35

We had rooms at the Australia Hotel, and were invited to dine there after our days of travel. I felt bound to ask Fred to join us, and was relieved when, after a few whiskies, Alfred seemed content to accept him as not a bad fellow who was trying to fit in, and who in any case had none of his father’s pretensions. The chef also cheered us up by telling us he had cooked leg of mutton stuffed with oysters, knowing it was our late father’s favourite dish.

A waiter made us a wonderful punch in Father’s style, and we sat into the night drinking it by the cup and discussing pastoral matters. The brotherhood of the bush, after all, united us. Fred asked us whether we thought it might be worth his while to take his cattle and sheep westwards for sale in the South Australian settlement of Adelaide.

The next morning, we were driven a few blocks along Macquarie Street to meet up with Sir Charles, who our coachman told us everyone called ‘Slippery Charlie’, yet who seemed too ordinary a man for such a romantic nickname. I was ready for someone arduous and loud, but Sir Charles was dressed in sober morning suit and black neck cloth. He announced his grief at the guvnor’s passing quite elegantly, and then invited us to join him at the breakfast table. Firstly he wanted to persuade us that had our father ever visited New South Wales he would have agreed that it had a much saner and companionable balance than the neighbouring colony of Victoria, with its Customs Houses along the Murray River to gouge revenue out of anything, from a cowhide to a jug of milk to a shovel the New South Welshmen might try to export across that mighty barrier. He told us we would be meeting the New South Wales governor, one Lord Belmore, whom he described as an Ulster landlord, but not a bad chap. He also confided that Lady Belmore was sickly and wanted to be back in Fermanagh at the family estate, and that Belmore himself wanted to pursue his political career. Lord Belmore would preside over the memorial service at the Anglican cathedral later in the day.

We were asked by Sir Charles of the tractability of the natives, and I spoke of the reliability of the Momba darks as Fred Bonney would have wanted me to, but only when invited. Fred Trollope spoke about the fact there should be some legal sanction against selectors who took up good acreage, not because they intended to farm it but to make the original leaseholder – him – pay them out. It was, opined Trollope, a form of legalised blackmail. That sort of thing had not yet occurred at Momba, I said – when pressed by Sir Charles – but it was bound to. It had happened at Poolamacca Station, said Alfred, where a notorious duffer had claimed six hundred acres of creek-front land in full knowledge that he could not sustain it as a farm but was waiting to be paid off so that he could do it again somewhere else.

By the way Sir Charles leaned forward, we began to get that elation the innocent too easily acquire when the powerful so much as listened: that we had a hand in changing grand policy.

After conversing with the premier, we were taken to the splendid drive of Government House and ushered into the sandstone mansion by a young subaltern of the Inniskilling Fusiliers. I thought of the photograph we had of Lieutenant Walter Dickens looking solemn and boyish, his neck emerging thin from an ample gilt collar as if the uniform was borrowed, and desperately grasping his undrawn sword by its handle with his left hand.

The youngish governor was tall and good-looking, with a casual rather than official polish.

‘Oh, my heavens, how I wish this meeting were occurring on less sad terms,’ he said to all three of us as he wrung our hands. Then, addressing Alfred and me, he added, ‘When your father fell to the floor, British letters fell! Nations lie hostage to his loss.’

So much for Trollope senior’s ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’!

‘I saw your father read his Dombey material one night in Belfast just – well, confound me, it was all of four years ago. He left nothing unexpressed!’

Though Alfred and I had been predisposed to suspect this Ulster landlord, having been raised in the household of a radical, he seemed a thoughtful fellow, without superciliousness. He praised Australian claret to us and said we would be drinking it at dinner, as a fine substitute for Bordeaux.

We went for a walk on open sward above the brilliant harbour when Lord Belmore said suddenly, ‘Of course, both you Dickens children will say a few words this afternoon? Just a memory or two of your father. I am sure the colonials will be delighted, as many read your father’s books as a cure for homesickness and will feel his loss very severely. Even the most ordinary household memory of yours will console them.’

I was overtaken by a rush of panic which revealed itself in a stupid blush. Knowing what a test speaking would be for me, Alfred tried to excuse me from the burden, saying, ‘I will certainly be able to accommodate that.’

