Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “We’ll soon see if there’s honour among thieves, me dear,” Walter said as he walked in through the open doorway of the house the kaffir had described. Ironically enough, this was the night house where she had made her first inquiry of the evening. Walter paused just over the threshold and surveyed the interior; a change in his expression showed that Annie, or someone of her description, was, indeed, inside.

  Abigail could bear the game no longer. She strode in past Walter and turned toward where he had been looking. It was Annie right enough.

  If she had earned anything this evening, a good part of it must already have vanished down her throat. She sat at a coverless table, the centre of a rank of five girls, all drinking but none so drunk as Annie. She stood out in more flattering ways, too. Even drunk she was handsome—dark-eyed, angular, sleek-skinned. The years and troubles had not marked that skin; the four other girls were puffy-fleshed, fuddled, and blowsy. “Blowsabellas,” Annie had once called such girls; and so they were.

  “Annie, dear. The pub is yours again,” she told her.

  It took Annie a moment to recognize the source and then the bringer of this news.

  “It’s yours,” Abigail said again. “The pub is yours.”

  “Welcome to Wales!” Annie said, half falling over the table as she tried to gesture around the room.

  “Mr. Oldale will never trouble you again.”

  She did not take it in. All the self-disgust Abigail guessed was there suddenly came welling up. “Piss off!” she shouted.

  “You ungrateful wretch!” Walter said. “Come home now, as your mistress commands.” He turned to Abigail. “This is exactly the sort of thing I forbid Aunt Arabella to expose…” His voice tailed off as he caught Abigail’s eye.

  “You don’t even recognize her, do you, Uncle Walter?” Abigail said, taking no care now to hide her contempt.

  “Recognize…?” He looked back at Annie in bewilderment. “Ah! Lady Winifred’s maid—of course. Yes, of course. Dear, dear!”

  Clearly he did not know her from Eve. To be rid of him Abigail pretended to share his triumph of memory. “What facility you have, Uncle Walter! But I think it best for you to go now. I know this girl very well and I’m sure I shall cope. Besides, Aunt Arabella might begin to wonder what you’re at!”

  The eagerness that showed in his face was at the thought of escaping this place and her company, and returning to the Haymarket to resume the more wonted role of cavalier with the laughing wench. Abigail’s disgust did not survive his departure by a second; he was too slight an entity to bear what properly belonged to that vast segment of mankind—or man-kind—who nightly and daily made the whole mess possible.

  She turned back to Annie, who was staring at her with a swaying, angry absorption.

  “Come home with me, Annie dear. I’ll look after you.”

  “Fuck off! Just…fuck off!” Annie burst into tears and fell over the table, sending glasses sprawling.

  A bully came over; until now he had been lurking in the dark to one side of the bar. “Enough of that,” he said to Abigail. His accent was Welsh.

  “I came to tell her her husband is dead.”

  The man looked at Annie, still sobbing heavily. “You told her,” he said.

  “I want to take her back home.”

  The man jabbed a finger in Annie’s back, making her wince. Her sobbing stopped. “You wanna go home?” he asked.

  She shook her head with such weary slowness it was more final than her obscenities or any word she might have spoken.

  “So.” The man turned back to Abigail. “You may flit off.”

  I tried, Abigail thought as she went outside. At the door she heard Annie scream. She turned back, but Annie was fighting with one of the blowsabellas and the Welshman was once more weaving his way toward that table.

  A moment later Annie was pitched out into the street, still cursing the other girl, the Welshman…the world. Almost at once she was picked up by two policemen, who started frogmarching her up to the wagon at the top of the Haymarket.

  Abigail stepped in their path and handed them her card. “This girl is one of my servants,” she said severely. “Bring her home in half an hour and I have two guineas for the police widows’ fund.”

  She turned and called up her cab to take her home.

  ***

  Annie slept a full eighteen hours—in Abigail’s bed since there was none other for her. Abigail, who slept but fitfully beside her, heard her toss and turn and call out strange half-words all night.

