Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  When the atmosphere in that sickroom became too claustrophobic to bear, they took to going on long walks around the lakeshore. Sometimes Caspar would come with them; more often he would stay and talk with César. For all their differences in temperament, he and César got on like twins.

  Nora knew exactly what was happening to John—knew from the way his conversation kept going back over the circumstances of Abigail’s own birth and his relief at her, Nora’s, eventual recovery. But she felt unable to help him turn these memories into a springboard for the plunge back into her life, despite her almost desperate longing for him. Once before, the best part of twenty years ago, he had broken down and begged her to let him back and she had agreed, rapturously thinking he intended to give up his mistress, Charity, and their children; but he had been labouring under the opposite delusion—that she would agree to share him with Charity. This time (if there was to be a this time) she would say nothing until he spoke.

  Not until the eighth week of Abigail’s illness, when César dared to hold out some crumbs of hope, did John begin to make even the first overtures. “I’m near seventy,” he said, apropos nothing. And then, as if to belie the words, he hurled a pebble far out into the lake.

  Nora watched the ripples spread. “Eay, what’s this then?” she asked in broad Yorkshire. “Second childhood?”

  He looked at her askance. “What do’st mean?” he answered. He had not spoken to her in their native dialect for years. It held a special richness, not to be squandered on trivial moments.

  “When thou were forty,” she said, “it were all ‘hush of life’ with thee. I never thought thou’d make it to sixty.”

  He hurled another stone, and another. The ripples became enmeshed. “Eay, Nora,” he said. “We’ve seen some times, thee and me.”

  She said nothing and shortly afterward they returned to the villa. But from that moment on, she knew it was a matter of time only. Somehow this idle little exchange had contrived an obscure breach in the wall that divided them. Inexorably the rest of its fabric would now fall.

  Next day it was raining too hard for a walk. They paced up and down the verandah upstairs, listening to the drumming of the raindrops on the tiles and the gurgling of the waste where it gathered. Nora stopped at one point where the gutter had a pinhole leak. In the black of its belly she watched the points of light swell to ripeness and fall…fall…fall. She caught one in her hand and tried the softness of its water on her cheek.

  “You did me a great wrong,” John said suddenly.

  “Aye,” she agreed.

  The silence swelled like the ripening drops of rain.

  “I regretted it,” she said, “the minute it happened. But I don’t regret the fruit of it. Sefton will be a credit to you.”

  Sefton, her youngest son, had been fathered by a rising young painter with whom Nora had had a passing affair when she had first discovered John’s infidelity. Nora had made sure John knew he was not the father. That painter was now a senior R.A., and Sefton was off to Cambridge this autumn. So long ago!

  “It was a great wrong,” John repeated.

  “Put a like measure on the provocation.”

  He placed his hand over hers. She pulled away, longing for him to follow—fight her—force her to yield. “I will yield,” she wanted to shout.

  But he had lost too much of his assurance with her to know what she might be thinking; he could judge her only by her outward behaviour.

  “You were off to India for six months,” she said, deliberately keeping the heat from her voice. “You came home to me for one night—and slept like a eunuch. Because…where had you been?”

  “Provocation!” he said, in a tone that implied he knew a thing or two about provocation. Then, hearing her draw breath, he headed her off. “What is Abigail to do now? What are we going to do about this baby?”

  Nora gave a grim chuckle. “You think we can have any say? You’ve known Abigail all these years and you still think that?”

  “Maybe Annie knows what’s on her mind, since the boy’s going to be legally hers. I blame Annie for a lot of this.”

  “So did I, at first. But now I think that would be unfair.”

  He leaned over the edge of the verandah and called softly: “Mrs. Crabb, are you down there?”

  Annie’s head poked out of a window, squinting up against the rain.

  “My lord?”

  “At your leisure, if you might spare us a moment.”

  Annie nodded and withdrew.

  “Abigail was twenty-two or three when this…liaison…began,” Nora said. “She would not have stopped just for lack of suitable premises.”

  “Suitable? An East End pub!”

  “Caspar told me he had to compare two separate reports by two different inquiry agents before he could work it out. How much more discreet do you…”

  “If Annie hadn’t provided the means…”

  “Abigail would still have…you don’t know her. Either that or you’ve forgotten the strength of the passions we’re talking about.” Their eyes dwelled in each other’s.

  “D’you think I could ever forget that?” he asked.

  Annie opened the door of one of the rooms that led onto the verandah. Nora turned toward the lake and cursed softly. John at last dared to give her arm a squeeze, but there was time for no more than that.

  “My lord?” Annie stood at the door. She would never say “your lordship,” like a servant.

  “We were wondering, Mrs. Crabb, what arrangements have been made for the little boy?”

  “Or,” Nora added, “even talked about.”

  Annie spoke so low that no eavesdropper, not even one with perfect English, could have overheard. “I’m staying by Abbie. The little boy’ll be mine—in law, I mean. But he’ll have two mothers—three, I daresay, if Celia stops.” She gave a little laugh. “Three women, ruined by men, bringing up a man! I don’t think God has much time for women, somehow. Either that or He’s fond of a good laugh!”

