Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “He has never hurt me.”

  “He has degraded you. Anyway, what did your parents say when you told them these disgusting things?”

  Celia closed her eyes, unwilling to relive the memory. “I wanted so much to go back home. I wanted everything to be as it was before.”

  “But what did they say?”

  “They said I couldn’t come back. They said I belonged to him. Of course, they were unhappy—my mother was miserable—but they said he had the right to do whatever he was doing. And I must endure it.”

  “And for ten years you…Was there no one else you could confide in?”

  Celia shrugged at the impossibility of it. “I hinted I was unhappy to the vicar. I think he suspected that Henry was not as…as nice as he seems. He lent me books on fortitude and resignation. He reminded me I married for better or for worse—that was my vow. He is a marvellous man. A great comforter to me.”

  “What of your children? Do you have any children?”

  “How could God bless so wicked a union!”

  “Is that why you are now desperate enough to…well, to write to me as you did? You feel the wickedness?”

  Her heavy eyelids fell as she nodded; to open her eyes again seemed a labour in itself. “Also, it gets worse. Last time it began at ten and finished at four next morning. I cannot go without sleep as he can. I am worn to a frazzle by it.”

  “So I can see.” Abigail thought it odd that in all this recitation, which must have cost her every bit of courage she had, Celia had not once seemed close to tears—not even when she had laughed so hysterically.

  “For better or for worse does not mean for impossible. If God is asking the impossible of me…I have tried it for long enough, and I can try no more.”

  A silence fell between them.

  “Does it not sometimes make you cry, Celia dear?” Abigail ventured.

  “I used to cry, but he liked that.”

  The silence returned. In a while Abigail spoke again: “What do you want to do? If I may help, in any way, even with money—despite what you said—you have only to ask. Whatever is in my power I will do.”

  Celia drew a deep breath and smiled so radiantly that Abigail suddenly understood that she had been waiting to hear this offer; without it she would have asked nothing. “I want to leave Henry. I want to live alone. I don’t know how a woman of my education may earn a living.” She laughed. “Lady Winifred was so right! And we used to think her so…” She shook her head. “I don’t even know if the law will permit it. Can he force me to return to him? I thought you would know all these things.”

  “I know where I can find out. And as for you—you look as if you could sleep forty-eight hours straight through.”

  “Oh, I could!” Celia said rhetorically.

  “Then do so. There is my bed. I shall go and see some friends. And in two days I shall return with all you need to know.”

  ***

  “Pepe? Do you know the laws on divorce and separation and that sort of thing?” she asked that evening.

  He grinned knowingly. She asked why.

  “A man in Smithfield market recently showed me how they get a wily heifer into a pen when all normal persuasion fails.”

  “How?” Abigail smiled, half guessing.

  “Open the gate at the far side. Show the apparent exit. They always fall for it. So of course I know the divorce law—backwards to Jericho. And of course I’ll tell you. I’m delighted you ask—at long last.”

  She laughed and gave him a kiss for persistence.

  “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “It might make an article.”

  “It’s been done. Mary Morris did it. It’s in this week’s Companion.”

  “So you really do know the law.”

  “It so happens I do. Marriages can be dissolved on grounds of…”

  “Yes, yes. I know all the old reasons. But the new ones. The offences.”

  “The Act of ’fifty-seven?”

  She nodded.

  “The husband can divorce the wife for adultery. Just that alone. But the wife has to prove adultery plus one other offence. I mean one of a number of offences. If he’s cruel, for instance—beats her, starves her, slanders her—that sort of thing.”

  “Degrades her?”

  “In public?”

  “Or in private.”

  “What d’you mean by degradation, then?” he asked.

  “Makes her wear indecent clothing and pose indecently for him.”

  Laon looked dubious. “Devilish tricky to prove. You wouldn’t get the courts interfering there…unless…” He looked shifty.

  Thinking she was on to something, she pressed him: “Unless what?”

