But never mind, she thought now; ignore its inadequacy and concentrate on what the Manifesto said. Its next sentence was surely significant. “The natural counterpart to bourgeois marriage is public prostitution.” The internal consistency of the argument pleased her, and, as developed by the revolutionary woman, it became quite exciting, if only because it was Abigail’s first attempt at a more than personal response to the outrage.
She showed it to Victor in manuscript. He read it and passed it back with a thin smile. “Zola’s safe, anyway,” he said.
Frances said nothing when she handed back the typescript.
“You don’t mind?” Abigail asked.
“No. Not in the least. Indeed, it makes me doubly grateful to you for rescuing me as soon as you did.”
But Abigail still believed enough in the story to send it off to Pall Mall, whose editor, Frank Griffith, was one of the “office boys” to whom, on Caspar’s joking advice, she had been kind twenty years before.
The typescript came back by return. “I was very tempted to take this,” Griffith wrote, “not because I think it good (in fact, I think it dreadful), but because I know you are one of the very best, and I long to have you write regularly. A month from now you would execrate me if I accepted this. Your anger at what is obviously a real-life incident (seen by you?) is natural; and your description of the arrest had me on the edge of my seat. I thought it my luckiest day in this office that you had honoured me with so riveting a tale. Imagine, then, my disappointment when it all trickles away in that windy, shallow, platitudinous monologue by the revolutionary woman! Is she a sort of joke?
“Frankly, I don’t think it makes a story. Anger is a bad muse and a worse midwife. But it would make an article; and even some of the things your dreadful woman says could actually become quite interesting in that context—because you would not then be asking us to imagine a flesh-and-blood woman mouthing such a lecture to a poor girl with a broken leg!
“What say you? We find we can print quite strong stuff if only we keep the language high. Read Acton, and Mrs. Besant, and Josephine Butler and you’ll soon see the thing to do. A word of warning: Tale or article, it will, I fear, merely confirm to the average English male what he already knows about the French: that they are savages; and, thank God, they know how to keep their streets swept free of diseased girls! I was not so cynical when last you knew me. But then, nor was I editor.
“As editor I beg you to do me the honour again. And again. And again…”
***
Shortly after that the Earl and Countess, who had been away in Scotland, came. Both were limping, John through age (he was now eighty) and Nora (still a sprightly sixty-nine) from “a fall off a damned contrary horse.” Abigail could see that her mother was in some agitation. On the one hand she was delighted that her daughter had at last married; and she and John took an instant liking to Victor—it was a meeting of three varieties of human toughness. On the other hand, she was furious at the memoir of Daniel. And somewhere between these extremes there were practical things, like the marriage settlement and the registering of Victor’s foreign title, to be determined. Without registration, no one would know where to seat him.
It was a warm day—the first really warm day of the year—and they sat out in the garden, dappled in the shade of a tulip tree. “Garden” was hardly the word. It measured but twenty yards by fifteen and was isolated from its neighbours by a twelve-foot-high brick wall on all three sides (the house, of course, making up the fourth). There was no grass; it was paved throughout in old flags of Oxford limestone. All the growth, except for the tree, was confined to tubs and urns. But, with the help of a little fountain and a couple of carefully sited statues, the effect was pleasant and relaxing. It was also extremely private.
“I gather you’re displeased,” Abigail said to Nora, nodding at the typescript her mother was clutching. She thought it best to dispatch the topic at once. “I’m sorry.”
John shook his head vehemently at her, but the die was now cast.
“I don’t mention Daniel’s connection with us,” Abigail went on. “It’s not meant for publication but, even so, no one can trace him to us.”
“D’you think I give a fig for that!” Nora said. “Though, by the way, you are wrong there, too, as you’re wrong throughout. My maiden name of Telling is clear for all to see in Burke’s Peerage and Debrett, and there are ten thousand people in this country who, though they may read no other book in their lives, read those two for breakfast. But I don’t mind. What I object to is this glorification of Daniel. To use a phrase he would have understood, he was a class traitor. He was a traitor to the only class who should have mattered—the class of me and Sam and Wilf and Dorrie.”
“He was a friend of Victor’s,” Abigail warned.
“A good friend?” Nora asked. “Loyal? Steadfast? True?”
To each Victor nodded assent.
“Then he learned new arts since he deserted me. Did he tell you I denounced him to the French police, after the eighteen forty-eight rebellion?”
Victor’s eyes went wide with shock. Obviously Daniel had never mentioned it.
“Did she?” Abigail asked her father.
John nodded as if he, too, were still surprised.
“We had friends and interests in France ten thousand times more important than that traitor,” Nora explained. As an explanation it clearly satisfied her.
“Was that the last time you met?” Victor asked.
“No, Monsieur de Bouvier. He came back once more. The next year I think it was. Or—wait! This was the time after ’forty-eight. The other was earlier. When the rebellion failed he asked me for sanctuary.” She turned to Abigail. “I was at that inn we bought in Coutances, where Clement was born. I turned him away. He drew a gun on me, but he hadn’t the courage to shoot. He hit me with it. Broke a rib. And that’s the last I ever saw of Daniel.” She looked back at Victor. “And he never told you that, either, did he!”
