Gwendolen (26 page)

*

Often Hans accompanied me when I went home to see mamma. He was a loved guest. I have on the wall before me his sketch of the family grouped in the porch at Offendene as I arrive and mamma and my sisters greet me. That was how I remembered the scene on so many occasions. It was my delight to arrive like a meteor bearing gifts of hats, scarves, perfumes and a hamper from Fortnum & Mason.

Mamma told me I looked radiant, and in truth so did she: her face less lined, her eyes bright, her clothes fashionable. She proudly showed me her wardrobe of new gowns. She told me Mr Quallon the banker was her new adviser on financial matters. Offendene was smart; its management supervised by Rex: the hedges clipped, the stables extended. There was a full-time groom, a carriage for mamma to go visiting. Refitted windows made the house warmer; Jocasta and Miss Merry acquainted me with the new and gleaming kitchen. Rex's generosity was an act of loving kindness; he wished for nothing in return but our well-being.

I doubt mamma could see me with a man without wondering if he might become another husband, but fortunately she was too reticent to ask questions about Hans. We all gathered around the dining-room table and my sisters quizzed me about the exotic life of balls and lovelorn swains they supposed I lived in London. I gave some account of Mrs Lewes and her salons, the circus, opera, and latest hats and plumes in the shops, but I did not talk of Julian's wondrous shift to Juliette, or my ascent in a hot-air balloon and descent to earth in a parachute, for they seemed like flights too far for Pennicote.

Mamma's delight was to see me happier and safe. She confided her fear of my being lost, in grief and disappointment, to myself and her. With simulated nonchalance she asked of you: had you written to me? I said you had not, but that from others I heard details of your sunlit journey to the Wailing Place.

Clintock called at every opportunity and was so ardent in wooing Isabel he seemed scarcely now to notice me. His habit was to hold forth on tedious matters as if they were of supreme importance: how not to clean a hen coop, I remember was one. It was a mystery to me that Isabel tolerated an hour of his company, let alone the prospect of a lifetime of it, but I had learned that many life choices defy understanding.

Bertha came home, knowing I was there. I told her about Julian, for in knickerbockers and with short cropped hair she now looked more of a man than he. It was her view that all people should be free to follow their hearts. She enjoyed her work as a landscape gardener and spoke with unconscious frequency about Marjorie Millet, a stable girl at the Myre estate, with whom she rode, picnicked, and roamed the countryside. I suspected Bertha might be the next to surprise me about the byways of the human heart.

When I left with Hans for London, mamma did not say goodbye with the same puzzled and disappointed countenance as when I was married to Grandcourt. As our carriage drove away, she and my sisters waved and waved from the porch, and I waved and my heart was wrenched, but more from a sense of the fragility of their lives and hopes, and the awareness of all things passing, than from remorse at leaving Offendene for the still unknown.

*

‘You must meet Barbara,' Mrs Lewes said at my next attendance at her salon gathering. She gave her now familiar scrutiny of me, as if reading every detail of my appearance and thoughts.

Mrs Bodichon was about fifty, tall but plumpish, unselfconscious and with a proud, intelligent face, her hair still golden though sprinkled with grey, her skirt rather short. Hans told me she was a good watercolourist, a pioneer for women's liberation, that Mrs Lewes portrayed her in her novel
Romola
, and that she did not wear corsets because she viewed them as a symbol of male subjugation. How he acquired this last piece of information I do not know, but he liked such detail.

He was deep in talk with a tall, dark-haired young man whom I had not seen on previous Sunday gatherings and who, whenever I looked up, seemed to be looking at me. I rather wished I was in their company for I was curious about this stranger's manner and their intense conversation.

‘So you're the intriguing Gwendolen,' Barbara Bodichon said to me. ‘Mary Anne has talked a great deal about you.' Apprehension as to what this talk might be must have shown on my face, for she added, ‘About your love for Daniel Deronda and your unfortunate marriage.'

*

‘Your love for Daniel Deronda': as I heard those words, though time had passed and I had made such moves forward to life without you, a stab of pain and loss went through me so keen that I reeled, and to steady myself held the back of a chair. I then met the gaze of the tall young man and for a moment, because I was thinking of you, I thought his gaze came from you. It had the same intensity of interest as yours at the Kursaal in Homburg when you drew me into you, and the same effect on me of fear that my will had surrendered. I looked away.

