Beautiful Lies (20 page)

Somewhere, in a house in a street not far from this one, Ida sat, stood, slept, ate. Charlotte had told Maribel that Dr Coffin was not in fact an angel of death but so fierce a proponent of hygiene that he inspected every tent in the camp daily and had the Indians turn out their beds for ventilation at half past seven sharp every morning. Such a regime surely demanded that he be lodged close by. Maribel felt the skin on her arms tighten. She walked faster.

The railings became a whitewashed wall of planks. People had carved their initials into the wood, hearts pierced with arrows. The name FANNY was gouged in uneven capitals. She could hear voices, the stamps and whinnies of horses. Beyond the wall the railings began again. She was almost at the station when she saw two patched-up boys squeeze themselves through a gap in the palings. They dragged behind them a small dog on a piece of string.

The taller one eyed her as she passed, his face sharp with calculation. There was no one else about.

‘Penny to spare, miss?’ he called out.

She hesitated, slowing her pace. The boys glanced at one another.

‘Tuppence if you got it,’ added the other hastily.

Maribel stopped, turning to face them. The boys’ eyes travelled over her, taking in the silk dress, the garnet brooch on her collar.

‘Have you boys proper business with the Wild West?’ she asked. ‘Or were you trespassing?’

‘Trespassing, miss?’ the taller boy said with great affront. ‘Course we wasn’t trespassing. Me mum works at one of the stalls inside, don’t she? Selling programmes and that. We was bringing her her dinner.’

‘Do you do that often?’

‘Most every day. Me or me brother.’

‘So you know the doctor then? The one who takes care of the Indians?’

‘S’pose.’

‘Well, do you or don’t you?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’ll give you a shilling if you can tell me where he lives,’ Maribel said.

The boys exchanged another look.

‘Awright,’ the taller boy said and he jerked his head left, tugging at the dog, whose nose was buried in a patch of groundsel. ‘’S up there. Ward Street, number 16. Third street on the right.’

‘You are quite sure? Dr Maitland Coffin?’

The boy grimaced, holding up a grimy palm.

‘Course I’m sure. Everyone round here knows old Coffin.’

‘Very well then,’ Maribel said, fumbling in her purse for a shilling. ‘Thank you.’

Ward Street was no less spiritless than the terrace she had observed opposite the showground, and hardly more respectable. In Ward Street at least the houses did not open directly onto the pavement but had narrow front gardens, boxed with low wooden fences, and some of the window frames looked freshly painted, but like the other it had a mean and temporary air. The yellow bricks were sandy-looking, as if they might crumble when you touched them, and, beneath the low roofs, the yellow was streaked brown with damp. Maribel had not thought of Ida in a place like this.

Number 16 was neither the best nor the worst house in the terrace. Its front garden was neat, with paving laid to the front door, and the brass door knocker was only slightly tarnished. There was a dried-out attempt at a border, edged with pebbles. Maribel exhaled, convulsed by the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette. Then she marched up to the door and knocked.

There was the sound of voices from inside, the thump of feet descending the stairs. Maribel smoothed her hair, her lips moving uncertainly as they searched for a suitable expression. There was a pause. Then the door opened. A red-faced woman in a faded dress eyed Maribel suspiciously. She held a swaddled infant in her arms, while, from among her skirts, another child, a girl, peered out with bright bird eyes. Yellow stains crusted the infant’s blanket.

‘Yes?’

Maribel stared at her and the anticipation ran out of her like sand.

‘This is not the home of Dr Maitland Coffin, is it?’ she said.

‘Coffin?’ The woman’s face twisted with disgust. ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’

‘No,’ Maribel said. ‘I have made a mistake. I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

The red-faced woman frowned.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ she said less brusquely. ‘You need a drink of water?’

Maribel shook her head. ‘I am quite well, thank you,’ she said.

As she turned away, the infant began to wail, a sharp high scream like the shriek of a dog fox. Maribel kept walking. There had been foxes in the woods behind their house in Ellerton. Once a vixen had made its earth near the woodshed and there had been cubs, four of them, that tumbled over one another for the sop of bread and milk that the children set out for them. Ida had named them all, though no one believed she could tell them apart. She had begged their mother to let her keep one as a pet.

