Gwendolen (22 page)

*

In Sir Hugo's town house I was accorded a bedroom in pale green and cream, and an elegant sitting room with writing desk, chaise and view over Hyde Park. As the maid closed the door I felt calm and safe, but I yearned for you to call, see me in these surroundings, free and determined to be myself, be pleased for me and give me encouragement. The wish passed and I realised, with strange sorrow, that I thought about you with less pain, and only with effort could I conjure you in my mind, your still and thoughtful presence, your eyes that seemed to take me in, and although I still revered you, the day might come when you ceased to be the person to whom, in my heart and soul, I addressed my every wish.

I was sad that despite you saying you would write to me and remain close you did not because you could not: not as a married man, when the bond between us had seemed to hint at marriage. Sir Hugo and Hans always read to me their letters from you, but what could I care about this place called Palestine and your other life and adventures from which I was so excluded?

*

London seemed full of secrets, promise and destinations. From my windows I looked out at trees and lawns, people strolling, talking, hurrying, smart carriages, buskers, lamplighters. I thought of Bertha and my surprise that she should find a singular talent and the strength to pursue it. I hoped there might be a similar fate for me.

I was freed from diamonds and furs and Grandcourt's threatening presence. Hans promised to show me the world, escort me to the theatre and circus, take me on boat trips, introduce me to his clients, friends and fellow artists. He encouraged me to wear simpler clothes and to coil my hair more freely. I talked of getting it cut short like some of the suffragists. Hans said he would cut it for me with his mother's kitchen shears and that when he had finished I need never again fear the amorous intentions of any man.

*

One of the first visits we made, in late autumn, was to Mrs Lewes and her husband. We were invited to one of her Sunday salon afternoons. ‘She wants to know more about you and your feelings for Dan,' Hans said. ‘She misses her conversations with him.'

I had first spoken with her at the Abbey the day after Sir Hugo's New Year's Eve party, when you and she were talking about the Jews, then a few times more at Park Lane, at the Mallinger gatherings. Hans told me it was you who inspired her to study Jewish history, and you who introduced her to Mirah Lapidoth, who then sang Hebrew songs at her musical soirées.

I had thought no more of her, but now, widowed and uncertain of my social status, I was trepidatious at the prospect of meeting. I feared that, like Klesmer, she would confront me with her genius and my middlingness, and I had had sufficient of that mix.

Hans said she had her own muddles, just like the rest of us. ‘She's not really Mrs Lewes even though she insists on being addressed that way. She always corrects anyone who speaks of her as Miss Evans, but that's who she is. She can't marry him because he already has a wife, Agnes, whom he can't divorce.'

Apparently Mr Lewes had been Agnes's tutor. He married her when she was nineteen. She was blonde, beautiful and clever and translated books from French and Spanish. She believed in free love and gave birth to eight children. ‘Lewes was the father of the first four,' Hans said, ‘and Thornton Leigh Hunt, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, fathered the others.' Leigh Hunt also had another ten children with his legitimate wife and on two occasions was the father of a child by her, then one by Agnes, born within weeks of each other. He had wanted to be an artist but paint made his skin fester and itch, so he turned to journalism. Hans sympathised, because he himself was allergic to many things, though fortunately not to paint.

Apparently Lewes was at ease with this unconventional marital arrangement and cared more for the first of the babies fathered by Hunt, but born to Agnes, than for any of his own children, with whom he was rather distant. He put his name as father on the birth certificate though the child was ‘very brown with unmistakeable Hunt eyes'.

Hans was unclear when Mary Anne Evans and George Lewes became lovers but thought it was early in the 1850s. Before she would agree to live with Lewes she wrote to Agnes for assurance their marriage was over in all but name. Agnes replied she would be delighted for Mary Anne to marry her husband but he had condoned her own adultery so they could not be divorced. So Miss Evans lived in a loving and committed relationship which she could not grace with legal status. Her eldest brother, Isaac, whom as a child she adored and revered, would not speak to her because of it and only communicated about unavoidable family matters through solicitors.

