Abigail (17 page)

She went to her room and brought them all down for Nora to read. And Nora, glad that what had looked set for a fierce argument had instead taken this mild and serious turn, read them with a doubled pleasure. “They are good,” she said. “More than good.”

“Thank you,” Abigail said. “But in a way that is irrelevant to what I’m saying. The difference between literature and journalism is very simple. If a book is good, no one can
really
say why. They can only make guesses at the reason. That’s what criticism is—an interesting guess at why a book is good or bad. The
real
reason is the book itself, of course. But if a piece of journalism is good, anyone can say why: It’s good because an editor paid money for it and printed it.”

Nora smiled at this cynicism. “If you said that at a dinner table, I wouldn’t let it pass,” she warned. “However, for argument’s sake, I will. You were saying that the excellence or otherwise of these pieces is irrelevant. Now why?”

“Because of that feeling I’m talking about. When I wrote these, nothing in me was saying ‘I wonder.’ It was not experimental. In a way it’s absurd, isn’t it? Here I am with…what? Four or five pieces to my credit. It’s
nothing
! Yet I’m asserting…I’m saying I’m absolutely convinced that’s what I’m going to do in life.”

“How can you say that?” Nora, suddenly seeing where this oh-so-calm and reasonable conversation was going, felt a twinge of alarm.

“Yes!” Abigail laughed, even calmer, even more reasonable. “How can I? Yet it is so. I once told Winnie that we are born knowing all the important things we need to know—whether or not we like strawberries, or
really
believe in God, and so on. The learning we acquire,
her
sort of learning, is trivial by comparison. When I said it, I was just saying something clever-sounding to prevent a real discussion—or so I thought. Now, since making this discovery about myself, I think it was more profound than I knew. And when I told you I was never going to marry…” She looked intently at Nora. “
Did
I ever tell you that, by the way?”

Nora laughed, beseeching the heavens with her eyes.

“When I told you that, I said it in a sort of panic, not knowing what to put in place of marriage. But it was that same kind of knowledge. The kind we are born with. The kind that never makes us say ‘I wonder’ about whether or not it’s true.”

“It’s wrong to be so certain about
that
,” Nora said. She herself felt a sort of panic—about this conversation. Abigail furious, Abigail hysterical, Abigail in the miseries of remorse—these she could cope with. But Abigail sitting like a god in judgement on herself…

“Why is it wrong?” Abigail asked, still without a hint of provocation in her voice. “What is so special, so marvellous, about marriage?”

Nora, stung and drawing breath to reply, saw the calmness vanish from her daughter’s face. At once she understood that the girl had asked the question in a general sense, wanting Nora to interpret Society’s edict. But as soon as the question was out she had realized that, for her mother, it had a much keener edge. Seeing the girl’s discomfiture as her chance to penetrate that godlike calm, Nora (who had been going to point out that marriage was as old as mankind, and develop the argument from there) said instead, “I would not undo
my
marriage, for all the sorry thing it has become. If I could go back and undo it, I would not.” Her voice faltered. She had started this line of argument coldly enough; but now its sentiment overcame her. The room swam with her tears. She lowered her head. “I would bind it a million times more firmly.”

Abigail ran to where Nora was sitting, fell to her knees, and threw her arms about her mother, hugging her tight. “Oh, Mama! I didn’t mean…” She, too, broke down and wept.

Nora, tearful but triumphant, stroked her daughter’s head and neck. “I know, popsie. I know you didn’t. But if I can say that about my marriage—which has been no marriage these ten years and more—if I can say that, how can you, who have experienced none of it, talk of these things with such certainty?”

A new sort of calm stole over Abigail—the calm of self-disgust. This emotional outburst had happened so quickly it had caught her unawares. But her mother’s words changed nothing. She lay there, gathering her thoughts, letting Nora think she was soothing her, until she was self-collected enough to stand again and say, “But it changes nothing, Mama. The ‘experience’ you talk of is yours, not mine. Just as your mother’s experience was not yours. You did what you knew you had to do. And I’m sure no one could have talked you out of it, could they?”

Nora, who sensed her own failure not in Abigail’s words but in the return of that immovable calm, said, “Things were so different. I had nothing. I was as far outside Society as it is possible to be. It mattered to no one what I did. But you are in Society. You have…”

“I shall live
outside
Society,” Abigail said.

Nora ignored her interruption. “You have a father prominent in the country’s affairs; a mother whose position in London is no less prominent.” All softness had now deserted her. “You have brothers and sisters who, not being blessed with your outstanding talent for dashing down amusing pieces on this and that in return for the odd handful of guineas…”

“Mama!”

