Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Why me?” She laughed.

  “You are Hélène Fourment, you are Mademoiselle Murphy, you are Saskia, you are la Donna Isabel…the Mona Lisa. You are one of those rare women of each age who demands the revelation of painting.”

  For César it was the equivalent of a four-hour speech; she hoped it was not also a declaration of love.

  ***

  The following day was warm; spring was a week premature. She went for a walk in the garden and then sat under a moth-eaten parasol to read and doze. No one could doubt that all she needed for a complete return to health was time.

  “Will you come back to us now?” Nora asked her. “Or at least back to London? If so, we’ll wait here. If not, we’ll leave soon and expect to see you in the summer.”

  Caspar said he had to leave tomorrow anyway.

  “I think the least question-raising course is the best. We’ll all go to Rome, and become ourselves again, thank God! Then I’ll send my novel to Pepe and see,” she said. Then, thinking it a little unfeeling after all they’d endured, she added, “I’d love to come home, but we must be wise.”

  “Yes,” John said. “Now and in the future.”

  “Dear me,” Abigail said. “I must be getting well if you can warn me of that.”

  When she went to bed that night, she asked for Annie to come and sleep beside her.

  “Old Celia’s glad, I’ll bet,” Annie said as she slipped between the sheets. “She reckons I prattle far too much.”

  “So you do. And is she no talker?”

  “She said enough! ’Ere, she needn’t bother with no divorce. She can get an annulment any day.”

  “Are you serious? How? What has she told you?”

  “She don’t know it. I never said it to her. But old Crabb, he never touched her.”

  “Oh, pardon me, Annie, but I saw…”

  “He never touched her! She’s a virgin still. Look, don’t try and tell me!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as I am of the Henry Crabbs of this world. Cover you with beads. Slobber all over you. But can’t raise so much as a smile!”

  “But all that ritual—what was it for?”

  “Search me! What’s any of them for? Except theirselves!”

  “‘The best fun we ever have?’”

  Annie laughed. “Did I say that? Well, you can tell it to Cheeks the Marine—it’s like the fisherman’s lucky creek. No one knows where it is!”

  “Except the fishwife.”

  “Yeah? Well, tell me her name! I know it’s not Annie. And it’s not Celia. And I don’t think it’s Abigail, neither.”

  “Well—I’m too tired to think of all that now.”

  This time it was Annie who cradled Abigail’s head in her arms and stroked her hair and forehead, and kissed her to sleep. It was marvellous being with Annie again.

  Chapter 32

  On their third day in Rome, César found the ideal place for them—an atelier on the (modern) top floor of the ancient Teatro di Marcello. It stood between the old Vecchio Ghetto and the Capitoline Hill, just outside the original city wall.

  “Romans and Jews—it’s The Old Fountain again!” Annie said.

  The Teatro had been started by Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus Octavius, who named it after his late nephew, Marcellus; at its opening twenty-five thousand civilized spectators watched the slaughter of six hundred “savage beasts” so called. In the Middle Ages it had served as a castle for a succession of powerful families, during which time it had lost its top layer and its bottom layer had been half buried in rubble. In 1712 it passed into the hands of the Orsini family, who built the Palazzo Orsini on the rubble inside the semicircle of the theatre. They still owned the whole area when César and the three women moved in.

  The rest of the Teatro was a ruin. The massive walls still stood but their decorations, which had at one time been the finest Doric and Ionic in Rome, had crumbled beyond recognition. Six of the half-buried ground-floor arches had been cleared and let off as workshops; and where the now-missing top floor had been, there stood what amounted to a semicircular terrace of modern houses, built at various times between the seventeenth century and the present, in all shapes and sizes.

