Caught In the Light

by Robert Goddard

  Perhaps, had we not both been so startled by the sight of each other, we would have found a few fitting words of greeting. But the explanations we should then have been obliged to offer to our respective companions would undeniably have been as embarrassing to them as to us. Perhaps, therefore, upon reflection, it is as well that we passed by without exchanging more than a glance of recognition.

  It was gratifying to see how well you are carrying your years, and I do sincerely hope that Susannah’s absence from your side had no doleful significance. The middle-aged gentleman to whom you were talking was surely dear Nelson. He did not notice me or catch your glance in my direction, and might not have recognized me even had he done so. But the face of the child is there in the man and in the face also of the child who was tugging impertinently at your coat-tail, who I would surmise must be your grandson.

  Was it you, I wonder, who led your party to the photographic exhibits? I have not forgotten our last conversation, and nor, I suspect, have you. It was a poignant experience, I cannot deny, to see what others have accomplished in the years since I was forced to abandon my research in the field of heliogenesis, as photography might now be called but for your brother’s – how shall I phrase it? – rigidity of mind.

  I do not wish to traduce the dead, nor lodge claims of scientific primacy which others would regard as preposterous. What was done was done, what was lost lost. There is an end of it. We are both too old to squander our remaining years on futile regrets. My purpose in writing to you is entirely sentimental and I pray you will respond in kind.

  It has occurred to me that your evident shock at catching sight of me yesterday may have been occasioned by your harbouring till then the belief that I was dead. It is a belief Jos would have been pleased to entertain himself and to encourage in those of his friends and relatives who knew me. Perhaps he hoped that I had died of a broken heart. He had, after all, done his very best to foster conditions in which I might easily have done so. I feel sure you are familiar with the sordid details of his conspiracy with Mr Byfield to break my spirit and imperil my sanity. What you may not be familiar with are the exact circumstances of our final parting. I can hardly suppose that he gave you an accurate report of them. If, however, his distortion of the facts persuaded you that I had embarked upon a foredoomed quest after the errant Mr Byfield, you will not have been misled. I wasted seven years of my life – seven years of my precious freedom from your brother – in such a quest. At its end I tracked Mr Byfield to his hiding place on the island of Guernsey. I succeeded. But what a success!

  I will tell you the truth of it in the hope that my candour will find an echo in your own soul. On the crossing to Guernsey I made the acquaintance of a woman who had believed herself to be Mr Byfield’s wife until his desertion of her and their child some years previously and her subsequent discovery that she was not his first such victim. It was a bigamous union, quite possibly not the only one Mr Byfield contracted in his amorous career. The child had died. The woman was close to despair. She had, like me, traced his whereabouts in the face of many difficulties. She proposed to throw herself upon his mercy. For she loved him still, with a shameful passion. He was ever one to command such emotions. I speak, of course, from personal experience.

  What was I to do? Confronted by this ample proof of Mr Byfield’s duplicity and my folly, I did not disembark with the woman when we reached Guernsey. I remained on the ship and returned to England, sadder and wiser and quite possibly harder hearted than I had been before. To have found him out was in the end more important than to seek him out.

  I shall not weary you with an account of my doings in the years since. Suffice it to say that, if I have not always been happy, I am now at least content. Where I live and how I live are matters you need not concern yourself with. Indeed, my experiences at your brother’s hands have left me reluctant to disclose too much of myself to any member of his family, including, alas, you, dear Barrington. Forgive me if I am too harsh. Forgive me and confer blame on the one who should bear it.

  Jos is dead and I will say no more about him. It is the manner of his death that concerns me. I had fondly imagined that there would eventually be an opportunity for me to revisit Gaunt’s Chase and to retrieve my heliogenic records and equipment, all of which I was obliged to leave behind. But the fire destroyed everything. I saw that for myself when I paid the house a surreptitious visit some weeks after reading of the disaster. All was gone.

  Or was it? I remember your interest in my heliogenic researches. I remember your proposal to take them forward under your stewardship. And I remember your curiosity about the heliogenic picture I made of you and Susannah. It occurs to me – as no more than the frailest of hopes, I grant – that you may have rescued something of my work from Gaunt’s Chase, either with Jos’s consent or, more probably, without it. It occurs to me, as rather more of a guess than a hope, that you must at least have tried, if I read your character right.

  You can tell me whether I do or not. You can, with the munificence of the venerable, reassure me that I did not dream my former accomplishments. Our chance meeting of yesterday prompts me to beg this favour of you. I hope the same chance will prompt you to grant it, if not for old times’ sake, then for family’s sake.

  A letter or a package, or whatever you are able to send, will reach me if sent care of Miss Arabella Humphreys, Arnwick House, Burnham Market, Norfolk. She is a good friend of mine and her discretion is absolute.

  I wish you well, and close this letter wondering if I will hear from you as you have now heard from me, in a spirit of reconciliation.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Marian

  After I’d read the letter, I went back out to the garden, where Quisden-Neve was waiting. He cocked his eyebrow questioningly at me as I sat down opposite him. Then he leaned forward to pour me some more whisky.

