Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  You took up your hat. You wanted to leave. It was as if, having had a duty to perform, you had done it and now wanted to turn to other matters. As ever, my heart lurched at the prospect of your going. I stood up. I said I would do as you advised, but what else must I do? I tried to check my tears as again on your face I saw that mix of compassion and desire to be gone. You asked if I was going with Mama to the country. In a week or ten days, I said. That was the best I could do at this time, you thought—to be with her and my sisters. Other plans would follow. “Think that a severe angel seeing you along the road of error grasped you by the wrist and showed you the horror of the life you must avoid. It has come to you in your springtime. Think of it as a preparation. You can, you will, be among the best of women, such as make others glad that they were born.”

  I felt unreal. You spoke of the promise of salvation and the prospect of a new life, but I had no idea what that life might be. I felt inseparable from you. With all the longing of my heart I wanted you in my life. Again you held my hand. You said you must not weary me, that I looked ill and unlike myself. I tried to be calm. I said I could not sleep, that memories tormented me, of Grandcourt’s face as he rose from the sea, of the woman at the Whispering Stones. In time such memories would lessen, you said, but I did not know how, or with what they might be replaced.

  I would have said anything, done anything, to make you stay, but pleading was importunate. Again I asked if you intended to stay at Diplow or at the Abbey with Sir Hugo?

  You were noncommittal, you gave a vague assurance you would visit Diplow, then moved to the door. I asked you to come to Park Lane once more before I left town. If you could be of use, you said, if I wished it, but there was reluctance in your face and hesitation in your words. I cried the more, implored you, said I had no strength without you. Yes, you would come, you said, but you looked miserable. I tried to control myself, to appear brave. I said I would remember your words, remember your belief in me. I asked you not to be unhappy about me.

  * * *

  YOU WERE MY world. I trusted and admired you and yearned for you to be with me, to redeem me, for you to know my better nature, not just my troubled heart. I had not consciously thought of marriage to you, but I could not bear separation from you.

  I endured a difficult week, then dared ask you to visit again. I was in limbo, overwhelmed by the horror of what I had done. My summons disturbed you. You had seen too much of my despair. I was making demands on you that you were unable to fulfill. A year previously you might have moved to save me from sorrow and to carry to a conclusion the rescue begun with your redemption of the necklace. But unbeknown to me, momentous things had happened to you. I was too absorbed in my own world to observe anything of yours other than that you pitied me but could not respond to my appeal.

  Mama spoke to you of the plan, now that I had decided to accept my income, for us all to return as a family to Offendene, and of her hope that I would piece back my life to what it was when we first went there and I was happy. You talked of the tranquillity of the countryside and the consolation and healing power of family life. I took your approval of the plan as rejection and a desire for others to bear the burden of caring for me. You revealed nothing of your life or intentions, and I asked you no questions. Not even why you had been in Genoa.

  Some weeks later, on your next visit to Sir Hugo at Diplow, but before Mama, my sisters, and I had returned to Offendene, you called uninvited to see me at the White House. We sat alone together in the drawing room. I was composed. Jocasta brought us tea. I apologized for having caused you pain and being so full of grief and despair on your previous visit, and thanked you for all you had done for me in Genoa and after. You looked at me with concern. Hesitantly, you said you were troubled: you had things to tell me affecting your own life and future, which you should have told me before, had my own affairs not been so pressing. I thought you must be referring to matters concerning Sir Hugo and his property. I apologized for having been so bothersome and for giving you no choice but to think only of how to help me.

  Then you gave your news: In Genoa you found out who your parents were. You went there at the summons of your unknown mother, who, when you were a baby and after your father’s death, had given you away to Sir Hugo Mallinger. You showed me a jeweled locket with her portrait in it. I supposed the locket had significance, like Grandcourt’s diamonds. Her gaze was familiar; it was as if the portrait was of me. Although our coloring was different, she dark and I fair, I thought I saw reflected my own pride and loneliness.

