Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  Your M

  ‘You look happy,’ Maribel remarked to Alice as they waited to board the diligence for Orense.

  ‘Well, of course I look happy. It’s over, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s over.’

  It was a dank grey day and the mules at the traces of the ancient conveyance looked thinner and more dispirited than she remembered them. She glanced up at the roof of the coach where their boxes were lashed alongside the jute sacks of earth from the mine. In the doorway of the inn Sr Muñoz pumped the hand of the innkeeper and made extravagant promises to return with glad news. The driver of the diligence whistled. Sr Muñoz gave the innkeeper a final triumphant clap on the back and bounded across the muddy churn of the yard to swing himself aboard the conveyance.

  As the diligence bumped along the poor road away from the village Maribel looked back towards the inn. Slowly the tumble of buildings shrank and slipped behind the curve of the hill until they were no longer visible. Maribel settled into her seat. She would never come back, she was certain of that.

  They stayed in Madrid while tests were carried out on the samples Sr Muñoz had collected from the mine. Although he remained resolutely optimistic until the last handful of earth had been ground and blasted to a fine dust in the crucibles of the Mining College, Maribel allowed herself only one wild moment of hopefulness in the moment before the engineer assigned to their assay announced the results of their analysis. She knew before he spoke that the mine was infructuous. Whatever the earth had once yielded had long been exhausted. There was not one trace of gold in its ancient clay.

  Sr Muñoz seemed bewildered. He shook his head angrily as though plagued by flies, unable to comprehend either the possibility of failure or the pig-headed stupidity of the scientific instruments. Maribel only shrugged. Early the next morning they made their farewells to Sr Muñoz and began the long journey back to England. ‘The mine was always a million to one chance,’ she said to Alice as the train jolted northwards over the ill-closed Spanish points. ‘A grand and crazy dream. I don’t suppose dreams are meant to come true.’

  ‘You would tell me that now, ma’am, after all you have put me through?’

  Maribel grinned. ‘Were it not for the joy of tormenting you, Alice, I should have turned back at Plymouth.’

  ‘You are a wicked woman, ma’am. Still, at least next time you drag me to abroad I shall know to bring my own sandwiches. Not to mention several pounds of proper English tea.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry. The mine is a dud, after all. I have no plans to return.’

  ‘Not here, perhaps. My brother Joe was like you. The itchiest two feet ever laced into a pair of boots. There’ll be another somewhere soon enough, you mark my words.’

  ‘You would do that? You would come away with me again?’

  Alice rolled her eyes. ‘Ma’am, what choice do I have? I saw them snails you ate straight from the shells. If I don’t go with you who will stop you from losing your head and going native?’

  The two women were silent, staring out of the window. It had begun to rain and streaks of water snaked in diagonal lines across the glass. Maribel lit a cigarette.

  ‘Tell me about Joe,’ she said.

  ‘Not much to tell. The boy thought he was David bleedin’ Livingstone. Never shut up about Africa and finding the Nile and whatnot. He’d not managed a month apprenticed when he ran off to join the navy, stupid bugger. Sorry. Broke our mam’s heart.’

  ‘Did he make it to Africa?’

  ‘Never got past Portsmouth. Influenza.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Alice shrugged. ‘Weak chest. He’d have made a rotten explorer.’

  ‘I suppose one must admire him for trying.’

  ‘He was a stupid bugger. No other way of saying it.’

  The whistle screamed, the brakes doing noisy battle with the tracks as the train pulled into a station. A family got into their carriage, a fluster of boxes and bags and children chattering like starlings in rapid Spanish. They spread a picnic, offering food to Maribel and Alice, who declined politely. Maribel took out her book but the words swam before her eyes. Her thoughts were all of Joe Tweddle with his weak chest, who strove for Africa and died without ever getting his feet wet.

