I could have examined the contents of the box there and then, of course. But I was reluctant even to touch it. I was frightened by what had happened, frightened by its power, its weird sucking falling pull at every part of me. I started driving again, heading for Bradford-on-Avon and any kind of explanation Milo could offer.
But he was past explaining anything. I think I sensed that as soon as I saw the ambulance turning out of the entrance to Saffron House, lights flashing and siren blaring. It could have been any one of the elderly and infirm residents, but somehow I knew it wasn’t. I drove up to the house and got instant confirmation from the receptionist.
‘Poor old Mr Esguard’s had another heart attack,’ she said, the ‘another’ deepening my dread. ‘I told him only yesterday he was overdoing it.’
They took him to a hospital in Bath, where I spent the rest of that afternoon and most of the evening waiting for news, pacing up and down and drinking coffee, and wondering if it was my fault that he’d been ‘overdoing it’. He’d been so animated the day before, perhaps too animated. Nobody had told me he had a weak heart, but even so I should have taken things more slowly. What did my fancies and fantasies matter compared with his life?
They wouldn’t let me see him. He wasn’t conscious anyway, and as a non-relative I didn’t have many rights. A nurse asked me if I knew his next of kin. I said I didn’t, but I should have realized the nursing home would be trying to contact Niall while I was sitting there, waiting and hoping. As it was, it never occurred to me that I was taking any sort of risk by staying put. Actually, it did occur to me, but only when a tall, thin, lank-haired man, who looked to be in his late thirties, sat down next to me in the waiting area and said, ‘Mrs Moberly? I’m Niall Esguard.’
He must have been able to see the shock on my face. I’m always too transparent for my own good. Looking at him with his faintly pitted skin and his piercing eyes and his moist lips and his crooked nose, I felt that he could see not just straight through me but straight into me, where there was a secret he craved, cowering and pleading for protection.
‘Sorry if I surprised you,’ he went on in a husky whisky-and-cigarettes voice. ‘They gave me your name at Saffron House. You’ve been seeing a lot of my uncle lately, apparently. Why’s that, then?’
It was as much as I could do to speak, but I forced out something non-committal and got a ghastly little half-smile as my reward.
‘Not been running any errands for him, have you?’ Niall asked. ‘Only he can be a devious old bugger. I wouldn’t put it past him to talk a considerate lady like you into … a lot of trouble.’
‘I can’t imagine what you mean,’ I managed to say.
‘Just like I can’t imagine what the two of you have in common. Unless it’s something the three of us have in common.’
‘What could that be?’
‘Don’t you know, Mrs Moberly?’
‘No.’
‘Sure of that?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well, perhaps I should … put you in the picture, then.’
‘Picture?’
‘Yes. Picture. As in photograph. Uncle Milo’s quite an expert on photography. Its history. How it began. Who it began with. Some old squire out at Lacock in the eighteen thirties, so they say.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. But Uncle Milo’s never been convinced of that. He’s always … had an alternative theory.’
‘Really? We’ve never talked about it.’
‘Come off it. I bet you’ve never talked about anything else. According to—’
‘Excuse me,’ interrupted a nurse. ‘Mr Esguard?’
‘Yes,’ Niall said to her, though he was still staring straight at me.
‘The doctor would like a word with you, Mr Esguard. About your uncle.’
‘Oh, right.’ Niall hadn’t much choice but to get up and put on a show of nephew-like concern. ‘How is he?’
‘Very poorly, I’m afraid. Would you come this way?’
The nurse set off. As he followed her, Niall turned his head to look at me and said, ‘Don’t run away, Mrs Moberly.’
But that’s exactly what I did. As soon as he was out of sight, I rushed out of the hospital to my car and drove away. Niall Esguard had frightened me even more than Milo’s heart attack. My life was beginning to be taken over by people and events, some here and now, some long ago, and I wanted it to stop. I wanted safe humdrum normality back again.
I didn’t stop until I was back in London. I went straight home, thankful that Conrad wouldn’t be there to demand explanations, and tried to think matters through. Niall knew my name, but nothing else about me. I’d given Milo my telephone number, but he’d made a point of memorizing it rather than writing it down. God, I was grateful for his sense of melodrama now. The last thing I needed was a creep like Niall on my trail. A conversation of just a few minutes had convinced me he had a vicious streak. He seemed to know Milo had been hiding something from him. And he seemed certain I was helping the old fellow.
He was right, of course. I had the box and whatever secret it contained. I’d intended to take it to Milo, confident he’d tell me the truth at last. But Milo was in no condition to tell me anything. I phoned the hospital and asked how he was. The answer was just what I’d dreaded. ‘I’m afraid Mr Esguard died an hour ago without regaining consciousness.’
So that was it. Milo was dead. I sat staring into space, numb with the shock of it. Poor old Milo. I’d known him such a short time. Yet in some strange way I felt as if I’d known him all my life. I also felt responsible for his death, ludicrous though that may seem in any logical sense. If he’d been under more strain lately, it was because he’d wanted to be. He’d gone into this with his eyes open. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling I owed him something.
