Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  Edward tore the letter up, incensed at least as much by Webster’s synthetic bonhomie as by the expectation that he would wish to disclose private family matters to a newspaper of dubious reputation. The truth was that Webster’s letter touched a nerve. So far the press had refrained from publishing Edward’s history but privately there were many who had reason to recall his father’s violent descent into insanity. Already several distant relatives and a number of Vivien’s friends had written to Edward to rebuke him for his misguided actions, the misery he was causing his poor mother, who had surely suffered enough. Propriety prevented outright accusation but it was there all the same in the spaces between the words, the shadow of his father’s madness, the taint of inheritance. Nobody doubted the publicity that Edward’s trial was bound to attract. At least until that was over Edward Campbell Lowe and his reputation would be dissected and discussed, his felonies and his failings picked over until there was no meat left on them. It was not difficult to imagine careless remarks to a curious newspaperman, whispered insinuations. The years in the asylum were long past and not exactly a secret but, as Edward knew, they were shameful enough to cause damage. His reputation, after all, was hardly one of solid respectability.

  She did not tell him, then, about Ida. She said nothing of her own moment of madness with Ida’s husband, her ruinously ill-judged confession. How could she? He had expressly told her that there could be no more contact with her family. She had agreed. Of course she had. Both of them understood only too well the scandal that would engulf them if she were ever to be exposed. If Edward’s own skeletons were regrettable, hers were nothing short of catastrophic. If the truth were to be discovered his career would be over. And not just his career. Sometimes, late at night, when she lay awake smoking and staring up into the darkness, she tortured herself with imagining Edward at the breakfast table opening the paper, the slackening in his features as he read about her baby, the baby she had never told him about, and she had to press her fingernails into her palms to stop herself from crying out.

  Edith had never sent her Ida’s address. Presumably she believed it was better for Ida, better for both of them. Edith had never understood anything. If Maribel only had Ida’s address, she thought, she could write to her and explain. She could confess the terrible foolishness of her impulse to confide in Ida’s husband, the overwhelming urge she had felt to tell him something secret so that she might somehow be closer to Ida. She could implore her to intercede with her husband, to make him see how absolutely crucial it was that he never tell another soul.

  Days passed. Maribel took to chewing her nails. She smoked cigarettes as though she meant to devour them in a single inhalation, lighting one from the burning stub of another. But however many cigarettes she smoked, however much she wrote letters and busied herself in the flat, however often she told herself that there was no point in stewing on things one could not change, the worry continued to bubble up inside her until she thought she would burst from it. Once at Inverallich the vet had pressed the tip of a knife into the stomach of a colicky horse, discharging a whistle of foul-smelling gas. If she could only be sure of Ida, she thought as she bit at the tattered skin around her thumbnail, if she could know beyond doubt that neither she nor her husband had said or ever meant to say anything, that their discretion was absolutely to be depended upon, it would be like that. It would finally let out the fear.

  Meanwhile she scanned the newspapers desperately, her eyes raking the print for any reference to the Member for Argyllshire. At breakfast every morning she watched Edward’s slow fingers as he sorted the envelopes and she had to fight the impulse to snatch the letters from his hands. Every morning she prayed for a letter from Ida, the hope in her so sharp and vain that it blistered her stomach. But when at last Edward handed her her pile and she looked through them, the longing in her was met with a rush of guilt and apprehension at least as fierce as any hope, and the blister in her stomach burned like an ulcer.

  25

  CHARLOTTE’S ARM WAS MENDING well and the doctor had granted his permission for her to rise in the afternoons and receive visitors, as long as the arm in its cast was secured in a sling. Charlotte had quickly abandoned the doctor’s calico in favour of brightly coloured silk scarves, which she pinned at the elbow with a brooch. The effect was rather dashing. On Monday afternoon Maribel arrived to find the arm swathed in a scarf printed with pink cabbage roses, and a pair of ladies whom she knew a little as the wives of Arthur’s school chums already ensconced in Charlotte’s yellow silk sofas. The conversation stopped abruptly as she was shown in. Only her unwillingness to cause embarrassment to Charlotte prevented Maribel from turning round and going home.