  She had sworn Sir Hugo to secrecy. Now, mortally ill, she wanted before she died to explain to you her motives for abandoning you to him. “Her chief reason had been that she did not wish me to know I was a Jew,” you said.

  “A Jew!” I am embarrassed to remember how I blurted the word and the look you then gave me of sharp reproach. To retract my blunder, I said, “What difference need that have made? I hope there is nothing to make you mind. You are just the same as if you were not a Jew.”

  You told me you were more than glad of it. You were overjoyed. A chasm widened between us. Why should you or anyone be overjoyed to be a Jew? Then you said how, in the past few months, you had become intimate with a remarkable Jew whose ideas so attracted you, you were going to devote the best part of your life to living out those ideas. To do this, you must leave England for some years and travel to the East.

  I did not know what you were talking about. I had no clue what those ideas could be or what living them out might mean, beyond my exclusion. What I did understand was that you were going away. Afflicted with anxiety at the prospect, I felt my mouth tremble and I began to cry. I pleaded, “But you will come back?”

  You huddled in your coat and moved to the mantelpiece. If you lived, you would return at some time, you said.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Can I understand the ideas, or am I too ignorant?”

  You said, or I think you said, you were journeying to the East to restore a political existence to “your people,” the “chosen people,” who, though in a covenant with God, were scattered in different countries. You wanted to help restore them to Palestine to form a nation again. You saw this as your duty according to the Jewish scriptures. You were resolved to devote your whole life to this and to awakening this cause in others’ minds in the way it had been awakened in yours.

  What was I to think? Who were these scattered people, and how were you to find them and herd them in? I felt confused, crushed. I, it seemed, was not one of “your people,” not one of the chosen. You intended a holy crusade from which I was excluded by birth. Your cause had nothing to do with me. I was the unchosen, without abiding connection to a people or place. No safeguard of birthright. I was to be consigned to Pennicote, in a rented house, my future without direction. “Marriage is the only true and satisfactory sphere of a woman,” Uncle had told me. For me it had proved false and unsatisfactory.

  My life seemed small and unlivable. Before my miserable marriage I felt all that happened was in some predestined and intimate relationship to me, even the stars in the sky, and the sea in which Grandcourt drowned. I had no curiosity about what lay on the other side of intimacy. It was as if I now stood alone with a void spinning round me into which you were disappearing. I felt like a speck of existence, an irrelevance, a nowhere person, unloved and unprotected.

  After a time I said, “Is that all you can tell me?” I still almost hoped to hear you call this journey irrelevant in view of your love for me. You started to explain that the remarkable Jew who so influenced your thinking was Mordecai, the learned, emaciated brother of Miss Lapidoth. I remembered the afternoon when I called to see her. I heard you in the next room, she told me you and Mordecai were reading Hebrew, but I paid no more attention than if she had said you were playing whist.

  “Did she tell you that I called to see her?” I asked. You said no, looked perplexed, and said you did not understand. And suddenly the truth came to me, and I felt my h
eart race and my breath halt. I asked if you could marry Miss Lapidoth. Yes, you said, you were going to marry her. She, her brother, and you would then journey together to the Promised Land.

  It was not a dawning of error, as with my marriage to Grandcourt, but a sudden clarity of mortal wound, the piercing of a knife. I cried out that I was forsaken. For the eternity of a year all my hope and grief was directed at you. I had no life without you. I suppose I looked ill, you knelt beside me, held both my hands in one of yours, dried my eyes, said you were cruel, looked at me imploringly. Tears welled in your eyes too. You said you would write when you could and asked if I would answer. It was always your way to speak words of hope even when a situation was hopeless.

  But all I really heard was that you loved someone else, were going, and I would not see you again. I tried to match your words of optimism. I said it would be better with me for having known you. You said had we been much together, we should have felt our distances more, but now, despite separation, you would be more with me than you used to be.

