Beautiful Lies (28 page)

A gentleman from the Royal Society had once tried to explain to her at a dinner party the principles of electromagnetism. The air pulsed with hidden patterns, he said, waves of electrical activity that might be discerned by the right apparatus. He had talked earnestly of oscillation and quaternions and she had nodded attentively and, for the most part, let the words wash over her. One particular, however, had aroused her curiosity. For hundreds of years, he had said, mariners had observed that lightning strikes would agitate a compass needle. Nothing holds perfectly steady, she had thought then, not even True North.

When it was time for the final plate to be removed from the wash bath she stacked the boxes containing the plates and pushed them into a corner of the workbench. Then she removed her gloves and apron, balling them up and stowing them in their cubbyhole at her feet. Fatigue pulled at her neck and pinched the space between her eyebrows. She took an apple from her bag and ate it, contemplating between bites the gleam of the white flesh in the gloom. Edward was out and she had given Alice the night off. Supper would be something cold on a tray. There was no reason for her to hurry.

She yawned, throwing the apple core into the old paint tin under the workbench. There was nowhere to sit in the darkroom, no room for a chair. Instead she sat on the workbench, swinging her legs, and lit a cigarette which she smoked very slowly, watching the dull red gleam of the lit tobacco flare vivid scarlet as she inhaled. The paper burned faster on one side than the other, leaving a dark point like the tip of a pencil. She picked at it, scorching her fingers. When it was finished she lit a second cigarette from the stub of the first and smoked that too. Then she let herself out, locking the door of the darkroom behind her. The light in the corridor was grey, grainy. Soon it would be winter.

The sudden appearance of Mr Pidgeon in the corridor made her jump.

‘Ah,’ she said, thrusting the key at him. ‘You’ll excuse me, I hope. I am horribly late.’

‘I thought you might be interested in this.’

‘Mr Pidgeon, as I said, I –’

‘Please.’

Maribel looked at the photograph in her hand. An old woman in widow’s weeds gazed at the camera. Her hair was parted in the middle and drawn tightly back from her face, stretching the skin across her prominent cheekbones. Her eyes were dark beneath heavy brows, her mouth severe, and in her lap she held a Bible. Her hands were large with prominent knuckles, a man’s hands. Behind her to her left stood a tall Chinese vase of ornamental grasses and, half hidden amongst them, stood the shadowy figure of a young man in a stiff collar. Apart from the collar and a halo of pale hair like dandelion fluff it was hard to make him out.

‘Frankly, Mr Pidgeon, I –’

‘The widow is a Mrs Burwood. I am informed by the family member who graciously entrusted me with this print that the man behind her is quite recognisably her husband. When the picture was taken he had been dead a full year.’

Maribel sighed.

‘What nonsense,’ she said. ‘That “man” is hardly more than a boy.’

‘The dead disdain the ordinary conventions of time. He appears to her as his wife first knew him, as a young man.’

‘Mr Pidgeon, these photographs are tricks. Hoaxes. Like the bones of the saints the tinkers sell on the Camino de Santiago.’

‘Not everything in this world is for sale, Mrs Campbell Lowe. The solace that Mrs Burwood derives from knowing her husband is close by is surely without price.’

‘That does not make it true.’

‘You are right that there is some fraudulent manufacture of such photographs, but this one is quite genuine. As is yours. I am prepared to make you a handsome offer for it.’

Maribel thought of the narrow streets around the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the jewel-box shops with their silk stockings and fur stoles and heavenly heady perfumes. She thought of Charlotte and of the child, whose flesh was her flesh, and whose name she had whispered to herself in the darkness.

‘It is bad enough, Mr Pidgeon,’ she said, ‘that you consider yourself entitled to share my private property with Mr Webster, a man with whom my husband is required, as a Member of Parliament, to maintain a professional association. It is quite unacceptable that you continue to harangue me in this insistent and offensive manner.’

‘Madam, please. I know I should not have shown your photograph to Mr Webster without your permission. It was only that Mr Webster showed such great interest in you and in your work and it was plain that he held you in such high regard –’

‘I am not remotely interested in your excuses, Mr Pidgeon. Your conduct was indefensible. Now if you would step aside –’

Mr Pidgeon regarded her with his bloodhound’s eyes. Then he held up his hands in surrender.

