by Joan Taylor
I stared at it. He stared at me.
“Is it a striking resemblance, or—”
Christ, I thought. “No, Mr. Prain. It’s me from about five years ago. I’ve always liked this print. Denis Johns.” My voice was cream. And what did he want me to say? Did he expect me to redden, cringe, protest that I only did it for the money, or for a friend? Was he expecting me to be struck speechless that my body, naked and nubile, should be flashed across the tea table, the shadows playing against my round breasts, the curve of my stomach and thighs, arms, pubic hair? I felt chilly inside, and knew suddenly that I was impervious to whatever he said to me on this matter. Indignation made me stone. What was he up to? Blackmail? His gaze was just as clinical as before, but now I met it, confident that my manner was truly unruffled. I was not at all embarrassed or ashamed of the picture of my nude body. I had given him my stories, poems; to bear my naked imaginings to such a man now seemed a far more horrible thing. “I used to model for life classes at Slade,” I said. “I have always known a lot of artists and photographers who I’ll sit for.”
He looked as if he was listening, but it was to the machinations of his own mind that his attention was drawn. He was thinking. Presently, he said, somewhat brusquely, “Interesting.” Was this a fitting response to the news that I posed naked for artists?
“Why interesting?”
“Nothing,” he said, flapping away the query like a fly. A sharp, quick smile. “I bought this print at Denis Johns’ exhibition at the Waterside Studios.”
“A year ago?”
“Indeed.”
I handed the print back to him, and as I did so I noticed a slight trembling in his fingers. Trembling? Was he afraid of me, or of his own intentions? So he had invited me here for other reasons. There was something about him now, in his moment of slight weakness, that unleashed some ire, truant and vandalistic. I had been misled.
“Why did you buy it?” I asked, my voice hard.
“Oh …” Carefully, he placed the photograph back in its former position. “I’ve collected a number of photographs over the years. I have a rather good collection … an Arbus, and—.” He stopped. He purposely arrested himself, aware that he was not answering the question. His hands went to the expanded prayer position and he looked down. I noted that he kept a close watch on himself, observing his movements as closely as he observed mine. He would not let himself waffle, not as I did. He looked up. “I liked the image. I liked the form and the chiaroscuro. I thought it evoked sensuality, eroticism even, without being too titillating. It struck the right balance. With Page 3 girls and all the rest, I think it must be increasingly difficult for photographers to use the female form. Johns has succeeded here. Also …” There was slight hesitation. “I thought the woman was very beautiful.”
My wits were like razors ready to slash out across the table top.
“Some photos are more flattering than others,” I said.
I thought he might say something dreadful like “some women are more beautiful than others” that would have made the world groan, but he did not. The tone of the exchange suddenly altered. There was a gravid pause, large with his thoughtfulness, with embryonic ideas of how the conversation should now proceed. The excitement was over. But what had he wanted?
“I keep this upstairs as a rule,” he said, “with other photographs, in a gallery that’s almost devoted to that medium. All these antiques can become stifling after a time.”
“Yes,” I said, with a sidelong look to the ogre.
“So you used to model regularly?” he asked, sitting up to return to a more chatty mode. I felt there was now something disconcertingly abrupt about him. Was it nerves? Outwardly, he seemed composed, but was he? Why the shaking hands? I felt his thoughts racing, but what were they?
“That was how I earned my money when I first came to England, before I began selling second-hand books.” My attitude remained calm. “I also worked as a barmaid. Life modelling for painters was easy, but it’s boring and not that well paid. Photographic work was better because you can keep moving, and believe me, if you’ve found a pose and you get cramp in your tendon, no one thanks you for curling up in a ball.” Introducing a wry note did not help the peculiar atmosphere between us.
Then, one of those awkward silences that one only really feels at such times gaped between these words and the next utterance. He needed to take stock of his position, and clearly felt no qualms about causing the hiatus. Curl up in a ball like a hedgehog, I thought. That was what I wanted to do. Beware of the spikes.
The silence grew wider and wider. In fact, it was probably not long, but under the circumstances it seemed an eon. Mr. Prain was not perturbed by it. He poured himself another cup of tea. I lifted my hand to indicate I did not want another. He was momentarily lost in pensiveness, lost, that is, to me; down a secret tunnel that I could not peep into, not of fantasy, but of cogitation. I was not musing. I was painfully conscious of the multiple noises of which we are normally not aware: a plane flying overhead, a cat yowling in the distance, my intestines making a pernicious rumble, the birds, and then the sound of someone trying to start a motor. Looking through the window, I saw that the gardener was back. He had placed a tool kit down on the ground, and was giving the motor another try before settling down to take the engine apart.
I snapped a glance back at Mr. Prain’s thoughtful face and saw his eyelids flutter enough in my direction to indicate that his attention had returned to me. I made a decision. Now I would ask what I should have asked the moment I stepped through the front door.
“Did you read my work, Mr. Prain?”
“Oh do call me Edward,” he replied. “There’s no need to be so formal.”
“Edward,” I repeated, like a compliant child, hoping that the next request would not be for “Eddie” or “Ted.”
