Beautiful Lies (11 page)

There was a pause. In the corner a large grandfather clock ticked loudly. Mrs Bryant pursed her lips. Then she smiled, stretching her lips over her teeth.

‘Well, you certainly look well. You are hardly changed at all.’

‘Nor you.’

It was true. In the thirteen years since she had seen her, her mother had grown perhaps a little looser around the jaw but for the most part she looked exactly as Maribel remembered her, her hair parted in the middle and caught in a low roll at the nape of her neck, her soft pale face barely fretted with wrinkles. On her left hand she wore the pearl and ruby ring that Maribel had liked to play with when she was small. Even the shape of her nails was familiar.

Maribel thought of her beautiful Spanish mother, who had not existed until Maribel and Edward had invented her, and who, as the years passed, Maribel seemed more and more vividly to remember. In Madrid, when Edward took her away from the Calle de León, they had lain in bed in the afternoons in a small hotel near the railway station and imagined a third life for Maribel, not Peggy Bryant or Sylvia Wylde but Maria Isabel Constancia de la Flamandière. The details of her new childhood were shaped in part by practical considerations – she spoke good French and, because of Victor, tolerable Spanish, and Chile, unlike France or Spain, was conveniently far away – but also by the shape of things as she had always wished them, as they were meant to have been. Maribel’s Spanish mother had died tragically young but she had lived as life should be lived, joyfully and without restraint. On sleeply summer afternoons she had held her only daughter in her lap and stroked her hair and told her mischievous stories about the starchy matrons of Buenos Aires, whose priggishness was surpassed only by the English.

‘How is Ida?’ she blurted out before she could stop herself.

Mrs Bryant’s mouth pinched.

‘Your brothers and sisters are all quite well, thank you for asking, and your father too, though he suffers these days with his ankles.’ She frowned, her head on one side. ‘Surely you don’t need to keep up that peculiar accent? There is no one here but us.’

‘Mother –’ Edith giggled.

‘Goodness, Edith, I suggest it only for your sister’s sake. One would think she’d be glad to have the chance to drop the pretence. Be herself for an hour or two. It’s hardly as if you and I don’t know who she is.’

Maribel shook her head.

‘Actually, you don’t have the slightest idea,’ she said, her Continental lilt more pronounced than it had been for years. ‘You never did.’

There was a silence. Edith shifted from foot to foot. Then Mrs Bryant sighed, fanning herself with one hand.

‘It’s unspeakably warm, isn’t it? I wonder how long it can hold. Edith, won’t you invite us to sit down? You can’t want us cluttering up your hall all morning.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Edith said and, thrusting out a hand, she clumsily squeezed Maribel’s arm. Maribel flinched. With a strangled gasp, Edith pushed past her mother and, shoulders hunched, scurried down the narrow hall towards the parlour.

Despite the brightness of the day the room was dim, the windows obscured by heavy curtains with stiff fringes, and crowded with rugs and sofas and footstools and tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl and papier-mâché screens and spindly-legged chairs upholstered with spaniels in needlepoint. Beside silk-swathed standard lamps and vases bristling with bunches of dried grasses and peacock feathers, claw-footed tables were laden with glass bowls in pastel shades, each filled to the brim with waxen fruit or marble eggs or flowers made from seashells. Between these curiosities prowled a small menagerie of birds and animals in glass cases, while from his place beside the fireplace a large Negro boy stared at Maribel with beady glass eyes, clutching at his arsenic-green draperies. Above him on the mantel a green marble clock of similarly poisonous hue could just be discerned behind a barricade of porcelain figurines, brass candlesticks, ornamental plates and fans decorated with découpage. The coal scuttle bore a picture of Warwick Castle.

‘Won’t you sit down?’ Edith said.

How many times had she said that to Maribel when they were children? As a girl Edith had only ever wanted to play house. Whenever it was her turn to choose the games, she had insisted upon endless wearisome tea parties with dusty water poured from the dollies’ teapot and oak leaves for sandwiches. When Maribel had on one occasion attempted to inject a little excitement into the proceedings by staging a fit, Edith, awash with tears, had declared her sister the cruellest creature the world had ever known.

