Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Love!” Abigail laughed. “That’s what I need a long break from! A long, long break. I think if I met someone I liked, or even someone with nothing I disliked, I’d marry him. Liking’s easy. Love is so hard.”

  “What about César Rodet?” Nora ventured.

  “Heavens, no!” She laughed. “There’s only one love in that man’s life—painting. Oh, no—the man I liked would have to adore me, absolutely and to distraction.”

  They both laughed at her egotism.

  “It is possible, though,” Nora said, “inside marriage. Love.”

  “So I see,” Abigail answered, throwing away the buttercup and linking arms with her mother. They reached the end of the walk, where the long avenue of limes marched down the ridge to mingle with a deep belt of fox covert. For a moment they stood, looking out over the sunlit valley beyond. Then they turned and made for home. “Even so,” Abigail continued, “you had your ‘long, long break,’ too.”

  “Aye,” Nora said.

  “If you are a huntress,” Abigail pressed, “why did you tolerate it so long? Why didn’t you go and rout out…Can we say her name now?”

  “Charity. I don’t know. Well—I do. But…”

  “You don’t have to say,” Abigail cut in. “It’s none of my business really.”

  “But I will tell you,” Nora said. “There’s no other living soul I’d tell—for fear of not being understood.” She gathered her thoughts. “Also, you’ll maybe see why I’m not so lacking in understanding of you.” She began to walk in a different manner, swaying awkwardly, as if to transfer an ungainly thought from her mind to her body. Abigail slowed their pace to the merest loitering stroll.

  “Was it Shakespeare,” Nora asked, “who said there’s a tide in human affairs that you’ve got to take at the flood or not at all? Something like that. Well, I missed that tide. Perhaps I even wanted to miss it—how can we ever be sure of these things? Perhaps, when I heard of…Charity, I was just ready for a little dalliance of my own. Anyway, I lost no time at it.” She laughed bitterly. “It endured precisely one week, never mind twenty years. One week! But there was a chance it had left me in…well, in the same condition as Laon put you. And I don’t need to tell you how that suddenly dominates your life and drives out everything else. How could I get your father to do…what he had to do, if I went out to Saint John’s Wood and turned that baggage out into the streets and made a scandal to set all London by the ears! Oh, and there were all the other, social reasons, too. What peer’s wife ever made a public fuss of her husband’s mistress? Isn’t Saint John’s Wood full of carriages with all the arms in Debrett, from dukes to baronets, every evening of the week! I’d have been the laughing stock; John would have been the hero. I’d have lost everything. D’you want more reasons?”

  “Are there more?” Abigail squeezed her mother’s waist.

  She wanted to say that “dalliance” was the very opposite of her own ideas about love and sexuality, but did not dare risk the rebuke it would imply; she was, indeed, somewhat overawed by her mother’s confession.

  “I went to see her, you know,” Nora continued. “After your father went to India; when I knew he’d be away half a year. We’re all animals, really. Civilization’s just a veneer.”

  “You mean you fought?”

  “Just the opposite. No.” She sought for words. “You know how when you enter a new bitch into a pack, how she curls herself over and fawns to the others until they accept her? Young Miss Charity did just that. And I did what the established bitches do—I snarled and left her be. That’s why I say we’re all animals. I behaved just as she did when I first entered Society—when I was the new bitch in the pack. I did all the fawning then.”

  “Exactly what did Charity do?” Abigail asked, fascinated.

  “Oh…she wept. Said she loved John but he didn’t love her—he loved only me. She could tell it. He’d throw her over any day and come begging back to me.”

  “Clever thing!”

  “No, I think she believed it. I even think it was true. I think John was smitten by her for a year or so—long enough to get her with child. The rest was obligation. You know what he’s like with his obligations!” She pointed at an old gardener who was snipping at the fringe of lawn overhanging the ha-ha. “Old Pengilly there was one of his navvies at Summit Tunnel. He lost his foot in a rock fall. John’s found him work ever since. Oh, the times his goodness has betrayed him—but he’ll never change!”

  Abigail, who had dared so much in raising the issue at all, dared one further question: “Do you not think that, despite all the obvious differences between you, you sensed something of a sister-under-the-skin with her—not before, but when you and she were actually face to face?”

  “Who knows?” Nora shrugged, unwilling to reopen the memory. “The one thing I still find hard to forgive is that he let her call herself Stevenson—and the children.”

  “I wouldn’t be too worried about that,” Abigail said. “They’re not really Stevensons, you know—only by charity!”

  She had waited over fifteen years to deliver this reassurance.

  Nora threw back her head and roared with laughter. “Oh, darling!” she gasped, wiping her eyes. “You’re a tonic!”

  But a short while later she realized that the witticism was very like something from Abigail’s journalism, and she grew worried. “Here,” she said “Don’t go putting any of this into a book, will you. However disguised.”

  Abigail chuckled and gave her mother’s arm a further squeeze. “No fear of that. Your behaviour is too inconsistent. In real life people are allowed to be inconsistent because, as we both know too well, they got there by accident! But people don’t get into books by accident. They all have a Purpose. Inconsistency like yours would just destroy it.”

