Abigail (34 page)

“No, Celia!” She was sharp. “Not ‘just like that.’ But let’s pretend, eh?”

“Sorry.”

“You look it.”

Celia was hurt. “Oh? Should I be sorry? What’ve I done?”

Abigail, forced to concede her own unreasonableness, smiled. “Of course you shouldn’t. I just wish I lived in any other country or any other time.”

Celia smiled too. “Ancient Rome?” she asked.

“They probably knew it all.”

“Knew what?”

“What I try to say in my book.”

Celia grasped Abigail’s arm, suddenly alive. “Abbie! Let’s go back to Rome! Just for the summer, you know. Just painting and reading and—and not deciding anything!”

“We’ll see,” Abigail said. Something in her leaped up with joy at the suggestion.

Just after she turned out the gas, Celia said, “D’you think I might read this book, Abbie?”

She read it on the train back to London. She almost finished it on the train to Digswell. And she read the last few pages in the coach to Maran Hill, one of the Stevensons’ country homes, where the Earl and Countess were passing a few weeks by way of a midseason break.

“Well?” Abigail asked as she finished. They were driving along the foot of the Maran valley, one of the loveliest in all Hertfordshire.

“It’s an idyllic tale,” Celia said. “But lord, what a fool I am!”

“Why?” Abigail laughed.

“I’m ashamed to tell you.”

“Tell what?”

“I had no idea…why men and women…you know. Of course it’s obvious. Yet I’d never seen it. I never understood.”

“But…Henry?”

Celia shook her head. Then she laughed bitterly. “To think I was afraid to tell you about him! And all the while I was the ignorant one. Is it really like…as you say? Such an exquisite joy?”

“But what did Annie tell you? In Rome you told me she talked of nothing else.”

Celia hid her face and chuckled. “I thought they did to her what Henry did to me. Just decorated her and…and drooled.”

An intense green light reflected off the water meadows beside the river; it filled the cab with an unearthly radiance.

“Damn Henry!” Celia said, looking up again.

“Never mind, Celia. You’re young yet. You’ll still have your day.”

Perhaps,
she thought,
I should lend this book to all England—one reader at a time!
Only the rational parts of her would ever learn to accept the impossibility of seeing it published.

It was marvellous to see her parents together again, especially as they were so obviously relishing a second honeymoon still. Over dinner they relived for Abigail’s and Celia’s benefit the triumph of their first railway contract—Summit Tunnel on the Manchester & Leeds, over forty years ago. John had been no more than a navvy ganger when the tunnel started. Then the contractor had gone bankrupt and Walter Thornton, the company’s engineer, had taken a big risk to his own reputation and had proposed John as the man to finish the job. The same day Nora, tramping from Manchester to Leeds, had come into John’s life with nothing but a faded blue dress, a gold sovereign, and a phenomenal gift for figures. Together they had slaved through the night working out all the costings “every way from Jericho.” When John went before the Manchester & Leeds board the following day he dazzled them with Nora’s sums; without her, he swore, he’d never have been trusted with so great an enterprise—the world’s then-longest tunnel. He’d come straight back to the Summit workings and asked Nora to marry him.

Nora was so carried away at the retelling of this tale that she ran upstairs to get the very blue dress she had been wearing—as if the story would not become real until everyone had seen it and felt it.

“I’ve not washed it nor anything,” she said. “I left it as it was, to look at in case we ever got too proud.”

“What’s this?” Abigail asked. “Blood? It looks like blood.”

Nora smiled and nodded. “Next day, while John was in Manchester, I went to help break up a rabbit warren. Conies, we called them. Breaking warrens and squandering conies was a great country sport in those days.”

“You were always a huntress, weren’t you!” Abigail said. “I’d never realized it went back that far.”

“And further!” Nora answered. “I got two dozen conies that day. That’s rabbit blood on that dress.”

“I can’t imagine you like that,” Abigail told her. “I can only ever imagine you in places like this.”

Nora grinned at John. “He can,” she said. “He proposed to me in that lane, dead rabbits and all. And me barefoot, in that dress.” She put her hand in his. “He said—you’ll excuse the Yorkshire, but it means nothing in any other tongue—he said, ‘I hope I may always remember thee like this, Nora, my…most precious.’” Her eyes began to swim. “‘Dusty. Loppered wi’ blood. Bare of feet.’” Her voice broke. She could not continue.

