Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Another painter, Bob Stevenson, who was later to be immortalized by his more famous cousin Robert Louis as “Springheel Jack,” then presumed to welcome her to France, on no greater pretext than that he was working over there at the moment and their names were the same.

  R.L. Stevenson called Springheel Jack a “loud, copious, intolerant talker.” Bob’s speech that night was certainly very strange. Abigail had only the vaguest knowledge of him. Their ways had never crossed. She had never written about his work. Yet he spoke as if he owed his very life to her or, rather, he hinted as much in one breath and withdrew it in the next. It was a topsy-turvy speech, full of paradoxes and extravagance, yet all spoken with the most solemn earnestness.

  Afterwards, in conversation with her, he apologized and said he had stood up merely to fish a coin from a very deep pocket but then, finding himself on his feet, had been carried away by the occasion. It transpired that he was then painting at Barbizon, near Fontainebleau, and was a close friend of another painter, a Frenchman also painting there, who knew her well and also knew of her forthcoming visit to Deauville: César Rodet. Perhaps they might call on her some day this autumn?

  César Rodet! He had been a remote, godlike figure, a taciturn giant of twenty-five years, when she, a babe of sixteen, had stayed with the Rodets. He had flitted in and out of the house twice in that year. She thought he had been a doctor, not a painter. She could hardly remember him now.

  “You will like him,” Bob Stevenson said. “He never utters a word. The very best kind of conversationalist, I always find. We look forward to seeing you in France.”

  Laon could hardly bear to say goodbye. “It will be a wasted year,” he said in an angry sort of grief. “A needless hole in our lives. You could stay away for twenty years and yet find me as much your captive as I am at this minute. Your tragedy is you still think life is long. You have not yet grown up.”

  Part Two

  Chapter 28

  They settled at the Villa Corot in Deauville during the fashionable middle two weeks of August. Abigail was seen everywhere: at the Casino, in the party of M. Rodet, the Elder; at a concert, squired by an officer on leave from Boy’s regiment; and at a ball, where her companion was none other than Bob Stevenson. Her constant chaperone was the jolly Mrs. Crabb.

  At quieter hours, in the morning, the two ladies could be seen assisting a third, a tall woman in widow’s weeds who, to judge by Lady Abigail’s solicitude, was in an interesting condition.

  In September, when fashionable London had returned to fashionable London, taking with it the firmest memory of these images, life at the Villa Corot settled to a more natural routine. Its centre was Abigail. Her baby and her book were all that mattered. Annie and Celia vied with each other to ensure the safe gestation of both—to such an extent that Abigail had at last to intervene with a list of the services she required, and to say which of them was to furnish each. Then, with autumn fast drawing on, something like peace settled in among them.

  It was a kind of peace Abigail had forgotten, a peace almost from her childhood. Each dawn, as she woke up, her mind automatically reached for the matter she would cover in today’s articles—the galleries she would visit, the periodicals she would scan, the people she would see—and she found…nothing!

  At first it was unnerving, like an unnatural silence. Then, imperceptibly, the silence became natural. For the last ten years she had been pursued by a noise—the noise of success, the noise of her London: “What happened?…What’s next?…Did you hear?…Did she really?…I don’t believe it!…What do you think?” Journalism had consumed her, at five—six—seven thousand words a day. She fed it words; it gobbled words and said “Good!” and to say good was to say More! More words!

  And now the endless chain was broken; the treadmill was silent. And the silence itself had become natural. Would she be forgotten as easily? Was the silence of the Abbot and Madge Challis and Drucilla Getz equally natural in London now? She found she did not mind.

  Partly, to be sure, that was the baby inside her. She could not feel it yet—not as a lump, though there was the occasional squirm, a vertigo of the midriff. But the knowledge that it was there was strangely comforting. She had heard of girls who had endured the most terrible privations, girls for whom the final refuge of the workhouse was a heaven, and all for the sake of that little life within them. She understood them now.

  These were new thoughts, though—too new to have wrought so profound a change within her. That change led her back to an inner simplicity she had forgotten. It was not a thought, nor even a feeling, but something much more raw: it was a sensation. Complex but immediate. It hit at her from the morning air and the autumnal light so that she reeled under the shock of it and had to probe and reason her way back into herself.

  It was the morning air. It was the autumnal light. As simple as that! How long since she had smelled such fragrance? How long since she had seen the unmarked world, the stones, the cracks in the pavements, the sea pinks, the distant white horses, with such clarity? How long since her mind had been so empty of worldly trivia? Empty enough to be filled—more than filled: possessed—by such simplicities?

  If she had said, or even thought, I am going to France to rediscover myself and my directions, she would have cringed at the solemn portentousness of such a wish. Yet, wish or no, it was happening to her just the same.

  She had thought herself happy in London, and so she was. But the happiness had been stretched—a serial. She was glad to be living. Here she was something far better: she was glad to be alive. It meant being young again. It meant the joy of aimless strolling, the warmth of woollen stockings, the taste of hazelnuts, the crispness of white linen. It meant the gladness of a life that could be consumed in such ordinary things.

