Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  Mrs. Lewes stood beside me. She remarked on the particular intricacy of the carving of the willow branches. Without looking at me, she said, “You have a knife, shaped and carved like a willow leaf.” I was breathless. I did not answer. How did she know? Had Grandcourt told her? Was my every move surveilled and known to her as well as to him? Did she know of my temptation, my hatred?

  “You must love this place very much,” Juliet Fenn said to you. She had inquisitive eyes and was making notes. “So many homes are alike, but yours is unique and you seem to know every cranny of it. I daresay you could never love another home as much.”

  “I carry it with me,” you said. “There’s no disappointment in memory. And one’s exaggerations are always on the good side.”

  Your words seemed to relinquish the Abbey and acknowledge your loss and my unwanted triumph. They implied loneliness and severance from all that appeared to be yours but at root was not. I wondered about your mysterious foreign mother.

  I was prevented from talking to you. Sir Hugo showed us the portraits in the gallery above the cloisters: rows of Mallinger descendants, males from the female line, females from the male line, painted by Lely, Kneller, Reynolds, Romney, men in armor with pointed beards, ladies lost in hoops, ruffs, and coiffures, men in black velvet and wigs, politicians in powdered perruques. Their resemblance to each other recurred in the family aquiline nose, the ladies’ rosebud lips, the alabaster skin. I searched every one for likeness to you but could find no resemblance to your dark curls, dark eyes, and light brown skin.

  At the tour’s end Grandcourt went to the billiard room and I to the boudoir assigned me. I shut myself away and in despair looked at my image in the glass. In seven weeks my past life was crushed and belief in my own power gone. My will had been imperious but girlish. Grandcourt had rendered my body and spirit helpless and gained a mastery like that of a boa constrictor that goes on pinching and crushing without alarm at thunder. I dreaded hearing from him that, before our marriage, he already knew I had broken my promise to Mrs. Glasher. Were that admitted aloud, his hold over me would be complete.

  * * *

  ON NEW YEAR’S Eve at the Abbey Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger held a grand ball in the picture gallery above the cloisters. As a signal to you of our secret allegiance, I wanted to wear the turquoise necklace as my sole ornament. Knowing Grandcourt would not allow it, I put on his hated diamonds, wound the turquoise three times round my wrist, then concealed it with the lace frill of my glove.

  Half the gallery was to be used for dancing, the other for the huge supper table. The red carpet was down; hothouse plants and flowers filled every recess. Sir Hugo opened the ball dancing with me, Lady Pentreath danced with you, and Lady Mallinger was obliged to dance with Grandcourt; it was hard not to see her as the mother who produced nothing better than daughters and so let her husband’s land and mansions slip into the pocket of this arrogant man.

  To my surprise, you then boldly asked if I wished to dance. Grandcourt was beside me grumbling he was bored and wanted to leave. My hopes lifted; here was my chance to show you the necklace. I said I had danced enough but asked you to fetch me a glass of water. As you brought it, I drew off my glove. You noticed the necklace. Grandcourt noticed you noticing. “What is that hideous thing you have on your wrist?” he asked.

  With you there I was fearless. “It is an old necklace I like to wear,” I said, looking at you. “I lost it once, and someone found it for me.” I drank the water and handed you the glass. When you returned you spoke of a fine view from the side windows of moonlight on the stone pillars. I said I should like to see it and asked Grandcourt if he wished to. “Deronda will take you,” he said, and walked away.

  You offered your arm. I felt proud to hold it. I looked out at the moon, the light and shadows, and they soothed me. I felt I must talk to you but had so little time. You knew I was unhappy, needed you, and could not speak directly. “Suppose I had gambled again, and lost the necklace again, what would you have thought of me?” I asked.

  “Worse than I do now,” you said.

