Abigail (39 page)

Somehow her desire to paint began to dwindle the moment Victor came into her life. Perhaps she had been working up to this break for long time, she thought. How else to explain her shame at the trivialities he had witnessed that very first night? The heart of the matter was that she would never be more than a competent, talented, but very minor painter. She was not even of the stature of Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot—and heaven knew they were minor enough. Until Victor came, the fact had not worried her in the least; but his coming had kindled something within her, an old sense of ambition.

Exactly what she wished to achieve she did not know. Painting was, for her, a cul-de-sac. A new literary ambition then? The felled oak of
Into a Narrow Circle
lay across that avenue. Yet no other suggestion offered itself—only the raw feeling that her life was meant for something more than an obscurely pleasant passage of days and nights in Rome. She had to resign herself to the hope that something would turn up.

They spent Christmas in Venice, where the slow pace, on water or on foot, exactly suited her waiting mood. She had never seen that most startling and beautiful of all cities in winter. The drift of cold, astringent mists along the canals, the black progress of rain squalls over the face of the lagoon, the forlorn and shuttered desertion of the apparatus of summer, the classical grandeur of palaces and churches, indifferent alike to the waters that were slowly drowning them and to the people who did nothing to prevent such a costly death…it was like a ringing down of the curtain between two acts. She hoped it was like that.

Back in springtime Rome, where the rebirth that belonged properly to the city lent a little of its colour to her life, she still found no object for the ambition whose presence and power were now undeniable. She was not unhappy for it, quite the contrary; she had never for a moment doubted the rightness of her love for Victor nor the depth of his love for her. Obituaries often spoke of couples who lived in perfect harmony through fifty years of marriage, with never a cross word or even a reproving glance. Once, a long time ago, she had written that her idea of hell was to be invited to write the biography of such a couple, for what was there to be said about them other than that they loved each other. A lot. Every day. For fifty years.

Yet that was how she and Victor lived. No one in her family would have believed it. And if his tales of his wild youth were only half true, no one who knew him would believe it either. But it was so. Every day was as tranquil and loving as every other day. They read, they slept, they walked, ate, made love, went to the theatre or opera, and talked and talked…and it was an eternal renewal of the first happy day of an affair. And far from thinking it dull, she found it brought her the greatest comfort—more even than that: the profoundest sense of security.

But, naturally, that very fastness of their love only heightened the feeling that her life was still fallow. What was that security
for
?
Not for itself—that would be as absurd as taking out an insurance policy to insure against nothing but the failure of the policy. It had to be for something else. But what? It was a return to the same old question.

Lack of an answer did not leave her life empty, though. Apart from Roman occasions and friends, there was a steady stream of people from London and Paris. The anarchic layout of the atelier and Victor’s gift for appearing to “happen by” rather than to live there preserved her reputation among casual callers.

One such visitor was Grant Allen, the novelist, nearly two years her junior. When the brilliant magazine
London
failed back in 1879, she had written her condolences to him, saying that his contributions had been among the best. She had offered what help she could through her connections, but it turned out that he needed none. She and he had since kept up an occasional correspondence, but this was the first time he had ever visited her in Rome.

He had an idea of doing a guide book based on his own notion of the unifying powers of art and history. He was the sort of man who had a dozen irons in the fire—he wrote on evolution (Spencerian, not Darwinian) and physics and falling in love; he reviewed for numerous periodicals and wrote short stories for many more. But that afternoon in Rome he was obviously withholding something. And as he left he asked if he might come back the following day.

When he returned he confessed that he was thinking of writing a novel on an entirely new theme: the Free Woman—a woman who loves and yet refuses to marry, out of respect for the dignity of her sex. Though he and his own wife were happily married, he regarded that as a lucky accident; for many women—as J.S. Mill had shown twenty years earlier—marriage was no more than servitude.

“In a legal brothel with but one client,” Abigail said, testing how far he was prepared to go into this shocking business of being plain honest.

