Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “But…Pepe! You were naked. And with her.”

  She wished he had not begun this “explanation”; it diminished her and left him dishonoured. So he and that girl had “talked” for an hour, had they…“mostly about her”! She could just hear it: “Tell me what it’s like to be you!” and his dark, begging eyes launching the words. Did they rise to his throat automatically at the sight of female flesh? And did he imagine that this explanation would satisfy her—even in the most narrow, logical sense?

  He nodded. “That’s in a way what I mean. All the beastliness in sex was put there by men. Oh, Abbie…I missed you!”

  “I missed you, too, darling. Only God knows how much. But it would never even have occurred to me to find solace with any other man. Even men I feel quite attracted to. And what was that girl to you? You don’t even know her name. And she reeked.”

  “I know. I know!” Pepe said. “But you don’t know. You have no idea what it’s like to be a man. I’ll bet you don’t think about you and me—in between…”

  “I think about you all the time.”

  “Yes, but not about us. Not actually together, here, naked, in each other’s arms. Me in you. I’ll bet you never actually picture that and get excited about it.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “You see! Now if I made such an answer, with a hundred men to witness, then a hundred men would know instantly that I was lying.”

  “You mean…you…?”

  “I mean all men. All men. I think about you and me, like that, a dozen times a day. More!”

  “But why? Where’s the point in it?”

  “The answer’s in our stars, not in ourselves. I mean we’re all born that way. Take the cow to the bull. If the cow’s ready, the bull is. But not the other way round. It’s the same with all animals. The male must be ready—always.”

  Despite his penitent tone there was smugness in the way he aligned the whole of nature on his side and consigned all blame to the world of beasts. She stood and began to dress.

  “It seems,” she said, “that there was hardly any point in our struggling to the top of the evolutionary tree!”

  It was an easy rebuke to allow, for it touched him not at all. “Why d’you think Annie hates you so?” he asked.

  Abigail smiled. “You don’t understand women at all. She did it because she loves me.”

  She did not want to add that Annie had done it out of hate of him—for bringing her, Abigail, so much happiness.

  She would be very kind to Annie, who had worries enough and more without adding to them the remorse of her own treachery.

  “Funny kind of love.”

  Yes, she thought, looking down at him. Funny—and deep. You wouldn’t understand it. She barely understood it herself, not in so many words. There was a sense in which love between men and women was shallow; they might feel it deeply but that did not make it deep. And when they hurt each other, it filled in part of their love, making it shallower yet. The language was different. This thing Pepe had done—he might very well see it as a cry of anguish, a way of saying to her, See how miserable I am! But how could she think of it like that? It was not something she herself could do without revulsion, not even in imagination; therefore it conveyed nothing to her—except that same revulsion. And when he said, “I am like that—all men are like that,” it shut off part of him, and part of all men, from her forever.

  Annie had hurt her, too; but the language of the action was one she recognized. Through it she saw a little more deeply into Annie’s confused and lonely bitterness. Annie’s cruelty made the love between them more profound; Laon’s cruelty made part of him a third person to her. What was the difference? The only difference was the flesh. The love between Annie and her was entirely human and purely of their spirit; but her love and Laon’s? He had been right to invoke the animals.

  She had the first intimations of carnal love not as an enrichment but as a means of battle.

  When she was dressed, she looked down at his exhausted, still-naked body. Something was missing, she felt. It was a moment before she could place it, but when she did, her heart dropped a beat. “Pepe!” she cried. “You weren’t wearing anything!”

  But his jaw did not drop. He did not sit up in alarm. Instead a slow smile spread over his face.

  “Well,” she said. “Two rousing cheers for honesty!”

  ***

  Annie showed her how to use the douche. “The bastards!” she kept saying. “But we’ll cheat them yet, you’ll see.”

  “Take a glass or three of gin each night, now,” was her parting advice. “And a bath as hot as you can stand it. When’s the cardinal due?”

  She had to explain that.

  “Oh,” Abigail said. “This week, I think.”

  “Might be lucky then.” Annie was full of confidence.

  On the threshold Abigail turned and said, “It’s what you told me all those years ago. You remember? ‘Then they’ve got you where they want you,’ you said.”

  “And wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I just. Still—you’ve got the idea, gel. Don’t never marry him. Take your fun, like what they do. Keep yourself free, like what they do.”

  On his appointed day, the “cardinal” came, which was no extraordinary relief after Annie’s supreme confidence. But Abigail could not get out of her mind what Laon had tried to do. He had used his body, his seed, as a weapon to trap her. It was like…She tried to think what it was like. But it was like nothing that had ever happened to her. Her mind went back again to the time Annie had first told her The Secret and she had tried to imagine what it would be like to let a man into her. That shrinking-into-herself feeling—it was something like that. A recoil from him.

  Then one day, walking through the Bond Street Arcade, she saw a shopkeeper sticking pins through dead butterflies and impaling them on silk panels. He seemed to be smiling as he worked; in fact, it was only his concentration, but the smile was Pepe’s smile. At last she had an image to contain her raw feeling—something she could point to and say, “That is what it was like!”

