Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “That was so nice of you, popsie,” Nora said after Collins had left.

  “What was?”

  “Not to protest when he began scribbling all over your story—and to send it off at once, so that he could be sure you wouldn’t just throw that proof away and use another. I don’t know any other writer who’d allow such a thing.”

  “But he was right!”

  “Even less of a reason, to most people.”

  “You’re talking about men authors. Maybe they’re different. I must write at once to Bristol, though, and tell that editor what happened.”

  But that letter did not go until the following day.

  ***

  Two days later Pepe was waiting for her at Annie’s with an amused grin. “Read and learn,” he said. And he passed over a couple of letters from the editor of the Bristol Times & Mirror. The first said he had already had a sample of Mr. Abe Stevenson’s impertinence and had been in two minds about taking this new story; now his doubts were confirmed. If Mr. Stevenson thought his compositors had nothing better to do than decipher Chinese hieroglyphs…etc. The second begged Mr. Laon to ignore his first letter and to convey his warmest feelings to Lady Abigail. (“How the ripples do spread,” she chuckled.) He had no idea she was acquainted with Mr. Collins…Could she perhaps beg some trifle from him for the BT&M…She might feel every assurance that past misunderstandings were past and would never recur.

  She laughed and they sat down to their meal.

  “BT&M!” She snorted. “I’d like to kick him on his B, T, M! I should have thought of it when I wrote that first time.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t understand that. What was it? I didn’t know there’d been a fracas between you.”

  “Oh, it was over that first story you syndicated, ‘The Weaker Sex.’ Remember he changed the ending?”

  “Yes. But I said to let it pass.”

  “Well, I tried to but I couldn’t. All I did was write and ask him why he’d done it. I mean I really wanted to know. And he had the effrontery to write back and say he’d assumed there was a page of manuscript missing. The story had no proper end, so he wrote it himself.”

  “Was that all?”

  She took a morsel of food to avoid answering; she held out her empty wineglass to distract him.

  “Was it?” he repeated as he filled the glass.

  “No. I wrote again,” she said.

  He drummed the table with his fingertips, looking at her wearily.

  “I told him,” she said defiantly, “that the village editor has no more right to adulterate literature than the village grocer has to put chalk in the flour.”

  “Oh my God!” Laon sank his head in his hands.

  “And I added that I knew the practice was rife in the latter trade but had not until now been aware of its spread to the former.”

  Laon silently shook his head. At last he raised his eyes to hers and held her in a long survey while he gathered words.

  “You got away with it,” he said. “But the lesson is nonetheless plain. Your book, your one book, may have sold as well as The Moonstone—it may even have outsold it—but that does not even begin to turn you into the sort of literary figure Wilkie Collins now is. This”—he held up the second letter—“fawning and grovelling is entirely due to the magic of his name. Not yours. It will be a long time yet before you can give yourself such literary airs. Until then, darling Abbie, never never forget that you are writing for a market. For a dozen markets. Always remember that each piece has a market.”

  “Market!” she said, feeling too diminished to attack his main argument. “What is a market!”

  “A market…” he began and then paused to think. A slow smile transformed his face. “A market is a strange mixing—a chimera composed of ninety-nine percent pure editor and a trifling one percent adulteration known in the trade as ‘The Reader.’ Yet ‘The Reader’ gives his name to the entire beast!”

  His witticism amused him. She, too, laughed, though more in relief that he had not grown angry with her. He would have had every right to be angry.

  “Forget it at your peril,” he said, closing the subject.

  Before she left that night she went as usual up to Annie’s boudoir. The nameless auntie was still there.

  “Annie’s away a long time,” Abigail said. It had been nearly four weeks.

  “Oh, no, dear, she’s back,” the woman answered. “She came back while you and your gentleman was…er…eatin’.”

  Abigail was delighted. “Oh, but tell her I’m here, do! I’m longing to see her again.”

  “Well—I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure of what?”

  “She may not want to see you.”

  For a moment Abigail did not know what to say. “Why ever not?” she asked at length.

  The woman shrugged, plainly embarrassed, and, going to the door, said, “Well, I’ll tell her then.”

  Annie’s appearance appalled Abigail. She looked old. And beaten. Though she smiled bravely there was an air of defeat about her that not all the would-be girlish squeaks and hugs could mask.

  “What is it, Annie?” she asked.

  “I’ll soon be right as a rainbow,” Annie said. She laughed. “And twice as crooked, you’re supposed to say.”

  “Right from what? What’s been happening to you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, love. Me sister, the one in Wales, did I ever tell you? No? Well, her little one took ill. That’s where I went. He died. Oh, it was chronic. But don’t talk about it. Tell us about you.”

  She looked around as if she had forgotten something, saw the decanter of port on a small credenza, and almost ran to pour herself a glass. Abigail realized she was already a little tipsy…“obfuscated,” as Annie called it.

  She sipped the port and pulled a face. “Decoction of brewer’s apron,” she said. “Well, gel. Have you made the addition?”

  Abigail heard ‘edition,’ and did not understand.

