Beautiful Lies (16 page)

She waited but he did not come out. After perhaps ten minutes another gentleman emerged from the area steps, his hat similarly pulled down low over his face. At the second-floor window a woman’s face appeared fleetingly. It was then that Maribel knew for sure. Terrified that Edward would find her there she stumbled along Tottenham Court Road, pushing her way through the early-evening bustle. Even so late in the day it was still unpleasantly close and the perspiration dampened her hands and sent a trickle of moisture between her breasts.

She had thought to take the Metropolitan Railway but the entrance to the station was crowded with clerks and shopgirls in gay bonnets and she did not have the strength for it. Instead she took a cab. As the hansom inched around the traffic-choked snarl of Trafalgar Square she had put her face to the open window, trying to find a breeze, trying not to think of Edward, his elegant fingers, his narrow back, the long white stretch of his limbs. Beside the cab, an old woman shuffled along the pavement, a darned shawl over her head. The back of her skirt was worn, fringed with tattered threads. From somewhere in the melee, a man shouted something. The woman turned, gesturing obscenely and with such vigour that her shawl fell back from her face, and Maribel saw that she was not old at all but hardly more than a girl. Her eyes were yellow as a lion’s. Beneath her skirt she wore men’s boots without laces.

The box tree outside the house on Whitfield Street had been pruned into a perfect ball, its leaves so uniformly green and pristine that they might have been fashioned from wax. At the Calle de León, in the central courtyard, cascades of purple bougainvillea foamed over the iron balustrades and water danced in a stone fountain. She covered her eyes, her thumb and forefinger clamped against her temples. In the drawing room, the Señora had served pale gold white port in tiny glasses like vials of sunlight.

At the Calle de León they had spoken Spanish, sometimes French. Never English. It would be different in English, she thought. Then she shook her head, impatient with herself. The traffic was finally moving and the cab soon passed the high railings that bordered the private lawns of Belgrave Square. She would be home directly. She was not sure now what had possessed her to follow Edward when he could so easily have turned round and seen her. She imagined his courteous perplexity, his faint embarrassment at her impropriety, and the thought of it made her squirm.

It was on the longest and warmest day of 1887 that Victoria, Queen regnant of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and first Empress of India, celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Along the length of the processional route the streets were wreathed and swagged, every house arrayed with velvets and tapestries and hanging baskets filled with roses and flags of every imaginable nation. Embroidered banners bore loyal mottos and greetings to Her Majesty in tall gold letters, triumphal arches of extravagant design spanned the thoroughfares, festoons of brightly coloured silk hung from windows and from roofs. Between them profusions of flaunting flags and bunting and clusters of Union Jacks criss-crossed the air so that, as the Queen drove from Constitution Hill to Westminster, flanked by her mounted princes, it was as though she traversed a single great avenue of brilliant colour.

Immense crowds thronged the streets, the swell of their cheers like the roaring of an ocean. From their place on a sweltering balcony in a window at the foot of the Haymarket, Edward and Maribel observed the crush of Her Majesty’s subjects stretch as far as the eye could see in both directions. Despite the sweltering temperatures, the people greeted every part of the parade with unwearying enthusiasm, whooping in loud approval for the handsome German Crown Prince, a chivalrous apparition clothed all in white, and louder still for the Prince of Wales and his brothers who followed, mounted on three fine bay horses. Sunlight flashed on helmets and epaulettes, on scintillating cuirasses and buttons. When at last their Queen passed in her golden carriage, her eight cream-coloured horses bedecked in golden harness hung with crimson tassels, her footmen gleaming in their livery of gold lace, the bellows grew deafening. All along the street men doffed their hats. Many threw them in the air. Among all the dazzle of the procession, the gold and the blazonry, only the Queen was plainly dressed in a gown of sombre black-and-grey stripes, its sole embellishment the broad blue ribbon of the Garter across her shoulder. In place of a crown, she wore a simple grey bonnet.

‘Why, she wore that very same bonnet to the opening of the People’s Palace,’ remarked the wife of the Member for Croydon as the Queen raised her hand to the crowds arrayed in windows and on roofs, delight lighting her plain pale face.

‘Such thrift,’ Edward said.

