Beautiful Lies

by Clare Clark

  ‘Oh, Ida, I never meant –’

  ‘What does it matter, what you meant? All your life, you have done exactly what you wanted to and left others to pay the price. The scandal when you left, the whispers and the nudges and the way that people looked at us in church and in the street, as though we were infectious, contemptible – but why should you trouble yourself about that? You thought us all beneath contempt yourself, you never pretended otherwise. You were the special one, the bright shining star. The rest of us were ordinary. You could not be expected to concern yourself with us.’

  Maribel stared at Ida. She sounded like Edith, like Lizzie.

  ‘Ida, it wasn’t like that. I had to get out. I had to. If I had stayed –’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me go to school.’

  ‘Oh, Ida. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well. You never asked.’

  ‘I tried to write. I wanted to. I thought of you all the time. It was only –’

  Ida closed her eyes, shook her head. Then she reached up and unpinned her hat.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about any of it. I don’t care about you. I just want you to go away. To go away and never come back.’

  The hat was made of felt with an upturned brim and a bitter-chocolate ribbon fastened in a rosette. Ida touched a damp fingertip to the rosette, brushing away a smut, and set the hat on the dresser. She did not look at Maribel. Instead she undid the brass buttons of her coat. The buttons were stiff and she grimaced as she forced them through the buttonholes. When the coat was undone she took it off, folding the arms inside the lining and laying it over the back of the rocking chair. Then she opened the door. She stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest.

  ‘Goodbye, Peggy.’

  Maribel bowed her head.

  ‘You are right,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought I was a star. Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry rolled into one. I went to the stage door of every theatre in London. I thought if they could only see me –’ She stared down at the table, at a knot in the wood like a staring eye. ‘One part. One part in a year. A theatrical career of thirteen words. I sold myself to a man I did not care for because he promised to make me famous, and afterwards, when he had tired of me, I sold myself to any –’

  ‘Stop! I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘I had a baby. They made me give it away. I’d never told anyone until –’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Ida cried, banging the flat of her hand against the pine dresser. And then again, more quietly, ‘That’s enough.’

  Maribel swallowed and the tears fell unchecked down her cheeks.

  ‘Ida, I am so sorry. I didn’t mean – you were never like the others. You always understood. That’s why I want you to know all of it. All of my mistakes. I want to show you how sorry I am for what I did, that I was wrong about so many things. I hurt you and I never wanted to. Ida, I thought I’d lost you. Now that I’ve found you I – don’t send me away. I love you, Ida. Tell me it is not too late to set things right.’

  She reached out, placing her hand over Ida’s. Ida stared at it. Then very slowly she slid her hand away.

  ‘But it is,’ she said. ‘It is too late.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  Ida turned away.

  ‘I don’t want you here. Please leave now.’

  ‘Ida.’

  Ida glanced at the clock and frowned. Snatching up a dishcloth she yanked open the door of the range, releasing a rush of acrid-smelling smoke, and snatched out a tray of tarts. They were burned, blistered with black scabs, the pastry scorched to charcoal around the edges. Ida dropped the tray into the sink. It was only as she turned that Maribel realised that she was pregnant.

  ‘I asked you to go,’ Ida said. ‘I won’t have you here when my husband gets home.’

  ‘But I can’t go. The carriage –’

  ‘Then take a cab. Take the Underground train. Fly for all I care. Just go.’

  ‘Ida, please. Don’t do this. I am your sister.’

  Ida shook her head. She did not seem angry any more, only tired.

  ‘Edith is my sister,’ she said. ‘Hester and Lizzie and Maude are my sisters. Not you. Not any more.’

  ‘You can’t choose your sisters. We agreed that, remember?’

  ‘I didn’t choose. You did.’

  Maribel was silent. Ida bit her lip. Then she looked at Maribel, directly at her, for the first time.

  ‘I am happy,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t take that away from me too.’

