Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  * * *

  IF ONLY WE could have stayed at Offendene a few years before misfortune struck! There was society enough to make life pleasant. Mama accompanied me to parties and dinners: the Arrowpoints at Quetcham Hall; our landlords, Lord and Lady Brackenshaw, at Brackenshaw Castle; Mr. Quallon, the banker, at the Firs. Sometimes in summer Mama, my sisters, and I, along with my cousins Rex and Anna, picnicked on the grounds of Diplow Hall. Though the house, owned by Sir Hugo Mallinger, for most of the year was unoccupied and shuttered, its acres of secluded grounds, forested with elms and beeches, were open. Deer grazed on the grassland. We spread ourselves under the trees or by the lilied pool.

  I was petulant and hard to please. I viewed myself as superior to provincial Society, voiced discontent with what was around me, and expressed little gratitude for such good fortune as I had. Though unable to define what I wanted or was capable of achieving, I could not view the Archery Club, dances at Brackenshaw Castle, and dinner with the Arrowpoints as the zenith of my ambition. Being so much admired and so often told I was beautiful set me apart. I liked to be the center of attention, in control, and to have the last word. I came to see my beauty as a kind of genius, an accomplishment of my own doing. It was like a magnet. In hotels waiters fawned, smoothed my napkin, brushed crumbs from the cloth in front of me. If the laundress ironed a crease into a sleeve, the maid would say, “This will never do for Miss Harleth.” If the wood smoked in the bedroom fireplace, though Mama’s eyes watered, she apologized to me. If, after a long and tiring journey, I was last at the breakfast table, the main concern would be, Was Gwendolen’s coffee hot, was Gwendolen’s toast crisp? “Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet,” Miss Merry said. And it was true. Forgive me. I was young.

  I did not hide my exasperation with my half sisters. I assured them they were lesser creatures—deserving of their back to the highway in the carriage, entitled only to the smaller piece of cake.

  I was incredulous that you, though you saw my charm, resisted it and even criticized me.

  * * *

  ON OUR SECOND day at Offendene, as I brushed my hair in front of the tall mirror in our bedroom, Mama said, “Gwendolen, dear, if you had a wreath of white roses in your hair, you’d pass as Saint Cecilia.” (Mama, I have to tell you, thought my singing voice divine.)

  “Except for my nose,” I joked. “Saints’ noses never in the least turn up. I wish you had given me your perfectly straight nose. It would have done for any sort of character—a nose of all work. Mine is only a happy nose. It would not do for tragedy.”

  “Oh, my dear, any nose will do to be miserable with in this world,” Mama replied. It was typical of her to imbue a jest with gloom. I wanted her to be enthusiastic. I believed her melancholy made gloomy things happen. It was as if all my hope and joy could never counterbalance her pessimism, and yet she looked for and found her happiness through me.

  I told Mama her dullness made me feel nothing was of use. Was it marriage, I asked, that left her disaffected? “You must have been more beautiful than I when you were young.” She protested at this, of course, and in my secret heart I doubted it. “Marriage is the only happy state for a woman, as I trust you will prove,” she said, and although I did not want that to be the case, I supposed it had to be true.

  “I would not put up with it if it was not a happy state,” I said, then told her I was not going to muddle away my life in service to a man and do nothing remarkable for myself.

  I did not want to believe in the imperative of marriage. It held no appeal. I knew little about men beyond what I had read in books. I grew up with women. Mama’s marriages had sapped her wealth and twice left her widowed then penniless. Family life I viewed as curtailing and petty. I had no wish for children, I found them irritating. Yet I supposed I would marry—someone of distinction and rank—I neither doubted it nor dwelled on it. I was resolved, though, that I was not going to let a man have power over me; lovemaking appalled me; when propositioned, I felt obliged to tease. I felt no attraction to any man until I met you. Marriage was not the focus of my ambition. I wanted fame but thought no further than that my life should be pleasant, that I should star at parties, be victorious at the Archery Club, applauded at the piano, and admired on horseback.

