Abigail (35 page)

“Exactly what did Charity do?” Abigail asked, fascinated.

“Oh…she wept. Said she loved John but he didn’t love her—he loved only me. She could tell it. He’d throw her over any day and come begging back to me.”

“Clever thing!”

“No, I think she believed it. I even think it was true. I think John was smitten by her for a year or so—long enough to get her with child. The rest was obligation. You know what
he’s
like with his obligations!” She pointed at an old gardener who was snipping at the fringe of lawn overhanging the ha-ha. “Old Pengilly there was one of his navvies at Summit Tunnel. He lost his foot in a rock fall. John’s found him work ever since. Oh, the times his goodness has betrayed him—but he’ll never change!”

Abigail, who had dared so much in raising the issue at all, dared one further question: “Do you not think that, despite all the obvious differences between you, you sensed something of a sister-under-the-skin with her—not before, but when you and she were actually face to face?”

“Who knows?” Nora shrugged, unwilling to reopen the memory. “The one thing I still find hard to forgive is that he let her call herself Stevenson—and the children.”

“I wouldn’t be too worried about that,” Abigail said. “They’re not really Stevensons, you know—only by
charity
!”

She had waited over fifteen years to deliver this reassurance.

Nora threw back her head and roared with laughter. “Oh, darling!” she gasped, wiping her eyes. “You’re a tonic!”

But a short while later she realized that the witticism was very like something from Abigail’s journalism, and she grew worried. “Here,” she said “Don’t go putting any of this into a book, will you. However disguised.”

Abigail chuckled and gave her mother’s arm a further squeeze. “No fear of that. Your behaviour is too inconsistent. In real life people are allowed to be inconsistent because, as we both know too well, they got there by
accident
!
But people don’t get into books by accident. They all have a Purpose. Inconsistency like yours would just destroy it.”

“Forget books!” Nora said with a sudden intensity. “Forget all this unhappy past. Go back to Rome and paint—a dozen summers, if need be. Painting’s such a happy art. But forget books! All painters live to be ninety. But look at the number of writers who’ve ended by hanging themselves.”

Rome gleamed in the spring—that unique rejuvenation which annually flowed through the city’s arteries. Nothing Abigail had ever done felt more right than this return to the quaint atelier perched on top of the half-ruined Teatro Marcello. Even César’s smugness had all the warmth of a welcome. And when he saw the Aladdin’s chest of paints and pastels, of mediums, crayons, and papers, she had brought from Cornellison’s of London, he hugged and waltzed her all around the studio.

“Oh”—she laughed to Celia as they swept past her—“the way to this man’s heart is through his palette!”

She loved the studio smells of oil paint, which were strong enough to mask the stink of fish from the Oratory across the way. Turpentine, as clean and sharp as eucalyptus. Poppyseed oil and linseed oil, warm as cream. And all the different colours, their aromas, now mingled, now separate, redolent of some ancient alchemy. They were all part of the excitement of a painter’s studio, just as the lack of them contributes to the sense of flatness sometimes felt even in the world’s greatest galleries. Perhaps it was this intoxication, no more, that had made her heart leap up at Celia’s first suggestion of a return to Rome.

Next day, the first full day of their reunion, they all went out painting together; they crossed the river into the Travertine district and walked down the Tiber to a spot near the Porta Portense. There was a ready-composed view of the river, with even a cluster of sailing barges moored to the right bank, and the Aventine Hill across the water, fringed with a row of medieval hospitals and convents. The viewpoint they had chosen, a nook closed off by the massive ramparts of the sixteenth-century defence wall, was a haven of tranquility in the babel of the Roman springtime.

The weather held, and they came back each day for a week. Celia could pull off a watercolour in a few hours, so it was not long before she had moved to some other vantage for a different view. But Abigail and César, working in oils, stayed at the same scene all week—though with two canvases, one for morning, one for afternoon. By the third day, Abigail was fairly pleased with both her paintings. Their composition was full of assurance, the skies airy, the hill convincingly solid, the buildings straggling picturesquely. On the sixth day both paintings were dead.

The paint lay on them like worried butter, the skies were turgid, the hill was neither flat nor round, the river was leaden. César’s, by contrast, had grown lighter and fresher with every stroke. Yet he used far more paint than she had done; his shadows were as thick as his highlights.

“What did I do wrong?” she asked.

“If you wish to be Celia,” he said, “you did wrong to go on after the third day. If you wish to become a painter, then you learned something. That’s never wrong.”

“But the painting is…all wrong. What can I do?” She was dejected. She didn’t really want to know what to do. But she sat up when he took his palette knife and held it at the top of her painting. “Yes?” he asked.