  He squared himself and looked at her coolly. “What’s a pederast, Abbie?” he asked.

  She frowned. “It’s what Steamer once called a schoolfellow of his. It’s not very nice.”

  “Indeed not! Is that all you know? I’ve been meaning to ask you for years and thought the chance would never arise.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s a man who takes no pleasure…there.” He touched her. “But there, instead.”

  She cringed in disgust. “But what did Steamer mean?”

  “You think, Abbie. Boys’ school. Strong passions. No women. You think!”

  She hid her face.

  He smiled indulgently. “So be careful how and when you use that word next time, my darling.”

  She hugged him, still not wanting to show him her face.

  “Adultery plus that would be grounds for divorce. Also incestuous adultery—even with the wife’s brother’s daughter. But not with his own first cousin. Aren’t we marvellous! When we are at our most logical, then we are at our least reasonable.”

  His bitterness startled her, so that she could face him. In response to the question in her eyes he said, “I think this is a monstrous law, Abbie. And if you want to strike at it—as only you could do—I will print it wherever it will be most effectual.”

  “Why, Pepe…” she began.

  “Look what the law of marriage has done to your friend Annie. Oldale can booze and gamble this pub—her pub—into bankruptcy. Because the law says it’s his. He could spend all her money on a mistress and she can do nothing to prevent it. If she tried to, he could go to law and force her to yield.” He looked at her solemnly and said, “And now tell me—who else are we talking about?”

  “Who else?” She gulped.

  “Your curiosity has none of the signs of disinterest. You are asking these questions on someone’s behalf. If we are to help her, I must know what’s what.”

  So she told Pepe—told him what she had only just promised Celia never to reveal to anyone. Before she finished the tale, his head had sunk into his hands. He was a long time silent; she even wondered if he was crying.

  “There is no escape,” he said at last.

  “For her?”

  “For all of us.” He looked up. She wanted to hug him, he seemed so forlorn. “When I found out how my father made his money—the money that had paid for my education, fed me, bought all my comforts—when I found out that, I didn’t know where to go for the shame.”

  “Did you have an argument with him?”

  “Argument? I didn’t…I couldn’t even look at him, nor bear the sound nor smell of him. I remembered all the comforts and advantages I’d had, and I thought of the cost in lives made foul, in violated bodies—bodies of little girls of twelve. Or even less! I was in a fever for weeks. I almost died of my own disgust.” For a long moment he could only breathe, as if breathing needed all his concentration. “And then I came to realize that my father was not alone to blame. He was not the cause. There was no cause. No single cause. There were thousands—hundreds of thousands of causes: men. This terrifying, im
placable urge that possesses all of us, to get over a woman. All of us—you see? I was guilty, too, in thought if not in deed. Oh, Abbie—what would I have become if I had not met you?”

  “Why?” She laughed in surprise.

  “You remember how long it took us to copulate.” He snorted. “Even that word, which is usually spoken in sniggers, or with a sort of forensic challenge, even that word—you have taught me to find the love and beauty inside it.”

  “You were saying…how long it took…”

  “Yes. That was not coyness.”

  “Hardly! I always thought you were being considerate of me.”

  “I needed time to…to discover the love and beauty in it. Not just in the word but in the act. It was I who needed time, not you. If you had not taught me that…” He shrugged at the inexpressible vastness of the alternative.

  “What? You have to tell me now! You can’t just leave…”

  “I hated all men. I loathed us for what we are and how we degrade women. I wanted to become a woman.” He laughed. “Why else did I take over those women’s magazines? And when I first met you, I wanted us to enjoy the most wonderful, pure, platonic love that ever was. We were to be the arrow’s tip of a new revolution in human love! And we almost succeeded. But then you met Annie and told me about her. And bang! I exploded inside. You were as near to being raped then as you ever were in your life. And that was the craving and the violence in me, which I fought and fought—until you taught me how to yield to it, how to make it gentle and lovely. If I hadn’t met you, I would have gone on hating my masculinity, craving everything feminine.” He laughed. “I’d have become a sort of male lesbian.”

