Abigail (12 page)

By the time he left she was so fired with the ideals of clear writing and “the inevitable thread of words” that she wanted to go home at once and write the next dozen chapters. Like someone who had just learned to ride a bicycle or to swim, she wanted to practise the new skill to the point of exhaustion.

At the doorway, on the threshold of his departure, he turned back to her and, cutting short her delighted thanks, said, “Next time we’d better talk about money.”

They did not, however, talk about money the next time they met, nor the time after that—nor, indeed, for several weeks. Once or twice, as he was leaving, Laon said, “We really must give a thought to the financial side of things.” But that was as far as the discussion went. Somehow the editing and rewriting of the story always seemed more important.

They met, as on the first occasion, at The Girls’ College, usually in the mornings. Within very few weeks Abigail found that her life was beginning to revolve around “Pepe,” as she came to call him. (He, however, refused to call her anything but “Lady Abigail.”) She wrote for him alone, or rather for him as arbiter of children’s reading. His own private taste in literature, as distinct from what he could approve of as editor and publisher, was far more scholarly. They wasted hours talking of Ben Jonson and Milton and Gibbon; they analyzed Shelley and Wordsworth to dust; they retraced the history of the novel from Defoe and Fielding to their own time and speculated endlessly on the course it might take next.

Yet somehow, despite these distractions, her own story got rewritten and edited and re-rewritten. And in the process the question of whether or not Laon would agree to publish the finished book (and whether or not Abigail would permit him to publish) was obscurely passed over. Suddenly there was no question at all: The book would be published, and by Laon—his first venture into bound books.

Abigail was careful to keep her growing admiration not only from Laon himself but also from her mother. She knew that if Nora suspected any kind of unsuitable liaison to be developing, the whole thing would be called off. And Abigail now wanted to see herself in print far more ardently than she wanted to go on meeting Pepe.

She did, nonetheless, want to go on meeting him.

But on one occasion—it was one of their rare afternoon appointments—she had to forgo that pleasure. She was driving along Piccadilly as usual, reading her manuscript for the tenth time, and feeling ten times as dissatisfied as she had when she wrote it, when, glancing casually up, she found herself eye to eye with Annie.

There was no mistaking her, despite the gorgeous clothes. An innocent girl might have taken her for a young noblewoman or a leader of fashion out for a stroll; a man of the world would have known, by the slightly too elegant cut of her, that she was an expensive one, not to be approached under twenty guineas; but Abigail knew her at once: Annie, unchanged beneath it all. And Annie recognized her, too; she could see that.

The coach, caught in the traffic, stopped a few yards ahead of Annie. Without thought Abigail opened the door, right in the girl’s path. “Do jump in, Annie,” she said.

For a fraction of a second she was sure the girl was getting set to refuse.

“We’ve so much to talk about,” she prompted.

Annie, slightly to her own surprise, got up into the coach. For a moment the pair of them sat staring at each other, too shy to speak. Abigail grinned and shrugged her shoulders; Annie tried not to laugh. The coach jolted forward a step or two.

“Let’s go out to Richmond and take tea,” Abigail suggested.

Annie fished in her bag and pulled out a dark lace cloth, which she draped over her shoulders. “It helps kill them a bit,” she said.

Abigail, now laughing, leaned forward and grasped the girl’s gloved hands in her own. “Oh, Annie! I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you so well.”

“You?” Annie asked in surprise. “What’s it to you, my lady?”

“Oh, I suffered agonies after the Countess dismissed you. I used to go out all over London looking for you. And imagining such terrible things. I’ve prayed for your…your safety and all that, ever so often. Every night, I should think.”

Annie sat back, jutted her jaw, and blew upward over her face, miming the astonishment she felt. “Stupid!” she said.

The affront must have shown in Abigail’s face, for Annie corrected herself at once. “No! No, I don’t mean stupid. I mean, it was very nice of you. And I’m grateful, I’m sure. What I meant was it was silly to worry. About me. Nice, but silly. I’ve always been able to look after myself.”

Abigail nodded ruefully. That at least was demonstrably true. “So I see,” she said. “I must agree you’re doing slightly better than you were three or four years ago.”

And then, having ordered the coachman to go to Richmond, she told Annie all that had happened to her since. And a lot of family news, too.

