Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer

by Gibson, Miles

  Ethel and Alice were very upset at the news of their master’s departure. They knew they would never see him again. On the morning of his departure they were up before dawn, warming his vest, shining his boots and snorting into their handkerchiefs.

  ‘You’ll write a postcard when you arrive,’ said Alice, looking very flushed as she carried his suitcases down the stairs. She leaned towards him to plant a kiss but only managed to bend his nose.

  Swann said that he would write postcards to all of them and Dorset wasn’t very far away and these days the railways were excellent and he’d probably want to come home in a week.

  ‘I made a meat and pickle pie for the journey,’ said Ethel, running breathlessly from the kitchen. ‘But the crust caught and I threw it away.’ She looked at Swann, then burst into tears and pulled her apron over her head.

  Swann tried to comfort her but only succeeded in making her worse and after she’d daubed his face with kisses she fled to hide in the larder.

  ‘Look after Ethel for me,’ he whispered, turning to Alice and then, to his great embarrassment, Alice burst into tears and crushed him roughly into her arms, making him wheeze and fight for breath.

  When he reached the front door old Mrs Spooner lined up the children to shake him by the hand. He gave them each an aniseed ball. Mrs Spooner smacked her gums and brushed away a tear.

  ‘You’re a lovely, lovely gent, Mr Swann.’

  43

  When Kingdom Swann climbed down from the train at Upshott Magna he found Lord Hugo Prattle waiting for him with the station master and a brace of porters. His lordship, face hidden by a pair of goggles, flapped forward in a long canvas coat and embraced Swann so enthusiastically that the old man fell back and tumbled over his luggage. The porters picked him up, the station master brushed him down and, when he was quite recovered, his lordship led him to a motor car that was parked in the station yard.

  ‘Came to collect you myself,’ he said proudly, banging the bonnet with his fist. ‘Trained a groom to drive this brute. Lost him last month. All the young men go to war. House full of women.’

  He hauled Swann into the passenger seat and wrapped his legs in a blanket. It was a foreign racing-machine. A green metal fish on wheels. Prattle climbed behind the controls, wiped his goggles with a silk scarf and frowned doubtfully at the steering wheel.

  ‘Is it safe?’ asked Swann timidly.

  ‘Safe?’ said Prattle, looking puzzled.

  ‘I’ve never ridden a racer,’ said Swann, who had never ridden in a motor car of any description and had hoped to be spared it.

  ‘There’s nothing to it,’ beamed Prattle. ‘It’s like sitting in a railway carriage with all the windows open. You’ll love it.’

  ‘You hear of such fearful accidents,’ said Swann.

  ‘I’ve never had a collision yet,’ laughed Prattle, pulling at the lever he thought might be the brake.

  ‘How long have you been driving?’

  ‘Since eight o’clock this morning.’

  Swann was trying to open the door and throw himself overboard when the engine spluttered into life. ‘Hold tight!’ shouted Prattle and then they were shooting down a gravel road into the winter twilight.

  ‘Too fast!’ cried Swann. But his words were swept away in a deafening tunnel of wind. The world was spinning, lurching, melting into fantastic shapes. He closed his eyes. The wind stung his face and drilled his ears. His nose turned a dangerous shade of blue. ‘Too fast!’ he moaned, shrinking into his seat and pulling the blanket over his head.

  Prattle clung to the controls, grinding his teeth in concentration. Birds burst from hedges and fled, shrieking, into the sky. Cattle trumpeted in pens. At a bend in the road a dog, emerging from a ditch, was caught in the wheels and thrown twenty yards through a fence.

  ‘Crazy dog!’ screamed his lordship. ‘Did you see that? We could have been killed!’

  Swann said nothing. It was growing dark. Lamps were burning at cottage windows. The rushing fields were lakes of mud. Despite his love of speed, it took an hour for Prattle to find his way home. He lost his way in the narrow lanes and stopped several times to ask for directions.

  ‘I ought to recognise the land,’ he kept shouting. ‘It’s been in the family for three hundred years!’

  At last they found the iron gates that marked the boundary of the estate and splashed through an avenue of skeleton elms towards the lights of the great house.

