Abigail (27 page)

“Then don’t go. For heaven’s sake, it’s not as if…”

“I do have to. I must. I’m so unfair to you—holding on to you and yet swearing I’ll never marry.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“I am, darling. That’s what this time is for.”

“And if, at the end of it, I am still of the same mind?”

“I may change.”

His eyes filled with hope until she added, “I may change in ways you don’t welcome, too.”

***

Celia saw another flaw that had escaped both Abigail and Annie. When Abigail said she knew just the place—the Villa Mancini on Lake Como—Celia said, “Suppose you were not circumstanced as you are—is that where you would choose to go?” And Abigail had to admit that it was not.

“What would you do then?”

Abigail considered.

Her mother had many years ago bought a lot of land and foreshore at a place in Normandy called Deauville, opposite the fashionable resort of Trouville; there were hopes of making an equally fashionable resort out of Deauville. Those hopes were still only half-realized, but the scheme had already borne certain fruits, among them a number of fine villas, any one of which Abigail would have begged if her sole purpose had been to write a book.

Annie looked at Celia with a new admiration. “We’d best keep you by us,” she said, “in case we turn to crime. You’d flannel a good line on any turnover.”

Celia blushed at this barely comprehensible praise, though she did not like Annie’s use of “we.” As far as she was concerned, she and Abigail were taking Annie along.

Nora was all in favour of her daughter’s scheme. She was glad Abigail had never married Laon—and almost glad she had never married at all. She saw this year-long break as the beginning of the end for Laon’s chances.

“From September you may have your pick of the villas,” she said. “But in fact the best is vacant now. Countess d’Aligny was to have had it, but her husband is ill, poor lady. She would be glad, I’m sure, to have the rent returned.”

“Which one is it?”

Nora had sketches of all the villas. “This,” she said. “The Villa Corot—after the painter, you know. He stayed there a few years ago and we renamed it in his honour. There is a little studio in the garden.”

It was charming—romantic, even anarchic, but in a very controlled French way. “Perfect,” Abigail said.

“And you can go over and see Tante Rodie every day if you wish.”

Ah! She had forgotten Tante Rodie—Madame Rodet—her mother’s great friend. The year she had spent in France perfecting her French had been passed in the Rodets’ Paris house at Saint Cloud; she had forgotten La Gracieuse, their home at Trouville.

“I had thought of that, of course.” Abigail smiled. “But Tante Rodie’s nearness may turn out to be the disadvantage. I hope she would understand.”

“What?”

“I
must
write this book. If I find Deauville too distracting, or if I can’t settle, or the weather’s bad, I’ll have to move on. I thought the Villa Mancini near Como—you remember? The Rodets took it that summer I stayed with them.”

And so she laid the grounds for a move that would be inevitable, never mind the weather or the distractions of Deauville or how well or ill she settled; there could be no question of being within a hundred miles of Tante Rodie from the moment the swelling became visible.

In case she harboured any illusions about what she was relinquishing by this mad notion of hers (Pepe’s words), Laon arranged a testimonial farewell dinner at the Albion. Editors and writers returned from grouse moors in Scotland and from moorings in the Solent to be there; many a Grand Old Writer on his retirement would not have been so honoured.

G.V. Simms, in a witty but pointed speech, made it clear that the book she was going to produce had better be a masterpiece, or she would have deceived her admirers twice over. Jimmy Whistler brought the roof down with his selection of readings from the Abbot’s columns, artlessly choosing only those passages that referred to him and innocently ascribing their reference to some unknown painter whom he longed to meet—they might have sued Ruskin jointly and thus doubled their damages! At the end, with that extraordinary ability of his to ring a sudden change, he paid her a most moving personal tribute as a lady above reproach in all things.

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.”

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 little 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.