by Various
All this was hard to explain later. In the flow of dinner party conversation, people (not his wife) would ask him what it was like and he couldn’t say, as the more successful the photograph, the more it seemed to turn back time, immunising him against the perils he had been expecting and sometimes undergone. On the days of his actual returns, Tabitha herself would most often regard the proffered images with a cold, vague complacency, before muttering crossly about some domestic oversight.
Once, he remembered, on his coming back from Yemen (where he had been in search of oryx on the Sarawat Mountains’ western slopes), the topic of her displeasure had been the amount of canine excrement left in the garden because he had not taken Congo (as their black Lab was called, in honour of his own early productions) for a turn round the block on the morning of his departure. Rennison resented these duties. Tabby didn’t work herself; there was nothing much active about her but her tongue, which seemed to mint every month a new way of being beastly about working-class people and foreigners. She got through nannies almost as rapidly as she bought new Emma Hopes.
Rennison did not sleep well that night, and he woke tired and cross. Washing his face with cold water – in one of those small porcelain basins, which along with pull-cord paisley curtains are often a fixture of these country houses – he wondered if the sleeplessness he had laboured under was a type of fear. As he brushed his teeth, he became conscious of a need for extreme wariness about Maudsley’s offer; probably the best thing was to take the set of portraits and get himself back to London sharpish.
Coffee helped a bit and the fact that Maudsley had been wrong about the morning. It was clear and bright, a light fresh wind blowing down from Exmoor.
After breakfast, Rennison fetched his camera, tripod and other kit from the Lexus. They went out to the mausoleum: a strange, modernist feature in that otherwise old-fashioned garden of Victorian roses and raspberry canes. The Exmoor wind was blowing about the glass box, lifting leaves at its edges. Maudsley opened its door and let them in.
Made of painted wood, the coffin really was a smaller-scale reproduction of the garaged Corvette, in which Rennison had been given a ride on his previous visit, Maudsley swooping up and down the Devon lanes at such a speed as to put the fear of God into him.
Rennison erected the tripod, and affixed his camera to it, also setting up a silver-coloured, umbrella-like light reflector on the white gravel.
‘Well,’ said Maudsley, ‘I suppose the only thing is for me to get in now, so that I am remembered this way alive when someone puts me in dead. That will be you, Richard, by the way.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding. Aren’t there undertakers for this kind of thing?’
‘I have always wondered why they are called that,’ Maudsley said, climbing into the cherry-red coffin with an action that seemed like a bound. ‘I mean, what do they undertake?’ His voice echoed under the canopy.
‘Do you mind if I close the lid a little further?’ asked Rennison, in the voice of a patient artist; he was checking the light meter in the green digital display of his camera, which at the touch of a button could be cumbered up with verifying numbers.
Four months later, Maudsley was in that coffin for real, and Rennison was on the road to Gabon. Tabitha had been remarkably encouraging about the plan, saying if he had done it before, why couldn’t he do it again, in tones which suggested the expedition would really make a man to be reckoned with. Profoundly indifferent to danger as it was, her bravura attitude seemed to promise a new beginning for their marriage – a fresh start, a new channel of communication, a luxury of genuine intercourse such as he had never before really had with this thin, sharp blonde who had somehow become his wife.
At first, returning home from Combe Britton, Rennison had felicitated himself on resisting Maudsley’s offer. But then news of his death came, and next the ponderous solicitor’s letter outlining what he was to do if he were to inherit the estate, made all the more temptingly complicated by Rennison himself being sole executor of the will.
He sat in the vehicle with the engine idling – not a Land Rover this time, but a Toyota Land Cruiser, such as the Kurds, he remembered from one of his trips, called a Monica because of its full-bodied look. His plan had been to go first into the drinking shops and whorehouses of Minkébé town, begin with their infamies before entering the more hideous site of jungle infection, with its documentary prospect of imminent decay, of which the worst was blood flowing from victims’ eyeballs.
