Beautiful Lies (45 page)

When yet another day had passed without word from Sr Muñoz, Maribel was almost in despair. They would wait three more days, she decided. If by then he still had not come they would go home. She said nothing to Alice. They took their places at the supper table in silence. As the dish of baked chicken was placed in front of her, Alice’s expression was unreadable. Her hands closed together as though she were about to pray, she looked at the plate. Then, without a word, she took up her fork and began to eat. When the plate was empty she wiped her oily lips on her napkin and remarked with a shake of her head upon the stringiness of the meat. It was the first time that day that Maribel had smiled.

By then she was certain that Sr Muñoz had no intention of coming to Orense. It was a surprise, therefore, the very next morning, to hear that he had indeed arrived in town, and even more of a surprise to discover that he positively brimmed over with enthusiasm. Sr Muñoz was not a young man by any reckoning but the notable modesty of his achievements had served only to amplify his certainty that great things lay ahead. He had a head too large for his body. His hair was astonishingly abund ant and, when he spoke, his tongue fell over his mossy teeth, disbursing sprays of spittle. He had been delayed, he explained, by the process of submitting claims which must be done properly if the profits were to be fairly allocated. As he went on to outline the other preparations he had made for the journey to the Val de Verriz, it was as if not only the existence of the mine was firmly established but the capital needed for its operation were already safely in the bank. Maribel returned to her lodgings more cheerful than she had been since leaving England.

They stayed in Orense only as long as was necessary for Sr Muñoz to complete his preparations. The remainder of the journey to the Val de Verriz was completed by diligence, a rickety, creak-wheeled conveyance pulled by four ill-tempered mules whom, in the absence of a whip, the driver encouraged to greater effort by throwing handfuls of pebbles at their heads. The passengers were a motley lot, for the most part travelling salesmen or priests, which as Maribel wrote to Edward amounted to much the same thing. Crammed into the small wagon like puppies in a sack, they eyed Maribel and Alice with undisguised curiosity and made what space they could around them, as though the women’s sex was something that might be caught.

The two women were obliged to press close together. Maribel grew familiar with the warmth of Alice’s thigh, the dense pad of flesh that cushioned her hip, the faintly musty smell of her shawl. Sometimes when the wind came up and cut through the seams of the wagon, Alice spread the shawl so that it covered both of their laps. Sometimes, exhausted, they slept, their heads on each other’s shoulders. On the last day of their journey, when they were almost at Ferrixao, the diligence hit a rock, dislodging a wheel from its axis. The passengers were hurled sideways, their limbs flailing, striking their heads against the sides of the carriage. When at last the damage was repaired and the journey resumed, Maribel reached beneath the shawl and took Alice’s hand. Alice held it tightly. They travelled in this manner, hand in hand, until the diligence drew to a stop outside the inn that would be their final destination.

Maribel spent a single night with the men at their camp near the mine. Then she returned to Ferrixao. It was another dull day, the damp chill of the Galician winter undercut by a sharp breeze, but, when she reached the village, she could see Alice seated on a rough bench outside the inn. The maid rose as soon as she saw her mistress approaching, gathering her shawl about her shoulders as she hurried towards her.

‘Well?’ she said. She eyed the mules suspiciously, keeping a safe distance. She had refused to ride a mule herself. She said that foreign animals bit. ‘Are we rich?’

Maribel laughed. The mule guide gestured at the inn and she nodded. She watched as he had the boy tether the beasts outside the inn and unload the luggage from the panniers. The innkeeper came out, yawning and rubbing his head. His hair was rumpled, the buttons of his shirt wrongly fastened so that it gaped over his paunch, revealing a strip of thickly furred belly. Beneath his stomach, like a sling, he wore a sash of black fabric, rather stained.

‘I am not sure about rich,’ she said. ‘But we found the mine.’

‘That is good news.’

‘It’s better than good. Muñoz was so overcome I feared he might drown in his own spittle.’

Alice made a face but, beneath the twist of her mouth, Maribel thought she was smiling.

‘They think it will take perhaps a week to collect sufficient samples of the earth. Then we shall take them to the Mining College in Madrid for the assay.’