John supplied the rest, speaking only just above a whisper; his lips scarcely moved. He took both her hands between his. “‘There’s grand changes agate, they’ll sweep up thee and me and carry us I know not where. But I ’ope thou might never lose this…this sunshine i’ thy spirit.’” He did not turn from her. “And she never did,” he added.

“And never will!” Abigail ran between them and put an arm around each. “Oh, I’m so
glad
about you two. We all are.”

“Amen,” Nora said.

Later, when they were preparing for bed, Celia said, “What is it about some people—they can make life so much more real than it usually is? They carry an extra sort of electricity around with them.”

“My parents, you mean? Yes, they have…”

“But you too, Abbie dear. You also have it. There’s always more life when you come into a room, and it departs with you. You don’t have to say anything, or do anything. It’s just something that’s…you!”

At that moment Nora came in. “I suppose I may read this book that’s doing the rounds of the family?” she asked. “So as not to feel entirely superannuated.”

“I shan’t publish it,” Abigail warned. “Winnie and Steamer have persuaded me.” She handed the by-now-tattered envelope to her mother.

“From all I hear,” Nora said, “that’ll simply quadruple my pleasure.”

She finished the book shortly after lunch the following day. Abigail had watched her from safe hides, through cracks in doorways, peeping in mirrors. But Nora’s face had given nothing away. Now, as her mother crossed the ballroom, she was afraid to turn and look at her face. She stood in the large bow window, peering out through the lavender-tinted glass at the lawns and a small fountain down near the ha-ha.

Nora put her arms around her from behind and, kissing her on the ear, gave a gentle hug. “I want your father to read it,” she said.

Abigail was too delighted—and astounded—to know how to respond.

“There’s so much in it,” Nora went on, “that we both know and have rediscovered, but we’d never have the wit to say.”

Abigail began to laugh. “I thought Winnie and Steamer would be for it and you’d be dead set against it. Have I changed so much? Or is it you? Or did I never really know you?”

“Who knows that side of anyone? I didn’t know it of you. I didn’t know you saw it all so deeply.” She sighed. “Oh Abigail, what shall you do? You’re no lass for these times. You’d want eyes as narrow as one pair of cufflinks to be sure of happiness. Chain and all. Aye! What shall you do?”

“I’m finished with Pepe,” she said. And she wept, quite spontaneously. All the tension of these last weeks suddenly brought her down. A child again, she turned into Nora’s arms and cried for the sheer comfort to be found there.

“You never could do the easy thing,” Nora said, clutching her hard. “Not from birth. The first thing you ever drew—you remember that? A flower pot? The first thing that wasn’t just scribble?”

Abigail, her sobbing only part stilled, shook her head.

“In this very house it was. Above this very room. If you covered one sheet of paper, you covered twenty before it satisfied you. There never was such a child for going on and on, through anger and tears, on and on, till you got it right. I wonder if any of us ever changes. You said last night I was always a huntress. My earliest memory of a great excitement is going ratting with a stray terrier. And if I live to be a hundred, I’m like to die in the hunting field.”

Abigail’s weeping had subsided. A void was replacing the sorrow. “Let’s go along the linden walk,” she suggested. And when Nora turned back toward the hall, she said, “No. No hats. No gloves. And damn who meets us! If that old blue dress were down here still, I’d say put that on and kick off your shoes as well.”

The ha-ha was less than a hundred yards long, little more than the width of the lower lawn, which it made seem continuous with the deer-cropped parkland beyond. At each end, behind a concealing shrubbery, its ditch rose to a wrought-iron fence, with a wicket gate to give access to the south park. From the western gate stretched an avenue of ancient limes that had probably been planted in Elizabethan days. This was the linden walk Abigail had suggested.

“I still can’t publish it,” she said when they had gained the avenue.

“No question of that.”

Abigail laughed, with hardly a trace of bitterness. “Somehow the disappointment of it is outweighed by your approval. That means more to me.”

“Then you may be thankful your next crust of bread didn’t depend on publication!”

