Abigail (5 page)

Later, in the billiard room when she was one frame up and well into a break of forty, “despite these ridiculously hampering clothes,” as she pointed out, Caspar again asked her what was wrong.

She smiled and sank the red ball in the far pocket with a convincing thwack! “I feel a bit of a fool, Steamer. When I wired you, I was in somewhat of a state. But I seem to have weathered it.”

“Was it important?” He put the red back on its spot.

“Not really. Well…yes. Yes, it was. I found out about men and women…and, you know, babies.”

The red shuddered between the cushions guarding a pocket and failed to sink. But Caspar did not give his usual cry of mockery. He did not move from where he was.

“Your ball,” she said. And when he continued to stare at her she asked, “What?” For his look was almost that of a prosecutor.

“D’you remember the Christmas before last we were all at Maran Hill? And you came and told me you’d found out about the pater’s mistress? That girl called Charity? And you said he had children by her?”

“I didn’t.”

“Pardon me, Abbie, but you did. You said the children were ‘only Stevensons by Charity.’”

“It was only a way of speaking. Good heavens—did you think I knew how such things happened then?”

Her vehemence and obvious sincerity shook him, for he had been sure, then and since, that Abbie knew.

“You really didn’t?” he asked.

She ran and threw her arms about him. “Oh, Steamer! I had no idea what you would say. Or even how I could bring myself to tell you. And it’s so easy, isn’t it?”

“How did you find out? Who told you?”

“Never mind. That’s not important. A girl at a dance. She had a headache and I played the Miss Nightingale. It was quite dark. And confidences always come more easily then, don’t you find?”

This piling up of irrelevant circumstantial detail sounded convincing, she hoped.

“Well!” He broke free and addressed the cue ball again. “So now you know…everything!”

“And she told me such quaint phrases, too, Steamer! ‘Putting Nebuchadnezzar out to graze’…‘seeing the elephant’…‘the four-leg frolic!’”

She laughed, hoping he would laugh too, both as a relief and as a welcome into the grown-up world. But he paused in mid-shot and fixed her with a piercing stare. “I see!” was all he would say.

Twenty points further into his break he said, “You read a deuce of a lot, Abbie. What—for instance—did you think
Othello
was all about?”

Abigail pondered a while. How strange that until this moment she had related her new-found knowledge only to the actual world. As if the world of literature were hermetic and guided by different laws of behaviour and motive.

“To tell the truth,” she said, laughing at herself (for it was the truth), “I always thought it much too much ado about nothing. To go and strangle your wife merely for lending your handkerchief to a friend!”

When their laughter died she said, “Steamer, is it really the best fun ever?”

To her dismay she saw that the question embarrassed him acutely. “You really shouldn’t ask,” he said. Too coolly. “It will be time enough for such knowledge when you marry.”

“But I shall never marry.”

He smiled provokingly. “Then it need never concern you.”

Suddenly she hated him. He was marvellous when he talked to her as equal to equal; but when he became superior like this he was…offensive. Like Winnie when she played big sister.

“Don’t think I shan’t try to find out,” she warned.

He slammed the cue down upon the table. The tip leapt from it in an explosion of chalk dust. She had not seen him so angry in a long time. “You would,” he choked, fighting to master himself.

She would do anything to placate him now, to stop this terrifying anger. “I was only hitting out,” she said, “because you keep such secrets. I wouldn’t really try.”

He became a little calmer. But when he grasped her shoulders she could still feel him trembling. “Oh, but you would,” he said, as much rueful as angry. “You would. Out of curiosity—or to spite someone—or simply through being swept away. You, of all people, my love, you would.” He looked around as if for aid or comfort. “What to do?” Annie had looked about her in just that way before letting out The Secret.

She wanted to say, “Spike my curiosity,” but she knew that if the suggestion came from her, he would never act on it. Instead, in a breathless voice, full of hollow sincerity—well-meant enough but hollow—she said, “I wouldn’t, Steamer. Truly now, I just know I wouldn’t.”

The empty frailty of her vow persuaded him. Still he held her shoulders. “Listen, love. You’re going to have to grow up rather early, for a girl of your class. I’m going to have to trust you with information that is normally kept only for married ladies, or ladies of a certain maturity. But it is to save you from any experiment that might damn you forever.”

She squirmed in his grip and looked back at the table, implying she would far rather be going on with the game. But of course—and as she had intended—the gesture only made Caspar the more determined to speak out.

“It is, as you call it, ‘the best fun ever.’ For women, too, whatever learned doctors may say to the contrary. More than fun. A kind of intoxication. A delirium. All the high-flown love poetry you’ve ever read is a pale echo of…a mere hint.”

