‘Tell it calmly and sequentially,’ I can hear you say. ‘Chronological order sorts the real from the imaginary.’ Well, I’ll try. But don’t rely on chronology too much, Daphne. I’m not sure I know what it means any more. Anyway, here goes.
Hawaii was great. It was so remote, so completely different from my normal life. Getting away from it all never sounded so appealing and never proved so wonderful. Out there, in the middle of the Pacific, I could be absolutely confident Marian wasn’t going to catch up with me. Didn’t I say something like that in that postcard of the Kilauea Crater I sent you? It was out of this world. Out of her world.
I didn’t want to come back. I actually tried to talk Conrad into extending the trip. But he was already getting twitchy about being away from work so long, and he thought I’d flipped when I suggested staying on without him. There are some things he won’t tolerate. We came back together, on schedule. And the very next morning it started to go wrong.
I got up late, a good few hours after Conrad had gone to work. I suppose the jet lag must have hit me. Anyway, I forced myself to go out and do some shopping. We were low on lots of things. When I got back there was a man waiting for me at the entrance to the apartment block. He was a paunchy, red-faced chap with a shock of grey hair, wearing a tweed suit, a bright yellow bow tie and a purple shirt. He looked like a cross between a country solicitor and a superannuated playboy.
‘Mrs Moberly?’ he said, stepping into my path and grinning. ‘My name’s Montagu Quisden-Neve. My card.’ He handed me his card as he spoke. It described him as an antiquarian bookseller, with an address in Bath. ‘We don’t know each other, Mrs Moberly, but we do have a mutual acquaintance. Niall Esguard. Also his late uncle, Milo Esguard. Do you think I might come up to your flat and outline a small business proposition I’d like you to consider?’
I was too stunned to refuse. Even if I hadn’t been, I’d have gone along with what he wanted. The mere mention of Niall Esguard terrified me. I’d thought I was safely out of his reach. But if this man Quisden-Neve could find me …
So I took him up to the flat. He carried my shopping and burbled away about the weather and the charms of Mayfair, as if he was unaware how frightened I was. But I already had the impression the fruity-toned courtesies were an act. The bow tie and the double barrel didn’t make him any softer centred than Niall Esguard. And once we’d got inside and he’d somehow manoeuvred me into pouring him a gin and tonic he soon made it obvious I had plenty to be frightened of.
‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mrs Moberly,’ he said, still grinning like some obsequious car salesman. ‘I was negotiating with dear old Milo at the time of his death for the purchase of some early photographic negatives, possibly the work of an ancestor of his, Marian Esguard. I see you’ve heard of her. It was frustrating to be denied such a historically interesting acquisition by the untimely intervention of the Grim Reaper, but none of us is immune from his attentions, so who am I to complain?’
‘I thought you said you were going to come straight to the point,’ I protested weakly.
‘Quite so. I do beg your pardon. With Milo gone, I’ve been obliged to negotiate with his nephew, Niall Esguard. I believe you’ve met the gentleman, though “gentleman” is perhaps an inappropriate description. Niall is a believer in stripping matters to their essentials. He is a crude but effective operator in several substrata of life, a blunt-mannered individual whom only tiresome necessity prompts me to do business with.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Come, come, Mrs Moberly. Prevarication will not aid you. Niall believes you became his uncle’s trusted confidante in the closing weeks of his life, and so do I. Since the negatives were not among Milo’s effects, it follows that he gave them up for safe-keeping. To you, I rather think. Such is Niall’s conclusion, at all events. One he would be keen to discuss with you, if only he knew where to find you. There, of course, I have the advantage of him. For I do know where to find you. Indeed, I have found you.’
‘How did you trace me?’
‘Simplicity itself, my dear. But the sort of simplicity alien to Niall’s smash-and-grab mentality. I gleaned your name and address from the library users’ book at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath. It was foolhardy of you to record the purpose of your visit so openly, if I may say so. “Marian Esguard.” Rather a give-away, I fear. But perhaps you had no reason at that time to place a premium on secrecy. Still, you should have gone back later and erased the entry. I would have done, in your shoes. And very elegant shoes they are, too. Made in Milan, I would guess. I find you can tell the product of a Milanese last at a glance, don’t you?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want the negatives. Please don’t trouble to claim you don’t have them, or that they don’t exist, or that you have no idea what I’m referring to. We both know what they are, though I suspect you may not have taken steps to establish their monetary worth, which is perhaps just as well. It is also irrelevant, since I’m not offering to buy them from you. What I am offering to do is say nothing to Niall Esguard concerning your whereabouts and, purely as a gesture of goodwill, to cover your tracks in Bath rather more effectively than you managed to. In return, of course, for your surrender of the negatives.’
‘I—’
‘Say no more, Mrs Moberly. I have the distinct impression you’re about to indulge in a pointless series of denials, which will only embarrass you as well as me. Since I assume the negatives are not stored here, I will give you a few days to reflect on your position and to retrieve them from whichever bank vault they currently rest in. I shall be returning to the capital the day after tomorrow. Join me for tea at Richoux in Piccadilly at three o’clock that afternoon. And bring the negatives with you. That, my dear, is all you need do to bring this matter to a painless conclusion. But you do need to do it. The requirement, I fear, is strictly non-negotiable.’
