Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  ‘You are quite sure? Dr Maitland Coffin?’

  The boy grimaced, holding up a grimy palm.

  ‘Course I’m sure. Everyone round here knows old Coffin.’

  ‘Very well then,’ Maribel said, fumbling in her purse for a shilling. ‘Thank you.’

  Ward Street was no less spiritless than the terrace she had observed opposite the showground, and hardly more respectable. In Ward Street at least the houses did not open directly onto the pavement but had narrow front gardens, boxed with low wooden fences, and some of the window frames looked freshly painted, but like the other it had a mean and temporary air. The yellow bricks were sandy-looking, as if they might crumble when you touched them, and, beneath the low roofs, the yellow was streaked brown with damp. Maribel had not thought of Ida in a place like this.

  Number 16 was neither the best nor the worst house in the terrace. Its front garden was neat, with paving laid to the front door, and the brass door knocker was only slightly tarnished. There was a dried-out attempt at a border, edged with pebbles. Maribel exhaled, convulsed by the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette. Then she marched up to the door and knocked.

  There was the sound of voices from inside, the thump of feet descending the stairs. Maribel smoothed her hair, her lips moving uncertainly as they searched for a suitable expression. There was a pause. Then the door opened. A red-faced woman in a faded dress eyed Maribel suspiciously. She held a swaddled infant in her arms, while, from among her skirts, another child, a girl, peered out with bright bird eyes. Yellow stains crusted the infant’s blanket.

  ‘Yes?’

  Maribel stared at her and the anticipation ran out of her like sand.

  ‘This is not the home of Dr Maitland Coffin, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Coffin?’ The woman’s face twisted with disgust. ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’

  ‘No,’ Maribel said. ‘I have made a mistake. I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

  The red-faced woman frowned.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’ she said less brusquely. ‘You need a drink of water?’

  Maribel shook her head. ‘I am quite well, thank you,’ she said.

  As she turned away, the infant began to wail, a sharp high scream like the shriek of a dog fox. Maribel kept walking. There had been foxes in the woods behind their house in Ellerton. Once a vixen had made its earth near the woodshed and there had been cubs, four of them, that tumbled over one another for the sop of bread and milk that the children set out for them. Ida had named them all, though no one believed she could tell them apart. She had begged their mother to let her keep one as a pet.

  Ida would never have allowed her child to be taken away.

  Maribel walked for a long time. The featureless streets sprawled for what seemed like miles, a profuse and desolate undergrowth of brick that snaked greedily over the sour earth. The few trees were scrawny things, hardly more than branches jammed in the ground. It was neither prudent nor quite respectable to walk alone in such a place but Maribel walked all the same and it was not the wilderness of the voracious city that she saw but the moors of her childhood, the green hills scabbed with rock, the spring of the heather as she lay on her back watching the larks rising in the empty sky, silvering the air with their song.

  The reply from Colonel Cody was both as punctilious and as favourable as Maribel could have hoped. He wrote that he remembered her well, and that he would be delighted to permit her to photograph his Indians at any time convenient to herself, though the twice-daily shows did mean that she might be better to attend the camp in the mornings if she wished to see the Indians at their ordinary business. He asked that, once she had decided upon a suitable date, she write to Major Burke at the Wild West office so that he might meet her upon arrival and act as escort during her visit. An interpreter would also be provided for her convenience.

  Maribel set the letter to one side. She was glad of it, of course, but the fierce urgency that had possessed her had quite gone. The thought of seeing Ida no longer thrilled her. She told herself it was Edward she thought of, that she acted from conscience, from scruple, but she knew she deceived herself. It was not all about Edward. He was not even the biggest part of it.

