Abigail (21 page)

She was too numb to weep. She stood at the window and watched the squalls of rain sweep across the wintry face of the river; she felt like a machine whose sole purpose was to stand and watch the world yet comprehend it not at all. Everything was pointless. The stirring of the branches in the wind, the flotsam bobbing along the rain-filled gutters and falling into the drains, the soot stirring in random eddies where the window ledge was still dry—all these were at one with the dull heartbeat within her, all meaningless.

She stood thus for an eternity, until Caspar’s voice pierced her silence. “I say, Abbie, what’s up?”

She turned and looked at him, standing at the door. “Up?”

“I’ve been watching you.” He came to the window and put an arm about her. “With the survey telescope. You didn’t move or…”

She leaned into his embrace and tears she did not know were left inside her fell like rain. “Oh, Steamer…Steamer, I’m so miserable—I just wish I could die. If he’s going to leave me, I will die. I know I will.”

Caspar held her, saying nothing, just hugging all the comfort he could into her.

Eventually she was calm again, but still he held her. He spoke over her shoulder. “You’re talking about Laon, of course.”

She nodded; after-tears hiccups shook her.

“What has he done?”

“It’s what I’ve done. I said something…he thought…I didn’t mean…but he…”

His hug stifled her. “Calm!” he said. “Be calm. Tell me just a bit at a time. What exactly did you say?”

His stillness and good sense reached into her. She nodded and made the effort. “We were talking about success. About how Society worships it and will forgive anything if it makes money. And I said…you know how one exaggerates for effect?”

She felt him nod; his jaw grazed her hair. “What I said was…” She choked.

“Go on,” he urged gently.

“I said a man could spend his life selling little girls into vice…of course it was ridiculous, but you know how one sometimes…”

“Go on,” Caspar repeated, but this time his voice was laden with foreboding.

“I said if such a man made enough money, Society would applaud.”

“You said that to Laon?”

“Yes, but I’d
forgotten
about his father. I swear it! I haven’t thought about Porzelijn for years. I didn’t
mean
that. God! Of
all
the hyperboles I might have chosen, why did I choose
that
!”

“Indeed, Abbie. Why did you? He will never believe it to be accidental.”

“Oh, Steamer!” She broke down again.

He let grief work its way and then nudged her gently toward the sofa. “Let’s talk,” he said.

When they were seated he continued. He spoke gravely, not as if he were out to comfort her. Indeed, he seemed to speak more to himself. “You remember how Mr. Ignaz Porzelijn first—what shall I call it?—
impinged
on our lives?”

She nodded. “Mary Coen.”

“I was in love with Mary Coen. For six months after she vanished I went through the sort of hell you must be going through now. I know it feels unique, but it isn’t. Everyone you meet has gone through it.”

“But that…” she began in her disappointment.

“I know,” he cut across. “But that makes no difference. I know. I wasn’t going to try and pretend otherwise. It makes no difference. I wasn’t even going to say that I got over it in the end. But I
did
get over it. I stopped crying myself to sleep every single blessed night. I stopped whispering her name to make my guts turn over. I stopped hoping to see her round every corner.” He gave a contemptuous laugh. “I used to ride round Yorkshire—Yorkshire!—knowing she was vanished off the face of the earth, and I’d look for her behind every bush and down every lane! Yet I got over it. Oh, I was quite myself again when Nick told me he’d seen her in Paris. And what did I do? I nearly broke my ankle jumping off the ship. Oh, I’d got over her! I didn’t rest until I’d reached Paris and tracked her down. But I’d got over her!”

His full meaning dawned upon her. “Oh, Steamer! You…still?”

He nodded, not taking his eyes off her. “
And
Laney, that girl in New York. Don’t imagine you’ll ever get over it. You just get used to
not
getting over it—until one day you’ll suddenly realize it’s been years since you even thought about it. But even then don’t deceive yourself. It’s a sleeping volcano, that’s all. If Laney was to come walking down the street one day next week—or Mary Coen—I don’t know if…”

She touched his mouth with the tips of her fingers. “Please!”

“Oh, you haven’t heard the best of it,” he said. “I think I know why this is. That’s what I really meant to tell you. It’s the only comfort I can honestly give.”

“What is it?”

He looked at her, summoning resolution. “You’re a big girl now, Abbie. So I suppose I may tell you. I loved both those girls. Not with the pure love of a medieval knight, you understand—but with a
real
love. I craved them.”

“I know,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

But he seemed not to hear. He was now embarked not on a story but on a compulsion to tell a story. “The way Society goes on you’d think men and women need only five seconds to beget the next generation, like flies. I mean, that’s the longest time we allow the two sexes together unchaperoned. Well, Mary Coen and I passed two nights in bed together and nothing happened. I mean
everything
happened, but not that one particular…you know what I mean.”

