Beautiful Lies (22 page)

She missed the theatre. She had never before permitted herself to admit it. She missed it. Not the realities of her brief career, the awful rooms and the worse auditions in the seedier theatres the wrong side of Leicester Square, the producers with their shiny coats and their squint-eyed hangers-on, the sighing and the sucking of teeth, the if-onlys and the not-this-times. What she missed was the promise of a magnificent future, the intoxicating certainty that if she could only escape the barred cage of her childhood she would fly.

At night, in her bed in Ellerton, she had closed her eyes and listened to the roar of the audience like the roar of a great sea and she had curtsied and smiled and kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed the flowers in their swathes of ribbon and crinkly tissue paper against her chest and she had thought she would burst with the need of it. When she was thirteen a girl she knew vaguely had died from a swollen heart. For weeks afterwards Maribel had lain in her bed, her own heart bloated with longing in her chest, certain that hers would kill her too.

She had slipped the door of the cage but she had not flown. She had fallen, like a fledgling pushed too soon from its nest, and thought it flying, till the ground came up to meet her. Now she watched from the ground as others made patterns in the sky for posterity, and her heart was small and hard, like a walnut.

The little notebook she carried with her was in her pocket, a stub of a pencil attached to it by a ribbon threaded through the spine. On impulse she pulled it out, leafing through it for an empty page. The wrought-iron bench that encircled the largest of the beeches was wet. She sat all the same. Poems had to be written quickly, before the act of thinking corrupted their simplicity.

The clear white page on which I set to write
In sky-high letters, curlicued, sun-bright,
Is grey with jottings, doodles, words rubbed out,
Thoughts half strangled, half forgotten,
Mangled verses misbegotten,
Discarded truths I never thought to doubt.
Fierce June of hope now chill November:
What did I dream? I daren’t remember.

She let her hand drop, staring down at the poem in her lap. A friend of Edward’s, impressed by his political articles for the
Commonweal
, had recently asked him if he might be interested in writing a series of pieces on his travels as a young man in South America. There was a possibility of a book. Edward had said he would think about it but he had already begun to write. Several days ago he had shown her a short piece that he had written about two gaucho brothers from the pampas on the River Plate. Though he had dashed it off in hardly more than an hour it was a polished piece, witty and wise. When Maribel asked him how much of the story was taken from his own experience, and how much made up, Edward had only laughed.

Write what is in your heart, that was the advice someone had once given her, and she had tried to. Perhaps, she thought, her poetry revealed what she had so far managed to conceal even from herself, that her heart was full of platitudes, platitudes served up in a gravy of doggerel. She could not even bring herself to cross the poem out. The hammy symbolism of such a gesture was worse even than the lines themselves.

Summer was coming to an end. In the newly planted orchards the apples had begun to ripen. Henry and Edward played Wild West with them, throwing the little green windfalls into the air for the other to shoot. When they came in for tea they had little bits of apple in their hair.

When Henry departed to stay with friends in possession of a proper grouse moor Maribel did not return with quite the same staunchness to her neglected duties. Though she continued to conduct estate business in the mornings, in the afternoons she found herself often taking refuge in the library. It was not a room that she and Edward were accustomed to using. Edward’s father had contrived to lose a fortune during his lifetime and the library at Inverallich was his greatest legacy, proof of his ability to part with money without the slightest thought or purpose. He had favoured the purchase of books by the boxload, weight being, in his opinion, the best estimate of a book’s value, and the resulting collection, for the most part, stood as a testament to the ability of man, by way of Mr Caxton, to set down on paper more words than most speak in a lifetime and still say almost nothing at all.

Maribel had half intended to begin some kind of clearing out of the collection and several tea chests, half filled, stood in the corner of the library. During her excavations, however, she had discovered that, among the stolid discourses on heraldry, the outdated travelogues and the collections of poor sermons and poorer poetry, there was to be found the occasional jewel: some essays of Montaigne, Cervantes’
Don Quixote
translated into Scotch, a hand-inked volume, bound in sheepskin, containing a monk’s sworn account of his conversations about God with a mule. There was an entire shelf of books of natural history, translated long ago from Latin or Greek, and another dedicated to the obscurer sciences. Several had elaborate illustrations. Maribel, filled to the brim with the poetry of her contemporaries, found herself entranced by these volumes, by their blend of the prophetic and the preposterous, the peculiar beauty of their language. As she immersed herself in the arcana of alchemy or astral magnetism, the words, so long dormant, began to move in her.

