Gwendolen (27 page)

Her interest seemed too direct and even absurd. ‘Have you met mamma?' I asked, knowing she had not. I gave vague and equivocal answers to most of her questions, but I remember telling her how uncle met Lassman by chance at the Army and Navy Club in London and found him lacking in all contrition. With money borrowed from his bank, which he could never repay, this architect of our downfall set up as a property developer and built a terrace of houses in East London. Mrs Lewes asked me my opinion of him and I condemned such ambition to profit at the expense of others. Her look was ironic.

Was Grandcourt's body ever washed ashore she wanted to know. Where was Mrs Glasher now? Did I still sleep in a bed beside mamma's when I went home to Offendene? And with that question I realised the hard transition I had made. I would never again be the child I was, the adored, assured, bright, witty girl. Yes, Offendene was the place I viewed as home, but Grandcourt took the innocent heart of it from me. I could not again be mamma's beloved daughter whose every word and wish was precious.

All I said to Mrs Lewes was that Offendene, Pennicote and Wancester now seemed to me small and used up. I had outgrown that life and must reach for the wider world. And even if I could not grandly succeed I wanted to look forward, see new landscapes, meet new people and be at ease with who I felt myself to be.

‘You will not accept a small size for your woman's heart,' she said and laughed.

*

Then she told me how, when she and Mr Lewes were in Homburg, they visited the Kursaal – only, she stressed, because of their interest in its architecture and history. She saw there a beautiful English girl, apparently Byron's great-niece, gambling feverishly and she wept to see this young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her.

Again I had a sense of unreality, as if I were a work of fiction, a creation of her pen. Was she likening me to Byron's great-niece? Did she know I had gambled at the Kursaal and lost? Was she colluding with your disapproval when on that decisive day you gazed at me? I could not countenance that she might know of that gaze, or how for me it was the moment of supreme connection against which I measured my downfall.

I tried not to show consternation. I said I did not see why occasional gambling was a crime. For myself I enjoyed the distraction of it and hated the duplicitous standards expected of women, particularly if they were young and unmarried. ‘Surely you know what it is to suffer the slavery of being a woman,' I quoted your mother, ‘your happiness made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.' ‘Ah,' Mrs Lewes said, ‘the Princess Eberstein. But she had a world-class talent to defend. When her voice failed in middle age she married again: a Russian prince.'

I supposed her to imply my talent had no class and therefore, though still in youth, my best option was to find a prince. I said I found it hard to understand why Princess Eberstein chose to take a second husband after her declared abhorrence of marriage and admission she was unable to love. Nor did I understand her explanation that she gave you away to spare you from knowing you were born a Jew. Her father and husband died soon after you were born and she then converted to Christianity. She could have raised you as a Christian without Jewishness being of significance.

Mrs Lewes thought your mother would have kept you if she could both have cared for you and pursued her career. Giving you to Sir Hugo was perhaps an impulsive act. He was there and said he longed for a son like you. But I was mystified. Giving away your child was hardly like pawning a necklace. And she abandoned you entirely, evinced no interest in you and although she remained unloving, then remarried, had five more children but did not part with them.

*

I wondered if Mrs Lewes had researched the lives of everyone in this room and beyond. I wondered if she dwelt on other people's lives to deflect attention from her own, and whether she denigrated me – my beauty, youth, lack of education, talent or sound judgement – in order to elevate herself. Mr Lewes was devoted but her own arrangement of the heart was unusual. I suspect she was troubled by its unorthodoxy.

I began to view her as a fairground gypsy, a Madame Rose who could reveal my future, about which I was increasingly more concerned than my past, if I proffered the palm of my hand or if she felt the contours of my skull or scrutinised the dregs in my teacup. I felt alarmed in her company. I surmised you or Sir Hugo must have given her much information, for it certainly had not come from me.

*

She then mentioned my physical recoil at lovemaking and asked what was at the root of this aversion and if I preferred women to men. She said she had experience of that. I did not grace such questions with an answer. In her books, or the few I had read, she had not been candid about such issues. But I must have blushed, for she gave her knowing smile then asked if I might marry again. I told her I would not.

