Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Then he was a clockwork toy, running down, doing all the old tricks but ever more slowly. In the end he was so slow that even the Italian police could catch him! The rest you know, or can guess, or—like me—is unimportant.”

  The tears in her eyes prevented her from seeing him clearly; the lump in her throat made it hard to say, “If I had known, I’d have helped you with him to the Tiber. I would have said a prayer over him.”

  “He didn’t go without a prayer,” the man said. “Atheist as I am and as he was, if there is a God, I believe He would rather hear prayers from atheists than hypocrites. ‘If I had only known…’ is the cry of the bourgeoisie whenever its eyes are forcibly opened.”

  She put her hands to her face and wept silently into them, ashamed for him to see her. He made no move to comfort or touch her. When she grew calm again, she felt the need to explain to him.

  “When you first asked for help,” she said, “and I refused you, all I saw was a man who frightened me talking about a man my mother detested. But you…you knew all…all this story you’ve just told me, and more. And you had just sat through an evening of me and my friends—all that bright, inane chatter, while your friend, my uncle, was dying here. How is it you can still bring yourself even to talk to me? I am not worthy to do you the most menial service.”

  He sank his head to his hands and pushed his fingers up into the fringe of his hair, massaging his scalp violently. “I must say it again!” He looked up at her with a smile. “I am an old man. Death is too near me. I feel his breath mocking mine. It makes me impatient to speak, so I speak like a telegram. I say what is significant, but I omit what’s important: I omit the truth. All you’ve said is true. All I’ve said is true. But the entire truth? No one ever says it. After every statement you must yourself supply a but. Your lover says, ‘I love you,’ and you say, but…Your mother says, ‘Daniel deserted me and killed the two babies,’ and you can now say, but…”

  She grinned ruefully. “I say I’ve lived forty-two years a trivial and shallow woman.”

  “So you say. I don’t know you. You must be able to supply many buts to answer that. I know only one.”

  “Which is…”

  “But wait for the next forty-two!”

  ***

  “Daniel’s favourite phrase was, ‘It’s no accident that…’ Everything to him was part of a larger structure—a conspiracy, an inevitable tide of history, something of that sort. Mere chance terrified him, because it could pull the rug out from under his feet at any moment. If he was on a train and a wheel overheated and they had to stop, he’d at once look for the secret police, or make a note to check the political loyalties of the wheelgreasers’ union. There had to be a cause other than mere accident, you see.”

  She nodded and hung on his next sentence. Now that he knew her better and was nearly well again in himself, he was relaxed enough to speak in long detours that opened up for her the most fascinating windows into a life she could never have envisaged.

  “Why did I tell you that?” he asked. “Oh, yes! I was myself about to say, ‘It was no accident.’ But it really was no accident that I brought him to you. He followed all your lives, your mother’s and father’s, of course, and also all your brothers’ and sisters’. But most especially yours. He was astonished by you—and very proud. Things you wrote which he liked—little phrases or startling ways of putting things—he’d learn them by heart and work them into his speeches. Even when they weren’t in the least appropriate. People laughed, of course, but when they understood, they liked him for it. He had no children of his own.”

  He sighed and shook his head, vanishing for a moment into a reverie.

  “If he had lived, he’d be sitting here now, quoting you to yourself by the ream! You’d be really embarrassed then!”

  “Yes. I’d have shattered one more of his dreams.”

  He smiled at her, with something of a challenge in his look. “You underestimate his powers. Even at seventy. Even burned out. He was still no ordinary man. You don’t mind my going on about him?”

  “Heavens no!”

  “He was my lodestone. I always hoped that through him I would one day hear the Voice of History. As clearly as he heard it. He might have made you hear it, though. He often said that if you were with us, we could really have made the masters tremble!”

  “What would the voice have told me, I wonder? I’ve never seen myself as Joan of Arc.”

