Night of Fire

by Colin Thubron

  ‘Her words are dead. There’s no person in there. I need a way into her character. But I can’t find one.’

  He’d meant to joke, but the words came out tense: ‘Perhaps you’ve never been betrayed.’

  She laughed: a quick, low sound that told him nothing. ‘Usually you start to understand a role in rehearsal. Your character takes shape alongside the others. But our director’s lost his way. He’s tired, I think. So the actors start hamming it up. It’s a kind of insecurity. Then the play falls apart. Of course it was never together in the first place . . .’

  Later, in the quiet of his bedroom, he would realise how inextricably this fascination for her was bound up with what she did, with a stage presence that he could already imagine. Even the way she lifted her fork to her lips seemed delicate and extraordinary to him, as did the pursed mobility of her mouth when she spoke, with a darting intensity that might haunt an audience.

  When she asked him about his work, he was relieved that he need not pretend. Alongside more humble assignments, he was starting to receive commissions for photographic portraits. Compulsively he set himself to reflect his subjects’ inner life. The challenge, he told her, was less a matter of manipulated light or photographic angle than of some unconscious disclosure in his sitters, some essence unique to them. He wanted his sitters to confront the camera head-on.

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer them naked.’ She was laughing. ‘And what do they think of the results?’

  Those could be unsettling and occasionally cruel, he admitted. Sometimes his sitters’ relatives were more pleased than they were, as if something unrecognised had been revealed. Often he was asked to revert to more conventional portraiture, to create flattery.

  Linda asked suddenly, still laughing a little: ‘Do you believe people have essences?’

  Yes, he hunted for something like that. Even in landscape. Recently, he said, he had taken to walking along the South Downs. There were places there that tantalised him, where the view extended beyond the copses and hedges that sliced up the fields, until the fields themselves became foreshortened and then disappeared, and it looked as though a seamless forest was flowing to the hills. Obsessively he would descend to wander among these scattered woods. He could not photograph without this experience of them. Because the woods had become a visual forest, and the forest must have a heart. Perhaps, he said, it was like trying to fathom a theatrical character. He reached across and touched her fingers where they rested on the table: they did not recoil. What did she think?

  She said: ‘I think you’re a fruitcake.’

  ‘What?

  ‘You’re nuts. Your forests are an illusion. Illusions don’t have hearts.’ Then she saw she’d disconcerted him, and burst into husky laughter. ‘Well, I guess I just don’t get it. I had a camera once and I dropped it in a river. It had shots of my old boyfriend on it and I thought: that’s the end of him!’

  He smiled at her, but said with sudden pleading: ‘I’ll show you, Linda. I’ll show you what the camera can do. Let me photograph you.’ He thought instantly: but where? Not back at his flat, with Richard. ‘I’ll come to your place, on Sunday.’

  ‘But will you find my essence? I can’t.’ Her mockery at once ravished and maddened him. ‘I look inside me and there’s a blur. Maybe that’s why I’m an actor. I think I can be anybody. We can all change places.’ She went quiet, and toyed with the wine bottle. He had ordered a vintage Chianti Classico, pricier than he could afford, and emptied it into their glasses. She said: ‘My parents knew a brain surgeon once who said there’s no real heart to us, just synapses firing at one another, or something.’ Her eyes shone on and off his face. ‘And my father’s a vicar!’

  ‘What does he think of your going on stage?’

  ‘He wants to love it, but my changes of character upset him.’ She snapped off the dripping candle wax, and aligned its fragments like people. ‘He thinks I have a soul.’

  ‘Of course. Who wouldn’t? You’re so . . .’ I must stop this, he thought, she’ll guess I’m falling hopelessly in love with her. ‘You’re very defined.’

  ‘Am I? Well I believe in other people’s reality. They may even have souls, for all I know.’ He remembered this moment months later, but wondered at the time only if the drink had gone to her head. ‘Other people may exist.’

  He did not know what to say. She seemed half serious. He murmured: ‘I’ll photograph you on Sunday. Then you’ll be unmistakable.’

  ‘Why don’t I come to your place?’

  ‘That’s hard. I share it with Richard, my brother.’

  ‘Oh, was he your brother? I didn’t realise.’

