Abigail (36 page)

“I’ll go,” César said, drawing the sheets up over his head. His muffled voice added: “Soon.”

Abigail laughed but Celia took action; she began to tickle him. He fled soon enough then.

“It wasn’t wrong,” Celia said when they were alone together. “I really thought I’d die of cold.”

“It wasn’t wrong—as it turned out. But it mustn’t happen again.”

The cold did not relent. By three that afternoon it had clamped around them once more, driving them out to the Posta, the Falcone, the Greco, the Café de Venise, the Best Society, armed with sketchbooks and constitutions that could take a dozen coffees without a flutter. On the way back they stopped in at the Osteria della Campana in the shadow of the Teatro. They had often passed it, never ventured inside.

César was delighted to find there a plaque, erected by a proud king of Bavaria, boasting the fact that there “in the years 1776, 1777, and 1778 Wolfgang Goethe had amorous intercourse with Faustina, a beauteous country girl.”

“The quintessence of romance and Germanic thoroughness in one sentence!” he said. “Not ’seventy-six to ’seventy-eight, as you or I would gloss it, but all three years!”

When they crossed their own threshold and sensed that especial cold which seemed to drift uniquely through the top floor of the Teatro, they did not even question that they would pass another night together. This time César slept between them, for they had discovered last night that he was the warmest-blooded of the three.

“You know,” he asked as soon as the candle was snubbed, “of the German professor of aesthetics who was invited to dinner by Venus herself?”

They did not.

“Well, after the dinner, which was, of course, ambrosia and nectar, Venus dismissed her servants and, divesting herself of her raiment (which was, in any case, little more than woven air), lay back on her silken cushions and said to the German professor of aesthetics, ‘You may have your will of me.’ Of course, the German professor of aesthetics’ eyes popped out. ‘You mean it?’ he gasped. ‘Indeed and indeed,’ replied the goddess. ‘
Anything?
’
asked the German professor of aesthetics. ‘Anything, anything,’ Venus said, all of a flutter. ‘Only be quick!’ Whereupon the German professor of aesthetics whipped out a tape measure and, approaching the goddess with trembling hands, said reverently, ‘My colleagues and I have been disputing this for a lo-o-o-ng time!’”

Abigail was certain that, under the cover of darkness, César held an imaginary tape measure to some decidedly nonimaginary points of Celia’s anatomy. It annoyed Abigail.

Next morning there was some sun; and they found that by leaving the bedroom and studio doors open, enough of its heat filtered through to make the studio bearable, even though the frost persisted. But Celia came up from her room dressed for the street. She began to gather together all her watercolours from the summer and from Normandy. “I found a dealer a couple of days ago,” she said. “He wants to buy. When I come back we shall be rich and I’m going to take us to the Quirinal for dinner.”

When she had gone César said, “He will cheat her, this dealer.”

“Why don’t you go with her then?” Abigail asked.

“She must learn. It’s only one season’s work. She has many years to go.”

“You’re cool!”

“You think so?”

Abigail wondered if César was right. There was a hard streak in Celia—look how she had treated Henry after she left him. “What would you call ‘cheat?’” she asked. “What ought she to get?”

“Let’s say seventy-five lire per painting. She won’t get it, though.”

When they broke for lunch she returned obliquely to what had happened—or what she thought had happened—last night.

“Celia had a rotten marriage,” she said. “Has she ever talked about it?”

He said no, but his eyes hinted at some kind of knowledge.

“Her husband was not a normal man.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She drew a deep breath and framed herself to it. “Because of what I think is going to happen.”

“Which is?”

“I think you want to become her lover.”

He did not betray himself by the slightest gesture, but his eyes still had not lost their omniscience.

“I would like that, César, but only if you are sincere. I know that men are promiscuous in their desires. You can separate it from love as we cannot. Celia does not need—of all people, Celia doesn’t need—another man who would use her like that. You may desire her…?” She looked at him questioningly.

“I do,” he said evenly.

“Then I beg you—do nothing about it unless you also love her. Don’t make her love you, then use her, then leave her. It’d be so easy for you to do that. But it would be the end of her.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said casually.