He smiled a trifle unnaturally, but as if he had set something to rights that had caused him vexation for a considerable time. We were to be on first names. If we were speaking French, would we now be saying tu to one another? I remembered once making a mistake with the phraseology in a school test: I had people using the word tuer, to kill, rather than tutoyer. “Shall we not kill each other now?”
“Yes, I did. It’s quite good,” he said.
My jaw dropped. I was half expecting him to evade the question, after his detour into how he wished to be addressed.
“I must say, though, that it intrigues me how old-fashioned you are in your fictional style, considering … well, how you are. I thought of Proust once or twice. To be frank I leave the vetting of manuscripts to my editors, and they only give me things that have some problem or some special interest, so I may be gaining an unbalanced picture. But you are much more classical than I expected.”
“It’s quite good,” came the echo in my head. “Quite good.” “Proust?” Forget about the photo, I thought. He is now going to discuss my writing. Then I can go.
“How am I classical?” I asked.
This appeared to Mr. Prain a very strange question. “How are you?”
“Yes.”
“You relish style, structure, and words. You believe in the power of words.” The puffball of tension he had held within him had exploded. I was in my proper place again.
“Don’t all writers?”
“No.”
I waited for him to say something else. He did not. He looked at his nails. “Is that all you’re going to say about my work then?” I asked.
“For now, yes.” Then he smiled a little tentatively and added, “If you don’t mind.”
I looked away, confused. So this was not the time to exit. I could not go until he had returned my typescripts and said all he had to say. I could not. I shifted back in my chair, and as I did so I noticed a tiny sense of relief, a minute sigh, as if a part of me did not mind staying, as if it did not want our conversation to end. But I did not want him to think I was willingly surrendering to him and his plans for the day. “You have a nerve,” I said cooll
y, “to bring out that photo, and then to say only this.”
“For the moment. I have your typescripts elsewhere, and it’s better we wait till I have looked again at my notes. Wouldn’t you prefer I show you the house?”
“No, actually,” I said. “But if that’s what you want, then so be it.” About time I was stroppy, I thought.
A timorous smile on his lips. A flash of insecurity. I stared at him. I studied him, trying to fathom what was in his mind. I made him into a learned monk, a fifteenth-century friar in Italy. He would philosophise about politics, theologise about art, shun sex, think of it constantly. He would be a secret practitioner of alchemy. He was a man who might, because of the whim of a prince, become a court official, or else be burnt at the stake. The image covered him for a moment, and then was drawn away, and I saw him again sitting as he was in his leather chair. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him. I knew then that he felt that, despite certain anxieties, this was all going very well, and our conversation was taking the path he intended. But I withdrew. I gazed down at the floor momentarily embarrassed by the fact that we had been looking at one another. The air in the room seemed stale. I wanted to thrust open the window. He continued to fix me with a stare that I felt upon my skin like a draught.
And then Monique was there. Enter Monique, centre stage, with grace, with hesitation, with charm. “Excuse me,” she said. “Would you like fresh tea?”
“Would you?” he asked.
“No thank you,” I said. I summoned politeness and forbearance and put a mild expression on my face. I sat forward. I must be more assertive, I decided. This is becoming strange. “All right, then show me the house now, and that gallery with the photographs.”
“Certainly,” he replied, formally.
Mr. Prain and I rose, and moved away from the tea table, but, as he passed Monique, she bowed her head towards him and whispered something. His forehead wrinkled. His dark eyes flashed, concentrating, like those of a rodent.
A conspiracy. I knew. Collusion. Aiding and abetting. Murmured French. What better tongue for intrigue? I wondered if they were lovers, but decided I had got it back to front. Lovers can appear like conspirators because they have their own language, their own purposes and codes. Conspirators therefore remind one of lovers. This is what I decided, looking at them.
Like the reader of a bad novel, who laments the time it takes to get to the end and cannot put the book down because the barbed bait of the promise of answers drags the reader on through the plot after one bite, so I, uncomfortable as I was, remained where I was.
chapter two | the bedroom
The brief discussion we had about my work, following so quickly on the revelation of the photograph, put me in a vulnerable and morose mood.
Dismissive, pompous, supercilious, conniving snob, I thought, sullenly. The adjectives I could have fun with here, in order to pinpoint precisely why he was so vexatious! He was nothing but a hubristic, Machiavellian, cunning, starchy, bumptious turkey cock! No, that would sound too much. A controlling, hoity-toity know-it-all. That was not quite right either. I wanted to sum him up. If I could define him perfectly, that would make him safer. Yes, I did like words.
I really did not understand what was happening between us. I had believed that he had invited me to his house to discuss my work, and instead we appeared to be playing a game of wits. I did not know what the rules were, or to what end this would lead. He had misled me into thinking he was interested in my typescripts, when he had other, ignoble, motives for inviting me to tea. Literature and the publishing industry was just something we could talk about in safety, intellectually, but our conversation was a mask.
