Abigail (30 page)

“Like what?”

“The way you said it. You know the way you said it.”

“I meant where’s the harm in it now?”

Nora laughed. “Well, now you know!”

“Eay, Nora! We’ve not done this for…she and I…for…I don’t know. It can’t be as long as ten years, but it feels like it.”

“Listen, John.” She was serious now. “If you live to be a hundred, I shall be eighty-nine. And if on your hundredth birthday I hear you so much as passed the time of day with her, I’ll blind you with these fingernails.”

“But the lads are all grown up and gone,” John said. “She’s alone.”

“What fifty-year-old mistress isn’t! All right, John. I’ll accept that your continued interest is kindness of heart, not lust…”

“It never was lust.”

“Oh? What was it then brought you and her to bed?”

“Nay, love—no recriminations. It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter if it was lust or…or a common fear of spiders. You were in the middle of accepting the fact that I have a kind heart.”

“Aye. So I’ll say this—because I’ll match kindness with kindness. You may see her to settle what affairs you have to settle, and you may then see her but once more: when you give her away on her wedding day.”

“Wedding?” He was astonished.

“If we can’t find her a nice settled widower who’d rather have the company of a wife than a housekeeper, the world has changed too much. Especially a wife with a pension.” She chuckled. “A small pension, of course. You’d not want to attract gold seekers.”

“Well…” he said uncertainly, but could find no obvious flaw.

She grinned and kissed him. “Of course you never thought of it,” she teased. “You’re the dog with three beef shinbones and but two jaws!”

She tried to excite him again.

“Eay, no, Nora love. It hurts, it truly does.”

“Goo-o-d!” she whispered.

In the ninth week of her illness Abigail rallied. “Did the baby live?” she asked. “Was it a boy or did I dream that bit?”

Annie brought him to her. “Oh, it’s Pepe’s face,” she said as she took him. “What’s he called?”

Annie looked at her in surprise. “You never said no name.”

“And you waited for me? How old is he?”

“Nine weeks.”

“I must have been very ill.”

“Ill enough to bring Mr. Caspar and the Earl and Countess—surely you remember when they came two weeks back?”

She thought hard. “I seem to. My brain is like…blunt lace. That’s a quotation from something.” She looked back at the baby. “I don’t feel anything about this one. I suppose that’s a wicked thing to say. Someone’s looking after him well.”

“There’s a wet nurse comes from Como every day. He sleeps all night now, thank God.”

“Oh, Annie, I’m so sorry.” Tears surprised her. “So much trouble for everyone. And all for such passing pleasure, too. Why can’t we do without it!”

“Speak for yourself!”

The baby began to cry as well. Instinctively she gave it back to Annie. “Call him William. He’ll grow up a good and kind lover of women, into an age that understands us better.”

“César wants to circumcise him. I think so, too.” Annie calmed him again by lifting his petticoat and blowing rasps on his tummy. “It’s cleaner,” she went on, “when it grows into a big belly-ruffian. Ooh, look at him! Ooh, he’s full of sauce! Yes he is! Yes he is! Little William. Shall we cut his little willie? William’s little willie? Cut it with César’s knife? Only can’t let Annie do it! No—Annie’d only cut the bleeding thing right off!”

“César? Oh, yes—César.”

“’Ere—did you know he was a doctor?”

“Yes, I always thought that. Then I thought I must have remembered wrongly. You mean to say he…” She looked at William.

“Yeah. He saved your life, gel. If all the men in the world was like him, I could just about stomach them. He’s never been farther from you than that gate where he is now.”

“You’ll find someone yet, Annie. They’re not all rotten.”

Annie leaned over the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “I don’t need to, me old love,” she said. “I don’t even need to look.” She stood and took the baby away. Then she threw open the window and called César, who was talking to Caspar.

They both turned and hurried toward the house. John and Nora, who also heard the joy in Annie’s call, came from the drawing room next door. They walked and stood arm in arm.

Abigail saw the difference in them at once. “It’s over!” she cried.

