have adopted parsimony and there is nothing more Scotch than that. You should be grateful.’
‘Parsimony, indeed. You have on a very handsome dress, if I may say so, Mrs Campbell Lowe.’
Maribel made a face, though she could not help herself from stroking the silk of her skirts. Edward was right. It was a particularly handsome dress.
‘You know quite well that in Paris everything nice is dear,’ she protested. ‘There is no purpose in spending almost as much money for things which are worth only the half. This dress shall last me ten times as long as a cheap one and prove the better bargain, you’ll see.’
Edward laughed and poured himself a drink.
‘Dearest Bo, it would not be half so much fun to tease you if you did not rise so eagerly to my bait. I should have you spend ten times what we do not possess to see you happy.’
‘You know quite well that is a shocking lie but it is dear of you to say it all the same.’ Maribel yawned. ‘The vote went your way, I hope?’
‘Not a bit of it. Between them, Matthews and that devil Warren have whipped the Tory bench into a roast-beef-and-port-wine frenzy about decency and the safety of our women and children. Why is it, when it is quite apparent that the vast majority of Conservative members dislike both women and children, that the merest mention of their frailties renders the whole herd red-faced and deaf to reason?’
‘So they have banned public meetings?’
‘Not yet. But it is only a matter of time. Ever since last February’s riots the Home Secretary has done his utmost to stir up a terror of the mob. If one-tenth of his enthusiasm had been directed instead into the relief of the misery of the ordinary man, there would be no need for the demonstrations of which he is so afraid. You should be in bed.’
‘I have been writing.’
‘Successfully?’
Maribel made a face.
‘May I read it?’ he asked.
‘Not yet.’
Edward drained his whisky and set the glass on Maribel’s tray. Then he leaned over his wife, took the cigarette from her hand and stubbed it out.
‘Bed.’
Putting out her hands, Maribel let him pull her to her feet. There was a fleck of something on one of his silk lapels. She brushed it away. Without her shoes the top of her head barely reached his shoulder.
‘It is not so very late,’ she said.
‘Bed,’ Edward said, and in the grate the dying fire sighed, exhaling soft grey ash.
3
T WO DAYS LATER M ARIBEL attended a teatime lecture at the home of Mrs Gallop, Treasurer of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. They had been promised Mrs Garrett Fawcett, co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, but for some reason she had not been able to come. Her replacement was a heavily built woman with wiry hair who had studied at the Slade School of Art. She wore a dress the colour of stewed tea and, wound several times around her neck, a necklace of lumpy brown pebbles. Somewhere in Hampstead, or perhaps Bloomsbury, Maribel thought, there was a tailor who specialised in Attire for the Clever Spinster, apparel of such wilful ugliness that she could not look upon her clients directly but only in the reflection of a mirror.
‘Because of her work with animals, it was not long before Rosa Bonheur found the clothing of her sex to be a tiresome inconvenience. It was to that end, and not for the depraved reasons that some have chosen to attribute to her, that she solicited authorisation from the Prefect of Police to wear men’s clothing.’
Beside Maribel, Charlotte leaned forward, her head on one side. Maribel thought of the problems in the second stanza of the poem she had begun two nights earlier. There might be something, she thought, in
the airless parlour of the past, glass-eyed under glass
, but, though she worried at it like a terrier, she could not unearth what came next. Their friend Oscar had recently been appointed editor to a new literary magazine,
Woman’s World
, and he had promised to look at anything she