A Division of the Light (7 page)

The deliberate echo of his own question was not lost on Gregory. He answered without emphasis.

“If you wanted Cassie to be here then she could be. But I'd ask her to leave if I felt that the chemistry worked better without her.”

“But she would stay in the office downstairs?”

“If it made you more comfortable.”

“I'm sure it would.”

“We'd have to see,” Gregory said, as if he found the discussion irksome.

Alice wondered if his relationships with women were always fleeting and without depth. Perhaps that was the way he preferred them to be.

“But if you took my portrait—if I
let
you take it—then what could I possibly find in it that I didn't already know?”

“We'd both find signs that we hadn't expected. There are things going on inside you that I don't know about. I don't think you understand them, either.”

Alice felt that Gregory would argue anything to get his own way. It was quite likely that he often did not believe what he was saying. He probably saw no contradiction in this. Stung at being patronized, she turned on him.

“Why do you expect me to respond to flattery? You told me I was special. I knew you didn't mean it. If you really thought I was all that special then you wouldn't speak to me as if I was just another face to frame in your viewfinder.”

The accusation irritated Gregory more than she had expected. He had reached the end of his patience, and it would be reasonable if he demonstrated anger.

“Do you think I speak like this to anyone?” he demanded.

“Don't you?”

“You keep asking questions—now let me put some questions to
you
. Why are you so suspicious of my motives? Why can't you accept that I have an eye for composition, and for human features and form, which is out of the ordinary? Are you simply incapable of understanding that I can look at you and see things that you'll never find in any mirror? You could stare at your reflection for days and never discover what I can show you. I know what I'm talking about—this is a job that I've done very, very successfully for more than thirty years. And I've always,
always
followed an honorable protocol, just as I would do for you.”

He bent over the desk monitor and switched it on. Taken aback by the energy of his response, Alice took a step further away. After a few moments the screen flickered into life and Gregory moved the cursor to an icon. His voice had thickened.

“Those prints are all enlarged detail, apart from one. These are the originals. All of them were taken on the spur of the moment. There was no time for proper composition. I knew I'd be able to work on them later to bring out their best qualities. But you can't or won't see the value in those versions. Instead you just want to study the raw material.”

Twelve photographs appeared on the screen, lined up like cards in a game. Capping them, at their end, was the thirteenth, a blurred image of a distant motorbike about to enter a stream of traffic.

“I'll print out a copy of each one and you can take them away,” Gregory said angrily. “I don't want them back. We're not likely to see each other again.”

Alice saw that Gregory had lied when he told her that he had
taken only five or six. But she did not protest, and instead stepped closer to the screen.

What she saw did not involve her. Instead she felt detached from the woman in the photographs, the woman who looked like her, wore her clothes and was thrown forward in the way that she had been. The sequence appeared as inauthentic as a re-enactment by impersonators.

“These don't seem like me either,” she admitted. Alice wondered if she might not even have recognized herself if she had not been told the truth.

The comment made Gregory pause. From somewhere in the studio there came the sound of a ticking clock; Alice had not noticed it before. She turned to him.

“Of course I
know
that it's me—or rather, a semblance of me. And I know this is a record of what actually happened. But it seems to be happening somewhere else and to a different person.”

“Why should you think that?” he asked quietly. “You recognize that all of these images are truthful. This isn't your double, is it?”

“Of course not.”

“Right. Do you often have a feeling of not belonging to the world?”

“Sometimes,” Alice admitted, and would not look at him.

Gregory became as sleek as a tempter.

“Maybe you were just thinking of the girl with the visions. Maybe she's been on your mind without your realizing it. You've been infected by a sense that the real world is a kind of illusion.”

Alice shook her head. She was no longer sure what to think. Gregory went on.

“When you looked at that girl's face you must have seen that she was a contradictory mixture of the worldly and the unreal.
What I told you was true. A successful portrait opens up the personality.”

But Alice would not discuss it, and broke the spell.

“Can you put these on a full screen? Or enlarge parts of them?”

“That's how I decided on the characteristics that were best.”

“This one,” Alice said, pointing to the image of her body as it was flung toward the lens with its arms outstretched.

Within a second it filled the screen. Alice stared hard at it, searching for signs that she could not detect.

She held out one finger near to the screen and traced the shape of an oval around the head.

“Can we get closer?” she asked.

Gregory zoomed in on a close-up of the angled head. All that Alice could see was her hair, the dark glasses, a face so foreshortened it could have been that of a child being born. And no matter how hard she stared, there was nothing unusual, nothing unexplained and nothing unidentified that could be seen around her.

“And my hands?” she asked.

Again, there was nothing to the hands other than their reaching out in a reflex.

“What are you looking for?” Gregory asked.

“I'm not sure. I thought that maybe something would be made visible. It was all so sudden, so hurtful . . .”

“
Made
visible? Objects are either visible or they're not. I don't understand.”

“No. No, I imagine that you wouldn't.”

Gregory leaned purposefully on the table. It creaked slightly beneath his weight.

“When we met by the river you hinted at something that might
be found in the pictures. I told you there was nothing unusual about them. Do you want me to ask you again what you're looking for?”

Alice was aware that, for Gregory, the idea of the immaterial suddenly irrupting into the visible world was absurd.

“I've heard it said that sometimes cameras catch light patterns around people. Light patterns that can't normally be detected with the naked eye.”

Still Gregory did not grasp what she meant, and he spoke as if he expected Alice to find his answer reassuring.

“Photography has been going beyond the visible spectrum since just after its invention,” he said, and then he paused. She looked down at the prints again. “You mean auras,” he said.