  ‘We’re not much alike.’ He heard the distaste in his own voice. ‘He’s much more mature.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She put down her wine glass. ‘I thought he was a jerk.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ He was pleased, of course, relieved.

  ‘Then you come to me. I’m sharing digs with Diana. So you can photograph me in the right setting. Squalid bedsheets, worn-out carpets. The glamour of theatre life.’

  The auditorium was almost full. He looked down the cast list and found her as the lights dimmed. Linda Spalva. The name fitted her. Her paternal grandfather had been Latvian, she’d said, a refugee from the Second World War. Hence, perhaps, her wide-set gentian-blue eyes. He had drunk himself to death in Glasgow.

  The curtain rose on an empty Edwardian drawing room. He felt nervous for her. Might she forget her lines? Or freeze, or trip up? But when she came on – the last to do so – he scarcely recognised her. Her ground-length skirt flared down from a sashed waist, and her hair was swept up beneath a huge sloping hat. During her few scenes, she barely spoke. She suffered. All her animation, her febrile, birdlike intensity, was corseted in a poised tension. He could not take his eyes from her. In her stillness, it seemed, she projected a terrible pent-up sorrow, and when she spoke the words that she had found meaningless, they came with devastation. ‘There is nothing . . . nothing that you can do for me now. I have no more love for you. Was there anything worth loving in Judas?’

  Each evening until Sunday he returned to the stalls to watch her. He forgot what the play was about, if he had ever known, and experienced only the astonishment of her presence: the carved beauty of her features, the fragile figure in its cream lace gown, the surprising low voice. Even when she did nothing, and the stage around her teemed with action, he saw only her.

  On the fourth day her place was taken by an understudy – nobody explained why – and his gaze widened to take in the whole stage. Then he realised that an entire play had been going on around her: other actors, other emotions. There were movements and speeches that he had never registered. They creaked with cliché. But on Saturday she returned, and once more he was sitting in the dark like a voyeur, elated and faintly guilty, and her intensity suffused the stage again. There is nothing . . . nothing that you can do for me now . . . As he gazed at her – he had bought opera glasses – he saw close up her ravaged face and the still blaze of her eyes and the bitterness of her full lips, and her breast heaving, and could not believe that he might be with her next morning; nor did he understand that when the actors took their curtain call the applause for her was not tumultuously louder than for the others, and he did not dare wait for her at the stage door, in case she could not meet him tomorrow after all, and he saw indifference in her eyes.

  He took a taxi to her rented rooms, piling his equipment beside him. He had dressed with careful casualness, but he glimpsed his face in the taxi mirror. It was too pale. He had barely slept. When he did, she had entered his dreams. He thought: her enigma will be dispelled by the morning light. A thin rain was falling. The streets were empty. Within ten minutes he was standing with his lamps and cameras on her doorstep.

  Her rooms were run-down, she was right: two bedsits with a shared bathroom. He set up his lights and reflectors in cramped corners. She sat on the edge of the bed. Fastidiously, almost reverently, he positioned and lit her.
She was very still. He was hypnotised by her changes of expression, even in this stillness. Sometimes she looked starkly inconsolable, her eyes downcast into long almonds. At others a perennial mischief surfaced, and her torso – he was starting to photograph her body too – arched teasingly, and her smile turned ironic. At last she grew impatient. Hadn’t he had enough of her? No, he hadn’t. There were only so many lights and camera angles, weren’t there? There seemed no limit, he said.

  Finally she rebelled and lay back on the bed, pretending to snore. He switched off the lamps and leant over her. She opened her eyes. For a second the air between them was a vacuum of suspense, then her gaze pulled him down. Fearfully, helplessly, he stooped and kissed her lips.

  Later he would remember the room in intimate detail: the lopsided curtain rail, the tarnished wardrobe mirror, the pattern of the wallpaper (a trellis of blue roses) behind her head as he lay beside her afterwards for a sated eternity, dazed by the gentian eyes that seemed now part of himself, or nearly, the life of him poured out into her, and she laughing a soft laugh of contentment.