  She had returned from her exertions in Earls Court exhausted, her feet aching, and taken to her bed. An hour later she had roused herself and, asking Alice for tea and paper, had sat up, an ashtray balanced on her chest, and tried to write. It was not the poverty of the streets she had walked that she strove to capture. It was the emptiness. Maribel had visited with other members of the Socialist League the slums of the East End, had borne witness to the rags and the tallow lamps, the rotting beams and stinking basements, the wretchedness of the squalid lanes. Ward Street and its ilk were nothing like these. They were respectable neighbourhoods, moderate and mostly law-abiding. In Ward Street ragged children did not cluster in doorways. The women were not poisoned in lead-works, exhausted in nailworks, worn haggard and ancient by ceaseless toil. They did not squat dead-faced in the mud and dust, their hands extended in grim appeal. Ward Street was quiet, the lives of its occupants hidden from view. These were the homes of ordinary working men, thrown up so quickly the builders had not troubled with found ations. They would fall. Till then the walls were shored up with fear and fatigue and the frantic struggle for propriety. It was a blank brick waste-land of cheeseparing and quiet desperation.

  All afternoon Maribel had smoked and scratched out lines in her notebook. By evening the bed was littered all about with torn-up paper, scraps of words that drifted across the coverlets like snow, but the stone still lodged in her chest and the enchantment never came. She thought of her beloved Ida, the elephant tamer, boxed into one of those cramped little houses with an infant that cried like a dog fox, and she thought of Sylvia Wylde, the actress in the whitewashed room whose soaring ambitions had been nothing but the vain fantasies of a child, and she knew she could not write it because to write it was to admit that it was so.

  When Edward consulted her about the final arrangements for their journey to Inverallich, she did not attempt to persuade him to delay their departure. The knowledge that Ida was nearby had settled in her. The violent jolt of it, electrical in its force and urgency, had waned to a bruise that, as long as it were not touched, might be forgotten. In place of the urgent need to see her sister was a kind of grief, the anguished assurance that there would be no purpose in it. There could be no repairing a bond of sisterhood long severed, no blessing in reminding them of what they had lost. Ida was her memory, her truth. The truth now was that she did not want Ida to remember. With Ida she would see the distance she had travelled, the void between what she had wished for and what she had become.

  Maribel had made another self since then. The Edward Campbell Lowes had a wide circle of illustrious and influential friends. Among their acquaintance they numbered many whose names were familiar across the country: artists, politicians, writers, the more bohemian of the aristocracy. Edward was Laird of Inverallich, even if he did not care to use the title, and distinguished enough to be lampooned in Vanity Fair. Maribel had had a poem accepted for publication. She had presented a well-received lecture to members of the Socialist League on ‘Socialism and the Modern Woman’. But she was not yet ready. One day, when she was established as a poet or perhaps as a photographer, she might be able to present herself to Ida and see, reflected in her sister’s eyes, the version of herself that she had left home for, the version of herself for which she had risked everything. Then it would be time.

  She packed for Scotland briskly, impatient to be off.

  12

  BY THE TIME THEY reached Inverallich the heatwave of London felt as distant as a dream. High summer in Argyllshire that year was cold and wet, the wind-lashed rain like hurled pins against their cheeks. Even on dry days clouds muffled the mountains, burying the peaks in their rolls of grey flesh. Maribel shivered in her shawls and knitted gloves. The house, situated at the northernmost tip of a peat-stained lo
ch, seemed to drink in the damp and chill from the black earth. The sheets mildewed and, in the grates, the sodden firewood hissed and smoked. It was the kind of place, she wrote to Charlotte, where it was possible to recall Miss Woolley and her Circle with nostalgia.

  She was seldom alone, though she saw Edward hardly more than she had in London. Five hundred miles from the wretched encampments of Trafalgar Square, the raised fists and placards of the Socialist demonstrators protesting angrily outside the Whitehall offices responsible for the Poor Law, there was no reprieve for the poor of rural Scotland and, despite the powers of the new Crofters’ Commission, unrest prevailed. Impatient with their plight, Salisbury’s government showed no qualms in using troops to quell their protests. Edward’s days were taken up with appointments, rallies, visits to local smallholdings and crofting townships, speeches at public meetings. Maribel attended those at which she was required, making polite conversation with slab-faced ladies whom she knew would afterwards declare her accent unfathomable. Edward was always at the other end of the room.

