Beautiful Lies (3 page)

‘Goodnight, my dear Teddy.’

‘Goodnight, Mother. I am sorry you did not enjoy the play much.’

‘Yes, well, I suppose I am glad to have seen it. The newspapers were right in one regard. It was an extremely dramatic production.’

‘Wasn’t it? There were moments when I was sure we would all go up in smoke.’

‘But still lacklustre, for all the modern wizardry. A poor translation, of course.
Faust
is not a pantomime. All those bangs and whizzes might stop the heart but in the end it is Goethe’s poetry that chills the soul.’

In the cab Maribel rolled her eyes. She did not disagree with her mother-in-law’s analysis. She just wished that for once Vivien would simply say thank you and be done with it.

‘I wish we could have given you dinner,’ Edward said, pulling the bell. ‘Blasted vote.’

‘Dearest, at my great age, the digestion is glad of the respite.’

‘For an intelligent woman you talk a great deal of nonsense.’

The front door opened, the light spilling over the pavement. As Edward kissed her cheek, Vivien Campbell Lowe pressed his face against hers, her fingers pale against the red-gold blaze of his whiskers.

‘You must go,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, my dear boy. Take care of him, Maribel. Try to keep him out of trouble.’

Maribel shook her head. ‘You know as well as I that there is no possibility of that.’

Vivien smiled, a different smile than the one she reserved for her son.

‘He looks tired,’ she said.

‘Doesn’t he?’

The two women eyed each other for a moment. Then, touching the tips of her fingers to her lips, Maribel blew her mother-inlaw a kiss.

‘Goodnight, Vivien.’

‘Goodnight. I shall expect you for eight o’clock on Friday.’ ‘I shall look forward to it.’

The courtesy came easily enough. Vivien Campbell Lowe might be provoking but she was a faultless hostess and dinner at her pretty house was mostly very agreeable. Edward’s father had suffered from violent fits and, as his behaviour had grown increasingly erratic, Vivien had abandoned the moors and mountains of Argyllshire for the cosmopolitan society of London. There she had established a salon in the Parisian style to which she invited writers and artists and, as soon as he was old enough, Edward and the more charming of his circle. By the time of her husband’s death when Edward was twenty she was well accustomed to the life of the prosperous widow. As she grew older her friends grew younger and, even now, she was often to be found at the parties that Edward and Maribel attended, dressed in the dramatic jewel-coloured velvets that flattered her complexion. She was vain of her dark hair and disdained hats, preferring to adorn her carefully arranged coiffures with feathers or diamond clasps. Sometimes when she conversed with her mother-in-law Maribel found herself peering at her, eyes narrowed a little, in the hope of finding the first traces of grey.

‘Go inside,’ Edward said gently to his mother. ‘You’ll make me late.’

Vivien lingered, smoothing the hair from her son’s brow. She had never remarried, though Maribel was sure that there must have been offers. Instead Edward paid her a pension he could ill afford and, along with Henry, his bachelor brother, escorted her on those occasions when the absence of a husband might prove awkward. Edward worried about her, living alone with only the servants for company, but it seemed to Maribel that she had everything sewn up very nicely.

‘My beautiful boy,’ Vivien murmured. Then, patting him like a child, she shooed him out towards the waiting hansom. ‘Till Friday.’

‘Till Friday.’

As the driver snapped his reins Maribel lit a cigarette. Beside her Edward stretched out his long legs and yawned, sweeping away the smoke with the back of his tapered white fingers. His narrow face was drawn. She frowned at him.

‘Must you really go back to the House?’ she asked. ‘Surely this week they have had their pound of flesh.’

‘Please, Bo, not tonight.’

‘It is you I am concerned for. Your mother is right. You look exhausted.’

‘Not so exhausted I can’t put flies in the Home Secretary’s ointment. Honestly, Bo, something has to be done. If Matthews has his way it won’t be long before twelve people in a dining room constitutes an infringement of the law.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Maribel said. ‘Even the Mr Podsnaps want England a free country.’

‘Free for a man to starve in – that is a privilege the government is eager to preserve – but not, apparently, if he would rather hold a public meeting. If he is poor and a Socialist, or worse still Irish, then God help him. For such men Mr Matthews espouses freedom in the Russian style.’

Maribel tipped her head back, releasing a stream of smoke from her mouth. It clung to the darkness like hair.

