Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  For a second she lost the thread and could only stare at him.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “I had hoped you weren’t serious.”

  “What d’you mean ‘not serious’! Have you read it?”

  “I mean I hoped it was like a long…extended private letter to me. I was touched and deeply moved by it. But I hoped you realized it could never be published.”

  “But it must be published. People must see…”

  “People must?” he interrupted. “What’s all this? People must? Are you turning into one of these polemical novelists?”

  “Damn your labels. I am what you made me. What’s in that story is everything I’ve learned through…Pepe! You’re not serious, are you? You will publish it?”

  Obviously hating himself, he shook his head. “I’d be sent to prison. And you’d be reviled, high and low. They’d pick up horse dung in the streets and pelt you as you passed. That’s no exaggeration, either.”

  “Is that all? Have you not enough courage to face that?”

  “Easily said. Just look at the trouble Zola is having with his new book, Nana. And he’s got the Socialists behind him. Have you read it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, it’s modesty itself compared to some of your scenes.”

  “But they’re true. They’re honest.”

  He frowned. His patience was getting short. “Oh, come now, Abbie. What has happened to your instinct—that marvellous journalist’s instinct—for what the public will accept? Of course your William and Catherine are true—and honest, and real, and moving. But you cannot bludgeon people with truth and honesty! You must surprise them—ambush them—then let them escape back into their own comfortable ways—then ambush them again…and so on. Until, imperceptibly, they find they’ve arrived at quite a different destination from the one they set out for. Good heavens! You used to know that so well I never had to tell it you.”

  She wanted to weep. He was right, of course. She had not lost the instinct, only the will to apply it. She was weary of the tricks, weary of journalism. How could anyone who saw, as clearly as she could see, that the whole of Society was wrong and would have to stand all its ideas on their heads—how could she feed that massive insight to them in little ambushes? Suppose that all those cool-headed, sensible people you get in every society, the Pepes of this world, had told Jesus to give out the Sermon on the Mount at the rate of one sentence a century! He’d be at it still.

  She looked across at Pepe and the gulf between them might as well have been infinite. “Come back to my room now,” she begged.

  He clenched his fists, as if to prevent his hands from agreeing. “We must settle this first. Tell me at least that you see my point of view, even if you…”

  “This longing for you will burst me.”

  “Oh, Abbie—have pity!”

  She stood and walked out, past the waiter who was bringing in their tea. Pepe sprang after her but did not catch up until she was out in the square. “What’s happened to you?” he asked breathlessly. “D’you think if I’d found your rooms and we’d gone to bed at once—you think I’d have said anything different?”

  “You’re like a fly that’s found a wound,” she told him. “Talk of something else. Look, there’s the Gésu church. Talk about that.”

  He stared in bewilderment, at the church, at her. But she was already walking on. “I’ll talk about it then,” she said. And without looking at it she began to point out how the facade, which was at first sight stolid and imposing, was a hotchpotch of uncomfortable detail and restless elements. “They lost all their confidence while designing that church,” she said. “It’s a moment when history turned over. Reason, proportion, harmony, humanism—all the triumphs that had secured the Renaissance—were beginning to fail them. The old, dark forces were creeping back. In a church for the Jesuits, naturally! Look at that façade and you can hear Savonarola thundering. Oh, Pepe!” She drew him into a deep doorway, barred with iron. “Kiss me! Kiss me, my darling! Stop me talking like this. It isn’t me.”

  After the longest kiss they had ever enjoyed, he broke and murmured, “It was you. You used to write like that.”

  Arm in arm and silently then they drifted back to the Teatro. In a half-dream she led him to their atelier. He admired César’s painting; César nodded at him and carried on at his easel. He admired little William and told Annie that things had turned out well. Annie linked arms with Abigail and said, “Don’t I know it!”

