Beautiful Lies by Clare Clark Page A

accidentally been exchanged at birth. Apart from Ida, her sisters were timorous, biddable, so awash with docility that it made Maribel want to scream, and the boys were just dolts. When she railed against the dreariness of her existence, her mother had made the face she made, when her mouth pinched and the tip of her nose went white, and called her histrionic. Mrs Bryant considered impetuosity in women intolerably vulgar. Maribel had lain in bed at night listening to Lizzie sucking on her tongue as she slept, and imagined herself Lady Jane Grey, imprisoned in the Tower, or better, Joan of Arc at Rouen, for, although Joan of Arc was not so beautiful, she was a soldier and a Catholic which was more dramatic.
    Ida had loved Joan of Arc almost more than she had. For years Ida had kept a picture of the saint tucked inside her Bible so that she could look at it during the sermon on Sundays. She said it was so that she would remember that being clever and fighting people was sometimes what God wanted you to do, even if you were a girl. On the days that Ida did not want to be an elephant keeper when she grew up, she wanted to be a soldier-saint like Joan of Arc. Sometimes they slipped out late at night, when the others were all asleep, creeping across the garden and into the woods beyond. The woods were full of strange loud noises, foxes screaming and owls hooting and trees moving restlessly in the earth. Maribel held Ida’s hand and told her it was essential for an actress to understand fear, but Ida was not afraid. She turned cartwheels on the lawn, her nightgown a pale ghost in the darkness, and said that in the night the world was more exciting because you could not see where it ended.
    Ida had been twelve when Maribel ran away. Maribel had not given a straw for the rest of them, but Ida, brave, dogged Ida, had been her ally, her confidante, the only one who understood her, who loved her for herself and not the insipid dullard they wanted her to be. She had promised to take Ida with her. In the end she had not even left a note.
    Her mother stepped forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She smelled, as she always had, of face powder and rose water. Maribel’s face felt stiff as a doll’s. She hardly trusted herself to move. Beside her Edith issued a low moan, pressing her hands against her mouth and hopping from foot to foot.
    ‘It is good of you to come,’ Mrs Bryant said. Her mouth twitched a little, as though fingers plucked the nerve strings beneath the skin. ‘Did you have a tiresome journey?’
    ‘No, no. The traffic was light. And it is not so long a distance. You never said Edith would be here.’
    ‘Well, it is her house, dear. That is a fetching dress. Unusual.’
    ‘It’s from Paris. Nobody in Paris wears the bustle any more.’
    ‘Is that right? We are rather insulated from the fashions, in Yorkshire.’
    There was a pause. In the corner a large grandfather clock ticked loudly. Mrs Bryant pursed her lips. Then she smiled, stretching her lips over her teeth.
    ‘Well, you certainly look well. You are hardly changed at all.’
    ‘Nor you.’
    It was true. In the thirteen years since she had seen her, her mother had grown perhaps a little looser around the jaw but for the most part she looked exactly as Maribel remembered her, her hair parted in the middle and caught in a low roll at the nape of her neck, her soft pale face barely fretted with wrinkles. On her left hand she wore the pearl and ruby ring that Maribel had liked to play with when she was small. Even the shape of her nails was familiar.
    Maribel thought of her beautiful Spanish mother, who had not existed until Maribel and Edward had invented her, and who, as the years passed, Maribel seemed more and more vividly to remember. In Madrid, when Edward took her away from the Calle de León, they had lain in bed in the afternoons in a small hotel near the railway station and imagined a third life for Maribel, not Peggy Bryant or Sylvia Wylde but