“It would! It’d be the end of her chances of finding love and happiness.”

“Those chances end only with our death.”

“Please don’t, César, please? I beg you!”

“What if I tell you I can’t. That I desire her so much I must have her.”

Horrified, she stared at him. “That’s not like you,” she said.

He reached across the table and took her hand. Hers was trembling but his was calm. “What’s like me? You don’t know. You don’t care. You don’t know inside me, what goes on.”

Her eyes fell. “Do you want me, too, César?”

“Of course. You are beautiful, you’re kind, you’re intelligent, you are sympathetic. Also, most important, you are: Abigail!”

Wishing she could control her shaking hand and voice, she said, “Then have me, César. Leave Celia alone until you also love her. If it’s only that pleasure you want, let me try to give it you. Nothing much can harm me now.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it as if each finger were due some special reverence, forcing her to look at him again. Now she saw that the look in his eyes was not the remote glint of secrets, withheld from her, but compassion. “Dear Abbie,” he said. “You think it’s Celia who needs such tenderness, but really it’s you. Because you have a mind—because you can think about things and make a grand philosophy—you think you’re no longer vulnerable. But you are. I tremble for you, not Celia. Celia can come back from hell and next day she’ll be painting watercolours to show you what it was like. No man will ever harm Celia now. She never had any great passion in her. Celia will be a nice, warm, comfortable wife. But you! Why haven’t I painted your portrait as I promised? Because of all I would see if I looked into your soul for three, four weeks; because of what I would put on canvas; because of what you would then discover.”

“Are you trying to say you love me?” she asked, alarmed now.

“Yes. And Celia, too.” He let go her hand and held up his own fingers to count upon. “First I love: painting. Second I love: painting. Third I love: painting! Fourth-equal I love: you-and-Celia…Celia-and-you.” He snorted. “How unkind of Nature—to give me desire as big as a mountain but to leave my capacity for love down in the foothills. It would not harm Celia. But you—I don’t know.”

She was embarrassed enough to try to make a joke of it. “Poor César. You’ll have me yielding out of pity next!”

Whether or not he knew she was joking, he took her at her word. “Ah! That’d be good. That’ll do you no harm. Pity is a cul-de-sac of love. You will be safe for a while there.”

She punched him playfully and laughed.

He stood and walked to the door. “Come on,” he said without looking back.

***

It was an extraordinary experience. With Pepe she had never separated her physical from her emotional pleasure—it had never occurred to her that they could be separate. They went so completely hand in hand; when she had been emotionally out of sorts with Pepe, she had been physically unresponsive, too.

But with César there was no question of such a coalescence. Her senses and emotions, though both involved, stood a little apart. Her mind could oversee them both. Physically her senses found it as shattering as anything she had ever known. It was the same brush with intimations of death. Emotionally it was…comforting…satisfying. Her painting that afternoon went well.

Celia was late home but her face was triumphant. “Good news all the way!” she called out. “Henry is dead and I’ve sold all my paintings.”

“Celia!” Abigail’s shocked cry was simultaneous with César’s “How much?”

“For the bigger ones, a hundred and fifty lire. The smaller ones a hundred. And there were three he wouldn’t go above seventy-five for—but that was just to salvage the last remnants of his pride. His first offer was fifty apiece for the lot! Hoo!” She sat down, feigning an exhaustion that her face and voice belied.

“Celia, did you say Henry was dead?”

“Yes, the solicitors wrote
poste restante.
The letter’s been there a week. Oh, it took me all day but I slowly beat him up and up. Fifty lire! He won’t try that again.”

“But how did he die? Do they say?”

“Yes.” She stood up. “He hanged himself. Well, I’m going to dress for dinner. Tonight at the Quirinal we shall be
la crème de la crème.
So clean fingernails please!”

When she had gone, Abigail turned and stared at César.

With a sardonic smile he said, “What price, I wonder, for a watercolour of Hell?”

***

Next day he hired a porter with a barrow, loaded a dozen canvases on it, and sent Celia out to sell them, offering her ten percent of whatever she got. Abigail wondered if this was an elaborate ruse to get Celia out of the way again; but he made no move all afternoon. They painted on in contented silence.

