Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Can I comb out your hair?”

  “If you’ll be gentle.”

  Abigail was delighted; she’d always felt very close to her mother when she was allowed to comb out her hair.

  Nora watched the girl’s studious concentration. “You’re getting quite a wise head on those shoulders, aren’t you? I’m sure I’d never have thought so clearly about happiness at your age.”

  Abigail pulled a face. “You’d probably experienced a lot more of it though.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!”

  “But isn’t it true? At eighteen you had next to nothing, when you met Papa. At twenty-one you were well on your way to fortune. And you did it all yourselves.”

  Nora, unwilling to speak, merely nodded. She tried to think about those times as little as possible nowadays—those days when she and John had stood and lived and fought the world side by side. They had been marvellous. She would never know their like again. And now? Now she had more money than even she knew what to do with. She had all the formidable power of one of London’s leading hostesses. Houses and villas all over Europe. And so much influence in so many directions its exercise sometimes frightened her. Yet she could not think of it as anything but mere compensation—compensation for all that vanished glory. How could she tell Abigail that?

  “I met Annie the other day,” Abigail said.

  “Annie who?”

  “Annie Barnard, who used to work for us.”

  “Oh, that Annie.”

  “She went on the streets, you know.”

  Nora was silent a while, watching the careful nonchalance in her daughter’s face. “You are growing up.”

  “I wonder what I’d have done in her situation.”

  “You wouldn’t have done that.”

  “You’re very sure, Mama. I wish I could share your certainty. I imagine myself sewing shirts for pennies a day…barely enough to buy the candles to see by. And I imagine some kindly gentleman holding out twenty guineas…How can I judge Annie?”

  “Twenty guineas!” Nora sneered. “You didn’t believe that, did you!”

  “Guess who gave it to her!” Abigail, who had always had a facility as a mimic, dropped into Annie’s argot: “‘He was a railway engineer, ever so high up. About fifty. Ever so old. And after he done it to me and I was crying, he asked if it was my first and I said yes and he said then it’s worth twenty guineas and he made me stay all night. Learned me a lot, too, he did and all. About men and that. And all the tricks. And the funny thing is—’Ere! ’Ere’s a funny thing. His wife spends her life rescuing the likes of us. Got her own refuge and all. Only he never could see the funny side of it!’”

  Nora’s face blanched, but not for the reason Abigail believed. Like Abigail, she recognized Walter Thornton at once. But what Abigail could not possibly know was that all those years ago when she “was eighteen and had next to nothing,” she had met up with Walter Thornton, then a young railway engineer, and had exchanged her only commodity for a golden sovereign. It was Walter who had told her she might get a shakedown among the navvies on his railway, and that was how she had met John and helped him win his first railway contract—and all that followed.

  And now here was Abigail thinking that, through Annie, she was making one of the discoveries of the century! Even suppose she wanted to enlighten the girl (which she emphatically did not), where could she possibly begin such a tale?

  “I’m sure there are dozens of senior railway engineers with wives like that,” she said calmly.

  “Mama!”

  “Dozens,” Nora insisted.

  Abigail smiled and resumed her trade of coiffeuse.

  “You imitate her very well. What else did she tell you?”

  “Oh, she’s saved up two thousand pounds and is going to buy a gin palace down east. And she’s going to get married—to one of her regulars.” She watched her mother for a reaction. “Don’t you condemn her then?”

  Condemn her? Nora thought. In this world? “I suppose there are degrees of…er…turpitude.”

  “Don’t say ‘turpitude,’ Mama. It’s what Anglicans say when they’re afraid of being taken for Methodists. There’s nothing wrong with good, plain ‘wickedness’. As a word, I mean.”

  “D’you wish me to write it out a hundred times?” Nora asked.

  Abigail laughed and hugged her. “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying, there are degrees. Annie appears to have kept her wits and her money. And she is now going into a relatively respectable trade—by comparison. Anyway, it is not for us to condemn the person. Only the sin.”

  “Yet if Annie had been one of those courtesans, une grande horizontale, we would not even condemn the sin. She would be feted and welcomed everywhere. At Ascot and the opera, gentlemen would vie to do her little services. How money sanctifies!”

  “Let us be thankful for that, dear. If we had not made so much money, I’m afraid very few people would consider us even respectable.”

  “Good,” Abigail said.

  Nora caught the tone. That’s round one! it meant. She wondered what tortuous plan the girl was following. “How’s Mr. Laon?” she asked, not consciously making the connection until she saw Abigail’s face in the looking glass; then she was sure there was a connection between the girl’s devious leading of their conversation and Laon.

  “Very…ah…helpful,” she answered, too casually. “The book will be finished before the end of April.”

  “I’m glad.” Nora took the brush from Abigail and trapped her hand. “Sit down, dear,” she said. “I know this is like commanding you to go and marry the man by special licence, but I wouldn’t form anything other than a professional attachment to your Mr. Laon.”

  Abigail breathed deeply to contain her anger. “May a woman of twenty-one ask why?” she said at length.

  “We’ve heard some disturbing things about his time at Cambridge.”

  “He ran a book, you mean?”