  The following morning Abigail went back to The Old Fountain, this time with Celia, where she “discovered” the dead Roger Oldale and called in the police. Her story (especially when later confirmed by half a dozen broker’s men), the evidence of their eyes, and their own common knowledge of the man himself satisfied them he had died—as indeed he had—of drink.

  She had arranged to travel abroad, she said; would it be possible for her and Mrs. Crabb to swear a deposition giving formal evidence of finding the body to satisfy the coroner? The inspector was most sympathetic; their affidavits were sworn well before lunchtime.

  ***

  She and Annie lay awake long that night, talking in the dark, tracing the silver and black of the window mullions where they splayed their shadows over the ceiling. Annie spoke of the whole mess of her rotten marriage; her hatred of Roger had inflamed into a hatred of all men—all the men in history, it seemed. There wasn’t a good one among them.

  “Yet you were going back into that trade, Annie. You were going back to please them.”

  “Please them!” She snorted. “I want to get poxed. You think I’d normally go in a fleapit like that? I want to burn. I want to go out among them like a fireship!”

  “Oh, Annie—don’t do that, please.”

  “I don’t see no other way out.”

  “Come and stay here. Stay with me.”

  Annie sat up. Her eyes gleamed with light borrowed from the street. “Straight?” she asked with hushed breath. “Oh, I’d do anything for you, Abbie. I’ll cook and skivvy and slave for you. I idolize you, honest. You know that.”

  The fury of this devotion took Abigail aback. In a flash she saw how impossible a situation it would be. Annie was too mercurial. She’d be “devoted” now; in two days she’d be hurling pots downstairs.

  She laughed. “What are we talking about, Annie! He’s gone. You don’t have to come here. The pub is yours. I’ll lend you the money to get you going again.”

  But Annie shook her head, sighed, and lay down again, accepting that Abigail had offered only a temporary refuge. “No more pubs for me, love,” she said. “I’ll sell it. That’s what I’ll do. Open a little haberdasher’s down Pimlico. Victoria way. Do me a treat. Nice quiet little business…don’t need no bleedin’ man. I’ll just sit there and grow old respectably.” She giggled at the idea that such a thing really was possible for her.

  “You and Mr. Laon will have to find new quarters,” she said.

  Abigail told her then. “I tried all the things you suggested last time, but they didn’t work,” she finished.

  “No, this one’s got your name,” Annie said. “Listen, I know a lady as keeps down the census—by Aldgate pump. I’ve heard gels talk about her.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Annie. It’s myself I hate, not…it.”

  “So you’ll marry him, and that’s all about it!”

  “I suppose so. As you said”—she imitated Annie—“I don’t see no uvver way aht.”

  Annie kissed her warmly and settled herself to sleep. “We’ll see about that,” she said. “Time for a little think.”

  Abigail lay back contentedly. Annie would think of something; it might be mad, it might be impossible—it probably would be—but it would be all Annie.

  I am lucky, she thought. Celia was a dear, good friend;
and Annie was…a sister? No—even more than a sister. A strange twin self. They could share joy and suffering without a word passing between them.

  She awoke drowsily in the small hours. The first light of dawn filled the streets, lending a pink flush to the window glass and filling the room with a sense of peace. By some telepathy Annie awakened, too. She snuggled against Abigail and put an arm over her neck. Abigail kissed her forehead lightly.

  “I thought it all out, gel,” Annie said. “You don’t need to marry him. You can go away and have your baby and come back and carry on just like before. You can even keep the baby by you. And all without one whiff or sniff of a scandal. There, now!”

  Abigail smiled at the ceiling. She ran her fingers lightly through Annie’s hair. “Dear Annie!” she said.

  “You think I’m dreaming?” Annie shivered and trapped Abigail’s fingers at the nape of her neck.

  “Sorry,” Abigail said.

  “No, don’t stop. It’s nice. I’m not used to it, that’s all—not for a century.”

  “Tell me how I can live this miracle.”

  “Let me have the baby for you.”

  “Oh, willingly!”

  “No, straight. Here’s how. D’you know a safe house in France or somewhere? Italy?”