  * * *

  NOW I SEE such thinking as specious nonsense. I had been candid with you, but you had not been candid with me. Perhaps I gave you no opportunity. I had no inkling of how excluded I was from your life plan. You had made no mention of what that plan was. No reference to it. What could I have known of your being a Jew? I had seen you at Topping Abbey. You were its heart. An English gentleman. You knew every stone.

  It had been a revelation to me to realize I loved you. I was punished for this love, first by Grandcourt, and now by you.

  You had said what you needed to say, and you so wanted to be gone from my distress. I struggled to find courage. I told you: you had been very good to me, I deserved nothing, I would try to live, I would think of you, and I hoped I had not harmed you. We clasped hands, you kissed my cheek, you left.

  Mama found me, said I looked very ill, and persuaded me to go to bed. She sat with me, and I cried in her arms for most of the night. In the morning when I saw her concern, I determined to console her. I commanded her not to be unhappy and assured her I would live to enjoy Offendene, annoy my sisters, and make the best of what there was. I did not say I felt I too had died.

  III • Gwendolen

  You had your Jewish wedding with your newfound Jewish friends. I was to hear about it from Hans Meyrick and Sir Hugo. Mordecai Lapidoth witnessed the betrothal of his sister and you, the two people whom he loved best in the world. Sir Hugo gave you as a wedding present all the equipment necessary for Eastern travel and for your wife a locket inscribed TO THE BRIDE OF OUR DEAR DANIEL DERONDA, ALL BLESSINGS, H&LM. It occurred to me Mirah Lapidoth was blessed with lockets, Sir Hugo’s and your mother’s, while I had been cursed with diamonds. The Klesmers gave you a watch. I sent you the following letter.

  Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding day. I have remembered your words—that I may live to be one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me. I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve any more for me. It is better—it shall be better with me for having known you.

  I had drafted the letter a dozen times. I wanted to bleach it of self-pity or accusation. I was mindful of the letter I received on my wedding day. I could better endure my loss and pain at losing you than live with the apprehension that once again I had been spoiling.

  * * *

  HOW BLEAK I felt after your departure. My life became inexpressible. Without your support I did not know how to continue. I could not speak of all I had endured in degradation from Grandcourt, or say that through the deep winter of that marriage you were my only hope. I could not talk of my shame at withholding help from a drowning man because I hated him. All I could not say raged like a contagion within me.

  It was an effort to get from my bed to a chair. Nothing interested me, everything disturbed me. My sense of guilt was acute and of worthlessness entire. I could not concentrate on a book, receive guests, or easily look at my reflection in the glass. Worse, I felt my return home was an anxiety to Mama and depressing for my sisters. At night I cried out because of my dreams. I dreamed I opened a door and found you there, but when I woke, you were not. I dreamed you called my name. Again and again I dreamed of Grandcourt’s face rising from the sea. One night it was you who were drowning, and I could not get the rope to you.

  Dr. Millington said my nervous system was exhausted, applied leeches to purge my despair, prescribed quinine and iron and Dover’s Powder to coax me to sleep. A Nurse Pollock was hired but failed to tempt me with fish pie and chicken soup. Uncle said fresh air, sunshine, and exercise would restore me, but I felt incapable of venturing out. I think my aunt suspected I hastened Grandcourt’s death, then acted the part of the bereaved widow.

  Days and weeks passed in a haze. Sir Hugo feared for my mental and physical state and recommended that while Uncle organized the move from Jodson’s back to Offendene, Mama take me to the spa at Bath for two weeks. He booked rooms for us in the Royal York Hotel. The queen had stayed there, he told us.

  Bath was filled with white-haired people drenched of purpose but steeped in ailments: retired judges, generals, and their widows. I was put under the care of Dr. Myrtle, an unctuous man who exuded professional concern. I told him my suffering was to feel nothing. He diagnosed nervous exhaustion and a jaded brain and said my nerves were unstable, that I was worn out by menstrual bleeding, and that my depression was because despite being married I had borne no children.

