by Francis King
Saying nothing of her plan to her mother and her aunt, Alexine now called on Laycock. A small, balding, middle-aged man, perpetually on the dithering move as he posed and reposed his sitters, he was taken aback by her request. ‘Oh, I don’t know. My wife assists me, of course, but it’s highly unusual for a lady …’
‘I’m not proposing to set up as your rival in business, Mr Laycock.’
‘Of course, of course. I know that, madam. You – you are aware, of course, that the chemicals will stain your fingernails?’ He held out a small hand, the long nails of which were dyed with the autumnal tints of an unripe orange. ‘I’m afraid, however much care one takes … Even my wife …’
‘Oh, I don’t mind about that.’ Nor did she. ‘I want to learn, and I want to learn quickly.’
He was still dubious. ‘Photography isn’t easy,’ he warned her. He drew in his fleshy, moist lips and sucked on them. ‘ When I decided to move from portraits to likenesses, it was far from easy for me. Fortunately my wife showed an unexpected aptitude for the scientific side of the business. It was amazing, yes, quite amazing. But for her I could never have made the change.’
‘Well, if she showed that aptitude, why shouldn’t I? I’ve always been a quick learner.’ Alexine strode over to examine a portrait of a stout, flabby-faced man, forearms resting on the arms of the chair and eyes staring unblinkingly into the lens, that was hanging, among many others, on one of the walls. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said of it, in renewed enthralment to this new art. She turned back. ‘I’ll make it worth your while, Mr Laycock. I’ll be your apprentice – but an apprentice who pays. What’s wrong with that?’
Laycock saw nothing wrong with it. He knew of the vast Thinne fortune, as did everyone in the country. He was already making far more money than he had ever done as a painter of miniatures, but he had no aversion to making even more. In any case, his flustered, fluttery nature responded, albeit reluctantly, to her forceful one. He realized that he would enjoy teaching her.
‘Let us sit for a moment.’ He pointed to a chair. ‘I have seen my last client for the day.’
At that moment, his wife came bouncing down the stairs, hair plaited in wickerwork fashion above her round, firm, good-natured face, a feather-duster in one hand. She slackened her pace when she saw that her husband was not alone and hurriedly concealed the duster behind her back.
‘My dear, this is Mademoiselle Thinne. You may remember her from the time that she, her mother and her aunt came here to have their likenesses made.’
Mrs Laycock withdrew the duster from behind her back and set it down on the table in the centre of the room.
‘What are you doing with that?’
‘Those frames need a dusting.’ She pointed at a wall. ‘I noticed it this morning. That girl never sees a thing.’
‘Can’t you leave it for her?’
‘No time like the present. She’s gone out to get some bread.’
Alexine and Laycock sat, facing each other, while Mrs Laycock, plump arms akimbo, stood by her husband’s chair.
Laycock began to explain that, at first, he had confined himself to the daguerreotype process, but that now he had begun to experiment with another process, invented by a fellow countryman of his, a Mr Henry Fox Talbot. He had had remarkable results from this calotype process, as it was called, since it had the advantage of enabling several positives to be made from a single negative. But he thought that it would be best if Alexine were to corifine herself to the daguerreotype.
‘Why?’
It was Mrs Laycock who answered, while her husband was hesitating. ‘My husband thinks that the calotype process would be too troublesome and difficult for you.’
‘But the results are better?’
‘On balance, yes, madame.’ Again it was Mrs Laycock who answered. ‘The final likeness is not reversed, and you can retouch the negatives.’
‘Then that is the process I want to learn.’
‘There is also another process,’ Mrs Layock said. ‘There’s been a lot of talk about it. It’s called the wet plate process. But it sounds even more troublesome than the calotype process.’
‘I want to learn the latest process. If it is the best,’ Alexine said firmly.
Mrs Laycock approved. She smiled. ‘I’ve been trying to get my husband to investigate its possibilities, but he’s been reluctant to do so.’
‘Well, we’ll investigate it.’
