Beautiful Lies (12 page)

‘On my mother’s side, I suppose?’

Mrs Bryant looked flustered. ‘If you wish.’

‘And that is it? That is the entire reason you asked me here?’ ‘Well, it is pleasant to see you, naturally, but yes, that is why I took the liberty of insisting. It matters so to Hubert and there are the children to think of. I knew you would want to help your sister if you were able. I have no more appeals up my sleeve, I assure you.’

She laughed, an artificial tinkle. Maribel gaped at her. A letter of introduction for her aspiring son-in-law. It was so preposterous it was almost funny.

‘Why on earth could you not have asked me this in a letter?’ she demanded.

Mrs Bryant looked aghast. ‘A letter, on such a delicate matter? It would have been quite unseemly.’

‘More unseemly than risking my husband’s career?’

‘Come, Peggy, we have been the souls of discretion. Nobody need ever know you were here.’

‘But you would gamble with my husband’s future, for Edith’s husband’s sake.’

‘Heavens, well, I never meant for – it was simply that –’

‘I’m glad she didn’t write,’ Edith said softly. ‘I am glad you came.’

Startled, Maribel turned to look at her sister. Edith’s pale eyes were pink, her nose pinker still. Between her fingers she twisted a handkerchief.

‘Lizzie always thought you had gone to America to be a famous actress,’ Edith said. ‘But Laurie – Laurie said he thought you were dead.’

‘That will do, Edith,’ Mrs Bryant said.

Maribel thought of Laurence’s tin soldiers, scattered by the force of his cannon.

‘Laurie would have had us all dead every day by teatime,’ she said. ‘As for Lizzie –’

Edith’s face twitched. She bit her lip, twisting her handkerchief into a knot.

‘Edith,’ Maribel said, ‘would you see me out?’

Standing, Maribel touched her cheek briefly to her mother’s. The smell of rose water had faded. She noticed the crow’s feet at the corners of her mother’s eyes, the way the loose skin crinkled around the curve of her ear. Her jawline was downy and dusty with powder.

‘Goodbye, Mother,’ she said.

‘You will ask your husband, won’t you? About Sir Douglas?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

‘We would be so grateful if you would.’

‘I said I would think about it. You will have to be content with that.’

Mrs Bryant hesitated. Then she nodded.

‘Very well. Thank you, my dear.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Maribel picked up her gloves.

‘Take care of yourself, Peggy,’ her mother said.

‘Maribel.’

‘Yes, well. We old aren’t good at change.’

It was strange, Maribel thought, knowing that you looked at someone for the last time. When she had left Yorkshire she had been too young to think of it.

In the hallway she kissed Edith.

‘I will do what I can,’ she said.

‘I know you will.’

Maribel pulled on her gloves, busying herself with the buttons.

‘Tell me about Ida.’

‘Ida? She married a doctor, an associate of Father’s at the hospital. She is Mrs Maitland Coffin now.’

‘Her husband is Dr Coffin?’

‘Yes, but you mustn’t laugh. She hates it when people laugh.’

Maribel said nothing. The Ida she remembered would have thought Dr Coffin uncommonly funny.

‘They live in London too,’ Edith said.

‘They do?’

It was a shock, though she knew it should not be. It was just that she and Ida had always planned to come to London together. They had thought Regent’s Park the most suitable place for a house since it would be convenient both for the theatres and for the Royal Zoological Gardens. Their house was to have electric lighting and modern plumbing and wallpaper and a library full of novels, French as well as English as Jumbo the elephant had been brought up in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and Ida thought it would be comforting for him to be read to in his childhood language. The windows would look out over the park so that on fine days they could watch boys sailing their boats on the pond and hear the animals talking to each other. There would be two cats, Punch and Judy, both tortoiseshell, who would be encouraged to sleep on the sofas, and a freckled maid called Sally, and crumpets with honey for tea every day. It was important to eat well before a performance.

‘Yes,’ Edith said. ‘Not all that far from here, actually. I see her quite often.’

Ida was in London. Somewhere, quite near here, Ida was speaking, walking, breathing. The thought made her breathless.

Edith hiccupped.

‘What is it?’ Maribel demanded. ‘Why are you crying?’

‘I am not crying.’

