Abigail (32 page)

She was lying, of course. The truth was far more complex—beyond the simplicities of “happier” and “more at ease.” But Annie did not need the truth from her, any more—she realized—than she needed it from Pepe.

***

Next morning when she awoke, Annie had gone. So had her clothes. But William was there. Abigail rose and dressed and heated up his goat’s milk. She had to wake him to feed him. He was growing almost as taciturn as César.

She tried to feel some kinship with him, but he had become Annie’s, in fact as in law. He was so registered at the embassy and on her passport.

Annie came back shortly before ten; she avoided Abigail’s eyes.

“I’m going, love,” she said. “Back to England. Back to the Smoke.”

“No, Annie!”

“I’ll never settle here. And you won’t go back there.”

“But…”

“I just seen Mr. Laon. He’s off on the night train and he agreed to squire me—and William. He sired the little bleeder, now he can squire him.”

“Annie? Please stay.”

Annie showed her rail ticket. “I pinched the money off of you,” she said.

“This is because of…last night!”

“’Course it is.”

“But don’t pay heed to that, Annie. I was cruel. I didn’t know what I was saying. It was losing Pepe made me like that. Don’t leave me!”

“I must, love. Cruel or not, you was right. Don’t make it hard now, eh?”

“I’ll do anything, Annie. Anything you want, only don’t leave me alone!”

Annie smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be alone too long, gel.”

“I’ll pretend so well you’ll never know.”

“Oh dear!” Annie’s lips began to tremble.

Abigail seized her arms. “Come on. Come back to bed now. I’ll show you!”

With a superhuman effort Annie wrenched her arms free and drew a deep breath, both to steady herself and to bellow “Celia!” at the top of her voice. Celia came running from the studio, watercolour brush between her fingers. “Give us a hand, there’s a love,” Annie said. “I’m going back to England today.”

She even managed a laugh.

What will you do?” César asked. “Will you write another novel?” She shook her head. For days she had not left the atelier. She had drifted from room to room, staring out of the windows, following cracks in the plaster, wanting not to be alive. She had found a shawl left by Annie and had almost worn it out passing it through her fingers, raising it to her face to sniff the last trace of her.

She missed Annie far more than she missed Pepe. He had half gone from her life a year ago. She still loved him, but the companionship, the kinship of obsessions, had gone.
Now,
she thought, in vindication of her life,
suppose we had been yoked in marriage!

Annie was the real loss. She thought of her all the time. Wherever she turned, a part of her prepared to welcome Annie. Her dark eyes and angular features were everywhere. She remembered her voice, her tread on the floor, the rustle of her clothes, her laugh, her angry, tender love for little William. At night she would wake and reach for Annie’s body before memory returned. She remembered Annie’s lips on hers and Annie’s hand on her breast. Had she been wrong and Annie right? If she had yielded, would she have
seen
?
Had her love for Pepe been a mere apprenticeship for the love she might have found with her?

At first, in the depth of her double loss, she believed that to be so. But as time staunched the immediate flow of her grief, she came to doubt it. Some part of her wanted it to be true; but the rest of her was too honest, and too self-aware, to connive at the wish.

By the time César judged it right to ask her what she would do, to face her again toward the future, she knew that if ever she loved again, it would be with a man; yet because of what Annie had offered—and she so nearly accepted—she would understand that love far more deeply than before.

“If not a novel, then what?” César persisted.

She smiled then. “I might even paint.”

He nodded judiciously. “It could be good.” His rich, dark voice was comforting.

But even as the thought occurred to her, she shied away from it.
Oh, dear,
she wondered.
Am I going to look for comforting things to lean on all my life?

So when he stood up suddenly and said, “Let’s go out to the Cavour. Music and sparkle and officers in uniform! My eyes are starved of spectacle!” she was just in the mood to accept with something like the beginnings of enthusiasm. With gratitude, anyway.

When the spirit took him like that, he was marvellous company. He danced with both Abigail and Celia equally, paid them lavish but equal compliments, made sure they both became equally tipsy, and gave them equal support all the way home. It was the first night in many that Abigail had not cried herself to sleep.

In the small hours, sometime between three and four, she came wide awake with the conviction that she was being a fool. She had lost Pepe. She had lost Annie. She had lost her baby. And she had lost her book. The four most valued things in her life. But how was it going to help for her to hide herself away in Rome? What would a new career as a painter—a very minor painter, she felt sure—achieve? How, when the grief had passed, as all griefs pass, would she come to view herself for her spineless acceptance of all these losses?

True enough, there was little she could do about the loss of Annie; if she had any ally there, it was time, and time alone. There was nothing (short of resigning the world and all the acquaintance and connections that sustained her in it) to be done about little William, beyond what she had already done. But Pepe? Was she going to accept that loss as absolute? And his refusal to publish—had that become her own refusal, too? Was she not still a
Stevenson
?