  Half an hour of idle prattle did little to ease her mind. The ladies painstakingly steered the conversation away from the icebergs of politics and economics, but it seemed to Maribel that, for all their fixed smiles and fastidious politeness, Edward might as well have been there with them, his rear out and his trousers around his ankles. They would surely not have felt more disgusted by him, and more mortified on her behalf, if he had defecated right there and then, in front of them, on Charlotte’s elegant Oriental carpet.

  It was difficult to imagine a less prudent time to enquire after Ida. Maribel bit her lip, her toes clenched with impatience. The hands moved slowly around the clock and still the ladies showed no sign of going home. Someone remarked on the weather, someone else upon the prettiness of Charlotte’s tea tray. The conversation faltered. Spoons clinked against saucers. Maribel set her cup down on the table.

  ‘I don’t suppose you ever heard from your Good Samaritan?’ she said with studied carelessness and she gave a little shrug to underscore the casual nature of her enquiry. Charlotte did not answer immediately. She was distracted, preoccupied with the matter of more hot water for the tea. She frowned as the maid fumbled with the pot, slopping a little on the lacquered table, sighing as the flustered girl mopped ineffectually at the spill. With her good hand she absently made circles on the curve of her belly. Maribel hesitated, lighting a cigarette. The ladies wrinkled their noses.

  ‘The Shawl Lady,’ Maribel said again. ‘Did she ever write?’

  The tone of idle curiosity was more difficult to pull off the second time. Maribel could feel the perspiration under her arms. Charlotte frowned at her.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? I am quite sure that I told you.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘This is the lady who came to my rescue at the Academy,’ Charlotte explained to the other ladies. ‘She gave me her shawl so afterwards I naturally wished to return it but, like Cinderella and the glass slipper, I had no idea who she was.’

  ‘I hope you sent a footman to every house in the kingdom to find the girl it would fit,’ Mrs Norton asked.

  Charlotte laughed.

  ‘Fortunately Maribel is of a more practical bent,’ she said. ‘We left my address with the Academy in case the Shawl Lady enquired. And she must have done, because she came to collect it on Monday.’

  ‘She was here?’ Maribel said.

  ‘Well, of course. I should have invited her here earlier if I had had any notion of how to find her.’

  Ida had been here. She had been in Charlotte’s house. Maribel thought of her standing in the hall with its polished walnut table and its silver bowl of flowers and the thick curving banister with its coiled finial, and the thought of it changed the taste of the air. Maribel frequently visited on Mondays. If Edward had not been hurt she might have been here, might have sat on this yellow silk sofa and drunk tea with Ida out of Charlotte’s forget-me-not cups.

  Except that Ida had always hated tea. Their mother had insisted that she learn to endure it, had considered the drinking of tea a social skill like needlepoint and playing the piano, but Ida had emptied her cup into a pot plant when Mrs Bryant was not looking. Was it possible, Maribel thought suddenly, that Ida had chosen a Monday for her call because she had hoped to find Maribel there too? The idea was f
anciful, of course, for there was no way Ida could possibly have known about Maribel’s Mondays, but although she dismissed it as absurd, it left behind a residue of brightness, a faint golden gleam.

  ‘What kind of a person was she?’ Lady Brooke asked.

  ‘A doctor’s wife. Quite respectable, if a little patched and darned around the edges.’

  Maribel fumbled another cigarette from the case on the table, striking a match, sucking the smoke down hard into her lungs. Like all exquisite pleasures, it was almost pain.

  ‘Was that sensible?’ Mrs Norton said. ‘I mean, giving out your address like that. She could have been anyone.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. It was the Academy, not the Clapham Omnibus.’

  ‘They allow all sorts of people into the Academy these days.’

