Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “You should verify them, Mr. Hallam. You needn’t make a fetish of being trusting.” He removed a cloth purse from inside his coat and poured a small handful of coins into his palm. “Have you ever had your picture taken, Mr. Hallam?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Would you give three pence in exchange for a likeness of yourself you could send home? I’d make a quarter plate for you — just a good, close likeness. Mr. Arnold is paying ten for a half, so it really is a very good trade.”

  Even though this suggestion agreed with his earliest instinct that he was going to be railroaded by Mr. Ennis, Hallam still agreed without hesitation; the thought of a portrait had of course occurred to him from the moment he walked into the studio. To be able to give his family such a keepsake and have it cost him next to nothing (even if he were about to be fleeced) was irresistible. He proposed returning to his rooms to change into something more appropriate, but Ennis demurred. “You’re no bride, Mr. Hallam. You’re a missing man to all who love you. Let them see you as you are.”

  “I’d rather something more formal, Mr. Ennis. Something that won’t worry them.”

  “A picture of Mr. J.G. Hallam, apothecary.”

  “No, not quite that. Just myself, a little spruced up.”

  Ennis shrugged and stepped aside so Hallam could go back into the street. In the cramped foyer Ennis saw the next two customers, both young women. “Come back at the end of the day, Mr. Hallam. Before the sun goes down, and we’ll do it then.” Ennis looked at the rest of his day’s work and knit his brows as if facing a trial. But Hallam had seen the women and knew this was a man who loved his work. “Miss Read?” Ennis said, and the one with the dun-colored hair and tiny red mouth stood and went through his door into the studio. The shaft of light stood within the room like a pillar of alabaster.

  WHEN THEIR ELDEST daughter, Jane, was still a toddler, she wandered out of the house one morning with nothing on but a little white dress. Alice ran to the shop, thinking Jane might have gone there to visit her father, and he and Alice rushed out onto the Hampstead Road calling her name, Hallam still in his frock, Alice six months pregnant with Cecile. They must have looked to all as if they’d just been robbed, frantically searching back and forth down the street, falling to bickering over which direction to take, each trying to think like a child. What had her conversation been like over breakfast? Had she said anything that might yield a clue as to where she had gone? He begged Alice not to weep as they swept down toward Harrington Square and Arlington Street. If lost, Jane may have tried to trace her way back to the house on Albert Street, he thought aloud. But here, at the fork of three major byways, where the Southampton Arms stood, any wandering child would have been in danger of being hit by cabs, carts, or just horses and riders. You won’t be able to see, he said to Alice angrily, stop crying. They halted people on the sidewalk, hailed the hackneys to ask if they’d seen the child. Alice ran with one hand over her stomach.

  He thought: What will be the last image of the girl I carry in my mind? What will be the final expression in my memory, always, that I will think I had not paid enough attention to? Your father loves you, he thought, pressing this sentiment to the air around them, urging it to its home. Beloved, listen to my voice.

  The shops and people in their workaday clothing sped by. Alice should not run like that, he thought. Bells and organ music filtered past. He insisted she sit and he crouched in front of her as she rested on a barrel outside of Hamilton’s Meats. “She is somewhere,” he said. “You wait here for us. Don’t move.”

  “What if she went to the canal?”

  “Maybe she wanted to watch men fish?”

  “What if someone took her?”

  Hallam stroked her hot, pale face. “I’ll return with her. You stay here or go back to the house.”

  “I won’t go to the house,” she said.