  Then Abigail held out her hands to Pepe and led him to the door to her room. Glancing back she saw Annie staring at them in bewilderment, not to say horror. When she opened the door, Annie shook her head violently but Abigail misinterpreted the gesture until it was too late.

  She slipped out of her clothes and stood, a silvered silhouette, facing him. He ran to her. She began to undress him but he stopped her with a kiss. He kissed her neck. Her shoulders. His lips and breath ran down to her breasts, shattering her self-possession. She clutched his head to her. Down he went, grazing the skin of her stomach with his lips.

  He stopped.

  The scar! How could she have forgotten the scar!

  He stood and began to turn her into the light.

  “No!” She crumpled and sat on the bed.

  Winded, he sat beside her, all excitement drained. “So that was it,” he said tonelessly. “My God!”

  She could tell him nothing.

  “Of all the humiliations you heaped on me, I never dreamed…”

  Her cry was almost a scream. “No, Pepe—not humiliations!”

  “What a simpleton I am. What a fool you must think me.”

  “Oh, Pepe, why? Why? It isn’t like that. I did it for love of you. To keep…”

  He laughed, though the tears ran down his cheeks. “Love? What love is it that gives away its fruit—its jewel—and to a whore like that!”

  He stood up and strode from the room, too swiftly for her to stop him.

  She called his name but, being naked, could not follow. Enraged at herself she fell upon the bed and howled into the pillow.

  A door slammed. Then Annie was at her side, soothing her, urging her between the sheets, stroking her hair, saying nothing.

  An hour later she stirred. She thought of rising but there was nothing to rise for. Nothing! She tried to contemplate the infinity of that nothing.

  “My life is finished, Annie,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Truly. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t feel more at giving William to you. More sense of loss. I thought it was because I was ill so long and he’d grown to be yours meanwhile. But that wasn’t really it. I know what it was.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “I had another baby. My book. I was so sure Pepe would publish it.”

  “And he won’t?”

  “No. Nor anyone else. It tells the truth about love and he says…”

  “Better burn it,” Annie said. “’Cos you don’t know love from a horse’s hoof.”

  When this produced no response she added, “Stop in bed now, I should. I’ll bring your supper when the waiter comes.”

  They usually ate out but sometimes they had the nearest trattoria send their dinner up in a pail.

  “I shan’t want to eat.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Annie was right. By half-past nine, when the dinner came, Abigail was ravenous. It was saltimbocca alla Romana; she could have eaten it twice over. She and Annie finished a whole bottle of Chianti with it. Annie took away the debris and came back with William, fast asleep.

  “He’s taken to that goat’s milk a treat,” she said. “So there’s a weight off our minds. That and his circumcision. Perhaps we’ll get some peace now.” She bent and kissed him. “Sleep, you little rascal,” she murmured. “Hear me? Ooh, don’t they smell good when
they’re all washed and clean! I reckon angels smell like that.”

  She heaved off her clothes and sniffed at her own armpits. “I’ll do.” She laughed. “Gawd, I reckon I wash meself four times a day here.” She put on her nightdress and slipped in beside Abigail.

  “Well, gel,” she said cheerfully as she snuffed the candle, “what’s it like out there at the end of the world?”

  Abigail almost hurled herself upon Annie. “Oh, Annie—thank God you’re here! Without you I’d be lost.”

  Annie held her in her strong arms. “I’ll always be here, love,” she said. “I’m not a man. I’ll always be by you.”

  She soothed away her tears and caressed her to sleep. Abigail was actually dropping off when she was brought back to full consciousness by an entirely new sensation. Annie was kissing her on the lips! And Annie’s hand, which had been soothing her hair and shoulders—like the soothing hand of a mother—now fell to her breast and began to caress her with the soft urgency of a lover.

  She lay petrified with the shock. And the shock was not just at what Annie was doing but at her own response to it. Something in her—all those parts that had so recently yearned for Pepe and had been thwarted—now began responding to Annie’s…to Annie’s what? What was Annie doing?

