Beautiful Lies (9 page)

‘Good heavens, if I ever forget where I came from I hope you will restore my memory with a sharp kick to the backside. Pardon the language. The taller the tree, the deeper the roots need to go. There is nothing more intolerable than a man who reaches the top and cannot recall how he got there.’

‘So speaks the errand boy. Your father, is he still alive?’

‘He passed away eight years ago, God rest his soul, and Joyce has come south to us in Wimbledon. You remember my sister Joyce?’

‘Feisty little Joyce with the pigtails?’

‘No pigtails these days, though she has lost none of her Yorkshire plainness, I am glad to say. I shall never be permitted to grow grandiose with her about. Do you have sisters, Mrs Campbell Lowe?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I wondered if you had a sister?’

‘No. No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘A shame,’ Webster said. ‘I have found sisters to be like bridge or needlepoint. A pursuit incomprehensible to the young buck but a considerable pleasure in middle age.’

The two men laughed. Maribel did not. She hugged her arms around herself, suddenly desolate. The front of the tent had been raised and clusters of people were wandering outside. The desire to be gone was so strong in her that it was almost a taste in her mouth. To her relief she saw Edward making his way towards her through the crush.

‘Might we go?’ she whispered. ‘I am so tired.’

He nodded, squeezing her arm.

‘Mr Campbell Lowe, good evening to you!’ Webster said jovially. Maribel held Edward’s arm more tightly.

‘Edward, dear,’ she said. ‘You remember Mr Webster. And this gentleman is Mr Fording.’

‘Good evening, sirs.’ Edward gave Webster’s outstretched hand a perfunctory shake. ‘And how is the filthy swamp of Fleet Street?’

‘The greatest agency for influencing public opinion in the world. And the House?’

‘Still the National Gas Works.’

Webster gave an exasperated snort.

‘There is nothing done in Parliament because you people are too blasted polite to shake the government into action!’

‘Excessive politeness does not appear to be my difficulty,’ Edward said.

‘It is only with the power of the press behind you that the masses of the people will be raised from their slumbers and true pressure brought to bear!’ Webster cried. ‘I have spoken to Mr Hyndman about this. His reluctance is madness. I’m telling you, it is public opinion that powers the turbine of democracy, not timid toing and froing in the Chamber!’

‘We should talk about this another day, Mr Webster. It is time I took my wife home.’

Webster glanced at Maribel. She dropped her gaze, heat once more suffusing her neck.

‘I shall not utter another syllable,’ Webster declared, holding up his hands. Then he lowered them. ‘But you know I am right. There will be no change to Matthews’ position while you have no one behind you but the Socialists and a ragtag of unemployed idlers. Think of Khartoum. Was it politicians who forced Gladstone into sending General Gordon? No, sir. It was the press, the Chamber of the Fourth Estate. Without the public clamour and the outrage and the letters to the newspapers do you think Gladstone would have conceded? Of course he would not. And nor will the Tories now, not with Ireland and half of your lot on their benches. If you are remotely serious about forcing the government to relieve the plight of the working man, you need us. Believe me, sir, you need us.’

‘And my wife needs her rest. Goodnight, Mr Webster. Mr Fording.’

Maribel murmured her goodbyes and hastily turned away. She did not look at Webster, nor offer him her hand. She did not look at Edward either. She hurried towards the exit, leaving him to follow in her wake.

Outside the crowds had dispersed and the stallholders were packing up and closing their shutters. The ground was littered with spilled popcorn, torn tickets, a silk flower fallen from a hat. In the light of a gas lamp a man in a corduroy waistcoat stacked piles of volumes into a wooden box, while a boy beside him extracted the pins from a luridly coloured poster. The poster showed Cody on horseback at full gallop, a rifle in his hands. Above his hat in fat scarlet letters was printed BUFFALO BILL NOVELS 164:
BUFFALO BILL’S DEATH-DEAL or THE WANDERING JEW OF THE WEST
4d. The evening was warm, the air soft. Somewhere a dog howled.