  Towards noon they fell asleep in one another’s arms. Diana looked in, and tiptoed away. He woke to the hardening rain outside. He stretched out, as if released from something, and held Linda’s hand under the sheets. The sky was darkening beyond the window. In the room’s dimness the tripods and spectral lamps were still standing around them. Awake, naked, they exchanged random intimacies. He breathed out his anger at his father, and his intermittent solitude – now dispelled by her – and listened to her childhood, which he had started to romanticise, imagining an only child brought up by pious parents in a windy vicarage. But she cut him short. Her father was a hot-headed, faintly ludicrous figure, she said, whose sermons were full of Latin idioms inherited from her grandfather. As for herself, she had been an ungrateful, rebellious daughter. She disliked everything she learnt about God. At the age of seventeen she had an abortion, arranged by her distraught mother. Her father went on loving her, to her mind absurdly.

  As for Steve, his boyhood, when he spoke of it, sounded constrained and colourless. But he was afraid to admit to her his inner shaking, how parts of himself were torn away from him, especially at night, so that when his father left – coldly, without warning – it only confirmed an apprehension that had tormented his childhood: nothing was stable, or lasted.

  Linda asked gently: ‘Did you ever dream of another life?’

  Yes, he said. As a boy he thought he might become a surgeon or even a priest: anyone devoted to what he conceived as human essence, whatever did not disintegrate. But his mother had favoured the law or banking.

  ‘Not photography?’

  ‘She said I’d become as useless as my father.’ But his mother had not been dead a year, and he could not talk of her. He asked abruptly: ‘And what else would you have done?’

  Nothing else, she said. She ached to play the complex, meaty women of Ibsen and Strindberg, but her appearance was dead against it. She smiled a little bitterly. ‘Why was I born with these stupid looks? I’ve got the character of Lady Macbeth in the body of Ophelia.’

  ‘Stupid?’ He was able to tell her now, without constraint, how heart-rendingly beautiful she was.

  She drummed her fingers on his chest, and gave her self-mocking laugh. ‘You have funny taste in women.’ But she was smiling.

  When his photographic prints arrived back from the laboratory the following week, he was baffled. He had been beguiled by her looks. They had tempted him to employ the flattering clichés that he despised, and of which she had no need: the classic turn of the shoulder, the elbows free from her waistline, the placement of her hands. He had angled her face two-thirds from the camera, and had deployed a broad, near-frontal light source that crept illumination round her whole face and blurred its shadows into softened highlights. The delicate translucence of her skin was lost. She looked beautiful, of course, but no longer unique, curiously like others.

  But his chief failure was elsewhere. He had also posed her facing his lens full-on. It was an unflattering practice, sometimes heartlessly revelatory, always in black and white. His wide-aperture lens gave a shallow depth of field that misted away the cheap wallpaper and everything else behind her. She emerged from this fog in violent chiaroscuro. He had risked a higher reflector light on her astonishing eyes, which now slanted out of darkness. Eyes that sloped backwards, he realised, were impenetrably difficult to encompass. Some part of hers seemed always to elude the camera, as if they should be shot from many angles at once. Above all he had asked her not to smile, and perhaps it was this that emptied her of any expression he recognised. Her face had taken on the stark definition of a mask. He wondered if the diffuser had slipped from one of his lamps or if he should have used a texture screen to soften her. She was stonily enigmatic. He even blamed the processing laboratory.

  He may have imagined that in photographs he could possess her. Just as when abroad he never thought he had experienced a place unless he had framed and shot it, so now the feeling that she had eluded him, that he might never grasp her, rankled miserably. His lens had lost her in a collage of ungiving surfaces.

  To distract himself, he dusted down his old Canon cine camera and shot impromptu sequences of his flat, of the seafront, and of her. Filming might not distil a subject’s psyche as a photographic portrait could, but it was harder to coerce. Nobody in film could preserve for long the rictus of a photographic smile. They walked in the illusion of the present, grounded in voice and movement. Yet they too were transient and ungraspable. And they were never quite themselves. Before the cine camera they simpered and buffooned or simply walked off as if into reality.

  Linda watched herself on screen with indifference, but she leafed happily through the still photographs that he hated. She murmured: ‘Yes, that’s me all right . . . Why are you so upset? . . . That one’s quite good . . . and this one’s me . . .’ She did not seem to realise how the photos reduced her.

