Gwendolen (2 page)

Offendene: set amid tranquil pastures and leafy lanes. It is the only house I have ever viewed as home. We had lived there scarcely a year when news of this financial calamity came.

Mamma, my half-sisters Alice, Bertha, Fanny and Isabel and Miss Merry the housekeeper, all were grouped in the porch when I stepped down from my carriage. ‘Well, dear, what will become of us?' was mamma's bleak greeting. I observed her faded beauty and shabby black dress. Her despondency cut me. My sisters looked at me with subdued concern. I was the eldest. I was responsible. Before my luggage was lifted down I resolved to safeguard the roof over all their heads.

*

Persevere with my story and you will learn how a welter of humiliation led me to sell my soul to achieve this. I did what I knew to be wrong, then paid heavily as the wheel of my misfortune kept spinning.

*

The house, a sprawling red-brick mansion, was serene: the smell of applewood fires in the hearths, the flickering shadows of candlelight. Oil paintings hung in the staircase that led from the large stone hallway: a huntsman on a bay surrounded by hounds; a poacher and a gamekeeper; sheep and goats in a barn; girls on a riverbank. The dining room's oak panelling smelled of beeswax, the rosewood chairs were covered with worn red satin. Over the mantelpiece dogs snarled at each other in two dark paintings and Christ worked his wonders with loaves and fishes. The wainscot carved with garlands in the drawing room, the organ built by Henry Willis, all the familiar detail seemed impervious to bad news.

*

We had not seen Offendene before we moved in. Uncle Henry – the Reverend Gascoigne – arranged matters for us after Captain Davilow, my stepfather, died. On moving day too mamma and my sisters gathered in the porch and looked questioningly at me. ‘Well, dear, what do you think of the place?' mamma asked, and I made my rapid and abiding judgement: ‘I think it charming, a romantic place, anything delightful may happen in it, no one need be ashamed of living here, it would be a good background for anything.' Offendene gave ample room for me, mamma, my half-sisters, Mrs Startin their governess, Miss Merry, and Jocasta Bugle the maid. Though the house lacked the splendour mamma thought my due, I truly believed we might be happy in it.

*

I wanted to shut out the apprehension that the dark comes however bright the day. I have always been afraid to hear about the indifference of the universe, my own insignificance, the casual inevitability of death and the caprice of chance. Even at school I trembled when astronomy was taught.

On the day we moved in I found that under Offendene's protective roof was hidden a prescient warning. My sisters and I excitedly explored the house. In the drawing room Isabel tapped a hinged panel in the wainscot. A painted image of a dead upturned face sprang out, with a panicked figure fleeing from it. The effect on me was extreme. I froze with fear and trembled but could not scream. Mamma and Miss Merry wrapped me in a blanket. When revived I shouted at Isabel, ‘How dare you open things which were meant to be shut!' I ordered Miss Merry to fetch the key, lock the panel and give the key to me. No one, I instructed, was ever, ever to open it again. The device, we later learned, was a practical joke by the Earl of Cork who first owned the house. The eccentric Earl wore knee breeches and costumes of his own invention. Another of his jokes, long removed, was a suit of armour which drew a sword when a key was turned.

*

Mamma tried to shield me from the terror within me and assuage my fear of the dark and of being alone. I tried to assuage her loneliness and disappointment. She had looked to me for comfort when my stepfather was so often away. I did not want a room of my own. Mamma and I shared the large bedroom, decorated black and yellow with a view of the garden. My small white bed was made up beside hers.

On the night I returned from Homburg, in bed and overtired, behind my closed eyes I again saw mamma in her shabby clothes and heard her supplicating words, ‘Well, dear, what will become of us?' and then came an hallucinatory image of the dead face in the wainscot and the figure in flight. I cried out. Mamma lit a candle, I crawled in with her, she called me her darling and I slept with her arms around me. To others I seemed beautiful, daring and rash. To her I was a child.

