Sophie and the Sibyl (33 page)

They were followed, of course, by a not-so-young woman stepping smartly down the winter paths, pattering over the frosty grass and turned earth. Edith Simcox hovered too far back to catch a word of this exchange, but she deduced the intimacy of the conversation from the way the two men leaned together, their hats almost touching.

END OF CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

in which Fortune once more turns her Wheel. A Birth and a Marriage are joyously reported.

Well, our story has reached the freezing days of January 1879. The Sibyl, shrouded in grief, will see no one. Johnny Cross has poured his pain all over Max, the handsome German archaeologist whom he does not expect he will ever see again. Edith, paddling in filthy slush, stands guard outside the Priory, watching her Beloved’s windows. And in the warm rooms of the Berlin household at Wilhelmplatz, battened down against blizzards, for there is a snowstorm coming, the drifts are already burying the northern forests, Sophie strolls to and fro, under her mother’s watchful eyes. She is nine months gone, her belly is huge; the waters may break at any time and the miracle of birth will begin.

All Sophie’s usual activities have been curtailed or completely forbidden. Her only consolation, for riding has been out of the question for many months, is that ice and winter darkness would make anything other than a trot round the sawdust in the covered school quite impossible. She is reading a letter from Max, already on his way home from London, describing the soft white turning to foul mud in the London streets. He records as much as he can remember of the curious encounter with Mr. John Walter Cross, the sad man, hunched and wretched as a sick crow, tottering across Regent’s Park. He describes his relief at being spared an interview with the grieving Sibyl. He has neither set eyes upon her, nor exchanged one word. What could I have said, Sophie?

What indeed? In her expectant happiness even Sophie relents a little in her resentment towards the Sibyl. Years have gone past, and there have been no repercussions whatsoever, concerning the opening scenes of
Daniel Deronda
. Her father has discussed the book with Herr Klesmer, who roars audibly in praise of the author’s depiction of the Jews. The child kicks her hand, the very hand in which she holds the letter. Sophie grins, satisfied, and strokes her belly.

‘Shall I ring for chocolate and cakes, dear?’ Her mother senses a shift in the emotional backwash from Sophie’s skirts. ‘Your father will soon be here.’

‘I am carrying a son, Mama,’ declares Sophie, preening her head and neck as she turns, and letting her shawl fall back.

‘Is that so? Well, you are certainly big enough for a boy.’ Her mother hopes for a grandson, but is too tactful to say so. She pulls the bell rope, and adds thoughtfully, ‘But you never can tell. I was quite big with you.’

And at the same moment on 22nd January 1879, Marian Evans Lewes wrote to Mr. John Walter Cross: ‘Dearest Nephew, Sometime, if I live, I shall be able to see you – perhaps sooner than anyone else. But not yet. Life seems to get harder instead of easier.’ For indeed it did. G.H. Lewes had made his will twenty years earlier, in 1859. He bequeathed his copyrights in all his work to his three sons and all his other property to Mary Ann Evans, Spinster, who was also named as the sole executrix. His own estate was worth less than £2,000, but her securities were worth more that £30,000. Both houses were registered in his name. Thus the Sibyl, wealthy as she was, owned nothing in her own right, beyond her personal effects. A flutter of litigation must ensue, deeds of transfer, and rearrangements had to be negotiated and put into effect. The Sibyl emerged from her grief-stricken seclusion to organise her accounts. And so, at last, by deed poll, she legally adopted the name of Lewes. This little lie, which had served her so well for decades, became at last a partial truth. Now she really was called Mary Ann Evans Lewes. There were only two witnesses to all these transactions: Lewes’s son Charles and John Walter Cross.

On 7th February 1879 she wrote tentatively to Cross, summoning him into The Presence.

In a week or two I think I shall want to see you. Sometimes, even now I have a longing, but it is immediately counteracted by a fear. The perpetual mourner – the grief that can never be healed – is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning – a new acquaintance with grief.

