Abigail (33 page)

Winifred pretended to accept this dilemma as her “task.” But Abigail could see that her sister’s monumental self-assurance—the crust of a dozen years’ headmistressing—was not even dented. Perhaps, in the end, that was the only quality essential to a headmistress: a self-assurance no one and nothing could dent.

They talked then of family matters and Abigail’s recent illness, and then it was time for Winifred to go back and conduct evening prayers.

Abigail had learned from her sister that Caspar was at the firm’s London offices all this week. Five minutes later, a messenger was carrying Abigail’s manuscript to him, with an accompanying letter to say that she and Celia would be at Falconwood on Saturday unless she meanwhile heard that the visit would not be convenient.

***

Falconwood was maturing well. Russian vine and a new creeper called wistaria were thickening on the walls; the copper spire had collected its verdant patina; the vast tree plantations no longer looked like scars over the hilltops but were resplendent in their new spring mantles of green. The lakes, grassed to their edges and girt about with walks and rides, might have been there since the last glacial retreat. Peacocks strutted beneath the cedars; roe deer cropped nonchalantly at the lawns. The fountains played for two hours each afternoon. The gravelled court was raked into patterns of oriental complexity after every passing carriage. Eighty indoor servants, twenty-four gardeners, four dozen gamekeepers and estate workers, twenty stable hands and coachmen, a bailiff, two managers, a chaplain, a tutor, a governess, and a chef all went unobtrusively about their business of tending Caspar, Caroline, their five children, and their guests.

Caspar was not in a literary mood that weekend. He had newly installed an electrical generator, driven by the steam engine that also powered the hydraulic lift, and he had brought down an electrical plate-warmer as the first demonstration of the new magic. This had made it necessary to raise some floorboards in the servery and butler’s pantry to get at the copper bars he had buried there more than twelve years earlier.

The trouble was that neither he nor the engineer had remembered to bring down cable to join the platewarmer to these copper conductors.

“We’ll use garden wire,” Caspar said.

When it was brought the engineer looked dubious. “Iron,” he said, shaking his head. “And very thin. It’ll get hotter than the wire in the platewarmer.”

Caspar overruled his objections. Everyone was summoned to watch the new marvel perform. A chain of servants carried the message “Now!” to the engine house. The engineer slipped the belt that drove the generator.

After a long, tedious wait, there could be no doubt that the miracle of electricity was making the plate somewhat hotter than any hand might bear. For several minutes Caspar basked in the triumph.

Then his youngest daughter, Charlotte, perhaps because she was only three, and thus was nearer the ground than the others, pointed at the floor beneath the plate. “Pity!” she giggled in delight. “Pity! Pity!”

And though she meant
pretty
she was actually nearer the mark with the word she uttered; for the wire beneath the plate was glowing and the floor beginning to smoulder. Caspar tried to operate the switch but the heat had fused it. The engineer began the long run back to the engine house. Dismayed, the rest of them watched the flames begin to kindle among the joists.

“Here, this won’t do,” Caspar said and, standing, he gave a heavy kick to the platewarmer. The white-hot wires drew out to thin threads and sputtered into an incandescent divorce, showering sparks.

Imperturbable Lucas, the butler, passed Caspar a soda syphon. Caspar played its jet at the burning joists and cooling sherds of iron until everything was black and sodden.

“Pity! Pity!” Charlotte giggled.

The galvanometer needle fell back to zero; the engineer had succeeded in throwing the drive belt. Everyone breathed again and looked at Caspar to see how he would take this failure. He surveyed the charred and still-steaming floor and the welded, shattered scraps of wire. “Pioneers,” he said, “must expect the occasional setback.”

“No!” Linny shouted. It was a long dining hall and her voice carried back to them as she strode away, the full length of it. “I shall never complain of gas again. We may even go back to oil lamps. But electricity? Never! Never while I live here!”

Caspar was then, after lunch, rather glad to escape into the higher realms of literature.

