Abigail (45 page)

Oh, Victor!” Abigail said a few days later, when they had reduced Walter’s manuscript and galleys to the first semblance of order. “We must have some guardian angel above. I mean, haven’t I been saying all this time that what we need is to hear the honest, authentic voice of the English
man
,
the English middle-class client of the girl whose plight we know so well? And here it is—in embarrassing richness.”

He nodded.

“Why so pensive?” she asked.

“Depressed,” he said, waving at the piles around them. “It’s so…English. So utilitarian. The Renaissance passed Russia by; that’s why life is cheap there—the individual is valued at nothing. And now I see the Romantic movement passed England by; that’s why women are cheap here—Walter doesn’t even look for love, he values it at nothing.”

“But weren’t you the same once? You used to go to La Chaumière, where ‘the girls were the prettiest in Paris!’”

“Good heavens, they weren’t streetwalkers!” he protested. “They were
odalisques…cocodelles…lorettes…grisettes.
They lived from day to day—a dinner here, an apple there. The daughters of concierges, apprentice dressmakers, governesses without charges, actresses between theatres, chambermaids caught bending. They walked like free, wild creatures, with bright eyes and their hair down. They knew the slightest breeze could blow them into the Seine.”

“They took money for it.”

“But—oh, you English!—they never
asked
it. And I never went with one I didn’t also love. But Walter…he doesn’t look for it, nor even want it. He’d be embarrassed by it. If I hadn’t loved the girls at La Chaumière, I could’ve done nothing.”

“Love?” She laughed.

“Oh, yes. Love! One can be in love for as little as one hour. Don’t you know that?”

She shook her head. “It sounds perilously close to self-deceit.”

“So? If it is? It can be only a little deceit. One hour! Forgive me, but to be in love for ten years and then to find out, after the lapse of another ten that nothing is left of that love, not even the desire to talk about it—is that a small deceit, too? Or a big one?”

She knew he was half-provokingly dealing in these paradoxes, yet there was a truth at their heart. She nodded.

“Look,” he said. “Forget deceit. It’s too universal. This is what I’m talking about. In my
bohème
days I’d say to myself, ‘I’ll go out and find a girl and pay her money to sleep with me.’ But I was absolutely determined to love the girl, too.” Seeing the scornful curve of Abigail’s lip, he added, “Oh, yes! And often I did. Often the girl would come back and live with me for days or even weeks. Once I danced with a masked beauty—I never even slept with her—and pined for her for four weeks until she walked up to me in the street and ended my misery. Never mind! You see the point. When Walter says to himself, ‘I’ll go out and find a girl and pay her to sleep with me,’ the very idea of love would be repugnant to him. That’s what I say. It’s a utilitarian act. To him a girl is a pretty kind of sewer—a gorgeous slop pail. There’s no romance in it. Even at the climax of his enjoyment, his language is the language of the moneychanger. ‘I spent into her,’ he says. Or ‘we spent together’! My God—my hair stands on end to read it!”

He smiled then and squeezed her hand, mocking his own vehemence. “But you’re right. Walter’s is the authentic voice we’ve been seeking for so long.”

***

There was one of Uncle Walter’s loose-leaf memoirs that she began to read with special interest. It stood out from most of the others in that it consisted of several leaves pinned together. But that was merely what attracted her attention in the first place. What held her attention—and held it riveted—was the fact that it quite obviously referred to Walter’s time at Summit Tunnel, where her parents had started on the road to fortune…“Dusty,” in her father’s phraseology. “Loppered with blood. Bare of feet,” but with sunshine in their spirit. It amused her to think that while the pair of them had been slaving eighteen hours a day, Uncle Walter had been roaming the countryside and tumbling field girls.

“Devilish hot [he wrote]. I walked toward the shade of an old wall overhung by trees, amazed at the variety of grasses and plants there are in a pasture. Thought of a scheme to find the best and kill off the others. Even the birds couldn’t stand the heat.

“Then a stroke of luck. I thought she was a field girl, and my heart sank. I’m weary of their big, coarse bodies and gluepot stink. She was in field girl’s dress, heavy blue serge, stained, torn, and muddy; but she was a tender, dark-haired little minx inside it. Been starving herself a bit, I’d say. I like to be of help when they are of use to me. Fair’s fair.

