A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  Her betrayed men were often distraught. Up until the last days they imagined that she was content. But because it was so evident to Alice that a break-up was unavoidable, she was puzzled by the lovers who clung so despairingly to the past—could they not see that there was nothing of any value left?

  At the end of these intense romances she believed that she had learned all that was worth knowing about each man, but every one of them felt that they had not known Alice at all. She recognized this and took pleasure from it. Alice had a need to be unlike other people. Ever since her adolescence she had been convinced that she was destined for excitement, progress and revelation; it was just a matter of events being allowed to fall around her in a particular pattern.

  So it had become obvious to her that her time with Thomas was reaching its natural end. It was also obvious that, like most men, Thomas would choose to ignore the evidence, or perhaps be unable to comprehend it.

  She spoke his name again, more sharply this time so that it carried over the Bach, and he looked up.

  Alice picked up the remote control and lowered the volume by several levels. Thomas did not react. She waited for a few seconds before putting her question.

  “Thomas, why don’t you do something that you really want?”

  His expression was at first startled and then suspicious. She gazed back at him with innocent eyes and he moved one hand across the textbook as if he were throwing dice.

  “I have to know all of this. In case I’m asked.”

  Thomas was teaching mature students, many of them retired, who had enrolled on his short local history course because they needed to occupy their time. Alice knew that such a group was unlikely to ask the kind of precise technical question for which undergraduates might anticipate a detailed answer. They would expect to be taught in broad sweeps, with points of vivid color to maintain interest, and their concentration would always remain on the local. Afterward they would forget most of what they were supposed to have learned. There was no need for specialized expertise.

  Thomas had second thoughts and attempted a direct answer to her question.

  “Besides, in a way, this is what I really want. Part of it, anyhow.”

  Alice carefully placed the remote control alongside a book she had been studying. The book was the George Eastman House history of photography that Gregory had lent her. She had noticed Thomas glance at it and then turn away.

  “I don’t think you want to be teaching pensioners and the unemployed. You want something a lot bigger and a lot more important. You see yourself as a professor, giving lectures, writing books, heading up excavations. Being an occasional tutor for continuing education is a long way from that ambition.”

  Thomas looked back down. His voice bore the weight of hurt. “We’ve had this argument before. Please just let me get on with my notes. If you want to needle me I’ll go somewhere else to work.”

  “And where would you go, Thomas?”

  “A café, a library, a friend’s. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t really have friends. Or a family.”

  “I have a brother.”

  “You never see him. And you hardly even speak.”

  His answer was so aggrieved that it surprised her.

  “Richard is still a brother. I should be able to rely on him if I needed to. You don’t have a brother or a sister or anyone. Unless you count your photography man as a friend. Which he isn’t.”

  Alice sat forward. The light inside the room brightened momentarily and then returned to what it had been.

  Thomas pretended to be once again absorbed in his textbooks, although for him the words were being drained of meaning. Most of what Alice had said was a kind of challenge. Even her evasions were a form of confrontation.

  There was a sudden deafening crack, as if a huge flat surface had splintered just outside the window. Air pressed against their eardrums. Startled, they both looked up and heard the noise of something distant, massive and rolling, which faded within seconds.

  Later Alice was to persuade herself that this had been the moment when a fireball struck a church some miles away.

  “That was close,” Thomas said, almost under his breath. He had begun to sweat a little and he passed his fingers across his brow.

  After a while Alice spoke again.

  “You’re right about the arguments. We shouldn’t get into another. We have too many.”

  There was no humor in Thomas’s smile. Alice went on.

  “I’m not trying to taunt you, I’m trying to help. All I’m saying is that you should give yourself time and space to do what you’ve always wanted.”

  “I see. And what would that be?”

  “Thomas, I don’t know. What do you want?”

  Fearing a trap, he did not answer.

  “It has to be something to do with archaeology,” she suggested, “something that’s easily arranged and isn’t just a daydream. Something realizable. You’ve told me before there are places in Britain that every archaeologist knows about but that you’ve never visited. Hadrian’s Wall?”

  “Everybody’s been there.”

  “Skara Brae? Callanish?”

  “They’re not easy to get to.”

  “Well, go somewhere that is easy to get to. When we first met you told me that there are dozens of places in the north that only a few people know about. I remember some of the names. The Langdale ax factory. Samson’s Bratfull.”

  Thomas corrected her pronunciation. When threatened, he often took refuge in pedantry. “Sampson’s,” he said. “There’s a p in the name.”

  “Sampson’s,” she repeated with too much emphasis. “Whatever. Go there. Give yourself a treat.”

  “Sampson’s Bratfull is just a featureless heap of stones on a remote moor. There’s not much of it left. It’s not even worth seeing.”

  “I didn’t think you’d seen it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  Alice sighed. “Thomas, those were just names I could remember. I’m not an expert. How should I know what’s worth visiting and what isn’t? You shouldn’t be so defeatist. You spend time looking at plans and photographs of places like those. We both know they fascinate you, so why not go and see what they’re really like? Pick the good ones and just visit those.”

