Girl in a Blue Dress Paperback - 2010

Excerpt

1

My husband’s funeral is today. And I’m sitting here alone in my upstairs room while half of London follows him to his grave.

I should be angry, I suppose. Kitty was angry enough for both of us, marching about the room in a demented fashion. They couldn’t stop you, she kept saying. They wouldn’t dare turn you away — not his own widow. And of course she was right; if I’d made an appearance, they would have been forced to acknowledge me, to grit their teeth and make the best of it. But I really couldn’t have borne to parade myself in front of them, to sit in a black dress in a black carriage listening to the sound of muffled hooves and the agonized weeping of thousands. And most of all, I couldn’t have borne to see Alfred boxed up in that dreadful fashion. Even today, I cannot believe that he will never again make a comical face, or laugh immoderately at some joke, or racket about in his old facetious way.

All morning I have waited, sitting at the piano in my brightest frock, playing “The Sailors’ Hornpipe” over and over again. The tears keep welling from my eyes every time I try to sing the words. But I carry on pounding the keys, and in the end my fingers ache almost as much as my heart.

At last, the doorbell rings, and in seconds Kitty is in the room. She has an immense black veil, a heavy train running for yards behind her, and jet beads glittering all over. “Oh, you should have been there, Mama!” she cries, almost knocking Gyp from my lap with the force of her embrace. “It’s completely insupportable that you were not!”

I pat whatever part of her I can feel beneath the heavy folds of crepe and bombazine. I try to calm her, though now she is here — so strung up and full of grief, so pregnant with desire to tell me all — I am far from being calm myself. My heart jitters and jumps like a mad thing. I dread to hear what she has to say, but I know of old that she will not be stopped. She is near to stifling me, too; her arms are tight, her veil is across my mouth. “Please, Kitty,” I gasp, “You will suffocate us both! Sit down and gather yourself a little.”

But she does not sit down. On the contrary, she stands up, starts to wrench off her gloves. “Sit down, Mama? How can I sit down after all I have been through? Oh, he might almost have done it on purpose!”

“On purpose? Who? Your father?” I look at her with amazement. What can she mean? What can Alfred possibly have done now? What mayhem could he possibly have caused from beyond the grave? Yet at the same time, my heart quickens with dismay. Alfred always hated funerals, and would not be averse to undermining his own in some preposterous way.

“Oh, Mama!” She throws her mangled gloves on the table. “As if it’s not enough that we’ve had to share every scrap of him with his Public for all these years, but no, they had to be center stage even today, as if it were their father — or their husband — who had been taken from them!” She lifts her veil, revealing reddened eyes and cheeks puffed with weeping.

So it is only his Public she inveighs against; nothing more sinister. “Oh, Kitty,” I say. “It is hard, I know, but you must allow his readers their hour of grief.”

“Must I? Really, Mama, must I?” She takes out her handkerchief. It is silk with a black lace border and I cannot help thinking that she must have outspent her housekeeping with all this ostentation. She dabs at her eyes as violently as if she would poke them out. “You’d have expected, wouldn’t you, that after giving them every ounce of his blood every day of his existence, at least they’d let him have some peace and dignity at the end?”

“And didn’t they?” My blood runs cold; all kinds of grotesquerie fill my mind. “For Heaven’s sake, child, what did they do?”

“They were like lunatics, Mama.” She takes an angry turn around the curio table, nearly knocking it over.

“Lunatics?” Surely that cannot be the case. Even the most cynical of his critics would not have begrudged him a decent funeral. “Do you mean there was no respect?”

She pauses, shrugs reluctantly. “Well, I suppose there was at first. When I looked out of the drawing room window, I even thought how patient they’d all been: men, women, and children standing six foot deep, even though it had been raining for hours. Everyone still and silent, save for the sound of the carriage wheels, and the shufflings and sighings and doffings of hats. But the moment we turned away from the park, some desperate wretch ran out and started pulling at the heads of the horses, crying, ‘No! No! Don’t leave us!’ And then it was as if a dam had burst, and the crowd was a great surge of water, flowing everywhere. It was terrifying, Mama! The horses were rearing, feathers floating in the air. I thought we’d be turned over and trampled to death. Trampled by his very own Public at his very own funeral — how fitting that would have been!” She glares around the room, as if daring the furniture to disagree with her.