  “Have you lost your stakes?” Annie laughed. Her tone grew a little wild. “Has he been all there but most of him? Swopped a bit of hard for a bit of soft, did you? Take the starch out of him?”

  “Oh, Annie, don’t! It isn’t like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s not a battle. Nor a game.”

  “Try it with the chill off!”

  “What’s the matter, Annie dear?”

  Annie made obvious efforts to rally herself. “Sorry, love. Tired, that’s all. Just tired. All be different in the morning.” She grinned—genuinely—and seemed to relax. “Seriously,” she said. “Did he?”

  Abigail smiled. “We did. We do.”

  Annie clapped hands and laughed. “Straight? What d’you think of it, then? D’you take to it?”

  Abigail could only grin back at her; she could not follow Annie’s animalistic line. The thing itself was too sacred; it would have been a betrayal.

  “Bet you do!” Annie challenged. Then she grew serious again. “’Ere! He wouldn’t break your leg, would he?”

  Abigail shook her head, but Annie took it as a sign of incomprehension. “Leave you with a lapful? In the familiar way?”

  She shook her head more forcefully. “He has…those things. Like you showed me.”

  Annie was only half reassured. “They’re better than nothing. But what you want is one of those things we can wear. What they call a Dutch cap. It’s a new idea but they say it’s the best. Shall I get you one?”

  Abigail had no notion what Annie was talking about; the only images in her mind were all from Rembrandt and Van Dyck—girls in starched white bonnets.

  “What are they like? What do they do?”

  Annie explained and showed one of her own. “It’s me Sunday one,” she said with a wink.

  Abigail
thought it would be a good idea.

  “Well,” Annie said as she downed her third port, “got to give my old man his supper I suppose.”

  Just before she went Abigail asked why it was called a Dutch cap.

  “Well, it is a cap, isn’t it?” Annie said.

  “Yes, but why Dutch?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Annie said in surprise. “The Low Cuntries!”

  Abigail still did not comprehend, though she knew some kind of double meaning was involved. Later she wondered at Annie’s utter inability to talk about men, women, and copulation without elaborate, joking circumlocutions and double meanings. She and Pepe could talk about it, straight and unabashed, but that was a private language. The only person she knew who could manage it in public was William Blake, in some of his poems; and the only place you could get those poems was in the dirty bookshops.

  Dirty bookshops!

  Someone, she thought, has got the marching orders wrong!

  Chapter 22

  Abigail took a large set of chambers in an old house near the river end of Buckingham Street, just south of the Strand near Charing Cross. The new embankment was nearing completion, much of it built by the Stevenson family business. Often when looking out of her windows she would see her father or Steamer on one of their regular visits to check on the progress of the works; sometimes she would run out and join them and be taken on a tour of the new sewers and underground railway and all the other marvels. Usually there was another man with them, Joseph Bazalgette. Her father introduced him as “the gentleman who made it possible for you to live in Buckingham Street without choking on the stench of the river.”

  Bazalgette was, in fact, the architect of London’s modem sewerage system, not yet complete, and the chief begetter of all the new Thames embankments.

  “D’you know when the guvnor and he first met?” Caspar asked her once, when the two older men were out of earshot. “It shows the value of old friendships.”

  “Does it?”

  “Those two first met the year before you were born, Abbie. The guvnor got up at half past four one morning, especially to meet that man—and found him with his surveyor’s tools at the bottom of a twenty-foot trench in Fleet Street.”

  “Hurt?”

  “No! Working, silly. No one had ever heard of Bazalgette then, but they talked for an hour, enthusiast to enthusiast. And that’s why we’ve got so large a slice of this!” He looked around the workings with crisp satisfaction. “I mean, they trust each other.”

  Abigail, watching her father and Bazalgette, envied so long a friendship. Of all the people she met now (apart, of course, from Pepe), whom would she still know and work with twenty-five years hence?

  Steamer, unconsciously echoing her thoughts, said, “So, Abbie dear, the moral is plain—when you go to meet your grand publishers and all those great editors, be sweetest of all to the office boys!”

  ***

  Her family took far more kindly to her unconventional choice of life than she had dared to hope—perhaps because she was so careful to keep all possible taint of scandal from her. Naturally she and Pepe still dined together and made love several times a week, at Annie’s pub; but they always arrived and left separately, even by different streets. And Annie had the builders in to stop one of the passages short and so allow a private access between her own apartments and the supper room. Abigail never entered that room until the food was in and the servants gone. For the rest, the men who came to call on her invariably found her chaperoned by Mary, the young daughter of the married couple who looked after her, Mr. and Mrs. Stone.

  Society, as she had hoped, took an ambivalent stance, neither accepting nor condemning—that is, for every one who condemned, there were two who would defend her. And since blame shouts the louder, that proportion appeared as perfect balance. True, her style of dress was unconventional, but it was plain and modest, and she carried it with assurance; and when the occasion demanded, she would don all the crinolines and petticoats and ribbons and lay bare as much of her shoulders and chest as anyone (or any other woman) could desire. And those women who might otherwise have condemned her the loudest were quite pleased to see how dowdy she looked; and to call her “dowdy” to one another was almost to admit her into their warmest friendship.