‘Yes you are. What on earth is it? Is it Ida? Is something wrong with Ida?’

Edith shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut.

‘For heaven’s sake, Edith, spit it out!’

Edith looked up and the tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘Oh, Peggy, I mean Maribel, I can’t bear it. I thought you were dead and yet here you are, standing right here in front of me, and then you will leave and I will never see you again.’

Maribel sighed. Then she patted Edith lightly on the arm. ‘It is for the best, you know,’ she said. ‘Think what harm it would do, if there was a scandal. Think of Mother and Father. Think of your husband.’

Edith sniffed. ‘But might we not meet again?’ she pleaded. ‘Here, in secret? I wouldn’t tell a soul.’

Maribel looked about her, at the grandfather clock and the paintings of ringlet-headed infants and the Chinese vases that crouched beneath their china hats like fat constables, and she shook her head.

‘I don’t think so. But I shall think of you, of course.’

She turned away but Edith caught her by the arm, tugging at her sleeve. Her tear-stained face was swollen and shameless, like a child’s.

‘What happened, Peggy, after you left us? It was Miss Phillips, wasn’t it? You went to Miss Phillips.’

‘Goodbye, Edith.’

Outside the sun blazed in a bright blue sky and the air was thick as soup. Maribel paused at the bottom of the steps and put up her parasol. At the far end of the terrace a greengrocer wrestled a crate from his cart as his horse waited, its harness loose, its head low beneath its heavy collar. In the garden behind the wall birds sang.

Maribel opened the gate and began to walk in the direction of the High Street. She did not turn, and so she did not see Edith watching her from behind the door nor her mother, half concealed at the parlour window, one hand on the heavy drapes. She thought instead of Ida, who was twenty-five years old, a woman, and neither a saint nor an elephant keeper but only a wife, as Maribel was.

Maribel should never have gone to London without her. She should have waited. For thirteen years she had carried with her the weight of her betrayal, like rocks in her pockets. Now, at last, Ida had come. The thought quickened Maribel’s feet and her heart.

E
DWARD WAS OUTRAGED, OF
course. Maribel could not blame him. She knew the courage it had taken to urge her to go. His intimates would mostly have forgiven him the deception – they were men of the world, after all, and Maribel sufficiently unlike their own wives to allow for latitude – but in the House his provocations were tolerated only because of his standing as a man of the highest integrity in public life. If Maribel were to be exposed as a fraud and a liar the scandal would not only end his political career, it would profoundly threaten the work of the Radicals in Parliament. That he had risked their cause solely that he might promote the career of a man too incompetent to do it for himself made Edward furious.

For all his principles, however, Edward was not entirely devoid of common sense. He understood that the more rapidly he answered to Mrs Bryant’s demands the more quickly she would be dispatched. Besides, what she asked for might be granted easily enough. The machinery of the House, like that of his class, was oiled with quiet words and mutual favours, and, though Edward found the back-scratching distasteful, there was nothing unlawful in it. His only condition was that Maribel make it quite clear to her mother that this would be the end of it. There would be no more letters, no more secret rendezvous. Maribel had not the least difficulty conceding to his terms.

The next time he saw Sir Douglas in the House, Edward approached him and offered his somewhat rusty skills as a batsman in the upcoming House of Commons cricket match. When Maddox accepted, Edward admitted that he had a favour to ask in return. An acquaintance of his wife’s cousin had some manner of business proposal in which he thought Sir Douglas might be interested and had asked if an introduction might be arranged. Edward confessed that, besides his understanding that the young man in question was considered something of an upstart, he knew next to nothing of the proposal and he understood perfectly if Sir Douglas did not wish to comply. Indeed, he urged him to decline immediately and put an end to the matter there and then. Edward had no doubt that the young man would manage quite well without Sir Douglas’s assistance.

It was not much of a gamble. Edward had known Sir Douglas for years. He knew quite well that, even if propriety had not required Maddox to concur, his vagueness as to the nature of the business venture on offer would prove irresistible. The third son of a Greenock barber, Sir Douglas had left school at fourteen to take up his vocation as a capitalist. The flash of profit drew him like a salmon.

‘May the dogs please now be put back to sleep?’ Edward asked Maribel when it was done. She smiled at him and adjusted his tie.