“It’s over,” Nora said. “You don’t remember what we were like together, this impossible man and me. But you’ll see now!”

“Because of me?”

“It wouldn’t have happened without you,” John said.

“Steamer!” she called as he came panting in at the French window. “It’s over! The Great Schism is over!”

Caspar joined her laughter, overjoyed that she could laugh. “I know! They’ve even redrawn their wills. We don’t exist now—they’ve left it all to each other. For eternity.”

“You’ll show some respect, young Caspar,” John warned with mock severity. “The days are gone when you could go to your mother for an ally against me, or to me against her.”

“Curses!” Caspar said, twirling imaginary moustachioes.

“César.” Abigail held out her hands, which he took and squeezed. Silent as ever, he stared into her eyes. She pulled him onto the bed. “How can I thank you?” she asked quietly. “I never can, of course. I owe you my life.”

He shook his head, not in mock modesty but sincerely. “Thank those who gave you the strong body you have. And the will to fight away death.”

He took her pulse, looked at her tongue, made her squeeze his wrists with both hands, peered at the whites of her eyes, and said, “I’ll go painting tomorrow. The light is better every day.”

***

She walked a few steps that day; quite a lot more the next. The following day she sat up for several hours by the fire, taking it in turns to read with Celia. Only then did César follow his promise and go out painting.

He brought it to her that evening like a hunter with a trophy. It was of the villa—but more than that, it was everything she had felt about the villa. He felt it, too.

“You don’t start, as I was taught,” she said, “with all the dark parts, painted thinly, and then work up to the highlights using more and more linseed oil?”

He laughed. “When you write, d’you put in all the nouns first and then go back and add the verbs? What’s wrong with shadows that I should drown them in turpentine? Shadows are rich, too.”

Then he brought her a portrait he had done of her to stop himself going mad of anxiety at her bedside. At once she saw how ill she had been.

“I did it,” he said, “because it was all I thought was left of you. But now, when spring comes and you can run again, I’ll do better.”

“Why me?” She laughed.

“You are Hélène Fourment, you are Mademoiselle Murphy, you are Saskia, you are la Donna Isabel…the Mona Lisa. You are one of those rare women of each age who demands the revelation of painting.”

For César it was the equivalent of a four-hour speech; she hoped it was not also a declaration of love.

***

The following day was warm; spring was a week premature. She went for a walk in the garden and then sat under a moth-eaten parasol to read and doze. No one could doubt that all she needed for a complete return to health was time.

“Will you come back to us now?” Nora asked her. “Or at least back to London? If so, we’ll wait here. If not, we’ll leave soon and expect to see you in the summer.”

Caspar said he had to leave tomorrow anyway.

“I think the least question-raising course is the best. We’ll all go to Rome, and become ourselves again, thank God! Then I’ll send my novel to Pepe and see,” she said. Then, thinking it a little unfeeling after all they’d endured, she added, “I’d love to come home, but we must be wise.”

“Yes,” John said. “Now
and
in the future.”

“Dear me,” Abigail said. “I must be getting well if you can warn me of that.”

When she went to bed that night, she asked for Annie to come and sleep beside her.

“Old Celia’s glad, I’ll bet,” Annie said as she slipped between the sheets. “She reckons I prattle far too much.”

“So you do. And is she no talker?”

“She said enough! ’Ere, she needn’t bother with no divorce. She can get an annulment any day.”

“Are you serious? How? What has she told you?”

“She don’t know it. I never said it to her. But old Crabb, he never touched her.”

“Oh, pardon me, Annie, but I saw…”

“He never touched her! She’s a virgin still. Look, don’t try and tell
me
!”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I am of the Henry Crabbs of this world. Cover you with beads. Slobber all over you. But can’t raise so much as a smile!”

“But all that ritual—what was it for?”

“Search me! What’s any of them
for
? Except theirselves!”

“‘The best fun we ever have?’”

