Beautiful Lies (15 page)

Outside the heat was worse than ever. It took only a few minutes to walk down Lower Sloane Street to Mr Pidgeon’s Turks Row studio, but by the time she pushed open the heavy green door she had almost regained her composure. It was not in Edward’s nature to bear grudges. By the time he got home that night their spat would be quite forgotten.

The green door opened directly into the back stairwell of the large red-brick building that housed Pidgeon’s Photography. Mr Pidgeon was a gentleman of dour expression and irreproachable respectability whose business was mostly in the line of captivating family groups, for which the demand appeared inexhaustible. His studio was dominated by a large rocking horse and a plywood doll’s house in the Palladian style. There was also an upholstered chaise, large enough to accommodate comfortably a mother and several of her entrancing offspring without irreparably crushing her skirts.

It was plain that the boisterous behaviour of his clientele told upon Mr Pidgeon, for his complexion was yellow and the pouches beneath his eyes slack and bruised, but his attitude of harried resignation did nothing to dampen the appetites of his eager clientele. There seemed always to be at least one child galloping a hobby horse up the stairs or bowling a hoop in the hallway and often, above the shouts and the kicks to the skirting boards, the siren cry of an infant wailing inconsolably. The corridor outside the studio teemed from ceiling to floor with framed photographs of moon-faced moppets in curls and ribboned sailor suits.

When Maribel had first approached Mr Pidgeon about renting his darkroom he had been startled by the suggestion that she attend to her own plates. Mr Pidgeon was of the opinion that the darkroom was an uncongenial and even dangerous place for a lady and had suggested that it might be more appropriate if he were to develop them for her.

‘Consider me a trusted midwife,’ he had said. ‘In my care you may be confident of a safe delivery.’

Maribel had winced a little at the metaphor and firmly declined. Mr Pidgeon had not pressed the matter. With the air of one accustomed to rebuff, and once he had satisfied himself that neither she nor the darkroom would come to any harm, he allowed her to continue in her work unmolested. When they happened to meet in the corridor he nodded politely. He never asked to see her work and she was glad of it, for it saved her the otherwise inescapable courtesy of pretending interest in his.

After the heat of the street, the stone stairwell was cool as a church. Maribel climbed the stairs to the studio on the first floor. The key to the darkroom was kept on a nail inside the studio and it was customary, when Maribel knocked for it, for Thomas, Mr Pidgeon’s gap-toothed apprentice, to answer the door. He was a bashful boy with a shock of dark hair, who ducked his head respectfully as he handed her the key but never ventured to speak. Maribel had several times wanted to ask if she might photograph him. Today, however, there was no need to knock. The door to the studio was open. In the corridor a man stood at the window looking out over the street.

Maribel’s heart turned over.

‘Mrs Campbell Lowe?’

‘Mr Webster!’

Flushing a little she extended her hand. He shook it, smiling at her, his brow creased with what seemed to be astonishment. His eyes really were extraordinary. They drew the heat in her out like a poultice.

‘You are here to be photographed?’ Webster asked bemusedly. Self-consciously Maribel put her hand to her hair. She was wearing the bandanna she always wrapped around her forehead when she was working so that her hair would not fall into her eyes. She looked down at her old ticking dress, her battered canvas apron. The front of the apron was badly stained, the strap that fastened it about her neck torn and tied with a knot.
Titian or Giorgione
, she thought,
never Francisco de Goya.
She batted at her skirts with her hands, mortified that he had seen her in so slovenly a costume.

‘Heavens, a fine picture that would make!’ she said gaily. ‘You must excuse my appallingly disreputable appearance. I have come to use Mr Pidgeon’s darkroom and the chemicals – well, I’m sure you can imagine.’

‘Disreputable? On the contrary, you look perfectly charming. The epitome of artisanship.’

Maribel made a face. ‘May God forgive you the excesses of your chivalry.’

‘The Lord is merciful,’ he said, his mouth twitching.

Maribel looked at the ground. She was sure that those milky eyes of his saw the blush that crept up her chest, the trickle of sweat between her breasts. He was wearing a tweed coat and waistcoat quite unsuitable for the heat and a stiff collar. He did not look hot at all.

‘So you are a photographer,’ he said. ‘How remarkable. I too am an enthusiastic practitioner of the science. A collector too, particularly of portraiture.’

