Abigail (20 page)

Abigail took a large set of chambers in an old house near the river end of Buckingham Street, just south of the Strand near Charing Cross. The new embankment was nearing completion, much of it built by the Stevenson family business. Often when looking out of her windows she would see her father or Steamer on one of their regular visits to check on the progress of the works; sometimes she would run out and join them and be taken on a tour of the new sewers and underground railway and all the other marvels. Usually there was another man with them, Joseph Bazalgette. Her father introduced him as “the gentleman who made it possible for you to live in Buckingham Street without choking on the stench of the river.”

Bazalgette was, in fact, the architect of London’s modem sewerage system, not yet complete, and the chief begetter of all the new Thames embankments.

“D’you know when the guvnor and he first met?” Caspar asked her once, when the two older men were out of earshot. “It shows the value of old friendships.”

“Does it?”

“Those two first met the year before you were born, Abbie. The guvnor got up at half past four one morning, especially to meet that man—and found him with his surveyor’s tools at the bottom of a twenty-foot trench in Fleet Street.”

“Hurt?”

“No! Working, silly. No one had ever heard of Bazalgette then, but they talked for an hour, enthusiast to enthusiast. And that’s why we’ve got so large a slice of this!” He looked around the workings with crisp satisfaction. “I mean, they trust each other.”

Abigail, watching her father and Bazalgette, envied so long a friendship. Of all the people she met now (apart, of course, from Pepe), whom would she still know and work with twenty-five years hence?

Steamer, unconsciously echoing her thoughts, said, “So, Abbie dear, the moral is plain—when you go to meet your grand publishers and all those great editors, be sweetest of all to the office boys!”

***

Her family took far more kindly to her unconventional choice of life than she had dared to hope—perhaps because she was so careful to keep all possible taint of scandal from her. Naturally she and Pepe still dined together and made love several times a week, at Annie’s pub; but they always arrived and left separately, even by different streets. And Annie had the builders in to stop one of the passages short and so allow a private access between her own apartments and the supper room. Abigail never entered that room until the food was in and the servants gone. For the rest, the men who came to call on her invariably found her chaperoned by Mary, the young daughter of the married couple who looked after her, Mr. and Mrs. Stone.

Society, as she had hoped, took an ambivalent stance, neither accepting nor condemning—that is, for every one who condemned, there were two who would defend her. And since blame shouts the louder, that proportion appeared as perfect balance. True, her style of dress was unconventional, but it was plain and modest, and she carried it with assurance; and when the occasion demanded, she would don all the crinolines and petticoats and ribbons and lay bare as much of her shoulders and chest as anyone (or any other woman) could desire. And those women who might otherwise have condemned her the loudest were quite pleased to see how dowdy she looked; and to call her “dowdy” to one another was almost to admit her into their warmest friendship.

But women do not look at each other with men’s eyes. Their “dowdy” indicates no more than a departure from fashion’s latest dictates, even though that departure may be next year’s high-water mark of chic. No man who looked at Abigail found her “dowdy.”

And thus she earned the gratitude of both sexes insofar as it was due—or important.

Her own explanation for this remarkable acquiescence was, naturally, her talent. She had more than fulfilled that early and outrageous self-prediction: “I am going to become the writer whose pieces no one can afford to miss—whom no editor can afford to reject.” She still wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. The Abbot, now a regular columnist in
Once a Week
, still flayed the pretensions of the art world. Her unsigned but unmistakable satires appeared almost as regularly in
Punch.
Short stories by Abe Stevenson were in everything from
Blackwood’s
to
The Pall Mall Magazine.
She wrote as a glutton eats, by compulsion; she turned down nothing. She was “Mrs. Madge Challis,” adviser on etiquette and domestic matters to
My Lady.
She was “A Chef to the Aristocracy” in
The Drawing Room.
She wrote sly, risqué pieces for
The Girl of the Period
as “Drucilla Getz.”