Rennison was, not at all for the first time on this journey, driven to quit his route and seek refuge in the comfortable Michaelis hotel back in Brazzaville. There had been an Arabic woman there in high heels and a flowing caramel dress whose outlandishly seductive body had captivated him as he drank at the bar; he would have much rather taken her photograph – could have satiated himself upon its magnificence, in fact – than those of monstrous corpses, or the zombie-like near dead. But it had made him, the very thought of Minkébé, dreadfully nervous about everything, so he had not broached the idea with her.
Gripping the steering wheel with sweaty hands, he tried to imagine it – tried to see, in his mind’s eye, all those wholesale human oozings in wicker chairs already red with mud which, along with Monsieur Oueey and his gold tooth and heavy-knobbed cane and pack of gunmen, had characterised the suite of photographs taken, over twenty years ago, by a nervous young man who’d get more money for his images than he ever expected.
He thought also about the pictures he had taken of Maudsley: they had given him an oddly babyish air, as if the garish image of the Corvette were not being presented (or represented) as a coffin but as a playful crib. He had photographed his subject in a dozen different attitudes in this receptacle – every position they could conceive of between them – but the impression of an infant was always the same.
The obesity of the jungle swelled around him, threatening to smother up the road in a curtain of rich green leaves and silence. But this road was not like other roads in Africa, rutted, impassable as a stony riverbed, or thronged with demands for cash from men with Kalashnikovs. It was straight, narrow, flat, with the blessedly attractive brush of central grass that the mind demands of the ideal country road; were it not for the threat of the jungle, wall-like and obvious, it was almost fine enough to convince oneself that one was on the right track for Eden.
If he wanted to pass on himself, he could; there was nothing stopping him, except for his desire to return to the slightly quickened notations of modernity that constituted Brazzaville, which apart from the Michaelis hotel was a brown, torpid place.
Still he sat, with the engine ticking on, reverberating dully through the cab, and seeming to echo palpitations in his chest. The spectre of the awaiting deaths haunted him before their exact perception, as if he was already looking at a double-page spread in the article he had arranged before having taken the shots. How could he go there now, into Minkébé, potentially sacrificing everything for a few images or many noughts in his bank account, whichever it was? Coming here struck him as a monstrous folly, testament to the savage nature of his munificent taskmaster, whose real nature he felt he had sentimentalised in life – and who now seemed to be stretching out, as it were, a clammy hand to exert his will from the grave.
Agitated by fear as he was, Rennison suddenly remembered a platform event he had attended at a festival in Saint-Malo, something to do with travel photography. Asked by the interviewer why he took photographs, he had replied that it was to pay the mortgage. A French photographer, also on the podium, had turned in shock to him and said this was a statement of artistic suicide, adding that if he was faking, it was just the kind of attitude he expected from an insincere Anglo-Saxon. At the time, Rennison had maintained that making art to meet the bills was nothing to be ashamed of, but now he was not so sure.
Giving a cry like an animal, he put his foot on the accelerator and drove onward a few miles, the air coming through the open window seeming an abomination of divine bre
ath; then he stopped again. His chest hurt. Here he was, back in Africa, misled by the blandishments of a dead man and – oh, his chest really was hurting a lot, his heartbeat seeming to flutter to and fro within it like a batting eyelid. It was as if something that he had feared in his overly sympathetic imagination was now beginning to relish the process of taking hold of him bodily, grasping the heart that is real life more presently and vividly than any of his imaginings, which he now almost looked back on with a gilded yearning.
Here, where he’d stopped, the trees were waltzing shadows across the road; how late was it? had more time passed along this line of futility than he’d thought? Soon it would be time to don the protective white suit and mask he had packed, time to sweat from subject to subject, lugging his camera equipment between the impassive dead. Again he felt a malignant sense of anticipation, again his heart bruited irregularly in his breast, taking no more coherent order than the sight of matchsticks falling from a matchbox on to a tiled floor. He struck himself on the forehead, cursing his pusillanimous nature, then took to rubbing his chest.
He pulled himself together and drove on a little further – coming, he thought, to the exact spot where he had met Maudsley all those years ago; though he couldn’t be sure. As he pulled on the handbrake, a fork of pain lodged in his torso.
