Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “Please!” she begged, not knowing what she begged. “Oh, please!”

  “Yes!” he promised, not knowing what he promised.

  His fingers stole to the edge of her breast. She drew a deep breath; her lost voice meandered in and out of her breathing.

  His hand covered her breast. At once that inward glow turned to incandescence. A distant cry, her own, echoed through the sudden infinity she had become. Delight so great it was also a terror seized her, again and again—then there was a quick and overwhelming fear of death.

  She knew—beyond certainty she knew—that she was close to death. Her skin burned in uneven flushes. Her heart would not beat; it squirmed in its weakness. She pulled his hand off her and crept at once into his embrace, straining herself to him, wanting to die in his arms.

  Now his hands comforted her, dowsing the fires that had turned to terror, gently easing apart that awe-full unity, restoring all the separate parts of her body to her own possession.

  “There,” he said, kissing her salt-soaked cheeks.

  Feeling hot she drew away from him and blew down her front to cool herself. Where her skin had burned there were lingering patches of discolour. “Something is wrong with me,” she said.

  “Mmmm?”

  She repeated herself in more matter-of-fact tones.

  “I’ll poison any doctor who confirms it,” he said. His voice was lethargic, all his movements leaden; he was only half awake.

  “Seriously,” she said. “I just had a seizure of some kind. Epilepsy. Or a heart attack.”

  He laughed, a comatose attempt at a hearty laugh, and hugged her to him. “Oh, Abbie, Abbie! I love you.”

  “What?” She did not like to be unwittingly funny.

  “Don’t you understand?”

  “You saw the Great God Pan,” he said. “And so,” he added, pointing at a damp mark on his pantaloons, “did I.”

  When Abigail went to Annie’s boudoir to tidy herself, she tried to explain what had happened—and found herself hesitating and stammering as if she had to say it in a language she had only half mastered. She—the writer whose sales were rivalling those of Dickens, the journalist no editor had yet refused to print—could not begin to describe what had just happened to her.

  “Blimey!” Annie said. “And all he did was touch you? There?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must love him, gel. That’s all about it.”

  “Is it? Why?”

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “I don’t know. It gave me such a fright.”

  “First time? Never happened before?”

  “Never. What was it, Annie?”

  “Next time you’ll be expecting it. Then you’ll see.”

  Abigail stared, trusting Annie’s words more than she understood them.

  “It’s what it’s all about, gel,” Annie said.

  ***

  August passed into September and the days were noticeably drawing in. Now and then a damp, salty mist would drift in off the Thames and make the year seem even later than it was.

  They dined at Annie’s as often as they could, sometimes four nights a week. For both it was a time of marvel; they knew where it was leading; Abigail did not fear it; Laon was not consumed with impatience. Day by day each unravelled more of the mystery of the other’s body. She learned the things that gave him ecstasy and discovered where her own thrills were released. In Annie’s phrase she “saw the elephant”—saw it, felt it grow, held its gristle, squeezed its sinew, contained its throb, and looked in wonder at the starchy residue on her fingers.

  She realized this was the stuff with the power to quicken her. She had no idea how; but that only made it more magic and potent. She feared it. But the fear was not of mere social death; it was of something deeper and far, far more ancient.

  And Pepe feared her, too. She could sense that. He approached her body with a sort of awe that was only part in worship; the other part was dread. She would catch him staring into her eyes as a man might stare at a bomb whose appointed hour for explosion has come and gone. Then he was the rabbit; though she did not feel one whit more like the cat.

  With time these taut moments began to slacken. The fear, the novelty, the awkwardness all diminished. The magic remained. Though their love was, as yet, unconsummated, and therefore ought to have been tense with anticipation, she found she could relax—even bask—in his sexuality, without fear, without anxiety, and with a longing untinged by desperation.

  “When?” she asked once, in that rich language that had grown between them, threadbare only in its words.

  “When we need to,” he said. “Soon.”

  But as “soon” drew near, his proposals of marriage became more insistent—as if he were hoping to make the one act conditional upon the other. He did not press, nor did he grow angry; but his quiet resignation, his sadness, which he took no pains to hide, cut her to the quick. She grieved for him that he could not see her fear of marriage and domesticity as anything but juvenile.

  Fortunately it did not affect her work, nor his impartiality as her editor and agent. And as September came on, pushing back the enervating heat of August, she fell into a spate of work that extended her in every direction, from the aloof wit of the Abbot to earnest and sincere trifles on cookery (helped by Anton, her mother’s chef) for Laon’s own magazines. She came to love the wearing of all these different hats and being all these different people—insatiable people, each of whom wanted to write her (or “his”) piece and damn the others. She averaged around seven thousand words a day, which excused the fact that she was still living at home, still merely talking of moving to a place of her own.