  “Not just that,” Nora said and told her what Boy had heard at Christmas.

  “But we do that in business every day, surely. If we undertake to build a bridge for such and such a sum and then the price of bricks or the wage for bricklayers falls, I’m certain we don’t go to the proprietor and say, ‘We can now build your bridge even cheaper—here’s a few thousand pounds back.”’

  Nora laughed at the notion. “Business is different, dear.”

  “But Pepe ran a book. That’s business.”

  “All right, dear—but it’s very borderliney, isn’t it? Just don’t become involved with him in any…What has he said about publishing? Has he offered you a contract?”

  Abigail grinned. “The last time I asked, he told me of a theatrical friend of his who was forced into signing a contract with a young girl dancer. The girl’s mother had drawn it up—pages and pages. Among other things it stipulated that she should not be required to dance in any group larger than three. To keep her out of the corps de ballet, you see. Of course, the first thing they did was to put her in the corps. But never dancing with more than two others. And the girl’s mother could do nothing, because the fact that there were other groups of three on the stage at the same time had no bearing on her contract.”

  “And that’s Mr. Laon’s last word on contracts, is it?”

  “For the moment. Anyway, I trust him. I think one should trust people.”

  “It’s a very good way to get hurt.”

  “So is horse riding. That’s what makes it fun, surely?”

  Chapter 15

  But you can’t possibly publish it under your own name!” Laon laughed. And his laughter, even more than his words, told Abigail how preposterous he thought it was.

  “Why not? Anyway, it’s a fine time…to wait until the book is at the printer’s and then tell me.”

  “It just never occurred to me that you woul
d dream of using your own name. No! It must have a man’s name.”

  “But why?”

  “Because everyone knows that women writers are a dissatisfied and resentful bunch of creatures. Happy women, women whose lives are rounded and complete, do not need to buttonhole the world: all they want is the calm, daily tide of household duties and pleasures. It will do you no good, you see.”

  “What rubbish! You might as well say that any man not actually engaged in charging down the enemy, sabre clamped between his teeth, is equally ‘dissatisfied and resentful!’”

  Laon smiled tolerantly. “Quite possibly true,” he conceded. “But it has no bearing on what all the world knows about women as writers. Whether they hide it like Jane Austen or parade it like Mrs. Gaskell, they are as sour as sucked lemons. I won’t let you expose yourself to the charge. No…come now, let us think of a suitable name.”

  “George Stevenson!”

  “Oh, do be serious, darling.”

  “I am serious, Pepe. Good heavens, it’s only a children’s story. If a female may not write such a book, then what may she do?”

  “You see, that’s where we differ. You believe it’s ‘only a children’s story.’ But I believe it could attract a much wider readership. It has intellect and wit. Incidentally, that’s another reason to publish under a male name. Women writers are notoriously lacking in both qualities. With a woman’s name on it, the book will never acquire that wider host of readers. Anyway, what does ‘Abigail Stevenson’ sound like? A scullery maid!”

  Pepe was on his home ground, of course, in his own editorial office, or else he never would behave so officiously. Abigail paced up and down in front of the two tall windows, hating him with an intensity that was possible only between those who are deeply in love. More than all, she hated the truths that gleamed behind his arrogance. Most women were happy not to write. Whatever Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters were famous for, it was certainly not their wit and intellect. And if her book did, indeed, have qualities likely to attract a serious adult reader, “Abigail Stevenson” was not the author to recommend it. “Scullery maid” was close to the mark.

  But she was not about to yield easily. “How long could we keep it secret?” she asked scornfully. “Dickens saw that ‘George Eliot’ was a woman before he was ten pages into Adam Bede. In less than a year everyone knew.”

  Pepe was smiling. “Naturally the secret will out. But it won’t matter by then. The book will have made its mark. Why do you not trust me, sweet? I trust you as a writer. Why don’t you trust me as a publisher—even if you can’t see the argument yourself?”

  At that he convinced her. She could feel her mind yielding to his persuasion. And though she might yet muster an argument or two, she would not be able to make them sound convincing. With a speed that would have done credit to her mother in her most nimble-witted days, she sought crumbs of comfort and advantage.

  “I agree on one condition,” she said, with every show of reluctance. “That I write a regular article for one of your papers under my own name.”

  Again that tolerant, tolerant smile. “Don’t you think you could do a great deal better,” he asked, “than my humble papers? Why aim so low?”

  “Better?”

  “What would you say to reviewing for The Examiner? Or a column on the galleries for The Spectator? Or stories for The Cornhill or Blackwood’s? I think you should try your hand at some journalism now—but not at this parochial women’s level.” Thus he dismissed his own stable.

  Her first instinct was to laugh at the grand folly of his suggestions—the very idea of it, that she should write for such august journals! But then something she had not expected to find within herself grew angry at that nascent laughter. Indeed, why should she not write for them all! It was that necessary touch of blind arrogance which is to a writer as a shell is to a turtle—a shield against the desiccating heat (in her case, the withering heat of endless self-criticism) and against the claws of enemies. Yes, why should she not write for them all!