‘Can’t you hear the snoring already?’

Edward had a dinner in the City, something to do with the party. When he was gone Maribel sat down at her desk. She had meant to write a note to Charlotte, who, after considerable encouragement, had finally been persuaded to sit for her first photographic portrait, but somehow the words came out differently.

My dearest, dearest Ida
,

You are in London. It is so sweet to write those words, to think that we are close again at last. Perhaps you are looking out of your window as I write and watching the swifts I can see making patterns in the sky. Perhaps you are walking along streets that I too walk along, looking into windows that I gaze into every day. Not seeing you is so much harder now that I know you are so close. There is so much I have to tell you. I never made it as an actress. For a while I thought – but life does not always come out as you hope. I don’t expect you are an elephant keeper either. Or Joan of Arc, for that matter. Do you remember you used to ask me if I’d forget you once I was famous and I promised that I wouldn’t? I never broke my promise, Ida. I forgot all about Peggy Bryant as soon as I was able and the dreadful Miss Phillips sooner than that but I never once forgot about you. My name is Maribel now and I am from Chile. It turned out that Sylvia was not who I was either. But you – you were always Ida.

She stopped, unable to continue. Then, very carefully, she capped her pen and stood, too quickly perhaps, because the light-headedness caused her to sway and she had to close her eyes to compose herself. It was the past, the great chasm of it, that did for her. It was always a mistake to look down.

She hadn’t thought of Miss Phillips for years. A temporary governess, hired hurriedly when Miss Finton’s mother was taken unexpectedly ill, Miss Phillips was a soft-voiced, soft-fingered sigher, much given to wandering about the house in bare feet, her mousy hair loose about her shoulders. Devoted to the poetry of Christina Rossetti, she had the girls study ‘Goblin Market’ and rhapsodised with breathy intensity about erotic desire and moral redemption. When she read
Sonnets from the Portuguese
aloud she wept. The boys laughed at her which made Maribel furious, both with them and with Miss Phillips who, for all her sensitivity, was unable to desist from idiotic pronouncements on the Beauty of Nature.

Still, Miss Phillips was the first person Maribel had ever met who shared her passion for the theatre. It was Miss Phillips who insisted upon taking Maribel to the Theatre Royal in York to see Henrietta Hodson as Imogen in
Cymbeline
, Miss Phillips who took her afterwards to the stage door and persuaded the doorman to let them pay their respects to the actress, Miss Phillips who confided to Miss Hodson that ‘dear little Peggy’ had ambitions to go on the stage. Maribel, struck dumb by the momentousness of the occasion, had hardly spoken. The tiny dressing room with its mirrored wall, the costumes hanging on the door of the press, the proximity of Miss Hodson in her wrapper who had until a few moments before
been
Imogen, the poetry of Shakespeare upon her lips, his breath in her chest – all these wrapped like ribbon around the intense magic of the play, shaping it into something real, something meant for her.

‘Are you any good?’ Miss Hodson had asked and when Maribel stammered that, yes, she thought she was, the actress had pursed her mouth as though she meant to apply lipstick.

‘It is a hard profession. Few enjoy success.’

‘I shall,’ Maribel said fiercely. ‘I must.’

‘You sound very sure.’

‘It is all I have ever wanted. It is only when I am acting that I feel – real.’

Miss Hodson had given her a hard look, her head on one side.

‘Then you must act,’ she said. ‘You have the looks for it, at any rate.’

‘What should I do? How should I start?’

Miss Hodson had shrugged.

‘By starting. For God’s sake don’t rot out here in the provinces. Go to London. Go to the theatres. Persuade them to give you a try. If you really want to be an actress you have to act.’

‘Like you.’

‘Like me.’ Miss Hodson had smiled. Then on impulse, she had taken a card from a silk purse on her dressing table. The card had her name on it and the address of a theatre in London. ‘Here. When you make it to London look me up. I know a good many people. I might be able to help you.’

Some weeks later Miss Phillips had been dismissed by Maribel’s mother, who declared that she could no longer endure her unpinned hair and extemporaneous outbursts of weeping. Miss Phillips had written to Maribel a few days later, a secretive letter that she begged Maribel not to mention to Mrs Bryant, filled with impassioned quotations and declarations of sisterly love.