So that was it. They knew something, but not everything—not his new title, for instance. She did not want to add to their knowledge, especially as she herself knew nothing. It was pointless, and perhaps dangerous, to insist further.
“I see.” She rose to leave. “I shall be staying at the Pension Boisanfray in the Rue Michel-Ange at Auteuil. You will kindly arrange for the girl to be delivered there by ambulance without delay.”
She named the pension she had always used in her days as a journalist. If she was to nurse this poor English girl, she didn’t wish to impose on Celia and César, nor to link them with Victor in the minds of the police.
The prefect, courteous to the last, escorted her all the way to the chief entrance. “Lady Abigail understands our language very well,” he said. “It gives me immense confidence there will be no further…unfortunate occurrences during her brief stay in Paris. We must think above all of this poor young woman’s reputation, mustn’t we?”
***
The girl was still in pain, but a great deal less distressed in mind, when the ambulance attendants brought her into the pension. Her name was Frances Law and her father owned three butcher’s shops in the Deal area of Kent. She was more worried about him than about herself. She was supposed to meet him at the train from Calais. “I was an hour early,” she said. “But he must have arrived some time ago. He’ll be frantic with anxiety.”
Abigail sent messages by the pneumatique to the station and to the school where the girl had been a pupil, giving her new address. She also sent word to Victor.
The doctor, who came within minutes of her arrival, gave his opinion that the leg was fractured rather than broken. For the rest, she was badly bruised, but no internal organs seemed to be injured. He set her leg in plaster and said she might travel on a stretcher and on a calm sea within a week. He gave her opium to help her sleep. “You English ladies are tough,” he said admiringly.
So, in a way, Abigail thought, were French ladies who poked at corpses with parasols. Yet there was something almost unnerving at this girl’s lack of shock; still, it was preferable to hysterics or tears.
A pneumatique came from Victor to say that he was seeing Vauchet, a powerful minister and a long-standing enemy of the morals police. To occupy the time, Abigail rewrote her statement and repeated the drawings the prefect had casually confiscated; no doubt he’d hand the originals out for each man to frame and hang at home—all part of the well-known French tolérance for violence in crimes of passion.
The girl’s father arrived before Victor. At first he was angry and wanted to kill the entire morals police force, from the prefect down; but when he read Abigail’s sober, unembroidered account, a wiser (or, at least, a more calculating) counsel insinuated itself.
“I don’t know, your ladyship,” he said, making implosive sucking noises at his upper front teeth. “It’s a bad business. Take this charge, now…what she was charged with. That’s a bad business.”
“But she wasn’t charged, Mr. Law. And, in any case, it was groundless.”
He shook his head and went on sucking his teeth. “Mud sticks though, don’t it, your ladyship. It’s different for a lady of class and breeding, I daresay. No one’s going to suspect…well, the likes of you, if I may make so bold. But…” He nodded at the sleeping girl. “A girl of our class don’t start out with three farthings’ worth of reputation anyway. There’s no lean to spare, see.”
Sadly, Abigail saw. She rose to go.
He handed her back the drawings and statement. “Not but what I’m not grateful, your ladyship. Mrs. Law and me, we’ll never be able to repay your kindness.”
“Oh, please don’t think of it in that light, Mr. Law. To have done less would be despicable. I’ll come back and sit with Miss Law for two or three hours tomorrow afternoon. It would be a shame for you to stay a week in Paris and see nothing of the city.”
He protested. She insisted. It was arranged.
As they reached the front door, she saw Victor alighting from a fiacre. “Don’t pay him off,” she called. “We’ll go home now.”
She introduced Law to Victor.
“Vauchet’s all set for a fight,” Victor said in English.
She told him of Law’s decision. Victor pulled a face. “That’s what Vauchet said would happen. It always does. Neither the guilty nor the innocent want to stir up trouble; that’s what puts these swine above the law.”
“To coin a phrase!” she said, nodding at Law.
