Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  True enough, there was little she could do about the loss of Annie; if she had any ally there, it was time, and time alone. There was nothing (short of resigning the world and all the acquaintance and connections that sustained her in it) to be done about little William, beyond what she had already done. But Pepe? Was she going to accept that loss as absolute? And his refusal to publish—had that become her own refusal, too? Was she not still a Stevenson?

  What would her parents do in the face of such reverses? Or Steamer—Boy—Winnie—any of them? Shrug it off and settle for a new life at something they knew was second rate? Very likely!

  She rose and began to pack. She and Celia were a week behind Pepe and Annie in their return to London. César smiled when he saw the boxes they left in Rome, “to be sent on when we have found a place.”

  “I’ll still be here when you come back,” he said. “And your rooms will be ready for you.”

  From the wistful way Celia hung around until the last moment, and the way her eyes drank greedily at each last sight of Rome, Abigail could see how miserable she was at leaving; but naturally it was impossible for her to remain alone with César, quite apart from the obligations her gratitude owed to Abigail.

  ***

  They put up at a small hotel in Holborn, conveniently close to the publishers with whom she hoped to deal. But she was tactician enough to know that no reputable house would take the book without the strongest assurance of her mother’s support. Even then, to judge from Pepe’s response, they might still balk at the idea, but without the Countess’s support the book had no chance at all. Abigail decided on a flanking move, via Winifred and Steamer; if her mother was in two minds, she’d be bound to consult one, if not both, of them.

  At least she started with one great potential objection removed: Her parents were reconciled, so her mother could not play that card a second time. First, however, there was the manuscript to be recovered from Pepe.

  For a writer she showed a remarkable distrust of letters; but she remembered how she had ignored that letter from Pepe during their previous separation, and she could not believe he would behave differently if she wrote to him now. Instead she walked in upon him in his office.

  He was looking through some proof prints with one of the engravers. The man stared at her in surprise; Pepe’s stare was something more fierce. He nodded at the engraver, who left without a word.

  “I came for the manuscript,” she said.

  He opened a drawer, took out a packet, and handed it to her. “Or shall I have it sent?” he asked.

  She let it lie on the desk between them. “I suppose you haven’t reconsidered—and won’t?” she asked.

  He made an exasperated face.

  “Then it simply means you don’t understand it,” she said. “It’s not just a tale—an idle invention to divert fat ladies between one chocolate and the next. It’s a truth. It demands to be told. If you understood it, you’d see that. If you understood it, you’d be moving heaven and hell to see it published.”

  He savoured these words as if they were a professional offering, not personally touching him. “I see,” he said. “To understand all is to forgive all…eh?”

  “If you’re quoting Madame de Staël, her actual words were, ‘The more we know, the better we forgive; whoe’er feels deeply, feels for all who live.’ Hah—it might almost be Blake himself!”

  “And I suppose I know nothing and feel nothing! I tell you, I feel about as betrayed as it is possible to feel.”

  “And you won’t even let me…”

  “Lady Abigail,” he began. Then, hearing how petulant the snub made him seem, he softened it: “Abbie…Abbie! You gave away my son. I didn’t mean you to have a child. I didn’t”—he sought a violent word—“inject the baby there, use myself as a weapon to subdue you. But the child formed itself nonetheless. We made it. Together. It was ours. But you alone concealed it. You alone disowned it. You alone gave it away for a common, ignorant whore to raise. If ‘all that lives is holy,’ what name can you give such blasphemy? And what can you expect between us now, except—at the very best—a sort of baffled aversion? One day, if my prayers are answered, I’ll stop hating you. But that day is not this day.”

  He spoke mournfully, without passion. And mournfully, and without passion, she nodded, picked up her manuscript, and left without a backward glance. Then and later she wondered that his rejection, so absolute, did not reduce her to tears. Or was her spirit now so low that even tears would have been an elevation? Perhaps his very absoluteness was a kind of cautery, sealing the wound beneath an instantaneous scar.

