by Clare Clark
‘And Cody?’ Maribel asked, amused. ‘Where was he in all this?’
‘As far away as he could manage. Bill has woman trouble aplenty without the Princess.’
‘Oh?’
‘He is hopelessly smitten with a young American actress.’
Maribel made a face.
‘Pretty as a picture, of course, and like all Americans quite without conscience,’ Henry said. ‘And don’t give me that look. South America is quite a different matter.’
‘Go on.’
‘The charming Miss Clemmons met Bill at a supper party a few weeks ago. She has travelled all the way from California for acting lessons with Emile Banker, no less, but as far as I can see she has no need of them. Already she has quite persuaded Bill that she has eyes only for him.’
‘Perhaps she has,’ Maribel said, lighting another cigarette. ‘She is an actress, for heaven’s sake, with a nose for a wealthy patron. She makes no secret of her desire to be famous.’
‘And in exchange Colonel Cody gets a beautiful young girl on his arm. Who is to say he does not get the better end of the arrangement?’
Henry shook his head. ‘She is making a fool of him, Mar. You should see him, trailing after her all over the Wild West and out to dinners and plays, introducing her to everyone as his “niece”, while his tongue lolls from his mouth like a Labrador’s. Behind all that easy pioneer charm Bill is an innocent where women are concerned. The voracious Miss Clemmons will eat him for breakfast.’
Then more fool him, Maribel thought.
‘I thought Cody’s daughter was with him,’ she said instead. ‘Surely she knows a fake niece when she sees one?’
‘He has packed Arta off with his nephew on a six-week tour of Europe. Still, I suppose when they get back he will have to put a stop to his nonsense.’
‘And you men can get back to your poker.’
‘This is not about the poker.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘You, Mrs Edward Campbell Lowe, are a fearful cynic.’
‘And you, Mr Henry Campbell Lowe, are fearfully fond of cards.’
Henry laughed. ‘Shall we play?’
‘Why not?’
Stubbing out her cigarette, she took down the large atlas that always served as a tabletop and set it in the centre of the sofa as Henry rummaged for cards among the clutter of dice and coloured counters in the top drawer of the tallboy.
‘Poor Mrs Cody,’ she said quietly.
‘Au contraire, disgustingly wealthy Mrs Cody. There are rumours that Bill has been offered a million dollars for the Wild West providing he stays with the show for three years. Even Miss Clemmons would leave plenty of change from a sum like that.’
Taking a pack of cards from the drawer, he slid them from their box and shuffled them. They were a pack Edward had been given by a friend upon winning his seat in Parliament, the cards all pen-and-ink caricatures of well-known politicians. Joe Chamberlain’s card was entitled The Rt Hon. Orchid Chain-Em-In, the Baron de Worms’s the Baron de Caterpillar. Edward had studied the cards and declared himself duly warned. Campbell Lowe was a name that offered itself all too willingly to parody.
‘Will he sell?’ Maribel asked Henry as he dealt.
‘If the offer is genuine he would be mad not to. The Wild West cannot remain a sensation for ever. There are only so many times an Indian can be slaughtered before it gets tedious.’
‘Tell that to the American government.’
Henry won the first round easily, laughing with mock triumph as he swept the cards into a pile. He shuffled again, his fingers dextrous as a conjuror’s.
‘Did you ever take your photographs of the Indians?’ he asked, as they studied their cards.
Maribel shook her head. ‘There was not time before we left London,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when we are back. Colonel Cody has been very kind.’
‘Don’t leave it too long. The show goes on tour at the end of October.’
‘That soon?’
‘Your turn to start.’
Maribel was distracted and played poorly. When Henry beat her for the third time she shook her head. She pushed the atlas away. Several Members of Parliament slid to the floor.
‘I need some air,’ she said. ‘Will you walk with me?’