‘You collect Mr Pidgeon’s work?’

‘Goodness me, no. Photographs of plump-cheeked infants do not interest me, however prettily arranged. Mr Pidgeon and I are members of a small society that meets from time to time to discuss the art and science of photography. I am something of an evangelist for the role of photography in Art.’

‘How fascinating. Was it an illuminating meeting?’

‘Regrettably I am here today with plump-cheeked infants of my own. A family portrait. My wife insisted. You have caught me truanting, I fear. I told Mr Pidgeon that I was in need of some air.’

She smiled. ‘I am quite sure you were,’ she said.

‘I dislike being photographed, don’t you? As a newspaperman I am more accustomed to the position of observer. The camera fascinates me. To have the world in which we live presented to us without artifice, not through a glass darkly but face to face, it must alter the way we understand it altogether.’

Before Maribel could answer there was a clamour at the door of the studio.

‘Papa, Papa! Arthur has Grace’s doll and will not give it back!’

Webster looked round. A small girl in an organdie frock tugged at his coat. He bent down, kissing her upon the nose, and took her in his arms.

‘Come now, Patience. Remember your manners and say how do you do.’

The child gazed up at Maribel with round china-blue eyes and said nothing.

‘I must be getting on,’ Maribel said. ‘If I might just collect the darkroom key?’

She gestured towards the studio door. Mr Webster stepped to one side. She felt his eyes on her as she tapped the jamb of the door with her knuckles. Inside, the studio was hot with lights and the hive thrum of children’s chatter. Thomas looked up and hurried over, unhooking the key from its nail and handing it to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She weighed the key in her hand as she turned back to Mr Webster. ‘Good luck with the portrait.’

He smiled at her.

‘Papa!’ the child hissed, wriggling to be put down. ‘I promised I’d bring you. Grace is crying!’

‘I shall be there presently. Good day, Mrs Campbell Lowe.’

‘Good day, Mr Webster. Goodbye, Patience.’

As she turned towards the darkroom a faint breeze stirred through the open window, bringing with it the clatter of traffic. Behind her Webster murmured something to the child.

‘How do you do, ma’am?’ the child chanted in a high singsong voice, as though reciting times tables. Maribel turned, smiling back over her shoulder.

‘Very well, thank you,’ she said.

The child twisted her face away, burying it in her father’s shoulder. Webster patted her absently. Maribel nodded and walked away, aware as she shifted the satchel on her shoulder, as she slipped the key into the lock, that he watched her, that he knew as she did the quickened beat of her heart, the faint tremble in her fingers as she turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. The darkroom smelled as it always did of chemicals and used-up air. She inhaled the smell gratefully, leaning against the door. Then, sliding the key back into the lock, she did something she never usually did. She locked herself in. She would not be able to work, she knew, if she did not keep him out.

The darkroom was hardly more than a cupboard lined with shelves, crammed with bottles and boxes and piles of plates awaiting exposure, each marked in white ink with the name of the family group. Maribel took her box of exposed plates from her bag and put them to one side. Then she took down the three developing trays and set them on the lowest shelf, which had been widened so that it might serve as a work table.

When she had filled one basin with clean water she pulled on a pair of leather gloves and, standing on tiptoe, reached down several brown glass bottles from the shelf above her head. Their labels were stained and torn about the edges but it was still possible to make out the names written in faded green ink in Mr Pidgeon’s tiny meticulous script: pyrogallic acid, potassium bromide, ammonium carbonate. She murmured the names to herself as she measured out the compounds and prepared the two plate baths, tasting the poetry in the words, their alchemical promise of transformation. In the small warm room their powerful smells insinuated themselves into her nostrils so that her eyes watered and her head swam a little. She inhaled, the caustic air ravishing her lungs, and the shimmer of anticipation quickened inside her. Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art, she thought, and, holding her breath, she took the first plate and slid it from its cover.