Facing up to whatever the box contained was just about the least. I knew it had to be done. Part of me was consumingly curious, in fact, though another part remained reluctant. But curiosity always wins over reluctance in the end. For reasons I couldn’t properly have explained, I put the security chain on the door and unplugged the telephone before lifting the lid.
Sheets of paper. That’s all there was in it. But not just any sheets. They were photographic negatives, measuring about six inches by four, developed on flimsy and obviously very old paper, variously creased, stained and torn. The dark areas appeared a muddy grey-brown, the light areas a pale, dirty yellow. There were seven in all: four outdoor shots of the same building from different angles – it looked like a substantial country house; two of the interior of a library, one focusing on a bookcase, the other on a handsomely mounted globe; and one of a man and a woman standing at the bottom of a broad flight of stone steps, the same flight that was visible at a greater distance in one of the house studies. There was one additional sheet, a positive print of the couple, with a tiny hand-pencilled caption added at the base. The print had a reddy-brown hue, but was strikingly sharp.
I can’t remember in what order the realization hit me. I think the way the couple were dressed struck me first. The man wore riding boots over pale trousers, a high-buttoned double-breasted jacket beneath a long, loose duster coat, some sort of ruffled white shirt and stock, gloves and a narrow-brimmed top hat. He was holding a riding crop in one hand, slightly blurred, and leaning casually against an orb-topped pillar, his other hand clasping the lapel of his coat. He was clean-shaven, with a fleshy, faintly vapid face. I’d have put him in early middle age. The woman was somewhat younger, or at any rate looked it. She was standing stiffly upright, peering at the camera with a slight frown. She wore a pale, high-waisted, ankle-length dress and a short, darker-coloured jacket that reached no lower than her bosom. Ringletted hair could be seen beneath her frilled bonnet, held in place with a ribbon, one end of which was just a smudge, as if it had been disturbed by the wind during exposure. I didn’t need a degree in costume design to identify her outfit as classic Empire line, which meant 1830 at the latest. The caption speci
fied the date, anyway, along with the subjects, and location. ‘Barrington and Susannah Esguard, Gaunt’s Chase, 13 July 1817.’ According to Milo, Barrington Esguard had been over eighty when he died, some time in the 1860s. That put his birth at around 1780 and his age in 1817 mid to late thirties, which wasn’t far off what the man in the photograph looked.
The house was Gaunt’s Chase, burned down in 1838. The couple were Milo Esguard’s great-great-grand-parents. The photographer was Marian Esguard. And the date was more than twenty years earlier than it had any right to be. I was holding in my hand the proof, as Milo had promised, of Marian’s genius.
And then, as I stared at the photograph, it happened again. Suddenly I was there, in the warm summer sunshine. At Gaunt’s Chase in July 1817. I could see the shadow-etched pattern of the brickwork of the house, and the mellow cream glow of the stone facings. I could see Barrington and Susannah relaxing their poses and beginning to move. Barrington’s coat was grey, his trousers fawn, his jacket green, his top hat a gleaming black. Susannah’s dress was white, with a delicate floral pattern that had eluded the camera, her jacket turquoise, her bonnet grey. They smiled and moved away from the steps towards me. I could hear a dog barking somewhere and wood being chopped in the distance.
‘What am I to believe we have just accomplished, Marian?’ Barrington enquired in a sceptical tone. ‘Beyond a certain stiffness of limb as a result of lengthy immobility.’ He was talking to me, I realized, talking and looking and approaching.
‘I wonder that Jos encourages you in this, my dear,’ added Susannah. ‘It is scarcely what I would have expected him to approve of as recreation for his wife.’
I could see and hear, and now I knew as well. I knew Barrington for the affable, pliable, empty-headed fool that he was and Susannah for everything such a man deserved in a wife. I knew them from long acquaintance. I was married to Barrington’s brother, the altogether more intelligent, but vastly less genial, Joslyn Esguard. I’d been so for eight years, since he’d lured me away from the contentments of my agreeable existence in Chichester and condemned me to act out the part of his devoted wife at this wind-lashed home of his dubious ancestors on the Dorset uplands. My mind and my memory were aflood with all the jumbled events and circumstances of my life. They came to me as something quite natural and inescapable, as the sum of what constituted my past and present.
‘I have not sought Jos’s sanction, Susannah,’ I heard myself say. ‘Nor do I intend to. My innocent little scientific explorations need not concern him.’
‘Those stains on your hands must concern him, surely,’ said Barrington as he drew closer. ‘What did you say had caused them?’
‘The substances I make use of to achieve the desired result.’
‘I confess I am still somewhat uncertain what that result is. If this … contrivance … is, in essence, our dear old friend the camera obscura, what is to be gained by your squinting into it for minutes at a stretch whilst we impersonate statues?’
‘It was a matter of seconds, Barrington, as you full well know. And what is to be gained is a more accurate picture of you and Susannah than the finest artist could achieve with oils and a brush.’
‘So you say. But where is the picture?’
