by Francis King
Then at long last, sweat darkening his pale blue shirt under the armpits and glistening on his forehead, he suddenly reached a place, shadowed by overarching trees and the grass almost waist-high, that made him at once say to himself, with a mingling of relief and triumph, ‘Yes, yes, this is it!’ He had searched in vain in books and on the internet for the exact location at which Millais had sat on his stool before his easel. But he had absolutely no doubt that this was where it was.
Here the often narrow river was unusually wide as it curved in its negotiation of a dumpy hillock surmounted by three elder trees. The contrast between the emaciated near-nudity of those trees and the green luxuriance of the willows on the opposite bank was startling. Perhaps it was on that hillock that Millais had set up stool, easel and umbrella as the rain fell relentlessly and he no less relentlessly worked at his masterpiece. In the otherwise symmetrical curve there was another, far smaller curve, where a tributary stream – yes, the brook, the brook, he thought, of Gertrude’s valedictory description – joined the river. Millais must have at once decided that that location was exactly right. That was what people had meant when they talked of his luck.
Hands on hips Luke stared from the coign of the hillock, with its dry, yellow grass and skeletal trees, across at the luxuriant arbour opposite. Then he glanced to right and left, on the other side of the bank. Far off to the right a tall, middle-aged man in a dark suit – how hot he must feel and how ridiculous to dress like that on a day like this! – was meandering along the tow path, a camera slung round his neck. A fellow photographer, perhaps even a rival. Nearer, to the left, a woman sprawled out in a deck-chair, a red bug of a car parked behind her in the shade. Two small girls, dressed only in what at this distance looked liked white knickers, were playing in the shallows. From time to time the wind carried their excited voices and laughter over to him. But the sounds did not disturb him in the least, as first the sounds of the thudding football and the foreign male voices and then of the blaring transistor radio had done.
He lowered his rucksack and took out the Leica. Bought second hand, it dated from a period when he had still not been born. By contemporary standards it was primitive. But it was the camera that he treasured the most. The difference between using it and the Canon was the difference between driving an ancient Rolls Royce with a manual gearshift and a new Honda with automatic transmission, he had often thought. In the first case, troublesome though it was, one had so much more control over precisely what one was doing.
But on this occasion he felt dissatisfied with the Leica. As he first calculated distance and then, holding out the meter, aperture and shutter speed, he realised that that leafy, flowery bower of the painting was too far away. He needed the Canon and its powerful telephoto lens. He sighed, replaced the one camera, took up the other. Then, as he gazed at the screen of the Canon, he all at once had the demented illusion that something at once devastating and exhilarating had happened. There, in the centre, a figure lay out for him on the quiet water, hands and face pale, eyes open as if in a trance, robes heavy around her and yet never dragging her down into the chilly depths and so out of sight. But the figure was not that of the beautiful, doomed woman who had lain for hours on end in lukewarm water in a bathtub. Instead, it was that of another beautiful, doomed woman, his wife, his Joy. He gasped. Then frenetically he began clicking. As he did so the figure slowly bled out of the image on the screen, until the arbour was once again no more than a stretch of water overhung by willows and surrounded by reeds and flowers. That he had suffered such an obvious hallucination alarmed him. It showed the depth and distraction of his grief.
He continued to take photographs now from this angle and now from that. At one point, kneeling on the grass, he had to replace the by now exhausted film with another. He laboured to the top of the knoll and took a photograph from that vantage. Then he slithered down it. He changed cameras and again took some photographs with the Leica. He knew that those would be inferior, but he persisted out of loyalty to his ancient favourite.
He hardly heard the car that was lurching and swerving over hummocks of grass as it approached. But he turned as its engine abruptly cut out, and first one door slammed and then the other.
‘Excuse me, sir.’
‘Yes?’
Two uniformed police officers, a tall, gaunt man and a tiny, tubby woman with large calves, were walking towards him. It was the tall, gaunt man who had spoken. Even though the pace of the couple was so leisurely, Luke had a sense of stealthy menace. Suddenly he felt afraid, as he had suddenly felt afraid when in Morocco the official had asked him why he had not accompanied Joy on her last, fatal walk along the beach at night.
‘May I ask what you are doing, sir?’
‘Well, taking photographs. As you can see.’ He held up the Canon.
‘May I have that, sir?’ The policeman extended a large hand. Luke noticed that the band of the wedding-ring on its fourth finger was unusually broad. Luke surrendered the camera. Later, he was to wonder why he had done so with such submissiveness.
‘What’s all this about?’ he asked as the man handed the camera to the diminutive woman. She would have been pretty if it had not been for the almost total absence of any eyebrows.
It was the woman who answered the question. ‘ We had a complaint,’ she said. ‘By mobile.’ She had an oddly metallic voice and her diction was so precise that it sounded almost prim. Each word was like a small stone being dropped, at regular intervals, into a tin.
‘A complaint? What am I supposed to have been doing?’
The man now replied. ‘Over there.’ He pointed across the river. ‘Those two kids. Someone complained that you were spending a long, long time photographing them.’