There was a little tea room with a glazed balcony overlooking the river, just downstream from the bridge; on this bright, raw March day it was practically deserted. Abigail was still talking as they came in and sat down; any reserve Annie might have felt had long since evaporated. She looked so queenly in her “killed-a-bit” clothes that the serving girl unthinkingly helped her to be seated first. And such was the friendship that had grown between them that Abigail merely laughed—waiting to do so until the girl had gone for the toasted crumpets and strawberry jam.

“Well!” Annie said. “And what have I been doing with myself, eh!”

“You needn’t tell me if you’d rather not.”

“I’d be more ashamed to confess I’d lived by begging. I’ve made my own way up. The only way such as I can. Things being as they are.”

Abigail wanted to contradict her; she wanted what the girl said to be untrue. But words like “thrift” and “diligence” died unuttered in her throat. For the first time in her life she realized consciously that a secure way of life was not open to everyone. Until now poverty had always been the result of someone’s moral failing. Her own mother’s childhood poverty, for instance, had been due to her great-great-grandfather’s fondness for gambling.

“D’you know how much I’ve put aside, my lady?” Annie asked.

But Abigail, following up her new insight, was trying to imagine herself in that position—no education, no particular skill, no character. How would she manage? She remembered the time Annie had pointed out the “gay ladies” of Piccadilly to her, saying that they did not even know the men they went off with; and she wondered now, exactly as she had wondered then, how such a thing was possible.

“Best part of two thousand pound!” Annie said. “And I never stinted myself meanwhile, neither. I’m giving it the blow-by next month.”

“Giving it up?”

“That I am. Buy me a nice little public, and…”

“But, Annie—you could have given it up a long time ago, surely?”

Annie shook her head with condescending superiority. “Oh no, my lady. Not me. I seen too many gels scrape together just enough to buy a little shop or something and then sweat theirselves to starvelings trying to make a go of it. And then end up back in the way of life. Very few of them ever climbs out twice. They’re parson’s meat, they are. But not me. Oh, no!”

“What’s parson’s meat?”

“Food for sermons.” Annie laughed. “And they end up getting sermons for food, and all. Out in them refuges and suchlike.”

The serving girl brought their tray and they busied themselves pouring the tea and spreading the crumpets. Both took off their gloves.

“But what’s it like, Annie?” Abigail asked casually, wiping her fingers on her napkin.

Annie licked the butter from her fingers with relish. “Hard work,” she said. “Harder than housework. Harder, in some ways, than sewing, or any sweat trade. Yeah,” she added, weighing it up. “It can be a sweat trade all its own. March is dead. But April’s a riot. Funny, isn’t it! Spring and all that. You’d think there’s a new army in town in April.” She sipped her tea. “I should have got out in February.” Then she straightened and her eyes grew bright with a new resolve. “In fact, why not now! Yes, I’ll get out now. Meeting you, my lady, was what I needed—the right sort of a shove.” She leaned back and her sigh was almost of ecstasy. “Ye-e-s! I’ve trod the last paving stone. I’ve smiled the last smile. That was providence—you coming along.” She grinned. “And I almost never got into your carriage, my lady. I almost turned my back on you.”

Abigail was startled. “But why?”

Annie shrugged. “Dunno. Afraid, I suppose.”

“Of what?”

“Preaching,” Annie said reluctantly. Then she chuckled. “Funny—when I go down our street, I’m a queen. I give out money like royalty, too. Penny here, sixpence there. Even shillings and half-crowns. And the little gels come out and stare. And I can see it in their eyes, you know. I know what they’re thinking. ‘One day I’ll be like her. All them fine clothes.’ That’s me—a queen. And then I see one of your lot, and I see their eyes looking at me, and I feel like a plate of cat’s leftovers.”

“Not my eyes, Annie dear. I’d never even
think
that of you.”

Annie brightened. “No. Perhaps that’s why I come in the end.” She looked at Abigail’s face, the hesitant smile, the questioning eyes, and something within her divined that she had not answered Abigail’s real question. “You mean what’s it really like?” she asked.

Abigail nodded intently.

Annie screwed up her face. “I got to think back a bit,” she said. “I’ve got my own followers now, regular like. I don’t go on parade much, not now. When you saw me in Piccadilly back there, I wasn’t parading like. Only shopping. Well…parading on my merry way to the shops you could say.” She sighed. “But, thinking back now…”

“When you left us, when the Countess turned you off, what did you do?”