  He untied his frock and handed it to her; it had impeded his legs. “She’s but two,” said Alice quietly as he took off toward the canal, down Mornington Crescent toward the tracks where there was a bridge, but in imagining Jane standing at the edge of the canal, he hit on an intuition. They had always taken her for walks in the pram, but lately had let her amble where it was safe (a grave mistake now!) and she had peered down into the tracks on the Birmingham Line and said, “River?” and they had corrected her, delighted with her. For the lines had been built deep below the level of the streets, and where they had walked that afternoon, the tracks sat down in a gulley. Hallam turned left on Mornington Road now, away from the bridge, and, as if materialized by his terror, he saw the clean white dress at the crest of the hill above the tracks only a hundred feet in front of him. She was only half a mile from her front door. He stopped dead on the spot. He could not see, from the flatness of his perspective, how close she might have been to the edge. The distance to the bottom, everyone knew from the Times’ article, was ninety feet; it had taken the men seven months to drill and carve out the enormous ditch. If they’d chosen just to run the line at street level, he would not have stood in such deep awe as he did then, fearing that moving a yard forward could displace air down the street in the direction of her back. “Jane!” he called to her, but she was just a dot of white with tiny dashes of pink legs below, and she could not hear him. Still he called to her, “Jane —” until the urgency he could not muster in his voice reached his legs and he exploded into a panicked dash. He came up behind her (she remained unmoving, gazing into the activity below; he had even forgotten about the trains — there would be no surviving the fall) and stood ten feet away, staring at her form. She turned to him then, unsurprised to see him — for two-year-olds expect their parents to be wherever they are — and turned back to the scene in front of her. He went and gratefully clasped her hand. “No river,” she said.

  “No, darling. This is for the trains.”

  “Come,” she said, and led him back in the direction he, and he presumed she, had walked. He brought her back to where her mother sat, although upon seeing her daughter at a distance Alice stood and, riven to the spot, simply began crying uncontrollably until they reached her and she could be sure it was not her fevered wishing that revealed to her this vision of her daughter still alive. Alice picked up the child and held her tightly to her.

  “Where did you go!” she asked now, letting Jane lean back from her to look in her eyes. “Must I tie you up?”

  “Ah, ah, ah,” said Jane, “train.”

  “She was at the trains?”

  Hallam shook his head wonderingly. “On the top, staring down.”

  Alice brought her eyes back to Jane, who was smiling at her and playing with her collar. And then Alice slapped her. It was quite sudden. Jane froze, a surprised expression on her face, and then the blood filled her cheeks and she burst out wailing. “Home is the only place for you!” shouted Alice. Passersby quickened their pace. “Not trains, not rivers, not streets!” She was fairly quaking. “This is what will happen every time you step out of your house without your mama or papa! Do you understand me, Jane?”

  “Alice,” he said, reaching for the baby.

  “No. I’m speaking to Jane. Do you understand, Jane?”

  “Love you, Mama,” said Jane, her voice contorted.

  “Only home is safe,” Alice repeated, and she pushed the girl’s head into her neck and held her there.

  ONLY HOME IS safe, he thought, walking back to Ennis’s in his day suit under a gray mantle. Ragged fat sparrows had made their reappearance in the city and sat on fence posts, twittering at each other. Hallam had shaved the day’s stubble off his cheeks, ran his hand over the raw skin. If only my own father had punished me for wandering rather than encouraged it, he thought, what hot drink might I be taking in front of the fire now, my daughters involved in their books? Wish such independence on a child and they may well be shipbound. He realized that his own sense of desperation had developed to the point that when he thought of his wi
fe and children, he could think only in emergencies. His imagination pressed on him terrible outcomes to the daily dramas that must, still at that moment, be going on at home. And yet, the plain white dress did not tumble into the breeze, flying up around the little legs like a flag. He could not help seeing it in his mind, however unencumbered by the reality of his daughters’ ongoing survival. He stood at the top of the railway crest and saw his two-year-old child’s body dashed on the stone and the iron rails below, a knot of people already gathering, their eyes following the line of the gulley up to where he helplessly stood. He had to shake the image out of his head.

  “Ah, you’re respectable now,” said Ennis. “Too bad.”

  “Too formal?”

  “It’s your picture. You wait here — it’s something of a tip inside.”