Outside the rain had stopped. The pale grey sky had a white trim and, beyond the dull grey slate of the loch, the heather hazed the moor with purple. They walked through the gardens and took the path down to the pebbled beach. The brambles had flowered and the yellow-spattered gorse filled the damp air with the smell of coconut. Maribel looked out towards the tiny island at the loch’s centre, its trees stunted and gnarled as Japanese bonsai. As boys, Edward had told her, Henry and he used to spend whole days on the island. They would take sandwiches and fishing rods and not come back till it was nearly dark. They liked to pretend that they were the only two boys left in the whole world.
‘It’s a pity you could not be there when Bill took forty of his Indians to the Congregational Chapel at West Kensington,’ Henry said. ‘That would have made a splendid photograph. Apparently they sang “Nearer My God to Thee” in Lakota.’
‘I am not interested in the Indians as curiosities. If I am to photograph them it should be as they really are. The truth, not the myth-making.’
‘But the Wild West is all about myth. Bill is the first to admit that no tribe could have afforded to be so gloriously feathered as his troupe, even before Custer. As for all that whooping, no real Indian has whooped in all his life. Cody invented it, to give the Indians a better entrance.’
‘That’s just the show. My photographs would show them behind the scenes, going about their ordinary lives.’
‘What lives? They have no lives in London. When they are not being paraded in full warpaint as a mobile advertisement, they sit in their tepees and wait to be summoned for luncheon.’
Maribel was silent. They walked along the beach, Henry occasionally stopping to pick up a stone which he turned several times in his fingers before sending it skimming across the loch. The stones skipped and spun, drawing six or seven silvered arcs before finally sinking into the water. There was no purpose in arguing with Henry. He spoke as she would have spoken had their positions been reversed, and what he said was true. There could be no photographing the Indians as they had been. Those Indians were gone, wiped out as the herds of buffalo had been wiped out, by the inexorable advance of the white man’s civilisation. The few that remained were kept, like the buffalo, in captivity, a souvenir from a past redesigned by those who were not there. The Indians of the Wild West were actors. Worse, they were ghosts.
‘Perhaps if I do this that is what I should try and capture,’ she said at last. ‘The miserable emptiness of it.’
‘Oh, they aren’t miserable,’ Henry said airily, launching another stone across the water. ‘Just idle. And a good deal less savage than Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would have us believe.’
When Henry suggested walking on to the boathouse Maribel declined. She watched as he strode off before she turned and made her way back up towards the terrace. It was four o’clock and nearly teatime. By now the Indians would be in the middle of a show. For the sixth time that week they would attack the stagecoaches and cabins of the white men only to be summarily dispatched by Buffalo Bill and his band of cowboys. The only good Indian is a dead Indian – wasn’t that what one of the American generals had said? She could not remember which, though she supposed it was Custer. Custer had not been fond of Indians.
There was no shame in dying, of course. It was the measure of a great actress, she had always told Ida, to die well. In the schoolroom in Ellerton, trembling and resolute, she had died again and again. Juliet, Antigone, Lady Jane Grey, Joan of Arc, she had whispered her final words like a prayer before, with a poignant grace, she finally succumbed. One had to learn to fall beautifully, she informed Ida, because it was much too late to rearrange yourself once you were down. To fall beautifully and not to breathe. The effe
cts were ruined if the audience could see you breathe.
She missed the theatre. She had never before permitted herself to admit it. She missed it. Not the realities of her brief career, the awful rooms and the worse auditions in the seedier theatres the wrong side of Leicester Square, the producers with their shiny coats and their squint-eyed hangers-on, the sighing and the sucking of teeth, the if-onlys and the not-this-times. What she missed was the promise of a magnificent future, the intoxicating certainty that if she could only escape the barred cage of her childhood she would fly.