  34

  EDWARD AND JOHN BURNS were released from Pentonville Prison at seven o’clock on a dark Saturday morning in February, less than a fortnight after Maribel returned from Spain. The two men had served ten of the twelve weeks of their sentences, having earned remission for good behaviour. Though the early hour had been chosen deliberately by the authorities to ensure the prisoners’ quiet release, an enthusiastic crowd awaited them outside the gates of the prison. As they stepped out into the street they were greeted with a barrage of noisy cheers. Several men in heavy boots threw their hats into the air and others thrust food into the freed men’s hands, hunks of bread and slices of pie which the two men bit into ravenously before adjourning to breakfast in the coffee shop on the other side of Caledonian Road.

  While they were still eating Maribel arrived in a hansom, stepping down amid a flurry of applause from the knot of supporters still gathered on the pavement outside. She had risen early, anxious to be punctual, but somehow, with one thing and another, she found herself delayed, and by the time she was ready to leave the flat, the cab driver had been waiting for the best part of an hour. She had spent the journey huddled in the seat, fighting impatience at his cautious progress and the strong urge to return to Cadogan Mansions. Her grey silk dress was too obviously good, her hat too fashionable. She wished now that she had worn her brown walking suit after all.

  She paid the cabman and turned to go in. Edward was sitting with John Burns at a table in the steamed-up window, the words ‘MURPHY’S COFFEE HOUSE’ in time-worn gold lettering in an arch above his head. The sight of him in his familiar long black overcoat at the crude wooden table, his red-gold head bent over a plate of bacon and eggs, caused her to catch her breath. It was only then that she understood how afraid she had been that he was gone from her for ever. Inside Edward kissed her and she pretended not to cry. He was thin and very pale, dark smears of exhaustion beneath his eyes. He smelled different. There were crescents of dirt under his fingernails. She shook John Burns’s hand and toasted their health in tea so strong it left a stain on the inside of the cup. Mr Hyndman of the SDF arrived with two other men whom Maribel did not recognise. They were both young, one barely more than a boy. The proprietor brought more chairs and a basket of fresh rolls. When it was time to leave he refused to allow Maribel to pay the bill.

  Outside, a handful of men still loitered on the pavement. Two or three pushed forward as they emerged from the coffee shop, shouting questions.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ Hyndman murmured to Edward. ‘They’re none of them on our side.’

  ‘Are there any left that are?’

  Hyndman grimaced, steering him round the corner to where a hansom was waiting.

  ‘Courtesy of Mrs Aveling,’ he said.

  Mr Burns looked at Edward.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ he said with a crooked smile.

  Edward took Burns’s hand. His lips were pressed very tightly together.

  ‘Adios, amigo.’

  ‘Till next time.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They looked at each other, their hands still clasped. Then Burns turned away, the two young men following close behind him. Edward watched him go as Mr Hyndman helped Maribel into the cab. Then slowly he turned and climbed in beside her.

  On the pavement Hyndman raised his hand in a salute. The cabman touched his whip to the horse’s neck and with a jingle of harness the cab jolted forward. Edward flinched. Gently Maribel stretched over and placed her gloved hand on his. He pressed it, sliding his fingers between hers. They did not speak. The brim of Maribel’s hat was broad and low, its edge nudging Edward’s shoulder. He shifted away from her a little to avoid crushing it. Impatiently she pulled the hat off, dropping it at her feet. He loo
ked down at her and very faintly he smiled. Tucking her other hand into the crook of his arm she pulled him close, setting her head on his shoulder. The prison smell of him mixed with the worn leather of the hansom seat, the wool of his coat. He rested his cheek on the top of her head. His breath was slow and very careful.

  The cab rattled south along Baker Street, the panorama of brightly coloured shops and restaurants unspooling before them like a bolt of cloth, but she closed her eyes, the world contained in the warmth of his lean thigh against hers, the lurching slant of his shoulder, the weight of his head. The pressure of his fingers between hers stretched the tendons, pulling the skin tight around her knuckles. When she squeezed his hand he set his other one on top of hers, clasping it tightly, so that she felt the throb of the pulse in her fingers, the steady thump of her heart.

