Beautiful Lies (4 page)

Tonight the evening paper took ghoulish pleasure in informing the London public that the scalp of the Indian who had slain Custer at Little Bighorn would be on display at the Wild West. The thought made Maribel shudder. In Texas, on their honeymoon, she and Edward had been shocked by the malice of the American settlers towards the Indians. In towns like Brownsville and Corpus Christi callowness and casual violence were commonplace, contempt a matter of pride. In Reynosa, on the border with Mexico, they had found a small boy huddled beneath a bush, his arms clasped tight round his rickety legs, his dark eyes round and blank. Every one of his ten brothers and sisters had been rounded up by a party of farmers and shot, one by one, in the head.

Edward had been enraged. Like the Scots at Bannockburn, he saw the Indians as patriots, justified in taking up arms against the trespassers who would subjugate them and steal what was theirs. When he received news that the ranch he had purchased near San Antonio had been burned down by an Indian raiding party and the livestock all driven off, he only shrugged. Morality, he said simply, did not yield to self-interest. It was hard to imagine a man less suited to a life in politics than Edward.

In the hall the grandfather clock struck midnight. Maribel knew that she should go to bed, that Edward would be cross if he found her still up when he got home, but she did not move. She would go to bed when the fire went out, she told herself, and, as she burrowed more deeply into her nest of cushions, a slow tingling moved down her arms and into her fingers. Not memory, precisely, but what the Portuguese called
saudade
, a yearning for something long unseen. There was no word for it in English. Perhaps most English people did not feel it.

She closed her eyes, the smell of sun-baked dust suddenly sharp in her nostrils. A wagon train was not every woman’s idea of a honeymoon. In Texas Edward had bought a consignment of cotton which he was sure he could sell in Mexico for a substantial profit. They had been warned that the trek would be long and likely dangerous but the two of them had embarked upon the adventure eagerly, as hungry for movement as for money. They had travelled for nearly sixty days across wild and desolate country and, at night, fearful of Indian attack, they had formed the wagons into a circle and lit a great fire at its centre. Danger had suited her, and discomfort. Though time passed slowly, she had not fretted in its traces. She had eaten simply and slept well, her bed a straw-filled box slung beneath the largest of the wagons. Sometimes, when the night was hot and the scream of the cicadas beyond endurance, she had lain with Edward on his palliasse on the ground, gazing up at the vast sky salted with stars.

‘For you,’ he had whispered the first time, reaching up to cup the moon between his hands, and she reached up too, fitting the shape of her hands inside his.

‘For us both,’ she had answered and for the first time in her life she did not want to be anywhere else.

The fire stirred, the apple logs sighing into ash as the
saudade
curled in her like the smoke from an incense burner, solemn and sweet. When it had passed she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke of the tobacco into the same parts of her. The previous winter she had suffered from an infection on the chest and the doctor had asked that she confine herself to twenty cigarettes a day. Maribel had refused to agree to any such thing. Oscar had once claimed that the joy of cigarettes lay in their being both exquisitely pleasurable and profoundly unsatisfying. Maribel had rolled her eyes and told him to inhale. When she drew the smoke into her lungs, the burning tobacco scattered sparks of light that danced in her blood. It was when she smoked that she knew that she could write.

Edward found her there an hour later, her dark head bent over a notebook, her brow creased, her tongue pressed in concentration between her teeth. The fire was almost out. She held a pencil in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. Torn-up pages, crumpled and abandoned, littered the carpet around her and, on a tray beside her, a soup bowl and an ashtray brimmed with smouldering cigarette ends. He bent over her, kissing her lightly on the lips.

‘Whisky,’ she said and she wrinkled her nose.

‘All those years in Scotland and still you cannot adopt the ways of my mother country?’

‘I have adopted parsimony and there is nothing more Scotch than that. You should be grateful.’

‘Parsimony, indeed. You have on a very handsome dress, if I may say so, Mrs Campbell Lowe.’

Maribel made a face, though she could not help herself from stroking the silk of her skirts. Edward was right. It was a particularly handsome dress.