  I whispered I had done much worse, a great deal worse, and because of this felt wrong, miserable, and deserving of the punishment that had come. I asked you what I should do, what you would do. I wanted to tell you what was happening to me, but I could not utter the words. You were so honest and pure minded. You did not encourage me to be candid. I could not tell you I was nightly ravaged by a man whom I had voluntarily married, that I asked him not to come to my bed but that made him more vicious, that I wanted to kill him and feared I would do so. You said pure thoughts and good habits helped us bear inevitable sorrow and that wrongdoing could not be amended by one thing only. I wanted to say, Yes, that is all very well, but help me, please.

  “Why,” I asked, “did you make me doubt what I was doing and stop me gambling at the Kursaal? I might have won again. Why shouldn’t I do as I like and not mind? Other people do.”

  “I don’t believe you would ever get not to mind,” you said. “I don’t believe you could ever lead an injurious life without feeling remorse. If it were true that baseness and cruelty made some escape from pain, what difference would that make to you if you can’t be quite base or cruel?”

  “Tell me what better I can do,” I pleaded to you, knowing I must return to my jailer.

  “Many things. Look on other lives besides your own. See what their troubles are and how they are borne. Try to care for something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care for what is best in thought and action. Something that is good, apart from the accidents of your own lot.”

  Your words scored into my thinking as much as Lydia Glasher’s curse. They gave me hope that even though I was trapped, I might one day be free. I was the chattel of an evil man who intended to tame me, bring me to heel, make me respond to the rein; but he could not take my resistance from me, he knew nothing of my soul. It was not that I thought I might become a missionary, suffragist, nun, or teacher, but rather that were I to find a path to freedom I would go down it, were I to find a place of kindness and courage I might live again. My sorrow was that I wanted that place to be you.

  You returned me to Grandcourt. We passed Mrs. Lewes, who looked intently at us. I told my wretched husband I was ready to go, I asked you to excuse us to Lady Mallinger, then thanked you, and we left.

  Unpleasantness, I knew, would follow. Grandcourt came to my boudoir, sprawled in a chair, and said, “Sit down.” I sat. “Oblige me in the future by not showing whims like a madwoman in a play,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I suppose there is some understanding between you and Deronda about that thing on your wrist. If you have anything to say to him, say it, but don’t carry on a telegraphing that other people are supposed not to see. It’s damnably vulgar.”

  “You can know all about the necklace,” I said, pride overcoming my fear.

  “I don’t want to know. Keep to yourself what you like. What I care to know I shall know without your telling me. Only you will please to behave as becomes my wife and not make a spectacle of yourself.”

  It gave him no discomfort to chide me in this way. After our marriage he only ever addressed me by way of command and punishment.

  “Do you object to my talking to Mr. Deronda?” I asked.

  “I don’t care two straws about him or any other conceited hanger-on. You may talk to him as much as you like. But you are my wife, and either you will fill your place properly—to the world and to me—or you will go to the devil.”

  “I never intended anything but to fill my place properly,” I said. I did not say that in taking my place with him I had gone to the devil and beyond.

  “You put that thing on your wrist and hid it from me till you wanted him to see it. You will understand that you are not to compromise yourself. Behave with dignity. That’s all I have to say.”

  He stood with his back to the fire and looked at me with derision. It was f
utile for me to try to explain, counterproductive to argue or show emotion. There was much I might have said about compromise and dignity. Grandcourt pursued argument only to regard subduing me as winning it. He was not jealous but contemptuous and vicious. He would punish every independent move I made; I would do as he said, endure all he did, or be damned. I was his wife.

  “Please leave me to myself tonight,” I whispered. He left the room and returned within an hour.

  * * *

  MISERY FED MY defiance. The next day I determined to make use of Grandcourt’s scornful permission for me to talk to you. I encountered you in the drawing room at teatime. You were in conversation with Mrs. Lewes, whom I again thought ugly, with her jutting chin and big nose. I approached. “Mrs. Grandcourt,” she said, and I was discomfited by her appraisal of me with her thoughtful blue eyes. I feared she was critical and considered me shallow because I cared about my appearance and was young and not learned. I told her I had enjoyed Silas Marner and wished that I, like Eppie, had had a loving adoptive father such as Silas. “Yes,” she said. “It was a pity you were so young when your father died, and that Captain Davilow proved unsatisfactory.”

