Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  When Maribel had asked if she might take her picture, the girl’s sharp face had shrivelled. Her skin was greasy and pimpled, her eyes hard as chips of glass. There was a sore at the corner of her mouth. When she spat on the ground the smell of drink on her was very strong.

  ‘Cost yer sixpence,’ she had said, ‘or a shillin’ for Cock Lane,’ and she cackled and hitched up her skirts so high that Maribel caught a glimpse of felted hair, dark against pale thighs. The girl’s jeers had echoed in her ears as she hurried away.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Maribel asked Charlotte. She was glad to see that her friend seemed comfortable and that she had a little colour in her cheeks. Arthur had declared the birth an easy one but a husband’s view of such matters was seldom reliable.

  ‘Never better. I can’t tell you what heaven it is not to be pregnant.’

  Maribel raised an eyebrow. ‘I shall be sure to remind you of that in six months,’ she said and Charlotte laughed and gazed down at the baby in her arms, her laughter softening into a smile of such fierce and private tenderness that it pierced Maribel’s heart. ‘An ounce of mother is worth a pound of priest,’ Maribel murmured.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘It’s an old Spanish proverb.’

  ‘Or so your mother told you.’

  Maribel smiled.

  ‘Helena Mary Gwendolen Charterhouse,’ Charlotte murmured, tracing the curve of the infant’s cheek with the back of her finger. ‘Such a big name for a little girl.’

  ‘The older ones must be thrilled to have a new sister.’

  ‘Not a bit. As Kitty asked me, what good is a baby who can’t play? This one will be nothing but a nuisance until she is old enough to eat pretend cake and withstand the medical attentions of Doctor Ursie, or Nursula as the children have taken to calling her.’

  Maribel laughed. ‘She still harbours ambitions to be the next Elizabeth Garrett Anderson?’

  ‘I hope that Dr Anderson’s interest in medical matters extends beyond a passion for bandaging. Ursie should have been born in ancient Egypt. Mummification would be her idea of perfect heaven.’

  The baby began to whimper. Charlotte crooned at her, rocking her in her arms, but the infant did not quiet. A nurse, all starched skirts and self-importance, bustled into the room.

  ‘It’s time for Baby’s bottle, madam. May I?’

  When Charlotte hesitated, the nurse bent down and scooped the child from her arms.

  ‘Come now, missy,’ she chided as she whisked the infant from the room. ‘You will give poor Mother a headache with that infernal racket.’

  Charlotte watched them go.

  ‘Don’t look so pitiful,’ Maribel said. ‘You’ll be pregnant again before you know it.’

  Charlotte mock-pouted, swiping at her friend with the back of her hand.

  ‘There are rules about teasing a woman who is still in childbed, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t. How soon can you get up?’

  Charlotte laughed and rang for tea. Without the child in her arms, the soft vagueness that had enveloped her seemed to recede a little. Maribel lit a cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs, savouring the shiver of it in her chest, in the backs of her knees.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, tipping back her head and exhaling. ‘That’s better.’

  Charlotte waved impatiently at the plume of smoke. ‘Just don’t let Arthur catch you,’ she said. ‘Now tell me about the opening. I can’t tell you how maddening it was to miss your moment of triumph. I want to know everything.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. There were a good deal of people there, lured in by moral outrage and Moselle cup. Most of them duly hated it. Some bought, though not as many or for as much as the oleaginous Mr More would have liked. You weren’t there because you were having a baby which I consider a tolerably good excuse. That’s it really.’

  ‘If you imagine you can get away with that, young lady, you have another think coming.’

  Maribel smiled. Since the exhibition’s opening, the gallery had continued to attract a steady trickle of visitors. It had even secured a short review in the Illustrated London News, three lines of teeth-sucking ambivalence in which none of the photog raphers had been mentioned by name, thereby exceeding by some margin Maribel’s modest expectations. Though Edridge’s monumental subjects had proved more popular with the public than her portraits, she had to her surprise sold six pictures, including the boy from Ferrixao. Even after the gallery had taken its commission the proceeds would cover a substantial share of her bills in Paris when she travelled there for fittings in May.