  It was not just constituency business either. The Coal Mines Regulation Bill was in the Committee Stage and in the course of two gruelling weeks in August Edward addressed more than fifty meetings across the Scottish mining districts, mustering grass-root support for the wider publication of safety reports, an unqualified ban of child labour in the mines, and a compulsory eight-hour day. In the last few months the gap between his politics and those of his party had widened sharply and the satirical cartoons in Punch and the Daily News made much of the correlation between the colour of his hair and that of his opinions. As Trafalgar Square swelled with the homeless, with agitators and demonstrators and sightseers eager to enjoy the circus, Edward and his kind were denounced by the city’s newspapers as provocateurs, reckless rabble-rousers intent upon violent confrontation. Only Webster at the Chronicle held steady, his support of the Socialists unwavering, his impassioned editor ials in defence of the poor a persistent thorn in the government’s side. Edward had the newspapers sent up from London and, though Webster’s muscular Christianity raised his hackles, he was grateful. They were in no position to be choosy.

  Maribel was left often to her own devices. She had much to occupy her. She managed the estate accounts. She organised the cook and the two raw-faced maids. She counted the silver. She wrote one or two indifferent poems, took some indifferent photographs which, lacking a darkroom, she parcelled up with the still undeveloped plates from the Jubilee and sent to be printed at Oban. She visited the Inverallich cottages, taking baskets of freshly baked bread and cakes, and admired children and sheep. The tenants asked after Mr Edward and the affection in their voices was unfeigned. Mr Edward was much loved at Inverallich. After the election, when he had won his seat for the Liberals, two hundred tenants and feuars had gathered to greet them at the railway station. There had been cheers, speeches, boys whistling on blades of grass set between their thumbs. Then, instead of horses, fifty men with ropes had pulled their carriage to the house just as the Skye crofters had pulled the carriage of Henry George, the radical social reformer, two years before. They had travelled the short distance in silence, Edward’s hands clasped on his lap. It was the first time since Maribel had known him that he had had nothing to say.

  Maribel occupied herself as much as she was able but still darkness came late and the days were long. Vehemently opposed to the annexation of the great Scottish estates as playgrounds for the wealthy, Edward did not shoot or stalk but, on those few days that he was home, he walked or rode out into the hills. For all the urbanity of his manner the bleak landscape of Inverallich was his querencia, the Spanish word for the home territory of an animal, the mists and mountains as much in his blood as the pampas of Argentina. Sometimes Maribel went with him on these expeditions. More often he went alone. On horseback he covered great distances and returned exhausted and content, his breeches crusted with spatters of peat.

  This summer, and despite his punishing schedule, he rode more than ever. In Glasgow, where they had stopped for a few days with friends on their journey north, Edward had, to his astonishment, encountered a spirited Argentine mustang in the traces of a tram-car and had, after some negotiation, persuaded the owner to sell the horse to him for fifty pounds. It was only once the animal was settled in the stables at Inverallich that he had discovered that she bore the brand of Javier Casey, an old friend of Edward’s from his gaucho days. Delighted as much by the caprices of Fate as by the mare herself, he named her Pampa.

  Maribel had never before seen him so charmed. He smiled whenever he talked of Pampa, which he did often, declaring her the finest and most mettlesome horse he had ever known. He had Maribel take her photograph and pressed unwary guests into inspecting her. Several times Maribel came down for dinner to find the drawing room empty and the men in their evening suits in the stable courtyard, treading cautiously over the cobbles in their thin-soled slippers. Edward had determined to bring the creature to London, though the livery costs were exorbitant, so that he might ride her through the winter. A great deal of time was taken up by the complicated plans for her conveyance.

  Letters came regularly from Charlotte in Sussex, from Oscar and Constance and Edward’s brother Henry in London. Edward’s mother visited. There were games and parties and balls in other people’s draughty houses, with much bellowing and dancing of Scottish reels. It was too much and, at the same time, not enough. The society at Inverallich was narrow, the demands of the estate wearisome. Both were relentless.

