Abigail Read online

  No one understood it. The received wisdom in the family was that Abbie behaved as she did out of a kind of inferiority: If she demanded only the best, she imagined the world would overlook her own imperfections. Only Winifred, the eldest, sensed that the true reasons lay deeper, that Abigail was in some way merely justifying herself to herself; the world’s opinion did not come into it.

  When Abigail had begun writing her story, the previous year, Winifred had been her most admiring and encouraging reader. And Abigail, for her part, had been so astonished at such praise—for Winifred was by nature most sparing of praise (as any girl in her school, or any teacher on her staff, would vouch)—that she became absurdly dependent on Winifred’s visits and Winifred’s encouragement. But the praise was heartfelt. Winifred truly (and, as later events showed, rightly) believed her sister’s tale was the product of a delightful and original talent.

  But not all the praise nor all the encouragement she could lavish would prevent Abigail from destroying a page that was not—to her mind—perfect.

  “Why?” Winifred would ask furiously when she discovered that some passage she had admired was now no more.

  Usually it was because something—a phrase, or even a single word—had displeased Abigail.

  “Then cross it out. Write over the top. Use a different colour ink.”

  “No!”

  “You don’t have to scrap the whole page.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m sure you’d find Dickens’s manuscripts, or any writer’s manuscripts, a mass of crossings out and misspellings and corrections.”

  “But not mine.”

  “No! Not yours!” Winifred’s scorn—so effective on everyone else—rarely worked on Abigail. “At this rate you’ll never finish,” she said once.

  “Life is long,” Abigail answered.

  “No dear. That’s Art. Ars longa, vita brevis. Life is the short one.”

  “Vita Brevis! What a splendid name for a character! She’d be a fizzy, bubbling girl, wouldn’t she! She’d depart from every scene trailing gorgeous cataracts of fire and laughter, leaving everyone else a bit flat…giving them the feeling that the real fun will be wherever she’s going next—don’t you think?” And she laughed.

  Privately Winifred thought that was just the sort of girl Abigail would love to be.

  Fortunately Abigail was not at all perfectionist in her destructions. She did not tear her rejected pages into little shreds but merely crumpled and discarded them, leaving them for the maids to pick up.

  It was toward the end of the summer of 1864, when Winifred was first setting up her school, The Girls’ College, Highgate, that she entered a conspiracy with the maids to salvage these crumpled sheets and give them to her whenever she called in at home. But for that subterfuge, Abigail’s book would never have been finished, much less published.

  And the course of their lives would have been quite different.

  Chapter 3

  In 1863 Highgate was a remote village, as far out of London as Hampstead. In fact, both villages, Hampstead and Highgate, stood at opposite ends of that long, high ridge which defined every Londoner’s northern skyline. Healthy and bracing, it reared above the dreadful pea-soup fogs that could clamp down around the smoke of a million coal fires and choke even the chirpiest cockney spirit. And when summer filled the bowl of the city with the stink of sewage (and with the fear of its pale horseman, cholera), the village of Highgate rode in the fresh country air that topped the miasma. “As healthy,” Winifred told the girls’ parents, “as the Yorkshire dales.”

  In that first summer of 1864 there were a lot more parents than there were, finally, girls. When people heard that Lady Winifred Stevenson was about to start a new boarding school for girls, they flocked to enroll their daughters. True, Lady Winifred was only twenty-three years old; but she was by all accounts a remarkable young woman. Her mother, the Countess of Wharfedale, was one of the leaders of London Society—or rather, since London has dozens of societies, a leading patron of artists, musicians, and men of science. She was forever in the papers and the ladies’ journals.

  Her father, too, was an extraordinary man. Now the Earl of Wharfedale, he had started life as plain John Stevenson, a railway navvy, from which level he had risen to become the most notable civil-engineering contractor in the country before he had entered public life. He was always sitting on commissions or running the most delicate and secret errands for the government. The ideal nonparty man, he had the ear of every prime minister. The Prince Consort, they said, used to listen more to him than to anyone. They also said (excusing themselves for venturing on a topic so vulgar) that the Earl was one of the richest men in the world—and that the Countess, Nora, was even richer, though she, too, had started from very humble origins.

  And on the academic side (which, of course, one must not entirely forget—even in the education of girls), Lady Winifred had taken all the honours in the Cambridge public exams. Moreover, she had taught for a while at Cheltenham Ladies’ College under no less a person than Miss Beale. All in all, Lady Winifred had everything in her—and her new college’s—favour.

  To be sure, there was an ugly whisper about a rather protracted visit to France the previous year—no one knew why…and she certainly had not been seen in French Society at that time. But then you know how people’s tongues love to wag, especially to devise a scandal where there is none.

  And her fees, at £15 a year, were surprisingly modest.

  So people flocked to enrol their daughters. But to their annoyance, they found a school that, in every particular, either failed to meet, or ran absolutely (one would almost say wilfully) counter to, their expectations.

  “But you do teach the accomplishments?” one exasperated father was moved to ask after Winifred had outlined the Highgate curriculum.

