Dreams of Exile by Ian Bell

Author:Ian Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466891661
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

10 1880–1884

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands …

“A CHRISTMAS SERMON”

Maggie Stevenson was barely ten years older than her new daughter-in-law. Colvin, with a touch of acid, had judged the Scotswoman “the fresher of the two” when comparing them at Liverpool. Fanny had reason to be weary.

She was touching middle age when she began this new chapter in her life with a thirty-year-old author of unproven worth. It was not that she doubted his talent—she thought him a genius and never wavered from that judgement—but she could have been forgiven for wondering what sort of contract she had entered into, she to whom life had not been kind, not simple, not easy. Louis was kindness itself, but neither simple nor easy to live with.

She could take credit for having saved his life and for helping his reconciliation with his parents. Her apparent competence, the ease with which she managed R.L.S., impressed people. But Fanny had several disguises, and wore them according to need or whim. With Thomas and Maggie Stevenson she worked hard to charm, and to make them realise she was not the adventuress they must have feared. Just as she reassured them, however, Heriot Row reassured her. The precarious structure of Louis’s life turned out to rest on sound foundations of prosperity and taste. She took to it all with unfeigned delight, particularly when Louis was obliged to don some of the splendid clothes he had left hanging in his Edinburgh wardrobes, though she later felt guilty that she was taking so much from her husband’s parents and giving so little. As things stood, she was giving them more than she realised.

“Fanny fitted into our household from the first,” Maggie told her diary. Thomas, in particular, found her charming, perhaps because she agreed with almost everything he had to say. Fanny, for her part, thought Maggie Stevenson a more sympathetic and complex character than Mrs. Stevenson’s own diaries and letters have suggested to posterity. The two women had Louis in common, however, and achieved more understanding over husband and son than a wife and a mother usually do.

Walter Simpson presented the couple with a wedding present in the unlikely form of a black Skye terrier, variously named Wattie, Woggs, Woggy, Wiggs, and, finally, Bogue. True to his breed, he was a stubborn, short-tempered beast who snarled and fought his way across Europe, soiling carpets and upsetting waiters as he went, for six years. If Thomas Stevenson was right in believing that dogs possess souls, Bogue was a demon incarnate. His mistress, the old man decided, was not.

Thomas, no fool, may even have concluded that his son would be better off in the hands of this older woman, who seemed to know what she was doing and what she wanted. If Louis would listen to her advice, it could only be an improvement. Thomas seems to have admired Fanny’s evident strength, and the admiration was reciprocated.

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