Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  Sir Hugo was adept at managing and investing my inheritance, such as it was. He explained to Uncle, Mama, and me what must be done to derive the best income from it. He journeyed to inspect the Gadsmere property. Mrs. Glasher had moved with indecent haste into Grosvenor Square. Sir Hugo described a landscape black with coal dust, a gloomy mining village, and an isolated house of gray stone. That was where, by the terms of his will, Grandcourt wished to confine me. Only a monster, Sir Hugo said, would consign the woman he purported to love to a solitary existence in such an outpost.

  He arranged the letting of it, to a man who worked in the coal business, at a far higher rent than Lord Brackenshaw required for Offendene. I had no wish to set eyes on the loathsome house, but it made me proud to provide Mama with a thousand pounds a year to pay for Miss Merry, Jocasta, the gardener, fuel for the fires, and even luxuries. And it gratified me to give my sisters a small allowance for clothes and see their delight.

  I looked out at the garden, the downs, and fields of grazing cattle; I ventured into the lanes. The old house was a constant, and though it could not be to me the kind of heritage you found first at Topping Abbey and then from your Jewish forebears, the sense of unknown others having been in some way at home here, and now the door opening and Mama or one of my sisters coming to greet me, was consolation of a sort.

  I tried to find pleasure in small things: ferns and foxgloves in the hedgerows, celandine in the ditches, the songbirds, the stick nests of hawks in the cedar trees. One afternoon I walked along the lanes with Mallow, the stable collie. One morning I rode Criterion with the same abandon and recklessness as when Grandcourt was away.

  My sorrow dulled. No one put pressure on me to be what I was not, but I had changed. I wanted a room of my own. My fear of sleeping alone had gone; so had my terror of the face in the wainscot. I saw only a ridiculous image, a practical joke poorly executed. I could not explain why it had ever made me afraid.

  But though those fears had dissipated, so too had my joy. When life with Grandcourt became cruel, I thought I would be content to return to the calm, uneventful life that so frustrated me before I married, before I loved you. But I could not settle into the small bed alongside Mama’s, the domestic routine. I could not again brave musical soirées at the Arrowpoints, face the Klesmers in their confidence, dine with Mr. Quallon at the Firs, take part in archery shoots or the hunt. I had enjoyed the hunt before I became a victim, before I was the hunter’s prey. Or perhaps it was more that I had enjoyed the speed of the ride, the light on the corn and haystacks, the admiration accorded me for my beauty and verve. Now I wished never to hunt again, see fear in the vixen’s eyes, spittle round her parched mouth, watch her killed by hounds that bayed and slathered, or ride home with her severed tail and head as trophies.

  Perhaps, though I felt at sea, I became a kinder person because of all that had happened to me. You were my lien to life, and I did not know where you were. I struggled with my own unworthiness: I had burdened you, failed in marriage, and been complicit in a death. When I looked in the mirror, I saw crow’s-feet around my eyes and disappointment in the downward turn of my mouth. The sparkle had gone from my appearance and my hopes. Or that was how I seemed to myself. I was twenty-two.

  * * *

  SIR HUGO BECAME like a loving father. It was as if he adopted me, the way I learned he had adopted you. Hitherto, his flippancy and facetiousness irritated me; now I saw only a man of sensibility and compassion who was kind and observant. He regularly sent a carriage to take Mama and me to Diplow, or visited us at Offendene. I think he did not want us to be dependent on Uncle again. He was circumspect in what he said, and never overtly critical, but I believe he doubted Uncle’s motivation and business acumen, and thought Uncle ought to have asked questions of Grandcourt and not spurred me into a hasty marriage to relieve his own parlous financial state.

  He was outraged at what he knew of how Grandcourt used and ill-treated me. And I think disappointed in you for, as he saw it, encouraging me, but not catching me when I fell. He told me he had angered you by saying you and I made the perfect couple and that pity was a poor reason for selecting a wife. But he could not, in any deep or lasting way, be critical of you or your mother. She and you were the light of his soul, his unquenchable fire of love. Perhaps I became his crucial link to you because I grieved your absence as much as did he.

