The emptiness was appalling. How, she wondered, could one person support such loss? Why did the grief not kill her? What a monstrous prison her body had become—a prison where time and memory lay shackled together, each pinning fast the other, fouling their sweetness.
But what sweetness! Pepe’s dark eyes…Pepe begging her to marry him…Oh, the folly! The folly of those proud refusals! “Yes, I will, I will!” she called at the dark.
“I love him so,” she whispered, drowning the ghostly room in hot salt.
In the small hours she arose and dressed. Two lines of pain ran from her neck up the inside of her skull; her bruised eyes saw dual images of everything; her nose could smell nothing but the brine that had swilled it raw. The movement of each racked muscle was a miracle, but no mercy.
From room to room she wandered unconsoled. Mary, hearing her movement, rose and came as far as the door.
“Go back to bed, Mary.” She had to force the words through thickets of phlegm.
Mary did not go back to bed. Five minutes later she came from the kitchen with a candlelit tray on which stood a glass of hot milk and a buttered wafer.
Abigail wanted neither; but her dry throat and cavernous stomach won. She sipped—and was amazed at the relish of it. She ate—and never had such simple food tasted so good.
“What prisoners we are,” she said glumly. “What power our bodies hold over us!”
Mary nodded.
The milk tasted odd.
“There’s a drop o’ comfort in that, m’m,” Mary said.
How like Annie she talked—the same chirpy cockney. All confidence. No one puts it over me, it proclaimed. I seen it all. Twice!
She would go and see Annie tomorrow. No—she looked at the clock—today.
“Were you ever in love, Mary?” she asked.
Mary grinned. “I am, m’m. I was going to ask as if I might be allowed a follower. He’s a p’liceman but he’s ever so respectable.”
In the face of such enthusiasm Abigail could not avoid a smile, a brief, wan, sad little stretching of her lips, but a smile no less. It felt like a split in her face after so long an absence. She wanted to say, You see what has happened to me—and you still want to risk it? But that part of her mind which silently spoke her words in advance of any possible utterance heard the melodrama and silenced her.
“My lady?” the girl pressed.
“I shall have to talk to your mother. For myself I have no objection. You must ask him to call on me.”
Only the knowledge of her mistress’s grief kept the girl from dancing.
When Abigail was alone again she went—or, rather, her body went, by long habit—to her desk. She took a spill and lighted the gas; the dancing fishtail of flame was absurdly jolly. The whole world seemed bent on mocking her grief.
The first papers beneath her hand were some pages of a short story Pepe had returned with his comments. “Can’t you get it into your head…” one of them began.
The tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. She could hear his voice, feel his presence, in those words. “Oh, I love him. I love him!” she said.
But she had to clench her eyelids now to force the tears to roll upon her cheeks; the luxurious floods of yesterday were gone. A drab sadness claimed her. She sat and read.
“Can’t you get it into your head that casual accidents—truly casual accidents—are not permitted in literature? There must be purpose in everything. The reader is not looking for more cloth off the same loom that weaves his or her own seemingly unpatterned experience. He wants you to show him it need not be patternless. He wants to watch you play at God—and make a mess of it, like everyone else; but at least he wants you to try. So go on—play at God! Enjoy it, too! Your writ is brief enough.”
In some obscure way—and not just because she heard his voice in every word—this one-paragraph essay brought immense comfort to her. She took up her pen and began to revise the story to accord with his suggestions. And in that way she kept him comfortingly near her until dawn.
Mary was by now quite accustomed to sweeping and dusting the room around her mistress, for Abigail was often at her desk an hour or more before the girl arose at six. Today, when the girl had finished, Abigail sent her round to Pepe’s office with the revised manuscript; as an afterthought she put in his letter, still unopened. Whatever he had said in it, in haste, in hurt, he would know she could not hold it against him. It was a kind of apology. Well…almost.
She even managed a light breakfast.
Midmorning brought another letter from him. It had a different envelope and was promisingly fat; eagerly she opened it—and gave a cry.
Out fell his letter of yesterday, still in its original envelope. And there was another piece of paper, a note: “I am glad you at least are calm enough to work. For myself the desolation is terrible, to know that all this time I have adored someone quite different from the person you have turned out to be. Please read my first letter. I did not write it in haste. It contains a number of practical suggestions for our future—or, I mean, our futures—which you must consider and answer. For the meantime I must—and will—continue to act as your agent. To act otherwise would do us both quite needless harm. And you can hardly deal directly as a male author could.”
She was too numb to weep. She stood at the window and watched the squalls of rain sweep across the wintry face of the river; she felt like a machine whose sole purpose was to stand and watch the world yet comprehend it not at all. Everything was pointless. The stirring of the branches in the wind, the flotsam bobbing along the rain-filled gutters and falling into the drains, the soot stirring in random eddies where the window ledge was still dry—all these were at one with the dull heartbeat within her, all meaningless.
She stood thus for an eternity, until Caspar’s voice pierced her silence. “I say, Abbie, what’s up?”
She turned and looked at him, standing at the door. “Up?”