Reluctantly she nodded.

He scraped off the paint in long, bold strokes from top to bottom, wiping the knife clean on the bark of a nearby cherry tree. “Perfect,” he said, pleased with the result. “Look—you did some very good underpainting. Now! Tomorrow I’ll finish here, so you have one more day.”

It still wasn’t a good painting when they finished, the following day, but it had revived a little; and she had sense enough not to want to become Titian overnight.

All that summer the three of them painted out of doors, except when the rain or the noonday sun drove them under cover. In August, when the heat (and the vile stink of the fish) became unbearable, they would go down to Ostia each day in search of seascapes and sea breezes. They ate all their meals out, and the wife of one of the artisans in the workshops below the Teatro did their washing and housekeeping—so painting became their sole reason for existence.

Abigail, who had taken to painting as a way to shut out the habits of a decade, soon became as immersed in it as if she had been born for nothing else. Her new life, at the easel and in the cafés, crowded out her old.

When groups of painters collected in the cafés, she no longer listened to their talk as an informed outsider—as a journalist seeking copy; the points they argued had become life-and-death issues to her, the cornerstones of her new universe: Is a painter bound by tradition or is each of us hurled alone against nature? Is it immoral (a violation of Truth) for us to
compose
a picture? Light is the hero of every painting—how can we capture him? Is our love affair with Nature or with paint? Is it justified to deny the flatness of a canvas—to make upon it an illusion of depth…should we not accept, even celebrate, that flatness? And what, when colour photography is perfected, are
we
going to do in order to make connoisseurs prefer us to the mechanics?

This last question was the nearest any of them got to the idea that art might have a social purpose, something beyond the painter’s own itches and obsessions. Abigail did not notice the lack of it—not for several years. Now that painting was her obsession, too, she entered these discussions from inside. She knew what everyone was talking about, shared the same shorthand, argued with a passion that, only months earlier, she would have found either amusing or beyond comprehension. At first she spoke mainly in French; half the painters there were French, anyway. But as summer drew into autumn she found she was managing almost as well in Italian; soon she spoke French only with César.

Celia and César took little active part in these café discussions. Celia would listen intently, nod and smile when anyone said anything apt, laugh when the saying was funny—and all quite independent of the matter of the argument. Her attitude said, “I’m glad to be here. To be glad is enough.” César listened warily rather than with Celia’s intensity. He weighed everything and, Abigail guessed, bothered to remember very little of it. From working at his side and accepting his guidance, she knew he was far ahead of the rest of them in skill and understanding. Often the conversation would get around to some question that he had, by chance, settled for her that very afternoon; then she would turn to him, expecting him to speak. But he would smile or wink, and leave her to say it for him—and she, feeling hypocritical, would have to say it, for to leave a truth unsaid would have hurt too much. In that way she gained a reputation far beyond her skill—and she knew it. Then she grew shy of showing her work to anyone but César.

Sometimes in these discussions César would curl up and go to sleep—deliberately, not as something accidental. If Celia was there, she’d stop him and take him home, for though everyone else thought it charming, or a good joke, she could not think of it as anything but rude. Despite all that had happened to her there was still a lot of the middle-class Celia Addison there.

On those evenings someone else would escort Abigail home. Usually it was Massimo Ronzi, a tall, dark Adonis, still in his twenties. He had enormous facility with paint, which inclined him to be more of a realist, almost photographic, and entirely traditional. His great trouble was that in all Rome he could find no male model as beautiful as himself. When Abigail first heard him make this complaint, she thought he was joking. But he was quite serious. His youthful obsession with his own beauty and skill—and prowess—always amused her. It certainly lightened many journeys home.

“Celia is your friend?” he asked once.

“Naturally.”

“Why don’t you move out and give her a chance?”

“What nonsense now, Massimo?”

“No nonsense at all. She’s in love with César. Any fool can see that.”

“Then, of course, I have to take
your
word for it!”

But the shaft was lost on him. “Of course,” he said complacently. “And César cannot choose between you. If you move out, he has to choose.”

“Ah, youth!” she said. “It’s all so easy.”

“You come with me. I’m a superb lover.”

She laughed and squeezed his arm. “Don’t be absurd.”

“And you’re beautiful. With a beautiful woman I’m even more superb.”

Tiring of him, she began to hum a tune.

“It’s nice,” he said, as calmly as if she had not snubbed him at all. “I sing too. Superbly.”

And he sang “Là donna è mobile” (what else!) from
Rigoletto.
And—she had to allow—he sang, if not superbly, at least very well. People came from their houses and out onto balconies to listen; and they clapped when he finished. Rome does not confer its accolade lightly.

