Gwendolen (20 page)

Sir Hugo encouraged me to look forward and seek new opportunities, though he did not say how. I struggled to make sense of the chance happenings, reactions and oppositions that formed my destiny and yours. I wondered if they conformed to a mathematical equation or some configuration of the stars.

*

You did not write, just as your mother had not written to you. I knew you would not, not because you had forgotten me, but I supposed your wife would be jealous and you would not pain her. She had heard from Hans Meyrick how he thought you and I made the perfect couple. She told him I was as beautiful as Princess Eboli in Verdi's
Don Carlo
.

Sir Hugo read me the letters you wrote to him. It pained me to hear how you and Mrs Deronda sailed from Brindisi to Alexandria, then by steamer down the River Nile. I learned about your life, saw the hopelessness of my love for you, yet hoped I remained with you as your mother's free spirit, though your wife was with you as your grandfather's dream.

*

Hans stayed at the Abbey. With his long blond hair he looked the part of the artist. He told me he was named after Holbein and that he took every commission he could so as to provide for his widowed mother and three sisters. Sir Hugo paid him a generous sum to paint portraits of his wife and daughters to hang in the gallery among the Mallinger forebears.

Hans painted my portrait too, not as the bejewelled Van Dyck duchess, but dressed in black, my only adornment the talisman turquoise necklace, and seated in the gallery amid the brocades, plush upholstery and formal elders frozen in their frames. Sir Hugo bought it and said he wished it might hang with those of his own ancestors.

As I had with Sir Hugo, at first I found Hans flippant: voluble and keen to joke, but he too had a generous heart. He was enamoured of me and that tinged our friendship and made him keen to please, but he did not exasperate me with lovemaking.

*

It was a glorious summer and in caring company and the calm of the Abbey I could not only be sad. In the mornings I exercised Ruben, a bay; Constance, a mare roan; and Pleasant, a grey. They were not as fast or spirited as Criterion, but I rode far and regained strength. For hours, as I traversed the fields and lanes, among all the joys and wonders of the English countryside, I felt I had discarded Grandcourt and my past. When Sir Hugo was in town, or occupied, in the afternoons I picnicked with Hans, alone or with the Mallinger girls. We swam and played croquet. Sometimes I allowed him to win. He sketched me picking cherries in the orchard, and reading beneath a willow tree.

*

Hans was bereaved to be separated from you, his closest friend, Mirah whom he hoped might love him, and Mordecai. He loved fun and laughter, took nothing too seriously except his painting and was surprised to find I was neither haughty nor self-assured.

Used to the company of sisters, he was unafraid to tease, flatter and befriend. I was taller and stronger than he, and we joked that I was more of a man: he could not ride because horse hair made him sneeze and his eyes stream, boating on the lake exhausted him, and he splashed and paddled rather than swam.

He told me how, as students at Cambridge, he and you shared rooms and you helped him for he had no money. When afflicted with an infection in his eyes you were so attentive you neglected your own study of mathematics and had to quit university. He succeeded at your cost and wrote to Sir Hugo of your sacrifice. Sir Hugo called it your ‘passion for the pelted', but part of your allure was in the way you sought to protect the vulnerable. I think you would have liked to save me, but my needs alarmed you. Hans's sisters thought you as magical as Prince Camaralzaman from the
Arabian Nights
.

*

Hans showed me sketches of your rescuing Mirah Lapidoth from drowning in the Thames. He said he planned a large canvas of the scene, a work of abstraction and ambiguity in which it would be unclear where the sky ended and the water began, or whether you were pulling her from the water or she drawing you into it. He never painted this, but as I looked at his sketches he told me the story behind them: how on a July evening you went boating on the Thames near Putney and saw a girl of about eighteen take her cloak, soak it in the river, wrap it around her as a drowning shroud and slip into the water. How you swam across and saved her.

That was how the Jewess Mirah Lapidoth came into your life. She had come to England to look for her mother and brother but despaired of finding them. She had run from her wicked father, who had tried to sell her into prostitution, and she had nowhere to go, no money, no friends. You took her to Hans's mother and sisters, who welcomed her into their small house. Hans showed me a dozen sketches he had made of her. He thought her beautiful, was a little in love with her himself and jealous of her preference for you.

