Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  I went with Hans to performances in various towns and cities. He filled sketchbooks with drawings of elephants and lion tamers, equestrian acts with seventy horses in the ring at once, dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, and trapeze and high-wire acts. In Paris we saw Miss La La hoisted upward by a rope in her mouth until she reached the high wire. We gasped at the danger.

  I was witness to no serious mishaps beyond a dropped baton and a slipped step, though Hans told me of Madame Blondin, who, in front of thousands at Aston Park, Birmingham, shackled and blindfolded and with a bag over her head, held the balancing pole, took three steps on the high wire—which broke—then fell to her death. She was eight months pregnant. The queen then complained to the mayor of Birmingham.

  When the circus came to Olympia Hans and I, on several nights, sat in the third row. I enjoyed the antics of the clowns, the displays of acrobats and gymnasts, but it disturbed me to see the exploitation of damaged people: dwarves, giants, bearded ladies, and fat men, and of animals, lions, elephants, horses, forced to behave in ways alien to their nature. It was not their choice to parade in such a way, and my time with Grandcourt made me recoil from such shows of captivity and control.

  But then came Juliette. The arena plunged into darkness, gaslights flared, and she appeared, adorned with paillettes, feathers, and lace, at the top of a thirty-foot column. Her bodice and headdress glittered with silver lamé, her huge gauze skirt fanned over the length of the column and spread wide on the floor, she began to twirl on the top of the column, and as she did so the skirt gathered momentum, lifted off the floor, and spun like a wheel. It was an aerial ballet. The audience roared.

  Next she appeared as a circus girl, swathed in ostrich feathers and jewels. Then she shed her headdress and clothes and became in turn an elf, a fairy, an angelic creature, a statue that came to life and then performed. Wearing little but jewels, and flaunting her perfect figure, she walked backward and forward on a high tightwire, then a slack wire; she pirouetted on rings and the trapeze to music by Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov; she pretended to fall and caught herself by a last-second hook of her foot. We were aghast, amazed; we gasped, groaned, and shouted. In another act she hung by her teeth and whirled.

  Then at the end, to the disbelief of us all, she threw down the balancing pole, leaped down to the stage, gave a bow, and tore off her wig to reveal—how loud we gasped—a boy’s head. Juliette became Julian, who to wild applause made a salute with a clenched hand. He returned many times, put on his wig, then doffed it to show his cropped hair and remind us we had marveled at a man playing at being a woman.

  My own astonishment was intense. I could not put him from my mind. Hans took me backstage and introduced me as the van Dyck duchess. Julian laughed and said he imagined I was less laced up than any duchess.

  I met him many times while he was in London; at Hans’s studio, where he went to model for him, Hans sketched and painted him as Julian transmorphing into Juliette, and on several occasions I visited him at his lodgings. He rented a room from a grim landlady in King’s Cross in a house that smelled of cabbage. The room was damp and cold with stained wallpaper and dirty windows, and I marveled that great beauty could emerge from such squalor. Some afternoons he called at Park Lane, usually when I was alone. He was the most exquisite creature, and I felt his beauty matched the elegance of the Mallinger house. I suspected the tea and cakes Avril the maid served were his main meal of the day.

  I had confided to both Sir Hugo and Hans and drawn strength from their affection for me and their kindness, but with Julian there were few taboos in our conversations. He was outside of Society. We talked of face powder, blushers, unguents, and my menstrual pains. Despite his femininity, he exercised to a peak of physical fitness and was as strong as any stevedore. I saw how callused and scraped his hands and limbs were, yet his acts on the wire and trapeze seemed effortless. He said when he dressed in women’s clothes he became a woman, but that was not his quintessential self, and that identity need not be fixed, neither his nor mine.

  To Julian I managed freely to talk of all that had happened to me, to confide how I loathed men to touch me or make love to me, and yet I loved you and longed for you, though in reality you were quite out of reach to me.

