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
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
takes place in Venice.
Max managed to reduce their baggage train to three servants: a nursemaid for Leo, a lady’s maid for Sophie – and Karl. Karl served as Max’s valet, and the family’s garde-du-corps, but he also dealt with the luggage, tipped the boatmen and porters, even if they were unhelpful and rude, sought out their carriage on trains and shovelled them all in, one by one, procured fresh horses as necessary, and purchased cigarettes for Max. Karl fixed broken things, from parasols to carriage wheels. His shifty, flickering eyes passed over everything at speed, judging scale, volume, distance. The luggage – two huge trunks, several leather cases, three voluminous hatboxes, and a carpetbag – always fitted perfectly into increasingly smaller spac
es. Thus, when their party disembarked at the last station before the railway bridge across the lagoon, accompanied by a vulgar horde of jolly English tourists, all screaming with pleasure at their first sight of the distant city, floating in mist, Karl had already located the tiny port, secured the first two gondolas and stacked their chests and boxes neatly in each prow, while the gondoliers leaned on their oars, smoking.
The city, transformed during the Austrian occupation, now had a brand-new railway station and a new bridge, levelled like an arrow to its heart. But the old Count, whose memories of Venice were at least thirty years out of date, insisted that they must approach the city across the green waters and see it first as the painters did, Serenissima, caught between water and sky, palaces and towers rising from the mud. Be sure you take the gondolas, there’s nothing like it. You’ll be floating into Paradise. So here they were, negotiating a musky little channel between flags and bulrushes; the solid waterlogged stakes, which marked out the deeper waterways, sticking up like cloves. The prows’ silver teeth wheeled towards the rocking open deep of the lagoon. Sophie ripped off her gloves, leaned out of the closed black cabin, and trailed her fingers in the lapping green.
‘Oh Max!’ She gazed at him, her eyes blazing. ‘It’s warm. It’s actually warm.’
All the long northern winter dissolved into this extraordinary wash of opaque green. He gazed at her sensual white fingers stroking the water, the other arm firmly coiled around her son, whose desire to plunge into the deepening lagoon now expressed itself in a series of shouts. Leo could almost speak clearly, albeit with a very limited vocabulary, and was beginning, at fourteen months, to totter at alarming speeds. He now banged his heels against the red-carpeted boards of the gondola.
‘Schnuh, Schnuh!’ he clamoured, his version of ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ in a demand for more speed. He had inherited Sophie’s decisiveness.
The second gondola, at first close behind, now surged past them. The two maids, neither of whom could swim, clutched one another in distress. The gondoliers, whooping across the heads of their passengers, proposed a race to amuse the gentry, and increased the pace and the strange, sweeping scoop of their oars. Karl lashed the trunks with an extra cord and told the shrieking maids to shut up. The two gondolas, now side by side, bucked and dipped, pummelling the swell. The terrified maids wailed in horror, but their cries, engulfed by the warm wind, faded and died. Max lit a cigar, steadied his hat and grinned at Sophie, who pushed open the slats and the little doors so that the warm air of the green lagoon blew through the cabin. Still clutching Leo with one arm, she waved the other high above her head, her lace sleeve falling back to the elbow, her skin white from winter. Then suddenly, with fabulous ferocity, she screamed, ‘Vai, Vai, Vai!’ at the gondolier, as if she had wagered all her fortune on the outcome of the race. A little rush of spray caught the wind; the oarsman leaned into the curve as the gondola skimmed and shuddered over the gentle, rocking tide. Max watched her face, white and flickering beneath her veils, her features awash with joy.
The Hotel Danieli turned its blind, shuttered eyes across the lagoon towards the ivory façade of San Giorgio Maggiore. The gondolas slipped into a tiny channel on the right of the hotel before a damp green jetty where a fleet of uniformed staff fought one another to bear the family and all their luggage into an Oriental interior of arcades, decorated pierced screens, and a lopsided flight of stone stairs. Max checked the guest list to see who was already there. To whom should he send his card? Here were one or two acquaintances, better known to the Countess, and an elderly Professor of Natural History, whose lectures he had attended in Leipzig. The usual medley of rich English aristocrats and a welter of bourgeois names, some of whom they had already encountered at the various resorts, from Interlaken onwards, into the Austrian Alps. He decided on French as the more tactful language in which to address the receptionists, despite the evident invasion of Prussian tourists, and enquired after the sea-bathing facilities on the Lido. Sophie had taken up swimming, equipped with a hat that looked like a fruit basket, and could not be dissuaded from experimenting with bathing machines.
And so began their long warm days of idleness and insouciance. Sophie conducted her usual arguments with the hotel kitchens. What should Leo be allowed to eat, and what, under no circumstances, should he be allowed to touch? She had her fish brought to her at the table, in a raw state, then sniffed and prodded the blank-eyed slab, before giving her gladiator’s thumb that all was well and that the sturgeon, turbot, tunny, mullet or sole, for which the lagoon was famous, could now be safely cooked. She listened carefully to the chef’s suggestions at breakfast every day, then countered him with proposals of her own. The kitchen staff cheekily called her ‘la Contessa’, with a roll of the eyes, and were all delighted when it turned out that Frau Maximilian Reinhardt August Duncker and Sophie, Gräfin von Hahn, were actually one and the same. Were they really married? Dozens of clients in the hotel were not who they claimed to be. Everyone, from the manager downwards, shrugged and carried on. Is their cash real and is their credit good? What else matters?