What would her parents do in the face of such reverses? Or Steamer—Boy—Winnie—any of them? Shrug it off and settle for a new life at something they knew was second rate? Very likely!

She rose and began to pack. She and Celia were a week behind Pepe and Annie in their return to London. César smiled when he saw the boxes they left in Rome, “to be sent on when we have found a place.”

“I’ll still be here when you come back,” he said. “And your rooms will be ready for you.”

From the wistful way Celia hung around until the last moment, and the way her eyes drank greedily at each last sight of Rome, Abigail could see how miserable she was at leaving; but naturally it was impossible for her to remain alone with César, quite apart from the obligations her gratitude owed to Abigail.

***

They put up at a small hotel in Holborn, conveniently close to the publishers with whom she hoped to deal. But she was tactician enough to know that no reputable house would take the book without the strongest assurance of her mother’s support. Even then, to judge from Pepe’s response, they might still balk at the idea, but without the Countess’s support the book had no chance at all. Abigail decided on a flanking move, via Winifred and Steamer; if her mother was in two minds, she’d be bound to consult one, if not both, of them.

At least she started with one great potential objection removed: Her parents were reconciled, so her mother could not play
that
card a second time. First, however, there was the manuscript to be recovered from Pepe.

For a writer she showed a remarkable distrust of letters; but she remembered how she had ignored that letter from Pepe during their previous separation, and she could not believe he would behave differently if she wrote to him now. Instead she walked in upon him in his office.

He was looking through some proof prints with one of the engravers. The man stared at her in surprise; Pepe’s stare was something more fierce. He nodded at the engraver, who left without a word.

“I came for the manuscript,” she said.

He opened a drawer, took out a packet, and handed it to her. “Or shall I have it sent?” he asked.

She let it lie on the desk between them. “I suppose you haven’t reconsidered—and won’t?” she asked.

He made an exasperated face.

“Then it simply means you don’t understand it,” she said. “It’s not just a tale—an idle invention to divert fat ladies between one chocolate and the next. It’s a truth. It demands to be told. If you understood it, you’d see that. If you understood it, you’d be moving heaven and hell to see it published.”

He savoured these words as if they were a professional offering, not personally touching him. “I see,” he said. “To understand all is to forgive all…eh?”

“If you’re quoting Madame de Staël, her actual words were, ‘The more we know, the better we forgive; whoe’er feels deeply, feels for all who live.’ Hah—it might almost be Blake himself!”

“And I suppose I know nothing and feel nothing! I tell you, I feel about as betrayed as it is possible to feel.”

“And you won’t even let me…”

“Lady Abigail,” he began. Then, hearing how petulant the snub made him seem, he softened it: “Abbie…Abbie! You gave away my son. I didn’t mean you to have a child. I didn’t”—he sought a violent word—“
inject
the baby there, use myself as a weapon to subdue you. But the child formed itself nonetheless. We made it. Together. It was ours. But you alone concealed it. You alone disowned it. You alone gave it away for a common, ignorant whore to raise. If ‘all that lives is holy,’ what name can you give such blasphemy? And what can you expect between us now, except—at the very best—a sort of baffled aversion? One day, if my prayers are answered, I’ll stop hating you. But that day is not this day.”

He spoke mournfully, without passion. And mournfully, and without passion, she nodded, picked up her manuscript, and left without a backward glance. Then and later she wondered that his rejection, so absolute, did not reduce her to tears. Or was her spirit now so low that even tears would have been an elevation? Perhaps his very absoluteness was a kind of cautery, sealing the wound beneath an instantaneous scar.

***

She left
Into a Narrow Circle
with Winifred, expecting to be invited back to Highgate a week or two later. But the following day Winifred called at the hotel, with the manuscript in a sealed envelope inside her bag. She gave a laugh that was almost apologetic. “I thought I’d better get it off the premises as fast as possible!”

Abigail’s heart fell. “As bad as that?” she asked.

Winifred did not at once answer. Abigail saw that her sister was trembling. She sent for some tea to be brought up; at all costs Winnie must be put at her ease.

“What d’you think of
Jane Eyre
?”
Winifred asked the moment she was seated. It was a prepared gambit, an academic’s nonquestion with, no doubt, a dozen prepared nonquestions to follow, depending on her initial reply. She saw the point at once, of course. Jane Eyre, when faced with the prospect of becoming the mistress (and what is more, in the circumstances, the almost blameless mistress) of the man she so passionately loved—the man she had only hours earlier been on the point of marrying—Jane Eyre nonetheless chose to run away to friendless poverty and starvation because that was the only virtuous course open to her. But Catherine of
Into a Narrow Circle
did not for a moment hesitate to make the very opposite choice when faced with an almost identical decision. Even at the time of writing it, the contrast had struck Abigail.

