by Clare Clark
In the drawing room at Cadogan Mansions the light was itself a subject, the buttery weight of it in the drapes of muslin behind Charlotte’s head, the filtered column of silver that turned, dust-spangled, in the shadows by her skirts, the splashes of bright white spattered on the ceiling by the diamond solitaire Charlotte wore on her left hand. Maribel knelt at her friend’s feet, arranging the spill of her skirts, observing how the silk shimmered with dark lights, and she thought of the loch at Inverallich on a fine day, the breeze puckering its smooth skin. One day there will be photographs in colour, she thought, and the beauty of the world captured so, without our veil of not seeing, will be unbearable.
‘Lift the muslin away a little with your right hand,’ she told Charlotte. ‘As though you were looking out of the window but did not want to be seen.’
‘Like this?’
‘Just like that.’
The sun had moved a little and no longer shone directly through the window. The gentler light caught in the pearls around Charlotte’s neck and in the soft arc of her hair. Maribel gazed at the composition through the viewfinder, at Charlotte pinned beneath the glass like a butterfly. The brightness from the window caused her to squint just a little so that, as she stood there, her features, usually so animated in expression, gave way to the heavy-lidded somnolence of a medieval madonna. The woman in the frame was Charlotte and yet not Charlotte, her eyes and mouth, her chin tilted a little upwards, and yet without the quickening essence of Charlotte that claimed them and made them hers. The observation unnerved Maribel a little. Wasn’t that what they said about the bodies of the dead?
She was almost ready. Taking up a collodion plate in its holder she slid it into the camera. She checked to see that the plate was in place, then carefully extracted the cover and set it to one side. In the window Charlotte blinked a little, pressing her lips together to suppress a yawn.
‘I know you think you have suffered enough already,’ Maribel said. ‘But the worst is still to come. I am going to talk now and, however much you desire to contradict me, you are not allowed to answer back. However overwhelming the temptation, you must let me continue in my delusions uncorrected, do you understand?’
Charlotte grinned and immediately she was Charlotte once more.
‘It won’t be good for you,’ she said.
‘Perhaps not,’ Maribel agreed. ‘But it will be very good for you.’
She leaned down, one hand loosening the lens cover. As she talked, rehearsing the old jokes, the well-worn stories, memory moved over Charlotte’s face like weather, changing the light and the angles, shifting the shape of her beneath her skin. Maribel watched her friend intently, her fingers alert on the lens cover, readying herself for the shot. The new dry plates required no more than a fraction of a second for exposure, allowing for the capture of the most fleeting of atmospheres. It had been quite different in the old days, with wet plates. Then a model had been required to hold quite still for five or six seconds, a single expression pinned to her face, and the slightest movement could ruin a picture. Mr Corelli had always said that he could tell which of the girls would have a successful career by the discipline that they exhibited when being photographed.
‘You cannot hold an expression for the count of five?’ he had once declared disdainfully to a girl who complained. ‘Then you’re no actress.’
The girl in question had gone on to have moderate success in music hall. Afterwards Mr Corelli was heard to mutter that it was fortunate for Hetty Farnshaw that she had the kind of figure that fogged men’s brains. Those girls could get away with not being able to count.
Charlotte turned her head imperceptibly, her full lips softening as she raised her chin. Maribel steadied herself and pulled away the lens cover. For perhaps one half of a second, the camera held Charlotte in its unblinking gaze. Then she shuttered it again.
‘That’s it?’ Charlotte asked without altering her position.
‘That’s the first. You can move a little if you wish. It will take me a moment or two to change the plates.’
Charlotte stretched, turning her head from side to side to loosen her shoulders, as Maribel slid the plate cover back into the camera, obscuring the exposed area of glass. Then, slowly, she extracted it and placed it in the cloth-lined box at her feet. Mr Corelli had been a great talker, hardly drawing breath as he worked. He had always claimed that silences were as bad as the cold for cramping muscles. Victor’s photographer had hardly spoken at all, or not to her. He had conferred quietly with Victor behind a screen and, when they were finished, it was Victor who had instructed her as to the requirements of her arrangement. When she asked him who she was supposed to be, Victor had raised an eyebrow.
‘The Rokeby Venus,’ he had said, and he had laughed and looked at her in the appraising way that he had, with his head on one side. The photographer had spoken only to murmur instructions to the boy who was his assistant. The studio had been stiflingly hot and relentlessly red, with scarlet shot silk on the walls and crimson velvet drapes, like the inside of some-body’s mouth. All the glass in the windows had been painted black.
Maribel frowned at the camera, forcing herself to concentrate, but the memories pressed in on her: the ache in her neck from holding the pose, the pins securing the draperies around her hips, the stick of rouge with its dirty paper wrapper. The tightness of her hair in its elaborate twist had given her a headache. Victor had insisted upon the hair, had summoned a woman to the house to assist with its arrangement. The woman had smoothed the hair with wax and spit rubbed into the palms of her hands. It was a matter of tastefulness, Victor said, of refinement. The effect must be of Titian or Giorgione, never Francisco de Goya. Maribel had known hardly anything of paintings then. She had known only that Victor knew people and that he was her best hope. Afterwards she had found twin stains of rouge like spots of blood in her bodice.