  Ennis rearranged items within, and then opened the door into the foyer and stood aside, making a grand gesture toward the reset room. Hallam went to the chair and sat, pulling his pant legs down to cover the tops of his shoes (a lesson his mother had taught him as a boy when they went visiting and he would sit there looking as if, in her words, he were ready to pull them the rest of the way up and go hunting for frogs). Ennis went behind his camera and framed his subject.

  “Does your wife call you Mr. Hallam, Mr. Hallam?” He stood in front of his subject with arms crossed. Hallam laughed uncomfortably. In nine months, it was the first time anyone had brought up his wife.

  “Not normally.”

  “And your children? Mr. Hallam, or Papa?”

  “Papa.”

  “Mmm,” he said. Ennis approached him and lifted the hat off his head, stepped back to regard him. “Still too much Mr. Hallam here,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get Papa in the room without making you seem too ragamuffin.”

  “You want me in shirt sleeves.”

  “Maybe one like that for your wife. What does she call you?”

  “Jem,” he said quietly. It hurt even to hear his own voice say that private name. “It’s short for —”

  “Good enough, Mr. Jem. Now tell me why you are so keen on sending home an image of Mr. Hallam, a man your loved ones hardly know, when just a layer or two down, Jem and Papa are available to be photographed?”

  Hallam understood the point but presumed the picture would be shown around; he had to admit he was thinking of his father’s interests. A prosperous-looking man of twenty-seven was more likely to be given some room to fail and then rebound; the man Mr. Ennis wanted to photograph might have to be rescued.

  “Let’s not mull it too long, Jem Hallam, I’ll do it both ways for the same price. You’ll choose the one you like and I’ll scrub the other. What do you say?”

  “It’s more than fair,” he said, holding his hand out for his hat. “Thank you. Let’s do the scion of the family firm first.”

  Ennis returned to the huge camera and slid a black metal plate in through the top. He leaned down into his eyepiece. The bad eyelid poked out from the side, like a toadstool on a tree. “With less light, we’ll need almost fifty seconds, so hold still. Think of this photo on someone’s wall, and their saying, That’s Jem Hallam, he started all this.”

  “My grandfather did.”

  “Time to stop talking. Shutter open.”

  He took the cover off the lens and Hallam saw himself upside down in the glass, his hat spread out in a comical crescent at the bottom. He held still, focused on one of his black buttons in the middle of the lens, and Ennis counted off the ten-second gaps between silences. He did not attempt to make the wait more comfortable by regaling him with a distracting fable about the power of the picture they were now making. He simply stood, as before, with his arms crossed and his head turned ever so slightly to his left, to compensate.

  “Forty-nine,” he said, and finished the picture. He took out the masque and went into the back to fix the plate. He returned with another holder. “Now stand up and get that hat and coat off.”

  Hallam did, and stood in his vest in front of the chair.

  “Good. Now sit down and let me see a little of Jem Hallam.” Hallam sat again, and turned away a little from the camera, as he’d seen Mrs. Arnold do; it was a pose that seemed both decorous and relaxed. Ennis stood, staring at him, an unnerving vision that Hallam imagined must take some getting used to. “Fetching,” he said. “A little too much so. Turn back straight. No. Uncross your legs, hands on knees.” He contemplated Hallam a little and checked in his eyepiece before returning his unhappy gaze to the scene. “Can you let your shoulders go, Mr. Hallam? I mean, try actually to sit in the chair. You appear to be levitating.”

  Hallam tried to push his shoulders down and he stretched his neck forward to release the muscles in his back, wrung his hands out in front of him as if they were wet, and then settled again. He tried to fix an expression on his face neither pompous nor uncertain. He felt very much like a monkey on a stick but sat there in silence, gazing straight ahead at the lens cover, waiting. But Mr. Ennis was laughing into his fist.

  “Is there something the matter?”

  “No, Mr. Hallam,” he said, “only mausoleum portraits are extra. Will you please come with me? Please?”

  Hallam followed Ennis through the curtain that led into the man’s private room. It was a jumble of chairs and clothing, much ugly crockery standing in a tower in an upright metal sink, and staves from a long-broken barrel scattered about. The bed leaked straw from inside its cloth and showed long signs of habitation: a deep trough was pressed into the middle of it where Samuel Ennis had slept for the two years he’d lived in the city. Hallam had suspected some misbehavior on Mr. Ennis’s part when he’d left him alone with the two young women in the afternoon, but the state of his personal room cast doubt on that, for he could not think of a woman of any standing consenting to be in this room, with or without Mr. Ennis.

  There was a squat can against the wall, a milk can of sorts, and Ennis brought down two teacups from a doorless cupboard and passed one over.

  “Now truly, Mr. Hallam, d’you trust me?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  “Now’s the time to make your mind up.”

  Hallam regarded the milk can with some worry. “I don’t think there’s any advantage in turning back now, Mr. Ennis.”

  “Excellent. Do as I do then.” Ennis lowered his teacup into the can, producing a faint bubbling sound as he did. It echoed around the inside of the metal walls. He removed his cup, and Hallam stepped forward and did the same, withdrawing a clear liquid from inside.

  “What is it?”

  “Mother’s recipe,” said Ennis, and threw the contents of his teacup directly into the back of his throat. “Go on now.”

  Hallam did the same. It went down like water, cool and refreshing, although somewhat more viscous was the word that came to his mind. It reached the pit of his stomach (which was empty, he now realized) and began to warm it. It was very nice, this whatever-it-was, some kind of Irish bitters perhaps. Then, without any discernable transition between very nice and violently unpleasant, something like brimstone seemed to explode in the space behind his eyes and nose. He staggered back as if from a blow and handed Ennis the teacup in order to have his hands free. I might need my hands now was his dumbstruck thought as the heat from the liquor began mounting throughout his body at once, like a flame climbing a wall. Finally a flavor — or was it a fragrance? — became apparent, a full five or six instants after ingestion: burning hot bile, a greeny acid, the taste of one’s insides cauterized. He thought that maybe smoke would come out of him. He held his breath, frightened to risk even a cough, his diaphragm pumping in and out, and then, as if a blockage had been broken, it was all over, and a sudden warmth settled in his limbs. Ennis, apparently long acclimatized to the effects of his refreshments, had calmly watched the whole reaction.

  “There you go,” he said.

  “This is your mother’s recipe?”

  Ennis smiled broadly. “She’s quite dead now.” He held back the
curtain and they re-entered the studio, which looked brighter to Hallam at this moment, even though it was past five o’clock and there couldn’t be more than an hour and a half of sun left. “Back to your little chair, Mr. Hallam. Smartly, smartly.”

  He sat again, and Ennis moved his apparatus closer. “You know what to do, so let’s begin without delay.” He pulled away the lens cover and Hallam saw himself again in the ground glass, clownish and upside down. But now he sensed that the inverted image in the glass was a kind of translation of his earthly self, and that the light which entered his eye and allowed him to see that image of his distorted form was the same light that was entering the camera and scarring the plate within. And at some level, it now seemed quite clear to him, his eyes that received this light also cast it, and this was why the image could be made upon the silver.

  Hallam fixed his eyes unmovingly on the lens and looked past it to concentrate all of himself on the plate. He pushed his tattered, flagging spirit along the wire of his gaze and embedded it, so Alice would have him, so their children would have him. He felt the liquor of his self crawl along this wire of light, a fluid like that which seeps out of a burn.

  “Ah, I see Jem Hallam now,” Samuel Ennis said quietly. “There he is in front of me. We’ll need fifty-five seconds of him now. I see him with his wife . . .”

  “Alice —”

  “He’s with her, drawing back the covers of their bed. He blows out the candle and fits his arm around her. This is her, her lovely self.” Hallam was certain they could both smell the warmth of Alice’s bedclothes, the sharp-sweet scent of her skin. “Her hair drifts across the pillow. Everything you care about is this simple. In the morning, the children come into the room.”