  The adjustment to ordinary life was not as easy for Edward as either of them had hoped. The injuries to his skull caused crippling headaches, while the blows to the stomach had resulted in internal inflammation that refused to heal. The pain kept him from sleeping.

  Several times Maribel rose in the night to find him sitting alone and in darkness in the drawing room at Cadogan Mansions, staring out over the empty street. He said it was the silence that woke him, that in prison the nights had echoed with the tramping of men up and down their cells, the mysterious code of rappings by which prisoners communicated with one another repeating themselves in patterns over and over again until one’s skull sang with it. He talked of the twisting and turning of those interminable nights, the frequent rising from his narrow bench, the restless pacing, the ritual touching of the few articles in the cell, always in the same order, the counting to one thousand, to one hundred thousand, the weariness of lying down only to rise again moments later and begin all over again. In the darkness he had reflected on every base thing he had ever done. He had shouted and wept and cursed like a drab and beaten the walls with his fists until they ached, until at last he fell into a thin uneasy doze that seemed to last only a minute or two before he was roused again by the sounding of the morning bell. He had marked the passing of the nights on the wall by his bench with a bent pin he had found hidden in his salt box. It helped him, he said, to think of the man who had left it. It was the closest he could get to a conversation.

  On those nights Maribel did not try to persuade him back to bed. She brought a blanket to put around his shoulders and sat with him, her legs tucked up beneath her, as he yielded to the spate of words dammed up for ten solitary weeks. In the light of the street lamp his hair was bronze, his face a sulphurous yellow. The winter dawns were late and it was still night when they returned to bed. In the darkness they made love quietly, tenderly, their cheeks pressed together as though they were dancing.

  As soon as he was able Edward began to work. The day after his release several boxes were delivered to Cadogan Mansions from the offices of the Socialist League, filled to the brim with files. Maribel urged him to take time to recuperate but he told her that he had wasted enough time already. It was plain that he was not well. Several times she came into the drawing room to find him asleep in his armchair, his glasses crooked on his face, the floor around his feet littered with dropped newspaper clippings and sheaves of memoranda.

  He had been free six days when he returned to Parliament to attend a disorderly debate on public meetings. Despite his imprisonment he had retained his seat in the House but, from the moment of his arrival, it was plain that he had categorically forfeited the support of his fellow Members, his own party among them. In the Palace of Westminster it was universally agreed that Edward Campbell Lowe was, as the Times had opined, a disgrace to the House. His actions were condemned as brag-gadocio, the intolerable posturings of a rabble-rouser and political sensationalist. Even those who had supported him in the past had to concede that he had shown himself to be, without question, an enemy of law and order. Such a man, it was agreed, had no part to play in the democratic constitution of their great Empire.

  The Liberals were not foolish enough to vilify one of their own in public but when a Conservative backbencher accused the Member for Argyllshire of being nothing short of a revolutionary, there were murmurs of assent on both sides of the House. Edward stood, begging the Speaker’s indulgence. In an impassioned speech he declared that if to be a revolutionary was to wish to improve the wretched condition of the poor, to seek a fair wage for fair hours, to demand on their behalf a properly democratic manner of government, to fight for the payment of Members of Parliament and to resist with every fibre of his being the illegal suppression of free speech, then, yes, he was indeed a revolutionary.

  The speech, though eloquent, found little favour with the floor. Edward sat down to booing on both sides of the House. Later, on his way out of the Chamber, he found himself walking beside the Prime Minister.

  ‘Well, well, Mr Lowe,’ Lord Salisbury said mordantly. ‘And where exactly do you intend to erect your guillotine?’

  Edward raised an eyebrow. ‘In Trafalgar Square, of course,’ he replied.