  In one of the narrowest of these, facing north and looking directly at the church of Sant’Agnolo Pescivendolo, César had discovered the perfect studio in a former sailmaker’s loft. Four other rooms, two on the same floor, two below, went with the loft. They thought the place was cheap because of the permanent smell of fish, for the fishmongers’ Oratory, attached to the church, was also used as a fish mart; when the catch was big, the market—in best medieval tradition—spilled over into the church as well. It was not until winter that they discovered the real reason for the cheapness of their atelier.

  They stood, that bright spring afternoon, at the large windows of César’s studio, looking down at the church and the pathetic remains of the ex-splendid Portico d’Ottavia.

  “The Temples of Juno and Jupiter once stood there,” César told them. “And the church is on the site of the temple of Mercury. What vanity! And here, too, is where every victorious Roman general started his triumphal ascent to the Capitol. And what is it now? A fish market and a ghetto! That’s the way to treat history, if you want to rejuvenate yourself: Start again; become the Eternal City!”

  After that he spoke only monosyllables for four days; but the women hardly noticed. They were too busy arranging for the atelier to be cleaned, furnished, and stocked—or, rather, Celia was too busy doing that, for Annie spent half the time with her baby (and none of them now thought of William as anything but hers), and Abigail, still convalescent, had to give her novel a final revision before sending it off to Pepe.

  When it was sent, Abigail tried to sketch but could settle to nothing. She thought of visiting a few galleries and doing a piece for one of the London papers on spec; but her spirit recoiled so violently from the notion that she began to wonder if she’d ever be a journalist again. So she and Celia—and Annie, whenever she could persuade César to mind William—took to strolling aimlessly about the streets, visiting whatever palaces and ruins and catacombs they chanced upon. She could do nothing serious until Pepe answered.

  “César is right about rejuvenation and this city,” Celia said. “It has learned the secret—neither dwell on nor forget your own past. But use it. I think it’s marvellous the way they just build on top of the old Teatro. And the way the Jews and poor people built their houses all leaning against and wedged between the pillars of the Portico d’Ottavia. And then plastered them over and recarved them. The Forum and all the old imperial ruins are dead. But our part of Rome is alive—and yet still Ancient.”

  “And how will you apply this secret?” Abigail asked.

  Celia laughed, a little embarrassed at her own effusiveness. “I don’t know. Does it matter? I just feel it’s possible. And more possible here than anywhere.”

  “I hope Annie can feel that, too.” Annie was at home that day.

  “I feel so sorry for her,” Celia said. “What a terrible life!”

  “Well, you saw the man,” Abigail reminded her, “even though he was dead.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant on the streets—‘on the turf’ as she calls it.”

  “Did she tell you about that?”

  “Oh, my dear, she talked about nothing else. Why?”

  “Strange. She never talks to me about it at all.”

  “She can make me hate the very idea of a man.” Celia laughed. “Mind you, after Henry that is no great achievement. But then I think of Pepe, and your brother, what little I know of him, and César, and I wonder—are they two people, each of them? And can a pure woman bring out the best in them, just as an impure woman can bring out the worst? In other words, was I to blame for the way Henry behaved?”

  Abigail bega
n to tremble, her mind was so packed with things to say. Again she yearned to find that superword which would cram the whole vision of Blake—or, now, the whole of Into a Narrow Circle—inside Celia’s mind at one swoop. Why could Celia not even glimpse what was so self-evident?

  “You think I was?” Celia interpreted her silence.

  “No, no, no!” She answered so vehemently that tourists all around turned amused or outraged faces toward them. They were walking on the bank of the Tiber, just below the Palatine Hill. Abigail changed direction abruptly to cross the square called Bocca della Verità; there were fewer people there, and most of them were clustered either around the fountain or at the “mask of truth” that gives the square its name.

  “It’s the division into two people that’s wrong. Don’t you see? They do it to us. Then we accept it. And then we force it on them.” She looked at Celia’s uncomprehending face and raged at the ineptitude of her words. “Look.” She tried again. “We are worshipped—idolized—adored by men. Yes? They raise us far above them in purity, sweetness, and virtues like that. You agree so far?”