“No, Countess. He spoke of you—all of you—with pride and affection.”
“Aye—a true communist for you. Treats history like a wife!”
Victor laughed.
“Speaking as a husband,” John said, trying to lighten the occasion, “I take exception to the implications of the Right Honourable Lady’s last remark. And”—he smiled all round—“while on the subject of husbands and wives…” He looked at Nora.
“Oh yes,” she said, speaking to Victor. “When Abigail came of age, we set aside…that is, the family trust set aside…” She came to a halt and began again. “I must go back a bit. When we started in business, back in the ’forties, the then John Stevenson had so low an opinion of our skills and prospects that he saddled us with a ten percent levy on all our profits.”
John cleared his throat as a protest.
“Very well,” Nora said. “Put it another way. It was a time when even fools could make fortunes. So a genius”—she waved at John—“could afford to put aside ten percent and still be keen at the job. In ten years we had a family trust worth…well, let’s say one or two millions. That’s the background. And when Abigail turned twenty we put aside two hundred thousand as a settlement. That’s quite apart from her income, which has always stood at about two thousand a year.”
“And of which I’ve hardly spent a penny,” Abigail said.
“Things are different now.”
“We shan’t go about much,” Abigail warned.
“Just listen!” Nora said petulantly.
Victor nodded agreement and held up a finger at Abigail.
Nora went on: “Two hundred thousand compounded at three percent over twenty-four years is…something over four hundred and ten thousand.”
“Victor!” Abigail cried. “What fools we were! Oh, curses on our hasty, impetuous natures! Had we but postponed our marriage until I am seventy, we could have been mi
llionaires! Mother, all this is so unnecessary. We don’t need such money. We’ll never use it. It’s only a worry and an embarrassment.”
“What does Monsieur de Bouvier say—or Victor? May we call you Victor?”
Smiling, he nodded and drew breath to speak.
“He’s rich in his own right,” Abigail answered for him. “Yet d’you know what his entire worldly goods amounted to when we moved here? Three trunks and a tea chest.”
“Victor?” Nora repeated.
“Neither of you can touch the capital,” John warned. “But the income is absolutely yours.”
“Over twelve thousand a year,” Nora added.
Abigail made an exasperated noise.
“A good marriage needs a strong cement,” Victor said. “We are grateful, both Abigail and I.”
Abigail stood abruptly and ran into the house.
Nora leaned forward as if to rise and follow her, but then looked at Victor. Still smiling, he asked, “You will permit me?”
He found her in the drawing room, not weeping but pounding a cushion with her fists. He watched briefly. “Ouch…ooh…ah!” he cried in apparent pain at each blow. She stopped and turned on him. “Judas!” she cried.
“No,” he said evenly. “John the Baptist—if that’s to be your modest metaphor.” He came to her but she shrugged herself away from him.
“You could at least have discussed it with me first,” she said.
“Had you any idea this settlement was in prospect?”
She waved her head vaguely, unwilling to admit it in words. But the gesture was enough for him. “Then you could have discussed it with me, for I had no idea at all.”
“But what do we want with all that money? I hate the idea of it. I’ve already got over eighty thousand—all my unspent income over the years. I just shrivel when I think of it. And now you…”
“What does it cost to organize a petition?” he asked, still without a trace of heat. “How much to set up a clinic for working-class women? What’s the price of fighting a dozen law suits, would you say? Is research free nowadays? Is the world drowning in scholarships and endowments? Even twelve thousand a year isn’t going to stretch very far. So cheer up, my darling, we may yet live and die in comparative poverty!”
She laughed then and fell into his outstretched arms. “Oh, Victor…what is it about that woman? I’ll always turn back into a child when she’s around!”
“You must think like a politician now, which isn’t as hard as you’d imagine. If you really can turn yourself back into a child, you’re already half-way there. Come down and talk them into giving us twenty thousand a year.”
Again she recoiled, until she saw he was laughing. They began to walk slowly back to the garden. “What was all that?” she asked. “Clinics…petitions…lawsuits…”
He shrugged. “We don’t know what we’re going to do yet. But it could involve all those things.”
“Oh, you think so clearly, darling. I don’t think at all. I just…react to things.”
“Let’s start by taking Frank Griffith’s advice. Next stop: the Reading Room of the British Museum.”
“Yes! Beginning Monday!”
“And ask them to reserve me Karl Marx’s old seat. Just see if we don’t put it to better use.”
“Well!” Nora said, delighted at their return. “In a matter of months, Victor, you have obviously discovered some secret that has eluded our entire family for more than forty years. She not only returns, she brings a winner’s smile with her.”
“Is it patentable?” John asked.
“We have this marvellous, shining new thing,” Victor said solemnly. “It’s called The Future. It’s quite new to Abigail. All I need to do is point her at it and then there’s no holding her back.”
Abigail pretended to kick him.
