Abigail

by Malcolm Macdonald

  On the back of the second was an entire verse, also from Blake:

  Love seeketh not itself to please,

  Nor for itself hath any care,

  But for another gives its ease,

  And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

  “Did I choose right?” he asked when he gave them to her. She had spoken to him often enough of Blake to make the question rhetorical. “What will you do with them?”

  “Feel angry,” she said. “Every time I look at them.” The gift, which she had not expected, moved her deeply. She remembered the original drawings, of course, but had not even known he was at work on the paintings; he must have done them in his own room.

  He laughed nervously at her answer. “Why?”

  “For the fact that they can never be shown—just as Into a Narrow Circle can never be published.”

  “Never?”

  “All right! Who cares for posthumous fame? I will take them, César, and I’ll never part with them. One day they’ll show the world that some of us at least were on the side of life. Even though we lacked the courage to stand up and say so.”

  Together they looked at the paintings a long time, in silence.

  “Isn’t it absurd,” she said. “Even if these were of models—paid models—no English painter could show them. I doubt if they could even paint them. They’d have to disguise the girl in a classical setting. Or mythological.”

  “English painting is absurd. In France it’s a joke.”

  “I shall never go back to England. I’m a Roman now.”

  ***

  That summer she dared at last to exhibit several paintings. All were praised—sometimes by aspiring critics who sought admission into the circle that was loosely formed around her; but established connoisseurs, too, who had no need of her patronage, admired her work, even where they recognized it as a trivialization of César’s profounder and more difficult vision. And she was too conscious of her debt to mind when they pointed it out.

  Her tenancy of the slummy atelier opposite the fish mart began to seem incongruous now that she was starting to move in Roman Society. At best, people thought her choice of home quaint. But to move out would have been to lose César—and what he had called the “cul-de-sac of love.” He came to her still, once or twice a week, though now he was sleeping every night with Celia. How he set his visits right with her, Abigail never asked. Nor did Celia ever mention it to her, except once, obliquely, when, on the anniversary of Henry’s death, she cursed him for having denied her ten years of joy.

  To move out would also have been to admit that painting had become the lesser half of her life, and that was something she was not willing to do. If people wanted her society, they’d have to take her for what she was. The fact that they did so was not flattering; it meant she was growing old—passing out of that young-virginal range over which Society exercises such an implacable vigil and exacts from its trespassers such cruel revenge. By the time she grew to be sixty, she reflected grimly, she could if she wished live a life of open scandal; she’d be tolerated still, even warmly, as an eccentric who could no longer make the slightest dent.

  In the spring of her fourth year in Rome, César told her he and Celia would be leaving the atelier. Celia was, at last, expecting a child and they would be married. They would also be going back to France—to Paris.

  Abigail decided to stay on at the atelier, even after they had gone. He smiled when she told him so. “Now I’m sure you’ll go back to England,” he said.

  “No. I’ll stay here.”

  “I mean one day you’ll go back. The atelier has no kitchen and no fireplaces. It’ll always be just rooms to sleep and work in. You’ll never have roots here. That’s why you cling to it—because it leaves you free to go one day.”

  “It leaves me free to enjoy Rome. Everyone lives in public here. Even people with homes and families still live out in their streets.”

  The night before they left for Paris, Abigail was astonished to hear César’s familiar knock at her door; only the day before, he and Celia had been married. She did not let him in. “I want to part good friends with Celia,” she said.

  He laughed. “It’s all right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll go and get her.”

  She let him in then.

  “It’s already a very French marriage,” he said when they were side by side. “It would distress her only if she could not meet my mistresses socially.”

  “Mistresses! We are plural, then?”

  “Only in the course of time. The English are confused about romantic love. They put it inside marriage and it gets swamped in bills and babies’ napkins.”

  She laughed.

  “But,” he went on, “it’s their only serious fault. For the rest they are all virtue. They believe in family, in lineage. They like order. They work. They put their own interests first and everyone else’s nowhere—but, oh so politely! They know value, to the last farthing. And above all, because they know exactly what they want, they also know exactly how to compromise.”

  “Yes.” Abigail smiled. “It’s a portrait of Celia.”

  “Of course. Except that she has no illusions about romantic love, either.”

  “The perfect woman, then.”

  “The perfect wife. And that’s all she ever really wanted to be.”

  “And all you ever wanted?”

  He did not answer. She rose on one elbow and with her free hand began to caress his head, running her fingers through his hair and beard. For a while he did not stir, then suddenly he grasped her hand and, turning to it, planted a passionate kiss on her fingers, a kiss he seemed afraid to break.

  She lowered her head on his and kissed his ear. “I’ll miss you,” she said, not sure what sort of comfort he wanted.

  He was crying. His cheeks made wet sounds against the skin of the hand he was kissing.

