Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  We spoke of the irony of your wanting the life your mother tried to safeguard you against. She, Sir Hugo, and I would have liked you and me to be together in a scene of English happiness: the tall, dark, handsome Eton- and Cambridge-educated squire of a stately home, with his beautiful rose of a wife.

  But I was not a true English gentlewoman: I had a wastrel father, subdued mother, lived in a rented house, with no money in the bank, no links to landed estates. I could no more be what by circumstance I was not than match your pioneering zeal, go to Palestine, and view it as my Promised Land.

  I asked Sir Hugo if he thought you hated your mother for abandoning you, and if reversion to all she despised was your revenge. He did not countenance the idea. You were not a man ever to be driven by revenge or anger, he said, but nor would you be pushed in a direction in which you did not choose to go.

  Sir Hugo had an uncensorious heart. Our friendship was a salve. He said without the truth we could not be free and urged me to accept that Grandcourt’s death was all to the good. “See that drowning as a godsend,” he said. “It could not have come too soon. The ocean befriended you that day. Now your life can begin.”

  * * *

  IN THAT STRANGE summer between my old life and the new, I tried to go beyond my broken dream to the source and complexity of your feelings and actions and of Sir Hugo’s and my own. You had said my life would be worth more if I had an interest beyond the drama of my small personal desires. I began to see the wider drama, its creation and implications, its sadness and muddle, and my part in it. Sir Hugo encouraged me to look forward and seek new opportunities, though he did not say how.

  You did not write, just as your mother had not written to you. I knew you would not, not because you had forgotten me, but I supposed your wife would be jealous and you would not pain her. She had heard from Hans Meyrick how you and I made the perfect couple. She told him I was as beautiful as Princess Eboli in Verdi’s Don Carlo and that she feared my hold on you.

  Sir Hugo read me letters you wrote to him. It pained me to hear how you and Mrs. Deronda sailed from Brindisi to Alexandria, then by steamer down the River Nile. I learned about your life, saw the hopelessness of my love for you, yet hoped I remained with you as your mother’s free spirit, though your wife was with you as your grandfather’s dream.

  * * *

  HANS STAYED AT the Abbey. With his long blond hair he looked the part of the artist. He told me he was named after Holbein and that he took every commission he could so as to provide for his widowed mother and three sisters. Sir Hugo paid him a generous sum to paint portraits of his wife and daughters to hang in the gallery among the Mallinger forebears.

  Hans painted my portrait too, not as the bejeweled van Dyck duchess, but dressed in black, my only adornment the talisman turquoise necklace, and seated in the gallery amid the brocades, plush upholstery, and formal elders frozen in their frames. Sir Hugo bought the painting and said he wished it might hang with those of his own ancestors.

  As with Sir Hugo, I had, at first, found Hans irritating—voluble and keen to joke; but he too had a generous heart. He was enamored of me, and that tinged our friendship and made him keen to please, but he did not exasperate me with lovemaking.

  It was a glorious summer, and in caring company and the calm of the Abbey I could not only be sad. In the mornings I exercised Ruben (a bay), Constance (a mare roan), and Pleasant (a gray). They were not as fast or spirited as Criterion, but I rode far and regained strength. For hours, as I traversed the fields and lanes, with all the joys and wonders of the English countryside, I felt I had discarded Grandcourt and my past. When Sir Hugo was in town, or occupied, in the afternoons I picnicked with Hans, alone or with the Mallinger girls. We swam and played croquet. Sometimes I allowed him to win. He sketched me picking cherries in the orchard and reading beneath a willow tree.

  Hans was bereaved to be separated from you, his closest friend, Mirah, whom he hoped might love him, and Mordecai. He loved fun and laughter, took nothing too seriously except his painting, and was surprised to find I was neither haughty nor self-assured.

  Used to the company of sisters, he was unafraid to tease, flatter, and befriend. I was taller and stronger than he, and we joked that I was more of a man: horsehair made him sneeze and his eyes stream, so he could not ride, boating on the lake exhausted him, and he splashed and paddled rather than swam.

