The man suddenly looked at Abigail. “Jerusalem,” he said. “There’s a lady present. I can’t finish this one.”
By now the tears were streaming down every face. “Don’t take it amiss, love,” Annie gasped to Abigail. “He always says that about someone. There’s no proper end to that one.”
“You mean you’ve heard this before?”
“Scores of times.”
The monologue went on, a formless, quickfire tale full of lodgers, black eyes, infidelities, illegitimate children, risqué puns, contrived misunderstandings, and catch phrases, until people were calling “Stop!” and “More!” in the same breath.
At last he did stop, though (on the line “You marry whichever one you fancy, son. He’s not your father, anyway!”), and gave people a chance to wipe their eyes and rub their aching sides.
“Still,” Annie cried breathlessly, “like the gel said—the more you cry the less there is to piss! I hope that’s not still your first glass of champagne, love?”
Abigail downed it guiltily and held out the glass for a refill.
Spontaneously, from a corner of the room, an angelic young girl in white stood and sang “Home Sweet Home” in a pure, flutelike voice. At once the mood changed. The raucous crowd, which only moments earlier had bayed the roof with laughter, sat still and leaned their heads to one side and sighed and looked far away.
“She’s beautiful!” Abigail whispered.
Annie merely nodded. But when the song was over she added that the girl had been “on the turf since the age of ten, though you’d scarce credit it.”
Indeed, Abigail did not credit it—until the girl, with that same winsome innocence, sang “Whoops—I lost it!” and looked around with mock surprise at every salacious laugh.
Then there was dancing. Then a fat woman stood and recited “Living, alias Starving,” followed by an awkward, rubbery sort of man who declaimed a parody of Hamlet: “To woo, or not to woo?”
The high spot of the evening came when the guvnor himself, Mr. Oldale, sang “Up in a Balloon” and “Slap Bang Here We Are Again.” He had a fine boozy baritone that “needed only ale to oil its squeaks,” as Annie said. But he could put over a drinking song with great verve, which brought everyone to a rousing cheer at the end. With elaborate courtesy he dedicated the cheers to Annie, kissing her hand as Queen of Revels.
“Oh, he’ll feed the dumb glutton tonight all right,” Annie told Abigail with a wink.
Later Annie said, “What you going to do, gel?”
“Do?”
“Yeah. Sing? Recite? Do a patter? What?”
“Oh, Annie! I couldn’t!”
“’Course you can! Everyone does.”
“But I…”
“They’ll think you’re giving yourself airs, if you don’t.”
“I had no idea.”
“Don’t you sing nothing?”
“I know ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’”
“Luverly!” She clapped her hands for silence and Abigail, to her horror, heard the announcement: “And now, straight from her success at the Olympic Theatre in the Strand, The Old Fountain proudly brings you Bessie Power to sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’”
At the time, Abigail could have killed her; but later she realized it was a kindness Annie had done. For by the time that first awful sinking of the stomach hit her she was already well launched into the song, and the moment for nerves had passed. What nervousness there was merely gave her voice a not unpleasing vibrato.
Of course no one was deceived. By the third line everyone knew she was an ordinary domestic performer like themselves; but then Annie’s elaborate introduction worked in her favour—everyone wanted her to live up to it.
By the middle of the second verse she actually found herself enjoying it. Until now she had sung only on private, family occasions; now, to see a hundred or more eyes, all fixed on her, was oddly exciting—frightening, but exciting. They fed something back to her, something that her song imparted to them. They were moved to sadness at the thought of the rose “left blooming all alone”; and the repetition in “withered…faded…plucked…gone” struck a deeply nostalgic and tender response among people whose lives never strayed far from the margins of death and loss.
She caught the mood from them. Its ineffable sadness almost felled her in the last verse.
So soon may I follow, when friendships decay,
And from love’s shining circle, the gems drop away.
Her voice broke at
When true hearts lie wither’d, and loved ones are flown.
She could see many in her audience beginning to weep and, curiously enough, that helped to rally her. It was as if, by imparting her own sorrow, she had lost it. What she had caught from them she now gave back. She felt a strange mixture of love and contempt for them—love for those who shared her sense of loss, contempt that they could do so only through this doggerel song (and contempt for herself, too, that she could be moved by it as deeply as they).
So she roused herself easily for that final line:
O-oh, who wou-uld inhabit this bleak world alone?
A long gasp of ecstatic sentiment erupted into the greatest applause of the evening; even as their tears still ran, they shouted and stamped and whistled. “Encore! Encore!”
But Annie plucked at her sleeve. “Don’t trump your own ace, gel,” she advised. She, too, had been reduced to tears.
Some time later, Annie’s husband was overcome by drink and the heat. Annie had him carried up to the private apartments; Abigail followed.
Annie stood over his bloated figure, loosening his cravat. It seemed an affectionate gesture until she said, “Who needs them, anyway!”
There was a challenge in her eye as she looked up at Abigail. “And what’s come over you, gel?” she asked.
“What d’you mean?”
“Why’d you come here alone? Where’s your Mr. Laon? And the way you sung? Think it don’t show, love?”
