Abigail (19 page)

In spells of law to one she baths? And must she drag the chain

Of life in weary lust? Must chilling, murderous thoughts obscure

The clear heaven of her eternal spring; to bear the wintry rage

Of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod…’”

“Oh darling!” he said. “It is wrong, wrong, wrong!”

“Listen!”

But he would not listen, not to
her
, only to the words, turning them into ‘cold floods of abstraction.’ His merciless fingers gave her longings no rest.

“Please, Pepe,” she said, hearing the bewilderment of her straying voice. “It’s all the things I don’t want to happen to us.

“‘To turn the wheel of false desire; and longings that make her womb

To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form

That live a pestilence and die a meteor, and are no more.’

“I don’t want to…I want…” she faltered.

“I want,” he whispered. “I
want
,
I
want,
I want.”

He slipped beneath her to kiss her hanging breasts and suckle her. His hands moved to her thighs, up and up.

“Pepe,” she murmured. He had not heard. He listened and understood but he had not
heard.

Yet that was in the
Visions
too!

…Take thy bliss, O man!

And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

…The moment of desire! The moment of desire! The virgin

That pines for man shalt awaken her womb to enormous joys…

The words had heaped her day. The longing for him was now insupportable. She moved down upon him. He pulled her home, to the hilt of him.

Time ceased. In that infinity of pleasure all thought came to its stop. They surrendered every faculty but sensation.

He toppled her, smothered her. She became their bed, the room, the house, the whole Earth; it was at once the strangest and most natural thing to lack fingers…toes…all extremities, all defined boundaries—to vanish and yet to become…
everything.

At last she returned to herself, spiralling down the memory of one long voiceless moan that still lingered on the air of the room. Every muscle in her body collapsed. The movement made her aware that Pepe was no longer in her. His dead body breathed into her ear. Her hands found him, found the napkin between them, felt its dampness.

She remembered language but not the need to use it. Not yet. The firelight was warm and golden on their bodies. The clock began to tick again. When Pepe stirred to ease his weight on her, a sudden stab of longing for him came, fierce as ever—
don’t go!
A little memorandum from her flesh—to remind her of its sovereignty “in lovely copulation.”

“‘
I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy, happy love! free as the mountain wind!
’”

She whispered the words to him.

“It’s no true recipe for life though, is it?” he said, not stirring. His breath made a furnace in her hair and on her neck.

“I want it to be. It feels so
right.
I know it goes in the face of everything.”

“Especially of logic.”

“Yes. Especially that. To want such utter freedom. Free! Love! The two most beautiful words. To want that freedom and yet to want to share every moment and morsel of it with you! To be in thrall to you, and yet to call that slavery the most perfect of all freedoms!”

He raised himself on one elbow and pulled off the damp napkin, revealing himself shrivelled and boneless. “I could have stayed inside,” he said, “and ended all these fancies.”

She wanted to weep. He had gathered nothing! All her ideas and feelings, as clear and sharp to her as a thousand suns…he stared straight through them as if they were not there.

“Never think
that
!” she said fiercely. “I would even bear your child unmarried. A hundred children.”

He slumped, shut his eyes, and lay beside her a long minute.

Later, when she dressed and went up as usual to Annie’s boudoir, she found a stranger, a nervous middle-aged woman, there. “I’m Annie’s auntie, dear,” she said, offering no name.

At first Abigail thought her nervousness was a form of embarrassment at what she knew must have been going on with Pepe in the locked supper room. But when she asked the “auntie” where Annie was, and saw the shifty look in the older woman’s eye, she knew it had something to do with that.

“She’s out on an errand of mercy, love,” the aunt said. “Be away all week, she will.”

Abigail was still overwhelmed by Pepe’s inability to comprehend; she had no time to bother much at Annie’s absence.

One day that autumn—it was the week before Abigail finally left home—Wilkie Collins called on Nora. He was an even less frequent visitor than Rossetti, and Nora soon discovered he had come to see not her but “the remarkable young author of that remarkably witty book
The Land of That’ll-do.
”
The secret was breaking; the ripples spreading.

From the writer of
The Moonstone
, an even greater recent success than Abigail’s book, this was praise indeed. When Nora rang for a footman to fetch Abigail, Collins expressed a hope to see her at her desk, saying one could learn more about a writer from that than from a dozen drawing-room conversations.

Nora knew how terrified Abigail would have been of this encounter less than a year earlier, so it was with some misgiving that she agreed to take Collins up to the room which Abigail had made her study. But when she saw how easily the girl coped, greeting Collins almost as an equal (which he did not, Nora noticed, entirely welcome), she understood just how much her daughter had matured these last months.