*

If only we could have stayed at Offendene a few years before misfortune struck! There was society enough to make life pleasant. Mamma accompanied me to parties and dinners: the Arrowpoints at Quetcham Hall; our landlords Lord and Lady Brackenshaw at Brackenshaw Castle; Mr Quallon the banker at The Firs. Sometimes in summer mamma, my sisters and I, and my cousins Rex and Anna, all picnicked in the grounds of Diplow Hall. Though the house, owned by Sir Hugo Mallinger, for most of the year was unoccupied and shuttered, its acres of secluded grounds, forested with elms and beeches, were open. Deer grazed on the grassland, we would spread ourselves under the trees, or by the lilied pool.

*

I fear I was petulant and hard to please. I viewed myself as superior to provincial society, voiced discontent with what was around me and expressed little gratitude for such good fortune as I had. Though unable to define what I wanted or was capable of achieving, I could not view the Archery Club, dances at Brackenshaw Castle and dinner with the Arrowpoints as the zenith of my ambition. Being so much admired and so often told I was beautiful set me apart. I liked to be the centre of attention, in control, and to have the last word. I came to see my beauty as a kind of genius, an accomplishment of my own doing. It was like a magnet. In hotels waiters fawned, smoothed my napkin, brushed crumbs from the cloth in front of me. If the laundress ironed a crease into a sleeve the maid would say, ‘This will never do for Miss Harleth.' If the wood smoked in the bedroom fireplace, though mamma's eyes watered she apologised to me. If, after a long and tiring journey, I was last at the breakfast table the main concern would be whether Gwendolen's coffee was hot, her toast crisp. ‘Gwendolen will not rest without having the world at her feet,' Miss Merry said. And it was true. Forgive me, I was young.

I did not hide my exasperation with my half-sisters. I assured them they were lesser creatures – deserving of their back to the highway in the carriage, entitled only to the smaller piece of cake.

I think I was incredulous that you, though you saw my charm, resisted it and even criticised me. Now, after so much grief, I view beauty as a questionable gift.

*

On our second day at Offendene, as I brushed my hair in front of the tall mirror in our bedroom, mamma said, ‘Gwendolen, dear, if you had a wreath of white roses in your hair you'd pass as Saint Cecilia.' (Mamma, I have to tell you, thought my singing voice divine.)

‘Except for my nose,' I joked. ‘Saints' noses never in the least turn up. I wish you had given me your perfectly straight nose. It would have done for any sort of character – a nose of all work. Mine is only a happy nose. It would not do for tragedy.'

‘O my dear, any nose will do to be miserable with in this world,' mamma replied. I rebuked her. It was typical of her to imbue a jest with gloom. In our new house I wanted her to be happy, enthusiastic. I believed her melancholy made gloomy things happen. It was as if all my hope and joy could never counterbalance her pessimism and yet she looked for and found her happiness only through me.

*

I told mamma her dullness made me feel nothing was of use. Was it marriage, I asked, that left her disaffected? ‘You must have been more beautiful than I when you were young.' She protested at this of course and in my secret heart I doubted it. ‘Marriage is the only happy state for a woman, as I trust you will prove,' she said, and although I did not want that to be the case I supposed it had to be true.

‘I would not put up with it if it was not a happy state,' I said, then told her I was not going to muddle away my life in service to a man and do nothing remarkable for myself.

*

I did not want to believe in the imperative of marriage. It held no appeal. I knew little about men beyond what I had read in books. I grew up with women. I saw mamma's marriages sap her wealth and twice leave her widowed then penniless. Family life I viewed as curtailing and petty. I had no wish for children, I found them irritating. And yet I supposed I
would
marry – someone of distinction and rank, I neither doubted it nor dwelt on it. I was resolved though that I was not going to let a man have power over me; lovemaking appalled me, when propositioned I felt obliged to tease. I felt no attraction to any man until I met you. Marriage was not the focus of my ambition. I wanted fame but thought no further than that my life should be pleasant, that I should star at parties, be victorious at the Archery Club, applauded at the piano and admired on horseback.

*

I read novels, poems and plays, had views on Mr Rochester in
Jane Eyre
, Becky Sharp in
Vanity Fair
, the silliness of Lydia in
Pride and Prejudice
, the awfulness of Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, the piety of Eva in
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
I was praised for my soprano voice, the skill with which I played the piano, my graceful dancing. I could read music. I spoke passable French. But my power, my gift, was to be the most captivating person in the room. My wit sparkled. I never offered merely pleasantries. Mamma, my sisters, the servants, all obeyed my wishes and feared my displeasure and sharp tongue.