Maribel perched on the edge of an overstuffed sofa and slowly peeled off her gloves. The room was stifling. On the stool before the empty grate a jug sweated, beads of moisture sliding over its belly. They might have been back home in Ellerton. Nothing would have changed there, of course. There would still be the fat dust-pink chesterfields crowded around the fireplace, the pink-trimmed curtains with their pattern of bloated roses, the fender stool embroidered with peacocks, the fringed lamps and the painted miniatures and the china shepherdesses and the poker with the handle shaped like a pine cone. Trapped there on tedious afternoons she and Ida had sometimes used the shepherdesses as puppets, setting them in dramatic tableaux along the mantelpiece, but the housemaid always put things back the way they had been before. Nothing in that house had ever changed. She had thought she would go mad with the overstuffed sameness of it, month after month, year after year, until she could hardly breathe.

‘You must be in need of refreshment,’ Mrs Bryant said. ‘Edith has had Cook make fresh lemonade. I can’t stomach tea in this weather, can you?’

‘Lemonade would be nice.’

Mrs Bryant poured.

‘Laurie writes that in India they drink tea all the time, despite the heat. And all those ghastly curries! I have to keep reminding myself he is a grown man and won’t get the stomach ache.’

Maribel took the glass. A grown man. When she had last seen Laurie he had been eleven years old, a thin, shy boy with a mop of unruly hair and a passion for toy soldiers. He had lain for hours in the nursery on his stomach, arranging them in lines. The others had made an eager audience for her performances, settling themselves cross-legged, the little ones in their laps, as, dressed in trailing chiffon, she was Cleopatra or Lady Hamilton or Héloïse whispering the secrets of her heart to Ida’s Abelard. Not Laurie. Even as she wept, Mark Antony’s dying body cradled in her arms, she could hear the boom from the back of Laurie’s throat as his heavy cannon decimated the massed ranks of Napoleon’s Imperial Army. Occasionally a small lead figure bounced dully off the wall.

‘Still, I suppose one should be grateful, if only for the sake of Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee. Edith says there are all manner of celebrations planned so one must hope it holds. After such a long hot spell poor weather would be a terrible disappointment.’

Maribel sipped her lemonade. It was weak and over-sugared. She pushed the glass into the jostle of knick-knacks on the side table.

‘Mother,’ she said.

‘I imagine your husband has a good deal to do with the arrangements, being a Member of Parliament?’

Suddenly Maribel could endure it no longer. She flushed furiously, fifteen again.

‘Damn the Jubilee,’ she said.

‘Peggy!’

‘I mean it. Damn the Jubilee. Damn the weather. Damn the Queen while we are at it. All these years – you summon me here to talk to you and we waste time on this nonsense. Why can you not just get to the bloody point?’

Mrs Bryant touched her fingers to her brow.

‘Really, Peggy,’ she said faintly, ‘there is no call for such offensive language.’

‘Isn’t there? I have come here as you asked, as you demanded, at considerable risk to my husband’s reputation, not to mention his parliamentary career, and you prattle on about nothing as though we were at tea with the vicar. Well, damn it, Mother, say what you have to say and be done with it. And, by the way, my name is not Peggy. It’s Maribel.’

Furiously Maribel tore open her silk bag. Snapping open her cigarette case, she jammed a cigarette between her lips and struck a match. Edith stared at her sister, her pale eyes glazed. Maribel drew the smoke into her lungs and held it there, then tipped back her head, closing her eyes, and blew out a long, deliberate column of smoke. Her head was swimming, the knock of her heart rapid in her chest.

‘I cannot believe it,’ Mrs Bryant murmured faintly.

‘Oh, I am sorry!’ Maribel exclaimed. ‘Where are my manners? Mother, Edith, would you like a cigarette?’

Edith’s eyes grew rounder. She glanced at her mother, who waved a disgusted hand at the smoke, her lips tightening into a thin white line.

‘I had thought that marriage might civilise you. I see that I was mistaken. A lady smoking tobacco at all is shocking enough but in your sister’s good parlour? Edith will never be rid of the smell. It is just like you to spoil things for everyone else. You always did.’

‘Mother,’ Edith said in a small voice, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters a great deal. It is unspeakably discourteous. I am quite sure Hubert would not tolerate it for a moment.’

