Beautiful Lies (17 page)

At Cadogan Gardens Edward descended first so that he might open the umbrella. Maribel took his arm as they crossed the street.

‘Henry told me that the Prince has had Cody arrange a shooting match between his little sharp-shooter Annie Oakley and the Grand Duke Mikhail of Russia,’ Edward said, pushing open the front door. ‘Apparently the Queen hopes that a humiliating defeat by a girl half his height will be enough to send the Russian home and put an end to his unsuitable interest in the young Princess Victoria.’

Maribel laughed, then put her finger to her lips, gesturing towards the door of Lady Wingate’s flat. Edward nodded, his face stern. Folding the umbrella he twirled it like a walking stick and, his knees raised high and his feet pointed, he tiptoed stagily across the hall. Maribel giggled. She closed the front door as quietly as she could manage but, as Edward set his foot on the first step, it emitted a loud creak. Lady Wingate’s door flung open.

‘Madam,’ Edward said with a bow. ‘Good evening.’

Lady Wingate glared at him. She wore a loose gown of a vaguely oriental design, her long grey hair in a plait over one shoulder. Her eyes were bright as a bird’s.

‘Good evening?’ she scolded. ‘It is the middle of the night! And yet in you slam, rousing the whole lot of us with your racket. It will not do!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Maribel said.

The old lady ignored her.

‘You are in all sorts of trouble with the papers again, you know,’ she said, gesticulating at Edward. ‘More Irish than the Irish, they call you. Will you bomb us? Or do you mean simply to smash things up?’

Edward grinned.

‘Dear Lady Wingate, if I bomb or smash anything you’ll be the first to know.’

‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself, consorting with common criminals. You should watch your step.’

‘I shall do my best. This one in particular,’ he said, pointing to the one beneath his foot. ‘We shall have someone come and look at it tomorrow. There must be something we can do about the creak.’

‘In Burma it was the frogs that kept one awake,’ Lady Wingate said. ‘That and the cicadas screaming their heads off. One was required to sleep under a net, of course, because of the mosquitoes. My mother hated it, she said she could not breathe, but I always found it rather romantic. Like sleeping in a cloud.’

‘Goodnight, Lady Wingate,’ Edward said.

The old lady hesitated, then waggled a reproving finger. Her knotted hand was bunioned with rings.

‘It won’t do, you know,’ she said. ‘That child this afternoon and now all this rumpus in the dead of night. It won’t do at all.’

Halfway up the stairs Edward stopped. Lady Wingate waited in her open doorway, her shadow staining the tiled floor.

‘Goodnight, Lady Wingate,’ he called down. ‘Tomorrow I shall buy you a mosquito net. One should always sleep in a cloud.’

It was Alice’s night off. Inside the flat Maribel turned on the lamp by the coat stand and removed her hat. The window at the far end of the corridor had been left open and the undrawn curtains stirred, rain glinting in a puddle on the sill.

‘That woman gets dottier by the day,’ Maribel said, loosening her hair. ‘The door’s one thing but disturbed by a child? She knows quite well that there are no children here.’

‘That woman has the hearing of a bat,’ Edward replied. ‘She could hear a child sneeze six streets away.’

‘She’s lonely,’ Maribel said.

‘She never leaves her flat.’

‘She’s old.’

‘She’s the same age as my mother.’

At the bedroom door Maribel turned her back to her husband.

‘Would you?’ she said, bending forward a little.

Edward unhooked her dress. Halfway down he paused, sliding his hands inside the bodice to cup her breasts, kissing her softly on the back of her neck.

Maribel thought of Whitfield Street and the house with the box tree.

‘I thought you had an early train,’ she said.

‘Not so very early.’

She turned towards him, stroking his tired face. There were lavender shadows under his eyes.

‘And what about Lady Wingate and her bat hearing?’ she murmured.

‘I promised I should watch my step.’