  She suppressed a sigh, knowing she had already lost this parent. Nothing short of the complete reversal of all she believed in would bring his daughter to Highgate.

  “Accomplishments?” she asked.

  “Yes. Needlework, you know. Watercolours. Flowers. Foreign lingos. That sort of thing.”

  “We certainly teach foreign languages. Up to six hours a week, in fact. And most girls will do an hour’s needlework and an hour at art study.”

  “An hour? I had expected, Lady Winifred, that you would say a day. If not two days.”

  “No, Mr. Dale, an hour. There is no time for more.”

  Dale looked at the printed curriculum in his hand. “Forgive me, Lady Winifred, forgive me for saying this, but it does very strongly resemble the curriculum for a boys’ school, don’t you know.”

  “Better, I hope, Mr. Dale. I doubt a boys’ school would devote six hours to French and German. Or seven to mathematics. Or five to natural history. And only three to classical studies.”

  Dale sighed. “It is a very…modern…er…I…”

  “It was Edmund Burke,” Winifred intervened, “who said ‘a great empire and little minds go ill together.’” She held him pinned with her stare. “The girls of Highgate will be the wives and mothers of the leaders of our empire, Mr. Dale. To fill their heads with stitchery and coloured daubs would be ill-preparation indeed for such a role…”

  “I almost had him then,” she told her mother that evening. “He distinctly wavered.”

  “Of course he did,” Nora answered. “It is a very good point.”

  “I have won several parents with it—you know, people who come looking for a cheap way to turn out and finish off their middle-class missies, and who presume…”

  “But not Mr. Dale?”

  “No. I could see a sort of terror in his eye as he realized there might actually be something in the argument. He didn’t know what to do then. Should he bring on this girl to be fit for an imperial match…or would that be to risk being left with a pert, assertive, forward hussy whom no m
an in his right mind would marry?”

  “And of course he is right, dear,” Nora said solemnly. “A spinster daughter past marrying age is a terrible burden for many parents.”

  Winifred laughed. “You speak from experience!”

  Nora grinned smugly, half closing her eyes.

  “May I have a peach?” Winifred asked.

  “You still have room? After all you ate at dinner?”

  Winifred weighed the peach undecidedly, as if she had not considered whether she was actually hungry.

  “Don’t let yourself run to fat, dear,” Nora said, serious again. “You used to be so beautiful and slender.”

  “You mean”—Winifred would not join in her seriousness—“if I eat as I like, then I never will marry!”

  “No. Do it just for your own sake. I hate all these indolent, spreading women. They’re only half alive, most of them. They leave me exhausted just to look at them.”

  Winifred sighed, but she put back the peach. “You have the best chef in London, they say. How do you stay so thin?”

  “But that is the whole point of having a good chef. If one is to eat only morsels, each one must tell.”

  “I think Steamer has plans to entice Anton from you.”

  “Caspar! He’d never dare.” But the suggestion alarmed her. Caspar, her young son, now master of half the family business, usually got what he wanted. “Besides, he and Linny already have an excellent cook.”

  “But not for this absurd palace they are planning. The latest count is two hundred and eighty rooms, you know. With a whole suite for a chef. That’s not going to be for their present cook, however excellent she may be.”

  “Anton would never leave.” She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. And Winifred, who was driven enough by her own ambitions to be quite insensitive to those of others—insensitive enough to mention the possible loss of London’s finest chef as a topic of mere passing interest—unconsciously obliged her. “Would you say,” she asked, “that I am pert, or assertive, or forward?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you’re a headmistress. And a member of the aristocracy. You’d be failing if you were not the dreadful person you are.”

  Winifred laughed and shook her mother’s arm. “I meant it as a serious question.”

  “Oh? Are you wondering then why you’re not married?”

  “You know why. Until women may have property independently of their husbands, I could not risk…”

  “I know, dear. I will try to be serious. Why did you ask?”

  “I mean, even the most honourable and best-intentioned husband could be bankrupted through no fault of his own, and then my school would…”

  “I know.” Nora did not repeat her long-standing offer to set up the school as a trust so as to remove this barrier to Winifred’s possible marriage. She knew that from the moment the girl had decided to give her life to teaching, she had put aside all thought of marriage. This business about married women’s property, though true enough, was a justification she kept, so to speak, at the front of her mind, to stifle any deeper questioning of her motives. “Why did you ask if you were forward?”

  Winifred did not at once answer. The street noises began to intrude—the clip-clop of horse hooves, the ring of iron tyres on cobblestones. Someone at Apsley House was ill and the servants had put out straw and rushes to deaden the racket. With your ear, and your mind’s eye, you could follow a vehicle up from Hyde Park Corner, then lose it as it fell into that sound-limbo of straw, then pick it up again as it dwindled away along Piccadilly.

  “Oh dear,” Winifred said ruefully. “Here we are, barely begun, and already I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of what I’m doing.”

  “Be thankful for that. It’s when you cease to doubt that you should…”

  “Thank you, Mama dear. Very proper and correct. But I mean real doubt. Not a casual sort of ‘I wonder-hum-hum.’”

