Caught In the Light

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Look, we met in Vienna in January, by chance. There was … immediate attraction. We became … emotionally involved.’

  ‘You became lovers?’

  ‘If it’s any of your business, yes.’

  ‘I wish it weren’t. Regrettably, I have to tell you that the woman you’re “emotionally involved” with has a profound psychological problem. It wasn’t a chance meeting. Let me ask you this. Did she know you were a photographer before introducing herself?’

  ‘No. That is … Well, yes, in a sense. What of it?’

  ‘It’s why she chose you, Mr Jarrett. And why she used the name Marian Esguard.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m at liberty to explain.’

  ‘Not at liberty? I love this woman, Miss Sanger, and she loves me. We agreed to leave our spouses for each other when we came back from Vienna. And I went through with it. I left my wife for her. Then … something went wrong.’

  ‘She vanished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Leaving you with no clues to her whereabouts?’

  ‘None. Except … her husband’s name: Jos. And an implication that they lived in some sort of ancestral country residence.’

  ‘Gaunt’s Chase?’

  ‘She never identified it. I was led to Tollard Rising by a postcard of the church, sent to me anonymously. By Marian, I think.’

  ‘Do you have the envelope?’

  ‘Yes.’ I took it out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘I can’t be sure. I’ve never seen her handwriting.’

  ‘But I have.’ Daphne Sanger nodded slowly in recognition. ‘I’d say that was almost certainly written by Eris Moberly.’

  ‘You see. She wants me to find her, Miss Sanger. She needs me to find her.’

  ‘Possibly.’ An afterthought seemed to occur to her. ‘Jos is short for Joslyn, of course. Surely that satisfies you Esguard is an assumed name.’

  ‘I’m not sure it does.’

  ‘Then let me tell you this. My enquiries haven’t been restricted to Tollard Rising. I’ve traced a marriage certificate for Joslyn Esguard and a birth certificate for his bride. Marian Juliana Freeman. She was born in Chichester in 1787. She married Joslyn Esguard, a man eleven years her senior, in 1809. The marriage seems to have been childless, assuming they lived throughout it at Tollard Rising; there’s no record of a birth there. Nor is there any record of the original Marian Esguard’s death. But I’m sure you can see what it all implies. Eris may have sent you the postcard simply to show you where she obtained her alias. In other words, to put an end to your search.’

  ‘Why such an elaborate charade?’

  ‘Because elaboration upon reality is at the root of her psychological difficulties.’

  ‘So you say. For reasons you’re not free to share with me. Well, if you can’t discuss your patient – sorry, client – with me, what about her husband?’

  ‘I know nothing about him beyond his supposed name, Conrad Moberly, and Eris’s description of him as wealthy and emotionally detached.’

  ‘Could he be a descendant of Joslyn Esguard?’

  ‘He could be. Theoretically. But if you’re suggesting Eris is using the relationship between Marian and Joslyn, whatever kind of relationship it was, as some sort of convoluted code for her feelings about her husband …’

  ‘What if I am?’

  ‘Then I have to tell you you’re wide of the mark.’

  I took a deep breath, letting her see how frustrated I felt. ‘Do you have any idea where Eris Moberly is now, Miss Sanger?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Do you think she may be in danger?’

  Daphne Sanger hesitated a long time before replying. ‘It’s possible. There are … worrying ramifications to her case.’

  ‘I want to help her. Don’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then don’t you think we should … pool our resources?’

  She frowned. ‘To do so would involve a gross breach of confidence on my part.’

  I shrugged, trying to imply I might walk away from the problem unless she gave me a good reason not to. ‘Until you tell me more than you have so far, I don’t see how we can make any progress. Do you?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’

  She clunked the ice cubes round in her glass to make the tonic fizz, stared thoughtfully down into it for a moment, then looked up and said, ‘I suggest we meet again in a day or two at my practice. I’ll have made up my mind by then as to whether it would be appropriate, in all the circumstances, to explain to you what this is really all about.’

  ‘And how will you make up your mind?’

  ‘That’s the bit you’re not going to like, Mr Jarrett.’ She shaped a cautious smile. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to win my trust. And I’m not a naturally trusting person.’

