Gwendolen (18 page)

After a time I said, ‘Is that all you can tell me?' I still almost hoped to hear you call this journey irrelevant in view of your love for me. You started to explain that the remarkable Jew who so influenced your thinking was Mordecai, the learned, emaciated brother of Miss Lapidoth. I remembered the afternoon when I called to see her. I had heard you in the next room and she told me you and Mordecai were reading Hebrew. I paid no more attention than if she had said you were playing whist.

‘Did she tell you that I called on her?' I asked. You said no, looked perplexed, and said you did not understand. And suddenly the truth came to me and I felt my heart race and my breath halt. I asked if you could marry Miss Lapidoth. Yes, you said, you were going to marry her. She, her brother and you would then journey together to the Promised Land.

*

It was not a dawning of error, as with my marriage to Grandcourt, but a sudden clarity of mortal wound, the piercing of a knife. I cried out that I was forsaken. For the eternity of a year all my hope and grief was directed at you. I had no life without you. I suppose I looked ill; you knelt beside me, held both my hands in one of yours, dried my eyes, said you were cruel, looked at me imploringly. Tears welled in your eyes too. You said you would write when you could and asked if I would answer. It was always your way to speak words of hope even when a situation was hopeless.

But all I really heard was that you loved someone else and were going when I needed you most. I tried to speak, to match your words of optimism. I said it would be better with me for having known you. You said had we been much together we should have felt our distances more, and seemed to get further apart, but now despite separation you would be more with me than you used to be.

*

Now I see such thinking as specious nonsense. I had been candid with you, but you had not been candid with me. I had no idea of how excluded I was from your life plan. You had made no mention of what you were doing. What could I have known of your being a Jew? I had seen you at Topping Abbey. You were its heart. An English gentleman. You knew every stone.

It had been a revelation to me to realise I loved you. I was punished for this love, first by Grandcourt and then by you.

*

You had said what you needed to say, and you wanted to be gone from my distress. I struggled to find courage. I told you that you had been very good to me, I deserved nothing, I would try to live, I would think of you, I hoped I had not harmed you. We clasped hands, you kissed my cheek, you left.

*

Mamma found me, said I looked very ill and persuaded me to go to bed. She sat with me and I cried in her arms for most of the night. In the morning when I saw her concern I determined to console her. I did not say I felt I too had died. I commanded her not to be unhappy and assured her I would live to enjoy Offendene, annoy my sisters and make the best of what there was.

You had your Jewish wedding with your new-found Jewish friends. I was to hear about it from Hans Meyrick and Sir Hugo. Mordecai Lapidoth witnessed the betrothal of his sister and you, the two people whom he loved most in the world. Sir Hugo gave you as a wedding present all the equipment necessary for Eastern travel and to your wife a locket inscribed ‘To the bride of our dear Daniel Deronda, all blessings, H&LM'. It occurred to me that Mirah Lapidoth was blessed with lockets, Sir Hugo's and your mother's, while I had been cursed with diamonds. The Klesmers gave you a watch. I sent you the following letter:

I drafted the letter a dozen times. I wanted to bleach it of self-pity or accusation. I was mindful of the letter I received on my wedding day. I could better endure my loss and pain at losing you than live with the apprehension of being spoiling.

*

How bleak I felt after your departure. Without your support I did not know how to continue. All I could not say raged like a contagion within me. I could not speak of all I endured in degradation from Grandcourt, or say that through the deep winter of that marriage you were my only hope. I could not talk of my shame at withholding help from a drowning man because I hated him.

It was an effort to get from my bed to a chair. Nothing interested me, everything disturbed me. My sense of guilt was acute and of worthlessness entire. I could not concentrate on a book, receive guests, or easily look at my reflection in the glass. Worse, I felt my return home was an anxiety to mamma and depressing for my sisters. At night I dreamed I opened a door and found you there, but when I woke you were not. I dreamed you called my name. Again and again I dreamed of Grandcourt's face rising from the sea. One night it was you who were drowning and I could not get the rope to you. I cried out because of these dreams.

Doctor Millington said my nervous system was exhausted, applied leeches to purge my despair, prescribed quinine and iron and Dover's Powder to coax me to sleep. A Nurse Pollock was hired but failed to tempt me with fish pie and chicken soup. Uncle said fresh air, sunshine and exercise would restore me, but I felt incapable of stirring out. My aunt suspected I had hastened Grandcourt's death and supposed me to be acting the part of the bereaved widow.

Days and weeks passed in a haze. Sir Hugo feared for my mental and physical state and recommended that while uncle organised the move from Jodson's back to Offendene, mamma take me to the spa at Bath for two weeks. He booked rooms for us in the Royal York Hotel. The Queen had stayed there, he told us.

