Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Winifred gaped at her. “Really?” she asked. “Did she really do that?”

  Abigail threw up her arms in mock despair and turned on her heels. “Of course she didn’t,” she said as she went out to the carriage. “’Till next week then.”

  Halfway down the drive they passed the cedar tree under which she had sheltered; Celia Addison was there again. Abigail stopped her carriage and leaned out.

  “Not crying?” she asked cheerfully. “Why when I was your age, Miss Celia, I could cry for three days without ceasing.”

  Celia, uncertain at first, broke into laughter. “Will you come here again?” she asked. “Shall I see you?”

  “Next week.”

  ***

  But they did not meet the following week. The things Winifred hinted at so disturbed Abigail that she began to wake up in the small hours with the feeling of a great dark weight upon her, a sense of unremembered nightmare. The muscles of her body tensed as if to flee some unseen, unheard, unknown pursuer; yet all she could hear was the night silence; all she could touch was the familiar bric-a-brac of her room. She would lie there shivering, and she wondered what oppressed her so.

  At the end of the week she did what she had always done in a time of crisis: she went to her brother Caspar.

  Dear Steamer!

  Only, dear Steamer was no longer comfortably near, in his room down the corridor. Dear Steamer was building a vast palace in the Cotswolds, eighty miles away.

  Chapter 5

  Falcon Wood is a mainly Georgian house, built in the northern Cotswolds by the same John Wood who, with his son, built the grand houses and crescents of the city of Bath. Its severely classical lines, rising to a completely undecorated pediment straddling the eight Ionic columns of the entrance portico, did not please Caspar. The whole building was wrong. Its public rooms were too many and too huge; its private rooms too cramped and awkward. Vast and draughty stone staircases swept grandly up to a point where they vanished from the visitor’s sight, whereupon they immediately dwindled to something mean—marble balusters were supplanted by limestone of the same design and hue; alabaster panels turned to painted stucco; real pillars soared to an entablature and then continued as cast pilasters. Even in the painted vertical frieze that flanked the monumental Adam fireplace in the ballroom the same principle of economy was employed, for the vines teemed with butterflies and scarabs to exactly eight feet above the floor, but the remaining twelve feet of vegetation displayed not a single insect.

  “A dishonest bit of building from an age of barbarism and sham,” Caspar had said even before he and Caroline had bought the place. “We’ll pull it down and build afresh.”

  But Caroline (remembering that her father was not expected to live and that her mother would almost certainly leave Caer Gwent, her family’s monstrous and depressing home in South Wales, as soon as she could) had persuaded Caspar that Falcon Wood might yet serve a purpose.

  “We may need a dower house,” she said. “And for a dower house Falcon Wood is quite fair. In any case, this valley is too small for a really grand house. Why not build our new place in that valley we rode through yesterday? It’s much broader.” And when Caspar still looked dubious, she dug him in the ribs and said, “Surely in eight and a half thousand acres we can find some suitably large valley?”

  “But what shall we call it then?” Caspar objected. “If this house still exists, everyone will go on calling it Falcon Wood. I like that name.”

  “We’ll call the new place Falconwood,” she said simply; and then she watched Caspar’s face as the idea took hold—watched his bewilderment give way to a smile, and the smile turn to laughter.

  “Linny! You’re a marvel! It’s superb.”

  “It will sort out the sheep from the goats, anyway,” she said contentedly. “The world will divide into people who know Falconwood is not Falcon Wood”—she favoured this group with her right hand, as if her thumb and finger felt fine silk cloth—“and people who don’t.” With her left hand, she dismissed this group into the dark.

  Caspar hugged her and laughed again. “Only you could have thought of it,” he said, without much exaggeration.

  ***

  Abigail and her maid Annie came by train as far as Stroud, where Caspar’s carriage was waiting.

  “Is my brother at home or at the new building?” she asked the coachman.

  “At the new building, my lady.”

  “Take me there then.” She was annoyed at having forgotten the man’s name.

  The first part of the journey—about five miles—lay along the valley bottom, all the way to Nailsworth. In summer it was closed about in deep green shade; a hot silence seemed always to pervade these leaf-hung lanes. But today, with winter only just beginning to loosen its grip, all was the colour of stone and bark and bright gray sky—bathed in a cold, pellucid light that fell evenly from every quarter, illuminating everything but taking from it all sense of weight and solidity. It might have been a landscape of painted drapes and thin mist.

  She said nothing of Annie’s recent tipsy revelations. The shock of them had gone too deep within her for any of its ripples to reach the surface. Outwardly she was unchanged; but inwardly all was changed—the world and all the people in it. They had gained a new dimension. Before, people had been simply different from one another: this one fat, that one slender, another jolly, another sour…commanding respect…worthy of pity…provoking annoyance…enlisting friendship…all different. But a new gloss had come to unite them, and in some way to narrow that wide diversity. They all did that thing Annie had told her about.

  Since then she had looked at people and tried to imagine it. The mechanics of the action were not clear. She thought they must stand motionless as people stand when they kiss. (Lord—would she ever be able to kiss again?) She did not realize that they needed to move.

