by Clare Clark
‘Such thrift,’ Edward said.
When darkness fell there were fireworks in the park. The streets were thronged with people until late into the night, their drunkenness exceeded only by their good humour. The next day, despite the heat, Maribel took her camera and walked the route taken by the Queen’s procession. She photographed the sagging swathes of bunting, the wilted flowers, the heavy-eyed huddles of weary merrymakers, the flotsam of the great wave of celebration that had surged so triumphantly through the capital. At the gates of Hyde Park a cordon of policemen blocked the roads in every direction. The park itself was closed. Thirty thousand of London’s children had been invited to a fete presided over by the Queen herself, a constable told Maribel. As well as magicians and tumblers, the children had been promised tea, with sandwiches and three kinds of cake.
That night, as the Campbell Lowes attended a dinner given by Frederic Leighton in the Arab Hall of his house in Holland Park, a mob broke into the enclosure where the children’s party had taken place and set fire to the marquees. In the days that followed, fearful of a repeat of the riots of the previous winter, newspaper editorials called for a clearing of Trafalgar Square, where the number of men and women sleeping rough had swollen to several hundred. They thundered warnings of respectable citizens once again attacked, carriages overturned, shops smashed and looted, property stolen. Unless repressive action were taken immediately, they roared, law-abiding London would once more fall victim to the savageries of the mob.
Only the Chronicle took the side of the poor. Throughout July the newspaper ran a series of fervent articles about the men Webster dubbed the ‘unemployed’, who, he argued, lived barely quarter lives; stunted physically and morally, deprived of any kind of education, they could not live as God had meant them to live but were instead reverting to a race of brutes, a miscegenation of debased humanity capable of every kind of evil. He wrote of godlessness, of foul language and fouler lodgings, of the lack of thrift that forced wives to seek work outside the home, of the cursed affliction of promiscuity and casual marital relations, and laid the blame for all squarely at the doors of an inhumane and profit-hungry society. In particular he condemned the landlords of pestilential dwelling houses as no better than brothel keepers, for both profited from the moral and physical ruin of the weak and the destitute. For several consecutive days he published the names and addresses of landlords in the East End whom he deemed particular offenders. When the Chronicle received a letter from a prominent firm of lawyers threatening a libel action, Webster published that too.
‘He speaks his mind,’ Maribel observed as she glanced through the paper one evening. ‘There is no doubting his courage.’
Edward turned from the window. The weather was finally breaking. Beyond the roofs purple clouds massed, hastening the evening towards darkness.
‘A facility for making enemies is not the same thing as courage.’
‘But his writing is vigorous,’ Maribel said. ‘He will not be ignored.’
‘He enjoys whipping himself into a frenzy of righteous fury.’
‘But if he can whip up his readers too, surely it will help you?’ Edward shrugged.
‘I defy him to whip up Parliament,’ he said. ‘He could plug the entire House into Deptford Power Station and provoke not so much as a twitch.’
Maribel did not answer. She thought of the heat in her skin when he looked at her, the quickening of her pulse, and it occurred to her that for once Edward might be mistaken.
A week after the Jubilee celebrations, Maribel and Edward dined at Chester Square. Edward’s brother Henry was there, and several other of Arthur’s friends who had known one another at school and shared Arthur’s uproarious sense of humour. The conversation during dinner was dominated by an enthusiastic reminiscence of the practical jokes that these men had played upon one another, both as boys and in later life. Maribel listened in silence to tales of tapioca spiked with frogspawn, shoes filled with ink, boys tied to their bedsteads or held out of windows by their ankles, and thought of the stories Edward had told her of the payadors of Argentina, gaucho troubadours who vied to out-verse one another in contests of song that could go on for hours. It was the custom among the gauchos, whenever they were paid in silver, to fix the coins to their belts or to their horses’ bridles. In Chester Square the silver was displayed on the dining-room table, shaped into gleaming forks and candlesticks and coasters and artfully feathered game birds with open beaks.