“Charlotte Brontë was trapped in a house of sermons. She wasn’t free to write as she pleased.”

Winifred let this shallowness answer itself. She merely smiled and shook her head, a relaxation that delighted Abigail.

“
Jane Eyre
the book or Jane Eyre the woman?” Abigail then asked.

“Either.”

“The book is a marvellous piece of storytelling, of course. But it’s flawed by the choice that Jane makes—to run away from love. In order to settle matters and bring the lovers together again, Miss Brontë then has to manage a startling sequence of coincidences—of a kind that our own Great Author so consistently fails to arrange in real life by way of reward in those who, like Jane, set cold righteousness above all else.”

The reply astounded Winifred. “You mean you’ve stopped believing in God?”

“Of course not, Winnie. Of course I still believe in God—but not as a good way out of a literary error. The happiness Jane is given at the end is a cheat. All the time, we see, someone has been standing outside her story; and at the end that someone says to Jane, ‘You were a good girl not to take the cake when it lay open and inviting on the table, so now I’m going to give it you.’ I’m not interested in writing books which cheat like that. The happiness my Catherine wins, even in facing her own death, is something she’s earned; it grows out of everything she’s done—and you can’t say she had an easy time of it. No primrose path for her! I don’t cheat.”

At least Winifred was no longer trembling. But Abigail could see that, of all possible answers to that opening question, she had not expected this. At once, in a clap of insight, she understood why it had been wrong to involve Winnie in this whole business.
Jane Eyre
was a red herring. Jane was no counterpart to Catherine. The true counterpart was Winifred herself.

Winifred’s refusal to marry had little to do with her often stated reasons. She did not fear a husband’s ownership of her school; she feared the passion of love itself…the husband’s ownership of
her.
In a curious way, though they had travelled such utterly different routes, she and her sister were now but a hairsbreadth apart. Yet, as Abigail discovered, it is quite possible to be so close and yet to face in opposite directions.

“Then I’m sorry to have to say this, Abbie dear”—Winifred steeled herself to continue—“but I wish you
had
‘cheated,’ as you call it. I think
lnto a Narrow Circle
is a pernicious book. Precisely because it is so moving and tender and—yes, if you force me to it—so true.”

“You…” Abigail laughed in bewilderment. “I’m speechless.”

Winifred tapped the manuscript. “A pity. This conversation comes a year too late.”

Abigail froze. Did Winifred know? She
couldn’t.
Only those at the Villa Mancini knew. Then Winifred touched the manuscript, and Abigail understood that she had meant the book, not the baby.

Abigail challenged her: “How can truth be pernicious?”

“…asked the serpent! Truth, you say? You mean merely that life is as you describe it? Love is as you describe it? That sort of truth? The accidental truth of a photographic snapshot! Surely literature—all art—must aspire to a higher truth than that? As
Jane Eyre
does. Charlotte Brontë directs us toward a higher moral choice and away from sensuality. You not only do the opposite, you also try to claim some sort of moral justification for it. Fortunately no one will ever publish the book. I strongly advise you never to show it to anyone else, not even to Pepe. And for yourself—well, I believe you have some thinking to do.”

Her understanding of Winnie, and of all the deep reasons for this inability to face the honesty of Catherine’s choice, prevented Abigail from feeling utterly downcast at this rejection. She even managed a smile. “Come,” she said, “if we are to set each other tasks, then I have one for you.”

“Oh?” Winifred, who had feared a blistering row…tantrums…tears…was delighted that Abigail should take her harshness so bravely.

“Yes. Right at the end of
Jane Eyre
,
where Jane takes in the tray and candles to poor blind Mr. Rochester, what does she call him?”

“I don’t remember!” Winifred laughed.

“Guess! ‘My love’?…‘my angel’?…‘darling’?…‘precious’? After all, they had sworn undying devotion. They had stood side by side before the altar. And they are clearly going to marry, now that Rochester is free at last. So what does she call him? She calls him ‘my dear master.’
Master!
”

“Well?” Winifred shrugged, not seeing a point. “It’s not surprising.”

“Of course it’s not. Not when you consider what sort of woman Jane was—a woman who lived in perpetual submission to one authority after another.
Your
problem, Winnie, is that you want to educate your girls into freedom from precisely that sort of submission. You want them to have my Catherine’s intellect, Catherine’s insight, Catherine’s independence of spirit. Yet, at the heel of the hunt, you want them to make
Jane’s
moral choices. I believe those are two metals you’ll never alloy.”