He choked and said he wasn’t going that far; his heroine’s objections would be more on a spiritual plane.

“Yet you must be honest, Mr. Allen,” she said.

He began to look uncomfortable.

“Your heroine must still be a woman.”

“Ah!” His eyes lit up. “But what
is
a woman, Lady Abigail? A Free Woman? We know her only as servitude has revealed her.”

“I think you’ll find,” Abigail said, “that she’s very much the same. Free Woman will still defer to that man whose manliness makes him her natural master. If she’s a mother, she’ll sacrifice everything of herself to the sacred ideals of motherhood.”

“Then so it shall be!” he cried, delighted to find that his novel would be far easier to write than he had dared to hope.

After Allen had gone, Victor stared at her a long time, willing her to look at him. She did not.

He coughed.

She pinched her lips together, trying not to smile, but only succeeded in half smothering her laughter.

“That was wicked,” he said.

“It was necessary.”

“Oh? That was always Daniel’s word for something he was half ashamed of doing.”

“Well, I’m not at all ashamed of this. You know how you can sometimes see everything complete—a truth? All at once. You don’t have to work towards it.”

“You mean when the alarm bells start ringing? Or ought to, if you’ve learned any sense.”

“Don’t spoil it, now. Such moments are rare enough as it is. But that’s what I felt when I heard Grant Allen talking just now. At first I was angry, because he seemed to be rewriting
Into a Narrow Circle
;
but then I realized he could never do it. And that’s where the whole idea came from. You’d call it an ‘imp.’ Grant Allen’s a fine fellow—a first-rate essayist. I like him enormously. But even he, I’m sure, would admit he’s only a second-rate novelist. And that’s what makes him the ideal person to write the rubbish I’ve just poured into his ear. A first-rate writer, someone like Shaw, for instance, would see through it within a couple of paragraphs. But a second-rate writer—by definition—is someone who can take all our fashionable prejudices and make them ring like eternal truths.”

“But why? Why d’you want this lie about women to ‘ring like an eternal truth?’”

“Well, that’s what I’m talking about—this idea I saw all at once. Grant Allen’s book is going to be a shocker. That means it’ll be very popular—which means a lot of men will read it (no doubt with one hand in their pocket to disguise their…ah…literary interest). And I suddenly thought to myself, what honeyed words might I whisper to them through the medium of this book? And then it came to me:
See!
the book will whisper,
the liberated woman is still a Woman! The Manly Man can still bend her to his will. Motherhood is still her destiny. So she’s really no threat to you—no threat at all! Why bother to resist her, then? Let her clamour for liberation. Encourage her. She thinks she’s found the pass through into the promised land. Let her take it. And let her discover for herself that it’s just a new gulch in the same old box canyon.
’”

“One book will do all that?”

“No, but ‘every little helps,’ as the sailor said on London Bridge.” It was one of Annie’s catch phrases; Abigail had no idea what it meant, nor did she know why it popped into her mind at this moment.

“So!” He smiled. “You’ve learned a trick or two from Daniel.”

“Not a bit! It’s an ancient Christian tradition—doing good by stealth.”

“The trouble with doing good is that it becomes a habit. For a time you’ll be happy enough merely hunting about for second-rate novelists to pervert; but then you’ll begin to crave stronger meat—people who really can change the course of history: chefs, racing tipsters, even”—he looked aghast—“theatre impresarios! Your depravity will recognize no bounds.”

She laughed, for it was a parody of the familiar argument against allowing young girls to hold hands with young men.

He joined her laughter but when it died he said, “Nevertheless, I was making a serious point: will you leave it to Grant Allen, or do something on your own account?”

She was still smiling. “It’s a question that answers itself, isn’t it? I can’t just throw
his
hat into the ring.”

“I see.”

“D’you approve, darling?”

“I? Does it matter?”

