The Honeymoon (19 page)

She drew close especially to Barbara, entranced by her bustling, take-charge nature, her animal spirits. Barbara was everything she wasn’t — fearless, headstrong, proudly tenacious. Barbara was determined to found a college for women at Cambridge, and she wanted to establish a
women’s hospital with Bessie’s cousin Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in America. Barbara was especially adamant on the topic of “enforced feminine innocence.” “This whole idea of ‘protecting women,’ ” Barbara insisted, “means they forfeit their rights and duties as human beings.”

Barbara never spoke of her illegitimacy, though everyone knew and talked about it. Perhaps that was what fueled her sympathy for the oppressed people of the world.

As their friendship deepened, Marian confessed to her that one day she would like to write books of her own, novels, but she wasn’t sure she had any talent. Besides, she had no time because of her work at the
Westminster
and her need to churn out reviews and essays to earn money. When she told Barbara of her secret desire, Barbara leapt on it.

“But if that’s what you want to do in life,” Barbara cried, “then you’re obligated to do it.”

“Think of Scheherazade in
The Arabian Nights
,” Barbara said. “My father hired a tutor to try to tame us, and he used to read it to us. I loved it! Scheherazade telling the sultan stories night after night, so he wouldn’t have her killed, entrancing him with them. In the end, he falls in love with her and he spares her life. Storytelling set her free!” Barbara cried.

One evening, Herbert Spencer invited her to go to the theater with him. He had press orders for
The Merry Wives of Windsor
at the Princess.

Arriving at the theater, they found George Henry Lewes in their box, there to review the performance for the
Leader
.

When Lewes saw her, he smiled. “We met at Jeff’s, if you remember?”

She did remember. As they were waiting for the curtain, she told him, for the sake of conversation, that she’d read some of his pieces in the
Leader
. He used a pseudonym in them, “Vivian.” “Vivian” was a witty, mischievous character, a blistering critic, and a ladies’ man. Lewes had just published a satire in the magazine called “The Beauty of Married Men.” But he’d also written serious things, including an essay on George Sand in which he’d compared her to Balzac. He’d defended Sand’s position against marriage: Sand wasn’t against marriage itself, he argued, just unfair marriage laws.

She told him she’d just read his essay “A Gentle Hint to Writing Women” in the
Leader
.

“Yes!” he cried. “That’s my idea of the perfect woman, the woman who can write but
doesn’t
. Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell should just get back to their knitting! They’re so talented they’re crowding us men entirely out of the field. Burn your pens and purchase wool! say I.”

She noticed that he hardly kept still as he chattered on. Even Spencer smiled at his ebullience.

At last the audience was settling down, the curtain was going up.
“C’est la pire pièce de Shakespeare,”
Lewes muttered. “My grandfather was a comic actor, you know,” he whispered. “I’ve done some acting myself and written plays. Did you see my play
The Noble Heart
, by any chance?

“Sorry, I didn’t,” she said, sitting up and focusing on the stage.

At last the play began. It was awful, the actors overacted. Every time there was a joke, they nudged one another and laughed loudly in case the audience didn’t get it.

Intermission came. Lewes hit himself on the head.
“Oh, mon Dieu, c’est terrible, n’est-ce pas?”

All through the rest of the play, he kept up a commentary in a loud whisper.
“Consolez-vous, chère Madame. Il ne reste qu’une heure …”

At the end she asked him, “Do you often speak French?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I spent part of my childhood in Jersey and France. When I get excited, I tend to lapse.”

When they reached the door of the theater and it was time to say goodbye, he bent over low and kissed her hand.

“
Au revoir
, Madame,” he said. “I do hope we meet again.” She didn’t quite know what to think of the man, but he was rather amusing.

Lewes began coming to the Friday evenings at the Chapmans. He was usually surrounded by a group of people, telling silly jokes: “An Irishwoman goes to a lawyer because she wants a divorce … ‘Is he violent?’ the lawyer asks. ‘Yes! Once he was so annoying I threw a tumbler at him and he locked me in my room.’ The lawyer says, ‘I’m afraid that’s not enough. Is there any other evidence in favor of a divorce?’ ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m not certain he’s the father of my child …’ ”

In spite of herself, she laughed. He was also a flirt. Whenever a woman left the party, he’d always notice it, jump up, and insist on kissing her goodbye.

He was clearly not a man to be trusted. She’d had her time with married men.

She and Spencer began taking long walks together on the terrace of Somerset House, deep in discussion about his work. And as they leaned over the balustrade looking out at
the brown waters of the Thames — upstream toward Westminster and Whitehall, downstream to St. Paul’s and the factories and smokestacks — she managed to draw him out about his own life.

He told her he came from a family of religious Dissenters in Derby. His mother gave birth to seven children and six of them had died. Herbert was the only one who survived.