I thought of Grandcourt and Mrs Glasher when they became lovers, their ‘best young love'. Colonel Glasher refused to divorce his wife. Mary Anne Evans avoided social ostracism by calling herself Mrs Lewes. She was wiser than the law.

Apart from such tiresome practical obstacles, the Leweses and Leigh Hunts were civilised and supportive of each other. There was no vengeance or malice: no lying in wait at Cardell Chase, no wedding-day letters about withered hearts, no menacing appearances in Rotten Row. Mrs Lewes wrote her successful novels under the name of George Eliot, whom I, like many of her readers, had supposed to be a man. George was Mr Lewes's Christian name and Eliot, she said, was ‘a good mouth-filling easily pronounced word'. Writing earned her wealth as well as fame and financed her husband, his wife and their offspring, whom she viewed as her stepchildren. The children called their mother ‘mamma' and the second Mrs Lewes ‘mother'.

My eyes were being opened to London life and I resolved to choose my time to explain such complexities to my mother. But hearing of such temerity gave me an inkling how I might perhaps for myself, by some act of daring or rebellion, achieve liberation from the fixed receipt of a woman's happiness. I might yet, like Hester Stanhope, dress as a Bedouin and travel with a caravan of camels across the desert.

I doubted, though, if I could be a writer, like Mrs Lewes or Mrs Arrowpoint. I could not conjure unborn people in my mind or bring myself to care about the truth or otherwise of Tasso's madness, or whether his seventeenth-century Italian love life was one thing or another. I cared about my own love life, and yours, and Hans's and Rex's and Sir Hugo's and mamma's and Bertha's.

Mrs Arrowpoint of course did not shine outside of Wancester, whereas George Eliot was admired worldwide. Queen Victoria had twice read
Adam Bede
and was so taken by it she commissioned the artist Edward Corbould to paint two watercolours from scenes in it: one of Dinah preaching, the other of Hetty making butter. Hans said these pictures hung in Buckingham Palace though he had not seen them. He admired Corbould's technical skill but considered his subject matter stiff and traditional.

*

Hans and I went in Sir Hugo's carriage to The Priory, the Leweses' house by the Regent's Canal. I told him I would like to arrive a little late to give other guests time to gather. I did not want to be conspicuous. I wore pale green and white, a simple pearl necklace and of course the turquoise chain.

The house, secluded and pretty, was set far back from the street. Late roses still bloomed in the front garden. The rooms, spacious with large windows that reached almost to the ceilings, had been arranged and furnished by the architect Owen Jones, who designed the interior of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. All had bespoke wallpapers and carpets and were filled with paintings, engravings, sculptures and exotic fabrics. The Leweses each had a study lined with books. They shared a music room.

I was discomfited when on arrival Mr Lewes took me into his study, ostensibly to show me a portrait of ‘Polly', as he called Miss Evans – to add to the confusion about names – which hung over the fireplace. I recoiled at the way he took my arm and looked at me. He asked Hans for his view of the portrait and I knew by his circumlocutory reply Hans thought it of little merit. Mr Lewes wanted to commission him to do another, of Polly reading in their garden with her dogs beside her.

The setting was warm and welcoming but I felt apprehensive among the mix of such confident, self-important people. I made Hans promise not to leave my side. He said it would be easy to stay with me for I was the most amusing and beautiful woman in the room. There were perhaps a dozen men but only five or six women. Barbara Bodichon was there – I had heard of her – and two other ‘Ladies of Langham Place', feminists who wrote pamphlets about women's rights. Through their campaigning the Married Women's Property Bill had been passed in about 1850, which meant husbands could no longer be entitled, in marriage or divorce, to have all the assets that belonged to their wives. I remembered Grandcourt's derisory comment on this jurisdiction in support of women: ‘They'll be wanting to enter Parliament next,' he had drawled.

*

I knew almost none of the guests, though I recognised the Hebrew scholar Immanuel Deutsch, with whom you had studied. He was at Lady Brackenshaw's musical evening when Mirah Lapidoth sang. He was Jewish too. He had dark hair and eyes, was small and sad-looking and wasted with cancer. Hans told me he had been to the Holy Land some years previously to visit the Wailing Place in Jerusalem, which Jews regard as the gate to heaven. They go there to tear their clothes and cry to God to deliver them from persecution and exile and restore their Promised Land to them. I supposed that to be your destination.

