Beautiful Lies (21 page)

This summer, and despite his punishing schedule, he rode more than ever. In Glasgow, where they had stopped for a few days with friends on their journey north, Edward had, to his astonishment, encountered a spirited Argentine mustang in the traces of a tram-car and had, after some negotiation, persuaded the owner to sell the horse to him for fifty pounds. It was only once the animal was settled in the stables at Inverallich that he had discovered that she bore the brand of Javier Casey, an old friend of Edward’s from his gaucho days. Delighted as much by the caprices of Fate as by the mare herself, he named her Pampa.

Maribel had never before seen him so charmed. He smiled whenever he talked of Pampa, which he did often, declaring her the finest and most mettlesome horse he had ever known. He had Maribel take her photograph and pressed unwary guests into inspecting her. Several times Maribel came down for dinner to find the drawing room empty and the men in their evening suits in the stable courtyard, treading cautiously over the cobbles in their thin-soled slippers. Edward had determined to bring the creature to London, though the livery costs were exorbitant, so that he might ride her through the winter. A great deal of time was taken up by the complicated plans for her conveyance.

Letters came regularly from Charlotte in Sussex, from Oscar and Constance and Edward’s brother Henry in London. Edward’s mother visited. There were games and parties and balls in other people’s draughty houses, with much bellowing and dancing of Scottish reels. It was too much and, at the same time, not enough. The society at Inverallich was narrow, the demands of the estate wearisome. Both were relentless.

In Scotland it was not as easy as it was in London for Maribel to close her eyes to their financial difficulties. With agricultural prices continuing to fall they had had no choice but to increase the allowances to their beleaguered tenant farmers. Rents were down. The interest on their mortgages swallowed any profit raised on the estate, leaving them only a few hundred pounds on which to live. Such an amount did not come close to meeting their day-to-day expenses, let alone provide funds for additional repairs and improvements. She had managed, after much difficulty, to persuade Edward to sell a small section of the estate closest to the town to raise capital, but prices were depressed and the money was quickly swallowed. With the expenditure required to support his political career and the necessity of supporting even a frugal household in London, they had not only failed to reducing their borrowings, they had been obliged to add to them. When Henry arrived, lured north by the promise of the Glorious Twelfth, she confessed to him that, if things did not improve, she feared that, sooner or later, they would have no alternative but to sell up altogether.

‘Poor Mar, how dreadfully you would mind that,’ Henry said with a grin and Maribel laughed and swatted at him with her book.

‘Edward would mind horribly. I can’t imagine how he would manage without it.’

‘It is our father’s fault, not yours. Teddy knows that. You have done wonders.’

‘Not wonders enough.’

‘Wonders,’ Henry said firmly. ‘But you should tread carefully. I’m afraid Mother will blame you.’

‘For debts accumulated by her own husband?’

‘For obliging her to remember their existence. My father was packed off to the madhouse when I was, what, nine? Mother has had more than twenty years to revise her recollections of marriage.’

It was a great comfort to Maribel to have Henry at Inverallich. Henry loved shooting game almost as much as his brother abhorred it but, unlike Edward, he was discouraged by poor weather and, when it rained, he preferred the fireside to the moors. Maribel was only too happy to abandon her duties in order to keep him company. The two of them sat together companionably, reading and writing and smoking and drinking tea, every so often exchanging stories from the newspaper or titbits of information from their letters.

As witty as he was worldly, Henry was a wonderful gossip. He related in glorious detail the latest spat between Oscar Wilde and his old friend James Whistler, and his descriptions of the waspish American painter hissing like a djinn in his monocle and pointed slippers made Maribel laugh out loud. He told her of the son of a well-known peer discovered at the Café Royal with a stolen lobster in the leg of his trousers when it became apparent that the creature was not half as dead as the young man had presumed it to be. He told her about the party thrown by Lillie Langtry to celebrate the her divorce from her long-suffering husband, which the Prince of Wales had had to be forcefully dissuaded from attending, and about the letter that had arrived at the Wild West from his wife, Princess Alexandra, informing Buffalo Bill that she wished to attend the show incognito. Given that the Princess’s face was about as well known in London as the face of Big Ben, this had presented Cody with something of a difficulty.

