Gwendolen (30 page)

I had no hesitation or alarm in agreeing. I stood on a dais, a soft cloth wound round my waist, my head looking up, my right arm stretched high. My breasts were as much mine as my arms. Think of all you aspire to be, Paul said to me. Think of how powerful you are and the journeys you will make. Stretch as high as you can. Feel as brave as you are. He talked of the ‘Salon of the Rejected', of the need to move on from the old order, to discard the orthodoxies, trumpery and inhibitions of the past and find the courage to be.

For many sessions I became Marianne, Goddess of Liberty. I thought how proud Barbara would be of me. I concentrated and felt safe within myself and without embarrassment or alarm at Paul looking intently at my part-naked body. As I reached upward, my head back, my muscles flexed, I thought how far I had travelled from Herr Klesmer's insults and Grandcourt's diamonds. With my short hair and unfettered body I felt as I did when riding fearlessly, swimming in deep water or parachuting through the air. Whatever the future held for me, no one, I vowed, would again diminish me. I wished that you could have seen me, so strong and free.

*

Barbara accompanied me, Peter, Antoine and Hans to see mamma and my sisters at Offendene. We arrived with flowers, sketchbooks, straw hats, exotic fruits and special Algerian sweets. Rex and Beatrix visited, and Anna. Bertha and Marjorie Millet joined us all for tea. I expected mamma to be horrified at my new appearance but she and all the others thought me more beautiful than ever. Mamma was girlish and happy with my new-found friends. Barbara flattered her and made her laugh. I thought how different mamma's life might have been had she been shown a way to determine her own path.

*

And you, you receded but did not disappear. I carried you in my mind. I thought of your compliant wife, her obedience and self-abnegation. I did not regret exclusion from the world your faith imposed. Your orthodoxy seemed another oppression, another man-made scheme. I could not be a Jew.

Nor could I reach the noble, self-effacing ends you advised. Each directive you gave seemed daunting, each aspiration beyond my grasp: I was not to gamble, I was to accept my suffering, nurture remorse, live to serve others. Others were no more to me than trees blowing in the wind. I chose instead to aspire to be myself, responsible for myself, to stand on my own feet.

*

On several occasions I visited Mrs Lewes with Mrs Bodichon, who always arrived with a gift: a jar of home-made blackberry jam, a basket of mushrooms, a sketch of a friend. Mrs Lewes had several of Mrs Bodichon's paintings on her walls. I observed the generosity of both women and the deep bond of friendship between them. They had been friends since Barbara was twenty-five and Mary Anne, as she called her, thirty-three. Mary Anne was then shy, awkward, suffered with her writing and spoke of the pain and disgrace inflicted on her family because she lived with Mr Lewes and her sorrow that her brother would not speak to her because he thought her shameful. Barbara's view was that it was not for others to say how Mary Anne's should live, and whatever her choice she would stand by her.

Mrs Lewes, I came to observe, had as warm a heart as Barbara. I reviewed what I at first mistook as her dislike of me. I don't think it was that. I think she was in awe of my appearance and suffered because such gifts eluded her, as her intellect and talent eluded me. And I believe she wondered what direction there could be for me if I had no particular ability or talent beyond my looks, and no strong or determined direction like you. She understood marriage would not suit me, but did not see how, outside of marriage, I might carve my way for myself. I could not be brilliant like Catherine Arrowpoint, capture the admiration and attention of Herr Klesmer, be rooted in a cause like you. I had to brave the world with my shortcomings and still believe myself worthy of an equal place with all the rich, clever people with whom I brushed shoulders, minds and points of view.

*

Barbara would have liked her friend to take part in campaigns for justice, but though Mary Anne wanted to see women socially elevated, educated equally with men and protected by fair laws, she was not going to write manifestos or make political speeches. Her contribution was to take a man's name while being truly a woman and to create Dorothea Casaubon, Maggie Tulliver and Romola. Barbara said I would be surprised were I to read Mary Anne's latest book, which was with her editor, John Blackwood, for I would recognise many of the people in it. I said I would purchase a copy when it was published. I asked its title but Barbara could not, or would not, say.