Annie laughed. “Did I say that? Well, you can tell it to Cheeks the Marine—it’s like the fisherman’s lucky creek. No one knows where it is!”

“Except the fishwife.”

“Yeah? Well, tell me
her
name! I know it’s not Annie. And it’s not Celia. And I don’t think it’s Abigail, neither.”

“Well—I’m too tired to think of all that now.”

This time it was Annie who cradled Abigail’s head in her arms and stroked her hair and forehead, and kissed her to sleep. It was marvellous being with Annie again.

On their third day in Rome, César found the ideal place for them—an atelier on the (modern) top floor of the ancient Teatro di Marcello. It stood between the old Vecchio Ghetto and the Capitoline Hill, just outside the original city wall.

“Romans and Jews—it’s The Old Fountain again!” Annie said.

The Teatro had been started by Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus Octavius, who named it after his late nephew, Marcellus; at its opening twenty-five thousand civilized spectators watched the slaughter of six hundred “savage beasts” so called. In the Middle Ages it had served as a castle for a succession of powerful families, during which time it had lost its top layer and its bottom layer had been half buried in rubble. In 1712 it passed into the hands of the Orsini family, who built the Palazzo Orsini on the rubble inside the semicircle of the theatre. They still owned the whole area when César and the three women moved in.

The rest of the Teatro was a ruin. The massive walls still stood but their decorations, which had at one time been the finest Doric and Ionic in Rome, had crumbled beyond recognition. Six of the half-buried ground-floor arches had been cleared and let off as workshops; and where the now-missing top floor had been, there stood what amounted to a semicircular terrace of modern houses, built at various times between the seventeenth century and the present, in all shapes and sizes.

In one of the narrowest of these, facing north and looking directly at the church of Sant’Agnolo Pescivendolo, César had discovered the perfect studio in a former sailmaker’s loft. Four other rooms, two on the same floor, two below, went with the loft. They thought the place was cheap because of the permanent smell of fish, for the fishmongers’ Oratory, attached to the church, was also used as a fish mart; when the catch was big, the market—in best medieval tradition—spilled over into the church as well. It was not until winter that they discovered the real reason for the cheapness of their atelier.

They stood, that bright spring afternoon, at the large windows of César’s studio, looking down at the church and the pathetic remains of the ex-splendid Portico d’Ottavia.

“The Temples of Juno and Jupiter once stood there,” César told them. “And the church is on the site of the temple of Mercury. What vanity! And here, too, is where every victorious Roman general started his triumphal ascent to the Capitol. And what is it now? A fish market and a ghetto! That’s the way to treat history, if you want to rejuvenate yourself: Start again; become the Eternal City!”

After that he spoke only monosyllables for four days; but the women hardly noticed. They were too busy arranging for the atelier to be cleaned, furnished, and stocked—or, rather, Celia was too busy doing that, for Annie spent half the time with her baby (and none of them now thought of William as anything but hers), and Abigail, still convalescent, had to give her novel a final revision before sending it off to Pepe.

When it was sent, Abigail tried to sketch but could settle to nothing. She thought of visiting a few galleries and doing a piece for one of the London papers on spec; but her spirit recoiled so violently from the notion that she began to wonder if she’d ever be a journalist again. So she and Celia—and Annie, whenever she could persuade César to mind William—took to strolling aimlessly about the streets, visiting whatever palaces and ruins and catacombs they chanced upon. She could do nothing serious until Pepe answered.

“César is right about rejuvenation and this city,” Celia said. “It has learned the secret—neither dwell on nor forget your own past. But use it. I think it’s marvellous the way they just build on top of the old Teatro. And the way the Jews and poor people built their houses all leaning against and wedged between the pillars of the Portico d’Ottavia. And then plastered them over and recarved them. The Forum and all the old imperial ruins are dead. But our part of Rome is alive—and yet still Ancient.”

“And how will you apply this secret?” Abigail asked.

Celia laughed, a little embarrassed at her own effusiveness. “I don’t know. Does it matter? I just feel it’s possible. And more possible here than anywhere.”

