Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  ‘Perhaps he shan’t, if you and Edward have anything to do with it.’

  ‘Then we will have done our job. At least your husband appears to have suffered no ill effects from his banishment.’

  ‘Banishment? You make the House of Commons sound like a fairy kingdom.’

  ‘Now there’s a thought,’ Sir John interrupted cheerfully. ‘The question is whether one considers Matthews Prince Charming or the wicked stepmother.’

  ‘Or Sleeping Beauty,’ said the woman on his left archly. Maribel did not know her. She had a heart-shaped face and a mouth like a buttonhole. ‘One must only hope someone kisses him awake before those vagrants in Trafalgar Square start smashing up Pall Mall all over again.’

  Sir John laughed.

  ‘Be careful what you say about vagrants to Mr Webster,’ he said. ‘I gather he bites.’

  Mr Webster smiled blandly.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It surprises me only when decent-thinking men – and ladies, come to that – place a higher value on the windows of a gentleman’s club than on the lives of hundreds of starving poor.’

  ‘Come now,’ Sir John said, discomfited. ‘I hardly think this is the time.’

  ‘Then when is? When the wretched men and women and children in Trafalgar Square have conveniently expired?’

  ‘Mr Webster, no doubt you think me an old fuddy-duddy but I am old-fashioned enough to believe that political discussion is best kept for when the ladies have withdrawn. Perhaps we might talk of something more congenial?’

  Shrugging his shoulders Webster worked his spoon into the corners of his dish. A fleck of cream gleamed white on his chin and under the table his leg jiggled restlessly up and down, as though the agitation in him could not be contained. Maribel could feel the prickle of it in the air between them, in the tiny hairs on her arms.

  Picking up her spoon she dipped it into her egg, pressing the bowl of the spoon against the round yolk. It stared up at her balefully. She pressed harder. The yolk resisted and then burst, bleeding yellow into the cream. As she stirred the mixture a muscular swirl of raw white clung to the spoon. She pushed the dish away.

  Sir John hesitated. Then he began once more to converse with the lady on his left side. On Webster’s other side Mrs Van den Bergh was engaged in a discussion about Atlantic steamships. Mr Webster finished his egg and set down his spoon. The conversation of the other guests rumbled around them as the cocottes were taken away and soup was brought, a thick soup of grass green flecked with herbs, a spiral of cream curled at its centre. Webster picked up his spoon and took a mouthful of soup. He swallowed. Then, shaking his head, he set it back down.

  ‘Mrs Campbell Lowe,’ he murmured.

  Maribel’s stomach lurched.

  ‘I meant to ask,’ she said hurriedly. ‘How were the portraits from your sitting with Mr Pidgeon? Were you pleased with the results?’

  ‘I would rather talk about your work –’

  ‘I am ashamed to say that I have taken pitifully few photographs of late. Having said that, Major Burke at the Wild West has just recently agreed that I might photograph Buffalo Bill’s Indians. Not all dressed up like actors for the shows but behind the scenes as it were, the real men without all the whoops and the warpaint. It had occurred to me that perhaps your newspaper might be interested in publishing them.’

  She tailed off, discomfited by the intensity of Mr Webster’s stare, the coquettish smile stranded on her lips. As she put down her soup spoon and patted at her mouth with her napkin he leaned towards her, once again tugging at his stiff collar with one finger. Instinctively she leaned back.

  ‘We are more than just acquaintances, are we not?’ he murmured. ‘We understand one another?’

  Maribel’s stomach lurched.

  ‘I – I am not sure I follow you, Mr Webster.’

  Webster leaned closer. Maribel stared at her lap, her napkin twisted in her hands.

  ‘Horace Pidgeon spoke to me about your photograph,’ he murmured. ‘The one of the woman.’

  Maribel’s head jerked up.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

  ‘It was wrong of him, of course, but do not judge him harshly. Mr Pidgeon knows of our acquaintance. He implored me to speak with you, to persuade you to reconsider. Please, Mrs Campbell Lowe, hear me out. This has nothing whatsoever to do with my work at the Chronicle. I speak to you not as a news-paperman but as a Spiritualist.’