“I’ve been watching you.” He came to the window and put an arm about her. “With the survey telescope. You didn’t move or…”
She leaned into his embrace and tears she did not know were left inside her fell like rain. “Oh, Steamer…Steamer, I’m so miserable—I just wish I could die. If he’s going to leave me, I will die. I know I will.”
Caspar held her, saying nothing, just hugging all the comfort he could into her.
Eventually she was calm again, but still he held her. He spoke over her shoulder. “You’re talking about Laon, of course.”
She nodded; after-tears hiccups shook her.
“What has he done?”
“It’s what I’ve done. I said something…he thought…I didn’t mean…but he…”
His hug stifled her. “Calm!” he said. “Be calm. Tell me just a bit at a time. What exactly did you say?”
His stillness and good sense reached into her. She nodded and made the effort. “We were talking about success. About how Society worships it and will forgive anything if it makes money. And I said…you know how one exaggerates for effect?”
She felt him nod; his jaw grazed her hair. “What I said was…” She choked.
“Go on,” he urged gently.
“I said a man could spend his life selling little girls into vice…of course it was ridiculous, but you know how one sometimes…”
“Go on,” Caspar repeated, but this time his voice was laden with foreboding.
“I said if such a man made enough money, Society would applaud.”
“You said that to Laon?”
“Yes, but I’d forgotten about his father. I swear it! I haven’t thought about Porzelijn for years. I didn’t mean that. God! Of all the hyperboles I might have chosen, why did I choose that!”
“Indeed, Abbie. Why did you? He will never believe it to be accidental.”
“Oh, Steamer!” She broke down again.
He let grief work its way and then nudged her gently toward the sofa. “Let’s talk,” he said.
When they were seated he continued. He spoke gravely, not as if he were out to comfort her. Indeed, he seemed to speak more to himself. “You remember how Mr. Ignaz Porzelijn first—what shall I call it?—impinged on our lives?”
She nodded. “Mary Coen.”
“I was in love with Mary Coen. For six months after she vanished I went through the sort of hell you must be going through now. I know it feels unique, but it isn’t. Everyone you meet has gone through it.”
“But that…” she began in her disappointment.
“I know,” he cut across. “But that makes no difference. I know. I wasn’t going to try and pretend otherwise. It makes no difference. I wasn’t even going to say that I got over it in the end. But I did get over it. I stopped crying myself to sleep every single blessed night. I stopped whispering her name to make my guts turn over. I stopped hoping to see her round every corner.” He gave a contemptuous laugh. “I used to ride round Yorkshire—Yorkshire!—knowing she was vanished off the face of the earth, and I’d look for her behind every bush and down every lane! Yet I got over it. Oh, I was quite myself again when Nick told me he’d seen her in Paris. And what did I do? I nearly broke my ankle jumping off the ship. Oh, I’d got over her! I didn’t rest until I’d reached Paris and tracked her down. But I’d got over her!”
His full meaning dawned upon her. “Oh, Steamer! You…still?”
He nodded, not taking his eyes off her. “And Laney, that girl in New York. Don’t imagine you’ll ever get over it. You just get used to not getting over it—until one day you’ll suddenly realize it’s been years since you even thought about it. But even then don’t deceive yourself. It’s a sleeping volcano, that’s all. If Laney was to come walking down the street one day next week—or Mary Coen—I don’t know if…”
She touched his mouth with the tips of her fingers. “Please!”
“Oh, you haven’t heard the best of it,” he said. “I think I know why this is. That’s what I really meant to tell you. It’s the only comfort I can honestly give.”
“What is it?”
He looked at her, summoning resolution. “You’re a big girl now, Abbie. So I suppose I may tell you. I loved both those girls. Not with the pure love of a medieval knight, you understand—but with a real love. I craved them.”
“I know,” she said. “I know what you mean.”
But he seemed not to hear. He was now embarked not on a story but on a compulsion to tell a story. “The way Society goes on you’d think men and women need only five seconds to beget the next generation, like flies. I mean, that’s the longest time we allow the two sexes together unchaperoned. Well, Mary Coen and I passed two nights in bed together and nothing happened. I mean everything happened, but not that one particular…you know what I mean.”
She nodded. Her silence made him look at her. “Shocked?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“What I’m saying is that because I was denied—or denied myself—that ultimate joy with them both, I never ceased to long for them.” He squeezed his torso at the ribs. “This—heart-thing—is such a tyrant to us. To men, anyway.”
“And to women.”
“I doubt the tyranny is so immediate. But no matter. Even if it is, that’s just what I’m saying. The fact that you and Laon are not married is bound to intensify…” Her smile made him falter.
“Dear Steamer!” she said. “Now you think your experience is so unique!”
He sprang to his feet, aghast. He moved away from her as if she had admitted having cholera. “No!”
“Oh?” She was stung to the edge of anger. “It is all fine and beautiful for you—but not for your sister!”
“That is different.” Spit flew from his lips. “Of course it is different.”
“I’ll tell you how different, brother dear. Pepe and I went not two nights but two months of nights before we felt ourselves ready for that joy you speak of…”
“Stop! I want to hear no more!”
