Denninghay
August 11, 1845
Dickie,*
You ask of Gideon. Why in hell does it matter? You commit yourself to your cousin’s service as I write.
In any event, I knew the child and youth, not the man. Carolina left him with us when he was six, when she and Edmund returned to India. Tribes of these children were shipped home, to escape fevers, to begin the only schooling that made any sense. They still are. He took it uncommonly hard. What can I tell you after so many years? That he was an obedient child? That at puberty he remained obedient, but with the odd, passionate outburst?
At Norwich they gave similar odd reports, though he was counted an unexceptional student. He would ‘disappear,’ sometimes for a day or two, and then reappear at matins, neither informative about his whereabouts nor contrite. Part of this time he apparently spent on the Wensum in some half-rotted scull. He liked boats. They said he’d often have a friend with him, a tall, fey boy who followed him about like a tail. At Jesus, he was finally sent down, leaving not secretly and in shame but in an open phaeton with bouquets and someone’s sister.
Your Aunt Beryl loved him, I suppose, in her puzzled, birdlike way, but when he became big – and he became very big, much like you – she shrank back. For his part, he never showed much affection as a child but would sometimes lean against her like a little board. When he became older he seemed to hold her in some vague disdain, perhaps because she so closely resembled Carolina in colouring and voice and height, yet with no semblance of his mother’s cold loveliness. It was as if, before they were born, raw stuff for the two sisters was set out in pots – the pigments, the long bones, the quavering vocal cords – and put together, once with genius in his mother, and once as a joke in Beryl, whom you know I loved dearly.
Carolina occupied the deepest recesses of his heart. He seemed always to be saving himself for her, a cold little nut to the rest of the world. He asked after her incessantly in the beginning, and Beryl, not knowing what to do, made things up. Small things, a description of a hat, a fictional picnic, a red boudoir – things in which he took so much delight that she made up more. She hinted that Carolina had a special love for nature: hence, I believe, his lifelong cockeyed interest in botany and birds.
He missed her terribly and for an astoundingly long time. He seemed to have devised a list of things that, when done scrupulously, would draw her back. He would be a good boy. He would love no one else. He would be patient. He would write. He did all these things, and still she did not come. She sent the occasional gift. These – an elephant on wheels, a wooden cow – he animated, adored.
When he came into his manhood, females noticed and he was heartless. What tenderness he showed seemed reserved for the odd, the misfit forms of life. I don’t know why you want to know all this or, frankly, why I ramble on, except there’s little left to me at this age but the pen. You’ve committed yourself to his service and, more than likely,
