Beautiful Lies (41 page)

Edward’s arrest had not advanced her faith in politics. But in the desolate days after her meeting with Ida she came to understand Edward’s stubborn dedication to the cause in a new light. He did not expect to win. He fought with all his strength, knowing that the most he could hope for were small triumphs, progress that at best edged two and a half paces forward for every two it took back. He fought because not to fight was impossible. Edward’s Socialism was not an intellectual construct. It was as much a part of him as his lungs, his liver. He could no more stop fighting than stop his heart from beating.

She had known as soon as she left her that she would never see Ida again. At first she refused to believe it, closing her ears to the bleak voice that cried like the wind in her head, but, as the days passed, she did not have the strength to withstand it. The misery was a darkness in her that would not lift. She walked around the flat as though drugged, her feet heavy as stones. She picked things up and stared at them, startled to find them in her hands. She could not settle. She wanted to hate Ida, to rage at her for her cruelty, her savage coldness. She wanted to plead for her forgiveness, to prostrate herself at Ida’s feet, to weep and weep until Ida melted in the hot flood of her tears. And yet, even in the darkness, she knew that she would do none of these things. There was no hope. She would never sit beneath the flowering honeysuckle in Ida’s garden on a warm spring afternoon. She would not eat jam tarts with Ida in her cramped kitchen or hold Ida’s child in her arms. Ida did not want to see her. She would not change her mind. Edith had been a weeper and Lizzie a fearful sulk, prone to hours of wounded moping, but Ida had always been as stubborn as a mule. Once she had decided to be angry there was no reasoning with her, nothing to do but to leave her because she would not budge and she could last longer than anyone.

There was no hope and yet time passed, day following night in its habitual pattern. As the trial drew closer, Maribel threw herself into the preparations. She wrote letters to Edward’s supporters, checked his speeches, proofread his articles. There was solace in occupation. Slowly the darkness in Maribel began to shift, allowing pale gleams of light. It was then that she understood that nothing had changed. She loved Ida. She could not stop loving her just because Ida wanted her to. She would keep on loving Ida, however painfully, because Ida was not a tumour to be cut out. She was in Maribel’s blood, in the marrow of her bones. That Ida no longer loved her back changed nothing.

‘Let’s go to Inverallich,’ she said to Edward one evening. ‘Tomorrow morning, on the first train. You can ride. We can walk. Just a few days. We wouldn’t even have to tell anyone we were there.’

Edward was tired, his face pale. When she brought him a glass of whisky she stood behind his chair, rubbing his shoulders through the cloth of his evening coat. He leaned back against her, his red-gold hair bright in the firelight, and she saw, for the first time, several threads of silver at his temples.

He shook his head. ‘We can’t.’

Maribel did not protest. She knew it was true. There was not time. The lawyers would object. It was possible that the terms of his bail did not even permit it. All the same, she longed to go, for Edward’s sake. At Inverallich Edward would be free. He would breathe in the air of the place he loved, sharp with peat and heather and the snow that gathered itself for winter in the clefts between the mountain tops, and it would settle inside him and take root and it would succour him in all the dark nights to come. Besides, when there is nothing that can be done, and the knowledge that there is nothing that can be done is too much to bear, it is always better to do something.

The proceedings were late to start. Someone in a gown made an announcement in legal language designed to obscure understanding. There was a complication but it was not clear to Maribel whether the delay was temporary or if the trial would have to be postponed. Beside her Mr Morris frowned over his poem, biting the end of his pencil. A week after Edward had been arrested, at a second demonstration at Trafalgar Square, a man had been killed, an Alfred Linnell, junior clerk to a solicitors’ firm in Cheapside, and Mr Morris had promised a poem for his funeral service. Maribel peered over his shoulder. The poem was called ‘A Death Song’. She could not make out all the words, his writing was cramped and very messy, but at the end of every verse, he had written the same refrain:

Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.

Maribel thought of Edward, his broken head and his bruised stomach and his dogged indefatigability, and she thought: Not him. You can’t have him.