‘And Mr Edward?’ asked Lord Belmore.

‘I . . .’ I began, but could not find a verb to follow.

‘Remember the day you and I went rowing with him and he stole my hat,’ suggested Alfred. ‘Just tell people about that.’

‘That’s right,’ Lord Belmore chimed. ‘Just an anecdote. As if you were talking to one person.’

‘That’s right,’ Alfred assured me. ‘As if to one person.’

‘I . . . I suppose I can do that, sir,’ I told the governor, though I wondered if I could.

Before the memorial service we were fitted out with morning suits and silk hats of the kind the guvnor despised as funerary pomp. After gathering with parliamentary and civic notables in the bright afternoon sunlight, we progressed into a vaulted church behind Belmore in his governor’s rig with sword and gaiters and cocked hat, and the bishop and attendant clergy. As Alfred and I walked towards the front of the cathedral, worthies in the pews craned to see our father’s face living on in ours. Here, it struck me that this was a far more intense funerary ceremony than the guvnor would have tolerated in the Abbey.

I averted my eyes from those faces avid with solemnity. But I felt a sudden tremor when I saw Connie’s neat and pretty face turned to me from one of the pews, her sister and parents arrayed beside her. Her face meant more than the multitudes of features. Her gaze was straight and had no whimsy in it, and her mouth was appropriately pursed. These good people must have travelled the week to get here and would need a week to travel back! They had travelled as far to this memorial service in fact as anyone on earth should be required to. People were grateful to relatives who came a day’s journey to an English funeral. Athwart, I felt like singing. Athwart! Athwart!

After the organ stopped, as always the air felt shocked into silence broken only by the scuffle of feet. Then, in his great cape and mitre, the bishop declared that the Lord was the resurrection and the life, that none of us has life in himself and none becomes his own master when in doubt and in death. ‘Oh God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day, our brother Charles. We thank you for giving him to us, to his family and his friends throughout the world, to know and love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage.’

We, in our seats in the front row, answered responses and listened to the reading from the Book of Lamentations. The choir sang a plangent old dirge magnificently, and then as the bishop read from the Gospel of John, ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions’, the imminence of my having to speak drummed in me like a pulse.

So now, without mentioning the fact that the guvnor had been a lacklustre attender of the Anglican church, the bishop dared compare the many mansions in heaven to the many mansions of the mind from which the immortal Mr Dickens had made his work, giving us tales and characters that were exemplary of all that was noblest and basest in humanity, and angels sang in his work, and what was demonic in the hearts of men and women was brought low. He expressed the hope that we should tell people in England that the Anglican communion in the distant colonies of Australia were unanimous in their applause of and grief for the death of our irreplaceable father. Alfred looked across at me and winked improbably, and punched his fist a little like an exhortation to courage.

It was now Governor Belmore’s turn to speak. Tall and courtly in his black and silver uniform, he declared that Australia was made up of a number of congregations, that as divided as it might recently have been by the sad attack upon Prince Alfred, it was united in admiration for the late Charles Dickens. He had seen the great writer sub specie perform a reading in Belfast four years before, and as immediate as were the characters and illuminations of his books when read, incidents when recounted and acted out by Dickens convinced the audience of the depths and colour of the novels of Dickens the writer. He was the inheritance of all peoples, and in the great universal equality of death still shone with the constancy of a great star. Lord Belmore said it was his duty to signify the commiserations of the people of New South Wales to the Dickens family, and in particular to the two sons who were present, and to call on Mr Alfred Dickens to express some sentiments about his father’s death.

I watched Alfred as he rose from our pew and stepped forward into the echoing stone spaces before climbing up the marble step of the choir. I wondered, would I be able to do that? As he scanned the assembled crowd his face seemed to fill with blood and he frowned. Was he about to complain that no one mentions Mother, I wondered nervously. Worse still, might he say, ‘No one mentions the girl’?