  She had to ask him to explain. Celia’s revelations—and Pepe’s—blunted the distaste she would otherwise have felt.

  “Perhaps,” he said reluctantly, “perhaps I already am. Perhaps that’s why I accept what few other men would accept from you—your refusal to marry me. And then I hear this dreadful ordeal of your friend Celia’s and I feel you are right. Oh God, Abbie—has anyone ever known what to do with it? Will any society ever get it right?”

  “What?”

  “What to do with sex.”

  “We have, I think. I mean you and me.”

  “We are not Society. Nor could all Society do as we do. This beautiful shape of flesh I have here, and this beautiful space you have here, which accepts it with such ineffable sweetness—they are tied by an unbreakable thread, which we cannot ignore, to remote questions like who gets this bit of land or that boxful of gold when flesh and space are gone to earth and dust again.”

  “It’s so vast,” Abigail said, wondering at the scope of his vision. “How will anyone ever get all of it right at the same time! And meanwhile there is poor Celia.”

  Chapter 26

  It was Pepe who pointed the way out of Celia’s difficulties. If she set up alone, even if she could find work, her husband could sue for restitution of his rights over every penny she earned and every stick she possessed. And any man who employed her could risk an action for criminal conversion of her affections brought by her husband.

  “He would never dare,” Abigail said. “Look at all the things she could tell the court about him!”

  “A woman has no right to be heard in a crim-con action. Only the husband and the man he accuses. It’s between them.”

  “But that’s monstrous! Two men could act in collusion to damn a woman forever—and she’d have no right even to be heard?”

  “That’s the law. Such injustice must have happened often. But what I’m suggesting for Celia is that you should give her employment.”

  “Good heavens!”

  “Don’t you see the advantages? With a married lady as your companion, you could be your own hostess. I know that tongues have more or less ceased to wag about you, but it would ensure that they’d never grow loose again. And look at the thousand ways she could be useful, even if she has only half a head on her shoulders—the errands she could run that you now cannot entrust to Mary; the tedious letters she could answer; the tiresome people she could see on your behalf; copying; looking things up. And when you visit Paris or Rome—the arrangements she could make in advance and also supervise during your travels. How have you managed without her!”

  Within very few months Abigail was asking the same question. Celia was like a spring unstoppered. With the burden of her husband’s attentions removed, she grew jolly, rosy, and plump again; she recovered well enough for Abigail to be quite angry with her at times, for she could be both forgetful and extravagant. Mostly though, Abigail was delighted she had followed Pepe’s suggestion; despite these occasional lapses, Celia was an invaluable secretary and a boon of a companion.

  Henry Crabb, her husband, made several attempts to enforce her return. He tried personal entreaty. He tried suing for restitution but dropped the case before the first hearing. He even waylaid them in the street, but Celia, newly assured of her legal status, would not so much as glance at him. Abigail thought he looked so pitiable and abject that she asked him to call on them the following day.

  Of course, that was just bait. She sent Celia out on an errand well before Crabb was due; she thought if she could see him alone, she might get him to understand that there could never be any question of Celia’s return. But he found it impossible to accept.

  “She’s my wife!” he kept saying in a bewildered tone. “She cannot run away. It’s against a woman’s nature. It’s against the duties she was brought up to respect.” And he turned to Abigail as to another person of sense. “Can’t you make her understand that, my lady?”

  She realized then, as no amount of letter writing or arm’s-length dealing could have done, how possessed he was, and how that possession unhinged him.

  “Tell her I adore her still,” he said just before he left. “Tell her that everything I did was done in adoration of her.” He broke down then. “Where in all the world am I to find a woman to worship as she let me worship her? I never harmed her. I never defiled her. I never burdened her…”

  He was still listing his own virtues as she led him to the door.