  The entire household had gathered on the steps of the house. Prattle jumped from the car, tore the goggles from his face and waved at the frozen bundle still huddled in the passenger seat.

  ‘This is Mr Kingdom Swann,’ he announced. ‘The very famous photographer. He is to be our guest. You are here to look after him. The man is a great artist. A genius. We shall never see such a man again. A privilege and a pleasure to have the honour to attend to him.’

  The housekeeper stepped forward to drop a curtsey, followed by the cooks, the housemaids, laundry-maids, kitchen-maids, scullery-maids and maids-of-all-work. The maids, who were very young, wore high bustles to their skirts so that, when they moved, they seemed to pitch forward, strutting like fat-breasted turkeys. Mrs Petersen, the housekeepter, was dressed in a gown more suited for the opera than the duties of a country house and cut so low she’d been forced to cover herself with a shawl against the damp night air. Even the cooks, who were nearly as plain as their food, had been turned out in freshly starched aprons and caps. The only men to be seen were four decrepit gardeners who tipped their hats and shuffled their heavy, iron-shod boots as they laboured to unload the luggage.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Swann, to my humble family home,’ said Prattle, wrenching open the car door to help Kingdom Swann back to earth. ‘We hope to make you most comfortable.’ But Swann did not move. He was frozen to the seat. The blanket that coverd him sparkled with frost. When Prattle gave the bundle a poke, it toppled reluctantly into his arms.

  The cooks, housemaids, laundry-maids, kitchen-maids, scullery-maids and maids-of-all-work shrank away from the scene with a gasp. The gardeners dropped the luggage and gawped. It was left to Mrs Petersen to run down the steps and help carry Swann to the safety of the house. Prattle took his arms, the housekeeper took his legs, and together they hauled him upstairs and laid him out on the bed.

  ‘Is he dead?’ whispered Prattle, once they’d unwrapped him and peered at the silent face through the tangled growth of beard.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Petersen. ‘His heart is beating. It’s very faint but I think I can feel it beating.’ She had broken open the old man’s waistcoat and was feeling anxiously under his shirt.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ moaned Prattle. He paced up and down the room, his canvas coat slapping the furniture. ‘Fetch a doctor!’ he shouted at no one. ‘Bring me a dozen hot water bottles! Give his chest a whisky rub!’

  ‘You must leave him alone with me, sir,’ said Mrs Petersen softly. ‘I have ways to help revive him.’ She had pulled off his boots and was briskly slapping the soles of his feet.

  ‘What?’ barked Prattle suspiciously. ‘What are you planning to do with him? I don’t want any of your damn gymnastics, madam! He’s an old man. He’s very fragile. He wasn’t born in one of your fjords!’

  Mrs Petersen rose and stared down at Lord Hugo Prattle with eyes that were full of thunder. She jerked the shawl from her shoulders and flung it to the floor. ‘If we do not act quickly, sir, I believe we shall be too late to save him. His blood is freezing under his skin. If we cannot revive him very soon an icicle may puncture his heart.’

  This diagnosis was so bizarre and yet uttered with such authority that Prattle was lost for words. He bristled and growled and puffed himself up but he couldn’t match his housekeeper’s height nor her look of determination. ‘Ring the bell if you need assistance!’ he snapped, retreating towards the door.

  When his lordship finally withdrew Mrs Petersen turned the key in the lock and threw more coals on the fire. She kicked off her sh
oes and unlaced the front of her gown. She wrenched the gown to her waist and struggled next to unwork her corset, tugging savagely at the cords until she had broken free from the shell.

  Swann lay sprawled in the eiderdown with his mouth open and his eyes closed. His breath was reduced to a rattle. She pulled him roughly from his clothes and managed to roll him into bed. His skin was very cold and all the colour had leaked from his face. She paused to listen, again, for his heart. And then she lay down upon him, pressed his face between her breasts and touched him with her living heat.