  He invited me and Mama to Topping Abbey, suggesting I might further restore in that sequestered place. His daughters would be company, he said, and Hans Meyrick, your friend, would stay while painting a portrait of Lady Mallinger with her dogs. He suggested that to build my strength, I exercise the horses stabled at the Abbey. Again he said that now he neither rode nor hunted, that his horses could not compare with Grandcourt’s; but he was concerned for them to be well tended and content.

  Mama felt unable to leave my sisters but encouraged me to go. It was a sacrifice on her part, for she was happiest when I was near, but she so wanted me to be well. In my mind I saw the meadow surrounded by elms, the acres of forest, the river, the old bell tower, the choir of the Abbey church, the stained-glass windows, the little spaniel curled in the hackney carriage. At the Abbey I thought I might be close to you and again hear your voice explaining the history behind the stones.

  I went for what remained of the summer, and in that enchanting setting, historical, romantic, and homelike, of gothic cloisters, fresh-baked food, woodlands, meadows, and summer breezes, my strength and courage returned.

  * * *

  A ROUTINE OF the visit was for Sir Hugo and me to talk in the library at around three in the afternoon. Lady Mallinger, calm and gentle, was pleased for him to have my company. She checked the tea and candles, then left us. I believe she felt I eased his pain at your departure. Theirs was a gentle love, imbued with grace and trust.

  With views from the windows of oak trees and parkland, Sir Hugo talked of you. We missed you grievously, and I needed to hear your story. Sir Hugo described it as your “whim of Israel.” “I thought Dan had gone mad when he wrote to tell me he was going to marry a Jewess about whom I knew nothing and go East to build a homeland for the Jews,” he said.

  I confided my bewilderment when you called at the White House and told me you were a Jew and were going away to Palestine. “I know nothing of the Jews,” I said, “though clearly some of them are very clever. Herr Klesmer, of course. But I thought Mr. Deronda belonged here.”

  “Dan is the spirit of the Abbey,” Sir Hugo said, and gestured toward the walls, books, portraits, and the grounds beyond the window. “You’ve seen his unfailing sensibility to every stone and cornice. His going gouges the heart from the place and severs a limb from me.”

  “And I have lost my anchor,” I ventured to say. “Through the ordeal of my terrible marriage, Mr. Deronda was my hope.”

  I did not, I could not, tell Sir Hugo I loved you, but he knew, and put his arm around me.

  “Madness,” he said. “Madness, to leave all that with your heart and mind you love, to pursue a theoretical idea.”

  He asked, “Did Dan tell you why he was in Genoa on the day when Grandcourt drowned?”

  I felt apprehension at the revelation that was to follow. You had told me of your reason for being in the city but in my heart I had supposed, I think I had supposed, you were in Genoa because you belonged with me. I saw your being there as fate and was unsurprised after Grandcourt was compelled to pull the yacht in for repairs, to see you at the Italia. A week later it seemed meant to be that you were at the harborside after I was dragged from the sea. I was so absorbed in my own drama, I had not wondered why else you might be there, other than to be with me. “I think Mr. Deronda mentioned his mother,” I falteringly said.

  Sir Hugo handed me a paper from his desk. “Here’s a copy of the letter I gave Dan the previous week,” he said. I skimmed the words. I had learned to fear letters.

  TO MY SON, DANIEL DERONDA … I wish to see you … my health is shaken … no time lost before I
deliver to you what I have long withheld. Let nothing hinder you from being at the Albergo dell’ Italia in Genoa by the fourteenth of this month. Wait for me there.

  Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein. Your unknown mother.

  I did not know what to think. Unknown mother. The words looked strange. “She was dying,” Sir Hugo said, “and wanted to see her son to explain why, when he was a baby, she abandoned him and gave him to me. The approach of death made her reflect on her past: her Jewish upbringing, her father’s control of her, her child’s birth. She needed to break a lifetime’s silence.”

  Sir Hugo told me how apprehensive you were about the meeting, how you wandered the city, went to the opera, explored the Jewish quarter, then were summoned to her rooms. You told him she seemed an unreal figure, theatrical, dressed in black lace, not like a mother.