All these names and activities were more or less widely known in London Society. And when it was clear that hers was no mere skyrocket of a career, that she was in earnest, that she could write with style and wit and always find at least one of those phrases that make people say, “Why didn’t I think of that!” it was also obvious that she simply could not be ignored. Besides, her book had become a modern classic, selling steadily and capturing the imagination of all who read it.

Laon’s explanation was different. “You have your mother to thank,” he said. “You know this extraordinary swath you have cut through the social forest this past year or so?”

“One cuts a swath through a cornfield. Through a forest one cuts a trail.”

“You leave my lines to me, miss.” He called her “miss” quite often these days. “Did you notice all those blazes healing on the trees as you passed? They were cut by your mother.”

Abigail sniffed. “I really must get around to reading
her
books sometime.”

“The single most remarkable thing about your mother is…do you know?”

“Ten million pounds.”

“That’s unworthy, darling. The truly remarkable thing about her is that she has no enemies—or none who amount to anything. Don’t you think that’s extraordinary? There she is, with a Yorkshire accent she doesn’t disguise, and as a girl she worked in a cotton mill and lived in a hovel, none of which she tries to hide; and now here she is a countess and the benevolent dictatrix of an important section of metropolitan Society—and the only words you’ll hear to her discredit are those stupid little sneers
all
women make about one another, even about their closest friends.”

“I don’t.”

He looked at her as if the point had never occurred to him. “No,” he agreed at length. “That’s true.”

“Nor does my mother.”

“Perhaps that’s the secret, then.”

“Collapse of stout theory!”

He shrugged and smiled, but the gesture conveyed that he knew better—that she was too obtuse to recognize the truth. From anyone else it would have infuriated her, but she would take it from Pepe because it was probably true. He had always had that air of being one secret ahead of her.

She sought a gesture of appeasement. “The truth is in between,” she said. “What Society worships is
success.
In any form. My mother’s—mine—any success. Why, if a man were to…” she sought for some activity that would violate Society’s supposed values to the ultimate limit. “If a man were to sell little girls into vice, so long as he made a fortune at it, you’d find some section of Society willing to…”

She faltered. Pepe was staring at her, aghast.

“
You…Judas!
” he cried.

And then she remembered: Percy Laon…Porzelijn…the man who had sold Mary Coen—and countless other girls—into French brothels.

“What?” She tried to brazen it out, but the memory had shown in her face and he was not deceived.

“Don’t make it worse,” he said.

For what seemed an eternity they stared at each other. A million things clamoured to be said; she was so crammed with things to say that her tongue could not pry loose one of them.

“Oh…Pepe…!” she stammered.

His bloodless lips parted. Out of the black of his mouth she heard a voice that was barely his say, “I will write to you when I am myself.” He went to the door. “But there can never be anything more between us.”

With an anguished cry she ran to him. She reached the door just as it slammed behind him. She would have followed him into the street but the terrible finality of his last words stayed her: She was afraid to hear them repeated. Instead, she rushed to her bedroom, pulled the clothes over her head, and howled herself dry and voiceless. Twice, unknown to her, Mary Stone came and stood at the foot of the bed, only to tiptoe away again.

The third time Mary had a letter, brought by messenger; it seemed important enough to justify disturbing her mistress.

Abigail saw at once that the envelope was addressed in Laon’s hand. “Put it on the table, Mary,” she croaked. She did not want to open it, for the same reason she had not followed him into the street.

“Please, my lady, my mother says are you in to dinner?”

“I am in but I shall not dine,” she said tonelessly.

***

The letter was still unopened when she went to bed. Its pale outlines challenged her from the dark corner where it now lay. Again and again she had picked it up, turned it over, stared at it, and put it down once more.

“But I love him so!” she told the emptiness, as if to prove that none of this could be happening.

The emptiness was appalling. How, she wondered, could one person support such loss? Why did the grief not kill her? What a monstrous prison her body had become—a prison where time and memory lay shackled together, each pinning fast the other, fouling their sweetness.

But what sweetness! Pepe’s dark eyes…Pepe begging her to marry him…Oh, the folly! The folly of those proud refusals! “Yes, I will, I will!” she called at the dark.

“I love him so,” she whispered, drowning the ghostly room in hot salt.

