Abigail (11 page)

The ball was a resounding success; even those who came to sneer had to admit it—even as they sneered. The chief architect of this triumph was, in fact, the architect of the building itself. His grand entrance hall at the heart of the house became the ballroom, with the orchestra in the gallery at the end of the wrought-iron bridge. And everything that anyone could want lay only a few paces away. A groaning buffet in the dining room to the southeast; quiet corners and soft chairs in the library and morning room to the south and southwest; space in which to promenade or sit in the drawing rooms and winter garden to the west; a discreet ambulatory for snatched kisses in the armoury (and lots of things to point at and pretend an interest in should others approach); and on the north and east the billiard rooms and the covered entrance court offered a haven to men who had sickened of feminine chatter and who were desperate for a smoke. For those whose thirst outran their capacity there was half an acre of frozen terrace on which to walk it off.

Best of all, there were a dozen places where political and other business could be mooted safely—that is, without imperilling the dancing, feasting, drinking, and other merrymaking. During the course of the evening two new members were recruited to a royal commission of inquiry into docks and waterways, a new justice of the peace was found for the Stroud bench, two candidates were selected for forthcoming bye-elections, a possible new bishop was nominated, and the success of the government’s latest Contagious Diseases Bill was as good as ensured.

In most of these affairs John played a prominent part; his presence there was, after all, the sole reason that many of the guests—those with official or parliamentary connections—had agreed to come. In passing, and on his own account, he extended the firm’s contract for the new Thames Embankment, agreed to tender for the new Bradford Town Hall, and added his weight to a scheme for financing the nearly completed Suez Canal if the French and Egyptians got into trouble.

John had agreed to the building of Falconwood only with the greatest reluctance; and until tonight he had remained firmly of the opinion that the house was a hostage to Caroline’s ambition and Caspar’s vanity. Now, after this first public evening, he withdrew all he had thought and said against it. Nora had always maintained that Caspar was the only member of the family who could see the firm as it should be five or even ten years from now. If tonight was anything to go by, she could very well be right.

About three o’clock, when it looked as if the young folk were set to dance until dawn, he sought out Nora to say he was turning in.

“Of course,” she agreed. “No one will expect you to stay up. But don’t drop off. I’ll come up in five minutes—there’s something urgent to discuss, something I’ve heard from Young John.”

Whenever he and she went visiting together they were naturally put in one room as man and wife. To avoid embarrassment he usually slept in a portable trestle bed in his dressing room. Nora gave him ten minutes to settle himself and then followed him up.

To her surprise he was still washing. “I’ll come back,” she said turning to leave.

“Towel!” he spluttered through the soap and water, groping wildly behind him.

She brought him the towel, warm from the fire. Instead of putting it into his groping hand, she draped it over his wet neck and began to rub it dry. Slowly, astonished, he turned to face her, but she covered his face with the towel and went on drying him.

Without warning her heartbeat doubled its rate—which struck her as odd since the rest of her felt quite calm and unemotional. She had no idea why she was drying John in this way, and she rather wished she hadn’t started. “There,” she said, before she removed her hands.

But he clasped them up and held them fast to the towel that still concealed his face.

“Well?” she asked. For him she did not need to elaborate the question; it meant,
Have you got rid of The Bitch?

“The Bitch” was Nora’s only name for Charity, the ex-fallen, ex-rescued (and now, happily for Nora, ex-young) woman who was John’s mistress and the mother of his three bastards. She had been eighteen and very pretty when John had first met her in 1850; she had been even prettier in 1855, when John had set her up in St. John’s Wood. But now, at thirty-five, she had grown plump and pasty—and, according to Nora’s sources, somewhat inclined to be shrewish.

John clutched the towel from her and began rolling its thinner selvedge into his ears to dry them. If he had heard her, he gave no sign of it.

“Did you talk to Young John?” she asked.

“Yes, we seem to be reconciled again. He’s not nearly so priggish now he’s learned a bit about the world. He was almost cordial to me.”

“Did he talk of Mr. Laon at all?”

