Abigail (29 page)

For nine weeks she hovered at the frontier of death. Sometimes she would recover consciousness, recognize one or other of them, smile, half say something, and then fall back into a shallow doze. At other times she would beat her head against the pillow repeatedly, and with as much vigour as it would take to ride a horse.

“That’s a good sign, surely?” they would say to César.

He would only shrug, not wanting to admit how long it was since he last practised medicine. But during those weeks he could not have done more to make up for lost time. Not once did he go out to paint or sketch. He was never farther from her than his brief walks to the gate by the foreshore took him. For the rest of the time he was either at her side or asleep on a truckle bed behind a screen in the corner of her room. Annie and Celia, who shared the bed next door, took turns to mind the baby or to sit by her.

Their anxiety was compounded by the deception they had practised, and were almost daily making worse in their correspondence with Pepe and with Abigail’s family. Time and again, especially when her life seemed at last to ebb, they were on the point of sending telegrams summoning Lord and Lady Wharfedale at once, only for Abigail to rally and so give them hope they would not have to betray her. Celia answered the letters from England, saying that Lady Abigail was immersed in her novel as she had never before been immersed in any other undertaking and begged their indulgence a few days longer.

But a few days cannot be tricked out into nine weeks; and before six of those weeks were up, Caspar was ringing at the main gate and asking for Lady Abigail. He was more than a little surprised to be presented to Celia, but she, having dreaded such an encounter for weeks, was prepared.

“Steamer darling!” she cried. “Thank God you’re here. Do come in.” And she shut the door quickly behind him.

He did not even stay overnight. A week later he was back, this time with John and Nora. Primed by him, they greeted Celia as their daughter before the door closed on them. By good fortune Abigail was on one of her crests of apparent recovery. She was conscious and in no pain. She had even taken nourishment. She was weak, of course, and a little bewildered. She did not ask for the baby; indeed, she appeared to have forgotten it. But no one could doubt her delight at seeing her parents again.

“Both!” she said. And she sighed such contentment it would have seemed all her life’s ambition to see them so.

Soon, however, she was unconscious and rambling again, and they understood how precarious was her hold on life.

César told them the circumstances of her delivery. For John it was the recapitulation of a nightmare. Over thirty-three years ago, when Abigail herself was born, Nora had undergone just such an ordeal; for weeks she too had lingered at the point of death. He remembered it as a fact. Now, looking down at the pallid, wasted figure of his daughter, he remembered it as an experience as well.

Over the days that followed, more memories of that time returned. He had been up at Stevenstown, near Stockton, when news of Nora’s near-death came through. Hudson—poor old George Hudson—had laid on a special train to take him down to her, near Hertford. He remembered how he had sought some magic to keep her alive until he arrived, how he had conjured up her image, there in the rattling dark of the railway carriage, and had reached out and grasped her and shouted his love to her above the roar and clank of the speeding train. He had imagined himself to be some night eagle soaring over Maran Hill, where Nora lay; and in that way he pinned her soul to the house and drove off the angel of death.

Remembering that, and looking now at Nora, he longed to take her in his arms again, as he had not done for twenty years or more; he wanted to tell her of that same love, which once had dimmed but now burned bright as ever. But the imminent possibility of Abigail’s death somehow stayed him, as if he feared it would be an intrusion into Nora’s quite separate anxiety.

When the atmosphere in that sickroom became too claustrophobic to bear, they took to going on long walks around the lakeshore. Sometimes Caspar would come with them; more often he would stay and talk with César. For all their differences in temperament, he and César got on like twins.

Nora knew exactly what was happening to John—knew from the way his conversation kept going back over the circumstances of Abigail’s own birth and his relief at her, Nora’s, eventual recovery. But she felt unable to help him turn these memories into a springboard for the plunge back into her life, despite her almost desperate longing for him. Once before, the best part of twenty years ago, he had broken down and begged her to let him back and she had agreed, rapturously thinking he intended to give up his mistress, Charity, and their children; but he had been labouring under the opposite delusion—that she would agree to share him with Charity. This time (if there was to be a this time) she would say nothing until he spoke.