After acknowledging His Excellency and His Lordship the bishop, he said, ‘I am the sixth child of Mr Charles Dickens, and of my mother, Mrs Catherine Dickens, who, through God’s mercy, has been spared to grieve her husband. My brother Walter, born four years before me, died as a young man after serving to suppress the Bengali mutiny. My little sister Dora perished at the age of ten months, suddenly and without warning, and my father held her in his arms all night. But now he is reunited with Dora and with poor Walter, so Walter has now enjoyed the reunion that death previously denied him.’

Alfred nodded and committed himself to what people wanted to hear, talking about how Father used to like family and friends’ plays, especially on Twelfth Night, our eldest brother Charley’s birthday. He would devise parts for the children, and Alfred remembered a play in which he was required to be a page, and come on stage to say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have been sent ahead by the Emperor to ask you to ready yourselves for his arrival.’ Instead, Alfred said, he walked onto the stage and, seeing family and friends, including Mr Thackeray, Lord Lytton and Mr Wilkie Collins, all there and silently looking at him, he believed the warning unnecessary and walked over and sat on Mr Collins’ knee. The congregation laughed at this enchanting tale, and I felt a surge of brotherly love. Alfred’s auburn sideburns and neat auburn moustache looked like a hope rather than an assertion of success and, in the light of his story, were poignant.

‘If God’s Kingdom grants our loved ones that which they most desire,’ he said, ‘then Father is now directing a play, you can be sure, and is taking a substantial role in it, in an even nicer theatre than the one behind Tavistock House, where he had some of the greatest painters of the day, Millais and Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, come by and paint the scenery for him.’

After he’d concluded he came and hunched beside me, whispering in my ear, ‘Tell them you’re frightened, tell them you are terrified of talking. They’ll forgive you anything.’

I heard my name called by the clergyman who was acting as master of ceremonies, and rose like a prodded beast might rise, empty of thought, with each nerve vibrating in a key of alarm. Like Alfred going to Wilkie Collins’ familiar lap, I contemplated standing right there, my back to the faithful, looking to the western rose window which, at the moment, was engorged with robust winter light. I spent a while contemplating it, like the crater of some friendly volcano I could pitch myself into. I made myself turn, and looked for Connie’s face, but realised I had no time to search the file upon file of human countenances raised to me.

I forgot to nominate all the dignitaries and then began, ‘I am not . . .’ pausing as I saw Alfred make a ‘louder, please!’ gesture with his hands. I raised my voice. ‘I am not a good speaker, ladies and gentlemen. You must not think I am just because my father could speak and read to beat the rest of the world. Some gifts are not passed on.’

There were actually a few kindly chuckles at this and I did wonder for a crazy second if I said it again it would double the sympathy of the cathedral congregation. ‘The Medway . . .’ I continued, then paused again and saw a few people glance at each other as the silence grew. ‘It is a river that flows close to Gad’s Hill.

‘My father was a boy of Kent, and liked to say he was a Kentish man since Gad’s Hill, the home he settled in, was north of the Medway.’

There were nods and smiles from those with their own Kentish background. North of the River Medway, ‘Kentish men and women’. South, ‘men and women of Kent’.

‘My father greatly enjoyed taking a boat from Rochester Castle to Maidstone,’ I continued. ‘He would come home and say he had rowed it himself, so one day Alfred and I asked him to take us. We were given a set of oars each and Father acted as our cox. I remember as the sun grew strong he took Alfred’s boater away and claimed it as his, declaring he had seen Alfred’s blow overboard.’

There was now reverent laughter in the church, and I began to wonder what I’d feared about facing an audience. ‘Seven miles down that lovely river and seven miles back. Then, as we landed, Father handed the boater back to Alfred, pretending he’d fetched it from the water.’

Franker laughter still.

‘Alfred and I will always remember that day, and my father’s criticising our rowing in the quick, humorous way he had. My father might be a great writer to you, but to me he is the man who took us on adventures, whether they be on the water of the Medway or on the home stages of Tavistock House or Gad’s Hill. He was father and sometimes playmate to us. And for both, we are eternally grateful to him.’

I could not think what else to say for a second but then declared, ‘I will tell my mother that you were all here, and were so generous in your feelings. I know she will be amazed and grateful to you . . .’

I remembered where we were then and said, ‘And to God.’