“He began to. Yes. But I had to break off to have a word with Bright. What about Laon?”

Nora told him then, everything that Boy had told her (and Boy had kept back nothing but Locke’s name). “It’s this suggestion to publish Abigail’s book that worries me,” she concluded. “Winifred’s safe, mainly because I control all the school’s finances. But Abigail…” She sighed.

John, now in his nightshirt, said through the foam of his toothpowder, “The income from one little book! What does it matter? Suppose she lost it all—do her good. Teach her a valuable lesson.”

Nora was not convinced. “Let’s assume the worst, John,” she said. “Assume Laon is an out-and-out scoundrel. And suppose the book sells very well. Suppose the income were over a thousand pounds. It would be a most expensive lesson.”

The possibility clearly had not occurred to John. “Is it really so good?” he asked. “Have you read it?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t even know it existed. I thought she’d destroyed it—the way she destroys everything. But Winifred is so taken with it—and you know how sparing she usually is of praise, especially for Abigail. And anyone can see how keen Laon is, beneath that mask of indifference. Oh, he has the money itch, all right. So I think we have to assume it could…”

“Damnation!” John burst out. “What is wrong with our girls? Are they all determined to shame us! Just when people have grown to accept the fact that the Earl and Countess of Wharfedale’s eldest daughter, who could have a million-pound dowry and marry whom she pleased, prefers to run a girls’ school, along comes the second daughter, with equal advantages, and now she’s going to write for money! And what is Hester doing up in the nursery? Plotting to open a cigar divan in the Strand, I have no doubt.”

Nora laughed, relieved that he could joke about it, despite the seriousness of Abigail’s proposal to write for money. “At least you’re avoiding the heavy hand.”

“Oh, I learned that lesson. Six years ago.”

“Five.”

“Five…six—it seems like sixty. Oh dear, what are we to do?”

“This seems to have turned into a discussion about how to stop Abigail from writing. I wanted to arrange ways of preventing Laon from trepanning her. If that is his intention.”

“Or from marrying her.”

“Oh, that would be easy. Just let it be known we’d disinherit her. He wouldn’t take the risk.”

John gargled and spat. “Why not do for her what you do for Winifred?” he asked. “Look after the money side of things?”

“I doubt if she’d let me, John…”

“Let!” he exploded. “Ye gods! Our children now
let
us.”

“It’s not just
our
children, dear. No one nowadays can tell their daughters who and who not to marry.

“Any more than husbands can tell their wives what…” He bit off the rest of the sentence.

There was a brief silence between them. “No,” she said at last.

“I’m surrounded by a conspiracy,” he grumbled. “All I get from Winifred is ‘Married Women’s Property’ and repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. What’s gone wrong with women?”

“We’re straying again,” Nora said. She reached some internal decision, squared her shoulders, and smiled. “Your idea is sound, though. Someone must look after the financial arrangements for her. I wonder if I can persuade Caspar.” She laughed. “Yes! He has two dozen good reasons to wish no good to Mr. Laon. Alias Porzelijn.”

But the image that kept presenting itself in her mind’s eye as she left him and went back to the ball was not of Abigail or Laon or any of them; it was of John’s torso, which she had not seen naked for over seven years now. The flesh was a little fallen perhaps, the skin less supple—he was, after all, getting on for sixty—but he still had more muscle than any other man she knew. And not an ounce of flab.

She remembered it. And her body remembered it—that marvellousness of him enfolding her. Much later, when the dance was over and the young people had gone back to the hunting field, she lay in her bed, not a dozen yards from him, and, for the first time in years, mourned the loss of him. She grieved that he had wasted himself so long on The Bitch.

Winifred said, “P.P.?”

“Mmm?” Laon was reading galleys. They were in Winifred’s study, waiting for Abigail. Outside two teams of girls were playing lacrosse, the new Canadian game. Watching them, Winifred wondered that anyone could ever have imagined girls to be gentle creatures. Was she being fair, she wondered, encouraging such a competitive spirit? Was it not storing up misery for the girls when they left?

