Beautiful Lies (36 page)

‘Forget the
Morning Herald
,’ said Maribel. ‘Look at the letters that have come this morning. See how many champions you have.’

‘Among the Socialists perhaps. It is a commonplace for Socialists to be united in defeat. How many letters from my fellows in the House?’

Holding her cigarette between her lips, Maribel leafed through the letters, her eyes narrowed against the smoke. There was one from Charlotte, another from Henry, and a good number scrawled on paper that was not quite clean. She could see no sheets of writing paper stamped with the portcullis of the House of Commons.

‘I’m not sure. If they have written personally –’

‘They will not write,’ Edward said. ‘My honourable colleagues share the opinion of the Fourth Estate. I am a revolutionary, a seditionary and an enemy of law and order. Not to mention a disgrace to the Commons.’

‘Isn’t that what you have always wanted?’

Edward put the newspaper down. His smile was weary.

‘It is a dream come true,’ he said.

‘Red, you fight for the causes dearest to your heart. You provoke people and they do not like it. It has always been so.’

‘And the working man is no better off.’

‘You know that is not true.’

‘I shall go to jail as proof that the capitalist masters of London can treat their slaves in whatever way they choose. It is hardly a worthy cause.’

‘You will not go to jail,’ Maribel said without conviction, brushing ash from the counterpane.

‘There are Irish members imprisoned for simply speaking their minds.’

‘They cannot do that here. The Crimes Act only applies in Ireland.’

‘Legally perhaps. But do you think our government is troubled by a little nicety like that?’

‘They might ban public meetings but they cannot fix your trial. This is England.’

‘No. We are Russia now. Whatever my fate, it has already been decided.’

Edward’s counsel was Mr Asquith, a skilled advocate and Liberal Member for Fife. The party, it seemed, was not yet quite ready to abandon him.

Mr Asquith, while hardly more optimistic than Edward about his chances of avoiding imprisonment, was of the view that, given the testimony of a number of witnesses, Edward might be acquitted of the more serious charge of assault. He did, however, stress the importance of discretion in the weeks before the trial. Edward was to write nothing, to say nothing. The newspapers had made much of Edward’s reputation as an agitator, his contempt for the law. Any further suggestion of impenitence would gravely disfavour his cause. Edward chafed against such restrictions but he was obliged to acknowledge the prudence of Mr Asquith’s position. Instead, as soon as he was well enough, he occupied himself with close involvement in the preparation of his defence. The work engaged him and improved his spirits.

Still the days passed slowly. Maribel smoked too much. At night she could not sleep. After the riots of the previous year she had gone with Mr Morris’s wife Jane and Mrs Besant to visit several prisoners in Millbank and the miserable gloom of the place had clung to her for days afterwards. The men had been held in narrow cells furnished only with a table, a hammock, a slop tub with a lid and a stick painted red at one end and black at the other. The stick was the only form of communication the prisoner had with his fellow man. If he wanted work he put his stick through a narrow slit in the wall of his cell with the black end out. If his needs were of a personal nature he showed the red end. It had been a mild day and yet the damp and the chill of the place had entered her bones, as though all the weed-clad, mud-scabbed ghosts of the river, the dregs of the desperate and the damned, had risen from the marsh to stake their claim there.

When she thought of Edward in such a place, wordless, wretched, half starved, his long, elegant fingers bleeding from picking oakum, it was with agitation and, increasingly, with anger. In the newspapers’ leading articles and on their letters pages, Edward was not only damned as a revolutionary but disdained as a reckless exhibitionist, determined upon exploiting every moment to its dramatic full. Several cartoons lampooned his gaucho style, his broad-brimmed hats, his bandannas, the ornaments of Argentine silver on Pampa’s Spanish saddle.