Even Henry could not keep himself from laughing as he related what had happened next. The Princess had arrived in an ordinary carriage and had refused Major Burke’s invitation to sit in the royal box, insisting instead on being seated among the people. When Burke had asked why, she had simply replied, ‘I like the people.’ Burke had duly taken her to the press box which was, to his great relief, unoccupied. Minutes into the performance, however, the door to the box had opened and several journalists and their lady friends had noisily taken their seats alongside the Princess. During a break in the show, one of the journalists had turned to Burke and asked who the other guests were.

‘Excuse my inquisitiveness,’ the journalist had said. ‘It’s only that I never saw such a likeness in my life to –’

Burke had cut him short.

‘I know what you are going to say. The resemblance is quite striking, though I would ask you to refrain from remarking upon it. Since arriving in London Mrs Jones has heard nothing else. I fear she grows weary of the comparison.’

An introduction was inescapable. Burke, in a cold perspiration, had proceeded to present the Princess and her companion as Colonel and Mrs Jones, friends of his from Texas. He had not breathed easily again until his troublesome charge was once more safely seated in her carriage, at which point she had laughed uproariously and thanked Burke for a grand adventure.

‘And Cody?’ Maribel asked, amused. ‘Where was he in all this?’

‘As far away as he could manage. Bill has woman trouble aplenty without the Princess.’

‘Oh?’

‘He is hopelessly smitten with a young American actress.’

Maribel made a face.

‘Pretty as a picture, of course, and like all Americans quite without conscience,’ Henry said. ‘And don’t give me that look. South America is quite a different matter.’

‘Go on.’

‘The charming Miss Clemmons met Bill at a supper party a few weeks ago. She has travelled all the way from California for acting lessons with Emile Banker, no less, but as far as I can see she has no need of them. Already she has quite persuaded Bill that she has eyes only for him.’

‘Perhaps she has,’ Maribel said, lighting another cigarette. ‘She is an actress, for heaven’s sake, with a nose for a wealthy patron. She makes no secret of her desire to be famous.’

‘And in exchange Colonel Cody gets a beautiful young girl on his arm. Who is to say he does not get the better end of the arrangement?’

Henry shook his head. ‘She is making a fool of him, Mar. You should see him, trailing after her all over the Wild West and out to dinners and plays, introducing her to everyone as his “niece”, while his tongue lolls from his mouth like a Labrador’s. Behind all that easy pioneer charm Bill is an innocent where women are concerned. The voracious Miss Clemmons will eat him for breakfast.’

Then more fool him, Maribel thought.

‘I thought Cody’s daughter was with him,’ she said instead. ‘Surely she knows a fake niece when she sees one?’

‘He has packed Arta off with his nephew on a six-week tour of Europe. Still, I suppose when they get back he will have to put a stop to his nonsense.’

‘And you men can get back to your poker.’

‘This is not about the poker.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘You, Mrs Edward Campbell Lowe, are a fearful cynic.’

‘And you, Mr Henry Campbell Lowe, are fearfully fond of cards.’

Henry laughed. ‘Shall we play?’

‘Why not?’

Stubbing out her cigarette, she took down the large atlas that always served as a tabletop and set it in the centre of the sofa as Henry rummaged for cards among the clutter of dice and coloured counters in the top drawer of the tallboy.

‘Poor Mrs Cody,’ she said quietly.

‘
Au contraire
, disgustingly wealthy Mrs Cody. There are rumours that Bill has been offered a million dollars for the Wild West providing he stays with the show for three years. Even Miss Clemmons would leave plenty of change from a sum like that.’

Taking a pack of cards from the drawer, he slid them from their box and shuffled them. They were a pack Edward had been given by a friend upon winning his seat in Parliament, the cards all pen-and-ink caricatures of well-known politicians. Joe Chamberlain’s card was entitled The Rt Hon. Orchid Chain-Em-In, the Baron de Worms’s the Baron de Caterpillar. Edward had studied the cards and declared himself duly warned. Campbell Lowe was a name that offered itself all too willingly to parody.

‘Will he sell?’ Maribel asked Henry as he dealt.