“Well, I looked for another place, of course. About ten days I was. Looking. But it was no go, not without a character. So anyway one gel I got to know, she give me an address where she said I could get a good position. Maid-of-all-work, she said. But believe me, by that time I wasn’t choosy. I was too hungry. So anyway, it was a poky little place, no more than a floor of furnished rooms, rented by a geezer who called hisself Carey, though I later found out his real name. Of course, the girl what told me was having me on. For a joke, like. The only position there was, as you might say, stretched flat and smiling.

“And even when he opened the door I knew it. Mind you, I’d called four times and no answer, and this was my only hope of a job, so I was near my wit’s end, I can tell you. Anyway—I knew it. I could see it in his eyes. He’s real old. Nearly fifty, and very respectable. He’s a railway engineer and very high up. ’Course, I didn’t know all that then. But I knew his game. And—being hungry and all…”

She sought the air around her for fitting explanations. “You know how…did you ever see a cat killing a rabbit?”

“I must have done.”

“You know how the rabbit, when it’s done screaming but it’s still alive—even when it’s not bleeding or anything and you’d think it could still make a run for it and maybe escape—but it doesn’t. It just kind of sits there, big eyes. Just kind of looking at the cat. And the cat’s not excited either. Dead calm. Just looking at the rabbit. The two of them just snug and side by side, looking at each other. And if you was to get their photo like that, not knowing what went before, or what’s going to happen, just that moment, you’d think they was real mates.”

Abigail nodded, surprised at the sudden beating of her heart. Annie’s description was so vivid, and Annie so tense with the relived memory, that Abigail could feel herself almost becoming both animals. She remembered the time when Falconwood was just starting to build, and she had found Steamer and Nick Thornton out on the hillside, and how Nick had looked at her. For one brief moment she had been transfigured by a particular sensation. She had never quite forgotten it, and now Annie’s words had brought it back so sharply it might have happened only moments ago. It was the feeling of being those creatures.

“I think,” Annie said, “there’s a bit of that rabbit in all of us. Women. I think we’re made that way. For the sake of the men. God made us for the men, didn’t He?” When she saw Abigail’s astonished eyes, she added defensively, “You know. Like it says in the Bible, out of one of Adam’s ribs and all that. Anyway I can’t explain it no other way. I could no more say no to him than that rabbit could run away. All he had to do was he held out his hand and I took it and he led me inside and done it to me.

“Then after, when I was crying, he asked me was it my first time for money. And I said yes and he said that was worth twenty guineas if I’d stay till next day. Twenty guineas! That was more than a year’s wages so don’t ask why I didn’t run away. Even though all I wanted was to go and hide in the dark somewhere.”

“But why did he want you to stay?”

Annie snorted a surprised laugh. “Why d’you think?”

“Again?”

“Gor-lummy yes. And again. Yeah, that’s men for you. But he wasn’t bad. He was very nice to me. Not that I fancied him. But there’s a long way between fancy and hate. And he was very kind. Learned me a lot. How to go up to a mark—a man. How to flash myself. How to please them. How to avoid the big bay window…you know, the familiar way. And how not to get burned.” When she saw Abigail’s bewilderment she said: “Not to get in for the plate. You know…winning the heat? Never mind. He learned me a lot. He was a regular education to me.”

She half vanished into her own reverie. “Funny thing is, his wife spends all her time rescuing the likes of me. Got her own refuge and all. I often used to laugh, but he wouldn’t never see the funny side to it. Life was all de-dah de-dah de-dah to him. He explained it lots of times but I couldn’t never seem to catch on.”

Abigail’s heart was suddenly trying to force its way up her throat. She suddenly knew who this “Carey” man was! There couldn’t be two senior railway engineers around the age of fifty with wives who devoted themselves to the rescue of fallen women. It could only be her “Uncle” Walter—Walter Thornton, Nick’s father, and one of their oldest family friends.

“What sort of things did he say?” she asked, hoping her agitation did not show. She could not believe that dear, mild, respectable Uncle Walter could do and be all the things Annie had said. Yet Annie could have no possible motive for lying. She could not even suspect that her “Mr. Carey” was known to Abigail.

Annie shrugged.

“Was he a respectable man? I’d love to hear how a respectable man might justify such things.”

“I only go with respectable men. I got twenty-two regulars, and all above three thousand a year. I got a bishop. A man who was cabinet minister. An equerry. Four lords, five honourables, two baronets. A tea importer. A shipowner. Three barristers…”