Gwendolen

by Diana Souhami

  * * *

  ALONE IN MY room, unnerved by the day, I conjured images of the occasions when you and I met: your gaze in the gaming room at the Kursaal; at Diplow when I was engaged to Grandcourt; riding beside you at the hunt; as you sat with your back to me at your desk in the library at the Abbey; when we stood by the window and looked out at the moonlight; in the Mallingers’ drawing room when Mirah Lapidoth sang; when Grandcourt found us together after I asked you to call at Grosvenor Square; at the Italia Hotel in Genoa when I saw you on the stairs; when you called at the White House to tell me of your impending marriage and departure for the East. All those moments and more were pictures in my mind, like treasured possessions. Each time I saw you I was surprised; as if I had found what I had lost and been searching for. Now there was no point in searching, though the ghostly feeling remained of what I wanted but could not find.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY Paul Leroy left his card with a request that he might visit me at five the following afternoon. As I prepared for his visit, I hoped with agitation that he did not intend making love to me. I dressed in pale green and pearls, placed the sheet music of Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 16 in C major on the piano, and an opened copy of George Eliot’s Romola on a small sofa. I thought of wooings of me at Offendene: Rex’s gauche declaration of undying love, Grandcourt’s businesslike proposal, my appeal to you, and your apology that you could not help me.

  Mr. Leroy arrived some minutes late. Tall and soberly dressed, he looked more like a lawyer than an artist. He did not appear vain, though he must have known he was handsome. His voice was quiet, pleasing, his English fluent, though with a light accent for French was his first language.

  There was no flirtation. He displayed no anxiety or particular desire to flatter or please. He surveyed the room and me, thanked me for agreeing to see him, and asked if I would model for him. He said he would like the chance and challenge to capture in paint something of what I seemed to express. Mine, he said, was a face of subtle expression into which much could be read. Not only my conventional beauty intrigued him, but the divided emotions that showed behind my eyes. He spoke of a wish to paint nuanced portraits, which he hoped would show progression of feeling from one emotional state to another, from optimism to disappointment, for example, or pain to strength, or captivity to freedom. He wanted a classical face, as he called it, and said that when he saw me it was as if his theoretical idea met the living model. Portraiture is itself a relationship, he said, a reaching out from artist to model, a generosity from model to artist. I would be his muse. He could never reach who I was, but would like to offer his interpretation.

  He had a direct way of talking, neutral but friendly. He said he also wanted to paint the shared exchange of emotional states as they registered on the faces of couples. What he called the split second of a realization. I wondered how my face and yours must have looked when you told me you were to marry Mirah Lapidoth.

  The modeling sessions were to be at his Tite Street studio. He assured me he would pay me generously and not be demanding of my physical endurance or put pressure on me. If the work suited me, and if I had time, he hoped I would sit for him regularly. He could not begin for another month for he had to be in Paris for an exhibition of his drawings.

  I was intrigued, though cautious. It seemed Paul Leroy viewed me as his inspiration. I thought of what men wanted from me. You perhaps saw my troubled soul and hoped to protect me; Rex admired my daring and beauty; Grandcourt saw a challenge to his viciousness; Sir Hugo thought me in need of a father; to Hans I was a caged creature whom he wanted to set free. But I did not want only to be a perception in the eyes of others. For myself I wanted to explore life more and take risks, though not of the marrying sort. Paul Leroy had come to my door; he offered another adventure.

  I agreed to go to his Tite Street studio and try one session. I explained I was restless and found it difficult to sit still or do what I was told and that I preferred the outdoors: horse riding, swimming, walking, archery, parachuting. He laughed and said all those activities sounded inspirational and that if I indulged them, maybe he could draw them. As for sitting still, I must fidget as much as I liked.