Chapter 44
Mr. Marx?” the Reading Room attendant said dubiously. “Mr. Marx? Oh…Mr. Marx! Oh, yes…of course I remember. Well, fancy you knowing Mr. Marx. How’s he keeping?”
“Whereabouts did he use to sit?” Abigail asked.
“Yes, he came here years and years, you know. Mr. Marx, eh!”
“Which was his favourite corner?” Victor pressed.
“Yes! Years and years. But”—he turned mournful eyes upon them—“he went away, you know. And we never heard what happened to him.”
“Oh, he died,” Abigail said. “Six or seven years ago.”
“Well, well! Old Mr. Marx dead, eh? Dear, dear!”
He couldn’t remember where dear old Mr. Marx had sat. “We get so many in here, you know,” he said.
Victor thought it the funniest little encounter of his life. “I hope the Old Karl was wrong about survival after death,” he said. “I hope he overheard us. It would explain the one thing that always puzzled him—why the Revolution consistently failed to materialize in this country, despite his increasingly querulous predictions of it.”
For weeks that summer they sat there, side by side, reading through Mayhew and Bracebridge, Acton, Mrs. Besant, following up all the references and footnotes, and comparing their findings at the end of each day. As yet they were looking for information rather than theories—at least, they were trying to avoid forming the sort of full-blown theory that might have led them into premature action. Nor did they confine their researches to sexual relationships. They sought any details that might form a background to those relationships: the everyday lives of the poor, their beliefs and attitudes; how news reached them; how opinions were formed among them; how their family relationships were organized; how they budgeted…anything, literally anything, that might later be useful in forming theories. Only then would they be able to think of policies and campaigns of action.
Nevertheless, there were certain facts, right from the beginning, that could not be blinked. Prostitutes were overwhelmingly drawn from the working class. Their clients were overwhelmingly married, middle-class men with families. And some female trades were so poorly paid that even eighteen hours work a day (if it could be got) yielded less than the barest subsistence; the term “lacemaker” or “shirt seamstress” was an absolutely reliable synonym for “whore.”
Yet none of the (admittedly middle-class) writers they read dared to come out and say openly that poverty on the one side and surplus wealth on the other was the overwhelming cause of prostitution—or, as Abigail preferred to call it, the murder of love. They said it in one paragraph and withdrew it in the next. They spoke of “natural” lasciviousness among lower-class females and “natural” purity among ladies—as if the human race were two separate species; then they remembered they were supposed to be scientists and that such talk was nonsense, so they withdrew that, too.
“They tie themselves in knots,” Abigail said.
“Yes!” Victor grinned with relish. “It must mean we’re close to an important truth.”
She held up her left hand. “Money,” she said. She held up her right. “Poverty.” She shook her left. “Lust.” She shook her right. “The mechanical ability to satisfy it.” She stopped.
“Go on,” he said.
“I can’t. There’s something missing. They make a circle, but it’s too small. Too neat. We need something more—something that makes the circle bigger. Love! We must make love fit, somehow. The circle must include love.” She beat her head. “Oh, the answer’s in there somewhere! It’s in my life. I’ve lived this problem. But I still can’t…put it together.” She gave up and laughed. “I must go and see Annie.”
He looked at her in surprise. “About this? It would be like asking a foundry worker how he explains the present demand for pig iron.”
“An ex-foundry worker, I hope. No. Maybe she’ll jog my memory. No, it isn’t even that. I just want to see her again. I’ve put it off and put it off.”
“Why?”
“I don’t kn
ow. Perhaps because she didn’t answer my letters. I don’t know how much she’s changed. Perhaps I’m afraid of meeting young William…knowing Annie’s view of men. But I must see her. It’s so easy to put it off from day to day.”
A further two weeks went by before she visited Annie, and even then it was more a matter of opportunity than intention. One Sunday she went to early evensong at Westminster Abbey and then, finding herself at a loose end, she remembered that Annie’s place, in Pimlico, was only a gentle walk away.
Annie was alone in the house. Beneath the superficial changes she had not altered a jot. She was greyer and more lined, but she still had that fine-boned face and those flashing dark eyes. She was overjoyed at seeing her Abbie again…sorry she hadn’t never answered all them letters…and William was out kicking a ball down the old gardens…and wouldn’t she come in, only it would soon be time to start the dinner…and not to mind that glass of port too much…she only took one a week, on Sunday afternoons.
It was Annie’s new life in one disjointed sentence.
“Well, gel. You look bonny! How’s the old Teatro? And how’s Celia and…Whos’s’name—Julius Caesar!” She laughed at herself and clapped her hands.
A warmth Abigail had forgotten suddenly came crowding back—a special, near-Annie warmth. She was glad now that Annie had never written. Annie-in-print could never be the equal of the real Annie. Letters would have changed Abigail’s memory and made this meeting harder. Instead, here was Annie, same as ever, making it the easiest thing in the world.
She told Annie of all that had happened since she and Pepe had left them in Rome, but merely said she and Victor had come back to England to write. At length she asked if Annie—or William—ever saw Pepe these days.
Abigail Page 42
