Afterimage

by Helen Humphreys

  Please be so kind as to pass this along to my sister so she may write to me at the address below.

  Respectfully yours,

  Michael Phelan

  Isabelle wants to close her hand around this letter, draw it out, hand it to Annie, say—“Here, this is what you’ve been waiting for.” But instead she says, “Tess doesn’t have to go. I won’t make her go.”

  Annie looks at the straw on the ground. The light coming through the roof makes the straw a tangle of gold at her feet.

  She remembers the architecture of this scene they were preparing for. She remembers the moment she stood in the studio, looking at the straw and the dull light hefting through the window, the moment before she went out to the coal cellar in search of Isabelle. “Take my photograph,” she says.

  “As who?”

  “As me.” Annie tilts her head up, looks at Isabelle.

  The light this afternoon is beautiful. Clean. Every object caught by it seems sharp and distinct. The spring sky, through the glass roof, is as blue as the sea.

  Isabelle stands behind her camera. Don’t leave me, she thinks. I can’t lose you too. She moves the camera forward so that Annie’s face fills the frame. She screws down the focus. It takes a few tries to get the stopper out of the collodion bottle, but she accomplishes this, coats the glass plate with the sticky liquid. She plunges it into the silver nitrate bath, slides the glass into the plate holder, and pops that into the back of the camera.

  Annie holds her head up as straight as she can. Perhaps, for once, for the first time, the photograph of this moment will be the same image to her and Isabelle. They will see the identical thing. It will not be simply persuasion. It will not be one person describing and one person believing that story. It will be a place to start out from, a moment unclouded by desire. A clear, clear day. That is something to hope for. That is something to want.

  Isabelle has her hand on the camera lens. “That’s good,” she says. “You look like a heroine. Like someone who has just saved a child. Don’t move.”

  Annie thinks of the night she kissed Isabelle, how that moment when she felt fully alive she is not allowed to speak of again. How Isabelle kept a room full of carriages and toys that belonged to children she can’t forget and won’t remember. And that room, where they kissed, is gone now, destroyed by the fire. Nothing left of that evening. How here, in the studio, this place where they’ve been the most indmate, in front of the camera, Isabelle will let Annie be anyone, except herself. Annie has existed for Isabelle, not as who she is, but only as who Isabelle wanted her to be at a particular moment. Now, again, she is to be a heroine, a girl who has rescued a child from a deadly fire. Early on, when Annie was full of admiration for Isabelle’s competent strength in the world, when Annie was grateful just to be noticed, it was enough just to be paid attention to. Now it is not. That kiss felt real, was real. She wants Isabelle to admit this, to admit that it was Annie she kissed. But Isabelle Dashell has looked so hard at Annie Phelan and has never once seen her at all.

  Annie thinks of Eldon, of all the places he imagined going and never went to. Now he is buried beside his children in the small village cemetery. It rained on the day of his funeral. Annie had stood beside Isabelle while the coffin was lowered into the muddy grave. On the way down it bumped against the sides, against roots thick as fists, the dark eye of a stone embedded into the earth wall. Annie had cried. Isabelle had turned back for the carriage at the first shovel load of earth on the coffin. She had flinched at the sound of it.

  Eldon would have been proud that Annie had rescued the boy from the fire. She had behaved in a loyal way to those in her charge. She had been a good member of the expedition.What she thinks now is that she will go back to Ireland by herself, back to County Clare, to try and find out what happened to her family. Eldon would like that. And even though the letters he sent there were never answered, if she went herself and made enquiries, there might be someone who would recall the Phelans. Yes, this is what she will do.

  Annie holds her head up as straight as she can. This photograph is all Isabelle will allow her to give. This is all Isabelle will have to remember her by. She wants it to be a good likeness. “I’m ready, Isabelle,” she says.

  The winged boy falls to earth. Isabelle watches his slow flight down, the streaks of smoke articulate from the trailing ends of his feathery arms. The knot his small body makes in the air.

  It is the perfect photograph, and she has missed it.

  This is what she has always feared. That she will not be able, no matter how she wills it or orchestrates it, to create an image as pure and true as this. That what she does is not really about life, about living. It is about holding on to something long after it has already left.

  Like grief Like hope.

  Life is the unexpected generosity of a kiss.

  It is the falling moment. Unrecorded.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron for their haunting inspiration.

  Thanks to the Corporation of Yaddo, where some of this book was written.

  I would like to thank M. Lindsay Lambert for his expertise in Victorian photography, and my grandfather, Ronald Brett, for his imaginings of Sussex life in 1865.