Most days, when Edward came in from the stables, he found Maribel curled up on the old chesterfield in front of the fire, a book open in her lap, a notebook and pencil on the seat beside her. He would sprawl next to her then, his stockinged feet propped on the fender, and drink what was left of the tea from her cup while she read out to him passages that had caught her eye and breathed in his smell of rain and horses. Sometimes she would have found a book he had mentioned, or one that she thought would amuse him, and they would read together, their shoulders touching, the warmth of the fire pink in their cheeks, until it was time to bathe and change for dinner. Occasionally Maribel would reach for her notebook, her head bent as she scribbled. The bathwater grew cool and, in the kitchen, the cook tapped her spoon restlessly against the iron pots.

It was some nights before their own departure for London that Edward arrived back at the house to find Maribel waiting for him in the stone-flagged hall.

‘You’re cold,’ he said to her, kissing her on the nose. ‘Where is your shawl?’

‘I am warm,’ Maribel said. ‘And I have something I want to show you.’

Taking him by the hand she dragged him into the library. Two large books bound in battered brown leather lay open on the table in the centre of the room. Maribel picked up the first, turning it over so that Edward could see the spine. The book was the second of two heavy volumes of Pliny’s
Natural History
, translated into French. She turned the pages, searching for something. Many passages were underlined or marked with exclamation marks, and the margins were crammed with pencilled comments, also in French, declaiming Pliny’s inaccuracies with Gallic disgust.

‘What on earth is that?’ Edward asked.

‘Pliny. I was reading it this afternoon.’

‘Good God. Has it really come to that?’

‘I was browsing in the first book through the parts about Lusitania. A lot of it was about the geography, the flora and fauna of the region, but Pliny also writes a lot about gold mines. Apparently the Romans obtained a great deal of their gold from Lusitania, which of course is part of modern-day Galicia. And it occurred to me that even when I was there the country people used to go to the River Sil and wash for gold. There were endless folk stories about the treasure people had found and about a mine in the Vierzo where, long ago, before anyone could remember, gold had been brought from the ground in blocks so heavy it took three men to lift them.’

‘That sounds like a typical Galician story.’

‘Well, yes, but then I read Pliny’s chapter about minerals in Book II and I found this: “In all gold there is some silver, in varying proportions; a tenth part in some instances, an eighth in others. In one mine, and that only, the one known as the mine of Albucrara, in Lusitania, the proportion of silver is but one thirty-sixth; hence it is that the ore of this mine is so much more valuable than that of others.”’

‘I am not sure I understand your point.’

‘My point is that I know where Albucrara is. Not the mine but the valley. I’ve been there. Pliny describes it exactly, the oxbow lake, the S-shaped twist in the river, the mountains to the south. He’s describing the Val de Verriz. I know he is.’

‘Bo, Galicia is a big place. It is filled with lakes and rivers.’

‘Not exactly like this one.’

Edward kissed her and pushed her lightly away.

‘Your nose is icy,’ he said. ‘Bath time.’

Maribel allowed herself to be led upstairs. It was not until later, when dinner was over and Edward was helping himself to cheese, that she returned to the subject of Pliny. This time she did not allow Edward to discourage her.

‘Very well,’ Edward conceded at last. He held his glass of port up to the candle in front of him, contemplating its garnet gleam. ‘Let us say you are right and Pliny’s Albucrara is indeed in your Val de Verriz. You are not the first person to have discovered Pliny, even in French. If there was a gold mine to be found there, someone would have stumbled on it by now.’

‘But why? The Val de Verriz is in the middle of nowhere. It’s a part of Spain most Spaniards don’t even know. No one there would have ever heard of Pliny, let alone read him. I’ll wager the area has never even been surveyed.’