She nodded. Her silence made him look at her. “Shocked?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“What I’m saying is that because I was denied—or denied myself—that ultimate joy with them both, I never ceased to long for them.” He squeezed his torso at the ribs. “This—
heart-thing—
is such a tyrant to us. To men, anyway.”

“And to women.”

“I doubt the tyranny is so immediate. But no matter. Even if it is, that’s just what I’m saying. The fact that you and Laon are not married is bound to intensify…” Her smile made him falter.

“Dear Steamer!” she said. “Now
you
think your experience is so unique!”

He sprang to his feet, aghast. He moved away from her as if she had admitted having cholera. “No!”

“Oh?” She was stung to the edge of anger. “It is all fine and beautiful for you—but not for your sister!”

“That is different.” Spit flew from his lips. “Of course it is different.”

“I’ll tell you
how
different, brother dear. Pepe and I went not two nights but two months of nights before we felt ourselves ready for that joy you speak of…”

“Stop! I want to hear no more!”

But her anger was up now. She stood and seized him by the shoulders to shake him. “This tone of high disgust has the reek of hypocrisy,” she said. “I warn you, Caspar, my experience is every bit as beautiful and holy to me as yours obviously was to you. If you behave as if it were something foul and disgusting, you and I will part company. Now!”

“But Abbie…” He was in anguish.

“Choose!”

Defeated, he sat again on the sofa. She sat beside him and took his hand. “Very well,” he said. “Not disgusting. But”—he looked at her searchingly—“
dangerous
!”

“We are careful. People who know us well, even intimately, have not the slightest suspicion of what we are doing. If they did…”

He cut in: “But someone must see him come here.”

“Here! He hardly ever comes here.”

“Where then?”

“Neither you nor anyone else will ever know.”

It was a foolish thing to say and she regretted it at once; Steamer loved nothing so much as a challenge. Still there would be time enough to worry about that.

Then she realized what that last thought of hers implied: hope! The bleak conviction that all was finished had lifted from her. Somehow Steamer had brought her comfort after all.

***

She slept for sixteen hours and awoke ravenous enough to do justice to a four-course breakfast. During the night an unexpected transformation had worked in her. It showed itself first when she thought by habit,
I must call on Pepe—
and then felt a twinge of doubt.

She still wanted to talk to him…explain…see him…touch him. None of that had diminished in any way. But alongside it had grown a conviction that if she went to him she would lose something. What it was she could not say, any more than she could say in plain words why she was still so full of terrors at the thought of marriage. But the loss would be permanent. It had something to do with the marvellous symmetry of their love, hers for him, his for her. If she went to him now, it would introduce a permanent inequality between them; the symmetry would be destroyed. “Symmetry” was another aspect of her freedom.

Beneath this reasoning, barely perceived by her, was something of that same inexplicable impulse which, at the beginning of their affair, had made her postpone for three days an assignation with Pepe that she longed for. But that was beyond her fathoming.

She rose from her breakfast and went to the window, intending no more than to see what sort of a day it was, and found that she was searching the street for the sight of Pepe! It was the same all day, just as Caspar had described it. She followed the usual round—visiting the galleries, calling on friends—and everywhere her body prepared her for an encounter with him. It was not quite so absurd as it had been with Caspar and Mary Coen. Laon’s public path did occasionally cross hers, after all. But she knew that if she were in Paris—or Peking—she would be looking for him in that same way.

A week later she still had not seen Pepe; neither had she opened his first letter. Each day she said,
Today I will go and see him.
And each day that reluctance to be the first to act held her back. She longed for him, wept for him, sighed for the loss of him; yet long habit would not let her believe that it was final. They would be together again, soon; but the move that would reunite them would be his.

Each day, too, she resolved to go and visit Annie, who had been away on one of her periodic visits to Wales, where her sister always seemed to be in one kind of trouble or another. Abigail was not even sure Annie was back, but she ought to go and see. After a week she realized that the same reluctance to meet Pepe was keeping her from visiting Annie. Of course, that was absurd. The last place in London where she’d be likely to run into Pepe was at Annie’s.

It was Sunday. She went to early evensong at St. Paul’s and then took a cab to Crutched Friars. Sunday was a quiet evening at The Old Fountain; they’d have lots of time for a chat. She knocked at the private door. The maid, recognizing her, took her up.

“They’re having such a jolly party, m’m,” she said. “The missus and all. It’s just like when we first come here.”