  There was a directness about Mr. Leroy. He was not guarded and cautious like you. He and I talked that afternoon in a personal way, an exchange of confidences. He had learned of my marriage from Hans and how my husband drowned in my presence. He too had been disastrously married. His ambition to be an artist formed when he was a child. His mother, like my father, died soon after he was born. He grew up with a stepmother whom he disliked, as I disliked my stepfather. His father, a martinet, owned hotels and casinos on the French Riviera and would not countenance his only son wasting his life dabbling with paint and canvas. To consolidate his own financial empire, when Paul was nineteen, he pushed him into an arranged marriage with a first cousin four years older than himself. Paul felt no desire for her and had no interest in her but said it was worse for her because she was in love with another man.

  After what he called four wilderness years of working for his father, he abandoned this wife and their small son, told no one where he was going, changed his name to Leroy, and traveled alone in Europe, Russia, and South America. At first he eked a living finding such paid work as he could and selling his pencil sketches. With money earned from these he bought oils and canvases. When his paintings sold, he rented a studio in Paris and hired models. Now his work was sought after and his income assured.

  He had no contact with his family, and like Julian he seemed a self-creation. At ease with him, I felt no need to sparkle or use words merely to impress. He was serious and strange, but I had a sense of trust. He did not interrogate me, as did Mrs. Lewes, or woo me, as did Rex; I did not feel he wanted to control me or enslave me, as had Grandcourt. I thought you would like him. He saw something in me to inspire his work; I was curious about what I might see reflected back to me through the mirror of his eyes. And I especially liked his assurance that payment terms would be generous. It felt indiscreet to ask what these terms were, but I was thrilled at the idea of earning money for myself, even if not in quite the way I had anticipated. I decided to spend it all on stylish clothes and gifts and outings for my sisters and Mama.

  * * *

  SCALANDS, BARBARA BODICHON said, was a house for women from whose encouragement, wisdom, and experience I would benefit. The front door opened into the living room, with a brick fireplace where those who visited wrote their names; walls were crammed to the ceiling with her paintings. There were books everywhere and pottery brought from her travels in Algiers and other places. Some of the women smoked cigars and wore jodhpurs or dungarees.

  I often visited Scalands. I met artists, poets, writers, and workers for social reform, but also women ill treated by their husbands or victims of unjust laws. I met Anna Howitt, a painter and petitioner for married women’s rights; Marie Rye, who in Liverpool housed girls from the streets or the workhouse, taught them, helped them find employment; Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who qualified as a doctor, but when she tried to pursue her training, the male doctors complained to the hospital management.

  I shared the scorn of these clever women at the way the rule of men suppressed their lives, but though inspired by them, I did not want to join their protest marches or sign their petitions, and I fear I preferred novels to the sort of books they wrote.

  Mrs. Bodichon was outraged by all she heard of Grandcourt. It was bad enough, she told me, that a woman’s property should belong to her husband, but terrible for her body to be claimed as his possession too. “I can imagine how you suffered,” she said to me. “Mary Anne told me of it.”

  “Neither she nor anyone knows quite what happened,” I said. “I cannot speak of that, even to myself.” I remembered my conversations with Julian and his lack of surprise, but even with him I could not find words for what I endured from Grandcourt or how despairing and unclean he had made me feel.

  “If you wish, you can try to spe
ak of it to me,” Mrs. Bodichon said. “My sympathy may be of use to you. I might be shocked but not embarrassed. I am as well able as anyone to understand suffering and disappointment. I am more often discouraged in my mind than exulting. I can’t get what I want. My life is less than my aims.”

  I was disarmed and surprised to hear such an admission of weakness from a woman so confident and outspoken, who dared to flout all rules. “But that’s how I feel,” I told her.

  “Friends help,” Mrs. Bodichon said. “Every good friend one has is a fortification against evil, an extra arm for good.”

  Though joyous of her friendship and the doors she opened to me, I could not return even in words to that dark time with Grandcourt. I wanted to erase him from my mind. But I told her how, through that endurance, it was you who kept alive my optimism and gave me courage. I said I looked to you as my best and only friend, my confessor and hero, and that when you left for Palestine with your blameless Jewish wife, I felt devoid of hope. I admitted I yearned for you to fill my life when Grandcourt drowned.

