Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Italian was at that time more of a literary than a living language—even Cavour, for example, when he was prime minister, had spoken in French to King Victor Emmanuel. Celia, who had learned literary Italian at school, very soon adapted it to the Roman dialect. Abigail, whose French was near perfect and was almost universally understood in her sort of circle, had less incentive to improve her Italian. It was her greatest regret each time they left Rome; if she could stay just a few months longer, she felt, she would soon be as fluent in it as she was in French. But, as things were, each time she returned to Italy she seemed merely to recover the linguistic ground she had lost since the previous time.

  But each such visit had to end. Four weeks would exhaust the journalistic possibilities of a Roman season; Paris could be covered in three. And then all those other literary selves she had left in London would clamour for rescue from their depleted larders, and she and Celia had to return. The sugar on the pill of this disappointment—for Abigail—was the knowledge that her Pepe would be waiting for her with three or four weeks of longings to squander.

  Celia’s companionship was the final crowning of a life that had grown steadily more pleasant with the passing of the years. She could now entertain on her own account. A little circle of friends, mostly fellow journalists, would drop in on a couple of evenings each week—Mondays, when the week’s issue was nail-bitingly uncertain (but the coup of the century still possible), and Fridays, when the edition had gone to bed as exciting and run-of-the-mill as ever. She could give dinner parties to some of the grander people who attended her mother’s salons. She became one of the arbiters of London’s taste. People sought her opinions on plays and books, they asked her to judge this or that picture they were thinking of buying; to an extent she was even lionized.

  It could have gone on for the rest of her life; but one day she awoke with feelings of nausea—and she realized that the cardinal was long overdue.

  Chapter 27

  She was thirty-two years old and she was pregnant. She had made her own life, had built it around a rare talent, had become a person well above the common run, had skirted convention and been allowed to get away with it, had settled. And now a tenacious little bud of life—a natural tumour—had fastened itself like a tick into the wall of her womb and, in four or five months’ time, would swell visibly enough to wipe out everything.

  How had it happened! Had they not taken every care? What terrible will could circumvent two stout blockades of rubber and a toxic bath of quinine jelly, and then turn into this mindless, microscopic vandal of her life? She raged that there was no way of communicating with it, for she longed to shout within herself and let it know it was doing itself no good by fattening there; it would destroy both of them. In despair she reverted to an Abigail she thought she had abandoned several milestones back in her life: she fled to Caspar.

  But Caspar was not at Falconwood—was not expected for two days. So for two days she practised the new art that was to sustain her through the next nine months and more: the art of laughing when her heart would burst, of eating while her gorge rose, of conversing lightly when her thoughts were congealed, of smiling when she lived within an ace of a scream.

  Caroline, who sought her opinion on paintings, colours, furnishings, flower beds, was deceived. Her nieces and nephews, whom she hurrahed on their ponies and pushed on their swings, were deceived. But Caspar, when he came, was not, though he laughed and joked as expertly as she.

  As soon as they were alone—it was a hot Saturday in July, and they took a walk in a new plantation of balsam poplars—he asked what was wrong.

  “I’m ruined,” she said.

  “Money?” He was jovial.

  “No. Really ruined.”

  He fell silent. “The Old Fountain!” he said bitterly at last.

  She remembered how she had stressed to him the care she and Pepe took over their meetings. He would have taken that as a challenge; she did not want to know how he had found out. Anyway, what did it matter now?

  “Won’t Laon marry you? I assume…” he began. “Well, of course.”

  “Yes, of course it is his. And he doesn’t know yet.”

  “You think he would refuse?”

  “I don’t want to be married.”

  “That’s a bit academic now, isn’t it? I presume, then, that he would marry you.”

  “It would send him over the moon with happiness.”

  “But you don’t love him? Not that that is of much…”

  “He is food, he is wine, he is everything to me. Except my own life. And I still want my own life.”

  Caspar walked on, a long way, before he spoke again: “Abbie, you know you would never be turned away from here. You could go on the streets—commit murder—and you would always find a refuge here. But you would join us. I could not join you. I could not go against Society. To be specific, you would have to retire to your room whenever others called or visited; no one could meet you and we could not risk asking anyone to do so. Yet this would be a friendly house, Abbie dear. Think what the world would be like! Think how absolutely unfriended you would be. You and this new life you hold—what a life for both of you!”

  “So,” she said, as forlorn as she had ever felt. “It’s public ruin or private ruin.”

  “Is he really such a bad chap as all that?”

  “Not him! Me! I shall change…Oh, it’s no use. You’ll never understand. No man will ever understand. Annie understands me.”

  “And a fine friend she proved to be!”

  Abigail, hating the frailty that pressed her to it, burst into tears—not because Caspar’s condemnation of Annie was true but because, of all he had said, it was the only lie.

  ***

  Celia, when Abigail confessed it all to her, agreed at once with Caspar. Since leaving Henry Crabb she had seen enough of the world to know what an oddity that man had been; she had no fear her advice might deliver Abigail into a similar fate. Her good-humoured calm did much to restore Abigail.