It forked again, seeming to bend its prongs round his heart. The willing of viscosity out of that clenched organ finally put all the vulgar agencies of dread which had populated his imagination to flight, sending them back down the same invisible thoroughfares between mind and body from which they had mounted their campaign.
The agony spread. Steel thongs seemed now to garrotte his whole chest, in a pain at once punishingly physical and perversely abstract: it was like being strangled by the ineffable.
He opened the door of the Land Cruiser and half fell, half staggered out. He crawled to the edge of the road, feeling the sun on his back – not as sun, but as something which was trying to suck his heart up through his back, leaving a train of fire; it was as if a retreating star were trying to grasp back some of the light it had shed, millennia ago, before glaciers of which we know, before Britons, before Normans, before an age of empires, SIM cards, Monica Lewinsky, capitalism in its later phases.
It was a heart attack, he realised that rationally now, but suddenly he knew that nothing he possessed within reason was going to defend him against fatality. He looked up like a dog at one of the tall trees by the side of the road. He regarded its absolute, don’t-give-a-shit inhumanity, and thought of the wood of Maudsley’s coffin, before another bout of quivering pain cored into his chest like an augur.
A froth of spit began to bubble about his lips. He fell on to his face. His lips ate dirt. The dust of the road mixed with the spit of his mouth, became a paste. He rolled over, giving up his browned face to the mercy of the sun. But what the sun saw was the whiteness of death.
He raised his hands, scraping at the air with the tenacity of a climber. He heard a call of birds, and saw a flight of green parrots shoot up into the sky from the tree. Their wings made a noise like applause over the compounding solidity of his body, before disappearing in the direction of Brazzaville, as if they too wanted to leave Gabon an undiscovered country.
Then came a kind of lull or pause, that slowly began to be filled, but only by a dissonant, gong-like ringing in his ears, over one of which an ant had begun to crawl. The whiteness that the sun saw in his upturned face filled his own eyes, very bright, as if the commissioned article had been spiked, and all the coloured pictures were being snuffed from the page by clicks of the art director’s mouse. Crawling back down the wire in staggered segments, like cars in slow traffic, the images he had not yet produced – and the self-image of Rennison also, somehow catapulted up into the figured face of the watching sun – began to disappear byte by byte, until the page was blank.
LYNNE TRUSS
TESTAMENTS
IN THE SPRING of 2010, a family meeting was held at Hoagland Hall, near to Devizes in Wiltshire. Presiding was the thirty-six-year-old newly encumbered 14th Earl Donington, christened Francis, but known since childhood to his family as Franco. Also present were Franco’s wife Teresa, children Crispin and Anna, and older sister Harriet. His feckless younger brother Julian conspicuously failed to attend, but promised he would return from Patmos within the next month or two, once the punishing demands of his current song-writing project abated. While the three adults conducted their discussions in the old library at the rear of the house, with its view over the once-glorious (but now scrubby) parterre, the children, quietly, went exploring.
It was an exciting and productive meeting, concerning the future of the Hall. Julian would have done well to attend. Six months previously had occurred the sudden death of Franco’s father, the 13th Earl, at the tender age of sixty-eight. While the customary observances had been quite sincerely made at the time of his departing (his offspring had wept, to their own surprise), both Franco and Harriet were agreed that the Earl’s unexpected demise had been a terrific stroke of luck for them, and indeed for nearly everybody; it had been a calamity, in fact, only for the network of lowlier auction houses of the kingdom, where the loss of the Earl’s reliable business would be keenly felt. His permanently open wallet and genial catchphrase (‘What an absolute bargain!’) had made him a very popular figure in the world of the provincial saleroom. But his capacity for squandering the family fortune on ‘ephemera’ had been a source of genuine concern to his more worldly children, which was why his death (by falling off the roof of the Hall, during a birthday party) was greeted with a large degree of both relief and opportunistic excitement. Of course, they had feared the tax bill. True, Franco had considerable personal wealth, accumulated through a combination of judicious marriage, luck in property investment, and a decade or more in stockbroking. This personal wealth on top of his inheritance might just suffice to save the Hall for the family, but only without taking his father’s bizarre ‘collections’ into account. So, what a great day it was for them when Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, after due consideration, deemed that, besides the house itself, the 13th Earl had left ‘nothing of value’. Perversely encouraged by this news, the family met and produced a three-point strategy for going forward:
Franco and his family would live at Hoagland Hall, and in due course open it to the public.
