5  

All family deaths herald a new beginning. However, the hoped-for reconciliation between Georgina and her mother never took place. Sussex was as forbidden to her as ever, and the frost between the members of the family never melted. Losing the baby and finding herself barren had been a cruel blow to Georgina which she dealt with entirely on her own. Now that Morgan was gone, she hoped she might be accepted back into the fold. Louisa in her old-fashioned and artless way simply crowned Dal the new head of the family, and he kept his sister firmly at arm’s length. While Flo and Apsley might feel sorry for her, she had the bitter and lifelong enmity of Emily to contend with. Flo married first. Her husband was an officer of the Life Guards who scandalized a garden party by remarking to a young woman serving at a tea stall, “My wife is ill. When she is dead and buried I shall marry you.” Flo died a few months later. Emily married a man named Bill Williams who was land agent to the Duke of Newcastle. He was painfully dull. Apsley married a hapless girl named Mamie.

Though she sang for her supper in many of the great houses and lived among people her mother could only ever dream of meeting, Georgina was growing increasingly disillusioned. After a charity concert organized by Mrs. Gladstone she wrote: “I was furious and so was dear Harry to see that horrid old crow and humbug Jenny Lind put herself down for five solos and me for one.” She adds, “Jenny Lind the image of a shrunken crab apple! She sings through a veil and it might be in any language but her style is good and altogether if she was nice her singing would be nice. Deacon accompanied lovelily and I sang The Keeper so as to draw tears from most eyes. J.L. looked as though a toad had croaked and took not the slightest notice.”

This is overreaching. The Swedish Nightingale was then in her early forties and one of the richest artists of any kind in the world. Julius Benedict had secured her £20,000 for a single tour of America, and from her stupendous life earnings the singer had endowed an entire hospital in Liverpool and the wing of another in London. She was in fact the consummate professional. Georgina was just one of any number of pretty young society sopranos that fell in her way—and not so young any longer either. Jenny Lind lived in state and was the friend of kings and princes. Georgina, when she was not in London, famously received visitors to her cottage in Beaumaris in her apron, her pug Dan Tucker yapping at her feet. Over the teacups she would confide her most cherished and almost her only artistic opinion. She had taken to explaining that superiority was its own form of exile:

I have already given some idea of the select society in which I ruled and reigned and of which I was the “Peri,” the “Queen of Song,” the “Semiramis,” the “Corinna,” the “Nightingale,” the “Muse” etc, and all those other pretty flattering names which are accorded to the worst amateur, as well as to the greatest artist. I was acquainted with all the richest and noblest among those who were in the habit of throwing their money out of the window, and as my runaway marriage, beneath me and sans façons, had not been the signal for a shower of wedding presents, I thought that my friends would have seized this opportunity of repairing their want of generosity, in order to give me proofs of their appreciation, their admiration and their gratitude. How often, with eyes suffused with tears, with smothered sighs had I not been accosted with—“Ah, Mrs. Weldon, what ought we not to do for you who lavish so bountifully your divine gifts on your fellow creatures? What have you not a right to demand of us?”

The labored facetiousness of this is quite awful. Was it the job of the richest and noblest to repair a bad marriage? And did it really help her case to describe the hospitality they offered as being akin to throwing money out of the window? It was ridiculous bravado of her to write, “Mrs. Gladstone sent me an impudent invite. So I sent word that I should come if I had nothing better to do.” The fact was she had run after such opportunities ever since losing the baby in 1860, and if it was all now beginning to pall, that was hardly the fault of her hosts. When she was only thirty-two, she wrote, “The sun has quite gone down on my beautiful past.” It was probably the most poignant sentence she ever wrote. She had tried to make the whole world love her without being able to see how impossible an ambition that was.

Some of her despair was with Harry. Though he continued escorting her wherever she went in high society with his customary and impertubable good humor, he was not the man she had married. There was a reason. Harry was unfaithful and had been since 1863. The details were woundingly prosaic. Shortly after his mother moved to Chester, he went to see her on a filial visit. There he met Mrs. Annie Lowe, a dressmaker and widow of a Fusiliers’ officer. They commenced a relationship, and in time she gave him a son, Frank. Had they known of it in the Beaumaris Artillery Volunteers, his friends might have shrugged and smiled. This was very much the scrape he might get himself into, even so soon after the tumult of marriage to Georgina. It was worth a drunken cheer to learn that Harry had a clandestine child by this other woman, after all the fuss and bother with Georgina’s doctors. There was clearly nothing wrong with his shot and shell. However, if they reasoned that their support was needed to help get him out of a tight corner, they were wrong. Harry had found the woman in his life.

