Afterimage (27 page)

At first Isabelle doesn’t see Annie Phelan standing against the far wall, so intent is she on surveying for damage. When she does finally notice her, she just stands and stares, puts her hand into her dress pocket, and runs her thumb along the edge of the letter there, the letter she took from Eldon’s desk.
Miss Annie Phelan c/o Mr. Eldon Dashell
it says on the envelope. It’s postmarked Country Clare, Ireland. On the overleaf the name of the sender,
Phelan.
Isabelle has steamed the letter open and read the contents, knows what they say so thoroughly that she could open her mouth and recite them.

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.

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.

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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T
he 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.

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.

2 Author Biography

4 Helen Humphreys Discusses
Afterimage

9 Afterimage
and the Art of Julia Margaret Cameron

15 Web Detective