He smiled and the tremble left his voice; now that the ice was breached, the unthinkable could be thought, the unsayable said, quite easily and calmly. “Difficult to believe? I have known it since I was thirteen. Not because I am in any way cleverer, but because men grow up differently—men are different. With men, our passions are all on our sleeve. Simple. Even a bit mechanical. It prevents us from ever really becoming noble, of ourselves, of our own accord. It’s as if we must always look for a light ahead to guide us, a pattern to copy, a better example. In other words: women. So a woman, both in her upbringing and in her very nature, is different, is purer, is nobler—of herself and of her own accord. That is why this knowledge is not for her, at least until she marries. For she has a darker, more earthy, less noble side to her nature, too—every woman, I mean. You have it, though I’m sure you aren’t remotely aware of it yet.”

She noticed that his eyes strayed from her face during these last few words. Did he fear to see a denial there? she wondered. She wanted to assure him it was true: She had no such side to her nature. Yet, paradoxically, his utter assurance affronted her—so much so that she felt like shouting aloud: “It’s not true! I feel it just as you do!”

“Funnily enough,” Caspar went on, “it was Nick’s father—Uncle Walter, I mean—who made it clear to me. He caught us, Nick and me, gawping at the fallen women outside the station in York.” Caspar edited and bowdlerized the memory for her; Walter had actually caught them doing more than merely gawping. “I’ll never forget it. He told us how a woman’s nobility, her purity, was like a lighthouse to a man in the storms and tempests of life; and so it is something doubly precious—to her, and to him. Only the very worst kind of man trifles with it and sullies it. Because it is a very short step from being pure to being polluted; it can be five minutes’ work. But once it’s done, it can never be undone. The polluted woman can never find her way back to purity.”

“What about Mary Magdalene?”

Caspar was puzzled. “Well, she was
saved
,
I suppose. Yes, of course she was. But she was never made pure again.” And when Abigail frowned, as if about to argue, he added, “In a religious sense I’m sure she was patched up as good as a saint. But I’m talking about Society. Forgiveness is God’s business, not Society’s, or it would all fall to bits, wouldn’t it? No. Believe me—once a woman has crossed that narrow line, there’s no way back.”

“And men?”

He smiled. “Sinners all, I fear.” He took a new cue and began to assess the lie of the table. “But it don’t signify, Abbie, dear love. It don’t signify. We bear no children. Our father’s bastards, as you so wittily said—and before you even understood what you meant—our father’s wayside oats are ‘only Stevensons by charity’—with a big and a small C. They’ll never assume any legal relationship to us.”

Next morning, while Abigail was out riding, he sent Annie home to London, carrying a letter to his mother, Lady Wharfedale.

Not until the day after her return to London did Abigail notice her maid’s absence. “Where’s Annie?” she asked her mother.

Nora met it head on. “I’m afraid there was no question of her continuing in our service,” she said.

For a moment Abigail did not understand. “She gave notice?”

“I dismissed her.”

“But why?”

“You know very well why.”

Abigail stared at her, numb at the shock of her dawning understanding. “She told you?”

“In the end. There was no point in her trying to deny it.”

“You threw her out?” Abigail asked, and then answered herself with the same words, now accusatorial: “You threw her out.” A third time, now with anger, she repeated the words: “You threw her out!”

For one frightened moment Nora thought the girl would hit her; but she stood her ground. “Of course I threw her out. And of course she expected to be thrown out. She made less of it than you are now…”

“When?” Abigail interrupted.

“The moment she returned.”

“Steamer’s letter!” she exploded. “He made her carry her own death warrant!”

Nora laughed, not feeling the least humorous but wanting to show Abigail how absurdly she was magnifying things. “Death warrant!”

“Yes! A death warrant. To cast a young servant girl out on the street without a character is a death warrant. What do you know of poverty!” she sneered, forgetting that her mother had grown up in circumstances every bit as low as those Annie had described (or, rather, not exactly forgetting, but choosing to forget).

Nora knew that even Abigail, even in the grip of this anguish, would realize that her last taunt was too wide of its mark to measure; so, instead of venting the anger she felt, she put her head on one side and smiled tolerantly, letting time do its work for her. She hoped some of the fight would then go out of the girl.

But it did not. If anything, she grew even more pugnacious. “How did Steamer know?” she shouted. “I didn’t tell him. What did I say? It must have been something I said. I gave her away. It’s my fault. It’s my fault!”

With a weary anger born of ten thousand such clashes, Nora stifled an impulse to grasp her daughter by the shoulders and shake her until the brain rattled, to stop that brew of venom and self-disgust from reaching the boil. The girl was so pretty, so talented—she could have such a marvellous life if only she would let go, drift a little, be more accepting of things.