So that is all; simply some overexuberance of the crowd. But she is not used to it, of course; she never had to run the gauntlet of the riotous masses in America all those years ago, when I’d had to cling to Alfred’s arm as he cleaved through them, smiling as if it were nothing in the world to be pulled about by strangers who thought you belonged to them, body and soul. “Poor Kitty,” I say. “How dreadful for you! And yet your most fervent wish is that I had been there to witness it all.”

She looks a little chastened. “But it was your right, Mama,” she says, sniffing loudly. “You should have insisted. It is a matter of principle. You should not have allowed Sissy and the others to win again.”

As always, she sees life as a battle. But I am no longer interested in winning or losing, especially with my proud and pretty sister. It’s all too far in the past, and none of Kitty’s ridiculous raging will make one iota of difference now. I look at her sumptuous frock, her extravagant train, her acres of beading, and her very fine, long veil; only the mud around her hem spoils the theatrical effect. “But your clothes seem undamaged, Kitty. Surely the excitement of the Public cannot have been so very bad?”

“You think I exaggerate?” she exclaims, casting herself into the fireside chair. “Well, you can ask Michael. He was in the carriage with Alfie and me. If he’d not kept hold of the door handle, we’d have been pitched out on the road! And if I hadn’t clung to the curtains, I’d have cracked my head against the windows or been knocked to the floor! There was such a monstrous surging ahead of us that I would not have put it past them to have laid hands on the coffin itself.” She wipes her nose defiantly. “He would really have belonged to his blessed Public then!”

I am distressed at her ordeal, but there is something in me that wants to laugh, too. I see Alfred in my mind’s eye, throwing back his head and roaring with mirth, but poor Kitty sees only the disrespect. “I’m sure they did not intend to frighten you, Kitty,” I say. “They were simply expressing their grief.”

“Grief? Well, it was a strange kind, then! It seemed more — oh, I don’t know — as if they were some kind of savages and he were some sort of god! In Piccadilly they actually pelted the carriages with flowers; at the corner of Pall Mall they chanted his name and pressed his books to their hearts as if they were holy icons. Ladies fainted and had to be carried away by the dozen. Gentlemen lost hats and gloves — and even boots.” She shakes her head vehemently.

I smile to myself: urchins and pickpockets must have had a fine time.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“This juicy novel imagines the private life of a famous couple: Catherine and Charles Dickens…. Arnold sticks close to the Dickens’ life story but changes all the names…. Smart readers will connect the dots.”
— People magazine

“Wonderful…. Arnold's knowledge of Dickens is impeccable…. Beautifully written, entirely satisfying.”
— The Times

“Fabulously indulgent Victoriana…. A lovely, rich evocation of the period [with] complex characterisation and silky prose.”
— The Observer

“Arnold's portrayal of Gibson/Dickens is spot-on.”
— The Guardian

“Fascinating…. A moving story about the special burden of loving a universally adored man…. [What] Arnold handles so effectively, is portraying the intermingling of love and resentment, affection and pettiness, that renders any marriage mysterious to outsiders.”
— Washington Post

“Arnold picks apart domestic psychology as efficiently as a housemaid cleaning a coal stove…. The sections in which [Dodo] recollects their years together pulse with the excitement of a secret courtship and a highly erotic early married life, as well as the anxieties of a woman increasingly exhausted by the arrival of child after child…. Dickens aficionados will delight in winky references to his novels, as well as to his biography.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Arnold's achievement, in constructing a busy, engaging, above-all empathetic fiction on the foundation of facts, is considerable. Gibson emerges as a monster of a kind, narcissistic and voracious, yet his gaiety, inventiveness and magnetism shine off the page.”
— Miami Herald

“Readers interested in the life of Charles Dickens will find [Girl in a Blue Dress] engaging and surprising…. Arnold's easily recognizable reworking of Charles is Alfred Gibson, a literary genius with immense energy and charm.”
— Winnipeg Free Press


From the Hardcover edition.