When darkness fell there were fireworks in the park. The streets were thronged with people until late into the night, their drunkenness exceeded only by their good humour. The next day, despite the heat, Maribel took her camera and walked the route taken by the Queen’s procession. She photographed the sagging swathes of bunting, the wilted flowers, the heavy-eyed huddles of weary merrymakers, the flotsam of the great wave of celebration that had surged so triumphantly through the capital. At the gates of Hyde Park a cordon of policemen blocked the roads in every direction. The park itself was closed. Thirty thousand of London’s children had been invited to a fete presided over by the Queen herself, a constable told Maribel. As well as magicians and tumblers, the children had been promised tea, with sandwiches and three kinds of cake.

That night, as the Campbell Lowes attended a dinner given by Frederic Leighton in the Arab Hall of his house in Holland Park, a mob broke into the enclosure where the children’s party had taken place and set fire to the marquees. In the days that followed, fearful of a repeat of the riots of the previous winter, newspaper editorials called for a clearing of Trafalgar Square, where the number of men and women sleeping rough had swollen to several hundred. They thundered warnings of respectable citizens once again attacked, carriages overturned, shops smashed and looted, property stolen. Unless repressive action were taken immediately, they roared, law-abiding London would once more fall victim to the savageries of the mob.

Only the
Chronicle
took the side of the poor. Throughout July the newspaper ran a series of fervent articles about the men Webster dubbed the ‘unemployed’, who, he argued, lived barely quarter lives; stunted physically and morally, deprived of any kind of education, they could not live as God had meant them to live but were instead reverting to a race of brutes, a miscegenation of debased humanity capable of every kind of evil. He wrote of godlessness, of foul language and fouler lodgings, of the lack of thrift that forced wives to seek work outside the home, of the cursed affliction of promiscuity and casual marital relations, and laid the blame for all squarely at the doors of an inhumane and profit-hungry society. In particular he condemned the landlords of pestilential dwelling houses as no better than brothel keepers, for both profited from the moral and physical ruin of the weak and the destitute. For several consecutive days he published the names and addresses of landlords in the East End whom he deemed particular offenders. When the
Chronicle
received a letter from a prominent firm of lawyers threatening a libel action, Webster published that too.

‘He speaks his mind,’ Maribel observed as she glanced through the paper one evening. ‘There is no doubting his courage.’

Edward turned from the window. The weather was finally breaking. Beyond the roofs purple clouds massed, hastening the evening towards darkness.

‘A facility for making enemies is not the same thing as courage.’

‘But his writing is vigorous,’ Maribel said. ‘He will not be ignored.’

‘He enjoys whipping himself into a frenzy of righteous fury.’

‘But if he can whip up his readers too, surely it will help you?’ Edward shrugged.

‘I defy him to whip up Parliament,’ he said. ‘He could plug the entire House into Deptford Power Station and provoke not so much as a twitch.’

Maribel did not answer. She thought of the heat in her skin when he looked at her, the quickening of her pulse, and it occurred to her that for once Edward might be mistaken.

A week after the Jubilee celebrations, Maribel and Edward dined at Chester Square. Edward’s brother Henry was there, and several other of Arthur’s friends who had known one another at school and shared Arthur’s uproarious sense of humour. The conversation during dinner was dominated by an enthusiastic reminiscence of the practical jokes that these men had played upon one another, both as boys and in later life. Maribel listened in silence to tales of tapioca spiked with frogspawn, shoes filled with ink, boys tied to their bedsteads or held out of windows by their ankles, and thought of the stories Edward had told her of the
payadors
of Argentina, gaucho troubadours who vied to out-verse one another in contests of song that could go on for hours. It was the custom among the gauchos, whenever they were paid in silver, to fix the coins to their belts or to their horses’ bridles. In Chester Square the silver was displayed on the dining-room table, shaped into gleaming forks and candlesticks and coasters and artfully feathered game birds with open beaks.

It was not until the ladies retired to the drawing room that Maribel had the chance to talk to Charlotte. When the coffee had been served, and the other wives settled on the sofa, they stood together before the empty fireplace. Maribel licked the crystals of coffee sugar from her spoon and lit a cigarette. Beyond the thick curtains rain spattered lightly against the windows.