She had not expected to be so disheartened. All manner of difficulties could bedevil both the preparation and the development of dry plates and she was inexperienced. She was also clumsy and horribly tired. It was no wonder that she made mistakes. Perhaps she had touched the surface, mixed the chemicals incorrectly, allowed a foreign object into the plate holder of the camera. Perhaps, in her ignorance, she had somehow contrived to expose the plate twice. There were all manner of explanations, each one of them enough to ruin a print, but knowing them did nothing to ease the bitterness of her disappointment. She stared at the spoiled picture disconsolately. In Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits of her daughter, the light fell like a veil over the young girl’s face, and her eyes were huge with innocence and fear. It was not as easy as she made it seem.

Her head ached from the fumes of the developing chemicals. Locking the darkroom door behind her, Maribel slung her satchel over her shoulder and hurried along the corridor. The sun was high and she squinted a little, raising one hand to shade her eyes from the brightness of the light. Against the dirt-etched glass of the high window, the sky was a deep Prussian blue.

It was hardly the end of the world, she told herself. Charlotte would sit for her again, and tomorrow she would return to look more calmly at the developed photographs. Proper examination would surely reveal what fault of hers had occasioned such unfortunate results. Mistakes were inevitable, especially among novices. She would improve.

Abruptly a line came back to her from her childhood, a favourite of the Scottish governess, Miss Finton, who had something of a weakness for Samuel Smiles: ‘The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.’

‘And ladies, mind,’ Miss Finton had liked to add, waggling a finger at the girls arrayed before her as she corrected their fractions, and Maribel had rolled her eyes at Ida because she had known what Miss Finton did not, that there were those who had something and those who did not, and no amount of industriousness could change that one jot.

T
HE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
brought no respite from the oppressive weather. The heat stunned the capital, stifling appetite, curiosity, the process of intelligent thought. Though several times she roused herself to contemplate the work clothes hanging in her press, Maribel did not return to Mr Pidgeon’s studios. She felt heavy, too heavy to work and certainly too heavy to chance another encounter with Mr Webster. As for the spoiled photographs, the thought filled her with weariness. It was too hot to write, too hot to walk, to hot even to dress. For the first time in her life she was grateful to Georgie Burne-Jones, who several years ago, in an attempt to recruit Maribel into her Aesthetic movement, had bestowed upon her a flowing dress in the medieval style, slit-necked and wide-sleeved and embellished upon the skirts and around the neck with sunflowers worked in free-form art embroidery. The terracotta fabric had been coloured with a natural vegetable dye which gave the silk its distinctively faded appearance. It might, Georgie had declared proudly, pass for an antique.

Maribel had privately considered the dress an abomination and had refused ever to wear it. It seemed to her a kind of madness that a woman who could dress in ravishing gowns from Paris would choose instead to disport herself in a hideous brown sack. There was nothing liberating about ugliness. Besides, Maribel was neither tall nor willowy. Hers was the kind of hourglass figure shown to its best advantage in stays.

All the same, as the temperature in London continued to rise, it was with some relief that Maribel abandoned the stifling confinement of her undergarments and draped herself in Georgie’s loose brown folds. The first time Edward saw her he laughed so much he had to sit down. When he was recovered enough to speak he promised her that as soon as Parliament rose for the recess he would take her to Le Touquet, so that she could parade her exquisite taste before all the aristocracies of Europe.

The days dragged. Invitations were sparse. Those who could left town. Half mad with boredom, Maribel agreed one afternoon to accompany Charlotte to a meeting of the Fabian Society in Fitzroy Square to hear a lecture by Mrs Marx Aveling entitled ‘America and the Unconscious Socialist’. Charlotte was to depart for Sussex the next day and Maribel was eager to see her before she left. All the same, the effort of leaving the flat almost defeated her and by the time she arrived in Fitzroy Square, the lecture was starting. Hastening to cross the road, she was surprised to see Edward step down from a cab. She might have called out to him if something in his bearing had not impeded her. His habitually loose-limbed stroll was hunched, furtive as a furled umbrella.

Drawn by the low angle of his hat and a sinking sense of inevitability, she had followed him at a distance to a house in Whitfield Street. The house was pale brick, flat-fronted, its white-painted windows bland with respectability. Beside the black front door there was a neatly clipped box tree in an iron tub. She watched as Edward climbed the three stone steps and pressed the brass doorbell. He did not step back from the door while he waited. Instead he stood very close, as though he might press his lips to its glossy paint. A moment later the door opened and closed swiftly, like a mouth swallowing. Upstairs, on the second floor, the curtains were drawn.