With his hand still inside her dress he guided her into the bedroom. When he kissed her she closed her eyes, suffused not only by the first stirrings of desire but also by the reassuring familiarity of his mouth against her mouth, his hands on her skin. Beyond the uncurtained window the rain was still falling. Taking Edward’s hand she pulled him over to the window, pushing the sash up as far as it would go. A light breeze was blowing and, when she slipped free of her sleeves, flecks of rain gleamed on her bare arms. The coolness of the air was exquisite. Thunder rumbled, a deep belly growl, and fell silent. There was a moment of stillness and then a crack of lightning that broke the night in two. In the knife-white light Edward’s hair was black.

Afterwards, when he had returned to his dressing room, Maribel rose to smoke a cigarette. Dragging a chair to the window she threw open the curtains. The storm was dying. The rain had stopped and the sticky night air clung about her like a sigh. She smoked slowly, holding the smoke in her chest, lighting a second from the stub of the first. On a night like this one, in a narrow alley behind the Criterion Theatre, Victor had taken her into his arms and promised to make her a star.

‘You know why the sun sets in the evening, Sylvia?’ he had asked her in his soft Spanish drawl, standing on tiptoes slightly so that he might kiss her. ‘Because that is your moment. Even the sun knows when it is beaten.’

She had held him in her arms and known he was a gift from God. She had begun to despair. Victor might be small and rotund, and a great deal older than he chose to admit, but he had money. He knew people. He had invested in a play that had toured in Europe. He could do for her what Mr Corelli’s photographs had not – put an end to the ceaseless rounds of auditions, the dusty couches and the snatched bit-parts. Victor’s next project was a charming piece about a beautiful ingénue. The West End, Broadway, even Paris and Vienna, they would take them all by storm. Sylvia Wylde would be bigger than Sarah Bernhardt, bigger even than Charlotte Cushman in her heyday. The washed-up Miss Hodson would read of her triumphs in the newspapers and weep.

Three days later she had moved out of her cramped room in Rupert Street and into a small and comfortable cottage he had rented for her close to the canal in Maida Vale. It had a little wrought-iron balcony and a large porch over the front door, creamy with clematis. In the mornings she sat on the balcony, watching the sun on the water and the ducks as they squabbled in the reeds, and her bright future was so close she could feel the warmth of it like breath on her face.

The photographer in the crimson studio had made only two hundred prints. Victor had had them expensively mounted. He said that it was all about exclusivity, that he did not mean to have her picture fingered by grimy-fisted working men. She was not a music-hall chanteuse, a sly-winking wanton. She was a leading lady and a leading lady was not handed around in the public house, hidden under the mattresses of miners. Twelve years ago he had looked at the portrait of her, her hand set coyly between her thighs, and declared it a Work of Art. Were those the kind of pictures Mr Webster collected and showed to men after dinner when they were red-faced with port? Was that why he looked at her like that, because he had seen her before? The fear rose in her sharply, a spike in her throat like vomit. She inhaled deeply, swallowing it down. It could not be. The chance of such a coincidence – surely it was less than infinitesimal. Twelve years was a very long time. A photographic print was not made to last twelve years.

All the same she stood, shaking her head as though she could shake her thoughts loose. Pushing the sash of the window as high as it would go she leaned out. Above the roofs the moon slid clear of a silver-trimmed tatter of cloud and drifted slowly across the night. The London moon was so small, she thought, a moon not so much to be cupped in the hands as pinched sharply between finger and thumb. She was not in the least bit sleepy. She thought of her notebook, the unfinished poem, but it was words from the schoolroom that stirred in her, verses recited long ago at Ellerton, her hand pressed to her chest, her childish voice straining for pathos.

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

T
HE NEXT DAY
, as promised, Maribel went to tea at Chester Square. She was late. As she was shown in, a posse of boys mounted on wooden hobby horses descended the wide staircase in a stampede of boots and whooping, the smallest one whirling a loop of rope around his head. Ducking their heads to avoid the ordinary courtesies, they careered across the hall and thundered, with a slam of doors, towards the garden. The maid sucked in her cheeks as she took Maribel’s parasol.

Charlotte was in her sunny sitting room on the first floor. She smiled as the door opened.