  “No. I doubt if Joan of Arc did, either. But let’s try and work it out. Tell me about yourself and your life. From inside, I mean. I know the outside.”

  She told him then. Everything. She thought it might take an hour. It was just after lunch when she began; she did not finish until well into the evening. He was silent for a long time, but as he appeared to be deep in thought she left him be. Eventually, though, the silence became too much to endure.

  “Well?” she asked. “No voice?”

  “It’s too big,” he said. “It can’t be settled tonight. There’s only one thing we can settle tonight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I am an old man and even now I hear the men with the darkness crossing my courtyard. It makes me impatient, so forgive me if you think me brusque and unmannerly, but will you sleep with me tonight?”

  There was that buzz! The note she had missed for so long. What was about to happen was, beyond all question, right. She began to undress.

  “No questions?” he asked. “No reservations?”

  “None.”

  ***

  Next morning when he saw she was awake he said, “There was one question you should’ve asked me, you know.”

  “Mmmmm?”

  “My name.”

  She slipped her arms around him and tickled his ribs. “Why don’t I just go on thinking of you as God?” she said.

  He chuckled. “Because not even the British Embassy would have the arrogance to issue me a passport in that name.”

  “Passport?”

  “Yes. We must go back to England.”

  “Festina lente!” She sat up. “We are not about to conduct my life at a revolutionary tempo!”

  “Well, well and good. But my name is…” He chuckled. “Look at her! She’s expecting some shattering revelation. Can’t you even guess?”

  “You aren’t…” she asked, suddenly horrified, “not Ignaz Porzelijn!”

  He laughed. “There is still enough imp in me to consider that pretence. Because your relief and laughter to find that I’m not that man would be so great. But no, I’m not. You’ve never heard of me. I’m the man whose name is last but two or three on every police list. I am Victor Bouvier.”

  “And the others? The last two or three below you?”

  “They were invented by informers with a conscience. So in the revolutionary dossiers I have always stood at the division between illusion and reality. It’s time I found a more secure mode of existence.”

  When he saw the alarm in her face, he chuckled and stroked her head and neck, making her tremble.

  “There’s that imp,” he said. “I never was a revolutionary. I hoped, of course. But I also learned to fear. Daniel was my greatest friend. Yet he was also the greatest warning anyone could have against the perils of all fanaticism. So don’t worry. No one’s after me.”

  “Why do you talk like a revolutionary then? False passports and lists and informers!”

  He shrugged. “Wishful thinking. Or what a conjuror calls ‘misdirection.’ When you hear me at it, look around for a bourgeois. They bring it on me like a fit. I only do it pour épater la bourgeoisie.”

  As he spoke he lowered a pointing finger onto her brow, between her eyebrows. She did not blink. Their eyes dwelled in each other’s and a marvellous, rocklike certainty filled her. “I love you, Victor,” she said, creeping into his embrace. “Enough for a lifetime.”r />
  “So little?” He pretended to be sad.

  She clung to him. “Don’t talk like that,” she begged. “Don’t say such things!”

  Chapter 39

  The biographies she had imagined for him could not have been wider of their mark. He was the son of a petty nobleman, too petty to bother even the bitterest and most ardent revolutionary—or, as Victor said, “By the time they might have worked down the list to my family, they were much too busy denouncing and slaughtering one another.”

  During the 1830s he had been a young man about Paris—which meant he was a poet, songwriter, tragedian, romantic, follower of fashion, revolutionary, comedian, antiphilistine, and, above all, a tireless seducer of gullible girls and older men’s mistresses. It was the Paris of Henri Murger’s Scenes de la vie de bohème, which Puccini later made famous in his opera La Bohème.

  Victor had known them all. He had shared an apartment for a time with Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Arsène Houssaye, and Camille Rogier. It made Abigail’s Roman circle seem the very depths of tame respectability. They worked furiously all day, Gérard on The Queen of Sheba, Théo on Mademoiselle de Maupin, Arsène on La Pécheresse, and Camille on his famous illustrations for Byron and The Tales of Hoffmann.