Edward made a face. ‘Do I deduce anxiety at the parlous state of our finances?’

‘What harm would it do to make some enquiries? You have friends still in Madrid. We could write to them, see if they knew someone who might help.’

A knock on the door interrupted them.

‘Will you take your coffee in the drawing room, ma’am?’ Cora, the maid, asked, nudging the door open with her knee. She had the tray in her hands, its side wedged against her belly to keep it steady. Maribel nodded. By the time the tray had been set down, the coffee poured, and they were settled in front of the fire the conversation had moved to practical matters. Maribel was content to leave it so. As one of his Socialist associates had once observed, one was obliged occasionally to plant an idea with Edward Campbell Lowe but one should never make the mistake of trying to water it.

When they had drunk their coffee they rose. It was still light. Beyond the window the sky had lifted its padded grey skirts, revealing petticoats of startling pinkish blue, and the late roses tapped their white faces against the glass.

‘Perhaps tomorrow will be fine,’ she said. ‘Wonders will never cease.’

Edward came to stand beside her. She could feel the warmth of him, the quiver of energy in his long lean limbs.

‘Do you think about it?’ he asked softly. ‘About Spain? About Madrid?’

Maribel hesitated.

‘It was a long time ago,’ she said.

‘There is a picture I carry in my head from that house on the Calle de León. You are sitting up, your knees pulled up to your chin, and your hair is tumbled about your shoulders and you are looking at me in that way you have, so intense it is almost angry, and you are so beautiful, so – absolute, that I know without doubt that this is why I have come. This is why Madrid is here.’

Maribel looked up at her husband, an ache rising in her throat as she touched him very gently on the cheek. He smiled. She longed for something to offer in return but, to her bafflement, she found that she could summon almost nothing of those dusty months in Madrid and, as for Edward, no trace at all. Absently she found herself recalling how the shadowy parlour of the house on Calle de León had always smelled of almonds. It had been the Señora’s strongly held belief that men who liked women also liked cake.

In the convent on the edge of the oxbow lake the old woman had baked her a cake of almonds on Kings’ Day, when the people of her village celebrated the visit of the three wise men to the baby that lay in the manger in Bethlehem.

‘Come,’ she said softly. ‘It is time for bed.’

T
HE LOW AFTERNOON SUN
spilled into Charlotte’s drawing room. The horse-chestnut trees were turning, their leaves yellowed and spotted with age. It was the end of September. Soon the leaves would be gone.

‘We have some news,’ Charlotte said.

Maribel smiled. ‘Do you?’ she said.

‘I – you already know, don’t you?’

‘Perhaps. A little.’

‘Am I so very fat already?’

‘You look radiant. How do you feel?’

‘Fat.’

‘And happy?’

‘Very happy. I thought when Clovis came I – but . . .’

She smiled, the sedated smile of a Lippi saint. Maribel smiled back. Charlotte had borne a child regularly every eighteen months for the length of their friendship and Maribel had known as soon as she saw her that she was pregnant again. It was the same every time: Charlotte’s lassitude, the fullness of her face, the abstracted vagueness with which she trailed off in the middle of a sentence, a slight frown of bemusement denting the pale flesh between her eyebrows. Just a few minutes earlier she had hunted across the tea tray and even on the floor for her teaspoon before Maribel had realised what it was she was looking for and gently pointed out that she was holding it in her left hand. Charlotte had shaken her head then, and smiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ she had said. ‘You must think me quite dotty.’

Maribel had laughed but she had not denied it. The conversation had progressed in fits and starts, Charlotte frequently lapsing into a soft-faced reverie.

As a girl Maribel had been repelled by pregnant women, by the misshapen bulk of them. They reminded her of the picture in her encyclopaedia of the great African snake which dislocated its jaw so that it could swallow an antelope without having to chew. It was a surprise then to observe Charlotte, who did not carry her children so much as merge into them. With each of Charlotte’s pregnancies Maribel had been struck most not by her friend’s size but by her softness, the blurriness of her edges. It reminded her of baking as a little girl when, on rainy afternoons, she was sometimes allowed to take the cut-off parts of the pie crust and roll them together to make something new.