‘Dearest, you are come after all,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad. I thought you might have forgotten.’ Kissing the tousle-haired child on her lap, she set it onto its feet beside her chair so that she might stand up. Toys lay scattered across the Aubusson rug and, on the footstool, a mass of picture books, some open, was piled in a precarious heap. ‘Beatrice, say good afternoon to Mrs Campbell Lowe.’

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Campbell Lowe,’ Beatrice parroted and, sidling up to the tea tray, she snatched a bun, took a big bite from it, and slipped the rest into the pocket of her pinafore. Charlotte shook her head.

‘That will do, Bea dearest. Now go and find Ellen and the others in the nursery. There will be tea there too, you know.’

The child darted out of the room. Charlotte smiled.

‘How other mothers manage to bring up their children to be civilised human beings is beyond me. My lot remain resolutely feral.’

Maribel managed a smile. She felt giddy, thick-headed, as if she might be coming down with something.

‘You must be longing for tea.’ Charlotte peered into the pot. ‘Oh dear, I shall have to ring for more. This pot is quite stewed.’

‘I like my tea strong.’

‘Not as strong as this, surely?’

‘Possibly stronger.’

Charlotte shook her head and poured, adding milk and offering Maribel the sugar. Maribel took two teaspoonfuls and stirred, gazing into the rich brown swirl of her cup.

‘So you brought the Jubilee photographs, I hope?’ Charlotte said, gesturing at Maribel’s battered satchel. ‘Are they good?’

Maribel shrugged.

‘I don’t know. I have yet to develop them.’

‘I thought you were going to do them this morning? If I remember rightly it was the reason you were obliged to refuse my kind invitation to the Foundling Hospital recital.’

‘Ah.’

‘Quite right “ah”. Anyone would think you didn’t care for my children’s wilful destruction of the works of Schubert.’

Maribel smiled faintly. She removed the spoon from her tea and set it in the saucer. A cluster of tiny bubbles circled slowly around the edge of the cup. Charlotte looked at her.

‘I was only teasing.’

‘I know.’

‘Is something the matter?’

‘No, of course not.’ Maribel fumbled for her cigarettes. ‘It’s been a busy day, that’s all. If I can only sit here peacefully drinking my nasty stewed tea and smoking my nasty Egyptian cigarettes I shall be quite restored. Tell me about the recital.’

‘Must I? I shall bore us both half to death. Besides, we have much more important matters to discuss. Did I tell you that we dined the day before yesterday with the Rawlinsons?’

Sir Gerald Rawlinson was an illustrious physicist and member of the Royal Society whose most recent preoccupation was the proof, through scientific means, of the existence of God. As Charlotte described his latest experiments, Maribel sat quietly in a pose of attentiveness, sipping at her soupy tea, but she hardly heard a word. She kept losing the thread of what Charlotte was saying.

She had not lied to Charlotte when she had told her that it was her intention that morning to develop her Jubilee photographs. That morning she had indeed gone to Mr Pidgeon’s studio. As usual Thomas answered her knock but, to her surprise, instead of handing her the key, he blinked at her and asked if she might wait where she was. A moment or two later Mr Pidgeon himself appeared at the door.

‘Mrs Campbell Lowe,’ he said. ‘You are come at last.’

Maribel frowned. ‘Is there something wrong?’

Mr Pidgeon glanced behind him into the studio. Then he stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I might talk with you for a moment?’

The gravity of his expression was discomfiting.

‘Why?’ she said uneasily. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

‘Dear me, I have alarmed you. Forgive me. That was not my intention, I assure you. It is just the photographs, the ones you left in the darkroom to dry. It is not my business, I know, but in the circumstances it was not possible to avoid seeing them. Suffice to say, I have secured them in my private office under lock and key. I hope you forgive my presumption. I knew you would not wish them left in the darkroom.’

‘Oh, those,’ Maribel said. ‘You are kind but you need not have gone to any trouble, I know they are spoiled. The fault was plain as soon as I developed them, though I cannot think what it was I did wrong. Was it the bath, do you think, or something to do with the plates? I wouldn’t want to make the same mistake with these ones.’

Mr Pidgeon peered at her.