It was not until the ladies retired to the drawing room that Maribel had the chance to talk to Charlotte. When the coffee had been served, and the other wives settled on the sofa, they stood together before the empty fireplace. Maribel licked the crystals of coffee sugar from her spoon and lit a cigarette. Beyond the thick curtains rain spattered lightly against the windows.
‘London has been very dull without you,’ she said to Charlotte.
‘And Sussex just as dull with me,’ Charlotte replied. ‘Even the children were insensible with the heat. I had forgotten what silence sounded like.’
‘Was it heavenly?’
‘It should have been but after one day of it I longed for riots. I seem to have become accustomed to them.’
‘We must adapt to survive. That Mr Darwin was no fool.’
Charlotte smiled, her attention distracted by one of the other women. Maribel talked desultorily to someone’s wife about the servant problem. When at last the gentlemen joined them from the dining room, bringing with them loud laughter and the smell of cigars, Edward pleaded fatigue and an early train the next morning. A cab was summoned. In the hall Charlotte kissed them goodnight and pressed upon them an umbrella. The rain was falling hard, the sultry night restive with thunder.
‘I’ve hardly spoken to you.’
‘I know. Come to tea tomorrow, won’t you? I want to hear about the photographs. Were they good?’
Maribel wrinkled her nose. ‘They should have been, or three of them anyway. The light was perfect, absolutely perfect, and you too of course, but somehow I managed to spoil the plates. I don’t even know what I did wrong, some kind of double exposure, maybe, or dirt on the glass. Whatever it was I botched them. I am sorry.’
‘Don’t be a silly,’ Charlotte said. ‘We will just have to try again.’
‘Seriously? You could bear it?’
‘Of course I could. We must adapt to survive.’
Reaching out, Maribel squeezed her friend’s hand.
‘Thank you.’
‘Thank Mr Darwin.’
‘I mean to develop my Jubilee photographs tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed I do better with them.’
‘Maribel,’ Edward said wearily from the doorway, gesturing towards the cab. His wife’s inability to leave a party promptly was one aspect of her nature to which he refused to become accustomed.
‘Tomorrow, four o’clock,’ Charlotte said and pushed her towards the door. ‘Take her home, dear Edward, I beseech you. We have had quite enough of her.’
The rain drummed on the roof of the cab, piercing the light from the street lamps like a cascade of silver needles. The heaviness of the downpour required them to keep the windows up, and the cab smelled strongly of stale sweat. Maribel lit a cigarette.
‘How were the gentlemen? Awash with blue jokes and tales of schoolboy high jinks?’
‘Gossip, mostly. They are as bad as a bunch of wives when they get together. They were full of salacious stories about your Mr Webster.’
‘He is not my Mr Webster.’
‘Dearest Bo, you rise like a salmon.’
‘Then don’t be a fly.’
Edward smiled. ‘Do you remember when you saw him at Turks Row that he told you he collected photographs? Well, it turns out that his is rather more private a collection than he might have intimated. Arthur’s friend Woodhouse went to dinner at Wimbledon the other night, strictly gentlemen only, and they all had a good deal too much to drink. The collection was brought out with the cigars. Woodhouse, who had been dreadi
ng a pious lecture in aesthetics, was perfectly delighted. It was basically naked ladies. Webster of course calls it Art.’
Maribel was glad then that they sat side by side and that in the darkness he could not see her face.
‘One might have guessed, of course,’ Edward added. ‘It is always the Congregationalists.’
‘I thought it was the Scots.’
Edward laughed. ‘The Scots too. What we bury under our tartan blankets would make a sailor blush. By the way, I have suggested to Henry he come up to Inverallich this summer. It would be nice for Mother.’
‘Did he say he would?’ Maribel asked, glad of the change of subject, and she leaned forward, pressing her crossed arms hard against her stomach. The thought of Mr Webster looking at photographs of naked ladies with those milky eyes of his was peculiarly unsettling.