  Daphne Sanger’s method for assessing my trustworthiness was to call in a couple of references: a friend to verify my account of myself as far as he could, for which role Tim was tailor-made; and my wife to confirm I really had run out on her, which Faith naturally wasn’t going to deny, especially when asked by a psychotherapist, the sort of person whose help she’d more or less told me I badly needed.

  I warned Tim to expect a call from Miss Sanger and let him believe I was consulting her for the sake of my mental well-being. I left Faith to make what she liked of it, then sat back and waited for the results. My visit to Harley Street was fixed for Wednesday afternoon, which gave me two clear days to check Miss Sanger’s credentials – they proved to be impeccable – and drive down to Tollard Rising again.

  Nothing had changed at St Andrew’s Church, or at the sloping swathe of farmland that had once been the deer park and landscaped vistas of Gaunt’s Chase. For an idea of what the place had looked like I had to call at the local-studies library in Dorchester and leaf through various old county histories until I came across a reproduction of an oil painting by Canaletto, no less, of the house as it had appeared in 1753. A four-square, red-brick construction, faced in pale stone, with tall chimneys springing from a broad-hipped roof, it sat starkly in a strangely empty park, with only the rolling hills in the background to remind me that it was the same corner of Cranborne Chase where I’d seen nothing but fields and barns and fences. The county histories were principally interested in its architecture – ‘restrained Dutch Palladian of the 1690s, possibly the work of William Talman’ – and the circumstances surrounding Canaletto’s commission to paint it – a flirtation with the role of patron of the arts by Nathaniel Esguard, grandfather of Joslyn. The Esguards’ money was airily attributed to substantial holdings in the East India Company. Their eventual decline and fall – along with that of Gaunt’s Chase – was undocumented, apart from the terse caption to Canaletto’s depiction of the house. ‘Destroyed by fire, 1838.’ Canaletto’s original was evidently in the hands of a private collector in Texas. Everything, it seemed, was either long ago or far away. And of no obvious concern to me. Except that Daphne Sanger’s Eris Moberly and my Marian Esguard had decided that it should be.

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Jarrett,’ said Daphne Sanger as I entered her ground-floor consulting room in Harley Street. It was furnished and decorated in soothing shades of green, blending with the shadows of an overcast late afternoon. ‘It doesn’t have to be the couch. I only have one because so many people expect me to.’ Her self-assurance seemed magnified in this, her particular domain. It was warm and comfortable, yet oddly impersonal – odd because the lack of clutter, the lightness of her presence, somehow contrived to lower my defences. As no doubt it was meant to. ‘May I call you Ian?’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘And what will you call me?’

  ‘What did Eris Moberly settle for?’

  ‘Daphne.’

  ‘Daphne it is, then. How did the positive vetting go?’

  ‘Positively. Tim Sadler made all the right noises. And your wife �
� seemed pleased to hear you were coming to see me.’

  ‘She thinks I’m mad. Or says she does.’

  ‘From her point of view, your recent behaviour hardly looks … rational.’

  ‘What about from your point of view, Daphne?’

  ‘I have the advantage of knowing rather more of the background.’

  ‘And am I to share that advantage?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve decided to set my ethical reservations to one side.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said, exerting some effort not to look it. ‘Where do we begin?’

  ‘With any doubts you may have that Marian Esguard and Eris Moberly are in fact the same person. Listen to this.’ She pressed the play button on a tape recorder stationed on the desk in front of her, and a voice that made me start with surprise floated into the room between us. ‘My name is Eris Moberly.’ It could have been Marian whispering to me in the darkness in Vienna. Daphne must have been able to read the startled recognition in my face even as she switched the machine off and looked across at me. ‘Those doubts, if there were any, are now, I trust, dispelled?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Marian.’

  ‘Or Eris. I suggest it will avoid confusion if we stick to the name she used here.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘As to Marian Esguard, are you sure you’ve never heard of such a person in another connection – a historical connection, perhaps?’

  ‘I never have.’

  ‘Absolutely certain?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Very well. As I told you, Eris Moberly became a client of mine last summer. She came to me because of my work as a hypnotherapist. She saw an obvious application of hypnotherapy to her singularly bewildering experiences, in particular the concept of regression to a previous incarnation.’