  Thomas jotted down some words, stared at the page as if he could no longer read his own writing, and then looked at Alice.

  “Will you come with me?”

  She had anticipated the question.

  “Thomas, this is for you, and not for both of us. Treat it as work, or research, or recreation—maybe all three. You don’t want me trailing with you across moors to see heaps of stone that are miles away from anywhere. That wouldn’t involve me in the way that it would involve you. Why don’t you just go traveling for a few days, on your own and at your own pace, following your own route, and enjoy it?”

  “And then come back here?”

  Alice did not answer. Thomas felt his heart contract. He looked back down at his notes.

  “Maybe I’ll do that,” he said.

  “Maybe?”

  “Sometime.”

  Alice watched him for a few seconds, but he did not raise his head.

  Thomas was his own worst enemy, she thought. What he saw as integrity, others saw as pettiness. Sometimes, and increasingly often, he was as moody and unresponsive as a child.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. After a while, the urgent blare of a police siren drifted up from the street.

  Thomas, too, was aware that there was something immature within him. For years he had been desperate to replicate the closeness and exclusivity of a lost childhood friendship. Others knew that it would be stifling and restrictive to come too close to Thomas, and kept their distance. Already infected by a sense of righteousness, Thomas felt noble just as much as he felt jealous or spurned. There was a certain perverse pleasure in the sense of being crushed. His brother Richard’s lifelong indifference had merely strengthened his mispl
aced sense of honor.

  Only at university had he learned how to mix freely and even to be a winning conversationalist. A brief affair with a fellow student had left him fantasizing that the most appropriate reaction to its end would be his suicide, but he was astute enough to know that this was just an imaginative way of coming to terms with loss. And besides, he lacked the courage to kill himself. Nevertheless, the failure of the affair, and what the woman had said as she left him for the last time, seemed to confirm to Thomas that he was a man who would remain on the margins. From that he drew further justifications of himself.

  He was sharply alert to this aspect of his character. For most of the time he controlled it, but sometimes he indulged it. He saw it either as a crippling imposition from his youth, or as a gigantic psychic wound that he romantically compared to those suffered by doomed heroes from myth.

  When Thomas had first met Alice he was not sure why she had responded so positively. Partly, perhaps, she had an intuitive understanding that he lacked experience and that this could easily be remedied. And, partly, it could have been that he had been schooled in subjects so arcane that they could never form part of everyday discussions.

  Thomas had dreamed that Alice had never before known anyone quite so learned and quite so compromised. In those moments he was possessed by an optimism that was almost euphoric. He was able to think of himself as unique, as a man so distinctive that only a woman equally distinctive could recognize his qualities and love him for them.

  He could not continue to believe this. More and more, Thomas felt that he had misjudged Alice. She had always hidden her past from him, but from the way in which she made love he knew that it must have been erotically adventurous. Compared to her inventiveness, his own sexual techniques were merely dutiful. For Thomas could scarcely have imagined a woman so uninhibited in her actions, so direct in her language and demands, so thrilling in her relish of unembarrassed physicality. Every intoxicating action seemed to confirm their indispensability to each other.

  But now Alice was retreating into herself. She was no longer interested in Thomas’s displays of knowledge. His eloquent descriptions of the past had begun to bore her. He spoke less and less frequently about henges, burins, the Neolithic, the Catuvellauni. If he visited museums to look at flint axes or bone needles or antler harpoons then Alice no longer came with him. He had begun to expect that one day she would openly state that Thomas was not special after all. He wondered if she wanted be rid of him so irrevocably that in the future his name would not even pass her lips. He brooded that she had become fascinated by Gregory Pharaoh because he was a man with a different expertise who would perhaps offer her a different future. No longer would Alice tolerate what she judged to be Thomas’s inertia, but which in his eyes was nothing but an unbroken run of bad luck.

  And yet, if this were to end, Thomas had nowhere to go and nothing to fall back on. Whatever Alice might think of him now, he loved her. Maybe his passion bore a greater emotional similarity to the intense friendship of his youth than it did to a mature relationship; it was uncomfortable to contemplate that. But he also knew that he loved Alice with a kind of tender ferocity that no one else could have nor ever would.

  Now she sat opposite him in silence, and even though he did not lift his head Thomas was aware that she was studying him, reading his posture, thinking forward.

  In a deliciously slow torment of self-pity, he wondered what she would decide and when he would be told.

  6

  More than sixteen hours had passed since the lightning strike, but the air inside the church was still vinegary with the smells of flood and smoke. By the time the first of the fire brigades arrived the conflagration had already spread to the support beams, and within minutes an entire section of roof had collapsed and fallen into the nave. Crews fought most of the night to extinguish the blaze. Gregory had watched the television footage of water jets arcing onto a dark roof that gaped apart to expose a glow as fierce as an entrance to hell.