Not until the eighth week of Abigail’s illness, when César dared to hold out some crumbs of hope, did John begin to make even the first overtures. “I’m near seventy,” he said, apropos nothing. And then, as if to belie the words, he hurled a pebble far out into the lake.

Nora watched the ripples spread. “Eay, what’s this then?” she asked in broad Yorkshire. “Second childhood?”

He looked at her askance. “What do’st mean?” he answered. He had not spoken to her in their native dialect for years. It held a special richness, not to be squandered on trivial moments.

“When thou were forty,” she said, “it were all ‘hush of life’ with thee. I never thought thou’d make it to sixty.”

He hurled another stone, and another. The ripples became enmeshed. “Eay, Nora,” he said. “We’ve seen some times, thee and me.”

She said nothing and shortly afterward they returned to the villa. But from that moment on, she knew it was a matter of time only. Somehow this idle little exchange had contrived an obscure breach in the wall that divided them. Inexorably the rest of its fabric would now fall.

Next day it was raining too hard for a walk. They paced up and down the verandah upstairs, listening to the drumming of the raindrops on the tiles and the gurgling of the waste where it gathered. Nora stopped at one point where the gutter had a pinhole leak. In the black of its belly she watched the points of light swell to ripeness and fall…fall…fall. She caught one in her hand and tried the softness of its water on her cheek.

“You did me a great wrong,” John said suddenly.

“Aye,” she agreed.

The silence swelled like the ripening drops of rain.

“I regretted it,” she said, “the minute it happened. But I don’t regret the fruit of it. Sefton will be a credit to you.”

Sefton, her youngest son, had been fathered by a rising young painter with whom Nora had had a passing affair when she had first discovered John’s infidelity. Nora had made sure John knew he was not the father. That painter was now a senior R.A., and Sefton was off to Cambridge this autumn. So long ago!

“It was a great wrong,” John repeated.

“Put a like measure on the provocation.”

He placed his hand over hers. She pulled away, longing for him to follow—fight her—force her to yield. “I will yield,” she wanted to shout.

But he had lost too much of his assurance with her to know what she might be thinking; he could judge her only by her outward behaviour.

“You were off to India for six months,” she said, deliberately keeping the heat from her voice. “You came home to me for one night—and slept like a eunuch. Because…where had you been?”

“Provocation!” he said, in a tone that implied he knew a thing or two about provocation. Then, hearing her draw breath, he headed her off. “What is Abigail to do now? What are we going to do about this baby?”

Nora gave a grim chuckle. “You think we can have any say? You’ve known Abigail all these years and you still think that?”

“Maybe Annie knows what’s on her mind, since the boy’s going to be legally hers. I blame Annie for a lot of this.”

“So did I, at first. But now I think that would be unfair.”

He leaned over the edge of the verandah and called softly: “Mrs. Crabb, are you down there?”

Annie’s head poked out of a window, squinting up against the rain.

“My lord?”

“At your leisure, if you might spare us a moment.”

Annie nodded and withdrew.

“Abigail was twenty-two or three when this…liaison…began,” Nora said. “She would not have stopped just for lack of suitable premises.”

“Suitable? An East End pub!”

“Caspar told me he had to compare two separate reports by two different inquiry agents before he could work it out. How much more discreet do you…”

“If Annie hadn’t provided the means…”

“Abigail would still have…you don’t know her. Either that or you’ve forgotten the strength of the passions we’re talking about.” Their eyes dwelled in each other’s.

“D’you think I could ever forget that?” he asked.

Annie opened the door of one of the rooms that led onto the verandah. Nora turned toward the lake and cursed softly. John at last dared to give her arm a squeeze, but there was time for no more than that.

“My lord?” Annie stood at the door. She would never say “your lordship,” like a servant.

“We were wondering, Mrs. Crabb, what arrangements have been made for the little boy?”

“Or,” Nora added, “even talked about.”

