by Clare Clark
A knock on the door interrupted them.
‘Will you take your coffee in the drawing room, ma’am?’ Cora, the maid, asked, nudging the door open with her knee. She had the tray in her hands, its side wedged against her belly to keep it steady. Maribel nodded. By the time the tray had been set down, the coffee poured, and they were settled in front of the fire the conversation had moved to practical matters. Maribel was content to leave it so. As one of his Socialist associates had once observed, one was obliged occasionally to plant an idea with Edward Campbell Lowe but one should never make the mistake of trying to water it.
When they had drunk their coffee they rose. It was still light. Beyond the window the sky had lifted its padded grey skirts, revealing petticoats of startling pinkish blue, and the late roses tapped their white faces against the glass.
‘Perhaps tomorrow will be fine,’ she said. ‘Wonders will never cease.’
Edward came to stand beside her. She could feel the warmth of him, the quiver of energy in his long lean limbs.
‘Do you think about it?’ he asked softly. ‘About Spain? About Madrid?’
Maribel hesitated.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she said.
‘There is a picture I carry in my head from that house on the Calle de León. You are sitting up, your knees pulled up to your chin, and your hair is tumbled about your shoulders and you are looking at me in that way you have, so intense it is almost angry, and you are so beautiful, so – absolute, that I know without doubt that this is why I have come. This is why Madrid is here.’
Maribel looked up at her husband, an ache rising in her throat as she touched him very gently on the cheek. He smiled. She longed for something to offer in return but, to her bafflement, she found that she could summon almost nothing of those dusty months in Madrid and, as for Edward, no trace at all. Absently she found herself recalling how the shadowy parlour of the house on Calle de León had always smelled of almonds. It had been the Señora’s strongly held belief that men who liked women also liked cake.
In the convent on the edge of the oxbow lake the old woman had baked her a cake of almonds on Kings’ Day, when the people of her village celebrated the visit of the three wise men to the baby that lay in the manger in Bethlehem.
‘Come,’ she said softly. ‘It is time for bed.’
13
THE LOW AFTERNOON SUN spilled into Charlotte’s drawing room. The horse-chestnut trees were turning, their leaves yellowed and spotted with age. It was the end of September. Soon the leaves would be gone.
‘We have some news,’ Charlotte said.
Maribel smiled. ‘Do you?’ she said.
‘I – you already know, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps. A little.’
‘Am I so very fat already?’
‘You look radiant. How do you feel?’
‘Fat.’
‘And happy?’
‘Very happy. I thought when Clovis came I – but . . .’
She smiled, the sedated smile of a Lippi saint. Maribel smiled back. Charlotte had borne a child regularly every eighteen months for the length of their friendship and Maribel had known as soon as she saw her that she was pregnant again. It was the same every time: Charlotte’s lassitude, the fullness of her face, the abstracted vagueness with which she trailed off in the middle of a sentence, a slight frown of bemusement denting the pale flesh between her eyebrows. Just a few minutes earlier she had hunted across the tea tray and even on the floor for her teaspoon before Maribel had realised what it was she was looking for and gently pointed out that she was holding it in her left hand. Charlotte had shaken her head then, and smiled.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had said. ‘You must think me quite dotty.’
Maribel had laughed but she had not denied it. The conversation had progressed in fits and starts, Charlotte frequently lapsing into a soft-faced reverie.
As a girl Maribel had been repelled by pregnant women, by the misshapen bulk of them. They reminded her of the picture in her encyclopaedia of the great African snake which dislocated its jaw so that it could swallow an antelope without having to chew. It was a surprise then to observe Charlotte, who did not carry her children so much as merge into them. With each of Charlotte’s pregnancies Maribel had been struck most not by her friend’s size but by her softness, the blurriness of her edges. It reminded her of baking as a little girl when, on rainy afternoons, she was sometimes allowed to take the cut-off parts of the pie crust and roll them together to make something new.
‘I almost forgot,’ Charlotte said, rousing herself. ‘I have a present for you.’
‘For me? Surely I should be the one giving presents.’