  “Forget books!” Nora said with a sudden intensity. “Forget all this unhappy past. Go back to Rome and paint—a dozen summers, if need be. Painting’s such a happy art. But forget books! All painters live to be ninety. But look at the number of writers who’ve ended by hanging themselves.”

  Chapter 35

  Rome gleamed in the spring—that unique rejuvenation which annually flowed through the city’s arteries. Nothing Abigail had ever done felt more right than this return to the quaint atelier perched on top of the half-ruined Teatro Marcello. Even César’s smugness had all the warmth of a welcome. And when he saw the Aladdin’s chest of paints and pastels, of mediums, crayons, and papers, she had brought from Cornellison’s of London, he hugged and waltzed her all around the studio.

  “Oh”—she laughed to Celia as they swept past her—“the way to this man’s heart is through his palette!”

  She loved the studio smells of oil paint, which were strong enough to mask the stink of fish from the Oratory across the way. Turpentine, as clean and sharp as eucalyptus. Poppyseed oil and linseed oil, warm as cream. And all the different colours, their aromas, now mingled, now separate, redolent of some ancient alchemy. They were all part of the excitement of a painter’s studio, just as the lack of them contributes to the sense of flatness sometimes felt even in the world’s greatest galleries. Perhaps it was this intoxication, no more, that had made her heart leap up at Celia’s first suggestion of a return to Rome.

  Next day, the first full day of their reunion, they all went out painting together; they crossed the river into the Travertine district and walked down the Tiber to a spot near the Porta Portense. There was a ready-composed view of the river, with even a cluster of sailing barges moored to the right bank, and the Aventine Hill across the water, fringed with a row of medieval hospitals and convents. The viewpoint they had chosen, a nook closed off by the massive ramparts of the sixteenth-century defence wall, was a haven of tranquility in the babel of the Roman springtime.

  The weather held, and they came back each day for a week. Celia could pull off a watercolour in a few hours, so it was n
ot long before she had moved to some other vantage for a different view. But Abigail and César, working in oils, stayed at the same scene all week—though with two canvases, one for morning, one for afternoon. By the third day, Abigail was fairly pleased with both her paintings. Their composition was full of assurance, the skies airy, the hill convincingly solid, the buildings straggling picturesquely. On the sixth day both paintings were dead.

  The paint lay on them like worried butter, the skies were turgid, the hill was neither flat nor round, the river was leaden. César’s, by contrast, had grown lighter and fresher with every stroke. Yet he used far more paint than she had done; his shadows were as thick as his highlights.

  “What did I do wrong?” she asked.

  “If you wish to be Celia,” he said, “you did wrong to go on after the third day. If you wish to become a painter, then you learned something. That’s never wrong.”

  “But the painting is…all wrong. What can I do?” She was dejected. She didn’t really want to know what to do. But she sat up when he took his palette knife and held it at the top of her painting. “Yes?” he asked.

  Reluctantly she nodded.

  He scraped off the paint in long, bold strokes from top to bottom, wiping the knife clean on the bark of a nearby cherry tree. “Perfect,” he said, pleased with the result. “Look—you did some very good underpainting. Now! Tomorrow I’ll finish here, so you have one more day.”

  It still wasn’t a good painting when they finished, the following day, but it had revived a little; and she had sense enough not to want to become Titian overnight.

  All that summer the three of them painted out of doors, except when the rain or the noonday sun drove them under cover. In August, when the heat (and the vile stink of the fish) became unbearable, they would go down to Ostia each day in search of seascapes and sea breezes. They ate all their meals out, and the wife of one of the artisans in the workshops below the Teatro did their washing and housekeeping—so painting became their sole reason for existence.

  Abigail, who had taken to painting as a way to shut out the habits of a decade, soon became as immersed in it as if she had been born for nothing else. Her new life, at the easel and in the cafés, crowded out her old.

  When groups of painters collected in the cafés, she no longer listened to their talk as an informed outsider—as a journalist seeking copy; the points they argued had become life-and-death issues to her, the cornerstones of her new universe: Is a painter bound by tradition or is each of us hurled alone against nature? Is it immoral (a violation of Truth) for us to compose a picture? Light is the hero of every painting—how can we capture him? Is our love affair with Nature or with paint? Is it justified to deny the flatness of a canvas—to make upon it an illusion of depth…should we not accept, even celebrate, that flatness? And what, when colour photography is perfected, are we going to do in order to make connoisseurs prefer us to the mechanics?

  This last question was the nearest any of them got to the idea that art might have a social purpose, something beyond the painter’s own itches and obsessions. Abigail did not notice the lack of it—not for several years. Now that painting was her obsession, too, she entered these discussions from inside. She knew what everyone was talking about, shared the same shorthand, argued with a passion that, only months earlier, she would have found either amusing or beyond comprehension. At first she spoke mainly in French; half the painters there were French, anyway. But as summer drew into autumn she found she was managing almost as well in Italian; soon she spoke French only with César.

