Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  She typed up the accounts of the overcrowded villages of Motherwell and Coatbridge where the roar of the furnaces and the steam hammers never ceased, so that the ground trembled beneath one’s feet and, at night, the sky above the town burned scarlet. She noted the tight rows of thrown-up houses, where the miners’ families lived ten to a room and tuberculosis was rife, the unflagged dirt floors, the open sewers, the filthy skin of black dust that overlay everything. She hesitated as she made out a note in the margin that Edward had underlined and marked with an asterisk: ‘Everyone either very young or very old, for age follows so hard on youth in Coatbridge.’

  The next time he went to the mining villages she went too. She took her camera, a bag filled with food and candles and matches, and, reluctantly, a young man in heavy boots whom Edward insisted accompany her as guide and guardian. She made the boy wait at a safe distance while she held up the camera for the thin, bow-legged children, so that they might look through the viewfinder and see how the plates slid into the holder. As she stood over them she could see the lice crawling in their hair.

  She photographed them as she had photographed the boys in the field at Ferrixao, very close. She did not flinch from the stink of unwashed bodies, the scabs on their cheeks and foreheads, the crusted snot around their noses. She did not bring handkerchiefs or Bibles. She did not try to comb their hair. They stared into her lens and she met their gaze, steadily and without judgement. When she was finished she had the young man distribute the food and the candles and a handful of pennies from a purse she had given him to keep safe.

  Back in London she waited in the darkroom as their faces gathered shape, their eyes darkening and deepening. It was not true what they said, that the wretchedness of poverty extinguished the human spirit. In time, perhaps, it would but for now, though the children’s faces were all pinched, depleted by the deficit of light and nourishment, there was no uniformity of character or expression. Beneath the weariness there was the wariness and insolence that one might have expected from street urchins, there was sullenness and slit-eyed calculation, but there was hope too and humour and eagerness for praise. A boy with sores about his mouth laughed unguardedly, his eyes pressed into half-moons by the wideness of his smile, while a girl with thick brows and hair in strings about her face thrust up her chin in swaggering defiance, her shoulders up and her jaw set like a prize fighter. One of her teeth was broken. Only the tilt of her eyes betrayed her youth and the uncertainty of her challenge.

  Maribel bent over the baths of chemicals, the taste of the fumes sharp in her mouth, and with her tongs carefully lifted out a print of a pale-haired child. The child had a high brow and wide-set eyes and might have been beautiful had it not been for the cleft palate that split her upper lip to the nose, peeling it away from her gums. The fleshy nakedness of her exposed mouth was shocking, almost obscene. Propped on the sill of the blacked-out window the boy from Ferrixao watched her work. She set the print to dry, standing back to consider it.

  ‘Any good?’ she asked him.

  The beauty of him still caused her heart to turn over. Frowning, she turned back to study the girl. Two days previously she had received a letter from Constance Wilde in which she wrote of an acquaintance of hers who owned a gallery in Duke Street. It seemed that the gentleman, who had recently inherited the business from his late father, wished to mount an exhibition of photographs and had asked Constance if she knew any photographers whose work might be suitable.

  I recall from our last conversation that you have certain misgivings about this latest project but, should you be interested in showing it, I should be delighted to effect an introduction. Mr More is remarkably open to new ideas and when I mentioned your portraits he showed himself so eager I feared he might snap my arm off at the elbow.

  Maribel stared at the girl. As yet she had not written a reply. She shook her head at the boy, wiping her hands on her stained apron.

  ‘I need a cigarette.’

  Taking cigarettes and matches from her satchel she pushed open the door. The tall windows of the corridor were lemony with spring sunlight and she squinted, her eyes unaccustomed to the brightness. On the wall opposite, the ranks of sailor-suited moppets pouted winsomely at her, ribbons and ringlets arranged in charming cascades.

