Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  The setting was warm and welcoming, but I felt apprehensive among the mix of such confident, self-important people. I made Hans promise not to leave my side. He said it would be easy to stay with me for I was the most amusing and beautiful woman in the room. There were perhaps a dozen men but only five or six women. Barbara Bodichon was there—I had heard of her—and two other “Ladies of Langham Place,” feminists who wrote pamphlets about women’s rights. Through their campaigning the Married Women’s Property Bill was passed in 1850-something, which meant husbands could no longer be entitled, in marriage or divorce, to have all the assets that belonged to their wives. I remembered Grandcourt’s derisory comment on this jurisdiction in support of women: “They’ll be wanting to enter Parliament next,” he had drawled.

  I knew almost none of the guests, though I recognized the Hebrew scholar Immanuel Deutsch, with whom you had studied. He was at Lady Brackenshaw’s musical evening when Mirah Lapidoth sang. He was Jewish too. He had dark hair and eyes, was small and sad-looking and wasted with cancer. Hans told me he had been to the Holy Land some years previously to visit the Wailing Place in Jerusalem. I supposed that to be your destination.

  I was glad Herr Klesmer was not among the guests, though even without him I feared the talk was disconcertingly erudite. I was aware of Mrs. Lewes’s repeated scrutiny of me in a way I could not interpret but that seemed unfavorable. I felt weighed in the balance and found wanting. She keenly observed my appearance, though her clothes were a veritable mishmash of ill-assorted things. I thought her so plain and evidently fiercely clever that not many men would want her as their wife. It was as well Mr. Lewes was devoted. I suspect she viewed herself as ugly, which she was, hers was such a heavy face—her big nose, severe jaw, and rather tired eyes. Perhaps she had been led to believe she was ugly as often as I had been praised as beautiful.

  Mr. Lewes told Hans that Polly was much troubled by her teeth, and indeed she kept putting her hand to her cheek in a way that indicated pain or at least discomfort. Two of her canine teeth had recently been pulled after she was first made unconscious with nitrous oxide.

  Mr. Lewes was if anything uglier than she, with wispy brown hair, a straggly mustache, pockmarks on his skin, wet lips, and a head too large for his tiny body. He was illegitimate and so was Barbara Bodichon, Hans said. I thought of Mrs. Glasher’s brood and began to wonder if half the world had been born out of wedlock. Even when living with his young, beautiful wife and four sons, Mr. Lewes had had affairs with other women. I found it difficult to believe women could find him attractive in that way.

  But all that was in the past, Hans told me, for now George Lewes and Polly were everything to each other and never apart. He adored her, encouraged her genius, helped and guided research for her books, and loved her so much he was not tempted to be unfaithful.

  Seeing them together, I had the sense that the man’s role and the woman’s merged. He fussed in case she was in a draft or if the tea might be too hot for her teeth, whereas she paid all the bills. Both he and she were clever, witty, and self-assured, with languages to learn, countries to visit, and books to write—his were about philosophy and psychology, I think. I thought her brave, openly to live with a man who was married to someone else, but I wondered what her view would be of my marriage to Grandcourt and if she would consider Lydia Glasher’s venomous behavior toward me justified.

  As if reading my thoughts she beckoned me over. In anticipation of meeting her, I had rehearsed a small speech. I told her I had read several parts of her recent novel Middlemarch and found Mr. Casaubon perfectly awful, though not as horrible as my husband had been, and that I feared Will Ladislaw was not much better. She seemed immoderately hurt by my remarks and looked across to Mr. Lewes, who again held my arm, took me to one side, and whispered that criticism plunged Polly into despair and we must try to shield her from it.

  I had not intended criticism. I felt like telling him that apart from you I considered no man worthy to be anyone’s husband, but it seemed best to say nothing if everything was open to misinterpretation. Mr. Lewes then said something to her, I think in Hebrew, which is how they communicated when they wanted no one else to understand.

  She then told me she had recently received a letter from you. Again I felt a stab of jealousy that you wrote to her as well as to Sir Hugo and Hans but not, as you had said you might, to me.

  “What is his news?” I politely asked, though my voice sounded strained.