“Yes?” Laon asked.

“Yes what?”

“What d’you mean—‘yes what’? You were going to ask me something.”

She thought. “Oh yes. Nothing really…I was just about to remark that you are rather young for a publisher.”

“Ah!” He gave a knowing grin. “Depends when you start, don’t it! At eighteen I was writing reviews for
The Examiner—
and got elected to the Savile Club.”

“But…I mean…if you quarrelled with your father, how did you get the money?”

He stood up, dropped his proofs, and came to stand beside her at the window. “Marry me,” he said, “and I’ll tell you the secret.”

“Don’t be foolish!” she said. But she grinned almost savagely. Her left hand hung against her skirt. He let the back of his hand graze it.

“Stop that,” she said, pulling away.

He sighed. “I thought you were about to become serious,” he complained. “I thought when a Stevenson gets on to money it has to be serious.”

She tossed her head. “How you got your money is a matter of supreme indifference to me.”

“Oh. In that case, I’ll tell you with pleasure. When I’m in bed at night, you know, I think about you a lot.”

She looked at him in owlish surprise.

“And I think to myself:
If I can but keep her indifference alight, I shall surely be counted the happiest of mortals!
”

“You’re impossible,” she said, delighted at his safe-dangerous foolery.

“I am,” he said. “I am the square root of a minus number. The June snowball. The janissary’s favourite grandson…”

“I should have known better,” she told him. “Go back to your galleys.”

He did as she bade; but almost at once he laid down the papers again. “Seriously,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Nothing to be ashamed of. I ran a book when I was at Cambridge and…”

“Gambling!” Winifred was horrified.

“Wait,” he said. “You’re going to win, so don’t worry. I didn’t. Win, I mean. I came down with a paltry few hundred, which, considering the thousands that passed through my fingers, I call as good as losing. So there I was with a first in law and a conviction that gambling was no high road to fortune.”

“And a few hundred pounds.”

“Yes.” He did not welcome the interruption. “While I was waiting to be called to the Bar, I began scribbling for Malthus Roy, the man who then owned three of the magazines I now publish. One day, quite coincidentally, I went into a shop, the toyshop in Saint Martin’s Lane it was, to buy a clockwork boat for a young nephew of mine, and I was astonished to be charged thirteen and sixpence. When I asked why it was so expensive, the man told me he couldn’t get the clockwork under nine shillings. So I bought the boat, but I’m afraid my nephew didn’t get it. I took out the clockwork and went to every little workshop in the East End, and even Camden Town. And I couldn’t find a single man who’d quote me under eight and sixpence. So I went to Paris. And Lyon. The same story. And Switzerland was hopeless. So I was about to give up. But I thought, ‘No, I’ve put so much into it now, I’ll put just a little more.’ And—call me Dick Whittington—I found a fellow at last, in a little place outside Milan, where they’d make them for seven shillings. That was two years ago. This year one half of all the clockwork toys sold in England will have motors supplied by me. Same with musical boxes.”

Winifred clasped her hands in delight. “How d’you find time?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t have anything to do with the day-to-day running of the business. Malthus Roy does that.”

“The…”

“The same one. It shows how much we all owe to sheer chance. One day Roy said to me, ‘D’you know, Laon, I’d rather be buying and selling scrap metal than publishing these wretched rags.’ And they were rags, too, in his day. He loathed them. And it showed. Another time he said, ‘If I have to read one more account of Lady Whatsit’s new furnishings, I shall go out and put every chintz factory in London to the torch!’ Oh, he hated it, all right.”

“So you simply changed seats? How marvellous!”

Laon chuckled. “Not quite so simply. No. He was losing money heavily. I was making it handsomely. No. I offered him a partnership in a lucrative business in return for the millstones around his neck. And now I’ve made those profitable, too. This year I do believe we’ll really turn the corner.”

Winifred saw Abigail’s coach turn in the driveway. “I’m so glad for you,” she said. “Persistence like yours—and flair—deserve success.”