  I read novels, poems, and plays, had views on Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, the silliness of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice, the awfulness of Casaubon in Middlemarch, the piety of Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was praised for my soprano voice, the skill with which I played the piano, my graceful dancing. I could read music. I spoke passable French. But my power, my gift, was to be the most captivating person in the room. My wit sparkled.

  * * *

  HOW PUNISHED I was for such hubris. But through the torment I endured, I did not fall victim to Mama’s dulled acceptance of misfortune. Beyond my suffering I kept alive a longing for a life that was free and a love that linked me to your wisdom; or was it to your kind dark eyes and beautiful voice?

  Mama and I do not quarrel. Our love is deep. She is magnanimous, as was her mother, I believe. I was her favored child, her princess, best friend, and source of pride. She coiled my hair, fastened my dresses, advised me which gloves and what jewelry to wear. She would do anything for me, make any sacrifice, and readily forgive me any misdemeanor. In her eyes I never truly could do wrong.

  But I was rash, impulsive, consumed by my emotion of the moment, and at times cruel. I recall with shame a cold night when in our beds Mama felt unwell but had forgotten to take her medicine. She asked me to fetch it. I was warm and sleepy, and I refused. “She would have done that for you whatever the discomfort, whatever the cost” was the rebuke that went through my head as I heard her stumble to the cabinet.

  I was short-tempered with my sisters too. Remembered incidents of wrongdoing added to a sense that I deserved my punishment when it came … One afternoon while I was playing Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” Alice’s canary kept up a shrill whistle, which I found intolerable. It was as if the wretched creature mocked me. I exploded in temper and crushed it in my fist. I killed it. Alice wept. I was shocked at myself. That I could so lose control and be provoked into rage and violence. I am capable of murder, I thought. To compensate, I bought her a white mouse, but she said she hated mice and was scared of them. I think she became afraid of me and what I might do next, and it was true I was unpredictable. To myself most of all.

  * * *

  THE DEATH OF Captain Davilow, my stepfather, accorded me no grief. I always hated him to come home. His attention to me was leery and unwanted. I tried never to be alone in a room with him. I could not admit my aversion to Mama. To do so would have destroyed her fragile world. But I came to resent my four half sisters and the life Mama’s marriage to him compelled me to live. He squandered her money and stole her jewelry and sold it.

  I think of your childhood, Deronda. Sir Hugo told me of it: how you grew up knowing nothing about your parents or even your true name. How you thought Sir Hugo was your father and on the one occasion when you met your mother she told you she could not love you.

  We were both outsiders, you and I. More united by uncertainty than ever you allowed. But you plucked certainties for yourself from the fictions of the past: a prescriptive, demanding religion, a directional quest, a constant wife, whereas I … I blew with the wind and hoped to arrive at a perfect destination.

  Davilow inflicted a bewildering lifestyle on us. We moved from hired Paris apartments to hired villas in Lausanne, Baden, Amsterdam. We stayed nowhere long enough to settle, make friends, or feel part of any place. It was a lifestyle that made me restless, rootless. Mama gave birth to Davilow’s tedious daughters: Alice, to whom I was asked to give lessons, was slow, pulled silly faces, and had no ear for music or languages. Bertha was always sketching flowers and leaves but covered the sketches if I asked to see them. She and Fanny whispered and giggled a great deal. Isabel was clumsy. That was how I viewed them then.

  D
avilow disappeared for weeks at a time without saying where he was. I do not know if Mama ever asked. I was her anchor, her link to my father, the eldest daughter, the one apart, the one in charge. I was contrary and demanding, but looking back to the days before the calamity of our loss of money, the impending loss of Offendene, my terrible marriage, I believe what formed my character, shaped my courage, was the haven of Mama’s love for me. She protected me from my fears: of the dark, of loss of control, of failure, or of someone bending my brittle will to theirs.

  I knew almost as little about my forebears as you of yours. Mama’s father had owned sugar plantations in Trinidad, so when the American Civil War began I think she was ashamed of her family’s links to the Confederates and slavery. My father’s family, apparently titled, cultured, and certain of themselves, viewed Mama as inferior and an unsatisfactory wife for one of their kind. When I was twelve Mama showed me a miniature of my father, a colored portrait in a silver frame. I saw little beyond eyes shaped like mine, but I offended her by asking, “Why did you marry again, Mama? It would have been better if you had not.” She blushed and said I had no feeling.