Did ‘we’ mean the three of them, Laycock wondered, or only the two women?
It meant only the two women.
Excitedly preoccupied with the creation of a camera room in an attic of the house, Alexine only intermittently thought of Adolph. A letter at long last arrived from him, at first full of silly endearments but then containing the dire news that, before his return to The Hague, he had to accompany the Foreign Minister on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople. Alexine was plunged into a state of fury and despair; but soon after the delivery of the letter the builders arrived, followed by Mrs Layock, and in deciding with them how precisely the roof of the attic was to be opened up and glassed over, she forgot these emotions.
Soon, she was not merely buying equipment in the Netherlands but also ordering it from England and France. ‘This is all going to be horribly expensive,’ Mrs Laycock demurred, for Alexine to tell her firmly: ‘Oh, don’t worry about expense. In the long run it’s never an economy to buy things on the cheap.’
Eventually Adolph returned. He had been sailing the Bosphorus, and the sun and wind had given his neck and forehead a raw flush that, for Alexine, only added to his attraction, even though he himself was embarrassed by it. He had brought her two presents: a necklace of Wedgwood blue cameos illustrating the signs of the zodiac, and, bought in a Constantinople bazaar, a butterfly, constructed from the lightest of balsa wood and filmy, painted gauze, which agitated its four wings if one pulled on a string. The butterfly rested on cotton-wool in an ill-made wooden box, painted vermilion. Under it was a card with a lace edge and a centre of painted lilies of the valley. Beneath each lily of the valley Adolph had inscribed a character so tiny that she had to screw up her eyes to make it out. In sequence, the characters read: ‘ You talk of constancy – But what does a butterfly know of constancy?’
She blushed with pleasure as she unwrapped first the necklace and then the butterfly. With brilliant eyes, she gazed at him. ‘Do you know which of these presents I shall treasure most?’
‘No. Which? I know which cost the most.’
‘This! This of course!’ She held out the butterfly to him and then pulled the thread back and forth so that its wings fluttered as though it were in its death throes. ‘Oh, I love it! I shall treasure it always.’
Without saying anything, Harriet now made a point of leaving the pair constantly alone together. ‘Come with me for a little stroll,’ she would say to Addy. Or: ‘I must go to see the milliner about that hat. Why not come too?’ Nanny Rose knew precisely what was happening, as her constant sniffing and scowling when Adolph and Alexine were closeted together without any chaperon, made amply clear.
With Mrs Laycock as her assistant, Alexine was at last sufficiently knowledgeable to begin to take photographs. At first, she had to leave to the older woman the tricky task of spreading an absolutely smooth, even coating of a solution of collodion, in which potassium iodide had been dissolved, over each scrupulously cleaned and polished piece of glass. But she was, as always, a rapid learner, so that within a matter of days she had mastered the process. Unlike Mrs Laycock, she did not care if her fingers got stained, even when Adolph remarked, with a grimace, on the discoloration.
Her first sitters were Harriet, Addy and Nanny Rose. The last of these kept protesting ‘Oh, do hurry up!’ as her hands, now deformed by arthritis, fidgeted on the arms of the chair. At first she had refused to have the clamp put on her neck – ‘What are you trying to do? Do you want to throttle me?’ But when the exposed print had been rinsed, toned in gold chloride to turn its imag
e dark brown, fixed in hypo and washed and dried, she could not conceal her wonder at it, peering down at it repeatedly, with an entranced, bemused expression.
Next it was the turn of Adolph. Alexine experienced a fluttering, erotic thrill as she posed him in the chair, putting out a hand to rearrange his long, golden hair, so that it fell uniformly round his handsome face, adjusting one foot, spreading his fingers on his knees, tightening the clamp. ‘No, don’t move, don’t dare to move! No! You’ll spoil it. Don’t move, don’t blink. Look into the lens. Here, here!’ He soon wearied as she inserted plate after plate. But she herself never did so.
Later, she would look at these images of him for seconds on end, while he grew impatient.