Maribel had never doubted her husband’s commitment, the sincerity of his opinions, but she wondered now whether it had been necessary for Edward to storm the police lines, to provoke so direct an assault. Others had not. George Bernard Shaw had decided to abandon the march when the police attacked, Mr Hyndman of the SDF too. Edward had declared them cowards, accusing Shaw of running away, but what was it that he had achieved that they had not, apart from arrest and a severe head wound? Edward was not a trades unionist or a self-taught labourer, after all. These were not his battles. He was a Member of Parliament whose power lay not in his fists but in his ability to press for constitutional reform. He knew as well as anyone that the debacle in Trafalgar Square would only serve to diminish what little authority he still wielded in the House. She thought of Mr Webster, who wore his prisoner’s suit of clothes to commemorate the anniversary of his incarceration, and it dismayed her, that Edward might not be so very different himself.

As for what would happen to her if Edward were jailed, she refused to discuss it.

‘The Charterhouses, perhaps?’ Edward suggested. ‘Charlotte would love to have you.’

Maribel put her hands over her ears.

‘You could go to my mother, I suppose.’

‘That is not funny.’

‘What about the Wildes? They say it is a Woman’s World in Tite Street.’

It was a weak joke. The
Woman’s World
was Oscar’s magazine, to which he had recently been appointed editor. Maribel shook her head.

‘I do not need to go anywhere,’ she said firmly. ‘I shall manage quite well here.’

‘Alone?’

‘I shan’t be alone. I have Alice. Not to mention Lady Wingate and goodness knows how many other lonesome lady companions. This building is packed to the gills with widows aching to commiserate with me.’

Edward smiled. In truth, Maribel was afraid. It was not just the change in the other occupants of Cadogan Mansions, the sidelong glances and hurried ascents of the stairs. Since Bloody Sunday they had received a number of intimidating letters, several of them written anonymously, from citizens eager to inform them of the particularly low opinion in which they held Socialists in general and Mr Campbell Lowe in particular. Most came through Edward’s parliamentary office but a few, including one that itemised in careful detail the series of punishments the writer considered appropriate for offences of this nature, which he deemed Treason with a capital T, were addressed directly to Cadogan Mansions. It was discomfiting to think that these people knew where she lived.

There were a great number of letters. It was no longer possible to deal at breakfast with all of the envelopes that came with the first post. Radicals of all descriptions wrote to express their support, friends their baffled affection. Witnesses offered testimony. Fellow marchers sent accounts of their own encounters with the police. Socialist groups praised Edward’s actions and invited him to lecture. A letter came from his constituency, signed by hundreds of well-wishers, another from Webster requesting a thoroughgoing interview for the
Chronicle
.

‘I have done a little digging, as newspapermen must,’ Webster wrote. ‘Though I doubt the meticulousness of many of my competitors, one must presume that they have done the same. Your father’s afflictions, the family’s subsequent financial difficulties, it would be hoped that these and other equally private matters might remain private. Alas, privacy is seldom the privilege of the infamous, and infamous, regrettably, is what you have become. I, however, continue as your advocate and, if I may be so bold, your friend. The cause for which you have battled so fiercely is my cause too, your fight my fight. Grant me the privilege of standing with you shoulder to shoulder. Let us share with the world the truth about you, your family, and your struggle for a better, fairer world, in your own words.’

Edward tore the letter up, incensed at least as much by Webster’s synthetic bonhomie as by the expectation that he would wish to disclose private family matters to a newspaper of dubious reputation. The truth was that Webster’s letter touched a nerve. So far the press had refrained from publishing Edward’s history but privately there were many who had reason to recall his father’s violent descent into insanity. Already several distant relatives and a number of Vivien’s friends had written to Edward to rebuke him for his misguided actions, the misery he was causing his poor mother, who had surely suffered enough. Propriety prevented outright accusation but it was there all the same in the spaces between the words, the shadow of his father’s madness, the taint of inheritance. Nobody doubted the publicity that Edward’s trial was bound to attract. At least until that was over Edward Campbell Lowe and his reputation would be dissected and discussed, his felonies and his failings picked over until there was no meat left on them. It was not difficult to imagine careless remarks to a curious newspaperman, whispered insinuations. The years in the asylum were long past and not exactly a secret but, as Edward knew, they were shameful enough to cause damage. His reputation, after all, was hardly one of solid respectability.