  “She gave Dan her father’s ring,” Sir Hugo said, “the symbol of his Jewish allegiance. Her father had wanted her, as a Jewish mother, to rear her eldest son as if he might be the Deliverer, the new Messiah. His dying wish had been for him to inherit the Charisi papers: the record of the family’s origins, migrations, and lives. Written in Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic, these papers were in a chest lodged in Mainz with an old and trusted friend.”

  I remembered how you left Genoa to go to Mainz. I felt ashamed it had not occurred to me to ask why.

  “Then Dan astonished her,” Sir Hugo said. He told her it was momentous to find he had been born a Jew, that he already instinctively identified with the Jews and wanted to travel East to help build a homeland for them. He told her about Mirah Lapidoth and her brother, Mordecai.

  That, I learned, was to be your only encounter with this unknown mother. She did not want to see you again. Sir Hugo, in letters to her about you, extolled your wonderful mind, sympathy, and wisdom, but she asked no questions and showed no interest in you or desire to meet you. You collected the trunk from Mainz and took it to Mordecai in London. He helped you translate and study the archived papers and understand your true heritage and identity.

  I listened to Sir Hugo with alarm. Your story did not belong to the portrait of you painted in my mind. I had thought you were in love with me, that you were in Genoa for me. But you had not been thinking of me. It was coincidence, not benevolent destiny, that had caused us to be in the same city at the same time. As Sir Hugo in his innocence spoke of your past and we walked the Abbey grounds, I felt an onset of the old terror that only my mother’s arms could salve. It was as if the landscape, path, stone walls, and garden rose to consume me. I stumbled. A scream lodged in my throat as if in a dream. Here were the facts of it. I was alone and unloved. Some perverse equation of my mind had made me resist a man who loved me, succumb to a man who ravished me, lose my heart to a man as unavailable as you.

  So much for me and men, I thought, and I remembered Captain Davilow. Sir Hugo’s concerned face came into my view. He put his arm around me, said I looked ill, and insisted I sit for a while. I pleaded it was nothing more than that the day was hot and I needed water, and although I wanted the conversation to continue, perhaps that was enough for now.

  * * *

  WHEN NEXT WE talked Sir Hugo explained how he came to adopt you. He spoke of your mother’s wonderful voice, her fame as Alcharisi, the opera singer, and how he pursued and courted her.

  “I was madly in love with her,” he said. “She was my once-in-a-lifetime love. We first met in Naples thirty years ago.”

  It was hard for me to imagine Sir Hugo madly in love, he seemed so elderly and uxorious, but as he relived in his mind what once he had felt, he became animated and youthful, like an actor who inhabits a different persona.

  “She was newly widowed but wouldn’t marry me. She said she couldn’t love me or any man. Her father also had just died. Dan was two.” Sir Hugo told me how your grandfather tyrannized her. “She counted as nothing to him. All he wanted was a grandson who would prove to be the Deliverer of the Jews, the new Messiah.” She felt forced into marriage by him, when what she wanted was to be free and true to herself and her talent. “She could not love or care for Dan, she saw him as an obstacle,” Sir Hugo said.

  Sir Hugo told your mother he loved her so much he would do anything for her. “One day Dan was sitting on my knees. I playfully said I would pay money to have such a boy. ‘Take him,’ she said, ‘and bring him up as an English gentleman, and never let him know anything about his parents, and never let him know he was born a Jew.’ She suggested you take the name Deronda after a branch of her family. Her father, she said, would have cursed her, but she was bitter about his rule: ‘This you must be, that you must not be. A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger; else it must be pressed small like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are by a fixed receipt.’ Now, she said, it was her turn to say who or what her son should be and what she herself should feel. She wanted to relieve Dan from the bondage of being born a Jew and save him from the contempt in which Jews were held.”

  What a bleak beginning to your life, I thought. Mama’s love was everything to me, and I could not countenance my fate without her. Nor could I understand her need to abandon you. “Why,” I asked, “if Alcharisi’s husband and father were dead, did she need to consider her son’s Jewishness?”

