A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  She energetically polished the worktops and the table, and then washed the cutlery and every plate and cup and glass. She found the last two bottles of wine that Thomas had bought and poured them down the sink. There was something comforting and final about the way in which the wine swirled red against the white surface before disappearing down the waste pipe in a series of expiring gulps. Every book, every CD and DVD was checked; if there were any suggestion that they might belong to Thomas, they were placed in a cardboard box with a lid that was closed and which she would later tape shut. Three wallets of old photographs, very few of them featuring Alice, were also slipped into the box. In the bathroom a bar of soap, two unused razor blades, and an almost-empty can of shaving gel had been left behind like relics. These were collected and put into a black refuse bag. Joining them was a supermarket ready-meal that Thomas had asked her to buy and that she no longer wished to eat. Also dropped like a contaminant into the bag was an unused packet of condoms from the table on the side of the bed where he had usually slept. Alice tied the bag with a double knot before dropping it down the rubbish chute.

  When all this was completed she looked round the flat and decided that soon she would repaint part of it, hang new curtains and buy a new duvet and perhaps a new standing lamp. Then she sat at the dining table and spread out the appointments section of a daily newspaper, glancing as quickly as she could through the jobs that were on offer. She would walk out of her present employment in a day or so, claiming irreconcilable differences as if she were a board member. There was enough money in her bank accounts to allow her if necessary to live without worry for several weeks. After that she would have to start earning again.

  When she had considered the advertisements and found nothing Alice checked her phone and found that Gregory had rung from his mobile. She had not responded to an earlier call, and she was not fooled by the apparent casualness of his message—something about asking if she wanted to help on a project that he did not describe. For a few minutes she considered ringing him back, but then decided to let him wait. Every trivial reason not to return such a call now began to seem increasingly important.

  And yet she could not stop thinking about Gregory. He was a strange person, certainly someone worth cultivating, and, as with all men, he used professionalism as a mask for his uncertainty. For him a camera was both shelter and probe. He was content to objectify Alice and yet eager to please her. There was little doubt that he wanted to have sex with her, but nevertheless he seemed conflicted about his reasons.

  As for Alice herself, she had grown used to the idea that she could enjoy sleeping with him—the trouble was, she was not sure if it would be worth it. Had she not by now had her fill of love affairs, of their profligate squandering of emotion? Gregory Pharaoh must have had many women, and he could never be as much trouble as Thomas had been. But something happened to men when they fell in love; it was as if they were no longer capable of reason. Would it not be wiser to keep Gregory at arm’s length, to use him when he could be useful and not to enter with him into the broken maze of an affair? Besides, Alice thought, it was possible that she had already been given the best that he could offer. What could he do now but take even more photographs? Was this the help he was requesting?

  She knew that all of these questions had a rational, considered answer. She had already had enough lovers; there was nothing to suggest that an affair with Gregory would be different from any of the others. But Alice also knew that she was a woman who had never been able to resist the intoxicating temptation of an unwise action.

  7

  The underground vault lay behind an oak door that was bolted, padlocked, and always remained unopened except for authorized visits. These were always arranged to take place when the church was quiet. At exactly the specified time a churchwarden arrived with a heavy key strung on a rope as thick as a lanyard. He opened the padlock and slid the long bolt right back so that it made a noise like a stone hitting raw earth. The churchwarden would adjust his glasses, grip a handle, and pull hard so that the door slowly moved, its iron hinges creaking like hawsers. The door had sunk under its own weight and could not be opened fully. Its lower corner ground so harshly across a flagstone that over the years a pale arc had been scored into the surface.

  Just inside the door was a switch that operated an electric light fixed to the wall in a metal cage. The cable for the light was bracketed to the wall at head height, and led down a stone staircase that turned to the right. The steps were narrow and gloomy and there was no handrail, making any visitors descend gingerly with arms outstretched and fingers trailing along the cold stone. This is what Gregory did until he grew used to the descent. Alice was less confident and continued to touch the walls for security.

