Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  She spoke of Hans’s paintings and said he had a considerable talent. The man with whom he was talking was Paul Leroy, an even more outstanding young painter. Had I seen his work at Arthur Tooth & Sons in the Haymarket? she asked. His canvases sold for as much as forty-nine pounds. I apologized for knowing nothing of Arthur Tooth or of Mr. Leroy and his art. “I am most ignorant,” I told her. “I have no more than a smattering of knowledge in any subject and no particular accomplishments.” She laughed, put her arm around me, and said, “You shouldn’t be so competitive.” I only half understood what she meant. I confided that in the past I had supposed I might earn merit and my living in the arts: by singing and acting perhaps, but I had been disabused.

  Mrs. Bodichon said for herself she liked to paint but did not care about recognition beyond giving pleasure to friends. I thought of my disdain for middlingness and your praise of it, and of how accepting you said you were of that state for yourself.

  “Paul’s eyes haven’t left you,” Mrs. Bodichon said. “You must be aware of that.” I was, she told me, une femme fatale. “Deronda apart—and he of course is a saint and too good for this world—I can’t believe this monstrous Grandcourt has been the only man to try to win your heart.” I did not mention Clintock or Middleton, for I thought them inconsequential, but I confessed I pushed Rex away because I could not bear him to make love to me.

  She encouraged me to confide and seemed interested in all I said. I told her I would not marry again but since Grandcourt’s drowning and your departure, I realized the importance of friendship, freedom, and adventure. I recounted how Hans and I went to the circus and how exciting it was that Juliette performed so convincingly as a woman and yet was a man. I tried to tell her how free I felt when I went up in a hot-air balloon and parachuted down to earth. Mrs. Bodichon was unsurprised. She told me of the French balloonist Nadar, whose real name was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who believed the future belonged to heavier-than-air machines. My flight followed his, she said. I too was moving from my land-locked present and reaching for the sky. I was a time-traveler journeying into the next century. Mrs. Bodichon had been in Hannover when Nadar crash-landed near a railway line. He broke a leg, and his wife hurt her neck. We aspire to the swiftness and ease of birds and angels, she said. It pains us to be earthbound.

  She told me she found freedom through travel and journeyed far and often. When younger than I, she and a friend, Bessie Parkes, made an unchaperoned walking tour through Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. I come closer to Hester Stanhope each day, I thought, and yearned for my own journey to unknown places.

  Mrs. Bodichon liked to escape to the English countryside to paint. To do this she had built Scalands, a cottage on her father’s estate in Sussex, set in three acres of woodland where, she told me, bluebells, nightingales, and cuckoos thrived. Would I like to visit her there, see her paintings, and meet her women friends? She could show me copies of photographs taken from Nadar’s huge balloon, “The Giant.” He called it “the Ultimate Balloon.” A crowd of two thousand in Paris watched its first ascent. Sarah Bernhardt had flown in it.

  Barbara Bodichon’s courage and imagination inspired me. “I sense your readiness for adventure,” she said. “You’ve had enough of genteel English life and the hypocrisy that writhes behind it. You need to ride into the distant hills and fly to the mountaintops. But first of all you must come and stay at Scalands. Let us fix a date.”

  When I looked toward Paul Leroy, he was looking at me. When I looked toward Mrs. Lewes, she was looking at me too. I was vain enough, for their benefit, to keep my back straight, my features composed. I could not know what either of them was thinking, but I was intrigued by their watchfulness and curiosity, as if defined by it.

  Mr. Lewes came over, again took my arm in a way I found too personal, and said, “I must prize her from you, Barbara. Polly wants to quiz her more.”

  Mrs. Lewes praised my dress and complexion and said that given all that had happened, I looked remarkably well. She wanted news of my half sisters: were they studying, courting, working? Alice and Fanny were still at home, I told her, Isabel was courting Clintock, the archdeacon’s son, and Bertha was working as a landscape gardener.