‘Why don’t you look at me?’ he demanded.
‘I seem to know you better when I look at your likeness.’
‘What are you talking about? What nonsense is that?’
Alexine began to experiment with lighting her subjects only from above or only from the right or the left. The Layocks remonstrated with her when they saw the results. Laycock later told his wife that he found these likenesses ‘ wilful’, ‘amateurish’, ‘crude’. By then he was jealous that she should be Alexine’s tutor and assistant, not he.
Mrs Layock laughed: ‘She says she wants to do with the camera what Rembrandt did with the brush.’
‘She’s no Rembrandt! That’s for sure.’
Mrs Layock admired and liked Alexine. ‘She’s become like a sister to me,’ she told her husband.
‘Don’t be so foolish. How can a woman of her social standing be like a sister to a woman of yours?’
When, as a young man in England, he had been an itinerant painter of miniatures, Laycock’s aristocratic patrons never treated him as a brother and all too often as a servant.
On a whim, Alexine decided to have some more dresses made for the winter season. Her wardrobes and cupboards were full of clothes never worn, sheathed in tissue paper and smelling vaguely of camphor, but an irresistible extravagance constantly urged her on.
Harriet told her, ‘It’s just a waste of money.’
‘I enjoy wasting money.’
‘It’s wicked.’
‘I enjoy being wicked.’
In her feverish attempts to diminish assets that, under John’s skilful management, merely went on swelling, Alexine had come to feel her wealth to be not a magic lubricant for her passage through life but an ever growing hindrance. She would see a beggar in the street and, on an impulse, would at once press into his hand as much money as one of the housemaids earned in a week. Before she and Adolph entered a restaurant, she would insist on passing to him the cash to pay for their meal. It was always at least twice as much as was required, but when, the bill settled, he attempted to give her back the difference, she was adamant in refusing to accept it.
‘I feel like a kept man.’
‘What’s wrong with that? If one treasures something, one keeps it. I treasure’you, I’m happy to keep you.’
‘It’s not right.’
‘Who cares whether things are right or not? Anyway, what do you mean by right? You’re not talking about morality, but only about convention. I have no use for convention.’
He laughed. But such a conversation made him feel uncomfortable.
‘This is what would make life difficult if we were to marry,’ he said on one occasion.
‘Why would? Why if? Why not say ‘‘This is what will make life difficult when we are married’’? Anyway – the world is full of men spending the money of their wives, just as it is full of women spending the money of their husbands. What does it matter? Who cares?’
‘You’re such a rebel,’ he said with a sigh, as he had often said. That she was such a rebel was part of her attraction; but it was also what made him, naturally cautious by nature, shrink from committing himself.
Madame Molnar had a cough. She raised a small hand to her mouth and coughed discreetly behind it, as she circled Alexine, examining the blue and white striped dress with its Brussels lace collar, its pleated bodice and billowing skirt. ‘ I suggest a bright blue ribbon with a black edge for the belt and sleeve bands. What does madame think about that?’
Alexine turned first to right and then to left to examine her image in the glass. She raised an arm. ‘Aren’t these sleeves too full?’ she said. ‘At the wrists, I mean.’
Head on one side, Madame Molnar stared at the sleeve. ‘No, madame. No, I don’t think so. Not at all. That’s the way they’re now being worn in Paris.’
Once again Alexine held up the arm and then dropped it. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
Madame Molnar knew that she was right. She always was about fashion.
‘I also need an evening dress.’
Madame Molnar thought: You don’t need it, you want it. ‘Yes, madame. What exactly did you have in mind?’
‘I was thinking of a silver-grey silk. Trimmed – trimmed with red roses. Large double pleats for the skirt. Bodice laced at the back.’ As Alexine extemporized, Madame Molnar frowned in thought.
‘I have a silver-grey silk,’ she said. ‘ By a coincidence, a bale came in only a few days ago from Lyons. Would you like to see it?’
‘Yes. Why not?’