He laughed. “Above retribution, then.” His English was good but not as flawless as her French. It was the first time she was more than intellectually aware of their difference in nationality. Until now she had thought of them as sharing some common but undefined citizenship.
“The main thing is,” Law said as they left him, “we got our little lamb back, eh?”
On their way home Victor said, still in English, “He seems a tolerably decent sort of fellow.”
His English vocabulary, unlike his French, was noticeably upper class. “Let’s talk French between ourselves,” she said.
He nodded. “Yet I wonder what sort of man can use as a term of endearment for his daughter the name of an animal he must slaughter and sell every day.”
***
Frances was delighted to see her again. Between the lines Abigail gathered that Mr. Law was a great man for homilies.
The girl had been in Paris as part of a bargain with her father. He had wanted her to marry from school—specifically, from the finishing school, or lycée, at Gentilly where, until yesterday, she had been lodged (and where Law had now gone to collect her things and settle accounts). She agreed only if he first let her train to be a typewriter and to do simple bookkeeping, for her aim was not to marry until she had tasted something of freedom in an office. Law, seeing his best hope was to let the two ambitions, hers and his, fight it out, had reluctantly agreed. The “fiancé” who had denounced her turned out to be one of the women teachers at the school, who had made improper advances to her and other pupils and had been dismissed.
“So,” Abigail said, “it’s your father’s half of the bargain that came unstuck.”
“Yes, my lady,” she answered glumly. “And he’s not the man to take the loss of face lightly.” Her speech was more refined than her father’s; she was as middle class as Celia.
“And can you typewrite, and bookkeep?” Abigail asked.
“I came second in my class—and the girl who was top had done the course twice. I can typewrite fifty-eight words a minute on a good typer. And bookkeeping doesn’t fluster me the way it does some girls.”
“And shorthand?”
“I’ll do some now if you want to try me.”
Next afternoon Abigail asked, “Would Mr. Law consider that a position as secretary to Baroness de Bouvier, formerly Lady Abigail Stevenson, might be a better finishing school than his first choice?”
“Never mind him, my lady! If the salary is anything like fifty pounds a year, you’ve no need to consult wider than these four walls.”
Their eyes dwelled in each other’s. Abigail laughed. “You knew!”
“After your questions yesterday, my lady? After my father saw you this morning going into the lycée?”
“Ah!” Abigail became more businesslike. “Very well, young lady. Now to lesson one. You no doubt think it very much the New Woman sort of thing to leap in and talk about money like that.”
“I believe a man would, my lady. New or Old.”
“Not a wise man. A wise man would at least find out about the job first, don’t you think?”
The girl bit her lip, worried now.
“This job, for instance, may involve a lot more than being a typewriter and keeping simple books. I may want someone who can do researches for me, meet people for me, go ahead of me in travels and make arrangements, take minutes, meet tradesmen
, hire servants, deal tactfully with important nincompoops—right up to really responsible commissions, like going out and choosing me a pair of gloves of exactly the right shade. Now!” She sat back and entwined her fingers with a flourish. “Tell me, Miss Law—tell me the going rate for such a person.
Frances swallowed hard. “Er…” she faltered.
“I’ll tell you. Such a person, after let us say five years of satisfactory fulfilment, would rightly expect to earn at least two hundred pounds, living in.”
“A man…” Frances started to say.
“I would not pay a woman less. My mother will call me a fool, but principles begin at home. Now, lesson two: no one should ever get what they want—not immediately. Accordingly, I will offer you just half of what you ask, for the first six months. Then, if you look like the sort of person I need, you may expect to advance steadily to the sort of salary I mentioned.”
She deliberately set her offer low to see if the girl was serious about working or was merely looking for a brief bit of fun and freedom with good pay as an added bonus. Frances smiled shyly. “Is there a lesson there, my lady?”
“My, my!” Abigail laughed. “Well—yes, I suppose there is: if a thing feels right, don’t hesitate about it.”