  Salisbury’s mouth moved in its thicket of whiskers but he said nothing. The next day the Herald carried a caricature of Edward in his prison uniform floating back towards Pentonville Prison in a balloon filled with his own hot air. When he next encountered Salisbury in the House his greeting was answered with a brief and chilly nod. It was clear that the Prime Minister considered it unseemly for the shamed to make jokes, even at their own expense.

  ‘I have a new title,’ Edward remarked drily the next day as he leafed through the newspapers. ‘“Disgraced”. “The disgraced Mr Campbell Lowe” and here “the Disgraced Member for Argyllshire”. That one sounds like the title of a Punch cartoon.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon.’

  ‘Hang on a moment. In the Chronicle, our friend Mr Webster has ploughed his own furrow and gone for “dilettante”. Well, that’s good. Whatever one’s views of the man one must admire his refusal to swim with the current. Oh no, I’m wrong. Here is “disgraced”, two lines down.’

  Maribel shook her head.

  ‘I can’t believe Lord Worsley allows him to hang on. If I had known that brute would still be editor when you got out I would never have given him such a piece of my mind.’

  Unable to contain herself she had confessed her outburst to Edward soon after he got out of prison. To her surprise Edward had been sanguine. It turned out that Mrs Aveling had written to him at Pentonville, expressing both support for his endeavours and admiration for his wife’s candour and her dauntless spirit. It was plain, she had remarked, that the two of them were perfectly matched.

  Edward smiled. ‘That, my dearest Bo, is utter rot.’

  ‘I’m still sorry. He might have deserved it but you don’t. Things are already difficult enough without me making them worse.’

  Edward took her hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘Well, don’t be. Mr Alfred Webster is an abomination and it was about time someone told him so. I just wish I’d been there to hear you do it. Mrs Aveling tells me that the fearless crusader for justice quaked in his boots like a schoolboy.’

  Maribel smiled reluctantly. Though she could scarcely allow herself to believe it, it seemed that perhaps there was, after all, nothing to fear. Once the spiteful coverage of the trial had abated, there had been no further mention of Edward in the Chronicle until his release, which was reported in a short paragraph at the bottom of page 5.

  ‘It’s a shame, of course,’ Edward mused. ‘Webster may be a double-dealing bastard, but, despite everything, he is a Socialist. Those leaders of his attacked me not because of my principles but because he doubted my seriousness. He is the only news-paperman in London who has ever wanted me to be more myself.’

  Edward was called to a meeting with the most senior members of the Liberal Party. While the whip was not formally withdrawn it was made perfectly plain to Edward that the party considered him a liability and that he could no longer count on their support. It was suggested that, if he wer
e to decide to stand at the next election, he would be obliged to do so as an independent candidate.

  Edward was not surprised. He no longer considered himself a Liberal either, or even a Radical. Though he scrupulously fulfilled his parliamentary duties he avoided Westminster. He spent most of his time in his constituency. A miner and secretary of the recently established Ayrshire Miners Union, a man by the name of Keir Hardie with whom Edward had become acquainted from his work with the Scottish Land Restoration League, had tried and failed to gain Liberal support for his candidacy in a by-election for the nearby constituency of Mid Lanarkshire. The experience had convinced him and many of his fellow miners of the need for an independent party representing the interests of labour and he had written to Edward to solicit his support. Convinced now that the Liberals neither could nor would do anything to relieve the misery of the working classes, Edward offered it eagerly. The prospect of a Labour Party filled him with new hope. Though both the Socialist League and the SDF promised to boycott the event, he agreed to chair a founding conference in Glasgow in May.

  Unwilling to be left alone again in London, Maribel travelled with him. At Inverallich she attended increasingly fractious meetings with the estate’s financial advisers. When the accountants were gone, she pored over the books, trying to see what might be done to improve their parlous situation. She drew the line at the endless round of wearisome political rallies but she acquired a typewriter and taught herself to use it, so that, afterwards, she might transcribe Edward’s illegible scribbles into serviceable minutes.