Beautiful Lies (10 page)

Maribel fanned herself with one hand and glanced at the clock on the mantel. In four hours the hansom would be here. It seemed an eternity and yet hardly any time at all. The dress she had decided upon hung sponged and ready in the press but she would need Alice’s help with her hair if she was to wear the hat she had purchased for the occasion, a pale straw with a pleated silk band and a wide enough brim to obscure her face. Perhaps she should ask Alice to serve breakfast early. Then again, in this weather she had hardly any appetite. The thought of hot tea was impossible.

Her mother had suggested that they meet at a house on Milton Terrace, a quiet slip of a street hidden among the wide stuccoed villas of Kensington, where she had arranged to stay for the duration of her visit to London.

Maribel could not picture her mother in London. She had talked of cities as others talked of darkest Africa, with bewilderment and a delicate shudder of distaste. When Maribel tried to summon an image of her, she could only think of her in the house by the river, sitting at the walnut desk in the window that looked out over the garden, her head bent over her letters and a dog asleep at her feet. There had always been dogs, brown-and-white King Charles spaniels with chocolatey eyes and foul breath and pink tongues like pansies. Her mother used to clutch them in her lap when her father shouted, her head bowed, her breath and the dog’s coming together in shallow snuffles. There was nothing that mortified her mother more than open exhibitions of emotion.

And yet she had travelled a considerable distance to confront face to face the daughter she had not seen for thirteen years. In none of her three letters had she given the slightest intimation of her purpose. It was surely too late for recriminations. Someone was dead, more likely, dead or dying. That was what Edward had meant when he said there were things you could not write in a letter. She thought perhaps that, if it were her father, she might not mind too much, or any of them for that matter, any of them at all just as long as it was not – She shook her head, screwing up her eyes and pressing her fists against her temples. There was no purpose in any of it, the remembering or the wondering what might happen next. She could torment herself with possibilities until she drove herself mad.

Restlessly she padded about the bedroom, picking things up and putting them down. On the floor by the press her evening dress lay abandoned where she had left it, the bodice collapsed into the crust of its skirts like a failed soufflé. The previous night she and Edward had dined with old friends of his mother’s in their house at Carlton House Terrace. On their way there, as they neared the Palace, Edward had asked the driver to take them through St James’s Park and up to Trafalgar Square.

Despite the lateness of the hour the park was crowded, but in place of parasols and perambulators, the lawns and benches were heaped with bundles and ragged camps had been set up beneath the trees. The heat had brought out the destitute like lice. At the centre of the park, beside the lake, workmen in shirtsleeves busied themselves on the construction of a bandstand in preparation for the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations. A smith crouched over a fire, the flames illuminating his face. The heat of the furnace turned the sticky air to water, scarlet sparks darting like fish.

As the driver entered the square, turning the horses towards Pall Mall, Edward called up to him to stop the cab. Families huddled around the fountains, drawn by the promise of refreshment and a free wash. A few ragged infants played in shallow puddles on the flagstones, shrieking and slapping the dirty water with their hands, but the prevailing sense was one of dull-eyed enervation. On the south side of the square a pair of constables stood in the shadow of a statue, sweating in their serge uniforms. Maribel watched from the window of the cab as Edward crossed over to speak to them. With his fastidious grace and elegant evening clothes he seemed to Maribel as much unlike the two thickset policemen as the Indian Chief Red Shirt himself.

The anger had stayed fierce in Edward all evening. The policemen had told him that the number of vagrants sleeping in the square was growing, that everyone knew it was the bread vans that were to blame for they attracted ‘loafers’ on the make. They said that the Home Secretary himself had said that it was a disgrace to the city. As dinner progressed Edward’s wit, always caustic, took on a savage edge. He gave an uncomfortably close impression of Lord Salisbury caressing a capitalist, his hand sliding suggestively between the buttons of his evening shirt. He pretended himself an African savage abandoned in the slums of the East End, tugging on the bone in his nose and enquiring querulously what precisely the English meant to teach him of civilisation. When he proposed a revision to the rules of Glorious Twelfth where, in place of grouse, the guns might be permitted to shoot Tory landowners or even, for a price, the lesser-spotted German princelet, his hostess was provoked enough to speak sharply to him, but neither her disapproval nor the obvious embarrassment of his fellow guests had the least effect upon him. As the women withdrew from the dining room Vivien took Maribel to one side.