  Under his guidance I followed a regime. I began my day with a bath in hot spring waters, followed by a water-drinking session under palms to the sound of music. At considered intervals I had vapor baths, tepid baths, hot baths. I was wrapped in hot towels and massaged, soothed by soft music and hands gently pressing against my skull, prescribed a diet of fish and well-cooked greens, and advised to chew each mouthful slowly. I gulped the air and sipped the curious water, which was greenish and tasted fetid, apparently contained lime and iron, and was said to cure the most diverse ailments: sciatica, depression, eczema, paralysis, rheumatism, convulsions.

  As I was wheeled in a black Bath chair to the pool in the mornings, dressed in my bathing clothes, in the company of the moribund and arthritic, I thought how the events of one year had turned me from the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth, star of the Pennicote Archery Meeting, into a patient in the company of the old and ill.

  Sometimes Mama and I went to Bath Abbey or for a drive and shopping, or we walked in the Spring Garden along the paths and parterres of flowers. We went twice to the play, drank tea in the public rooms, attended lectures on the arts and sciences (I do not remember what they were about). There was a bookseller where one might read the papers and a coffee room for ladies by the Pump Room.

  I took little notice of any of it. I imagined, in my twilit world, you might return to rescue me and that then my sense of unreality would end. You would divert me with explanations of the history of the city: what was Roman or Norman, the influence of Beau Nash and William of Orange and Thomas Baldwin (who had rebuilt the medieval baths), the story behind the large arched windows of the Pump Room. I had scant curiosity about such matters, though I accompanied Mama on two guided tours.

  I wore the turquoise necklace. My talisman. I could not discard the hope I had invested in it. In the street I would see ahead of me a man with a certain walk and think it was you. At the Abbey I sat next to a man who used the same cologne as you. I scanned passing strangers. It was as if I was expecting you at every moment.

  But behind my despair and bereavement I think I saw the possibility of freedom: Grandcourt was gone. Never again could he control me like his dogs, or abuse me. I was released from captivity. Vaguely, but without energy to act, I was aware my life was mine to shape if I knew how. But I was adrift. I did not have like you a destination, a mission. I did
not feel I could save some part of the world, find roots, champion a cause. Klesmer had trodden hard on my fragile ambition. I had thought destiny would protect me and guide me to the happiness that awaited me. But in truth I had no idea what to do with my life. Without you I did not know who or what might in some way light the path ahead.

  * * *

  ONE BRIGHT SUNLIT day Uncle and Mama took me home to Offendene. The old house welcomed us, its creaking boards and lack of graces. Mama as ever was so patient, brought me broth and hot chocolate, called me her darling Gwen, told me I was special, and was oh so pleased to have me home.

  Dr. Millington commended her as an excellent nurse, said rest and kindness were better medicines than he could prescribe, and advised me to look forward and not dwell on past pain. But I remained plagued by the image of Grandcourt’s face as he floundered and called for the rope, which I did not throw, and of your awkwardness as you sat beside me and told me you were to marry Mirah Lapidoth and go together hand in hand to your promised land.

  My sisters came to my room with flowers, spoke in soft voices, and tried not to giggle or annoy me. They brought news of Criterion and their outings and shopping expeditions. Alice said she was grateful to me for providing for Mama and her, Bertha, Fanny, and Isabel. Clintock was courting Isabel. She found him handsome and gallant. I asked if he had written poems for her, and she said he had, though she seemed unclear what they were about. Croquet? I suggested. Perhaps, she replied.

  I gave her my emeralds and told her to sell them if she wished. She wondered at their color in the candlelight. I felt scorn for such possessions as I had and wanted no reminder of the price they had made me pay. I let my sisters each choose one of my dresses, a hat, and a piece of jewelry.