Beautiful Lies (27 page)

‘You ran away to live with the Indians?’

‘I ran away because I couldn’t stay where I was. Unless that’s happened to a body he ain’t never going to understand it but it’s what happened to me. I was thirteen years old and a runt too. Not so much as a hair on my chin. The Indians took me in, taught me to fend for myself.’

Despite the chief ’s kindness Molloy had not stayed long with that first tribe. He had drifted from place to place, and from tribe to tribe, learning their customs and their languages. The Indians he met taught him to ride and to hunt. He grew skilful with a bow and arrow. When he was old enough he joined the US Army as a courier. They gave him a gun, for protection. It was not long before his language skills were noticed by senior officers and he was promoted. He acted as guide to the soldiers and as an interpreter. It was a better job with better pay.

‘So you went over to the other side.’

‘A man’s gotta make a living.’

‘But you turned informer. You betrayed the very people who had taken you in.’

‘It wasn’t that way. The old life was over by then. The West was as good as won. The Indians were promised that if they ceded their tribal territories they’d be given land, rations, schools. A future. The way I saw it, it was the best chance they had. I didn’t know the government’d end up treating ’em like dogs and half of them starving to death for lack of food. How was I to know that? If they’d ended up with one quarter of what they’d been promised they’d have been just fine.’

Maribel was silent. She slipped the leather strap of her camera around her neck, feeling the weight of the camera against her belly.

‘I didn’t know,’ she said.

Molloy shrugged, brushing dust from his lapels. Then he jammed his derby hat a little lower on his head and stood up.

‘You ready now?’ he asked. ‘Then let’s get this show on the road.’

I
N THE DARKROOM SHE
watched as the first of her photographs bloomed in its bath of developer. When the exposure was complete she extracted it, the tips of her gloved fingers touching only the very edges of the glass, and set it in the stop bath for a moment before sliding it cautiously into the tray of hardening fixer. She leaned forward, peering in the low light at the submerged plate. Her breath stirred the fixer, causing the dark shadows of the picture to shimmer and separate on its surface like droplets of oil.

She moved a little, shifting the gloom of her own faint shadow, and tried not to breathe. The surface of the bath steadied. Beneath it, as though through cheap glass, two men squatted in front of a tepee. Their faces were unpainted, their hair loose. One wore a striped blanket around his shoulders, the other a woollen overcoat, its arms empty flaps at his sides. Both men looked directly at the camera. Their dark faces were grave, almost stern. Their mouths turned down and there were deep shadows beneath their cheekbones. They might have been carved from wood. The tepee behind them was decorated with pictures of buffalo. Behind the tepee the rocky embankment rose steeply, and behind the embankment, crenellated against the white sky, stretched a row of chimney pots, one tipped with a twist of dark smoke. In the corner of the photograph, just visible, was a railway signal, its striped arm raised in salute.

It would not make a beautiful photograph. The day had been overcast, the light flat and insipid. There was no mystery in the picture, no grace, nothing to lift the image from ordinary representation into the realm of art. There was no connection between subject and observer as there was always in the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron, no tension, no intimacy. The scene was not even picturesque. On the ground beside the Indians was an abandoned Wild West programme, its cover tattered with use. But it was a good photograph. She had managed somehow to capture in it something she had not previously understood. A people on the brink of extinction did not look different because there was anything different about them. They were as they had always been, their grief and their gravity and their primitive instincts as old as the earth. They looked different because the world for which they had been made no longer existed. They were bewigged judges evicted from their courtroom, sleepwalkers who had woken to find themselves on a busy street in nothing but their nightgowns. They were actors in their costumes and their greasepaint, riding home on the Clapham Omnibus.