‘We are stuck in this godforsaken place a week?’

Maribel rolled her eyes good-humouredly. ‘We are and we may as well make the best of it. Don’t tell me you would rather be digging sheep out of the snow in North Yorkshire?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with Yorkshire.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

Alice curled her lip, crossing her arms over her chest. Exasperated, Maribel gestured down the hill towards the great still lake which, beneath the dull sky, gleamed pewter grey, its shores softened by thick forests of bulrushes. In several places the local fishermen had cut paths through the rushes and there, on the silent water, flat-bottomed boats idled, painted in bright colours long flaked and faded by the sun. Beyond the lake, as blurred as buildings in the London fog, rose the dark forms of the Asturian mountains.

‘Look, Alice. Look properly. Can you honestly tell me it is not beautiful?’

Alice shrugged. ‘Beauty is as beauty does. When I look properly do you know what I see? The food stains on the tablecloth, for one, and the fingerprints on the glasses. There’s not a plate or a dish here an English dog would care to eat from. As for the fleas in the mattresses, I can see those clear as day.’

‘Alice Tweddle, you are impossible!’ Maribel cried. ‘I am back for five minutes and already the complaining has begun. Well, I am not listening. I am in too good a humour for your ceaseless doom and gloom. Make sure my luggage is safely unloaded. I am going for a walk.’

Without waiting for Alice’s reply she set off towards the lake, following the path that led away from the village and around the base of the hill. She walked briskly, not looking back. Before long Alice and the inn were out of sight but she continued to walk, enjoying the stretch in her muscles after the uncomfortable journey. Near the lake the path turned abruptly, leading down to a narrow strand of pebbled beach. Reeds grew in the quiet tea-brown water, and, along the shore, tiny waves licked at the worn grey stones. The slip and clatter of the pebbles as she walked reminded her of Inverallich and of Edward. She thought perhaps everything reminded her of Edward these days.

Gathering up her skirts she bent down, picking up and discarding stones until she found one of the right shape. She looked at it, flat and smooth on the palm of her hand. Then she closed her fingers over it, holding it in her fist like the stone of a fruit. She did not throw it. Though Edward had spent hours trying to teach her she had never mastered the skill of skimming stones. Instead she held it until it was no longer colder than her hand. As it warmed it seemed to soften. She opened her fingers. A flat grey pebble, flecked with white, an oval with one end more sharply curved than the other and a dent at the centre. Like an ear, she thought, and she set it to her own ear to listen to it. The silence in it was whole and desolate.

She threw the stone into the lake. It landed neatly, sending tiny waves shimmering through the surface of the water. She lit a cigarette. Then, with the cigarette in her mouth and her hands in her pockets, she walked slowly along the edge of the water away from the path. She was not yet ready to go back to the village. As the waves reached the beach the hem of the lake frilled.

In a few weeks Edward would be released. They would unlock the door and he would step, blinking, into the disordered bustle of a London street. At Pentonville all the prisoners were kept in solitary confinement. When they exercised with other prisoners in the high-walled yard they wore specially designed caps with flaps that covered their faces, the slits for their eyes cut only wide enough to ensure they did not fall. At Sunday chapel the pews were arranged in rows of high-walled cubicles. Such solitude could make a man mad. There were stories told of the prisoners who believed themselves to be the Devil, or God, or the Emperor Napoleon. Edward would stand outside the prison, his hand shielding his eyes as he contemplated freedom, conversation, the unfamiliar feel of his own good clothes against his skin. The light would be a shock to him. The outside of the prison, with its classical columns and porticos, was painted a startling white.

Would they have changed him, those desolate days and nights, marked off in scratched lines on the cell wall? Edward was a man of principle but he was still a man, formed of flesh and blood. The miserable regimen would starve his body and torment his mind. That was its purpose. His suffering might harden his will or it might break it but surely it could not fail to shape him. Before the trial he had said that he did not regret what he had done, had claimed that, granted the opportunity to go backwards in time, he would do it all again. The assertion had roused in her both tenderness and consternation. She thought of Mrs Besant, who, years before, had been sentenced to six months in prison for publishing a book by the American birth control campaigner, Charles Knowlton. In the event she had not served her time. The case had been overturned on appeal but the scandal had allowed her estranged husband successfully to argue that she was an unfit mother and to press for sole and permanent custody of their two children. She had never seen them again. Arthur and Mabel Besant were almost grown up now and still lived with their father. Meanwhile their mother worked tirelessly on behalf of the poor and their children, as least half of whom would never grow up at all.