Fumbling in the workbox beside her chair Charlotte drew out a small package wrapped in tissue paper.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and you’ll see.’
Maribel unwrapped the parcel to reveal a small box. She lifted the lid. Inside was a curved wooden block. She glanced at Charlotte, who grinned.
‘It’s a studio stamp. Look.’
Taking it out of the box she showed Maribel the rubber plate on the underside. In reverse, in neat capitals, the rubber letters spelled out
CAMPBELL LOWE STUDIOS
CADOGAN MANSIONS, SW.
‘My own stamp,’ Maribel said, gazing at it.
‘All the professional photographers have them. Promise you will use it.’
‘I promise.’ Maribel ran her thumb over the raised letters. ‘Thank you.’
After tea the younger Charterhouse children were permitted a few minutes with their mother. When they came in like a whirlwind, jumping on the sofa and upsetting the milk jug, Charlotte did not remonstrate with them as she usually did. She only smiled and closed her eyes, inhaling their child smell of soap and starch. Pregnancy was Charlotte’s laudanum. Maribel saw how it enfolded her in its soothing embrace, drawing her down into a pure and private place where there was no world and no pain and only the light at the heart of her, behind the shutters of her closed eyes. Like laudanum she seemed unable to break the habit of it.
‘Read it!’
Two of the younger children thrust a book beneath Maribel’s nose, flapping it up and down.
‘Say please, Tilly,’ Charlotte said mildly.
‘Please read it!’
Reluctantly Maribel took the book. The story was a slight tale about a girl who dressed her kitten in a lace cap and took it for rides in a perambulator. Maribel thought it perfectly dreary, but the children leaned up against her, their thumbs jammed in their mouths, and gazed with big slow-blinking eyes at the pallid pictures as if they were windows they could see right through. She turned the last page. Opposite her Charlotte opened her eyes, watching sleepily as the other two children stacked wooden bricks one on top of another.
‘“Tomorrow, said Emily, we shall go to the zoo”,’ Maribel read and, with a flourish, she snapped the book shut.
‘Again,’ commanded Matilda.
’Clovis pulled the thumb from his mouth with a pop.
‘’Gain,’ he said.
‘Please,’ reminded Charlotte dreamily.
‘Pease,’ he echoed.
‘Not today, dear,’ Maribel said. ‘I have to go home.’
Extricating herself from the warm weight of the children she stood. Charlotte did not seem to notice. She sprawled in her chair, her head back and her mouth slightly open, gazing at the tower of bricks as though entranced.
‘Charlotte, dearest, I am leaving.’
Charlotte blinked, rousing herself. Behind her there was a clatter of bricks, a high wail.
‘You clumsy! You ruined it!’
‘Did not!’
‘Did so, you – you ninny! You knocked it!’
‘Ow! Get off me!’
‘Children, please,’ Charlotte murmured. ‘Dearest, must you go?’
‘I am afraid I must.’
Behind the arm of Charlotte’s chair the children jabbed and kicked at one anothe
r surreptitiously, their faces pinched with fury. A thrown brick struck the table leg.
‘I’ve bored you,’ Charlotte said. ‘Don’t bother to deny it, I know I have. I’ve bored myself.’
She made a face, turning down the corners of her mouth. It still looked like she was smiling. Maribel smiled back.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Maribel said, kissing her, but she was glad when the front door closed behind her and she stood alone on the wide pavement, breathing in the smoke-scented air. The sun was sliding like a gold coin behind the houses, washing the porcelain sky with streaks of pink and gold. Across the street, behind the high iron railings, the smooth-lawned gardens were empty, the nursemaids all gone home. In early summer the branches of the horse chestnut blazed with blossom like Christmas candles and beneath the avenue of limes the raked gravel paths grew sticky with sap. Now the horse chestnut drooped wearily, its withering leaves extended like hands, palm upwards.
