Abigail (44 page)

It was Abigail who needed comfort, for the lies she told and the lies she let, like sleeping dogs.

There was no train back to London after half past seven unless they cared to wait for the sleeper at half past midnight. Abigail did not care to wait. Once again the Stevenson name worked its magic and, within fifteen minutes of arriving at the station, she and Victor were in the luxurious directors’ coach on their way back to Paddington by “special.”

“Does anyone in your family bother with train timetables?” Victor asked. “Or do you all just turn up at any old station and tell them to get you a train?”

“It’s not much good having a father who’s a director of fifty railways if you can’t at least do that. Besides, we have to get back. We must find these rooms of Uncle Walter’s and clear away anything incriminating.”

“How do we do that? Those rooms could be anywhere in London.”

She shrugged. “Annie may remember. She went there once. If they’re the same rooms.”

***

“He must’ve moved scores of times,” Annie said. “They’ve been pulled down…I’d never find it…I’d die before I’d go back there again…”

In the end, by a stroke of luck and desperation, Abigail remembered Annie’s first description: “He’s written them all down,” she had said.
That’s
what those stories were, of course—his
own
experiences, not things culled secondhand from girls at the Refuge. It all fell into place now.

“He’s got writings there about you, Annie. Don’t you remember? And don’t you want to save them? Suppose a housebreaker got in and found them—and started selling them in pubs all over London!”

Annie reached for her bonnet. Walter hadn’t moved, they hadn’t pulled it down, Annie found it first time—and she didn’t drop dead on entry. But she wouldn’t go into the bedroom.

“Come on, love,” Abigail encouraged her. “Face it. You’ll find it’s all gone. I promise.”

“Easy said, gel.”

“Come on.”

Annie edged into the room. Abigail watched her, trying to test memory against reality and finding the memory worn too smooth to rasp. “All gone? As I said?”

“I remember it, yet…it could’ve been…like what someone else told me once.” Delighted to find no ghost to lay, she became much livelier and began opening cupboards and poking into drawers. “Bleedin’ paper everywhere, isn’t it!” she said.

Abigail and Victor, more methodical, found that the “bleedin’ paper” comprised the galley proofs and manuscript of a vast pornographic autobiography with none of the coyness and circumlocution she might have expected to find. It was the very strongest stuff. Its author was called “Walter” but even a cursory reading showed Abigail it was not her uncle, unless he had disguised himself very heavily.

“Victor darling,” she said. “If these are genuine, they’ll be absolutely invaluable.”

“Here they are!” Annie called out.

She had found a sheaf of the loose-leaf memoirs she had seen being written by her “Mr. Carey.” It was a small sheaf and she began reading through it eagerly, looking for her own “episode.”

But Abigail pulled out a trunk from the corner and it proved to be half full of almost identical memoirs, all on loose-leaf paper.

“Flaming hell! Let’s burn the lot!” Annie suggested.

“I don’t think so. Tell me, are these accurate, or are they all sick fantasy?”

“Search me!”

“Well, read some, Annie. Please? Just read four—pick any four at random and tell me if they at least sound plausible.”

“Is it important?”

“It could be. To us.”

Annie shrugged and did as she was asked. While she read she kept saying things like: “Big head!…Blimey, gel, you’re soft!…He’ll be lucky!…Oh yeah! Mr. Marvellous again!” Finally she handed them to Abigail. “Real enough,” she said. “Seen from
their
point of view.”

“That’s what we want. I think we already know yours!”

“These seem authentic, all right,” Victor murmured, reading some of the galleys. Abigail slipped out to the telephone call room in Heddon Street and rang Cattermole’s in Islington and asked them to come with a covered dray and a dozen tea chests. By late afternoon every scrap of paper and every personal possession of Uncle Walter’s was safely in Bloomsbury Square. On the bare table Abigail left a note asking “interested parties” to get in touch with her; she didn’t want the landlord to go to Aunt Arabella for back rent.

While packing they found a recent picture of Uncle Walter in a group photo of retired engineers of the Great Western. “There he is.” Abigail pointed him out. He looked so benign and avuncular, the very last sort of man you’d dream of associating with this vast outpouring of erotica.

Victor stared silently at the picture and then pointed at Walter’s left foot. “It’s blurred,” he said.

“So it is,” Walter’s legs were crossed, left over right.

“You don’t see much blurring in photography nowadays. His foot must have jerked.”

“Oh!” Abigail said, remembering. “It did that. Weren’t you there when he showed it? His foot did that whenever he crossed his legs. He couldn’t control it. He said it showed how old he was—things were taking their independence. It was just a joke.”

“More than a joke,” Victor said. “I think that’s what killed him. I think he had an aneurysm of the aorta.”