She ran to where he sat and, kneeling between his thighs, hugged him fiercely. “I’m not like Daniel,” she said. “I won’t sacrifice the things that are dearest to me for mere principle. And dearest of all is the love I’ve found with you.”

“Mr. Allen!” he shouted over her head at the long-departed guest. “A little demonstration for you! Proof, if you need it!”

“Be serious.”

Then he lifted her onto his lap and kissed her. “Oh, I’ll be serious. I’ll go where you go. And every day of our lives I shall renew”—he kissed her again—“my amazement.”

“We’ll go back to London.”

He nodded.

“And we’ll get married.”

He nodded again. “In Paris,” he said. “To show everyone how
absolutely
serious we are about it.”

“Yes!” She was delighted. “And we can see César and Celia, too.”

Later, in bed, he asked, “Exactly what shall we do in London?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Not if you want me to say ‘exactly.’ I want to do what I tried to do with
Into a Narrow Circle.
”
She pointed at César’s paintings of her. “I want to find a voice like César’s. Look at the physical love in those brushstrokes. You can see in them—anyone can see in them—how much we enjoyed each other. But, as pictures, they’re not salacious. They’re not crude. And nor, on the other hand, are they cold and clinical. They are exactly what the experience itself was—happy and natural. That’s what I want to find—a happy and natural voice to talk about physical love. Not pornographic and not clinical.”

He nodded but remained silent, thinking, for quite a while. “It’s no small thing,” he said at last. “So much else must change before people could listen to that voice without growing hysterical.”

“Oh, Victor!” she said ruefully. “Who knows it better than I do!”

“You’re not just asking men to change their ideas about women. You’re asking women to change their notion of themselves. That’s always the hardest thing.”

“Well, don’t talk me out of it before I’ve begun.”

He laughed and took up her hand. “You began this long ago. Over twenty years. And so, in a way, did I—from the other side. I’d count it an honour to join in your search.”

“What do you think we ought to do, darling?”

“Perhaps the first thing is to throw our weight into any movement already working for greater equality between men and women—because that’s one of the changes that’ll have to happen first.”

“The suffragists?” She pulled a face. “Look at the number of idiotic
men
who have the vote! I’d sooner join a movement to take it away from
them
than one that wants to add an equal number of idiotic women to the rolls. I wouldn’t even give
myself
the vote.”

“All the same, the ideas you need to change are the ideas of your own class—the ruling class. The suffragists all belong to that same class. They’re a ready-made audience. We shouldn’t dismiss them too hastily.”

The calculation in his words made her reconsider her objections to the suffragists; until now her aversion had been more instinctive than reasoned.

“Votes aren’t important,” she said, thinking aloud. “Nor money, nor power.”

His eyebrows shot up.

“It’s bigger than that,” she said urgently. “More important. A bigger freedom. If I say it’s the freedom to love, that sounds trite. But that’s what it is: the freedom to love. Look at the way
we
can love—not because you’re a man in your world and I’m a woman in mine, but because we’re
people.
And because we’re in the same world. Most men and women can’t love like that. And it’s wrong—they should be able to. There shouldn’t be these prison walls of manliness and femininity always shutting us off. I want to tear them down. I don’t know how, but I do know it’s the only worthwhile job in sight. And until those barriers are gone, nothing else is worth struggling for. All the votes and power and jobs in this whole manridden world aren’t worth a pinch of snuff without that.”

His smile, superficially, was mocking, but she could see he was really delighted. “Marching orders?” he asked.

Celia, now over forty, looked like one of Renoir’s girls—firmly plump, earth-motherly, and upholstered with warm experiences. César’s once-black hair and beard had turned slate gray and, though not receding, it had thinned. They both looked too old to be the parents of three such lively youngsters, Hélène, Bernard, and Delfine, the youngest, who was just toddling. Cries of “
Attention, Delfine!
”
punctuated Abigail’s and Victor’s entire visit.