Maribel picked up a fallen conker shell and ran her thumb over its green flesh, pimpled with spiky nubs. It was too early for conkers. The shell opened reluctantly, displaying a small sleek nut nestled in its centre. Its skin was a rich, marbled brown, the scar at its base chalk-white. Charlotte’s children were ferocious conker players, always quarrelling over the finest specimens, and in the autumn it was customary to find Charlotte with a bottle of witch hazel in one hand and a wad of cotton in the other, tending to the casualties of battle. The children were full of theories about the best way to harden conkers and tried each year to persuade the cook to bake them in the range. Charlotte had grown used to finding them forgotten in the airing cupboard or tucked into crevices behind a fireplace.
They had collected conkers when Maribel was young too. There had been a horse-chestnut tree at the bottom of the lawn of the house at Ellerton and, every autumn, Maribel and her sisters had gathered them, piling them up in glossy heaps in their pinafores. Lizzie and Edith had not cared about shape or size but Maribel had discarded the misshapen and the flawed, the ones with the yellowed scars or the flat corners. She had kept only the perfect ones, their rich brown lustre cool and silky against her cheek. Lizzie and Edith had kept theirs in a box for months, taking them out from time to time to make patterns with them on the schoolroom floor, but Maribel had refused to join in. She forgot every year how quickly conkers shrivelled and lost their shine. Every year the disappointment was fresh in her.
‘Why, Maribel!’
Maribel turned. Charlotte’s husband Arthur stood beside his carriage. He raised his hat.
‘Would it be impolite to ask whether you are coming or going?’ he asked.
Maribel smiled. ‘Going, I am sorry to say.’
‘Then let John run you home.’
‘Thank you, Arthur, but it is such a pretty evening. I would enjoy the walk.’
‘Nonsense, I won’t hear of it.’
He held open the door of the brougham with a theatrical bow and Maribel allowed herself to be helped inside. When Arthur Charterhouse was set upon benevolence there was no resisting him. He waved a hand as the carriage drew away, then turned towards his front door. She knew what came next. After all the years she had known Arthur his habits were almost as familiar to her as Edward’s. He would stand in the doorway, legs astride, and bellow his return, skimming his hat like a plate towards the hatstand. Even as it missed its hook, the boys would thunder down the stairs, tomahawks brandished, and he would whoop and roar as he chased them, wrestling them to the floor and tickling them until they wept for mercy. As the carriage turned out of the square, the low sun buttering the white stucco, she fancied that she saw the windows of the house shake in their sashes.
It was only a matter of minutes before the brougham pulled up outside Cadogan Mansions. Clicking reassuringly to the horses, the coachman jumped down from the box and opened the door.
‘Thank you, John,’ Maribel said as he unfolded the step.
‘Madam,’ he said in his Irish brogue, smiling as he touched his hat with his whip. John had been with the Charterhouses since before their children were born and was adored by all the family for the placidity of his temperament. Charlotte liked to claim that in fifteen years she had never once seen him frown but Maribel refused to believe it. She did not see how it was possible these days to be Irish and never angry. The outrages piled one upon the other, each more monstrous than the last. Only a few days before, in County Cork, thousands had gathered outside the Mitchelstown courthouse to protest the prosecution of Edward’s friend William O’Brien, the Irish MP, under the new Coercion Act, for his part in inciting yet another rent strike on one of Cork’s largest estates. Though the protest had been peaceful, the police had opened fire on the crowd, killing three estate tenants and wounding many more. Edward, without so much of a drop of Irish blood in his veins, had been unable to contain his fury at the violence of it.
‘Are they not content with evicting these men, with starving them and forcing them to live in hedgerows and heaps of stinking rubbish? What have they to add, that they must then slaughter them in cold blood?’
Even Charlotte, whose brain had softened to cheese, had been roused enough at tea to deplore for almost a full minute the plight of the Irish before her attention had been diverted. But John only nodded and smiled and touched his hat, his broad face placid as a cow’s. Perhaps it was best, Maribel thought, if you were Irish, to be incapable of anger. Otherwise, once you had started, how on earth would you stop?
14
EDWARD HAD SENT WORD from the House, telling her not to wait up. She ate supper from a tray and went to bed early. She dreamed of crowds, and when the blast of a gun startled her into waking, she lay for a moment in the darkness, her pulse fast, before she quite understood that she was awake. Somewhere in the flat Edward was banging about. Maribel peered at the clock. It was just after two thirty in the morning. Frowning, she rose, slipping her wrap around her shoulders.