  But women do not look at each other with men’s eyes. Their “dowdy” indicates no more than a departure from fashion’s latest dictates, even though that departure may be next year’s high-water mark of chic. No man who looked at Abigail found her “dowdy.”

  And thus she earned the gratitude of both sexes insofar as it was due—or important.

  Her own explanation for this remarkable acquiescence was, naturally, her talent. She had more than fulfilled that early and outrageous self-prediction: “I am going to become the writer whose pieces no one can afford to miss—whom no editor can afford to reject.” She still wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. The Abbot, now a regular columnist in Once a Week, still flayed the pretensions of the art world. Her unsigned but unmistakable satires appeared almost as regularly in Punch. Short stories by Abe Stevenson were in everything from Blackwood’s to The Pall Mall Magazine. She wrote as a glutton eats, by compulsion; she turned down nothing. She was “Mrs. Madge Challis,” adviser on etiquette and domestic matters to My Lady. She was “A Chef to the Aristocracy” in The Drawing Room. She wrote sly, risqué pieces for The Girl of the Period as “Drucilla Getz.”

  All these names and activities were more or less widely known in London Society. And when it was clear that hers was no mere skyrocket of a career, that she was in earnest, that she could write with style and wit and always find at least one of those phrases that make people say, “Why didn’t I think of that!” it was also obvious that she simply could not be ignored. Besides, her book had become a modern classic, selling steadily and capturing the imagination of all who read it.

  Laon’s explanation was different. “You have your mother to thank,” he said. “You know this extraordinary swath you have cut through the social forest this past year or so?”

  “One cuts a swath through a cornfield. Through a forest one cuts a trail.”

  “You leave my lines to me, miss.” He called her “miss” quite often these days. “Did you notice all those blazes healing on the trees as you passed? They were cut by your mother.”

  Abigail sniffed. “I really must get around to reading her books sometime.”

  “The single most remarkable thing about your mother is…do you know?”

  “Ten million pounds.”

  “That’s unworthy, darling. The truly remarkable thing about her is that she has no enemies—or none who amount to anything. Don’t you think that’s extraordinary? There she is, with a Yorkshire accent she doesn’t disguise, and as a girl she worked in a cotton mill and lived in a hovel, none of which she tries to hide; and now here she is a countess and the benevolent dictatrix of an important section of metropolitan Society—and the only words you’ll hear to her discredit are those stupid little sneers all women make about one another, even about their closest friends.”

  “I don’t.”

  He looked at her as if the point had never occurred to him. “No,” he agreed at length. “That’s true.”

  “Nor does my mother.”

  “Perhaps that’s the secret, then.”

  “Collapse of stout theory!”

  He shrugged and smiled, but the gesture conveyed that he knew better—that she was too obtuse to recognize the truth. From anyone else it would have infuriated her, but she would take it from Pepe because it was probably true. He had always had that air of being one secret ahead of her.

  She sought a gesture of appeasement. “The truth is in between,” she said. “What Society worships is success. In any form. My mother’s—mine—any success. Why, if a man were to…” she sought for some activity that would violate Society’s suppose
d values to the ultimate limit. “If a man were to sell little girls into vice, so long as he made a fortune at it, you’d find some section of Society willing to…”

  She faltered. Pepe was staring at her, aghast.

  “You…Judas!” he cried.

  And then she remembered: Percy Laon…Porzelijn…the man who had sold Mary Coen—and countless other girls—into French brothels.

  “What?” She tried to brazen it out, but the memory had shown in her face and he was not deceived.

  “Don’t make it worse,” he said.

  For what seemed an eternity they stared at each other. A million things clamoured to be said; she was so crammed with things to say that her tongue could not pry loose one of them.

  “Oh…Pepe…!” she stammered.

  His bloodless lips parted. Out of the black of his mouth she heard a voice that was barely his say, “I will write to you when I am myself.” He went to the door. “But there can never be anything more between us.”

  With an anguished cry she ran to him. She reached the door just as it slammed behind him. She would have followed him into the street but the terrible finality of his last words stayed her: She was afraid to hear them repeated. Instead, she rushed to her bedroom, pulled the clothes over her head, and howled herself dry and voiceless. Twice, unknown to her, Mary Stone came and stood at the foot of the bed, only to tiptoe away again.

  The third time Mary had a letter, brought by messenger; it seemed important enough to justify disturbing her mistress.

  Abigail saw at once that the envelope was addressed in Laon’s hand. “Put it on the table, Mary,” she croaked. She did not want to open it, for the same reason she had not followed him into the street.

  “Please, my lady, my mother says are you in to dinner?”

  “I am in but I shall not dine,” she said tonelessly.

  ***

  The letter was still unopened when she went to bed. Its pale outlines challenged her from the dark corner where it now lay. Again and again she had picked it up, turned it over, stared at it, and put it down once more.

  “But I love him so!” she told the emptiness, as if to prove that none of this could be happening.