  ‘You do that sort of thing, Daphne? Here in Harley Street? I thought reincarnation was the preserve of stage hypnotists.’

  ‘I do not do that sort of thing. Eris consulted me specifically because of my scepticism about reincarnation.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘She wanted me to supply an alternative explanation for her symptoms.’

  ‘And what were those symptoms exactly? Are you going to tell me she believed she was a reincarnation of the original Marian Esguard? You don’t expect me to swallow that.’

  ‘What I expect you to do is listen to this tape.’ She ejected it from the machine and laid it on my side of the desk. ‘I asked Eris to record an account of the events that had prompted her to consult me. This was the result. Go away and listen to it. Try to relate its contents to the state of mind of the woman you met in Vienna. Then come back here and tell me what you think we, as the only people party to her secret, ought to do about it.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll listen to it.’ I stretched out my hand to pick up the tape, and held the pose, my fingers resting on it as I looked her in the eye. ‘Are you sure you didn’t regress her hypnotically? Are you sure this isn’t some piece of parascientific dabbling that blew up in your face – and mine, too?’

  ‘I never hypnotized her. Not even for the most conventional of purposes.’

  ‘But she wanted you to?’

  ‘Yes. As a kind of last resort.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because it would have been too dangerous. Listen to the tape, Ian. Then you’ll understand just how dangerous it would have been. And still might be.’

  I listened to the tape lying on the narrow bed in my tawdry flat in Notting Hill Gate, wishing I could have had Marian lying beside me rather than Eris’s voice rising and falling in my ear. I wanted her to come back to me. But it seemed she couldn’t. Instead, I was condemned to follow, wherever her words took me. Into a life I hadn’t known. Hers.

  FOUR

  MY NAME IS Eris Moberly. I’m thirty-two years old, married, with no children. That isn’t a regret, by the way, either for me or my husband, as far as I know. I wouldn’t describe our marriage as perfect. Conrad’s too withdrawn for that. He isn’t … emotionally demonstrative. On the other hand, he seems content with what we’ve got. So am I. What I’m saying is that this … problem … hasn’t sprung from difficulties elsewhere in my life. I’m happy and healthy and, thanks to Conrad, wealthy. I’ve enjoyed the eight years we’ve been together. I don’t want to say any more about it than that. It isn’t relevant and Conrad wouldn’t approve of me pouring out my secrets to a stranger anyway, so … let’s keep him out of it.

  The same goes for my family background. It’s all standard, boring, upper-middle-class stuff. I wasn’t abused as a child. I had a good education and a stable upbringing. My parents did their best for me. My father’s a civil servant, retired now. My sisters are both married, with children. I suppose I don’t see as much of any of them as I’d like. Conrad can be … difficult at times. Not that he’d stop me going on my own if I wanted to. Which I do. Just not as often as I should. You get … settled in routines, don’t you? You think you’ll do something some time soon, and then you find another year’s flashed by and you still haven’t done it.

  What’s happened to me recently has had that benefit, I suppose. Routine’s a thing of the past. Ordinary life has changed. I’m not the person I used to be. I suppose I never will be again. I mean, even if you can make this stop, it won’t go away completely, will it? She’ll never leave me. I’m not sure I’d want her to. But even if I did …

  You said you wanted … what did you call it? … A sequential account of how it started, so here goes. Conrad suggested we get out of London for Easter, which sounded great to me. We booked into a country house hotel near Bath for the long weekend and went down there on Thursday night. It all started as pleasantly and relaxingly as you could want. On Good Friday we visited Wells and Glastonbury. We spent Saturday in Bath. Then, on Easter Sunday afternoon, we drove out to Lacock. I’m sure you’ve heard of Lacock Abbey, where Fox Talbot invented photography. We toured the house and looked at the oriel window, the subject of his famous first photograph. Then we visited the photographic museum they’ve set up in the lodge at the entrance to the abbey. I suppose you could say that’s where it began, except, of course, that it came into my mind as something I remembered very well, something I’d always known. It didn’t seem weird or worrying. It was just … a piece of knowledge I’d carried about with me since … well, I couldn’t have said when. A long time, for certain. It wouldn’t have struck me as significant. It probably wouldn’t have struck me at all, in fact, but for being at Lacock, where photography was invented. I’d never been there before, you see. I’d never consciously thought about it.