They had a house on the southwestern outskirts of the city, on the fringe of the Parc de Saint Cloud, quite near César’s parents’ place. On the side that faced the road this house had the aspect of a prison, with high stone walls pierced by the narrowest windows, rising directly from the edge of the foot pavement. This wall continued, almost at the full height of the house, all along the roadside edge of the property. Massive oak gates, panelled solid, gave coach access to a minute drive, really no more than the length of the house.

The contrast between the public and private sides could not have been greater. Only when you were within the walls did you realize that the house was L-shaped. Here, on the garden side, all the windows were large, right down to floor level, and gave out directly to the grounds or, on the upper floors, to wide iron verandahs festooned with clematis—and wistaria, which Celia had brought from Falconwood. The garden was magnificently planted, on a gentle slope that ran downhill and merged into the park itself. A place more private, so close to the city, would have been impossible to devise.

On the third day of their visit, Victor went in to Paris to make the final arrangements for their wedding, which was to be held the following Monday in the town hall of the eighth arrondissement, in which his own house was situated; the house itself was shuttered and empty, and they had yet to decide whether to sell or to keep it.

César and Celia took Abigail for a walk around their garden. They showed her the pond where Monet had painted the lilies, and the arbor where Rodin liked to sit and sketch the trees; but mostly they talked with laughing nostalgia of their years together in Rome. At one point Celia was called away to comfort Delfine, who, not having her parents on hand to call “
Attention!
”
at every other step, had seized the chance to fall over and graze a knee.

“So, César,” Abigail said as they continued their walk, “it’s all turned out very well. You’re famous, Celia’s happy, and Victor and I are about to do stupendous things.”

“What?”

“Oh, we haven’t made up our minds yet. But wait and see.”

He cleared his throat. “You remember the things I said our last night in Rome?”

“Oh! Dear me, César…so long ago?”

“That’s good, if you’ve forgotten. I just wanted to tell you, I didn’t mean what I said.”

“Whatever that was.”

“Marvellous, excellent,” he answered; but she could tell from his very insistence that he was annoyed she would not remember. “I said those things because I was sorry for you.”

“Oh,
those
things! Well, I knew that, César, dear. I thought it was sweet of you.”

“I was never in love with you.”

“Of course you weren’t. I’d never have let you into my room if I’d even suspected it. The danger would’ve been too great. Especially as I could never have loved you back.”

“Hmm.” This was not quite the conversation he had hoped for.

She laughed and dug him in the ribs. “Don’t be so
French
!”
she chided. “Such a petulant French man-child! Celia’s been spoiling you, I can see. You know we could never…never…”

“Why not? I don’t see that.” He was only half jolted out of his disappointed smugness.

“Because we’re brother and sister. I mean we’re too similar. What could I have given you? More of yourself. Or you me? More of myself. Rivers can feed anything except their own sources.” It was a blatant lie, of course, but it passed his guard.

“You literary people! You were always too literary to be a good painter.”

“Your first lesson…you remember? Tree…house…cloud! You were so kind to me, César. You may think you only taught me one or two things about painting; but really it was about art—all art. You changed my writing, too, you know. But even more than that you helped me discover so much about love and life. That’s the debt I really owe you. Whatever you tried to offer on that last night in Rome—comfort or whatever it was—that wasn’t important compared with the things you’d helped me to see already. That’s what I’ll always remember, and love you for.” She smiled to stop him looking so soulful. “As sister for brother, of course!”

It satisfied him. He was jovial again. How odd, she thought, that he, so self-contained and so assured of his genius, should have craved this small eulogy from her, a comparative nobody.

***

On paper the French civil-marriage ceremony is a dull and brief affair, designed, as Victor pointed out, to offer no competition to the worldly glory of its religious counterpart. But the mayor, an old friend of his and a freethinker from Bourbon times, managed to endow it with all the ecstasy the French language could deliver, which was no small measure. Abigail would naturally have preferred an Anglican service, but she would not force Victor into the hypocrisy it would entail. When it came to their civil vows she was astonished to hear Victor addressed as “monsieur le Baron.”