‘You are quite right. What I did was wrong. I apologise unreservedly.’

‘Very well, then.’

‘As for the photograph in question, I shall not mention it again. If, however, you should ever change your mind –’

‘I shall not.’

‘I don’t suppose you might permit me to see it just one last time?’

‘No.’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Good evening, Mr Pidgeon.’

‘Good evening, madam.’

Mr Pidgeon did not go back into his studio. As Maribel hurried down towards the street he stood watching her, one hand on the banister, his shadow staining the stairs like spilled tea.

A
T THE END OF
October the west of Scotland was hit by a hurricane. It came at night and quite without warning. The winds were so violent that they uprooted trees and stripped the slates from roofs. In the crofting townships that had sprung up on the fringes of the great hunting estates hundreds of the huts were destroyed, while flash flooding forced many more to be abandoned. At sea the waves were thirty feet high. Scores of fishermen were reported missing.

The next day a cable came from Inverallich. The ancient oak at the back of the house had fallen heavily across the enclosed courtyard, bringing down a part of the stables and damaging the old kennel house. The new glasshouse, only recently completed, had been shattered, the orchards badly hit. A large section of the roof at the northern end of the house had also sustained considerable damage.

It was quite impossible for Edward to leave London. It was left to Maribel to travel north to appraise the extent of their misfortune. She went resentfully, for the change in plans obliged her to delay her usual autumn visit to Paris and she knew there was little chance of her favourite dressmaker being able to reschedule her appointment in time for the winter season. As for the cost of all the damage, she could hardly bring herself to think about it. It was three weeks since the
Illustrated London News
had agreed to take one of Maribel’s photographs of the Wild West Indians for a modest fee. The journal had only recently begun to publish photographs at all and already Maribel had permitted herself to anticipate the pleasures of a regular income, a small fund of her own sufficient at least for the small luxuries that might fortify one against the larger privations of indebtedness. It was so much easier to be frugal in a brand-new pair of stockings.

The overnight sleeper was due to arrive at Inverallich station at a little before seven in the morning. Maribel refused the steward’s offer of an early breakfast and asked only that she be wakened in time to ready herself for disembarkation. It was still dark when she drew back the curtains of her small cabin. She dressed and washed her face. The edging on one of her gloves was starting to fray. She tucked the loose threads into her wrist as the train slowed, and peered out of the window. Grey light leaked into the black sky and the moon was wan. Even in the stuffy carriage, its air warm with the must of slept-in bedlinen, she could feel the misted chill of the Highlands insinuating itself into her bones.

A grim-faced McDougall met her on the platform. It had not been possible to bring the gig to meet her, he explained. The storm damage had left the roads to the house impassable. He would have a boy come down with a barrow for the luggage but he was afraid that they would be obliged to walk, if Her Ladyship could manage it.

They picked their way in silence along the storm-ravaged lane. The morning was grey but there was no rain. The road was littered with the twisted corpses of trees and branches, their ripped flesh fresh white against the dark banks of mud and rotting leaves. Those that had not fallen stood mutely along the length of the lane in silent vigil, their limbs shattered and amputated, the breaks in their ranks unclosed. The wind moved in sharp eddies through the hedges, setting what leaves remained to fluttering. Somewhere a blackbird sang.

When they reached the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Inverallich, McDougall hesitated, a frown pinched between his brows.

‘It’s bad, ma’am,’ he said.

She nodded, but as they rounded the bend in the drive and the lawn spilled away from her up to the house, she let out a sharp cry, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. Across the lawn the cluster of beeches that had stood there for more than two centuries had been ripped from the ground. Two lay on their sides, their branches reaching almost to the terrace in front of the house, their great pale roots clawing at the air. The iron bench that had encircled the larger one clung to its trunk, its feet pulled from the ground, its delicate filigree buckled and broken. On a mild day it had been Maribel’s favourite place to read.

The trees that remained upright huddled together, propped at drunken angles. The lawn was strewn with shattered branches, the terrace with broken pots and slates. Several of the substantial rhododendron bushes that framed the house had been uprooted. All were crushed. Above them, the house, which had always compensated for its lack of beauty with an imposing froideur, had shrunk into itself. The hole in the roof was like a mouth, edged about with broken teeth.

‘We were lucky the damage was not greater,’ McDougall said. ‘If a tree had fallen on the house . . .’