“Then I hope you’ll find me suitable in every way,” she answered.
“Good! I hope so, too. You’ll live on our side of the green baize door—you know what I mean?”
Frances nodded. “And how do I address you, my lady?”
“In private you may call me ‘madame,’ if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise nothing. I shall call you Frances. In public I shall always refer to you as Miss Law, and you may call me Madame la Baronne or Baroness because it’s a foreign title. And if you have to ask what’s private and what’s public, you aren’t the person I’m seeking.”
She saw a hint of fear in the girl’s face and was satisfied. That little injection of anxiety, if it could be regularly renewed, was going to keep this brave, confident young miss from overreaching herself until she knew her business.
***
With her anxiety for Frances settled and the girl’s immediate prospects secure, Abigail found her thoughts returning again and again to the atrocity she had seen at the Gare du Nord. The look she had seen in those men’s eyes came to haunt her.
How often, she wondered, are we secretly dependent on a particularly vivid image to unlock a whole train of thought? The philosopher who develops, say, an important theory of power and authority—might not the whole process have been released by his seeing nothing more apparently significant than a tree overshadowing a shrub? She remembered how, long ago, her disquiet at something Pepe had done was in part allayed when she found a satisfying image for it: the shopkeeper pinning up dead butterflies. The image had survived better than the memory of whatever Pepe had done.
Now the thing was working in reverse—the image haunted her, but the thoughts it seemed designed to encapsulate were still mere half suggestions at the fringe of her consciousness. It had something to do with her conversation with Victor after Grant Allen’s visit in Rome; but it was more than that. It awoke echoes stretching back over most of her life: her conversation with Steamer, when she decided not to publish Into a Narrow Circle; Annie’s blighted life and her hatred of men; Uncle Walter…right back to the mists of Pepe and the dead butterflies. It was the dark side of sexual love—the violence in men, the hatred, their will to dominate, and the sheer callousness of their overwhelming greed for satisfaction. She had an intuition that men, hating their bondage at the wheel of desire, hated, too, the objects of that desire. That was why Pepe had smiled like the man who transfixed butterflies. That was why Oldale had ruined Annie, why César had tried to leave her in Rome a captive to his memory, why those policemen had behaved so brutally to Frances. They could lust after a girl all week—never mind whether she was a whore or not—lie panting in her arms on Saturday, and kick her to a pulp on Sunday; and without a trace of inconsistency!
Yes, she thought wryly, it was well enough to lecture little Frances on the wisdom of finding out about a job before you undertake it—she could heed a bit of that advice herself. But how? Where do you start when your intuition is so vague? And refers to such a difficult and private area?
She had loved and slept with but three men—one of them Victor, who was like no other man in the world to her. What values could she draw from so slim an experience? Yet where could anyone turn for more general enlightenment?
At least she was aware of one danger that she might have minimized before: Her endeavour to establish happier and more natural relationships between men and women was not going to be a simple matter of moral, intellectual, and practical argument. There were dark, strong, and secret forces to contend with, too—forces that people neither recognized nor understood.
Part Three
Chapter 43
They took a terrace house on the sunset side of Bloomsbury Square—her first home with a telephone. It was a spacious, elegant place with four principal floors, an attic, and a semibasement. It was also, Abigail had to admit, an upper-class version of the meanly grand houses her mother had so cynically designed (and waxed so rich upon) almost fifty years ago. It had the same pretensions to an elegance beyond its means, scaled up, it is true, but stopping just short of the actual achievement. It was a house for people who wanted to make an occasional move into Society, rather than for those who intended to “go about” a lot; in that respect it suited her and Victor ideally.
She hung César’s two paintings of her at last—and in the drawing room, too.
“Is that wise?” Victor asked.
“Perhaps not,” she said. “But let’s not be cowards forever. Besides, I think a French baroness may do what the younger daughter of an English peer may not. Let’s see, anyway.”