  “Why? In what way?”

  “It’s my argument with Father all over again—you remember when I first went to teach at Cheltenham? He hated the very idea of my teaching, but if I had to, then he wanted the work at least to be honorary. And of course I didn’t need the money, so it was very hard to put a convincing argument against him. And I think even Miss Beale was a little contemptuous of me for taking a salary. But I had to. You understand, don’t you?”

  Nora smiled, like one who avoids a trap. “I understand why you felt you had to take a salary.”

  “And you agreed!”

  “Since you felt so passionately, I agreed it was right for you. But I would not have condemned any other girl for taking a different course.”

  Winifred’s laugh conceded the unprofitability of this line. “You’ll never come down off that fence, I suppose.”

  “Not until it’s rewarding to do so. Or expedient. I’m not much moved by the moral argument. But I know you felt that if you turned the work of teaching into a sort of honorary hobby, you’d be taking bread out of…”

  “The point is,” Winifred cut in eagerly, “that three out of every four teachers are women. Most of them are daughters of tradesmen and artisans. They need the money. No! It isn’t money. Money isn’t that important—it’s only a barometer. What I mean is that teaching is one of the few honourable ways a woman has to an independent life.”

  “Lots of women keep shops.”

  “One shopkeeper in five, if you want to be precise. And they start with capital, or an inheritance or something. I’m talking about women. Womankind. Not a lucky few. Teaching—the teaching profession, if that doesn’t make you laugh—is our Trojan horse. It’s going to be the way up for countless women. Up onto a plateau from where we’ll spread outwards into other jobs. There are ninety-five thousand office clerks in this country—d’you know how many are women? Three hundred! Yet there’s over three and a half million women at work up and down the land—and you know where most of them are: wherever there’s muck and no money!”

  “And in some obscure way,” Nora challenged, “this impressive display of statistical research has led you to have second thoughts about your curriculum?” She let her tongue linger on her lip. Secretly Winifred the Campaigner always excited her. All her life Winifred had been a solemn, studious, earnest girl—frequently childish in the way that only highly intellectual people can be childish; but she always took care to master a subject before she spoke of it to others. And on any subject she had mastered she was always impressive—in that unanswerable way which frightened off potential husbands by the sackful.

  “Yes…no! Well, in a way. What I mean is that more and more women of the artisan and tradesmen’s classes are going to get education and independence. It can’t be long now before we have universal and compulsory schooling for all children. My God! We’ll be the last civilized country to do so. Already the schooling given to girls of the lower classes is vastly superior to the useless mixture of mindless accomplishments and trivia drilled into middle-class girls at vast expense. What I’m saying is that this country will soon face the paradox of having a discontented and angry regiment of well-educated women of the poorer classes—and where may they look for a lead, eh? To the ignorant, fatuous, empty-headed hoydens who are allegedly their social superiors?”

  The point of Winifred’s argument suddenly struck Nora. “But,” she said, aghast, “what you wish to do, then, is to educate girls of good class into that same state of anger and discontent!”

  “Exactly!” Winifred said excitedly. Then she sank her head into her hands and repeated, in despair, the selfsame word: “Exactly.”

  “You tell the parents this? Before you take their fees?”

  “Some.”

  “You mean, I suppose, that you tell the ones who you know already agree with you!”

  “I tell everyone exactly what sort of daughter they may expect
to get back. They must draw their own conclusions.”

  “But is that fair? You have given the subject a great deal more thought than they. It’s a kind of intellectual bullying.”

  “If they’re too stupid, or too lazy, or too impressionable to see where the choice may lead, is it my duty to guide them?” Winifred broke into laughter even before she had finished speaking, for she knew she had picked exactly the argument her mother would find unanswerable. To make the point doubly certain, she added, “Caveat emptor—let the buyer beware—surely. In education as in everything else.”

  “Well…” Nora dipped her head, conceding. “We seem to have resolved your ethical doubts at least.”

  Winifred’s face fell. “Not at all. It’s the girls, don’t you see. I have no qualms about the parents. But the girls…Here is young Jane, who could be taught embroidery, dancing, music, and sketching, and grow up frivolous and empty-headed, and marry a gay hussar, and lead a life of mindless domestic tranquility. Or I can teach her, first that she has a mind (which most girls find hard to believe of themselves), then how to use it, and she will grow up to be contemptuous of most other women (or pitying—which is as bad). She will suffer them badly, and frighten the men and dogs and horses, and in general be a thorough misfit.”

  Nora would have had no such qualms. To her the happiness of Winifred was worth ten thousand other blighted lives. “It is not your concern,” she said with vast assurance. “They are their parents’ responsibility as far as that choice goes.”

  “I haven’t told you the nub of it yet. The real point is that if women—women as a class—are ever going to change their station—our station—we are going to need thousands of such misfits. Need their intellect, their money, their social position, their contempt or pity for their sisters—and, not least, their ability to frighten men and other animals. Their discontent will be the steam to drive our engine forward. From station to station.” She laughed at her own pun, but with little humour.