  The frost pierced her body and made her moan with pain. She shivered and clasped the old man tighter, afraid that she might have embraced a ghost. For a long time she shielded him, smothered him, until her own warmth had dwindled away and she felt so chilled she supposed all hope had been lost. But gradually he began to thaw. His ears burned and his big beard steamed. The blood returned to his feet. He grunted and mumbled in his sleep, turning his face to the pillow.

  Mrs Petersen slipped from the bed, threw on her gown and quickly searched for her shawl and shoes. When Swann woke up she was gone. He never knew what had happened to him. There was a flask of hot tea beside the bed and a bowl of spiced milk pudding.

  Abishag the Shunamite Excites the Old Man’s Dreams.

  44

  The next morning Swann was up early and walking with Prattle beside the lake. He had taken precautions against the cold by wearing two coats and a bear-skin hat but he felt none the worse for the night’s ordeal.

  ‘You gave us a nasty fright,’ said Prattle, swinging an ebony walking cane. ‘We were quite convinced you were dead.’

  ‘The cold,’ puffed Swann. ‘The cold knocked me out.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember what happened?’ said Prattle hopefully.

  ‘We were sitting in the racer,’ said Swann, ‘and the next thing I knew …’ He paused and scratched his beard. ‘I woke up in bed, stark naked and covered in sweat.’

  ‘And you don’t remember, ah, Mrs Petersen helping to revive you in any fashion?’

  ‘I don’t recall such a thing,’ said Swann.

  Prattle sighed and looked disappointed.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, no reason in particular. Nasty business. Best forgotten. But you’ll need to rest, sir, and build up your strength. We can’t have you going down queer again.’

  ‘I’m much obliged to you, sir,’ said Swann. ‘If it wasn’t for your kindness I’m sure I don’t know how I should have endured so many disappointments.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Prattle. ‘Why, not only do I have the honour of entertaining the most distinguished artist of the age, I find I now possess the largest collection of his work in Christendom.’ He laughed and coughed and took Swann’s arm.

  He led the old man through a bank of rhododendrons and there, half-hidden in the long grass by the shore of the ornamental lake, rose a white marble casket, set on a polished granite block, surrounded by seven, naked, mourning maids.

  ‘Now ain’t that a sight for sore eyes, Mr Swann? Don’t the look of it warm the blood? I sent to Italy for the sculptor. All the best. No expense spared. He followed your photographs to the smallest detail.’ He smiled and gazed up in admiration. ‘A woman is a miracle of beauty,’ he reflected. ‘They do nothing to earn it. Some of ’em frankly despises it. Yet God, in his wisdom, makes ’em lovely and man a slave to the sight of ’em.’ He clambered onto the grave and sat astride a prostrate mourner, rubbing the frost from her flanks with his gloves. ‘I come down here on summer evenings, rest my head among the bums and lean back to look at the stars,’ he said softly, casting a critical glance at the sky.

  ‘You always had a love for women,’ said Swann.

  ‘And you the art of praising ’em,’ beamed his lordship.

  ‘I should have been a painter,’ said Swann sadly, pulling at the collars of his coats.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Prattle.

  ‘They don’t take such a serious view of paint,’ said Swann. ‘It’s the photographs that frightens them.’

  ‘A painting emulates but a photograph stimulates,’ said Prattle, clapping his hands. ‘That’s the difference. It’s magic. It’s witchcraft. It’s stealing from life.’

  ‘I stole nothing!’ barked Swann. ‘I celebrated women’s beauty. Big, fat, honest women, common women, simple women, women made to stir the heart and invigorate the senses. I nearly flooded the world with their beauty. I nearly drowned the world with pleasure. It was a revolution. And now they want to destroy me.’

  ‘Who?’ said Prattle, climbing down from the grave. ‘Who are they? A few philistines, old maids and tosspots with a morbid dread of their sexual parts.’

  ‘Policemen,’ said Swann. ‘Damn great policemen armed with hammers.’

  ‘They won’t try anything like that here,’ snorted Prattle. ‘Private property. Everything under lock and key.’

  ‘Did Marsh send you a parcel of pictures?’

  ‘A thousand of ’em!’ laughed Prattle. ‘All wrapped up to look like Fortnum & Mason hampers. The station master met them and brought them up here in his wagon.’

