Gwendolen (23 page)

There was a silence in which she scrutinised me with her shrewd blue eyes. I found this unnerving, as if she were 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 realised 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 can 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 criticised his own father, 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 harbour 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 protection, a notion of privacy, whereas Mrs Lewes's blue eyes absorbed my deep blush, shortness of breath, struggle to confront the darkest deed of which I could ever be guilty. Were I to lie she would know, of that I was sure.

‘He came up further off,' I said, though my voice, as had 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, 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 that my desperate hate, my murderous rage, was born from his ravishment of me? Was she going to ask about that, or was that a 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 harbour side 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 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 harbour 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 unrecognised 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, and I gave a slight smile and a nod, to pretend I recognised 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. I suspected it might be some time before I read them. Yours was a religion of sublime far-off memories, she told me. ‘You must talk with Mr Deutsch. He is as erudite as Mordecai Lapidoth. 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-honoured and symbolic. While waiting for your mother you searched the city's archival records. She had also 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 harbour and could not go through the city gate unless granted a licence 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. Jewish traders from Frankfurt, on their way to San Remo for business, asked permission not to wear the yellow badges on their hats so as to avoid being insulted and harassed.

In Spain and Portugal the exiled Jews had been doctors, musicians, clockmakers, shop owners. By Genoa harbour they hawked fabrics, coffee, woollen stockings, shirts for soldiers. They were not allowed to wear swords, or walk about at night, any slight infringement of the law and they were arrested or killed, residence permits if granted for a time were renewed or not when they expired.

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 it 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, it is now that matters. I felt the same frustration and disinterest as with Uncle Gascoigne's sermons at Pennicote. I preferred galloping across the fields. All this: you must do this, and you can't do that, and this is how things are because Moses said so. 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 ask me which 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, the leading novelist of her time, a bluestocking immersed in different cultures and history who translated works 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 signalled 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? It was as if she inhabited 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 emphasised 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 acute; all around me others succeeded while I stood still. I was troubled by all I did not do; I felt suspended between past and future, ignorance and aspiration, and between my own reality and Mrs Lewes's strange clairvoyance.

*

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 marvelled, but only slightly. The city circus was of a different order.

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.