  “César,” she said softly. “Don’t leave me this memory.”

  “I should have married you,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have agreed to it. Only if you’d gone blind.”

  He shook his head.

  “What?” She tried to joke him out of this mood. “You think you could have forced me? Against all I know of you?”

  “What d’you know of me!”

  At least she had managed to stop his weeping; he was trying to be heroic now. She continued: “I have it on the best authority that you love painting first, second, and third.”

  “I said that to make it come true.”

  “And succeeded.”

  “No!” It was a quiet howl of torment. “You’ve understood nothing! The struggle to remain a painter instead of devoting my whole life, my whole being, my whole soul to you. Why else did I paint you so incessantly? Why did I come to you at night?”

  “I thought I knew that, at least. But tell me.”

  “To keep alive the hope of you! The knowledge that you would love me if I made you my first, second, third.”

  She kissed him again, not wanting to say it was untrue.

  “Tell me you would,” he said.

  She went on kissing him.

  “Of course you would. Otherwise you would not have become my mistress.”

  She was not going to stand for that. “What then was the reason,” she asked coldly, “that you became my petit gigot?”

  He went rigid with anger. She felt suddenly the barrenness of the whole conversation. “Why have you told me all this?” she asked briskly. “Even if it’s true—all right, I accept it’s true, I don’t want to mock your sincerity. But if you’ve kept it concealed so long, why come up here and spoil our last night with a confession like this?”

  “I wanted you to understand.”

  “When the understanding could be of no possible use?”

  “When I gave you those two paintings, an
d I asked you what you’d do with them? And you said you’d look at them and get angry, at Society and…”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “It was so impersonal. I gave them to you so that you could see how tenderly the sunlight caressed you. You’d remember how my eyes had fused with the sun, and how my hand and lips had caressed you, too. I gave them to you so that you’d always know you had been loved.”

  Oh no, you didn’t, she thought. It was plausible—even plausible enough for him to believe it. You came up here because, good and kind though you are, you wanted some power of you to linger on. You came up here to light a lamp for me to place in the cottage window of my little soul, for you, forever. You came up here because you are a man, and like all men, you think you can administer me.

  The insight had the extraordinary effect of making her want him physically more keenly than ever before. It was the only power she wanted to exercise over him, because it was so infallible. Even if he hated her, she could still wield it.

  She began to caress him then, as if too deeply moved by his last words to say any of her own. She caressed him in all the places that excited him most. Her own longing made her shiver and that excited him even more, for he took it as the absolute mark of her submission. She let him think so until they had finished—the most stupendous physical love that had ever engulfed her.

  Then in her afterplay she said softly, “Poor limp warrior! And poor, poor men. You think it such a marvellous weapon—and really it’s your Trojan horse!”

  Chapter 37

  She often thought of all the marvellous times she had spent with César and Celia. The walks in the strange and beautiful landscapes of the Campana, before the season of the mosquitoes…the happy, silent hours side by side at their easels…the walks home from the cafés, arm in arm, making the streets and squares ring with their song and laughter…the discussions about life and love and art that had seemed so profound and wise…

  Where was it all now? And Annie, who never answered letters? And Pepe, and all her London friends? All the grand forevers of her life—they each served their season and then she passed beyond them. Her need for them lingered awhile; then even it withered.

  In her new aloneness she tried to feel lonely, and could not. No need arose within her that was not already filled. Friendship? Rome was a warren of her friends. Work? Her painting was now everything; she knew she would never be more than a footnote in the histories of art, a parenthesis in a Life of César Rodet, but she did not paint for such a fame. In any case she had a fame of her own—she rarely went to the theatre or opera without seeing, at the corner of her eye, someone or other pointing her out to friends. Love? Annie had said the final word on that. And sex? If César were still there, she would want it; but she was not a man.

  Yet though she could identify no actual want, she knew that something was missing. Her baby? The chance of ever having babies? Unless she had found the trick of being massively dishonest with herself, it was neither of those. It was something much less tangible. Then one day, quite out of the blue and for no reason at all, she remembered a little incident from her girlhood. It was the moment she dipped her pen in its inkwell and started to write what became the Abbot’s first article. She could not, after so many hundreds of thousands of words, remember what it had been about. But what she did remember was that absolute sense of certainty in the act of carrying pen to paper, a heightened awareness that what was about to happen was right.

  And that, she realized, was the note now missing from her life. It was not dull, indeed it was exciting; nor was it profitless, nor worthless, nor stale. Yet it lacked that particular buzz: the certainty that what was coming next was right.

  Perhaps it was the sort of signal she needed only in her youth. Certainly she could go on working and enjoying life to the full without it now.