  ‘And I am supposed to find that reassuring?’

  He smiled as though she had made a joke.

  ‘I told Mr Pidgeon you would understand,’ he said. ‘I thought perhaps I might come to Turks Row tomorrow. So that I might see it.’

  Maribel shook her head.

  ‘There is nothing to see,’ she said. ‘Mr Pidgeon had no right to speak to you, no right at all. The photograph he saw was the result of a spoiled plate.’

  ‘With all due respect, madam, Mr Pidgeon has a great deal of experience in such matters and he assures me that your photograph is genuine. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘I know exactly what that means,’ she said angrily. ‘It means that Mr Pidgeon is mistaken. The plate was spoiled. It caused a smear on the photograph. That is the end of the matter.’

  ‘Mrs Campbell Lowe, have you ever seen a spirit photograph yourself ?’

  ‘Whether I have seen –’

  ‘I take it that you have not?’

  Maribel stared at him. ‘I do not care for swindles, Mr Webster,’ she said.

  ‘As I thought. So it is fair to assume, madam, that you would not consider yourself an expert in these matters?’

  ‘I really don’t see –’

  ‘Would you be willing to concede then that you are not the best person to ascertain whether the photograph in question was or was not genuine?’

  ‘On the contrary, I have all the experience I require. I have seen the photograph. You, sir, have not.’

  ‘But Horace Pidgeon has. And Pidgeon knows what he saw.’

  Maribel crossed her arms.

  ‘Mr Pidgeon may see fairies at the bottom of his garden for all I care. The photograph no longer exists. Which means that the point is moot, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I destroyed the plate,’ she said smoothly. ‘As for the prints, I burned them. There is no longer any photograph.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar, Mr Webster?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have done such a thing. You couldn’t possibly –’

  ‘Why on earth not? What use did I have for it?’

  ‘And its value to others, to – to the world? You never thought of that?’

  ‘My photograph was a disaster, a failed attempt at portraiture by an incompetent amateur. Forgive my candour, Mr Webster, but spirit photography is no more than a giant fraud practised upon the credulous. The picture was spoiled. It had no value of any kind.’

  Webster’s fists clenched on the table, his knuckles white. He leaned forward, so close she could smell the soup on his breath. The conversations around the table had grown louder and when he spoke his voice was hardly audible.

  ‘Am I to understand that you wilfully destroyed the work of God?’ he hissed, his milky eyes rolling in their sockets. ‘What kind of an agent of Satan are you?’

  Maribel leaned away from him, disgusted. When she thought of the squirm of excitement she had allowed him to rouse in her it caused her stomach to turn over.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she asked coldly.

  ‘I should have known it. I should have known it from the start, with your sighs and your sheep’s eyes and your oh-so-charming little blushes. I am married, Mrs Campbell Lowe, and a faithful husband, but what does a woman like you care for the sanctity of the marriage vow, for righteousness and ordinary English decency? What does a woman like you care for Truth?’

  Maribel clenched her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking.

  ‘
Are you quite finished?’

  Webster did not answer. He was breathing hard, the stiff front of his shirt heaving queasily, and there was perspiration on his forehead. Maribel took a sip of sherry. Then, setting down her glass, she turned her back on Mr Webster and began to converse with Sir John.

  ***

  The cab rattled briskly through the dark streets. Maribel leaned her head against the cracked leather upholstery and stared out of the window. In Grosvenor Square a gaggle of carriages loitered outside a grand house, the coachmen sprawled on their boxes, knots of liveried footmen trading insults. Lamps burned brightly in the pillared porch, and snatches of music and laughter drifted from the open windows. The windows were vast, like great aquaria. Behind the glass, gleams of bright silk flashed and dipped. The cab skirted the carriages to cross the square, passing into the shadowed gloom of the beech trees that fringed the gardens. Maribel watched her hands grow white and then a greenish yellow as the cab emerged once more into the gaslit dazzle of South Audley Street.