  Remember that life can change from minute to minute, he said. He advised me not to view all that happened as just one event; some things were good, some lucky, some bad, some terrible. Other possibilities would happen if I allowed them, if I was open and receptive: new friendships, distant countries, diverse experiences.

  His life inspired me. He spoke with a soft American drawl for he came from Texas. His mother had been a milliner, but he had no recollection of his father. His name was Julian Hope, and when, as a boy, he saw his first circus, mesmerized by the high-wire acts, he determined to be a tightrope walker. He practiced on the clothesline in his mother’s yard, worked in the cotton fields, and, using the money he earned, traveled to where circuses were being held.

  When he was fourteen he answered a billboard advertisement for auditions with the Giuliano Sisters, “World Famous Aerial Queens.” One of the three sisters had died, and a replacement was needed. He was hired, provided he would perform as a sister. So Julian became Juliette, though such friends as he had called him J.

  He learned a great deal with the sisters but felt constrained to be part of a troupe and aspired to perform alone, not as an acrobat in a woman’s clothes, but as a solo star of the theater, a vaudeville artist, or graceful daredevil. Shakespeare’s heroines were his influence. They were played by men, he said. When he performed he aspired to become the depicted woman, statue, bird, or two lovers in one body.

  At his solo debut in Harlem, audiences were ecstatic. He was hired to perform in revues, circuses, music halls, at the Casino de Paris, the Folies Bergère, and in Covent Garden in London.

  * * *

  I WONDERED IF you might have understood the allure I felt toward Julian, or if you would not have countenanced him. Uncle might have viewed him as an envoy of the devil and Grandcourt not have acknowledged his existence. I doubted Mrs. Lewes would have found a place for him in one of her books, and neither Julian nor Juliette would be invited into the living rooms of the Arrowpoints, Brackenshaws, Quallons, and Klesmers, but to me he was in every way aerial and free. He said we were similar, called us the narcissists whose beliefs came only from inside ourselves, and said neither of us had, or could have, roots or a place or person where we belonged.

  I confided my fear of having no place or profession, how I found it difficult to separate from Mama, and that when playing the part of Hermione in A Winter’s Tale, instead of coming to life at the appointed time, when I saw the image of the dead face in the wainscot I screamed. Fear, I said, stood between me and life. As I spoke I remembered your words Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like quickness of hearing. I had some glimmering of what you perhaps meant.

  * * *

  JULIAN SAID HIS body was all he had, and that he did not care if romance was between a man, woman, or idea; it was the theater of it he loved. One afternoon he told me of how he had been caught kissing a man and the theater manager forbade him to return and said he could not get work there again. My response to this was the same as when you told me you were a Jew. At first I blurted with shocked surprise, “A Man!?” But then when I saw disdain on his face I said, “What difference need that have made? If you wanted to kiss, it is just the same as if you kissed a woman.” And he said, with kinder rebuke than you leveled toward me and with less defensiveness, that it was not the same, that he would never kiss a woman. It was men he desired and wanted to kiss. That was a fixed point of feeling of which he was sure.

  And I felt bewilderment, yes, but beyond that a sense that perhaps my play was never A Winter’s Tale but The Tempest, and that I might, like Miranda, say, “O brave new world, that has such people in it,” one of whom, or maybe two or even a few, might if I were lucky guide me to a newfound home.

  I thought how Mrs
. Lewes was not Mrs. Lewes or a Mrs. at all. Nor was she a George. Juliette was Julian. You were really Daniel Charisi, Mrs. Glasher wanted to be Mrs. Grandcourt, and Hester Stanhope dressed in embroidered trousers and a purple velvet robe and wore a saber to greet the pasha. I thought how alarming for your mother to give you away as a baby to an unmarried man, then take no interest in your fate; how mystifying that I should be repelled by lovemaking, and how marriage to Grandcourt was the worst fate that could have happened to me, but perhaps had brought me to the place where I now was.

  Don’t look to the past, J said. Look forward, find happiness through whatever door it comes. He said he was glad to have met me, he found me beautiful and sympathetic, and how important it was to love someone or something, because only that way could we ever hope to love ourselves.

