Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  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:

  She was so immersed in these absurd little creatures that she failed to hear her mother until she was only a pace or two away. Then, halfheartedly, she covered the drawing; but all the passion seemed to have gone out of her, and when her mother delicately lifted her hands from the page she did not resist.

  Nora smiled. “The saddest thing about passion,” she said, “is that it never lasts.”

  Abigail, to her own surprise, was touched—and a little fearful that her mother was about to confess some secrets of her own marriage.

  But Nora said, “Don’t fret about Annie. She wasn’t nearly as upset about her dismissal as you might imagine.”

  Abigail shrugged.

  “But,” Nora went on, “I came here to talk about the Manly girl, Effie Manly.”

  “Mrs. Caldecott as she is now, you mean?”

  “Yes.” For a moment Nora appraised her daughter. “Tell me. Did it ever strike you as an odd match? The Honourable Effie and a major in the Royal Engineers?”

  “I thought she was very much in love with him.”

  “Indeed she had every cause to be. And grateful. Did you know that her dowry was not far short of fifty thousand pounds?”

  “But why? I would have thought…”

  “And d’you know why they were married so quickly?”

  “Because he was posted to India, surely.”

  “But do you know the real reason?”

  And when Abigail still looked blank, Nora’s hands sculpted a pregnancy in the air in front of her.

  Abigail was dumbfounded.

  “Think of it, darling,” Nora went on evenly. “Imagine yourself in that situation. Think of a little wriggling, squirming thing growing there inside you. Growing and growing and growing. And nothing you can do to stop it. And all the while you know that it will soon become impossible to hide your guilt and your shame. And then you will never be able to marry. You will never have any position in Society. All your friends will cease to know you, even to recognize you. You pass them in the street and they do not bother to turn away, as they would if they were snubbing you. They don’t even recognize you to that degree. They simply stare right through you. No one even talks about you. You never were. Your existence has been blotted out of everyone’s register. And all of that for one brief act of folly that was probably inept, humiliating, and painful.”

  Abigail sat tensely, her eyes shut, shivering. She wanted to run from the room. She wanted to stay and listen to every word. She wanted her mother to tell it to her again and again. She didn’t want to hear it.

  Nora went on: “And, in my view, this happened to poor Effie all because dear Lady Jane believes—or believed—in telling her daughters what you made poor Annie tell you. And Effie, being rather like another young lady not a million miles from here, has to see for herself if it’s true. And that’s what frightens me, because I know you. I know you will be quite incapable of letting such knowledge…”

  “Me!” Abigail cried, both horrified and angry. “You think I could do that? Let any man do that?”

  “If I gave you the key to paradise and said…”

  “Paradise? You said it was painful. And humiliating.”

  “Only the first time or so. No, it is clear to me that you must…”

  “Before Annie told me, I remember now, before she told me, she had a little private argument with herself. And she decided it was too dangerous not to know such things. And I agree.”

  “So do I!” Nora laughed tendentiously. “So does everyone. Good heavens above—why do you think you are chaperoned everywhere and never given even thirty seconds of opportunity! But as I was saying: You must be engaged as soon as possible and married as soon as is decent. There’s no other course now.”

  Abigail felt suddenly as if she were at the edge of a whirlpool. Invincible forces would soon clutch at her—already, in her father’s words, and now in her mother’s, she felt their first tugging. They would drag her down. Somewhere out there was an unknown man who, for the exchange of a few vows and the gift of a name, would acquire the right to her.

  “I’d rather be a…” she began to blurt out.

  And then she went very silent.

  Chapter 7

  I’d rather be a nun, she had been going to say—meaning it to be such a ridiculous overreaching of the possible that her mother would be shocked into understanding how she truly felt. But even in the heat of that intended outburst some little element of persuasion had bitten off the sentence and tucked the unspoken half away for calmer reflection. It was not, after all, impossible. Her reading then took a new and, to her parents, alarming turn. She read the whole of The Imitation of Christ at one sitting, and then reread it many times. St. Augustine’s Confessions followed. Then Renan’s La Vie de Jésus, which confirmed rather than diminished her faith. Volumes of sermons, most from the previous century, began to fill her bookshelves, until she knew as much of Socinianism (“Light without heat”) as of Methodism (or “Heat without light”—as she dismissed both, pretending the phrases were hers). She scanned the pages of The Times and the Morning Post until she knew every nuance of the current ecclesiastical controversy and could talk of Puseyites and Vestments and Ritual with the best.