But some very surprising guests strolled into the main salon to enjoy the small chamber orchestra, which performed on a little dais, surrounded by palms in gigantic Asiatic jars. Max found himself bowing to Hans Meyrick, now a rich and successful society portrait painter, on holiday in Venice with a lavish, if elderly, English widow.
‘Stroke of luck for me, old chap,’ grinned Meyrick, unashamed. ‘She wanted a portrait of her dog, and I’d almost finished it when the dog died. So now we’re in Venice to assuage her grief. I think she’s already mightily consoled.’
‘Who on earth is that?’ Sophie noted the painter’s easy familiarity with all the English, and his expensive, glossy clothes. But she no longer recognised her Homburg dancing partner.
‘I suppose we can’t be too particular about the company we keep when we’re on holiday,’ said Max ruefully. ‘This hotel takes in all sorts.’
‘Glocken! Glocken!’ yelled Leo, who possessed his own set of bells, and adored the bells of Venice, which sounded on the hour, all across the city.
John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1877, fourteenth edition) noted the Danieli’s slippage from the first rank of hotels in Venice and recommended six other establishments, including the Hôtel de l’Europe (good situation, fine view – no pension). Professor Kurt Marek, accompanied by his London entourage, intended timing their arrival to coincide with Max and Sophie’s visit to the Paradise of Cities. But they had decided against the Danieli and were booked into the Hôtel de l’Europe. And so Max set out through the labyrinth of streets and bridges to find out when they were expected. He plunged down a tiny slit between two leaning walls of stone. Within minutes he was lost.
And then another kind of Venice, not the one described in Ruskin, or in Murray’s Handbook, began to observe him carefully, from behind the shutters and from the top of damp steps. Mid-morning, and a bright blue day far above, yet even the thunderous church bells seemed to retreat and withdraw. The filth underfoot matched the strange stench from the canals, now narrow as arrow shafts and bloodily discoloured, not the fabulous shimmering green which stretched away into the haze, visible from their balconies on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Max stopped, looked deliberately about him to make sure that he was not being followed, and lit a cigarette. He sensed at once that he was being watched.
But no one else appeared behind him. He was alone in an obscure narrow calle in a city he did not understand. He waited for a moment, trying to identify the smells, and shrinking in disgust from the piles of discarded clothing, paper and faeces heaped in damp corners. A rat, unhurried and unafraid, slunk past his boots and sank into the canal.
‘Scusi, signor.’ The low voice materialised beside him in the doorway. A thin black hand with painted red nails and many bracelets presented an unlit cigarette. Max smiled. So! He had discovered the Venetian pleasure grounds, quite by accident. No immediate danger threatened,
and all he stood to lose was a match. The hand brushed his fingers with practised and suggestive gentleness. The voice tried several languages.
‘Merci. Thank you. Danke schön.’
I should walk on now. Nod. Bow very slightly. But something about the prostitute’s throat caught his attention; a sequence of smooth dark hollows, visible through the fine white lace across the shoulders. The figure in the doorway, veiled, exotically plumed, overdressed in red satin with white lace trim, that had, in places, seen better days, leaned back, blowing a fine white puff of smoke into his face. The tobacco masked the putrid odour of the canal. He glimpsed two red eyes behind the dim lace, patterned with tiny flowers, summing him up. I am being priced. The rich German visitor is hooked and landed. How much should I ask? Then one hand reached up to lift the veil and he found himself gazing into an extraordinary black face, exquisitely fine, wide, high bones, Oriental rather than European, with a long curved nose, huge eyes, the lids painted red.
‘How much?’ asked Max, mesmerised.
‘The signor will pay.’
Then the black hand shot out like a clamp, catching Max’s grey-gloved fingers and forcing them downwards into the satin folds. Max fumbled for the prostitute’s genitals, alarmed at his own instant arousal, and without thinking, stepped into the shadowed doorway. A shiver of shock and pure, unambiguous desire flooded through his arse and legs as he clasped two swinging testicles and a hardening penis. The creature before him, both woman and man, looked up into his face, offering a challenging flash of gold, the lower lip pierced. Max’s hat slipped back and wedged between his head and the wall as he sucked the dark mouth and smooth cheeks. The prostitute flicked the un-smoked cigarette into the narrow channel of water, unbuttoned the client’s trousers with three swift tugs, then rubbed the engorged pink tip of his sex up to a groaning climax, as rapid as it was intense. Max’s mind clung to the last sane thought he had. I should walk on now. Nod. Bow very slightly. Leave at once. The sharp smell of the prostitute’s body mingled with the rotting stench from the alley’s corners.
Sophie and the Sibyl Page 25