  Sir Hugo was unclear. He said she was contemptuous of the constraints and strictures of Judaism. “I was to feel everything I did not feel and believe everything I did not believe,” she told him: “awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuzah over the door; to find it beautiful that men should bind the tefillin on them and women not, to dread lest a bit of butter should touch a bit of meat, to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue and the howling and gabbling and the fasts and feasts and my father’s endless discoursing about Our People. I was to ever care about what Palestine had been. And I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world and all that I could represent in it.”

  Sir Hugo needed to talk about you, and I needed to hear your story. We spoke of our loss and bewildered sense of shame. He guided me toward understanding your life and my own. I think this lessened the pain and insult I felt from your actions. I stopped feeling so unworthy.

  Sir Hugo told me how he kept assiduously to your mother’s wishes, loved you as if you were his son, and brought you up as a Mallinger, the perfect English gentleman. “But,” he said, “I responded to Dan’s questions with such awkward evasions he became embarrassed to ask what he needed to know.” He said his evasions were lies of omission that turned you into an outsider, uncertain as to who you were, and that he now felt abject about the confusion and loneliness his silence must have caused you as a boy.

  We each admitted to selfishness in keeping our promise of secrecy. Sir Hugo wanted you for himself, as if you were his son, and suspected the truth might take you from him. And had I, before marriage, broken my vow to Mrs. Glasher and told Mama or Uncle the truth about Grandcourt, I would have had to relinquish the tainted financial privilege I obtained from marriage to him.

  As Sir Hugo and I walked and talked on the Abbey grounds, the river winding through the valley below, the view of the hills beyond, I revisited the drama that took place in the Italia that week: your past opening like Pandora’s Box spilling out confusion, and I, by bizarre coincidence, in the same hotel.

  I admired him for being “madly in love” with a woman as challenging as your mother: a young widow like me, a woman scornful of marriage and family. Her rebellion inspired me. If she dared defy the strictures imposed by men, then perhaps so might I.

  I thought of her portrait in the locket she gave you, her proud face and aloof demeanor, and of the sense I had of seeing my own reflection. I, like her, want the wider world, I thought. I too shunned the customs and rituals of control, this to be done on that day, that on the other, because a certain man or men did it so five thousand years past.

  I did not believe in God the Father, a Son born from a Virgin and a Holy Ghost, the importance of Moses, the divine authori
ty of the Bible, the landscapes of heaven. Before marrying Grandcourt, I believed, tentatively, in myself. As Sir Hugo talked of your princess mother, I resolved to find my own courage again.

  I had not met a woman like her. In Pennicote, Catherine Arrowpoint was gifted and clever, but she said amen to Klesmer. In London, Mirah Lapidoth would have drowned were it not for you. You were her deliverer. She said amen to you. Your mother broke free, greatly dared, and was the more loved and admired by men because of it. I wished I had met her. I felt I understood her, though of course I did not have her talent.

  In Genoa you did not mention your mother or the coincidence that within days I was a widow in the same hotel. I wondered what might have transpired had she and I met. She might have wanted me to be your bride, commiserated with the oppression I had endured, admired my courage, liked my Englishness and impetuosity, and seen in me a kindred spirit, a woman who aspired to live an independent life.

  My demeanor and beauty, my yearning for independence, and the spark in my eyes, Sir Hugo told me, reminded him of her when she was young. Like her, I was denied my own life because of domination by a controlling man. I endured Grandcourt and his grip on all I was: this you must do, that you must not. The jewelry and clothes I must wear because I was his wife, where I might visit, travel, to whom I might talk, what I must say or sing. But Grandcourt did not justify his control in deference to a higher power, a divine intention, or a force for good. He alone was the determining force.

  Your grandfather’s patriarchal ambitions were loftier. He looked to you to deliver exiled Jews to their homeland. He had not considered his daughter, her talent, wishes, or thinking. He overruled her, but she in time defied him and fulfilled her own ambition.

  To Sir Hugo, I confided how Grandcourt controlled me and crushed my spirit. He said that when he heard Grandcourt was dead and you were in Genoa, he took it as a foregone conclusion you would marry me. Lady Mallinger too supposed it to be more than coincidence for you to be there when the drama of Grandcourt’s death occurred. He took my arm and lightly said life seldom takes the path of true love and easy consolation, and we are obliged to learn the art of making the best of what happens to us.