  Celia’s smile was half a sneer. “It’s what they say. It’s what Henry was always saying. But…”

  “Forget Henry. I mean he was very…” And then Abigail paused. “No,” she said in a different tone. “Don’t forget him. He’s a caricature of what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the actual truth, but about the conventional, accepted belief in Society about us. About women. We are vestal virgins, spotless, above reproach, etcetera, etcetera. And we connive at that. We…”

  “But isn’t it true?” Celia asked, a little shocked at what Abigail seemed to be hinting.

  “No, Celia. It isn’t. But let me develop this my way. We connive at the division. Why not! It’s very flattering. What a wonderful, noble thing it is to be a woman, we are led to think. Until we discover the cost.”

  “You discovered the cost.”

  “We all did, Celia. That’s the point. You, Annie, and me, in our different ways. The cost is to vacate half of our true natures. We inhabit, as it were, the north of ourselves—tend it, embellish it, beautify it. Our cool northern self. But the hot south? Here you are in Rome, in the spring, does it not call to you?”

  Celia blushed and gulped, looking around for distractions.

  “If you don’t feel it,” Abigail said, “I’m wasting words. If nobody does, then I’ve wasted a whole bookful of words.”

  “Into a Narrow Circle?”

  “Yes.”

  “The whole book is about—that? What you call ‘north’ and ‘south?’”

  Abigail was silent for a while. “Let me tell you what it’s about. It’s about the fact that ‘north’ and ‘south’—or ‘pure’ and ‘impure’—are mere ideas. There is only one country. We are one. There is only one woman inside each of our skins. In their heart of hearts men know that. They say we are Purity, they beg us to elevate them, and yet look how they flock to the night houses and to all the girls like Annie—or like Annie was—all the thousands of them!”

  “Oh, they are the hypocrites all right!”

  “No, Celia. That is not true. That’s Annie talking, but she is deluded. It’s not hypocrisy. In a way it’s honesty. The hypocrisy is ours for letting them divide us as they do.”

  At this Celia began to grow heated. “I don’t know how you can say that, Abbie. If the truth about baby William ever got out—or even if it were known that you and Pepe passed one night together—you’d be shunned by Society forever. You know it! Men would cease to recognize you. Yet those very same men feel quite free to make the same slip with girls like Annie, any night of the week. Or they go home to degrade their legal wives as Henry degraded me. How can you say there is no hypocrisy!”

  “I know, Celia. Seeing what happened to you and Annie made me very bitter against men for a time. If I hadn’t had my love for Pepe—well, never mind. I only know that Annie’s sort of bitterness and misanthropy is no answer. It won’t serve. We have to sweep all our notions away and begin again. We have to make men understand that we are not vestals or…or Annies. They must understand that those two are not incompatible.”

  Celia laughed with a nervousness that bordered on hysteria. “But they are! By definition they are.”

  “Then we have the definitions wrong. Oh, Celia, my dearest wish for you is that you will meet a man you can love, a good man, a man who understands himself as Pepe does—who knows he is capable of adoration and lust not at different times but at the same time. That’s the important thing, Celia—the same time. It is a big, big emotion and it stretches all the way from adoration to lust. Love, real love, is both at the same time.” She paused for breath as if they had been running, though they were, in fact, walking so slowly that they had not even circled the piazza once as yet.

  In Celia’s eyes she thought she glimpsed the first sign of hesitation. Something inside was nudging Celia’s thoughts toward this impossible notion.

  “It is part of life,” Abigail said. “Henry made it foul for you. But for your own sake you must rise above that view. You must think of him as a caricature. He is what happens when ‘adoration’ is carried to a preposterous length. Annie is what happens when ‘lust’ is carried to the other extreme. We must all draw back from those extremes. We must find the middle ground. Where ‘all that lives is holy.’ Where ‘life delights in life.’”

  “The middle ground, it seems, is where babies happen!”