  He confided how, as students at Cambridge, he and you shared rooms and you helped him because he had no money. When he was afflicted with an infection in his eyes, you were so attentive you neglected your own study of mathematics and had to quit the university. He succeeded at your cost and wrote to Sir Hugo of your sacrifice. Sir Hugo called it your “passion for the pelted.” Part of your allure was in the way you sought to protect the vulnerable. I think you would have liked to save me, but my needs alarmed you. Hans’s sisters thought you as magical as Prince Camaralzaman from the Arabian Nights.

  Hans showed me sketches of you rescuing Mirah Lapidoth from drowning in the Thames. He said he planned a large canvas of the scene, a work of abstraction and ambiguity in which it would be unclear where the sky ended and the water began, and whether you were pulling her from the water or she drawing you into it. He never painted this, but as I looked at his sketches, he revealed the story behind them: How on a July evening you went boating on the Thames near Putney and saw a girl of about eighteen take her cloak, soak it in the river, wrap it around her as a drowning shroud, and slip into the water. How you swam across and saved her.

  That was how the Jewess Mirah Lapidoth came into your life. She had come to England to look for her mother and brother but despaired of finding them. She had run from her wicked father, who had tried to sell her into prostitution, and she had nowhere to go, no money, no friends. You took her to Hans’s mother and sisters, who welcomed her into their small house. Hans showed me a dozen sketches he had made of her. He thought her beautiful, was a little in love with her himself, and jealous of her preference for you.

  The Meyricks exuded love and charity and did not show caution at the allocation to them of a depressed and penniless stranger. Her despair and attempted suicide were soon forgotten, and you, Prince Camaralzaman from the Arabian Nights, were her irresistible savior.

  Six weeks after saving Mirah Lapidoth, you saw me in the Kursaal in Homburg. Your gaze as if from an opposite shore, your return of my father’s necklace, they were my hopes of rescue. No one made drawings of those events. Your own family were lost to you. Instead, while I yearned for you, you scoured the streets of London’s East End, searching for Mirah’s mother and brother. Her mother had died but you found Mordecai.

  Sitting with Hans on the grounds of Topping Abbey, I listened to this story with astonishment. I wondered at you reaching out to such a disturbed family. I thought the civility and privilege of your upbringing would have made you exclude connection with them.

  But what again most affected me was that all the time I was yearning for you, you were searching for this Jewish identity, planning marriage to Mirah Lapidoth and emigration to a land I did not know existed. While you were winging six thousand miles from me in your thoughts, I saw you in everything, referred to you constantly, repeated your words of encouragement and supposed them to be of love. And at night when I heard with dread Grandcourt at my door, then endured his repeated assailing of me, my deliverance was to imagine I was with you, and that one day my dream would become reality because that was so much what I wanted. I only vaguely wondered where you actually were, and what business you were about, but never could I imagine you to be absorbed in the historical destiny of the Jews. I could as easily imagine you rising from the air on a brazen horse and vanishing into the dark as a twinkling star.

  I appealed to Hans to explain to me what it meant to be Jewish. I hoped to understand my own exclusion. He advised me to read The History of the Jews from the Earliest Period down to Modern Times by Henry Milman; I took it from the Abbey library but found it dull
. Hans then tried to help me fathom the Jewish calendar: how their new year, called Rosh Hashanah, came in September and that at present they were in the year 5636. It was too confusing, and we agreed Christian strictures and rituals were impenetrable enough. He suggested we visit a synagogue when we went to London for there were none near Topping Abbey. He said you loved the Jews for the duration of their sorrows and the patience with which they bore those sorrows, and that your rescue of Mirah Lapidoth from drowning seemed portentous to you. But I was drowning too, and was there not a multitude of women like me, drowning unseen?

  Hans was as surprised as I about your Messianic plans. Though you shared rooms with him, you scarcely confided. He thought your being an only child of uncertain parentage made you withdrawn and disinclined to speak of affairs of the heart. He had no idea of your romantic interest in Mirah Lapidoth. He thought your passion was for me but that you were too moral a man to pursue a married woman. He was embarrassed to have boasted to you of his own interest in Mirah. When he read in the Times of Grandcourt’s drowning, he supposed you then hurried to Genoa to declare your love for me. He, like it seemed the rest of the world, had observed I was in love with you.