He tapped Abigail’s manuscript, still in its folder. “Yet this,” he said, “could earn more profit than all my businesses, and yours, next year. And she was going to throw it away! It hardly seems fair, does it?”

“Here she comes,” Winifred said.

***

Abigail was so nervous she could hardly put one foot surely before the other. The whole day seemed to be ringing and pulsating. Before, when she and Laon and Winnie had talked in general terms about her book, she had been quite calm. But now they were going to look at her actual writing, her very own words. And line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Laon was going to shred them and show her how foolish and…what was his word? She didn’t want to remember his word. The memory of how it had sliced through her was enough.

Thank God, Winnie stayed just long enough to see them settled. She wasn’t among the most considerate of people, but at least she had tact enough for that.

When they were alone, Laon turned to her. “I heard a good story at the club last night,” he said. He seemed in no hurry to start on the manuscript. “About Tennyson. This is going back thirty years. He was dining one night at the Savile with W.H. Brookfield and George Venables, and after the meal he stuck his feet on the table and tilted back his chair like an American. They pleaded with him to sit properly, but ‘Why should I?’ he said. ‘I’m very comfortable.’ ‘But people will stare.’ ‘Let ’em!’ Tennyson said. But Brookfield had the answer. ‘Alfred,’ he said. ‘People will think you’re Longfellow!’ And down went the feet!”

Anecdote followed anecdote; Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and his own contemporaries—people like Stevenson and W.E. Henley—he had stories about them all. Small, trivial stories, they were, like the night that Thackeray called unexpectedly to dinner. His host’s wife, caught with only a leg of cold mutton in the pantry, sent out for some tarts to enliven the meal. When the tarts were presented and she asked which he preferred, he said unthinkingly, “Thank you. I’ll have the twopenny one.”

Because of their intimate domestic nature, these little anecdotes seemed to invite Abigail into the charmed circle of writers, a circle where such tales must be common currency. She knew, of course, that Laon was doing it deliberately, but that did not make it any the less effective. She had come there like a schoolgirl for a session with her tutor; and within moments he had transformed her into a real writer, while subtly demoting himself to the status of editor, “the clown with the bucket and brush,” as he later explained, “doomed to wander the public arena in the wake of the literary elephant.”

All his more playful imagery, she found, had this dangerous, earthy tinge, redeemed by his wit or at least by his good humour.

“Now,” he said, when he saw that she was properly relaxed, “let us turn to this tale of yours.” He opened the box in which the rescued papers had been uncrumpled and pressed flat. “Let us take the opening:

“‘So careless are the folk of The Land of That’ll-do you will not even find their country on the map. They do not withhold this information of a purpose (indeed, there are hundreds of seasoned mariners who could take you there in the dark—especially in the dark); they truly intend the world to share the blessed happiness…”

He looked intently at her. “Et-cet-era,” he finished.

She cringed inwardly. It did sound frightful.

He glanced farther down the page. “You go on to say that, at mapmaking time, these folk of The Land of That’ll-do always forget to give the mapmakers the necessary details. And that’s how you justify your opening sentence. (Incidentally, I think you mean ‘carefree’ not ‘careless’ there.) But it’s too long-winded, too ponderous, don’t you see. Especially for a beginning. I mean, it’s a charming idea—that there is a mapmaking time, just as there is a haymaking time—but it doesn’t sustain an opening.”

“It sounds like a bad geography master,” Abigail said, “desperately trying to inject some interest into…”

“I’ll do the attacking,” he told her. “You get out the needle and thread.” He turned the page face down to compel her attention. “What does the reader want in an opening?” he asked.

She giggled nervously. “I don’t know anything about openings.”

“Pardon me, but I think you do. Guess what sort of book this sentence opens:
I have no idea who my parents were; I cannot even name the country of my birth.
”

“An adventure story. Or the tale of a self-made man.”

“Not a woman’s story?”

“Certainly not. It would be quite unsuitable.”

