Richard Flanagan: Wanting

‘I’m simply glad the folly’s finishing,’ replied Forster, without turning. ‘If this goes on any longer, he’ll end up more lost than Sir John.’

Seated in the best box in the house, Lady Jane gasped in shock with the rest of the audience when, in the concluding act, Dickens made his last appearance as the dying Wardour. She had to raise a cologne-scented handkerchief to her nose, for the stench of sweaty wool and animal odour rising from the heated crowd below seemed to worsen with each sensational development in the play. He had become a terrible being, eyes glaring like a wild animal’s, long grey hair and beard matted, his clothes no more than piteous rags.

‘Who is it you want to find?’ asked Ellen Ternan. ‘Your wife?’

Dickens shook his head wildly.

‘Who, then? What is she like?’

On stage, Dickens was allowed finally to stare into her eyes, to take in her cheeks, her nose, her lips, and he could not stop staring. Little by little, the hoarse, hollow voice he affected for the part softened.

‘Young,’ he said, ‘with a fair, sad face, with kind tender eyes. Young and loving and merciful,’ he now cried out, not to the audience but to Ellen Ternan, his voice no longer Wardour’s but strangely his own. ‘I keep her face in my mind, though I can keep nothing else. I must wander, wander, wander—restless, sleepless, homeless—till I find her! Over the ice and snow, tramping over the land, awake all night, awake all day, wander till I find her!’

Lady Jane, looking down from her box, was thinking how, like Clara Burnham, she had demonstrated the purity and virtue of her love. Yet far from making her feel vindicated with her life, instead of thinking nobly of Sir John, the play was taking her back to those final years in Van Diemen’s Land. There was such a wrongness about something, such a terrible wrongness, that she feared she might scream.

Dickens turned and sensed the huge audience out there in the darkness. Wardour had ceased to exist and was drifting away with the steam rising from his hot body. Yet he felt the heat of the crowd wanting something more. Though he did not know what it was, he knew he would keep giving it to them until there was nothing left and only death remained, death that had chased him here, death that was eating him even there on the stage. He suddenly fell to the floor—the audience gasped, someone shrieked in horror. Ellen Ternan knelt down and gently rolled his head into her lap.

He could feel her thighs beneath his neck as she cradled him, he could feel the white light envelop them at last as she wrapped him in her arms, and he wanted to stay that way, in her arms and in that light, forever.

Watching through his thick spectacles, Wilkie found himself not simply moved, but astonished as Wardour, now dying in Clara Burnham’s arms, finally recognises her as his long-lost love, for whom he has sacrificed everything so that her love, Frank Aldersley, might live. Wilkie had never witnessed anything like it in his life.

Ellen Ternan was looking at Dickens, shaking her head, biting her lips; and, to his amazement, Wilkie could see that she was weeping, not stage tears, but a heartfelt sobbing. In the rows, scores of people were weeping with her. Handkerchief clasped tightly to her face, Lady Jane, too, felt the emotion rising in her as an inexorable panic. Far below, she saw, as if through water, a murky orphanage courtyard and, standing alone within it, a bedraggled child staring back at her.

‘You,’ said Dickens, shakily.

Lady Jane was leaning down, the audience was coming forward, all craning to better watch and hear. They were like a living being, a single animal, waiting, ready. Dickens realised he was no longer speaking to a script, but that the script was—improbably, inexorably, inescapably—describing his soul.

‘You,’ he said again, this time louder, for he wanted to fill his mouth with her, he wanted to lose himself in Ellen Ternan’s breasts, to bury himself in her belly, to bite her thighs, to be rid of all that being still and alone made him fear. He was panting. His terror was absolute. He was shaking violently, his voice trembling, his words now revelations to him. ‘ It was always you! ’

‘Don’t,’ said Ellen Ternan, his Nell, saying words that neither Dickens nor Wilkie had ever scripted; then, realising her error, she shook her head. And as her body was seized with a most terrifying presentiment of its destiny, she tried to retreat into her lines, mumbling and confusing them in a way that was mistaken for acting.

But Dickens was pulling her into him, into some strange and terrible new fate, and she was unable to stop falling. She was terrified for them both. She looked around desperately, but everywhere outside the halo of light defining the two of them together was darkness. The wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else . The other cast members gathered around. The men reverently uncovered their heads. The end was near; they all saw it now.

‘Kiss me, my sister, kiss me before I die!’

His words were firing into her heart like a cannonade without end. Ellen Ternan leant over him and kissed his forehead. She kissed him not simply because it was in the script but because there was an inexorable logic to her kissing him that she struggled against but could not deny . The question is—can you pay? She could see now that it was a novel contained in his notebook, only she had not understood until that moment that she was its unwritten heart.

He could feel her lips on his brow, he could feel the immense human tensing of the darkened audience, a black void that radiated some energy that allowed him to live a little longer. He could feel it, feel them, willing him on. He had come here by chance, coincidences were bringing him to his destiny, and yet, as in his stories, he knew there were no coincidences in this world, that the purpose of everything is ultimately revealed, be it a savage’s skull or Sir John lost in ice floes or he, Dickens, lost until this moment. He had thought he would have to drag himself in a strange waking sleep through the rest of a life that had become a strange torture. But perhaps it was not so.

‘What is it?’ asked Dickens, with words Ellen Ternan had never heard before, unscripted words. She looked at him in shock, not knowing what was happening. ‘The way we are denied love,’ he continued, and she, along with the audience, could hear how hard it was for him to say these words. ‘And the way we suddenly discover it being offered us, in all its pain and infinite heartbreak. The way we say no to love.’

He never saw Lady Jane, white-faced, abruptly stand, turn and leave her box. Outside, in her rush to get away from the theatre, she accidentally trod in a gutter gouted with something foul and thick. She dropped her handkerchief and her nose and mouth were overwhelmed by the foul effluvia of the city, heat-leavened and wind-stirred: the wet sewage flowing through the streets and the dry dust of horse dung blowing in the air, the caustic filth of a thousand tanneries, workshops and factories, the stench of a million unwashed bodies.

Lady Jane felt lost, felt that she might vomit. It occurred to her that perhaps one only exists in those who love you. She could not find a landau or even a hansom cab. Had she said no to love, that day she looked down into the courtyard? She called out for a cab, called out louder, but none came. And if you turn away from love, did it mean you no longer existed? Did she? She felt as lost and dead as the silky soot that eddied around her. She was calling louder and louder, but still nobody came.

Inside, the only sound that could be heard was the slow puff and wheeze of the gigantic bellows working hard to sustain the burning limelight, as though that one pale fire were breathing for the two thousand mesmerised audience who remained.