Maribel walked ahead of Edward, inhaling the charcoal-scented air, exhaling Mr Webster. She knew the stories, of course. Mr Webster had taken over the
City Chronicle
from Lord Worsley several years earlier and had proceeded to turn it from one of the glut of stodgy Tory newspapers that filled the racks at gentlemen’s clubs into the best-selling newspaper in London. Though his first campaign had been to bring down a Liberal Member of Parliament accused of adultery (which the Liberal Member strenuously denied), it was not until his Sink of Iniquity articles that Webster had truly contrived to convulse the capital. After a frank and widely disseminated warning, in which he alerted his readers to the potentially offensive content that would follow over the next weeks, and suggested to those of a delicate constitution that they might wish to desist in the paper’s purchase until such time as the story was exhausted, he launched a month-long series of features committed to the uncensored exposure of the entrapment, abduction and procurement for sale of London’s poorest young women and children.

The Sink of Iniquity was not inspired by events, by the reporting of a particularly heinous crime or notorious court case. It was Webster’s personal crusade. He vowed to force change, most specifically by compelling Parliament to raise the age of consent for girls from thirteen years of age to sixteen, and in this he proved rapidly successful. Week after week, the paper had revealed to the breakfast tables of respectable London the Gomorrah in its midst, a subterranean world of reeking brothels, monstrous procuresses, forcibly administered drugs and padded chambers where wealthy gentlemen might indulge in private in the pleasures of an unsullied child. No detail was omitted, no outrage left unexamined. One by one the abhorrent proclivities of some of London’s richest and most respectable citizens were picked over with disgusted precision. Demand for copies was so urgent that for days at a time the paper could not be found on a news-stand in the capital and frenzied crowds of newspaper vendors laid siege to the
Chronicle
’s offices for reprints. The pressure of public opinion proved irresistible. Weeks later Parliament passed an amendment raising the age of consent. Even those who disdained Webster’s methods had to agree that they had been extraordinarily effective.

‘Summer is truly come,’ Edward said, catching up with her, and he tipped his head back, gazing up at the sky. ‘What a beautiful evening.’

Maribel did not reply.

‘I am sorry I abandoned you to Mr Webster. Did he try to persuade you to the canonisation of Oliver Cromwell?’

‘Astonishingly the subject of Cromwell never arose.’

‘Don’t tell me you liked him?’

Maribel shrugged, not meeting his eye. ‘I thought him perfectly agreeable,’ she said.

‘You liked him.’

‘Yes, I did. I thought he was – vigorous. I could see how he makes things happen.’

‘That, dear Bo, is precisely what is wrong with him. It is not the job of a newspaperman to make things happen. I cannot work out whether he is an evangelist, a fraud or a complete maniac.’

‘He spoke very favourably of you.’

‘Today. But I wouldn’t trust him further than I could throw him. He regards it as his mission to raise a prodigious stink about whatever takes his fancy without the faintest concern for the consequences.’

‘I had understood that to be the duty of the honourable Member for Argyllshire.’

Edward made a face. ‘At least they have not yet thrown me in jail,’ he said.

It was the laundrywoman’s daughter from Whitechapel who had done for Webster. In order to prove to his readers how simply such a thing might be managed, he had procured a thirteen-year-old girl from her mother for the sum of five pounds. Disguised as a roué, he had witnessed the girl’s abduction and consequent drugging with chloroform, before having her bundled off to a Salvation Army hostel in Paris.

Unfortunately for Webster, upon reading of her daughter’s fate in the newspaper, the girl’s mother had gone to the police. Charges of abduction and indecent assault were duly brought against Webster and his accomplices; Webster had been sentenced to three months in prison. That story had made the front pages on all of London’s newspapers.

Maribel tried to imagine Mr Webster confined in a cell ten foot square. She could not do it.

‘The man is a charlatan,’ Edward said. ‘Did you know that he attends séances to assist him in his editorial decisions?’

Something in Maribel shrivelled. She shook her head.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said.

‘He has a medium come weekly to the
Chronicle
’s offices.’

‘Surely that can’t be true.’

‘Burns’s friend Jamieson worked for him. Or he did until Webster had him try to procure a copy of de Sade’s
Justine
to add a little spice to his Sink of Iniquity stunts.’

‘De Sade? Wouldn’t that have been illegal?’

‘Come on, Bo. Surely legality is but a trifle when one’s dead relatives have gone to all the trouble of bringing instructions from the Other Side?’

At the main gate a jostle of cabs waited at the stand, the horses stamping and jingling their harnesses. Edward helped Maribel into the foremost carriage. It smelled stale and she pulled the leather strap to slide down the sash as the cab jolted forwards, breathing in the cool evening air. Beyond the window the sooty houses of West Kensington hunched along the narrow pavements in cramped, provisional rows.

