranged between Carrie and myself. It is her choice and it is final. However passionate and compliant your plumber… Mr Joseph Charles Clow… may be, and however well-regarded his distiller of a father might have been, your plumber’s actual, hopeful, but sometimes struggling bourgeois existence is not appropriate for Carrie at this point in her life. As you have pointed out, Caroline, she shall soon be entering society. She has chosen to do this from this fine home, from Number Ninety Gloucester Place, secure in the company of writers, artists, composers, and great men. She shall visit you frequently, of course, but this shall remain her home. I’ve discussed this not only with Carrie but with your current mother-in-law, and they both agree.”

Caroline had lowered both hands to the basin’s counter behind her and seemed to be holding herself upright only by the force of those straight, stiffened, and quaking arms.

I did not reach out to touch her as I brushed past to step into the hall, and it seemed that Caroline could not then have lifted an arm under any circumstances.

“I believe your decision is wise, my dear,” I said softly from the doorway. “You and I shall always be friends. Should you or Mr Joseph Charles Clow ever need assistance of any sort, I will endeavour to put both of you in touch with the kind of people who may be capable of helping, if they are inclined to do so.”

Caroline continued to stare at the space where I had been standing next to the tub.

“I’ll have Besse commence your packing,” I said. “And I will send George down to the thoroughfare for a cab sooner rather than later. I don’t mind paying the driver to wait a while if necessary. It’s best to begin a journey like this in the morning, when one is fresh.”

AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, Dickens’s and Dolby’s ship, the Russia, arrived in Queenstown Harbour on the last day in April, but none of the Inimitable’s friends rushed to Liverpool to welcome them. Telegrams from Dolby had made it clear that Dickens wished “a few days of solitary acclimatisation before resuming his duties and old habits.”

I translated this as meaning that the exhausted author would not be going straight to Gad’s Hill Place, nor would he stay in London (although he passed through there by train on May 2), but rather would continue on straight into the waiting arms of Ellen Ternan in Peckham. It turned out that I was perfectly correct in this assumption. I also knew through casual comments from Wills at the Wellington Street offices that the actress and her mother had returned from Italy only two days earlier.

How very convenient for the Inimitable.

It was another four days before Dickens made himself available for a welcoming from Wills, Frank Beard, and me. He took the train in from Peckham for an early dinner with Fechter and the rest of us, and then we all went to the Adelphi so that Dickens could finally see No Thoroughfare.

I had been more than prepared to express sympathetic concern and even shock at Dickens’s aged, exhausted state after the American tour, but Beard spoke for both of us at the station when the physician cried out, “Good Lord, Charles! Seven years younger!”

It was true. There was no sign of the limp and swollen foot we had heard so much about through letters. He had lost some weight in America, but it made him look younger and healthier. The eight-day spring sea voyage had obviously given him some real rest away from all duties, and long hours on deck had turned the always quick-tanning Dickens’s visage to bronze; somehow even his hair and beard seemed darker and fuller. Dickens’s eyes were bright. His smile was quick and his laughter and resonant tale-telling voice filled the restaurant where we dined and the carriage the five of us later took to the Adelphi.

“Good God, Wilkie,” Dickens said to me in private as we handed our hats, gloves, and sticks to the girl at the theatre, “I knew you’d been ill, but you look absolutely terrible, my dear boy. You’re shaking and pale and shuffling along like Thackeray near the end. What on earth has gotten into you?”

Gotten into me. How very clever. How very… droll . I gave Dickens a wan smile and said nothing.

Later, during the play, I had the most extraordinary experience.

Our little group was in the authors’ box—minus Fechter, of course, who had rushed backstage to put on his makeup and vomit in preparation for the show (even though everyone believed that this might be his last month of performing in England as the villain Obenreizer because of the actor’s increasing health problems). Despite my own illness, I had been there in that box many times in the preceding five months, but this was the first time Dickens had been present for the play on which he had collaborated in the early stages. Naturally, Dickens received a standing ovation from the full house even before the curtain opened. But I had expected that and it did not hurt my feelings.

No, it was the play itself that was the extraordinary experience for me. Counting rehearsals, I had seen my No Thoroughfare from start to finish at least thirty times. I could recite every line and every rewrite of every line. I had every entrance and exit timed to the fraction of a second.

But this night it was as if I were watching the play for the first time.

In truth, Dear Reader, it was as if one eye were watching the play for the first time. The headache that was always with me had settled, as was its wont, behind my right eye with such intensity that I expected the back of my eyeball to hiss the way a pitcher of good grog does when the boy thrusts in a white-hot rod to heat it. I could also feel the pressure of the scarab there. Sometimes I believed that it burrowed forward precisely so that it could peer out through one of my eyes.

So it was that as I sat there holding my temple first with my right hand and then my left, covertly covering first my left eye and then my right, as if I were watching the play I had written and seen so many times for the first time.

The scene at the orphanage with the foundling children being switched, I saw at once, was pure nonsense rather than real pathos, despite the obvious emotional response from the gullible audience. That Dickens had been most active in his collaboration in this pathetic setup business was little solace to me as the play ground on.

The death of our Walter Wilding (from both a broken heart and sheer guilt at the thought that he had accidentally inherited another man’s name and fortune) set the audience to boo-hooing as always, but it made me want to retch. Pure poppycock. Absolute drivel. How, I wondered, could any serious author have concocted such a scene?

And now Fechter was strutting to and fro in his guise as the villain Obenreizer. What an absurd character. What an absurd performance.

I remember showing one specific paragraph from the published story to Fechter, submitting it as the key to his character’s secret motivations and internal psyche. Now I recalled the words with rue—

But the great Obenreizer peculiarity was, that a certain nameless film would come over his eyes—apparently by the action of his own will—which would impenetrably veil, not only from those tellers of tales, but from his face at large, every expression save one of attention. It by no means followed that his attention should be wholly given to the person with whom he spoke, or even wholly bestowed on present sounds and objects. Rather, it was a comprehensive watchingfulness of everything he had in his own mind, and everything that he knew to be, or suspected to be, in the minds of other men.