  Two days after the opening she had written to Ida. It was a short letter, little more than an expression of her continued affection and the address of the gallery in Duke Street. For a moment she had allowed herself to imagine Ida’s face as she gazed at the boy from Ferrixao, the visible emotion in her expression. Then she had sealed the envelope and put it in the cigar box in the cupboard.

  ‘I can’t wait to be well enough to go,’ Charlotte said. ‘You know that Bertie has asked if he can come with me? He is beside himself to know a bona fide artist.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘He made me promise to ask you if you would sign that photograph you took of them with the Indian. He is convinced that it will be worth a fortune one day.’

  Charlotte rummaged among the books and magazines piled on the table beside her and pulled out the photograph. The Indian, shabby and pouch-eyed, hunched like a refugee as the boys grimaced at the camera, teeth bared, their tomahawks held high above their heads. The littlest one had moved as the shutter opened. His right arm drew a smoky trail through the air.

  It seemed like a lifetime ago. Maribel thought of the Indian slumped in the wooden settle in Ida’s bare parlour, of Dr Coffin’s strangely beautiful stethoscope with its walnut trumpet and Ida’s ugly brown hat. Briskly she stubbed out her cigarette and took the pen Charlotte offered.

  ‘Sadly, for Bertie, it is a pretty rotten picture,’ she said. Turning over the photograph she scrawled an affectionate message to the boy on the back. Charlotte read the message and smiled. Then she looked again at the photograph.

  ‘What horrors,’ she said tenderly.

  ‘Tell Bertie I shall take a proper portrait of him next time.’

  ‘Do tell me that means ghosts,’ Charlotte teased. ‘I was horribly disappointed there weren’t any in this one. I had rather got the impression that they were your thing.’

  Maribel shook her head, reaching again for her cigarettes. ‘No ghosts,’ she said, a little too firmly, and under her skirts she crossed her fingers, just in case.

  On Eaton Terrace the cherry trees were in blossom, clouds of pink and white that stirred in the breeze, exhaling their faint scent. Maribel walked home slowly, enjoying the warmth of the spring sunshine on her back. It was a beautiful day. The elegant stucco houses gleamed white against the blue sky, their glossy black doors and railings as slick as oil. An open victoria spun past, drawn by a pair of grey horses, a man and a child laughing in the back. The child’s coat was yellow and the crimson ribbons on her hat streamed out behind her like the tails of a kite.

  At Bourne Street, reluctant to return to the flat, she turned instead towards Sloane Square, intending to stroll a little in the direction of the park. It was too fine a day for sitting at a writing desk and much too fine for the darkroom. Instead she paused at the corner of the square where a flower seller in a patched shawl and battered straw hat had set up her stall. The trestle, a plank of wood balanced on decrepit tea chests, was crowded with baskets of pansies and violets and crocuses and gold-centred polyanthus, the colours as bright as a child’s painting. In a chipped white mug a mass of anemones turned up their scarlet faces to the sky.

  Maribel bought wallflowers and, on impulse, a bunch of the anemones and waited as the flower seller wrapped them in paper. On the other side of the square a building was being erected and hod carriers hefted loads of bricks from a heavy dray, dark maps of sweat on the
backs of their shirts. The wallflowers were heady with scent but they would not last long without water. Maribel turned for home. At the corner of the square a newspaper seller cried his wares to passers-by.

  ‘Chronicle ! Buy your City Chronicle !’

  It was like a sickness, the way her heart lurched whenever she saw a copy of Webster’s newspaper. She could not forget Edward’s expression when she had finally summoned the courage to tell him of Webster’s tirade on the night of her exhibition. He had composed himself quickly, had told her not to worry, that there was no reason to suspect that Webster knew any more than what was already widely known, that his father had owed a great deal of money and gone mad.

  ‘As fathers do,’ he had joked, but his smile came too late quite to conceal the bleak shadow that passed over his face, the presentiment of defeat that pressed his lips together and carved a small brief dent in the space between his eyebrows. In that look she had seen the momentousness of the scandal to come which would destroy not only his reputation for truthfulness, which was the only reputation he cared for, but whatever small concessions he had still hoped to wrestle from the future for those wretched men and women who had never stood a chance.