Abigail, already light-headed with the champagne, suddenly found herself wanting to share it all with Annie. Annie would understand. Annie knew everything about love; she would know what to do.
“Oh, Annie,” she began. “He…I…he thinks…” The tears brimmed again.
“Stow that!” Annie said harshly. “There’s not one of them is worth it. Not one that ever lived.” She looked at the sleeping Mr. Oldale. “Not Jesus Christ hisself.”
Abigail saw then that Annie knew nothing—nothing but her own bitterness and disappointments. Her impulse to tears was choked in a new pity. “Oh, Annie!”
Annie turned on her angrily, “Oh Annie, oh Annie!” she sneered. “You don’t know nothing, gel. That bastard there is killing me. And you want to cry to me about love? If your Laon said ta-ta, you don’t know when you’re well off. Love? It’s a gallows tree for us.”
Abigail hardly knew what to say. “Why d’you let him drink so much?” she asked. She suddenly felt like a visitor from the Poor Law guardians.
“I hope he may die of it,” Annie said calmly. She even smiled. “If I knew a way to get a bottle of brandy down him now, so help me I’d do it. I’d kill him with no more feeling than I’d pull the head off a flea.”
Her composure was dreadful. If she had screamed the words, Abigail could have discounted them. But Annie was as cool as a teacher of anatomy standing over a cadaver. Abigail saw that whatever comfort she herself might need, it was as a dimple compared with Annie’s well of grief.
But how could she comfort her?
Annie spoke again, still in that same flat voice: “I’d have more luck saving Margate beach from the sea!”
How could she tell her that life need not be as hers had become?
“Men!” Annie said.
And she spoke with such utter contempt that Abigail knew there was no way to tell her. A
nnie needed to believe in her own cosmic scorn—to know it was justly universal. Perhaps she could be made to see that, if it was true at all, it was true only of the men she had known and chosen. But what would be the use of that? It would only bring the blame too close to home. She would just pass from one kind of despair to another—from despair against men to despair at herself. It was a terrible thing to realize that here was another woman, a fellow human being, whom she loved as a sister, who was beyond any possible comfort. The desolation of it appalled her.
But Annie was suddenly bright and cheerful. “Come on, Abbie love!” she said. “Or we’ll have the brewers complaining!”
An hour later Abigail and “Auntie”—the only two who were even halfway sober by then—were putting a drunken Annie to bed beside her comatose husband. Her brow was still furrowed; not even oblivion, it seemed, could bring her peace.
“Poor mite,” the older woman said. “It’s all the ease she has now.”
Chapter 24
All next day Abigail thought far more of Annie’s wretchedness than her own. By evening she was drawn irresistibly back to the pub in Crutched Friars, where she had learned so much of joy while Annie had tasted so much bitterness. It did not deter her to know that Annie was beyond comfort; she wanted to try to help, or at least just to be with her.
Annie was in a dangerously joyful mood, brightly sharp.
“How’s Mr. Oldale?” Abigail asked.
Annie cackled: “Sobered up, sat up, drank up, pissed up, threw up—and I wish he’d bleeding well give up!”
It was a piece of comic patter that belonged to yesterday’s party—intrusive in real life.
“You said some terrible things last night, Annie.”
“You think they was wrong? You think your Mr. Laon’s so maaarvellous! Lay-on—that’s the name for him all right!”
“What d’you mean?”
“I hope you may never find out, love. Better live sweet, innocent, and foolish than be like me.”
Abigail sighed. If she left, she knew she would only be doubly miserable; but to stay seemed worse than futile.
She sat down to a meal, though, and gradually realized that her presence was, in a curious way, a comfort to Annie. Time and again Annie laughed or sneered at Abigail’s supposed innocence, hinting at secret knowledge—superior knowledge—until Abigail saw that Annie needed to score over her in this way, as a salve to her bruises. Then she did not mind so much.
But when Annie saw she did not mind, her crowing grew even more bitter. Once, after Abigail had turned aside one of Annie’s jibes, Annie said, “Words! That’s all you think it is, gel, don’t you! I bet you couldn’t walk in there and talk so calm and lovey-dovey.” She nodded at the private door to the supper room.
Abigail hesitated, not wanting to give Annie best, yet not certain she could face down such a challenge.
“Yeah! I thought as much,” Annie said.
At that moment the private door opened. The angelic-looking young girl who had sung “Home Sweet Home” last night stood angrily at the threshold, dressed only in a shift. “A right hanging Dick you lumped me with!” she shouted at Annie.
But Abigail, after that brief instant of recognition did not look at the girl again; for there beyond her, naked in the firelight, stood Pepe.
Annie laughed, an eldritch cackle of triumph that filled Abigail with a cold rage. She marched upon the room. The girl stood her ground but Abigail, fed on meat since birth, flung her aside like a straw doll. She slammed the door behind her and locked it.
“Me cloves!” the girl shrieked.
At first Abigail intended to ignore the shrieks and hammerings but the smell of the girl’s clothes was overpowering, rank flesh and perfume. She gathered the whole bundle and unlocked the door just long enough to hurl them out.
“See!” Annie mocked from beyond the closed door. “Now who’s right, gel?”