*

She invited me, Hans and Paul, with Antoine of course, and Mr and Mrs Lewes to spend Christmas with her and a writer friend, Matilda Betham-Edwards. She rented a parsonage on the Isle of Wight. Eugene Bodichon was stranded in Algiers. Miss Betham-Edwards had been a friend of Charles Dickens, wrote poetry and novels and loved France as much as England. She and Paul spoke mainly in French and I was pleased to find I understood most of their conversations.

I remember Mrs Lewes playing Beethoven on the parsonage piano while Hans and Antoine played practical jokes. We had a goose and vegetables for Christmas dinner. Hans came in with a silver tureen, said it was a Christmas speciality, took off the lid with a flourish, and I screamed because of what looked like a snake but was the vicar's scourge, which Hans had unhooked from a wall in the study.

I spoke of the forthcoming journey to the African continent, Arabia and other exotic destinations, but I rather felt Mrs Lewes was unconvinced that in the company of Paul and Antoine this was the right journey for me to make.

*

I was restless to leave England. Paul talked of the beauty and wildness of Africa and I longed to be there. I wanted to know what each day might bring, to walk and meet the unexpected, see other colours, distant rivers, a fiercer sunrise, to have if only for a while no fixed receipt. Barbara talked of blue mountains, waterfalls, dark cypresses, white houses among olive trees. I looked closely at her paintings of Moorish arches, white mosques, men in thobes, and Arabian nights. I wanted to breathe such sights, to see for myself.

I talked with puzzlement to Hans about why Paul wanted me to travel with him and Antoine. Hans said I screened them from too much visibility and eased their path and perhaps they did the same for me. He said gently he did not believe Paul was my prince on a white steed who would capture my heart and carry me to the castle of eternal happiness. Perhaps, he said, I did not want such capture. Perhaps I needed my spirit to be free.

*

On the eve of departure with Paul Leroy for unmet lands I went for one last time to Mrs Lewes's salon. I had said my goodbye to mamma, dried her tears and promised her my speedy return. Mrs Lewes had arranged a gathering as a way of saying bon voyage. Rex was there with Beatrix Brackenshaw, Hans with Anna, and my uncle and aunt stood to one side like awkward onlookers. Klesmer and Catherine played a piano duet.

Mrs Lewes quizzed me about our plans: where we were to stay, who we knew, what we were taking with us. Paul and Antoine had arranged it all, I explained. I asked her to tell me if the journey would be a success and if I would feel happy and free for a while at least. She laughed and said, ‘My dear Gwendolen, I must tell you again, I am not a soothsayer. I do not know what life holds for myself, let alone you.'

‘But you knew every detail of my love for Deronda,' I said, ‘and my pain at his going. You knew of Rex's declaration of love and how I spurned him, knew of my wrongdoing with Grandcourt and how punished I was. You knew of mamma's humiliation and uncle's avarice, of Mrs Glasher, Lush and Sir Hugo's love for Deronda's mother. You knew what was in the papers in the trunk in Mainz, of Mirah Lapidoth's disreputable father, the mildness of the weather on the evening when she tried to drown in the Thames and Deronda saved her. You knew everything, everything, everything that impinged on my life, so surely you must know if I will, for a few months at least, be happy with Paul Leroy.

‘My dear Gwendolen,' she said. Her voice was concerned and I at last felt she truly cared about the quintessential me, and not just with the detachment of her novelist's mind. ‘I don't know what the future will bring you. Paul is a talented artist, wealthy but not tainted by wealth, he is good-looking and cares for you with devotion. He is inseparable from Antoine and I do not know the significance of that or whether their togetherness will disconcert you. I cannot see why you should fail to enjoy your journey. The omens are good. But I do not know whether you will be happy or how life will treat you. You know as well as I that nothing is for ever, not the good times nor the bad, that our plans are often disrupted and our hopes diverted. I do not know, when you board the boat at Dover, whether the sea will be choppy.'