“Linny will come round to it,” he said confidently as they descended past the fountain and went down into the park. “We’ve heard that Armstrong is determined to light Cragside with incandescent electrical lamps next year. And we’re equally determined to beat him to it.”

For a while she talked about his new paintings. He had bought quite a lot since she had left for France the previous summer: a Poussin, a Tintoretto, two Gainsboroughs, three Rubenses, a Rembrandt, a Titian, and he had on approval a Stubbs and a Watteau. Over the previous decade she had helped form his taste; in this recent spate of purchases he was casting himself as ex-pupil, sealing his independence.

“Still,” he said when enough compliments had flown, “you came here to talk about your art, not mine.” He looked briefly at her. “Plain talking, eh, Abbie?”

“By all means,” she said; but her heart sank.

“Well, it’s not what you’d call a funny book, is it?”

“
Funny!
”

“Yes. Funny. Life’s full of comedy. Even the sort of intimacies you talk about—they’ve got their funny moments, too. But not your book. There’s not a single laugh in it. Not one you intend, anyway.”

She caught the qualification at once. “What does that mean?”

“Well…your utter solemnity is very funny at times, though I’m sure you don’t mean it to be. Frankly, Abbie”—he grinned his kindly intentions at her—“your Catherine and William, between them, are a bit of a hardwood bench.”

“Oh!” She had been prepared for every criticism but that. “You mean,” she said, brightening, “if I popped in the odd rib-tickler, the book would be…”

He was already shaking his head. “I merely thought, why loose off the big gun when the peashooter will do as well!”

“What’s the big gun?”

“Their view of love—presumably your view, too?”

She nodded.

“Suitable only for untenanted tropic islands. You could do that, you know. Shipwreck your Catherine and William on some island. Then you’d get away with it all. It’d still be a shocker, of course; but you’d just about get away with it. Or set it in some mythological Arcadia—perhaps even in a future Utopia.”

“Oh, but that would be cheating, Steamer.”

“Really? You mean the love you’re writing about is not a universal love but just a very local one, found only in England in the 1870s? Pity, as young Charlotte says.”

Abigail laughed. “Oh! You are…insidious.”

“I mean it. A lot of us could get to be quite fond of your William and Catherine—just as long as neither of them tries to move in next door. Or next year.”

“But why? If it’s true, then…”

“Of course it’s true! Who’s denying its truth?”

“Well then!”

“Well what? We don’t want all truths to get around, do we? It’s true that it’s very easy for a titled person to get a forgery entered on a passport at a foreign legation, eh?” He looked knowingly at her. “But we don’t want that truth to circulate too widely, do we? And it’s true that women can take as intense a pleasure as men can in…hmm…copulation, as dear Kate and Bill insist on calling it with that implacable solemnity of theirs. Or yours. But we don’t want that truth getting about too widely, do we?”

“Don’t we?”

“Of course we don’t,” he said. “Not among our unmarried womenfolk anyway.” She drew breath to object but he went on. “Because—and I’d hardly have thought you needed the reminder—married or not, young women can have babies. And babies have nasty habits. They make messes. They mess up the whole business of inheritance and property. So a few years of ignorance and lost opportunities on the part of young females seems to me a small price to pay for social stability.”

“If it
were
the only price,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

She told him then of the night she went searching for Annie and found Uncle Walter. “Until then, Steamer, I thought the few girls one saw in Piccadilly and the main thoroughfares were all that the Social Evil amounted to. I had no idea of those teeming courts and back alleys. I thought there were perhaps a mere hundred girls in London. There must be tens of thousands.”

“There are a lot, I know.”

“And I thought they were sustained by a few thousand men of low class or of depraved natures. But how can that be? Are there hundreds of thousands of men of that kind? Of course not. It’s all kept going by normal, apparently decent family men like Uncle Walter. And by all those earnest, hard-working bachelors who have to marry late. There’s another price—a price in family life based on deceit and hypocrisy. And what of the price Annie has paid? Her ability to love blighted by disgust. The same thing must have happened to others, to most of them perhaps. I don’t think it’s so small a price, Steamer.”