Beyond the stand of bulrushes the beach curved to the left, opening up the prospect towards the south. Maribel squinted through the veil of smoke. Far out on the water men were fishing and beyond them, in the distance, a cluster of cottages huddled around a jetty on the low slopes above the shore. Some way away, where the hills folded in on themselves, among the dark bars of winter trees it was just possible to make out the line of a wall, painted white. Victor had chosen the convent for its isolation. The buildings were low, one-storey stone constructions set among groves of orange trees and enclosed on all sides by high white walls. If it had not been for the old woman Maribel would have never known the lake was there. The old woman laundered and pressed her clothes and her bedlinen, tidied and cleaned, and brought Maribel’s meals from the refectory. She had a monkey’s face, wrinkled as an old apple, and a mouthful of ill-assorted teeth that seemed to move in her jaw when she spoke. Maribel did not know where she slept or if she ever went home. When Maribel woke in the night, she was always there in the hard chair, her lips moving wordlessly over her teeth as she counted the beads on her rosary. In the darkness the bells had tolled softly, summoning the unseen nuns to prayer, and the newborn child beside her had stirred, crying to be fed.

She had not thought that she had come to this place because of the child. She only knew that, on the long journey, as her faith in the mine failed, the fact of the convent across the lake held her steady. Her grief was as familiar to her as the shape of her hands, the ache of it old and unfailing. The pain had not grown sharper as they neared their destination. Perhaps it could not. But it came to her more often and more unexpectedly. The arch of a bridge, the shape of a glass, the smell of food or of a log burning in a grate, such particulars could summon the pain into her throat with all the urgency of vomit. At those times she ached for Edward, the longing in her so strong that she had to bite the insides of her cheeks to master it.

It was a comfort to wake in the dark mornings in the spartan inns that marked the stages of the diligence, to jolt and shake for another day over the mud-rutted trails. To have undertaken the expedition in the warm embrace of summer, to travel through the hills bright with wild flowers, to watch the women washing their linen in the streams, the shepherds piping their sheep from the hills in the pink dusk, to lie beneath the sky on those long blue nights as the heat of the day evaporated, distilling itself into the white heat of a thousand brilliant stars – such a journey would have been unbearable. She endured the many discomforts without complaint. White she was cold and bruised with travel and the lice moved in her mattress she thought of Edward and his closeness was a consolation.

It began to rain, a light persistent drizzle. A fine muslin of cloud rucked in the curves of the hills and obscured the houses of Meiriz. She might have written to the convent from England but she had not. There would have been no purpose to it. It had been years. Even if they remembered the child, they would never tell her where he was. Besides, where was the help in knowing? Details would only whet the edges of her grief. Loss was formless but places were fixed. The precision of longitude and latitude, of distances in miles, was too absolute to be borne. To know exactly how far away he was, how close he had always been, that would be unendurable.

Still, late at night and especially after Vigo when they were on Spanish soil, when the wine was uncorked and the joints of her limbs sang with the giddy effervescence of too many cigarettes, she had allowed herself to imagine meeting him. He would be nearly twelve years old, dark and gangly, the bones sharp at the back of his neck but the curves of his face still soft with childhood. She would hold out her hands and he would set down his suitcase and step towards her cautiously, and she would take his face between her hands and kiss his cheek and he would smile and frown and rub at the place where she had kissed him with the back of his hand, and the part of her which had always been broken would not be broken any more. When she permitted herself these imaginings she squeezed her eyes tight, holding herself suspended in that moment, the swell in her chest, the diffident affection pinking his cheeks. The feeling was exhilarating, swooping upwards in her stomach like the high point on a swing. It did not matter that she did not know what came next. The trick was to think of something else before the swing began to drop.