  ‘On the contrary, it turned out that we were practically acquainted,’ Charlotte said. ‘You’ll not believe this, Maribel, but it turns out that the Shawl Lady is none other than Mrs Dr Coffin!’

  Maribel coughed so violently that Mrs Norton was obliged to pat her on the back.

  ‘The unfortunately named Dr Coffin, from the Wild West, the one the boys worked themselves into fits over? The Shawl Lady is his wife. Isn’t that marvellous?’

  ‘Isn’t it,’ Maribel said faintly.

  ‘She even apologised that it was her, and not her husband, who had been there to assist me. Apparently he is something of a whizz with broken bones. He once set a cowboy’s leg in the arena in the middle of a show.’

  ‘Buck Taylor!’ Mrs Norton declared. ‘That was the cowboy’s name, don’t you remember? It was all over the newspapers for days. The West London Hospital had to create a special waiting room because he received so many visitors.’

  ‘Buck Taylor,’ Lady Brooke agreed. ‘Wasn’t it said that if he died half the housemaids in London would die with him, of broken hearts?’

  ‘Then thank Heavens for Dr Coffin,’ Charlotte said. ‘It is hard enough to find good servants as it is.’

  The ladies laughed. Maribel leaned forwards towards Charlotte.

  ‘The doctor’s wife,’ she said. ‘Did – did she stay long?’

  Charlotte shrugged. ‘No more than half an hour. She seemed in rather a hurry.’

  ‘Half an hour?’ Mrs Norton said. ‘To collect a shawl? That is no hurry, my dear. I should think she took one look at the house and decided to hold out for a reward.’

  ‘I told you, she was quite respectable. We talked for a short time. I returned her shawl and, yes, gave her a small token to express my gratitude. Of course I did, she had been very kind. Then she went away.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she left you her address, did she?’ Maribel said. ‘It’s only – well, I should like to write to her too. To thank her. I should have made a terrible mess of things without her.’

  ‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’

  ‘All the same. You have the address?’

  ‘Actually, no. I never thought to ask her. She has her shawl back, after all, and I already have a rather good doctor of my own.’

  Mrs Norton chuckled. Maribel stared into her teacup, trying to compose herself. The raw spot in her stomach burned and she swallowed a mouthful of tea. The liquid tasted sickly, too heavily smoked, like wood ash mixed with syrup. It occurred to her that perhaps she did not much like tea herself. Most certainly she did not like tea like this, thick with boredom and self-satisfaction and a fine puckered milk-skin of disdain. Maribel did not know how Charlotte, who was clever and witty and inquisitive and the dearest person she knew, could endure it. She thought of Edward, who only the previous evening had despaired to her of progress in the House.

  ‘Members of Parliament are no better than ladies at tea,’ he had raged. ‘Brought up from birth to skirt awkward issues, to leave unfortunate truths unspoken. Infinitely preferable to say nothing, to do nothing, than to display lack of breeding by embarrassing one’s fellow guests.’

  Edward was no lady. William Morris, safely in exile on the remote Isle of Socialism, might berate him as too well mannered by half but Edward had never flinched from saying what he believed should be said and, in doing so, he had made himself as unpopular in the House as any Irish member. Now he faced gaol, because the genteel tea-sippers of Westminster were afraid that, if they gave so much as a heel of bread to a starving man, the wretched would rise up as one and take for themselves the wealth of the capitalist classes which their labour had earned.

  The conversation had drifted, the Shawl Lady forgotten. Maribel squeezed the tips of her fingers hard between her thumb and index finger, turning them yellow, and prayed for the other ladies to leave so that she might talk to Charlotte alone. Charlotte poured more tea.

  ‘Will you be well enough to travel to Sussex for Christmas, Mrs Charterhouse?’ Mrs Norton asked.

  ‘I should go if I were three-quarters dead or answer to the children for the consequences. The Christmas rituals at Oakwood have been polished to a veritable gloss, right down to the order of the stockings on the mantel.’

  ‘How Arthur must love it,’ Lady Brooke said.