They found her correcting the galleys of a short story Laon had “syndicated” for her. The term was new to Collins, and Abigail had to explain it for him. “This same story appears in five or six different country newspapers, you see,” she said.

“And you get five or six times as much money for it?”

“Naturally.” Abigail laughed.

“Your Mr. Laon sounds a very clever man.”

“Oh, it’s not his own idea,” she said. “They do it a lot in America. He heard about it from a friend of Walter Besant’s, a Mr. Watt, who got it from someone called Tillotson.”

Collins held out his hand for the proof. “May I?”

He read the story with deep attention and declared it very good. But the ending he said, could be greatly improved—not by changing it, but merely by telescoping two or three incidents. “Don’t you see how much stronger that would make it?” he asked.

She agreed.

“D’you mind if I alter it?”

She said she would feel honoured.

He whipped out a pencil and soon not just her ending but the whole galley was a mass of excisions, links, and transpositions. Nora watched aghast, until her eyes met Abigail’s and Abigail winked.

“There!” Collins had finished. As he looked at the ruin of the galley and remembered where he was and why he had come, his face fell. “I am most awfully…” he began.

But Abigail took the galley from him and put it straight into an envelope already addressed to the
Bristol Times & Mirror
, the journal for which the piece was destined. She rang for a servant to take it directly to the post office at St. Martin’s. “It will arrive tomorrow,” she said. “How delighted they will be.”

Collins forgot then whatever slight affront he had felt and began discussing writers and publishers and the book trade without reserve or condescension. After a while Nora quietly withdrew, but Collins did not notice her absence for a full half hour. When he did, he was shocked.

“Good heavens!” he said, looking around him as if the floor had collapsed and he was left isolated on a single, infirm pinnacle. “This is most…most…er…irregular. I…”

Abigail cut him short, not concealing her impatience at his social scruple. “You have not talked of yourself, Mr. Collins,” she said. “What is your next book to be?”

Politeness (reinforced, to be sure, by natural inclination) forced him to answer, and in doing so he forgot the cause of his embarrassment and talked on for another half hour.

“That was so nice of you, popsie,” Nora said after Collins had left.

“What was?”

“Not to protest when he began scribbling all over your story—and to send it off at once, so that he could be sure you wouldn’t just throw that proof away and use another. I don’t know any other writer who’d allow such a thing.”

“But he was right!”

“Even less of a reason, to most people.”

“You’re talking about men authors. Maybe they’re different. I must write at once to Bristol, though, and tell that editor what happened.”

But that letter did not go until the following day.

***

Two days later Pepe was waiting for her at Annie’s with an amused grin. “Read and learn,” he said. And he passed over a couple of letters from the editor of the
Bristol Times & Mirror.
The first said he had already had a sample of Mr. Abe Stevenson’s impertinence and had been in two minds about taking this new story; now his doubts were confirmed. If Mr. Stevenson thought his compositors had nothing better to do than decipher Chinese hieroglyphs…etc. The second begged Mr. Laon to ignore his first letter and to convey his warmest feelings to Lady Abigail. (“How the ripples do spread,” she chuckled.) He had no idea she was acquainted with Mr. Collins…Could she perhaps beg some trifle from him for the
BT&M…
She might feel every assurance that past misunderstandings were past and would never recur.

She laughed and they sat down to their meal.

“
BT&M!
”
She snorted. “I’d like to kick him on his B, T, M! I should have thought of it when I wrote that first time.”

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t understand that. What was it? I didn’t know there’d been a fracas between you.”

“Oh, it was over that first story you syndicated, ‘The Weaker Sex.’ Remember he changed the ending?”

“Yes. But I said to let it pass.”

“Well, I tried to but I couldn’t. All I did was write and ask him why he’d done it. I mean I really wanted to know. And he had the effrontery to write back and say he’d assumed there was a page of manuscript missing. The story had no proper end, so he wrote it himself.”

“Was that all?”

She took a morsel of food to avoid answering; she held out her empty wineglass to distract him.

“Was it?” he repeated as he filled the glass.

“No. I wrote again,” she said.

He drummed the table with his fingertips, looking at her wearily.

“I told him,” she said defiantly, “that the village editor has no more right to adulterate literature than the village grocer has to put chalk in the flour.”

“Oh my God!” Laon sank his head in his hands.

“And I added that I knew the practice was rife in the latter trade but had not until now been aware of its spread to the former.”

Laon silently shook his head. At last he raised his eyes to hers and held her in a long survey while he gathered words.

“You got away with it,” he said. “But the lesson is nonetheless plain. Your book, your
one
book, may have sold as well as
The Moonstone—
it may even have outsold it—but that does not even begin to turn you into the sort of literary figure Wilkie Collins now is. This”—he held up the second letter—“fawning and grovelling is entirely due to the magic of
his
name. Not yours. It will be a long time yet before you can give yourself such literary airs. Until then, darling Abbie, never never forget that you are writing for a market. For a
dozen
markets. Always remember that each piece has a market.”