The sun was high beyond the window and the parlour uncomfortably warm. Maribel strode over to the window and threw open the sash.
‘You are doing wonderfully,’ she said to Charlotte. ‘Can you endure another?’
Charlotte proved herself a trouper. She managed four more plates, though Maribel did not think any as good as the first. Just as she removed the fifth from the camera, Charlotte closed her eyes and gave a little moan.
‘Save me,’ she said.
Maribel rang for Alice. The ginger beer and strawberries cheered Charlotte immeasurably.
‘A picnic,’ she declared happily. ‘What heaven.’
‘Next time we shall go out to the country, to the river perhaps,’ Maribel said. ‘And I shall photograph you outside.’
Charlotte shook her head firmly. ‘No next time,’ she said. ‘Once is enough, strawberries or no strawberries.’
‘You will change your mind when you see the pictures.’
‘I doubt that very much. Isn’t the camera obliged to tell the Truth, however disagreeable? I myself favour the Flattering Deception.’
‘That is such hokum,’ Maribel said, waving a cigarette in one hand and a strawberry in the other. ‘Those photographs that do tell the truth only do so by accident. Most are dishonest as any painting. More so, because they pretend to be real. Talking of which, I have something for your boys.’ Setting the cigarette between her lips she rummaged with her free hand in the pile of letters on her writing desk and drew out the photograph of Chief Red Shirt. ‘The photographer has rendered him more Stuffed Shirt than Red Shirt but he is still a real live Indian. He has even signed it, after a fashion.’
‘Thank you,’ Charlotte said. ‘The boys will adore it. They are all desperate to go to the show, of course, and complain bitterly that they must be the only children in London not yet to have seen it, but I have promised George faithfully that we shall not go without him so we must wait for the holidays.’
‘Have you met him yet, the famous Buffalo Bill?’
‘Only briefly at the Mansion House.’
‘He came to a party at the Wildes’ l
ast Tuesday,’ Maribel said. ‘The fawning over him put Oscar’s nose quite out of joint. He squatted like a toad in the corner of the drawing room and told anyone who would listen that Cody had never been a colonel and that the Honourable came from belonging to an American State Legislature slightly less important than the Essex County Council.’
‘Oscar is a brave man. Imagine risking the ire of all the doting peeresses of the realm.’
‘Worse still, he accused Cody of eating peas from his knife.’
Charlotte shook her head.
‘Dear foolish Oscar. They will flay him alive.’
Maribel laughed. ‘He has asked me to write a short piece on the Italian exhibition for Woman’s World. Will you come? I thought we might go tomorrow if it is not too unbearably hot.’
‘I can’t tomorrow, I fear. I have an appointment.’
‘What appointment?’
‘I promised myself I should not tell you. You will only get cross.’
‘I shall get much crosser if you don’t tell me.’
‘How extremely unreasonable you are.’
‘How true. So where are you going?’
Charlotte hesitated.
‘No. I am not going to tell you.’
‘Then you oblige me to draw my own conclusions. You have taken a lover. You have taken a trade. You are become a – a tanner. A crossing-sweeper. A child prostitute. You must dispose of the decomposing body of your murdered love rival. Am I getting warm?’
‘Positively scorching, dearest. You see now why I do not have time for the Italian exhibition.’
‘Charlotte, Charlotte. You know, don’t you, that I shall have to tell Arthur? He is a good man, your husband, in spite of his deplorable fondness for parlour games, and he does not deserve to be so misused. Of course, if you are prepared to buy my silence with a little more information –’
‘Will you ever let this go?’
‘Probably not this week.’
Charlotte sighed.
‘Well?’ Maribel demanded.
‘I am going to St John’s Wood,’ Charlotte said at last. ‘Lady Rawlinson is giving a tea party for Mme Blavatsky.’
Maribel snorted. Mme Blavatsky was a Russian émigré newly arrived from New York, who had brought with her an exotic wardrobe of scarves and a considerable reputation as a spiritualist and medium. Said to be shamelessly penniless, she had been put up in London by a wealthy American widow who had taken to describing herself as the Russian woman’s ‘disciple’. There had been much discussion in the drawing rooms of London of Mme Blavatsky.
‘You are not?’ said Maribel.
‘Yes, I am. And Constance Wilde is coming with me. She is as intrigued as I.’
‘Charlotte, how could you? Constance, perhaps, but you?’
‘Perhaps because, unlike you, I do not believe that we know everything there is to know. And don’t frown at me like that. Mme Blavatsky is not a circus act. She does not rig strings under tables or blow lights out. There is no essence of violets wafted about the room. Her investigations have to do with the complexities of human consciousness, the unexplained laws of nature and of matter. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, thought-reading, hypnosis, these phenomena are real, Maribel. They have been proven. Did you know that, even when our brains, the generators of our consciousness, are comatose, deep in sleep, scientists in Europe have found proof of intense and inexplicable mental action? Something must account for that spiritual energy.’
‘You disappoint me, Charlotte.’
