Abigail (22 page)

All next day Abigail thought far more of Annie’s wretchedness than her own. By evening she was drawn irresistibly back to the pub in Crutched Friars, where she had learned so much of joy while Annie had tasted so much bitterness. It did not deter her to know that Annie was beyond comfort; she wanted to try to help, or at least just to be with her.

Annie was in a dangerously joyful mood, brightly sharp.

“How’s Mr. Oldale?” Abigail asked.

Annie cackled: “Sobered up, sat up, drank up, pissed up, threw up—and I wish he’d bleeding well give up!”

It was a piece of comic patter that belonged to yesterday’s party—intrusive in real life.

“You said some terrible things last night, Annie.”

“You think they was wrong? You think your Mr. Laon’s so maaarvellous! Lay-on—that’s the name for him all right!”

“What d’you mean?”

“I hope you may never find out, love. Better live sweet, innocent, and foolish than be like me.”

Abigail sighed. If she left, she knew she would only be doubly miserable; but to stay seemed worse than futile.

She sat down to a meal, though, and gradually realized that her presence was, in a curious way, a comfort to Annie. Time and again Annie laughed or sneered at Abigail’s supposed innocence, hinting at secret knowledge—superior knowledge—until Abigail saw that Annie needed to score over her in this way, as a salve to her bruises. Then she did not mind so much.

But when Annie saw she did not mind, her crowing grew even more bitter. Once, after Abigail had turned aside one of Annie’s jibes, Annie said, “Words! That’s all you think it is, gel, don’t you! I bet you couldn’t walk in there and talk so calm and lovey-dovey.” She nodded at the private door to the supper room.

Abigail hesitated, not wanting to give Annie best, yet not certain she could face down such a challenge.

“Yeah! I thought as much,” Annie said.

At that moment the private door opened. The angelic-looking young girl who had sung “Home Sweet Home” last night stood angrily at the threshold, dressed only in a shift. “A right hanging Dick you lumped me with!” she shouted at Annie.

But Abigail, after that brief instant of recognition did not look at the girl again; for there beyond her, naked in the firelight, stood Pepe.

Annie laughed, an eldritch cackle of triumph that filled Abigail with a cold rage. She marched upon the room. The girl stood her ground but Abigail, fed on meat since birth, flung her aside like a straw doll. She slammed the door behind her and locked it.

“Me cloves!” the girl shrieked.

At first Abigail intended to ignore the shrieks and hammerings but the smell of the girl’s clothes was overpowering, rank flesh and perfume. She gathered the whole bundle and unlocked the door just long enough to hurl them out.

“See!” Annie mocked from beyond the closed door. “Now who’s right, gel?”

All this time, from the moment he had first recognized her, Laon sat with his head in his hands.

“How
could
you!” Abigail shouted at him.

“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” he said, still not looking at her. “I couldn’t.”

“What d’you mean?”

“What d’you think all
that
is about?” He nodded at the door and stared her in the eye at last.

He looked ghastly…thin, haggard, ten years older. She wanted to stay angry, to punish him for all the suffering he had caused her; but pity won. Pity and love—a sudden brimming incandescence of love. She was about to run to him, the cry of his name was in her throat, when he slumped upon the divan and said: “I cannot endure it any longer. You are everything to me—my life, my whole existence. I don’t care what sort of person you are. I don’t care how much contempt you feel for me. I don’t care if you mock me all your life, I can never leave you again. Did you ever hear anything so abject! Was there ever anyone more spineless! But it is your doing! Look at me—it’s your handiwork.”

His self-pity left her no room to speak. How could she say all that she yearned to say—that she had been miserable, too; that she would do anything,
anything
, rather than lose him again, even marry him—how could she slip all that past the seamless armour of his self-pity!

She sat beside him and pushed him down, supine. She lay beside him and kissed him, whispering his name. Their tears mingled, though neither was crying—or, at least, they were not sobbing.

She kissed his body and saw his excitement swell in the firelight, saw it grow firm and hard. It kicked in her hand when she toyed with it. Greatly daring, she kissed it and then, filled with a sudden terror—like an invisible suffocation—she threw herself upon him and kissed his cheeks and lips and throat and ears with a hurtful passion.

