Gwendolen (24 page)

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 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 on every occasion 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, gas lights 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 thread, 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 backwards and forwards on a high tight wire, 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.

And then at the end, to the disbelief of us all, she threw down the balancing pole, leapt 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 many times returned, put on his wig then doffed it to show his cropped hair and remind us we had marvelled 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 marvelled 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 calloused and scraped his hands and limbs were, and 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 had 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 birth name was Julian Hope and when, as a boy, he saw his first circus, mesmerised by the high-wire acts he determined to be a tightrope walker. He practised on the clothesline in his mother's yard, worked in the cotton fields and, using the money he earned, travelled 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 theatre, 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 of 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 mamma, and how, 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'd screamed. Fear, I said, stood between me and life. As I spoke I remembered your words: ‘Turn your fear into 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 he did not care if romance was between a man, woman or idea, it was the theatre of it he loved. One afternoon he told me of how he had been caught kissing a man and the theatre 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 said 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 levelled towards me and with less defensiveness, that it was not the same, 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 new-found 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 wore embroidered trousers, a purple velvet robe and a sabre 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 had left 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 uncertain and risk of injury 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 new 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 mamma, 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 at social occasions Rex seemed to avoid me, for when we had picnicked at Cardell Chase some months previously I dared to hope our childhood closeness might be restored.

Then one afternoon, at a gallery viewing of Hans's work, I saw him 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.

*

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. Within two years Rex 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. Events changed him, I supposed: my rejection of his marriage proposal, his family's sudden penury, his urgent desire to provide for them, the seriousness of his studies. 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 William, a twelve-year-old boy 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, the intention for him to admire my long neck, profile and retroussé nose. I wanted to dispel the shadow of that awkward morning at Offendene when I met his marriage proposal with scornful impatience. I wondered if either of us would allude to that day and our subsequent lives. ‘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, 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. My life might have been calm, even if not very different from other calm, contented lives.

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.