Ida would never have allowed her child to be taken away.

Maribel walked for a long time. The featureless streets sprawled for what seemed like miles, a profuse and desolate undergrowth of brick that snaked greedily over the sour earth. The few trees were scrawny things, hardly more than branches jammed in the ground. It was neither prudent nor quite respectable to walk alone in such a place but Maribel walked all the same and it was not the wilderness of the voracious city that she saw but the moors of her childhood, the green hills scabbed with rock, the spring of the heather as she lay on her back watching the larks rising in the empty sky, silvering the air with their song.

The reply from Colonel Cody was both as punctilious and as favourable as Maribel could have hoped. He wrote that he remembered her well, and that he would be delighted to permit her to photograph his Indians at any time convenient to herself, though the twice-daily shows did mean that she might be better to attend the camp in the mornings if she wished to see the Indians at their ordinary business. He asked that, once she had decided upon a suitable date, she write to Major Burke at the Wild West office so that he might meet her upon arrival and act as escort during her visit. An interpreter would also be provided for her convenience.

Maribel set the letter to one side. She was glad of it, of course, but the fierce urgency that had possessed her had quite gone. The thought of seeing Ida no longer thrilled her. She told herself it was Edward she thought of, that she acted from conscience, from scruple, but she knew she deceived herself. It was not all about Edward. He was not even the biggest part of it.

She had returned from her exertions in Earls Court exhausted, her feet aching, and taken to her bed. An hour later she had roused herself and, asking Alice for tea and paper, had sat up, an ashtray balanced on her chest, and tried to write. It was not the poverty of the streets she had walked that she strove to capture. It was the emptiness. Maribel had visited with other members of the Socialist League the slums of the East End, had borne witness to the rags and the tallow lamps, the rotting beams and stinking basements, the wretchedness of the squalid lanes. Ward Street and its ilk were nothing like these. They were respectable neighbourhoods, moderate and mostly law-abiding. In Ward Street ragged children did not cluster in doorways. The women were not poisoned in lead-works, exhausted in nailworks, worn haggard and ancient by ceaseless toil. They did not squat dead-faced in the mud and dust, their hands extended in grim appeal. Ward Street was quiet, the lives of its occupants hidden from view. These were the homes of ordinary working men, thrown up so quickly the builders had not troubled with found ations. They would fall. Till then the walls were shored up with fear and fatigue and the frantic struggle for propriety. It was a blank brick waste-land of cheeseparing and quiet desperation.

All afternoon Maribel had smoked and scratched out lines in her notebook. By evening the bed was littered all about with torn-up paper, scraps of words that drifted across the coverlets like snow, but the stone still lodged in her chest and the enchantment never came. She thought of her beloved Ida, the elephant tamer, boxed into one of those cramped little houses with an infant that cried like a dog fox, and she thought of Sylvia Wylde, the actress in the whitewashed room whose soaring ambitions had been nothing but the vain fantasies of a child, and she knew she could not write it because to write it was to admit that it was so.

When Edward consulted her about the final arrangements for their journey to Inverallich, she did not attempt to persuade him to delay their departure. The knowledge that Ida was nearby had settled in her. The violent jolt of it, electrical in its force and urgency, had waned to a bruise that, as long as it were not touched, might be forgotten. In place of the urgent need to see her sister was a kind of grief, the anguished assurance that there would be no purpose in it. There could be no repairing a bond of sisterhood long severed, no blessing in reminding them of what they had lost. Ida was her memory, her truth. The truth now was that she did not want Ida to remember. With Ida she would see the distance she had travelled, the void between what she had wished for and what she had become.

Maribel had made another self since then. The Edward Campbell Lowes had a wide circle of illustrious and influential friends. Among their acquaintance they numbered many whose names were familiar across the country: artists, politicians, writers, the more bohemian of the aristocracy. Edward was Laird of Inverallich, even if he did not care to use the title, and distinguished enough to be lampooned in
Vanity Fair
. Maribel had had a poem accepted for publication. She had presented a well-received lecture to members of the Socialist League on ‘Socialism and the Modern Woman’. But she was not yet ready. One day, when she was established as a poet or perhaps as a photographer, she might be able to present herself to Ida and see, reflected in her sister’s eyes, the version of herself that she had left home for, the version of herself for which she had risked everything. Then it would be time.