Celia returned with all the paintings still on the barrow. César was aghast until she told him she’d found a dealer with a gallery, willing to offer him an exhibition in the spring. Then, of course, he was overjoyed.

That night was the last they all slept together. The cold loosed its grip on the city the following day and they resumed their solitary beds with relief, for the novelty had worn thin and only the biting cold had made Abigail’s bed large enough for three. A week later, after they had retired for the night, she heard a scratching at her door. It was César.

“Obviously, you’re never going to ask,” he said.

“Ask what?” She felt foolish standing at the half-open door.

“So I’ll just have to offer my desperation and hope the wells of pity are still yielding sweet water.”

“Come in, then.”

At once he took her in his arms. Each could feel the other’s excitement. “You do enjoy it, don’t you?” he asked. “You don’t regret it after?”

“It’s fine. Come on.”

When they were in the warmth of her sheets, he said, “Then why didn’t you ask?”

Instinctively she turned her face away, though it was so dark neither of them could see the other. “I never would.”

“Why not?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

For her it was as pleasurable, and as unengaged, as the time before. Afterwards he lingered a little too long and held her a little too dearly for her liking. “Don’t fall in love with me, César,” she warned. “Don’t start to think it can ever be more than this.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” he said.

“And forget what I said the other day. Love Celia too, if you wish.”

“You mean it?”

“Why else would I say it?”

“Women sometimes say things to test men.”

“I am not ‘women.’ And you should know it by now. I would prefer you to love Celia, even if it meant we would have to stop enjoying each other like this.”

There’s always Massimo,
she thought. But a moment later her soul cringed at the very notion and she had to tell herself hastily that it was just a joke. A “test,” in César’s phrase, to see if her vision of herself was still chaste at heart.

“Shouldn’t one of us take precautions?” she asked as he rose to go.

He was silent for some time. “Surely Annie told you?” he said at last. “She said I wasn’t to tell you. She said she’d break it to you at the right time.”

Abigail froze. Time slipped.

“Don’t tell me she didn’t.”

“Oh…yes. She did. But I didn’t realize it was so absolute.”

“I’m sorry. It was the only time in my life when I have regretted being a painter instead of the best obstetrician in the world. Even then, I think, there could not have been much chance.”

When she was alone once more, she tried to feel the sadness of this news. But she felt nothing. It seemed not even to relate to her, except in the way that a person with amnesia might relate himself to the written record of his forgotten life. It was even comforting that such a phenomenon as amnesia was abroad in the world. She remembered how Annie had once said she wasn’t fit to love any more. Now Abigail said it softly, aloud, in Annie’s voice. “I dunno, Abbie—I don’t seem fit to love no one no more, some’ow.”

For a second it was like having Annie back with her, but even that memory, sharp as a pang, melted nothing within.

From then on her private life ceased. And a large part of her rejoiced at it—the painter, the lover of conversation and crowds, the letter writer, the playgoer, the opera enthusiast—the public and professional Abigail, who had almost vanished from sight since the Villa Corot. Now they reoccupied her, and her time. They carried her out in triumph into Rome.

She still painted assiduously, for work was the habit of a lifetime. And César did not spare his help; everything he knew he tried to pass along to her. More than that, the very act of teaching changed him, too. As her confidence grew, she revealed a surer sense of colour than his. He was not too proud to notice it and to learn from her. And because he was a genius and she was not, he could seize on this new learning and quickly develop it to a point she could never have reached unaided. For instance, it was she who first saw how to introduce strong, even violent, colours into a painting without wrecking its unity. But it was he who turned the skill to more positive ends—he made it enhance the painting’s unity.

That was the beginning of the style which was later to take him, if not to the forefront, at least to the second rank of French art (which would have outstripped the first rank in any other country). It was the style in which strong, clear colour was beautifully controlled to give light, airy canvases that looked as if they had arrived quite effortlessly.