“…will have to make their way within the bounds allowed by Society.”

“I will make my own way. I will earn my own place. Painters and writers are all acceptable now, as if I need tell
you
!”

Nora, realizing that cold opposition would get her nowhere, smiled and held out a hand for Abigail to take. When the girl was seated—warily—beside her, she said, “Not for a woman, dear. That path just isn’t open to a woman. Men, yes. But a woman’s only way into Society, in her own right, is by marriage.”

“Her
own
right! You call that her own right?”

“Don’t pick me up on words, dear. I mean a woman can make her own way only
after
she has secured a firm base in marriage.”

To Nora this fact was so obvious it seemed to her like the clinching argument. She was astonished then to see Abigail smile an I-thought-as-much sort of smile.

“You are saying that Society has nothing to offer me but marriage?”

“Not at all. It has everything to offer.”

“But only after I am married.”

“Well, that is self-evident. Society exists to regulate marriage and the family. How can it possibly offer rewards to a young girl who shuns both?”

Again that smile. “Perhaps,” Abigail said, and there was in her voice an edge of wonder that such a thing was possible, “perhaps Winnie and I are actually fighting the selfsame battle!”

Nora hesitated. Years ago John had been furious with her for neglecting all her social duties, for inviting painters and writers and such people to her dinner table; he had virtually commanded her to drop them and to enter Society properly and on Society’s own terms (which then excluded almost all painters, writers, university people—everyone she found interesting). Instead she had carried the battle into Society’s camp and, through her salon and her dinner parties, had made
her
friends acceptable from Windsor to Westminster. A few of the Old Aristocracy, rotting somewhere out in the shires, might turn up their noses still; but they were no longer a force that counted for much. And Nora had done far more than one mortal’s share to bring about this change.

And now, with Winifred and Abigail, each in her own different way, threatening to teach Society another new trick, how could she, of all people, object?

Abigail saw the hesitation. “You could do so much to help us,” she said. “
If
you wanted.”

Nora slumped where she sat. Her chin fell to her chest. For a moment Abigail thought she was crying again. “Oh darling!” she called and put an arm around her. But Nora was not crying; no emotion of any kind showed.

“Don’t you want to?” Abigail asked with all the relentlessness of her convinced and sell-absorbed youth.

“Want!” Nora said flatly. Then she turned her gaze on Abigail. “I’ll tell you what I want! I want your father back.” She spoke in that same level tone. “I am almost ready to accept anything. Even…” She could not say it.

“Even the fact that he…”

“We both know what I mean,” Nora interrupted firmly, even icily. She never wanted to hear the name of Charity nor the word “mistress” from anyone’s lips. “But that is not the only price. It would be out of the question for me to engage in yet another battle with Society.”

“Even if you were sure of winning? And you would win, you know.”

“Especially then. Your father began his…I mean, the breach came into our marriage the very week—I think it was the very week—he as-good-as ordered me to take up my social duties and I told him it would be on my terms or not at all.”

“And you were right.”

Nora’s stare was full of pity. “I sometimes think that’s the worst thing any human may be:
right
.”

Abigail, thinking the statement absurdly dramatic, began to laugh, a cajoling laugh to pry her mother out of this unaccustomed, dour humour.

But Nora added: “It’s what the Crucifixion was about, after all. Being intolerably right. Right beyond the endurance of other mortals. Don’t imagine you and I cannot have our own share of it. Little crucifixions are possible in every life.”

Abigail, now that her mother was out of emotional danger, became calm again. “If they were not, darling,” she said gently, “d’you think it would be worth living?”

Nora, hearing this easy courage from her daughter, was suddenly cut off from all certainty. She no longer knew which of them was right—she, with a weight of experience she could not even begin to impart; or Abigail, brave as a blind girl on a cliff top.

“What is it you are thinking of doing?” she asked.

Abigail came suddenly to life again; all that unwonted calm was gone. Her eyes gleamed; her voice shook with excitement. And Nora understood that whatever she had said, whatever invincible arguments she had mustered, it would have been as if she had said nothing. Abigail was set on her own destruction—or at least, she thought (snatching what comfort she could), on the destruction of all that the first twenty-one years of her life had made her.

“I am going to become the writer whose pieces no one can afford to miss—whom no editor can afford to reject, if he cares at all about the number of copies he sells.”

“All by yourself?”

“No. Pepe will help. He’ll be vital to me.”

“You’ll marry him?”

“I told you: No.”

“But you do love him.”

