Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

The girls looked indecisively at each other. “Is that proper?” Winifred asked.

  “Until the nonfamily guests come, I should say so. But go up the main stair if you wish.”

  They went up the main stair. He met them up on the first floor and showed them the north-side rooms there—the governess’s room, schoolrooms, and chapel, and a spare room where the yet-to-be-born children could make their own museum.

  “Hard to know where to stow a governess, Winnie,” Caspar said. “They belong to the family yet you can hardly put them among people in Society. An awkward class—teachers.”

  Winifred pretended to see a hint in this play-insult that Caspar had certainly not intended. “Never fear, Steamer,” she promised, “I’ll send you a gel who’ll fill your daughters’ heads with emptiness, turn your sons into budding Newtons, and be only too glad not to suffocate herself in the boredom that will reign on the south side of the house!”

  And Caspar had to grin and pretend he took Winifred’s barely playful insult as a joke, too. “The bachelors,” he said, waving a hand above his head, “have nine bedrooms on the second floor, over these rooms you’ve just seen.”

  He led them to the western end of the house, to admire the principal visitors’ rooms, with their balconies that opened directly into the fragrant warmth of the winter gardens.

  “Seven tons of coke a day,” Caspar said. “And when every room in the house is occupied, we’ll take ten tons of anthracite a day, too.”

  “So now you know,” Caroline said from the door, “why he married the heiress to a dozen coal mines.”

  There was much laughing and kissing.

  “And the coking plant and gasworks,” Caspar said.

  Caroline took them through the remaining bedrooms on the south side, showing the ingenious double corridor that separated the guests from the family. The bedrooms alternately projected and receded so that, though each had a balcony, it was impossible to get from one to another without risking a twenty-foot drop to the terrace below.

  “How ingenious,” Abigail said. “Morality is built into the very stones!”

  “It was my idea,” Caroline said, taking Abigail’s words as a compliment.

  “As I said,” Caspar added. “A machine for living in. We can move around here, informally, without disturbing our guests or they us.”

  “We do not occupy the grandest room,” Caroline said. “So, when Important Persons visit we are not obliged to yield them our beds and dressing rooms.”

  “Upper servants can move without meeting the lower servants or persons, except when required. The lower servants can clean-sweep-and-polish without disturbing the family or visitors. Bachelors can reach their rooms without mingling with married people; and menservants can reach them without mingling with any other servants.”

  Caroline took over the litany. “Young ladies have their own stair from this floor”—she pointed to it—“and their maids can reach them without mingling with the visitors’ menservants, who are on the floor above.”

  “And the children, you see”—Caspar wafted an imaginary river of them through the passageway ahead—“can go from nursery to schoolroom without sight of family or visitors. But here was our problem, you see: the young ladies.”

  They had come the full half-circle and were now at the minstrel gallery, immediately above the door by which they had first entered the house, looking along the wrought-iron bridge to the armour gallery at the far end of the hall.

  “The young bachelors go up out of sight in that corner. Everyone else retires up the main stair. But how do we get the young ladies from that end to their own staircase at this end? Eh? Hardly through the schoolroom! And hardly through the family corridor on this side. Hence…” He slapped the balustrade of the wrought-iron bridge; the metal sang in the echoing hall. “The only way to the foot of the young ladies’ stair is along that fifty-three-foot length of clanging conspicuousness. Now! Is Nick not a truly great architect!”

  “Eleven different circulations of people, who need never meet unless required to do so,” Caroline added.

  “A machine,” Caspar said yet again. “A machine for living in. Come and see the servant girls’ rooms.”

  There were eleven of them; four for eight visitors’ maids, two for five ladies’ maids, two for four housemaids, one for two kitchenmaids, one for two scullery maids, and the servants’ cook had a room to herself, next to the housekeeper. “Most of the female servants live out, of course,” Caroline said.

  The rooms were as neat and cheerful as barrack quarters.

  “Come and see the future!” Caspar cried from outside the housekeeper’s apartment. He led them through a workroom full of maids sewing Christmas bunting. They rose when they saw who their visitors were, but Caroline smoothed them back into their seats with one waft of her gloved hand.

  Winifred was impressed. “They are extraordinarily quiet and industrious for such young girls,” she said.

  “Yes,” Caroline agreed as they walked into the next room—the female ablutions. “But you have to remember that we are the only substantial givers of work for miles.”

  Caspar, smiling like a magician at the climax of his act, gestured at a row of gleaming porcelain basins and brass taps. He turned one of the taps. Within moments he was seemingly enveloped in great gouts of steam.

  “Hot water!” Abigail said in astonishment. She scalded her fingers as the price of half-belief.

  “For the servants?” Winifred asked Caroline.

  Caroline smiled. “Of course, that was how I felt. I thought it absurd. But darling Caspar”—she smiled indulgently at him—“came at me with pencil and paper and proved that the time they didn’t spend carrying their own hot water and slops they could spend in serving us.”

  “No sense in paying servants to wait upon themselves,” Caspar said.

  “Have all our rooms got hot water, too?” Abigail asked excitedly.