All this time, from the moment he had first recognized her, Laon sat with his head in his hands.
“How could you!” Abigail shouted at him.
“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” he said, still not looking at her. “I couldn’t.”
“What d’you mean?”
“What d’you think all that is about?” He nodded at the door and stared her in the eye at last.
He looked ghastly…thin, haggard, ten years older. She wanted to stay angry, to punish him for all the suffering he had caused her; but pity won. Pity and love—a sudden brimming incandescence of love. She was about to run to him, the cry of his name was in her throat, when he slumped upon the divan and said: “I cannot endure it any longer. You are everything to me—my life, my whole existence. I don’t care what sort of person you are. I don’t care how much contempt you feel for me. I don’t care if you mock me all your life, I can never leave you again. Did you ever hear anything so abject! Was there ever anyone more spineless! But it is your doing! Look at me—it’s your handiwork.”
His self-pity left her no room to speak. How could she say all that she yearned to say—that she had been miserable, too; that she would do anything, anything, rather than lose him again, even marry him—how could she slip all that past the seamless armour of his self-pity!
She sat beside him and pushed him down, supine. She lay beside him and kissed him, whispering his name. Their tears mingled, though neither was crying—or, at least, they were not sobbing.
She kissed his body and saw his excitement swell in the firelight, saw it grow firm and hard. It kicked in her hand when she toyed with it. Greatly daring, she kissed it and then, filled with a sudden terror—like an invisible suffocation—she threw herself upon him and kissed his cheeks and lips and throat and ears with a hurtful passion.
He had half her buttons undone before she realized it; she sat up and tore the clothes off her. Then their bodies were at a riot with each other. There was no finesse, no gentleness now. She gripped him like a succubus; he hammered at her like a demon.
“No!” she shouted, though if he had stopped she would have killed him.
She wanted to kill him. She bit his shoulder. She sank her nails into his ribs.
He gave a cry. He grabbed her hands and pinned them above her head. She was racked beneath him; for a moment of frenzy their eyes locked—and each was appalled at the pools of hate in the other’s.
She heard the familiar cry of his ecstasy, felt the pulse of it. And then there was a new sensation—the hot stabbing of his ejaculation. Then she was rent apart and scattered to the universe.
Usually he stopped at that point, but tonight he went on and on, whimpering all the while as if it were an exquisite pain. And she went on, too, rising again and again for that magical moment when all the sweetness and tenderness in the world seemed to melt and flow into her.
“No more!” she begged when the glory grew unbearable and verged on torment.
They lay gasping and panting until both fell into a brief, shallow slumber. She was the first to awaken.
“I couldn’t have lived another day without you, Pepe,” she said. He came awake like a cat: instantly. “Who told you?” he asked.
“Told me what?”
“About—my father.”
How calm they were, suddenly. Where had all that passion fled? “But I’ve always known.”
He snorted with impatience and at once grew dejected again. “You’ve no need to lie,” he said. “I’ve told you—I am yours on any terms. You can say anything. Even the truth.”
“But it is the truth. We had a servant girl once who was abducted and sold into a house in France. And the man involved was called Ignaz Porzelijn. Well, it’s hardly what you’d call a common name!”
His jaw fell. “So you all know!”
“No!” She lied. “Only Mama. She doesn’t even know I know. I mean, I read it all in her diaries.”
“W
hen? Recently?”
“No. Years and years ago.”
His eyes were full of wonder. “So you’ve always known!”
“Yes—long before we met. So long I’d forgotten all about it when I…”
“And it made no difference?”
She took his hand. “Oh, Pepe! Is that what you were afraid of?”
He crept into the shade of her. “Abbie, Abbie! I’ve done you such a wrong. And you are so noble. Will you ever forgive me?”
Mention of forgiveness must have stirred his most recent memory, for he sat up and looked at her earnestly. “Let me explain to you. About…” He nodded at the door.
“There’s no need.”
“But there is. Don’t you see? I think we should tell each other everything from now on. There should only be honesty between us. If I’d told you about my father and my feelings of shame, I wouldn’t have been such a fool this last week—God, is it only a week?”
She lay back and pulled him on to her. “Don’t stop touching me,” she said.
“I bought a copy of Blake’s prophetic poems,” he said. “And I found it hard to read. I’ve found it hard to do anything since…Anyway, I thought if I came here and read it, I’d be able to understand better. And to understand you better. Or try to.”
“And did you? Do you?” She was deeply moved.
“I had no chance. As soon as I’d finished the meal, Annie came in with that girl. Did you know, that’s her young sister!”
“Annie seems to have a million sisters,” Abigail said bitterly. She could see it all now.
“She said I looked as if I needed a bit of consoling. And she left me alone with…whatever her name is.”
“But I’ve been with Annie for the past hour, so…” She didn’t want to say the obvious.
“We talked,” Laon said. “Mostly about her. D’you know she must have been with over a thousand men, and she’s not yet twenty. And she’s never known the slightest…not even the most passing pleasure in it. What a terrible thing. She hates men. And after talking with her, I almost feel the same.”
Abigail Page 22