  ‘I did say it was a surprise, didn’t I, Mr Jarrett?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I take it you assumed Marian Esguard was the woman whose suicide apparently prompted Lawrence Byfield’s fatal duel on Guernsey. Monty would have known better, of course, already being in possession of the letter. He was very close to the answer, wasn’t he? Too close, as it turned out.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘I further take it Barrington Esguard had indeed helped himself to some of the negatives Marian left at Gaunt’s Chase and was sufficiently moved by her letter to return them to her via her friend in Burnham Market.’

  ‘It looks like it. Marian’s sister and her husband lived at Brant’s Carr Lodge. I think Marian lived with them. But perhaps she didn’t confide in them about her photographic work. Maybe they didn’t approve of women dabbling in science. That would have been another reason for using Miss Humphreys as a go-between. And for hiding the negatives under the stairs. Where they remained until Nyman discovered them.’

  ‘And subsequently destroyed them?’

  ‘Yes. He probably burned them on the fire in the bedroom. The ashes were still warm when I arrived.’

  ‘What would such items be worth – if he hadn’t burned them?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘How much is a lot?’

  ‘Enough to have made your brother a wealthy man. Enough to have run quite a few risks for.’

  ‘But not enough to get killed for.’

  ‘Nothing ever is.’ I glanced away and sipped some whisky, eager suddenly to talk of anything but death. ‘What will you do with the letters?’

  ‘I don’t know. Donate them to the Royal Photographic Society, perhaps. What are they worth, without the negatives?’

  ‘Financially, very little, I imagine. They could be mid-Victorian forgeries. Or Marian could be lying. No-one but Nyman ever saw the negatives. He could have been lying, too.’

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  ‘No. I’m sure they existed. And I’m equally sure they don’t exist now.’ I sighed. ‘Nyman was good at destroying things.’

  I
was planning to drive straight back to London when I left Quisden-Neve’s house. Just a few miles outside Northiam, however, I spotted a sign for Bodiam Castle. Instantly and completely, sharper than any photograph, the memory came back to me of going there one summer Sunday with Amy. The castle was a picture-book medieval relic that could have been made for children, with its battlements and portcullises and crumbling spiral staircases. Amy had adored it.

  A school party was swarming over the place when I arrived. They looked to be about the age Amy had been then. I walked round the lilied moat, listening to their voices filling the air. Somewhere, I knew, if I looked hard enough, I’d be able to find the film I’d had in my camera that day. But Amy wasn’t on it. I hadn’t taken any pictures of her or the castle. I’d let the visit go unrecorded. And now, just like Marian Esguard’s secret experiments with light and paper in the spring and summer of 1817, there was no proof it had ever happened. What I was remembering I could just as easily be imagining. Nyman had erased the past as well as the future.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE ONLY THING left in an empty life is time. I could almost touch it as it passed that spring and summer. Amy’s existence slipped away behind me like a single turning on a long straight road. I looked back at it fixedly, fearing that if I once glanced away it would vanish for ever. The world I was in wasn’t her world any more. And it didn’t feel like mine either.

  The house sold easily, for a good price. I banked my share of the money and moved into a rented flat in the centre of Barnes. Faith wrote to say she’d taken a bookkeeping job with a wine shipper in Adelaide and was staying on in Australia, for six months or so at least. She hoped I was getting back into photography. I didn’t reply. It seemed fairer to let her think I was too busy.

  The reality was that a kind of wilful inertia had settled over me. Hours and days seemed to flash by while I did nothing but walk the streets and stare at the sky. Sometimes I simply lay on my bed and watched the light change as the sun moved slowly round me. I took no photographs. In a sense, my life had become a photograph: a Fenton landscape in which I was the silhouetted figure in the middle ground, back turned to the camera, face unseen, purpose unknown. Every moment was frozen. And every moment was the same. I was slowly losing sight of everything that should have mattered but no longer did. I was spiralling down into a dark place where I could neither see nor be seen, but felt, in some strange way, safe from every kind of harm.

  Tim was just about my only human contact. He’d look at me during his periodic visits with such a despairing expression that I’d momentarily want to break out of the cycle I was trapped in. Then the desire would fade and I’d tell him not to worry.

  Tim had most of his advice and encouragement thrown back at him. But he didn’t give up. And, despite his denials, I detected his hand in the unexpected offer that came my way at the beginning of September. My agent broke the silence he’d maintained since the Vienna-in-winter fiasco with a weird and grudging proposition. The Icelandic Geodetic Survey wanted a set of up-to-date photographs of the island’s volcanoes to combine with their maps of the areas and the descriptive writings of some eminent vulcanologist in a definitive study of the subject. The vulcanologist was the problem. She was an eruptive character in her own right, and so notoriously reckless that no local photographer could be found who was willing to work with her. They’d all had their fingers burned one way or another. And so, like the runner who finishes last in the race, only to be handed the winner’s medal because everyone else has been disqualified, I was chosen for the job.

  I’m not sure why I took it. I think the finality of the opportunity shocked me into acceptance. Last chances are difficult to turn down. Besides, I knew nothing about volcanoes and I’d never been to Iceland. The whole project was alien to me. Which was the essence of its appeal. It was more of an escape than a challenge.