In the small hours she arose and dressed. Two lines of pain ran from her neck up the inside of her skull; her bruised eyes saw dual images of everything; her nose could smell nothing but the brine that had swilled it raw. The movement of each racked muscle was a miracle, but no mercy.

From room to room she wandered unconsoled. Mary, hearing her movement, rose and came as far as the door.

“Go back to bed, Mary.” She had to force the words through thickets of phlegm.

Mary did not go back to bed. Five minutes later she came from the kitchen with a candlelit tray on which stood a glass of hot milk and a buttered wafer.

Abigail wanted neither; but her dry throat and cavernous stomach won. She sipped—and was amazed at the relish of it. She ate—and never had such simple food tasted so good.

“What prisoners we are,” she said glumly. “What power our bodies hold over us!”

Mary nodded.

The milk tasted odd.

“There’s a drop o’ comfort in that, m’m,” Mary said.

How like Annie she talked—the same chirpy cockney. All confidence.
No one puts it over me,
it proclaimed.
I seen it all. Twice!

She would go and see Annie tomorrow. No—she looked at the clock—
today.

“Were you ever in love, Mary?” she asked.

Mary grinned. “I am, m’m. I was going to ask as if I might be allowed a follower. He’s a p’liceman but he’s ever so respectable.”

In the face of such enthusiasm Abigail could not avoid a smile, a brief, wan, sad little stretching of her lips, but a smile no less. It felt like a split in her face after so long an absence. She wanted to say,
You see what has happened to me—and you still want to risk it?
But that part of her mind which silently spoke her words in advance of any possible utterance heard the melodrama and silenced her.

“My lady?” the girl pressed.

“I shall have to talk to your mother. For myself I have no objection. You must ask him to call on me.”

Only the knowledge of her mistress’s grief kept the girl from dancing.

When Abigail was alone again she went—or, rather, her body went, by long habit—to her desk. She took a spill and lighted the gas; the dancing fishtail of flame was absurdly jolly. The whole world seemed bent on mocking her grief.

The first papers beneath her hand were some pages of a short story Pepe had returned with his comments. “Can’t you get it into your head…” one of them began.

The tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. She could hear his voice, feel his presence, in those words. “Oh, I love him. I love him!” she said.

But she had to clench her eyelids now to force the tears to roll upon her cheeks; the luxurious floods of yesterday were gone. A drab sadness claimed her. She sat and read.

“Can’t you get it into your head that casual accidents—
truly
casual accidents—are not permitted in literature? There must be purpose in everything. The reader is not looking for more cloth off the same loom that weaves his or her own seemingly unpatterned experience. He wants
you
to show him it need not be patternless. He wants to watch you play at God—and make a mess of it, like everyone else; but at least he wants you to
try.
So go on—
play
at God! Enjoy it, too! Your writ is brief enough.”

In some obscure way—and not just because she heard his voice in every word—this one-paragraph essay brought immense comfort to her. She took up her pen and began to revise the story to accord with his suggestions. And in that way she kept him comfortingly near her until dawn.

Mary was by now quite accustomed to sweeping and dusting the room around her mistress, for Abigail was often at her desk an hour or more before the girl arose at six. Today, when the girl had finished, Abigail sent her round to Pepe’s office with the revised manuscript; as an afterthought she put in his letter, still unopened. Whatever he had said in it, in haste, in hurt, he would know she could not hold it against him. It was a kind of apology. Well…
almost.

She even managed a light breakfast.

Midmorning brought another letter from him. It had a different envelope and was promisingly fat; eagerly she opened it—and gave a cry.

Out fell his letter of yesterday, still in its original envelope. And there was another piece of paper, a note: “I am glad you at least are calm enough to work. For myself the desolation is terrible, to know that all this time I have adored someone quite different from the person you have turned out to be. Please read my first letter. I did not write it in haste. It contains a number of practical suggestions for our future—or, I mean, our futures—which you must consider and answer. For the meantime I must—and will—continue to act as your agent. To act otherwise would do us both quite needless harm. And you can hardly deal directly as a male author could.”