Free Wanting by Richard Flanagan Page A

mingled reality and mystery of the show, the poetry, the lights, the company, the dazzling changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, so delighted Dickens that when he came out onto the rainy street at midnight, he felt as if he were tumbling from the clouds into a rancorous world of mud and noise and misery.
    To delay that fall a few moments more, he tried to lift himself back up by talking of his next amateur theatrical, which he staged every new year at Tavistock House. Family and servants and friends stood in for actors. Money from the tickets was given to one worthy cause or another, and Dickens’ productions had become quite an event in the London calendar.
    ‘The problem is that the year is creeping by,’ said Dickens to Wilkie, ‘and I still have no idea what our next play might be.’
    As the two headed down a dingy street toward a house recommended by Wilkie as ‘particularly excelling in sybarite pleasure’, the confusion of splendid deaths at the end of the play they had just watched and Dickens’ keen interest in Franklin’s expedition came together in Wilkie’s mind to suggest a solution.
    ‘Wild ideas are on me again, Wilkie,’ Dickens was telling his companion. ‘Wilder than ever, of going to Paris—Rouen, Switzerland, anywhere—somewhere I can write aloft in some queer inn room. I’m restless, Wilkie.’
    ‘Imagine,’ began his companion, ‘if your next Twelfth Night play had as its setting that chill, white world.’
    ‘I need a change, Wilkie, but I am obliged to live in ahome with a wife. They say Christ was a good man, but did he ever live with a woman?’
    Wilkie coughed.
    Wilkie liked women. He found Dickens’ railing against women difficult. Unlike his older friend, he was neither sentimental nor conventional about them, and he would come to manage living with two women, without marrying either. Wilkie also had unusual opinions on mesmerism, the spontaneous combustion of human beings, and scrofula, and his opinions on all such matters interested Dickens.
    ‘That world,’ continued Wilkie, flurrying his fingers as, in the flaring gaslight, he for a moment beheld not a great man of letters in his prime, but a poor creature preternaturally old, ‘where Parry conquered…’ Briefly he was unsure if the idea had chimed, then he began to suspect it may have been a very bad one. He battled on. ‘And where Franklin died.’
    Dickens turned and stared intensely at Wilkie, and all Wilkie could hear was the odd sound of him sucking his tongue. Then, in a conspiratorial way, Dickens leant in close.
    ‘Once we’re inside,’ he said, ‘let’s order two fingers of their very worst blue gin and five toes of their very best midshipman.’
    And Dickens’ smile lit up his face, and he turned towards the door as it opened.
    ‘Of course, it is inspired by Franklin,’ Wilkie called after him. ‘And…though the story is a fancy, it is a fancy drawn from the deepest truth. And how much better ifit can show Englishmen meeting their ends nobly rather than as savages, their finest qualities triumphing over their basest.’
    ‘Yes,’ Dickens said, his back still turned. ‘Most impressed. More than impressed. Charmed. A mighty, original notion for a play.’ As Dickens led the way up the worn stone steps and the mist around them turned a ruddy yellow from the gaslight spilling out, he looked back, still smiling. ‘And you, dear Wilkie, must be the one to write it.’
    On entering the house and its warm, enveloping sounds, its overripe scent of cheap perfume, Wilkie had the sense he had simply been given a task Dickens was happy to be freed of.
    ‘You want that line to remain then?’ asked Wilkie, when some months later he came to Tavistock House to inspect the improvements being made in preparation for the performance. There was, thought Wilkie, something changed in Dickens since he had seen him a fortnight before.
    ‘Which line?’ said Dickens loudly, as the two men made their way along