Mr. Prain showed me the house. We went downstairs to the main hall and began from there, to the library, the ballroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the salon. There was the old Tudor part from the sixteenth century, and then newer parts which expanded sideways and upwards, with curious connections, corridors and staircases, and a secret passageway between the kitchen and the “study” where we had just been sitting, at which point I had a peculiar feeling of déjà vu. There were vestibules, large rooms, small rooms, furniture, carpets, paintings, ornaments, with everything perfectly displayed inside this architectural mishmash. A mirror. A vase. A tapestry. Precision.
Because they were generally spacious and sparsely furnished, the other rooms of the house made the room in which we had been sitting seem even more cluttered by comparison. This was the sort of house that was featured in glossy magazines: a photo spread in Hello! or OK in which an overly made-up lady in designer clothes would pose resplendently by a gold-framed portrait, or beside her wealthy husband, or hold a pug dog in front of a Louis Quatorze cabinet.
The tour of the house was a moratorium, and an escape. Gradually I felt myself relax, and release the tension in the muscles of my neck. I could be passive and listen as he recited the history of the building and his ancestors. He too could relax into a monologue he had repeated so many times before, for other guests. But in fact, deep down, I suspected now that he was no calmer than I. He had a way of suddenly glancing this way and that as if he expected someone to leap out; though I suppose he was simply observing, inspecting me in this environment where I clearly did not belong. He had an intention, nevertheless, that seemed to cause him some anxiety. He was designing things so that he would be successful in some matter of importance, which related to the photograph. And that matter might be sex, I thought, though, if so, he was going about things by the most bizarrely circuitous route anyone could imagine.
We were walking along the hallway of the top storey when we passed a small corridor with stairs at the end. I pointed it out and asked where the steps led up to.
“Oh just my bedroom,” he said, plainly. “There’s nothing interesting in there.” I felt him hesitate. Clearly, it was not good form to show a female guest his bedroom. But then he said, “Well, there is a rather good view. It’s built into part of the old attic, and there are windows facing two directions: north and south. You might enjoy seeing that.” Enjoy? Without demurring further he walked along the corridor, up the few steps, and opened the door. I trailed obediently behind, reflecting on the fact that this tour was supposed to be enjoyable for me.
His bedroom was so tidy it almost seemed unused, as bedrooms do when exhibited to the public—those bare bedrooms of stately homes—except that it had an en suite bathroom that was clearly the place where he performed his ablutions. Beyond the open door I could see a shelf with his shaving things (badger shaving brush, hand razor) beside a huge mirror.
The bedroom was quite dark, being wooden-panelled, and strangely shaped, with the ceiling sloping down at both sides. It was dominated by an antique four-poster bed with a heavy green counterpane. A leaded window provided a view to the back of the house—where the gardener was still tinkering with the lawnmower—and the woods, which I could now see stretched for several acres before merging into a shallow valley that adjoined farmland. Another similar window faced the front, where we looked down to the sweeping driveway, gardens bathed in sun, and the ostentatious wrought-iron gates of Walton Hall, with their giant pineapple-topped stone pillars on either side. Beyond these gates was the road, and then more woods, oblong fields ripe with wheat and barley which swayed in the breezes as if being stroked with invisible combs, meadows dotted with sheep and cows, cottages and farms, lanes, hedgerows, a distant village, a disused railway embankment running towards the horizon, and a sky like a vast blue sheet.
“What a beautiful day,” I said.
“We’re not scared,” came the echo in my head, from the children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. It’s a beautiful day, and they’re not scared, but when they find a bear in a deep, dark cave they are absolutely terrified and run as fast as they can back home, lock the door and climb into bed.
Uh-uh, Mr. Prain’s house. A big, rich house. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got
to go through it!
“It’s really nice to be in the countryside,” I said, trying not to sound either too regretful or effusive. It was beautiful, this rural England. In London, it sometimes felt that the city was all there was in this land, sprawling out its tentacles via the tube map. Here it felt as if London was far, far away. Here there were different birds: robins, starlings, yellowhammers, bluetits, chaffinches. I wanted to lean on the windowsill and absorb the scene, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, to take it back with me to the traffic and buildings. If only we could have been out walking down those lanes, to a canal, rather than stuck inside. I wished I could inhale the country air, the smell of herbs, flowers, fields, hay. I looked at it all before me. It might as well have been a painting in a gallery.
And then, as I felt this rush of longing, I was aware of him standing next to me, also looking at the scene, but not with my intensity. It was all too familiar to him. It was the usual view from his bedroom window in summer. It did not move him. He was more aware of me. I sensed he was aware of me as I was under my dress; fusing the image of the photograph with the woman he had beside him.
But this moment passed. The mask was donned again with perfect decorum. He began to tell me about the area, about nearby Towcester and Banbury. He said that we were, in fact, in the Midlands, in “the shire of Northampton”; that the Roman name for Towcester was Lactodurum; that an internecine battle was fought in AD 556 between Cynric and Ceawlin and the Britons; that Banbury was under the bishop of Dorchester from the eighth to the eleventh centuries and then under the bishop of Lincoln; that Banbury Castle was constructed in 1125 but was penetrated by Parliamentarians during the Civil War and thereafter despoiled and torn down; that the famous Banbury cross was destroyed by fanatical Puritans in 1602, but the Victorians erected a new one in 1859.