‘Lucky the Huns don’t have one,’ said Swann.
‘God would never allow such a thing!’ laughed Prattle.
‘He gave ’em the poison gas,’ barked Swann but nobody was listening.
‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ said Prattle. ‘That’s science! A machine that will put an end to war!’ He raised the shotgun and squinted along the barrel. He squeezed the trigger. There was an ear-bursting report and, high above their heads, a crow exploded in the bright, cold air.
‘Gotcha!’ he roared and everyone laughed.
49
The next morning Spinks returned to London and Valentine Crane made the long journey home to Cromer. Once Prattle had helped his guests board their trains he took Marsh for a spin in the car. They packed a basket of brandy and cheeses, buttoned themselves into waterproof jackets and sped off into the lanes.
Swann woke up to a silent house. He’d been dreaming of Fletcher-Whitby and his days in the painter’s studio. A woman rampant in polished armour, the smell of horses and turpentine. A Feast at the Camp of Boadicea. In the dream he’d been a young man, scaling the heights of the scaffolding with a paintbrush clenched in his teeth. When he woke up he was old. He dressed slowly, shuffled down to the library and settled himself in his favourite chair. The short excursion exhausted him. A maid lit the fire and brought him a bowl of porridge and treacle. He asked for a flask of coffee but the maid did not return. He spent the rest of the day in the chair, forgotten and neglected.
It was nearly dark when Prattle and Marsh presented themselves at the library door. The sound of their boots on the marble floor startled Swann from his slumber.
‘We’ve found the Hall of Earthly Delights!’ shouted Prattle, very jovial, when he saw Swann crouched in the chair.
‘The Naturalist’s Paradise!’ cried Marsh.
They stood before Swann and grinned down on him, their faces bright with brandy and their hot breath black from strong cigars.
‘And yet I’ve a notion there’s something missing,’ said Prattle, frowning and poking an ear.
‘What’s that?’ smirked Marsh and he winked at Swann.
‘A tribute to the architect,’ said his lordship, throwing open his coat to embrace the fire. ‘Look around you, sir, and feast on the loveliness of women. There’s nothing like it in the world. This treasure house of beauty! No pleasure palace in Persia with paintings of women more ravishing, no pagan temple to be found in Rangoon with statues cut more exquisite. But where’s a picture of the man who uncovered ’em? Show him to me, Mr Marsh, and let me kiss the hem of his photograph. Where’s a glimpse of the face that successfully launched a thousand hips?’
‘Nowhere!’ cried Marsh looking very surprised.
‘Nowhere!’ roared Lord Hugo Prattle.
‘He’d make a queer sight,’ said Swann, ‘rubbing shoulders with so many buttocks.’
‘You’re historical,’ frowned Marsh, biting on his cigar. ‘You’re the last of the old masters.’
His lordship nodded his head in agreement. ‘I hope you’ll do me the honour, sir, of sitting for your picture. I’ve already taken the liberty of making arrangements with Marsh.’
‘What?’ shouted Swann. ‘What?’
‘He don’t do it as a general rule,’ beamed Prattle, wrapping an arm about Marsh. ‘But I told him to find the equipment.’
‘All the best,’ announced Cromwell Marsh. ‘Property of the British All-Star Vitascope Company.’
‘You want my picture?’ gasped Swann, clutching his beard in alarm.
‘It would be a privilege, Mr Swann, although I trembles at the thought of it,’ said Marsh. The old man had been good to him and, despite his new-found success, Marsh wasn’t the sort to forget a friend. He was eager to pay his respects.
‘The Swann Library,’ said Prattle. ‘Your picture hung in a place of honour. Your name in gold above the door.’
Kingdom Swann looked terrified. He shivered and turned his face to the fire. His hands trembled as he rubbed his knees.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Prattle, feeling disappointed. He’d gone to a great deal of trouble in order to do him these honours.
‘I never had my picture taken,’ confessed Swann. ‘I was always behind the keyhole.’
‘It don’t hurt,’ chuckled Marsh.
‘I don’t know,’ said Swann. ‘I don’t know.’ He began to nervously pull on his nose.
‘We’ll have it finished before you know it,’ said Marsh.
‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather decline your invitation,’ said Swann. But his protests were in vain.