*

Mrs Bodichon asked how I liked London and said she admired my courage in braving the city alone. I protested I could not claim courage, with Hans as my escort and attentive friend, Sir Hugo Mallinger caring for me like a father, my more than comfortable quarters at Park Lane, and mamma and my horse and the countryside only a day's drive away.

That was all to the good, Mrs Bodichon said, now I was free and not trapped in the iniquity of a violent marriage. She pulled from her bag two pamphlets she had published, and handed them to me. I glanced at their titles: ‘A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women', and ‘Women and Work'. I thanked her but doubted I would read either. I was more disposed to live iniquity than read about it. (I still have all Mrs Bodichon's pamphlets.)

She then gave me a little lecture on how wrong it was for men to hold the financial resources of the world and refuse to let women do decently paid work or have professional careers. To force women to marry for financial support was no better than legalised prostitution, she said. She spoke of a woman whose stolen purse was described in court as the property of her husband. ‘All professions ought to be open to women,' she said. ‘They should be employed as doctors, preachers, Members of Parliament, watchmakers, trained as clerks, cashiers and accountants, allowed to read all literature, including Rabelais, Fielding and Sterne, allowed to swim in municipal baths.'

I had read Charlotte Brontë's novel
Shirley
and thought her right to call on men to alter their laws so women might have lives other than through marriage, but though I wanted to be free or at least not chained, happy or at least not sad, mine was not a campaigning disposition. I told Barbara Bodichon I could not have great theories. I could only feel as I did. She said for us all it was how we felt that mattered. I had my life to live and, like all women she met, I needed that life to be unfettered. ‘I love the courage of women,' she said. ‘Had God existed she would have been a woman.'

*

Over the months that followed I learned about Mrs Bodichon's eventful life. She came from a family of social reformers, Florence Nightingale was her niece, and William Smith, who worked to abolish slavery, was her grandfather, so it was perhaps in her nature to strive to make the world a better place.

I remembered luncheon at Diplow and the conversation about sugar plantations. I had only half listened, for all I had wanted was to hear your voice. Mrs Bodichon told me of a slave auction she had observed in America, of a girl, advertised as ‘Amy, a good cook, a good washer', who was holding her baby. A blackguard-looking man opened Amy's mouth, examined her teeth, felt her all over, said she was expensive, and paid eight hundred dollars for her. Another girl, Polly, twice sold, had her three children taken from her, separated from each other and sold. Polly said to Mrs Bodichon, ‘Mum, we poor creatures have need to believe in God, for if God Almighty will not be good to us some day, why were we born.'

Mrs Bodichon's politician father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, never married her mother, a milliner like Julian's mother, nor did she take his name. Barbara, eldest of the five children she bore him, was seven when her mother, aged twenty-three, died. She and her brothers and sisters were then raised by Mr Leigh Smith. He taught them at home and supervised the building of a large carriage, like an omnibus and drawn by four horses, in which he, they and the servants each year went on magnificent journeys to Italy, Ireland or Scotland. They took sketching materials with them and this gave Mrs Bodichon her enthusiasm for painting out of doors.

*

At the salon afternoon she spoke of Hans's paintings and praised his 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 £49. I apologised 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 had 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 realised 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-traveller journeying into the next century. Mrs Bodichon had been in Hanover 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 said 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 asked. She could show me copies of photographs taken from Nadar's huge balloon ‘The Giant'. He called it ‘The Ultimate Balloon' and 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 mountain tops. But first of all you must come and stay at Scalands. Now let us fix a date.'

*

When I looked towards Paul Leroy he was looking at me. When I looked towards 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 prise 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 resumed her interrogation. She wanted news of my half-sisters: were they studying, courting, working? Alice and Fanny were still at home, I told her, and Isabel was courting Clintock the archdeacon's son. 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 colour of Jocasta's hair? Who exercised Criterion now I was so much away from home? Who did the Momperts employ as a governess after I withdrew my candidacy, and how was mamma managing with her rheumatic pains and shortness of breath? What news was there of Lassman of Grapnell & Co? Had uncle and mamma 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 and who meant nothing to her. I would not ask her the colour 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 anti-heroine and you her hero.