But, I said, if you knew in such detail, and without being told, so much of what has happened to me can you not tell something of what my future will be? ‘Now, Gwendolen, please,' she said, with humorous reproach. And she looked beyond me, so I turned to see at what and there you were. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating. ‘Yes,' Mrs Lewes said. ‘Daniel is visiting.' She smiled and moved away to talk to a small, elderly, grey-eyed woman with nervous gestures and a hesitant smile who I think was a writer too.

*

It was as if the years snapped shut. There you were. Your quality of stillness. Your grave demeanour. Your gaze of persistence and containment as at Homburg, as if all I am was known to you. Your skin was darker; you had grown a beard; you were wearing one of those little hats, a mark of Jewish orthodoxy, a
kippah
, Hans said they were called. You looked biblical.

You asked, with all caring, how I was, your dark eyes searching, expecting perhaps the old unrestrained outpouring. I saw you had not forgotten me, that you held fixed our unchanging love though we took it to no harbour. For a brief but eternal moment I could not speak. Then I told you I was going on a journey with friends and was leaving the next day.

You looked quizzical, disappointed, and as if you wanted to know more. Wanted perhaps to hear of the handsome prince, with the castle, carriages and glinting sword of honour, who rescued me from suicide by drowning and helped me overcome the guilt of aiding my evil husband's death.

‘Your life …' you said, in a hesitant voice, but I did not know what to say. I did not tell you I had learned from Barbara and Mrs Lewes that money and the marriage sacrament do not matter as much as the shared love I could not find. I did not tell you how broken I was when you left, that I recovered but was changed, or how I found the essence of my being when weightless in the swirling sky. So I talked of an impending journey with untried friends, of kind Sir Hugo, Hans, the constant of Offendene, mamma's contentment, the new windows in the house and the same returning swallows in the barn.

You wanted to go beyond detail and delve into my heart. So I told you that, for the most part, I was at peace with myself, that out of evil good had come, and I had learned to take things as they are, not as I wanted them to be, or how I was led to believe they ought to be. I said I could be reflective at whatever came to me, good or bad, sun or shadow, the best things about myself and the worst. ‘You'll be pleased to hear,' I said, ‘that I have almost but not quite lost any wish to gamble.'

You smiled but looked confused. And I sensed the gulf between us. Though I had gone no further than to London, Paris and Amsterdam, and you three thousand miles to the other side of the world, I had travelled in a way you could not understand. Your star was fixed. My journeys lay ahead, journeys that were uncertain, and sometimes built on sand, but I had found within me the courage to make them, though my true journey perhaps would never be made.

Time and suffering had built a wall between us. Standing beside you I revisited the intense love I had for you three years previously, but I could not return to the girl I then was. You were more entrenched in who you were, more sure of what was right and wrong, and I was less. I had seen how little it takes to drown. It was not that I had learned to be more cautious, for to travel to unknown places with men to whom I was not attached was not cautious. It was more that I had learned not to suppose I could arrive at a destination.

You took your belief and its trappings with you from Wessex to Palestine: the Torah and the Tehillah, the ten commandments, the day of atonement, a day for rejoicing. I shunned any orthodoxy, Christian or Jew. I had suffered confinement and I would avoid it again: this you must be, that you must not be, pressed on me like a frame. I cared for the wide world and my brief and glancing view of it, not defined by a man's commands. I was a free spirit like your mother, though I lacked her strength and talent. I loved you from the moment I first saw you, I love you now. You are in my heart. I would always be thrilled, shocked and delighted to go into a room and see you there. It would always be as if I had found what I had lost and was looking for. But I could not have converted to your beliefs.

*

You noted I was wearing the turquoise chain. You said you thought of me often. You did not write because you were uncertain what to say. Sir Hugo often sent you my news. You were disappointed I would be unable to visit the Abbey while you were there. Mirah was at home in Jerusalem with your son, Daniel.

And then you said it had long been on your mind to give me a memento. Something other than the turquoise chain. You took from your coat your mother's locket with her picture in it. I am wearing it now.

*

You and I, we were the life we did not live. Never together, never wholly apart. We were the figures on Keats's Grecian Urn, questioning desire locked in our eyes and hearts. I was important to you like the unreal mother you once glimpsed but never knew. You were important to me like the love and happiness I yearn for still.