“What was that?” she asked afterwards.

He was embarrassed. “While we were in Venice, it seems, a distant uncle died and the title has descended on me, er, baroness.”

“La Baronne de Bouvier…Baroness de Bouvier…” She tried it in both languages. “Either way it sounds most forbidding.”

He shrugged. “We can ignore it.”

“No, no. It could be useful. It’s a battle-winning name if ever I heard one—I quail at the sound of it myself. Is there a château or anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Madame la Baronne, eh! Well, no one can say I sound like a lower servant any more.”

This visit to Paris was, in a sense, their honeymoon—at least, it was the only one they wanted; but Victor asked her if there was anywhere she particularly wanted to go, as a special mark of the occasion. She said she would like to see Gérard de Nerval’s grave. Victor’s story of Gérard’s tragic death had been the turning point in her feelings toward him. She regretted the wish when she saw how glum a face he made, but from then on he was determined to comply. They went to the Père-Lachaise cemetery the following morning.

They walked up from the Place de la Nation, entering by the Israelite Cemetery. Gerard’s grave was almost at the farther corner from there. The path led past the tomb of Abélard and Héloise.

“Are they really both buried there?” she asked.

“All of her and
most
of him,” Victor said.

“Oh yes, I’d forgotten. What a terrible thing to do to a man.”

It was a chill spring day, the opposite of everything conjured up by the phrase “springtime in Paris.” The sky was one sheet of unrelieved gray; the damp ground would never dry. Subdued birds watched sullenly from newly clad branches. Gérard’s grave was unremarkable, but she was glad to have seen it—to have, in her mind’s eye, a locus for the poet’s memory, bequeathed to her by Victor in such graphic detail.

“We thought he’d be content enough,” he said, “opposite Balzac and Bazin and so close to Nodier.”

He shivered and cast his eye wildly around, like an animal seeking escape. She asked why.

“This is the very spot, between the busts of Balzac and Nodier, where the Commune was killed. Nineteen years ago this day, the twenty-seventh of May. It was a Saturday, though, not a Tuesday. And the rain fell…mercilessly.”

“Were you here?”

“No. I was already being marched to Versailles.” He looked away to the east. “You see the wall there?”

She nodded.

“That’s
the
wall. They rounded up the handful who surrendered and shot them there. You know how many they shot in all? All over Paris?”

“I remember reading at the time. It was sickening.”

“Twenty thousand. The stink reached Versailles. The Seine was red with blood. People think that’s poetic fancy but it was literally true. The army went mad, they shot anyone, without reason. They shot all the doctors and nurses in my hospital. I’d have been shot, too, if I’d not been on the roof, hiding Daniel. They said they’d been fired on from my house, but it was a lie. To have stayed in Paris at all—that was the crime. General Valentin said as much. He wanted to kill or transport everyone who’d stayed in Paris.”

She shuddered. “Let’s go home,” she said.

Together they began the walk down to the main gate.

“I went out to look for food and got arrested. And because my hands were black they said I was an incendiarist. I pointed to the red cross on my armband, but the officer had never seen such a symbol. I told him it was the sign of the International Geneva Convention, which was the worst thing I could’ve said. All he heard was that one word ‘International.’ I was actually standing in a line of about three hundred people, waiting my turn to be shot, when a sergeant recognized the symbol and sent me over to join the ordinary prisoners. He’d been a medical student in the days when the world had been sane.”

“Oh, Victor—why did you indulge my whim to come here? I’m so sorry.”

