Abigail (41 page)

Frances swallowed hard. “Er…” she faltered.

“I’ll tell you. Such a person, after let us say five years of satisfactory fulfilment, would rightly expect to earn at least two hundred pounds, living in.”

“A
man…
” Frances started to say.

“I would not pay a woman less. My mother will call me a fool, but principles begin at home. Now, lesson two: no one should ever get what they want—not immediately. Accordingly, I will offer you just half of what you ask, for the first six months. Then, if you look like the sort of person I need, you may expect to advance steadily to the sort of salary
I
mentioned.”

She deliberately set her offer low to see if the girl was serious about working or was merely looking for a brief bit of fun and freedom with good pay as an added bonus. Frances smiled shyly. “Is there a lesson there, my lady?”

“My, my!” Abigail laughed. “Well—yes, I suppose there is: if a thing feels right, don’t hesitate about it.”

“Then I hope you’ll find me suitable in every way,” she answered.

“Good! I hope so, too. You’ll live on our side of the green baize door—you know what I mean?”

Frances nodded. “And how do I address you, my lady?”

“In private you may call me ‘madame,’ if it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise nothing. I shall call you Frances. In public I shall always refer to you as Miss Law, and you may call me Madame la Baronne or Baroness because it’s a foreign title. And if you have to ask what’s private and what’s public, you aren’t the person I’m seeking.”

She saw a hint of fear in the girl’s face and was satisfied. That little injection of anxiety, if it could be regularly renewed, was going to keep this brave, confident young miss from overreaching herself until she knew her business.

***

With her anxiety for Frances settled and the girl’s immediate prospects secure, Abigail found her thoughts returning again and again to the atrocity she had seen at the Gare du Nord. The look she had seen in those men’s eyes came to haunt her.

How often, she wondered, are we secretly dependent on a particularly vivid image to unlock a whole train of thought? The philosopher who develops, say, an important theory of power and authority—might not the whole process have been released by his seeing nothing more apparently significant than a tree overshadowing a shrub? She remembered how, long ago, her disquiet at something Pepe had done was in part allayed when she found a satisfying image for it: the shopkeeper pinning up dead butterflies. The image had survived better than the memory of whatever Pepe had done.

Now the thing was working in reverse—the image haunted her, but the thoughts it seemed designed to encapsulate were still mere half suggestions at the fringe of her consciousness. It had something to do with her conversation with Victor after Grant Allen’s visit in Rome; but it was more than that. It awoke echoes stretching back over most of her life: her conversation with Steamer, when she decided not to publish
Into a Narrow Circle
;
Annie’s blighted life and her hatred of men; Uncle Walter…right back to the mists of Pepe and the dead butterflies. It was the dark side of sexual love—the violence in men, the hatred, their will to dominate, and the sheer callousness of their overwhelming greed for satisfaction. She had an intuition that men, hating their bondage at the wheel of desire, hated, too, the objects of that desire. That was why Pepe had smiled like the man who transfixed butterflies. That was why Oldale had ruined Annie, why César had tried to leave her in Rome a captive to his memory, why those policemen had behaved so brutally to Frances. They could lust after a girl all week—never mind whether she was a whore or not—lie panting in her arms on Saturday, and kick her to a pulp on Sunday; and without a trace of inconsistency!

Yes, she thought wryly, it was well enough to lecture little Frances on the wisdom of finding out about a job before you undertake it—she could heed a bit of that advice herself. But how? Where do you start when your intuition is so vague? And refers to such a difficult and private area?

She had loved and slept with but three men—one of them Victor, who was like no other man in the world to her. What values could she draw from so slim an experience? Yet where could anyone turn for more general enlightenment?

At least she was aware of one danger that she might have minimized before: Her endeavour to establish happier and more natural relationships between men and women was not going to be a simple matter of moral, intellectual, and practical argument. There were dark, strong, and secret forces to contend with, too—forces that people neither recognized nor understood.