  I asked if he thought, if I learned to walk the high wire, I might find employment similar to his, not on the same level but perhaps as a supporting act. I said I was adventurous and very good at most sports, I could jump any brook on horseback, was a fair dancer, and I liked to act. J said it was not impossible, my elegance and grace would captivate any audience, but I was coming to it late so it would be hard to make up for the childlike fearlessness and ease that came with an early start.

  Unlike Klesmer, Julian discouraged me gently. The pay, he said, was derisory, work opportunities were uncertain, and risk of injury was high. He thought I might get to dread, as did he, finding myself alone on tour in dingy lodgings in provincial towns and cities. He said for himself he had always known the tightrope was where he needed to be, but without such compulsion it was not an existence to envy.

  * * *

  HANS INTRODUCED ME to strange people and brave excitements. In the world into which he took me I found freedom of thought and action beyond the social round and searching for a husband I did not want. I could not now care about winning at the archery contest, marking every dance on my card, coiling my hair just so, or riding with the hounds. I found courage and a determination that was mine alone. One day I told him I felt hopeful and were a chance of happiness, however passing, be open to me, I believed I might take it.

  * * *

  REX AND HANS were good friends and saw much of each other, so it was inevitable Rex and I should meet again. Uncle feared that Rex, now a pupil in chambers near the Royal Courts of Justice, might revive his infatuation for me, but I gathered from Hans he had given up hope of my loving him, the pain of rejection had diminished, and he felt no ill will. Rather, like Hans, Sir Hugo, and Mama, he wished for me to find some joy in life. Hans said it was absurd to allow one falling-out to break a lifetime of friendship, and I agreed. But I was disappointed that Rex at social occasions seemed to avoid me, for when we picnicked at Cardell Chase some months previously I had dared hope our childhood closeness might be restored.

  Then one afternoon, at a gallery viewing of Hans’s work, I saw Rex standing alone. I went up to him and asked if he would call and have tea with me the following day. He looked startled but delighted, and he agreed.

  In the formal setting of the Park Lane house we were reserved. I was aware how much we both had changed. I was less confident, he was more: a well-cut suit, his hair stylishly barbered, his manner authoritative though without conceit. Rex within two years had changed from a boy to a man, whereas I had changed from a girl who was witty, bright, and impulsive to a woman more troubled and unsure. Uncle’s pride in him was not misplaced, and he was set for a distinguished career. He was ambitious for law reform and outraged at the denial of women’s rights and the severe punishments given to children—he told me of a twelve-year-old boy called William sent to Wandsworth Prison for stealing two rabbits to feed his family.

  I should have hated Rex to pity me. Pride made me stand by the mantelpiece, seemingly composed, assured, and poised but, with the ghost of past vanity, with the intention for him to admire my long neck, profile, and retroussé nose. I wanted to dispel the shadow of that awkward afternoon at Offendene when I met his marriage proposal with scornful impatience. “All the happiness of my life depends on your loving me—if only a little—better than anyone else,” he had said.

  He did not look unhappy now, so perhaps he had kept a little happiness back for himself. Unfair though it was, for I did not want Rex for myself, I was jealous to think he might entirely have recovered from his passion for me. I knew from Hans that Beatrix Brackenshaw was interested in him. I wondered if the interest was shared, or if he was deterred by her father’s conservatism and belief that women should dine separately from men. Apparently, Beatrix was headstrong and clever, a rebel and a suffragist, and intended to study to be a doctor like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.

  “I am sorry you have endured misfortunes,” Rex said, and his concern was sincere, though his words sounded stilted. “But you seem restored and are as beautiful as ever.” He looked at me in his familiar, tender way, and I again thought had I been able to love him, be wife to him, mother to his children, how solicitous, kind, and generous he would always have been to me. I might have had the direction and safety I felt I wanted but could not find.