Suddenly defensive, Alice folded her arms tightly around herself and continued to examine the prints.

“They don't exist,” Gregory said flatly. “Oh, there are charlatans who doctor their photos to show faces and bodies surrounded by haloes of color, but that's easy manipulation. Only the gullible would believe it.”

“I see,” Alice said quietly, although it seemed to her obvious that under certain intense conditions the body would throw off an energy, a vibration, a shield that perhaps only certain kinds of photography would be able to capture.

“I'm not interested in metaphysics,” Gregory said. “Meaning resides in the here and now. Truth lies in how a body moves or facial muscles react. There is no mystery, no transcendence, no Great Beyond. Images and memories are the only things that people leave behind. There's nothing else.”

Alice remained silent.

Confidential, brotherly, apparently trustworthy, Gregory edged
a little closer. He lowered his voice as if they could somehow be overheard.

“It would be a big step for you; I know that. But it's one that you should take. You have nothing to fear.”

Alice did not react, but stared hard at the woman in the photographs.

“More than anyone else I can think of,” Gregory went on, “you deserve to be in front of a lens. When you go home to Thomas Laidlaw I want you to think about that. And I want you to know that I'll be considering the best way to pose you.”

The muscles at the back of Alice's legs had begun to tremble as though under pressure. She wondered if that shaking would be visible to Gregory if he stepped back and studied her again.

“I'll portray you in black-and-white prints,” he said. “Humphrey Jennings said that black-and-white film lives on ideas but color lives on sensation. That's why I'll show you in black-and-white. I think you'd approve.”

Alice was not sure whether or not she had moved her head.

“Promise me to think about it,” Gregory said, and then waited. “Of course,” he continued, “we'd save a lot of time, and a lot of uncertainty, if you agreed now. We would each know where the other stood.”

Alice remained silent. Her mouth was dry.

“Wouldn't we?” he asked.

Thomas lay with his feet up on the sofa and a book open in front of him. Apparently absorbed, he was surreptitiously watching Alice. All was quiet but for the sound of her shoes on the floor. She paced the confines of the flat as though forbidden to leave.

The book was a gazetteer of European archaeological sites, its
text liberally illustrated with maps, plans and photographs. On the previous night Thomas had returned to the flat to discover Alice examining its images of tilted monoliths, collapsed tombs, and half-robbed mounds of stone. When he asked if she wanted to know more about the sites she had shaken her head and not looked up. But she had carried on turning the pages, apparently at random.

Thomas was puzzled. Some time ago Alice had insisted that she had lost interest in the technicalities of archaeology, but now she appeared to be discovering something unexpected in bleak images of deserted remains. He was not to know that it was not historical data that intrigued her, but composition, lighting, and atmosphere. It was as if Alice wished the sites to be stripped of all investigation, to become once again unknowable, and to exist purely as mysteries or symbols.

Thomas felt an ache of regret. In their early days together he had enjoyed telling his lover about the evidence of lost worlds that was still scattered across the European landscape. Even the names were evocative—Los Millares, Long Meg and Her Daughters, Rocha dos Enamorados, Grime's Graves. For Alice this knowledge was intriguingly arcane, and she had always been attracted to people who were experts on subjects about which she knew little. What had been especially appealing about Thomas's expertise was that within it she could always read an inference of development, of improvement, of ascent. No matter how much he insisted that such a model of progress had been discredited, to Alice it still seemed as if the world had been programmed to improve.

Now, alive with nervous energy, Alice prowled the flat while Thomas eyed her like a keeper. She checked the contents of
drawers, moved ornaments fractionally, touched the corners of a framed poster to make sure that it hung straight on the wall. Then she stared out of the window at the busy street below for several minutes, all the time swaying almost imperceptibly from side to side. Thomas recognized that these were displacement activities. Alice had begun to exhibit them with increased frequency; often they led to distressing scenes.

When she left the room and went into the tiny kitchen he waited for a few moments, put down his book, and then followed her. Alice was kneeling in front of the refrigerator making a silent inventory of its contents. Her blouse with the vertical blue stripes was open one button too far and the sleeves were pushed up to her elbows.

When he told her that there was no shortage of food, her distracted expression made him think that she had not heard.

“There's something on your mind,” he said. “Why don't you come back and sit down and we can talk about it. Or maybe we could go out for a few hours. We could go anywhere you want.”

“I'm just making sure nothing has been forgotten. Someone has to keep on top of these things. Who else is going to make sure that everything runs smoothly?”

Alice closed the fridge door, stood up and folded her arms. Her fingers tapped against her own skin with the rapidity of a Morse signaler. When she next spoke she did not look at Thomas but to one side, as if a third person stood within the room, invisible and silent. He thought it best not to break the spell.

“I may as well tell you,” she said at last.

Whenever she made a comment like that, a tide of panic rose within him.

“Tell me what?”

“What I've decided to do. You see, I found out something from Gregory Pharaoh.”

“There's something in those photographs?”

Alice was silent. She did not seem to have listened.

“You could identify the people who robbed you?” Thomas suggested.

She shook her head in dismissal. “No, it's not that. That doesn't matter any more. Those two men were just means to an end.”

Thomas waited. He could hear traffic noise filtering up from the street.

“He told me that I have a certain . . . quality.”

“Quality,” he repeated flatly.

“He told me that I'm photogenic. I didn't expect that.”

Thomas felt a surge of relief. All that had happened was that Alice had been flattered. A photographer such as Pharaoh would be prone to exaggeration; sooner or later Alice would realize it. There was no cause for Thomas to worry.

But she acted as if the word had set a seal on her uniqueness, and when she continued she spoke like an advocate.