At this stage she was still signing her letters ‘Your affectionate aunt, M.E.L.’ He came to see her on Sunday 23rd February. She had withered into a heap of bones.

But now the Priory doors had opened again to friends and supporters of Lewes’s many causes. And therefore also opened to scroungers and parasites, presenting themselves as either indigent or simply presumptuous relatives. Quick, let’s touch the rich lady for cash, while she’s in a vulnerable state. Play on her famous sympathy for the needy and the destitute; get in there before the others do. Lewes’s nephew demanded £100 as ballast, ‘to save him from reducing his capital’. She wrote a cheque for £50 on the spot, but someone must have told him what sort of leech he was, as he returned the cheque on the following morning, with an apology. Bessie Rayner Parkes, now Mrs. Louis Belloc, an old friend of many years past, had no such scruples, and requested £500. Herbert Lewes’s widow Eliza set sail from Natal, with her insidiously named offspring, Marian and George, expecting to move in with the famous wealthy novelist, and be set up comfortably for life. The vultures had gathered in force.

The Sibyl panicked and sent a desperate note to Johnny Cross at his office. ‘Dearest N, I am in dreadful need of your counsel. Pray come to me when you can – morning, afternoon, or evening. I shall dismiss anyone else. Your much-worried aunt.’

She needed not only advice, but also a man of the world who could deal with the voracious, encroaching predatory menace. Johnny Cross had known George Lewes; he was already inside the gates, part of her innermost circle, one of her most devoted followers, acquainted with all her business affairs. When he confessed that he was reading Dante’s
Inferno
, with the help of Carlyle’s translation, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, I must read that with you.’ And so the intimate little sessions, with the Sibyl as
magister
and the red-bearded young man as the devoted pupil, began.

Nessun maggior dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria.

(There is no greater sadness than remembering joyous times in times of grief.)

But her time of joy, like the dust from a chariot seen in the distance, came galloping towards her. By the end of May 1879, installed in her summer residence in Witley, she played the piano once more. Here, she received her frequent visitor, free from the surveillance of the ubiquitous Edith Simcox. Johnny Cross fell, irrevocably, under her spell.

And now we, her readers, encased in future times, become the secret voyeurs. Our moral imperatives are not the same as those of her friends, her admirers and her first critics. We look back, digging in the letters and in the massive three volumes of biographical material, carefully edited by Cross, those laconic Journals where one or two words are lifted out of context, polished and surveyed, and made to mean all kinds of unimaginable things. For sometimes that’s all she wrote: one or two words. On Monday 2nd June 1879 she still refers to him as ‘Johnny’, but by Tuesday 30th September he has become ‘Mr. Cross’. Something happened in between. But what? Could it be the ‘decisive conversation’, mentioned on Thursday 21st August? And what is the significance of that wonderful sentence from her entry on Wednesday 8th October 1879: ‘Joy came in the evening.’

I ponder the recorded tributes from our predecessors, her first readers. On Tuesday 29th July 1879 she received a ‘beautiful anonymous letter from New Zealand’. But on Wednesday 1st October 1879, ‘letter from a madman in Kansas’. So it seems to me that we can choose who we become in relation to her. Do I send her a beautiful anonymous bouquet and wish her every happiness with her handsome financial adviser? Or do I join the madman in Kansas and speculate fiercely on her strange behaviour? What can she think she is doing: inveigling into her web a man twenty years younger that herself, whose closest attachment up to this point appears to have been his mother?