  ***

  She left Into a Narrow Circle with Winifred, expecting to be invited back to Highgate a week or two later. But the following day Winifred called at the hotel, with the manuscript in a sealed envelope inside her bag. She gave a laugh that was almost apologetic. “I thought I’d better get it off the premises as fast as possible!”

  Abigail’s heart fell. “As bad as that?” she asked.

  Winifred did not at once answer. Abigail saw that her sister was trembling. She sent for some tea to be brought up; at all costs Winnie must be put at her ease.

  “What d’you think of Jane Eyre?” Winifred asked the moment she was seated. It was a prepared gambit, an academic’s nonquestion with, no doubt, a dozen prepared nonquestions to follow, depending on her initial reply. She saw the point at once, of course. Jane Eyre, when faced with the prospect of becoming the mistress (and what is more, in the circumstances, the almost blameless mistress) of the man she so passionately loved—the man she had only hours earlier been on the point of marrying—Jane Eyre nonetheless chose to run away to friendless poverty and starvation because that was the only virtuous course open to her. But Catherine of Into a Narrow Circle did not for a moment hesitate to make the very opposite choice when faced with an almost identical decision. Even at the time of writing it, the contrast had struck Abigail.

  “Charlotte Brontë was trapped in a house of sermons. She wasn’t free to write as she pleased.”

  Winifred let this shallowness answer itself. She merely smiled and shook her head, a relaxation that delighted Abigail.

  “Jane Eyre the book or Jane Eyre the woman?” Abigail then asked.

  “Either.”

  “The book is a marvellous piece of storytelling, of course. But it’s flawed by the choice that Jane makes—to run away from love. In order to settle matters and bring the lovers together again, Miss Brontë then has to manage a startling sequence of coincidences—of a kind that our own Great Author so consistently fails to arrange in real life by way of reward in those who, like Jane, set cold righteousness above all else.”

  The reply astounded Winifred. “You mean you’ve stopped believing in God?”

  “Of course not, Winnie. Of course I still believe in God—but not as a good way out of a literary error. The happiness Jane is given at the end is a cheat. All the time, we see, someone has been standing outside her story; and at the end that someone says to Jane, ‘You were a good girl not to take the cake when it lay open and inviting on the table, so now I’m going to give it you.’ I’m not interested in writing books which cheat like that. The happiness my Catherine wins, even in facing her own death, is something she’s earned; it grows out of everything she’s done—and you can’t say she had an easy time of it. No primrose path for her! I don’t cheat.”

  At least Winifred was no longer trembling. But Abigail could see that, of all possible answers to that opening question, she had not expected this. At once, in a clap of insight, she understood why it had been wrong to involve Winnie in this whole business. Jane Eyre was a red herring. Jane was no counterpart to Catherine. The true counterpart was Winifred herself.

  Winifred’s refusal to marry had little to do with her often stated reasons. She did not fear a husband’s ownership of her school; she feared the passion of love it
self…the husband’s ownership of her. In a curious way, though they had travelled such utterly different routes, she and her sister were now but a hairsbreadth apart. Yet, as Abigail discovered, it is quite possible to be so close and yet to face in opposite directions.

  “Then I’m sorry to have to say this, Abbie dear”—Winifred steeled herself to continue—“but I wish you had ‘cheated,’ as you call it. I think lnto a Narrow Circle is a pernicious book. Precisely because it is so moving and tender and—yes, if you force me to it—so true.”

  “You…” Abigail laughed in bewilderment. “I’m speechless.”

  Winifred tapped the manuscript. “A pity. This conversation comes a year too late.”

  Abigail froze. Did Winifred know? She couldn’t. Only those at the Villa Mancini knew. Then Winifred touched the manuscript, and Abigail understood that she had meant the book, not the baby.

  Abigail challenged her: “How can truth be pernicious?”