  She said you wrote of palm groves, pelicans, barren hills, mud dwellings, and fields of sugarcane. You had climbed Mount Sinai to see where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. You were studying Sanskrit, Aramaic, and other strange languages in order better to understand the Talmud.

  “What is the Talmud?” I asked, supposing it to be a building like Topping Abbey.

  She gave me an amused, condescending glance and said it was the encyclopedia of Jewish law: “civil, penal, ecclesiastical, international, human, and divine.”

  “I see,” I said, though in truth I did not quite see, and the familiar bewildered feeling of unreachable worlds from which I was excluded afflicted me.

  Your knowledge of Jewish matters interested her greatly. I asked her if she was Jewish. I thought she perhaps was, given she had such a large nose and was rather plain.

  “Unfortunately not,” she said. “They are such a cultured, creative people.”

  I did not know what to say. I knew little of the Jews, knew only of my hopeless love for you. I longed for your news, not of holy shrines, synagogues, temples in Egypt and Palestine, and the fate of the Jewish nation, but of you and your feelings for me.

  There was a silence in which she scrutinized me with her shrewd blue eyes. I found this unnerving, as if she was weighing me up for I did not know what. Then she leaned forward and in a whispered hiss asked, “Why did you marry Grandcourt? You’re not foolish. Surely after the most perfunctory acquaintance you could have seen his character? And you knew of the other woman and his children. You did not have her permission.”

  I was taken aback by such sudden intense intimacy, the abrupt change of direction of the conversation, the implication that she knew much about me and indeed about us all.

  “It was a mistake,” I said nervously. “We make mistakes. It happened so quickly. I married in haste. We hardly talked. He did not reveal his character. I saw what I wanted to see. When I realized my mistake, it was too late. Marriage to him was a steel trap. It snapped shut. I could not escape. I paid so fiercely.”

  She looked at me as if she knew all that. She nodded. “Grandcourt was polite, charming, and attentive,” she said. “That was his tactic of capture before punishment, an aspect of his control.”

  I wondered if she pitied or even despised me. I thought of her unorthodox domestic arrangement, her proxy mothering of Lewes’s children. I dared to say, “You did not swear promises you could not keep. You could escape at any time.”

  “Mr. Lewes and I love and cherish each other,” she said. “We are in the best sense married. We see the world through the same eyes. Without him I would achieve nothing. I provide”—she swept her hand to the furnishings, paintings, ornaments—“and for the children.”

  “Yet you feel the approbation of Society,” I countered, for her air of moral superiority discombobulated me almost as much as her apparent clairvoyance. She did not reply. I felt accused. I said I did not see why all women had to marry. For myself, I did not like men, and marriage had brought me to my knees. I entered into it all too hastily for unworthy reasons, and I did not intend to attempt it again. I did not reveal that had you married me, I might have thought myself in paradise.

  “If you reject men, you must perhaps make do with women,” she said. “You must meet Barbara. Though I doubt she will turn you into a feminist or suffragist. And you should meet my adoring ‘daughters,’ as I call them, Elma and Emilia.” She showed me a table and mirror carved by Elma, a soldier’s widow who lived in France, called Mrs. Lewes her “
spiritual mother,” and bombarded her with gifts: woodcarvings, shawls, paperweights, slippers, photographs of her dogs, Watch and Dora, and letters saying she longed to be her servant and to kiss the hem of her dress. I wondered if Mrs. Lewes encouraged such attention. I should not like it. Emilia, I gathered, had a very old husband, the rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, with whom she was unhappy.

  Marriage, Mrs. Lewes told me, was a moral state. She said the shackling of women to men in bad relationships appalled her. Herr Klesmer and Catherine Arrowpoint were meant to marry; they were in love, they respected each other’s talent. Catherine was right to defy her parents; she and Klesmer would not have their pure hopes sullied by the venality of greed or the prejudice of race. “Your uncle,” Mrs. Lewes said, “his interests were venal too. He should not have put pressure on you to marry a man of low character.”

  How did she know of my uncle Gascoigne and his insistence that I should marry Grandcourt? I was unnerved. I had made no mention of him, I had not spoken of him to you, Rex would not have criticized his own father, and Hans cared for the good name of us all.