  “You’re a brick, Celia,” she said. “Not to judge me.”

  “Judge you? I! Judge you! Abbie dear, even in the schoolroom I’d not have judged you. I’ve lived a thousand years since then.”

  Abigail smiled. “No. You aren’t that sort of person. That’s your fate. If you were, you’d not have stood two weeks of your marriage. It’s what makes you such a lovely and loving friend.”

  And so she decided to marry Pepe by special licence before a registrar, as soon as it could legally be done. She went to tell Annie the news—Annie, who, from the little she had seen of her lately, could do with some cheering up herself.

  ***

  The Old Fountain was closed—that is to say, its doors were wide open but no customer was inside and there was neither barman nor maid nor waiter on the premises. The doors were open to let the broker’s men in and out—in empty-handed and out with what furniture and knickknacks remained.

  “Where’s Mrs. Oldale?” she asked one of the men.

  “Gawn scarlet,” he said, not stopping. “What d’you mean?”

  “Vamoosed,” said another. “Scarpered, as the gypsies say.”

  “To Wales?”

  The men laughed. “West of here, anyway,” one said, and with such heavy humour that Abigail understood at once that he meant she was on the streets up west.

  “And Mr. Oldale?”

  “Drinking the last keg.” The man nodded toward the gin-palace end of the establishment.

  “No he ain’t,” his partner said. “He’s kipping it off upstairs.”

  “And no one else is here?”

  “Shouldn’t be.”

  “How much is wanted?” she asked.

  “Albert!” one of the men called.

  A fat bowler-hatted man with drooping moustaches and an air of self-importance waddled slowly from the direction of the
kitchens, licking his fingers and belching. He coloured when he saw Abigail. “Not so much of that,” he said to the man who had shouted. “Mr. Williams to you.”

  “Lady wants to know the distraint.”

  “Lady who, may I ask?” He looked at her truculently.

  “The Lady Abigail Stevenson.” She gave him her card.

  His manner changed at once. “Begging pardon, your ladyship…er…the distraint?” He consulted a notebook. “One hundred and fourteen pounds eleven shillings and fourpence three-farthings.”

  “Owed to?”

  “Er…sundry creditors. Most of it to Whitbread’s.”

  “Put everything back,” she said. “I will bring you the money directly.”

  “I have a bill of exchange prepared, my lady. Payable at sight. If you will put your name to it, I’m sure that will satisfy me.”

  She signed and endorsed it with her banker’s name. Within twenty minutes everything (and it was little enough) was returned. She gave them two bottles of rum out of the newly restored stock. They left delighted.

  “I’ll leave the key with your ladyship,” Mr. Williams said.

  When they were gone she went around the place, locking every door and barring every window. Then, taking a bottle of brandy from the bar and a funnel from the kitchen, she went upstairs in search of Mr. Oldale.

  Wales!

  Now it was clear where all those trips had been. Annie had ten thousand such sisters in that Wales. And that was what had kept this pub stumbling along all these years, had given Oldale his betting money and booze: Annie, driving herself back, time and again, to the trade she loathed.

  Her easiest way to the apartment led through the private supper room that had been “hers” and Laon’s for over ten years now. Emptied, it was no longer anybody’s—a room on the market. She tried to imagine it, telling herself, “There we sat…there we lay together…there I conceived…” It was meaningless in the context of this day.

  She walked through to Annie’s boudoir, empty save for a single deal bed and a cracked ewer and jug. On the bed, in a pool of puke, lay the purulent, blue-veined wreck of the man Annie had chosen among hundreds because, like herself, he was “fond of a good laugh.” Why had she really married him? Was her own self-opinion so low that this was all she could find to match it? Decent men must have proposed to her, too. Had she been afraid of their decency? Had she feared it might illuminate all that she found unworthy within herself?

  What was wrong with Annie and with Celia, the two women she knew and loved the best? What was it in Celia that had allowed her to endure so many years of Henry Crabb’s vileness so meekly? And what in Annie had sent her back to a vileness ten times as bad, not once but repeatedly, for the sake of this rubbish now dying on the bed and for the tawdry splendours of this place? Was there something in all women—or something lacking—that made them endure and submit? Did they cast themselves as victims and then go out and seek a man as instrument?

  And what of herself and Pepe…

  Before she could pursue that thought, the remains of Roger Oldale stirred. Without further ado—and certainly without pity—she took up the funnel and the brandy bottle, bit through the wax of the seal, pulled out the stopper—like, she thought, pulling the head off a flea. It was a kindness, to him and to Annie. She never considered it to be anything else.

  Twenty minutes later she was on her way west.

  ***

  By eight that evening she returned, alone and exhausted, to Buckingham Street, not to rest but to snatch a meal and refill her purse with half-sovereigns. She had bribed her way into more alleys and courtyards, bars and night houses, than she had ever dreamed existed—and all within ten paces of streets she had known and traversed all her life.