It had taken some persuading to convince Mr Molloy to lend the taller of the Indians his coat. It was clear that the brave shared Molloy’s reluctance. Flatly refusing to put his arms in the sleeves, he slung the coat around his shoulders and muttered something Mr Molloy omitted to translate. It was Maribel who had found the Wild West programme and put it in the foreground of the shot, Maribel who had calculated that, if she stood upon a trestle, the chimneys would be visible above the embankment. The result was an image that, if not strictly true, had the weight of truth about it.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

It was nonsense of course, a great deal of Keats was nonsense and never more so than when he attempted aphorism, but all the same Maribel felt a prickle of anticipation as she slid the plate into the wash tray. Photography might not be among the higher arts, might not, to some, be an art at all but only a chemical reaction, a scientific tool whose place was in the lab oratory. Still, it would be something, she thought, to open people’s eyes, to make them see, so that, like a theatre-goer in one of the boxes too close to the stage, they found themselves looking not only at the stage but into the half-light of the wings.

Hurriedly she set about the next plate. Even if she worked quickly the process of development would take her several hours. Major Burke had warned her that time was limited, that the first of the day’s two performances began at three o’clock and the Indians would be required to get ready, so, with Mr Molloy’s assistance and a boy from a refreshment stall pressed into help with the props, Maribel had worked like a demon, contriving to pack the work of several days into as many hours: a brave in front of the bookstall, surrounded by brightly covered cowboy adventures; a herd of buffalo with pelts like mothy carpets grazing in their enclosure over which towered an almost-finished mansion block, its roof cross-hatched with scaffold; a squaw gingerly holding a borrowed safety bicycle. She had had Molloy ask the squaw to straighten her arms, to frown at the new fangled contraption.

‘So that the bicycle almost falls over, yes, just like that. The more uncomfortable she looks, the better.’

Now, in Mr Pidgeon’s darkroom, she thought of the advertisement she had seen recently on the end of a terrace of houses, ‘PEARS SOAP’ painted in curling letters several feet tall, and underneath, more soberly, ‘MATCHLESS FOR THE COMPLEXION’. She imagined two dark-faced squaws standing beneath it, their faces sexless and unsmiling, dark-faced papooses in their arms, and wondered if Burke might permit her to take the squaws to Hammersmith.

They had been packing up when Molloy accosted a slight gentleman in a dark suit. His narrow face was trimmed with dark side whiskers that curved towards the corners of his mouth and on his nose he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘Hey, Doc,’ Molloy called out to him. ‘There’s someone here wants to meet you.’

The gentleman cast a glance in Maribel’s direction and his face twitched, an almost imperceptible frown. He walked towards them slowly. He wore a sombre suit of black cloth and around his hat a band of black silk.

‘Mrs Campbell Lowe, this is Dr Coffin, medical director here at the Wild West. Didn’t you want to ask him something?’

‘Dr Coffin,’ Maribel said faintly.

The doctor gave a peremptory bow. He was hardly taller than she was. On the chain of his fob watch he wore a grosgrain mourning ribbon.

‘Madam.’ His voice was startling, a rich baritone much too large for his body. ‘What is it you wish to know?’

Maribel moved her lips but her voice did not come. The doctor frowned at Molloy, not troubling to conceal his impatience.

‘Are you unwell, madam?’ Molloy asked.

Maribel shook her head, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her head swam.

‘No, thank you. I just – I suppose – I wondered – do the Indians suffer from distempers unknown to white men?’

He answered carefully, the words rumbling in his chest, but Maribel hardly listened. She held tightly to the handle of her satchel, battling to maintain an expression of polite curiosity.

‘I hope that answers your question?’

‘Why, yes, yes, thank you.’

‘Then good day, madam.’ Once again he lifted his hat. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’

Maribel nodded. The doctor turned away.

‘My sympathies,’ she blurted. ‘For your loss.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Was it – I don’t mean to – it was not a close relative, I hope?’

A shadow passed over Dr Coffin’s face.

‘My daughter,’ he said ‘She lived only a few days.’

‘Oh God.’ Covering her mouth with her hands Maribel stared at the doctor and the tears in her eyes spilled over and fell down her cheeks. Reaching out, she touched the doctor very lightly on the sleeve. He flinched and turned away, nodding at Molloy.

‘If that is all, perhaps you would excuse me –’

Maribel thought of the tiny white coffin, of Ida, her fierce little face shrunken with grief, and her heart twisted.

‘I lost a son,’ she said. ‘He was six weeks old.’