Edward was in the drawing room, a glass in one hand and the whisky decanter in the other. Maribel squinted at him in the brightness of the electric light.
‘Red, what is it? What’s wrong?’
Edward drained his whisky. Then he poured himself another.
‘What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s bloody wrong. What’s bloody unspeakably immeasurably bloody wrong is that an assembly of dyed-in-the-wool dunderheads, not one of whom occupies his seat for any other reason than a blind accident of birth, a bunch of petrified anachronisms who sleep through most of the proceedings and talk through the remainder, not only dare to dictate to us, who have been elected by the people, but have the legal right to do so, while we who are the people’s spokesmen are forbidden to speak in their defence. What is the point of it, Bo? What is the damned point of any of it when we can say nothing, do nothing?’
Maribel’s heart sank. She put her arm around him, steering him towards the sofa.
‘Sit,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Edward sat, Maribel cross-legged at his feet. It was the Coal Mines Regulation Bill, he told her. He had been working on the bill for months, arguing in the House, lobbying in the tea room, returning again and again to the coal-grimed men’s clubs and the church halls not only of his own constituency but of Yorkshire and the Black Country. A workable bill had finally been jostled and wheedled through the Commons, only to be subjected by the Lords to a series of amendments, amendments that, in Edward’s opinion, not only cut the heart from the bill but extracted its teeth, one by one. The final provocation came with an amendment from Lord Cross which would prevent the appointment of checkweighmen, the trusted agents of the miners themselves, as safety inspectors. Incandescent with rage, Edward had risen to his feet to condemn the indefensible powers of the Upper House and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the English Parliament. The House had erupted. Calling for order, the Speaker had demanded that the honourable member withdraw his remarks. Edward refused. In the vote that followed the motion was passed by a heavy majority. The Member for Argy
llshire was to be suspended from the House.
‘For how long?’ Maribel asked, lighting two cigarettes and passing one to Edward.
‘Seven days.’
Maribel thought of Mr Engels, who had patted her arm at one of his famous Sunday parties and told her that her husband was a fine man in sore need of a manager, of pale po-faced Miss Potter, who hankered moonily after the revolting Mr Chamberlain and who had once declared in Maribel’s hearing that Edward Campbell Lowe was generally agreed to be a poseur and a fool. She wished she did not feel ashamed.
‘Seven days is not long,’ she said. ‘Will you keep your seat?’
‘It hardly matters. If I can’t say what must be said openly to defend the interests of my constituents, if I am to be gagged for speaking out in the service of democracy and of reason, then that seat is worth nothing.’
‘Will you resign? Is that what the party will expect?’
Edward shrugged.
‘The party expects me to disappoint them. They take comfort in my predictability. As for me, how can I leave when there is so much left to do?’
He leaned forward, his glass cradled in his hands. Maribel put her hand on his shoulder and they both watched as the whisky turned in slow honeyed circles around the crystal. Then Edward raised the glass to his lips, tossing it back in a single swift swallow.
‘Those damned Tory bastards,’ he said. ‘What hope do the coal miners have now?’
Edward was summoned by Earl Spencer. The meeting was civil, the rebuke discreet and emphatic. It was made quite clear that it served no one’s purpose, least of all that of the Liberal Party, to defy the rules of the House, and that it would be best for both Edward and the party if he were to apologise. When Edward declined, confessing himself unable to apologise for something he did not regret and for which, furthermore, he had already been publicly chastised, Spencer did not press him. He did, however, make it quite clear that no further improprieties would be tolerated. The party, catastrophically split by the Irish question, was already dangerously weakened. Though Trevelyan had been persuaded back into the Liberal fold, Goschen continued to strengthen his position in the Conservative government in the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and recent talks with Chamberlain and Hartington about the reintegration of the Liberal Unionists had collapsed. While the Grand Old Man might share many of Edward’s political convictions he had precious little patience for agitators.