  At first the size of the vault was difficult to gauge. The ceiling bulb was dim and a yellowish deposit coated its underside, further weakening its glow. Traceries of decaying cobweb were strung around the fitting. At the end of the room a tiny barred window looked out onto the churchyard. Grass grew unchecked on its outside and the inside had been colonized by pads of moss. Most of the panes were level with the ground so that apart from a thin strip of pale daylight the window admitted only a murky green.

  When she first saw the bones piled on the wooden racks Alice could not think what she should say. Instead she remained silent and unmoving in the gloom at the bottom of the stair, tightening her arms around herself because of the cold. As Gregory walked along a narrow aisle, checking the perspectives, his breath turned to cloud and his voice was metallic and unreal.

  “There are hundreds—can you see? Look at the numbers. This one is 248. Another one over there is 316.”

  The crypt was stacked with human bones—not every bone, only the skulls and the long bones from the limbs. These, Gregory had been told, were the bones that were considered essential for resurrection. At some moment in the past the ribs, pelvises, vertebrae and digits had been lost, disposed of, perhaps thrown into the nearby river and washed away. Now all that was left of the dead was piled on the tiers and rows of grubby wooden benches, each one slatted like a barracks bed. As though arranged by a weaver or builder of stone walls, the long bones had been placed in configurations that steadied them against each other so that they did not slip or roll away. On top of these secure layers the skulls had been set down in rows, some with their jawbones, some without. Every relic was shaded in color from pale yellow to dark brown, like nicotine stains, and every skull had a number inked on its forehead. Each number was fading into the bone, and none was in sequence, as though at some point the entire collection had been taken apart and then reassembled at random.

  Alice found the ossuary macabre and uncomfortable. She could see no value in keeping these part-skeletons where they lay. Far better, she believed, to act on the recommendation of the church authorities and have them buried with due ceremony in a mass grave in the churchyard; after all, they might originally have been exhumed from there. But a local debate about the future of the crypt had turned into a national argument between clergy, parishioners, historians and forensic archaeologists. Some claimed the remains were those of plague victims, others that they had been massacred in the English Civil Wars; no one truly knew. Gregory had already photographed spokespeople on opposing sides of the dispute; now he had to complete his work by taking studies of the relics.

  Before he drove to the church to unload the car he had parked at a café overlooking the village green. Preoccupied throughout the journey, Alice had constantly checked the screen of her mobile phone in case she had somehow missed a call. Fortunately Thomas had not rung; unfortunately, neither had any prospective employer.

  Gregory did not realize the extent of her concerns, although he was aware that Alice had had arguments both with her employer and with Thomas. As they relaxed in the sunshine, however, Alice began to express doubts as to what she was doing there, and why she had agreed in the first place. Was it really true, she asked, that Cassie was working for her charity
that day? And had Gregory told his daughter that, for this day only, Alice was to be his assistant?

  Smoothly reassuring, Gregory told her that there was no actual reason why Cassie should know, or why she should ever be told. Alice read more into his words than had actually been spoken.

  Then, as if once again striving to prove the longevity of his profession and its continual reinvention of themes, Gregory produced a copy of Nadar’s 1861 image of the Paris catacombs. Those bones had been separated by type and stacked like wood in a timber yard, he explained; Nadar’s problem had not been in the framing but in the degree of illumination and length of exposure necessary for the wet-collodion plates. Framing would, however, be a problem for Gregory. No matter how wide the angle of the lens, space restriction within the crypt would limit him severely.

  Now as she stood in the gloom at the foot of the steps Alice could see that he was right—there were difficulties of height, angle, light, perspective. She understood why, along with all the metal stands and extension leads, Gregory had brought along an aluminum stepladder. At the same time his reasons for requesting that Alice assist him seemed even more perverse.

  “Why did you ask me here?” she asked, and was surprised at how eerie her own voice sounded within the confines of the vault.