  I feared she had power over me, a psychic ability to read my mind and innermost thoughts, and would know were I to lie or dissemble. I wondered if she disliked me because I was beautiful and perhaps felt I used my beauty to undermine her. I did not know why she was questioning me or what she really wanted to know. Yet I was intrigued by her and hoped she would advise me what to do next with my life.

  She leaned forward again. “In the harbor at Genoa,” she whispered, “you withheld the rope.”

  I did not answer.

  “You saw him sink?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what?”

  I thought of the Catholic confessional, the shield between confessor and priest, which offered an illusion of privacy, whereas Mrs. Lewes’s blue eyes absorbed my deep blush, shortness of breath, struggle to confront the darkest deed of which I ever could be guilty. Were I to lie, she would know, of that I was sure.

  “He came up farther off,” I said, though my voice, like Grandcourt’s as he drowned, seemed not to belong to me. “The boat had moved, I stooped for the rope, I had the rope in my hands, and I was sure he could swim.”

  “But you hated him,” Mrs. Lewes said. “You wanted him to die.”

  “I dreaded him. He went down again. My heart said die. He sank. And I felt it was done, and that I was wicked and lost.”

  She gave a strange satisfied smile as if I had confirmed what she wanted to hear but already knew. But did she, I wondered, know my desperate hate, my murderous rage, was born from his ravishment of me? Was she going to ask about that, or was that taboo, so embarrassing and terrible it must not be mentioned? I waited, aware of my racing heart, hoping she would ask and help me talk of it, so that I might rid myself of the blight of shame and self-disgust. She said nothing, and silence hung there, like an undisturbed curtain.

  “Did you not think it strange,” she asked, “for Deronda to be at the harborside when you were taken ashore by the fishermen? Were I writing a fictional account, I’d hesitate to include such a coincidence, such synchrony. It would strain my reader’s sense of credibility.”

  I said I had not wondered. I was disturbed when hauled ashore, and you were so continually on my mind I was unsurprised to see you.

  “It was not all mere coincidence,” Mrs. Lewes said. “Deronda deferred his departure from Genoa because he was sure you needed his help. When he first met you on the stairs at the Italia and saw your troubled state of mind, he resolved to talk with you, however counter that ran to Grandcourt’s wishes. On the afternoon of the drowning he asked at the desk if you were both still in the hotel. He learned you were out boating. He went to the synagogue, then took his evening walk along the quay, hoping to catch you as you came in from the sea.”

  Our lives, it seemed, were in Mrs. Lewes’s hands. She knew not just our stories—the facts and details of what happened when and where—but our motivation. I felt dazed, drawn back to that terrible day, afraid I might be forced to live it again. But I was thrilled to hear you had been waiting for me and wanted to talk to me. In the precious chamber of my heart I stepped on a summer’s evening from a wrecked boat to a safe harbor and my ordained union with you.

  I must have swooned into a trance for next I heard her say sharply, “That’s enough,” and I started, as if woken in an unfamiliar and for a moment unrecognized place.

  She became more formal. “Do you know anything of Jewish history?” she asked.

  I spoke of my effort to read Milman’s History of the Jews and inability to get far with it. I said I preferred novels, romances, and mysteries, though I had a fondness for Shakespeare, particularly A Winter’s Tale.

  “‘To unpathed waters. Undreamed shores,’” Mrs. Lewes said. I gave a slight smile and a nod, to pretend I recognized the quotation. “If you knew something of Jewish history, you would better understand Deronda and his departure.” She guided me to her study and showed me shelves of books about Jews. Yours was a religion of sublime far-off memories, she told me. “You must talk with Mr. Deutsch. He has visited Palestine many times and written eloquently of the Jews and their thousand years of collective suffering.”

  Your connection to Genoa, Mrs. Lewes told me, was time-honored and symbolic. While waiting for your mother, you searched the city’s archival records. She too had studied them. Your forebears, Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal, fled to Genoa from persecution at the time of the Inquisition. They arrived as refugees, were herded into a ghetto by the harbor, and could not go through the city gate unless granted a license and displaying a yellow badge. When they wore these badges, they were insulted by the indigenous Genoese. If they failed to wear them, they were fined. Mrs. Lewes told me of a Jewish man who put candle wax in his ears so as not to hear the insults hurled.