“Indeed? Then what of this, the first line of a short story:
Rosamund had often heard of the phrase ‘dance the night away’ but the Ball of 1868 was the first at which she both polkaed out the sunset and waltzed in the dawn.
”

Abigail laughed; she loved these games. “Easy! That’s for one of your magazines.”

“But you told me you know nothing about openings—and I see you know everything. Try this, a harder one.
The long, rainless day was coming to an end, and the sun, now a huge, dull, dusty sphere already nibbled by the skyline, threw before them a pool of shadow in which their fancy (or was it their fatigue?) painted strange and disturbing scenes.
”

Still grinning Abigail gave it some thought. “Gothic,” she said. “Decidedly long-haired, artistic, and gothic!”

“And you still maintain you know nothing of openings?” he asked. “Here’s one last one.
So careless are the folk of The Land of That’ll-do…
”

He got no further. “All right!” she shouted, her humour gone.

“Good!” He beamed. “It’s not the opening to anything, is it?” He turned the manuscript face up again. “Yet it contains the germ of a superb opening. I wonder if you can see it.”

She turned her face away.

“Go on!” he encouraged. “Have a good flinch, then read it again.”

She read it again.

“What d’you like best—or dislike least?” he asked.

She shrugged. Grudgingly she said, “That bit about getting there especially in the dark.”

He rapped the table, delighted. “Exactly! That’s your opening, you see:
You cannot reach The Land of That’ll-do, unless you go by night.
Now that could not be anything but a children’s tale, and already it hints at mystery and excitement. Now let us go on. I’ll do a page or two with you and leave you to finish the rest of the chapter on your own during the week. But don’t start on chapter two just yet. I want to talk to you about the structure of the book from the second chapter on.

They spent an hour on the first three pages. Abigail, who until then had used commas as mere stage directions, meaning “pause here to draw breath,” found it hard going.

He showed her how to make each sentence grow out of its predecessor. “So many of yours are only half-connected,” he complained. “I have to read the whole paragraph, trying to hold these half-connected ideas in my mind, and then—somehow—I have to force the connection, once I’ve grasped the main idea, the main drift of your thoughts. And I mean drift! It’s such a pity, because the connection is there. The ideas are a delight. The events a joy. But the words! They are like tussocks of grass underfoot. Or squelchy mud.”

And he showed her how to make them smooth and firm, how to achieve “the inevitable thread of words.” In general he simply rearranged her original, rarely adding to it, but quite often cutting. He was ruthless with her dashes and parentheses and dot-dot-dots wherever they masked a certain breathlessness of thought; out of them he cobbled firm, freestanding sentences.

At first she was excited. It was like watching a good gardener weed a thickly infested shrub border, leaving it neat, showing the form and texture of every plant. But when he had done the best part of a page she read it again and felt a sense of uneasy disappointment. It did not flow as he claimed. The shrubs, so to speak, had been pruned too hard and the unity of the border was destroyed.

But then he went back over his work and added half a dozen seemingly empty little words and phrases—“however,” “to be sure,” “after all,” and so on. At one point he tacked a whole new sentence on to the front of a paragraph: “Corney Grain was not the only one to notice that the ship had turned about.”

“D’you see how all these little extras help to fill the cracks?” he asked.

And, having just noticed the cracks herself, she had to agree.

He also began a process that was to last through many months of her craft training—the process of rigging literary alarm bells around certain notorious constructions.
Stop
with -
ing
was one. “‘He stopped her coming down the street.’ ‘He stopped her going to the dance,’” he said. “The first probably means ‘stopped her while she was coming down the street,’ the second probably means ‘stopped her from going to the dance.’ You may say that the context nearly always makes the choice clear. And I say to you that only a bad writer would rely on it. For a good writer the words and the context must point the same way; but if one of them is leaning on the other, they can’t, can they!”

Inverted sentences (“Brave would be he who…”) formed another class of pitfalls.

The position of the word “only” was another.

And there was the illiterate “whom” (“Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drowned…”). It was a motley collection—inevitably, since it depended on the random illiteracies of her text; but it whetted her appetite for more.