  In the end it was not the images of others that disturbed her, but the image of herself in that situation. It was an unthinkable violation to allow that…that maleness to possess her. Worse—it was actually frightening. At least, she took the tremors induced by the thought as the tremors of fear. Maleness was rough, like sandpaper; hard like boxers’ fists and footballers’ knees; strong, like navvies’ arms; and arrogant, like her father, like Steamer, like all men.

  She would never let it possess her. Or so she vowed. Yet the evidence of the world was entirely against her. People did this thing. Even archbishops and their wives, even the Queen before the Prince Consort’s death. How could she hope to escape? That was why she had come to Caspar; he would know what’s what.

  Beyond Nailsworth stretched the part she had come to think of as “The Ends”—Tickmorend, Downend, Nupend, Barton End, Tiltups End. “Well, Steamer,” she had told Caspar when he first brought her this way, “at least no one can complain that the journey to Falcon Wood is endless.”

  “Steamer” was a school nickname that had stuck into adulthood because it seemed so much more apt than the baptismal Caspar. He was a steamer—busy, noisy, thrusting, unstoppable. Yet when he did stop (of his own accord, naturally) he seemed as immobile, as dead, as an engine off the boil. The bustle of activity was so normal to him that any pause seemed like torpor itself.

  Her first view of him on this afternoon, up on the tops of the Cotswolds, where the cold winds tugged at hair and clothing, showed him with his back to her, framed between a piledriver and a temporary site hut, trying to clutch at plans, fighting for them with the wind, while he gestured away down the valley, spotting-in the covert and copses, the rides and lakes, that would one day embellish its sheep-cropped sides.

  “What?” she called. “The house not up yet? For shame, Steamer!”

  The wind and his own absorption had kept the sound of the approaching carriage from him. He turned with a wide, welcoming smile and ran to help her down. His architect, Nick Thornton, snatched the plans into safekeeping.
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  Side by side, partly in the lee of the site hut, brother and sister ran satisfied eyes up and down the landscape.

  “It’s the only valley on the whole estate whose northern side faces the sun at exactly half past two of an afternoon,” he said.

  “You told me that last time.”

  “But we shall have to plant twelve thousand trees a year for the next ten years to get anything halfway decent in the way of a view.”

  She almost whistled but the wind had dried her lips.

  “That’s forty trees every working day,” he went on. “Do you know how many different kinds of tree there are?”

  “No.” She loved it when Steamer was out to impress her with facts.

  “Nor do I. It would greatly help us if, when you return to London, you could pop over to Kew and find out.”

  She groaned aloud at the idea—but even more at the knowledge that she would, indeed, do as he asked. She never refused him. It was part of the unspoken pact between them.

  “Hello, Nick,” she said at last. Her delay had been a deliberate tease.

  “Good afternoon, Lady Abigail,” he said, not seeming to mind her afterthought greeting.

  All her life she had been plain “Abbie” to him—until she came out, and until he had begun to work for Caspar on Falconwood. She did not like the change, but she was beginning to see why childhood friendships could not persist unaltered into maturity.

  At that moment a thought came that almost felled her on the spot. More of a picture than a thought. A picture of herself and Nick “putting the difference together,” in Annie’s delicate phrase. But it was different from all the other pictures, for Nick was moving…rutting, like a boar.

  Even now, here on the windswept hilltop, his eyes gleamed, boarlike, as he shook her hand.

  The gleam was replaced by concern. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She recovered swiftly. “I must have been sitting too long.” She grabbed Steamer’s arm. “Take me around and show me how it’s all changed since I was last here,” she commanded.

  He showed her how they had decided to double the size of the fountain and bring two grand marble steps around each side, “like Versailles,” he said.

  “What are they digging?” she asked, pointing to where she knew the kitchens would one day be.

  “The wine cellar and, below part of it, the hydraulic cellar, deeper still.”

  “Oh, good,” she said. “I meant to ask about that last time. I saw no provision on your map for a hydraulic cellar and I’m sure every decent house should have at least one, aren’t you?”

  He sniffed coldly, not rising to it. “A map of a house is called a ‘plan,’” he said.

  She laughed. “Steamer! For goodness’ sake, what is a hydraulic cellar?”

  “It will power a big platform—lift it to any floor. Hydraulically. All the luggage and furniture and laundry and hot water and food trolleys will go up and down by it. But if we build it first, we can even use it to help in the building—carry all the materials we need.”

  She was delighted at the idea. “Oh, pike I!” she begged.

  “What?”

  “Pike I be first to ride up on it.”

  He shook his head. “If I know our pater, he’ll be first. It was his idea. We’re casting the cylinders ourselves—building the whole engine, in fact.”

  But she had already transferred her interest. “Is that where you’re going to put all these trees?” she asked, pointing down the valley. “There’s quite a lot there already.”

  “But they’re all in the bottom. I want lakes along the bottom. And I want to see them from here; so I want the trees higher up the slopes and on top.”

  “But nature put them at the bottom. Don’t you think there may be a reason? Mayn’t it have something to do with shelter from the wind?”