Annie coughed. “Eh? What’s this, gel? Do
all
your friends turn into doctors?”

Victor laughed and explained. “De Voisins died of the same thing in the Commune. And Dr. Daugny, who used to smoke the same tobacco as Louis Philippe and sent roses every day to the two little milliners in the Rue Nicolini, he diagnosed it afterward from a photograph in which the foot was also blurred.”

“How Victor knows things,” Abigail said to Annie, “is always very simple in the end.”

Later, when they were alone, Victor added that one kind of aortic aneurysm could be caused by syphilis, perhaps contracted fifty or sixty years before.

“Somewhere here,” he said, waving at the crated memoirs, “we may find it—the little long-slumbering death he got at twenty.”

***

That evening, as soon as Frances had retired to bed, Abigail followed her up and tapped lightly on the door.

“Come in,” the girl called.

“I have something to tell you,” Abigail said. “It’s about your work here.”

“I hope it’s satisfactory, madame?”

“Absolutely. Indeed, more than merely satisfactory. But I don’t want to shower you with the praises you deserve, in case you imagine I’m just trying to butter you into staying when it would be distasteful to you.”

“Oh, never…”

“Wait. Things have changed.”

Frances was silent.

“You must know already, from the things you’ve been asked to typewrite and file, that the Baron and I are embarking on a study of modern-day relationships between men and women.”

She nodded.

“And you must also know that we think those relationships are in a sad mess—and that someday, perhaps, he and I, and possibly others, will begin a campaign of some kind to clear up that mess.”

Another nod.

“Well, some aspects of our research are distasteful in the extreme. And I’m afraid those tea chests you saw delivered today are full of papers in that category.”

Her eyes went wide.

“Yes, Frances. All of them. To be explicit, they consist of the very frank memoirs of a man who, over the best part of sixty or seventy years, spent every moment he could with prostitutes; in short, it is the memoir of between seven and nine
thousand
such encounters!”

She gasped.

Abigail allowed the fact to sink before she resumed. “To us, of course, it’s a gold mine of information and attitudes we could discover in no other way. But there’s no denying that the task of sorting through it and reading it is going to be distasteful. It will not fall to you, or not principally; but inevitably you will come into contact with it. Now I want you to think about that, Frances, and forget any notions of obligation to me and the Baron. Think only of your future. Think of your prospects of marriage and what it might do for them if you were associated with us…Why d’you smile?”

“Bless you!” Frances said. Abigail could see the girl wanted to touch her, to reassure her. “I thought of all that weeks ago…the first day you came back from the Reading Room. I nearly handed in my notice then. But I thought better of it. I thought, no, what you’re doing is good. And right. And any young man who took exception to it…well, I’d not want him to father my children. So that decision’s already made, however bad these new papers are. And all you’ve done tonight is show me once again how kind and considerate a person you are.”

To cut short the eulogy Abigail reached forward and squeezed her arm. “We’d have missed you,” she said. At the door she added, “Sleep well.”

She was out in the passage when Frances called, “Madame!”

She put her head back into the bedroom. “Yes?”

“Would you think it presumptuous of me if I told you what I think about all this? These things you’re studying? It’s made me think a lot.”

“Presumptuous! Good heavens, I’d welcome it. Anything. Frankly I feel lost. D’you mean now?”

“No. Soon. When I’m ready…I mean, when it seems clear to me.”

“Then I’ll try to be patient. And, Frances…I’ve tried to wear this ‘madame,’ and I don’t think the best tailor in the world could get it to fit. I’d be so obliged if you’d just call me Abbie when we’re not in public.”

“I’ll try.”

“There’s a dear. Sleep well!”

They were still wading through Uncle Walter’s loose-leaf memoirs and the much more puzzling printed memoirs of what was obviously quite a different “Walter” two days later when the maid announced, “A Mr. Walter Thornton to see you, my lady.” Feeling more than slightly unreal, Abigail turned his card over in her hands.
Mr. Walter Thornton
it undeniably read. He had a set of chambers in the Albany and belonged to the Garrick and National Sporting clubs. She went down to meet him.

“That public-school machine has gone berserk,” Victor said as she left. “They are even coming out with the same
name
now!”

A young man in deep mourning was parading slowly back and forth admiring the two paintings of her by César, never once taking his eyes off them. The door was aslant and she paused for a while, watching him. He walked to the one in which she stood in a foot bath by the open window and he ran the tip of one gloved finger down over her back and buttocks.

She laughed in delight and stepped into the room. “Until this moment,” she said, “I was inclined to disbelieve the name on your card.”

He turned to her, not the least taken aback, but calm, even nonchalant. “He handles the paint like an angel, Madame la Baronne. But I see he had an angel for a model, too.” He pressed her hand to his lips.

“I know all Uncle Walter’s children,” she said. “You must be…?”

