Dan Simmons - Drood

To all these missives of misery, I replied with nothing more than a polite acknowledgement of receipt and the vaguest commiserations— sending the letters, as always, through Carrie (and assuming that Caroline would burn them after reading, since Clow might kill her if he discovered that she was receiving letters from me)—but the details and tone all went into my Man and Wife.

My seducer—Geoffrey Delamayn—was (and remains to my literary eye) a delightful character: a long-distance runner of superb physique and tiny brain, a player of many sports, an Oxford-educated ignoramus, a brute, a blackguard, a monster.

Critics of even the early instalments of Man and Wife would call my novel a bitter and angry book. And I acknowledge to you, Dear Reader, that it was that. It was also very sincere. I was pouring into Man and Wife not only my fury at the very idea of someone being trapped into marriage—trapped the way Caroline had attempted to trap me and the way that Martha R—, “Mrs Dawson,” even at that moment was scheming to trap me—but also my righteous anger at the treatment that Caroline was receiving at the grimy hands and fists of the lower-class brute she had succeeded finally in trapping.

Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood was not an angry or bitter novel, but the truths and personal revelations that he was pouring into it, as I would understand only much later, were far more astounding than those I thought I was being so candid about in my own book.

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?

I WAS NOT invited to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas.

My brother went down with Kate, but Charley was in even worse favour than usual with the Inimitable, and they came back to London shortly after Christmas Day. Dickens had finished the second instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by the end of November and was trying to hurry the artwork for the cover and early interior illustrations, but after sketching that cover based on Dickens’s sometimes vague outline of the shape of the tale, Charley decided in December that he could not draw at such a rate without further harming his health. Showing his impatience—and perhaps even disgust—Dickens hurried up to London and conferred with his publisher Frederick Chapman, and they decided as a replacement on a young man new to illustration, a certain Luke Fildes.

Actually, as was almost always the case, it was Dickens who decided, this time based upon the advice of painter John Everett Millais, who had been staying at Gad’s Hill Place and who showed the Inimitable a Fildes illustration in the first issue of a magazine called The Graphic. When Fildes interviewed with Dickens at the offices of Frederick Chapman, the young upstart actually had the audacity to say that he was “of a serious nature” and thus would be best at illustrating (unlike Charley and so many of Dickens’s previous illustrators such as “Phiz,” who best loved the comic scenes) the graver aspects of the Inimitable’s novels. Dickens agreed—actually he loved both Fildes’s more modern style and more serious approach—and thus my brother, after only a final cover sketch and two interior drawings, was finished forever as Charles Dickens’s illustrator.

But Charley, who was in his own hell of battling his constant gastric problems, did not seem to mind (except for the loss of income, which was shattering to the couple’s plans).

Nor did I mind Dickens’s not inviting me to Gad’s Hill for Christmas after so many years of a pleasantly contrary tradition.

Word came from my brother and others that Dickens’s left foot had become so swollen that he spent much of Christmas Day in the library having it poulticed and sat at the dining table that evening with the swollen and bandaged limb propped on a chair. He was able—with help—to hobble into the drawing room after dinner for the usual Dickens-family games, although his contribution uncharacteristically (for Dickens did love his games) was to lie on the sofa and watch the others compete.

For New Year’s Eve, Dickens accepted an invitation to spend that Friday and Saturday (for New Year’s Eve fell on a Friday that year) at Forster’s luxurious digs, but according to Percy Fitzgerald, who heard it from Wills, who heard it from Forster himself, Dickens’s left foot (still poulticed) and left hand were still giving him much pain. However, he made fun of the discomfort and read the second instalment of Edwin Drood with such spirit and obvious good humour that the self-serious new illustrator, Fildes, would have almost certainly been at a loss to find a scene to illustrate if “grave” were his only criterion.

With his usual precision, Dickens timed the triumphant conclusion of his reading to the assembled party to finish exactly at the stroke of midnight. Thus 1870 began for Charles Dickens as it would continue until his end—with a mixture of extreme pain and loud applause.

I had considered giving another New Year’s Eve dinner party at Number 90 Gloucester Place, but I remembered that it had not gone so swimmingly the year before. Also, because the Lehmanns and Beards were some of my favourite guests—and since their children were angry at me for telling the truth about sports athletes (and since I still felt a tad uncomfortable in purely social settings around Frank since he had delivered Martha R—’s baby the previous summer)—I decided to spend the evening with my brother and his wife.

THE EVENING WAS QUIET—one could hear their two loudest clocks ticking—and Charley began feeling unwell and had to excuse himself halfway through dinner so that he could go upstairs and lie down. He promised to try to waken and join us by midnight, but judging from the lines of pain etched on his face, I doubted if that would happen.

I also stood and suggested that I go (since there were no other guests), but Kate all but ordered me to stay. Normally this would have seemed natural—when I lived with Caroline, as I believe I may have already mentioned, I would often go to the theatre or somewhere and leave her with our male guests and think nothing of it—but things had been strained between Kate and me since the day of Caroline’s wedding more than a year earlier.

Also, Kate had been drinking much wine before dinner, during dinner, and now brought out brandy after dinner as we adjourned to the parlour, where the clock ticking was at its loudest. She was not slurring her words (Katey was a mistress of self-control), but I could tell from her rigid posture and the loss of plasticity in her expression that drink was affecting her. The girl I had known so long as Katey Dickens was—at almost thirty years of age—on the verge of becoming an old and bitter woman.

“Wilkie,” she said suddenly, her voice almost shockingly loud in the draped dimness of the little room, “do you know why Father invited you to Gad’s Hill last October?”

In truth, the question hurt my feelings. I had hitherto never required a reason to be invited to Gad’s Hill Place. Sniffing my brandy to cover my discomfort, I smiled and said, “Perhaps because your father wanted me to hear the opening of his new book.”