Then she asked an even more perverse question: was there a level on which I invited Grandcourt's assault on me? Was that the only way in which my coldness could be breached? ‘Relationship is formed from recognition,' she said. ‘You knew of his cruelty, knew how unscrupulous and punishing he was to the woman who bore his children.'

I could not check my anger. I was not, I told her, the flawed victim she perceived me to be. I said, ‘I am not like that. You don't know me. I am a young woman who has been unlucky and badly treated. It is as simple as that. My luck will change.' I accused her of contriving a version of me then condemning her own creation.

I felt questioned and cross-examined like a defendant on trial. It occurred to me if ever I was to confide what Grandcourt had done to me I would need Barbara Bodichon's outspoken warmth, not Mrs Lewes's adversarial detachment.

*

‘You needed money,' Mrs Lewes said. ‘You hoped Grandcourt's wealth would save your mother and sisters from penury. Your motive was in part honourable but your course of action sullied.'

‘I had no guidance, no time to reflect,' I told her. ‘Grandcourt deceived me. He was determined, persuasive, and pressed me into hasty marriage. For the span of a brief courtship he charmed all problems away. He pretended to be what he was not.'

She observed my agitation and became gentler. ‘I hoped Rex might marry you,' she said, and again I had a fleeting intimation of how safe and, yes, happy my life might have been had that come about. I said it was enough that he and I had now restored the friendship I feared lost when I could not reciprocate his love for me. Did she know, I asked, of his engagement to Beatrix Brackenshaw, his management of the Brackenshaw estates and the gift he helped arrange of security of tenure at Offendene for mamma and us all? She looked surprised and said she knew nothing of that: the last she had heard of Rex was of his excelling at his law studies and his continuing devastation at my rejection of him.

Though she knew so much about us, it seemed the connection stopped at a point in time, like a broken love affair or a moving on from friendship. Or perhaps she viewed us as players on a stage for the duration of an evening, then abandoned us into the night and went home with her ugly little quasi-husband, dogs and toothache, to other interests.

*

I wanted no more questions about myself. I wanted news of you. Had you loved me? I blurted the question unrehearsed. ‘Yes,' Mrs Lewes said, without hesitation. ‘But perhaps he found you too like his mother, too wilful and vain. I expect he thought you would hurt him. And you are not a Jew. You cannot understand the essential allegiance.'

And then I asked the question that if I allowed it choked my heart: did she think you would come back to me?

Her eyes looked shrewd but tired. ‘Gwendolen,' she said. ‘I am not a soothsayer. But as you know, Mr Deronda is married, his wife is adoring, they have a child now, they are an orthodox Jewish family. Will he return to you? How can I know? I am sure he carries you with him.'

*

I thought of the Abbey and your English upbringing. You must carry that with you too. And I felt she did know. That she knew it all. Knew me from even before I was born. Knew why it was that the face in the wainscot broke my control, and why I shivered if touched by a man. I suspected she had been there in the room on my wedding night when I opened the box of diamonds, had seen Grandcourt tear at my clothes, pin me to the bed and spoil me. Knew why I then yearned for you to console me, counsel me, help me mend. Knew that were you to return, it would not be to me.

‘But,' I ventured despite myself, ‘were his wife to die …' She made an exasperated sound and turned away. Her strange little husband, who was not a husband, sensed discord and came to my side. He spoke apologetically of Polly's fascination with human nature and the quotidian detail of all our lives.

Mrs Lewes then took my hand in her warm hand and said in the kindest voice that I fascinated and intrigued her and was often on her mind. More often than I would ever know. The admission sounded like a declaration of love. I was unsure how to respond to this, or what to make of it, or what my relationship to her was. ‘Please come back next Sunday,' she said. ‘There is much else I should like to know.'