‘He said he would think about it. He is preoccupied with the Prince of Wales, with whom he has taken to playing poker. To my lasting credit I refrained from vulgar jokes about knaves.’
‘Your self-restraint is commendable. Will he be bankrupted?’
‘Henry? On the contrary, he is confident of riches. Apparently he and Prince Edward have been receiving instruction in the game from Buffalo Bill and they are become quite expert. It may of course be that they will soon become expert in losing money to Buffalo Bill. We shall have to hope for the best.’
At Cadogan Gardens Edward descended first so that he might open the umbrella. Maribel took his arm as they crossed the street.
‘Henry told me that the Prince has had Cody arrange a shooting match between his little sharp-shooter Annie Oakley and the Grand Duke Mikhail of Russia,’ Edward said, pushing open the front door. ‘Apparently the Queen hopes that a humiliating defeat by a girl half his height will be enough to send the Russian home and put an end to his unsuitable interest in the young Princess Victoria.’
Maribel laughed, then put her finger to her lips, gesturing towards the door of Lady Wingate’s flat. Edward nodded, his face stern. Folding the umbrella he twirled it like a walking stick and, his knees raised high and his feet pointed, he tiptoed stagily across the hall. Maribel giggled. She closed the front door as quietly as she could manage but, as Edward set his foot on the first step, it emitted a loud creak. Lady Wingate’s door flung open.
‘Madam,’ Edward said with a bow. ‘Good evening.’
Lady Wingate glared at him. She wore a loose gown of a vaguely oriental design, her long grey hair in a plait over one shoulder. Her eyes were bright as a bird’s.
‘Good evening?’ she scolded. ‘It is the middle of the night! And yet in you slam, rousing the whole lot of us with your racket. It will not do!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Maribel said.
The old lady ignored her.
‘You are in all sorts of trouble with the papers again, you know,’ she said, gesticulating at Edward. ‘More Irish than the Irish, they call you. Will you bomb us? Or do you mean simply to smash things up?’
Edward grinned.
‘Dear Lady Wingate, if I bomb or smash anything you’ll be the first to know.’
‘I don’t know how you can live with yourself, consorting with common criminals. You should watch your step.’
‘I shall do my best. This one in particular,’ he said, pointing to the one beneath his foot. ‘We shall have someone come and look at it tomorrow. There must be something we can do about the creak.’
‘In Burma it was the frogs that kept one awake,’ Lady Wingate said. ‘That and the cicadas screaming their heads off. One was required to sleep under a net, of course, because of the mosquitoes. My mother hated it, she said she could not breathe, but I always found it rather romantic. Like sleeping in a cloud.’
‘Goodnight, Lady Wingate,’ Edward said.
The old lady hesitated, then waggled a reproving finger. Her knotted hand was bunioned with rings.
‘It won’t do, you know,’ she said. ‘That child this afternoon and now all this rumpus in the dead of night. It won’t do at all.’
Halfway up the stairs Edward stopped. Lady Wingate waited in her open doorway, her shadow staining the tiled floor.
‘Goodnight, Lady Wingate,’ he called down. ‘Tomorrow I shall buy you a mosquito net. One should always sleep in a cloud.’
It was Alice’s night off. Inside the flat Maribel turned on the lamp by the coat stand and removed her hat. The window at the far end of the corridor had been left open and the undrawn curtains stirred, rain glinting in a puddle on the sill.
‘That woman gets dottier by the day,’ Maribel said, loosening her hair. ‘The door’s one thing but disturbed by a child? She knows quite well that there are no children here.’
‘That woman has the hearing of a bat,’ Edward replied. ‘She could hear a child sneeze six streets away.’
‘She’s lonely,’ Maribel said.
‘She never leaves her flat.’
‘She’s old.’
‘She’s the same age as my mother.’
At the bedroom door Maribel turned her back to her husband.
‘Would you?’ she said, bending forward a little.
Edward unhooked her dress. Halfway down he paused, sliding his hands inside the bodice to cup her breasts, kissing her softly on the back of her neck.
