Sophie and the Sibyl (9 page)

We shall remain at the coast here, or in Brittany for some months, on account of my health, which has for some time been very frail, and which is benefited by the sea air. The winter we shall probably spend in Germany. But any inconvenience about money payments to me may, I suppose, be avoided if you will be kind enough to pay my income to the account of Mr. G.H. Lewes, into the Union Bank of London, Charing Cross Branch, 4 Pall Mall East, Mr. Lewes having an account there.

I wrote to you many weeks ago from Scilly, enclosing a letter to Chrissey, which if you received it, you would of course put by for her, as it was written in ignorance of her extreme illness. But as I have not received any intimation that my letter reached you, I think it safest to repeat its chief purport, which was to request that you would pay £15 of my present half-year’s income to Chrissey.

I shall also be much obliged if you will inform me how Chrissey is, and whether she is strong enough to make it desirable for me to write to her.

Give my love to Sarah and tell her that I am very grateful to her for letting me have news of Chrissey.

[. . .]

We are not at all rich people, but we are both workers, and shall have enough for our wants.

I hope you are well and that Sarah is recovered from her fatigues and anxieties. With love to her and all my tall nephews and nieces,

I remain, dear Isaac

Your affectionate sister

Marian Lewes

Notice that she claims her rightful income, and insists on the importance of her family relationships. All that loving care for her ailing sister Chrissey, who had married a hopeless failure and had her health ruined by constant childbirth. But none of this solicitous obfuscation worked. Isaac Evans smelt a rat. She said that she had changed her name, but not that she had married. If Lewes had three sons and was indeed the respectable scientist and intellectual she said he was, then he must have had some form of a wife. Would it not have been prudent, honest and sensible to mention the fact that he had been, for many years, a widower? But, as in a more famous contemporary narrative, the gentleman possessed ‘a wife now living’. Isaac Evans handed the letter over to his solicitor, and demanded concrete evidence of marriage in a church, a shrewd tactic, which forced Marian Evans to waffle on about sacred bonds and legal contracts in her dignified, unflinching, candid reply. But she still signed herself, defiantly, Marian Lewes. Isaac Evans broke off all communication with his abandoned sister, and forced the rest of his family to do so.

And herein lies the problem. Marian Evans Lewes, or whichever of her many names you wish to use, insisted upon the value of an integrity she did not actually possess. She wrote thousands of pages defending the so-called sacred bonds, all of which proved in need of sharper definitions. No one could argue that Miss Evans was seduced and betrayed in true nineteenth-century fictional fashion. The writer may have hidden behind a complex web of sexual moralities, a labyrinth that we are still decrypting, but the woman herself stubbornly brazened it out. She insisted on calling herself Mrs. Lewes, never mind the other Mrs. Lewes, whose sons she supported and whose bills she paid.

Mr. Fowles never bothers with the daring and courageous women of the mid-nineteenth century who fought for social and sexual reform: Caroline Norton, accused of ‘criminal conversation’ with the Prime Minister, who campaigned for the transformation of the divorce laws, Barbara Bodichon, who founded the
English Women’s Review
, and visited Marian Lewes and to hell with decorum and appearances, Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote
Ruth
(1853), championing the virtue and innocence of the young woman seduced. Actually, Gaskell insists so fanatically upon Ruth’s utter innocence that I, for one, have never been able to identify the moment when the wicked Mr. Bellingham makes himself Master of her Person. But possess her he certainly did, because she gives birth to a son, who lives to be proud of his heroic mother. The latter dies in a burst of sanctimonious religiosity. Saved at last!

The Sibyl saved herself by writing fiction.

END OF CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

spins the Wheel of Fortune in unexpected ways. The Reader is invited to place her Bets.

