Beautiful Lies (54 page)

Edward stared at their hands, her fingers between his. Then, gently he extricated his hand. He shook his head.

‘Exile is a prison too.’

A
FTER BREAKFAST THEY BOTH
went to work. At Turks Row Maribel had a sudden dread of encountering Mr Webster on the stairs but she saw no one. The corridor outside Mr Pidgeon’s studio was deserted. She knocked softly. A moment later Thomas answered the door and handed her the key.

Maribel hesitated, fiddling with the ribbon. ‘Mr Webster,’ she said. ‘I wondered – you do not expect him today, do you?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘No, ma’am. He came the day before yesterday. No customers today.’

‘That’s not like Mr Pidgeon.’

‘Mr Pidgeon’s not here, ma’am. He’s got family business. Won’t be back till tomorrow.’

Maribel nodded. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you. I shall drop the key back when I am done.’

She stood in the corridor for a moment, smoking a cigarette. Then she unlocked the darkroom and went in. She had spent the previous day photographing the fishmongers at Billingsgate and she took the plates from her satchel and set them on the developing table. Yesterday, returning from the market in the Underground train, her hair ripe with the smell of fish, she had imagined developing the prints with excitement. It felt like a lifetime ago. She tried not to think at all as she set out the chemical baths and took down the bottles of solution. Mixing them together she slid her first plate out of its cover and slipped it into the bath of developer.

Anxiety made her clumsy. The solution splashed onto her wrist, burning her skin. Cursing, she spat on the burn, fumbling on the shelf nearest the door for a rag to wrap it with. As she tied it she noticed a thick brown folder tied with ribbon, WEBSTER printed in Mr Pidgeon’s neat capitals on the front. Before she knew what she was doing Maribel took it down and opened it. There, in print after print, was Webster, standing in his white collar and his jerkin with his legs astride and his milky eyes fixed upon the camera. There was a horrible satisfaction in looking at him, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. The photographs were almost all identical, differing only in the angle of Webster’s head, the set of his mouth, the position of his left hand. Turning them quickly one could almost see him move.

It was only when she closed the folder that she thought of it. The idea was absurd, impossible, but, as she took up her tongs, watching her photograph begin to form beneath the stippled surface of the chemicals, it too began to take shape.

On the shelf to the right of the table there were, as usual, several stacks of covered plates awaiting development. Each stack was wrapped in brown paper and marked with the name of the customer. Standing on a chair she struck a match so that she might see them more clearly. The light snagged on the labels, BAXTER, HOLLAND, MAXWELL. She pushed them to one side impatiently. And then, as the flame burned almost to her fingers, a pile of perhaps twenty plates marked WEBSTER.

Maribel dropped the match. Very carefully she took the Webster plates and set them on the workbench. When she had rearranged the stacks so that the gap was not noticeable she clambered down and stood, one hand on the package, feeling the shape of them beneath her hand. Then, pulling out the cloth-lined box at her feet, she secreted the unexposed prints inside.

When she knocked at the door of the studio again Thomas looked surprised.

‘Is anything the matter, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly. I wondered if I might ask you something.’

Thomas frowned, biting his lip. ‘Me, ma’am? I don’t know –’

‘How long have you been Mr Pidgeon’s apprentice, Thomas?’

‘It’ll be three years this June, ma’am.’

‘By now you must know almost as much as your master.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘The thing is, I need some help.’

‘It’d be better if you talked with Mr Pidgeon, ma’am. He’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘I’m rather afraid it can’t wait till tomorrow. Might I come in?’

Thomas hesitated. Then, reluctantly, he opened the door. Along the back wall of the studio hung the long curtain that had provided the backdrop to Webster’s photographs. In front of it stood the rocking horse and a small upright chair.

‘Is this how Mr Webster photographed himself last time?’ she asked. ‘Astride a white steed?’

Thomas grinned awkwardly and did not answer.

‘I saw his photographs in the darkroom,’ she said casually. ‘So many prints all the same.’ She took up a position in front of the curtain, her shoulders thrown back and her hands upon her waist. ‘One would have thought he would have tired of the same pose.’

Thomas ducked his head. ‘Camera was set up for it. On a clock. Had to use a mark to hold the focus.’

Maribel looked at the floor. ‘I think I see it. Just here?’