But her anger was up now. She stood and seized him by the shoulders to shake him. “This tone of high disgust has the reek of hypocrisy,” she said. “I warn you, Caspar, my experience is every bit as beautiful and holy to me as yours obviously was to you. If you behave as if it were something foul and disgusting, you and I will part company. Now!”
“But Abbie…” He was in anguish.
“Choose!”
Defeated, he sat again on the sofa. She sat beside him and took his hand. “Very well,” he said. “Not disgusting. But”—he looked at her searchingly—“dangerous!”
“We are careful. People who know us well, even intimately, have not the slightest suspicion of what we are doing. If they did…”
He cut in: “But someone must see him come here.”
“Here! He hardly ever comes here.”
“Where then?”
“Neither you nor anyone else will ever know.”
It was a foolish thing to say and she regretted it at once; Steamer loved nothing so much as a challenge. Still there would be time enough to worry about that.
Then she realized what that last thought of hers implied: hope! The bleak conviction that all was finished had lifted from her. Somehow Steamer had brought her comfort after all.
***
She slept for sixteen hours and awoke ravenous enough to do justice to a four-course breakfast. During the night an unexpected transformation had worked in her. It showed itself first when she thought by habit, I must call on Pepe—and then felt a twinge of doubt.
She still wanted to talk to him…explain…see him…touch him. None of that had diminished in any way. But alongside it had grown a conviction that if she went to him she would lose something. What it was she could not say, any more than she could say in plain words why she was still so full of terrors at the thought of marriage. But the loss would be permanent. It had something to do with the marvellous symmetry of their love, hers for him, his for her. If she went to him now, it would introduce a permanent inequality between them; the symmetry would be destroyed. “Symmetry” was another aspect of her freedom.
Beneath this reasoning, barely perceived by her, was something of that same inexplicable impulse which, at the beginning of their affair, had made her postpone for three days an assignation with Pepe that she longed for. But that was beyond her fathoming.
She rose from her breakfast and went to the window, intending no more than to see what sort of a day it was, and found that she was searching the street for the sight of Pepe! It was the same all day, just as Caspar had described it. She followed the usual round—visiting the galleries, calling on friends—and everywhere her body prepared her for an encounter with him. It was not quite so absurd as it had been with Caspar and Mary Coen. Laon’s public path did occasionally cross hers, after all. But she knew that if she were in Paris—or Peking—she would be looking for him in that same way.
Chapter 23
A week later she still had not seen Pepe; neither had she opened his first letter. Each day she said, Today I will go and see him. And each day that reluctance to be the first to act held her back. She longed for him, wept for him, sighed for the loss of him; yet long habit would not let her believe that it was final. They would be together again, soon; but the move that would reunite them would be his.
Each day, too, she resolved to go and visit Annie, who had been away on one of her periodic visits to Wales, where her sister always seemed to be in one kind of trouble or another. Abigail was not even sure Annie was back, but she ought to go and see. After a week she realized that the same reluctance to meet Pepe was keeping her from visiting Annie. Of course, that was absurd. The last place in London where she’d be likely to run into Pepe was at Annie’s.
It was Sunday. She went to e
arly evensong at St. Paul’s and then took a cab to Crutched Friars. Sunday was a quiet evening at The Old Fountain; they’d have lots of time for a chat. She knocked at the private door. The maid, recognizing her, took her up.
“They’re having such a jolly party, m’m,” she said. “The missus and all. It’s just like when we first come here.”
And it was a splendid party, too. A real East End booze up, with oysters and whelks and jellied eels, with porter and milk stout and rum, and with dancing and comic turns and songs. The only people Abigail knew were Annie and her husband and a couple of the waiters. But that evening everyone was her friend. She never quite fathomed what exactly they were celebrating—a win on the horses, Annie’s return, or a general deliverance from some unspecified but awful fate; but that they were celebrating was never in doubt. Annie made an immense fuss over Abigail and set her in a place of honour at her left.
“Fetch a plate o’ whelks!” she called. “And a magnum o’ bubbly.” She leaned conspiratorially toward Abigail. “You think you know about fun up them palaces up west. Well now, just see how we can cheat the worms! And don’t mind me, gel. If you see a bit of prairie—go!”
Her laugh filled the room and became the signal for their interrupted fun to start again.
“So anyway,” said a foxy little man with a red moustache who had been speaking when Abigail came in, “he’s stuck for lodgings so he knocks on this door and this landlady comes out. ‘Yes?’ she says. And he says, ‘I’m stopping here.’ And she says, ‘Well stop there then!’ And she shuts the door in his face so he knocks again and she says, ‘Yes?’ ‘You’re cracked,’ he says. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘but it’s not where you’d notice.’”
Everyone howled with laughter. The foxy man grinned wickedly around. “That’s what I like about you,” he said. “You’re quick! So he says, ‘No don’t mess around now. Can’t you see me all right for tonight?’ So she looks up and down the street. ‘Just yourself, is it?’ she asks. ‘Only I don’t want no children.’ ‘Now then,’ he says, ‘I’m a married man myself.’ So she takes him in and in the parlour he meets this pal. ‘Hello, me old china,’ he says. ‘How’s the missus?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I left her home in bed, smoking.’”
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