  What of the face in the wainscot, Mrs. Lewes asked, was it still there? Was Miss Merry still overly fond of ginger biscuits? Would I remind her of the color of Jocasta’s hair? Who exercised Criterion now that I was so much away from home? Whom did the Momperts employ as a governess after I withdrew my candidacy, and how was Mama managing with her rheumatic pains and shortness of breath? What news was there of the agent Lassman? Had Uncle and Mama received redress for his irresponsible business dealings that led to our losing such income as we had?

  She asked so many questions. I could not understand such curiosity about people whom she did not know. I would not ask her the color of her brother’s bedsocks, whether cabbage gave her dyspepsia, or if Mr. Lewes snored. Her pursuit of detail was so unrelenting I concluded we were all research material for some book. Perhaps I would be her heroine or antiheroine and you her hero.

  “Have you met Mama?” I asked, knowing she had not. I gave vague and equivocal answers to most of her questions, but I told her how Uncle ran into Lassman by chance at the Army and Navy Club in London and found him lacking in all contrition. With money borrowed from his bank, which he could never repay, this architect of our downfall set up as a property developer and built a terrace of houses in East London. Mrs. Lewes asked my opinion of him, and I condemned such ambition to profit at the expense of others. Her look was ironic.

  Was Grandcourt’s body ever washed ashore? she wanted to know. Where was Mrs. Glasher now? Did I still sleep in a bed beside Mama’s when I went home to Offendene? And with that question I realized the hard transition I had made. I would never again be the child I was, the adored, assured, bright, witty girl. Yes, Offendene was the place I viewed as home, but Grandcourt took the innocent heart of it from me. I could not again be Mama’s beloved daughter whose every word and wish were precious.

  All I said to Mrs. Lewes was that Offendene, Pennicote, and Wancester now seemed to me small and used up. I had outgrown that life and must reach for the wider world. And even if I could not grandly succeed, I wanted to look forward, see new landscapes, meet new people, and be at ease with who I felt myself to be.

  “You will not accept a small size for your woman’s heart,” she said, and laughed.

  Then she told me how, when she and Mr. Lewes were in Homburg, they visited the Kursaal—only, she stressed, because of their interest in its architecture and history. She saw there a beautiful English girl, apparently Byron’s great-niece, gambling feverishly, and she wept to see this young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her.

  Again I had a sense of unreality, as if I was a work of fiction, a creation of her pen. Was she likening me to Byron’s great-niece? Did she know I gambled at the Kursaal and lost? Was she colluding with your disapproval when on that decisive day you gazed at me? I could not countenance that she might know of that gaze, or how for me it was the moment of supreme connection against which I measured my downfall.

  I tried not to show consternation. I said I did not see why occasional gambling was a crime. For myself I enjoyed the distraction of it and hated the duplicitous standards expected of women, particularly if they were young and unmarried. “Surely you know what it is to suffer the slavery of being a woman,” I quoted your mother: “your happiness made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.” “Ah,” Mrs. Lewes said, “the princess Eberstein. But she had a world-class talent to defend. When her voice failed in middle age, she married again: a Russian prince.”

  I supposed her to imply that my talent had no class and therefore, though still in youth, my best option was to find a prince. I said I found it hard to understand why Princess Eberstein chose to take a second husband after her declared abhorrence of marriage and admission she was unable to love. Nor did I understand her explanation that she ga
ve you away to spare you from knowing you were born a Jew. Her father and husband died soon after you were born, and she then converted to Christianity. She could have raised you as a Christian without Jewishness being of significance.

  Mrs. Lewes thought your mother would have kept you if she could have both cared for you and pursued her career. Giving you to Sir Hugo was perhaps an impulsive act. He was there and said he longed for a son like you. But I was mystified. Giving away your child was hardly like pawning a necklace. And she abandoned you entirely, evinced no interest in you, and although she remained unloving, she then remarried and had five more children, but did not part with them.

  * * *

  I WONDERED IF Mrs. Lewes had researched the lives of everyone in this room and beyond. I wondered if she dwelled on other people’s lives to deflect attention from her own, and whether she denigrated me—my beauty, youth, lack of education, talent, or sound judgment—in order to elevate herself. Mr. Lewes was devoted, but her own arrangement of the heart was unusual. I suspect she was troubled by its unorthodoxy.