  “Certainly not!” Caroline said. But Caspar smiled at her as if her scorn were only half the tale. “People would think,” she went on, “that we could not afford the servants to bring hot water in the proper way.”

  Still Caspar smiled.

  “What is it, Steamer?” Winifred asked.

  “When I was in America,” he said, “I remember a bath with a little charcoal stove at one end. You could fill it with water, light the stove, and in forty-five minutes it was piping hot. You could sit in it up to your neck.”

  “Ooh!” Abigail luxuriated in the very thought of it.

  “See!” Caspar waved at her as if she proved a point. “The voice of tomorrow. I’m convinced that within twenty years even the English may begin to feel that a bath should consist of more than four jugs of tepid water lugged along half a mile of frigid corridor by a frail domestic with the rheumaticks.”

  “Therefore?”

  “Therefore I have laid down over a mile of piping in the fabric of this house, ready to carry cold water and steam-heated hot water to its every corner. And waste pipes to carry off the slops.”

  “Your dear brother cannot distinguish between what is practical and what is sensible,” Caroline said. There was an edge of asperity in her voice, as if she had heard the argument once too often.

  They began to walk back to the main wing.

  “But does it all just come bubbling up out of the bedroom floor?” Abigail asked. “Like a hot spring?”

  “No. The bath is fixed. That means it needs a room of its own. A bath room.”

  “Do I have such a room?” Abigail was excited again.

  “Of course not,” Caroline said crossly. “No one does.”

  “Except the chef, the butler, and the nurseries.”

  “I mean people don’t,” Caroline corrected, as if Caspar’s qualification had been ultra-pedantic. “But the result is that we are left with fourteen small, windowless roo
ms with empty pipes beneath their boards, waiting for this bath-time revolution Caspar is so confident of. I shall tell people they may put their servants to sleep there if they want them nearby.”

  “I’ve cooled toward the idea already,” Abigail said. “The whole fun of taking a bath is stepping out in front of the fire and watching the towel steam as it toasts. And being inside it.”

  The sybaritic qualities of this vision, however innocent, embarrassed the other three.

  “Well, Steamer,” Winifred said quickly. “You have copper bars waiting for the electric revolution, and iron pipes waiting for the revolution in bathing. What other wonders are yet slumbering around us, ready to spring from their concealment as science dictates, and”—she nodded at Caroline—“as Society permits?”

  Caspar drew breath to answer but Caroline cut in: “Oh, do not be surprised to find contraptions of feathers and sealing wax among the rafters—ready against the day when all houses fly!”

  ***

  Later Caspar offered to take his sisters for a brief drive around the park before the daylight fled. Winifred, who had letters and speeches to write, papers to mark, timetables to prepare, and professional jealousies to settle, declined; but Abigail was delighted to accept. Wrapped for Siberia, they sat in the governess cart and trotted at a brisk clip down into the valley and up the other side.

  “Poor Linny,” Caspar said, feeling that some explanation of her acerbity was due. “These last three years can’t have been easy. To live in a crumbling old place like Falcon Wood, knowing that so much needed doing to it—and knowing also how wasteful that would be. And to see nothing but the hugger-mugger of a building site here. To have to entertain and make her mark on the county in the old place—all the time knowing what a splash she could be making if only this place had been ready. It must have been very hard.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t have lived so close.”

  “From her point of view, that’s true. But since I could devote only two days a week to the building, if we had taken a house elsewhere, I’d never have seen her. Work! It’s our curse.”

  “You are happy, aren’t you, Steamer?”

  “Indeed!” He laughed. “Why d’you ask?”

  “When you mentioned America I nearly dropped. I never heard you…I thought you’d obliterated that memory.”

  “America.” His voice was curiously flat, neither questioning nor musing.

  “D’you ever think of her?”

  He stared at his sister a long time. “Of course,” he said at last. “Every day.”

  “Oh, Steamer. I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled. “Every day I imagine her trying to manage Falconwood. And how she’d fail. And how miserable that failure would make her. And how superbly Linny copes with it all. You know we shall be sleeping forty-six, apart from ourselves, on Boxing Day? And the ball is for over five hundred. Poor Laney could never have managed anything on that scale. She’s better off in New York. She is a queen there, just as Linny is here.”

  “Even so…”

  “Even so! Even so!” he mocked. “You Stevenson women will never understand. I think you and Winnie would actually prefer me to die of a broken heart. Well, I’m sorry but I shan’t oblige. When I took on the responsibility for the firm, it automatically became necessary for me to marry someone like Linny. I’m lucky enough to love her, too. So spare me your easeful deaths, if you please.”

  She smiled and hugged his arm, not quite believing him but content to let matters rest.

  “Also,” Caspar went on, “I’d be grateful if you’d do all you can—you and Winnie—to help her make a success of this first big occasion. You are both very self-assured young ladies and very at ease with people. You could do a great deal, you know—more perhaps than even you think.”

  “Of course!” Abigail almost shouted the assurance. Her brother seemed so vulnerable in his appeal, she would have done anything to restore his usual ebullience.

  “I know we Stevensons are supposed to be the new arrivals and the Sherringhams are the old guard, but in some curious way Linny craves to be accepted by us. And especially by you and Winnie.”