  “And if I do?”

  “Here’s me—friend of yours. Widow in black—thick veil and all. Carrying. Tragic case. Needs to get away. Here’s you—how long since you writ that book, Land of Whossname?”

  “A lifetime!”

  “There you are then. For years you wanted to write another, didn’t you? Go around telling people that. Dying to write another. Remind them how you’ve been saying it for years.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  “That won’t stop them remembering it.” Annie assumed a lah-di-dah accent. “D’you kneow, Ay rahthah think Ay’ll take may deah friend Mrs. Eoldale to Frahnce this heah wintah. She can do her kitten and Ay can wrate may book.”

  The idea, and Annie’s mockery of Abigail, were both so farfetched that the two women fell into helpless giggles.

  “Annie!” Abigail said, wiping her eyes.

  “It would work,” Annie said, growing serious again. “You could lace in so nothing’d show for six or seven months. I’ve known gels on the turf lace in till the foal’s dropped. And meanwhile I’m wearing black with a little bustle basket around the front.” She giggled again. “And the little basket’s getting bigger every week, isn’t he!”

  Abigail sighed and shook her head.

  “Tell me one way it wouldn’t work. In the last two months you’re desperate to finish your book. Night and day you’re at it—anyone can see the light in your study. Don’t want no visitors thanks. I’ll lay any odds you’re not the first writer what ever done that.”

  Abigail felt a certain tension grow within her; she was actually considering this preposterous idea! Something within her desperately wanted it to happen—just as Annie painted it. For heaven’s sake! a wiser self sneered. But her mind’s eye did not relinquish its hold on that little foreign villa—somewhere—with its high wall, its groves of sheltering myrtle and cypresses, and the sad, stately figure of the English widow with her belly out. And her good friend, the dedicated writer-recluse, the celebrated Lady Abigail, desperately trying to finish the masterpiece that still lurked within her. And, of course, Lady A’s companion, the demure, jolly—and jolly respectable—Mrs. Crabb.

  Widow Oldale…Lady Abigail Stevenson…Mrs. Crabb…by thunder, it could work! The very madness of the idea almost guaranteed it. The real temptation, Abigail realized suddenly, was the idea of writing another book. How had Annie thought of that? She herself had hardly realized, until now, when the possibility was handed to her, how much she wanted to write another book. She was tired of journalism; she might even be getting stale.

  And what a book it would be! No children’s fable now. She would write of a real modern woman and a real modern man. She would write of love—real love. Not the absurd histrionics of Heathcliff and Catherine, nor the sugarwater innocence of David Copperfield and child-bride Dora, nor that all-suffering, all-forgiving, ever-constant Agnes. But a real woman—one who would make even the “shocking” Madame Bovary seem tame.

  “And if I was always around,” Annie said, “what’s more natural than that she’ll be around, too?”

  “She?”

  “The baby, of course.”

  “Suppose it’s a he?”

  Annie hugged her. “You won’t have no man-child, gel. Got too much sense, you have.” And she gave Abigail an embarrassingly passionate kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re a baby yourself,” Abigail said.

  ***

  Celia, to Abigail’s surprise, thought the idea little short of genius; perhaps ten years of enormity had accustomed her to take any idea in her stride.

  But Abigail put her finger on its moral weakness: “It isn’t very fair to Pepe,” she said.

  “Fair!” Annie snorted. “Was it fair when he shot you in the giblets that time? He done it deliberate and all.”

  “It was a long while ago, Annie. This was not his intention.”

  “When were you born, gel? They’re all the same—sweet as figs, but they’ll put the white swelling on you, easy as laughing. You don’t owe him.”

  “I do, love. I’ve just realized what I owe him. I owe him the chance to find a life without me. Since I cannot give him his child, that will have to do.”

