Abigail by Malcolm Macdonald Page A

patchwork at the very limits of vision. Somewhere far off a vixen yapped, a sharp, plaintive call that seemed to double the intensity of the frost.
    Caspar clucked the pony into movement once again. “What a difference a few dozen degrees make,” he said. “Last July I was standing here wondering how to endure the heat—and the insects. And now!”
    Abigail smiled. “Think of Boy in India.” Boy—whose real name was John—was their eldest brother.
    “I suppose so. Funny thing about those insects. Mostly little midges. They were thick enough, you know, to form actual clouds. It was like a mist. A drifting mist in quite a stiff, steady breeze. There must have been hundreds of millions of them to make clouds like that. And that was just the output of this one valley. Think of all the valleys, all the land, in England. And they’re quite at the mercy of the breeze, you know. A lot of them, millions and millions, just get carried out to sea and die.”
    As his words formed an image in her mind’s eye a sharp sadness caught her up. The waste of it all…the sheer profligacy! She remembered something one of the learned men in her mother’s salon had said to her: “If you think in mere numbers, then the most typical living thing is a creature actually in its death throes or within moments of them.” In a curious way he had intended it as a sign of hope. “To survive one day in the kingdom of plants and animals,” he had concluded, “is a small miracle. And a great mercy to us.” When she thought of those millions of insects being wafted to their collective death from this one valley—this one lovely peaceful haven—it was hard to find comfort in her own survival.
    “D’you think they chatter to each other as they go, Steamer?” she asked. “About life? And God? And happiness?”
    He laughed. “What strange ideas you do get!”
    As they clattered over the new cobbles of the stable yard he remembered something. “Whom has Winnie invited down, d’you know? She wasn’t sure last week.”
    “A man called Laon, I think. Percy Laon. Or is it Peter?”
    “Does he do anything?”
    “Everyone Winnie knows does something. She wouldn’t tolerate an idler. I think he’s something to do with ladies’ magazines.”
    “A scribbler?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “It’s a queer name, Laon. Sounds foreign.”
    “Tut tut!” Abigail mocked as she skipped ahead of him toward the house.
    They were late. Tea was already served, and their parents, John and Nora—looking very much the Earl and Countess amid the gothic splendour of the morning room—were thawing gratefully by the fire.
    “I haven’t shown them around,” Caroline said quickly to Caspar, as soon as the welcomes were over. She turned to Nora. “It would be more than my life is worth.”
    Nora laughed. “He was like that with all his toys. Anyway, I’m sure John already knows every stone.”
    Abigail sat on John’s lap and began to tell him how superb the house had looked from across the valley. Caspar asked where all the children were—though the only children left in the family were his youngest sister and brother: Rosalind, who would be sixteen come March, and Sefton, now getting on for eight. Mather, now seventeen, and Hester, almost twenty, were of the grownups. (At least until the more formal, post-Christmas festivities began.)
    “In your nurseries, I hope,” his mother told him. “And having the time of their lives, I expect.”
    “By the way,” John said, “marvellous news. Young John may be coming. I had a telegram from the India Office just this morning.”
    Everyone was delighted at the news. Abigail glanced at Winifred; usually the word “telegram” brought on an attack of classical Greek and a lecture on the preferability of “telegrapheme.” But not today, it seemed.
    “I say, Winnie,” Caspar called to her. “Who’s this Laon person you’re bringing?”
    “Oh, a friend. A guardian of one of my girls, in fact. But a friend