  Celia and César took little active part in these café discussions. Celia would listen intently, nod and smile when anyone said anything apt, laugh when the saying was funny—and all quite independent of the matter of the argument. Her attitude said, “I’m glad to be here. To be glad is enough.” César listened warily rather than with Celia’s intensity. He weighed everything and, Abigail guessed, bothered to remember very little of it. From working at his side and accepting his guidance, she knew he was far ahead of the rest of them in skill and understanding. Often the conversation would get around to some question that he had, by chance, settled for her that very afternoon; then she would turn to him, expecting him to speak. But he would smile or wink, and leave her to say it for him—and she, feeling hypocritical, would have to say it, for to leave a truth unsaid would have hurt too much. In that way she gained a reputation far beyond her skill—and she knew it. Then she grew shy of showing her work to anyone but César.

  Sometimes in these discussions César would curl up and go to sleep—deliberately, not as something accidental. If Celia was there, she’d stop him and take him home, for though everyone else thought it charming, or a good joke, she could not think of it as anything but rude. Despite all that had happened to her there was still a lot of the middle-class Celia Addison there.

  On those evenings someone else would escort Abigail home. Usually it was Massimo Ronzi, a tall, dark Adonis, still in his twenties. He had enormous facility with paint, which inclined him to be more of a realist, almost photographic, and entirely traditional. His great trouble was that in all Rome he could find no male model as beautiful as himself. When Abigail first heard him make this complaint, she thought he was joking. But he was quite serious. His youthful obsession with his own beauty and skill—and prowess—always amused her. It certainly lightened many journeys home.

  “Celia is your friend?” he asked once.

  “Naturally.”

  “Why don’t you move out and give her a chance?”

  “What nonsense now, Massimo?”

  “No nonsense at all. She’s in love with César. Any fool can see that.”

  “Then, of course, I have to take your word for it!”

  But the shaft was lost on him. “Of course,” he said complacently. “And César cannot choose between you. If you move out, he has to choose.”

  “Ah, youth!” she said. “It’s all so easy.”

  “You come with me. I’m a superb lover.”

  She laughed and squeezed his arm. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “And you’re beautiful. With a beautiful woman I’m even more superb.”

  Tiring of him, she began to hum a tune.

  “It’s nice,” he said, as calmly as if she had not snubbed him at all. “I sing too. Superbly.”

  And he sang “Là donna è mobile” (what else!) from Rigoletto. And—she had to allow—he sang, if not superbly, at least very well. People came from their houses and out onto balconies to listen; and they clapped when he finished. Rome does not confer its accolade lightly.

  “I am even more superb as a lover,” he said. “Come and try.”

  His persistence intrigued her. “How many women do you talk to like this?” she asked.

  “All. I want all women.”

  “And how many accept?”

  He had to think. It was not a question that had concerned him before.

  “Many?” she prompted. “Most?”

  “One in ten,” he said proudly. “Enough.”

  She did not want to snub him again, not outright. “I’ll think about it, Massimo,” she said.

  “Most women say that,” he told her. “And if in the end you say no, we can still be friends. I am not too proud. The loss will be more yours than mine.”

  “You make it very easy.

  “No. It is already easy.”

  She often thought about what Massimo had said concerning Celia and César. And it was, she decided, possibly true. Perhaps even the pair of them did not realize it; but there was some kind of rapport between them.

  Strong enough to call love? No one could know that until its strength was challenged.

  ***

  The Roman autumn was devised especially for painters, just as Travertine marble is made by nature for the Roman sun, which burnishes it with gold at the slightest t
ouch. The autumn light is like no light ever seen in northern Europe. It sparkles. It is the light that shines from the heart of a crystal. It wakens every surface, even the dullest, with a lambent fire. That autumn it kept César and the two women painting from twilight dawn to twilit dusk. It was an intoxication that left their evenings hung over with a surfeit of visual delight. Abigail’s memory of that time was of the perfect silence that reigned between them. She had, of course, seen the Roman autumn before; but not as a painter sees it. Naïve as her visual sense still was, she now knew well enough to marvel where before she had merely enjoyed.

  She marvelled, too, at the vast new world painting had opened up to her. She could never be bored again. The train is three hours late? Marvellous! Out with the sketchbook and cram its pages with life, life, and more life! She could reach out and touch the world directly. As a writer she had thought she could do that; but now writing began to seem a monstrously stiff and roundabout way of connecting with the world. And the painter did more than merely connect. The painter loved! Every line was a line in an unending hymn of love sung to the world. In church every Sunday, while others offered up their standard prayers, she prayed especial thanks for the new eyes of childhood that had been miraculously restored to her.

  In December, when winter at last fell upon them and she remembered to go and buy a little present to send to William, she said to the other two, “If Annie was to come here now, or Pepe, I think I’d worry first about which room to put them in!”

  It was winter that brought home to them the reason for their astonishingly low rent. In the heady days of spring, who looks for fireplaces? Or in the torrid heat of summer? Or even during the golden hours of autumn, when the whole world clamours to be painted? But winter, rimming the tiles with frost, muting at last the stink of fish, putting clouds of breath between eyes and easel, winter revealed at once the dread fact: there were no fireplaces in the atelier.