Maribel thought of Whitfield Street and the house with the box tree.
‘I thought you had an early train,’ she said.
‘Not so very early.’
She turned towards him, stroking his tired face. There were lavender shadows under his eyes.
‘And what about Lady Wingate and her bat hearing?’ she murmured.
‘I promised I should watch my step.’
With his hand still inside her dress he guided her into the bedroom. When he kissed her she closed her eyes, suffused not only by the first stirrings of desire but also by the reassuring familiarity of his mouth against her mouth, his hands on her skin. Beyond the uncurtained window the rain was still falling. Taking Edward’s hand she pulled him over to the window, pushing the sash up as far as it would go. A light breeze was blowing and, when she slipped free of her sleeves, flecks of rain gleamed on her bare arms. The coolness of the air was exquisite. Thunder rumbled, a deep belly growl, and fell silent. There was a moment of stillness and then a crack of lightning that broke the night in two. In the knife-white light Edward’s hair was black.
Afterwards, when he had returned to his dressing room, Maribel rose to smoke a cigarette. Dragging a chair to the window she threw open the curtains. The storm was dying. The rain had stopped and the sticky night air clung about her like a sigh. She smoked slowly, holding the smoke in her chest, lighting a second from the stub of the first. On a night like this one, in a narrow alley behind the Criterion Theatre, Victor had taken her into his arms and promised to make her a star.
‘You know why the sun sets in the evening, Sylvia?’ he had asked her in his soft Spanish drawl, standing on tiptoes slightly so that he might kiss her. ‘Because that is your moment. Even the sun knows when it is beaten.’
She had held him in her arms and known he was a gift from God. She had begun to despair. Victor might be small and rotund, and a great deal older than he chose to admit, but he had money. He knew people. He had invested in a play that had toured in Europe. He could do for her what Mr Corelli’s photographs had not – put an end to the ceaseless rounds of auditions, the dusty couches and the snatched bit-parts. Victor’s next project was a charming piece about a beautiful ingénue. The West End, Broadway, even Paris and Vienna, they would take them all by storm. Sylvia Wylde would be bigger than Sarah Bernhardt, bigger even than Charlotte Cushman in her heyday. The washed-up Miss Hodson would read of her triumphs in the newspapers and weep.
Three days later she had moved out of her cramped room in Rupert Street and into a small and comfortable cottage he had rented for her close to the canal in Maida Vale. It had a little wrought-iron balcony and a large porch over the front door, creamy with clematis. In the mornin
gs she sat on the balcony, watching the sun on the water and the ducks as they squabbled in the reeds, and her bright future was so close she could feel the warmth of it like breath on her face.
The photographer in the crimson studio had made only two hundred prints. Victor had had them expensively mounted. He said that it was all about exclusivity, that he did not mean to have her picture fingered by grimy-fisted working men. She was not a music-hall chanteuse, a sly-winking wanton. She was a leading lady and a leading lady was not handed around in the public house, hidden under the mattresses of miners. Twelve years ago he had looked at the portrait of her, her hand set coyly between her thighs, and declared it a Work of Art. Were those the kind of pictures Mr Webster collected and showed to men after dinner when they were red-faced with port? Was that why he looked at her like that, because he had seen her before? The fear rose in her sharply, a spike in her throat like vomit. She inhaled deeply, swallowing it down. It could not be. The chance of such a coincidence – surely it was less than infinitesimal. Twelve years was a very long time. A photographic print was not made to last twelve years.
All the same she stood, shaking her head as though she could shake her thoughts loose. Pushing the sash of the window as high as it would go she leaned out. Above the roofs the moon slid clear of a silver-trimmed tatter of cloud and drifted slowly across the night. The London moon was so small, she thought, a moon not so much to be cupped in the hands as pinched sharply between finger and thumb. She was not in the least bit sleepy. She thought of her notebook, the unfinished poem, but it was words from the schoolroom that stirred in her, verses recited long ago at Ellerton, her hand pressed to her chest, her childish voice straining for pathos.
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east