  She had been mistaken as competition and reviled. She had been mistaken as competition and proposed to; one man, panting at her angry heels, had gone as high as forty guineas. But when she still refused, he had shouted after her, “What are you, anyway—old spinster carrion?”

  By nine o’clock, changed and half-refreshed, she went out again, determined not to rest until Annie was rescued. Celia had begged to go with her but Abigail was adamant. No one would see Annie in that trade and condition who might afterwards see her in quite another.

  It was near midnight before she finally tracked Annie down. A “kaffir,” or whore’s bully, who had taken half a sovereign off her earlier in the evening, came running up behind her. “Still got the glims out fer Annie B?” he asked.

  She said she was still looking. She had established earlier that Annie went by her maiden name, Barnard, in these parts.

  “There’s a little casa round in Panton Street, Haymarket end. Looks like a drinking gaff but really it’s a body ken.” She was not sure whether he said “body” or “bawdy.” He winked. “Your noffgur’s in there, dying of barrel fever with a party of bulkers. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Is it certain this time?” she asked.

  “Didn’t I just cut from her?” he answered.

  She offered him more money but he pushed her hand down with a grin. “No, lady, you paid already.”

  A strange flirtation with honour, she thought as she made for Panton Street, by a man who certainly would not scruple to rob her.

  She was well down the Haymarket, almost at Panton Street, when she was brought to a dead halt by a man who came tripping out of a night house with a laughing young girl on his arm. Abigail knew him at once; it was her Uncle Walter—Walter Thornton, Nick’s father. She had known him all her life, for he and his wife Arabella were old family friends; in fact, Uncle Walter had been the company engineer on her father’s first railway contract.

  Walter recognized her in the same instant. Give him his due, he had enough presence of mind for twenty. He smiled broadly, even graciously—certainly without a trace of embarrassment. “Why, Lady Abigail! Is anything amiss? May I help in any way?”

  Even as he spoke these few terse words he managed subtly to change the nature of his grip upon the girl’s arm. When she first spotted him he had been a cavalier carrying off a wench, but now he was something more like a parish beadle with a petty wrongdoer. It was skillfully managed. The girl played along, too.

  “I’m looking for a former servant of ours, Uncle Walter. You wouldn’t remember her, I’m sure, but her name is Annie Barnard. I’m told she’s round in Panton Street.”

  The irony of it! she thought, hoping the thought didn’t show. This was the man who had been Annie’s first customer. In a sense he was her seducer.

  Walter was looking back up the Haymarket, over Abigail’s shoulder, as if he expected to see something there; his disappointment at apparently not seeing it was keen. “Did you not pass Aunt Arabella?” he asked.

  “Not knowingly—obviously,” Abigail said, wondering that he took her for such a fool. His immediate assumption that his nimble wits and cool head would easily deceive her was intensely annoying. Her own set of friends was not smart or racy, but it was sophisticated—well beyond this sort of schoolboyish bluff. The fact that Uncle Walter was twice her age only made his childish arrogance the worse.

  “She must have the carriage up there in Jermyn Street,” he said, half to her, half to the girl. Then he turned wholly to the girl. “Look, my dear. Walk up to the corner of Jermyn Street and if you see a growler there, perhaps with other unfortunate women in it, go up to it and make yourself known to my good wife. Otherwise wait for me there. Be assured I shall not desert you.” The girl moved off in obedience. “Nor will the good Lord,” he shouted after her. “God is close to you tonight!” He contrived to face Abigail back toward Panton Street before she could see how the girl might respond to this afterthought.

  “I will not allow your Aunt Arabella into places like that,” he said, nodding at the house he and the girl had just left. “Nor, by the same token, can I permit you. I shall find thi
s servant for you, if she is to be found at all. What was her name? Amy?”

  “Annie. Annie Barnard.” Abigail described her and translated what she thought the kaffir had told her.

  Annoyed, she had no choice but to play Uncle Walter’s game; to do otherwise would be to give the lie to him openly. Perhaps he even knew that—knew she was not deceived and did not care. Now there was real cause for anger; it revealed a view of womankind she had almost forgotten. Her success, the esteem she had earned, the equality with which she competed for, and won, space for her writing (which was herself )—these had isolated her from her sisterhood and the way men patronized them.

  She looked at Walter, at his arrogant, twinkling eyes, as avuncular as his courtesy title, and felt a sudden welling-up of hatred that surprised her. She would feel insulted enough if he imagined his charade deceived her; but if he knew it did not, and he himself did not care so long as convention forced her to play his game, that was far worse. Beyond her surprise she was self-aware enough to know that at any earlier point in her life, at least part of her would be amused at catching out Walter in this way and at watching his calm (even if perfunctory) saving of the situation.

  What had changed her? Annie. And the things that had happened to Annie. The chances Annie had never known—to find what love truly is, to own a little dignity, to possess her own person—and all because arrogant, twinkling-eyed men like this “uncle” walked abroad with Annie’s food in their bellies, Annie’s cloth on their backs, and Annie’s cash jingling in their pockets, for so it now appeared to her.