  Abigail, who knew and loved all these works, was thrilled to think of their being created cheek by jowl in one big salon. “And you?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I wrote songs and ballads for street vendors. Thirty a day. All of them very good. I was the highest paid among us. For six songs we could dine at the Place de L’Odéon; for two more we could all go on to the Café Voltaire! Once a week we went to La Chaumière, where the girls were the most beautiful in Paris—and the most simpleminded. One of them told Arsène that a wise girl was one who allowed only one lover at a time! Arsène and Ourliac, who wrote Suzanne, had devised a fantastic quadrille depicting the complete life of Napoleon. It ended in a flourish of pistol shots and broken chairs, which was the signal for us to descend on those horizontales and odalisques like the Assyrians on the Sabine women.”

  He caught her eye. “It was the Assyrians?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It was the Romans, under Romulus.”

  He, too, shook his head, but in sadness. “Oh, Abbie, Abbie…you are going to be no fun! We tried to pay them in sonnets and songs, but all they said was ‘Can we eat sonnets? Can we wear your songs?’ What gems they refused! No one understood romanticism, even then, when it flourished in the midst of them. Mind you, I never dressed like a romantic. I was always the height of fashion. The others used to mock me—and Gavarni, who was the same; but I noticed that the girls didn’t repulse me and Gavarni as ardently as they fought off the others, with their dishevelled clothes and matted hair and general contempt for soap.”

  It was a firm tradition among them that youth ended precisely on the knell of one’s twenty-fifth birthday—so much so that Théo had to start lying about his age when he wanted to go on pursuing a young grisette called Cydalise, who was Camille Rogier’s mistress and was dying of consumption. Some of Gautier’s best poetry came out of that forlorn pursuit.

  “Of course, youth doesn’t end at twenty-five,” Victor said. “I’ve still got mine, even if it tastes sour at one or two of its edges—which isn’t surprising after two marriages, two revolutions, and the life of a bourgeois rentier.”

  At that magic age of twenty-five he had won (at a game of cards where he had believed the stakes to be in mere centimes instead of thousands of francs) the Salon du Pré, a concert hall near the Tuileries in the heart of fashionable Paris. In August, when only tourists roamed the city, they used to stage human and tame-animal acts there. That was how he had lost his eye, and gained his scarred cheek—a knife thrower too drunk to take proper aim. So much for any supposed connection with revolution and romance!

  After his convalescence he had become interested in the whole improbable business of presenting spectacles for the public. Soon he thought he knew enough about it to branch out into small theatres and music halls, even into poses plastiques and tableaux vivants. In the provinces he built a number of theatres for the serious drama. His feel for public entertainment made him a very rich man within ten years.

  By the time Louis Napoleon came to power, after the revolution of 1848, Victor was married and lived in a large house near the Bois de Boulogne. There were no children.

  “The very day he came back, I had every windowbox in the house filled with Corsican violets. In the days of the Bourbons, you know, violets were hardly ever seen in Paris. They said I was clairvoyant, but it was only the same instinct that made me a good showman and impresario. I think I had a better sense of history than Daniel, though he made history his god.”

  Abigail and Victor went on many long walks around Rome that autumn. He was a compulsive memory man; he had known everyone, performed discreet services for every great lady and little cocotte, helped grand ministers and struggling artists out of difficulties, dined every leading singer and dancer who ever visited Paris, saved the Kaiser from being crushed by an elephant, procured two mistresses for the emperor…a rich, ordinary, useful, useless life.

  “You moved in such a different world from Daniel, I wonder you ever met,” she said.

  “Oh, we didn’t meet then. In fact, we didn’t meet until the siege of ’seventy-one. I turned my house into a hospital during the siege and all through the days of the Commune. Daniel was brought to me wounded. I hid him from his would-be executioners.”