It was too late. Nothing could stop that boiling over. Nothing had ever been able to stop it. Abigail ran, white-faced and tight-lipped, from the room, seeking the anodyne of activity to crowd out the accusations that pressed upon her mind from every angle. Nora’s cry to the footmen followed her down the marble stair. Flutelike echoes of it swept the galleries as a footman, also too late, ran to bar the door. Abigail, hatless and gloveless, was already striding up Piccadilly.

Half a mile she went, beyond Burlington Arcade, before she could admit the futility of it. Her hopes turned every girl along the street into Annie—from a distance; close to, they became caricatures, not of Annie, but of the thing to which Annie had been reduced. Portraits in henna, powder, and rouge. Her disgusted spirit shrank from all contact with them; it turned within, banking up the accusations:
your fault…your fault…your fault.

How had Steamer learned? What had she said to make it so clear to him? A few unguarded words—even one unguarded word—would be enough, for he was quick to grasp such hints. No one kept secrets long near him.

And what would she not give now to unsay their whole conversation, to unvisit Falconwood. Why had she gone there anyway? What good had it really done? It was the action of a child. When would she grow up and learn some sense?

She became aware that she was attracting attention; a young gentlewoman out in a busy and fashionable part of London without hat, gloves, or chaperon—it was enough excitement to make the day for most of those who saw her and to wind up their tongues for a week. She looked around at that sea of inquisitive, uncaring city faces and felt something close to panic. She stepped backwards off the pavement.

A man, a gentleman, more kindly than the rest, came toward her, opening his mouth and squaring himself to speak. But the voice came from somewhere above her head: “Why, Miss A!”

The day darkened. Things were no longer quite real. The advancing gentleman looked up and beyond her. “You know this young lady, sir?” he asked.

She turned to face the gleaming, varnished cliffside of a phaeton. The coat of arms was familiar. And the voice.

“I do, sir. Thank you for your interest.”

Lord Cullfe, a family friend—or, rather, since it was years since they had been anything you could call a family, a friend of her father’s.

“Well, here’s a coincidence,” Lord Culffe said. “I’m on my way to meet your father. Step in…”

His two grand white muttonchop whiskers hung toward her like the prongs of a pitchfork. Years ago, she remembered, when her father had still been plain John Stevenson, they had seemed even larger and grander; his lordship had dandled her on his knee and let her tug at them gently. And she had disgraced herself and almost ruined the family by tugging at one and imitating the flushing of a water closet. It had seemed exquisitely funny to her eight-year-old mind—until she had glanced up into those terrifying eyes. Then she had curled up in an embarrassment that still had the power to make her cringe. Did he remember any of it now? She was sure he did. Sometimes all you could ever remember about a person was one searing, shocking thing. Usually an insult.

While she hesitated, one of her mother’s footmen came breathlessly up with her hat, cloak, and gloves. Now she had a choice—to walk straight home, or to accept Lord Culffe’s invitation. Her freedom not to do so made it easy to accept.

“I’m to meet Lord Wharfedale at the Admiralty and take him on to Westminster,” Lord Culffe said. “The coach can take you home from there.” And when she was settled opposite him, he said, “Well here’s a young lady who has grown!”

Their talk, all the way to the Admiralty, barely strayed above that level of banality. He was well mannered enough not to ask why she had been in Piccadilly in that state; it was the same instinctive good manners that had made him, despite his surprise, identify her as “Miss A.” Not even “Lady A.” She waited in the coach while he stepped indoors.

Her father was in good spirits. She could tell it even when he and Lord Culffe were still a hundred yards off, for he trod with a lightness that belied both his fifty-odd years of age and his giant frame. At one point he stopped, said something to Lord Culffe, clapped him on the shoulders, and the pair of them gave a laugh that put up every pigeon in Charing Cross.

“Lady Abigail, your servant.” Her father was laughing as he got in. It was a quotation from a charade they had done last Christmas.

“’La, sir, do I know you?” she quoted back, also laughing.

He sat facing her, drinking her in, delighting in all he saw. “Well, I hardly know you,” he said at last. “My! Since you came out last autumn you’ve become quite the woman.” He nudged his companion. “Say? Culffe?”

Culffe joined in. “Time she married, Wharfedale. No point in waiting.”

They laughed, and so did Abigail, but she could see something serious and calculating in her father’s scrutiny of her. He did not ask how she came to be alone in Piccadilly; Lord Culffe had probably managed to imply that she had been out shopping with a servant, who had been sent on home.

And she, for her part, managed to conceal from him the anguish she still felt at Annie’s dismissal. His good humour made it easy; he was marvellous company when he was like that—the sort of man you’d trust your life to, for he seemed to carry life itself around with him. Things suddenly heightened when he appeared; zest became more zestful, joy more joyful, light brighter, reality more aware. The very air around him seemed different—somehow more valuable. Certainly when he and Lord Culffe got out at the Palace of Westminster the drabness they left behind, which was the drabness within herself, seemed ten times more desolate.