“That must have been so very terrible for your parents, and for you,” she said.

“They died in infancy,” he replied, without emotion. “Except for my sister, Louisa, who died when she was two and I was three.”

“Do you remember her?”

“I remember vaguely playing with her in the garden.” He said nothing more.

He told her that his parents were so afraid their one surviving child would get sick that they refused to send him away to school. Then, when he was thirteen, they finally sent him to boarding school. But he was so homesick that he ran away, walking over a hundred miles home by himself. “All I had were two shillings in my pocket, some bread, and some beer.”

The story made her want to cry, imagining the brave, stalwart boy marching through the countryside, missing his parents so, determined to get home. “Did your parents punish you?”

“No. They embraced me. I’m afraid I cried rather a lot. Eventually, they persuaded me to go back. From then on it was all right.”

She felt so sorry for him, that his early life was so marked by tragedy. Perhaps that explained his coldness
and his inability to engage with others. She felt herself wanting to allay the sadness that must surely lurk in his soul with warmth and affection, to woo him into the comfort of human companionship. She wanted to make him laugh, or at least smile, to lift the burden of his shyness and isolation.

“You have no lines on your forehead,” she joked.

“That’s because I’m never puzzled.” And he gave her a little, self-mocking smile.

He had many peculiarities. He had constructed a device, a circular spring with ear pads. If someone was boring him, he’d put it on over his head to block them out, explaining it was on the advice of his doctors. Naturally, the person would stop talking. “Please, do continue,” he’d say. “I can’t hear what you’re saying anyway.” She teased him about it, and sometimes elicited a sly smile from him, as if he were aware of how odd he was. He was also a hypochondriac, forever putting his hand uneasily to his stomach and complaining vaguely of digestive difficulties.

Perhaps she held a special place in his life, perhaps even … perhaps he was even falling in love with her? Could it be that here at last was someone for her alone?

As spring warmed the air, and the daffodils, then the tulips, blossomed in the park, the sweet fragrance of new life floating in the air made her feel old. She was thirty-two now, her complexion sallow, her skin felt dry.

In July, the next issue of the
Westminster Review
was closed and she was exhausted. London was blisteringly hot. She decided to take a holiday and rent a room in Broadstairs.
Perhaps the sea would heal her. She mentioned to Spencer that she was going, hoping he’d offer to accompany her. But he didn’t, so she went alone.

When the boat arrived at the little town, she disembarked and made her way to the room she’d rented, across from the cliffs overlooking the sea. After she’d unpacked her things, she went out for a walk. It was high season, and the narrow beach on Viking Bay was packed, every inch of sand filled with families and children and bathing machines. She seemed to be the only unaccompanied woman in the whole place, and she wouldn’t think of using one of the bathing machines by herself.

She went to the town library and read the
Times
, and looked through the books. She felt safer there, not as uncomfortable being a woman alone.

Later, she had supper in the ladies’ dining room at the Broadstreet Arms. Even there, no other single women appeared, just women in couples or groups. So as not to seem too alone or unhappy, to show she wasn’t seeking to meet anyone, she propped up Harriet Martineau’s novel,
Deerbrook
, in front of her. It wasn’t bad. Two sisters arrive in a village and become romantically involved with the apothecary. Thank God, she could become absorbed in the book and didn’t betray herself to the other diners as lonely.

In the morning, she rented a deck chair and sat on the beach. For two days she occupied herself reading and sleeping while the families played around her, their cries mingling with the cries of the gulls. Beyond her the narrow bay was flecked with sailboats.

She read George Henry Lewes’s novel
Rose, Blanche and Violet
— very melodramatic, with courtship, adultery,
suicide, prostitution — and walked along the beach beneath the cliffs, fending off the smiles of strangers who guessed at her plight and seemed about to try to engage her.

At the post office, she asked if any letters had come for her — perhaps there would be something from Spencer. But it was too soon to expect anything.

After a few days letters began arriving from Chapman about magazine business. Everything was falling apart in her absence, he wrote. The
Westminster Review
was going bankrupt and George Combe, who was one of the investors, said he was pulling out his money because Chapman couldn’t manage the finances. Chapman begged her to intercede with Combe — Combe was fond of her because his phrenological analysis of her skull had revealed that she had such great intelligence. She wrote to Combe, pleading with him on behalf of Chapman, and he softened.

At last a letter came from Spencer. She dashed through it, searching for some personal note, an expression of affection. But it was mostly about his progress on his book on human psychology. He did, however, complain about the heat in London.
“Dear Miss Evans, London is appallingly hot, and my room is on a high floor, which makes it worse. I do miss our conversations. I think of you with some envy there enjoying the cool sea air …”
She felt a rush of joy — he missed her.