  “Deronda,” Barbara Bodichon said, “is a good man. I have not met him, though I have heard often and in detail from Mary Anne of his exceptional qualities and extraordinary life. But perhaps his expectations are too lofty for a creature as impulsive and daring as you. Perhaps his opinions and ideas are too fixed. You did not know the price of your mistake when you married Grandcourt.”

  I confessed to her how much I did know. How I was warned by Lydia Glasher and had known Grandcourt humiliated and discarded her. Known too in my heart that those who wrong one person will wrong another.

  Mrs. Bodichon would not condemn me. The marriage was intolerable, and had it continued, I would have endured a death within life. The worst of it, in her view, was that having realized my mistake, I could not extricate myself with sufficient money and the support of the law. I should not have been obliged to stay. The law should have protected me from Grandcourt’s violence, allowed me to leave, and granted me the wherewithal to do so. I should not have been so ground down, so belittled as to have no choice but to withhold the rope when he drowned.

  I spoke of the guilt I felt and the sense I now had of not knowing what direction to take.

  “Good habits are important,” Barbara Bodichon said to me. “And a routine life if you are in a weak state of mind. Don’t despise little things if they make you cheerful. Dress helps, I find. When dispirited I put on a better and brighter gown.” Then she said what gave her most strength was the sense that others relied on her. “If one leans on one side and one on another it gives strength to what is weaker than either.” She said she built a rough wooden-scaffold bridge of life with the hope that one day she would see a perfect arch.

  “I am one of the cracked people of the world,” she told me. “I like to be with others like me.” She said I was cracked too, and though I had never thought of myself in quite that way, I did not object to the notion.

  * * *

  THERE WAS MUCH laughter at Scalands on weekends. Mrs. Bodichon made each day fun. We all went horse riding, walking, blackberrying; we even went bicycling. Violet Greene, who specialized in fashion designs for modern women, offered to cut my hair short. Mrs. Bodichon thought this would be a rite of passage for me. And she favored my reverting to my birth name. She had kept hers as well as taking her husband’s. She called herself Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. I was to meet this husband, Eugène Bodichon, when summer came. He was, she told me by way of understatement, a most unusual man who hated England and the rain, so he stayed half the year in Algiers until the sun shone here.

  I told Barbara how when married I would say my own name over to myself because I loathed to be called Grandcourt, and even to hear the name spoken provoked me into remembering all I wanted to forget. You are Gwendolen Harleth, she said. Abandon Grandcourt, never mention it, and you will forget it, and others will forget it too. Men, she said, by imposing their own names on women, enslaved them and made their past invisible.

  I thought how Mary Anne Evans, although not married, called herself Mrs. Lewes and wrote books as George Eliot, though she was not a man, and how George Lewes called her Polly, though I am not sure why. You were Charisi, not Deronda or Mallinger. Lydia Glasher would have liked to be Mrs. Grandcourt. Princess Halm-Eberstein called herself Alcharisi, Julian could transform to Juliette, and Paul Leroy was I did not know who. I am Gwendolen Harleth, I said. Gwendolen Harleth. I will not lose my name again.

  * * *

  IN THE COMPANY of energetic women, who viewed the world fearlessly, I dared make small choices, out of delight in the present, hope for my unknown future, and in opposition to the prescriptions of the past. I recalled the day when, as we toured Topping Abbey, you explained its architectural features, and you and Sir Hugo defended the mingling of the ancient and the modern. I did not have an opinion, other than that I loved the horses stabled in what once had been the choir and the way the evening sun came through the stained-glass windows. Now, I thought I would look for a new way of living and a modern view, while cherishing some things from my past: how safe I felt with Mama, the charm and romance of Offendene, my love and respect for you.

  Looking at Barbara Bodichon’s paintings, I hoped I too might have some talent for art. I excelled at drawing when at school, Bertha had a skill, so perhaps there was an inherited gift on the maternal side. Barbara found inspiration on her travels. She painted Swiss peaks, Lombard plains, and white Moorish houses, mountains, and cypresses in Algiers. As I looked at her work, she talked of such elsewhere places, and I felt inspired to travel to them, not like you to fulfill a mission, but to find a world outside of myself, as you recommended I try to do.