‘London has been very dull without you,’ she said to Charlotte.

‘And Sussex just as dull with me,’ Charlotte replied. ‘Even the children were insensible with the heat. I had forgotten what silence sounded like.’

‘Was it heavenly?’

‘It should have been but after one day of it I longed for riots. I seem to have become accustomed to them.’

‘We must adapt to survive. That Mr Darwin was no fool.’

Charlotte smiled, her attention distracted by one of the other women. Maribel talked desultorily to someone’s wife about the servant problem. When at last the gentlemen joined them from the dining room, bringing with them loud laughter and the smell of cigars, Edward pleaded fatigue and an early train the next morning. A cab was summoned. In the hall Charlotte kissed them goodnight and pressed upon them an umbrella. The rain was falling hard, the sultry night restive with thunder.

‘I’ve hardly spoken to you.’

‘I know. Come to tea tomorrow, won’t you? I want to hear about the photographs. Were they good?’

Maribel wrinkled her nose. ‘They should have been, or three of them anyway. The light was perfect, absolutely perfect, and you too of course, but somehow I managed to spoil the plates. I don’t even know what I did wrong, some kind of double exposure, maybe, or dirt on the glass. Whatever it was I botched them. I am sorry.’

‘Don’t be a silly,’ Charlotte said. ‘We will just have to try again.’

‘Seriously? You could bear it?’

‘Of course I could. We must adapt to survive.’

Reaching out, Maribel squeezed her friend’s hand.

‘Thank you.’

‘Thank Mr Darwin.’

‘I mean to develop my Jubilee photographs tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed I do better with them.’

‘Maribel,’ Edward said wearily from the doorway, gesturing towards the cab. His wife’s inability to leave a party promptly was one aspect of her nature to which he refused to become accustomed.

‘Tomorrow, four o’clock,’ Charlotte said and pushed her towards the door. ‘Take her home, dear Edward, I beseech you. We have had quite enough of her.’

The rain drummed on the roof of the cab, piercing the light from the street lamps like a cascade of silver needles. The heaviness of the downpour required them to keep the windows up, and the cab smelled strongly of stale sweat. Maribel lit a cigarette.

‘How were the gentlemen? Awash with blue jokes and tales of schoolboy high jinks?’

‘Gossip, mostly. They are as bad as a bunch of wives when they get together. They were full of salacious stories about your Mr Webster.’

‘He is not my Mr Webster.’

‘Dearest Bo, you rise like a salmon.’

‘Then don’t be a fly.’

Edward smiled. ‘Do you remember when you saw him at Turks Row that he told you he collected photographs? Well, it turns out that his is rather more private a collection than he might have intimated. Arthur’s friend Woodhouse went to dinner at Wimbledon the other night, strictly gentlemen only, and they all had a good deal too much to drink. The collection was brought out with the cigars. Woodhouse, who had been dreading a pious lecture in aesthetics, was perfectly delighted. It was basically naked ladies. Webster of course calls it Art.’

Maribel was glad then that they sat side by side and that in the darkness he could not see her face.

‘One might have guessed, of course,’ Edward added. ‘It is always the Congregationalists.’

‘I thought it was the Scots.’

Edward laughed. ‘The Scots too. What we bury under our tartan blankets would make a sailor blush. By the way, I have suggested to Henry he come up to Inverallich this summer. It would be nice for Mother.’

‘Did he say he would?’ Maribel asked, glad of the change of subject, and she leaned forward, pressing her crossed arms hard against her stomach. The thought of Mr Webster looking at photographs of naked ladies with those milky eyes of his was peculiarly unsettling.

‘He said he would think about it. He is preoccupied with the Prince of Wales, with whom he has taken to playing poker. To my lasting credit I refrained from vulgar jokes about knaves.’

‘Your self-restraint is commendable. Will he be bankrupted?’

‘Henry? On the contrary, he is confident of riches. Apparently he and Prince Edward have been receiving instruction in the game from Buffalo Bill and they are become quite expert. It may of course be that they will soon become expert in losing money to Buffalo Bill. We shall have to hope for the best.’