‘You know quite well that in Paris everything nice is dear,’ she protested. ‘There is no purpose in spending almost as much money for things which are worth only the half. This dress shall last me ten times as long as a cheap one and prove the better bargain, you’ll see.’

Edward laughed and poured himself a drink.

‘Dearest Bo, it would not be half so much fun to tease you if you did not rise so eagerly to my bait. I should have you spend ten times what we do not possess to see you happy.’

‘You know quite well that is a shocking lie but it is dear of you to say it all the same.’ Maribel yawned. ‘The vote went your way, I hope?’

‘Not a bit of it. Between them, Matthews and that devil Warren have whipped the Tory bench into a roast-beef-and-port-wine frenzy about decency and the safety of our women and children. Why is it, when it is quite apparent that the vast majority of Conservative members dislike both women and children, that the merest mention of their frailties renders the whole herd red-faced and deaf to reason?’

‘So they have banned public meetings?’

‘Not yet. But it is only a matter of time. Ever since last February’s riots the Home Secretary has done his utmost to stir up a terror of the mob. If one-tenth of his enthusiasm had been directed instead into the relief of the misery of the ordinary man, there would be no need for the demonstrations of which he is so afraid. You should be in bed.’

‘I have been writing.’

‘Successfully?’

Maribel made a face.

‘May I read it?’ he asked.

‘Not yet.’

Edward drained his whisky and set the glass on Maribel’s tray. Then he leaned over his wife, took the cigarette from her hand and stubbed it out.

‘Bed.’

Putting out her hands, Maribel let him pull her to her feet. There was a fleck of something on one of his silk lapels. She brushed it away. Without her shoes the top of her head barely reached his shoulder.

‘It is not so very late,’ she said.

‘Bed,’ Edward said, and in the grate the dying fire sighed, exhaling soft grey ash.

T
WO DAYS LATER
M
ARIBEL
attended a teatime lecture at the home of Mrs Gallop, Treasurer of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. They had been promised Mrs Garrett Fawcett, co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, but for some reason she had not been able to come. Her replacement was a heavily built woman with wiry hair who had studied at the Slade School of Art. She wore a dress the colour of stewed tea and, wound several times around her neck, a necklace of lumpy brown pebbles. Somewhere in Hampstead, or perhaps Bloomsbury, Maribel thought, there was a tailor who specialised in Attire for the Clever Spinster, apparel of such wilful ugliness that she could not look upon her clients directly but only in the reflection of a mirror.

‘Because of her work with animals, it was not long before Rosa Bonheur found the clothing of her sex to be a tiresome inconvenience. It was to that end, and not for the depraved reasons that some have chosen to attribute to her, that she solicited authorisation from the Prefect of Police to wear men’s clothing.’

Beside Maribel, Charlotte leaned forward, her head on one side. Maribel thought of the problems in the second stanza of the poem she had begun two nights earlier. There might be something, she thought, in
the airless parlour of the past, glass-eyed under glass
, but, though she worried at it like a terrier, she could not unearth what came next. Their friend Oscar had recently been appointed editor to a new literary magazine,
Woman’s World
, and he had promised to look at anything she wanted to send him with a view to publication. Several times in the past weeks she had begun poems but, though in their first moments they seemed new and fresh, bright with a lustre that might, with work, become brilliance, like children’s balloons they had by the next day shrivelled to something disappointing and faintly obscene.

She ached for a cigarette, for the carpeted hush of the flat at Cadogan Mansions. She could not think why she had let Charlotte persuade her to come. It was one of her gravest shortcomings, she thought, the impulse towards company. When the invitations arrived she meant to refuse them but instead she consoled herself with assurances that curiosity was as essential to a writer as paper and ink, that the company of other artists would stimulate both the intellect and the imagination, that to perceive the truths of the world one must live among them and not in the isolation of an ivory tower. It was said to be the opinion of William Morris that a poet should not require paying for his poetry, because he would write better poetry if he had an ordinary occupation to follow. That was all very well for Mr Morris, Maribel thought. His ordinary occupation was to make Art to order and sell it at a profit. So far she had managed only to interest a tiny literary journal in a short poem about Paris. However much she wished to convince herself otherwise, inspiration was not the same thing as distraction. Next year she would be thirty. By thirty Emily Brontë was already dead.