She packed for Scotland briskly, impatient to be off.

B
Y THE TIME THEY
reached Inverallich the heatwave of London felt as distant as a dream. High summer in Argyllshire that year was cold and wet, the wind-lashed rain like hurled pins against their cheeks. Even on dry days clouds muffled the mountains, burying the peaks in their rolls of grey flesh. Maribel shivered in her shawls and knitted gloves. The house, situated at the northernmost tip of a peat-stained loch, seemed to drink in the damp and chill from the black earth. The sheets mildewed and, in the grates, the sodden firewood hissed and smoked. It was the kind of place, she wrote to Charlotte, where it was possible to recall Miss Woolley and her Circle with nostalgia.

She was seldom alone, though she saw Edward hardly more than she had in London. Five hundred miles from the wretched encampments of Trafalgar Square, the raised fists and placards of the Socialist demonstrators protesting angrily outside the Whitehall offices responsible for the Poor Law, there was no reprieve for the poor of rural Scotland and, despite the powers of the new Crofters’ Commission, unrest prevailed. Impatient with their plight, Salisbury’s government showed no qualms in using troops to quell their protests. Edward’s days were taken up with appointments, rallies, visits to local smallholdings and crofting townships, speeches at public meetings. Maribel attended those at which she was required, making polite conversation with slab-faced ladies whom she knew would afterwards declare her accent unfathomable. Edward was always at the other end of the room.

It was not just constituency business either. The Coal Mines Regulation Bill was in the Committee Stage and in the course of two gruelling weeks in August Edward addressed more than fifty meetings across the Scottish mining districts, mustering grass-root support for the wider publication of safety reports, an unqualified ban of child labour in the mines, and a compulsory eight-hour day. In the last few months the gap between his politics and those of his party had widened sharply and the satirical cartoons in
Punch
and the
Daily News
made much of the correlation between the colour of his hair and that of his opinions. As Trafalgar Square swelled with the homeless, with agitators and demonstrators and sightseers eager to enjoy the circus, Edward and his kind were denounced by the city’s newspapers as provocateurs, reckless rabble-rousers intent upon violent confrontation. Only Webster at the
Chronicle
held steady, his support of the Socialists unwavering, his impassioned editor ials in defence of the poor a persistent thorn in the government’s side. Edward had the newspapers sent up from London and, though Webster’s muscular Christianity raised his hackles, he was grateful. They were in no position to be choosy.

Maribel was left often to her own devices. She had much to occupy her. She managed the estate accounts. She organised the cook and the two raw-faced maids. She counted the silver. She wrote one or two indifferent poems, took some indifferent photographs which, lacking a darkroom, she parcelled up with the still undeveloped plates from the Jubilee and sent to be printed at Oban. She visited the Inverallich cottages, taking baskets of freshly baked bread and cakes, and admired children and sheep. The tenants asked after Mr Edward and the affection in their voices was unfeigned. Mr Edward was much loved at Inverallich. After the election, when he had won his seat for the Liberals, two hundred tenants and feuars had gathered to greet them at the railway station. There had been cheers, speeches, boys whistling on blades of grass set between their thumbs. Then, instead of horses, fifty men with ropes had pulled their carriage to the house just as the Skye crofters had pulled the carriage of Henry George, the radical social reformer, two years before. They had travelled the short distance in silence, Edward’s hands clasped on his lap. It was the first time since Maribel had known him that he had had nothing to say.

Maribel occupied herself as much as she was able but still darkness came late and the days were long. Vehemently opposed to the annexation of the great Scottish estates as playgrounds for the wealthy, Edward did not shoot or stalk but, on those few days that he was home, he walked or rode out into the hills. For all the urbanity of his manner the bleak landscape of Inverallich was his
querencia
, the Spanish word for the home territory of an animal, the mists and mountains as much in his blood as the pampas of Argentina. Sometimes Maribel went with him on these expeditions. More often he went alone. On horseback he covered great distances and returned exhausted and content, his breeches crusted with spatters of peat.