  28

  AT EDWARD’S TRIAL THE visitors’ gallery was packed with his supporters. There was a ripple of attention as Maribel entered the court and, escorted by Mr Morris, made her way to her seat. She carried herself very upright, her chin thrust out like the prow of a ship. Charlotte had made her promise she would wear her black walking costume, a dress Charlotte deemed suitably penitential for the occasion, but Edward did not like her in black. Instead she wore a dress she had bought in Paris the previous winter and had altered to suit the season’s fashion, a striking bronze silk with a high neck and puffed sleeves that emphasised her narrow waist and suffused her pale skin with gold. Her dark hair was carefully dressed and the pearls around her neck gleamed. In the dingy police court she shone like a lamp.

  Charlotte had sent her apologies. Arthur had argued that, with her arm in plaster and the baby coming, a public gallery was no place for her, but the truth was that he considered Edward’s conduct indefensible. So did Charlotte, come to that, but Maribel knew that she would have come all the same if Arthur had not forbidden it. Maribel did not blame her. She did not want to make things worse between the two of them. Nor did she want Charlotte there if Charlotte was not unequivocally on Edward’s side. Irrational as it was, she clung to the hope that, if she could only crowd the courtroom with enough of Edward’s supporters, so that the very air was charged with their faith and determination, the power of their will might just force an acquittal.

  Maribel took a seat in the front row, between Mr Morris and Mrs Marx Aveling. She did not know Eleanor Marx Aveling well but she had made her acquaintance in the months since missing her lecture in Fitzroy Square and she knew what everyone knew, that she had been her father’s favourite and had helped him with the translation of Das Kapital into English, and that she was not married to her husband, who already had a wife. They nodded at one another without smiling and Maribel noticed the bandage on Mrs Aveling’s right hand, the heavy eyebrows that looked as though they had been drawn on with a burned cork. Mrs Aveling had marched with the others to Trafalgar Square. Although she had evaded arrest, she had been injured badly enough to be taken to hospital. Edward admired her. He was also of the opinion that a little of her went a very long way.

  Mr Morris took a book from his pocket. His whiskers were wild and he appeared to have slept in his suit. Opening the book he slid a stiff white invitation card from inside its front cover.

  ‘Thank you for asking me,’ he said, smiling at her, and she smiled back, the queasiness in her stomach easing a little. She was glad then that she had sent them, that she had not allowed Charlotte to talk her out of it.

  Mrs Campbell Lowe

  At Home

  Bow Street Police Court

  She had sent the cards to everyone she could think of, including all the newspaper editors in London. Mrs Besant had remarked approvingly upon her drollery and several of Edward’s friends from the SDF had applauded her disdain for the English legal system. Henry, Edward’s brother, had hugged her and asked whether there would be dancing. As for Edward’s mother, she had raised an eyebrow and asked if it had been Edward’s idea. It was Maribel’s impression that Vivien rather wished it had been her own.

  ‘But, dearest, why?’ Charlotte had protested. ‘Aren’t things difficult enough? Making light of the arrest can only provoke the party further. It might even make things come off worse for Edward.’

  ‘I am not making light of it.’

&n
bsp; ‘Then what are you doing?’

  ‘I am trying not to be afraid.’

  It was the truth. The visiting cards made her feel braver. It comforted her that she could be the kind of person who made such a gesture, who might countenance the prospect of her husband’s imprisonment without fear or, more shamefully, shame. There was something else, though, something more important which she only partly understood herself. By sending out the cards, she pledged herself unequivocally to her husband and to his cause. She would not attend her husband’s trial as an observer, an outsider, but as a participator. The invitation cards declared her collusion. It was as close to the dock as she could get.