‘Whatever is the matter with Edward?’ she asked. ‘He is behaving appallingly.’

Maribel shook her head. ‘We came through Trafalgar Square this evening,’ she said. ‘It shook Edward a good deal. You know as well as I how heavily the injustices of the world weigh upon him.’

‘The world’s injustices provoke a man to indignation,’ the older woman said tartly. ‘It is his private dissatisfactions that render him offensive.’

Maribel had been saved from the necessity of a reply by her hostess who, passing through the hall, seized upon them both and bore them into the drawing room. By the time the gentlemen joined them Edward’s fury had sunk to an ashen gloom. They left soon afterwards and travelled home in silence, Maribel drawing greedily on the cigarettes that she had refrained from all evening out of affection for her old-fashioned hostess and the reluctant conviction that at least one of them should try to abide by the conventions of good manners. Edward had slept in the dressing room. He had left for Scotland before dawn. Maribel had woken briefly, had heard his low cough as he passed her bedroom, the muffled slam of the front door. He had not come in to say goodbye.

The clock chimed the half-hour. Time would pass, as it always did. In five hours, perhaps less, it would all be over. She sank down on to the bed and tucked her legs up beneath her. In the drawer of the bedside table she kept a leather-bound notebook and several much-chewed stumps of pencil but she did not take them out. It was too hot for words. Instead she reached for her cigarette case and, lighting a cigarette, leaned back her head, rounding her lips to release the exhaled smoke in a series of neat rings. There was consolation in the circles’ perfect roundness, their steady progress towards the ceiling.

Milton Terrace was an unobtrusive row of perhaps twelve white-painted houses set back from the road behind black iron railings. There were no houses on the opposite side of the narrow street. Instead a walled garden exploded from its crumbling brickwork, ivy like unkempt hair, a tangle of rose bushes heavy with browning blooms. The houses of the terrace were austere, narrow and flat-fronted, their windows discreetly pedimented. The only embellishment was a modest stone balustrade that ran the full length of the first floor, divided into twelve by fans of iron in the same plain style as the railings. The front doors were all painted black, their brass numbers polished, their steps scrubbed clean. There was no mistaking the street’s respectability. Tucked behind the splendid villas of the adjoining streets with their pillared porticoes and extravagant stucco mouldings, the houses bore themselves with the prim self-effacement of maiden aunts.

Maribel straightened her hat and tugged the creases from her gloves. Then, descending from the cab, she walked slowly up the four shallow steps to the front door of number 8. When she pulled the bell the loudness of it startled her. She touched her tongue to her dry lips. She could hear the sound of footsteps from inside the house. She arranged her features into an expression of polite enquiry.

The young woman who opened the door wore a dress of ice-blue silk, stiffly ruffled and bustled in a style that was no longer quite fashionable. Her hair, swept up in a knot, was mousy brown, with a short fringe frizzled over her shallow forehead. She stared at Maribel, her eyes round and pale as sucked sweets. Maribel frowned.

‘Is Mrs Bryant not at home?’ she asked stiffly. ‘I am expected.’

The woman blinked, her mouth wide open in an O. She bounced a little on the balls of her feet, her hands flapping at her sides. Maribel stared at her.

‘Edith?’

‘Oh my, oh my, Peggy! It’s really you!’ Glancing in alarm along the deserted street, she seized Maribel’s hand and tugged at her like an impatient child. Her own hand was hot and very damp. ‘Oh my goodness, come in, come in! Quickly, before anyone sees you. Oh, Peggy, look at you! I can’t believe you are really here.’

Peggy. No one had called her Peggy for thirteen years. She had always hated it. No proper actress could be called Peggy, or Margaret for that matter. They were starchy schoolgirl names, names made of needlepoint and piano lessons and conjugated French verbs. Girls called Peggy were not breathless with passion, magnificent with anger, devastated by grief. They did not raise armies or plot murder or love so entirely that they would swallow poison rather than live without their beloved. They never stood before a rapturous audience, their arms filled with lilies, to receive a tearful standing ovation. Girls called Peggy mouldered for ever in the provinces, where nothing good ever happened and the only prospect was to become the wife of a red-faced squire.