I was in a state of shock when he left. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. He’d found me so easily. The idea that I could opt out of Marian’s life – and opt her out of mine – was in ruins. And, worse than that, I felt I’d somehow let her down. She wouldn’t have wanted either Niall or Quisden-Neve to have the negatives. They were hers and, in a sense, mine. They ought never to be theirs. But how could I avoid handing them over? In the simple, logical twentieth-century world I inhabited, what the hell was the problem with giving up a few old pieces of paper in exchange for my peace of mind? Well, that was the problem. It wouldn’t be at peace. I knew that even if I knew nothing else. On the other hand …
I can’t account clearly for what I did next. I suppose on some level I felt I had to get as close to Marian as possible before I decided what to do. On another level I had to get out of the flat and out of London. It was choking me. I wanted to run away and hide. And, if I ran, there seemed only one direction I could run in.
So I started driving, south-west out of London along the A30, past Windsor Great Park, down through Camberley and Basingstoke and Salisbury in buttery autumn light, until I reached Cranborne Chase and the wide-open rolling hills round Tollard Rising. It was my first visit, the first I’d dared to make, but everything had that feeling of vague familiarity I’d known it would have. The lie of the land; the shape of the buildings; the folding together of field and sky: I recognized them all. I’d waited for them, just as they’d waited for me.
I parked the car on Charlton Down, with the landscape of the past and the present fusing in the mellow late afternoon below me. Then I clambered over a barbed-wire fence that had once been a fragrant hedgerow and struck out across the swelling breast of the down, knowing the exact moment when the roofs and chimneys of Gaunt’s Chase would have come into view – if it had still been standing. Sheep scurried away as I walked dead straight through the dull, green, flowerless pasture. The wind was cool, the sunlight weakening at the merest hint of dusk. I was still in the real world, defying that other world to show itself, rushin
g to prove the truth or falsehood of what had hovered at the edge of my mind’s eye for far too long. I thought momentarily of Quisden-Neve, then of the negatives I’d seen in the box. I remembered one weirdly tinted shot of the house taken from just the angle at which I’d see it first if—
And as swiftly and simply as the blinking of my eye it was done. I was there. And it was the real world. The grass was a richer green, spattered with meadow flowers. The turf yielded like a cushion beneath my feet. When I looked down, I saw the polished toes of my half-boots sinking into it with every step, and the hem of my ankle-length pink-and-yellow dress swaying as I walked. There was no surprise in any of this, no shock or wonderment. It was as natural and fitting as arriving home and opening the door and going in.
I glanced ahead and saw Gaunt’s Chase, unrazed and unaltered in its parkland setting on the gently sloping westward face of the down. The house was shimmering faintly in a heat haze and I was aware, as if remembering a briefly forgotten practicality, that it was a summer’s afternoon in the year 1817, the sunlight falling warmly on my back as I returned, neither hurrying nor dawdling, from a walk to my favourite vantage point, where so much of Dorset and Wiltshire stretched itself in my hilltop gaze that the limitations and confinements of my domestic existence could seem like contemptible trivialities.
Marian’s life became mine once more in that instant. Every memory of her past and every fact of her present burst into my mind like so much half-expected foreknowledge. I was thirty years old, plain by the standards of the day and too slim to be flattered by the bosomy fashions, too energetic and intelligent to be content with rural isolation, but nonetheless subject to the variable and sometimes brutal moods of a husband who came and went as he pleased and behaved accordingly. My contentment, amounting almost to happiness, was thereby explained, for Jos was in London, at the house in Berkeley Square, which I’d not visited since the earliest years of our marriage. And though Gaunt’s Chase could never truly be home to me, because every brick and pillar bore some imprint of its owner, it was, in his absence, a place where I could live at ease with myself.
Besides, there was more to life than fashion and a fond or faithful husband. There was science – and my dream of heliogenesis. The warm summer sun was the agent of something altogether astonishing. Since the spring, I’d achieved more than I’d ever have thought possible when the idea first came to me. And in the last few days those achievements had accelerated beyond my wildest expectations. I was excited and impatient to share my new-found knowledge with the only person in the locality I trusted not to abuse my confidence.
So I was already thinking of him when I saw the figure moving towards me along the edge of the beech hanger north-west of the house. Then I recognized who it was and felt my heart jump with a girlish anticipation I was tired of rebuking myself for. I had scant cause to be grateful to Jos, when all was said and done, but the society of Lawrence Byfield was one blessing he had conferred on me, albeit unwittingly. When, earlier in the year, he’d mentioned giving a London acquaintance of his the use of Legion Cottage while he convalesced from an illness, I’d feared Mr Byfield would turn out to be as rank a scoundrel as my husband’s liking for him implied. To my amazement, however, he’d shown himself in the months since to be a man of honour as well as charm, of discernment as well as humour. At first I’d distrusted my own liking for him. I remembered my susceptibility to Jos’s flattering attentions during our courtship, and the loveless marriage it had misled me into. I knew from bitter experience how a certain kind of man enjoyed deceiving women into thinking well of him, just as he enjoyed the moment when he chose to reveal his true character. Besides, Jos counted Mr Byfield as a friend, and I secretly regarded any friend of my husband as an enemy.