  “…asked the serpent! Truth, you say? You mean merely that life is as you describe it? Love is as you describe it? That sort of truth? The accidental truth of a photographic snapshot! Surely literature—all art—must aspire to a higher truth than that? As Jane Eyre does. Charlotte Brontë directs us toward a higher moral choice and away from sensuality. You not only do the opposite, you also try to claim some sort of moral justification for it. Fortunately no one will ever publish the book. I strongly advise you never to show it to anyone else, not even to Pepe. And for yourself—well, I believe you have some thinking to do.”

  Her understanding of Winnie, and of all the deep reasons for this inability to face the honesty of Catherine’s choice, prevented Abigail from feeling utterly downcast at this rejection. She even managed a smile. “Come,” she said, “if we are to set each other tasks, then I have one for you.”

  “Oh?” Winifred, who had feared a blistering row…tantrums…tears…was delighted that Abigail should take her harshness so bravely.

  “Yes. Right at the end of Jane Eyre, where Jane takes in the tray and candles to poor blind Mr. Rochester, what does she call him?”

  “I don’t remember!” Winifred laughed.

  “Guess! ‘My love’?…‘my angel’?…‘darling’?…‘precious’? After all, they had sworn undying devotion. They had stood side by side before the altar. And they are clearly going to marry, now that Rochester is free at last. So what does she call him? She calls him ‘my dear master.’ Master!”

  “Well?” Winifred shrugged, not seeing a point. “It’s not surprising.”

  “Of course it’s not. Not when you consider what sort of woman Jane was—a woman who lived in perpetual submission to one authority after another. Your problem, Winnie, is that you want to educate your girls into freedom from precisely that sort of submission. You want them to have my Catherine’s intellect, Catherine’s insight, Catherine’s independence of spirit. Yet, at the heel of the hunt, you want them to make Jane’s moral choices. I believe those are two metals you’ll never alloy.”

  Winifred pretended to accept this dilemma as her “task.” But Abigail could see that her sister’s monumental self-assurance—the crust of a dozen years’ headmistressing—was not even dented. Perhaps, in the end, that was the only quality essential to a headmistress: a self-assurance no one and nothing could dent.

  They talked then of family matters and Abigail’s recent illness, and then it was time for Winifred to go back and conduct evening prayers.

  Abigail had learned from her sister that Caspar was at the firm’s London offices all this week. Five minutes later, a messenger was carrying Abigail’s manuscript to him, with an accompanying letter to say that she and Celia would be at Falconwood on Saturday unless she meanwhile heard that the visit would not be convenient.

  ***

  Falconwood was maturing well. Russian vine and a new creeper called wistaria were thickening on the walls; the copper spire had collected its verdant patina; the vast tree plantations no longer looked like scars over the hilltops but were resplendent in their new spring mantles of green. The lakes, grassed to their edges and girt about with walks and rides, might have been there since the last glacial retreat. Peacocks strutted beneath the cedars; roe deer cropped nonchalantly at the lawns. The fountains played for two hours each afternoon. The gravelled court was raked into patterns of oriental complexity after every passing carriage. Eighty indoor servants, twenty-four gardeners, four dozen gamekeepers and estate workers, twenty stable hands and coachmen, a bailiff, two managers, a chaplain, a tutor, a governess, and a chef all went unobtrusively about their business of tending Caspar, Caroline, their five children, and their guests.

  Caspar was not in a literary mood that weekend. He had newly installed an electrical generator, driven by the steam engine that also powered the hydraulic lift, and he had brought down an electrical plate-warmer as the first demonstration of the new magic. This had made it necessary to raise some floorboards in the servery and butler’s pantry to get at the copper bars he had buried there more than twelve years earlier.

  The trouble was that neither he nor the engineer had remembered to bring down cable to join the platewarmer to these copper conductors.

  “We’ll use garden wire,” Caspar said.