Abigail stooped to pick a buttercup, trembling in the breeze. “D’you still like butter?” She held it below her mother’s chin. “Yes, you do. So do I.” But she did not test herself. “I used to have a sort of rule that I’d try to live by my earnings and leave my income untouched. But I never applied it absolutely rigorously. Perhaps I should do that. Is there a way of locking up my income against any weakening in my resolve?”

Nora snorted. “You’d be as ridiculous as a steam engine with sails! I was making the opposite point. Because you have an income, because you don’t depend on your earnings, you can be that much more honest in life. If it’s true, for example, that my approval means more to you than publication, you can accept that fact and say so. You must also accept what you are—a rich woman.”

“But how?”

“That’s what I asked. What shall you do now?”

Abigail sighed.

“Still,” Nora went on quickly, “no need to make up your mind all in a hurry. Time’s on your side. Celia told me at breakfast that you’re thinking of going back to Rome and spending the summer painting. I think that would be excellent. You need a long break from everything. And painting was always a kind of second love, wasn’t it?”

“Love!” Abigail laughed. “That’s what I need a long break from! A long, long break. I think if I met someone I liked, or even someone with nothing I disliked, I’d marry him. Liking’s easy. Love is so hard.”

“What about César Rodet?” Nora ventured.

“Heavens, no!” She laughed. “There’s only one love in that man’s life—painting. Oh, no—the man I liked would have to
adore
me, absolutely and to distraction.”

They both laughed at her egotism.

“It is possible, though,” Nora said, “inside marriage. Love.”

“So I see,” Abigail answered, throwing away the buttercup and linking arms with her mother. They reached the end of the walk, where the long avenue of limes marched down the ridge to mingle with a deep belt of fox covert. For a moment they stood, looking out over the sunlit valley beyond. Then they turned and made for home. “Even so,” Abigail continued, “you had your ‘long, long break,’ too.”

“Aye,” Nora said.

“If you
are
a huntress,” Abigail pressed, “why did you tolerate it so long? Why didn’t you go and rout out…Can we say her name now?”

“Charity. I don’t know. Well—I do. But…”

“You don’t have to say,” Abigail cut in. “It’s none of my business really.”

“But I will tell you,” Nora said. “There’s no other living soul I’d tell—for fear of not being understood.” She gathered her thoughts. “Also, you’ll maybe see why I’m not so lacking in understanding of you.” She began to walk in a different manner, swaying awkwardly, as if to transfer an ungainly thought from her mind to her body. Abigail slowed their pace to the merest loitering stroll.

“Was it Shakespeare,” Nora asked, “who said there’s a tide in human affairs that you’ve got to take at the flood or not at all? Something like that. Well, I missed that tide. Perhaps I even
wanted
to miss it—how can we ever be sure of these things? Perhaps, when I heard of…Charity, I was just ready for a little dalliance of my own. Anyway, I lost no time at it.” She laughed bitterly. “It endured precisely one week, never mind twenty years. One week! But there was a chance it had left me in…well, in the same condition as Laon put you. And I don’t need to tell you how that suddenly dominates your life and drives out everything else. How could I get your father to do…what he had to do, if I went out to Saint John’s Wood and turned that baggage out into the streets and made a scandal to set all London by the ears! Oh, and there were all the other, social reasons, too. What peer’s wife ever made a public fuss of her husband’s mistress? Isn’t Saint John’s Wood full of carriages with all the arms in
Debrett
, from dukes to baronets, every evening of the week! I’d have been the laughing stock; John would have been the hero. I’d have lost everything. D’you want more reasons?”

“Are there more?” Abigail squeezed her mother’s waist.

She wanted to say that “dalliance” was the very opposite of her own ideas about love and sexuality, but did not dare risk the rebuke it would imply; she was, indeed, somewhat overawed by her mother’s confession.

“I went to see her, you know,” Nora continued. “After your father went to India; when I knew he’d be away half a year. We’re all animals, really. Civilization’s just a veneer.”

“You mean you fought?”

“Just the opposite. No.” She sought for words. “You know how when you enter a new bitch into a pack, how she curls herself over and fawns to the others until they accept her? Young Miss Charity did just that. And I did what the established bitches do—I snarled and left her be. That’s why I say we’re all animals. I behaved just as she did when I first entered Society—when I was the new bitch in the pack. I did all the fawning then.”