He had half her buttons undone before she realized it; she sat up and tore the clothes off her. Then their bodies were at a riot with each other. There was no finesse, no gentleness now. She gripped him like a succubus; he hammered at her like a demon.

“No!” she shouted, though if he had stopped she would have killed him.

She wanted to kill him. She bit his shoulder. She sank her nails into his ribs.

He gave a cry. He grabbed her hands and pinned them above her head. She was racked beneath him; for a moment of frenzy their eyes locked—and each was appalled at the pools of hate in the other’s.

She heard the familiar cry of his ecstasy, felt the pulse of it. And then there was a new sensation—the hot stabbing of his ejaculation. Then she was rent apart and scattered to the universe.

Usually he stopped at that point, but tonight he went on and on, whimpering all the while as if it were an exquisite pain. And she went on, too, rising again and again for that magical moment when all the sweetness and tenderness in the world seemed to melt and flow into her.

“No more!” she begged when the glory grew unbearable and verged on torment.

They lay gasping and panting until both fell into a brief, shallow slumber. She was the first to awaken.

“I couldn’t have lived another day without you, Pepe,” she said. He came awake like a cat: instantly. “Who told you?” he asked.

“Told me what?”

“About—my father.”

How calm they were, suddenly. Where had all that passion fled? “But I’ve always known.”

He snorted with impatience and at once grew dejected again. “You’ve no need to lie,” he said. “I’ve told you—I am yours on any terms. You can say anything. Even the truth.”

“But it is the truth. We had a servant girl once who was abducted and sold into a house in France. And the man involved was called Ignaz Porzelijn. Well, it’s hardly what you’d call a
common
name!”

His jaw fell. “So you
all
know!”

“No!” She lied. “Only Mama. She doesn’t even know
I
know. I mean, I read it all in her diaries.”

“When? Recently?”

“No. Years and years ago.”

His eyes were full of wonder. “So you’ve always known!”

“Yes—long before we met. So long I’d forgotten all about it when I…”

“And it made no difference?”

She took his hand. “Oh, Pepe! Is
that
what you were afraid of?”

He crept into the shade of her. “Abbie, Abbie! I’ve done you such a wrong. And you are so noble. Will you ever forgive me?”

Mention of forgiveness must have stirred his most recent memory, for he sat up and looked at her earnestly. “Let me explain to you. About…” He nodded at the door.

“There’s no need.”

“But there is. Don’t you see? I think we should tell each other everything from now on. There should only be honesty between us. If I’d told you about my father and my feelings of shame, I wouldn’t have been such a fool this last week—God, is it only a week?”

She lay back and pulled him on to her. “Don’t stop touching me,” she said.

“I bought a copy of Blake’s prophetic poems,” he said. “And I found it hard to read. I’ve found it hard to do anything since…Anyway, I thought if I came here and read it, I’d be able to understand better. And to understand you better. Or try to.”

“And did you? Do you?” She was deeply moved.

“I had no chance. As soon as I’d finished the meal, Annie came in with that girl. Did you know, that’s her young sister!”

“Annie seems to have a million sisters,” Abigail said bitterly. She could see it all now.

“She said I looked as if I needed a bit of consoling. And she left me alone with…whatever her name is.”

“But I’ve been with Annie for the past hour, so…” She didn’t want to say the obvious.

“We talked,” Laon said. “Mostly about her. D’you know she must have been with over a thousand men, and she’s not yet twenty. And she’s never known the slightest…not even the most passing pleasure in it. What a terrible thing. She hates men. And after talking with her, I almost feel the same.”

“But…Pepe! You
were
naked. And with her.”

She wished he had not begun this “explanation”; it diminished her and left him dishonoured. So he and that girl had “talked” for an hour, had they…“mostly about her”! She could just hear it: “Tell me what it’s like to be you!” and his dark, begging eyes launching the words. Did they rise to his throat automatically at the sight of female flesh? And did he imagine that this explanation would satisfy her—even in the most narrow, logical sense?

He nodded. “That’s in a way what I mean. All the beastliness in sex was put there by men. Oh, Abbie…I missed you!”