‘Take his arm and help him along,’ said Prattle, turning to Marsh. ‘It’s a cold night and we can’t keep the company waiting.’
They helped him to his feet and guided him from the library. They led him across a quadrangle of moonlit flagstones and through a low stone porch. They coaxed him up and down flights of stairs, along empty halls and narrow chambers, towards the east wing of the house. Swann was complaining and gasping for breath but they would not let him rest until they had climbed to the top of the stairs that led to the painted ballroom.
Cromwell Marsh drew open the doors. The ballroom was full of light. A colonnade of cast iron candelabra blazed and smoked the length of its walls. It was bright and hot and heavy with perfume.
At one end of the great hall a sweep of polished steps led to a circular platform built to balance an orchestra. The steps had been covered in silk carpets and richly embroidered materials. A quantity of muslin fell in a drift from the ceiling to form a canopy over the stage. And in the centre of the stage, surrounded by cushions and tasselled pillows, stood a red, lacquered chair the size of a mandarin’s throne.
The housekeeper stood beside the throne. She wore nothing but a pair of evening gloves. Her hair was tied in a knot and her eyes were obscured by a mask made from parakeets’ feathers. Her skin was very white and the only colour it possessed was in the crimson of her mouth and the rouge on her tiny nipples. She stood in silence beside the throne. In one arm she held an hour-glass filled with grains of fine black sand. The other hand cradled a human skull.
Beneath the housekeeper the housemaids, laundry-maids, kitchen-maids, scullery-maids and maids-of-all-work were arranged in order of importance. They were also naked but for the satin evening gloves and exquisite feather masks. Some wore ivory beads at their throats and others had pearls in their hair. They were sprawled upon the steps of the stage as if in voluptuous narcolepsy.
The entire household had been gathered before the throne, except for the crippled gardeners who were locked away in their cottages, sleeping off a ration of rum; and the cooks who, dressed in their best bib and tucker, were bent at a huge stone hearth, savagely stoking the fire.
As the three men approached, one of the maids raised an indolent hand to beckon Kingdom Swann forward. Prattle retired to a comfortable chair. Marsh attended his equipment. The camera he had borrowed was small and light and made the studio Fallowfield look like a clumsy museum piece. He adjusted the camera on its stand and patiently waited for Swann to take his position on the stage.
Swann ascended through the ghostly spiral of sprites until he had reached the red, lacquered throne. And then the sound of engines filled the hall. The ceiling shook with a rumble of thunder.
50
‘It’s the invasion!’ bellowed one of the cooks and made a kitchen-maid scream.
‘Silence!’ hissed Mrs Petersen and kicked the maid in the back of the neck. The maid squealed and smothered her face in her hands.
The noise of the engines grew louder, shook the stage and rattled the glass in the window frames.
Prattle ran to the window and anxiously stared through his own reflection. ‘It must be an air raid!’ he shouted and turned to rescue Swann from the stage. Marsh, looking sick, clung to his camera while the maids began to dress themselves in all the available carpets and cushions.
‘What’s happening?’ croaked Swann bu
t his voice was drowned in the uproar around him. He toppled from his throne and knocked the skull from the housekeeper’s arm. He followed the skull as it bounced down the steps and rolled across the ballroom floor.
‘Stop him!’ bawled Prattle, surrounded by struggling chambermaids.
The cooks ran forward and tried to catch him but Swann wriggled free and was gone. He was blundering down the central staircase when Mrs Petersen caught up with him and took him back to his room.
‘Take the children to the scullery,’ he whispered. ‘Go and tell Alice to hide them …’
‘There is no danger, sir,’ said Mrs Petersen softly.
She took him by the hand, this tall, masked woman in evening gloves, and he was too confused to resist. A small fire burned in the grate. A plate of biscuits beside the bed. She pushed him into a chair and told him to behave himself and stay in his room until the raiders had passed overhead and she could come back to collect him. Her breasts quivered. Her mouth was the colour of blood.
He waited until she had closed the door and, when she was gone, he was back on his feet and searching for the stairs to the front of the house. His lungs hurt. The cold night air filled his eyes with tears. He turned and followed a gravel path that would take him home to the library. He didn’t know what was happening but he knew that he was frightened and wanted to return to his ghosts. He wanted to be with his shadow hoard, restored to the arms of his fabulous women. Psyche, Venus and Aphrodite. The women he had known and loved and the women he had loved and forgotten. He wanted to be restored. He wanted to go home.