  I began to view her as a fairground gypsy, a Madame Rose who could reveal my future, about which I was increasingly more concerned than my past, if I proffered the palm of my hand or if she felt the contours of my skull, or scrutinized the dregs in my teacup. I felt alarmed in her company. I surmised you or Sir Hugo must have given her much information for it certainly had not come from me.

  She then mentioned my physical recoil at lovemaking and asked what was at the root of this aversion and if I preferred women to men. She said she had experience of that. I did not grace such questions with an answer. In her books, or the few I had read, she had not been candid about such issues. But I must have blushed, for she gave her knowing smile, then asked if I might marry again. I told her I would not.

  Then she asked even more perverse questions: Was there a level on which I invited Grandcourt’s assault on me? Was that the only way in which my coldness could be breached? “Relationship is formed from recognition,” she said. “You knew of his cruelty, knew how unscrupulous and punishing he was to the woman who bore his children.”

  I could not check my anger. I was not, I told her, the flawed victim she perceived me to be. I said, “I am not like that. You don’t know me. I am a young woman who has been unlucky and badly treated. My luck will change.” I accused her of contriving a version of me, then condemning her own creation.

  I felt questioned and cross-examined like a defendant on trial. It occurred to me that if ever I was to confide what Grandcourt had done to me, I would need Barbara Bodichon’s outspoken warmth, not Mrs. Lewes’s adversarial detachment.

  “You hoped Grandcourt’s wealth would save your mother and sisters from penury,” Mrs. Lewes said. “Your motive was in part honorable but your course of action sullied.”

  She observed my agitation and became gentler. “I hoped Rex might marry you,” she said, and again I had a fleeting intimation of how safe and, yes, happy my life might have been had that come about. I said it was enough that he and I had restored the friendship. Did she know, I asked, of his engagement to Beatrix Brackenshaw, his management of the Brackenshaw estates, and the gift he helped arrange of security of tenure at Offendene for Mama and us all? She looked surprised and said she knew nothing of that; the last she had heard of Rex was of his excelling at his law studies and his continuing devastation at my rejection of him.

  Though she knew so much about us, it seemed the connection stopped at a point in time, like a broken love affair or a moving on from friendship. Or perhaps she viewed us as players on a stage for the duration of an evening, then abandoned us into the night and went home with her ugly little quasi husband, dogs, and toothache to other interests.

  I wanted no more questions about myself. I wanted news of you. Had you loved me? I blurted the question unrehearsed.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Lewes said, without hesitation. “But perhaps he found you too like his mother, too willful and vain. I expect he thought you would hurt him. And you are not a Jew. You do not understand the essential allegiance.”

  And then I asked the question that if I allowed it choked my heart: did she think you would come back to me?

  Her eyes looked shrewd but tired. “Gwendolen,” she said. “I am not a soothsayer. But as you know, Mr. Deronda is married, his wife is adoring, they have a child, they are an orthodox Jewish family. Will he return to you? How can I know? I am sure, though, he carries you with him.”

  I thought of the Abbey and your English upbringing. You must carry that with you too. And I felt she did know. That she knew it all. Knew me from even before I was born. Knew why it was that the face in the wainscot broke my control, and why I shivered if touched by a man. I suspected she had been there in the room on my wedding night when I opened the box of diamonds, had seen Grandcourt tear at my clothes, pin me to the bed, and spoil me. Knew why I yearned for you to console me, counsel me, help me mend. Knew that were you to return, it would not be to me.

  “But,” I ventured despite myself, “were his wife to die?”

  She made an exasperated sound and turned away. Her strange little husband, who was not a husband, sensed discord and came to my side. He spoke apologetically of Polly’s fascination with the quotidian detail of all our lives.

  Mrs. Lewes then took my hand in her warm hand and said in the kindest voice that I was often on her mind. The admission sounded like a declaration of love. I was unsure how to respond to this, or what to make of it, or what my relationship to her was. “Please come back next Sunday,” she said.