  ‘What if it’s more than that?’ she had asked him and he had shrugged.

  ‘You mean you? But how could he possibly know? How would he have found out?’

  Maribel had thought of Mr Webster’s private collection of artistic portraits. She thought of Edith and Ida, and of Sir Douglas Maddox’s accidental remark about a cousin in Yorkshire. She thought about the times she had scorned Webster when she might have pacified him and flattered his vanity, and of Mrs Aveling’s remark outside the courtroom that newspapermen always got the last word. She thought with a shudder of the heat that had flushed her skin when they first met. Of all her mistakes that was the one of which she was most ashamed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she had whispered. ‘It’s my fault. I provoked him.’

  ‘You think I did not? But it makes no difference. We would have provoked him just by being us.’

  After that Edward had refused to discuss it again. One evening, plagued with apprehension, she had alluded to the matter obliquely as they returned from dinner. Edward’s response had been angry and unequivocal.

  ‘That’s enough, Bo, do you hear me? What possible purpose does it serve to torment yourself with the imaginary ways in which Mr Webster and his ilk might one day make us suffer? Whatever he knows, whatever he decides to print, we shall survive it. Until then you are not to waste a single minute thinking about him, do you understand?’

  Maribel had nodded. She had not mentioned it again, though she found herself thinking about it often. She thought about it as she opened the door of the rosewood cabinet and saw the cigar box pushed to the back of the high shelf, and on the evening, some four weeks after his release from prison, when Edward came home late, his eyes bright, his mouth soft and satiated, and she knew immediately where he had been. It pressed itself into the gaps in conversations, the stillness between breaths. In the dark wakeful hours of the night, her ragtag thoughts thrummed to the low drone of foreboding.

  The newspaper stand was on her corner. As she hurried by a thickset tradesman in a tweed coat and ginger whiskers pushed past her, a coin between his fingers. The newspaper seller flipped the paper into a neat roll and presented it with a bow.

  ‘Chronicle, ma’am?’ he asked, peeling another paper from the pile. She shook her head but all the same glanced at the headline. Directly beneath the newspaper’s masthead, in heavy capitals, were the words ‘FITZROVIA BROTHEL OUTRAGE’ and under that, in smaller letters, ‘CRIMINAL PEERS IN PARLIAMENTARY COVER-UP’.

  She closed her eyes. The smell of the wallflowers filled her nostrils, sickeningly sweet. She stood frozen and adrift in the middle of the street, jostled on both sides by passers-by, as the image in her head formed and sharpened like a print developing in its bath of chemicals: Edward, his hat pulled over his eyes, standing too close to a glossy black front door, his finger pressed to a bright brass bell.

  Someone pushed past her, knocking the flowers from her arms. She opened her eyes, staring at the scatter of blooms strewn at her feet.

  ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’

  She shook her head dumbly. There was still a chance it was not Edward. The headline had said CRIMINAL PEERS, after all, and Edward was not a peer. Even as she thought it she knew she was clutching at straws. The penny newspapers claimed anyone with the merest whiff of a title a peer. But criminal? Brothels might be scandalous, especially when their clients were respectable married men, but they were not illegal. Even Webster with his Congregationalist puritanism could not make them so. All he had managed with his Sink of Iniquity scandal was to raise the legal age of consent. Unless the girls were under sixteen –

  Maribel’s stomach turned over. Could it be that so respectable a place as Edward’s had employed underaged girls? That there were girls there held against their will? In the months after the Chronicle’s revelations and the subsequent amendments to the Criminal Act the newspapers had brimmed with the trials of men accused of criminal offences against minors. The guilty had been sentenced to imprisonment, years and years of imprisonment. What if the establishment in Whitfield Street had indeed broken the law? Would Edward be held accountable? Would he even have known? He was not the kind of man to take an interest in young girls. Their callowness, their inexperience, would bore him. He had always preferred sophistication to artlessness, worldliness to naivety. At parties he sought the company of his friends’ witty wives, not their wide-eyed daughters.