At night, in her bed in Ellerton, she had closed her eyes and listened to the roar of the audience like the roar of a great sea and she had curtsied and smiled and kissed the tips of her fingers and pressed the flowers in their swathes of ribbon and crinkly tissue paper against her chest and she had thought she would burst with the need of it. When she was thirteen a girl she knew vaguely had died from a swollen heart. For weeks afterwards Maribel had lain in her bed, her own heart bloated with longing in her chest, certain that hers would kill her too.
She had slipped the door of the cage but she had not flown. She had fallen, like a fledgling pushed too soon from its nest, and thought it flying, till the ground came up to meet her. Now she watched from the ground as others made patterns in the sky for posterity, and her heart was small and hard, like a walnut.
The little notebook she carried with her was in her pocket, a stub of a pencil attached to it by a ribbon threaded through the spine. On impulse she pulled it out, leafing through it for an empty page. The wrought-iron bench that encircled the largest of the beeches was wet. She sat all the same. Poems had to be written quickly, before the act of thinking corrupted their simplicity.
The clear white page on which I set to write
In sky-high letters, curlicued, sun-bright,
Is grey with jottings, doodles, words rubbed out,
Thoughts half strangled, half forgotten,
Mangled verses misbegotten,
Discarded truths I never thought to doubt.
Fierce June of hope now chill November:
What did I dream? I daren’t remember.
She let her hand drop, staring down at the poem in her lap. A friend of Edward’s, impressed by his political articles for the Commonweal, had recently asked him if he might be interested in writing a series of pieces on his travels as a young man in South America. There was a possibility of a book. Edward had said he would think about it but he had already begun to write. Several days ago he had shown her a short piece that he had written about two gaucho brothers from the pampas on the River Plate. Though he had dashed it off in hardly more than an hour it was a polished piece, witty and wise. When Maribel asked him how much of the story was taken from his own experience, and how much made up, Edward had only laughed.
Write what is in your heart, that was the advice someone had once given her, and she had tried to. Perhaps, she thought, her poetry revealed what she had so far managed to conceal even from herself, that her heart was full of platitudes, platitudes served up in a gravy of doggerel. She could not even bring herself to cross the poem out. The hammy symbolism of such a gesture was worse even than the lines themselves.
Summer was coming to an end. In the newly planted orchards the apples had begun to ripen. Henry and Edward played Wild West with them, throwing the little green windfalls into the air for the other to shoot. When they came in for tea they had little bits of apple in their hair.
When Henry departed to stay with friends in possession of a proper grouse moor Maribel did not return with quite the same staunchness to her neglected duties. Though she continued to conduct estate business in the mornings, in the afternoons she found herself often taking refuge in the library. It was not a room that she and Edward were accustomed to using. Edward’s father had contrived to lose a fortune during his lifetime and the library at Inverallich was his greatest legacy, proof of his ability to part with money without the slightest thought or purpose. He had favoured the purchase of books by the boxload, weight being, in his opinion, the best estimate of a book’s value, and the resulting collection, for the most part, stood as a testament to the ability of man, by way of Mr Caxton, to set down on paper more words than most speak in a lifetime and still say almost nothing at all.
Maribel had half intended to begin some kind of clearing out of the collection and several tea chests, half filled, stood in the corner of the library. During her excavations, however, she had discovered that, among the stolid discourses on heraldry, the outdated travelogues and the collections of poor sermons and poorer poetry, there was to be found the occasional jewel: some essays of Montaigne, Cervantes’ Don Quixote translated into Scotch, a hand-inked volume, bound in sheepskin, containing a monk’s sworn account of his conversations about God with a mule. There was an entire shelf of books of natural history, translated long ago from Latin or Greek, and another dedicated to the obscurer sciences. Several had elaborate illustrations. Maribel, filled to the brim with the poetry of her contemporaries, found herself entranced by these volumes, by their blend of the prophetic and the preposterous, the peculiar beauty of their language. As she immersed herself in the arcana of alchemy or astral magnetism, the words, so long dormant, began to move in her.