He shrugged. “What’s the alternative? D’you want men of our class to find their outlet with
women
of our class!”

“Yes! With love as the basis, not cash. As between William and Catherine.”

“And tiny feet?”

“Well, there are various Malthusian devices…”

“Which you and Pepe had never
heard
about, I’m sure!”

“They can be perfected.”

“They had
better
be, if you’re anything of a prophet.”

She could not brush Caspar’s objections aside easily. Winifred’s she could explain away in terms of Winifred’s life and circumstances; but Caspar obviously spoke for people in general—and for their most tolerant wing, at that. Years of journalism, that is, of daily exposure to judgement, had taught her to accept such outright rejection or, at least, to make a convincing show of it. She knew how to smile with interest, and how to raise her eyebrows with a gesture that said:
Oh, really? Do tell me exactly how bad it is—I long to know!

It had not happened often. In a decade of sustained work she had had no more than two dozen pieces rejected outright, mostly short stories. And she could remember every one. She could almost quote them word for word, though others that had gone through with a smile and a nod had vanished from her memory like the ephemera they were. Sometimes she would come across articles that bore one of her pen names and wonder,
Did I write that?
But rejected pieces lived on within her like unhealed cysts beneath the skin.

Worst of all was a rejection by a friend, for it could be ascribed to nothing but honest opinion, even to a care for her own best interests. (Indeed, she had noticed, editors always universalized their own objections: “Any reader with good instincts will scorn this creaking manipulation of the plot,” they would scribble down the margin. Or, “Your reader, I fear, will already have skipped to the end of this paragraph—if not of this
chapter
!”) At such times she met, or renewed acquaintance with, the demiurge that did her real writing for her. That implacable creature was no rational, urbane, polished young woman such as Abigail took pride in being. She-it would consider Pepe (and most rejections had naturally come from him, as first in the line of fire) with a smouldering hatred, seeing only a perverse, insensitive fool who stood between her distillation of wisdom—wit—pathos—and its proper achievement on the printed page. If she felt sorrow, it was for all those thousands of millions of readers, from now until the end of time, who were to be denied their share because of this doltish, illiterate, barbarian
editor
!

For hours after she and Caspar had parted company that afternoon—with all outward show of affection and, on her part, of gratitude—she strolled through the park, scheming every possible means of putting
Into a Narrow Circle
before that vast and grateful army of readers whose property it rightly was. She could print a few hundred copies herself and employ out-of-work but respectable people to leave them in railway trains about to depart, squeeze them into library shelves, pop them through reviewers’ letterboxes until a groundswell of clamour and curiosity forced Pepe into doing a proper edition. Or she could do as Caspar suggested—recast the tale as an allegory, set in the twentieth century (
Into a Future Circle—
what an intriguing title! Who could fail to want to read it!), and then, when it was accepted in its theatrical clothing and had passed into that special oblivion reserved for last month’s
causes célèbres
,
she would hurl the real book in the public’s face to let them see just what it was they had accepted.
Into a Narrow Circle?
Yes, the change would carry a double irony.

She began to grow quite excited by the idea. If she had picked any other phrase but “hurl…in the public’s face,” she might have been so fired with enthusiasm that she would have tried it. But that phrase had been Ruskin’s when he had accused Jimmy Whistler of “hurling a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Jimmy had sued him for libel and won; but a British jury had awarded him no more than a farthing’s damages. She remembered it not only because she had covered the trial but also because Jimmy had made a joke about it at her farewell dinner. So, in her mind, futility clung to the very phrase, “hurl…in the public’s face.” Before the trial Jimmy had been so sure, so convinced of the rightness of his cause—as convinced as she now was of hers. That memory alone was enough to tip the balance of her judgement back from hot to cold, until at last she saw, with bleak resignation, how impossible it was for her book to be published. For the first time in her life she hated her own country and its people. A land of philistine jurors.

That evening she told Celia, “There seems no point in showing my parents this book. I think I’ll just lock it away.”

“Just like that.”