  Thanks, as always, to Frances Hanna.

  In particular, I am grateful to my editor, Phyllis Bruce. Her kindness, thoroughness, and keen judgement have made me a better writer, and Afterimage a better book.

  About the Author

  HELEN HUMPHREYS is the author of five acclaimed novels: Coventry, a #1 national bestseller and a New York Times Editors’ Choice; Leaving Earth, winner of the City of Toronto Book Award; Afterimage, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Lost Garden, a finalist for Canada Reads; and Wild Dogs, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and one of NOW Magazine’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year. Her non-fiction work, The Frozen Thames, was a #1 national bestseller in 2007. Visit her website at www.hhumphreys.com.

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  International Acclaim for

  Afterimage

  “So rich with intimate detail…. Helen Humphreys gives us the gift of her unique imagination in a complex story, beautifully told.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Brilliant … immensely touching…. Annie, despite her resemblance to Mary Hillier, the young housemaid who was Cameron’s most frequent model, is fully imagined and gloriously herself.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Accomplished…. Humphreys delves boldly into the tumultuous Victorian era, bringing to life an aristocratic couple ravaged by the intensity of their aesthetic obsessions.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Inspired by the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, this urgent, well-made novel charts the boundaries where light becomes shadow, and the known can suddenly appear awful and astonishing.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A beautiful, powerful, and accomplished novel.”

  —National Post

  “A breath of fresh air…. tale.” Humphreys teases out a compelling

  —The Guardian (UK)

  “Lyrical…. This beautifully written novel edges toward saying something profound about the relationships between art and life, men and women, the powerful and the disempowered.”

  —The Economist

  “Afterimage wonderfully suggests the texture of Victorian life, as well as the intensity of emotion generated between artist and subject.”

  —USA Today

  “The book has a compelling afterimage of its own. What remains is a vivid impression of Annie, in its own way as haunting as the photographs that inspired her.”

  —Time Out (New York)

  “The atmosphere that encloses this evolving love triangle is sometimes erotic, sometimes poignant, and always complicated by Victorian class issues…. [Humphreys] has an impeccable command of imagery, and
her prose finds strength in its subtlety.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lushly suspenseful and tender…. Afterimage demands close attention.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A finely paced, carefully researched, and exquisitely told historical tale of ambition, longing, and unrealized dreams.”

  —The Antigonish Review

  “[Humphreys] has produced a fascinating novel that works on many levels…. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer.

  —Julia Margaret Cameron

  Un paysage quelconque est un état de l’âme.

  Any sort of landscape is a condition of the soul.

  —H. F. Amiel, 31 Oct. 1852

  The boy will remember it this way forever. His wings are on fire. He stands against a burning wall. The harder he moves his arms, trying to get free of the leather straps, the faster the flames shudder along the white feathers.

  The boy doesn’t see her until she’s right beside him. It seems as if she has poured out of the smoke, her grey cloak flapping around her like waves on the sea. For a moment they stare at each other. He sees the flicker of fear in her young face, but that is something he thinks later—young face—much later, when he is a man. Now he thinks only, Save me, his throat seared shut. He cannot push the dry burst of words through his parched lips. It doesn’t matter. She has grabbed him under the arms, holds him away from her body. Put your arms out, she says. He stretches his burning wings so that they stay clear of her clothes and she runs with him like this, down the hallway to Isabelle’s bedroom. There is smoke in the room but the window is open. She stands him by the door, rushes to the bed, and drags the mattress off. He sees the sparks sizzling along the trailing edge of her cloak as she tears off the bedding, stuffs the mattress through the window, and it somersaults to the earth below. She has hold of him again, leans with him in her arms over the sill.

  I’ve got you, she says.

  And then she lets him go.

  The boy falls. He puts both his arms out and for a brief moment his fiery wings stay the air and he floats down. The air pushing against the underside of the wings is the same pressure as when she held him over the sill, the same feeling. The rush of fiery air as he slows above the earth. Her strong and steady hands.

  This is him, flying.

  Author’s Note

  The photographs described in Afterimage are loosely imagined renderings of a series of photographs taken by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron of her housemaid, Mary Hillier.

  The quotes from Sappho are taken from a translation by Mary Barnard.

  The quoted passages of the whaling diary are from the Journal of the Margaret Rait—1840—1844 by Captain James Doane Coffin.

  The quoted passages and descriptions of McClintock’s voyage in search of Franklin are from The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions by Captain Francis Leopold McClintock; London, 1859.

  The quoted passages from John Franklin are taken from Arctic Breakthrough: Franklin’s Expeditions 1819–1847 by Paul Nanton.