“It’s better you should know. I can’t”—he gestured at the graves all around—“bury the memory. They shot anyone. If you had a watch, they said it proved you were an official of the Commune and they shot you. Even as an ‘ordinary prisoner’ I wasn’t safe. No one was. We were marched to Versailles by the cavalry under the Marquis de Gallifet. Clemenceau calls him The Swine, but it’s an insult to pigs. He stood us all in the Bois de Boulogne and the first thing he did was pick out everyone with white hair. ‘You’re old enough to have fought against us in the eighteen forty-eight revolution,’ he said. ‘Well, you shan’t live to fight a third time!’ There were over a hundred, and he shot them down in front of us, together with all the cripples, or even people he didn’t like the look of. ‘You’re an ugly fellow,’ he told the man next to me. ‘It’ll be a kindness to shoot you.’ And when the man pleaded for his life, Gallifet said, ‘I’ve been in every theatre in Paris. This acting of yours doesn’t affect me.’ Another prisoner told me—this was a different march; there was a march every day for weeks, all led by Gallifet: fifty thousand prisoners in all—this prisoner told me Gallifet had picked out a dozen pretty girls and told them they’d only be raped in Versailles and to spare them that he’d have them shot now. He made the soldiers strip them naked and told them to run. If they made it to the trees, they’d be safe. He held the fire until they were almost there, but—four hundred bullets! What chance had they!”

“The unspeakable…filth! Wasn’t he ever punished?”

“Punished! He’s in the present government.”

“Oh…Victor.” She closed her eyes tightly, but she was angry, not sick.

“I never want to live in France again. I was mad to suggest we should get married here.”

“No! Oh darling, no. I was mad, to suggest coming to this place.”

He smiled then and patted her hand on his arm. “No. It’s better for you to know. I want you to know—if you can bear it. And it’s like a purge for me. I’ll tell you it all now and then I need never tell you again.”

She nodded.

“More of us died on the way to Versailles. Anyone who stumbled or fainted they shot. And the soldiers relieved their tedium by tying anyone who still looked young and strong, man or woman, to a horse and then trotting, cantering, and finally galloping. No one survived that. And then in Versailles all the respectable bourgeois who had fled from Paris turned out to hit us with canes and parasols. The army tried to cram all forty thousand of us into the cellars and the riding school, and the orangery; of course it wasn’t possible. I got sent with two or three hundred others to Saint-Nazaire. They sent thousands of us to islands and ports on the west coast. My party was put in open cages on pontoons in the estuary of the Loire. No regular food, of course, and no water but the river. We were kept alive for sport by ladies and gentlemen who came to throw us scraps of food and watch us fight for it like animals. Those who died were just thrown up onto the quay. I’ve seen respectable ladies coming down like vultures to poke at the bodies with their parasols; they tried to open the trousers and expose the corpses’ genitals. Then they’d stand about laughing. I never saw gentlemen do that to the female corpses.”

“It’s horrible. Horrible.”

“I’m sorry.” He was suddenly concerned. He had been speaking in a very light, matter-of-fact way, as if about some atrocity in ancient history, and had assumed from her silence and her measured walk that she had adopted his mood.

“No,” she said. “I must know. As you say: It’s right I should know. When were you brought to trial?”

“Never. We were all released, those who still lived, just before Christmas. They released about half of all the prisoners without trial.”

“My God! If you weren’t a revolutionary before, I’d think you’d be…”

“Exactly,” he interrupted. “That’s what gave the socialists and republicans their great victories in the ’eighties. Even so, it’s not safe to have been one of the fifty thousand. The police have long memories. And bulging dossiers.”

“You mean you’re not safe in Paris?”

“If I make no trouble, I probably am. Otherwise…” He shrugged. “Who knows.” He laughed then. “Well, it was a lifetime ago,” he said. “And it failed to break my spirit. And if I’d known that twenty years on I would be only just beginning the deepest and most wonderful experience of love, I’d have laughed my way from May to December.”

She spun rapidly on one foot, throwing herself against him. They kissed tenderly. Raising his eyes, he saw an elderly lady walking nearby and looking at them somewhat askance. He broke the kiss and, smiling at the lady, said in near-flawless English, “We were married only yesterday, madame.”

She looked at them, at the graves all around, and, bursting into laughter, walked away. Victor followed her with his eyes.