And it was a splendid party, too. A real East End booze up, with oysters and whelks and jellied eels, with porter and milk stout and rum, and with dancing and comic turns and songs. The only people Abigail knew were Annie and her husband and a couple of the waiters. But that evening everyone was her friend. She never quite fathomed what exactly they were celebrating—a win on the horses, Annie’s return, or a general deliverance from some unspecified but awful fate; but that they
were
celebrating was never in doubt. Annie made an immense fuss over Abigail and set her in a place of honour at her left.

“Fetch a plate o’ whelks!” she called. “And a magnum o’ bubbly.” She leaned conspiratorially toward Abigail. “You think you know about fun up them palaces up west. Well now, just see how
we
can cheat the worms! And don’t mind me, gel. If you see a bit of prairie—go!”

Her laugh filled the room and became the signal for their interrupted fun to start again.

“So anyway,” said a foxy little man with a red moustache who had been speaking when Abigail came in, “he’s stuck for lodgings so he knocks on this door and this landlady comes out. ‘Yes?’ she says. And he says, ‘I’m stopping here.’ And she says, ‘Well stop there then!’ And she shuts the door in his face so he knocks again and she says, ‘Yes?’ ‘You’re cracked,’ he says. ‘I know,’ she says, ‘but it’s not where you’d notice.’”

Everyone howled with laughter. The foxy man grinned wickedly around. “That’s what I like about you,” he said. “You’re
quick!
So he says, ‘No don’t mess around now. Can’t you see me all right for tonight?’ So she looks up and down the street. ‘Just yourself, is it?’ she asks. ‘Only I don’t want no children.’ ‘Now then,’ he says, ‘I’m a married man myself.’ So she takes him in and in the parlour he meets this pal. ‘Hello, me old china,’ he says. ‘How’s the missus?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘I left her home in bed, smoking.’”

The man suddenly looked at Abigail. “Jerusalem,” he said. “There’s a lady present. I can’t finish this one.”

By now the tears were streaming down every face. “Don’t take it amiss, love,” Annie gasped to Abigail. “He always says that about someone. There’s no proper end to that one.”

“You mean you’ve heard this before?”

“Scores of times.”

The monologue went on, a formless, quickfire tale full of lodgers, black eyes, infidelities, illegitimate children, risqué puns, contrived misunderstandings, and catch phrases, until people were calling “Stop!” and “More!” in the same breath.

At last he did stop, though (on the line “You marry whichever one you fancy, son.
He’s
not your father, anyway!”), and gave people a chance to wipe their eyes and rub their aching sides.

“Still,” Annie cried breathlessly, “like the gel said—the more you cry the less there is to piss! I hope that’s not still your first glass of champagne, love?”

Abigail downed it guiltily and held out the glass for a refill.

Spontaneously, from a corner of the room, an angelic young girl in white stood and sang “Home Sweet Home” in a pure, flutelike voice. At once the mood changed. The raucous crowd, which only moments earlier had bayed the roof with laughter, sat still and leaned their heads to one side and sighed and looked far away.

“She’s beautiful!” Abigail whispered.

Annie merely nodded. But when the song was over she added that the girl had been “on the turf since the age of ten, though you’d scarce credit it.”

Indeed, Abigail did not credit it—until the girl, with that same winsome innocence, sang “Whoops—I lost it!” and looked around with mock surprise at every salacious laugh.

Then there was dancing. Then a fat woman stood and recited “Living, alias Starving,” followed by an awkward, rubbery sort of man who declaimed a parody of Hamlet: “To woo, or not to woo?”

The high spot of the evening came when the guvnor himself, Mr. Oldale, sang “Up in a Balloon” and “Slap Bang Here We Are Again.” He had a fine boozy baritone that “needed only ale to oil its squeaks,” as Annie said. But he could put over a drinking song with great verve, which brought everyone to a rousing cheer at the end. With elaborate courtesy he dedicated the cheers to Annie, kissing her hand as Queen of Revels.

“Oh, he’ll feed the dumb glutton tonight all right,” Annie told Abigail with a wink.

Later Annie said, “What you going to do, gel?”

“Do?”

“Yeah. Sing? Recite? Do a patter? What?”

“Oh, Annie! I couldn’t!”

“’Course you can! Everyone does.”

“But I…”

“They’ll think you’re giving yourself airs, if you don’t.”

“I had no idea.”

“Don’t you sing nothing?”

“I know ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’”

“Luverly!” She clapped her hands for silence and Abigail, to her horror, heard the announcement: “And now, straight from her success at the Olympic Theatre in the Strand, The Old Fountain proudly brings you Bessie Power to sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’”

At the time, Abigail could have killed her; but later she realized it was a kindness Annie had done. For by the time that first awful sinking of the stomach hit her she was already well launched into the song, and the moment for nerves had passed. What nervousness there was merely gave her voice a not unpleasing vibrato.