They took a terrace house on the sunset side of Bloomsbury Square—her first home with a telephone. It was a spacious, elegant place with four principal floors, an attic, and a semibasement. It was also, Abigail had to admit, an upper-class version of the meanly grand houses her mother had so cynically designed (and waxed so rich upon) almost fifty years ago. It had the same pretensions to an elegance beyond its means, scaled up, it is true, but stopping just short of the actual achievement. It was a house for people who wanted to make an occasional move into Society, rather than for those who intended to “go about” a lot; in that respect it suited her and Victor ideally.

She hung César’s two paintings of her at last—and in the drawing room, too.

“Is that wise?” Victor asked.

“Perhaps not,” she said. “But let’s not be cowards forever. Besides, I think a French baroness may do what the younger daughter of an English peer may not. Let’s see, anyway.”

The stationers in Drury Lane sent round a succession of typers until Frances, now convalescing on a chaise longue, found one to her liking. Abigail put her to work at once making copies of her little memoir of Daniel. Frances had not lied about her typewriting speed. From a selfish viewpoint Abigail was glad of the girl’s convalescence, for the responsibility it conferred made it impossible to do what she and Victor would otherwise have been obliged to do—waste a month or more in going around and meeting the family. Instead a letter and an open invitation to “cry in, in the passing,” discharged that duty much more agreeably. With each she sent a copy of the memoir; in her mother’s she included her drawings of Daniel’s death mask.

The first member of the family to call was, strangely enough, the one with whom she had the least contact and for whom she felt the least affinity: her brother Mather, who came with his wife, Corinna (who was Uncle Walter’s and Aunt Arabella’s youngest daughter). They had not met since she had been to their wedding some seventeen years earlier. Though he was less than four years her junior, they had always seemed much farther apart, in temperament, attitudes, and interests. Mather had not followed his three older brothers, Boy, Caspar, and Clement, to Fiennes School; instead, as Sefton had done later, he went to Eton. Unlike Sefton, Mather had gone on to Balliol College, Oxford, to study economics. He was now a senior lecturer in the subject at University College London, not half a mile from Bloomsbury Square; he was also a world authority on the theory of prices and wages, and a founder-member of the Fabian Society.

That was really what brought him round to see her. The Fabians, who included Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, believed not in violent revolutions but in “the inevitability of gradualness” in the spread of socialism; they took their name from Fabius Maximus, the Roman general who thwarted Hannibal’s ambitions by refusing to meet him in a set battle. Mather was fascinated at the thought that this hitherto unknown Uncle Daniel should have been so ardent a revolutionary.

But as Abigail listened to him, to his careful diction, to his precise, academically tempered excitement, she could not help remembering that wasted corpse with its ulcerated gums; she could not help thinking of all the suffering and indignity Daniel had endured in the name of the same principles that Mather now enunciated with such prim engagement; and she knew that, though she felt little enough in common with Daniel, she had nothing to share with Mather. There was no point in trying to convey her own hopes and enthusiasms to him. In any case, it was not Mather’s response she awaited but her mother’s.

Corinna seemed a quiet, agreeable woman. She said Bloomsbury was an agreeable place to live in, university society was agreeable, the Fabians were most agreeable people. “Except when they quarrel,” Mather said, “which is almost all the time.”

This period of waiting was a repeat of those impotent first weeks in Rome, after she had sent
Into a Narrow Circle
to Pepe and could settle to nothing new. Now, to fill the hours, she made a short story of the Gare du Nord atrocity; the girl-victim was French in this version, and there was no Abigail around to stir up trouble. The denouement was the same—the mistake was discovered and the girl was released, broken leg and all. The point of the story was not in its denouement but in the discoveries the girl made on her way to it, mainly in her conversations with fellow prisoners.

Perhaps because thoughts of Daniel were near the surface of Abigail’s mind, perhaps because of her recent conversation with Mather, perhaps in oblique homage to Victor, or perhaps because she simply lost grip of the form of the story, she made one of those fellow prisoners a tough revolutionary woman. This forced her—for the first time, really—to look at what had happened to Frances with an impersonal eye. What, she had to ask, would a woman who had survived the ordeals Victor had described make of it? The pain and brutality would not move her greatly; she would see it in the broader terms of the class war.