  The intensity of her feelings startled her. Throughout Edward’s parliamentary career she had always remained peripheral, detached. It was not that she disagreed with his politics. She was as distressed as he by the plight of the poor. She was sickened by the wretchedness of the slums, the poisonous factories, the half-lives of those compelled to labour at ill-paid and back-breaking work until they dropped from hunger and fever and exhaustion. When Edward talked of a nation whose greatness was defined not by the power of its capitalists, or by the size of their fortunes, but by the education and refinement of its masses, by the universality of enjoyment and the absence of poverty, she felt a tightening in her heart, like a fist clenching. It was just that there had never been any comfort for her in politics. She had no faith in Parliament and hardly more in the impassioned crusade of the grass-roots Socialists. At those meetings she had attended it had struck her forcefully that the speakers were not the advocates of the very poor. Yes, the Socialists called for the relief of the distress of the unemployed, and vehemently, but they would have it relieved according to the gospel of Socialism or not at all. They would rather the destitute starved than filled their mouths with the bread of capitalist charity. They were floored again and again by the ignorance of the indigent masses, their inarticulacy, their lack of curiosity, their torpor, and afraid of them too, of their squalor and their territorialism and their brutishness. They talked of the plague of evil bred by poverty, the degradation of humanity, the retrograde evolution that was turning the slum-dwellers of the East End back into savages. The problem with the Socialists was not that they wanted to transfigure the structure of society. It was that they wanted to transfigure the poor.

  Edward’s arrest had not advanced her faith in politics. But in the desolate days after her meeting with Ida she came to understand Edward’s stubborn dedication to the cause in a new light. He did not expect to win. He fought with all his strength, knowing that the most he could hope for were small triumphs, progress that at best edged two and a half paces forward for every two it took back. He fought because not to fight was impossible. Edward’s Socialism was not an intellectual construct. It was as much a part of him as his lungs, his liver. He could no more stop fighting than stop his heart from beating.

  She had known as soon as she left her that she would never see Ida again. At first she refused to believe it, closing her ears to the bleak voice that cried like the wind in her head, but, as the days passed, she did not have the strength to withstand it. The misery was a darkness in her that would not lift. She walked around the flat as though drugged, her feet heavy as stones. She picked things up and stared at them, startled to find them in her hands. She could not settle. She wanted to hate Ida, to rage at her for her cruelty, her savage coldness. She wanted to plead for her forgiveness, to prostrate herself at Ida’s feet, to weep and weep until Ida melted in the hot flood of her tears. And yet, even in the darkness, she knew that she would do none of these things. There was no hope. She would never sit beneath the flowering honeysuckle in Ida’s garden on a warm spring afternoon. She would not eat jam tarts with Ida in her cramped kitchen or hold Ida’s child in her arms. Ida did not want to see her. She would not change her mind. Edith had been a weeper and Lizzie a fearful sulk, prone to hours of wounded moping, but Ida had always been as stubborn as a mule. Once she had decided to be angry there was no reasoning with her, nothing to do but to leave her because she would not budge and she could last longer than anyone.

  There was no hope and yet time passed, day following night in its habitual pattern. As the trial drew closer, Maribel threw herself into the preparations. She wrote letters to Edward’s supporters, checked his speeches, proofread his articles. There was solace in occupation. Slowly the darkness in Maribel began to shift, allowing pale gleams of light. It was then that she understood that nothing had changed. She loved Ida. She could not stop loving her just because Ida wanted her to. She would keep on loving Ida, however painfully, because Ida was not a tumour to be cut out. She was in Maribel’s blood, in the marrow of her bones. That Ida no longer loved her back changed nothing.

  ‘Let’s go to Inverallich,’ she said to Edward one evening. ‘Tomorrow morning, on the first train. You can ride. We can walk. Just a few days. We wouldn’t even have to tell anyone we were there.’

  Edward was tired, his face pale. When she brought him a glass of whisky she stood behind his chair, rubbing his shoulders through the cloth of his evening coat. He leaned back against her, his red-gold hair bright in the firelight, and she saw, for the first time, several threads of silver at his temples.

  He shook his head. ‘We can’t.’