‘What absolute nonsense! I wasn’t photographing them. I was hardly aware of them.’
‘Then what were you doing?’
‘I was photographing that bend of the river. That’s all.’
‘And why should you be doing that?’ Again it was the small stones falling into the tin.
‘Because that’s where a famous artist painted his most famous picture.’
‘And who would that be?’ the man asked in a voice of disbelieving sarcasm.
‘He was called Millais – J.E. Millais. The painting was called ‘Ophelia’. It was here that he sat. On a stool. At his easel. It rained all the time. He used to have an umbrella open above him.’
The man might not have been listening. Again he held out his hand: ‘ May I have the other camera, sir?’
Luke hesitated. The man stooped and jerked it out of the rucksack. Then he said: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us.’
‘Come with you?’ Luke was incredulous.
‘Yes, sir. To help us with our enquiries. If we have a complaint of this seriousness, then we have to investigate it. Fully.’
‘But what have I done?’
There was no answer.
‘Better come along, sir,’ the woman said. ‘No point in wasting time.’
The small house was crowded with people. Luke might have had more acceptances than expected to a party.
A policewoman, not the one encountered by the river, peered at a photograph in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. She picked it up and peered at it even more closely. ‘And who might this be?’ she asked in a heavy Scottish accent.
‘My daughter?’
‘Your daughter?’
‘Yes, my daughter.’
‘Why has she got nothing on?’
‘There was a heat wave. We – she, her mother, I – were in the back garden. That garden’s not in the least overlooked. You can see for yourself.’ He wished that he did not sounds so flustered.
‘How old was she at the time?’
‘Five.’
‘Where is she now?’ a male officer behind her put in.
‘With her mother. We’re divorced now. She has custody.’
‘She has custody?’
Luke nodded.
�
�Why should that be?’
‘Well, that was what the court decided. And my second wife and I didn’t oppose the decision. That seemed the best for Carrie – for my daughter.’
‘And where is your second wife?’ the woman demanded.
‘Dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yes. Dead. She died seven weeks ago.’ His voice was now also dead.
Remorselessly they went through drawer after drawer in their ravenous appetite for anything put down on paper. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to take this,’ one or other of them would say, holding up a file or a packet of letters. They also announced that they would have to remove his two computers, all his disks, and the photographs so carefully stored in boxes in the garage.
‘But I need that,’ he repeatedly protested. Or: ‘But that has nothing to do with my private life. That’s only to do with my work.’
Sometimes one of them vouchsafed an expressionless: ‘ Sorry’. Sometimes there was no response at all.
Eventually, in a state of despair, incredulity and rage, he collapsed on to a sofa and let them get on with their task.
After they had bagged or boxed everything and were about to leave him, he asked: ‘And how long are you going to keep all these things?’
‘For as long as is necessary,’ the officer in charge replied.
‘And how long is that?’
The officer shrugged. ‘As long as it takes.’
One of the women volunteered: ‘ Your guess is as good as ours.’
At the door Luke said. ‘Why did that woman complain to you? What got into her? This sort of thing has become a crazy obsession with people. I’m not interested in children, never have been, never, never. For God’s sake I’ve been married – married twice.’
‘We can’t reveal our sources’ the officer in charge replied. ‘If there’s a complaint, we have to act on it.’
They went on with their stacking of the bags and boxes in their van. Then an officer appeared carrying the desktop, immediately followed by another carrying the laptop. ‘Don’t worry. No harm will come to these,’ the second said. ‘ We have our experts.’
‘But I can’t do without them. I need them.’
He had said it before. This time he might not have spoken. No one paid any attention, as they continued to hurry about their tasks.
Once again Luke had slept only fitfully. At one point, soon after four, he had even got up and decided to play some music. But the CD of the music that he most wanted to hear, the slow of movement of the Elgar piano quintet – so sublimely reposeful and consolatory, he had always thought – was mysteriously not in its place in the rack by his bed. Feverishly he had once again searched, eventually causing a number of disks to cascade to the floor. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck! He had stooped to retrieve them. The Schumann Violin Concerto wasn’t there, either. Those bloody idiots must have taken the disks by mistake. It was crazy, it was idiotic. He couldn’t even listen to the music that he wanted to. And if he now wished to send an e-mail, he had to trek out to the cyber café in the High Street. People had talked of Millais’s luck. How about his own ill-luck?
Later Carrie, who was on one of her weekend visits, and he sat out on the lawn of the little back-garden, having breakfast. Luke stared up at the sky as he munched on a slice of toast that he had managed to burn. It was so crisp that fragments scattered down from his mouth on to his shirt.
‘What’s the matter, daddy?
‘The matter? Nothing. I couldn’t sleep. That’s all.’ He had told no one of his trouble with the police. Irrationally, although he was totally innocent, he felt both guilt and shame.
‘Something’s the matter.’ Lydia was often remarking, with a mixture of pride and anxiety, that Carrie was so grown-up for her age. She was right. Now the girl leaned across the table: ‘Daddy, what is it? Tell me.’