  Now the building was cordoned off behind police incident tape and classed as unsafe. The floor was awash and littered with struts, panels and stonework. Fragments of colored glass lay scattered across the marble as if from the wrecked kaleidoscopes of giants. Lead panels on the roof had melted, flowed and solidified again in bizarrely shaped and motionless cascades and pools. Some of the wooden beams had burned in irregular textured sections so that they resembled incinerated totem poles. From where it had accumulated in hidden reservoirs, water still trickled down the walls and across memorial tablets to subalterns who had perished in India and firstborn buried on the veldt. Every few minutes a fall of ash smudged the weak sunlight that leaked through the ragged gaps where a stained-glass window had been.

  Gregory stood beside the rector in an aisle resembling a muddy track. Holding up a tiny camera further down the church was a man who had arrived only a few minutes earlier. The imprints of his boots were fading in thin gray ooze. He was the only one who was wearing an industrial hard hat. Its shell gleamed white in the subdued light. He even had his name printed on it: Adrian Wells.

  Wells had handed a business card each to Gregory and the rector, and explained at length that he was here on the instructions of the church authorities to carry out a preliminary investigation; afterward, he and a specialist team would carry out a detailed assessment. Gregory had slipped the card into a pocket of his camera bag. He seldom threw contacts away; Cassie now had a file with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of names.

  The rector, small, bald and with glasses, held the card in his hands as if about to lay it down in a game. He shook his head as though compelled by shock to repeat the motion every few minutes.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  Around them the ransacked space trickled and murmured with clicks, drips and creaks. Traffic noise drifted in through the opened roof and broken windows. A carpet, its pattern no longer discernible, squelched like upland peat whenever anyone walked across it.

  “It’s like the Blitz,” Gregory said, his voice echoing down the cavernous space. He knew that he would not be the only one to make this comparison.

  Wells was in his late twenties, bumptious and eager to impress the others with his research.

  “Parish records show that an incendiary landed here in early 1941 but did little harm. Yesterday must have been very like incendiary damage. We have several contemporary photographs in my office.”

  “I know them,” Gregory answered, slightly aloof. “They’re famous.”

  “Sure, but photographs can’t convey the heat and the noise and the smell. That’s what one misses.”

  “No? It seems to me that those sense reactions are all implied. You can’t get more vivid illustrations of destruction than those old wartime pictures. I’d like my work to have the same effect.”

  Wells smiled skeptically and walked further along the nave. Gregory looked at the rector and raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s young,” the rector murmured by way of explanation. Then, keeping his voice low, he added, “Some will say this is more than destruction.”

  “More than?”

  The rector had placed one hand on the back of the nearest pew. When he lifted it away the skin was coated in particles of ash the color and texture of wet cement. He began to clean his fingers on a handkerchief drawn from his pocket.

  “Many of our worshippers will think in terms of desecration, Mr. Pharaoh. They will find it hard to credit that this is only an accident.”

  “But it was a lightning bolt,” Gregory said. “It was just bad luck that it hit here.”

  “A fireball, most say. Sent for a reason.”

  “A fireball, then. With no reason behind it other than the laws of physics. Even your parishioners are bound to understand that the world is an accumulation of chance events.”

  The rector smiled wanly. Gregory looked up to the ceiling.

  “Will all this be rebuilt to be identical?”

  “If
Mr. Wells approves such a plan. I have no idea how much a restoration will cost, but I’m sure there will be an appeal.”

  From where he stood further down the church Wells could still hear them if they spoke at normal volume.

  “At the moment,” he called back, “I’m not even sure how much more of the roof and ceiling will have to come down to make it safe. Scaffolding is an urgent necessity.” He pointed toward the undamaged windows. “Those need to be covered for their protection.”

  Gregory glanced across at a stained-glass shepherd Christ, his crook in one hand, immaculate white lamb in the other.

  “Victorian?” he asked the rector, but Wells replied.

  “Later than the fabric. Standard iconography and somewhat mawkish for my tastes. Sensibilities have changed, thankfully.”

  Gregory raised his camera between his hands and held it like a trophy. “I need to do my job. Unlike you, I don’t have much time.”

  Wells looked at him and suddenly said, “Pharaoh: of course. I can place you now. You took a portrait of one of our bishops. Very recently.”

  Keen not to be left out of the exchange, the rector spoke up. “I believe Mr. Pharaoh also took some photographs of a little girl who has visions of the Virgin Mary.”

  Gregory looked askance at him. The rector shrugged, a little embarrassed. “When the newspaper phoned for permission I asked who you were,” he explained.

  “The girl being one of our faith’s many fantasists, no doubt,” Wells said. “Tell me, do you make a specialty of religious subjects?”

  “You’re not the only person to ask me that,” Gregory answered as he moved into position and checked out the sight lines. “The answer is no, I don’t. In a couple of weeks I’m due to photograph an ossuary, but after that I want to move away from any subject that could be labeled religious. I’m like an actor who doesn’t want to be typecast.”