  Despite her avowals to Mr Pidgeon she had not found another darkroom. She had made some half-hearted investigations but darkrooms for hire were uncommon creatures in Chelsea, still less on such reasonable terms as those extended to her in Turks Row, and the prospect of struggling to a studio in the likes of Ealing or Hackney had not filled her with enthusiasm. Then Edward’s trial had begun and she had not thought of photography.

  When she returned from Spain, her impatience to develop the images from Ferrixao had overcome what remained of her indignation. She had returned to Turks Row with a determined nonchalance, resolved to deflect any enquiries from Mr Pidgeon with breezy evasion. She need not have worried. For several weeks she had seen only the boy Thomas. When at last she had encountered the photographer it had been on the pavement outside the studios. He had not seemed surprised to see her. He had only raised his hat and muttered something lugubrious about the unseasonal lateness of the daffodils.

  There was no sound from the studio today. She leaned against the wall, striking a match, drawing the flame through the cigarette and right into the ache at the centre of her chest. Recently the urge for a cigarette had begun to wake her in the night and it was not until she had smoked two and sometimes three in quick succession that she was able to get back to sleep.

  She ground her finished cigarette out beneath her heel and returned to the darkroom. The image of the girl with the cleft lip was almost dry. She considered it, her eyes straining to adjust to the night-time gloom, her hand held up to obscure the child’s deformity. She was unsure why the image affected her, whether it touched something deep in her or only titillated her with the shock of disgust, like a freak at a fair. Carefully, holding it by its edges, she nudged open the door so that she might see it in the light. In the doorway of his studio Mr Pidgeon stood with his hands upon his hips, his glasses set low on his nose.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Campbell Lowe. Good afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she replied in a tone intended to be both polite and discouraging. She tilted the image towards the window, studying it in the primrose light. Above the mutilated mouth the child’s pale eyes and paler complexion shone with hidden light. With her thin eyebrows and a long delicate nose she had the look of a Lippi madonna. Maribel felt a flicker of hopefulness.

  ‘Sun’s out at last,’ Mr Pidgeon said. ‘Perhaps we shall have something of a spring after all.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I thought I should – the thing is, I have received a letter from Mr Webster. He wishes to take the studio for a few days next month. I have written down the dates.’ He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to her. ‘You may wish to – that is, if you thought that it might make for awkwardness . . .’

  Maribel took the piece of paper. ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Pidgeon nodded.

  ‘That one of yours?’ he asked, gesturing at the photograph. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is an impertinence, I know, in the light of past circumstances, but – might I see?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  Mr Pidgeon was silent. Then he cleared his throat. ‘If that’s all, Mr Pidgeon?’ she said, pushing open the door to the darkroom.

  ‘Good day, madam,’ the old photographer said sadly as the door closed heavily behind her.

  ***

  By the time Maribel finally left the darkroom the faint warmth of the spring sunshine had given way to a clammy dusk. She peered out of the window and was startled to see that the street below was thick with fog. In the milky blur the gaslight pulsed like an anemone. She could hear the warning shouts of an unseen coachman, the clatter and jingle of the carriage. A passer-by in a dark overcoat loomed into brief solidity and was gon
e. Somewhere, its bells muffled and thin, a church clock chimed the hour.

  She hastened along the corridor, not troubling to switch on the light, and pushed the key to the darkroom back through the slot in Mr Pidgeon’s door. A narrow ribbon of light caught on the hem of her skirt, illuminating the scuffed toes of her old boots. She had turned away when a fit of coughing seized her. She tried to swallow it but it was too strong for her. Though she hurried to the steps the door opened.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Pidgeon,’ she croaked, the cough still lodged in her chest.

  ‘Mrs Campbell Lowe? I did not know you were still here.’

  ‘I cannot stop, I’m afraid. I am horribly late.’

  ‘Before you go, I wonder if I might beg your tolerance in a small matter?’

  Maribel hesitated, one hand on the iron balustrade. ‘If this is about my account –’

  ‘Your account? No indeed. I have something I should like to give you.’