“She sat on the wall, dappled in the sunlight, tired of its heat, like me. ‘That’s the best employment today,’ I said.

“‘I’d like to be the lass you were thinking of,’ she answered. ‘You looked right through me.’

“Her mind already leaned in the right direction. She had a grand little smile with delicious teeth that I already longed to feel about me. I sat beside her. ‘The stones are hot,’ I said.

“She stood. Who said ‘a woman’s body is the handwork of God’? Hers was. I trembled to be at her. I was melting from neck to knee, but now not with the heat—or the external heat.

“‘Sit here,’ she invited. ‘The stones have cooled under my skirt.’

“Well! She couldn’t have asked for it plainer. ‘Oh?’ says I. ‘Is it so cold under there?’ I’d have been a fool to say anything else.

“Now she played with me. Stood up…heavy sigh…stroll about…says wearily, ‘I didn’t mean that.’

“‘Wants a little warming, does it?’ I asked. Always ignore their resistance; they never mean it, even when they believe they do. And, of course, being hungry, in all ways, she comes to it at once. Handsome girl, too. A few months’ feeding and dukes would take her. ‘I’ve a belly needs meat,’ she said.

“‘Ah!’ (I knew there was more to follow.)

“‘It’d cost thee. I canna frig with the likes of thee for naught.’ She haggled me up to 4
s.
6
d. to
5
s.
being all I had (or thought I had). Of course she said the usual thing—never done it for money before!

“She led me into the wood beyond the wall. I said I feared it was private property. ‘Private enough!’ she laughed. She was eager for it, I could see. My old cracksman was sore stiff by now; he’d brook no delay, endure no finesse. When she began fiddling with the twine at her waist, I threw her down upon a smooth rock, set my folded jacket beneath her head, and leapt aboard her and spouted at once.

“Of course that wasn’t enough for her! And though it hurt me to do it so soon again (and she knew it hurt, sweet tyrant), she made me go on until we spent together. Then she was satisfied.

“When I awoke from my slumber, she held a sovereign in her hand and looked daggers at me. ‘What’s to be done with it?’ she asked. ‘I thought it fell from thy neck, but thou said thou had naught.’

“It annoyed me, when I had hurt myself to please her, that she should accuse me of meanness. But—not to confirm her—I said, ‘Keep the wretched coin! Wagered money’s soon forgot, they say. And it’s true, for that’s how I won it—and forgot it. Now you can have it and forget it, for it cost you nothing you didn’t want anyway.’

“She laughed and told me her name was Molly (which I later found to be a lie). What else was a lie?

“I realized suddenly we were not in a grove at all but an ancient graveyard, and she and I had desecrated a grave—for our ‘smooth rock’ was a carved stone. Tonight I pray for the repose of the soul of Nicholas Everett, who quit this life AD. 1643.”

Abigail gasped aloud. Nicholas Everett—the name Uncle Walter had given his eldest son, young Walter’s father! She had stumbled here on no mere casual memoir. She read on eagerly:

“I expressed my horror to her, but she was hardened, laughing at my scruple. ‘I don’t know about thee! One minute thou art glimpsing paradise.’ (I may have cried out some such foolery in my ecstasy.) ‘Next minute it’s desecration!’

“Her father was recently buried nearby. She said the authorities had reopened the abandoned ground, for burying paupers. She had come to tend his grave on her way back over the hills to Leeds. And suddenly, as if to shock me on purpose, she said her father and she had frigged for years, ever since her mother had died. She had borne him children, too, ‘meagre wrecklings, born dead and soon cold.’

“I had been defiled by her. But she continued her scorn. She told me I ‘knew nothing.’ My sort ‘knew nothing.’ She meant nothing of poverty, of course. But why should we? We are not poor. She knew nothing of railway engineering, but I did not taunt her for it. Instead I asked what of the rest of her family?”

Abigail laughed. “Old Walter’s a dedicated researcher!” she said. Victor, deep in another section, nodded. Abigail sighed and returned to the memoir:

“She had one brother transported, another in service, and of the two ‘bairns’ one had died of rat bites and the other had strayed ‘right into the jaws of Tom o’ Jones’s boar as weren’t penned. There were naught left but one arm to bury.’”

Abigail shut her eyes and stopped breathing; her hand flew to her mouth. Victor saw the change in her at once. “What?” he asked.