  Caspar laughed pityingly. “The whole point of being human, my love, is to teach Mother Nature tricks she never dreamed of. It was Nature who made ponies; we turned them into horses. My latest thing is electricity. I’m going to bury two-inch-diameter copper bars under all the floorboards. We’ll pension off the night.”

  “Electricity?”

  “One of these days, and soon, someone is going to invent a practical kind of electric light, and it will be much cheaper and cleaner than gas. A fine mess it would make to rip up all the floorboards then! Oh, Abbie, there’s so much to think of.”

  She saw that he was trying to look harassed, and she laughed. “You love it!” she said.

  “I can only spend two days a week at it, you see: Fridays and Saturdays. That’s the trouble.”

  “You love it.”

  “Why did you come, Abbie? Is anything the matter at home?”

  “Should there be?”

  “Is Father pestering Mother?”

  “He knows better than that. Why should you think something’s wrong?”

  They strolled among marker pegs labelled Ballroom…Gun Room…Billiard Room…Bachelors’ Stair…Sculpture Gallery…Valet-du-Jour, seeing only Cots-wold turf and Cots-wold mud.

  “I’ve found out,” she said at last.

  “Found out what?”

  Their rambling had brought them close to the site hut and the carriage. Even though no one was in view, it was too close for comfort.

  “Something,” she said.

  “Oh good! I can’t tell you how glad that makes me.” He laughed.

  “After dinner I’ll beat you at billiards,” she said. “If we may be alone, I’ll tell you then.”

  ***

  At dinner Caroline was very scathing on the subject of electricity.

  “Dr. Collins says it will be most injurious to have these currents swilling to and fro beneath us and overhead as we sleep,” she told Caspar.

  “Oh?” Caspar pretended to take it seriously.

  “It’ll create magnetism that will interfere with our own magnetism.”

  “My dear, we already live and breathe, and sleep, in a magnetic field several thousand times stronger than anything our conductors will produce.”

  “You may. I’m sure I don’t. I would feel it.”

  “So would I,” Abigail said. “I’m very sensitive to magnetism.”

  Caspar smiled at Nick and shrugged. The gesture annoyed Caroline, not only for its implied patronage of her ideas, but also because she considered that Nick, being an architect, should eat in the servants’ hall, not at her table—never mind his being an old family friend.

  Abigail noted these undercurrents and relished them, for they helped restore an ancient conviction that she was above and outside the passions which moved the rest of mankind. Her own rages and delights were of an altogether different order.

  Toward the end of dinner, when conversation turned yet again to the plans for Falconwood, she even risked a little dart of her own.

  “By the way,” she said casually, “I saw no provision on your plan for a newspaper-ironing room. Such a pity.”

  “Newspaper-ironing room?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes. Louise Beaumont was telling me. Apparently it all started with the Prince Consort—in the year before he died, he took a strong objection to having folded newspapers delivered to the breakfast table. He insisted the footman should iron them first. And now all the royal residences have newspaper-ironing rooms. I thought Falconwood could be the first private house with the same accommodation.”

  “Oh, Abbie, you treasure!” Caroline was delighted as she turned inquiringly to Nick.

  “The menservants’ bootroom,” he said, “could go out into the corridor, leaving that room at the foot of the menservants’ staircase free. I don’t suppose it takes much space to iron a newspaper.

  Thus Abigail became the founder of an entirely spurious fashion. But it served Steamer right—the way he went on about Falc
onwood and all its wonders.

  Later, in the billiard room when she was one frame up and well into a break of forty, “despite these ridiculously hampering clothes,” as she pointed out, Caspar again asked her what was wrong.

  She smiled and sank the red ball in the far pocket with a convincing thwack! “I feel a bit of a fool, Steamer. When I wired you, I was in somewhat of a state. But I seem to have weathered it.”

  “Was it important?” He put the red back on its spot.

  “Not really. Well…yes. Yes, it was. I found out about men and women…and, you know, babies.”

  The red shuddered between the cushions guarding a pocket and failed to sink. But Caspar did not give his usual cry of mockery. He did not move from where he was.

  “Your ball,” she said. And when he continued to stare at her she asked, “What?” For his look was almost that of a prosecutor.

  “D’you remember the Christmas before last we were all at Maran Hill? And you came and told me you’d found out about the pater’s mistress? That girl called Charity? And you said he had children by her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Pardon me, Abbie, but you did. You said the children were ‘only Stevensons by Charity.’”

  “It was only a way of speaking. Good heavens—did you think I knew how such things happened then?”

  Her vehemence and obvious sincerity shook him, for he had been sure, then and since, that Abbie knew.

  “You really didn’t?” he asked.

  She ran and threw her arms about him. “Oh, Steamer! I had no idea what you would say. Or even how I could bring myself to tell you. And it’s so easy, isn’t it?”

  “How did you find out? Who told you?”

  “Never mind. That’s not important. A girl at a dance. She had a headache and I played the Miss Nightingale. It was quite dark. And confidences always come more easily then, don’t you find?”

  This piling up of irrelevant circumstantial detail sounded convincing, she hoped.

  “Well!” He broke free and addressed the cue ball again. “So now you know…everything!”