Georgina remained in complete ignorance of the liaison for fourteen years. Though Harry kept Annie Lowe a secret, there was no doubt left in his wife that the love she so craved was not in any case going to come from him: not in the form she most desired it. Harry tolerated her and even indulged her. But he could not be changed into Moncorvo—he could not be altered a whit from the easy-natured spendthrift he was. Georgina’s whole existence depended upon being thought irresistible. That had been the story of how she and Harry met, after all, and giving up all for love was one way of glossing their hasty and imprudent marriage. The strangest thing of all was that he did better than she in most social situations, partly because it mattered so little to him. Freddie Warre was back in London, and the two men renewed their Washington friendship. It did not include Georgina—Warre did not like her and once described her to her face as “Georgina Graspall.” It was a candid as well as a brutal assessment. She was importunate. Women of rank did not put themselves about in quite the brash way Georgina did. If they wanted to be in the world, they cultivated politics or the arts. They triumphed over men in the world of men. For all her running after social fame, this was a skill of which Georgina knew nothing. Meanwhile, Harry was elected to the Garrick Club, where he amused himself with Freddie Warre and other cronies in that pleasant and undemanding manner that made him such a popular figure.

Georgina was beginning to disappoint people. She began to realize that she made enemies much faster than Harry made friends. Even her most loyal supporters—and they were very few—saw in her a woman who was somehow detached from the realities of life. The thing she lacked most was a clear view of what was possible. All her energies flew off with centripetal force, bringing her back nothing but harm. There were scandals—none of them very great and some of them farcical. An example was when Harry asked her to make herself “agreeable” to Sir William Thompson, a distinguished surgeon and devoted amateur of the arts, in particular music. The elderly and susceptible Sir William was soon besotted, only to find that he was not being loved for himself but instead being asked to invest in a granite quarry in some part of Wales of which he had never heard. In general, society began to tire of her foolishness, her grand opinions of herself. It is at this time of her life that she began to end her account to friends of how she rejected the fabled Moncorvo with the remark “and this is why and how I became a great musician.” It was a desperate piece of wishful thinking.

Her bachelor friend Clay liked her, but even he must have winced when she claimed to know all the singing teachers in London, all of whom worshiped her genius. She had gone to Canada as a member of a choir, yet by her account of the tour a listener might be forgiven for thinking it was to give solo performances. Certainly, she had sung for the Gladstones, for Palmerston, Lord Lansdowne, and many others. But being asked a service of them—to provide part of an evening’s musical entertainment to a company that might exceed a hundred—was confused by her as an invitation to deep and lasting friendship, even intimacy. She seemed not to realize how others saw her talent, or the frame in which it existed. In the Mémoires she writes of another social acquaintance, this time with a quite reckless abandon:

In 1868 the composer Arthur Sullivan (who died quite recently and was buried in St. Paul’s, his tomb covered in palms and laurels) pestered me as he pestered all women with his disgusting familiarities. I was even obliged, laughingly, to get my husband to tell him to leave me alone. He was a tiny little fellow, quite dark, with enormous hands on very long arms and nigger feet. In our circle one called him Jackie—he was a comical little thing who made everyone laugh. As a musician he was a very facile plagiarist, a real parrot: when he imitated Handel, Fred Clay, Mendelsohn [sic] or Gounod, he was very good, but when he tried to be original his music was nothing. For myself, I never patronised his efforts and although he tried to cling to me like a monkey, I told him squarely what I’ve just now written. My husband eventually told him “Jackie, don’t bother my wife or I shall be forced to horsewhip you.”

These are the words of someone who has long lost touch with reality. The truth was otherwise. In those late sixties she cultivated Sullivan just as she did Clay and Julius Benedict because she was contemplating a dramatic change of direction. It began to form in her mind that she should cross the chasm that separated the amateur from the professional. She would open an Academy of Singing.