‘You work too hard.’

‘And you smoke too much. We must bear our burdens bravely.’

Maribel smiled. She might begrudge the incessant demands of Edward’s political life but she was not foolish enough to believe that anything she or anyone else could say would alter him one iota. Edward Campbell Lowe was a radical in his blood and in his bones – his father’s father had campaigned with Wilberforce for the freedom of slaves, while his maternal grandfather had famously made a bonfire with a valuable portrait of the Marquess of Bute because, he had declared, it was more than a man could stomach to encounter a Tory every morning before breakfast. Even Edward’s own father, whom no one liked to talk about, had espoused tyrannicide and knew the
Corn Law Rhymes
by heart. He had also gone mad. He had died in an asylum, bequeathing to Edward his Scottish titles and estates and debts totalling nearly one hundred thousand pounds.

At Cadogan Gardens Maribel stepped down from the cab. Edward made to accompany her but she shook her head, standing on tiptoes to kiss him tenderly on the cheek. He smiled at her, his hair fiery in the gaslight. He had always been a beautiful man.

‘Goodnight, Red,’ she said softly.

‘Goodnight.’

Edward leaned forward, knocking on the roof of the cab with his cane. The cabman slapped the reins and the horse coughed and moved off, its metalled hooves ringing against the cobbles. Fumbling her keys from her evening bag, Maribel hurried up the shallow stone steps of the mansion block and pushed open the heavy front door.

She wished that Edward did not make it his business to provoke people so. As soon as he had taken possession of his seat he had taken up every unpopular cause he could conceive of, including the wholesale reform of the parliamentary system. In the afternoons he liked to caracole in Rotten Row. As a young man he had spent several years as a gaucho in Argentina and he rode with the gaucho’s swagger, his bridle arm held high in the Spanish-Moorish fashion, his horse’s harness jingling with silver. Neither his radicalism nor his riding ingratiated him with his fellow Members in the House.

There was a narrow slice of light beneath the door at the foot of the stairs. Maribel closed the front door gently, taking care that it did not slam. Once or twice, when they had first come, Edward had failed in this duty and, like a child’s jack-inthe-box, Lady Wingate had leaped out from behind her front door to berate him. Edward found these encounters diverting. He claimed that, by provoking the acceleration of blood through Lady Wingate’s coarsening arteries, he was performing a duty of medical care, but Maribel had no appetite for the old lady’s implacable irascibility. She hurried on tiptoe across the wide tiled hall.

As she reached the stairs, the door to Lady Wingate’s flat banged open.

‘Mrs Campbell Lowe.’

Maribel sighed. She stopped, one hand on the banister.

‘Good evening, Lady Wingate.’

The old woman glared at her. She was dressed in a dark green velvet evening gown with a huge and rather tarnished diamond pin on the shoulder. The dress was low-cut, revealing a good deal of wrinkled décolletage.

‘Must you make such an infernal racket?’ she demanded. ‘I can barely hear myself think.’

‘I’m sorry. I tried to be extra careful with the door this time.’

‘Bang, bang, bang, that door, day and night. Anyone would think it was a pheasant shoot. I don’t suppose they have pheasant shoots where you come from, do they?’

‘In Chile? No.’

‘I told my son a flat was a modern abomination. A house, that’s the respectable way to live. Not all piled up one on top of the other like plates. We, thank heavens, are not the French.’

Maribel said nothing. The old lady made a low whistling noise to herself and patted her velvet arms.

‘No husband tonight?’

‘Not tonight. There is a vote at the House.’

‘So I shall have the pleasure of being woken by him later.’

‘I am sure he will be very quiet.’

Lady Wingate harrumphed, clicking her false teeth.

‘My mother would never have allowed my brother to put her in a flat. Not while she was of sound mind. She was of the opinion that only paupers and prisoners managed without stairs.’

‘Well. The world changes.’

‘The vote for women, now that would really have her turning in her grave. Silly old bat.’

Maribel smiled. ‘I should be getting along. I am sorry I disturbed you. Goodnight, Lady Wingate.’