She shook her head. Gently he tugged at the paper in her hand. She clutched it to her. “What?” he repeated.

“I’m going to be sick, I think.”

Her heart, having stopped, now hammered like a pile-driving engine. Everything blurred and swam. She heard the window sash screech as Victor threw it open. She attempted to rise but staggered and sat again.

“Don’t,” Victor said. “I’ll get a bowl.”

She shook her head; the nausea was dwindling. Now she was weak; her muscles had jellified.

“Water?”

She nodded but he had already gone for it. The relief was astounding. The flying miasma before her eyes drained itself down and settled. Her mind was cleared. She sipped again and managed a weak smile.

“What was that?” he asked.

She tapped the paper.

“Just something you read?”

Still holding the paper, she stood and began to pace about. At last she said, “There’s no one else in the world I’d ever reveal this to. But you, I know, will understand.” She gave him the paper. “The girl he is writing about here, the girl who gives her name as ‘Molly,’ is my mother. You will recognize the point at which that became clear to me. Will you, my dearest, read to the end and tell me if I should go on? Please?”

He did as she asked. He was stolid; little showed in his face. But she saw when he reached the bit about the boar. Then she ran to him and kissed his face and head over and over again. “Darling, darling Victor! Don’t if you don’t want. I don’t mind…we’ll go for a walk and I’ll calm down and read it myself.”

But he merely patted her hand and read on.

“You must read it,” he said when he’d finished. “Read it and pity these poor people.” He passed the paper back to her, and she, standing now, read on. He at once began to search for something through the pile of printed proofs.

“I marvelled at the force that drives these people to survive; they live in degradation that would kill me in a week, yet they face the world with the beauty and scorn of this young tigress, who defers only to my money (all of which she now has, save
5s.).
I looked at her body, which I had enjoyed so bounteously, and thought, perhaps a new life, half mine, is already kindling in her—to be born, to survive plague and disease, to worm its way up through the gauntlet of human cruelty and indifference, to eat its meagre fill, get drunk, frig, beget, and die. The futility of it—of our whole existence—it was all there in the stone and the air, in my limp prick and her charged body. Vanity! Even the vanity of the cypher in the stone: Nicholas Everett—it took me minutes to make out your name!”

Victor handed her a page of proof. “In case you worry how much has survived in print, I came across it last week. You’ll see how I recognized it.”

It was a passage describing how composite-Walter watches two agricultural women go into a churchyard “for a piss.” And he, “dying for it” as usual, follows them. A lot of banter, some of it quite amusing. One woman agrees. He rolls his coat for a pillow and has her on a tombstone…“and there we were laying [sic] in copulation, with the dead all around us; another living creature might that moment have been begotten, in its turn to eat, drink, fuck, die, be buried, and rot.” Then he turns over and has the other woman.

“He keeps the elements, you see,” Victor said. “The churchyard, rolled-up jacket, tombstone, intimations of mortality, and two women to stand for two acts. But the rest is gone. Young Walter said they left out a lot. They surely did! They left out their own humanity and understanding.
But!
”
He brightened and, wagging a finger, added, “As a great man once said:
That is no accident!
‘Walter’ is how old Walter and young Walter want to reveal themselves to the world. He may not be real Victorian man, but he is authentic—as Ulysses is authentic ancient Greek. How d’you feel, my darling?”

“Go on talking. Say anything. I feel like a walk.”

They walked aimlessly, threading through the maze of narrow streets between the house and Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “They’re going to pull all this down,” she said, “and drive a great
boulevard
through the rubble.”

“You’re a romantic.”

“I used to come and hunt for books here.” A parallel memory of the demolished Vecchio ghetto passed through her mind and a rare mood of nostalgia suddenly depressed her. The past. The past! She must not let it hamper her. The past had nothing to offer but the secrets it still concealed.

They walked the Fields in easeful silence and turned again for home; but a sharp image of those pinned-together memoirs—now safely locked away—halted her. “No,” she said. “I can’t go back yet.”

“Shall we walk up to Saint Paul’s?”

Nothing in her responded to the suggestion. Then suddenly she knew what she wanted. “Let’s take a cab out to Highgate Cemetery and look for old Karl’s grave.”

He laughed. “Why on earth? A cemetery? After what we’ve just read?”