Of course no one was deceived. By the third line everyone knew she was an ordinary domestic performer like themselves; but then Annie’s elaborate introduction worked in her favour—everyone
wanted
her to live up to it.

By the middle of the second verse she actually found herself enjoying it. Until now she had sung only on private, family occasions; now, to see a hundred or more eyes, all fixed on her, was oddly exciting—frightening, but exciting. They fed something back to her, something that her song imparted to them. They were moved to sadness at the thought of the rose “left blooming all alone”; and the repetition in “withered…faded…plucked…gone” struck a deeply nostalgic and tender response among people whose lives never strayed far from the margins of death and loss.

She caught the mood from them. Its ineffable sadness almost felled her in the last verse.

So soon may I follow, when friendships decay,

And from love’s shining circle, the gems drop away.

Her voice broke at

When true hearts lie wither’d, and loved ones are flown.

She could see many in her audience beginning to weep and, curiously enough, that helped to rally her. It was as if, by imparting her own sorrow, she had lost it. What she had caught from them she now gave back. She felt a strange mixture of love and contempt for them—love for those who shared her sense of loss, contempt that they could do so only through this doggerel song (and contempt for herself, too, that
she
could be moved by it as deeply as they).

So she roused herself easily for that final line:

O-oh, who wou-uld inhabit this bleak world alone?

A long gasp of ecstatic sentiment erupted into the greatest applause of the evening; even as their tears still ran, they shouted and stamped and whistled. “Encore! Encore!”

But Annie plucked at her sleeve. “Don’t trump your own ace, gel,” she advised. She, too, had been reduced to tears.

Some time later, Annie’s husband was overcome by drink and the heat. Annie had him carried up to the private apartments; Abigail followed.

Annie stood over his bloated figure, loosening his cravat. It seemed an affectionate gesture until she said, “Who needs them, anyway!”

There was a challenge in her eye as she looked up at Abigail. “And what’s come over you, gel?” she asked.

“What d’you mean?”

“Why’d you come here alone? Where’s your Mr. Laon? And the way you sung? Think it don’t show, love?”

Abigail, already light-headed with the champagne, suddenly found herself wanting to share it all with Annie. Annie would understand. Annie knew everything about love; she would know what to do.

“Oh, Annie,” she began. “He…I…he thinks…” The tears brimmed again.

“Stow that!” Annie said harshly. “There’s not one of them is worth it. Not one that ever lived.” She looked at the sleeping Mr. Oldale. “Not Jesus Christ hisself.”

Abigail saw then that Annie knew nothing—nothing but her own bitterness and disappointments. Her impulse to tears was choked in a new pity. “Oh, Annie!”

Annie turned on her angrily, “Oh Annie, oh Annie!” she sneered. “You don’t know
nothing
, gel. That bastard there is killing me. And you want to cry to me about love? If your Laon said ta-ta, you don’t know when you’re well off. Love? It’s a gallows tree for us.”

Abigail hardly knew what to say. “Why d’you let him drink so much?” she asked. She suddenly felt like a visitor from the Poor Law guardians.

“I hope he may die of it,” Annie said calmly. She even smiled. “If I knew a way to get a bottle of brandy down him now, so help me I’d do it. I’d kill him with no more feeling than I’d pull the head off a flea.”

Her composure was dreadful. If she had screamed the words, Abigail could have discounted them. But Annie was as cool as a teacher of anatomy standing over a cadaver. Abigail saw that whatever comfort she herself might need, it was as a dimple compared with Annie’s well of grief.

But how could she comfort her?

Annie spoke again, still in that same flat voice: “I’d have more luck saving Margate beach from the sea!”

How could she tell her that life need not be as hers had become?

“Men!” Annie said.

And she spoke with such utter contempt that Abigail knew there was no way to tell her. Annie needed to believe in her own cosmic scorn—to know it was justly universal. Perhaps she could be made to see that, if it was true at all, it was true only of the men she had known and chosen. But what would be the use of that? It would only bring the blame too close to home. She would just pass from one kind of despair to another—from despair against men to despair at herself. It was a terrible thing to realize that here was another woman, a fellow human being, whom she loved as a sister, who was beyond any possible comfort. The desolation of it appalled her.

But Annie was suddenly bright and cheerful. “Come on, Abbie love!” she said. “Or we’ll have the brewers complaining!”

An hour later Abigail and “Auntie”—the only two who were even halfway sober by then—were putting a drunken Annie to bed beside her comatose husband. Her brow was still furrowed; not even oblivion, it seemed, could bring her peace.

“Poor mite,” the older woman said. “It’s all the ease she has now.”