  A cab clattered past them, heading north. Otherwise the streets were empty of traffic. At the corner of Curzon Street a girl in a black shawl lingered, one hand at her throat, drawing circles on the pavement with a slippered foot. In the gaslight her scarlet dress had a brown tint, like dried blood. She looked up as the cab slowed at the junction, her eyes like dark holes in her pale face, and for a moment she gazed at Maribel and Maribel gazed back. Then the cabman hissed, the cab jerked forward and she was gone.

  Maribel shifted a little on the leather bench, drawing her fur cape more closely about her shoulders. Near the park two policemen leaned against high iron railings, pale brows above the blackout of whiskers and thick serge. A girl hurried past them, a servant of some kind perhaps, her bonnet low and her cloak drawn up around her chin, and one of the policemen called out to her and the other one laughed. The cab turned then to take the park road and, as the clouds parted to reveal a sliver of moon, it was possible to make out inky bundles huddled beneath the trees.

  Somewhere a dog barked. Maribel lit a cigarette. Roused by the flare of the match Edward yawned and pressed his hand to the back of his neck.

  ‘Poor Bo, what bad luck to get Webster,’ he said. ‘The man is quite intolerable.’

  ‘No. He’s worse.’

  ‘He gave Worsley the most fearsome lecture after dinner. I can’t imagine what possessed him. His position at the Chronicle has been precarious ever since the abduction case. Without Worsley’s support on the board Webster doesn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘That man is a – he’s insufferable. What was our poor host’s offence?’

  ‘Defending the right of scientists to research without censorship.’

  ‘How can anyone object to that?’

  ‘With the utmost moral outrage, when the study is of human sexual behaviour. Do you remember that doctor, Ellis he was called, whom we met once at dinner with Edward Carpenter? Fellowship of the New Life and all that “peace and vegetables” tripe?’

  ‘“The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all.”’

  ‘Exactly. It would appear that Mr Ellis has rather lost interest in the perfectibility of mankind and has embarked instead upon a scientific investigation of sexology in general and sexual inversion in particular.’

  Maribel thought of Oscar and of his famished helplessness in the presence of the beautiful and indifferent boy who lodged with them at Tite Street. Then she thought of Mr Webster’s milky stare and her insides clenched.

  ‘He hopes to publish an academic analysis along the lines of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis,’ Edward said. ‘Well, naturally Webster denounced Ellis as Satan’s pornographer, and when Worsley objected, Webster saw red. He even had the gall to demand of Worsley how he could look his wife in the eye.’

  ‘Webster’s father was a minister,’ Maribel said, remembering Charlotte.

  ‘I should have known it. The man is a bigot and a damned hypocrite, Bunyan on the library shelves and dirty pictures under the bed. The disgust he parades is nothing but blind terror at the voracity of his own appetites. Don’t be deceived by the reverential references to the invalid wife. There is no man in the world more infatuated with sex than Alfred Webster.’

  Maribel squirmed.

  ‘That is just what Charlotte said.’

  ‘I won’t ask how she knows.’

  At Cadogan Square Edward paid the cab and helped Maribel out. They were in the hallway when he began to laugh. Maribel put a hand over his mouth.

  ‘Quiet,’ she hissed. ‘You’ll wake Her Ladyship.’

  Edward kissed her fingertips as together they tiptoed up the stairs. He was laughing again by the time they let themselves into their flat.

  ‘What?’ asked Maribel. It had been days since she had seen him laugh. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I just remembered,’ he said. ‘Lady Worsley told me the most marvellous story about Webster. After all that Sink of Iniquity business, Worsley went to visit Webster in Holloway gaol. He had thought to cheer his spirits, but when he was shown to Webster’s cell, he found the man positively elated. When Worsley rather nervously enquired what it was that had made him so cheerful, Webster told him that, while exercising in the prison yard that morning, it had occurred to him that if anyone at that moment had asked who was the most important man alive, the answer would have to be – Webster himself. The prisoner in this cell, I believe, were his exact words.’

  ‘No. Really?’

