Caught In the Light

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Are you out of your mind? You think—’ She slowly shook her head, evidently dismayed that I should even hint at anything so absurd. ‘God, Ian, I think you’re falling apart, you know that? Maybe this Marian is the sort of woman who can drive men crazy. In your case that seems to mean paranoid. You ought to listen to yourself some time, you really ought. You’ll be hearing from Malcolm. I’ll leave you to find a solicitor of your own.’ She let in the clutch with a roar and accelerated away down the road.

  I watched her go. The stupidity of what I’d said hit home even before she’d turned out of sight onto the main road. It was illogical as well as unlikely, if not downright impossible, for Faith to have been responsible. She and Tim would have to have been conspiring against me. And if I started believing that … then I really might begin to fall apart.

  Faith would certainly have found some evidence for her view in what I did next. I took the Tube out to Heathrow and lay in wait at Terminal One for the late morning and early afternoon flights from Vienna. I could easily have asked Marian which flight she was going to catch, of course, but I reckoned she’d have forbidden me to meet her off it. This way, I could explain that I’d surrendered to a sudden romantic impulse.

  The only problem was that she didn’t catch either of those I was on hand for. I waited by the barrier as first one then two Vienna flights emptied, and there was no sign of her. I began to worry, even though I knew she could have flown to Gatwick or arrived by an early flight while I was still in Parsons Green. Emptying a pocketful of coins into a payphone on the concourse, I rang the Imperial, who confirmed that Mrs Esguard had checked out. Gatwick, or some indirect route, had to be the answer.

  But it wasn’t an answer that gave me much peace of mind. I caught the next express coach to Reading and a train from there to Chippenham. It was as grey and cold in Wiltshire as it had been in London. And the taxi driver seemed to think I expected a metropolitan level of conversation.

  ‘Everybody loves Lacock except me,’ he announced as we left Chippenham. ‘Not real, is it? Not genuine. Bloody museum village. Slice of medieval Olde England. Strictly for the tourists. And the film crews, of course. You’re lucky there isn’t one swarming over the place today. Not in that game, are you? Only you look as if you might be.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

  ‘You’re right there, mate. Dead right. What do they say? The camera never lies? They must be joking. It was invented at Lacock, you know: the camera. Back in the last century. More’s the pity, I say. We’d all be better off without photographs, if you want my opinion.’

  He may have gone on to explain why we’d all be better off without them, but by then I wasn’t listening. He had a point about Lacock, of course. I was well aware how idealized a vision of an English village the place represented. And therefore, in his terminology, how unreal it was.

  But unreality was more or less my state of mind at the time. Nothing quite fitted, or seemed in tune. I booked into the Sign of the Angel like a man in a dream, spent just long enough in the low-ceilinged double-bedded room to dump my bags, then headed out into what remained of the afternoon.

  It was strange to find myself breaking the habits of a professional lifetime by walking around without a camera. It was also a measure of how rapidly and completely I’d departed from normality. I followed a footpath I remembered north out of the village and over the fields to Reybridge, where I crossed the Avon and doubled back to the meadows on the opposite side of the river from Lacock Abbey. The building was exactly as it had been when Fox Talbot took his first photographs of it in the 1830s: a grey stone jumble of cloisters, turrets and chimneys. Fox Talbot himself might have stood exactly where I was standing on a winter’s afternoon 160 years earlier and pondered how to preserve the image of what he saw. And maybe that was the taxi driver’s point. An image was all a photograph could ever be. Even if my pictures of Marian had survived, her absence would be just as real.

  It was a fleeting reality, though, one due to give way in just a few hours to a renewal of all the pleasure and sense of purpose we’d discovered together in Vienna. As soon as I got back to the Sign of the Angel I phoned Tim.

  ‘Your camera’s fine, Ian. Perfect working order.’

  ‘As I thought.’

  ‘And that means … what exactly?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘When will you be back for it?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that either. I’ll phone you over the weekend.’

  ‘Faith called round to the lab at lunchtime.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘A shoulder to cry on, I suppose. A mutual friend to agree with her that what you’ve done is inexcusable.’

  ‘Which you did?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t disagree. How could I? Actually, she seems to be almost as worried about you as she is angry. She asked me a strange question. Was I sure you’d really met another woman in Vienna or could you be making the whole thing up?’

  ‘I haven’t left her for a figment of my imagination, Tim.’

  ‘That’s what I told her. But I didn’t get the impression she was convinced. I suppose in some ways insanity’s easier to deal with than infidelity.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘What I reckon, Ian, is that you’re as sane as I am. But you’re also mad to be doing this.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. It’s much appreciated.’

  Confidence was something I could have done with more of as the winter’s dusk faded into evening. I walked round to the George for a couple of drinks, but by seven o’clock I was back in my room at the Sign of the Angel, waiting, waiting, waiting. Eight o’clock came. Then nine, Marian’s self-imposed deadline. Still there was no sign of her. I grew more and more anxious, insecurity nibbling away at my reserves of logic. She wasn’t so very late, when all was said and done. As soon as she arrived, the fretful hours I’d passed alone would vanish from my memory. I knew that. Just as soon as she arrived.