  ‘I’d like to see them again,’ said Swann.

  ‘The library is at your disposal, sir,’ said Prattle. He put an arm around the old man and guided him slowly back to the house.

  ‘By thunder, but it’s cold!’ he exclaimed as he unlocked the heavy, oak doors. The hall was dark and smelt of damp. ‘I’ll fetch a maid to light the fire and bring you a flask of something hot.’

  But Kingdom Swann didn’t hear him. He was already wading into the gloom, searching the cobwebs and shadows.

  45

  He sat beneath the Hindu bronze of the woman and monkey locked in love and surveyed the albums and boxes that stretched the length of the library floor. Here was everything he feared had been lost, from the early sepia portraits of ghostly nudes in silver fog to the recent coloured photographs of red-haired, blue-eyed women with crimson-tipped breasts and blushes on their bountiful buttocks. The complete works of Kingdom Swann. The women he had known and loved and the women he had loved and forgotten. In the pages of a leather album he was reunited with Astor Pilbury, the notorious London beauty, who had broken hearts in Europe, Transvaal and Rajputana; who owned a castle in Spain and a mountain in Scotland; who had paid a fortune to have herself photographed, half-woman, half-fish, a mermaid drowned in a fisherman’s net. And here a woman with a name long-forgotten, immortal now as a queen of Persia, naked on a panther skin, head thrown back in pain or pleasure, one breast clasped in a serpent’s tail while the monster, with its jaws sprung open, curled out its tongue to nuzzle her notch. Among the rich and famous he found shop-girls and factory-slaves, who had come and gone in drudgery, leaving no mark upon the world, but for these few photographs where their simple beauty shone clear to heaven. And, for Swann, these were not pasteboard fantasies but laborious transformations, suggesting alternative realities, secret identities, a method of scratching at the hard and dirty crust of the world to reveal the beauty beneath its surface. He had taken commonplace women and fashioned them into exquisite objects of desire, erotic seraphim to stir the senses and dazzle the eye. The women were gone, grown old and faded, but their magic influence remained. This was the proof of his alchemy.

  46

  During the months that followed Swann’s arrival at Prattle House a small but distinguished stream of visitors made a pilgrimage to the library. George Augustus Fry was the first to pay his respects. Fry had once owned the London Exhibition Rooms and been considered the foremost rival of Murray Marks, the famous Oxford Street art dealer. During the 1890s he had commissioned Swann to photograph a string of beautiful mistresses. The women had long since been lost, along with their portraits, and he seized this last opportunity to reflect on the triumphs of happier times.

  He was followed by Sir Frederick Watson, Alfred Lord Spencer and other patrons of the arts. Prattle spared no expense on the comfort of his
guests and the big house became a favourite haunt of the aged dilettante.

  At Christmas Cromwell Marsh arrived on the train from London. He appeared at the door, dressed in a wolf-skin coat, with twelve pieces of leather luggage. He had left his wife to enjoy the season’s jollifications in the care of their eldest daughter and, at Prattle’s request, come down to talk of the old days with Swann. He greeted the photographer with a great deal of affection and brought him news from Golden Square.

  ‘Ethel prospers but Alice is down with a touch of distemper on account of a change in the weather; the children are bigger, the old one is smaller and Gloria has come to stay having quit her room in Old Compton Street being tired, as she says, of a life spent praying with her knees in the air.’

  ‘Do they have enough of everything?’ asked Swann, happy to remember them. ‘How do they manage in the house?’

  ‘They want for nothing, thanks to your generosity. Ethel has engaged a cook and has every hope of finding a maid. She sends her love, together with Alice and Gloria, and the children send you a box of peg-dolls which I’ve packed away in my luggage.’

  ‘And Mrs Marsh?’

  ‘Mrs Marsh, may God preserve her pipes and tubes, enjoys a spell of very poor health. You’ve never seen so many doctors! It’s costing me a fortune. They’re forever rubbing her chest or sticking their fingers up her bum. She has ointments for every part of the body and pills for every day of the week. She’s never enjoyed herself more.’