  Could talk—and did. For at weekends, when the family went down to their country house at Maran Hill in Hertfordshire, Abigail soon became the village’s most fervent Sunday school teacher, and this gave her licence to invite the curate to tea each Saturday, where they determined the lessons, the texts, and all the other business for the morrow. Within a year she had him into wooden sandals and a haircloth habit, cowl and all, living off bread and water, as miserably ecstatic a
s St. Jerome himself—and guiltily seeking escape into another curacy (a comfortable one on some remote, windswept Hebridean island, beyond the Friday-to-Monday reach of this intense and strangely compelling girl).

  It was a dangerous game but it bought her two years during which no one dared press her too seriously on the subject of marriage, for fear of driving her yet deeper into this present mania. It was dangerous because the forces she was playing with, the forces of Faith, held particular perils for a maiden girl at the end of her teens, especially one who had no real occupation in life. And so it proved with her.

  What had begun in panic, as the only possible (because the only respectable) reason for opposing her parents’ determination to see her married, soon consumed every waking moment and even pursued her into her dreams. The rector counselled the family that religious manias of this kind were not uncommon among girls of Abigail’s age and that they rarely lasted long enough to be worrisome. The family were not comforted. They knew Abigail as the rector did not. Even Winifred, who to start with (and rightly) suspected her sister’s sincerity, soon grew as worried as the rest. She tried to steer Abigail’s thinking toward the classical virtues of moderation and skepticism, but to no avail; reason and burning faith have no meeting ground—as Caspar, soon afterwards, discovered.

  On a visit to Falcon Wood, while they were watching one of the lakes being dug (she would not go near the new house—she wanted that to be a surprise when it was finished), he suddenly asked her, “D’you think it’s wise to put so much trust in God, Abbie?”

  She was too astounded to do more than repeat his word. “Wise?”

  “Yes, it seems to me, looking back through history with an unbiased eye, that about the only thing you can say with certainty is that if God has any profession at all, it consists entirely in letting His followers down.”

  He was prepared for her to run away; his hands were ready to grab at her arm as she gathered her skirts. Abigail of old would have run. But the new Abigail, secure in the fortress of her faith, merely smiled knowingly—forgivingly—and told him he was wasting his breath, like every other member of the family.

  “‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’” he quoted. “They’ve all said it, you know, in their different ways.”

  Again that smile. “When you test a piece of steel and it breaks, Steamer, d’you give up the business of steelmaking? D’you send out the town crier to ring his bell and tell the world that ‘Stevenson’s steel breaks’? Because that’s what you’re saying about God, you know.”

  “The only ones who didn’t get their fingers burned are those who obviously had no faith at all. The hunting, wenching popes of the Renaissance, who gave us Raphael and Michelangelo and Leonardo and Bramante and Vasari and the glory that is Rome. No grumbles about being forsaken there!”

  “They also gave us the Protestant faith. Surely that was no small monument.”

  Caspar laughed incredulously. “And that was God’s purpose?”

  “Of course. How simpleminded you are sometimes, Steamer. Henry the Eighth was hardly any better when it came to hunting and wenching. Yet he was the vessel through whom God managed to keep burning the light of our one, true Catholic Church. I may be young and silly but if there’s anything I’ve learned this last year or so, it’s that you get nowhere by trying to fathom divine purpose.”

  “Hmm!” It was all Caspar could say; he had been sure the argument would be much easier than this.

  “Anyway,” Abigail went on, “this is fine talk from the man who reads the lessons in such tones of ringing sincerity each Sunday!”

  “Oh, I don’t underestimate the value of religion—socially, I mean. Methodism has certainly prevented working-class rebellion in this country. But everything in its place, you know.”

  “You don’t believe at all.”

  “I do.”

  “What, Steamer? Tell me what you believe.”

  Caspar scratched his scalp with all ten fingernails, raising his hat on the spider of his knuckles. He gave a half-embarrassed laugh. “D’you really want to know?” he asked. “You won’t like it. I believe that religion—whether or not there’s any truth in it—is absolutely necessary. If we look back over all the different sorts of civilizations that ever were, the only two things they had in common were a ruling class and a servant class. They may or may not have had lots of other classes, but they all had those two. And the rulers’ aim has always been to get the servants to work as hard as they could for the smallest possible share.”

  Abigail was shocked. “D’you think that’s right?”