Edith hung her head, mottled circles of red flaring in her cheeks. Her neck was blotchy. Maribel stared at her cigarette, watching the red smoulder climb the paper. She took a fierce pull and then another. The scarlet flared. Then, leaning forward, she crushed it against the empty grate and threw it into the fireplace. It winked its red eye dully and exhaled a grey curl of smoke.

There was a silence.

‘Forgive me, Edith. I should not wish to cause difficulties with your husband. Now, Mother, perhaps you might tell me why you have asked me here.’

Mrs Bryant bowed her head for a moment, her lips pursed, one finger toying with her pearl and ruby ring. Then, patting her hair, she sat up a little straighter.

‘Edith’s husband is in insurance,’ she said stiffly. ‘Coulson Brown, no less. Edith was very fortunate. After what happened – well, it was not easy for any of them. There was no mixing with other young people after that, not for a long while.’

Maribel looked over at the Negro, who fixed her with his glassy gaze. Ida was the only one she had ever considered. If she had thought of the others at all after she left it had been to picture them like horses on a carousel, rising and falling forever in the same stifling circle of trap rides and tea parties and whist evenings. She had disdained their conformity, their stupid contentment, and she had comforted herself always, even on the worst days, that at least she was not them, crushed slowly to death beneath a creeping and relentless onslaught of tedium. She had not once stopped to think what difficulties they might have suffered by her running away.

‘Mother was ill for months,’ Edith added. ‘They said it was the shock.’

There was another silence. From behind its fortifications on the mantel the marble clock clicked and whirred, gathering itself to strike midday.

‘Well, heavens,’ Mrs Bryant said. ‘What gloomy talk and on so fine a morning. Perhaps it will be cool enough to walk out this afternoon, Edith. It would be pleasant to take a little air. More lemonade, Peggy?’

Maribel shook her head. She felt weary all of a sudden, oppressed by the whole wretched rigmarole.

‘Mother, if you have something to tell me, I insist that you say it. Otherwise I shall leave and I shall never so much as open a letter from you ever again. You may be sure of it.’

Mrs Bryant bit her lip. Clasping her hands tightly in her lap she glanced at Edith. Edith looked away. ‘Very well,’ Mrs Bryant said, her back straighter than ever. ‘I – well, yes. There was one thing. We thought, I thought – well, it seemed foolish not to ask, really, with everything so long in the past and your husband a Member of Parliament and Scottish too. I mean, it is not such a big place, is it, Scotland, and I am sure they must be acquainted, how could they not be? And family is family, after all, whatever water flows under the bridge.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about.’

‘Hubert, Edith’s Hubert, is an insurance broker. As I think I mentioned. Shipping. Doing well. Very well. In the main.’

Edith tittered. Her mother glared at her.

‘Sorry,’ Edith said and put a hand over her mouth.

‘For many months he has been working to secure the business of the Maddox shipping line on its route to Cape Colony. The company has the mail contract, you see, between London and wherever it is that mail goes to in Africa. It seemed that the arrangements were as good as finalised. Mr Coulson had gone so far as to offer Hubert a partnership on the strength of it. A partnership, can you imagine!

‘Only then the manager or director or whatever he was of the Maddox Mail Packet Company passed away quite unexpectedly. Such terrible luck. The new man’s a Boer, if you can believe it, and Hubert says there’s no talking sense with him. Apparently Boers have no idea at all how things are done here in England. He fears that it must all come to naught, all his months and months of hard work, unless of course he can secure an interview with Sir Douglas Maddox himself. Hubert is certain that it would be a small matter to convince him of the wisdom of it. But Sir Douglas is a very busy man who would not usually concern himself with matters of this kind and Hubert has no letters of introduction. So, you see, he finds himself in an impossible situation.’

Maribel watched a fat drop of lemonade quiver on the lip of the jug and then fall. She thought bleakly of Edward’s admonitions of courage.

‘That’s it?’ she said. ‘You want my husband to help Edith’s husband to get his name on the company stationery?’

‘I hardly think that is the way to describe a position on the board of Coulson Brown. But yes, I know Hubert would be very grateful if you were able to – to oil the wheels a little. You must know Sir Douglas, after all? I understand his constituency borders your husband’s. One must assume you are acquainted.’

‘We are acquainted.’

‘You see, I knew it. Just a letter, that’s all I ask. Hubert doesn’t need to know a thing, just that an acquaintance of mine turned out to be a cousin of yours.’