‘It’s funny,’ Edward said. ‘I had almost forgotten we were in London.’

When Maribel did not answer he put a hand on her arm.

‘I am sorry I abandoned you,’ he said. ‘I lost my head. Burke introduced me to Chief Red Shirt.’

‘Was he all you had hoped?’

‘He is wary. I don’t know if he has been coached in the subject but he was very careful to give a good account of the American government and their treatment of his people, though I suppose it is conceivable that the interpreter simply excised any seditious remarks from his translation. The ways of the white man have certainly rubbed off on him. He told me that he had visited the Palladium and then he sold me this for a shilling.’

Edward reached into his coat and pulled out a studio portrait of Red Shirt dressed in his feathered war bonnet, a pistol cradled in his hands. The Indian chief did not look directly at the camera but gazed downwards, a slight frown between his eyebrows. A scribble of ink across the bottom corner of the mount passed for an autograph.

‘For you,’ he said, passing her the photograph. ‘A memento. I should have got one of Webster but it seems that signed photographs are the one form of self-promotion in which he does not engage.’

Maribel frowned, coughing a little on the smoke of her cigarette.

‘This one will do very well.’

At home she propped the picture of the Indian up against the mirror on her dressing table. It was a poorly composed photograph, she thought as she brushed her hair. The background was ill conceived and badly lit so that it lacked depth and shape. As for Red Shirt himself, with his clasped hands and anxious expression, he resembled nothing more than a harried bank clerk in a silly hat.

‘If you cannot convince yourself you are adorable, my dear, what hope do you have of convincing an audience?’

The inflection of Mr Corelli’s Italian-London drawl came back to her precisely. Maribel had not thought of the old photographer for years. He had been old even then, unimaginably old to the hopeful girls who trooped up to his third-floor studio in Soho Square to pose against the heavy velvet curtains he had suspended from his ceiling. There were plaster pilasters, a little chipped, that rocked when you touched them and a screen of wrought iron. Mr Corelli’s portraits tended towards the classical. The studio was shabby, the floor marked with fraying crosses of tape. The velvet curtains smelled of greasepaint and dust and the dark red fabric was faded into stripes by the sun. Even as she pretended herself Juliet, one hand at her throat and the other set lightly on the unreliable pilaster, Maribel had wondered if Mr Corelli might soon become similarly striped, his back and shoulders a fresh black from being concealed beneath the dark cape of the camera, his trousers bleached to grey. It was said that he had photographed Ruth Herbert at the height of her theatrical career.

In those days, as she imagined Italian sunshine and waited breathlessly for fame to find her, Maribel had looked around his dilapidated studio and she had pitied him. His life was as good as over, hers only just begun. Now, sitting at her dressing table in her high-ceilinged bedroom with its silk-draped bed, she wondered if he might still be found in Soho Square, still taking photographs of young girls who dreamed of Ophelia and Guinevere and audiences at their feet, the tears wet upon their faces.

‘One day,’ Maribel had said to him then as she counted out his money coin by coin, ‘one day perhaps you will tell people that you photographed Sylvia Wylde.’

‘Perhaps I will at that, Miss Wylde,’ he had answered as he slipped the money into his pocket.

It was the kindest thing that anyone in London had said to her.

O
N THE DAY SHE
was to meet her mother Maribel rose early. The room was close and her nightgown clung to her damp skin as she crossed to the window, pulling back the curtains and raising the sash. It had been sultry for days and the weather showed no sign of breaking. Though it was not yet seven o’clock, the sun was already hot in the dazed sky. In the street below, the milk woman peered through the railings of the house opposite, calling out to an unseen maid-servant as she lowered a can of milk into the area. Her handcart was propped against the lamp post, the churns glazed with sunlight. The milk would be souring already, knots of white gathering in the yellowing rim. Maribel watched as the milk woman pulled up her empty rope and, curling it around her hand, tramped back to the cart, her hobnails ringing on the flags. The lettering on the side of the cart declared it the property of
Kemp, 36 Eccleston Street
. Perhaps, Maribel thought, she would allow herself to be photographed. Milk women were a dying breed in London, now that the trains brought milk in from the country. In some parts of the city the dairies delivered the milk ready measured in glass bottles made especially for the purpose. A milk woman, however diligent, would not be able to depend forever on Mr Kemp of Eccleston Street.