Abigail paused to stop herself gushing into confession. “Winnie loved Nick Thornton once. I think she loved Pepe, too, a bit, before she introduced us. She wouldn’t marry either of them. Or anyone else. What do you say to her?”

“But Winifred is not you, popsie. She has not your temperament, nor your gift for self-destruction. Well…” She sighed and turned to the practicalities of her own surrender. “There’s the house in Halkin Street. I suppose you’d better have that.”

Abigail laughed. “Halkin Street? What are you talking about?”

“We acquired it in a forced sale last year. I’ve had it redecorated and I was just about to put it back on the market. Quite a nice, modest little place. Six bedrooms and a mews. You could manage it all with just a dozen servants.”

Abigail was already laughing. “Mama! Haven’t you understood anything? I aim to live by my pen! Not by your dole! ‘Just a dozen servants’! I shall take rooms
en pension
where I shall live with just one maid. And I shall write.”

“But you are
Lady
Abigail Stevenson! How can you even think of…”

“It’s only a courtesy title, Mama. I’m really a commoner.”

“Legally, yes. But you’d still be seated above the wife of the eldest son of a marquis.”

Abigail’s hand flew to her mouth. “Good heavens! I never thought of that. What can I
do
?”

For a moment Nora was deceived. Then she put the echo of her words against this monstrous change that Abigail was proposing in her life—and, of course, she was unable to stem the laughter that seized them both.

“But what can
I
do?” Nora asked as they drew breath and wiped the tears from their eyes. “I must do something to help you. I gave Winifred the money to found her school, as soon as I was sure it was what she really wanted.”

“It doesn’t have to be anything to do with money,” Abigail said. “All I want from you is never to say ‘I told you so,’ never to deny to anyone that I am your daughter, and never to close your doors against me.”

Nora, looking at her daughter’s bright eyes and eager smile, and knowing what innocence and vulnerability—what capacity for pain—were there, smiled back when she could so easily have wept.

“Of course I won’t,” she said. “As if you even needed to ask!”

Annie’s pub, The Old Fountain, where Abigail had decided to take Pepe for dinner, was in Little Jewry, less than a quarter of a mile due north of the Tower of London. The Tower, the Royal Mint, and Trinity House—all within a stone’s throw—had prevented the utter decay of the area; yet an equal distance away to the north and east were slums as wretched and as deep in depravity as any in London.

But it was a good place for a pub, as a delighted Annie explained when she had overcome her surprise enough to show Abbie and Laon around. There was a spit-and-sawdust public bar for the poor Scots and Irish from their teeming rookeries off Aldgate and Whitechapel. There was a superior public bar for the brassfounders and artisans of The Minories and the area around the Royal Mint. There was a saloon bar for the City clerks—and here Annie took them to the window and pointed at the overhead railway lines into Fenchurch Street station, terminus of the London & Blackwall Railway.

“They pour in and out here,” she said, “from Stepney, Poplar, Limehouse, Bow. I remember the Countess once saying a man could make a fortune just buying land near railway stations. And it’s true here. I thought of that when I bought this place. Put a pub near a railway station—you can’t lose.”

“But wasn’t the pub here already, Annie?” Abigail asked.

“Pub!” Annie said pityingly. “I wouldn’t have kept coals in it!” She looked about her with satisfaction. “No, dear. I made this place. I put in all this cut glass, all them lights. What’s a City clerk want after a day in them dingy offices? What’s a stevedore want? Or a ragpicker? What’s a blancher want, or a press cutter, coming out The Mint? I’ll tell you—they all wants a palace, like this.”

With its opulent mahogany and walnut and its scintillating cut glass, it was a palace, too; a place where poverty could be deceived awhile, if not forgotten.

“And for the gentry…” Annie led them to the other half of her empire.

Until then they had imagined that the gin palace—the part Annie had just shown them—which sprawled along half of Little Jewry, was all of The Old Fountain. But the part to which she now led them was, if anything, larger still. It fronted discreetly (so discreetly, indeed, that their coachman had driven straight past it) onto the main thoroughfare, named Crutched Friars after a religious house that had once stood there. Its name was painted high on the wall—and in a side street, at that.

This was the “gentry’s” pub—private bars, a lounge bar, newspaper rooms, a chophouse, and supper rooms—all for City gentlemen.

Like all the best English pubs, The Old Fountain was, indeed, a faithful microcosm of its district.

But the tour was not complete until she had shown them the cellars—an immense warren of tunnels and chambers full of tuns and firkins, hogsheads and kieves.