I was glad Herr Klesmer was not among the guests, though even without him I found the talk disconcertingly erudite. I was aware of Mrs Lewes's repeated scrutiny of me in a way I could not interpret but that seemed unfavourable. I felt weighed in the balance and found wanting. She keenly observed my appearance but I doubt she was much interested in her own. Her clothes were a veritable mishmash of ill-assorted things. I thought her so plain and evidently fiercely clever that not many men would want her as their wife, so it was as well Mr Lewes was devoted. I suspect she viewed herself as ugly: hers was such a heavy face – her big nose, severe jaw and rather tired eyes. Perhaps she had been led to believe she was ugly as often as I had been praised as beautiful.

Mr Lewes told Hans that Polly was much troubled by her teeth, and indeed she kept putting her hand to her cheek in a way that indicated pain or at least discomfort. Two of her canine teeth had recently been pulled after she was first made unconscious with nitrous oxide.

Mr Lewes was if anything plainer than she, with wispy brown hair, a straggly moustache, pockmarks on his skin, wet lips and a head too large for his tiny body. He was illegitimate and so was Barbara Bodichon, Hans said. I thought of Mrs Glasher's brood and began to wonder if half the world had been born out of wedlock. Even when living with his beautiful young wife and four sons, Mr Lewes had had affairs with other women. I found it difficult to believe women could find him attractive in that way.

But all that was in the past, Hans told me, for now George Lewes and Polly were everything to each other and never apart. He adored her, encouraged her genius, helped and guided research for her books, and loved her so much he was not tempted to be unfaithful.

Seeing them together, I had the sense that the man's role and the woman's merged. He fussed in case she was in a draught or if the tea might be too hot for her teeth, whereas she paid all the bills. Both he and she were clever, witty and self-assured, with languages to learn, countries to visit and books to write – his were about philosophy and psychology, I think. I thought her brave, openly to live with a man who was married to someone else, but I wondered what her view would be of my marriage to Grandcourt and if she would consider Lydia Glasher's venomous behaviour to me justified.

*

As if reading my thoughts she beckoned me over. In anticipation of meeting her I had rehearsed a small speech. I told her I had read several parts of her latest novel
Middlemarch
, and found Mr Casaubon perfectly awful, though not as horrible as my husband had been, and that I feared Will Ladislaw was not much better. She seemed immoderately hurt by my remarks and looked across to Mr Lewes, who again held my arm, took me to one side and whispered that criticism plunged Polly into despair and we must try to shield her from it.

I had not intended criticism. I felt like telling him that apart from you I considered no man worthy to be anyone's husband, but it seemed best to say nothing if everything was open to misinterpretation. Mr Lewes then said something to her, I think in Hebrew, which is how they communicated when they wanted no one else to understand.

She then told me she had recently received a letter from you. Again I felt a stab of jealousy that you wrote to her as well as to Sir Hugo and Hans but not, as you had said you might, to me.

‘What is his news?' I politely asked, though my voice sounded strained. She said you wrote of palm groves, pelicans, barren hills, mud dwellings and fields of sugar cane. You had climbed Mount Sinai to see where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. You were studying Sanskrit, Aramaic and other strange languages in order better to understand the Talmud.

‘What is the Talmud?' I asked, supposing it to be a building like Topping Abbey. She gave me an amused, condescending glance and said it was the encyclopaedia of Jewish law: ‘civil, penal, ecclesiastical, international, human and divine'.

‘I see,' I said, though in truth I did not quite see, and the familiar bewildered feeling of unreachable worlds from which I was excluded afflicted me.

Your knowledge of Jewish matters interested her greatly. I asked her if she was Jewish. I thought she perhaps was, given she had such a large nose and was rather plain. ‘Unfortunately not,' she said. ‘They are such a cultured, creative people.' I did not know what to say. I knew little of the Jews, I knew only of my hopeless love for you. I longed for your news, not of holy shrines, synagogues, temples in Egypt and Palestine and the fate of the Jewish nation, but of you and your feelings for me.