  ‘To give me? Mr Pidgeon, I hardly think –’

  ‘Please. I did you a considerable wrong. Permit me to make amends.’

  ‘I do not –’

  ‘Please. It will only take a moment.’

  She sighed. Then slowly she turned back towards the studio.

  The room was very bare, the usual family scene dismantled. The rocking horse had been pushed back against the wall, a crumpled dust sheet obscuring all but its rump. The doll’s house was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘I don’t suppose you would care for a little refreshment?’ Mr Pidgeon asked.

  He opened a cupboard to reveal, between stacks of battered buff files, a decanter of sherry and several glasses. When Maribel shook her head he poured himself a glass and, taking a small sip, led Maribel to a screen behind which were several powerful lights, set about with white reflectors. He switched one on. On the wall were hung several large exposures of what appeared to be family portraits. He gestured at her to come closer. She looked without curiosity, then looked again.

  The portraits were indeed of a family group, father, mother and son, and, though perhaps a little blurrier than some of their counterparts, differed little in composition from the many thousands of such portraits taken in studios across England. The father, stern-faced and heavily bewhiskered, stood stiffly to one side of his seated wife, stout as the Queen in diamonds and black silk. At their feet the child, dressed in a sailor suit, sat cross-legged, his hair brushed neatly across his brow and his hands in his lap. It would have aroused in Maribel not the faintest curiosity had it not been that all three family members, father, mother and son, were quite plainly Mr Pidgeon’s assist ant, Thomas.

  Mr Pidgeon watched her, sipping at his sherry. Then, putting down his glass, he took one of the images from the wall and handed it to her.

  ‘For you,’ he said. ‘With my compliments.’

  Maribel blinked. Technically the picture was quite remarkable. It was also very funny.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘A triple exposure, madam. Each image taken separately on the same plate. To create a convincing ensemble requires care and accuracy but curiously little skill.’

  ‘It is extraordinary.’

  Mr Pidgeon shook his head. ‘It is a trick,’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes, but all the same –’

  ‘Anyway, it is yours. And now you must go. I do not wish to detain you further.’

  ‘Was it a commission?’

  ‘No. It –’ Mr Pidgeon hesitated. ‘Some months ago, you told me that spirit photographs were hoaxes, tricks played upon the credulous. Perhaps you remember.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I am a Christian, Mrs Campbell Lowe. I take solace from the knowledge that those who depart this world do not leave us but only pass into the next room, where, when the time comes, we shall be reconciled. I, like many others, have long harboured hopes that science would help us to gain a better understanding of God’s mysteries, so that we might see Him through a glass less darkly. Like them I have deplored the pseudo-scientific cynicism of the so-called psychical researchers who make it their business to discredit those miracles made possible by such technological advances. I cannot help thinking that if such people had been around when the Lord was creating the world, He would have abandoned His efforts in disgust.’

  Mr Pidgeon paused, his fist against his chest, and cleared his throat. His tone, when he resumed speaking, was soft.

  ‘In the past few months, however, I have come to see that the quest for evidence, for proof, though doubtless well intentioned, is – misplaced. The Lord does not ask us to comprehend His mysteries, far less to prove them. He asks us to have faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The opposite of proof. It is through our faith, not photographs, that we find truth and, through truth, comfort. The faith that requires proof is no faith at all.’

  ‘And this?’ she said, gesturing at the photograph.

  ‘It is difficult for some to accept that, on occasion, the camera does indeed lie. I wished to make it easier.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Besides, it was rather diverting.’

  Maribel smiled. Mr Pidgeon twitched his mouth and looked away.

  ‘It is difficult sometimes to know what is truth and what is only beauty,’ she said after a while. ‘Or the lack of it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.’

  Maribel blinked. ‘Hold this.’

  Handing the photograph back to him, she tugged at the buckles of the satchel on her shoulder and slid out a thin cardboard portfolio. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she spread its contents across the table.