  * * *

  AS HANS SPOKE of the Genoa drowning, I again saw Grandcourt’s face rising from the water and heard him call: “The rope!” I asked Hans if he had a mind to paint me jumping into the sea as I failed to save from drowning the husband I hated. I did not tell him of my guilt, though I yearned to do so and to speak out about how I was not married but held captive by a monster.

  With difficulty I told him something of Grandcourt’s brutality toward me: how he watched me like a praying mantis, visited his mistress as and when he wished, kept me from Mama, and controlled what I wore, where I went, and whom I spoke to. I wanted to admit to him the torment of the nights, but I could not shape the words. I recounted how Grandcourt put the diamonds around my neck and in my hair and ears and how he tore my clothes, but that was as much as I could say.

  Hans put his gentle, spindly arms around me and said Grandcourt had not touched the heart of me, that I must rid my soul of him and not dwell on his contempt. He said I resisted him with courage, and thank God neither I nor anyone else need ever see him again. He impersonated him by stroking an imaginary mustache, sucking at a pretend cigar, and tormenting a nonexistent dog. Drowning, he said, was too good for him, and he wished he were still alive so he could kill him.

  Hans’s mischief was a help. Look to the future, he said. The past is a closed book.

  * * *

  MANY OF HIS sketches were illustrations to the story of your life: the Abbey, the cloisters and library, Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger, the dogs and the river, the Meyrick family, Mirah Lapidoth, Mordecai. Looking at them, I gained some hold on the fleeting days, though it pained me to see how, in drawings of you, he captured your look of thoughtful appraisal.

  Hans was also a friend of Rex, whom, like you, he met at Cambridge. When he showed me sketches of him, remarked on his fine face, the strength of his upper lip, and said what “an uncommonly good fellow” he was, I felt another loss and such a desire for Rex’s honest company. Rex confided to Hans that he had been so in love with me he could no longer bear to go to Offendene if I was there, or see me since I became a widow. He was resolved to remain a bachelor and devote himself to the law. Hans thought that unlikely. He told me of your annoyance when he joked to you that if Grandcourt had not got himself drowned for your sake, it might have been for Rex’s. “Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs. Grandcourt should marry again?” you had said sharply, and Hans sensed ambivalence in you and jealousy, or some cousin to it.

  I and Mirah in love with you, Hans in love with Mirah, Rex in love with me, you in love with Mirah and me. Hans said God must be choking himself with glee. He and I talked and talked and after a while laughed at such muddles of the heart. He said knowing me assuaged his bereavement at losing you, Mirah, and Mordecai; that knowing me made him happy and glad he was born.

  * * *

  I STAYED AT the Abbey for seven weeks. The beauty of the surroundings, the wisdom of Sir Hugo, the kindliness of Lady Mallinger, the friendship of Hans—all worked magic on me to bring me to a wiser version of my former self.

  I admitted to Hans I was unclear what to do next. I cried when I told him I felt too punished by life and too at odds with myself to continue. He said I must see a wider world than Pennicote. I should go with him to London, shake off the dubious status of the widow denied her duplicitous husband’s inheritance, and reemerge as Gwendolen Harleth. A new life would beckon. But for now, Hans said, it was enough for me to be alive and, if not happy, free from entrapment and anguish. He told me I was lovely, humorous, energetic, witty, and intelligent, that I enlivened and would always enliven whatever company I was in, that his mother and sisters would welcome me, and that he was sure when a little time had passed Rex would gladly be friends with me again. Hans made me feel less alone, less sullied. He said I knew what love was because I had felt it for Mama and you, and that I did not have to go and find the Promised Land, save the Jews, sing like Alcharisi, compose like Klesmer, marry for wealth, or populate the planet. “You have suffered,” he said, “and now you owe it to yourself to live happily, free from pain and guilt.” Then he took my hand and we went swimming in the lake, I much faster and stronger than he.