  Yet when he had come to the Calle de León she had been just seventeen years old. She pressed her fingertips to her eyes, fighting the sudden rush of tears.

  A woman in a patched dress thrust her flowers at her, clumsily wrapped in their paper. The blooms were crushed and dusty.

  ‘There you are, ma’am,’ she said, patting Maribel on the arm. Her accent was Irish. ‘Will you be wanting to sit down?’

  Maribel shook her head. Taking a penny from her purse she jabbed it at the newspaper seller. She pushed the paper he gave her deep into the velvet bag she carried over her shoulder, and hurried away. The Irish woman called angrily after her, cursing her for her close-fistedness, but Maribel did not turn round.

  The lobby of Cadogan Mansions was dark after the brightness of the afternoon. She stumbled across the chequered floor, one hand clenched around the mouth of her bag. She could no longer pretend composure, even to herself. Webster was a newspaper-man and the most dangerous kind of moral despot. Moreover, he believed himself wronged. If Edward, knowingly or otherwise, had frequented a brothel that employed underaged girls Webster would show no mercy. It would matter not a jot to him that, following so hard on the heels of his imprisonment, Edward would have no armoury with which to withstand a scandal of this kind. It would not matter that the cause for which they had fought so zealously together might be damaged by the loss of one of its staunchest advocates, that a good man might spend the last years of his life in prison. For Edward was good. He was brave and kind and fierce and funny and vain and wholehearted, his sharp intelligence countered by an intuitive tenderness, his dry wit by a gentleness of temperament, his exhibitionism by a passionate determination to extract from life every drop of joy. He had never affected to be perfect. He was as tolerant of others’ shortcomings as he was scrupulous about his own. The only fault he could not forgive was cruelty.

  None of that would mean a thing to Webster. Again and again Webster had demonstrated that he had neither patience nor compassion for the ordinary failings of honourable men. Edward would be dragged through the dirt, set in the stocks for spite-soaked pinch-faced hypocrites to humiliate and torment. Moral outrage was an ouroboros, an insatiable monster that gorged on its own flesh. Its appetite would not be easily sated. How soon, then, before the stories started about her? She had not been careful and Webster was thorough. How soon before he found Ida and Edith too? Perhaps
he already had. What then would stop him and his kind from working backwards to Madrid, to Victor, to the photographs taken in the scarlet studio with the blacked-out windows? They would not see what Maribel had seen, that Edward was too fine a man to condemn her for her mistakes. They would be intoxicated by their own clamour of condemnation: liar, charlatan, harbourer of harlots. And what of the child, of whom Edward knew nothing? They would smash their lives as carelessly as eggs.

  Lady Wingate’s door swung open and the old lady peered out through the crack, her tortoise eyes blinking in the gloom. Maribel’s heart sank.

  ‘Ah. It’s you.’ Lady Wingate frowned and opened her door a little wider. She wore a lace cap and, around her shoulders, a moth-eaten fur stole. ‘I thought it was. You clatter through here like a freshly shod pony on those heels of yours. What is wrong with you? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Well, you are fearfully pale. It is hardly surprising. To judge from the manner in which you slam and stamp your way up and down those stairs you are always in the most tearing hurry. Look at you now. Positively itching to be off. Anyone would think you wished to avoid me.’

  Trapped, Maribel paused on the bottom stair, one hand on the banister, the other clutching her bag against her hip. Lady Wingate eyed her beadily.

  ‘I’ve just been looking at the newspaper,’ she said. ‘I wonder, is there any limit to your appetite for notoriety? Your wretched husband is only just out of jail.’

  All the stuffing went out of Maribel then. She sagged, gripping the banister to keep herself from falling.

  ‘I – I don’t think I –’

  ‘I suppose you thought it was your turn. That’s the way with you New Women, isn’t it? Anything they can do you can do better.’ She shook her head, pulling her stole about her shoulders. ‘These photographs of yours, the ones that have caused all the to-do. Should I be going to see them?’