  One day, after delivering a shoal of articles and a couple of short stories to Laon, she was sauntering up the Strand, wondering what to write next, when the delicious thought stole upon her that she would write nothing at all. A crisp, early autumn sun was filling the city with silver; the overnight rain had settled the street dust. It was a perfect day in which to loaf; a day to be young in. She would buy the first book that seized her fancy, take it home, sit out on one of the balconies in the sun with the glorious throb of the city at her feet, and read it from cover to cover. The ambition was easy to achieve, for that part of the Strand was full of secondhand bookshops (not all of them quite as proper as their outside stalls would lead the casual passerby to imagine).

  Some angel must have guided her steps, she afterwards felt. For the book that took her fancy (more for its rich binding than its title) was a facsimile edition of one of William Blake’s prophetic poems, Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Idly she opened it and read:

  The golden nymph replied.

  “Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild,

  Another flower shall spring,

  Because the soul of sweet delight

  Can never pass away.”

  And she almost ceased to breathe.

  Then Oothoon plucked the flower, saying:

  “I pluck thee from thy bed,

  Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts;

  And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.”

  Her hair stood on end. Blake, who had lived in Fountains Court, not two hundred yards from where she now stood, knew! He was telling her all those things she felt and yet could not articulate.

  The man did not want to sell the book to her—seemed annoyed that it had been on the stall where she had found it. But Abigail insisted. And when Abigail insisted on anything, few men could deny it her for long. She hurried home. By teatime she knew the Visions of the Daughters of Albion by heart. It was the textbook for her life: “All that lives is holy.”

  That evening the mists off the Thames were thick and the fires that people kindled only served to make them thicker. Abigail and Laon had a fire set in their supper room at Annie’s. Wit
h the fever of Blake’s Visions still on her, Abigail ate lightly and the meal was soon over. Soon, too, they were lying naked, side by side in near contact, touching only with their fingertips and lips.

  He was aware of this new excitement in her and she could see his eyes posing a question his tongue could not quite frame. She wished she could babble the whole poem to him in one great superword, so that he could see it the way you see a painting; she wanted him to share it, but instantly, not dragged out in time—time during which their lust would clamour, throats would dry, scalps itch, noses need blowing, fires tending, and a thousand other mundane irritations intervene.

  He drew breath to speak, to stumble at that still-forming question. She leaped upon him, on all fours, straddling him, hanging over him. She spoke barely above a whisper, kissing him lightly at every pause, until he could relax no deeper.

  “Thy joys are tears, thy labour vain, to form men to thine image.

  How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys

  Holy, eternal, infinite; and each joy is a love?”

  “What’s this?” he asked, smiling up at her in wonderment. He began to caress her spine and hips, gently, with raking fingernails.

  At bay to her own desire she said urgently, “Listen. It’s for us. It’s about us: ‘With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?’ Forget about parsons and farmers—it’s us,” she insisted.

  “‘What are his nets and gins and traps, and how does he surround him

  With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,

  To build him castles and high spires, where kings and priests may dwell,

  Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot is bound

  In spells of law to one she baths? And must she drag the chain

  Of life in weary lust? Must chilling, murderous thoughts obscure

  The clear heaven of her eternal spring; to bear the wintry rage

  Of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod…’”

  “Oh darling!” he said. “It is wrong, wrong, wrong!”

  “Listen!”

  But he would not listen, not to her, only to the words, turning them into ‘cold floods of abstraction.’ His merciless fingers gave her longings no rest.

  “Please, Pepe,” she said, hearing the bewilderment of her straying voice. “It’s all the things I don’t want to happen to us.

  “‘To turn the wheel of false desire; and longings that make her womb

  To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form

  That live a pestilence and die a meteor, and are no more.’

  “I don’t want to…I want…” she faltered.

  “I want,” he whispered. “I want, I want, I want.”

  He slipped beneath her to kiss her hanging breasts and suckle her. His hands moved to her thighs, up and up.

  “Pepe,” she murmured. He had not heard. He listened and understood but he had not heard.

  Yet that was in the Visions too!

  …Take thy bliss, O man!

  And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

  …The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin

  That pines for man shalt awaken her womb to enormous joys…

  The words had heaped her day. The longing for him was now insupportable. She moved down upon him. He pulled her home, to the hilt of him.

  Time ceased. In that infinity of pleasure all thought came to its stop. They surrendered every faculty but sensation.

  He toppled her, smothered her. She became their bed, the room, the house, the whole Earth; it was at once the strangest and most natural thing to lack fingers…toes…all extremities, all defined boundaries—to vanish and yet to become…everything.

  At last she returned to herself, spiralling down the memory of one long voiceless moan that still lingered on the air of the room. Every muscle in her body collapsed. The movement made her aware that Pepe was no longer in her. His dead body breathed into her ear. Her hands found him, found the napkin between them, felt its dampness.