  * * *

  ONE AFTERNOON IN the library I asked Sir Hugo how long it took him to recover from his grand passion for your mother, the beautiful, gifted Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein. He laughed and said a lifetime and that we should not expect or desire to recover from what affects us most. What has happened lives on in us, he said, and the art was not to stay fixed in the past but to move on in a state of acceptance: not to be bitter or pine for what we have lost or clearly cannot have, not to want blue eyes if we have brown, or seek to be young if we are old, not to let regret and disappointment define us.

  “I had Dan to remind me of her,” Sir Hugo said. “He was my beautiful, special son, gifted and wise, solemn and apart, abiding proof of my love for his mother.”

  He told me how, as you grew up, you modeled your manners and appearance on his and dressed, ate, and worshipped like a Mallinger, as English as the crest embroidered on your handkerchiefs (but torn from the handkerchief in which you wrapped my father’s chain).

  “But then when Dan went away to Eton, I was lonely,” Sir Hugo told me. “I was forty-five and troubled at having no legitimate son and heir. I wrote to tell him I had married Miss Raymond, of whom he had never heard. I am ashamed of how he must have felt as he read my letter.”

  I recalled how devastated and cast out I felt when Mama told me of her marriage to Captain Davilow.

  Sir Hugo said I should not imagine he was disappointed in Lady Mallinger, who was the sweetest soul, and they delighted in their daughters. He called the absence of unhappiness a freedom and a privilege. He enjoyed family life, his political work, the Abbey, friends, the social exchange, his London clubs, the ordinary things of every day. “But, dear Gwendolen,” he said to me, “our lives seldom go according to plan. We must accept what we cannot change.

  “I thought Dan would choose a profession: barrister, politician, writer. When he said he wanted to travel abroad to understand other points of view and rid himself of merely English attitudes, I was supportive, though I asked him to keep an English cut of clothes, smoke English tobacco, and not carry difference too far. ‘Know where to find yourself,’ I told him.”

  Sir Hugo felt he had failed you and your mother. “He will return,” he said to me, with hesitancy in his voice and loss in his eyes, and I cried for him as well as myself. All you turned your back on!—the pastures of England, the seasons of the year, your beautiful Abbey, and the secrets coded in its flagstones. And I knew nothing of the world in which you were transplanted, though I had seen engravings in books of such a place of desert and scalding sunlight.

  * * *

  AS EXECUTOR TO Grandcourt
’s will, Sir Hugo was compelled to meet with Lydia Glasher and Lush. I told him of the poisonous letter to me on my wedding night and how it lay like a nemesis on Grandcourt’s fetid parure of diamonds, the diamonds I loathed and wanted sent back to her. Sir Hugo suggested I pawn them, then gamble away every penny they fetched, for that might at least give me a diversion. More seriously, he said to return them would be open to misinterpretation, as if I was intent on moral victory. My inheritance was not large. He would arrange for their sale in Hatton Garden.

  He viewed Mrs. Glasher as trapped, and warped by Grandcourt’s years of ill treatment of her. He described her as avaricious, said she spewed jealousy and resentment of me despite the triumph of her inheritance, and as for Lush, it was a pity he had not gone overboard with his master, for they belonged together on the ocean floor.

  Lydia Glasher’s life, Sir Hugo said, was shaped by impulse, punishment, and desperation. Ten years back, aged twenty-eight, after five years of violent marriage to Colonel Glasher, she left him and their three-year-old son for Grandcourt, who was five years her junior. The colonel challenged Grandcourt to a duel. “The bullets merely grazed the air,” Sir Hugo said. At first Grandcourt wanted to marry, but Colonel Glasher would neither divorce nor allow her to see their son. The boy died within two years, uncomforted by his mother.

  She and Grandcourt moved from place to place abroad and had their four children. When her beauty faded, he tired of her. Her social isolation grew, she felt tainted by the irregular relationship, and it became her dominant wish for him to marry her. Her husband’s death removed all impediment in law, but Grandcourt no longer wanted the family he had created. Three years back he broke free and banished them all to Gadsmere, out of view of Society.