Free Gwendolen by Diana Souhami

my luck in London they would support me financially. That was the final laceration. I vowed never again to ask anyone in authority for their opinion of me.
    I congratulated him on his engagement to marry, said, ‘If I take the wrong road it will not be because of your flattery,’ then thanked him for his kindness, his offer of hospitality and his time. He gave me his card, said, ‘God forbid that you should take any road but one where you will find happiness,’ kissed my hand and left.
    My hopes receded with the sound of coach wheels on the gravel. I had wanted King Klesmer, messenger from the god of Art, to admire something in me, but I was too old, mediocre and vainglorious. I was a fantasist, a spoiled girl with a beautiful face and no talent who would earn no money and merit no applause. The acclaim accorded me thus far was from people who knew nothing of quality.
    Sawyer’s Cottage, the bleak railway waiting room, the governess’s room at the top of the Bishop’s house, the death’s head in the wainscot, the woman at the Whispering Stones, their curse was upon me.
    Mamma came into the room when she saw Klesmer had gone and observed my tears and brittle mood. I told her I accepted Sawyer’s Cottage and being governess to the Bishop’s daughters. I resolved to try not to care, to try to bear it all. I thought I had reached the depth of my own misery. I was wrong.
    *
    The next ordeal was with uncle and aunt. They and my cousins faced financial devastation with a fortitude to shame me. They took to penury with Christian zeal and embraced sacrifice and austerity. Aunt sorted depressing window coverings for Sawyer’s Cottage from the rectory storeroom. Uncle endlessly boasted of no meat for breakfast. Rex, even while working for a fellowship, arranged both to tutor his brothers and to take pupils.
    Mrs Mompert, uncle told me, wished to interview me before confirming my appointment as governess. Why? I asked. I had done myself the violence of accepting the humiliation of her employing me. Was that not enough? Did I need to be vetted like a horse for the stable?
    Mrs Mompert needed to be sure of me, uncle said. A woman of strict principle, she presided over her daughters’ religious and moral education. She would not, for example, have a French person in the house. She needed to assess my character and likely influence on her daughters.
    He went on to extol the Bishop’s ecclesiastical credentials. He talked of the Bible Society, private strictures and Lord Grampian, and conveyed a sense of oppression more stifling than embroidering table napkins for Pennicote church. I became awash with anxiety. I felt like a trapped and drowning bird. The pompous Bishop was to inform me on church matters of infinite dullness. His prim wife would have me hide my hair under a maid’s cap. Their wretched unmet girls already irritated me far more than my own sisters. I wanted to fly to the open sea, jump to freedom from any high window. I enquired desperately about the alternative: the position in a school.
    The teaching post was not good enough, uncle said, nor did I have an equal chance of securing it. ‘Oh dear no,’ aunt added. ‘It would be much harder for you. You might not have a bedroom to yourself.’ They apprised me of the character-building benefits of self-abnegation and how, from Mrs Mompert, ghastly Mrs Mompert, I would learn to conduct myself from a woman who was my superior.
    *
    Life was hateful. Mamma watched me in distress. I evinced no interest in dreary furnishings for the horrible cottage, I refused to go to the rectory and face uncle’s stoicism, I dreaded being subjected to Mrs Mompert’s scrutiny.
    The interview with her was fixed for a week away but I could not rouse myself. I had known since I was little that mamma was unhappy. Now it seemed I was to be even more unhappy than she. I do not think I suffered from overweening arrogance, only naïve optimism. You had given me insubstantial hope, Grandcourt