‘If the offer is genuine he would be mad not to. The Wild West cannot remain a sensation for ever. There are only so many times an Indian can be slaughtered before it gets tedious.’

‘Tell that to the American government.’

Henry won the first round easily, laughing with mock triumph as he swept the cards into a pile. He shuffled again, his fingers dextrous as a conjuror’s.

‘Did you ever take your photographs of the Indians?’ he asked, as they studied their cards.

Maribel shook her head. ‘There was not time before we left London,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when we are back. Colonel Cody has been very kind.’

‘Don’t leave it too long. The show goes on tour at the end of October.’

‘That soon?’

‘Your turn to start.’

Maribel was distracted and played poorly. When Henry beat her for the third time she shook her head. She pushed the atlas away. Several Members of Parliament slid to the floor.

‘I need some air,’ she said. ‘Will you walk with me?’

Outside the rain had stopped. The pale grey sky had a white trim and, beyond the dull grey slate of the loch, the heather hazed the moor with purple. They walked through the gardens and took the path down to the pebbled beach. The brambles had flowered and the yellow-spattered gorse filled the damp air with the smell of coconut. Maribel looked out towards the tiny island at the loch’s centre, its trees stunted and gnarled as Japanese bonsai. As boys, Edward had told her, Henry and he used to spend whole days on the island. They would take sandwiches and fishing rods and not come back till it was nearly dark. They liked to pretend that they were the only two boys left in the whole world.

‘It’s a pity you could not be there when Bill took forty of his Indians to the Congregational Chapel at West Kensington,’ Henry said. ‘That would have made a splendid photograph. Apparently they sang “Nearer My God to Thee” in Lakota.’

‘I am not interested in the Indians as curiosities. If I am to photograph them it should be as they really are. The truth, not the myth-making.’

‘But the Wild West is all about myth. Bill is the first to admit that no tribe could have afforded to be so gloriously feathered as his troupe, even before Custer. As for all that whooping, no real Indian has whooped in all his life. Cody invented it, to give the Indians a better entrance.’

‘That’s just the show. My photographs would show them behind the scenes, going about their ordinary lives.’

‘What lives? They have no lives in London. When they are not being paraded in full warpaint as a mobile advertisement, they sit in their tepees and wait to be summoned for luncheon.’

Maribel was silent. They walked along the beach, Henry occasionally stopping to pick up a stone which he turned several times in his fingers before sending it skimming across the loch. The stones skipped and spun, drawing six or seven silvered arcs before finally sinking into the water. There was no purpose in arguing with Henry. He spoke as she would have spoken had their positions been reversed, and what he said was true. There could be no photographing the Indians as they had been. Those Indians were gone, wiped out as the herds of buffalo had been wiped out, by the inexorable advance of the white man’s civilisation. The few that remained were kept, like the buffalo, in captivity, a souvenir from a past redesigned by those who were not there. The Indians of the Wild West were actors. Worse, they were ghosts.

‘Perhaps if I do this that is what I should try and capture,’ she said at last. ‘The miserable emptiness of it.’

‘Oh, they aren’t miserable,’ Henry said airily, launching another stone across the water. ‘Just idle. And a good deal less savage than Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would have us believe.’

When Henry suggested walking on to the boathouse Maribel declined. She watched as he strode off before she turned and made her way back up towards the terrace. It was four o’clock and nearly teatime. By now the Indians would be in the middle of a show. For the sixth time that week they would attack the stagecoaches and cabins of the white men only to be summarily dispatched by Buffalo Bill and his band of cowboys.
The only good Indian is a dead Indian
– wasn’t that what one of the American generals had said? She could not remember which, though she supposed it was Custer. Custer had not been fond of Indians.

There was no shame in dying, of course. It was the measure of a great actress, she had always told Ida, to die well. In the schoolroom in Ellerton, trembling and resolute, she had died again and again. Juliet, Antigone, Lady Jane Grey, Joan of Arc, she had whispered her final words like a prayer before, with a poignant grace, she finally succumbed. One had to learn to fall beautifully, she informed Ida, because it was much too late to rearrange yourself once you were down. To fall beautifully and not to breathe. The effects were ruined if the audience could see you breathe.