  P.S. Ideas, interviews, & features

  About the author

  2 Author Biography

  About the book

  4 Helen Humphreys Discusses Afterimage

  9 Afterimage and the Art of Julia Margaret Cameron

  Read on

  15 Web Detective

  About the Author

  Author Biography

  HELEN HUMPHREYS was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1961. She moved with her parents to Toronto in 1964 and spent her childhood in Scarborough. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario.

  Humphreys always wanted to be a writer, and decided not to go to university in favour of learning on her own and working at a series of odd jobs to pay the rent. She preferred jobs like pumping gas, where she worked alone, because during the slow times she was able to read. She had a few poems published in literary magazines while still in her teens, and in her early twenties she took the two-year Book Editing and Design Program at Centennial College. For the next decade she worked parttime, overseeing production on two academic journals published out of the University of Toronto, and continued to write poetry. Her first book of poems, Gods and Other Mortals (1986), was published by Brick Books when she was twenty-five.

  Gods and Other Mortals was followed by Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios (1990), The Perils of Geography (1995), and Anthem (1999), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2000 and was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award.

  After happening upon an idea that wouldn’t fit into poetry, Humphreys decided to move into fiction. The novel form was most suited to the layered narrative of what she envisioned: a tale, set during the Depression, of two young women trying to break the world in-flight endurance record of twenty-five days. The result was the novel Leaving Earth (1997), which won the City of Toronto Book Award and received international acclaim. Afterimage (2000) was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The Lost Garden (2002) was a national bestseller and a CBC Canada Reads pick for 2003. Each of these novels was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Wild Dogs (2004), which won the 2005 Lambda Prize for Fiction, was produced as a play by the Canadian Stage Company in 2008 and has also been optioned for a film. Humphreys followed these books with a work of creative non-fiction, The Frozen Thames (2007), a number one bestseller. Coventry (2008), her fifth novel, also a number one bestseller, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction and the CBA Libris Author of the Year Award. It was also chosen by The Globe and Mail as a Best Book of the Year. Humphreys’ work has been published internationally and has been translated into many languages.

  After happening upon an idea that wouldn’t fit into poetry, Humphreys decided to move into fiction.

  About the book

  The question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.

  Helen Humphreys Discusses Afterimage

  Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs were the primary inspiration behind Afterimage. What was it about them that captured your imagination?

  Cameron’s photographs are quite famous, and so I had seen individual images in the past, but the first time I saw an exhibition was in 1998, and it included a series of her maid, Mary Hillier. I started to cast around, trying to find out more about Hillier, but because she was a maid there was little available on her life. There was, however, a lot of information about Cameron, and so I started there—but the question of the unusual nature of the relationship was always at the heart of the story of Isabelle and her Irish maid, Annie.

  All the photographs in the novel were based on Cameron’s actual photographs. In all my historical novels I try to be faithful to one particular thing, and in Afterimage it was the real-life photographs and the photographic process that Cameron used to create them.

  In your novel, what is the relationship between Isabelle’s photography and her husband Eldon’s cartography?

  One is an art form that is in its death throes (cartography), and one is an art form that is just beginning (photography). I liked the idea of the tension that opposition could create within a household.

  Isabelle’s confidence in her artistic vision wavers when others don’t take her seriously. Was this also true of the real-life photographer Cameron?

  Cameron was an anomaly at the time. There weren’t women photographers when she took it up. In fact, photography itself was in its infancy as an art form and a profession, and perhaps this is why she was accepted within it. Territory hadn’t been properly staked out yet. Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography rel
atively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success. Where Cameron didn’t find inclusion, and in Afterimage where Isabelle Dashell also has trouble, is within the world of the male allegorical painters, such as Watts. They didn’t take photography, regardless of the gender of the photographer, seriously as an art form.

  How did you tackle the research for Afterimage, which delves into everything from Ireland’s Great Hunger to Arctic exploration?

  There was a massive amount of research required. But what I did initially, to maintain some order with it, was to break the book down into subjects—early photography, Cameron’s photography, life in Victorian England, the Irish potato famine, Franklin’s doomed trip to find the Northwest Passage, the history of map-making. There was a lot to learn and it took the better part of two years.

  “Everything was still very experimental. So Cameron was able to take up photography relatively late in life, at the age of forty-eight, and become a success.”

  “I think Eldon has never been very comfortable in his own skin.

  Several of the characters in Afterimage long to be someone other than themselves, most intriguingly Eldon, who in one passage says that he wishes he were Annie’s equal. Why?