  ‘You have never seen a man happier. This year he is scheming to dress one of the barns as the stable at Bethlehem. There have been frantic letters for weeks about gaslit stars and the practicability of securing a newborn lamb in the middle of December.’

  ‘Do you remember the year he decorated the ponies with mistletoe and holly and had them led into the drawing room after lunch like Spanish mules, with all the presents in panniers on their backs?’ Lady Brooke said, shaking her head.

  Charlotte laughed. ‘Neither my mother nor the carpet have ever truly recovered.’

  Mrs Norton turned to Maribel.

  ‘Will you spend Christmas in Scotland, Mrs Campbell Lowe?’

  Maribel contemplated Mrs Norton and something inside her broke open.

  ‘Not if my husband is in prison,’ she said.

  Mrs Norton’s neck mottled red. She took a sip of tea, choking a little in her haste, and coughed, her fist pressed against her lips. On the mantel the Dresden clock chimed out the hour.

  ‘You must have read that he has been arrested for his part in Sunday’s protest?’ Maribel asked in the same conversational tone. ‘That he is to stand trial?’

  ‘Well, of course there has been some – in the newspapers and suchlike – a mention or two –’

  ‘Assault and unlawful assembly. Those are the charges, even though he was unarmed and attacked without provocation by a policeman who kicked him in the stomach and split open his head. It is most puzzling. Perhaps you can explain to me how an assembly can be deemed unlawful when the Home Secretary has no constitutional power to declare it so?’

  ‘Maribel, dearest –’

  Maribel shook her head at Charlotte.

  ‘The Times has declared my husband a disgrace to the House of Commons because he upholds the legal right of ordinary men to protest, to speak and to be heard. And yet somehow they contrive to feel no shame at the disgrace that nearly half of men in this country are ineligible to vote. The disgrace that Members of Parliament continue to perform their roles unpaid and therefore the vast majority, when they trouble to attend the House at all, do so only to represent the interests of the privileged classes, that nearly one hundred men and women were taken to Hammersmith Hospital with serious injuries last Sunday because the House bestowed upon itself the power to declare a legal meeting illegal and brought in the Life Guards to drive their point home. My husband, a disgrace to the Commons? How dare they? It is the Commons that disgraces him.’

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Then Lady Brooke cleared her throat, patting her chest with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘You have heard, I suppose, that young Archie Stanhope is to marry an American girl?’ she said, leaning towards Charlotte. ‘Pretty as paint and, oh, the pots and pots of money.’

  ‘Those American girls are a menace,’ Mrs Norton said, rallying. ‘Brandishing their dollars like farmers on market
day.’

  Maribel set her teacup back on the tray and stood. She was filled with a strange exhilaration.

  ‘Charlotte dearest, it has been such fun. I do hope I shall have a great deal more time for gay little parties of this kind once my husband is safely behind bars. Until then, I am afraid it is time I went home.’

  26

  EDWARD WAS IN A good mood. He whistled as he dressed for dinner and, when Maribel went in to him, he took her face between his hands and kissed her full on the lips. Maribel looked at him, at the sleepy contentment that softened his mouth and glowed like sunshine in his brown eyes, and she knew where he had been. She turned away, busying herself with gathering up his socks, the shirt that he had discarded on the floor.

  ‘Leave those,’ he said. ‘Alice will get them.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  She twisted the clothes into a ball, wanting and not wanting to catch the smell of him in that place, and dropped them on the button-backed chair. Edward leaned towards the mirror, fumbling with his tie.

  ‘Let me do that,’ she said. ‘So you had a good day?’

  ‘Not bad at all. I lunched with John Worsley which is always a pleasure. He is having a ghastly time with Webster, you know. The Chronicle board is positively up in arms.’

  ‘You look distraught,’ she said drily.

  Edward grinned. ‘Webster is not a man it’s very easy to feel sorry for. I met with Hyndman this afternoon. There is to be another demonstration in the square this Sunday. It would seem that the Home Secretary has misjudged the mettle of the working man.’