‘Our Queen has condemned what she calls the “wicked folly” of Women’s Rights,’ declared Brown Dress. ‘But must Bonheur be condemned for unsexing herself, as Her Majesty would have it? At the Slade, where I myself studied, they have at last permitted male models to pose unclothed for their female students. Surely Mme Bonheur’s work attire, be it men’s clothes or perhaps even none at all, is nobody’s business but her own. As she herself once so notoriously declared, “The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me.” They should no more trouble us.’

The applause was enthusiastic, mostly, Maribel thought, because they could finally have tea. Brown Dress bowed, her pebble necklace swinging violently about her chin.

‘She’ll put her teeth out,’ she whispered to Charlotte, who pressed her lips together to keep from laughing and clapped more vigorously. When at last the appropriate thanks had been given the audience rose as one and moved quickly over to the platters of sandwiches and scones set out on the sideboard. Unable to wait any longer, Maribel pushed up the window sash and, in the shiver of cool air, smoked two cigarettes very fast.

‘Did you discover what became of Mrs Garrett Fawcett?’ Maribel said when Charlotte returned with teacups and a plate of cake. ‘She had better have an awfully good excuse.’

‘Apparently she sprained her ankle. Miss Russell nobly agreed to fill the breach.’

‘Well, she is certainly wide enough.’

‘Hush. She will hear you.’

‘Of course she won’t. Women of her kind don’t listen. Especially not with all those hideous pebbles clattering around her ears. She seems to have appropriated half of Cooden Beach.’

Charlotte laughed and shook her head. ‘Maribel! You are incorrigible.’

‘Come on. It must weigh five pounds at least. Is it any wonder the woman’s neck is thicker than her head?’

‘My Aunt Agatha always said that if a person couldn’t say something nice, she was better off saying nothing at all.’

‘Then your Aunt Agatha was a fearful prig.’

The boom of their hostess’s voice cut across their laughter like a noonday cannon.

‘Mrs Charterhouse, Mrs Campbell Lowe. What are you two doing skulking over here in the corner?’

Mrs Gallop bore down upon them, driving before her a diminutive woman with thin hair and a timid expression. Maribel squinted into her tea. Charlotte’s amused resistance to her more vinegarish remarks always left her feeling vaguely mean-spirited. Perhaps she had judged Miss Russell too harshly. The woman’s appearance was dowdy, certainly, but her opinions were sound. It was enough for women to do battle with the full weight of history without being sabotaged by their own side. And yet the truth was that the Miss Russells of the world had always provoked her. Horrified by frivolity, disdainful of pleasure and pretty dresses, they wore their drabness like a medal, proof of their scholarly superiority.

‘Maribel? You remember Miss Woolley, don’t you?’ Charlotte said as Mrs Gallop steamed away in search of new harbour. Maribel was certain she had never met Miss Woolley before in her life. She took the woman’s limp hand, shaking it briskly.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How do you do?’

‘Very well, thank you,’ Miss Woolley said. She sniffed.

‘You have a cold,’ Charlotte said sternly. ‘You should be in bed.’

Miss Woolley shook her head. ‘I could not have abandoned Florence on her big night. Not when she was so nervous.’

‘Florence?’

‘Miss Russell. She is part of my Circle.’

‘I would not have thought Miss Russell the nervous type,’ Maribel said.

‘Appearances can be misleading,’ Miss Woolley said gravely, with the authority of one asserting a great Truth. There was a silence. A drip was forming on the end of Miss Woolley’s nose. Maribel wondered whether, if she stooped, she might be able to see the whole of Mrs Gallop’s drawing room captured in its tiny globe.

‘I thought Miss Russell’s lecture most interesting,’ Charlotte said at last.

‘She is too modest, of course,’ Miss Woolley sighed. She rummaged in her cuff for a handkerchief and noisily blew her nose. ‘I should have liked her to talk more about her own work. It would have inspired us all, I think, to hear about the Muse.’

‘The Muse?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Miss Russell draws from life, of course, but, though those works are of course most accomplished, they are not, in my opinion, her very best pictures. They are too rooted in this world, too – too corporeal.’