  How strange I again felt. I could not fathom how she knew about my father and Davilow, or who in the room might have told her of them. She seemed to scrutinize you, too, as if to measure the effect of my presence on you.

  I attempted with scant success to follow your conversation. The topic was synagogues and Jewish customs and how you both were studying Hebrew with Emmanuel Deutsch. From her bag Mrs. Lewes gave you a list of eighteen books about the Jews and their history, which she thought would interest you. I could only ponder why.

  I gathered she was working on a novel in which she hoped to overcome English attitudes of narrow-minded arrogance toward the Jews. You mentioned Mirah Lapidoth, “a little Jewess” known to you both. Mrs. Lewes had invited her to dinner to hear her sing Hebrew hymns. Miss Lapidoth, she said, was equally accomplished singing in Italian or German. Herr Klesmer had called at the house where she lodged and been impressed by her rendition of Leopardi’s “Ode to Italy” and Faust’s “Songs to Gretchen.” So taken were you with her enchanting voice, you suggested Lady Pentreath and Lady Mallinger arrange singing lessons with her for their daughters, or hire her for private concerts. Were I to hear her, you assured me, I might revoke my resolution to give up singing. It would more likely confirm it, I said, for I would plainly see my own middlingness. On the contrary, you said, Miss Lapidoth would inspire me to try.

  Your praise of Miss Lapidoth’s talent made me jealous. Nonetheless, since you so admired her, I decided I should like to hear her and have lessons from her when in town. “I mean lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and my own deficiency,” I could not resist saying.

  Was she, I then asked, as perfect in everything else as in her music? You replied you had seen nothing in her you would wish to be different. She had had an unhappy life and childhood, but no advantages could have given her more grace or truer refinement. Mrs. Lewes concurred.

  I asked about her unhappiness. I was well versed in my own. You said she had been abandoned and ill-used by her father and in despair was on the brink of drowning herself. “What stopped her?” Mrs. Lewes asked, and you spoke in your oblique way of a ray of light, piety, and submission to duty. I became impatient. “I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right,” I said. “I cannot believe in their great suffering.”

  I was stung to compare myself in ill light with this Miss Lapidoth. There was much in me you would wish to be different. Unhappiness had spawned in me not grace and refinement but bitterness and hate. Klesmer lauded her playing and singing with the same authority as he dismissed mine. No doubt you and Mrs. Lewes would do likewise.

  You did not endear me to Miss Lapidoth. Nonetheless, beyond the catalog of my inferiority, I felt you were as drawn to me as I to you, although it seemed there was a barrier, even beyond my marriage, to your making any move toward me.

  * * *

  ON THE LAST day Grandcourt and I were to leave at three in the afternoon. In the morning he went with Sir Hugo to King’s Topping to see the old manor house. Other gentlemen went shooting. I strolled with the ladies, looked at the waterfowl and shrubs, endured Lord Pentreath’s anecdotes about the Crimean War and Mr. Vandernoodt’s compliments on my complexion and figure.

  Hoping to find you, I slipped away, ran back to the house and through a side door into the library. You were sitting at a writing table, your back to the door. There was a huge log fire, and the room was like a sequestered private chapel, which I scarcely dared enter. When you seemed to pause, I said your name. You rose in surprise. “Am I wrong to come in?” I asked.

  “I thought you were out on your walk,” you said.

  “I turned back.”

  You offered to accompany me, if I wished, to join the others. I said no, that I needed to say something to you and could not stay long. I had so little time. I needed your guidance. I rested my arms and muff on the back of the chair and spoke quickly. I had planned to confess and tell all, but my words, when they came, were evasive and circumventory. Vandernoodt, I believe, had hinted to you about Grandcourt’s establishment at Gadsmere. But I found I could not mention Lydia Glasher by name or directly say what I had done.