The worthless collections (whatever they were) would be curated by Harriet and marketed to the visitors in some clever postmodern way.
Julian would always have a home there if he wanted.
After the meeting, the five of them (including the children) clinked glasses.
‘Dad?’ said ten-year-old Crispin. His father ignored him. Teresa noticed Crispin’s frustration, but was unable to draw him into the conversation, because a grown-up (Harriet) had just had a thought.
‘We must have a funny slogan!’ Harriet yelled. Harriet had once worked as a publicist for a London publisher, so it was natural for the others to defer to her on matters of advertising.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Teresa.
‘Dad?’ said Crispin, again.
‘Not now,’ said Franco.
‘I don’t know,’ said Harriet. ‘I can’t think. But, you know, like, um, Like Castle Howard, but without –’ She stopped; she was racking her brain.
‘I know, I know, I’ve got it,’ said Franco. ‘Like Beaulieu –’
‘Yes?’
‘But Without the Cars’.
Everyone laughed except Crispin.
‘What is it, darling?’ asked Teresa.
‘I just wanted to say, Ma. Anna and I went upstairs and had a look at some of the stuff.’
Franco pulled a face. ‘Your grandfather was a fool, Crispo,’ he said. ‘Is it really dreadful?’
Crispin lowered his voice. ‘Dad, it is absolute crap.’
Five years later, Hoagland Hall was doing very, very well as a tourist attraction. It seems that the public had grown actually quite
tired of the country-house model with costly reproduction period furnishings and minor eighteenth-century portraits. Given the chance to see the world’s largest collection of unused Betamax tapes (in the old stables), or an exhibit of cheerful 1950s seed packets (in the ballroom), they merely took into consideration the outstandingly good five-star reviews of the tea room and thought, ‘Why not?’ It is the tea room that is, in reality, the most important attraction in any country-house experience; by way of research, Franco and Teresa visited many existing properties and were surprised by how crowded, offhand and dehumanising the tea rooms often were. Thus, the rather steep entrance fee for Hoagland Hall cunningly included a free pot of quality tea in the Orangerie Café, and also politically acceptable soft drinks for the children. This brought the punters straight in. Tea-shop manager Bethany – a caterer of rare brilliance – needed only to take it from there.
Julian came back from Greece eventually, but he sought no involvement in the running of the Hall. He was offered ‘the cottage’ on the estate, which had the benefit of being distant from the main house, and thus untroubled by the flow of visitors. ‘I wish we could live in it ourselves,’ Franco wrote in an email, disingenuously. ‘But we just wouldn’t all fit in when Anna and the Crisp are at home.’ All three Donington siblings were familiar with the slightly derelict cottage from their childhood games in the park – and the idea of living in it had not appealed to Franco for a moment; he and Teresa were very happy with the bright upper floors of the Hall. Nor had it appealed to Harriet, who chose to buy a charming small flat above a fishing-tackle shop in the village. But Julian was enthusiastic about having a whole cottage to himself. ‘Cheers, Franco,’ he had written back. On Patmos, he had been living with a German woman who, unattractively, reminded him quite often that while she worked long hours as a cleaner to pay for all their food and accommodation, he strummed a guitar all day on a balcony. It was difficult to be creative under such conditions, and Julian had been seriously considering returning to England when, in 2014, the German woman found out that the Earl had died some time before, leaving her layabout boyfriend an inheritance. Furious, she grabbed Julian’s guitar and tossed it into the harbour, where it sank, with bubbles, to the heartfelt cheers of several of the locals. At this point, Julian made his stand, by packing his stuff and leaving. His guitar, so they say, is still visible from the quayside as it rests on the rocky seabed below, such is the legendary clarity of the water around all the lovely islands of the Aegean.