  “At least,” Nora said, “the boy will grow up knowing what not to do. Shall you all come back to London?”

  “Abbie talked of staying awhile in Rome, my lady. So it’s parley-voo Italiano for me, though I doubt I ever will.”

  Nora laughed, despite herself.

  “We’d like to settle something on you and the baby,” John began.

  Annie drew breath through flaring nostrils. “I got two thousand five hundred of me own,” she said, tossing her hair. “And what’s mine is Abbie’s and what’s hers is mine.”

  “Well,” Nora cut in quickly, seeing that they had no hope of a swift and rational settlement, “don’t say no. Don’t say yes. Think about it. Think of all the accidents and reverses in fortune that can happen in life, how the best of friends can fall out, how money can be lost. And think, too, how nice it would be to know of some small and steady income that would be safe and unfailing.”

  “You’re a pioneer in new country,” John told her with a smile. “Pitch your tent near the spring.”

  It was exactly the right image to reach into Annie; it carried no censure and made her seem the brave one. She smiled back and said she was sorry if she’d started a bit of a slang and she’d think about it.

  Nora had forgotten how good John was at managing people.

  “If you do want to make Abbie happy…” Annie began. But then she thought better of it and shook her head.

  “What, Annie?” Nora asked.

  “No, my lady, it’s not my place. I was forgetting myself.” She left but had not reached the inner door before she turned and came back to them. “I’ll say this,” she added. “And it’s not impertinence but love for her as makes me, so you’ll please to take it as it’s meant. We’ve had many and many a jaw, Abbie and me, and at such times as no secrets is kept back. And if she’s told me once, she’s told me a dozen
times as how she hopes to be spared until…well, until things is right at home. There—now I said it.” She looked at both to be sure that they took her meaning, and then she was gone.

  John turned from Nora to face the lake. She saw how white his knuckles were from their fierce grip upon the iron balustrade. Suddenly she could wait no more for him to take the initiative. She was in hell until he did. “Well, John,” she said, “and shall you now forsake your canvas bed?”

  Still he did not turn. When he spoke, his voice was strangely altered by the power of his emotion. “I’d easier climb yon mountains than say what must be said.”

  “What? Just say it.”

  He slumped. “Eay, Nora! She’s fifty years old!”

  “And I’m near sixty.”

  He snorted. “You’re twenty compared with her.”

  Silence returned.

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?” she asked.

  “But what good am I? I blighted your life and I ruined hers. How can I ever make that up to either of you?”

  “Well, not by prolonging the offence, that’s certain.”

  He turned to her then, clumsily, and took her in his arms—though he leaned so heavily he would have fallen if she had not been there. His kiss, which she had not felt for so long, was exactly as her body remembered it. The Bitch had taught him no new tricks, then.

  She felt twenty again, as he had joked. She craved him with all the intensity she had so long fought to suppress. Now unbound, it consumed her, became the be-all of her. Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else to matter.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling him toward their bedroom.

  For a moment he resisted. “But I’m near seventy,” he said. “And you’re…”

  “I’m twenty. You may be what you please but if I’m to bear the weight of you, I’ll choose the manner of it.”

  They were older, of course; their skin was less supple, their muscles slower, they were more careful of their joints—but these were trifling changes. From the moment he pulled the bedclothes back over them and straddled her, seeking the old positions, she knew how much they still belonged to each other. And the knowledge made her as good as twenty—and him as good as thirty-two.

  An hour later he cleared his throat and said, “We must get up.”

  “Just once more,” she wheedled.

  Twenty minutes later she asked, “Where did all that ‘hush of life’ go then?”

  “I must have left it in Saint John’s Wood. There’s been an epidemic of it there!” After a silence he went on. “We must talk about…arrangements and things.”

  “What did you mean, John, saying ‘she’s fifty’ like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “The way you said it. You know the way you said it.”

  “I meant where’s the harm in it now?”

  Nora laughed. “Well, now you know!”

  “Eay, Nora! We’ve not done this for…she and I…for…I don’t know. It can’t be as long as ten years, but it feels like it.”

  “Listen, John.” She was serious now. “If you live to be a hundred, I shall be eighty-nine. And if on your hundredth birthday I hear you so much as passed the time of day with her, I’ll blind you with these fingernails.”

  “But the lads are all grown up and gone,” John said. “She’s alone.”

  “What fifty-year-old mistress isn’t! All right, John. I’ll accept that your continued interest is kindness of heart, not lust…”

  “It never was lust.”

  “Oh? What was it then brought you and her to bed?”

  “Nay, love—no recriminations. It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter if it was lust or…or a common fear of spiders. You were in the middle of accepting the fact that I have a kind heart.”

  “Aye. So I’ll say this—because I’ll match kindness with kindness. You may see her to settle what affairs you have to settle, and you may then see her but once more: when you give her away on her wedding day.”