  Because she was still angry with him for being so sure of himself she did not reward him with ecstatic cries of darling! and genius! “Yes—why not?” was all she said.

  Until a few moments earlier an invisible mental barrier had stood between her awareness of herself as a writer and the columns of journals like those Pepe had named. In fact, it had hardly struck her that those columns were written by flesh-and-blood people in lodgings, in taverns, in offices, in comfortable libraries and studies—by people as inwardly uncertain and as conscious of their own fallibility as she was of hers. The barrier had suddenly dissolved and she found herself standing on the far side of the line it had once taken.

  “Yes,” he echoed. “Why not indeed? You’ll never know what you’re made of until you try.”

  He tapped his desk impatiently. She could see he was working around to dismissing her. “If you were mainly interested in money, we would go about things in a slightly different way. But you’re not, are you?”

  “No,” she said grandly. “Of course not.”

  “So there’s an end to it.”

  Now that the clash between them was over she could permit herself once again to see him as the man she loved. And she loved him to the edge of distraction. The air around him was electric with her love.

  “Kiss me and I’ll go,” she said.

  He looked guiltily at the door and then at the windows. He laughed nervously. “I feel so inhibited here,” he explained.

  “Overwatched by the shades of all your dear lady contributors?”

  He snorted a single laugh. “Something of that sort.”

  “And am I not strong enough to banish them?”

  Of course, he could not let his gallantry fail that test. As his lips closed on hers she felt once again the overwhelming obsession for him that her body seemed to have developed quite independently of her wishes or even of her will. In those moments, he became the infinite. He filled the universe for her.

  And her effect on him was the same. She could tell it by the way he fought all those emotions when they were writer-and-editor together—for she fought them in precisely that way, too.

  When she left him that morning, the memory of him travelled in the carriage with her. No, she thought, not the memory—more than the memory—the fact of him travelled with her, all around her, like an envelope of some especial warmth. She wondered if anyone else had ever felt like this, and knew that, of course, they had—and yet she was amazed that the whole world did not ring with the sheer glory of it.

  With amused self-contempt she remembered her erstwhile dread of being possessed by a man, invaded by a man. She tried to remember the shiver of revulsion she had felt at the mere thought of such an approach, but now the man who drew near in her imagination was Pepe, and the shiver he induced was certainly not born of revulsion.

  The delicious, dangerous thought of him followed her up the Strand and across Trafalgar Square. Sir Edwin Landseer’s new lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column almost persuaded her of their dignified ferocity, but at the last minute their subfusc, pussylike quality burst through the sculptor’s intentions and ruined their pretence. They would never roar; if some Merlin touched them with his wand, they would mew sheepishly and slink away in shame.

  She determined then, for no greater reason than that Landseer’s name was in her mind, to go to the Royal Academy exhibition. Landseer had recently refused election to the presidency of that august body. It was too late for her to write any criticism of it, of course, the season was nearly done; but she could at least practise. One advantage of being over twenty-one, and (almost) a professional writer, was that she had, willy-nilly, acquired a lot more freedom of movement than could possibly have been granted to a younger girl.

  It so happened that a few days earlier she had gone to the new National Portrait Gallery exhibition in South Kensington, where portr
aits from 1688 to 1800 had just been added to the display. So, as she walked around the Royal Academy, amid acres of pompous, bombastic, tired canvas, lacking both soul and wit, she still had the clearest memory of Kneller and Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. She had once heard an eminent R.A. tell her mother that Hogarth had no sense of beauty—that Hogarth couldn’t paint.

  And there in South Kensington had been Hogarth’s “Miss Rich,” a simple, blue-eyed angel in a mobcap, as alive and fresh as she had been a hundred years ago. And there, too, were the Reynoldses—“Lady Lincoln” with her harp; “Jessamy Bride,” adored for her own loveliness and endeared to generations of readers by Goldsmith; “Lady Powis” in her blue beaver and white-sprigged mantua, walking her parkland; “Countess Spencer” with her straw hat and bridal muslin—and others. In six canvases Sir Joshua told more of humanity than any six hundred of the Academy’s jejune array. In one canvas—“Lord Mendip”—Gainsborough did the same. Even Kneller, whose gritty, big-boned Dutchmen had seemed crude in such company, even Kneller outshone this tired Royal Academy show as the sun to a candle.

  She left the Academy three-fourths unvisited, having seen it all before at the start of the season and feeling that today’s quarter-reminder evoked the memory of the rest sufficiently for her to want to escape it entirely. A depressing weight settled on her spirit.

  It demanded to be written about; but what could she say? What value was there in the opinion of a girl just out of school, and with no more critical qualification than her own profound conviction that the show was bad, bad, bad to its very heart?

  She could not even think of an opening sentence. Nevertheless, she did as Pepe always advised—she put a blank piece of paper on the desk before her and took up her pen. And, for once, the miracle happened immediately. As she moved the pen to dip it in the inkwell, she had no notion of what she was to spill forth upon the page. As she dipped the pen, she remembered that the Academy dinner was about to be held, this week or next. As she put the pen to the paper, she wrote: “My Lord, your Excellencies, etc…Gentlemen!…”