“I hope Annie can feel that, too.” Annie was at home that day.

“I feel so sorry for her,” Celia said. “What a terrible life!”

“Well, you saw the man,” Abigail reminded her, “even though he was dead.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant on the streets—‘on the turf’ as she calls it.”

“Did she tell you about that?”

“Oh, my dear, she talked about nothing else. Why?”

“Strange. She never talks to me about it at all.”

“She can make me hate the very idea of a man.” Celia laughed. “Mind you, after Henry that is no great achievement. But then I think of Pepe, and your brother, what little I know of him, and César, and I wonder—are they
two
people, each of them? And can a pure woman bring out the best in them, just as an impure woman can bring out the worst? In other words, was I to blame for the way Henry behaved?”

Abigail began to tremble, her mind was so packed with things to say. Again she yearned to find that
superword
which would cram the whole vision of Blake—or, now, the whole of
Into a Narrow Circle—
inside Celia’s mind at one swoop. Why could Celia not even glimpse what was so self-evident?

“You think I was?” Celia interpreted her silence.

“No, no, no!” She answered so vehemently that tourists all around turned amused or outraged faces toward them. They were walking on the bank of the Tiber, just below the Palatine Hill. Abigail changed direction abruptly to cross the square called Bocca della Verità; there were fewer people there, and most of them were clustered either around the fountain or at the “mask of truth” that gives the square its name.

“It’s the division into two people that’s wrong. Don’t you see? They do it to us. Then we accept it. And then we force it on them.” She looked at Celia’s uncomprehending face and raged at the ineptitude of her words. “Look.” She tried again. “We are worshipped—idolized—adored by men. Yes? They raise us far above them in purity, sweetness, and virtues like that. You agree so far?”

Celia’s smile was half a sneer. “It’s what they
say.
It’s what Henry was always saying. But…”

“Forget Henry. I mean he was very…” And then Abigail paused. “No,” she said in a different tone. “Don’t forget him. He’s a caricature of what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the actual truth, but about the conventional, accepted belief in Society about us. About women. We are vestal virgins, spotless, above reproach, etcetera, etcetera. And we connive at that. We…”

“But isn’t it true?” Celia asked, a little shocked at what Abigail seemed to be hinting.

“No, Celia. It isn’t. But let me develop this my way. We connive at the division. Why not! It’s very flattering. What a wonderful, noble thing it is to be a woman, we are led to think. Until we discover the cost.”

“
You
discovered the cost.”

“We all did, Celia. That’s the point. You, Annie, and me, in our different ways. The cost is to vacate half of our true natures. We inhabit, as it were, the north of ourselves—tend it, embellish it, beautify it. Our cool northern self. But the hot south? Here you are in Rome, in the spring, does it not call to you?”

Celia blushed and gulped, looking around for distractions.

“If you don’t feel it,” Abigail said, “I’m wasting words. If nobody does, then I’ve wasted a whole bookful of words.”

“
Into a Narrow Circle
?”

“Yes.”

“The whole book is about—
that
? What you call ‘north’ and ‘south?’”

Abigail was silent for a while. “Let me tell you what it’s about. It’s about the fact that ‘north’ and ‘south’—or ‘pure’ and ‘impure’—are mere ideas. There is only
one
country. We are one. There is only one woman inside each of our skins. In their heart of hearts men know that. They say we are Purity, they beg us to elevate them, and yet look how they flock to the night houses and to all the girls like Annie—or like Annie was—all the thousands of them!”

“Oh, they are the hypocrites all right!”

“No, Celia. That is not true. That’s Annie talking, but she is deluded. It’s not hypocrisy. In a way it’s honesty. The hypocrisy is ours for letting them divide us as they do.”

At this Celia began to grow heated. “I don’t know how you can say that, Abbie. If the truth about baby William ever got out—or even if it were known that you and Pepe passed one night together—you’d be shunned by Society forever. You know it! Men would cease to recognize you. Yet those very same men feel quite free to make the same slip with girls like Annie, any night of the week. Or they go home to degrade their legal wives as Henry degraded me. How can you say there is no hypocrisy!”