  “Dearest Abbie—I’m not now talking about right or wrong. I’m talking about what is. And what always has been. And always will be.”

  “But why? It won’t always be so.”

  “It will. For the simple reason that there isn’t enough to go round. And never will be.” He pointed at the navvies before them, digging out the lakes and carrying the spoil to form new, artificial hills. “It would be impossible for all these men to have as much as we have, for instance. So our purpose is to persuade them to do what they are doing for as little a share as possible of what we have.”

  “Our purpose, maybe,” Abigail began hotly. “But not God’s purpose.”

  Caspar smiled wickedly. “‘I may be young and silly,’” he quoted, “‘but if I have learned anything this last year or so…’”

  “All right!” she interrupted, still angry. “But when I said that I did not mean to imply…”

  “No!” he cut across her. “You asked, and now you shall hear. I said we must persuade them to do the greatest amount of work for the smallest possible reward. That is and always has been the aim of all rulers. One way we could do it is by simple slavery. In theory that would be the most effective way of all. Slaves work till they drop and they get no more than bare subsistence. But there are two objections to slavery. In the first place it is now morally repugnant—to us, the rulers. And in the second place, it stultifies progress. For if a slave has no money, what part can he take in promoting trade and commerce?

  “The slave’s reward is negative: a mere respite from the master’s whip. But once a civilization has progressed beyond the stage of slavery, as ours has, it needs an entirely different set of rewards. And that’s where religion comes in. Most of these men are Methodists or Baptists. But whatever they are—Anglicans, papists, whatever—they all go to church every Sunday, and they all hear ‘blessed are the poor…blessed are the meek…blessed are the humble…it is harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle…sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor’ and so on and so on and so on. And here we all are on Monday morning, them and me, happy to know that poverty and meekness and humility are building them a heavenly mansion, while earthly mansions like Falconwood will crumble and their owners, like me, will rot in hell.”

  At last he looked at her to see the effect of his words. He was puzzled, for he had expected an explosion long before this.

  “You will, too,” she said bleakly, as much to herself as to him.

  “When the bishops come begging for bread at my back door, I’ll begin to worry.”

  She sighed. “Oh, Steamer! I know you mean to shock me. You’re like everyone else in the family—you want to argue me out of religion. There’s a lot of truth in what you say. But if I thought it was the entire truth, I’d rather the whole business of organized religion were torn down and…”

  “Hah!” His laugh was surprisingly bitter. “D’you think that would change anything? Just suppose it were possible (which I don’t think it would be, but suppose it were possible) to devise a civilization entirely without religion. A purely secular state. It wouldn’t change anything. There would still be a few rulers and a vast mass of servants. And there would still be not nearly enough to go round. The ruling class would simply have to invent a different kind o
f reward. One that they could invoice without ever actually delivering. A Golden Tomorrow—a New Age of Mankind—something like that. They’d have to make the servants see how noble it is to sacrifice the here-and-now rewards for the sake of the Golden Future.”

  “At least it would be more honest.”

  “Would it? Any secular ruler who could believe such nonsense would have to be remarkably stupid. He wouldn’t last long. At least one can believe in some small part of our nonsense. How else d’you think I keep going?”

  Suddenly Abigail found herself on the point of weeping for him. “Oh, darling Steamer!” she cried. “What has made you so bitter?”

  He forced a laugh then. “I grew up, I suppose. I put away childish things—like meekness, and humility, and simple faith.”

  “Then I hope I never grow up.”

  “Life will cheat you into it in the end.”

  His tone was so lugubrious it lent to their conversation an air of melodrama that embarrassed even Caspar.

  To cover her own confusion—or her unwillingness to pursue his particular line of thought any deeper—she asked him why he had told her all this. “I mean, apart from the fact that Mama or Papa probably asked you to set me straight. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t enjoyed it, you know. I didn’t do it for my own good.” And he walked away hastily and began telling one of the foremen that he wanted the work done in a different way.

  She watched him with great tenderness. There were few things in his life that Steamer had ever bungled. She hated to have had so close a part in one of them.

  ***

  Abigail did not maintain her rather aggressive faith with unblinking ferocity throughout the years that followed the incident of Annie and that first threat to marry her off. She (or something within her) was already too mature and too smart for that. To be sure, the light of her belief never failed to shine, but it would flicker. Enough to let her at least contemplate, with every outward sign of compliance, the fate her parents had in mind for her.