Around her the audience stirred restlessly on the hard benches. People coughed or rustled in bags or muttered to one another in low voices. Mrs Aveling nursed her injured wrist in her other hand, her eyes closed, her fingers idling with the edge of the bandage. A man seated behind Maribel leaned forward and patted Mr Morris on the shoulder and murmured something Maribel did not catch. Mr Morris nodded without looking up, his pencil tapping at the blue corner of his notebook.

‘Linnell’s name will never be forgotten,’ the man sitting behind her said to his companion, and all along the bench there were murmurs of assent and approbation as though a man’s name was the beating heart of him, his crowning achievement. She had finally completed a short letter of condolence to Mr Linnell’s mother only to discover that he did not have one, nor any other family to speak of. His funeral would be paid for by Mrs Marx Aveling, out of funds raised to pay the fines of those arrested. It would not be a quiet send-off. The Socialists planned to march with the coffin from Soho to the burial ground in Mile End. Mrs Besant had already arranged for a banner to be sewn that could be carried at the front of the cortège: KILLED IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. They hoped that hundreds would attend the graveside, that thousands more would line the route of the procession in support.

And yet of all the men Mr Morris had spoken to, only one could remember ever meeting Linnell; he’d said simply that Linnell had seemed to be a nice enough chap, that he’d kept himself to himself and never been in any trouble. When Maribel had remarked on how sad that was, Morris had protested that, on the contrary, it was a blessing. For once, instead of the usual roll call of felons and layabouts and troublemakers, the Socialists had an irreproachable martyr. The funeral would be a call to arms, the poem a hymn to the struggle for righteousness, an elegy for the sacrifices of the ordinary working man. Alfred Linnell, a man of no particular party, who until his death had been perfectly obscure, would stand as a symbol for those who sought to build a future founded upon equality and beauty and happiness.

Maribel hoped that he was right. More than that she hoped that there would be someone at Mr Linnell’s graveside who knew what he had liked to do on a Sunday afternoon, that he had felt the cold and liked marmalade and knew how to whistle, that he had a way with dogs and had once ridden a bicycle without holding onto the handlebars.

The gallery was growing warm. At his table beside the dock a clerk shuffled papers. On the steps behind them there was the clatter of feet, the murmur of voices, as a flurry of latecomers was admitted to the visitors’ gallery. Mrs Aveling glanced over her shoulder. When she frowned, her eyebrows joined together to draw a thick black line above her eyes.

‘What the devil are they doing here?’ she muttered. Maribel looked round. There were murmured apologies as Mr Webster and Mrs Besant made their way to two empty seats near the back of the gallery. As they sat she whispered something to him and he nodded, brushing at the lapels of his coat with his fingers. ‘I suppose you saw this morning’s
Chronicle
?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Never mind. It was all nonsense anyway. Not worth wasting your time on.’

‘What was?’

Mrs Aveling shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

‘But you did.’

‘Yes.’ Mrs Aveling considered Maribel for a moment. Her dark eyes were shrewd. ‘There was a piece in this morning’s paper about the trial. A leader. The usual hyperaesthetic rant.’

‘And?’

‘It is Mr Webster’s wholly unconsidered opinion that, while Mr Burns is a gold-hearted working man and martyr to the cause, your husband is nothing but a charlatanic toff with an insatiable appetite for attention. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.’

Maribel blinked at Mrs Aveling. Then she twisted round again in her seat. Mr Webster was deep in conversation with Mrs Besant, leaning towards her so that Maribel could only see the side of his head. Mrs Besant nodded and then said something to the man on her other side. He nudged her, jerking his chin towards Maribel. Before she could turn back Mrs Besant caught her eye. She smiled, a twisted fleeting smile of something that might have been sympathy or apology. Maribel did not smile back. The thought of Webster hunched like a carrion bird behind her caused her stomach to turn over.

‘As I said, it’s nonsense and unimportant nonsense at that,’ Mrs Aveling said. ‘Sound and fury, signifying nothing. No one thinks he’ll hang on much longer at the
Chronicle
. That’s the real reason for the leader, of course. Webster has convinced himself that your husband is one of those conspiring with Lord Worsley to get him out.’

‘What? How do you know?’

‘The League keeps a careful eye on Mr Webster.’

