Free Wanting by Richard Flanagan Page B

the corridor, advancing into a babel of noise. He seemed to be holding himself differently, with a new vigour and delight in his very posture.
    ‘Where Wardour cries out,’ cried out Wilkie, ‘“The only hopeless wretchedness in this world is the wretchedness that women cause!”’
    ‘You can’t makes sense of his character without it,’ Dickens shouted back, as though it were another simple instruction of the type he issued daily at the office of Household Words , too apparent to demand explanation. Had not women failed him all his life? His mother. Maria Beadnell. His wife. Was it not obvious?
    Wilkie coughed.
    ‘Never give in to your stomach, Wilkie,’ said Dickens, ‘and your stomach will end up giving in to you!’ He pointed a heavily ringed index finger at Wilkie. ‘Now there’s another line that must go in! You see, Wilkie, that is Franklin’s experience and his lesson. We all have appetites and desires. But only the savage agrees to sate them.’
    And with that, Dickens swung open the door to reveal the chaos and cacophony of a score of carpenters and painters hard at work in a room that bore no resemblance to what Wilkie remembered as the children’s schoolroom. Paint pots adorned every available ledge and table, crates of tools lay scattered hither and thither, and at one end a bay window was being taken out and an altogether larger alcove built to house the stage. A labourer was heating size in a great crucible wedged into the fireplace and the room reeked of it, while gasfitters seemed perplexed as they installed extra pipes and lights.
    ‘Is it the Chatham Dockyard?’ asked Wilkie.
    ‘It is our theatre,’ said a thrilled Dickens, beaming and spreading his arms out. ‘The smallest theatre in London but a real theatre nonetheless!’
    And then Wilkie realised that not only the room had undergone a transformation.
    ‘I like your beard, Dickens,’ said Wilkie. ‘Very fashionable.’
    Dickens tweaked his newly sprouted whiskers.
    ‘I grew them for the role. I find myself more and more inhabiting, almost living, the part of Richard Wardour. Why, just yesterday I must have strolled the best part of twenty miles, and the best part of that was terrifying the locals of Finchley and Neasden into thinking I was a starving and demented polar explorer soon to perish for want of food or warmth, bearded and fully in part. I have it all committed to memory now, Wilkie, every line of yours up here,’ he said, tapping his goatish head. ‘Do you know what appeals so much about the Arctic?’ he said, and smiled once more. ‘There are no women there.’ And then he was gone to give the gasfitter advice on the placement of a row of jets.
    Wilkie coughed.
    At first, Dickens had not wished to invest his name in a project that was not fully his. He simply threw his friend ideas for story, a good line here or there. Yet as Little Dorrit grew and grew into a prison bigger than it was ever meant to be, the single ray of light shining into his cell was Wilkie’s new play.
    But it was only after Wilkie suggested Dickens should take the part of one of the play’s main characters, a villain to be called Richard Wardour, that his interest quickened. And it was only when he began to see that aman such as Wardour was not half as dislikeable as Wilkie had presented him that he became deeply involved. For Wardour’s character interested Dickens, and the more he thought about him, the more oddly close and familiar he seemed. Dickens began stealing time from the final instalments of his novel for Household Words to pen yet one more quick letter or card to Wilkie outlining cuts and making changes to his latest draft of the play, which, at Dickens’ suggestion, was to be called The Frozen Deep .
    ‘What is so marvellous about your play,’ he told Wilkie, returning from his conversation with the gasfitter, ‘is the way you’ve created such a man as Wardour—seemingly the worst, but with an unexpected depth. Somewhere