  “Annie,” she whispered. “No!”

  Annie was trembling. “I love you,” she whispered back. “Oh, Abbie, I thought I’d never be able to tell you. Never show it.”

  “I love you too, Annie,” Abigail said. “But not like that.” She slipped her hand between Annie’s and her breast but did not turn her lips away. The gesture stilled whatever it was that had begun to respond as a lover.

  “Don’t draw back now, gel. You come so close to it.” She kissed her again and again.

  Abigail neither withdrew nor responded. “I haven’t, Annie. Honestly. Please be like you were before. I can’t give you…whatever it is you want.”

  And what did Annie want? How could they do anything?

  Annie began to cry. Abigail wanted to comfort her but now was shy of it.

  “That night you come and got me…” Annie sobbed. “That night down the Haymarket—life began again for me. I was as low then as what you was this evening. You give meaning to my life, Abbie. You’re all I ever want.”

  “What? What do you want?”

  “To be with you.”

  “But you can be—you know that. Always.”

  “I mean…completely. Live together. Sleep together. Love each other.”

  “But how? I’m sorry—I don’t mean to sound shrill.”

  “I don’t know! I’ve never loved another woman before. But I love you. You’re the only one I ever loved—man or woman. And if you could love me, we’d find ways.”

  Abigail was silent. She wanted to say that it was unnatural but could not hear, in her mind’s ear, a kindly intonation for the word.

  “I s’pose I disgust you.”

  “No, Annie—of course you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  Abigail sat up abruptly and pushed Annie onto her back. At first Annie resisted and struggled to get up, but then Abigail kissed her, full on the mouth, as if she were Pepe and Annie her. Annie yielded with a sigh.

  “I can do that, Annie,” she said, suddenly quite calm. “I can even do this.” And she kissed her again and slipped her tongue into Annie’s mouth. “Or this.” She began to caress Annie’s breasts, still unsexing herself with the half-belief that she was a man.

  Annie moaned in pleasure.

  “I could probably—as you say—‘find ways.’ I know where my own pleasure arises. Yours is probably the same.” She snaked her hands down over Annie’s body. “There? And there?”

  Annie gasped and drew up her legs, spreading them wide.

  “The point is,” Abigail said, withdrawing herself a few inches and taking Annie’s hand, “I would feel nothing—certainly not that sort of passion.”

  “Oh, Abbie,” she whimpered. “Why can’t you?”

  “Why can’t you feel it for a man? Could you even do this with Celia? You don’t want me to pretend it for you, do you?”

  “Yes! Only try and you’ll see.”

  “But Annie, you of all people can’t want me to pretend it. You know what that sort of fraud is called. And you know what opinion the pretender soon forms for the one who accepts it as the real thing.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t. I only know I love you. I love you so much, I’d take anything.”

  “I love you too, Annie. But only as a sister. More than a sister—a twin. In almost everything I’m closer to you than to Pepe—but not in that one thing. I could share everything with you, be closer to you than I could with any man, but not in that one thing. If I could live with you twenty-three hours a day, and Pepe one, that would be heaven. I’m much happier with you than I am with Pepe, much more at ease, but I need that one thing from him. And only from him.”

  She was lying, of course. The truth was far more complex—beyond the simplicities of “happier” and “more at ease.” But Annie did not need the truth from her, any more—she realized—than she needed it from Pepe.

  ***

  Next morning when she awoke, Annie had gone. So had her clothes. But William was there. Abigail rose and dressed and heated up his goat’s milk. She had to wake him to feed him. He was growing almost as taciturn as César.

  She tried to feel some kinship with him, but he had become Annie’s, in fact as in law. He was so registered at the embassy and on her passport.

  Annie came back shortly before ten; she avoided Abigail’s eyes.

  “I’m going, love,” she said. “Back to England. Back to the Smoke.”

  “No, Annie!”