*

How punished I was for such hubris. You, Deronda, only ever knew a part of my punishment, my nemesis. But through the torment I endured, I did not fall victim to mamma's dulled acceptance of misfortune. Beyond my suffering I kept alive a longing for a life that was free and a love that linked me to your wisdom; or was it to your kind dark eyes and beautiful voice?

*

Mamma and I do not quarrel. Our love is deep. She is magnanimous, as was her mother, I believe. I was her favoured child, her princess, best friend and source of pride. She coiled my hair, fastened my dresses, advised me which gloves and what jewellery to wear. She would do anything for me, make any sacrifice, and readily forgive me any misdemeanour. In her eyes I never truly could do wrong.

But I was rash, impulsive, consumed by my emotion of the moment, and at times cruel. I recall with shame a cold night when in our beds mamma felt unwell but had forgotten to take her medicine. She asked me to fetch it. I was warm and sleepy and I refused. ‘She would have done that for you whatever the discomfort, whatever the cost' was the rebuke that went through my head as I heard her stumble to the cabinet.

I was short-tempered with my sisters too. Remembered incidents of wrongdoing added to a sense that I deserved my punishment when it came … One afternoon while I was playing Chopin's ‘Minute Waltz', Alice's canary kept up a shrill, persistent whistle which I found intolerable. It was as if the wretched creature mocked me. I exploded in temper and crushed it in my fist. I killed it. Alice wept. I was shocked at myself: that I could so lose control and be provoked into rage and violence. I am capable of murder, I thought. To compensate I bought her a white mouse, but she said she hated mice and was scared of them. I think she became afraid of me and what I might do next, and it was true I was unpredictable. To myself most of all.

*

The death of Captain Davilow, my stepfather, accorded me no grief. I always hated him to come home. His attention to me was leery and unwanted. I tried never to be alone in a room with him. I could not admit my aversion to mamma, to do so would have destroyed her fragile world. I came to resent my four half-sisters and the life mamma's marriage to him compelled me to live. He squandered her money and stole her jewellery and sold it.

*

I think of your childhood, Deronda. Sir Hugo told me of it: how you grew up knowing nothing about your parents or even your true name. How you thought Sir Hugo was your father and on the one occasion when you met your mother she told you she could not love you.

We were both outsiders, you and I. More united by uncertainty than ever you allowed. But you plucked certainties for yourself from the fictions of the past: a prescriptive demanding religion, a directional quest, a constant wife, whereas I … I blew with the wind and hoped to arrive at a perfect destination.

*

Davilow inflicted a bewildering lifestyle on us. We moved from hired Paris apartments to hired villas in Lausanne, Baden, Amsterdam. We stayed nowhere long enough to settle, make friends or feel part of any place. It was a lifestyle that made me restless, rootless. Mamma gave birth to Davilow's tedious daughters: Alice, to whom I was asked to give lessons, was slow, pulled silly faces and had no ear for music or languages; Bertha was always sketching flowers and leaves, but covered the sketches if I asked to see them. She and Fanny whispered and giggled a great deal. Isabel was clumsy. That was how I viewed them then.

Davilow disappeared for weeks at a time without saying where he was. I do not know if mamma ever asked. I was her anchor, her link to my father, the eldest daughter, the one apart, the one in charge. I was contrary and demanding, but looking back to the days before the calamity of uncle's loss of money, the impending loss of Offendene, my terrible marriage – what formed my character, shaped my courage, was the haven of mamma's love for me. She protected me from my fears: of the dark, of loss of control, of failure, and of someone bending my brittle will to theirs.

*

I knew almost as little about my forebears as you of yours. Mamma's father had owned sugar plantations in Trinidad, so when the American Civil War began I think she was ashamed of her family's links to the Confederates and slavery. My father's family, apparently titled, cultured, and certain of themselves, viewed mamma as inferior and an unsatisfactory wife for one of their kind. When I was twelve mamma showed me a miniature of my father, a coloured portrait in a silver frame. I saw little beyond eyes shaped like mine, but I offended her by asking, ‘Why did you marry again, mamma? It would have been better if you had not.' She blushed and said I had no feeling.