  And that was how she put it to Laon. “All this time I’ve been saying I was so afraid of being a wife…the woman who’s always there…your own tame Agnes whom you never need to woo or win…your bond-woman. Yet that is what I have made you, my darling. How many times have you yourself said it: that I cannot release you. You are my bondman. So I will take a year off to write this book. Poor Annie is with child and quite alone, so she will accompany me—and Celia, of course. And you will have a year to…” She almost broke down. “Oh, Pepe. I’m going to be so miserable.”

  “Then don’t go. For heaven’s sake, it’s not as if…”

  “I do have to. I must. I’m so unfair to you—holding on to you and yet swearing I’ll never marry.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  “I am, darling. That’s what this time is for.”

  “And if, at the end of it, I am still of the same mind?”

  “I may change.”

  His eyes filled with hope until she added, “I may change in ways you don’t welcome, too.”

  ***

  Celia saw another flaw that had escaped both Abigail and Annie. When Abigail said she knew just the place—the Villa Mancini on Lake Como—Celia said, “Suppose you were not circumstanced as you are—is that where you would choose to go?” And Abigail had to admit that it was not.

  “What would you do then?”

  Abigail considered.

  Her mother had many years ago bought a lot of land and foreshore at a place in Normandy called Deauville, opposite the fashionable resort of Trouville; there were hopes of making an equally fashionable resort out of Deauville. Those hopes were still only half-realized, but the scheme had already borne certain fruits, among them a number of fine villas, any one of which Abigail would have begged if her sole purpose had been to write a book.

  Annie looked at Celia with a new admiration. “We’d best keep you by us,” she said, “in case we turn to crime. You’d flannel a good line on any turnover.”

  Celia blushed at this barely comprehensible praise, though she did not like Annie’s use of “we.” As far as she was concerned, she and Abigail were taking Annie along.

  Nora was all in favour of her daughter’s scheme. She was glad Abigail had never married Laon—and almost glad she had never married at all. She saw this year-long break as the beginning of the end for Laon’s chances.

 
“From September you may have your pick of the villas,” she said. “But in fact the best is vacant now. Countess d’Aligny was to have had it, but her husband is ill, poor lady. She would be glad, I’m sure, to have the rent returned.”

  “Which one is it?”

  Nora had sketches of all the villas. “This,” she said. “The Villa Corot—after the painter, you know. He stayed there a few years ago and we renamed it in his honour. There is a little studio in the garden.”

  It was charming—romantic, even anarchic, but in a very controlled French way. “Perfect,” Abigail said.

  “And you can go over and see Tante Rodie every day if you wish.”

  Ah! She had forgotten Tante Rodie—Madame Rodet—her mother’s great friend. The year she had spent in France perfecting her French had been passed in the Rodets’ Paris house at Saint Cloud; she had forgotten La Gracieuse, their home at Trouville.

  “I had thought of that, of course.” Abigail smiled. “But Tante Rodie’s nearness may turn out to be the disadvantage. I hope she would understand.”

  “What?”

  “I must write this book. If I find Deauville too distracting, or if I can’t settle, or the weather’s bad, I’ll have to move on. I thought the Villa Mancini near Como—you remember? The Rodets took it that summer I stayed with them.”

  And so she laid the grounds for a move that would be inevitable, never mind the weather or the distractions of Deauville or how well or ill she settled; there could be no question of being within a hundred miles of Tante Rodie from the moment the swelling became visible.

  In case she harboured any illusions about what she was relinquishing by this mad notion of hers (Pepe’s words), Laon arranged a testimonial farewell dinner at the Albion. Editors and writers returned from grouse moors in Scotland and from moorings in the Solent to be there; many a Grand Old Writer on his retirement would not have been so honoured.

  G.V. Simms, in a witty but pointed speech, made it clear that the book she was going to produce had better be a masterpiece, or she would have deceived her admirers twice over. Jimmy Whistler brought the roof down with his selection of readings from the Abbot’s columns, artlessly choosing only those passages that referred to him and innocently ascribing their reference to some unknown painter whom he longed to meet—they might have sued Ruskin jointly and thus doubled their damages! At the end, with that extraordinary ability of his to ring a sudden change, he paid her a most moving personal tribute as a lady above reproach in all things.