But I had been obliged to reconsider. Lawrence Byfield was a good man, accounted odd by some because of his unfashionable beard, his pale and sometimes strained expression, his incapacity for idle chatter, his contempt for gossip and the gravity of his manner, which the unperceptive mistook for arrogance. Then there was his limp, which colourful rumour attributed to a knee wound suffered in a duel, and the unspecified illness from which he was recovering. His unwillingness to volunteer either explanations or clarifications was held against him. But not by me. I admired his restraint as well as his reserve. I found in him the first human mystery ever to fascinate me. Above all, I detected in him a nature akin to my own. He had the wit to see how matters stood between me and Jos. I had the impression he knew my husband as well as I did, if not better. He understood very clearly what marriage to his friend was likely to involve.
He never said as much. He never spoke a word that would bear such a meaning. But in the way his eyes rested on me, in the warmth of his smile and the tenderness of his solicitations, I could detect an anxiety on my behalf that was as delicate as it was diligent. Jos left me more completely to myself during Mr Byfield’s tenancy of Legion Cottage than he ever had before. I sometimes wondered if it was because of Mr Byfield’s tenancy, preposterous though the notion was. His presence on the estate seemed to act as a guarantee of my well-being. Jos grew inhibited in his company and took to spending more and more time in London, where Mr Byfield, on account of his health, could not join him. I was grateful for this, and so, I sometimes suspected, was Mr Byfield.
The spring and summer of 1817 were thus happy seasons for me. I progressed from the experimental application of my heliogenic theories to something approaching the perfection of a new and revolutionary pictorial technique. Each week seemed to bring some new insight, some new refinement of the craft. It was truly magical to see the pictures that I made by the manipulation of sunlight and darkness and chemically treated paper. I wrote to my father and told him of the significant strides I was making. He replied in tones of incredulity I could well understand. He’d not seen the pictures. But I had. And so had Lawrence Byfield.
I first mentioned my heliogenic researches to him one warm afternoon in late April, when I found him attempting a watercolour painting of Gaunt’s Chase from the far side of the park. I wanted to impress him, I later realized. He was the only person in the whole of Tollard Rising I did want to impress. So I goaded him with the claim that I could produce a better and more accurate picture without the aid of paints and brushes. He took me up on the challenge and called the following day to view the result, unaware of the procedure I’d planned to follow and of its scientific basis. When I showed him the picture, he was clearly taken aback.
‘But … what is it?’ he said in amazement.
‘It is a heliogenic drawing,’ I replied self-importantly. ‘A bringing together on paper of the reaction to light of nitrate of silver and the pictorial properties of a camera obscura.’
‘You did this?’
‘I made it, certainly.’
‘How?’
‘As I just told you, Mr Byfield. To be more specific, I trained a modified camera obscura on the part of the house you see pictured, having secured at the back of the camera a sheet of paper soaked successively in solutions of common salt and nitrate of silver. I then removed the sheet of paper from the camera in the darkened basement room I work in, observed the felicitous result, and sealed it against the depredating effects of daylight by applying a solution of hyposulphite of ammonia. I had the advantage of yesterday afternoon’s strong sunlight, of course. In cloudy weather I doubt—’
‘It’s a miracle.’
‘No, no. A remarkable achievement, I think, but not a miracle.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ He shook his head at me and smiled. ‘But that, perhaps, should not surprise me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, Mrs Esguard, I’ve never met anyone quite like you.’
From that day on we grew to be friends and, in a sense, colleagues. Though I never acknowledged as much to myself, it was my eagerness for his company, and his for mine, that drew us together, quite as much as his scientific curiosity. There was no danger, of course, that he wou
ld object to a mere woman carrying out such work. His openness of mind on that score was implicit from the start. Yet some, notably Jos, would object. So it was that a secretive element was part of our friendship from the start. We were, in effect, colluding in the deception of my husband, and the reputable, intellectual reasons for doing so made it easier than it otherwise would have been to entertain other reasons that were neither reputable nor intellectual.
My pleasure at seeing him riding towards me on Pompey that afternoon of early August would therefore have been considerable, whatever the circumstances. They were heightened, however, by my exultant mood, a mood stemming from a discovery I had made just two days before, which promised to elevate my researches to a wholly new level of significance. And what is a discovery worth if it cannot be disclosed to a friend so that he too may relish the joy of it?
He saw me almost as soon as I saw him and waved in greeting, then altered his route and trotted slowly across to meet me.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Esguard,’ he said as he drew up in front of me, courteously correct as ever. ‘You look, if I may say so, the very picture of good health.’
‘The climb to Charlton Down is an invigorating one, Mr Byfield,’ I replied.
‘I must undertake it more often if it is likely to prove such a tonic as your appearance suggests.’ He dismounted, wincing slightly as his right leg touched the ground. ‘But I suspect there may be more than fresh air and exercise to this … beaming contentment of yours.’
Caught In the Light Page 13