‘Then you know our grief,’ the doctor said stiffly.

Maribel shook her head, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No one could know that.’

There was a silence. Beside Maribel Mr Molloy sucked his teeth.

‘Well,’ the doctor said. ‘Good day, madam.’

‘Good day, Doctor. May God grant you peace. You and your wife.’

In the gloom of the darkroom Maribel fumbled one of the plates, her fingers clumsy in their canvas gloves, and again tears pricked behind her eyes. At breakfast Edward had asked her if she might be coming down with something. She had told him only that she was tired, which was true. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw Ida. When they were children Ida had made coffins for dead birds and mice and rabbits that she found in the fields and woods. Edith had wanted to conduct burial services with prayers and hymns and solemn readings from the Bible but Ida had refused. She buried them with handfuls of stones and wild flowers and lit fires on the turned earth.

Maribel did not know what had possessed her to tell the doctor about the baby. It was as though some kind of madness had come down on her, obscuring everything but him, her sister’s husband. She had wanted to take him in her arms. Instead she had told him the truth. He had stood before her, a stranger in a mourning ribbon, the loss of his child like a hole cut out of the middle of him, and she had opened herself up and shown him the hole in herself.

The chemical stink of the bath seared her nostrils and made her dizzy. It was only in the darkness that she began to comprehend the enormity of what she had done. The words she had spoken could never be unsaid. Now Dr Coffin carried them with him, inside him, like a seed. Perhaps it would wither and die, untended and forgotten. Or it might take root, pushing up towards the light. It was not difficult to imagine.

‘Dashed troublemaker, that Campbell Lowe,’ someone would say, because that was what they always said, and the doctor would look up from his newspaper and nod and remark that only the other day he had met Campbell Lowe’s wife at the Wild West and did they know that the Campbell Lowes too had had a child who died?

There was nothing she could do to stop it. The thought was awful and magnificent.

‘Mrs Campbell Lowe?’ She heard the scrape of the handle of the darkroom door as it turned, the rattle of the door in its frame. ‘Mrs Campbell Lowe, are you in there?’

Maribel blinked. Then very carefully she took the last of the plates from the development tray and slid it into the stop bath.

‘I am not yet finished,’ she said. ‘I shall give Thomas the key when I am done.’

There was a silence. Maribel cleaned the excess emulsion carefully from the final plate and set it in the fixative to harden. She took another from the wash tray. She inhaled the caustic stink of the chemicals, feeling the scour of them in her nostrils, their taste in the back of her throat. Mr Pidgeon did not go. His feet made dark shadows in the strip of white light beneath the door.

He knocked again.

‘If I might persuade you to spare the time,’ he said through the door. ‘I have something I should like you to see.’

‘I am working, Mr Pidgeon. I do not wish to be disturbed.’

‘Of course. I understand. I beg your pardon.’

There was another silence, then the click of footsteps along the corridor. The line of light beneath the door settled and set. She emptied the development tray into the sink and wiped it clean with a handful of rags. She clattered bottles into their places on the shelf.

With Mr Pidgeon gone, the air was clearer, less close. It was strange, she thought, how the presence of another human being shifted something in the atmosphere, how the energy of them or the warmth or the sucking into their lungs of oxygen alerted one to their presence, even if they were quite silent. Edward liked to walk about the flat in bare feet but, though he made no noise on the soft carpets, she knew always when he was near. The flat was different when he was in it. It was not a matter of any of the five senses but of something separate, some kind of unconscious divining of the air that sensed a changing of shape, a shifting of energy.

Often, when she was reading or writing, so absorbed that the ordinary sounds of the room had stilled to silence, something in her would prickle and she would look up to see him observing her from over the cover of his book. The weight of his gaze, wasn’t that the phrase so beloved of lady novelists? And yet, in the exasperating way of cliché, there was something of the truth in it. He looked at her and his gaze was like a touch, the heat of it stirring something deep and inexplicable in her so that whatever it was that occupied her was, for a moment, forgotten. There was probably a scientific explanation for it, an ether that propagated human warmth just as the luminiferous ether propagated light or something as simple as magnetism or electricity that set a charge between living things.