“Market!” she said, feeling too diminished to attack his main argument. “What is a market!”

“A market…” he began and then paused to think. A slow smile transformed his face. “A market is a strange mixing—a chimera composed of ninety-nine percent pure editor and a trifling one percent adulteration known in the trade as ‘The Reader.’ Yet ‘The Reader’ gives his name to the entire beast!”

His witticism amused him. She, too, laughed, though more in relief that he had not grown angry with her. He would have had every right to be angry.

“Forget it at your peril,” he said, closing the subject.

Before she left that night she went as usual up to Annie’s boudoir. The nameless auntie was still there.

“Annie’s away a long time,” Abigail said. It had been nearly four weeks.

“Oh, no, dear, she’s back,” the woman answered. “She came back while you and your gentleman was…er…eatin’.”

Abigail was delighted. “Oh, but tell her I’m here, do! I’m longing to see her again.”

“Well—I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“Not sure of what?”

“She may not want to see you.”

For a moment Abigail did not know what to say. “Why ever not?” she asked at length.

The woman shrugged, plainly embarrassed, and, going to the door, said, “Well, I’ll tell her then.”

Annie’s appearance appalled Abigail. She looked
old.
And beaten. Though she smiled bravely there was an air of defeat about her that not all the would-be girlish squeaks and hugs could mask.

“What is it, Annie?” she asked.

“I’ll soon be right as a rainbow,” Annie said. She laughed. “And twice as crooked, you’re supposed to say.”

“Right from what? What’s been happening to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, love. Me sister, the one in Wales, did I ever tell you? No? Well, her little one took ill. That’s where I went. He died. Oh, it was chronic. But don’t talk about it. Tell us about you.”

She looked around as if she had forgotten something, saw the decanter of port on a small credenza, and almost ran to pour herself a glass. Abigail realized she was already a little tipsy…“obfuscated,” as Annie called it.

She sipped the port and pulled a face. “Decoction of brewer’s apron,” she said. “Well, gel. Have you made the addition?”

Abigail heard ‘edition,’ and did not understand.

“Have you lost your stakes?” Annie laughed. Her tone grew a little wild. “Has he been all there but most of him? Swopped a bit of hard for a bit of soft, did you? Take the starch out of him?”

“Oh, Annie, don’t! It isn’t like that.”

“Like what?”

“It’s not a battle. Nor a game.”

“Try it with the chill off!”

“What’s the matter, Annie dear?”

Annie made obvious efforts to rally herself. “Sorry, love. Tired, that’s all. Just tired. All be different in the morning.” She grinned—genuinely—and seemed to relax. “Seriously,” she said. “Did he?”

Abigail smiled. “
We
did. We
do
.”

Annie clapped hands and laughed. “Straight? What d’you think of it, then? D’you take to it?”

Abigail could only grin back at her; she could not follow Annie’s animalistic line. The thing itself was too sacred; it would have been a betrayal.

“Bet you do!” Annie challenged. Then she grew serious again. “’Ere! He wouldn’t break your leg, would he?”

Abigail shook her head, but Annie took it as a sign of incomprehension. “Leave you with a lapful? In the familiar way?”

She shook her head more forcefully. “He has…those
things.
Like you showed me.”

Annie was only half reassured. “They’re better than nothing. But what you want is one of those things
we
can wear. What they call a Dutch cap. It’s a new idea but they say it’s the best. Shall I get you one?”

Abigail had no notion what Annie was talking about; the only images in her mind were all from Rembrandt and Van Dyck—girls in starched white bonnets.

“What are they like? What do they do?”

Annie explained and showed one of her own. “It’s me Sunday one,” she said with a wink.

Abigail thought it would be a good idea.

“Well,” Annie said as she downed her third port, “got to give
my
old man his supper I suppose.”

Just before she went Abigail asked why it was called a Dutch cap.

“Well, it
is
a cap, isn’t it?” Annie said.

“Yes, but why
Dutch
?”

“Don’t you get it?” Annie said in surprise. “
The Low Cuntries
!”

Abigail still did not comprehend, though she knew some kind of double meaning was involved. Later she wondered at Annie’s utter inability to talk about men, women, and copulation without elaborate, joking circumlocutions and double meanings. She and Pepe could talk about it, straight and unabashed, but that was a private language. The only person she knew who could manage it in public was William Blake, in some of his poems; and the only place you could get those poems was in the dirty bookshops.

Dirty
bookshops!

Someone,
she thought,
has got the marching orders wrong!