“His grandson. You know my father, Nicholas. I have called to thank you for all you did on the day of grandfather’s death, and going down to see my grandmother.”

“That is kind of you. But surely we shall meet at the funeral tomorrow?”

“It was a great kindness,” he said as if she had not spoken. “And greatly appreciated.”

“I had nothing but kindness from them all my life,” she told him as she rose. “Well, duty’s done. I won’t detain you. You look to me a very busy young man.”

In fact he looked a dandy. She was bored with him. His mourning might have been designed by Oscar Wilde, right down to the lily which lay with his cane across his hat.

“Er…my grandfather had a set of rooms, near Langham Place.”

“So I believe.”

“The landlord tells me you removed a few trifling effects he kept there.”

“Very little. He had some papers he had mentioned to me, papers that might distress his…your grandmother.”

“Ah! Yes…I see. His correspondence, I suppose?”

“I don’t know. Naturally I haven’t read it.”

The relief in his eyes gave him away. He knew everything. Before he could commit himself to a lie, she said, “Come on now, young fellow. You know very well what was there. You may have all the self-possession in the world, but your face is too honest to make you a good deceiver.”

He slumped into a chair, but more by way of relaxation than chagrin. “You
have
read it, then,” he said.

“In two days? Hardly! I’ve read enough, though. What is it? And what relation does ‘Walter’ in print bear to the real Uncle Walter?”

So he told her. Then she took him up to the study.

“Victor dearest, the mystery is solved. ‘Walter’ is both Walter
and
Walter. And this young man, by the way, is—er, Walter. The third one.”

He explained it again, less hesitantly this time, now that he was sure of Abigail’s attitude. He and his grandfather had on several occasions found themselves in the same night houses, music-hall galleries, cigar divans. They had passed from embarrassment to laughter and finally to close friendship. Old Walter had sealed that friendship by showing his grandson his by now vast collection of loose-leaf memoirs.

This had inspired young Walter to begin his own. Since the age of eighteen he had done nothing but live idly in London. He thought
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(which, he was careful to stress, he had read in manuscript!) divine. But old Walter’s revelations had inspired him to something more realistic.

“Then one day I said to him, ‘Look, old friend, your name’s Walter and so’s mine, and we’re both writing the memoirs of our night sticks—let’s combine ’em, eh? I’ll outlive the old queen and you started before they popped the crown on her. We’ll have the memoirs of one composite man who
was
the man of the entire reign.
Homo victoriensis
or whatever it would be—never was any good at Latin. Victorian man. Of course, the old boy took to it at once. We thought of calling the hero ‘Victor’ and his cousin ‘Ian.’ But then we thought that would give the game away—show people he was just made up. So the best disguise we could think of was ‘Walter.’ Vanity, I suppose.”

“And the result is these proofs? It’s about to be a book!”

“Fourteen books. You can say one thing for us Thorntons. When it comes to industry (and
Homo victoriensis
surely comes to that) we did our share!”

“Not your father,” Abigail said. “I know him well.”

Young Walter smiled. “According to Granddad, my father had his share when young, but he tired of it. Took to collecting the hot stuff. Books and things. He has a hundred and thirty thousand prints and photographs.”

Victor laughed uproariously, beating his head with open hands. “Aie…aie…ie…ie! Humanity, humanity!”

“So,” Abigail said briskly, “to get it clear, now. These loose-leaf sheets are old Walter’s originals. Somewhere here—we’ve not come across them yet—will be yours. And…”

“No, mine are at the Albany.” He looked around in dismay. “I say, here’s a thing. I’ll never cram all this in there. What am I to do?”

“We’ll come to that,” Abigail said. “What exactly do you want to do with it all?”

“Second edition,” he said. “First edition was eleven volumes. But we left a lot out. D’you know”—he sighed and looked again at the crates and chests, bursting with papers—“now the old fellow’s gone, I don’t think I have the heart. I suppose you want to pinch them?”

Suddenly she realized why he had been so frank with them: He thought they were fellow pornographers, like himself. From the moment he saw César’s pictures he must have been thinking partly that way!
I’d better make this convincing,
she thought.

“We are in the middle of a study to be titled
Human Sexual Pathology
for the University Press. You can imagine how difficult it is to collect accurate material. This is the first. I mean, that’s why we were delighted to have rescued it. This is the first honest material we’ve come upon.”

It was wasted on him. “Of course, of course,” he said with a wink. “Lots of hymnbook gothic on the title page, eh? Latin footnotes. Solemn title. Just the thing! Dad has hundreds of them. Well”—he waved at the material—“I wish you luck. ’Bout time women took a hand in writing our sort of books. The dear sweet things have invaded everywhere else. I’ll send you round all my stuff if you want.”