  * * *

  HANS AND I took a brougham home. He was enthusiastic about the guests at the Priory, the stylish setting, the pleasing cakes, and vintage wine. He asked me about Barbara Bodichon. I said I found her warmhearted, interesting, quite unlike any other woman I had met, and how pleased I was she had invited me to her country cottage. He spoke of her fame as a feminist and a socialist, and I told him I knew that, but it did not matter; she was as interesting as if she were neither of those things.

  Hans had talked to Paul Leroy and another painter, Edward Byrne-Jones, whose lover tried to drown herself in the Regent’s Canal when he did not elope with her. She was his model, a beautiful Greek woman, but Byrne-Jones was married and there was drama and scandal.

  Hans said Paul Leroy was smitten with me, had spoken of my beauty, grace, the pathos in my eyes, and I do not remember what, and had asked him to ask me if I would model for him. Hans teased about love at first sight, said he was aggrieved at such competition, feared his own chances were now nil, and that with beautiful women he was always destined to lose to men more talented, rich, and handsome than himself. First he lost Mirah to you and now clearly me to Paul Leroy. For himself, he would have to make do with women of the streets.

  Did he not consider it an impediment, I asked, that Paul Leroy and I knew nothing of each other and had not spoken? Hans said it was better that way, for then our illusions need not be broken. As for his own pretense at self-denigration, I reminded him how, for months now, at the mere mention of the name Hans, my cousin Anna’s eyes brightened. Hans’s view was that he and Anna were mere mortals, while I had cast my spell on genius, intrigued the eye, and snared the heart of a man who might prove the most important artist of his generation.

  Leroy had studios in London, Paris, and near Florence; his work was bought by the cognoscenti and the rich. I ought to be proud and pleased, Hans said. I was freed from my persecutor and welcome at the heart of London intellectual and cultural life. George Eliot, George Lewes, Immanuel Deutsch, Barbara Bodichon, Paul Leroy—here were the people who were shaping and changing our literary, artistic, and social destiny. And of course himself, he said. Shining over us all. Was I not glad, he asked, that I had left the little world of Pennicote behind? He would wager that Leroy’s destiny and mine were entwined.

  I was flattered to be reminded of my power to impress such glittering stars of Society but conscious of a familiar sense of inferiorit
y. It seemed I was not to contribute to the transcendence of Art. I doubted I could unequivocally enjoy Mrs. Lewes’s beautiful prose, Mr. Leroy’s inspired canvases, Herr Klesmer’s exquisite rendition of “Freudvoll Leidvoll Gedankenvoll.” Hans earned his place in the salon, while I, rooted in uncertainty and, neither a man nor an artist, was witness to a world from which I was excluded.

  When staking my numbers on the red and the black, or ascending the heavens in a balloon, I felt freed from the snare of middlingness. At heart I feared I was, like Julian, a daughter of Narcissus, and I feared being no more than the reflected image of desire in an admirer’s eyes or a puppet in the hand of a stranger.

  I lamented to Hans how Mrs. Lewes probed me with questions and how it made me feel most strange that she seemed to know everything about me.

  “She is a novelist,” Hans said. “Understanding people is her trade.”

  “But she does not quiz you,” I said. “And a novelist is not a biographer. Why should she want to know about Mama’s shortness of breath and Rex’s marriage and what my sisters are doing and what became of Lassman and whether Grandcourt’s body was on the ocean bed.”

  I said I suspected she was going to write about me, which made me uneasy. I wanted to live a free, adventurous, and happy life, not become a character in a book. Hans said she would probably write about us all, that was what novelists did, but the hero of the story would be you, Deronda. You were the one she admired and lauded; she was interested in the rest of us only insofar as we impinged on you. Hans said he believed Mrs. Lewes was jealous of your interest in me because I was beautiful and she was not. She engaged with you intellectually over the history of the Jews, whereas you were physically drawn to me and desired me. As he spoke I felt the familiar yearning. I had pushed you to the back of my mind, to the cold part of my heart, but you were always there.