  ‘Apparently. Isn’t it wonderful? She also told me that every year, on the anniversary of his imprisonment, Webster insists upon parading about London in his prisoner’s uniform for the entire day, cap and all. An act of remembrance, apparently. The irony is that, as a first-class misdemeanant, after the first day he wore his own suit of clothes.’

  Maribel thought of Webster’s clenched fists, the hatred in his milky eyes.

  ‘I think perhaps he is quite mad,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Of course he is. Only the insane believe themselves always to be right.’

  Much later, she rose and went into the drawing room. It was cold. She shivered, huddling into her nightgown as she unlocked the drawer at the back of her desk and drew out the photograph of Charlotte. The edges of the photograph curled a little. They had grown velvety with handling. She should mount it, she thought, but she knew that she would not. She ran her thumb very gently over the blur that smeared Charlotte’s skirts, touching the place where an overheated imagination might see a face. It was possible to see anything, she thought, if one wanted to enough. For a moment she pressed the photograph against her chest with the flats of her hands. Then, impatiently, she pushed the picture back into the drawer and, locking it, went back to bed.

  16

  HER EQUIPMENT WAS HEAVY and she travelled to the Wild West by hansom, her boxes tucked around her feet. Raw gusts of wind rattled the windows and tugged at the hats of pedestrians as they hustled, heads bent, along the busy pavements. Maribel pulled her cloak more tightly about her, glad of the fox-fur tippet around her neck. She rested the side of her face against it, rubbing her cheek against the shivery softness of its underbelly, and hoped it was not going to rain. She had almost not come. At breakfast she had told Edward she was not feeling well and thought it might be prudent to cancel the Wild West and spend the day in bed. He had considered her over the top of his spectacles. Then he had lowered the newspaper.

  ‘My father once told me that one only regrets the things one does not do,’ he said. ‘Aside from the inescapable fact that it would have behoved my father to regret a good deal more of the things he did do, it is one of the few wise things he ever said.’

  ‘I don’t mean not to go. Just not today. If I am coming down with something –’

  ‘Why are you so nervous?’

  ‘I’m not nervous.’

  ‘Good. Because you have no need to be. You will be wonderful. And you will go if I have to drag you there myself.’

  If the Speaker of th
e Commons had hoped that the mortification of exile would put an end to the excesses of the Member for Argyllshire he was to be considerably disappointed. In the days after the Worsleys’ dinner Edward returned to Parliament with a new and bitter determination, his old irony ground by the seven-day absence into something sharper and more vicious. When he left Cadogan Mansions in the mornings he slammed the front door. Maribel had taken to holding her breath as she tiptoed across the hall. She had no desire to face the wrath of Lady Wingate.

  At Drayton Gardens an overturned dray blocked the road. Maribel stared out of the window at the scrofulous bark of the plane trees that lined the pavement. When Edward had asked if she meant to write a plan for her day at the Wild West she had been emphatic. A plan constrained possibility, she said, and precluded the taking of risk. The preconceived shape of it limited what the eye could see, the heart feel. It was only in those spaces in oneself that opened when one was afraid that inspiration could truly take hold.

  She had been right, she thought as the cab driver touched his whip to the horse’s rump and the hansom began very slowly to edge forward. All the same she wished she had a plan. She had told too many people about her expedition to return with nothing. She thought again of the coquettish way in which she had suggested to Mr Webster that he might want to publish the photographs in his newspaper. Though almost a week had passed she still felt a sour squirm of nausea whenever she thought back to that night. She had not made a fool of herself, not quite, but she had come very close. When she had turned away from Webster to talk to Sir John he had made a sideways remark about political passions running high and the lady on his other side had pressed her buttonhole mouth tight shut and blinked her eyes in a way that had made Maribel want to pour soup over her head. Again and again she reassured herself that she had not really thought Mr Webster so very interesting, that, until he had revealed himself to be a madman, he had given a reasonably effective impression of an intelligent and entertaining companion whom any woman might have found congenial. Then she thought of the jolt in her stomach, the heat that had suffused her when he looked at her, and she was flooded yet again with shame at her foolishness and her mendacity.