The stationers in Drury Lane sent round a succession of typers until Frances, now convalescing on a chaise longue, found one to her liking. Abigail put her to work at once making copies of her little memoir of Daniel. Frances had not lied about her typewriting speed. From a selfish viewpoint Abigail was glad of the girl’s convalescence, for the responsibility it conferred made it impossible to do what she and Victor would otherwise have been obliged to do—waste a month or more in going around and meeting the family. Instead a letter and an open invitation to “cry in, in the passing,” discharged that duty much more agreeably. With each she sent a copy of the memoir; in her mother’s she included her drawings of Daniel’s death mask.
The first member of the family to call was, strangely enough, the one with whom she had the least contact and for whom she felt the least affinity: her brother Mather, who came with his wife, Corinna (who was Uncle Walter’s and Aunt Arabella’s youngest daughter). They had not met since she had been to their wedding some seventeen years earlier. Though he was less than four years her junior, they had always seemed much farther apart, in temperament, attitudes, and interests. Mather had not followed his three older brothers, Boy, Caspar, and Clement, to Fiennes School; instead, as Sefton had done later, he went to Eton. Unlike Sefton, Mather had gone on to Balliol College, Oxford, to study economics. He was now a senior lecturer in the subject at University College London, not half a mile from Bloomsbury Square; he was also a world authority on the theory of prices and wages, and a founder-member of the Fabian Society.
That was really what brought him round to see her. The Fabians, who included Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, believed not in violent revolutions but in “the inevitability of gradualness” in the spread of socialism; they took their name from Fabius Maximus, the Roman general who thwarted Hannibal’s ambitions by refusing to meet him in a set battle. Mather was fascinated at the thought that this hitherto unknown Uncle Daniel should have been so ardent a revolutionary.
But as Abigail listened to him, to his careful diction, to his precise, academically tempered exciteme
nt, she could not help remembering that wasted corpse with its ulcerated gums; she could not help thinking of all the suffering and indignity Daniel had endured in the name of the same principles that Mather now enunciated with such prim engagement; and she knew that, though she felt little enough in common with Daniel, she had nothing to share with Mather. There was no point in trying to convey her own hopes and enthusiasms to him. In any case, it was not Mather’s response she awaited but her mother’s.
Corinna seemed a quiet, agreeable woman. She said Bloomsbury was an agreeable place to live in, university society was agreeable, the Fabians were most agreeable people. “Except when they quarrel,” Mather said, “which is almost all the time.”
This period of waiting was a repeat of those impotent first weeks in Rome, after she had sent Into a Narrow Circle to Pepe and could settle to nothing new. Now, to fill the hours, she made a short story of the Gare du Nord atrocity; the girl-victim was French in this version, and there was no Abigail around to stir up trouble. The denouement was the same—the mistake was discovered and the girl was released, broken leg and all. The point of the story was not in its denouement but in the discoveries the girl made on her way to it, mainly in her conversations with fellow prisoners.
Perhaps because thoughts of Daniel were near the surface of Abigail’s mind, perhaps because of her recent conversation with Mather, perhaps in oblique homage to Victor, or perhaps because she simply lost grip of the form of the story, she made one of those fellow prisoners a tough revolutionary woman. This forced her—for the first time, really—to look at what had happened to Frances with an impersonal eye. What, she had to ask, would a woman who had survived the ordeals Victor had described make of it? The pain and brutality would not move her greatly; she would see it in the broader terms of the class war.
Abigail remembered a passage in the Communist Manifesto in which the bourgeois family is presented solely as a vehicle for protecting and passing on capital—the fruit of private gain. When she first read it, she had tried to think of a single bourgeois marriage of which this was even a one-tenth part of an adequate description, except in the most trivial sense, as one might say, “The bourgeois marriage is a vehicle for keeping boot-makers or the carvers of baptismal fonts—or the writers of political pamphlets!—in employment.”
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