The Meyricks exuded love and charity and did not show caution at the allocation to them of a depressed and penniless stranger. Her despair and attempted suicide were soon forgotten and you, Prince Camaralzaman from the
Arabian Nights
, were her irresistible saviour.

Six months after saving Mirah Lapidoth you saw me in the Kursaal in Homburg: your gaze as if from an opposite shore, your return of my father's necklace, they were my hopes of rescue. No one made drawings of those events.

Your own family were lost to you. Instead, while I yearned for you, you scoured the streets of London's East End, searching for Mirah's mother and brother. Her mother had died but you found Mordecai.

*

Sitting with Hans in the grounds of Topping Abbey, I listened to this story with astonishment. All I heard came as a revelation, an opening of my eyes. I wondered at your reaching out to such a disturbed family. I thought the civility and privilege of your upbringing would have made you exclude connection with them.

But what again most affected me was that all the time I was yearning for you, you were searching for this Jewish identity, planning marriage to Mirah Lapidoth and emigration to a land I did not know existed.

While you were winging six thousand miles from me in your thoughts, I had seen you in everything, referred to you constantly, repeated your words of encouragement and supposed them to be of love. And at night when I heard with dread Grandcourt at my door, then endured his repeated assailing of me, my deliverance was to imagine I was with you, and that one day my dream would become reality because that was so much what I wanted. I only vaguely wondered where you actually were, and what business you were about, but never could I imagine you to be absorbed in the historical destiny of the Jews. I could as easily imagine you rising from the air on a brazen horse and vanishing into the dark as a twinkling star.

*

I appealed to Hans to explain to me what it meant to be Jewish. I hoped to understand my own exclusion. He advised me to read
The History of the Jews from the Earliest Period down to Modern Times
by Henry Milman; I took it from the Abbey library but did not get far. Hans then tried to help me fathom the Jewish calendar: how their new year, called Rosch Haschana, came in September and that at present they were in the year 5636. It was too confusing and we agreed Christian strictures and rituals were impenetrable enough. He suggested we visit a synagogue when we went to London for there was none near Topping Abbey. He said you loved the Jews for the duration of their sorrows and the patience with which they bore those sorrows and that your rescue of Mirah Lapidoth from drowning seemed portentous to you. But I was drowning too, and was there not a multitude of women like me, drowning unseen.

*

Hans was as surprised as I about your messianic plans. Though you shared rooms with him you scarcely confided. He thought your being an only child of uncertain parentage made you withdrawn, and disinclined to speak of affairs of the heart. He had no idea of your romantic interest in Mirah Lapidoth. He thought your passion was for me but that you were too moral a man to pursue a married woman. He was embarrassed to have boasted to you of his own interest in Mirah. When he read in
The Times
of Grandcourt's drowning, he supposed you then hurried to Genoa to declare your love for me. He, like it seemed the rest of the world, had observed I was in love with you.

*

As Hans spoke of the Genoa drowning I again saw Grandcourt's face rising from the water and heard him call, ‘The rope, the rope.' I asked Hans if he had a mind to paint me jumping into the sea as I failed to save from drowning the husband I hated. I did not tell him of my guilt though I yearned to do so and to speak out about how I was not married but held captive by a monster.

With difficulty I told him something of Grandcourt's brutality towards me: how he watched me like a praying mantis, visited his mistress as and when he wished, kept me from mamma and controlled what I wore, where I went and who I spoke to. I wanted to admit to Hans the torment of the nights, to confide, so as to alleviate my pain and sense of shame, but I could not shape the words. I wanted to tell him how, even though I knew it not to be true, I came to feel I deserved such humiliation or invited it. I recounted how Grandcourt put the diamonds around my neck and in my hair and how he tore my clothes, but that was as much as I could say.