He pondered, again biting on to what had once been a slice of bread but was now a charred rusk. Again fragments scattered downwards. His mouth filled with a bitter dryness. He felt that he was choking. He put a hand to his forehead. ‘I suppose I’m sad,’ he said. ‘ How can I not be sad? Nothing seems right. It’s all gone. Everything. I’m sad.’ His lower lip briefly trembled.
‘Oh, daddy!’ Impulsively she put a hand over his. He looked down, realising that she was once again biting her nails, as she had started to do when he and her mother had first agreed on a divorce. She jumped to her feet. He thought that she was going to come round the table to comfort to him. He would have welcomed that. It might have bridged the gulf that now seemed always to gape between them.
But, distracted, she suddenly swerved away. ‘Good morning, Mr Thai!’ All her attention was now focused not on him but on the Siamese cat. Tail erect and blank, pale-blue eyes blinking at the sunlight, he had come out through the kitchen door. He let out a miaow and then another, louder one.
‘Oh, Mr Thai, you’re always hungry! What’s the matter with you. Have you got worms? Wait a moment, darling. I’ll get you something.’
She walked into the kitchen and the cat padded after her. Luke put his head in his hands.
‘I’m glad to be able to tell you that our investigations have now been concluded and that we have decided not to proceed any further.’ The middle-aged, moustached officer in his too short grey trousers and dark-blue blazer with brass buttons might have been a Navy officer who had taken early retirement. Behind him stood a wispy young man in a brown suit, who stared at Luke with a disconcerting fixedness.
‘Well, that’s really big of you. How kind! And can you tell me when I can have back my computers – and my files – and my photographs – and my letters. That might make life a little more convenient for me. That might make it a little easier for me to get on with my job.’
‘I can get a van to drop them off tomorrow afternoon, sir. That’s what I was just going to propose. If you’re likely to be in and if that’s convenient for you.’
‘I can certainly arrange to be in.’
‘Then that’s agreed. Tomorrow. Some time between two and five-thirty.’
‘This person – this person who made these ludicrous accusation … I’d be very grateful if you could now let me have –’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question, sir. It’s not our policy in cases of this kind to reveal the identity of an informant. For obvious reasons.’
‘Don’t you think I’m owed an apology?’
The man shrugged. ‘Just as we cannot reveal an informant’s name and address, so we never reveal the name and address of the, er, accused party until a charge has been laid. So it would be impossible for any informant to get in touch even if he – or she – wished to do so. In this case, no charge has been laid. Or will be laid.’
‘Then how about an apology from you lot?’
‘From us, sir?’
‘Yes. From the police. A formal apology. After all, you’ve put me through a hell of a lot of anxiety and inconvenience.’
‘I don’t think you fully understand, sir. If I may say so. If we receive a complaint of this kind, then it is only our duty to investigate. Thoroughly impartially. That is what we did. We have now decided that you have no case to answer. That’s the end of the matter.’
‘So no one apologises for a total cock-up? Is that what you’re telling me?’
The man gave a twitchy smile and a little bow, as though in affirmation. Then he said: ‘The van will be with you tomorrow afternoon.’ He turned away. ‘Goodbye, sir,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘And thank you.’
As Luke walked down the steps of the Town Hall into the downpour, someone said his name. He turned. It was a tall, middle-aged man with an umbrella raised in a hand, while the other hand rested on the camera that dangled from his neck.
‘I wanted to congratulate you. You deserved more than a commendation. You ought to have won.’
Luke laughed. He agreed with the man but felt no bitterness. ‘Nothing in life is fair.’
‘How right you are! Few of us get ou
r deserts.’ The man was now close beside him. He smelled of something cloying and sweetish. Luke himself never used any sort deodorant or aftershave. ‘I’m a photographer myself. In an amateur way.’
‘That’s all I am. An amateur.’
‘But an amateur with a professional touch.’
They were now walking down the street, with the man holding the umbrella more over Luke than over himself.
‘Why didn’t you submit something yourself?’
‘Oh, I take my photographs only for my own pleasure. A private hobby.’ The voice had not so much a stammer as an intermittent hesitation.
‘How did you come to know my name? Have we met before?’
‘I overheard someone introducing you to someone else. You were sitting just in front of me during the prize announcements. I’d noticed you already.’ He paused. ‘ Your face was – familiar.’
‘What an idiot I was not to bring an umbrella or raincoat! If you don’t take a bigger share of your umbrella, you’re going to get horribly wet.’
‘Why don’t we have a drink at my place until it’s all over? It’s just round the corner from here. Left at the pillar box.’
Luke hesitated. ‘ Well … All right. That’s kind of you.’
The steep steps of the Edwardian block of flats were slithery from the rain. The entrance hall was large and dimly lit. Two upright, bentwood chairs flanked a cumbersome oak table. Othewise the whole area was bare.
‘The lift’s not working. D’you mind walking up?’