  ***

  Within ten weeks her new novel was finished, save for the last chapter. But she knew exactly how that would go; she left it unwritten because she feared the emptiness that would follow—for it would be three or four months yet before she could send it to Laon.

  When she had outlined the book to herself, the night Annie had first broached this mad idea, the theme had depressed her. Such a story, such a love as she had envisaged, could not end happily—not in this century; the time was too far out of joint. How could you bring Blake’s vision of love to an age whose preparation for it was “Drink plenty of champagne and show no surprise!” And it was Blake’s vision of love on which she built her tale, as she had tried to build her life. To make that clear, she called the book Into a Narrow Circle and prefaced it with the quotation:

  And they inclosed my infinite brain into a narrow circle,

  And sunk my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hot burning,

  Till from all life I was obliterated and erased.

  But though her lovers, William and Catherine, ended tragically, theirs was a tale of terrible joy; even their death, in the final, yet-to-be-written chapter, would be a hymn to the holiness of love. For herself the story was a hymn to Pepe and all she had learned with him; while she wrote it she could not miss him, for his presence was as strong in the room as the ticking of her clock.

  None of these elements—not the peace of the Villa Corot, not the joy of their little sorority, not her passion for Blake, not her loving memories of Pepe—accounted for the speed with which she wrote. For that she had no one to thank but César Rodet, Bob Stevenson’s painter friend. To call him “taciturn” was the understatement of the century. On his first three visits he spoke not a word, neither bonjour nor adieu. He merely watched them with his dark nervous eyes.

  Tante Rodie, his mother, who called at least twice a week, waved her hands in eloquent despair. “That one!” she said. “Is he even French? How can we know?”

  Then one day César came visiting alone. He did not knock at the door; in fact, he climbed through the hedge at the bottom of the garden. Abigail, who had taken to doing a lit
tle sketching out in the studio each afternoon—just as a break from the tyranny of writing—watched him walk boldly up the lawn. Boldly? No. In anyone else his unconcern would have been bold; in him it was simply…unconcern. Nothing he ever did was ambiguous. Incomprehensible, perhaps, but not ambiguous.

  He caught sight of her and turned at once toward her—no embarrassment, not even the slightest hesitation. He did not say hello, but he smiled dazzlingly. How could she dislike him! He looked at her drawing and pointed at a shape; a puzzled frown knit his brow.

  “It’s that house,” she said nervously. “See?” She spoke in French out of courtesy.

  He nodded dubiously and pointed at another shape. “It’s that tree, the cypress,” she said. “I moved it nearer to help the composition.”

  He pointed at other features—each quite obviously whatever it was supposed to be: a building, a bush, a cloud. And, feeling increasingly foolish, she identified each in words.

  He grunted, smiled at her (was it with a hint of pity?), and sitting down beside her, pulled out his own sketchbook and began to draw. He sat at an angle that just prevented her from seeing his work without craning over rudely—though why should she feel that to be rude, she wondered, after his little performance?

  In only a few minutes he stood again, tore off his sketch, and handed it to her. “Here is how you draw,” he said, also in French. “But already my drawing is superior to yours.” And away he went, back through the hedge.

  His voice was so beautifully bass, like a flowing liquid, black as his beard, that she did not at first grasp the meaning. And the drawing did not immediately help. It consisted of the capital letters HOUSE, TREE, and CLOUD, each distorted into the shape of a house, a tree, and a cloud. When a person can draw, he or she can draw anything—a matchstick man, a little sketch map of how to reach the nearest post office—it doesn’t matter what; the talent for drawing will show. Abigail could see César’s talent in every line of his little joke. When he said “my drawing is superior to yours,” it was not vanity but simple truth.

  But was it a joke? she wondered. Something in his manner had made it seem more important than that. Was he also making a serious point? If so, then he was telling her—no, showing her—that she was not drawing things but concepts. That had been the idea behind his point-and-frown charade. She was not drawing the shape of the house, the shape of the tree—No! Even that was too verbal.

  Forget the words! Forget “house.” Forget “tree.” Forget “cloud.” Just look!

  Over there is a…a mass, and there another mass, and there another mass. In each there are parts—No! Parts need names. Forget parts.

  In each there are—there are surfaces! Surfaces that come toward you…twist…go away…face upward…overhang…fold in on themselves…flicker…scintillate.

  Was that what César was saying? Look at a landscape and forget the name, the function, the history, the associations of every element in it. Look only for masses, surfaces, movements, directions.

  With a feeling of excitement, as if the discovery were uniquely hers, she began a fresh drawing. Ten minutes later she had achieved a shattering insight—shattering because it was so obvious she ought to have seen it thirty years ago.

  Next day he came again, just as before, through the hedge. As he drew near she said, “The shapes between things are just as important as the things themselves!”

  He laughed! He danced on the frosty lawn. He ran to her and kissed her. It was not an erotic kiss. She felt that if she had been a male student of his (and without doubt she was now a student of his), he would have done the same.

  His face fell a little when he looked at her drawing, but then he gave a Gallic shrug that said, “It will get better from now,” and sat down to draw beside her, a proper drawing this time.

  After five minutes she asked, “Where’s Bob?”

