Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  And what followed was the purported speech of the president, Sir Francis Grant, replied to by Lord Derby for the government, and by the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaking on behalf of Money. It was cruel; it was accurate; it was devastating; and it was very funny. The academicians’ pursuit of money and social rank at the expense of artistic values was flayed mercilessly—seemingly out of the sublimely (if unconsciously) revealing utterances of their own president. The government’s philistinism shone through every line of Lord Derby’s reply, which was mostly taken up with a petulant attack on the few Noble Lords who had artistic taste—they would keep delaying the government in its attempts to put up new buildings like the National Gallery and the Law Courts or to beautify existing buildings with coloured brick, patent glass frescoes, and the like. The Chancellor confined himself to congratulating the Academy on keeping its finances so utterly secret that no one could even guess what they did with the ten thousand pounds they received from visitors to their exhibitions each year. Certainly the paltry three hundred lavished on the dinner came nowhere near it—nor the five hundred or so they spent on the Academy Schools. Perhaps, he concluded, he and they might enter a partnership; all his life he had sought someone clever enough to conceal the government’s management of money from the Audit Office and the House of Commons.

  When she read it over—and had finished hugging herself in delight—she began to wonder where all the jibes and thrusts had come from. A few she recognized—comments made by people at her mother’s salon; others she had no doubt read and forgotten; but most had sprung new-minted from her own mind. Indeed, not even from her mind but almost from the tip of her pen; she had been as astonished to see them take form on the page as any onlooker would have been.

  She knew she could never sign this with her own name. Too many of her mother’s friends were—if only by implication—skinned in it. She signed the pseudonym “Abbé”—“the Abbot”—at the foot of the page and blew the ink dry.

  Then she took it back to Pepe, finding him just on the point of leaving for dinner at Stone’s. “Come and eat,” he suggested, thrusting her manuscript in his pocket.

  “Women aren’t allowed there, surely?”

  “Then we’ll go to the Café de l’Europe. No! I know. That place in Russell Street, the Albion. They have private rooms there.”

  Private rooms! She had heard the words whispered and giggled at in ballrooms.

  When he saw her hesitation, he said, “Oh, it’s quite respectable at the Albion. That’s one thing we could learn from the French. I mean, where in this city can a man take his wife and daughters to dine? There’s only Simpson’s, the London Taverns, and the Albion. If you want mutton, we’ll go to Simpson’s, otherwise I’d recommend the Albion.”

  Instead of getting back into her carriage she grasped him by the arm and pushed him along Drury Court toward Drury Lane. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I don’t care if we eat dry bread and water. I want you to read my piece and tell me where you’re going to sell it.”

  She let Dilks, the coachman, see the Albion and then told him to return in two hours. They were shown into a magnificent room where a dozen might dine and not feel cramped. They had two waiters apiece.

  “This had better be a good article,” he joked, “or I shall be well and truly out of pocket.”

  They ordered turtle soup, cod à la crème au gratin, and roast snipe, with poached eggs and spinach to finish. It was a four-and-sixpenny dinner even without the wine.

  “Is it a very good piece?” Laon asked, looking at the list of wines.

  “The best,” she promised.

  “Then,” he told the waiter, “we, too, shall have the best: Tokay d’Alsace and a Château Curé Bon La Madeleine.”

  “Are you going to read it?” she asked before he had even finished the order.

  “I suppose I might.” He looked around the room. “Nothing better to do.” With great ceremony he took out her manuscript, laid it flat, ironed it several times with his hands, and then, when he could find no more cause for delay, began to read.

  He did not laugh once. His fingers gripped the paper ever tighter. His nostrils dilated, his eyes hardly blinked, but not a smile stirred his lips, not a chuckle escaped him. Abigail, watching him, was close to screaming with frustration before he had finished.

  He tapped the paper two or three times, folded it, and then raised his eyes to meet hers. “Stunning,” he said.

  “D’you like it?”

  More to himself than to her he added, “I wonder what Swift’s first piece was like?” He stood abruptly; if there had been soup on the table he would have spilled it. “I want a second opinion. Shan’t be long.” And the door closed behind him before she was halfway through asking him where he was going.

  A waiter came with their soup; she told him to take it back until Pepe returned. She waited ten minutes, committing the wallpaper pattern and the decoration of the cornice to memory; then she sent for her soup and the Tokay, consuming them alone. The suspense made her ravenous; she almost sent for his soup, too.

  She was into the second glass of Tokay when he returned, bursting with delight. “I sold it!” he said incredulously. “Just like that! I sold it!”

  “To whom?”

  He settled himself and smiled at her. When he spoke again he was a great deal calmer. “Ah—that shows you’re not yet a fully fledged writer. A true professional’s first question would be ‘how much?’”

  “Who to?” she said insistently.

  His soup came. He maddened her further by eating like a Frenchman—in reverent silence, as if the soup came straight from the kitchens in paradise.

  She took a loose spoon and held it threateningly over his plate. “If you don’t tell me, at once,” she said, “I’m going to let this fall.”

  Grinning, he pushed the spoon away and prepared to tell her. “You don’t deserve it,” he warned. “Things like this aren’t supposed to happen.”