  I had not then learned what she perhaps knew: that it is not only love that binds people in wedlock. Circumstance, sudden impulse, misguided optimism, and fear of loneliness and penury shape our decision making and our lives and, when we are unlucky, herald our despair.

  I did not want to be shaped by Mama’s melancholy, but I was. I think her marriage to Davilow began as a social and economic necessity, then became an endurance about which it was difficult for her to speak. I think her melancholy grew in the gap between the reality of life with him and the love she knew she could feel and had felt for my father.

  * * *

  THAT SPACE BETWEEN you and me, across the tables in the ornate salon of the Kursaal, I see and feel it now. How I longed to bridge it. As my passion for you grew, I became acquainted with the ache that life without you brought.

  From the start you resisted your attraction to me. I appeared to you spoiled and impulsive. You looked for the madonna, an unswerving virtue of a sort I lacked, a purity of heart. You sensed your mother in me: your beautiful, ambitious, unavailable mother; the wicked princess who turned you from her throne. But I was not like that. I was not like that. And why did you focus on me and encourage me toward you only to reject me? You chose Mirah Lapidoth, compliant, dependent. She was the better singer and had the sweeter nature, but—and I only dare write this because I will never say it to you—she was the lesser woman.

  * * *

  AFTER CAPTAIN DAVILOW died, leaving Mama penniless, she, my sisters, and I managed on what Uncle Henry gave us. How I resented living under his obligation! He was excessively clear about his own importance and had strong views that he stated as facts. He sat at the head of the table, said grace as if privy to the ear of God, and his word was law. His tedious sermons made no sense to me. In his church my mind drifted, and I heard only the authority in his voice. Before taking holy orders he had been an army captain. His own expenses were great, as he was ever at pains to remind us: six sons whose education much stretched him to finance, two daughters for whom husbands must be found. The rectory came rent free, but he was obliged to entertain with formal dinners and to pay the groom, gardener, and cook.

  Mama, to him and my aunt, was “poor dear Fanny,” victim of not one but two unfortunate marriages. My aunt looked like Mama and was concerned for her, but her own contentment and security made her behave as if she was superior: a condescending manner accompanied her comfort and good fortune.

  Uncle weighed the worth in money of my beauty. He was intent for me to be seen to advantage in Society, so that I should marry well. His thinking was that then the burden of caring for Mama and her brood would shift to my husband. He was paternal toward me, felt that as a child I had missed out on family life, and at heart found it hard to resist me. He encouraged friendship between me and his elder daughter, Anna. She was tiny, admiring of me, less aggravating and rambunctious than my half sisters, and I liked her well enough but could not view her as an equal.

  Uncle frequently reminded Mama of his cleverness at finding Offendene for us, how the house was more than she might expect for the low rent she paid, its running costs no greater than an ordinary house, and how the landlord, his friend Lord Brackenshaw of Brackenshaw Castle—Uncle cultivated influential friends—owned the Brackenshaw Archery Club as well as much of Wessex.

  I loathed the way I had to weasel and cajole Uncle for anything I wanted. I loved riding. There was nothing I liked more than to gallop across fields or ride with the hunt, and I very much wanted a saddle horse of my own. I put it to him, but he balked at the expense. I persisted, and when he next called for tea with my aunt and Anna, I flattered him, played the piano to his liking, induced him to join me in a duet, then urged Mama to speak up for me. “Gwendolen desires above all things to have a horse to ride—a pretty, light, lady’s horse,” Mama said. “Do you think we can manage it?”

  Aunt looked disapproving and suggested I borrow Anna’s Shetland pony. I protested I could not endure ponies and was willing to give up all other indulgence if I might have a horse. Uncle lamented the expense of his carriage horses, how a horse for me would cost a good sixty pounds, and then there was its keep, and how he only afforded a pony for Anna. As ever, he reminded Mama of the cost to him of her and her fatherless brood.