  They never heard of or from him again while he lived; but the memory of that sad encounter pursued Abigail for years. She was never able to think of the things Celia had endured and rouse herself to quite the same pitch of anger as before; the pitiable figure of Henry Crabb would not sustain it. At times Celia was now so cheerful that Abigail almost thought her heartless.

  ***

  Abigail had a rough-and-ready rule that her writing should support her. Thus, when the successful “Abe Stevenson” and all her other personae lived at the same address in Buckingham Street, they could pool their income and live in fair style. But when the Abbot or one of her even less well-paid aliases went to Paris (or Rome, or Vienna, or Berlin) to report on the latest exhibitions and the work in the studios, she insisted they do so without subsidy from the others—who, figuratively at least, remained in London and fed their editors from a literary larder built up over the previous months; so the Abbot could spend three weeks in Rome while Drucilla Getz sent her regular copy to The Girl of the Period—and so on with all the others, too.

  Celia at first did not like the arrangement. When Abigail had said “Rome!” Celia had had visions of wafting into the Hotel Bristol—or the Grand or the Inghilterra—on bouquets of flowers, trailing a comet’s tail of page boys and luggage. There would be rich food in dazzling restaurants…nights at the opera…days amid romantic ruins…sumptuous beds…and an attentive servant for every little want.

  “There is a very pleasant little pension in the Via Campania,” Abigail said. “Run by an admirable woman, Signora Facetti. I have stayed there before. It is clean and comfortable, less than a kilometre from the station and a hundred miles from the Forum and the Colosseum and all the other flypapers, and there are some pleasant and cheap cafés not too far away.” />
  But after a few days in Rome, Celia saw how right Abigail had been.

  “High living consumes so much time,” Abigail said. Living modestly as they did, they could visit the studios and exhibitions in the mornings, when those places were mercifully empty of all the tiresome people (who were at that hour still caught up in the toils of “high living”), stroll about the city and go into the first trattoria that took their fancy, eat a light luncheon, and return to the pension.

  And there, while sensible Romans slept through their siesta and high-living tourists sweltered in the flypapers, Abigail could sit in the cool shade of the balcony, look out over the Borghese Gardens, and write the copy that would be paying for it all. She did not tell Celia, but it pleased her to think that this part of the city was the site of the fabulous Gardens of Sallust…“an immoral man but a most artistic writer.”

  Then, when real Rome awakened for the evening, out they went, bathed and refreshed, to enjoy the sights of the modern city for an hour or two before taking up the serious business of the day: dinner. If Abigail had written something especially good—something that would be sure to earn a good fee—she would claim an instant reward and take Celia, and any artist or writer they met or whose lodging they passed, to the Falcone, there to feast on Maccheroni alla Napolitana, Cinghiale all’Agra Dolce, and the sweet, delicate wines of Orvieto. The Falcone was a shabby, sombre crypt, so old that the Caesars had been its patrons, and the waiters could even point out a grease mark left on the wall by the head of Augustus—just as the waiters in The Cheshire Cheese point to that mark of Dr. Johnson’s.

  After the meal, whether it was eaten at the Falcone or some cleaner, humbler place, they invariably went to a café. Usually it was the Nazionale Aragno in the Corso—the biggest and most sumptuous of all the cafés in Rome. There, amongst an infinity of mirrors, gilding, and blue plush, while the waiters pirouetted around them with their little nickel trays held high above their heads, they could sit and drink coffee and toy with the pastries and marzipan, and talk, or read a two-day-old copy of The Times or a ten-day-old Daily News.

  If they had found no companion before, they needed one for the Nazionale, which would not admit unaccompanied women (there being quite enough of them in the streets outside). All Abigail’s friends in Rome were writers or artists—mostly painters; and even the writers were agreed that painting was the doyen of the arts (though whether or not she agreed that Rome was its capital depended on whether she was in Rome or Paris). Often they would talk until one or two in the morning, debating hotly whether the artist’s purpose was to convey his own excitement at the appearance of things, or whether things themselves, and the light and colour that revealed them, were the true heroes of the pictures.