Gwendolen (31 page)

Down the years I have so often thought of you and seen and felt your gaze – in the music of Schubert, in the night sky. In the melancholy of evenings alone I penned these fragmented memories to you in violet ink, not with a wish for you to read them, only so as not to relinquish you.

*

I made my journey, the first of many. I made and make my travels of discovery and adventure with womanly courage, a pleasure in what is new and strange, an awareness of freedom and good fortune and as a bulwark against past or future pain. I left Paul and Antoine in the Seychelle Islands, not in anger or with disappointment but from a desire again to be at Offendene, walk the familiar lanes of Pennicote, see the bluebells in the woodland, hear the wind in the birch trees, see mamma, who I feared had grown frail. I journeyed home with strangers.

Next year I plan to journey to Ashkelon with Violet Greene and two of her friends. I will try to visit you and your family. One day I am sure we will meet again. I would like to tell you of the journeys I have made, see your wise, kind eyes, feel the warmth of your hand in mine. I would like to tell you travel means most to me when it is in my mind. I would also like to tell you, but I will never dare, that you will always remain, though faded like an echo and locked away like a keepsake, my place of safety, my heaven on earth, the destination about which I will always wonder but can never reach.

I consigned these pages to a drawer, time passed, memories faded. One afternoon my small daughter chanced on them, and strewed them over the floor. As I gathered them up, before hiding them again I glanced at what I had written and was pained to be reminded of all I had endured.

I did not see Mrs Lewes again after my return from Africa. She published the book about you in which I appeared. It was her last novel and she gave it your name. I have not read it for I do not want harsh memories to surface, but I heard that she freely invented and omitted when it suited her so to do.

Her own story became more fantastical than either yours or mine. Mr Lewes died of cancer not long after her book came out, and she then married a family friend, twenty years her junior, whom hitherto she had referred to as her nephew. She was about sixty by then. Mr Cross I think was his name: a city financier with a red beard. I do not recall meeting him at her salon afternoons. Mrs Bodichon told me he had until then lived with his mother who died, which left him desolate. Her view was that all love is different, but apparently he had had no previous involvement with any woman other than his mother. I wondered if Mrs Lewes married so as to gain approval from her brother Isaac, who deigned to break his censorious silence and congratulate her on the wedding. He cared about the fact of it, not whether it would bring her happiness. Then on the honeymoon in Venice Mr Cross jumped from the hotel window into the Grand Canal and had to be rescued from drowning by gondoliers and sedated with chloral. It did not sound a propitious beginning to married life.

I thought how being hauled, or not, from deep water figured large in the stories of your life, Mrs Lewes's and my own. Mrs Cross (I could not think of her as Mrs Cross though she liked to be referred to as such) within months of this marriage then died, I am not sure of what. A sore throat that turned into something else, I think.

*

I pondered the news I had heard of some of the others who affected my life and wondered what of it was true.

So much and yet so little has happened and happens to me and within me. Time leaks away, but I am not bound to the old rules, I am free and I have my flight. I cannot be summed up or shown to have arrived. I could not reach the destination of your heart but I have other loves, all different: my daughter Lucy is chief among them. I do not see her father, who already has a wife.

Mamma has become rather vague in manner and rheumy-eyed but her face lights with radiance at sight of me. And my true friends are there for me through good times and bad. Rex, predictably, is happily married and a respected judge. He always remembers my birthday, always invites me to dances, functions and to soirées which I have no wish to attend. Hans and my cousin Anna are married. She bestows the same devotion and adulation on her husband as she showed to Rex. In their company I recapture the picnic days of childhood, riding in the meadows, swimming in the lake.

Bertha lives happily with Marjorie Millet not far from Offendene in a thatched cottage. They are now acclaimed landscape gardeners, much in demand. They have created their own paradisal garden and talk hotly of birds and bees and how rigorously one should prune roses. I doubt either of them ever looks in a mirror.

Isabel, Mrs Clintock, so far has five sons. Mamma worries there will never be enough money, on a clergyman's pay, to feed this tribe. Alice married a Colonel and is proud of the aviary she has created in the grounds of their country house. Each time I visit I with shame remember my slaughter of her caged bird. Fanny married a crofter, I forget how they met. They moved to Scotland, and she seldom writes home.

As for the rest: I heard from dear Sir Hugo that the young Henleigh Grandcourt eschews Mammon, cares nothing for his inheritance, plays the saxophone, has grown his brown curls long, and writes poetry. Sir Hugo also told me how Lush endured an alarming death: he stepped into a quicksand near Lyme Regis, was not hauled from it until the following day, there had been a storm in the night, a chill turned to bronchitis then pneumonia. He lasted a fortnight. I shrugged when I heard.

Julian returned to America and wrote to none of us. Hans saw news that he fell from the trapeze wire in front of a huge crowd in Kalamazoo, damaged his back then took poison because he knew he would never perform his wonderful acts again. And from uncle I heard that Mrs Gadsby inherited a pig farm near Bristol from an unknown, unwed relative. It turned out to be a gold mine, so uncle said.