  He did not seem to hear. It was half an hour before he spoke, by which time her fingers and toes had frozen to numbness. “England,” he said.

  She looked at his drawing and felt a sort of despair. It was the scene before them—its essence, its spirit. Her own drawing was full of local colour, texture, imposingly deployed clouds, and “artistic” vignetting—or shading-off—at the edges. His was a modest display of everything she had missed. A passing tourist might have admired hers far more, but she was not deceived.

  “Why draw?” he asked. His deep voice was so warm.

  “For amusement…relaxation.”

  He shook his head. “There is only one purpose: painting. You draw to be able to paint. Drawing for drawing’s sake?” He pulled a face and pointed at her sketch. “Full of tricks and self-congratulation.”

  These encounters came at an important moment for Abigail—just as she was about to embark on the first full draft of Into a Narrow Circle. She saw at once how relevant were these new insights from César Rodet. His drawing might look as if it were tied to a particular scene—this unique arrangement of houses, trees, clouds, and so on; but his genius was to extract from that arrangement something that was true about all masses and shapes and surfaces, regardless of the names that might be pinned on them. So he could do a drawing that was accurate to the last leaf without limiting it to a time and a place. It remained universal.

  That universal feeling, of being accurate about a time and place without being tied to it, was exactly what she wanted in her book. And how to achieve it? That also came out of César’s drawing lesson: the shapes between. In a flash of insight she saw at once what was so wrong about Dickens—and what had made Pepe once say that she was “every bit as bad.” Dickens’s writing was “every bit as bad” as her drawing: full of rich local colour, full of texture, imposingly deployed elements, and artistic vignetting. Just the thing for the passing tourist. But the shapes between? Mere accidents, all of them.

  She knew then what to avoid in her writing. She did not yet know how to find those shapes between—the elements that related Catherine and William to each other and then to the world—but that was now her goal: to find them. It pleased her especially to realize that she had achieved this insight all by herself; every other discovery of hers had actually been placed in her path by Pepe, who had always been “one secret ahead” of her. Then with a slight wrench of sadness she realized that Pepe would probably never have planted this discovery. Even if she explained it to him, he probably wouldn’t see it—“Shapes between people? In a story? What airy rubbish is this?” She had passed beyond him, and not in some trivial area of her life but in the most important one of all.

  Because she knew, from the very first line, what she was after, the story grew with remarkable fluency. She had a mental sieve that allowed or blocked each possible development as it occurred to her. She never floundered, never wavered. Best of all, she did not miss Pepe’s guiding hand, the constant nudge of his editorial goad. At last she stood alone.

  César came almost every day; he was living at his parents’ home in Trouville now. When the weather was mild, he, Celia, and Abigail went out sketching along the seafront. When it was not, they sat and drew from one of the windows. Celia did watercolours—light, fresh, charming little landscapes and seascapes. César praised them, rather extravagantly, Abigail thought at times. They weren’t that good, surely? And Celia wasn’t really doing what an artist ought to be doing—what César himself did, and what she, Abigail, attempted. Celia wasn’t out to discover anything. For her, each blank sheet of watercolour paper was another chance to display a skill that was learned and completed years ago; if she continued until she was ninety, her paintings would look just as they did today. Abigail thought it very unfair of César to praise Celia so much and yet be so hard on her own much more honest work.

  Once, when Celia was not with them, she told him so.

  “But she’s not an artist,” César said. “What she does—it’s nothing to you and me. You want Molière to write fashion repo
rts? That’s all Celia can be—a fashion reporter. An illustrator. But she’s a very good one. So I tell her.” After a long silence, twenty minutes during which they sketched, he added, “Besides, she can make a living perhaps. It can be useful.”

  There were, she realized, depths to this man.

  ***

  Annie did not like César; she pointedly left any room as soon as he entered. More tiresomely, she grew very jealous of the time Abigail spent with him, though it was only an hour or two a day.

  Around this time Annie began to suffer night terrors—on account, she said, of never having slept alone. The only cure was for her to sleep with Abigail. At first, Abigail, who had never regularly shared a bed with anyone, not even as a child, resented it; but Annie was such a compulsive and colourful talker, had experienced so much that Abigail would never (she hoped) experience, and was so richly revealing of herself that Abigail soon looked forward to the nightly flow of Annie’s chatter.

  But she also realized that the words she had once jokingly spoken, “You’re a baby yourself,” were close to the truth. When Annie went over to London to attend the sale of her pub, and actually received quite a bit more than she had originally sunk into it, she came back to France and handed the whole lot over to Abigail. “You keep it, gel,” she said. “It’s all for you. Just give us a bit at a time.” Of course, Abigail transferred it all to an English bank in Annie’s name.

  Annie loved to cuddle up to Abigail, to put her ears to the barely perceptible mound of Abigail’s stomach and swear she could hear “the little gel’s heart a-beating.” And she could not sleep until Abigail had stroked her hair and neck. She talked endlessly of her childhood; it seemed to amaze her, no less than it amazed Abigail, that despite all the outward trappings of misery they had been so happy. The days when her father got steady work and was able to take the rest of them out of the workhouse and orphanage—Annie could make that joy ring out all over again.