  “I’ll never settle here. And you won’t go back there.”

  “But…”

  “I just seen Mr. Laon. He’s off on the night train and he agreed to squire me—and William. He sired the little bleeder, now he can squire him.”

  “Annie? Please stay.”

  Annie showed her rail ticket. “I pinched the money off of you,” she said.

  “This is because of…last night!”

  “’Course it is.”

  “But don’t pay heed to that, Annie. I was cruel. I didn’t know what I was saying. It was losing Pepe made me like that. Don’t leave me!”

  “I must, love. Cruel or not, you was right. Don’t make it hard now, eh?”

  “I’ll do anything, Annie. Anything you want, only don’t leave me alone!”

  Annie smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be alone too long, gel.”

  “I’ll pretend so well you’ll never know.”

  “Oh dear!” Annie’s lips began to tremble.

  Abigail seized her arms. “Come on. Come back to bed now. I’ll show you!”

  With a superhuman effort Annie wrenched her arms free and drew a deep breath, both to steady herself and to bellow “Celia!” at the top of her voice. Celia came running from the studio, watercolour brush between her fingers. “Give us a hand, there’s a love,” Annie said. “I’m going back to England today.”

  She even managed a laugh.

  Chapter 34

  What will you do?” César asked. “Will you write another novel?” She shook her head. For days she had not left the atelier. She had drifted from room to room, staring out of the windows, following cracks in the plaster, wanting not to be alive. She had found a shawl left by Annie and had almost worn it out passing it through her fingers, raising it to her face to sniff the last trace of her.

  She missed Annie far more than she missed Pepe. He had half gone from her life a year ago. She still loved him, but the companionship, the kinship of obsessions, had gone. Now, she thought, in vindication of her life, suppose we had been yoked in marriage
!

  Annie was the real loss. She thought of her all the time. Wherever she turned, a part of her prepared to welcome Annie. Her dark eyes and angular features were everywhere. She remembered her voice, her tread on the floor, the rustle of her clothes, her laugh, her angry, tender love for little William. At night she would wake and reach for Annie’s body before memory returned. She remembered Annie’s lips on hers and Annie’s hand on her breast. Had she been wrong and Annie right? If she had yielded, would she have seen? Had her love for Pepe been a mere apprenticeship for the love she might have found with her?

  At first, in the depth of her double loss, she believed that to be so. But as time staunched the immediate flow of her grief, she came to doubt it. Some part of her wanted it to be true; but the rest of her was too honest, and too self-aware, to connive at the wish.

  By the time César judged it right to ask her what she would do, to face her again toward the future, she knew that if ever she loved again, it would be with a man; yet because of what Annie had offered—and she so nearly accepted—she would understand that love far more deeply than before.

  “If not a novel, then what?” César persisted.

  She smiled then. “I might even paint.”

  He nodded judiciously. “It could be good.” His rich, dark voice was comforting.

  But even as the thought occurred to her, she shied away from it. Oh, dear, she wondered. Am I going to look for comforting things to lean on all my life?

  So when he stood up suddenly and said, “Let’s go out to the Cavour. Music and sparkle and officers in uniform! My eyes are starved of spectacle!” she was just in the mood to accept with something like the beginnings of enthusiasm. With gratitude, anyway.

  When the spirit took him like that, he was marvellous company. He danced with both Abigail and Celia equally, paid them lavish but equal compliments, made sure they both became equally tipsy, and gave them equal support all the way home. It was the first night in many that Abigail had not cried herself to sleep.

  In the small hours, sometime between three and four, she came wide awake with the conviction that she was being a fool. She had lost Pepe. She had lost Annie. She had lost her baby. And she had lost her book. The four most valued things in her life. But how was it going to help for her to hide herself away in Rome? What would a new career as a painter—a very minor painter, she felt sure—achieve? How, when the grief had passed, as all griefs pass, would she come to view herself for her spineless acceptance of all these losses?