Beautiful Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

wanted to send him with a view to publication. Several times in the past weeks she had begun poems but, though in their first moments they seemed new and fresh, bright with a lustre that might, with work, become brilliance, like children’s balloons they had by the next day shrivelled to something disappointing and faintly obscene.
    She ached for a cigarette, for the carpeted hush of the flat at Cadogan Mansions. She could not think why she had let Charlotte persuade her to come. It was one of her gravest shortcomings, she thought, the impulse towards company. When the invitations arrived she meant to refuse them but instead she consoled herself with assurances that curiosity was as essential to a writer as paper and ink, that the company of other artists would stimulate both the intellect and the imagination, that to perceive the truths of the world one must live among them and not in the isolation of an ivory tower. It was said to be the opinion of William Morris that a poet should not require paying for his poetry, because he would write better poetry if he had an ordinary occupation to follow. That was all very well for Mr Morris, Maribel thought. His ordinary occupation was to make Art to order and sell it at a profit. So far she had managed only to interest a tiny literary journal in a short poem about Paris. However much she wished to convince herself otherwise, inspiration was not the same thing as distraction. Next year she would be thirty. By thirty Emily Brontë was already dead.
    ‘Our Queen has condemned what she calls the “wicked folly” of Women’s Rights,’ declared Brown Dress. ‘But must Bonheur be condemned for unsexing herself, as Her Majesty would have it? At the Slade, where I myself studied, they have at last permitted male models to pose unclothed for their female students. Surely Mme Bonheur’s work attire, be it men’s clothes or perhaps even none at all, is nobody’s business but her own. As she herself once so notoriously declared, “The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me.” They should no more trouble us.’
    The applause was enthusiastic, mostly, Maribel thought, because they could finally have tea. Brown Dress bowed, her pebble necklace swinging violently about her chin.
    ‘She’ll put her teeth out,’ she whispered to Charlotte, who pressed her lips together to keep from laughing and clapped more vigorously. When at last the appropriate thanks had been given the audience rose as one and moved quickly over to the platters of sandwiches and scones set out on the sideboard. Unable to wait any longer, Maribel pushed up the window sash and, in the shiver of cool air, smoked two cigarettes very fast.
    ‘Did you discover what became of Mrs Garrett Fawcett?’ Maribel said when Charlotte returned with teacups and a plate of cake. ‘She had better have an awfully good excuse.’
    ‘Apparently she sprained her ankle. Miss Russell nobly agreed to fill the breach.’
    ‘Well, she is certainly wide enough.’
    ‘Hush. She will hear you.’
    ‘Of course she won’t. Women of her kind don’t listen. Especially not with all those hideous pebbles clattering around her ears. She seems to have appropriated half of Cooden Beach.’
    Charlotte laughed and shook her head. ‘Maribel! You are incorrigible.’
    ‘Come on. It must weigh five pounds at least. Is it any wonder the woman’s neck is thicker than her head?’
    ‘My Aunt Agatha always said that if a person couldn’t say something nice, she was better off saying nothing at all.’
    ‘Then your Aunt Agatha was a fearful prig.’
    The boom of their hostess’s voice cut across their laughter like a noonday cannon.
    ‘Mrs Charterhouse, Mrs Campbell Lowe. What are you two doing skulking over here in the corner?’
    Mrs Gallop bore down upon them, driving before her a diminutive woman with thin hair and a timid expression. Maribel squinted into her tea. Charlotte’s amused resistance to her more vinegarish remarks always left