‘It’s down in the storeroom. I’ll get one of the girls to give me a hand with it.’ Again she coughed.
‘You must take care of that cough,’ Alexine said.
‘I wish I could. I don’t seem able to shake it off. The problem is that I’m always so busy, no rest at all. The new girl who looks after the children isn’t all that reliable, and so I must always be looking in to see how they’re getting on.’
‘Well, it’s lucky that you also live in the house in which you work.’
‘Well, yes and no,’ Madame Molnar said dubiously.
Alone, Alexine wandered about the room, examining the half-finished dresses ranged around it. She recognized a black mantle, rich but austere, that her mother had ordered. Yes, it would suit her, just right. Then she found herself at the chimney-piece, looking down in amazement at an object resting on it, so lightly that it might have been about to flutter away in an instant. The butterfly, fragile and iridescent, was the twin of the one given to her by Adolph. She put out a hand, touched it, took it up, and then replaced it.
She moved away, turned back. On an impulse she once more took up the butterfly, to examine it even more carefully. On the chimney-piece, she suddenly noticed, a card had been propped against the wall. She herself had received exactly such a card, decorated with lily of the valley. Beneath each lily of the valley, inscribed in minuscule characters, she now read – as, filled with totally different but no less tumultuous emotions, she had already read only a few weeks before – ‘You talk of constancy – But what does a butterfly know of constancy?’
Hearing Madame Molnar’s footsteps on the stairs, she put the butterfly back on the chimney-piece, with such haste that it tipped over on to one side. She felt a sudden heat surge through her, bringing a flush to her cheeks, and then a glacial chill.
‘This is it.’ Madame Molnar extended the bale of silk. ‘What do you think?’
Mechanically, Alexine fingered the cloth. She stared down at it. She said nothing.
‘Are you all right, madame?’
‘Yes. Yes, of course. Why?’ Her tone was irritable.
‘You look –’
‘I never like to be told how I look,’ Alexine snapped.
‘I’m sorry, madame.’
‘We can talk about the silk another time. Let me get out of this.’ She indicated the half-finished dress that she was wearing. Then, with an effort, she forced herself to go on: ‘I like it, I like it a lot. I can always rely on you. Perfect.’ She gave an artificial smile, her eyes not meeting the dressmaker’s.
‘Thank you, madame.’
‘She’s not important. You know how it is.’
‘I don’t know how it is.’
‘Oh, come on! From time to time a man amuses h
imself. That’s how men are made. It means nothing, nothing. You’re the only person who means anything to me. It was just …’ Adolph made a wide, sweeping gesture with an arm, then shrugged his muscular shoulders. ‘She has many lovers. They mean nothing to her, she means nothing to them.’
‘Then why did you give her the butterfly?’
‘It was a nice present. And cheap,’ he added. ‘I found those butterflies on a stall in the bazaar. I told you that. On a stall. They cost almost nothing.’
‘And did you buy all of them?’
‘All of them? Why should I buy all of them?’ He laughed.
‘For all your other women as well.’
‘I don’t have other women.’
‘You even wrote the same thing for her as you wrote for me,’ she pursued implacably. ‘On the card. On exactly the same sort of card. Did you also find the cards in the bazaar?’
‘It was – fun. Why not?’
‘And which did you write first?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Her inscription or mine?’
‘Yours. Yours of course!’
‘And did you also give her the same sort of necklace?’
‘I didn’t give her any sort of necklace.’ He had, in fact, given her a bracelet, pinchbeck studded with tiny rubies. He shook his head. ‘No necklace. Never. The butterfly was just a toy – the sort of thing one gives to a child.’
‘But she’s not a child.’
For a long time they argued. As she grew colder and colder, so he became more and more heated. She did not understand men, he told her. Every man, he repeated – every man who was really a man – liked to fool around from time to time. That was his nature. It meant nothing, well, nothing important. Women learned to accept these little infidelities. Probably her own father …
‘Don’t speak about my father! He was a far better man than you!’ Suddenly, her anger flared out.