But there was something wrong. I could sense it in the halting, almost pained way that Dickens was walking and by the strained distance between the two of them. I could tell it by the way that Ellen Ternan would now lower the useless parasol, close it, grip it tightly with both hands, and then open it again. These were not two lovebirds. They were two injured birds.
The carriage stopped a final time and waited along the opposite kerb thirty yards from the entrance drive to the railway station.
As Dickens and Ellen came alongside the high hedge, I was suddenly frightened into immobility. The dying evening light and hedge-shadow should have worked in my favour, making the sometimes sparse hedge seem solid and dark to anyone walking beyond it, but for an instant I was certain that I was clearly visible to the two. In a few seconds Dickens and his mistress would see a familiar small man with a high forehead, tiny glasses, and a voluminous beard huddled on a bench less than two feet from the walkway they would be passing. My heart pounded so wildly that I was sure that they would be able to hear it. My hands were half-raised towards my face—as if I had been about to try to hide behind them—and set into the position in which they had frozen. I would appear to Dickens like a soft, pale, wide-eyed, and bearded rabbit caught in the beam of a hunter’s lantern.
They did not look in my direction as they passed the hedge. Their voices were low, but I could hear them easily enough. The train had not arrived, the suburban thoroughfare was empty of traffic save for the parked carriage, and the only other sound was the soft coo of doves under the station’s eaves.
“… we can put our sad history behind us,” Dickens was saying.
The italics were obvious from his tone. So was an undertone of pleading that I had never… never… heard from Charles Dickens.
“Our sad history is buried in France, Charles,” Ellen said very softly. Her broad sleeves brushed the hedge as they moved past me. “But it shall never be behind us.”
Dickens sighed. It came out almost as a moan. The two stopped ten paces before the sidewalk reached the turn towards the station. They were not six paces past my blind. I did not stir.
“What is to be done, then?” he said. The words were so loaded with misery that they might have been extracted from a man being tortured.
“Only what we have discussed. It is the only honourable course remaining to us.”
“But I cannot!” exploded Dickens. It sounded as if he was weeping. I could have leaned my face six inches closer to the hedge and seen him, but that was impossible. “I have not the will!” he added.
“Then have the courage,” said Ellen Ternan.
There came a rustling, the small sound of her small shoes slightly scuffing pavement, the heavier sound of his. I pictured Dickens leaning towards her, she taking an involuntary step back, and Dickens resuming his strained distance from her.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Courage. I can summon courage where will fails me. And summon will when courage flags. That has been my life.”
“You are my dear good boy,” she said softly. I imagined her touching his cheek with her gloved hand.
“Let us both be courageous,” she went on, her voice lilting with a forced lightness that ill-befitted a mature woman in her late twenties. “Let us change to brother and sister from this day forth.”
“Never to be… together… as we have?” said Dickens. His voice was the calm monotone of a man ordered to the guillotine repeating the judge’s sentence.
“Never,” said Ellen Ternan.
“Never to be man and wife?” said Dickens.
“Never!”
There was a silence then that stretched for such a length that I was again tempted to lean forward and peek through the hedge to see if Dickens and Ellen had somehow dematerialised. Then I heard the Inimitable sigh again. His voice was louder, stronger, but infinitely hollow when he spoke.
“So it shall be. Adieu, my love.”
“Adieu, Charles.”
I was sure they did not touch or kiss, although how I was sure, I could not tell you, Dear Reader. I sat motionless as I listened to Dickens’s footsteps pass around the curve in the hedge. They paused once at that curve—I was certain he was looking back at her—and then resumed.
I did lean forward then and set my face to the branches of the hedge to watch Ellen Ternan cross the street. The carriage driver saw her and drove forward. Her parasol was folded once again and both her hands were lifted to her face. She did not look towards the station as she got into the carriage—the bewhiskered old driver helping her as she climbed up and took her seat and then softly closing the door behind her—and she did not look towards the station as the old man retook his seat and as the carriage made a slow, broad turn on the empty boulevard and headed back towards Peckham proper.
It was then that I turned my head to the left and looked through the open trellis.
Dickens had passed right in front of the opening, gone up the four steps to the platform level, and now he paused.
I knew what would happen next. He would turn to look out over the park and over the hedge to catch one final glimpse of Ellen Ternan’s open carriage disappearing up the street. He had to turn. The imperative was written in the tense bunching of his shoulders under his summer linen suit and in the pain of his lowered head and in the half-step pause of his body itself on the platform.
And when he turned—in two seconds, perhaps less—he would see his former collaborator and presumed friend, Wilkie Collins, hunched over from staring through the hedge like the cowardly voyeur he was, his bloodless, guilty face staring back blindly at Dickens, his eyes mere blank ovals where the spectacles would be reflecting the paling sky.
But—incredibly, unbelievably, inevitably—Dickens did not turn. He strode around the curve of the station onto the platform proper without ever looking back at the single and greatest love of his sentiment-ridden and romance-driven life.
Seconds later the train to London arrived in the station with shocking exhalations of unseen steam and metallic grindings.
With wildly shaking hands, I pulled my watch from my waistcoat. The express was right on time. It would depart Peckham Station in four minutes and thirty seconds.
I stood, shakily, and retrieved my valise from the bench, but still waited a full four minutes for Dickens to board and take his seat.
Would he be sitting in a compartment on this side, staring out the window at the station as I went hurrying by?
So far this day, the gods had been kind to me. Knowing that they would continue to be for no reason that I could have explained then or now, I clutched the valise to my chest and ran to board before all my overly minded machinations were defeated by the departure of an unthinking but schedule-driven machine.
IT WAS NOT, of course, a long ride, this express suburban in from Peckham and New Cross to Charing Cross. And it took me most of the ride to work up my nerve to move forward from the rearward compartment of the carriage to which I had rushed. After so many trips with Dickens, I knew which carriage he would have boarded, of course, as well as which part of the almost-empty carriage he would have chosen for the ride.
And yet it was still a shock when, valise still clutched to my chest, I walked forward and found him alone in the compartment, staring at nothing but his own reflection in the window glass. He was a study in absolute sadness.
“Charles!” I cried, feigning pleasurable surprise. Without asking permission, I slipped in to sit opposite him “How uncanny but delightful to find you here! I thought you were in France!”
Dickens’s head snapped around and up as if I had slapped him with my glove. In the next few seconds readable emotions flashed across the usually inscrutable Inimitable visage in rapid succession: first absolute shock, then anger bordering on rage, then a pained sense of violation, then a return to the sadness I had glimpsed in his reflection, and finally… nothing.