‘Inside the camera.’ I turned towards what Barrington had called my contrivance, a rectangular wooden box two feet wide by two feet high by eighteen inches deep, with a hinged top and a lens, now capped, fitted in the centre of the side he and Susannah had been facing. It was mounted on a modified artist’s easel, having been constructed to my specifications by the estate carpenter, the excellent Mr Eames. ‘But not yet visible.’
‘When will it be visible?’
‘Tomorrow. Susannah, you really must explain to your husband the great virtue of—’
It was gone. As suddenly and completely as I’d been there with them, I was back in the present, alone in the Mayfair apartment, cold electric light falling on the fragment of the past I held in my hand, traffic noise seeping through the half-open window to wash away the sights and sounds of another place and another life. I dropped the pictures back into the box and closed it, then slid it away from me across the table. What I’d seen and heard at Bentinck Place could just about be dismissed as tricks that my mind had played on me. But the force of what I’d just experienced was too great to resist. It was true. It was real, God help me, every bit as real as the empty room I sat in, or the bustling city beyond the window, or the table I was leaning on. For a few precious moments, I’d shared a life with Marian Esguard. Some part of me must always have done. That’s how I knew what she’d achieved in the distant yet strangely close at hand prehistory of photography. And that part was growing stronger all the time. Nothing could stop it, even if I wanted it to. I’d been her. And she was becoming me.
I took a sleeping pill and went to bed. When I woke next day, it was nearly noon. To my surprise, I felt completely rested and refreshed. In daylight, it seemed possible to believe I’d somehow imagined what had happened, or at least that I could prevent it happening again. The person I’d been reasserted her right to an untroubled existence. I wasn’t prepared to share it with a woman who’d died more than a hundred years ago. I wasn’t going to let her take me over.
I showered and dressed, then put the box into a briefcase, walked down to our bank in Piccadilly and requested access to our safe deposit. With the box locked away securely, I treated myself to an expensive and solitary lunch. It had to stop, I told myself. It had already stopped, I willed myself to believe. I was going to forget Marian and revert to the frivolous life of Eris Moberly.
For a while it worked. I stayed in London, saw more of my friends and arranged a succession of dinner parties and evenings at the theatre. I made sure I was seldom alone and never at a loose end. Conrad jokingly complained that he couldn’t take the pace I was setting. But I was running to stand still, drinking too much and eating too little. As spring moved towards summer, I felt more and more like a mouse on a treadmill in a cage with an open door. I could give up if I wanted to and step through the door into clear, cooling air. There was nothing to be frightened of. I was free of whatever spell Marian had cast over me. I was cured.
One day, as if to prove the point, I drove out of London down the A3, heading for a Persian rug shop in Guildford I particularly wanted to see. But I didn’t stop at Guildford. I carried on south towards Chichester and, as soon as I saw its cathedral spire ahead of me across the plain, I felt hugely and bizarrely happy, as if I was returning home after many years’ exile. I parked at the theatre on the northern edge of the city and walked down into the centre. Everything seemed only superficially ordinary. I looked at the modern shopfronts and the bland faces of the passers-by and sensed a reality beyond them. It wasn’t at all threatening. I wasn’t frightened of anything any more. I was completely at my ease.
I reached Market Cross and stood in its familiar shade for some time, gazing up at the cathedral. Then I walked down South Street, more slowly now, and turned into West Pallant, comforted by my recognition of the elegant Georgian house fronts lining the narrow street. There was Dodo House ahead of me, as I knew Pallant House had always been called by the locals on account of the poorly sculpted ostriches crowning its gateposts. No longer capable of noticing anything odd in such knowledge, I pressed on along East Pallant, passing the houses on its gently curving southern side, noting and remembering the double-pillared doorway of one and the gleaming area railings of another. Then, instinctively, I stopped, and turned and retraced my steps as far as number eight.
It was architecturally more modest than some of its neighbours, but otherwise a classical eighteenth-century red-brick townhouse. A brass plaque advertised it as the premises of a legal practice. The front door was hooked open to reveal a glass inner door, through which I could see the hall and stairwell. As I looked, something changed in my perception, like a filter being lowered across my sight and understanding. I climbed the steps and entered.
The
hall was silent and empty, yet it teemed with memories. They came spilling out of the rooms around me and down the stairs to greet me, memories of a childhood and adolescence spent in this house with my brothers and sisters and our indulgent parents. Every detail was fresh and yet familiar, every facet of this small world within a world instantly recognizable.
I moved to the door of my father’s study, knocked and entered. And there he was, turning slowly in his chair and laying down his spectacles and the medical journal he’d been reading on the escritoire beside him. Dear Papa, tubbier and older and balder than he’d once been, but still with that benign and crumpled grin that had delighted me as a small girl, and which continued to charm even his more ill-tempered patients. Dr Thomas Freeman, physician of Chichester and founder of the local dispensary for the indigent sick, looked at me fondly across his book-lined refuge from domestic disorder and laid his open hand characteristically across his chest.
‘Marian,’ he said. ‘I had supposed you to be keeping your mother company at the milliner’s.’
‘She does not require my assistance to choose another few yards of ribbon, Papa,’ I replied, with exactly the correct level of respectful sarcasm.
Caught In the Light Page 9