One of her most subtle readers, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, in her book,
The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans
, writes: ‘In fact, the Cross marriage is still perfectly misunderstandable because it has no history that would allow us to interpret a choice according to its consequences.’ Well said. And there is plenty of evidence there in the archival record to fuel our misunderstandings. The blunt facts are these: on Friday 9th April 1880 she writes: ‘Sir James Paget came to see me. My marriage decided.’ Note that these two events, the doctor’s visit and the momentous decision, may not be related, for some have supposed that they are. She doesn’t even say to whom she has decided to be married. Well, why should she say? She wasn’t writing for us. And it isn’t ‘our’ marriage, but ‘mine’. To me, that does seem interesting. ‘My marriage’! On 6th May 1880 she writes:

Married this day at 10.15 to John Walter Cross, at St George’s, Hanover Square. Present, Charles [G.H. Lewes’s eldest son], who gave me away, Mr. and Mrs. Druce, Mr. Hall, Willie, Mary, Eleanor and Florence. We went back to the Priory, where we signed our wills. Then we started for Dover, and arrived there a little after 5 o’clock.

She signed herself, triumphantly, legally, married at last: ‘Mary Ann Cross’. Then she fled away on the boat bound for Europe, avoiding all her friends and the inevitable invidious public comment. Wherefore to Dover? Twenty-five years earlier, she had eloped to the Continent with a married man, trailing scandal in her wake. Now she did the same thing again, creating another interesting ripple of censorious gossip by her legal marriage to a man young enough to be her son.

Johnny Cross, years later, had this to say about their wedding journey through France to Italy:

I had never seen my wife out of England, previous to our marriage, except the first time in Rome when she was suffering. My general impression, therefore, had been that her health was always very low, and that she was almost constantly ailing. I was the more surprised, after our marriage, to find that from the day she set her foot on Continental soil, till the day she returned to Witley, she was never ill – never even unwell. She began at once to look many years younger.

Oh, did she indeed? I see Mrs. John Walter Cross striding through galleries and churches, marching into museums and cathedrals, carrying Murray and Kugler as guides, once more mistress of the plot, educating her ignorant young companion on points of taste and judgement. And I see Johnny Cross, trailing in the wake of mia Donna, the Sibyl herself, once more resplendent, authoritative, powerful – that’s My Lady!

But what has happened in Berlin? For we abandoned Sophie pages ago, big as a house, but confident and fearless in the face of her confinement. Ah, when has Sophie von Hahn ever shown anything but undaunted, careless courage in the face of high fences, high stakes at the gaming tables, or famous English writers? Her waters broke in the night, as she thrashed in her bed, unable to make herself comfortable. Her mother, sleeping in the next room with the door open, screeched for the midwife, who was already downstairs, preparing hot water and clean towels. All the lights in the house appeared in the windows. Max, nursing a minor hangover, sent for the doctor, who traipsed through the snow and arrived at six o’ clock in the yellow dark. By that time all the screaming and bloodletting were well and truly over. The afterbirth shot out, and Sophie, indignant at how much the entire process had hurt, despite an elevating mixture of rum and chloral, was cradling her son, Leo, with sinister tenacity. The child, a substantial kicking creature, bright red, wrinkled and grunting, opened his tiny, toothless jaws and yawned.

‘You can’t hold him yet,’ Sophie snapped at Max. ‘It’s not your turn.’

The midwife, educated in modern medical science, made everybody scrub their hands before they touched the baby. But Max’s first adoring kiss engulfed the tiny face in a gust of cigar smoke and alcohol. The old Count rushed down to his cellars and opened a bottle of vintage champagne, nursed, cherished and readied in hope that the first child would be a son. His grandson, and named Leopold, after his own father! Max, my boy, congratulations!

‘And what about a glass for me too? I did all the work.’ Sophie tried to sit up in bed and failed, her genitals still stinging from the pure spirits with which the midwife had tenderly purged every fold.

‘No wine,’ commanded the midwife, ‘just water and a little warm milk.’

Sophie wrinkled her nose.

Her mother crept in later, once the midwife, recuperating in the kitchens, had left the field clear.

‘Here you are, darling. Just half a glass, to build you up a bit. And to celebrate Leo’s arrival.’

A winter baby, born on the eve of Candlemas, when the sap stirs in the earth, and the first birds, far away in Africa, stretch out their wings, dreaming of return.

END OF CHAPTER SEVENTEEN