Lady Wingate harrumphed again and did not reply. She stood in her doorway, seemingly lost in thought, as Maribel climbed the stairs to the first floor. As she crossed the landing Maribel looked down. The old lady’s door was still open, her shadow a grey smudge on the black-and-white floor. In all the years of their acquaintance she had never once invited them inside her flat and they had certainly never asked her upstairs to theirs. It was the joy of modern mansion blocks. They came unfettered by the tiresome domestic obligations of ordinary houses. Nobody in a flat considered themselves to have neighbours.

She unlocked the front door and let herself in. Inside the lamps were lit and the grandfather clock ticked comfortably. Maribel paused, inhaling the warm smells of beeswax and applewood smoke. In the drawing room the fire was still burning. As she drew off her gloves and reached up to unpin her hat, Alice appeared in the doorway, a tray of supper in her arms. Maribel smiled at her and set the hat on a side table. It was a particularly pretty hat, purchased on her last visit to Paris, and the sight of it cheered her further.

‘Just put the tray here,’ she said. ‘I shall eat in front of the fire.’

Stretching a little she yawned as Alice set the tray on the fender stool. She knew they had been fortunate. When they had first set up home in London Edward’s mother had warned them darkly of the difficulty in securing servants in town, declaring the whole business a sea of troubles, but Alice, though sometimes a little rough around the edges, had proved competent and obliging. She had been with them almost as long as they had been married.

‘Will that be all, ma’am?’ Alice asked.

Ten years in London had done nothing to soften her West Riding accent. She had come to Maribel through an agency, and when she had first opened her mouth to introduce herself, Maribel had almost sent her away without an interview. It was only desperation that had prevented her, desperation and the recognition that Alice, alone among the trickle of dull-eyed, whey-faced candidates that she had seen that day, was a girl who might be trained. Alice was from Knaresborough. When Maribel had asked her why she had left Yorkshire she had only shrugged and said she never thought to stay.

‘The master has a late vote,’ Maribel said. ‘Again. Heaven knows what time he will be home. Leave something for him in case he is hungry when he gets in, would you? And you had better warm the bed in the dressing room. It gets so cold in there.’

Maribel ate supper curled up on the sofa in front of the fire. They had been back from Sussex a week and she still had not told Edward about the letter. Somehow the time had never been quite right. The Home Secretary’s proposals to suppress public meetings had caused a furore among the Radical Liberals in the House and, along with impassioned speeches in the Commons, Edward had attended meetings of the Socialist League and the Socialist Democratic Federation, whose ideological differences Maribel was still unable quite to comprehend. Moreover, the Coal Mines Regulation Bill was at the Committee Stage and Edward was lobbying hard on behalf of the Scottish miners. He was scheduled to travel north to speak at working clubs and town halls across the Scottish mining districts the following week and, on the rare occasion that he had no dinner engagement, he worked late on his speeches, several nights not retiring to bed until two or three in the morning. Most days they had seen one another only briefly at breakfast. Breakfast was no time for awkwardness.

She would tell him when he was back from Scotland. They would dine together alone and she would tell him. Until then the news would keep. It had taken her mother ten years to reply to her letter. Another week or so would hardly signify. And what would her mother do if she never replied at all? Surely she would not dare to send another. The possibility that the matter might simply go away on its own had not occurred to Maribel before and she felt her spirits lift a little. Perhaps Edward need never know at all.

Alice had left the evening newspaper on the side table and she glanced idly at the front page. There were riots again in Ireland, strikes in Manchester. Mr Gladstone and his wife were to pay a visit to Buffalo Bill’s ‘Yankeeries’. A cartoon at the bottom of the page had the Grand Old Man in a feathered headdress above the caption ‘Strong Will, Chief of the Opper Sishun Hinderuns’.

It was extraordinary, Maribel thought, how stirred up London was at the prospect of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The show had not yet opened and still the newspapers followed every detail of its preparation: the amphitheatre big enough to hold forty thousand people, the twenty thousand carloads of rock and earth required to raise the Rocky Mountains in West Kensington, the electric lights equal to half a million candles. It made
Faust
look like one of Arthur’s charades. Everywhere in London huge coloured posters bore portraits of Buffalo Bill Cody mounted upon a rearing white horse, the stars and stripes of the American flag unfurling behind him. The whole city was convulsed with cowboy fever. It was hardly possible to venture out without falling over little boys as they stamped and whooped, cardboard axes held aloft, their mothers’ shawls trailing from their shoulders. Charlotte’s boys were positively cowboy-mad.