  Abigail stopped and turned to her. Smiling radiantly she grasped both of Celia’s gloved hands in her own. “Yes, Celia darling. It is. And in the world I want to see, that would be no sentence of social death. It would be a joy. I would not be giving my baby away. I would not have had to flee from Pepe.”

  “But then…you want an end of marriage itself!”

  Abigail let go and walked on. “I certainly want an end to the sort of marriage that can serve up Roger Oldales and Henry Crabbs—and bind decent, good women to them for life. If you call it life. Look!” She turned toward the church. “The mask of truth. I’ll show you.”

  In the portico of the church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, was a large human mask carved in marble. At some time its mouth had probably formed a decorative opening to a small Roman sewer, but after it was rescued and set up at the church the legend had grown that this was the mask of the Great God Pan.

  “Lovers come here and put their arms in his mouth,” Abigail said. “Then they declare their love. Anyone who lies—the god bites off his hand. Or,” she said as she thrust her own arm in, “her hand. Now listen.”

  To the blank eyes of Pan she said, “‘All that lives is holy. Life delights in life.’”

  For a moment the flesh of her arm tingled; she had managed to half-convince herself of the legend. Celia saw the change in her face and went wide-eyed. Smiling, Abigail withdrew her arm and tested its integrity. Celia, relieved, took her other arm and together they began to stroll back toward the Tiber.

  “Now you may start believing me,” Abigail said.

  Neither spoke until they reached the river, when Abigail said, “I wonder if Annie will be able to settle in Rome? She’ll obviously never learn more than a few words of Italian. It won’t be much fun for her if I decide to settle a while.”

  “Annie will stay where you stay.”

  “D’you think so?”

  “I know so. Poor Annie!”

  Abigail laughed. “Dear me, Celia—is it so bad a fate?”

  “No!” Celia squeezed her arm. “I was thinking how she hates men so much and yet how she loves William. She absolutely adores him. And she’s so angry with herself for feeling like that.”

  “I think Annie’s changing underneath and doesn’t know it. Not one of us has commented on how odd it is that the four of us are still together—that the three of us women have moved into César’s atelier as if anything else would hav
e been…I mean, as if it hadn’t even occurred to us not to move in. I thought Annie at least would cry havoc.”

  Celia walked beside her in silence.

  “Don’t you think?” Abigail prompted.

  “You did not live through what we lived through at the Villa Mancini,” Celia answered.

  Chapter 33

  Pepe was in Rome within the month. Abigail came back one afternoon to find a pageboy from his hotel standing before the Teatro with a note for her: “Found the theatre all right but the labyrinth on the top floor defeated me. Perhaps it would be best for you to come here! Hotel Minerva.”

  She was disappointed. She wanted to ask the pageboy, “But didn’t he say anything about my book?”

  He could at least have written something. One word would have sufficed: Marvellous!

  She told Annie where she was going—just over half a kilometre away—and set off to meet Pepe.

  He was sitting in the hotel lounge, which was, in midafternoon, almost empty—but not empty enough to permit them more than a chaste embrace. He sent for some tea.

  “You are thin,” he said. “Are you not eating?”

  “It was hard to eat when all I wanted was to hear from my editor.”

  He smiled and raised his eyebrows—an ambiguous gesture. Then he laughed: “All?”

  “I also longed for my lover. Oh, Pepe—let’s go back to my room now!”

  He tapped his briefcase. “Don’t you want to talk about this?” His smile was warmly mocking.

  “No,” she said. “I’m afraid suddenly.” She looked around uncomfortably. “Why did you choose to stay at the Minerva? Only priests stay here.”

  “I didn’t know that when I booked. But now I think it’ll suit me very well. Priests don’t run up and down corridors. They don’t sing grand opera or stay up late. And say what you like—they’re enthusiasts for comfort and good food.” He looked steadily at her for a moment. “No, but you’re right to be afraid. You know, of course, that it’s out of the question to publish this book?”