“Used to brew their own once,” Annie said. “But I doubt we’ll go back to them days. ’Ere!” She led them to a corner below the coalholes that opened into the pavements of Crutched Friars. “What about that, then?”

A mouldering heap of stone projected into the cellar.

“Bit of the old Roman Wall of London, that is,” she said with pride.

Annie may have made the pub, as she claimed; but, Abigail thought, the pub had certainly made Annie. It was an empire, and she its queen.

“What did it cost, Annie?” Abigail asked as they returned upstairs.

Annie laughed. “A lot of silver.” She laughed again, even louder, and pointed into her wet, open mouth. “And a silver tongue.”

“And where is Mr. Oldale?”

Her laugh was now continuous. “Sleepin’ it off, the old devil!”

“Sleeping what off?”

“Only got hitched two days back, didn’t we? He’s not sober yet! No, but he’ll wake up. Then he’ll pull his weight.” She held open the door of her most sumptuous private supper room. “Or I’ll know the reason!”

They had a small argument over whose treat this was, Abigail’s or Annie’s, which both won; that is, Abigail said, “I’ll never be able to come here again or bring friends here if I fear you’re going to be so foolishly generous,” and Annie said, “If you let me treat you this first time, I give my word it’ll be the last. Go on—I’m giving out free dinners to likely regulars all week!”

They had potted meat, jugged hare, oysters, and galantine of mutton, washed down with a warm, summery ale.

“A good City meal,” Laon told Annie. “Good English food. Not the frenchified muck they serve up west.” He could not have pleased her more.

“I like him,” she said to Abigail as she took her up to the privy in her own apartments. “He’s not at all like what you made out.”

Abigail laughed. “I don’t suppose Mr. Oldale fits your description either.”

“No! He’s worse!”

When their laughter died Annie said, “’Ere. You want to be—you know—left alone with your Mr. Laon? Know my meaning?”

Abigail’s heart dropped a beat and then raced to catch up. She had not even considered it; but as soon as the words struck her she knew that she did, indeed, want to be “left alone” with Pepe.

“I don’t know,” she said.

On their way back downstairs Annie opened a bureau drawer and took out a long, limp silken envelope, something like a miniature balloon. “Don’t let him do anything unless he’s got this on,” she said, giving it to Abigail.

“On what?” Abigail asked.

Then understanding dawned and she blushed, thrusting it back into Annie’s hands. “Oh, I couldn’t!”

Annie looked at it and then at Abigail, seeing the impossibility of it. She stood her ground, unwilling to let Abbie return to Laon before some arrangement was made. “There’s things you can wear,” she said, “but only after, you know. Only after a time or two. He’s got to use this. First time anyway.”

“But Annie, it would look so calculating.”

Annie nodded. “Well, don’t let him…you know. Fingers is all right. But don’t let him…”

Abigail rescued her. “Don’t let him put Nebuchadnezzar out to graze—or work the hairy oracle!”

“Ye-e-ah!” Annie’s face split in a widening smile as the dimmest of dim memories grew brighter. “Blimey! That’s an age ago and all, what, ‘my lady!’”

“A lifetime it seems.” Abigail was suddenly at her ease. Those ridiculous resurrected phrases had worked some soothing magic and she was no longer afraid of going back to meet Pepe, no matter what happened. She was ready for him; yet she did not think about him—what he would do, how he would treat her. All she could think of was,
Will I be any good at it? Will he like me or will I disappoint him?
She remembered Annie’s image of the cat and the rabbit.

“Remember, love,” Annie said. “If it goes wrong, if you take on more than what you bargained for, if you know my meaning, come straight to old Annie. It’s not the end of the world.” Then she whispered her final words, for they were now back outside the supper-room door. “I’ll see you’re not disturbed—until you call.”

Pepe was sprawled across the divan, staring at a recharged tankard of ale. A fresh tankard awaited her on the dresser but she left it there, preferring to drink from the same one as Pepe.

“So where d’you go now?” he asked.

Over dinner she had told him of her decision to leave home.

“I’ll stay at home until I find a suitable place.”

“If you had enough friends like Annie, you could move around for months and never come to rest!”

“Why not forever?” she asked, sipping his ale.

He looked at her, suddenly more alert. “What a marvellous little article that would make!” he said. “How to cadge a living off your friends!”

Abigail saw it at once—and saw better. “Let’s pretend there was once this woman—one of those dull, solemn, well-meaning creatures who writes for your rags—and she wrote a book called…er…‘How I Managed My Household on £200 a Year.’ What name shall we give her?”

“Mrs. Warren? Does that sound solemn enough?”