“I know, Celia. Seeing what happened to you and Annie made me very bitter against men for a time. If I hadn’t had my love for Pepe—well, never mind. I only know that Annie’s sort of bitterness and misanthropy is no answer. It won’t serve. We have to sweep all our notions away and begin again. We have to make men understand that we are not vestals or…or Annies. They must understand that those two are not incompatible.”

Celia laughed with a nervousness that bordered on hysteria. “But they
are
! By definition they are.”

“Then we have the definitions wrong. Oh, Celia, my dearest wish for you is that you will meet a man you can love, a good man, a man who understands himself as Pepe does—who knows he is capable of adoration and lust not at different times but at the
same
time. That’s the important thing, Celia—the same time. It is a big, big emotion and it stretches all the way from adoration to lust. Love, real love, is both at the same time.” She paused for breath as if they had been running, though they were, in fact, walking so slowly that they had not even circled the piazza once as yet.

In Celia’s eyes she thought she glimpsed the first sign of hesitation. Something inside was nudging Celia’s thoughts toward this impossible notion.

“It is part of life,” Abigail said. “Henry made it foul for you. But for your own sake you must rise above that view. You must think of him as a caricature. He is what happens when ‘adoration’ is carried to a preposterous length. Annie is what happens when ‘lust’ is carried to the other extreme. We must all draw back from those extremes. We must find the middle ground. Where ‘all that lives is holy.’ Where ‘life delights in life.’”

“The middle ground, it seems, is where babies happen!”

Abigail stopped and turned to her. Smiling radiantly she grasped both of Celia’s gloved hands in her own. “Yes, Celia darling. It
is.
And in the world I want to see, that would be no sentence of social death. It would be a joy. I would not be giving my baby away. I would not have had to flee from Pepe.”

“But then…you want an end of marriage itself!”

Abigail let go and walked on. “I certainly want an end to the sort of marriage that can serve up Roger Oldales and Henry Crabbs—and bind decent, good women to them for life. If you call it life. Look!” She turned toward the church. “The mask of truth. I’ll show you.”

In the portico of the church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, was a large human mask carved in marble. At some time its mouth had probably formed a decorative opening to a small Roman sewer, but after it was rescued and set up at the church the legend had grown that this was the mask of the Great God Pan.

“Lovers come here and put their arms in his mouth,” Abigail said. “Then they declare their love. Anyone who lies—the god bites off his hand. Or,” she said as she thrust her own arm in, “her hand. Now listen.”

To the blank eyes of Pan she said, “‘All that lives is holy. Life delights in life.’”

For a moment the flesh of her arm tingled; she had managed to half-convince herself of the legend. Celia saw the change in her face and went wide-eyed. Smiling, Abigail withdrew her arm and tested its integrity. Celia, relieved, took her other arm and together they began to stroll back toward the Tiber.

“Now you may start believing me,” Abigail said.

Neither spoke until they reached the river, when Abigail said, “I wonder if Annie will be able to settle in Rome? She’ll obviously never learn more than a few words of Italian. It won’t be much fun for her if I decide to settle a while.”

“Annie will stay where you stay.”

“D’you think so?”

“I know so. Poor Annie!”

Abigail laughed. “Dear me, Celia—is it so bad a fate?”

“No!” Celia squeezed her arm. “I was thinking how she hates men so much and yet how she loves William. She absolutely adores him. And she’s so angry with herself for feeling like that.”

“I think Annie’s changing underneath and doesn’t know it. Not one of us has commented on how odd it is that the four of us are still together—that the three of us women have moved into César’s atelier as if anything else would have been…I mean, as if it hadn’t even occurred to us
not
to move in. I thought Annie at least would cry havoc.”

Celia walked beside her in silence.

“Don’t you think?” Abigail prompted.

“You did not live through what
we
lived through at the Villa Mancini,” Celia answered.