  In Spain and Portugal the exiled Jews had been doctors, musicians, clockmakers, shop owners. By Genoa harbor they hawked fabrics, coffee, woolen stockings, shirts for soldiers. They were not allowed to wear swords, or walk about at night.

  Sometimes the doge took action against those who threw stones and repeatedly insulted the Jews, but in 1686, in the name of the pope, he decreed that all Jews living in Genoa should be deported.

  Such were the iniquities and a thousand others like them against which, Mrs. Lewes told me, your soul rebelled. They were a people who were pelted, to use Sir Hugo’s word. Among those who survived, in whatever country would permit them entry, many kept alive their racial and cultural identity through language, diet, customs, and worship, in obedience to rules laid down by Moses on Mount Sinai. You wanted to help deliver your people to the homeland from which they had first been exiled.

  * * *

  I LISTENED TO Mrs. Lewes with some interest, but I felt discomfited. None of this was what I wanted to hear. Talk of the Jews bewildered me and distanced me from you. That was then, I wanted to say, but it is now that matters. I felt the same frustration and uninterest as with Uncle Gascoigne’s sermons at Pennicote. I preferred galloping across the fields. I did not care about Moses or Jesus. I could not match your Jewish suffering, your collective memory. Mine, it seemed, were the less than sublime not-far-off memories of Pennicote and twenty other unremarkable places to which I no more belonged than did the swallows and peonies of an English summer.

  Mrs. Lewes then confounded me by saying that although religions interested her, she believed death to be the end of life and the utter annihilation of the individual. That seemed a view too far.

  As we went back to her drawing room to talk to her clever guests, Mrs. Lewes told me she would like me to visit again in a month’s time at another of her salon gatherings or, if I preferred, tea and a quiet tête-à-tête. In the meantime she and Mr. Lewes were packing up, taking their dogs, and going to the countryside to write; they liked and needed long spells without distraction, away from Society. But I, she said, intrigued her, and there were a dozen questions she wanted to as
k me, questions that she hoped I would answer. I felt a mixture of flattery and perturbation. What was it about me she could want to know? Why should I be of interest to a famous writer, a bluestocking immersed in different cultures and history who translated books from French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and whose novels Queen Victoria admired and read aloud to the prince consort?

  I was relieved when Hans signaled to me that he wanted to leave. In the carriage back to Park Lane I told him I had found the afternoon intriguing but I was unsettled by it. What was I to Mrs. Lewes or she to me that she should be so interested in me? Had he seen how she singled me out? Who had given her all this information about me? Moreover, such a gathering of clever purposeful people emphasized the now familiar feeling of my own inadequacy and limitations. I neither wrote books, fought for women’s rights, nor studied ancient scriptures. My father had been an inconsequential man of whom I had scant memory; my mother was sweet, long-suffering, and uneducated. We had scarce money; I had made a disastrous marriage, and love eluded me.

  Hans said it was invidious to view oneself in such a way, that I should not underestimate the vulnerabilities and self-doubts of others, and that my compelling presence was evident by the way all eyes turned on me when I entered a room. “You don’t know your own power, Gwen,” he said. “Even Mrs. Lewes is intrigued by you above all her other guests.”

  I was flattered by his appreciation of me, though I doubted whether being an object of regard was sufficient justification for my existence. I was the statue that had yet to come to life. Uncertainty trapped me. My heart was in turmoil, my frustrations were acute, and all around me others succeeded while I stood still.

  * * *

  ONE DAY HANS said to me that as part of my education, I must meet Juliette, his latest friend. This was the time of Hans’s “circus phase,” when he was commissioned by the Graphic to illustrate circus life. I had not hitherto been to a spectacular circus. In our first autumn at Offendene a touring company pitched their tent in Pennicote; the display comprised two clowns, two dwarves, one juggler, two performing horses, a tightrope walker, a fire eater, and an acrobat. We marveled, but only slightly. The city circus was of a different order.