  “Wedding?” He was astonished.

  “If we can’t find her a nice settled widower who’d rather have the company of a wife than a housekeeper, the world has changed too much. Especially a wife with a pension.” She chuckled. “A small pension, of course. You’d not want to attract gold seekers.”

  “Well…” he said uncertainly, but could find no obvious flaw.

  She grinned and kissed him. “Of course you never thought of it,” she teased. “You’re the dog with three beef shinbones and but two jaws!”

  She tried to excite him again.

  “Eay, no, Nora love. It hurts, it truly does.”

  “Goo-o-d!” she whispered.

  Chapter 31

  In the ninth week of her illness Abigail rallied. “Did the baby live?” she asked. “Was it a boy or did I dream that bit?”

  Annie brought him to her. “Oh, it’s Pepe’s face,” she said as she took him. “What’s he called?”

  Annie looked at her in surprise. “You never said no name.”

  “And you waited for me? How old is he?”

  “Nine weeks.”

  “I must have been very ill.”

  “Ill enough to bring Mr. Caspar and the Earl and Countess—surely you remember when they came two weeks back?”

  She thought hard. “I seem to. My brain is like…blunt lace. That’s a quotation from something.” She looked back at the baby. “I don’t feel anything about this one. I suppose that’s a wicked thing to say. Someone’s looking after him well.”

  “There’s a wet nurse comes from Como every day. He sleeps all night now, thank God.”

  “Oh, Annie, I’m so sorry.” Tears surprised her. “So much trouble for everyone. And all for such passing pleasure, too. Why can’t we do without it!”

  “Speak for yourself!”

  The baby began to cry as well. Instinctively she gave it back to Annie. “Call him William. He’ll grow up a good and kind lover of women, into an age that understands us better.”

  “César wants to circumcise him. I think so, too.” Annie calmed him again by lifting his petticoat and blowing rasps on his tummy. “It’s cleaner,” she went on, “when it grows into a big belly-ruffian. Ooh, look at him! Ooh, he’s full of sauce! Yes he is! Yes he is! Little William. Shall we cut his little willie? William’s little willie? Cut it with César’s knife? Only can’t let Annie do it! No—Annie’d only cut the bleeding thing right off!”

  “César? Oh, yes—César.”

  “’Ere—did you know he was a doctor?”

  “Yes, I always thought that. Then I thought I must have remembered wrongly. You mean to say he…” She looked at William.

  “Yeah. He saved your life, gel. If all the men in the world was like him, I could just about stomach them. He’s never been farther from you than that gate where he is now.”

  “You’ll find someone yet, Annie. They’re not all rotten.”

  Annie leaned over the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “I don’t need to, me old love,” she said. “I don’t even need to look.” She stood and took the baby away. Then she threw open the window and called César, who was talking to Caspar.

  They both turned and hurried toward the house. John and Nora, who also heard the joy in Annie’s call, came from the drawing room next door. They walked and stood arm in arm.

  Abigail saw the difference in them at once. “It’s over!” she cried.

  “It’s over,” Nora said. “You don’t remember what we were like together, this impossible man and me. But you’ll see now!”

  “Because of me?”

  “It wouldn’t have happened without you,” John said.

  “Steamer!” she called as he came panting in at the French window. “It’s over! The Great Schism is over!”

  Caspar joined her laughter, overjoyed th
at she could laugh. “I know! They’ve even redrawn their wills. We don’t exist now—they’ve left it all to each other. For eternity.”

  “You’ll show some respect, young Caspar,” John warned with mock severity. “The days are gone when you could go to your mother for an ally against me, or to me against her.”

  “Curses!” Caspar said, twirling imaginary moustachioes.

  “César.” Abigail held out her hands, which he took and squeezed. Silent as ever, he stared into her eyes. She pulled him onto the bed. “How can I thank you?” she asked quietly. “I never can, of course. I owe you my life.”

  He shook his head, not in mock modesty but sincerely. “Thank those who gave you the strong body you have. And the will to fight away death.”

  He took her pulse, looked at her tongue, made her squeeze his wrists with both hands, peered at the whites of her eyes, and said, “I’ll go painting tomorrow. The light is better every day.”

  ***

  She walked a few steps that day; quite a lot more the next. The following day she sat up for several hours by the fire, taking it in turns to read with Celia. Only then did César follow his promise and go out painting.

  He brought it to her that evening like a hunter with a trophy. It was of the villa—but more than that, it was everything she had felt about the villa. He felt it, too.

  “You don’t start, as I was taught,” she said, “with all the dark parts, painted thinly, and then work up to the highlights using more and more linseed oil?”

  He laughed. “When you write, d’you put in all the nouns first and then go back and add the verbs? What’s wrong with shadows that I should drown them in turpentine? Shadows are rich, too.”

  Then he brought her a portrait he had done of her to stop himself going mad of anxiety at her bedside. At once she saw how ill she had been.

  “I did it,” he said, “because it was all I thought was left of you. But now, when spring comes and you can run again, I’ll do better.”