  My pride wilted as Mama demeaned herself and said she wore nothing but two black dresses. I winced to hear her tell Uncle how I was prepared to tutor my sisters when Mrs. Startin left. It was as if she was begging. I wanted Mama to have diamonds, furs, whatever she wanted and not need to ask anything of anyone. Aunt went on about how Anna rode only the wretched donkey and how no horse was afforded her. But Uncle’s indulgence was calculating: if I was to acquire an expensive husband—an aristocrat and landowner, with a fortune to benefit them all—a degree of finery and show was essential. “Gwendolen has,” he said, “the figure for a horse.”

  I got my horse. I called her Twilight. Anna, content with her pony, did not begrudge me. And before long Uncle saw his worldly ambitions for me realized.

  Apparently, on their way home Aunt rebuked Uncle for his indulgence toward me, but he spoke again of his duty to help me “make a first-rate marriage to a man more than equal to himself.” Aunt feared one of her boys, Rex or Warham, might fall in love with me, but Uncle assured her that would not occur. First cousins, he said, must not fall in love. If it happened, marriage would not be allowed and, more to the point, the boy would have nothing. “At worst,” he said, “there would only be a little crying. You can’t save boys and girls from that.” And crying there was, for Rex did fall in love with me, though not I with him. My crying was for you, Deronda. No one saved me from that.

  Such were life’s problems even before the catastrophe. It is hard to be proud when you have no money and are dependent on a pompous uncle. I had little freedom to do as I chose, nor did I know how or what to seek. I strongly felt the confinement of home, and I dreamed of breaking free, of being more than the chattel of my uncle or the elusive ambition of Mama. I wanted my own achievement, my own expression, but what did I have beyond my beauty and high spirits? Yes, I got my horse, but what I longed for were the wild plains where the horse might take me.

  * * *

  HERR KLESMER. LOOKING back, I realize the chain of my humiliation began with him. He was famed as a composer, pianist, and teacher. I met him at Quetcham Hall, in our first spring at Pennicote, at a dinner party given by the Arrowpoints. They had hired him as music tutor to their clever, gifted daughter, Catherine, who played the piano, violin, and harp. Mrs. Arrowpoint declared him a genius, and he looked the part, with his large head, long brown hair, flowing cape, gold spectacles, and flamboyant gestures. I did not at first know he was a Jew like you. I had never before met a Jew socially. I did not know Jews could be geniuses. I thought they were all moneylenders and pawnbrokers.

  Mrs. Arrowp
oint had written extensively on the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso. She had a voice like a parrot, wore startling headdresses, and was provoked by my beauty and its effect on men. I have often observed that unappealing women resent me. I told her, at this party, how I adored Tasso and that I too would like to be an authoress. She offered to loan me her unpublished manuscript, in which, she said, she corrected popular misconceptions about his insanity, explained his complex feelings for Duke Alfonso’s sister Leonora, and gave the real reasons for his imprisonment. Such was the lure of creative excitement in the district of Wancester.

  After dinner Klesmer and Catherine played a four-handed piece on two pianos. It was a more accomplished performance than I could ever aspire to, but it was very long. Mr. Arrowpoint then asked me to sing and led me to the piano. Klesmer stood a few feet away and smiled at me. I had no nervousness. Mama told me my voice was like Jenny Lind’s, and I believed this to be so. I sang the aria “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma.

  Ah! bello a me ritorna.

  Ah, riedi a me.

  Ah return to me my beautiful

  Ah, come back to me.

  Jenny Lind, though ordinary and uneducated, succeeded in the world as I hoped to do.

  Klesmer stared at me as I sang. I was aware of his gaze. It seemed to bore into me, a prelude to yours at the Kursaal. “Ah, riedi a me,” I sang. There was such applause. “Bravo!” Mr. Arrowpoint shouted with tears in his eyes. “Bravo, encore, encore!” Herr Klesmer stood mute. I prepared to sing again but first said to him, expecting contradiction, “It would be too cruel, don’t you think, Herr Klesmer? You cannot like to hear poor amateur singing.”