‘A little to the left, maybe. It was a matter of the light.’

‘A clock. How fascinating. But I am wasting your time. I did not come here to gossip.’ She set down her portfolio and untied the ribbons. ‘I came to talk about this.’

When he saw Mr Pidgeon’s family portrait Thomas grinned.

‘Fine, ain’t it?’ he said.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Maribel said. ‘I wondered, do you think you might be able to tell me a little about it? I would pay you for your time, of course.’

Tentative at first, in the warmth of Maribel’s interest Thomas opened like a flower. His knowledge was extensive, his eyes and curiosity sharp, and he grew animated, gesticulating with his hands as he talked of exposure times and emulsions and gelatin bloom. Maribel scribbled notes, possessed in turn by agitation at the multiplicity of difficulties that Thomas described and by a determination so feverish she could hardly keep up with her own hand. The difficulties would have to take care of themselves. When at last she bid goodbye to Thomas she returned the portfolio to the darkroom and locked the door. Slipping the key into her pocket she descended once again to the street.

Alice looked up, surprised, from her housework as Maribel hurried into the flat.

‘Is everything all right, ma’am?’

Maribel did not answer. In the bedroom she rummaged together powder puff, hairbrush, pins, a jewelled comb, a pair of paste earrings, a pinkish salve she sometimes wore on her lips, bundling them all into her satchel. She glanced around the room, then on impulse stuffed her silk wrap in on top. She buckled the bursting satchel and snatched up her camera.

‘I shall not be back for lunch,’ she called out to Alice as she let the door slam behind her. Less than twenty minutes later a hansom deposited her at the entrance to Green Park. It was before midday and, though the nocturnal haunts of the park would not awake for many hours, near to the place where she had tried to photograph the girl in the scarlet dress she found an old woman slumped on a bench, a bottle ill-concealed beneath her shawl and a basket of grimy artificial flowers tucked under one arm.

At first the old woman was unwilling to answer Maribel’s enquiries, but once she realised that Maribel was not from the Refuge and was prepared to enrich her by sixpence, she proved perfectly obliging and directed her to a low type of inn in an alley off Bury Street. The door stood propped open, and from inside came the sour smell of spilled beer. Maribel lit a cigarette, drawing the courage of it deep into her lungs. In the window of the house next door a green blind had been pulled down. In faded black letters it read ‘LODGINGS FOR SINGLE MEN 6d’.

The girl in the scarlet dress was both less intoxicated and less forthcoming than she had been on the occasion of their previous meeting. She gave her name as Betsey, though the slight squint of her eyes as she said it suggested that it was not a name she was accustomed to. She leaned against the jamb of the inn door, smoking one of Maribel’s cigarettes, and the swell of her pregnant belly lifted her grimy skirt almost to her ankles, displaying a battered pair of men’s boots. Her pinched face was opaque as she listened to the proposal that Maribel put to her, her eyes narrowed against the smoke, her sharp little jaw moving in rhythmic circles like a cow’s. It was only when Maribel mentioned a hansom to Turks Row that she screwed up her face, pinching out the smoked cigarette between two dirty fingers and throwing it like a dart into the gutter.

‘’Ow gulpy d’you fink I am? I knows a forriner when I ’ears one. ’Ow’s I to know you ain’t abductin’ me?’

‘For pity’s sake, do I look like a criminal?’

The girl shrugged. Maribel glanced down at her old work dress. It was very shabby.

‘We’ll take the omnibus,’ she said desperately. ‘I can hardly kidnap you on the omnibus.’

The girl said nothing but sucked on her teeth, her hands pressed against the curve of her back as though it hurt her. She was very near her time.

‘I’ll only need two hours, three at the most,’ Maribel said. ‘You’ll be back by nightfall.’

‘Why me? What’s so special ’bout me?’

‘It was your idea in the first place.’

The girl scowled suspiciously. ‘What you talkin’ ’bout?’

‘In the park, don’t you remember? You made me an offer.’

‘What offer?’

‘Cock Lane for a shilling.’

M
ARIBEL WAS OBLIGED TO
offer a good deal more than a shilling, and half the money upfront, before the girl was finally persuaded to return with her to Turks Row. As the omnibus neared Sloane Square Maribel lifted the shawl from around her shoulders and arranged it over her bonnet like a hood, obscuring her face. The girl eyed her suspiciously but said nothing. On Sloane Avenue Maribel slipped her arm through the girl’s, clamping her to her side, and hustled her to the narrow entrance to the studio.