Prostitutes, gorgeous as princesses, rubbed shoulders with the recently rich around the roulette tables, but too many of their Berlin acquaintances, there to enjoy the gambling, had already greeted him. Max decided to play safe. Forbidden to enjoy himself in the Kursaal, and disinclined to float gently in the baths, Max decided to pay for one whole night of bliss in the arms of his farmer’s daughter. She fulfilled all his expectations, and if not as weightless as the Fairy Queen Titania, nevertheless performed an exotic variety of magical tricks, some of which startled her worldly young gentleman into yelps of joy. Sated, washed, brushed and perfumed, he strolled back towards the populated promenades in the early morning, inordinately pleased with the intensity of his night’s bought pleasure. He paused to light his cigarette, not ten paces from the Israelite’s pawn shop, when a familiar young figure swung out into the street before him. Her plaits were tucked into her hat, so that her pale neck shone smooth as a statue above the embroidered collar and the bold green stripes of her walking dress. Max was so close that he saw the light gleaming through the fine blonde hairs at the nape. Her laced boots, black with white trim, hammered away over the cobbles. She kept her eyes down. She wasn’t looking for trouble. But there was no doubt about it; out of the Jew’s den flounced the Countess Sophie von Hahn.

Max froze, his face boiling with embarrassment and shock. Her receding virginity reproached him for that one night of love, and he stood, denounced, as guilty as any young husband caught
in flagrante delicto
with the housemaid. What on earth was she doing in Homburg? And did she know he was already here? Max dived into the Aladdin’s cave presided over by a tiny bearded Jew. The shop was darker than he had expected; the pocket watches, bracelets, necklaces and precious stones luminous on black velvet squares beneath locked glass.

‘May I be of service to you, sir?’ whispered the Jew. He laid down an elegant necklace of opals and rubies surrounded by diamonds, that he had been examining through an eyeglass, which he now carefully extracted, and set down beside the languorous jewels.

‘The young lady who just came in – what did she want?’ Max blurted out his alarm.

The Jew seemed to shrink a little. All transactions on his premises remained confidential. He murmured apologies. Max loomed over him. Without speaking, the pawnbroker simply lowered his eyes to the necklace and Max grasped the transaction at once. Sophie had borrowed money against the necklace, almost certainly without her father’s knowledge. But where was the Count? Would no one step forward to reprimand this wastrel daughter? What troubles had engulfed her? Blackmail and Vice hovered in the wings, awaiting their chance to drag down his adorable Sophie. Max mounted a metaphorical charger and lowered his lance at the Jew.

‘I understand you perfectly, sir,’ he snapped, although nothing had been explained. ‘How much?’

‘One thousand thaler.’ The Jew’s voice sank to a barely audible vibration. He glanced nervously into the rooms behind him, hoping for reinforcements if the gentleman before him, clearly a near relation of the lovely young lady, turned nasty. Max shivered slightly. The jewels glowed on the velvet between them. This necklace must belong to the old Countess; surely these jewels formed part of Sophie von Hahn’s dowry and inheritance. One thousand thaler barely touched their value and the Jew knew it. Redeeming the thing then and there drifted into Max’s brain, but without Wolfgang’s authorisation the project was impossible.

Max turned on his heel, threw open the door, with not one further word to the Jew, and bounded away down the street. He flung himself into the awakening watery sunshine of the little town and pounded after the woman he intended to honour with his own hand and his brother’s money. So far as Max was concerned Sophie von Hahn already counted as his wife, and never mind the fact that he hadn’t actually asked her. But she had vanished into air, as decisively as the fairies, dissolving at daybreak. He rang the bell of Frau Heide’s Very Superior Pension, but the sleepy maid informed him that they didn’t have rich people like the Count von Hahn staying there, and why didn’t he try the Grand Continental Hotel? Out of breath and temper, edgy and flustered, Max stormed the reception desk, only to be informed that the Graf von Hahn and his daughter had indeed arrived the day before, had left several messages for him, including a pressing invitation to dine with them on the previous evening, but had not yet emerged from their suite to greet the day. You little minx, Max fretted and bristled. Not dressed yet? Not gone out? He was quite prepared to hunt her down himself and give her a wigging. Had she got herself into debt? Surely the Count gave her a generous allowance? Was she supporting some indigent relative? The indigent and the undeserving remained indistinguishable in Max’s imagination. Or maybe she had become too deeply involved in good works of a religious nature?

Standing there, undecided, in the great foyer of the Continental, beside the palms in giant Oriental vats, Max poured out his apologies to the Count von Hahn on the back of his visiting card, which he left with the porter to be sent up with their breakfast. Then he marched out into the gardens to read his letters just arrived from Berlin: one from Wolfgang and the other from Professor Marek, inviting him to attend a series of lectures in preparation for the Anatolian expedition in the spring. Wolfgang outlined a counter-proposal for Max to negotiate with Lewes, which gave their house both Continental reprint rights and the translation copyright on the Sibyl’s next masterpiece, whenever she might choose to create said work, certain to be even more excellent and extraordinary than the present magnificent and amazing magnum opus. Max abandoned his brother’s hyperbole. Yet more negotiations with the inflexible hairy husband! Max almost mowed down an elderly English lady, her companion and their little dog, parading round the fountain. His self-satisfied mood of sexual accomplishment dissipated before a row of irritating obstacles.