  Chapter 25

  To the world she was a confirmed and contented spinster, a wise virgin, a regrettable, slightly-to-be-pitied, but in no way reprehensible thing to be. She was still far too nubile to be allowed an independent social status; she could not, for instance, entertain anyone in Society—or anyone anxious to get in. And that was irksome, since most writers and painters were in one of those two categories. They could meet at others’ entertainments, and she could accept their hospitality, but she could never return it as her own hostess.

  Laon frequently stressed these disadvantages to her until she stopped him by threatening to marry the first derelict whom a doctor could guarantee to be on his deathbed—for, as a widow, she would enjoy all the independence and advantages of a married woman.

  “But never mind,” she said. “In ten years or so I could put about a not-too-ridiculous claim to be forty, and the conventions will quietly relax their grip.”

  Laon could see this as nothing but cruelty. “You will not release me,” he said. “Indeed, you cannot. I am bound to you by ties that neither you nor I nor any earthly power can undo. You say you love me, but you will let nothing come of it. Only miseries.”

  “So it is misery, meeting me here?”

  “No, it is misery not meeting you here. Every moment we are apart is misery.”

  “But Pepe, we see far more of each other than most husbands and wives. We enjoy far more of each other—at work and in love. Why must you want what you can never have?”

  For all the determination of her words, there were many times when his misery touched her so deeply that she was on the point of yielding to him. Then Annie’s vehemence came to stay her resolution and reprieve her from that sacrifice.

  But Annie was often away these days, visiting her sister. And The Old Fou
ntain was showing signs of neglect. Oldale was worse than useless.

  When he was not dead drunk he was entertaining his betting companions in the private rooms, kicking up a shindy, driving away custom, and eating into the pub’s dwindling profits. Annie was often in tears at him—not soft, feminine tears but tears of bitter hatred. “If there was a legal day for murders, gel,” she would say, “how many men would be left, I wonder!”

  Abigail could understand Annie’s desire to be away from the place as long and as often as possible, but it was no real answer, for it could lead only to bankruptcy. Even now, she noticed, all the fine ornaments and nice furniture Annie had started out with were gone from the private apartments, to be replaced by plain deal of the cheapest make.

  “When your home goes, everything goes,” Annie said.

  And so her absences grew longer and more frequent.

  During one of them, when Abigail was almost desperate for the spinster courage Annie was so good at furnishing, she got help from a quite unexpected—indeed, almost unremembered—quarter. Late one night, Mary brought her a letter that had just been pushed through the door. It read:

  Dear Lady Abigail,

  I presume upon an acquaintance that, even at its warmest, was too slender for the weight I yet hope it may bear. In truth, I know no one else to whom I may turn, and if you cannot help me, then I shall know I am truly friendless and must bear my situation alone. I mean, you are my last hope. It is years since I first conceived the idea of enlisting your aid; I do so now only in an extremity.

  I know you must receive many begging letters, so let me at once say I need no money. It is probably the only form of assistance I do not need. All I ask is a little counsel, and from one whose words to me (almost ten years ago now!) and whose public writings since have proved her to be among the most sagacious and understanding of people.

  You may remember you cautioned me against a hasty marriage? It was a warning I was too impetuous to heed. I married directly from your sister’s schoolroom. What indignities, what monstrous miseries, I have since endured, I cannot set upon paper. Now I can endure no more, but I know so little of the world that I am utterly at a loss how to proceed next.

  I have followed your astonishing career from the moment the true identity of your various noms de plume became common knowledge. Even when my miseries first began, which was the first night of my marriage, it was to you that I was impelled to turn. But you seemed to move farther and farther from my small ambit until you were impossibly beyond my reach. Now, only my desperation furnishes me with sufficient boldness to attempt the bridging of that impossible gulf you must see between us.

  I shall, if I may, call upon you tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. If I find you “not at home,” please take this as my heartfelt gratitude for having read thus far. Be assured I shall not (for all my despair) do anything rash, nothing you might fear to reproach yourself with should you find it impossible to receive me. I shall return to my ordinary life and endure it as best I may, thinking none the less warmly of you.

  I sign myself as you may remember me and as I wish, ten thousand times a day, I still were,

  Celia Addison.

  ***

  She looked awful. She was dressed well enough, even richly, but she was as drawn as a waif. Abigail divined that, since delivering that letter last night, she had been wandering the streets.

  She had seen Celia Addison coming up from the direction of the Embankment and had herself gone to the door to greet her. Celia, expecting the maidservant, was thrown into confusion.

  “I cannot furnish you with a card, nor give you my married name,” she said. “In view of what I must tell you, it would be treachery to my husband.”

  This breaking of convention seemed so great a worry to her that it drove out all other fears.

  “I will call you Celia, and you shall call me Abbie—as of old. Why should the passage of mere years change all that,” Abigail said.