  “Things like what? I shall scream in a minute.”

  “Winifred talked of omens. Good and bad. Well, here’s an omen that couldn’t be better.”

  She changed her mood abruptly then, sipping her Tokay and looking at him coolly. “The grape, I would say, was plucked an hour too early in the day.” She sipped again. “Perhaps half an hour.”

  He told her then: “I suddenly remembered that some of the fellows from Punch dine here. Francis Garfield’s up there.” He pointed to the floor above. “At this minute your manuscript is about twenty feet over our heads. Next week it will be in every drawing room in England. Men in all the London clubs will be puzzling themselves into rigor over who this remarkable satirist who signs himself ‘Abbé’ can possibly be!”

  She said it then: “How much?”

  “He offered fourteen.”

  Her jaw dropped. Her heart skipped a beat.

  “I told him it wasn’t intended for Punch and I was on my way to Once a Week with it. Immediately he said twenty! So I didn’t try to nudge our luck any further.”

  “Twenty pounds!” Abigail shrieked.

  “Guineas!” he roared back. “Waiter! A magnum of the Bollinger ’62!”

  He was not serious again until the cod had been dispatched. “Why didn’t you tell me about it when we met this morning?” he asked.

  “I hadn’t done it then.” And she told him how the piece had been written.

  He accepted the account because, as he said, the thing read as if it happened in just that way. “Can you do more? D’you want to?” he asked.

  “What other exhibition is there? The British Artists?”

  “No, no. Not just art. Any journalism. ‘Abbé’ could be a general sort of wasp.”

  She grew thoughtful. “We’ve forgotten my parents,” she said.

  “That’s for you to consider, certainly.”

  “Pepe, why did yo
u quarrel with your father?”

  For an irresolute moment he stared a little to one side of her. Then he said, “At the risk of sounding repetitive, for I believe I’ve recently used the words in another connection, it’s not a fit topic for conversation.”

  “Is it something he did? Or something you did?”

  “It’s something he…does. Have some more Tokay.”

  “In the best society one never says ‘more’ like that. Even if it’s the person’s fiftieth glass, you offer it as if it were their first.”

  He laughed. “You can always do an etiquette column in one of my lot. Once you have sorted out your pronouns.”

  She smiled and then let a silence grow, for she wanted him to understand that her next question was serious. “Do you like your magazines, Pepe? You’re sometimes very disparaging about them.”

  He, too, became serious. “I…if I had to sell up, they would be the very last things I’d let go. I couldn’t say this to another man. He’d be bound to take it the wrong way.” He laughed, more in embarrassment than in humour. “I don’t know that I could say it to a woman, either—to anyone but you, my darling. I feel that part of me is a woman.”

  He lifted the bottle and peered at the gaslight through it. “Talk on!” he said to the wine. She realized then that he had laid this confession before her exactly as she had laid her article before him: full of trepidation—a potential sacrifice to laughter.

  “Why?” she asked, wanting to frame a more specific question but lacking all the words for it.

  Committed, he plunged on, as he emptied the bottle into their glasses. “Ask me what I really want in life and it isn’t riches or influence. All I want is to know what it’s like to be a woman. You think differently. You feel differently. You do not approach anything as we do. We are certainly not mere mirror images of one another—that is, you do not respond to us as we do to you, not even by opposites. Nor do you respond to yourselves as we respond among each other. I don’t mean that the differences are great. In fact, they are minute when you think of all that we have in common. But their very minuteness…I mean, you’d think something so small would easily get bruised or rubbed away. But they don’t! They persist, these differences. I’m sure they’d resist every conscious effort to efface them. And that stubborn, ironclad persistence is what makes them so eternally fascinating to me.”

  In the silence his embarrassment returned. He looked at his thumbnail and found nothing. “If I said that to a man, he’d think I meant it as a highfalutin’ way of excusing something unworthy. And I’m sure most women would believe I was out on an obscure ‘fishing expedition.’ But you understand, don’t you, Abbie?”

  Smiling, she took his hand between hers and nodded. Even the strongest words would have been less reassuring.

  “It is an impossible ambition. I realize that. But if I can know one woman as intimately and as entirely as I think I know myself. So that when I touch her here”—he stroked her gloved forearm—“I almost feel it here.” He touched his own forearm, and laughed. “Does that sound ridiculous?”

  The laughter was a welcome relief. “It depends, my darling,” she said, “on which woman you are talking about.”

  He became serious again; but it was a different seriousness, not tense with confession, but beautiful. “You know it is you,” he said. “We are bound at the wheel of each other now. We could not imagine, we could not even contemplate, a life without the other. Lord knows what sort of life we may have together; I know it won’t all be ‘a bank where the wild thyme grows.’ But a life apart is now unthinkable.”

  Chapter 16

  Next morning at breakfast there was a large package directed to her in Pepe’s handwriting. It contained the previous week’s issue of Punch, folded open at a certain page, and the cryptic note: Care to bite the hand that feeds you? P.P.