  ***

  In 1887 they pulled down the ghetto and turned it into a spacious square. The Jews, who had been freed from restriction at the end of papal rule, had long gone—the rich to villas amid the rich, the poor to try their luck a little apart from their history. But their tradition of cleanliness and order, despite the teeming anthill and dark labyrinthine alleys in which they had lived, remained. The ghetto had always been a friendly place, and she had often gone a little out of her way to walk through it. Now, though from the atelier she had been able to see no more than a slice of one corner of it, she missed its dark warmth intensely.

  They even began to clear the rubble from the streets and excavate them down to the original level, exposing the half-buried ground floor of the Teatro. Soon, perhaps, they would close the fish mart and the whole area would become respectable. She considered moving to Venice.

  It was easiest to think of such a move when she was alone in the atelier. But when she was in one of the cafés amid all her friends, arguing as if for her life about the new colour theories of Georges Seurat or the way Degas was handling pastel, then she could not even consider crossing the Tiber.

  So she came to tolerate the prettification of the Vecchio, and Venice dwindled to a distant possibility.

  One evening a man joined their café group with a simple, “You permit?” There was something about him that brooked no refusal. Certainly no one refused.

  He had the air of an artist—perhaps a sculptor, Abigail thought. He greeted no one as he sat down, but he nodded stiffly at her as if they might once have met. He looked at least sixty, though his fair, wavy hair had only just begun to recede. His eyes were blue and challenging; even later, when she realized that one of them was glass, they did not lose their challenge. His skin was dried and wrinkled, like a peasant’s; a scar ran from the corner of his left eye—the eye that proved to be glass—to his ear. The wrinkles of age crisscrossed it like a child’s scribble. His mouth was set as grim as a turtle’s, even when he smiled. His hands were rough; it was the sight of them that had made Abigail think he might be a sculptor.

  If someone had whispered to her, “That man used to get drunk every evening of his youth…that man has cuckolded more husbands than Casanova…that man has seen the inside of every jail in Italy…that man used to swallow nails and fire in a circus,” or any one of a dozen similar one-line biographies, she would have believed each and all of them. He looked the sort of man who might have done anything, and despite his years, he looked stocky and powerful enough—and ruthless enough—to do it all still.

  Though he followed everything that was said, he contributed nothing. He drank his wine with a mechanical efficiency—up, tilt, sip, tilt, down. And never once looked at the glass. Again and again his eyes turned to her. He made her flesh crawl. She hoped he was just passing through Rome and was not set to become an habitué of their favourite cafés.

  Usually their group broke up in twos and threes and drifted home, but that night someone came in and said there was a big thunderstorm descending from the Alban Hills and already it was impossible to get a cab. Everyone stood to hurry home. Massimo Ronzi walked most of the way with her; she was glad to see the glass-eyed stranger walk off up the Corso, in the opposite direction.

  “I hope he doesn’t come again,” she said. “Who was he?”

  “I never saw him before,” Massimo said.

  These walks home had now turned into baroque rituals of seduction and refusal; sometimes he told her of past conquests; sometimes he would court her with flowery salacity. This was such a night. He was a conquered land…he lay at her feet, trembling to know her will for she was his conqueror…he was hers to command…let her become his general and he would furnish her an army—all the privates she could ever want! She would see how they could stand and drill! And so on.

  “One day, Massimo,” she said as they parted, “you’ll die of a heart attack: I will say yes to you.”

  “Ah—if I might lie in the country of my choice, my heart would heal at once!”

  He was never short of a reply. Ye
t it often struck her that he might, in fact, be a virgin still. It would almost be worth yielding herself to find out. With a smile she watched him go away along the Via del Portico. Then the sharp squall of wind that heralds rain swept through the streets and made her scurry for home.

  A voice from behind called out her name.

  She turned. It was the glass-eyed man, hurrying toward her. “I know your uncle,” he said. He spoke Italian with a French accent.

  “I have no uncle, signor. Signor…?”

  “Your Uncle Daniel. Dan Telling? Your mother’s brother.”

  It stirred the faintest of memories. Her mother had only once mentioned such a brother. When Abigail was a girl of about fourteen, Nora had taken them all, her brothers and sisters, to see the hovel near Manchester where she herself had grown up. She had talked of a brother then—she and her brother used to sit under their father’s loom and “tie the rinks,” or something. She had never mentioned his name; there was some disgrace attached to him.

  “He’s dying,” the man said. “If he finds no safe shelter, he’ll be dead before the week is out.”

  The first large warm raindrops fell around them. Lightning turned the man’s scar into a canyon.

  “We can’t stand out here talking,” she said. “Let’s at least get under the arches over there.”

  They ran to the Teatro, ducking as if the rain were a fusillade of shot.

  “My uncle, you say?” she asked as soon as they were under an arch. The rain now fell in stair rods. The splatters on the street, when frozen by the lightning, were like an army of miniature silver knights on chargers, each with a glistening lance.