  I told you I had deliberately thrust others out and made my gain out of their loss. I could not alter that, but what should I do, I asked, as recompense for the injury caused? “What would you do, what would you feel in my place?” Your reply was guarded. In my place, you said, you would feel the sorrow I was feeling. That, I understood as a tautology. It was not enough. I persisted, “What would you try to do?”

  “Order my life so as to make any possible amends,” you said, “and keep away from doing any sort of injury again.” I said I could not make amends; I had to continue on the path I was on.

  I wanted to be taken to a safe harbor, to be shown what to do today and tomorrow. Instead, in a circumlocutory exchange of hints and suggestions, you gave me advice more lofty than Uncle’s sermons. You talked of “the yoke of my own wrongdoing,” said I must submit to it as if to an incurable disease, and, to counterbalance evil, use this unalterable wrong I had done as a reason for effort toward good. “Be spurred into higher conduct,” you said, “and save other lives from being spoiled.”

  How might I do that? I wondered. I did not love “other lives” and never thought much of anyone’s life except my own and Mama’s. “But what can I do? I must get up in the morning and do what everyone else does. It is all like a dance set beforehand. The world is all confusion to me, and I am tired and sick of it.”

  You became severe and said again that life would be worth more if I had an interest beyond the drama of my small personal desires. “Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?” you asked.

  I had no answer. Grandcourt insisted I be what he commanded. You suggested I be someone in my own right. It was hard for any woman to have passionate independent delights and interests, least of all a woman in my circumstances, young, disastrously married, and weakly educated. I wanted to cry to you, “Don’t you see I am in a trap? Can’t you see that I need help to escape?”

  I felt like a child shaken and told to wake up, get up, but into an empty house with locked doors. I said I would try, but that I was living without affection around me. I so wanted to be with Mama and that was impossible, everything had changed in such a short time, and the old things now gone, which I used not to like, I now longed for with all my heart.

  “Take your present suffering as a painful letting in of light,” you said. “You cannot escape that painful process.”

  I wanted to tell you of the cruel form of suffering given to me, but I could not. I said, “I am frightened of everything. When my blood is fired, I dare do anything, take any leap, and that makes me frightened of myself.”

  I wanted to tell you of my battle with anger
and hatred, of the knife with the willow-shaped blade, my fear of what I might do if the moment came when I could bear my affliction no longer. But, you see, you could not know what it was to be used by Grandcourt in the way I was used.

  “Turn your fear into a safeguard,” you said. How often would I cling to those words. Turn your fear into a safeguard. “It is like quickness of hearing,” you said. “When calm, we can change the bias of our fear. Take hold of your sensibility and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.”

  You looked at me as if I was drowning, which indeed I was, and as if you could not save me. I believe you wanted to help me but could do no more than share with me thoughts that had consoled you. Perhaps all I heard was your soft voice and all I sensed was your concern. I reassured you I would think of what you told me. I said you had helped me, that my life would be better because I had known you. I could not tell you that you were my only lifeline and that I loved you.

  Deronda, I struggled with your advice. My rejection of it was not willful, but I did not know how to apply it. I wanted redemption and to be guided toward virtue, but you were telling me to bear the unbearable.

  With silence, space, and the passing of time, I see my situation differently. What had happened to me was not like an incurable disease. I had married a cruel and deceitful man. It should have been possible for me to leave him, gain my freedom, expose his wrongdoing, and turn the spotlight of wrongdoing on him.

  * * *

  I LONGED FOR you to respect me. I wanted to improve and change. I wondered what books you might advise me to read. When Grandcourt and I returned to Ryelands, from the library I took to my room Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences by René Descartes and The History of Civilization in Europe by François Guizot, but I could not get far with either. I read some pages, then was deterred by their impenetrability, and my thoughts strayed.