  The woman was not as relieved as she might have been; Abigail guessed that she had wanted the distraction of the social solecism to draw attention from whatever she was now going to have to confess. Certainly once they were seated she was in no hurry to begin. She prattled a lot—about the weather, about the most recent of Abigail’s articles, about the charm of Abigail’s apartments, about how well she was looking…

  All the time she smiled, nervous smiles that flashed and faded like sparks and did not distract Abigail one moment from the gray lines of her face, her bloodless cheeks, her hollow eyes—eyes that had long ago shed every tear they possessed. Never would Abigail have recognized her as the plump, rosy, frivolous Celia Addison of the Highgate Girls’ College.

  “You must be famished,” she said, stemming the flow of inanities. “You look as if you had no breakfast.”

  Celia began to protest but Abigail took command, making her go into the bedroom and have a good wash and tidy-up. She sent Mary in to help her and meanwhile ordered a hearty breakfast from Mrs. Stone. It was a somewhat restored Celia who sat with her an hour later, with no further excuse for prevarication.

  It was then that a thought struck Celia—apparently for the first time. “Dear me,” she said. “You are so prominent a person, Abbie…you write so…wisely, that I had quite overlooked the fact that you are not married!”

  You did no such thing! Abigail thought, seeing for the first time a hint of ruthlessness beneath that browbeaten exterior. “Well, I don’t intend to get married,” she said. “Not even for you, my dear.”

  Celia laughed but was quickly serious again. “Oh, I would not wish it on my deepest-dyed enemy.”

  Still she volunteered no information. Abigail waited.

  “Even to ask you to listen is to pollute your thoughts,” Celia spoke half to herself.

  “I doubt it,” Abigail said.

  Celia looked at her wide-eyed.

  “Let me remind you that I write regularly for at least four ladies’ magazines. I frequently have to deal with letters from distraught readers who—believe me—are far from reticent in what they commit to writing. I doubt if you can tell me anything more ‘polluting,’ as you call it, than I see a dozen times a week.”

  The remark stung Celia—the idea that she could rank somewhere lower than first in a league of that sort. “More polluting than this?” she asked, pulling a sheet of paper from her bag and thrusting it into Abigail’s hand.

  At once she regretted the impulse and half drew it away; but Abigail clenched it tightly and read, with a bewilderment that turned to horror:

  Frolic of August 16th, 1874

  The title was written and underlined in differently coloured inks. The text ran:

  She will come to my bedroom at ten of the evening, bathed, perfumed, and dressed as in the Frolic of December 14th, 1867. She will stand before me and I will walk around her and touch her where I will. She will permit me to lift her robes and see her Jewel. I will stand above her and peer down on her Beauteous Orbs. She will kneel before me and with loving caresses divest me of my Inexpressibles. She will stand and lift her robe that I may kiss her Twin Pillars.

  On and on it went—a whole page of coy, multicoloured directions for lechery.

  “Your husband’s handwriting?” Abigail guessed.

  Celia, relieved that Abigail was not shocked beyond speech, nodded.

  “And you found this by accident, I suppose?”

  Celia looked away. “No. He sent it to me.”

  “Sent it!”

  “I mean, they are there beside my plate every Sunday at breakfast. And every Wednesday. He puts them there.”

  “They?” The sofa and the chair seemed to have become insubstantial.

  “That’s only the first page. They run to four or five pages usually.”

  “Your—let me hear now—your husband writes…things like this and leaves them for you to re
ad, twice a week?”

  “Yes, he…”

  “Does it occur to you that this other woman may not exist? This is surely some mental aberration. He writes these pages to consume his sick fantasy—but that is all.”

  Celia began to laugh—a wild laugh that soon turned hysterical. Abigail let the storm pass. When Celia was able to speak again she said, “The ‘other woman’ is me! These are not letters, Abbie. They are instructions. I must learn them by rote, though they are all mere minute variations in the same most loathsome, disgusting ritual. I must learn them and…” She lowered her eyes. “And perform them.”

  Abigail could not move. The implications of this terrible confession pinned her mind to a repetition of those dreadful last words—“and perform them.”

  Perform them!

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s mad. He’s driving me mad.”

  “I mean, why do you consent to do it?”

  Celia looked at her pityingly.

  “Have you told anyone else?” Abigail asked.

  “I told my parents. In the beginning. I ran away, you see. I ran back home. But it wasn’t like this then. He didn’t write it all down like this.”

  “But?”

  “He just told me what to do. Or pushed me into different—poses. Like clay or something. On our wedding night I had to sit on a sort of throne and he undressed me and”—she swallowed—“and hung jewels and flowers all over me. I was petrified. He looked…he was…he looked so odd.”

  “Did you know what to expect at all?”

  Celia shrugged. “My mother told me to drink plenty of champagne and not to be surprised at anything Henry did.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “There! I meant never to tell you his name!”

  “Oh, Celia—after all this you can still be loyal to him?”

  “He is my husband.”

  “He is your torturer.”