  At nine thirty-two the telephone rang. I grabbed it in a panic. ‘Marian?’ I said, assuming it was her for the simple reason that nobody else knew I was there.

  The line went dead as soon as I’d spoken. I put the telephone down, wondering if I’d somehow broken the connection by answering too quickly. A minute or so crept by. Then it rang again.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Ian?’ It was her. My heart jumped.

  ‘Marian, where are you?’

  ‘I’m not coming.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I realize now … I can’t.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘It’s all a mistake. As bad for me as it is for you.’

  ‘You don’t mean that. Hold on—’

  ‘You won’t see me again. Or hear from me. That’s the only way to do this. I’m sorry about the photographs. I had to make sure, you see.’

  ‘Sure of what? Where are you? What’s going on? Are you in some kind of—?’

  ‘Don’t try to find me. You won’t be able to. Goodbye, Ian.’

  ‘Marian, for God’s—’

  Too late. Already, I was talking to myself.

  PART TWO

  EXPOSURE

  THREE

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU going to do?’ Tim looked at me with a sympathetic frown that was somehow harder to bear than any amount of disapproval. ‘This is a hell of a mess.’ We were in the White Horse at Parsons Green early on Monday evening, the other side of a weekend I’d spent partly in Lacock and partly in my own kind of hell. I’d poured out the whole pitiful story to Tim because I needed to tell someone besides myself what I’d been through. ‘In effect, you’ve walked out on your marriage for nothing.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘And you’ve managed to antagonize your agent as well as one of your best clients at the same time.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Your professional reputation is going to look pretty sick after a fiasco li
ke this.’

  ‘Thanks for mentioning it.’

  ‘Do you think you were deliberately set up?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, Tim. But nobody gains by doing this to me. I prefer to believe – maybe I have to believe – that Marian was on the level in Vienna.’

  ‘So why didn’t she turn up at Lacock?’

  ‘Loss of nerve. Or worse. Maybe her husband took steps to prevent her leaving him.’

  ‘You have no idea where they live?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘And no way of finding out?’

  ‘None I can think of. I phoned the Imperial and cajoled them into checking their records, but it turns out she somehow failed to register her address.’

  ‘Suspicious in itself.’

  ‘Yes. And she paid her bill in cash, so they’ve no way of tracing her.’

  ‘And consequently neither have you.’

  ‘None at all. Apart from just … looking.’

  ‘Looking where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘That sounds pretty hopeless.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Besides, she admitted sabotaging your films. Doesn’t that prove she was planning to cut you adrift while you were still in Vienna?’

  ‘I think she may just have been desperate.’

  ‘On account of her husband.’

  ‘Yes. There was something about the way she described him – or didn’t. Something … fearful.’

  ‘You’re saying she might need rescuing?’

  ‘Possibly, yes.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘On the other hand, she could be an accomplished actress who got a kick out of making a fool of you.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I did say accomplished.’

  ‘I still don’t think so.’ I drained my glass and looked at him. ‘Same again?’

  ‘I’ve only just started this one.’

  ‘So you have. Back in a minute.’

  I stood up and went to the bar for a refill. When I returned to the table, Tim’s frown had deepened.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘That won’t help, you know.’ He pointed at my glass.

  ‘It’ll help me sleep.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I’ll start looking.’

  ‘What about work?’

  ‘If I get offered any, which after the Vienna cock-up is doubtful …’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll just have to wait.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘You’re determined to go after her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rather than try to patch things up with Faith and lose yourself in your work for a while?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I have to know why she did it. And to do that I have to find her.’

  ‘She told you not to try.’

  ‘Yes. But I’m no good at following instructions. Ask my agent. I’m going to try all right. And, the way I feel at the moment, I can’t imagine I’ll stop. Until I learn the truth. Whatever it might be.’

  Bold words for what was actually the only thing my self-respect would let me do. Marian needed me as much as I needed her. I was determined to cling to that belief because there was, quite simply, nothing else to cling to. And I wanted her, too, more than ever. The memories of our days and nights in Vienna were goads to the flesh as well as to the mind. I couldn’t bear the loss of so much so soon without fighting to regain it. And the only way I could fight was to start looking for her and to go on looking just as long and as hard as I needed to.

  It was a desperate course, no question. But the alternatives were worse. Faith had made it clear she wouldn’t have me back. Besides, I couldn’t have gone back even if she’d asked me to. I loved Marian, even more potently now I couldn’t see her or speak to her or touch her. As for photography, the loss of my Viennese pictures had shocked me into a raw-nerved abstinence. I hadn’t taken a single photograph since. I’d made a pact with myself. The next photograph I took would be of Marian.

  My first recourse was to return to Vienna, hoping I might be able to pick up her trail there. A doorman at the Imperial remembered her well and seemed to think that when he’d hailed a taxi for her on the morning of her departure she’d said she wanted to go not to the airport, but to one of the railway stations: the Süd-Bahnhof. It was a destination that made no sense, since trains from there headed south, into Hungary and Italy. But then nothing else made sense, so why should that be an exception? I hung around the concourse at the Süd-Bahnhof pondering the point, then wandered out into the park of the Belvedere Palace, where I’d walked with Marian and taken one of the best of my lost pictures of snow-draped Vienna. The snow was gone now, succeeded by rain and slush and a dismal air of wasted chances.