  The museum has a section devoted to the history of photography. Not just Fox Talbot and the quaint old box cameras knocked up for him by the village carpenter, but displays and information about the other pioneer photographers and the inventors who paved the way for them. We were standing in front of an illustrated panel describing how close Thomas Wedgwood came to inventing photography about thirty years before Fox Talbot, when I turned to Conrad and said, without thinking there was anything the least remarkable in it, ‘I wonder why they’ve overlooked Marian Esguard.’

  ‘Who?’ queried Conrad.

  ‘Marian Esguard,’ I repeated. ‘It’s only the lack of actual examples of her work that prevents her being acknowledged as Fox Talbot’s forerunner.’ Then I added, making a joke of it and feeling completely light-hearted, ‘Male chauvinism in operation again, I suppose.’

  Conrad was surprised as well as mystified. He’d never heard of Marian and, what’s more, he’d never heard me say anything before that suggested I knew the first thing about photographic history. But, then, if you’d asked me, I’d have denied knowing anything about it myself. The name – and the remark – had come to me quite spontaneously.

  It might have ended there, as a soon-to-be-forgotten throwaway remark. But Conrad never likes other people – especially me – knowing more than he does. He wouldn’t let it drop, said I was making
it up, though God knows why he thought I’d want to. In the end, we had some silly bet about it. I lost, and had to pay up. Conrad wouldn’t let me off. I knew he wouldn’t, of course, but I didn’t expect to lose. I was utterly confident I knew what I was talking about. We went to the person serving at the counter and asked them. They knew nothing about it. We looked through a couple of reference books they had on display, which were comprehensive enough to include Marian. But they didn’t mention her. Eventually Conrad insisted the curator be called. He tends to take things to extremes. And by then he sensed he was going to win, which he always enjoys. Anyway, the curator was away, not surprisingly on Easter Sunday, but somebody with a detailed knowledge of photographic history was unearthed. And he sided with Conrad. Nobody, apparently, had ever heard of Marian Esguard. He suggested I try the Royal Photographic Society’s library in Bath, but he made it pretty clear he didn’t think I’d find anything.

  We had to go back to London on Monday and the library wouldn’t be open till Tuesday, so I reckoned I’d have to drop the subject. It wasn’t really very important, after all. Just a stupid misconception on my part. But it wouldn’t go away. At first I thought it was pique at being proved wrong, but I knew it couldn’t be. Conrad gave me too much practice at that. No, I was frustrated by the discrepancy between what I was sure I’d read or heard about Marian Esguard and the official record, from which she’d been mysteriously deleted. And I realized I wasn’t going to be able to leave it there. I wanted to know why she’d been edited out of history.

  The days are my own during the working week. Conrad’s always very busy and I’m always very idle. He thinks I spend my time mooning around Bond Street and having lunch with friends. So I decided I could slip down to Bath for the day on the train without telling him, though I certainly meant to afterwards if I found any hard evidence of Marian’s existence. I wasn’t consciously being secretive.

  The Royal Photographic Society has a museum, gallery and library all under one roof in the centre of Bath. The library’s basically for members only, but I convinced them I was a serious researcher, so they let me in. I went through the index of every book they had on early photography looking for Marian’s name. There wasn’t a single mention of her. Thomas Wedgwood; Humphry Davy; Joseph Niépce; Louis Daguerre; John Herschel; William Fox Talbot: they were the names that kept cropping up, and I read enough to get a bluffer’s grasp of how the invention came about and what they each contributed to it. There didn’t seem to be room for Marian in any of the accounts. There weren’t any obvious gaps she could fill or missing links she could explain. If I hadn’t been so utterly certain of her existence, and her importance in photographic history, I’d have written her off there and then. In fact, I wouldn’t have had much choice but to give up if the librarian hadn’t asked me, as I was leaving, whether I’d found what I was looking for. I knew she wouldn’t have heard of Marian, but I asked her anyway, just for the hell of it.