“Yes! Well, I’ll pretend to be Mrs. Warren’s flighty young daughter.

“And I’ll write a piece saying how
I
get by on two hundred. An income of two hundred and an expenditure equivalent to eight hundred—all done by staying at friends’ houses.”

“You’d have to be married—I mean, you’d have to write as Mrs. Warren’s married daughter. It wouldn’t be funny to hear a single girl boasting of doing that.”

Abigail thought about it and realized he was right; then she laughed. He asked why.

“It’s almost exactly the point my mother was making earlier—from a different angle.”

“Marry me, Abbie.”

He slipped the words in as casually as if he were asking whether she wanted more ale; but he watched her with unblinking eyes and bated breath.

She kissed him, long and gently, their lips barely brushing. “I love you, Pepe,” she said as they separated. “I will never love any other man so much as this.”

But despite these words she managed to convey that she would not marry him. She saw his disappointment.

“Listen,” she said, taking the tankard from him and putting it under the divan. “What would marriage be for us? A house to maintain. Servants to pay, to organize, to watch over for their honesty, to guard from each other’s spites and jealousies. It will mean children—strangers to come between us, to claim you from me, me from you. I will not be chained at the mill of childbearing till I am dry and you are grown fat. Is that so very wrong?”

“There need be no children,” he said.

She looked at him, fearful of his meaning.

“There are ways,” he said. He pulled her head to him, brushed the hair from her temple, and kissed the delicate, blue-veined skin there. “This fine, beautiful head,” he murmured, “of this fine, beautiful girl—so quick of wit, so graceful, so intelligent, so gifted, so astonishing, so original, so…so absolutely
stunning.
And so wrong!”

For a long time then he kept his lips pressed to her head.

“Pepe?”

He heard her gentle voice coming up from below. “Mmmm?”

“If there were no children, there needn’t be any marriage. Nor any house. We could just be together whenever we wanted.”

He shook his head from side to side, still brushing his lips on her temples.

She chuckled and pulled away to look him in the eye. “I hope all our arguments are so gentle.”

“I am not arguing,” he told her.

“No!” Her vehemence was pretended but he could see the grain of genuine annoyance at its heart. “You just sit there knowing you’re right and I am wrong. Why do I
feel
wrong?” She turned her anger on herself. “Especially when I
know
I’m right.”

Now, laughing at her own confusion, she threw her arms about him and pressed kiss after kiss all over his face. “Oh, Pepe,” she whispered. “Let’s just see, eh? Let’s just see.”

His hands caressed her shoulders. She shivered. He undid the lace between her neck and the top of her bodice, which was by no means low cut. His hands, still barely touching her, gently stroked the skin the lace had partly covered. She shivered and gave a little moan of pleasure.

She longed for his hands to stray below the top hem of her bodice; but they did not. She marvelled at his self-control. She marvelled, too, that she, feeling as she did, yet made no move to show him he could go further; but she did not see that as having anything to do with self-control. It was simply the rabbit again.

At length he said, “We really ought to go.”

And twenty minutes later they did manage at last to tear themselves apart and leave—thanking Annie profusely for everything. Abigail contrived to gesture a “no” at Annie’s questioning eyes; and Annie understood that Nebuchadnezzar had not grazed.

“Pepe,” she said when they were almost home, “d’you keep accounts and all that sort of thing to do with my book?”

“Of course!” He laughed.

“Would you let my mother see them?”

He stopped laughing. “Why?”

“Oh,” she said lightly, “it was just a thought that occurred to me when I was talking with her earlier. I can’t think why now.”

“Did she suggest it?”

“Heavens no! No, it just…struck me. I’ve forgotten why. Still, it would do no harm. You, I mean. It would do you no harm with her.”

“She shall see them tomorrow,” he promised.

When they drew up at Hamilton Place, she said, “Annie says we can go back as often as we like. We’d never be disturbed there.”

“Good.” He was shivering as he kissed her. “Tomorrow then?”

“Friday,” she said, it being three days away.

“Bring your two-hundred-a-year piece. Mrs. Warren’s married daughter.”

Later, when she was in bed, she relived the evening with him, caressing her own shoulders as he had caressed them; then she let her hands slip to where his had failed to reach. It was a pleasure, but only for as long as she could forget the hands were really hers. Breasts were for keeping her own hands warm between on winter nights.

As she fell asleep she wondered why—when every minute away from him was a sweet torment—why she had put him off until Friday night? Was it because she wanted him never to take her for granted? Because she wanted everything about their love to be a surprise?

She did not think so. The decision seemed to have come from much deeper levels within herself than that.