‘But that’s absurd. Edward would never – and, as for John Worsley, he has gone out of his way to defend the wretched man.’

‘No one is saying it’s true. But Alfred Webster is a preacher’s son with two years of formal schooling to his name and an ingrained mistrust of the upper classes.’

There was a commotion in the court. There seemed to be some confusion, a door at the side of the courtroom opening and shutting, whispered altercations between several men in robes. Maribel thought she caught a glimpse of Edward’s face in the shadowed hallway, but she could not be sure. She leaned forward, gripping the rail. Mr Morris’s book fell from his lap, the invitation card dropping from between its pages. He leaned down to retrieve them both. Maribel looked at the card and she was filled with a sudden cold terror that this was the reason for the delay, that the card was in breach of some inviolable court regulation and that the consequences for Edward would be vicious and irredeemable.

Then the judge took his place and the court was called into session. Edward and John Burns were brought to the dock and the charges read and opening statements made. No explanation was given for the delay. It was a long time before Maribel’s pulse slowed and she was able to listen with some contrivance of attention to the proceedings of the court. Even then she was uneasy, troubled by the lapse in her concentration, afraid that for too many vital minutes she had failed to collect her energies on Edward’s account. That was the problem with doing something. There was always the danger that it was the wrong thing to do.

T
HE TRIAL WAS BRIEF
. Though acquitted of assault, both Edward and John Burns were found guilty of unlawful assembly and sentenced to twelve weeks’ imprisonment at Pentonville without hard labour. As the verdict was read out Edward looked up to the visitors’ gallery and, for a moment, his eyes met Maribel’s. Then he was led away. Mrs Aveling laid a hand on Maribel’s arm but she hardly felt it. She hardly felt anything.

‘He will be out in no time,’ Mr Morris said encouragingly. ‘No hard labour, that’s the main thing.’

Edward, who had done nothing, who had entered Trafalgar Square peaceably and unarmed, who had struck no one and had raised his arms only to shield his face from the blows of the police, was to be imprisoned. He would be confined alone in a cramped unheated cell. He would be forbidden to speak. It was unbearable to think of him shivering in the bitter chill of November nights, the damp and itch of the meagre regulation blanket, the cries and the curses and the stink of the bucket in the corner and the dirty straw on the floor. It was worse still to imagine him condemned to silence, his head bowed over his miserable work. Prisoners in Pentonville were permitted to use their voices only once a week, at chapel on Sundays, and then only the words allocated to them by the hymn book. Those spared hard labour were forced to pick oakum, pounds and pounds of it until their fingers bled. Edward’s fingers had been what she had noticed about him first. She had tried not to notice their faces but hands were different. He had always had beautiful hands.

‘Of course, he won’t serve the full twelve weeks,’ one of the men said. ‘He’ll get time commuted for good behaviour.’

‘Good behaviour? Campbell Lowe?’ another joked and several of the men laughed.

‘If the Commons did not break his spirit, it will take more than Pentonville to do it,’ a third man said and there were hoots of agreement and more laughter and the shuffle of boots on the wooden floor as people gathered up their coats and umbrellas and made their way out of the visitors’ gallery. In the lobby they nodded at Maribel and those who knew her shook her hand, but awkwardly, without quite meeting her eye, and muttered their commiserations into their mufflers.

‘Well, that’s that then,’ she heard one man say to his companion as he stepped into the darkening afternoon and she realised that it was, for them.

They would not abandon Edward, of course. They would write letters to the
Times
and publish articles in the
Commonweal
and speechify in Battersea and Clerkenwell, words heaping upon words, a citadel of proselytisation and poetry and propaganda in which they might shelter, leaving Edward coatless in his frozen cell.

‘Go home!’ the organisers of the march had said, passing the word around the disordered ranks of protesters as the cavalry pressed their horses forward and the Guards with their bayonets occupied the square, ‘Go home!’ but Edward had not gone home. He would not go home now. Edward, who had not turned back at the police line, who had not surrendered or slipped away but who had stood firm, knowing himself defenceless, and who had fallen, because the fight was not only on his tongue but in his blood and in his heart.