  In Scotland it was not as easy as it was in London for Maribel to close her eyes to their financial difficulties. With agricultural prices continuing to fall they had had no choice but to increase the allowances to their beleaguered tenant farmers. Rents were down. The interest on their mortgages swallowed any profit raised on the estate, leaving them only a few hundred pounds on which to live. Such an amount did not come close to meeting their day-to-day expenses, let alone provide funds for additional repairs and improvements. She had managed, after much difficulty, to persuade Edward to sell a small section of the estate closest to the town to raise capital, but prices were depressed and the money was quickly swallowed. With the expenditure required to support his political career and the necessity of supporting even a frugal household in London, they had not only failed to reducing their borrowings, they had been obliged to add to them. When Henry arrived, lured north by the promise of the Glorious Twelfth, she confessed to him that, if things did not improve, she feared that, sooner or later, they would have no alternative but to sell up altogether.

  ‘Poor Mar, how dreadfully you would mind that,’ Henry said with a grin and Maribel laughed and swatted at him with her book.

  ‘Edward would mind horribly. I can’t imagine how he would manage without it.’

  ‘It is our father’s fault, not yours. Teddy knows that. You have done wonders.’

  ‘Not wonders enough.’

  ‘Wonders,’ Henry said firmly. ‘But you should tread carefully. I’m afraid Mother will blame you.’

  ‘For debts accumulated by her own husband?’

  ‘For obliging her to remember their existence. My father was packed off to the madhouse when I was, what, nine? Mother has had more than twenty years to revise her recollections of marriage.’

  It was a great comfort to Maribel to have Henry at Inverallich. Henry loved shooting game almost as much as his brother abhorred it but, unlike Edward, he was discouraged by poor weather and, when it rained, he preferred the fireside to the moors. Maribel was only too happy to abandon her duties in order to keep him company. The two of them sat together companionably, reading and writing and smoking and drinking tea, every so often exchanging stories from the newspaper or titbits of information from their letters.

  As witty as he was worldly, Henry was a wonderful gossip. He related in glorious detail the latest spat between Oscar Wilde and his old friend James Whistler, and his descriptions of the waspish American painter hissing like a djinn in
his monocle and pointed slippers made Maribel laugh out loud. He told her of the son of a well-known peer discovered at the Café Royal with a stolen lobster in the leg of his trousers when it became apparent that the creature was not half as dead as the young man had presumed it to be. He told her about the party thrown by Lillie Langtry to celebrate the her divorce from her long-suffering husband, which the Prince of Wales had had to be forcefully dissuaded from attending, and about the letter that had arrived at the Wild West from his wife, Princess Alexandra, informing Buffalo Bill that she wished to attend the show incognito. Given that the Princess’s face was about as well known in London as the face of Big Ben, this had presented Cody with something of a difficulty.

  Even Henry could not keep himself from laughing as he related what had happened next. The Princess had arrived in an ordinary carriage and had refused Major Burke’s invitation to sit in the royal box, insisting instead on being seated among the people. When Burke had asked why, she had simply replied, ‘I like the people.’ Burke had duly taken her to the press box which was, to his great relief, unoccupied. Minutes into the performance, however, the door to the box had opened and several journalists and their lady friends had noisily taken their seats alongside the Princess. During a break in the show, one of the journalists had turned to Burke and asked who the other guests were.

  ‘Excuse my inquisitiveness,’ the journalist had said. ‘It’s only that I never saw such a likeness in my life to –’

  Burke had cut him short.

  ‘I know what you are going to say. The resemblance is quite striking, though I would ask you to refrain from remarking upon it. Since arriving in London Mrs Jones has heard nothing else. I fear she grows weary of the comparison.’

  An introduction was inescapable. Burke, in a cold perspiration, had proceeded to present the Princess and her companion as Colonel and Mrs Jones, friends of his from Texas. He had not breathed easily again until his troublesome charge was once more safely seated in her carriage, at which point she had laughed uproariously and thanked Burke for a grand adventure.