Those were the months when he painted her incessantly—the paintings he never parted with: “Self-portrait by a Third Party,” which was, in fact, his portrait of her at her easel; “A. Reading” (she was always plain
A.
in his titles), in which the light came at her from all sides—white from the page of her book, gold from the sun, green from the apple she was eating, ochre from the dry earth; “A. Asleep,” where she lay in a high-backed wicker chair, dappled with the radiance of the Roman springtime; “Box at the Opera,” where she sat with Celia and himself, lit from beneath with the cold limelight off the stage but engulfed in a dark, warm, fiery shadow…and many others.

The two best paintings of her were never exhibited—two nude studies drawn from life but painted from memory because he could not ask her to pose for the weeks they took him to finish. One showed her standing in a small footbath near an open window with the sunlight streaming in and falling over her like a caress. In the other, where she lay back upon a bed, apparently exhausted by the heat, he had painted himself, also nude, slightly intruding into the upper left corner of the picture. On the back of the first he had written, “The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”

On the back of the second was an entire verse, also from Blake:

Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

“Did I choose right?” he asked when he gave them to her. She had spoken to him often enough of Blake to make the question rhetorical. “What will you do with them?”

“Feel angry,” she said. “Every time I look at them.” The gift, which she had not expected, moved her deeply. She remembered the original drawings, of course, but had not even known he was at work on the paintings; he must have done them in his own room.

He laughed nervously at her answer. “Why?”

“For the fact that they can never be shown—just as
Into a Narrow Circle
can never be published.”

“Never?”

“All right! Who cares for posthumous fame? I will take them, César, and I’ll never part with them. One day they’ll show the world that some of us at least were on the side of life. Even though we lacked the courage to stand up and say so.”

Together they looked at the paintings a long time, in silence.

“Isn’t it absurd,” she said. “Even if these were of models—paid models—no English painter could show them. I doubt if they could even paint them. They’d have to disguise the girl in a classical setting. Or mythological.”

“English painting is absurd. In France it’s a joke.”

“I shall never go back to England. I’m a Roman now.”

***

That summer she dared at last to exhibit several paintings. All were praised—sometimes by aspiring critics who sought admission into the circle that was loosely formed around her; but established connoisseurs, too, who had no need of her patronage, admired her work, even where they recognized it as a trivialization of César’s profounder and more difficult vision. And she was too conscious of her debt to mind when they pointed it out.

Her tenancy of the slummy atelier opposite the fish mart began to seem incongruous now that she was starting to move in Roman Society. At best, people thought her choice of home quaint. But to move out would have been to lose César—and what he had called the “cul-de-sac of love.” He came to her still, once or twice a week, though now he was sleeping every night with Celia. How he set his visits right with her, Abigail never asked. Nor did Celia ever mention it to her, except once, obliquely, when, on the anniversary of Henry’s death, she cursed him for having denied her ten years of joy.

To move out would also have been to admit that painting had become the lesser half of her life, and that was something she was not willing to do. If people wanted her society, they’d have to take her for what she was. The fact that they did so was not flattering; it meant she was growing old—passing out of that young-virginal range over which Society exercises such an implacable vigil and exacts from its trespassers such cruel revenge. By the time she grew to be sixty, she reflected grimly, she could if she wished live a life of open scandal; she’d be tolerated still, even warmly, as an eccentric who could no longer make the slightest dent.

In the spring of her fourth year in Rome, César told her he and Celia would be leaving the atelier. Celia was, at last, expecting a child and they would be married. They would also be going back to France—to Paris.

Abigail decided to stay on at the atelier, even after they had gone. He smiled when she told him so. “Now I’m sure you’ll go back to England,” he said.

“No. I’ll stay here.”

“I mean one day you’ll go back. The atelier has no kitchen and no fireplaces. It’ll always be just rooms to sleep and work in. You’ll never have roots here. That’s why you cling to it—because it leaves you free to go one day.”

“It leaves me free to enjoy Rome. Everyone lives in public here. Even people with homes and families still live out in their streets.”

The night before they left for Paris, Abigail was astonished to hear César’s familiar knock at her door; only the day before, he and Celia had been married. She did not let him in. “I want to part good friends with Celia,” she said.