“I am even more superb as a lover,” he said. “Come and try.”

His persistence intrigued her. “How many women do you talk to like this?” she asked.

“All. I want all women.”

“And how many accept?”

He had to think. It was not a question that had concerned him before.

“Many?” she prompted. “Most?”

“One in ten,” he said proudly. “Enough.”

She did not want to snub him again, not outright. “I’ll think about it, Massimo,” she said.

“Most women say that,” he told her. “And if in the end you say no, we can still be friends. I am not too proud. The loss will be more yours than mine.”

“You make it very easy.

“No. It is already easy.”

She often thought about what Massimo had said concerning Celia and César. And it was, she decided, possibly true. Perhaps even the pair of them did not realize it; but there was some kind of rapport between them.

Strong enough to call love? No one could know that until its strength was challenged.

***

The Roman autumn was devised especially for painters, just as Travertine marble is made by nature for the Roman sun, which burnishes it with gold at the slightest touch. The autumn light is like no light ever seen in northern Europe. It sparkles. It is the light that shines from the heart of a crystal. It wakens every surface, even the dullest, with a lambent fire. That autumn it kept César and the two women painting from twilight dawn to twilit dusk. It was an intoxication that left their evenings hung over with a surfeit of visual delight. Abigail’s memory of that time was of the perfect silence that reigned between them. She had, of course, seen the Roman autumn before; but not as a painter sees it. Naïve as her visual sense still was, she now knew well enough to marvel where before she had merely enjoyed.

She marvelled, too, at the vast new world painting had opened up to her. She could never be bored again. The train is three hours late? Marvellous! Out with the sketchbook and cram its pages with life, life, and more life! She could reach out and touch the world directly. As a writer she had
thought
she could do that; but now writing began to seem a monstrously stiff and roundabout way of connecting with the world. And the painter did more than merely connect. The painter loved! Every line was a line in an unending hymn of love sung to the world. In church every Sunday, while others offered up their standard prayers, she prayed especial thanks for the new eyes of childhood that had been miraculously restored to her.

In December, when winter at last fell upon them and she remembered to go and buy a little present to send to William, she said to the other two, “If Annie was to come here now, or Pepe, I think I’d worry first about which room to put them in!”

It was winter that brought home to them the reason for their astonishingly low rent. In the heady days of spring, who looks for fireplaces? Or in the torrid heat of summer? Or even during the golden hours of autumn, when the whole world clamours to be painted? But winter, rimming the tiles with frost, muting at last the stink of fish, putting clouds of breath between eyes and easel, winter revealed at once the dread fact: there were no fireplaces in the atelier.

Of necessity then they ate out in the cafés. And when the rains drove down and they had to send for meals to be brought in a pail, they also had to hire
scaldini
from the artisan’s wife and sit with their feet ensconced in the warmth of them, huddled under blankets, and praying for just a touch of the heat they had cursed in summer and would curse again not six months hence.

January was worst. They said it was the hardest cold in memory. The breath froze one night in César’s beard. When they arrived home he twirled the ice in fairy sherds onto their doormat. Abigail lay in bed and wondered if she could survive the night. Nothing seemed to warm her.

A voice said, “This is madness.” César’s.

It was all the excuse he offered for climbing beneath the sheets with her. He had brought his own blankets. He was huddled up to her while she was still deciding whether to object or not.

“Don’t try anything,” she warned.

“Try what, for heaven’s sake!” he said.

When they were just a little warmer she asked, “Why didn’t you go to Celia? She’s nearer to you.”

“I…” he began. But then he was silent.

How might he have completed the sentence, she wondered? “I respect her too much? I prefer you? I have already seen you naked, so you no longer frighten me? I do not love you, so you don’t tempt me?”

It was strange, she thought, a token of the mystery of César, that she had no idea what he might have said.

When they were warmer still, warm enough for her to begin to feel guilty, she asked, “Will Celia be all right?”

Only by the change in his breathing did she know that the question stirred him. “People die of hypothermia,” he said. Then he chuckled. “Or, to put it into medical language—they croak of the cold. I’ll get her. It’s better anyway. You smell too beautiful.”

He was soon back with Celia. “D’you think it’s all right, Abbie?” she asked. But she was already between them, shivering gratefully in the warmth they had created.

After the intensity of the cold they had endured separately, the warmth was all the argument needed to quell their moral doubts. In any case, having fretted awake for so long, they were soon blissfully asleep.

Their awakening was a little sheepish. The sun had taken off some of the chill, removing also the direct justification for being together—the justification their flesh could feel.