Abigail remembered a passage in the
Communist Manifesto
in which the bourgeois family is presented solely as a vehicle for protecting and passing on capital—the fruit of private gain. When she first read it, she had tried to think of a single bourgeois marriage of which this was even a one-tenth part of an adequate description, except in the most trivial sense, as one might say, “The bourgeois marriage is a vehicle for keeping boot-makers or the carvers of baptismal fonts—or the writers of political pamphlets!—in employment.”

But never mind, she thought now; ignore its inadequacy and concentrate on what the
Manifesto
said. Its next sentence was surely significant. “The natural counterpart to bourgeois marriage is public prostitution.” The internal consistency of the argument pleased her, and, as developed by the revolutionary woman, it became quite exciting, if only because it was Abigail’s first attempt at a more than personal response to the outrage.

She showed it to Victor in manuscript. He read it and passed it back with a thin smile. “Zola’s safe, anyway,” he said.

Frances said nothing when she handed back the typescript.

“You don’t mind?” Abigail asked.

“No. Not in the least. Indeed, it makes me doubly grateful to you for rescuing me as soon as you did.”

But Abigail still believed enough in the story to send it off to
Pall Mall
,
whose editor, Frank Griffith, was one of the “office boys” to whom, on Caspar’s joking advice, she had been kind twenty years before.

The typescript came back by return. “I was very tempted to take this,” Griffith wrote, “not because I think it good (in fact, I think it dreadful), but because I know you are one of the very best, and I long to have you write regularly. A month from now you would execrate me if I accepted this. Your anger at what is obviously a real-life incident (seen by you?) is natural; and your description of the arrest had me on the edge of my seat. I thought it my luckiest day in this office that you had honoured me with so riveting a tale. Imagine, then, my disappointment when it all trickles away in that windy, shallow, platitudinous monologue by the revolutionary woman! Is she a sort of joke?

“Frankly, I don’t think it makes a story. Anger is a bad muse and a worse midwife. But it would make an article; and even some of the things your dreadful woman says could actually become quite interesting in that context—because you would not then be asking us to imagine a flesh-and-blood woman mouthing such a lecture to a poor girl with a broken leg!

“What say you? We find we can print quite strong stuff if only we keep the language high. Read Acton, and Mrs. Besant, and Josephine Butler and you’ll soon see the thing to do. A word of warning: Tale or article, it will, I fear, merely confirm to the average English male what he already knows about the French: that they are savages; and, thank God, they know how to keep their streets swept free of diseased girls! I was not so cynical when last you knew me. But then, nor was I editor.

“As editor I beg you to do me the honour again. And again. And again…”

***

Shortly after that the Earl and Countess, who had been away in Scotland, came. Both were limping, John through age (he was now eighty) and Nora (still a sprightly sixty-nine) from “a fall off a damned contrary horse.” Abigail could see that her mother was in some agitation. On the one hand she was delighted that her daughter had at last married; and she and John took an instant liking to Victor—it was a meeting of three varieties of human toughness. On the other hand, she was furious at the memoir of Daniel. And somewhere between these extremes there were practical things, like the marriage settlement and the registering of Victor’s foreign title, to be determined. Without registration, no one would know where to seat him.

It was a warm day—the first really warm day of the year—and they sat out in the garden, dappled in the shade of a tulip tree. “Garden” was hardly the word. It measured but twenty yards by fifteen and was isolated from its neighbours by a twelve-foot-high brick wall on all three sides (the house, of course, making up the fourth). There was no grass; it was paved throughout in old flags of Oxford limestone. All the growth, except for the tree, was confined to tubs and urns. But, with the help of a little fountain and a couple of carefully sited statues, the effect was pleasant and relaxing. It was also extremely private.

“I gather you’re displeased,” Abigail said to Nora, nodding at the typescript her mother was clutching. She thought it best to dispatch the topic at once. “I’m sorry.”