  I went everywhere we’d been, asking waiters and passers-by and people at nearby tables in cafés if they remembered me and my glamorous companion of a couple of weeks before. A few thought they did, but none had any recollection of seeing Marian since. I took the 71 tram from outside the Schwarzenberg down through the suburbs to the Zentralfriedhof, and plodded round the avenues between the graves, wondering if she was waiting for me there, if I’d glimpse the red of her coat somewhere ahead of me through the trees. But I didn’t. She wasn’t there. Or anywhere else I tried. And the longer I remained the weaker grew the visual impression she’d left on the only places where I’d ever seen her.

  I flew back to England and the onset of a relentlessly wet February. I moved my few belongings out of Tim’s house – despite his assurances that I didn’t have to – and rented a bedsit over a pizza parlour in Notting Hill Gate. It wasn’t much of a place, but then it didn’t need to be. I didn’t intend to spend much of my time there. It was just a base for my search operation.

  But where was the search to start? I reckoned I had two admittedly imprecise clues. Marian had said the house she lived in had been in her husband’s family for generations. That sounded rural, if not manorial. And Esguard was a highly unusual name. It should be possible, given enough time and effort, to track it down. She’d also said there was no problem getting from there to Lacock. That implied a drive of an hour or so, maybe two at the most. I allowed seventy miles as a maximum distance and checked a map to see what lay within that radius of Lacock. Most of the southern half of England was the answer: Exeter in the west, Birmingham in the north, London in the east, Bournemouth in the south. Not much of a help, but it marginally narrowed the field.

  I scoured the telephone directories covering areas inside the circle and drew a blank. No Esguards. Then I went through those for the rest of the country with the same result. That left me back at the beginning and eager to try my luck on the ground. My reluctance to take photographs, whatever their origin, had an even stranger partner in the sudden loss of my horror of driving. Maybe it was just a matter of necessity. Faith was no longer available to ferry me around. And I wasn’t going to get far on foot or public transport. Somehow everything – even the memory of that wet night on Barnet Hill when I’d taken a stranger’s life in a moment of carelessness – had faded into insignificance compared with the task I’d set myself. Tim had said I had a streak of obsessiveness. But he was wrong. Extremism was nearer the mark. About photography. About Marian. About finding her.

  I bought a second-hand car and gritted my way back to competence with a saturation dose at the wheel. The pattern of my search became a compulsion in its own right. I headed out of London along the radial routes, starting with the A23 down through Surrey and Sussex, working my way slowly west. Each route took several days to cover as I diverged either side, stopping at every town and village to ask the locals if they knew anyone living in the neighbourhood by the name of Esguard. I tried the pubs, post offices and estate agents as well. Nobody could help, but I went on asking, pushing to the back of my mind the fear that nobody would ever be able to. There was a kin
d of logic to it. If she’d lied to me, I’d never find her. But if she’d told me the truth …

  February faded into March with nothing gained except a desperate kind of equilibrium in my life. As long as I was looking for Marian I didn’t have to acknowledge the futility of what I was doing. My pursuit of her was also a flight from myself: from what my wife and daughter thought of me, from the sick joke I’d doubtless become among friends and colleagues and anyone who’d known me as a competent level-headed professional.

  I wonder now if I’d ever have stopped, if eventually I’d simply have widened the circle as often as I needed to in order to sustain the search. To have given up would always have seemed worse than carrying on. There’s no way to tell how and when it might have ended. Defeat, once admitted, would have been terminal, I’m sure of that. That’s why it was bound to be so long coming. I was slowly zigzagging my way across England towards a dead end, but I never once let myself believe it. Wherever I went, I asked questions and studied faces: the same question with the same answer; the same face sought with the same result. I put identically worded advertisements in the personal columns of the national press every Saturday: ‘MARIAN, PLEASE REMEMBER VIENNA AND RESPOND, IAN.’ But nobody ever wrote to the box number. I hired private detectives to cover London, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff. But they turned up nothing. I became a ghost hunting a ghost, haunted by a past I couldn’t forget and a future I couldn’t give up.

  The first stirrings of spring frightened me. I couldn’t stop time passing, but as it did so Marian retreated deeper, day by day, into my memory. Even the season of our love was passing. Tim, the only friend I saw anything of, urged me whenever we met to break the spell she’d cast on me and face up to the realities of life. Faith had set the wheels of divorce in motion, as I knew from the letters her solicitor – formerly our solicitor – had sent to me. So far, I hadn’t replied. But I’d have to sooner or later. And it wouldn’t be long before Amy was home for Easter. Ignoring Faith was one thing, neglecting my daughter quite another. Tim pointed all this out to me as patiently as he could, throwing in occasional laments for the photographic career I was steadily demolishing. But none of it made any impression. I didn’t expect anyone to understand what I was doing. I didn’t really want them to. It was a private crusade, in which any compromise, however slight, was likely to prove fatal. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, I’d find Marian. And when I did …