As he ran the terrible engine of war shrieked and seemed to swoop down on him. When he looked up he saw the machine, as big as a battleship, hung in the sky above his head. It shook the tiles on the roof and made the chimney stacks tremble. Swann staggered back through the shrubbery, fell down and blinked at the moon.
The Zeppelin had left its moorings in Germany for a bombing raid on Dover. Caught in a squall above the Channel the ship had been thrown from its course, lifted high and driven west towards the hills of Purbeck. Now the titan thundered towards the lake, turned to starboard and drew a great circle in the sky, attracted by the ballroom lights.
Swann dragged himself into the library and turned the key in the lock. He tiptoed down the darkened hall, through the corridors of leather books and hid behind a chair.
There was a sudden commotion from the house, the maids screaming, Cromwell Marsh shouting, and then Prattle was running across the lawn with a shotgun in his hand. As the Zeppelin made its second approach he jerked back the gun and fired both barrels at its flanks.
Nothing happened. He couldn’t understand it. He had expected fireworks. He had expected the monster to perish like a ha’penny birthday balloon. He threw down the gun and bellowed with rage, chased the airship over the lawn and threatened its crew with his fists.
No one saw the torpedo as it slipped from the cradle. It fell through the moonlight, wagging its tail and plunged through the library roof. There was a muffled roar and the library windows exploded.
Prattle sent for Marsh who was sent to summon the maids who ran away to dress and were sent to wake up the gardeners who were sent to search for buckets and pails which were brought to the house and inspected by Prattle who instructed them to be filled from the lake and emptied into the flames. And meanwhile the library burned to the ground.
The gallery collapsed. The cabinets were exploding like cannon, charged with hat pins, old shoes and buttons. All along the smoking shelves flames sprouted from the spines of books, blistered their bindings, fanned their pages, releasing millions of photographs that fluttered and shone in the turbulent air. Dipped in fire they caught alight, flew to the rafters, gathered like swarms of smouldering stars. And the old man ran about the library, snatching at the photographs as they burned in spirals around his head. He jumped and danced until the maelstrom swallowed him and then he laughed as his feet left the ground, his beard blew sparks and he shot out to heaven, carried aloft on a glittering pillar of flame and smoke.
Epilogue
Lord Hugo Prattle sits astride a prostrate mourner and tosses a sprig of snowdrops onto the lid of the casket.
‘He lived for the love of women and women was the death of him,’ he declares. ‘His work has perished but the man will not be forgotten.’
Beneath him, gathered in the shadow of the granite block, Alice and Ethel hold hands and try not to weep. The admirable Mrs Beeton and several girls from the Villa Arcadia murmur their approval and shuffle their feet in the snow. Marsh removes his hat and stares forlornly across the lake.
‘He’ll always be remembered,’ forecasts Mrs Beeton confidently. ‘He was an artist.’ She is wearing a black panther coat and a necklace of Whitby jet.
‘They should have shown him more respect,’ said Alice fiercely, glancing at Marsh.
Ethel sobs and buries her face in her mittens.
‘He was a man born out of his times,’ said Prattle. ‘But once he’s better understood the nation will do him the honours.’
‘One day they’ll write a book about him, I shouldn’t be surprised,’ says Marsh, who is cold and tired and already thinking of Pansy Waters and the work that is waiting in Cricklewood. The weather is bad and the trains are so slow. It’s time he bought a new motor car.
‘We’ll come here every year to put snowdrops on his grave,’ says Mrs Beeton as the little congregation turn away to the house with the promise of hot punch and toasted muffins.
Lord Hugo Prattle turns, one last time, to admire the cut of the polished casket and the circle of niveous bums. God rest you Kingdom Swann asleep in your borrowed monument. And then he climbs down and follows the party through the snow to the warmth and the lights of the house.
Behind him the seven marble mourners awake and a crack, no bigger then a worm, wriggles from the palm of an outstretched hand. The snowdrops shiver and fall to the ground. The tomb starts sinking into the lake.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Miles Gibson, 1990
New preface © Miles Gibson, 2013
The right of Miles Gibson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–29993–5
Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer Page 18