Hans put his gentle, spindly arms around me and said Grandcourt had not touched the heart of me, I must rid my soul of him and not dwell on his contempt. He said I resisted him with all that was good in me, I had great courage, and thank God neither I nor anyone need ever see him again. He impersonated him by stroking an imaginary moustache, sucking at a pretend cigar and tormenting a non-existent dog. Drowning, he said, was too good for him and he wished he were still alive so he could kill him.

Hans's mischief was such a help to me. Look to the future, he said. The past is a closed book.

*

Many of his sketches were illustrations to the story of your life: the Abbey, the cloisters and library, Sir Hugo and Lady Mallinger, the dogs and the river, the Meyrick family, Mirah Lapidoth, Mordecai. Looking at them I gained some hold on the fleeting days, though it pained me to see the drawings of you where he captured your look of thoughtful appraisal.

Hans was also a friend of Rex, whom, like you, he met at Cambridge. When he showed me sketches of him, remarked on his fine face, the strength of his upper lip, and called him ‘an uncommonly good fellow', I felt another exclusion, another loss, and such a desire for Rex's honest company. Rex confided to Hans he had been so in love with me he could no longer bear to go to Offendene if I was there, or see me since I was widowed. He was resolved to remain a bachelor and devote himself to the law. Hans thought that unlikely. He told me of your annoyance when he joked to you that if Grandcourt had not got himself drowned for your sake it might have been for Rex's. ‘Is it absolutely necessary that Mrs Grandcourt should marry again?' you had said sharply and Hans sensed ambivalence in you and jealousy, or some cousin to it.

*

I and Mirah in love with you, Hans in love with Mirah, Rex in love with me, you in love with Mirah and me. Hans said God must be choking himself with glee. He and I talked and talked and after a while laughed at such muddles of the heart. He said knowing me assuaged his bereavement at losing you, Mirah and Mordecai, that knowing me made him happy and glad he was born.

*

I stayed at the Abbey for seven weeks. The beauty of the surroundings, the wisdom of Sir Hugo, the kindliness of Lady Mallinger, the friendship of Hans: all worked magic on me to bring me to a wiser version of my former self.

I admitted to Hans I was unclear what to do next, discouraged as I had been by Klesmer over my music and acting, brutalised by Grandcourt and disappointed in love by you. I cried when I told him I felt too punished by life and too at odds with myself to continue. He said I must see a wider world than Pennicote. I should go with him to London, shake off the dubious status of the widow denied her duplicitous husband's inheritance, and re-emerge as Gwendolen Harleth. A new life would beckon. But for now, Hans said, it was enough for me to be alive and, if not happy, free from entrapment and anguish. He told me I was lovely, humorous, energetic, witty and intelligent, I enlivened and would always enliven whatever company I was in, his mother and sisters would welcome me and he was sure when a little time had passed Rex would gladly be friends with me again.

Hans made me feel less alone, less sullied. He said I knew what love was because I had felt it for mamma and you, and I did not have to go and find the Promised Land, save the Jews, sing like Alchirisi, compose like Klesmer, marry for wealth or populate the planet. You have suffered, he said, and now you owe it to yourself to live happily, free from pain and guilt. Then he took my hand and we went swimming in the lake, I much faster and stronger than he.

It was so new to me: loving friendship without expectation or demand – just for the sake of it, just for the sake of it. I felt reborn.

*

One afternoon in the library I asked Sir Hugo how long it took him to recover from his grand passion for your mother, the beautiful gifted Princess Leonora Halm-Eberstein. He laughed and said a lifetime and we should not expect or desire to recover from what affects us most. What has happened lives on in us, he said, and the art was not to stay fixed in the past but to move on in a state of acceptance: not to be bitter, or pine for what we have lost or clearly cannot have, not to want blue eyes if we have brown, or seek to be young if we are old, not to let regret and disappointment define us.

‘Dan was with me to remind me of her,' Sir Hugo said. ‘He was my beautiful special son, gifted and wise, solemn and apart, abiding proof of my love for his mother.'

He told me how, as you grew up, you modelled your manners and appearance on his and dressed, ate and worshipped like a Mallinger, as English as the crest embroidered on your handkerchiefs (but torn from the handkerchief in which you wrapped my father's chain).