  When it was brought the engineer looked dubious. “Iron,” he said, shaking his head. “And very thin. It’ll get hotter than the wire in the platewarmer.”

  Caspar overruled his objections. Everyone was summoned to watch the new marvel perform. A chain of servants carried the message “Now!” to the engine house. The engineer slipped the belt that drove the generator.

  After a long, tedious wait, there could be no doubt that the miracle of electricity was making the plate somewhat hotter than any hand might bear. For several minutes Caspar basked in the triumph.

  Then his youngest daughter, Charlotte, perhaps because she was only three, and thus was nearer the ground than the others, pointed at the floor beneath the plate. “Pity!” she giggled in delight. “Pity! Pity!”

  And though she meant pretty she was actually nearer the mark with the word she uttered; for the wire beneath the plate was glowing and the floor beginning to smoulder. Caspar tried to operate the switch but the heat had fused it. The engineer began the long run back to the engine house. Dismayed, the rest of them watched the flames begin to kindle among the joists.

  “Here, this won’t do,” Caspar said and, standing, he gave a heavy kick to the platewarmer. The white-hot wires drew out to thin threads and sputtered into an incandescent divorce, showering sparks.

  Imperturbable Lucas, the butler, passed Caspar a soda syphon. Caspar played its jet at the burning joists and cooling sherds of iron until everything was black and sodden.

  “Pity! Pity!” Charlotte giggled.

  The galvanometer needle fell back to zero; the engineer had succeeded in throwing the drive belt. Everyone breathed again and looked at Caspar to see how he would take this failure. He surveyed the charred and still-steaming floor and the welded, shattered scraps of wire. “Pioneers,” he said, “must expect the occasional setback.”

  “No!” Linny shouted. It was a long dining hall and her voice carried back to them as she strode away, the full length of it. “I shall never complain of gas again. We may even go back to oil lamps. But electricity? Never! Never while I live here!”

  Caspar was then, after lunch, rather glad to escape into the higher realms of literature.

  “Linny will come round to it,” he said confidently as they descended past the fountain and went down into the park. “We’ve heard that Armstrong is determined to light Cragside with incandescent electrical lamps next year. And we’re equally determined to beat him to it.”

  For a while she talked about his new paintings. He had bought quite a lot since she had left for France the previous summer: a Poussin, a Tintoretto, two Gainsboroughs, three Rubenses, a Rembrandt, a Titian, and he had
on approval a Stubbs and a Watteau. Over the previous decade she had helped form his taste; in this recent spate of purchases he was casting himself as ex-pupil, sealing his independence.

  “Still,” he said when enough compliments had flown, “you came here to talk about your art, not mine.” He looked briefly at her. “Plain talking, eh, Abbie?”

  “By all means,” she said; but her heart sank.

  “Well, it’s not what you’d call a funny book, is it?”

  “Funny!”

  “Yes. Funny. Life’s full of comedy. Even the sort of intimacies you talk about—they’ve got their funny moments, too. But not your book. There’s not a single laugh in it. Not one you intend, anyway.”

  She caught the qualification at once. “What does that mean?”

  “Well…your utter solemnity is very funny at times, though I’m sure you don’t mean it to be. Frankly, Abbie”—he grinned his kindly intentions at her—“your Catherine and William, between them, are a bit of a hardwood bench.”

  “Oh!” She had been prepared for every criticism but that. “You mean,” she said, brightening, “if I popped in the odd rib-tickler, the book would be…”

  He was already shaking his head. “I merely thought, why loose off the big gun when the peashooter will do as well!”

  “What’s the big gun?”

  “Their view of love—presumably your view, too?”

  She nodded.

  “Suitable only for untenanted tropic islands. You could do that, you know. Shipwreck your Catherine and William on some island. Then you’d get away with it all. It’d still be a shocker, of course; but you’d just about get away with it. Or set it in some mythological Arcadia—perhaps even in a future Utopia.”