  “Was that what changed you?”

  “Changed?”

  “From the sort of man you were in your youth.”

  He was unwilling to answer; he had to find a seat, as if the confession would take all his concentration. They happened to be in the Via Veneto, so the obvious place was a café. He waited until their cups were brought before he continued.

  “I changed, I think, in ’sixty-five, when one of my mistresses was thrown into prison—by her husband.”

  “What for?”

  “For being unfaithful. Oh, it could happen. It was legal. It still is, for all I know. The same thing happened to one of Victor Hugo’s mistresses. The worst part of it was that the husband himself was notorious; no woman was safe. Of course, I got the wife released almost at once—knowing which ears to bend, which arms to twist. But she was ruined socially. I gave her a job, naturally, and I think she’s found a tolerable happiness. But for me the zest of that way of life had gone. I began to look for something else. I thought I had found it with Daniel—that was after the death of my second wife. But…” He shrugged. “I suppose I’m still looking.”

  “Like me.”

  He smiled and took her hand. “We shall find it.” He looked at her and laughed. “Probably right under our very noses.”

  She wrote a small memoir of Daniel, called The Death of Daniel Telling. She had no thought of publication, but his death, with, as Victor had said, not a paragraph to mark his passing, irked her, and she wanted to record all that Victor knew of him before the memory dimmed.

  Victor’s compulsive reminiscing was most useful. Within a month she felt she knew her uncle as well as if she had lived a large part of her life at his side. But her admiration for him was dented when she passed from Victor’s judgements to the primary sources of Daniel’s own inspiration—the writings of Marx and Engels.

  She read Capital as far as chapter 3—or about two chapters further than most nonbelievers manage; it left her with nothing to admire in Daniel beyond his staying power.

  “Never mind,” Victor told her reassuringly, “Jules Vallès, who was one of the leaders of the Commune, always said that book was unreadable.”

  The Communist Manifesto reminded her, in a curious way, of her brother Boy. She had once heard Boy say, quite seriously, that if only everyone would obey the Ten Commandments and the commandment to love one another, all the world’s probl
ems would vanish and we would have an overnight paradise. He had been at university at the time, too—no callow schoolboy. Something of the same puerile idealism ran through every paragraph of the Manifesto.

  And what a ridiculous opening line: “A Hobgoblin is stalking across Europe…”! But there was much worse within:

  “Listen to this,” she said to Victor. “‘Insofar as the exploitation of one individual by another diminishes, so will the exploitation of nations by other nations also diminish. Insofar as class hatred ceases to exist within each nation, so will hostility between nations also vanish.’ Really! Even forty years ago that would have been hard to swallow. But now! Did Daniel honestly believe that?”

  Victor, who freely scorned Daniel’s communism to her, did not like to hear her at the same game independently. He shrugged awkwardly. “You have to see it in context,” he said. “What Anglican ever believed all Thirty-nine Articles—or scrupulously practised all he preached?”

  She saw in this evasion a shadow of Daniel himself. It helped her understand how bitter his end must have been—the end of a life in which ideals and reality had grown steadily farther apart, tearing him apart, too, the visionary man from the everyday worker.

  “All his life,” she wrote in the closing pages of her memoir of him, “he cried out: ‘Men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains!’ Toward the end he saw that his listeners were not actually in chains at all. They were in the pub, enjoying a beer, or at Epsom Downs, cheering on the Derby. They enjoyed his speeches, to be sure, for he was a master of rhetoric; but they enjoyed him as little more than one of the serious turns on life’s unending stage. If he had dared to proclaim the Revolution for the following Saturday, they would half-promise to join in; but he knew they had already half-promised to paper the parlour, too.”

  Her final words were: “The streets of Rome were rivers that night, but not of blood. The Tiber burst its banks. The swirling waters carried Daniel Telling off, yet did him no other harm. By then no fire was left to quench.”