He laughed. “It’s all right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll go and get her.”

She let him in then.

“It’s already a very French marriage,” he said when they were side by side. “It would distress her only if she could not meet my mistresses socially.”

“Mistresses! We are plural, then?”

“Only in the course of time. The English are confused about romantic love. They put it inside marriage and it gets swamped in bills and babies’ napkins.”

She laughed.

“But,” he went on, “it’s their only serious fault. For the rest they are all virtue. They believe in family, in lineage. They like order. They work. They put their own interests first and everyone else’s nowhere—but, oh so politely! They know value, to the last farthing. And above all, because they know exactly what they want, they also know exactly how to compromise.”

“Yes.” Abigail smiled. “It’s a portrait of Celia.”

“Of course. Except that she has no illusions about romantic love, either.”

“The perfect woman, then.”

“The perfect wife. And that’s all she ever really wanted to be.”

“And all you ever wanted?”

He did not answer. She rose on one elbow and with her free hand began to caress his head, running her fingers through his hair and beard. For a while he did not stir, then suddenly he grasped her hand and, turning to it, planted a passionate kiss on her fingers, a kiss he seemed afraid to break.

She lowered her head on his and kissed his ear. “I’ll miss you,” she said, not sure what sort of comfort he wanted.

He was crying. His cheeks made wet sounds against the skin of the hand he was kissing.

“César,” she said softly. “Don’t leave me this memory.”

“I should have married you,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have agreed to it. Only if you’d gone blind.”

He shook his head.

“What?” She tried to joke him out of this mood. “You think you could have forced me? Against all I know of you?”

“What d’you know of me!”

At least she had managed to stop his weeping; he was trying to be heroic now. She continued: “I have it on the best authority that you love painting first, second, and third.”

“I said that to make it come true.”

“And succeeded.”

“No!” It was a quiet howl of torment. “You’ve understood nothing! The struggle to remain a painter instead of devoting my whole life, my whole being, my whole soul to you. Why else did I paint you so incessantly? Why did I come to you at night?”

“I thought I knew
that
,
at least. But tell me.”

“To keep alive the hope of you! The knowledge that you would love me if I made you my first, second, third.”

She kissed him again, not wanting to say it was untrue.

“Tell me you would,” he said.

She went on kissing him.

“Of course you would. Otherwise you would not have become my mistress.”

She was not going to stand for that. “What then was the reason,” she asked coldly, “that you became my
petit gigot
?”

He went rigid with anger. She felt suddenly the barrenness of the whole conversation. “Why have you told me all this?” she asked briskly. “Even if it’s true—all right, I accept it’s true, I don’t want to mock your sincerity. But if you’ve kept it concealed so long, why come up here and spoil our last night with a confession like this?”

“I wanted you to understand.”

“When the understanding could be of no possible use?”

“When I gave you those two paintings, and I asked you what you’d do with them? And you said you’d look at them and get angry, at Society and…”

“Yes, I remember.”

“It was so impersonal. I gave them to you so that you could see how tenderly the sunlight caressed you. You’d remember how my eyes had fused with the sun, and how my hand and lips had caressed you, too. I gave them to you so that you’d always know you had been
loved.
”

Oh no, you didn’t,
she thought. It was plausible—even plausible enough for him to believe it.
You came up here because, good and kind though you are, you wanted some power of you to linger on. You came up here to light a lamp for me to place in the cottage window of my little soul, for you, forever. You came up here because you are a man, and like all men, you think you can administer me.

The insight had the extraordinary effect of making her want him physically more keenly than ever before. It was the only power she wanted to exercise over him, because it was so infallible. Even if he hated her, she could still wield it.

She began to caress him then, as if too deeply moved by his last words to say any of her own. She caressed him in all the places that excited him most. Her own longing made her shiver and that excited him even more, for he took it as the absolute mark of her submission. She let him think so until they had finished—the most stupendous physical love that had ever engulfed her.

Then in her afterplay she said softly, “Poor limp warrior! And poor, poor men. You think it such a marvellous weapon—and really it’s your Trojan horse!”