John shook his head vehemently at her, but the die was now cast.

“I don’t mention Daniel’s connection with us,” Abigail went on. “It’s not meant for publication but, even so, no one can trace him to us.”

“D’you think I give a fig for that!” Nora said. “Though, by the way, you are wrong there, too, as you’re wrong throughout. My maiden name of Telling is clear for all to see in
Burke’s Peerage
and
Debrett
,
and there are ten thousand people in this country who, though they may read no other book in their lives, read those two for breakfast. But I don’t mind. What I object to is this glorification of Daniel. To use a phrase he would have understood, he was a class traitor. He was a traitor to the only class who should have mattered—the class of me and Sam and Wilf and Dorrie.”

“He was a friend of Victor’s,” Abigail warned.

“A good friend?” Nora asked. “Loyal? Steadfast? True?”

To each Victor nodded assent.

“Then he learned new arts since he deserted me. Did he tell you I denounced him to the French police, after the eighteen forty-eight rebellion?”

Victor’s eyes went wide with shock. Obviously Daniel had never mentioned it.

“Did she?” Abigail asked her father.

John nodded as if he, too, were still surprised.

“We had friends and interests in France ten thousand times more important than that traitor,” Nora explained. As an explanation it clearly satisfied her.

“Was that the last time you met?” Victor asked.

“No, Monsieur de Bouvier. He came back once more. The next year I think it was. Or—wait!
This
was the time after ’forty-eight. The other was earlier. When the rebellion failed he asked me for sanctuary.” She turned to Abigail. “I was at that inn we bought in Coutances, where Clement was born. I turned him away. He drew a gun on me, but he hadn’t the courage to shoot. He hit me with it. Broke a rib. And
that’s
the last I ever saw of Daniel.” She looked back at Victor. “And he never told you that, either, did he!”

“No, Countess. He spoke of you—all of you—with pride and affection.”

“Aye—a true communist for you. Treats history like a wife!”

Victor laughed.

“Speaking as a husband,” John said, trying to lighten the occasion, “I take exception to the implications of the Right Honourable Lady’s last remark. And”—he smiled all round—“while on the subject of husbands and wives…” He looked at Nora.

“Oh yes,” she said, speaking to Victor. “When Abigail came of age, we set aside…that is, the family trust set aside…” She came to a halt and began again. “I must go back a bit. When we started in business, back in the ’forties, the then John Stevenson had so low an opinion of our skills and prospects that he saddled us with a ten percent levy on all our profits.”

John cleared his throat as a protest.

“Very well,” Nora said. “Put it another way. It was a time when even fools could make fortunes. So a genius”—she waved at John—“could afford to put aside ten percent and still be keen at the job. In ten years we had a family trust worth…well, let’s say one or two millions. That’s the background. And when Abigail turned twenty we put aside two hundred thousand as a settlement. That’s quite apart from her income, which has always stood at about two thousand a year.”

“And of which I’ve hardly spent a penny,” Abigail said.

“Things are different now.”

“We shan’t go about much,” Abigail warned.

“Just listen!” Nora said petulantly.

Victor nodded agreement and held up a finger at Abigail.

Nora went on: “Two hundred thousand compounded at three percent over twenty-four years is…something over four hundred and ten thousand.”

“Victor!” Abigail cried. “What fools we were! Oh, curses on our hasty, impetuous natures! Had we but postponed our marriage until I am seventy, we could have been millionaires! Mother, all this is so unnecessary. We don’t need such money. We’ll never use it. It’s only a worry and an embarrassment.”

“What does Monsieur de Bouvier say—or Victor? May we call you Victor?”

Smiling, he nodded and drew breath to speak.

“He’s rich in his own right,” Abigail answered for him. “Yet d’you know what his entire worldly goods amounted to when we moved here? Three trunks and a tea chest.”

“Victor?” Nora repeated.

“Neither of you can touch the capital,” John warned. “But the income is absolutely yours.”

“Over twelve thousand a year,” Nora added.

Abigail made an exasperated noise.