  He followed her despised play to Manchester and on to Sheffield. She found new digs, and they shared a narrow bed. He motored half the night between her venues and his work. Her life backstage held a rarefied novelty for him. Its warren of dressing rooms and lavatories seemed extemporised and spartan compared to the affluence of the auditorium, and her fellow actors were like an alien clan to him.

  But she did not go into the unemployment she had feared. Instead she was cast at once in a new play, which she admired: an exacting and uneven piece, she said, but her role was real. Several times he inveigled himself into the studio rehearsals, but the action was so often interrupted by the director – a nervous, elfin woman – that he never heard its language flow. Her part was larger than before. To his surprise she was playing a woman older than herself: a biologist whom she described as austere, and lesbian. He wondered how she could encompass such a woman. She was surely too mercurial, too fragile. He was afraid she’d been miscast.

  In the evening, in the cramped London flat that she shared with two absent actresses, she appeared to struggle over the words. She was not trying to memorise them, she said, but to hear a tone of voice. She was hunting for a way into the character. Over three weeks of rehearsal she hoped that interplay with the cast would internalise the role for her. She drank many mugs of coffee, even late at night, and dropped into nervous study or effervescent banter. They made obliterating love. After two weeks she could reel off her part verbatim – the words of a mature woman in love with a dreamy girl – but the role had not yet inhabited her, and she was afraid it never would.

  Then one evening he arrived late to the flat to find her calmly transformed. This melding with a scripted character, mysterious to him, had happened to her while rereading the play on the underground returning home. The key had been staring her in the face, she said, in a stage direction for her role:

  ‘SAMANTHA [regretfully]: There are things you’ll come to understand.’

  The girl who beguiles Samantha is young and idealistic. In her, the
older woman is looking on innocence. It attracts and saddens her. That is the clue to her: she is falling in love with the girl she used to be.

  Three days before the premiere, he drove Linda up to Peterborough, where they rented a garret opposite the theatre, near the cathedral square. The director, she said, refused to allow any outsider to watch dress rehearsals, so Steve strolled with a camera around the old town, marooned in modern development, and cooked simple suppers for her return. Now she apologised for her mental absence: the role was eating her wholesale. She had become more sombre and authoritative, he noticed. Her sudden smile had disappeared, and her voice had darkened.

  One day she said she would go shopping alone, but returned from wandering round the supermarket having bought nothing. She had followed teenage girls there, conjuring in the mind of her protagonist the lure of their innocence, imagining being in love with one, in love with a self she had lost.

  For some reason this disturbed him. He exclaimed: ‘Loss of innocence! You’re too young to feel that!’ Then he wondered about her age. He’d imagined her a year or two older than him, but had never asked.

  A woman sits in a darkened laboratory, staring at her hands. For a long time she does not move. Behind her head a wall map of South America is superscribed with butterfly species, according to region. But this is a stage designer’s pedantry, too intricate for the audience to read, and the footlights are dim.

  He imagines, after the curtain lifts, that the woman is Linda, obscured by a greying wig and glasses. But no, this is the leading actress, reflecting on her past as the lights fade. He feels his whole body tingling. He has no idea what will come. Once again, when Linda walks on set, he does not recognise her. A stately woman, perhaps thirty years old, is crossing the stage to conduct a seminar. She seems in sharper, more vivid focus than everybody else. Her hair has turned auburn. She moves with athletic ease. She even gives an illusion of height.

  Again, within a minute, he sees nobody but her. There are other characters, of course – a father, a sister, an older man – but her darkly spoken intelligence and the frozen blaze of her eyes consume the theatre. He watches her with reignited love. Is her script so much finer than the others’? And her intuition was right. Her young beloved hardens from enchantment with the intricate beauty of insects to their classification and behavioural analysis, and her personal life goes in parallel: from idealistic delight to adult knowledge and sorrow. Linda’s premonitory ‘There are things you’ll come to understand’, which he has heard her rehearsing in the bathroom, is suddenly heartbreaking. She is both foreseeing and remembering. This, it seems, is the play’s core: a kind of lyrical and necessary disillusion.