  I told her I was to model for Paul Leroy. She approved and thought he would prove to be an interesting friend. There are men who do not fit the stereotype, men who are like women in their sensibilities, she said, and Paul was such a man.

  I mentioned he would pay me generously for modeling. Barbara Bodichon too then offered me work: raising money for Girton, a Cambridge college for women she had founded, and for a school she had started, the Westminster Infant School, where pupils wore no uniform, were never punished, and there was no segregation because of belief or gender. Barbara and her friends taught boys and girls, Christians, Jews, and freethinkers. The fee was sixpence a week.

  I was successful at fund-raising, with help from Sir Hugo, Lord Brackenshaw, and one or two of Uncle’s connections. Barbara asked if I would like to teach at her school; I was emphatic I would not.

  * * *

  I WENT WITH trepidation to Mrs. Lewes’s next salon, for it troubled me to have my life flashed before my eyes like images in a kaleidoscope. I wondered if I would see Paul Leroy again, but he had already left for Paris. I half listened to Hans and a curate, John Payne, talking about their doubts as to a future life, but I could not be interested in this weighty matter of eternity. I missed Offendene and you. I had heard that Mr. Payne mumbled his sermons. He wanted to talk to Mrs. Lewes about a poem she had written called “The Spanish Gypsy.”

  Mrs. Lewes, though surrounded by acolytes, again sought me out. I was able to tell her that Uncle had suffered a bad attack of gout; that Mrs. Glasher, or so I had heard from Sir Hugo, was now living in Italy with Giuseppe Fede, a Tivolian count about whom I knew nothing; that George Jarrett, the Pennicote carpenter, broke both his arms when he fell from a ladder while replacing a window frame for the Arrowpoints at Quetcham Hall; that Mrs. Arrowpoint had recently published a long article about Tasso’s insanity, which had caused a small stir in certain circles; that Mrs. Gadsby, who had married the yeomanry captain and rode with the hunt, was now widowed, after the captain suffered a fatal heart attack while tending his bees; that Joel Dagge, the blacksmith’s son who had found Rex on Mill Lane after Primrose fell on the day of the Brackenshaw hunt, was now unemployed and not on good terms with his father; that Mr. Middleton, now a reverend, had a seat at Sudbury in Suffolk, was married to Florence, a seamstress with an
out-of-wedlock child, and that the responsibilities of family life had made him even more serious.

  “And what of Clintock, the archdeacon’s son? What had become of him?” Mrs. Lewes asked.

  Clintock. Oh yes, Clintock. Croquet. I looked at Hans. I stopped wondering how she knew these people and just supposed she knew everyone in the world. Clintock was to marry my sister Isabel. They planned to live in Bath.

  “And the young Henleigh?” she asked. “The now fortunate heir. What was he like? Was he as arrogant as his father?”

  I knew nothing of him, I told her. I had seen him holding his mother’s hand on Rotten Row and once before that at the Whispering Stones. He had looked cherubic and was pretending to play a toy trumpet. Perhaps Mrs. Lewes thought that heralded a musical career.

  “Ah yes, the Whispering Stones.” She ignored my flippancy, then said Lydia Glasher was well suited to Grandcourt. Violence and ill treatment from her first husband, the colonel, had hardened her. She was fearless, having been so cast out by Society. Neither she nor Grandcourt cared about being disliked.

  She then said she was disappointed Herr Klesmer could not attend her salon that afternoon. He and Catherine were giving a recital at the Wigmore Hall. She so fulsomely approved of their marriage you might be forgiven for thinking she engineered it. She told me they were much in demand for concerts in London, Europe, and New York and that Klesmer’s compositions seemed to her on a par with those of Franz Liszt, whom she had met in Vienna in 1839 when he was living at the Altenburg with the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt played one of his own compositions, and she said for the first time in her life she witnessed real inspiration: his face was beautiful, the music quiet, rapturous, triumphant. Klesmer, she thought, had something of this quality too. He and Catherine now had a child, a boy, who perhaps might prove to be a musical prodigy.