They walked together slowly up the drive. In the sunken Dutch garden to the south of the house the stone sundial lay toppled on its side like a skittle. Maribel thought of Edward at the last meeting of the Highland Land League, his fist in the air as he led the assembled crowd in their rallying cry:
Is treasa tuath na tighearna!
The people are mightier than a lord. The storm, it seemed, was mightier than any of them.

‘We’ll have a tarpaulin on the roof by evening,’ McDougall said. ‘The winds were too high yesterday. We couldna keep it down.’

‘And the tenants?’

‘Praise God no one was hurt. There’s some damage to the cottages, some slates off and the like, fences blown down. Most of the sheep found shelter. It’s the orchards’ve come off worst, ma’am. More than half the new trees down.’

Maribel spent the day with McDougall, assessing the extent of the damage. As she had feared, the cost of repair would run to hundreds of pounds, perhaps more. There was no money to pay for it. Late that night, when McDougall was gone, she sat down in the library with the estate accounts. There was no denying the numbers. Once the interest on their mortgages had been met, their free income for the previous year had amounted to a grand total of £298 6s 5d, more than £400 less than the year before. Such a sum barely began to cover their everyday expenses.

The fire was bright in the library, the light from the gas lamps soft and warm. Maribel lit a cigarette and then another, reluctant to abandon her cosy nest on the sofa. Though she had had Cora light a fire in her bedroom grate, she knew from long experience that it would be days before the breath and bustle of ordinary life banished the damp chill from the upper floors of the house. The prospect of the gelid bathroom was dismal.

Maribel turned the pages of the accounts. Business was bad but, with the way things were at present, she doubted if there was a farm in the country, large or small, that was not struggling. It was their interest payments that crippled them. At their last meeting in August Edward’s financial advisers had recommended to him that he sell a second parcel of land to the south of the estate in order to disburse a part of the mortgage. Edward had refused. He had argued that current prices were too low, that the sale would make only a small dent in the great mountain of their mortgages, that the income from that land, if properly managed, would be worth more to the estate than the capital sum raised by selling. His advisers had attempted, without success, to change his mind and had left unhappily, their handshakes curt. Edward had declined to offer them even the small consolation of promising to think about it.

It was, he told her later, a matter of principle. There were tenants on that piece of land and he would not betray the trust of his tenants. Maribel, who had a much better grasp than her husband of the principles of bookkeeping, had bitten her tongue. The truth was he could not bring himself to face it. It was not only his mother who could not forgive him the sale of the land to the west. He could not forgive himself. He might baulk at tradition and revile the unthinking attachment of the landowning classes to the conventions of their forebears, their worship of property and propriety, he might despise the earldoms over which his ancestors had squabbled and mock the hereditists who claimed for him, as descendant of Robert II, the rightful crown of Scotland, but he drew his strength from the black earth and peaty waters of the Scotch land to which he had been born. The peaks and the bogs and the boulders, the curving lochs and hidden springs, these, unchanged and unchanging, were his topography, his dominion, to have and to hold. Centuries of Lowes lay in the little private cemetery near the house, their bones criss-crossing beneath the tussocked ground. One day Edward would be buried with them. Perhaps then he would be at peace.

Maribel leaned forward, throwing the stub of her cigarette into the fire. She watched as it burned, curling her toes beneath her. It was late. She stretched, her fingers intertwined behind her head. The knot of her hair was thick and warm in the palms of her hands. She turned her head idly, releasing the stiffness in her neck, her eyes half closed. Then, brushing the ash from her skirt, she stood. The Pliny was in its usual place on the bookshelf. She put her hand on the spine, tracing the gilded letters of the title with the tip of her index finger. The leather was rough, bubbled where damp had lifted the skin from its binding. Gently she drew the book out, weighing the volume in her hands. It was still there, the frayed silk ribbon she had put in the book to mark the place. She opened it. The words
gold mine of Albucrara
were underlined in pencil and marked with an asterisk in the margin. The asterisk was dark and emphatic, its shape pressed into the pages that followed. Maribel could no longer summon the conviction that had added spike after emphatic spike to that asterisk but before she went to bed she set the book on her desk, its pages open at the correct place, her fountain pen in the dint along its spine. Tomorrow she would write to Edward’s friend in Madrid. It was always better to do something.