‘Oh, pooh. The fact that all the swans you’ve ever seen are white doesn’t mean that all swans are white.’
‘So you truly believe this Blavatsky woman can communicate with the spirit world?’
‘I don’t know. That is the point, Maribel, I don’t know. But at least I am prepared to allow that I don’t know and to hold my mind open.’
‘You say that as if it is a good thing.’
‘Well, of course it is.’
‘Why?’ said Maribel. ‘It is as foolish to hold open your mind as it is your front door. It does nothing but encourage undesirables.’
‘Spoken like a true Radical. Your husband would be proud.’
Maribel waved her hand, reaching once again for her cigarettes.
‘Do not think you can distract me with politics,’ she said. ‘Edward has tried it and it does not work.’
‘Then let me do it with ginger beer,’ Charlotte said.
Sloshing more of the cloudy liquid into their glasses, she handed one to Maribel and held hers aloft.
‘To Maribel and the closed mind.’
Maribel grinned.
‘To Mme Charterhouse, table rapper extraordinaire,’ she countered and she struck her glass firmly against Charlotte’s.
When Alice peered into the parlour some minutes later she saw the two ladies seated like children upon the floor, their stockinged feet tucked up beneath them. They were laughing uproariously, their heads thrown back, their hands clutched over their mouths, and their fingers were stained scarlet with strawberry juice.
8
THE MORNING BEGAN BADLY. It had been another unspeakably hot night and Maribel had slept only fitfully. Edward had come in a little after one and she had lain awake, smoking and listening to the small noises as he readied himself for bed. She did not go out to him. Instead she watched the ghosts that the smoke made in the darkness and thought of Ida. It was hard to imagine her in a house, especially in London. Perhaps it had a garden. Ida had always been happiest out of doors. Perhaps there were children. Maribel tried to imagine Ida with an infant in her arms but all she could think of were her unravelling plaits, her ink-stained fingers, her child’s face fierce with concentration. When Ida did sums she twisted her plaits with one finger, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. The knots in her hair had driven their mother to distraction.
At breakfast she was raw-eyed, irritable with lack of sleep. When Edward enquired why the marmalade was not the thick-cut kind that he liked she snapped at him. She answered only brusquely when he enquired after her plans for the day. She was tired of his parliamentary commitments and constituency business, and aggrieved by his new infatuation with the Socialist League and the SDF and the myriad subcommittees that such organisations always seemed to spawn. On those few evenings he was at home he stayed up late writing articles for the Commonweal. The articles were good and she knew she should be proud of him. She was proud of him, but she was also resentful of his neglect and weary of apologising for his absences. She was not supposed to confess it, the New Women would be horrified that she even thought it, but the truth was that without a husband one spent too much time with other women and too many of them were tiresome.
When Edward announced that the second vote in the House might prevent him from accompanying her to dinner with the Wildes that evening, the anger exploded in her without warning. Before he could fold the newspaper she had accused him of negligence, of callousness, of a vaunting political ambition that left everything else in its wake. Perhaps, she said bitterly, if he dug deep into his memory, he might recall that he had a wife. Perhaps he might even consider it prudent to see her from time to time so that he might remake her acquaintance. Or if, as seemed apparent, he meant to take the Liberal Party as a wife, perhaps he might inform his present wife of his decision so that she might release him from the obligations that he plainly found so burdensome.
Edward waited in silence until, like a wind-up toy, she ran herself down. Then, with a perplexed expression, he set his teacup back in its saucer. His apology, though conciliatory, was tinged with a fastidious disdain. He acknowledged that he was busy, promised that he would do what he could to limit the number of dinners and evening votes he was obliged to attend. He wished for easier times ahead. It was plain that he considered her display of temper entirely unreasonable. When he left the flat soon afterwards, he did not kiss her goodbye.
Maribel sat at the table for a long time after he was gone, the shame of her hara
ngue congealing in her cheeks. When Alice came in to clear the table she retired to her bedroom to lie down. She lay there for perhaps half an hour, staring up at the ornate plasterwork that decorated the ceiling. The tears leaked from her eyes and dampened the hair above her ears. Then, patting her face with a handkerchief, she rose. She put on the old dress she wore to develop her photographs and arranged her hair. When she took her satchel from the hall cupboard she could hear Alice in the parlour, humming tunelessly to herself as she dusted the furniture. She packed the satchel with her plates, her cigarettes and an apple for her luncheon.
Outside the heat was worse than ever. It took only a few minutes to walk down Lower Sloane Street to Mr Pidgeon’s Turks Row studio, but by the time she pushed open the heavy green door she had almost regained her composure. It was not in Edward’s nature to bear grudges. By the time he got home that night their spat would be quite forgotten.
The green door opened directly into the back stairwell of the large red-brick building that housed Pidgeon’s Photography. Mr Pidgeon was a gentleman of dour expression and irreproachable respectability whose business was mostly in the line of captivating family groups, for which the demand appeared inexhaustible. His studio was dominated by a large rocking horse and a plywood doll’s house in the Palladian style. There was also an upholstered chaise, large enough to accommodate comfortably a mother and several of her entrancing offspring without irreparably crushing her skirts.