His parting words to her were, “Who’s at home next Tuesday?”

“Mrs. Pelham,” she told him. “If I’m wrong, I’ll get word to you.”

“I’ll see you there.”

And he was gone.

The “you” was plural; it included her mother. The whole exchange had been a kind of code, meaning, “Make sure your mother is there.” The pair of them still appeared in Society together, gave the required number of entertainments together, fulfilled slightly more than a grudging minimum of their joint obligations, determined to show Society that, though on a private level they could no longer live together, on a public level they knew their Duty. And Society, on the whole, Approved.

The bleakness of it all merely added to the dreariness that filled the carriage the moment she was left alone.

At once her thoughts returned to poor Annie. She remembered the time the girl had spoken of her childhood. There, in the safe, gloomy warmth of the carriage, she had told of the poverty and squalor she had known. How easy it must have been for Annie to look back from the comfort and security of her job in Hamilton Place—the grand house, the spacious rooms, the carpeted floors, the good and plentiful food—how easy to look back from all that, Abigail thought (forgetting how peripheral a share Annie had taken of all these good things, and how tenuous a grip upon them hers had been), and shiver safely at such past horrors. And now the poor girl had been cast back into that pit. For in Abigail’s mind—indeed, as in everybody’s mind—vice, poverty, and squalor were three words with one meaning. More than that, you needed only to link them together, in any order, and each became a sufficient explanation and cause of its next-in-line: a perfect circular argument that no external force (such as truth or evidence) was likely to breach.

But guilt is a slow burner; and once its flame had consumed the immediate tinder—these bright and easy images of pitiful Annie—its more permanent glow, being much dimmer, seemed a kind of death. And the carriage was not yet halfway home! To revive its hurtful sparkle she sought new images.

She tried to imagine herself inside Annie’s head, standing there in Piccadilly, looking at the men—at the hundred men who would pass before even one would approach her. Not nice men, either. Not good men. Not men of the stamp of her father and brothers. Not any man of any sort she might know. But grubby men. The men disgorged by second-class railway carriages. Clean-shirt-once-a-week men. Tipsy men. Tobacco-toothed men with dewlaps. Men from mean houses in Kentish Town. Men with the remnants of jellied eels, oysters, and a cowheel pie between their teeth and gums. Aimless and truculent, sniffing chancers and stray dogs, they accosted her, paid their rent, stripped her, and got her marvellous, her unique, her only, person for their own. Her shame and guilt were back on the boil by the time she returned to Hamilton Place. Full circle.

Nora, guessing what sort of mood her daughter would be in and knowing she would need an audience, let the girl come to her; but she did not let her speak first.

“Listen, popsie,” she began (a childhood endearment of hers).

“I’m not a child,” Abigail was stung to reply.

“So you say. Listen! If you want to make a fool of yourself over the dismissal of one servant girl, I cannot stop you. God, I should know that! No earthly power can stop you. But you might at least acquaint yourself with the facts.”

Abigail was not going to let Nora dictate the course of the discussion like that. “What was wrong, I want to know. What did Annie do that was so wrong?”

“There’s no point in going back over all that. The girl herself certainly didn’t question it.”

“Didn’t question it! I’ll swear she didn’t even remember it.”

“Oh but she…”

“How could she? She was drunk.”

“Drunk?” Nora’s confidence was dented; she had caught a particular glint in Abigail’s eyes.

“I got her drunk and made her tell me. Now d’you understand why I…”

“Abigail! You are just saying this.”

“I’m telling you the truth. I got her drunk before she’d tell me.”

Nora sat down, winded. “But that is terrible.”

“Yes. Now imagine how I feel.”

“No. I mean terrible that you would think of doing such a thing. And almost boast of it. What could have possessed you?”

Abigail shrugged. “I didn’t know what she was going to say. How could I? Though ever since I’ve been wondering I was so blind. But all I knew was that there was a secret that Winnie hinted at and Steamer hinted at and all the world knew except me. Tell me one thing—honestly: If Annie hadn’t told me, who would have? You?”

“I expect so.”

“And when?”

“At the proper time.”

“The eve of my wedding, I suppose? When it would be too late.”

Nora smiled a knowing smile. “You would have—ah—reconciled yourself to it, I promise.”

“Never!” Abigail shouted in panic, feeling all her grand, simple guilt being undermined. “And never shall I marry. Never!” She stormed from the room.

Nora gave her twenty minutes and then followed. She found Abigail at her writing desk. The sheet of paper beneath her fingers was covered, perhaps, three hundred times, with the one word: Never. In the first examples of it the pen had almost pierced the paper; ink spattered from where the angry nib had stuck. But the latest examples were decorated with curlicues, and the one she had just finished was made of tearful little mannikins contorting themselves into the shape of the letters: