Caught In the Light

by Robert Goddard

  ‘I don’t think we can do anything else.’

  ‘You’re right, of course.’ She reached across to clasp my hand. ‘We can’t. I’ve known that all along.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

  She smiled. ‘Because I wanted to hear you say it first, I suppose.’

  We went back to the Imperial and made love. The sex was searing and committed, like two drowning people clinging to each other. The experience had deepened every time, until now it took us to places I wouldn’t have believed existed. She let me photograph her afterwards, lying naked on the bed, her lover’s eyes playing with the camera lens. The pictures, too, were a proof of our sincerity. What they meant could never be denied.

  ‘What time is your flight tomorrow?’ she asked as we lay together in the encroaching twilight.

  ‘One o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll drive you to the airport.’

  ‘No. Let me say goodbye to you here. In the best kind of way. Let me have that memory to hold in my head.’

  ‘When will you tell your wife?’

  ‘Straight away.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m sure.’

  ‘Me, too. Amazing, isn’t it? I love you, Ian. Do you realize that?’

  ‘I realize I love you.’

  ‘I wish I could fly back with you.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Because Jos is away on business until Friday. I can’t tell him until then. And I’d rather wait here to do it than in his house.’

  ‘Isn’t it your house, too?’

  ‘Not really. Esguards have lived there for generations. And I’ve never been one of them. Not where it counts, in the blood. It might have been different if I’d produced a son and heir, but …’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me why that never happened, Marian. Unless you want to.’

  ‘I want to, but I’m not going to. The less we know about each other’s marriages the better. By Friday night they’ll be history.’

  ‘Three days from now. It sounds a long time.’

  ‘Just long enough’ – she rolled onto her side and stretched out her hand to me – ‘to put a real edge on your performance.’

  ‘I think I can guarantee that.’

  ‘You can phone me here in the meantime and tell me what to expect.’

  ‘Where shall we meet?’

  ‘You’ve got this irritating practical streak, you know.’ She let go of me and sighed. ‘It must be your photographer’s mind. Exposure times. Light readings. Focal points. All that detail.’

  ‘Well, talking of photography, you mentioned you’d been to Lacock. Could you get there on Friday night?’

  ‘Lacock? Easily. Why?’

  ‘There’s a wonderful old inn in the village. The Sign of the Angel. You know the kind of place: oak beams; creaking floors; log fires; antique furniture; and nice cosy bedrooms.’

  ‘Sounds great. Especially the cosy bedrooms.’

  ‘I’ll book the cosiest one they have.’

  ‘You’ll be able to show me round the Abbey. Explain all that stuff about Fox Talbot I seem to have missed.’

  ‘’Fraid not. The Abbey will be closed at this time of the year.’

  ‘Never mind. There’ll be other opportunities.’

  ‘Lots, I hope.’

  She kissed me lightly on the cheek and settled her head on my shoulder. ‘As many as you want, Ian. Starting Friday.’

  We went no further that evening than the Café Schwarzenberg, where we lingered over wine and coffee and our vaguely formed plans for the future. But the complexities of life in England seemed too many to grasp while we still had one Viennese night to savour. We’d resolved to meet at Lacock when a decisive break with our pasts had been made, and that seemed as much as we were capable of for the moment.

  ‘Tell me how Fox Talbot came to invent photography,’ said Marian, as we finished our last coffee. ‘I’d better start boning up on this kind of thing now I’m going to be living with a walking authority on the subject.’

  ‘I’m hardly that. And it’s a long story.’

  ‘Give me the potted version.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes. I’d like to know.’

  ‘Well, ever heard of a camera lucida?’ Getting no answer, I went on. ‘It was a drawing instrument popular with amateur artists in the first half of the last century. Basically an adaptation of the camera obscura. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of that, either.’

  She pouted. ‘As a matter of fact I have. Besides, I know enough Latin to have got ahead of you. Camera lucida: light room. Camera obscura: dark room. Right?’

  ‘I’m impressed. Anyway, it works like this. Paint one wall of a darkened room white and drill a pinhole in the opposite wall. Given decent light, an inverted image of the scene outside the room will be cast onto the white wall. Put a lens in the pinhole and you can turn the image upright and focus it. Install a mirror in the room and you can reflect the image onto a sheet of paper and trace it. Shrink the room to a box and you have a portable drawing device. That’s the camera obscura. It was in widespread use by the end of the seventeenth century.’

  ‘You know it all, don’t you?’

  ‘You did ask.’

  She smiled. ‘Go on.’

  ‘OK. The camera lucida on the other hand comprised a small prism mounted on a telescopic stem. You stood it on your drawing board, adjusted the angle and looked down into the prism at the reflection of the scene in front of you. Then you moved your eye just far enough towards the edge of the prism for the images of the scene and the sheet of paper below to merge, apparently on the paper. All you had to do was trace what you saw. It was invented by a man called Wollaston at the end of the eighteenth century.’

  ‘But we’re still a long way from photography.’

  ‘Not really. It just took a few decades for someone to have the idea. Why not try to fix the images created by these devices as permanent pictures? William Fox Talbot, Wiltshire squire and amateur scientist, spent his honeymoon in the Italian Lake District in the autumn of 1833, trying unsuccessfully to rival his wife’s drawing skills using a camera lucida. When he got home to Lacock, he started experimenting with ways of removing his dodgy draughtsmanship from the equation altogether. The light-sensitive properties of silver nitrate were well known to him. What he did was treat a sheet of paper with a salt solution of the stuff before exposing it in a camera obscura. The result was a negative photographic image – light for dark, because light darkened the silver chloride. But if the paper was transparent, it could be re-exposed to create a positive image on another sheet below it – the key to photographic reproduction.’

  ‘So that was it?’

  ‘Essentially, yes. But it took him several years to get that far. And several more to find a really good fixing agent. Outdoor photography of people and objects didn’t become a practical possibility until about 1840. And it was complicated by the simultaneous discoveries of the Frenchman, Louis Daguerre. He achieved the same results using copper plate rather than paper. But the daguerreotype, as it was called, couldn’t be reproduced. That’s where Fox Talbot had the edge.’

  ‘You make it sound simple.’

  ‘It was. Beautifully simple. But the best ideas always are. Someone else could have thought of it before Fox Talbot. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the potter, seems to have gone a long way towards achieving the same thing thirty years earlier, but he died before he could make much of it. Tragic, really. We’d give a lot now for thirty extra years of photographic history, I can tell you.’

  ‘How do you come to know all this, Ian? I can’t believe most photographers are caught up in the subject the way you are.’

  ‘That’s their affair. To me, the dawn of photography is just about the most magical period in history. Until then, everything – every tree, every building, every human face – was just an artist’s impression. At some fundamental level, not quite real. But a photograph is differe
nt. A photograph is almost as good as being there.’ I caught her quizzical look. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s just … so weird. That I should meet you, of all people.’

  ‘What’s weird about it?’

  ‘The sheer … improbability of it, I suppose. Almost as if … I knew I’d find you here.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘You’re a photographer.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Fascinated by the invention of photography.’

  ‘What about it?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s just crazy, that’s all.’

  ‘Marian—’

  ‘Shush.’ She pressed her fingers against my lips. ‘I can’t tell you exactly what I mean. It’s too complicated and too incredible. But I will, I promise. At Lacock. It’ll make more sense there. It was an inspired choice of yours, really. Besides, whetting your curiosity like this means I can be sure you’ll turn up.’

  ‘You can be sure of that anyway. There’s no need for guessing games.’

  ‘This isn’t a game.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Wait and see.’ She grinned. ‘There are some things I don’t give up as easily as my virtue.’

  I thought at the time she was setting up some subtle joke at my expense about photography, though I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what. It didn’t really seem to matter. She’d promised to explain at Lacock and that was good enough. My impatience to see her again wasn’t going to turn on one minor mystery.

  In fact, I’d more or less forgotten about it when I left the hotel next morning with just enough time to book out of the Europa and catch the shuttle bus to the airport. I didn’t want to go when it came to the point, not just because I’d infinitely have preferred to stay with Marian, but also because there was a flak storm of condemnation from Faith to be ridden out before we’d meet again, all of it justified. I’d have no answer to as many accusations as she cared to throw at me. And then there was Amy. She’d have to be told, too. I was dreading that even more.

  But it was all worth it. The certainty struck home as I stopped outside the Café Schwarzenberg and looked back at the hotel to see Marian watching me from the window of her room. We waved to each other across the slushy grey bustle of the Ringstrasse and I held her gaze for as long as it took a tram to caterpillar slowly between us. Then I turned reluctantly away and headed on. Towards all the many consequences of what we were doing. And a future I was willing to trade them for.

  TWO

  THEY SAY TIME seems to pass more quickly as you grow older. They also say there’s a good reason for that: the brain measures time by how much of it there is to remember, so each year is a smaller proportion than the one before of your life to date. It’s a sour little trick to be the victim of, because it means pleasure, however intense, grows ever more fleeting. Sure enough, my five days with Marian in Vienna seemed like so many hours when I ran through them in my mind on the flight home. Not that it really mattered, because we were going to be apart for an even shorter period. And there’s the flip side to the trick: pain obeys the same rule as pleasure.

  Maybe that’s why I charged at the problem of explaining myself to Faith and Amy like a horse rushing a fence. I wanted to be over it and away. I wanted to be two days in the future, and I opted for the easiest and quickest route. I was a photographer, after all. I knew about brevity. It came with the job. And speed was part of what had drawn Marian and me together, the bloom on the dark fruit we’d bitten and swallowed.

  Besides, infatuation makes you selfish. It doesn’t leave room for much else, certainly not sensitivity or responsibility. It made me believe that what I wanted was all that counted, so long as Marian wanted it, too. And she did, just as urgently as me. I knew that. And so I knew it had to happen. Watching the tops of the clouds above London, spilling and pluming like the contours of an undiscovered landscape, I felt elated by the madness we’d set in motion. Everything before was drab and monochrome. I was about to see in colour for the first time.

  I’d lived at the house in Barnes for the best part of ten years. When I stepped inside that afternoon, I realized with a kind of delayed shock that it had always been more Faith’s home than mine, decorated, run, furnished and inhabited by her, merely used by me. I stood in the hallway, my bags at my feet, the traffic noise from Castelnau a background hum behind the tick of the clock and the buzz of the fridge and the click of the radiator. There’d been no danger of returning to a cold house. Faith’s thermostatically controlled domesticity was lying in wait for me.

  I turned and looked at the framed photograph of her and Amy hanging beside the barometer on the wall. It was one of my better efforts, capturing their unposed smiles, their snub-nosed twinkling-eyed resemblance and, just within the camera’s grasp, their ease together, their certainty, their indissoluble kinship.

  ‘You take pictures, Dad,’ Amy once said to me. ‘But there are hardly any of you. Why’s that?’ Because the photographer is never quite part of what he sees, Amy. Because the price of clear vision is the distance you need to focus in. I like to see, not be seen.

  It didn’t take me long to pack the little I needed. I’d be back for the rest later, when the dust had settled and our plans were clearer. Faith would be reasonable, I knew. There’d be no scissored suits or burned books. She’d let me off lightly in the end. I phoned Tim Sadler when I’d finished packing and asked if he could put me up for a couple of nights. Tim qualified as just about my best and oldest friend. We’d met at university, where we’d both specialized in photography during our art degree course. He’d been doing most of my developing for several years at his small trade processing lab in Fulham. He was too fussy and set in his ways for my line of work, but his pernickety nature made him the ideal developer. It also made him fastidiously loyal to friends. Besides, he’d heard this tale before and knew better than to press for details.

  ‘Does this mean what I think it means, Ian?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘A cooling-off period?’

  ‘A bit more than that.’

  ‘Well, be my guest anyway. And give my love to Faith – if you have the chance.’

  It was a nice idea, but hardly practical. I had only one message for Faith and it wasn’t of love. I’d been on a form of marital parole since the affair with Nicole and I was about to break bail. Not for the first time, Tim was going to be harbouring a fugitive.

  Faith came in at six, the clip of her office heels on the path warning me a few seconds before her key turned in the lock. The door was still closing as I walked out of the lounge and looked at her, groomed and smartly suited, briefcase in one hand, keys jangling in the other. Her weary expression turned towards suspicion as our eyes met. Already, at some intuitive level where our years together, the good as well as the bad, merged in her memory, she knew.

  ‘Not unpacked yet?’ she asked, noticing the suitcase further down the hall.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you, Faith.’

  ‘What?’ She dropped her briefcase and stared at me. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘You’ve only just got back.’

  ‘I mean I’m leaving …’ I looked away, gesturing helplessly. ‘You. This house. Our marriage. It’s over.’

  ‘Over?’

  ‘Finished. Done with. I can’t—’

  ‘Can’t what?’

  ‘Make it easy when it isn’t. Be fair when I’m not being. We’ve had our problems before and ridden them out. But not this time. This is the end.’

  ‘It’s Nicole, isn’t it?’ She crashed the keys down on the telephone table and stepped closer. Her face was flushed, her breathing rapid. She was more shocked than angry. But soon the balance would change. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That bloody woman.’

  ‘It isn’t Nicole. It’s someone … you don’t know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It d
oesn’t matter who she is. What matters is that I love her.’

  Faith tried to laugh, but her eyes were closer to tears. ‘I doubt you do, Ian. I doubt you even know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Nothing you say will make any difference. I’m sorry, truly sorry, to tell you so … bluntly. But there really is no other way.’

  ‘I forgave you Nicole. Have you forgotten that?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘I could have made things a lot harder for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Not just then. Other times. I’ve given you far more than you’ve ever deserved.’

  ‘I know. Faith, for God’s sake—’

  ‘What about Amy? Have you considered how she’s going to react?’

  ‘She’s a level-headed girl. She’ll understand.’

  ‘Oh, she will, will she? Well, just in case she doesn’t, perhaps you’d like to explain it to me. I mean, the way it works. Why it’s so easy for you to walk out on fifteen years of my life as well as yours.’

  ‘Who said it was easy?’

  ‘It must be. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.’

  ‘You know things haven’t been right between us for a long time.’

  ‘And this is how you put them right?’

  ‘You’re not listening, Faith. I’ve fallen in love with somebody else. It’s as simple as that. If I stayed now, I’d be living a lie. And I’m not prepared to do that. I’m doing this for your sake as much as mine.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’re doing it because you want to.’

  ‘All right. That’s true, of course. It’s what I want. But in time you may come to see that—’

  ‘It’s what I wanted all along without realizing it? Is that going to be your twisted justification for running off with whoever this bitch is?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I held up my hands to signal my abandonment of the argument. ‘This is getting us nowhere. I have to be true to myself, Faith. I’ve made my choice. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Go ahead then.’ Her eyes were red and brimming now. She blundered past me into the kitchen, catching my camera bag with her foot and slewing it across the floor. ‘Do as you please.’ She ran water from the tap onto her fingers and rinsed some of the tears away.