  She remembered language but not the need to use it. Not yet. The firelight was warm and golden on their bodies. The clock began to tick again. When Pepe stirred to ease his weight on her, a sudden stab of longing for him came, fierce as ever—don’t go! A little memorandum from her flesh—to remind her of its sovereignty “in lovely copulation.”

  “‘I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy, happy love! free as the mountain wind!’”

  She whispered the words to him.

  “It’s no true recipe for life though, is it?” he said, not stirring. His breath made a furnace in her hair and on her neck.

  “I want it to be. It feels so right. I know it goes in the face of everything.”

  “Especially of logic.”

  “Yes. Especially that. To want such utter freedom. Free! Love! The two most beautiful words. To want that freedom and yet to want to share every moment and morsel of it with you! To be in thrall to you, and yet to call that slavery the most perfect of all freedoms!”

  He raised himself on one elbow and pulled off the damp napkin, revealing himself shrivelled and boneless. “I could have stayed inside,” he said, “and ended all these fancies.”

  She wanted to weep. He had gathered nothing! All her ideas and feelings, as clear and sharp to her as a thousand suns…he stared straight through them as if they were not there.

  “Never think that!” she said fiercely. “I would even bear your child unmarried. A hundred children.”

  He slumped, shut his eyes, and lay beside her a long minute.

  Later, when she dressed and went up as usual to Annie’s boudoir, she found a stranger, a nervous middle-aged woman, there. “I’m Annie’s auntie, dear,” she said, offering no name.

  At first Abigail thought her nervousness was a form of embarrassment at what she knew must have been going on with Pepe in the locked supper room. But when she asked the “auntie” where Annie was, and saw the shifty look in the older woman’s eye, she knew it had something to do with that.

  “She’s out on an errand of mercy, love,” the aunt said. “Be away all week, she will.”

  Abigail was still overwhelmed by Pepe’s inability to comprehend; she had no time to bother much at Annie’s absence.

  Chapter 21

  One day that autumn—it was the week before Abigail finally left home—Wilkie Collins called on Nora. He was an even less frequent visitor than Rossetti, and Nora soon discovered he had come to see not her but “the remarkable young author of that remarkably witty book The Land of That’ll-do.” The secret was breaking; the ripples spreading.

  From the writer of The Moonstone, an even greater recent success than Abigail’s book, this was praise indeed. When Nora rang for a footman to fetch Abigail, Collins expressed a hope to see her at her desk, saying one could learn more about a writer from that than from a dozen drawing-room conversations.

  Nora knew how terrified Abigail would have been of this encounter less than a year earlier, so it was with some misgiving that she agreed to take Collins up to the room which Abigail had made her study. But when she saw how easily the girl coped, greeting Collins almost as an equal (which he did not, Nora noticed, entirely welcome), she understood just how much her daughter had matured these last months.

  They found her correcting the galleys of a short story Laon had “syndicated” for her. The term was new to Collins, and Abigail had to explain it for him. “This same story appears in five or six different country newspapers, you see,” she said.

  “And you get five or six times as much money for it?”

  “Naturally.” Abigail laughed.

  “Your Mr. Laon sounds a very clever man.”

  “Oh, it’s not his own idea,” she said. “They do it a lot in America. He heard about it
from a friend of Walter Besant’s, a Mr. Watt, who got it from someone called Tillotson.”

  Collins held out his hand for the proof. “May I?”

  He read the story with deep attention and declared it very good. But the ending he said, could be greatly improved—not by changing it, but merely by telescoping two or three incidents. “Don’t you see how much stronger that would make it?” he asked.

  She agreed.

  “D’you mind if I alter it?”

  She said she would feel honoured.

  He whipped out a pencil and soon not just her ending but the whole galley was a mass of excisions, links, and transpositions. Nora watched aghast, until her eyes met Abigail’s and Abigail winked.

  “There!” Collins had finished. As he looked at the ruin of the galley and remembered where he was and why he had come, his face fell. “I am most awfully…” he began.

  But Abigail took the galley from him and put it straight into an envelope already addressed to the Bristol Times & Mirror, the journal for which the piece was destined. She rang for a servant to take it directly to the post office at St. Martin’s. “It will arrive tomorrow,” she said. “How delighted they will be.”

  Collins forgot then whatever slight affront he had felt and began discussing writers and publishers and the book trade without reserve or condescension. After a while Nora quietly withdrew, but Collins did not notice her absence for a full half hour. When he did, he was shocked.

  “Good heavens!” he said, looking around him as if the floor had collapsed and he was left isolated on a single, infirm pinnacle. “This is most…most…er…irregular. I…”

  Abigail cut him short, not concealing her impatience at his social scruple. “You have not talked of yourself, Mr. Collins,” she said. “What is your next book to be?”

  Politeness (reinforced, to be sure, by natural inclination) forced him to answer, and in doing so he forgot the cause of his embarrassment and talked on for another half hour.