*

Hans and I took a brougham home. He was enthusiastic about the guests at The Priory, the stylish setting, the pleasing cakes and vintage wine. He asked me about Barbara Bodichon. I said I found her warm-hearted, interesting, quite unlike any other woman I had met and how pleased I was she had invited me to her country cottage. He spoke of her fame as a feminist and a socialist and I told him I knew that, but it did not matter, she was as interesting as if she were neither of those things.

Hans had talked to Paul Leroy and another painter, Edward Byrne-Jones, whose lover tried to drown herself in the Regent's Canal when he did not elope with her. She was his model, a beautiful Greek woman, but Byrne-Jones was married and there was drama and scandal.

Hans said Paul Leroy was smitten with me, had spoken of my beauty, grace, the pathos in my eyes and I do not remember what, and had asked him to ask me if I would model for him. Hans teased about love at first sight, said he was aggrieved at such competition, feared his own chances were now nil, and that with beautiful women he was always destined to lose to men more talented, rich and handsome than himself. First he lost Mirah to you and now clearly me to Paul Leroy. For himself, he would have to make do with women of the streets.

Did he not consider it an impediment, I asked, that Paul Leroy and I knew nothing of each other and had not spoken? Hans said it was better that way, for then our illusions need not be broken. As for his own pretence at self-denigration I reminded him how, for months now, at the mere mention of the name Hans, my cousin Anna's eyes brightened. Hans's view was that he and Anna were mere mortals, while I had cast my spell on genius, intrigued the eye and snared the heart of a man who might prove the most important artist of his generation.

Leroy had studios in London, Paris and near Florence; his work was bought by the cognoscenti and the rich. I ought to be proud and pleased, Hans said. I was freed from my persecutor and welcome at the heart of London intellectual and cultural life. George Eliot, George Lewes, Immanuel Deutsch, Barbara Bodichon, Paul Leroy: here were the people who were shaping and changing our literary, artistic and social destiny. And of course himself, he mocked. Shining from above. Was I not glad, he asked, that I had left the little world of Pennicote behind? He would wager that Leroy's destiny and mine were entwined.

*

I was flattered to be reminded of my power to impress such glittering stars of Society but conscious of a familiar sense of inferiority. It seemed I was not to contribute to the transcendence of Art. I doubted I could unequivocally enjoy Mrs Lewes's beautiful prose, Mr Leroy's inspired canvases, Herr Klesmer's exquisite rendition of ‘
Freudvoll, Leidvoll, Gedankenvoll
'. Hans earned his place in the Salon, while I was rooted in uncertainty and, being neither a man nor an artist, was witness to a world from which I was excluded.

When staking my numbers on the red and the black, or ascending the heavens in a balloon, I felt freed from the snare of middlingness. At heart I feared I was, like Julian, a daughter of Narcissus and I feared being no more than the reflected image of desire in an admirer's eyes, or a puppet in the hand of a stranger.

*

I lamented to Hans how Mrs Lewes probed me with questions and how it made me feel most strange that she seemed to know everything about me.

‘She is a novelist,' Hans said. ‘Understanding people is her trade.'

‘But she does not quiz you,' I said. ‘And a novelist is not a biographer. It discomfits me that she knows more about me than I know about myself. Why should she want to know about mamma's shortness of breath and Rex's marriage, and what my sisters are doing and what became of Lassman and whether Grandcourt's body was on the ocean bed?'

I said I suspected she was going to write about me, which made me uneasy. I wanted to live a free, adventurous and happy life, not become a character in a book. Hans said she would probably write about us all, that was what novelists did, but the hero of the story would be you, Deronda. You were the one she admired and lauded, she was interested in the rest of us only in so far as we impinged on you. I should remember she was very close to you and thought you the best of men. You were her hero.

Hans then said he believed Mrs Lewes was jealous of your interest in me because I was beautiful and she was not. She engaged with you intellectually over the history of the Jews, whereas you were physically drawn to me and desired me. As he spoke I felt the familiar yearning. I had pushed you to the back of my mind, to the cold part of my heart, but you were always there. I still so wanted to see you, hear you, gain courage from you.