Most days, when Edward came in from the stables, he found Maribel curled up on the old chesterfield in front of the fire, a book open in her lap, a notebook and pencil on the seat beside her. He would sprawl next to her then, his stockinged feet propped on the fender, and drink what was left of the tea from her cup while she read out to him passages that had caught her eye and breathed in his smell of rain and horses. Sometimes she would have found a book he had mentioned, or one that she thought would amuse him, and they would read together, their shoulders touching, the warmth of the fire pink in their cheeks, until it was time to bathe and change for dinner. Occasionally Maribel would reach for her notebook, her head bent as she scribbled. The bathwater grew cool and, in the kitchen, the cook tapped her spoon restlessly against the iron pots.
It was some nights before their own departure for London that Edward arrived back at the house to find Maribel waiting for him in the stone-flagged hall.
‘You’re cold,’ he said to her, kissing her on the nose. ‘Where is your shawl?’
‘I am warm,’ Maribel said. ‘And I have something I want to show you.’
Taking him by the hand she dragged him into the library. Two large books bound in battered brown leather lay open on the table in the centre of the room. Maribel picked up the first, turning it over so that Edward could see the spine. The book was the second of two heavy volumes of Pliny’s Natural History, translated into French. She turned the pages, searching for something. Many passages were underlined or marked with exclamation marks, and the margins were crammed with pencilled comments, also in French, declaiming Pliny’s inaccuracies with Gallic disgust.
‘What on earth is that?’ Edward asked.
‘Pliny. I was reading it this afternoon.’
‘Good God. Has it really come to that?’
‘I was browsing in the first book through the parts about Lusitania. A lot of it was about the geography, the flora and fauna of the region, but Pliny also writes a lot about gold mines. Apparently the Romans obtained a great deal of their gold from Lusitania, which of course is part of modern-day Galicia. And it occurred to me that even when I was there the country people used to go to the River Sil and wash for gold. There were endless folk stories about the treasure people had found and about a mine in the Vierzo where, long ago, before anyone could remember, gold had been brought from the ground in blocks so heavy it took three men to lift them.’
‘That sounds like a typical Galician story.’
‘Well, yes, but then I read Pliny’s chapter about minerals in Book II and I found this: “In all gold there is some silver, in varying proportions; a tenth part in some instances, an eighth in others. In one mine, and that only, the one known as the mine of Albucrara, in Lusit
ania, the proportion of silver is but one thirty-sixth; hence it is that the ore of this mine is so much more valuable than that of others.”’
‘I am not sure I understand your point.’
‘My point is that I know where Albucrara is. Not the mine but the valley. I’ve been there. Pliny describes it exactly, the oxbow lake, the S-shaped twist in the river, the mountains to the south. He’s describing the Val de Verriz. I know he is.’
‘Bo, Galicia is a big place. It is filled with lakes and rivers.’
‘Not exactly like this one.’
Edward kissed her and pushed her lightly away.
‘Your nose is icy,’ he said. ‘Bath time.’
Maribel allowed herself to be led upstairs. It was not until later, when dinner was over and Edward was helping himself to cheese, that she returned to the subject of Pliny. This time she did not allow Edward to discourage her.
‘Very well,’ Edward conceded at last. He held his glass of port up to the candle in front of him, contemplating its garnet gleam. ‘Let us say you are right and Pliny’s Albucrara is indeed in your Val de Verriz. You are not the first person to have discovered Pliny, even in French. If there was a gold mine to be found there, someone would have stumbled on it by now.’
‘But why? The Val de Verriz is in the middle of nowhere. It’s a part of Spain most Spaniards don’t even know. No one there would have ever heard of Pliny, let alone read him. I’ll wager the area has never even been surveyed.’
Edward made a face. ‘Do I deduce anxiety at the parlous state of our finances?’
‘What harm would it do to make some enquiries? You have friends still in Madrid. We could write to them, see if they knew someone who might help.’