She did not tell him, then, about Ida. She said nothing of her own moment of madness with Ida’s husband, her ruinously ill-judged confession. How could she? He had expressly told her that there could be no more contact with her family. She had agreed. Of course she had. Both of them understood only too well the scandal that would engulf them if she were ever to be exposed. If Edward’s own skeletons were regrettable, hers were nothing short of catastrophic. If the truth were to be discovered his career would be over. And not just his career. Sometimes, late at night, when she lay awake smoking and staring up into the darkness, she tortured herself with imagining Edward at the breakfast table opening the paper, the slackening in his features as he read about her baby, the baby she had never told him about, and she had to press her fingernails into her palms to stop herself from crying out.

Edith had never sent her Ida’s address. Presumably she believed it was better for Ida, better for both of them. Edith had never understood anything. If Maribel only had Ida’s address, she thought, she could write to her and explain. She could confess the terrible foolishness of her impulse to confide in Ida’s husband, the overwhelming urge she had felt to tell him something secret so that she might somehow be closer to Ida. She could implore her to intercede with her husband, to make him see how absolutely crucial it was that he never tell another soul.

Days passed. Maribel took to chewing her nails. She smoked cigarettes as though she meant to devour them in a single inhalation, lighting one from the burning stub of another. But however many cigarettes she smoked, however much she wrote letters and busied herself in the flat, however often she told herself that there was no point in stewing on things one could not change, the worry continued to bubble up inside her until she thought she would burst from it. Once at Inverallich the vet had pressed the tip of a knife into the stomach of a colicky horse, discharging a whistle of foul-smelling gas. If she could only be sure of Ida, she thought as she bit at the tattered skin around her thumbnail, if she could know beyond doubt that neither she nor her husband had said or ever meant to say anything, that their discretion was absolutely to be depended upon, it would be like that. It would finally let out the fear.

Meanwhile she scanned the newspapers desperately, her eyes raking the print for any reference to the Member for Argyllshire. At breakfast every morning she watched Edward’s slow fingers as he sorted the envelopes and she had to fight the impulse to snatch the letters from his hands. Every morning she prayed for a letter from Ida, the hope in her so sharp and vain that it blistered her stomach. But when at last Edward handed her her pile and she looked through them, the longing in her was met with a rush of guilt and apprehension at least as fierce as any hope, and the blister in her stomach burned like an ulcer.

C
HARLOTTE’S ARM WAS MENDING
well and the doctor had granted his permission for her to rise in the afternoons and receive visitors, as long as the arm in its cast was secured in a sling. Charlotte had quickly abandoned the doctor’s calico in favour of brightly coloured silk scarves, which she pinned at the elbow with a brooch. The effect was rather dashing. On Monday afternoon Maribel arrived to find the arm swathed in a scarf printed with pink cabbage roses, and a pair of ladies whom she knew a little as the wives of Arthur’s school chums already ensconced in Charlotte’s yellow silk sofas. The conversation stopped abruptly as she was shown in. Only her unwillingness to cause embarrassment to Charlotte prevented Maribel from turning round and going home.

Half an hour of idle prattle did little to ease her mind. The ladies painstakingly steered the conversation away from the icebergs of politics and economics, but it seemed to Maribel that, for all their fixed smiles and fastidious politeness, Edward might as well have been there with them, his rear out and his trousers around his ankles. They would surely not have felt more disgusted by him, and more mortified on her behalf, if he had defecated right there and then, in front of them, on Charlotte’s elegant Oriental carpet.

It was difficult to imagine a less prudent time to enquire after Ida. Maribel bit her lip, her toes clenched with impatience. The hands moved slowly around the clock and still the ladies showed no sign of going home. Someone remarked on the weather, someone else upon the prettiness of Charlotte’s tea tray. The conversation faltered. Spoons clinked against saucers. Maribel set her cup down on the table.

‘I don’t suppose you ever heard from your Good Samaritan?’ she said with studied carelessness and she gave a little shrug to underscore the casual nature of her enquiry. Charlotte did not answer immediately. She was distracted, preoccupied with the matter of more hot water for the tea. She frowned as the maid fumbled with the pot, slopping a little on the lacquered table, sighing as the flustered girl mopped ineffectually at the spill. With her good hand she absently made circles on the curve of her belly. Maribel hesitated, lighting a cigarette. The ladies wrinkled their noses.