*

Bath was filled with white-haired people drenched of purpose but steeped in ailments: retired judges, generals and their widows. I was put under the care of Dr Myrtle, an unctuous man who exuded professional concern. I told him my suffering was to feel nothing. He diagnosed nervous exhaustion and a jaded brain and said my nerves were unstable, that I was worn out by menstrual bleeding and my depression was because despite being married I had borne no children.

Under his guidance I followed a regime. I began my day with a bathe in hot spring waters, followed by a water-drinking session under palms to the sound of music. At considered intervals I had vapour baths, tepid baths, hot baths. I was wrapped in hot towels and massaged, soothed by soft music and hands gently pressing against my skull, prescribed a diet of fish and well-cooked greens and advised to chew each mouthful slowly. I gulped the air and sipped the curious water, which was greenish and tasted foetid, apparently contained lime and iron and was said to cure the most diverse ailments: sciatica, depression, excema, paralysis, rheumatism, convulsions.

As I was wheeled in a black bath chair to the pool in the mornings, dressed in my bathing clothes, in the company of the moribund and arthritic, I thought how the events of one year had turned me from the brilliant self-confident Gwendolen Harleth, star of the Pennicote Archery Meeting, into a patient in the company of the old and ill …

Sometimes mamma and I went to Bath Abbey or for a drive and shopping, or we walked in the Spring Garden along the paths and parterres of flowers. We went twice to the play, drank tea in the public rooms and attended lectures on the arts and sciences – I do not remember what they were about. There was a bookseller where one might read the papers, and a coffee room for ladies by the Pump Room.

I took little notice of any of it. I imagined, in my twilit world, you might return to rescue me and that then my sense of unreality would end. You would divert me with explanations of the history of the city: what was Roman or Norman, the influence of Beau Nash and William of Orange and Thomas Baldwin who, Sir Hugo said, rebuilt the medieval baths, the story behind the large arched windows of the Pump Room. I had scant curiosity about such matters, though I accompanied mamma on two guided tours.

I still wore the turquoise necklace as my talisman. I could not discard the hope I had invested in it. In the street I would see ahead of me a man with a certain walk and think it was you. At the Abbey I sat next to a man who used the same cologne as you. I scanned passing strangers. It was as if I expected you at every moment.

But behind my despair and bereavement perhaps I saw the possibility of freedom: Grandcourt was gone. Never again could he control me like his dogs, or abuse me. I was released from captivity. Vaguely, but without energy to act, I was aware my life was mine to shape it if I knew how. But I was adrift. I did not have like you a destination, a mission. I did not feel I could save some part of the world, find roots, champion a cause. Klesmer had trodden hard on my fragile ambition. I had thought destiny would protect me and guide me to the happiness that awaited me. I thought I might find joy with you. But in truth I had no idea what to do with my life. Without you I did not know who or what might in some way light the journey ahead.

*

One bright sunlit day uncle and mamma took me home to Offendene. The old house welcomed us, its creaking boards and lack of graces. Mamma, as ever patient, brought me broth and hot chocolate, called me her darling Gwen, told me I was special and was oh so pleased to have me home.

Doctor Millington commended her as an excellent nurse, said rest and kindness were better medicines than he could prescribe, and advised me to look forward and not dwell on past pain. But I could not stop myself from thinking of Grandcourt's face as he floundered and called for the rope which I did not throw, and of your awkwardness as you sat beside me and told me you were to marry Mirah Lapidoth and go together hand in hand to your Promised Land.

My sisters came to my room with flowers, spoke in soft voices and tried not to giggle or annoy me. They brought news of Criterion and their outings and shopping expeditions. Alice said she was grateful to me for providing for mamma and her, Bertha, Fanny and Isabel. Clintock was courting Isabel. She found him handsome and gallant. I asked if he had written poems for her and she said he had, though she seemed unclear what they were about. Croquet? I suggested. Perhaps, she replied.

I gave her my emeralds and told her to sell them if she wished. She wondered at their colour in the candlelight. I felt scorn for such possessions as I had and wanted no reminder of the price they had made me pay. I let my sisters each choose one of my dresses, a hat and a piece of jewellery.

*

Sir Hugo was adept at managing and investing my inheritance, such as it was. He explained to uncle, mamma and me what must be done to derive the best income from it. He journeyed to inspect the Gadsmere property. Mrs Glasher had moved with indecent haste into Grosvenor Square. Sir Hugo described a landscape black with coal dust, a gloomy mining village and a greystone isolated house. That was where, by the terms of his will, Grandcourt wished to confine me. Only a monster, Sir Hugo said, would consign the woman he purported to love to a solitary existence in such an outpost.

He arranged the letting of it, to a man who worked in the coal business, at a far higher rent than Lord Brackenshaw required for Offendene. I had no wish to set eyes on the loathsome house, but it made me proud to provide mamma with a thousand a year to pay for Miss Merry, Jocasta, the gardener, fuel for the fires and even luxuries. And it gratified me to give my sisters a small allowance for clothes and see their delight.