  Abigail was astounded at this news; the thought had never occurred to her. Linny was such a patrician sort of person most of the time.

  “I’d be more than grateful, Abbie,” Caspar said.

  The sun, hugely red yet heatless, flattened as it sank toward the mists above the skyline. The valley was already dark. The frozen lakes along its bottom gleamed like vast, dull stones. As the cart followed the winding driveway up the far side, it seemed they climbed into a second dawning.

  Abigail deliberately did not look at Falconwood until the cart drew up near a small pavilion and Caspar said, “Now.”

  They had timed it perfectly. The sun laid a majestic fire across the red brick of the house. It caught each projection and moulding and lined it with gold. The still untarnished copper spire on the clock tower burned against the violet of advancing night. The orange glow of gaslights flickered through the black windows. And in front of the house gleamed the pale marble of the terrace and steps, colder than the frosted lawns or the ice-sheeted waters.

  It was so exactly what Caspar had wanted that she laughed. She wanted to stand up and jump and clap her hands, like a child. “Oh, Steamer!” she said rapturously. “Just think, if God had been as rich as us, He could have done the whole world like that!”

  When the blasphemy of her words—an utterly unintended blasphemy—struck her, she turned to him and gripped his arm. “I mean…”

  But Caspar was already laughing hugely—a laughter that seemed to carry more relief than humour. “Oh,” he said as he grew calm again, “I told the mater not to worry. Wait till I tell her this!”

  “No. Please! I didn’t mean it in that way.”

  He looked at her, disbelieving, then a little worried. “Really?”

  She thought back. Had she meant it? Had some part of her, just behind her immediate thoughts, actually meant it? She smiled. “Perhaps just a little bit,” she said. “I meant to be funny—say something absurd. But not blasphemous.”

  Life was getting so complicated lately. Until very recently she would never have questioned what lay beyond her immediate consciousness; that would have seemed a kind of blasphemy.

  Then, for the first time in two years, she felt an urge to be writing. Her long-abandoned children’s tale surfaced in her mind just as, in childhood days, thoughts of iced orangeade and pantomimes had surfaced. Pop!

  Caspar, grinning again, stretched an arm about her and squeezed. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  She looked back at Falconwood, knowing that however many times she would see it in years to come, from whatever angles and in whatever moods, it would never again look as lovely as it did now, newborn and waiting to begin its life.

  On their way down into the dark of the vale he turned to her. “That—what you said. I wouldn’t repeat it to Linny. She is very conventional that way.”

  As they breasted the farther slope and emerged again into the last of the twilight he stopped and headed the pony across the drive so that they could look once more at the valley. As night slipped up from the east the brightest stars were already twinkling out of the purple. The colours of the park and woodland had sunk to the darkest resonance of their daylight splendour—a dull mightiness of jostling patchwork at the very limits of vision. Somewhere far off a vixen yapped, a sharp, plaintive call that seemed to double the intensity of the frost.

  Caspar clucked the pony into movement once again. “What a difference a few dozen degrees make,” he said. “Last July I was standing here wondering how to endure the heat—and the insects. And now!”

  Abigail smiled. “Think of Boy in India.” Boy—whose real name was John—was their eldest brother.

  “I suppose so. Funny thing about those insects. Mostly little
midges. They were thick enough, you know, to form actual clouds. It was like a mist. A drifting mist in quite a stiff, steady breeze. There must have been hundreds of millions of them to make clouds like that. And that was just the output of this one valley. Think of all the valleys, all the land, in England. And they’re quite at the mercy of the breeze, you know. A lot of them, millions and millions, just get carried out to sea and die.”

  As his words formed an image in her mind’s eye a sharp sadness caught her up. The waste of it all…the sheer profligacy! She remembered something one of the learned men in her mother’s salon had said to her: “If you think in mere numbers, then the most typical living thing is a creature actually in its death throes or within moments of them.” In a curious way he had intended it as a sign of hope. “To survive one day in the kingdom of plants and animals,” he had concluded, “is a small miracle. And a great mercy to us.” When she thought of those millions of insects being wafted to their collective death from this one valley—this one lovely peaceful haven—it was hard to find comfort in her own survival.

  “D’you think they chatter to each other as they go, Steamer?” she asked. “About life? And God? And happiness?”

  He laughed. “What strange ideas you do get!”

  As they clattered over the new cobbles of the stable yard he remembered something. “Whom has Winnie invited down, d’you know? She wasn’t sure last week.”

  “A man called Laon, I think. Percy Laon. Or is it Peter?”

  “Does he do anything?”

  “Everyone Winnie knows does something. She wouldn’t tolerate an idler. I think he’s something to do with ladies’ magazines.”

  “A scribbler?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a queer name, Laon. Sounds foreign.”

  “Tut tut!” Abigail mocked as she skipped ahead of him toward the house.

  They were late. Tea was already served, and their parents, John and Nora—looking very much the Earl and Countess amid the gothic splendour of the morning room—were thawing gratefully by the fire.

  “I haven’t shown them around,” Caroline said quickly to Caspar, as soon as the welcomes were over. She turned to Nora. “It would be more than my life is worth.”