  He spoke of his anxiety for me when he heard of the boating accident and Grandcourt’s drowning and his relief that you had been there to help me. I did not know if he knew the circumstances of the drowning or quite how terrible the marriage had been, or of Grandcourt’s dubious private life and the humiliation intended to me by the terms of his will.

  Then Rex looked at me as if to determine whether I was strong enough to hear uncomfortable news, and with a prescience worthy of Mrs. Lewes I knew what he was about to say. I thought again of that afternoon at the White House, the last time I saw you, when you told me with embarrassed hesitancy of your intention to marry Mirah Lapidoth. And now Rex wanted me to know he was to marry Beatrix Brackenshaw. He believed they would create a happy life together, which did not mean, he said, that I did not have an enduring place in his affections.

  For a moment I was silent, then I sat on the sofa, bent forward, and shed tears I could not check. I do not know why I wept so copiously, for I did not love him in a way that might fulfill his life: had he kissed my neck below the ear, I would have recoiled; had he told me, with an equally careful choice of words, that his feelings for me were unchanged, that all the happiness of his life depended on my loving him a little and becoming his wife, I should again have rejected him, though with more kindness, tact, and concern for his feelings than on the previous occasion.

  He implored me not to cry, spoke my name again and again, reiterated that I would always have a place in his heart—I was his cousin, his childhood sweetheart—the love and affection he felt for me could never be excised. And then he said his news brought the chance of good fortune to Mama and my sisters, and that was what he most wanted to tell me about, and was so glad of my invitation because of this opportunity it gave him. He was now legal adviser to Lord Brackenshaw over his estates. He had talked with him and Beatrix, and all were agreed that Offendene should, in perpetuity, be a grace-and-favor home for Mama, my sisters, and me. Moreover, the estate management would be responsible for repairs, renovations, and upkeep. A carriage was to be provided, a groom, a gardener to attend the grounds; there were already plans to retile the roof, reframe the windows, and redesign the vegetable beds. All of course in consultation with Mama.

  Such kindness and honor made me cry the more. I believe Rex would like to have put his arms around me but feared such an expression might be unwelcome or misconstrued. He walked to the window and waited, with his back to me, until I had calmed. I saw, even though my heart was troubled, what a gift this was to Mama and the girls. Henceforth they would be more than secure, Mama free from any anxiety of financial pinching, my sisters free from pressure to marry or to suffer as governesses in unfamiliar households. If they had aptitudes, there would be no impediment to their following them.

  I half wondered if Rex was entering into this marriage in order to help me in the only way he could, but I dismiss
ed the thought, for he was too honorable a man to calculate in such a way or compromise Beatrix’s feelings.

  I thanked him and asked perhaps rashly if he loved Beatrix Brackenshaw. I said I had heard she was freethinking and high-spirited. “There are different ways of loving,” Rex said. He was hopeful they would have a good life together of independent pursuits and shared interests; they saw life from the same point of view and got on well; she was more lighthearted than he, but ambitious in her own right. She was not content merely to be a wife and mother. They had much in common, and there were reforms in Society they both wished to strive to achieve.

  He laughed when he said had she not sought him out, he doubted his courage to have shown an interest in her, for fear of being viewed as avaricious. At first Lord and Lady Brackenshaw were antipathetic to him; he came with no inheritance, was a poor horseman, and encouraged their daughter in her wish to be a suffragist, doctor, and socialist, but now they accepted and even liked him, for it was clear he would excel in his chosen profession.

  As Rex left, he said he hoped he and I might from now on meet easily, for I was too precious and important to him to disappear from his life. I tried to reassure him, but with the same effort as wishing you success in your marriage, for in my heart I cried for my own safety. Again I saw a door that might have opened, and through which I might have gone, close shut as others walked through it into what might be happiness. Again there was direction and purpose for others’ lives but not my own.

  * * *

  HANS HATED TO see me sad. He said I was only outside of things if I chose to put myself there, and that he was determined to lure me into the activity of the present and the promise of the future.