I looked out at the garden, the downs, and fields of grazing cattle; I ventured into the lanes. The old house was a constant, and though it could not be to me the kind of heritage you found first at Topping Abbey and then from your Jewish forebears, the sense of unknown others having been in some way at home here, and now the door opening and mamma or one of my sisters coming to greet me, was consolation of a sort.

I tried to find pleasure in small things: ferns and foxgloves in the hedgerows, celandine in the ditches, the songbirds, the stick nests of hawks in the cedar trees. One afternoon I walked in the lanes with Mallow the stable collie. One morning I rode Criterion with the same abandon and recklessness as when Grandcourt was away.

*

My sorrow dulled. No one put pressure on me to be what I was not, but I had changed. I wanted a room of my own. My fear of sleeping alone had gone, so had my terror of the face in the wainscot. I saw only a ridiculous image, a practical joke poorly executed. I could not explain why ever it had made me afraid.

But though those fears had dissipated, so too had my joy. When life with Grandcourt became cruel I thought I would be content to return to the calm, uneventful life which so frustrated me before I married, before I loved you. But I could not settle to the small bed alongside mamma's, the domestic routine. I could not again brave musical soirées at the Arrowpoints, face the Klesmers in their confidence, dine with Mr Quallon at The Firs, take part in archery shoots or the hunt. I had enjoyed the hunt before I became a victim, before I was the hunter's prey. Or perhaps it was more that I had enjoyed the speed of the ride, the light on the corn and haystacks, the admiration accorded me for my beauty and verve. Now I wished never to hunt again, see fear in the vixen's eyes, spittle round her parched mouth, watch her killed by hounds that bayed and slathered, or ride home with her severed tail and head as trophies.

Perhaps, though I felt at sea, I became a kinder person because of all that had happened to me. You were my lifeline and I did not know where you were. And I struggled with my own unworthiness: I had burdened you, failed in marriage and been complicit in a death. When I looked in the mirror I saw crow's feet around my eyes and disappointment in the downward turn of my mouth. The sparkle had gone from my appearance and my hopes. Or that was how I seemed to myself. I was twenty-two.

*

Sir Hugo became like a loving father. It was as if he adopted me, the way I learned he had adopted you. Hitherto his flippancy and facetiousness had irritated me; now I saw only a man of sensibility and compassion, kind and observant. He regularly sent a carriage to take mamma and me to Diplow, or visited us at Offendene. I think he did not want us to be dependent on uncle again. He was circumspect in what he said, and never overtly critical, but I believe he doubted uncle's motivation and business acumen, and thought he ought to have asked questions of Grandcourt and not spurred me into a hasty marriage to relieve his own parlous financial state.

He was outraged at what he knew of how Grandcourt used and ill-treated me. And I think disappointed in you for, as he saw it, encouraging me, but not catching me when I fell. He told me he had angered you by saying you and I made the perfect couple and that pity was a poor reason for selecting a wife. But he could not, in any deep or lasting way, be critical of you or your mother. She and you were the light of his soul, his unquenchable fire of love. Perhaps I became his crucial link to you because I grieved your absence as much as did he.

*

He invited me and mamma to Topping Abbey, suggesting I might be further restored in that sequestered place. His daughters would be company, he said, and Hans Meyrick, your friend, would stay while painting a portrait of Lady Mallinger with her dogs. He suggested that to build my strength I exercise the horses stabled at the Abbey. Again he said that now he neither rode nor hunted himself, and that his horses could not compare with Grandcourt's. Despite that, he was concerned for them to be well tended and content.

Mamma felt unable to leave my sisters but encouraged me to go. It was sacrifice on her part, for she was happiest when I was near, but she so wanted me to be well. In my mind I saw the meadow surrounded by elms, the acres of forest, the river, the old bell tower, the choir of the Abbey church, the stained-glass windows, the little spaniel curled in the hackney carriage. At the Abbey I thought I might be close to you and again hear your voice explaining the history behind the stones.

So I went for what remained of the summer and in that enchanting setting – historical, romantic and home-like, of gothic cloisters, fresh-baked food, woodlands, meadows and summer breezes – my strength and courage returned.

*

A routine of the visit was for Sir Hugo and me to talk in the library at around three in the afternoon. Lady Mallinger, calm and gentle, was pleased for him to have my company. She checked the tea and candles then left us. I believe she felt I eased his pain at your departure. Theirs was a gentle love, imbued with grace and trust.

With views from the windows of oak trees and parkland, Sir Hugo talked of you. We missed you grievously and I needed to hear your story. Sir Hugo described it as your ‘whim of Israel'. He said, ‘I thought Dan had gone mad when he wrote to tell me he was going to marry a Jewess about whom I knew nothing and go East to build a homeland for the Jews.'