“I missed you, too, darling. Only God knows how much. But it would never even have
occurred
to me to find solace with any other man. Even men I feel quite attracted to. And what was that girl to you? You don’t even know her name. And she reeked.”

“I know. I know!” Pepe said. “But you don’t know. You have no idea what it’s like to be a man. I’ll bet you don’t think about you and me—in between…”

“I think about you all the time.”

“Yes, but not about
us.
Not actually together, here, naked, in each other’s arms. Me in you. I’ll bet you never actually picture that and get excited about it.”

“Of course I don’t.”

“You see! Now if I made such an answer, with a hundred men to witness, then a hundred men would know instantly that I was lying.”

“You mean…you…?”

“I mean all men.
All
men. I think about you and me, like that, a dozen times a day. More!”

“But why? Where’s the point in it?”

“The answer’s in our stars, not in ourselves. I mean we’re all born that way. Take the cow to the bull. If the cow’s ready, the bull is. But not the other way round. It’s the same with all animals. The male must be ready—always.”

Despite his penitent tone there was smugness in the way he aligned the whole of nature on his side and consigned all blame to the world of beasts. She stood and began to dress.

“It seems,” she said, “that there was hardly any point in our struggling to the top of the evolutionary tree!”

It was an easy rebuke to allow, for it touched him not at all. “Why d’you think Annie hates you so?” he asked.

Abigail smiled. “You don’t understand women at all. She did it because she loves me.”

She did not want to add that Annie had done it out of hate of him—for bringing her, Abigail, so much happiness.

She would be very kind to Annie, who had worries enough and more without adding to them the remorse of her own treachery.

“Funny kind of love.”

Yes,
she thought, looking down at him.
Funny—and deep. You wouldn’t understand it.
She barely understood it herself, not in so many words. There was a sense in which love between men and women was shallow; they might feel it deeply but that did not make it deep. And when they hurt each other, it filled in part of their love, making it shallower yet. The language was different. This thing Pepe had done—he might very well see it as a cry of anguish, a way of saying to her,
See how miserable I am!
But how could she think of it like that? It was not something she herself could do without revulsion, not even in imagination; therefore it conveyed nothing to her—except that same revulsion. And when he said, “I am like that—all men are like that,” it shut off part of him, and part of all men, from her forever.

Annie had hurt her, too; but the language of the action was one she recognized. Through it she saw a little more deeply into Annie’s confused and lonely bitterness. Annie’s cruelty made the love between them more profound; Laon’s cruelty made part of him a third person to her. What was the difference? The only difference was the flesh. The love between Annie and her was entirely human and purely of their spirit; but her love and Laon’s? He had been right to invoke the animals.

She had the first intimations of carnal love not as an enrichment but as a means of battle.

When she was dressed, she looked down at his exhausted, still-naked body. Something was missing, she felt. It was a moment before she could place it, but when she did, her heart dropped a beat. “Pepe!” she cried. “You weren’t wearing anything!”

But his jaw did not drop. He did not sit up in alarm. Instead a slow smile spread over his face.

“Well,” she said. “Two rousing cheers for honesty!”

***

Annie showed her how to use the douche. “The bastards!” she kept saying. “But we’ll cheat them yet, you’ll see.”

“Take a glass or three of gin each night, now,” was her parting advice. “And a bath as hot as you can stand it. When’s the cardinal due?”

She had to explain that.

“Oh,” Abigail said. “This week, I think.”

“Might be lucky then.” Annie was full of confidence.

On the threshold Abigail turned and said, “It’s what you told me all those years ago. You remember? ‘Then they’ve got you where they want you,’ you said.”

“And wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I just. Still—you’ve got the idea, gel. Don’t never marry him. Take your fun, like what they do. Keep yourself free, like what they do.”

On his appointed day, the “cardinal” came, which was no extraordinary relief after Annie’s supreme confidence. But Abigail could not get out of her mind what Laon had tried to do. He had used his body, his seed, as a weapon to trap her. It was like…She tried to think what it was like. But it was like nothing that had ever happened to her. Her mind went back again to the time Annie had first told her The Secret and she had tried to imagine what it would be like to let a man into her. That shrinking-into-herself feeling—it was something like that. A recoil from him.