  Maribel did not protest. She knew it was true. There was not time. The lawyers would object. It was possible that the terms of his bail did not even permit it. All the same, she longed to go, for Edward’s sake. At Inverallich Edward would be free. He would breathe in the air of the place he loved, sharp with peat and heather and the snow that gathered itself for winter in the clefts between the mountain tops, and it would settle inside him and take root and it would succour him in all the dark nights to come. Besides, when there is nothing that can be done, and the knowledge that there is nothing that can be done is too much to bear, it is always better to do something.

  The proceedings were late to start. Someone in a gown made an announcement in legal language designed to obscure understanding. There was a complication but it was not clear to Maribel whether the delay was temporary or if the trial would have to be postponed. Beside her Mr Morris frowned over his poem, biting the end of his pencil. A week after Edward had been arrested, at a second demonstration at Trafalgar Square, a man had been killed, an Alfred Linnell, junior clerk to a solicitors’ firm in Cheapside, and Mr Morris had promised a poem for his funeral service. Maribel peered over his shoulder. The poem was called ‘A Death Song’. She could not make out all the words, his writing was cramped and very messy, but at the end of every verse, he had written the same refrain:

  Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,

  But one and all if they would dusk the day.

  Maribel thought of Edward, his broken head and his bruised stomach and his dogged indefatigability, and she thought: Not him. You can’t have him.

  Around her the audience stirred restlessly on the hard benches. People coughed or rustled in bags or muttered to one another in low voices. Mrs Aveling nursed her injured wrist in her other hand, her eyes closed, her fingers idling with the edge of the bandage. A man seated behind Maribel leaned forward and patted Mr Morris on the shoulder and murmured something Maribel did not catch. Mr Morris nodded without looking up, his pencil tapping at the blue corner of his notebook.

  ‘Linnell’s name will never be forgotten,’ the man sitting behind her said to his companion, and all along the bench there were murmurs of assent and approbation as though a man’s name was the beating heart of him, his crowning achievement. She had finally completed a short letter of condolence to Mr Linnell’s mother only to discover that he did not have one, nor any other family to speak of. His funeral would be paid for by Mrs Marx Aveling, out of funds raised to pay the fines of those arrested. It would not be a quiet send-off. The Socialists planned to march with the coffin from Soho to the burial ground in Mile End. Mrs Besant had already arranged for a banner to be sewn that could be carried at
the front of the cortège: KILLED IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. They hoped that hundreds would attend the graveside, that thousands more would line the route of the procession in support.

  And yet of all the men Mr Morris had spoken to, only one could remember ever meeting Linnell; he’d said simply that Linnell had seemed to be a nice enough chap, that he’d kept himself to himself and never been in any trouble. When Maribel had remarked on how sad that was, Morris had protested that, on the contrary, it was a blessing. For once, instead of the usual roll call of felons and layabouts and troublemakers, the Socialists had an irreproachable martyr. The funeral would be a call to arms, the poem a hymn to the struggle for righteousness, an elegy for the sacrifices of the ordinary working man. Alfred Linnell, a man of no particular party, who until his death had been perfectly obscure, would stand as a symbol for those who sought to build a future founded upon equality and beauty and happiness.

  Maribel hoped that he was right. More than that she hoped that there would be someone at Mr Linnell’s graveside who knew what he had liked to do on a Sunday afternoon, that he had felt the cold and liked marmalade and knew how to whistle, that he had a way with dogs and had once ridden a bicycle without holding onto the handlebars.

  The gallery was growing warm. At his table beside the dock a clerk shuffled papers. On the steps behind them there was the clatter of feet, the murmur of voices, as a flurry of latecomers was admitted to the visitors’ gallery. Mrs Aveling glanced over her shoulder. When she frowned, her eyebrows joined together to draw a thick black line above her eyes.

  ‘What the devil are they doing here?’ she muttered. Maribel looked round. There were murmured apologies as Mr Webster and Mrs Besant made their way to two empty seats near the back of the gallery. As they sat she whispered something to him and he nodded, brushing at the lapels of his coat with his fingers. ‘I suppose you saw this morning’s Chronicle ?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Never mind. It was all nonsense anyway. Not worth wasting your time on.’