‘I am Maribel now,’ she said.

Pulling her sister into the house, Edith closed the door hurriedly behind her.

‘Oh, Peggy,’ she said. ‘I mean, Maribel, oh, I don’t know if I can call you that, it’s – well, it’s so pretty, exotic even, but – I can’t believe it. It’s really you! Mother, it’s her! It’s Peggy! Oh, Peggy, you look just as you always did! Mother would have had me at the Ragged School – Tuesday is my day for Good Works – but I simply couldn’t. You don’t mind, do you? I shan’t breathe a word, I promise. Mother has sworn me to secrecy. And the children are gone to the museum and the maid sent out on some fool’s errand and Cook won’t come upstairs, she never does, so you are quite safe.’

Maribel blinked. ‘You are married then?’

‘For five years. So I suppose I’ve changed my name too, how funny. I am Mrs Hubert Birtles now. You look a little pale, Peggy. Can I fetch you some water?’

Maribel shook her head. Perhaps it was the heat that made her so dizzy.

‘Mother!’ Edith cried. ‘Look, it’s Peggy. She’s come! Except that she is called Maribel now. Isn’t that a pretty name, Maribel?’

‘Hello, Peggy dear.’

Maribel turned round. Her mother stood in the hall. She wore the three-stranded pearl necklace she had always worn when Maribel was a child and a green dress with a high collar. A green dress. So she was not in mourning. Maribel swallowed, silently thanking God. If it was Ida at least she was not dead.

‘Mother.’

For as long as she could remember Maribel had known that her family did not belong to her, that she had somehow accidentally been exchanged at birth. Apart from Ida, her sisters were timorous, biddable, so awash with docility that it made Maribel want to scream, and the boys were just dolts. When she railed against the dreariness of her existence, her mother had made the face she made, when her mouth pinched and the tip of her nose went white, and called her histrionic. Mrs Bryant considered impetuosity in women intolerably vulgar. Maribel had lain in bed at night listening to Lizzie sucking on her tongue as she slept, and imagined herself Lady Jane Grey, imprisoned in the Tower, or better, Joan of Arc at Rouen, for, although Joan of Arc was not so beautiful, she was a soldier and a Catholic which was more dramatic.

Ida had loved Joan of Arc almost more than she had. For years Ida had kept a picture of the saint tucked inside her Bible so that she could look at it during the sermon on Sundays. She said it was so that she would remember that being clever and fighting people was sometimes what God wanted you to do, even if you were a girl. On the days that Ida did not want to be an elephant keeper when she grew up, she wanted to be a soldier-saint like Joan of Arc. Sometimes they slipped out late at night, when the others were all asleep, creeping across the garden and into the woods beyond. The woods were full of strange loud noises, foxes screaming and owls hooting and trees moving restlessly in the earth. Maribel held Ida’s hand and told her it was essential for an actress to understand fear, but Ida was not afraid. She turned cartwheels on the lawn, her nightgown a pale ghost in the darkness, and said that in the night the world was more exciting because you could not see where it ended.

Ida had been twelve when Maribel ran away. Maribel had not given a straw for the rest of them, but Ida, brave, dogged Ida, had been her ally, her confidante, the only one who understood her, who loved her for herself and not the insipid dullard they wanted her to be. She had promised to take Ida with her. In the end she had not even left a note.

Her mother stepped forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled, as she always had, of face powder and rose water. Maribel’s face felt stiff as a doll’s. She hardly trusted herself to move. Beside her Edith issued a low moan, pressing her hands against her mouth and hopping from foot to foot.

‘It is good of you to come,’ Mrs Bryant said. Her mouth twitched a little, as though fingers plucked the nerve strings beneath the skin. ‘Did you have a tiresome journey?’

‘No, no. The traffic was light. And it is not so long a distance. You never said Edith would be here.’

‘Well, it is her house, dear. That is a fetching dress. Unusual.’

‘It’s from Paris. Nobody in Paris wears the bustle any more.’

‘Is that right? We are rather insulated from the fashions, in Yorkshire.’