  Or so I thought until I stepped off the plane at Keflavík and met Dr Asgerthur Sigurthsdottír. She drove me into Reykjavík at what seemed foolhardy speed through a rainstorm that lifted only occasionally to reveal glimpses of an arid black landscape, treating me as we went to her contemptuous views of men in general and male photographers in particular.

  She was a large, flame-haired, gruff-voiced woman of forthright opinions and no discernible reserves of either patience or tact. ‘They told me your daughter was murdered a few months ago,’ she bluntly announced as we approached Reykjavík. ‘They think that will make me gentle on you. Maybe you think that also. Think again. You are here to work. I will work you. We start tomorrow.’

  Over the next six weeks we travelled the island, by Jeep and plane, and sometimes on foot, in all weathers, more of it foul than fair, trying to pin down, in her words and my pictures, the mood of the strange places she took me to. Asga – the diminutive she came to accept from me in preference to my mangled pronunciation of her full name – had been obsessed by the volcanoes of her native land since the explosive offshore birth of Surtsey in 1963, when she’d watched its column of ash rising into the sky from her school classroom 100 kilometres away. Since then, she’d been approximately 100 kilometres closer to every big bang the geodynamics of Iceland could supply – which was quite a few. Witnessing an eruption was, she said, ‘like sex with a man who knows what to do – rare, violent and unforgettable’.

  I let that and all her other provocative remarks pass me by. I was content to concentrate on photography. Iceland was a place like no other I’d ever been. Its vast, black, smoking wildernesses soaked into my mind, along with the wind and the rain and the cold dazzling sunlight. I felt removed into a realm of heightened vision, where some kind of photographic perfection was within my grasp. I filled film after film with hallucinatory images of glacial white and sulphurous yellow and deep drowning blue. I returned to the only thing I did well with an eagerness I could neither control nor deny. The pictures imposed themselves upon me.

  Early autumn was hazardously late to be visiting some of the sites, but that didn’t seem to bother Asga. And the volatility of the weather gave my photographs a menacing hue I could almost taste. There was an edge to them I couldn’t help relishing. I already knew they were going to be some of the best work I’d ever done.

  The nearest we came to disaster wasn’t, as I’d anticipated, in the grey deserts of the interior, where Asga’s giant-wheeled Jeep took swollen streams and sandstorms in its stride, but on Snaefellsjökull, the dormant volcano near the far western end of the Snaefellsnes peninsula, Jules Verne’s famous starting point for his Journey to the Centre of the Earth. We approached from the south-east, climbed as high as possible in the Jeep, then took a chance on the weather allowing us to make it to the summit and back on foot before nightfall. In the event, a blizzard blew up from nowhere, we lost our way, went down the wrong side of the mountain and reached the coast road in a state of near-collapse, with the light all but gone.

  Asga had just about enough breath to blame me for the position we found ourselves in. ‘You’re supposed to be the cautious one, lens brain.’ But she also had the sense to realize we weren’t going to make it back to the Jeep and the local knowledge that led us to an old fish-drying shed, fitted out as an emergency shelter, where we holed up for the night.

  It was there, 1,000 miles and more from all my previous experiences, that I finally explained to somebody who’d never met Amy how she’d died and why. ‘It’s too cold to sleep,’ Asga said. ‘You’d better tell me your story.’ It was her prickly way of admitting she wanted to hear it. And to my surprise I wanted to tell it. The time had come to do more than picture the horror and the waste of it in my mind. The time had come to speak. And in some inchoate way to accept. It was done and couldn’t be undone. I was going to live through it. Something in my nature was going to force me to survive. Whether I wanted to or not.

  Asga gave every impression of having forgotten all about our heart-to-heart by morning, when we trudged back round the coast road to the Jeep. She never so much as mentioned Amy’s name
. Or Nyman’s or Eris’s or Isobel’s or Marian Esguard’s, or any of the others I’d felt at the time she was taking such clear and cogent note of. She said nothing about any of them. Until the night before I flew back to England, that is, when she stood me a farewell dinner at a seafood restaurant near the harbour in Reykjavík. Then, at last, when I’d come to think she never would, she broke her silence.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your story, Jarrett. Best brain-food I’ve had from one of you click-clickers.’

  ‘Glad it entertained you,’ I said, way past taking offence at any remark she made, however insensitive.

  ‘I don’t know the people in it. Not one. I reckon that’s why I see it clearer than you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Sure thing. So I wanted to tell you, before you left, where you’ve got it wrong. You missed something, Jarrett. You didn’t get the picture. It must have caught you without your camera.’

  ‘What must?’

  ‘Nyman lied. On the tape. He didn’t destroy the negatives.’

  I smiled at her across the table. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Obvious. Because he lied about the reason for destroying them. He could have cut you out of the deal easy as slicing by sending them to Quisden-Neve’s brother along with the letters. Or just by leaving them where they were. They didn’t belong to you, did they?’

  ‘But he didn’t leave them where they were. The police searched the house from top to bottom and found nothing. And he didn’t send them to Valentine.’

  ‘Because he didn’t have them.’ She grinned triumphantly. ‘The other lie proves that.’