And so it was that Max, disgruntled and anxious, presented himself at Obere Promenade 14, equipped for battle with the publisher’s counter-proposals. But the scene which greeted him in the comfortable first-floor apartments suggested a peculiar and alarming scientific experiment. Lewes, he assumed that it was Lewes, sat at the table, still wearing his
robe de chambre
, an ample towel draped over his head, so that his voice, hoarse and stifled, emerged faintly through the folds. A sinister balsamic mixture filled the room with odours of menthol and verbena. A brown bottle containing the tincture stood beside the jug of boiling water, which the Sibyl poured carefully into the basin before her husband, causing the vapours to surge upwards, like mist evaporating from the valley bottoms. She nodded earnestly at Max.

‘Pull the towel right over the basin, dearest, and breathe deeply, so that you get the full benefit.’

Lewes bent forwards, as if intending to be sick.

‘I am sorry, my dear fellow,’ groaned the voice, hoarse and indistinct. He echoed like a reluctant spirit guide, discovered beneath linen drapes at the climax of a seance. ‘You have caught me at a low ebb.’

Max attempted to excuse himself and backed towards the door, but both the Sibyl and the muffled Lewes insisted that he should settle and be seated.

‘It’s only a chesty sore throat,’ gasped the voice, ‘and Polly’s wonderful inhalation may put a stop to it. I don’t want her to succumb to this as well.’

The closed rooms, stuffy and airless, with the fire banked up and blazing, produced a dreadful claustrophobic fug, smelling equally of illness and cloves. The Sibyl gazed at Max, the marvellous grey-blue eyes filled with beseeching tenderness and anxiety.

‘George wondered if you would be so kind as to escort me round the park. He is sure to be better tomorrow and is convinced that my headache will reappear if we sit here with the windows closed.’

‘Give Polly a run in the sunshine, won’t you, Max, there’s a splendid chap,’ croaked the scientist, suspended over the fumes. ‘And fight off the English. We’ve already turned away Lady Castletown this morning, and her daughter Mrs. Wingfield, who pours forth confidences to Polly. The English are kind and convivial, but also very wearing. Polly needs a brisk canter
à pied
and a dose of fresh air, or she’ll buckle under the strain.’ Lewes vanished again beneath the towel and the steam mounted around him as if he were sniffing hell-fire, well in advance of his appointed time. Max assented politely to every suggestion.

Here she was, the Sibyl, in bonnet and cape, neatly packaged with gloves and shawl, ready to step out through the wilder reaches of the park, beyond the prying eyes of the English guests at the Hessischer Hof, with Max as her guardian knight. The lady set a cracking pace. Max realised, in some alarm, that his charming promenades as a
flâneur
, through Berlin’s welter of amusements, did not equip him to pound down damp paths beside the Sibyl, who leaped bare roots like a champion racehorse, engaged on winning a steeplechase. They strode purposefully away towards the pine forests, carried on a light wind, beneath the reddening leaves. At first their speed permitted no more than sparse conversation and the occasional observation, but once they reached a safe distance well beyond the morning crowds circling the bandstand and the pavilion, the Sibyl slackened to a steady little trot and accepted his arm with a grateful inclination of her huge white forehead. The disordered bonnet slipped back a little, revealing a thick mane of chestnut streaked with grey. Max immediately felt embarrassed and intimidated by this unlooked-for tête-à-tête. The great trees around them blew leaves of many colours, as varied as Joseph’s coat, across their path. He kept an eye out for brambles snatching at her shawl, and lurking murky puddles, for the path, less frequented here in the outer reaches of the park, roughened and dipped. But the Sibyl knew where she was going. Her gentle pressure on his arm guided him on to woodland trails, unvisited. They startled a hare on the edge of a meadow, which leaped away into the undergrowth, ears flattened. The path now rose upwards and they began to climb. The trees thickened and darkened, the way before them flecked with sunlight.