  The piece he referred to was not one of Punch’s sprightliest—a tired page that might have condensed to a wry paragraph, mocking Mr. Bright’s proposal to enfranchise female property owners. Mr. Punch could not decide whether to laugh or be angry, so he sputtered between the two; his main argument was that the female mind was incapable of grasping, propounding, or following a logical train of thought and would therefore make a mockery of elections and Parliament.

  Abigail, who suspected that no mind, of either sex, was capable of logic when deep interests were threatened, thought Punch would be easy game. And so it was—too easy. The Abbot’s technique was to show folly and stupidity caught in flagrante delicto. Royal Academicians had been mocked out of the mouth of their own president—so let it be with parliamentarians (for it was they, not Mr. Punch, who would deny Bright’s motion). The parliamentary reports in Hansard would supply all her texts.

  It was a mere hour’s work—and most of that spent in simple copying—to cull half a dozen prime samples of inane masculine logic from those distinguished columns. Mr. Punch’s argument, suitably condensed to that one wry paragraph—and looking so much the better for it that even the editor himself could hardly complain—made her opening; and the simple assertion that “there must be at least ten million female minds in this country incapable of grasping, let alone following, the logic that shone forth from every parliamentary word” made a nice rounding-off conclusion.

  And yet…and yet it lacked the sparkle of the Abbot’s earlier piece on the Academy. She read it again but could not see precisely where “he” might add that sparkle. He had a good opening—that is, he took the argument he was going to attack and summarized it better than its original advocate could have done. His examples were amusing—doubly so when wrenched from their context. And his conclusion was both logical and pithy. But the whole thing remained ordinary. Indeed, if the tide of public and journalistic opinion had not been toward the other camp, you could have read such a piece in a dozen journals over a dozen signatures.

  Laon’s opinion of it was even lower than hers. “It’s a mere answering of like with like,” he said. “Everyone knows that women are inane, empty-headed creatures given over entirely to petty frivolities. If we are going to make any dent in that knowledge, we shall have to do ten times better than this.”

  He dropped her manuscript back on his desk. Then he saw her crestfallen face and sought to comfort her. “It’s merely good,” he said with a smile. “You’re never going to be merely good. You’re going to be the brightest star in the firmament.”

  And though she smiled back, his words descended on her like a great, gray weight. He was not joking, for all his jocularity. He meant it. And she knew that whatever talent she might possess, whatever occasional flashes of achievement it might serve up, she had not the sustaining genius to fulfil his prediction or to answer his hopes.

  “The good thing about this,” he said, picking up her piece again, “is that it shows you can turn out an ordinary, acceptable piece of journalism any day of the week. I’ll sell this for you, if you want. Not for twenty guineas, mind; more like three or four—if that. But I’d prefer you to take it away and try to come back with something more worthy of the Abbot’s signature. However, the choice is yours.”

  The choice is yours! she thought, not once but many times over the days that followed—days in which she wrestled with the impossible task of matching the Abbot’s first fine, careless (or did she mean carefree?) rapture. With a little more maturity and experience she would have seen at once what was lacking: she was no barrister, ready to argue for or against, up or down, black or white, at the drop of a guinea or ten; the fact was that she didn’t care a straw whether Mr. Bright got his motion or not. That was Winnie’s sort of obsession, not hers. She felt no identity with Womankind, and so could recognize no common cause with such a large and vague abstraction. She was too busy writing her book, loving her Pepe, discovering her world and selfhood, to engage her energies in anything so diffuse. “Enfranchisement of Propertied Women”? It sounded like a private joke among p
olitical philosophers.

  So, she began to ask herself, what did she care about; beyond, that is, her own immediate concerns? The only thing that absolutely sprang to mind was painting. She had always cared about painting. From her earliest girlhood she had never been able to go into a gallery or look at others’ collections without forming the strongest opinions as to the merits and failings of the works on show.

  Yes, but did she care about the wider aspects of the thing? she went on to ask. It was all very well to respond to this or to that particular painting, but what about Art? What was it for? And was the present generation serving that purpose well or ill?

  Even as the questions formed—and long before any answers occurred to her—she felt stiffened by a certain rapt concentration. Later she was to recognize this tension as the final stage of verbal pregnancy, the moment when ideas within her came to term. On this afternoon, though, sheer instinct guided her to take up her pen, brush aside her earlier drafts, and begin writing at the dictation of an inner voice that thought only a fraction of a second ahead of the moving hand.

  “In our common vision of the future,” she wrote, “do we foresee a time peopled exclusively by a mildly philosophical middle class, drifting through Arcadia in aniline-dyed druid costumes? I fear we do. And for that appalling vision we have no one to blame but the Pre-Raphaelites, unless it be ourselves.”

  She read back through the opening and changed middle class into the more exotic bourgeoisie, a word just coming into vogue. Then she went on to develop a scathing attack on all schools of modern art, and most especially the Pre-Raphaelites, for their backward-looking vision of beauty. It was something, she felt, that could proudly bear the signature l’Abbé.

  “But it’s all about art again,” Laon objected when he had read no more than the first paragraph. Yet he read on. And she could tell by his rapt, unsmiling face and his fierce grip upon the paper that she had written another “stunner.”

  “Superb,” he said when he had finished.