Annie spoke so low that no eavesdropper, not even one with perfect English, could have overheard. “I’m staying by Abbie. The little boy’ll be mine—in law, I mean. But he’ll have two mothers—three, I daresay, if Celia stops.” She gave a little laugh. “Three women, ruined by men, bringing up a man! I don’t think God has much time for women, somehow. Either that or He’s fond of a good laugh!”

“At least,” Nora said, “the boy will grow up knowing what not to do. Shall you all come back to London?”

“Abbie talked of staying awhile in Rome, my lady. So it’s parley-voo Italiano for me, though I doubt I ever will.”

Nora laughed, despite herself.

“We’d like to settle something on you and the baby,” John began.

Annie drew breath through flaring nostrils. “I got two thousand five hundred of me own,” she said, tossing her hair. “And what’s mine is Abbie’s and what’s hers is mine.”

“Well,” Nora cut in quickly, seeing that they had no hope of a swift and rational settlement, “don’t say no. Don’t say yes. Think about it. Think of all the accidents and reverses in fortune that can happen in life, how the best of friends can fall out, how money can be lost. And think, too, how nice it would be to know of some small and steady income that would be safe and unfailing.”

“You’re a pioneer in new country,” John told her with a smile. “Pitch your tent near the spring.”

It was exactly the right image to reach into Annie; it carried no censure and made her seem the brave one. She smiled back and said she was sorry if she’d started a bit of a slang and she’d think about it.

Nora had forgotten how good John was at managing people.

“If you do want to make Abbie happy…” Annie began. But then she thought better of it and shook her head.

“What, Annie?” Nora asked.

“No, my lady, it’s not my place. I was forgetting myself.” She left but had not reached the inner door before she turned and came back to them. “I’ll say this,” she added. “And it’s not impertinence but love for her as makes me, so you’ll please to take it as it’s meant. We’ve had many and many a jaw, Abbie and me, and at such times as no secrets is kept back. And if she’s told me once, she’s told me a dozen times as how she hopes to be spared until…well, until things is right at home. There—now I said it.” She looked at both to be sure that they took her meaning, and then she was gone.

John turned from Nora to face the lake. She saw how white his knuckles were from their fierce grip upon the iron balustrade. Suddenly she could wait no more for him to take the initiative. She was in hell until he did. “Well, John,” she said, “and shall you now forsake your canvas bed?”

Still he did not turn. When he spoke, his voice was strangely altered by the power of his emotion. “I’d easier climb yon mountains than say what must be said.”

“What? Just say it.”

He slumped. “Eay, Nora! She’s fifty years old!”

“And I’m near sixty.”

He snorted. “You’re twenty compared with her.”

Silence returned.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” she asked.

“But what good am I? I blighted your life and I ruined hers. How can I ever make that up to either of you?”

“Well, not by prolonging the offence, that’s certain.”

He turned to her then, clumsily, and took her in his arms—though he leaned so heavily he would have fallen if she had not been there. His kiss, which she had not felt for so long, was exactly as her body remembered it. The Bitch had taught him no new tricks, then.

She felt twenty again, as he had joked. She craved him with all the intensity she had so long fought to suppress. Now unbound, it consumed her, became the be-all of her. Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else to matter.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him toward their bedroom.

For a moment he resisted. “But I’m near seventy,” he said. “And you’re…”

“I’m twenty. You may be what you please but if I’m to bear the weight of you, I’ll choose the manner of it.”

They were older, of course; their skin was less supple, their muscles slower, they were more careful of their joints—but these were trifling changes. From the moment he pulled the bedclothes back over them and straddled her, seeking the old positions, she knew how much they still belonged to each other. And the knowledge made her as good as twenty—and him as good as thirty-two.

An hour later he cleared his throat and said, “We must get up.”

“Just once more,” she wheedled.

Twenty minutes later she asked, “Where did all that ‘hush of life’ go then?”

“I must have left it in Saint John’s Wood. There’s been an epidemic of it there!” After a silence he went on. “We must talk about…arrangements and things.”

“What did you mean, John, saying ‘she’s fifty’ like that?”