Thomas answered her knock almost immediately.

‘The darkroom key,’ he said anxiously. ‘Please tell me you have it?’

‘Silly me,’ Maribel said, fishing in her pocket. ‘I must have taken it by mistake. Let me fetch some plates. Then you can have it back. Go on, don’t be shy.’

She pushed the girl ahead of her into the studio. Thomas said nothing but a notch appeared between his eyebrows.

‘Thomas, this is – Violet. Violet has kindly consented to pose for me this afternoon so perhaps you might set up the lights for me while I get her ready?’

It took longer than Maribel expected to dress Betsey’s hair. It was matted and oily and the girl yelped furiously several times as Maribel yanked at the knots. Once it was combed out, however, it proved to be rather fine, a dark lustrous chestnut with a slight wave. The girl pouted admiringly at herself in the mirror as Maribel set about dressing it. She tried to remember how Alice did it, the roll of hair at the nape of the neck that gave the arrangement volume, the way she licked her finger and wrapped the hair around it to hold a curl. The effect needed to be elegant, any wantonness in it no more than the shiver of an almost-dimple, a glance held a second too long. Titian or Giorgione, never Francisco de Goya. Several times, as the hair slipped, escaping the pins, she wondered if perhaps she was mad, if the whole idea was preposterous. It would never work. But still she kept twisting and rolling and pinning. It was too late to stop now. Besides, it was always better to do something.

The final result, while hardly up to Alice’s standards, was not unsatisfactory.

‘Come and stand over here, Violet,’ she said and Betsey rose clumsily, her swollen belly making her awkward. Since arriving at the studio the girl had been very quiet, the rolling boil of pugnacity reduced to a simmering wariness. Now she stood before the long pale curtain like a defendant in the dock, the belligerence of her expression not quite concealing her apprehension. On the swell of her stomach her hands clenched in fists.

‘See this mark? I want you here, just six inches or so to the left. A little more towards that wall, that’s right. And try to relax. Let your shoulders drop. Imagine you have only just been woken, that you are still half asleep.’

She tilted Betsey’s head, adjusting her curls with one finger so that a ringlet brushed against her cheek. The hair would do. The difficulty was Betsey’s face. It was too bony to be pretty, the nose too narrow, the jaw too sharp. Her lips were thin, her mouth hardly more than a slit. There was none of the childlike softness of seduction about Betsey. Hers was a face for haggling and for disappointment.

Maribel thought of the photographer in the crimson studio, the appraising way he had studied her with his head on one side.

‘Turn away,’ she said.

‘Look back over your shoulder.’ Betsey scowled, jutted her chin. Maribel bit her lip. She thought of Victor’s hand on her shoulder, the scorched caramel burn of the brandy on her tongue.

‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘we need flowers. Might you be an angel and run out for them?’

‘There’s no need for that, ma’am. We have several silk –’

‘Fresh,’ Maribel interrupted smoothly. ‘Perhaps it is the scent but they quite change the mood of a composition.’ She extracted a crown from her purse and handed it to Thomas. ‘White roses. And freesias. They must be white.’

‘It is a bit early in the year for roses, ma’am.’

‘Thomas, please. Roses and freesias. I don’t care if you have to go to Timbuktu and back for them.’

Thomas opened his mouth to say something. Then, closing it, he nodded.

As soon as the door closed behind him she bolted it from the inside. Then she went to the cupboard behind the door and opened it.

‘Do you want a drink?’ she said. ‘There’s sherry.’

When Betsey took the glass she cocked her little finger and downed the contents in a single gulp. Then she made a face.

‘It ain’t gin,’ she said but she closed her eyes a little, savouring the warmth of the alcohol as it spread through her chest. Taking her silk wrap from her satchel Maribel handed it to Betsey.

‘Go and put this on,’ she said.

Betsey eyed her consideringly, then reached out and touched the robe, gauging the stuff between finger and thumb. The girl’s hands were grimy, her fingernails torn, and Maribel had to resist the urge to snatch the wrap away. She had bought it in Paris the previous season for a price she had done her best to forget. The heavy silk gleamed, its opalescent folds as unctuous as cream.