  ‘Yours?’ he asked.

  She nodded, standing to one side so that he might examine them more closely, her arms folded defensively over her chest. Already she regretted the foolish spontaneity of her decision. It hardly mattered what he thought, of course, the opinion of a jobbing portraitist was not worth a jot, a fraction of a jot, but all the same she watched him, scouring his face for any trace of a reaction. Eventually he straightened up.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded, despite herself.

  ‘Where did you take these?’

  ‘Mostly in Coatbridge. Some in Motherwell. In Scotland.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘They are unusual. Raw. Very – candid.’

  ‘But are they any good?’

  ‘Some are. Some are very good. This one in particular.’

  He reached over the girl with the cleft palate and picked up an image of a tow-headed boy who peeked up at the camera from beneath a rickety table. Maribel frowned at the picture. It was not one of her favourites. The dreaminess on the child’s face gave him a fey look, while the playful pose struck her as uncomfortably sentimental.

  ‘You think so?’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘The way the light falls, the lift of his knee here, the hands around the tin cup, it contrives to be charming, despite everything.’

  ‘I never meant it to be charming.’

  Mr Pidgeon smiled as though she had said something witty and put his finger to his lips.

  ‘I shan’t tell if you don’t.’

  Maribel shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. These are the children we have destroyed. The great capitalist’s bastard sons. That tin cup? Gin. The boy was drunk. Ten years old and unable to stand up straight. He said his father gave it to him, that it was the only pleasure he had in life. That there wasn’t anything in the world could ever make him give it up.’

  ‘So the camera lies,’ Mr Pidgeon said with a shrug. ‘It doesn’t matter. The boy himself, drunk or sober, is quite immaterial. What matters is the image, the moment you have created, the boy you have made. This boy belongs to all of us. We are each free to tell his story in whatever way we choose.’

  35

  FREDERICK MORE’S GALLERY WAS a small shop tucked beneath the overhang of a crooked Tudor-beamed residence in Duke Street. Under his father’s management it had specialised in oils of the eighteent
h century and, even blank-walled, the low-ceilinged rooms were stuffy and old-fashioned. It did not surprise Maribel that the son wished to wield a new broom. What puzzled her more was why he wished to champion the most controversial of the modern arts when it was plain that he had not the least artistic impulse in him. His questions to her were all about Edward and in particular whether it was true that the Queen had referred to him as ‘that insufferable Anarchist’. As for the photographs, he gave them only a cursory glance before inviting her to participate in an exhibition scheduled to begin in less than two weeks. It came as little surprise, then, to discover that the exhibition had been set up as a favour to Walter Edridge, a doctor and aspirant photographer of landscapes whose wife was a cousin by marriage of More’s, and who had made vague undertakings of investment in the gallery if the show was a success.

  So small an exhibition would likely have passed quite unnoticed had it not been for a letter to the Times from a group of painters, objecting in the strongest terms to the effrontery of those who presumed to claim photography as Art. It was not Art, the painters stormed, to ‘set down facts as they exist. There is in Photography no skill of hand or eye, no trace of the artist’s imposition of self upon his subject, that draws upon the highest flights and darkest reaches of the soul. Photography is no more Art than the making of a garment in a factory is Art, which creates a product through the mundane manipulation of a machine.’ They declared it a betrayal of London’s artistic traditions that an eminent gallery like the More dared to present the empty images of the camera as a creditable pretender to paint and charcoal. Mr More’s late father, they insinuated, would be turning in his grave.

  This letter inspired several others, three-quarters of them purple with violent agreement, and, though it was not long before the editor tired of their tub-thumping, the exhibition of photographs at the More Gallery received a good deal of publicity. Frederick More might have lacked his father’s aesthetic sensibilities but he had a nose for business. He hastily arranged a late opening for the gallery on the first night of the exhibition and invited not only the contributing photographers but all the gentlemen of his acquaintance to stop by for a glass of Moselle cup on their way to their clubs.