  “You volunteered.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this. Did you want to scare me?”

  “No. I thought this would be—” Gregory paused a moment before he went on, “instructive.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t have come here on my own.”

  “But would you have come with your boyfriend? Wouldn’t he be interested in these relics?”

  “Maybe. His real interest is in prehistory.”

  “You didn’t ask him his opinion?”

  “No.”

  Gregory read the pause.

  “You didn’t tell him you were coming, did you?”

  “I didn’t need to. Whatever Thomas thinks, it doesn’t matter much. It never has done.”

  Gregory did not speak, but examined her face for any movement. She knew it would be best to admit the truth.

  “Thomas isn’t with me any more. He’ll not be coming back.”

  They each felt their hearts beat a little more heavily.

  “Do you want him to?”

  “No,” Alice said flatly.

  “Well, then,” Gregory said, “it seems that being my assistant for the day is the only way that you could have got to see such an extraordinary spectacle.”

  Relieved not to be asked any further personal questions, Alice took him up on his remark.

  “Being extraordinary isn’t a convincing reason to come here. I feel that we’re intruding. You’ll tell me that’s not a rational response, but I still feel it.”

  Gregory nodded toward the racks.

  “These people stopped having opinions a long time ago. We can intrude all we like. They’re not going to bother when we rig up the equipment, and the sooner we start doing that, the better. My optimum position will be higher than the uppermost skulls, so I’ll need that ladder. We’ll move the lights around. I don’t want the full-on, empty-eyesocket look, because that would be a cliché. Let’s start moving, shall we?”

  They both had to make several awkward descents to the vault before he declared himself satisfied with the amount of equipment below ground. To Alice it felt strange even to be in motion in the crypt, as though she and Gregory had broken a seal on darkness and silence, and each time she came back underground she was filled with unease. The breath from their lungs smoked in the light beams, and each new positioning of the ladder or movement of the stands could not be made without harsh unforgiving scrapes and clatters that seemed to verge on sacrilege. When Alice looked into the shafts from the lamps she could see thousands of dust motes drift and lazily rotate, and she wondered if she were breathing in fragments of the dead.

  And she imagined that somewhere there would be another dimension in which she and Gregory were being observed and their clumsiness fretted over. Perhaps they were already being judged for their noise, their boorishness and their lack of respect.

  At one point the churchwarden appeared, seemingly taking shape out of the gloom at the foot of the stair to watch them, the light reflecting in his round glasses so that the lenses were like silver coins placed on the eyes of the dead. After standing quietly for several minutes he turned and went back up the steps as silently as he had arrived. Gregory winked and smiled at Alice to indicate that he had found the churchwarden’s presence oddly amusing. She smiled back without thinking, and immediately felt that she had been tricked into becoming complicit.

  With the new lighting, the skulls began to acquire shape and depth. Alice thought that if she stared at them long enough then she would be able to distinguish different characteristics, be it the shape of the cranium, the number of teeth, or the diameter of the sockets. But all the time she could not help but think that this was a demeaning and inhuman way for any life to have ended. Whoever had lived within and around these skeletal remains deserved more dignity than a number inked in the center of the forehead.

  Gregory moved the ladder noisily and climbed it, only to descend and move it again.

  “Look at this,” he suddenly said, and brushed his middle and index finger across the top of a skull. Moisture glistened on his fingertips. “Condensation,” he explained, “our breath is condensing on the bone.”

  Alice shuddered. She had no intention of touching these objects.

  And yet, as the camera shutter repeatedly clicked like a measure of each passing sliver of time, she began to feel not only discomfited but also strangely exhilarated. She was pleased she had come here. This reliquary was also a library of the dead, an assembly of untitled books whose pages had all been ripped out and scattered. It was both a memorial and a prophecy. Death was an inescapable solvent that stripped away personality, history and identity. These people, whoever they were, whichever sex they had been, had left nothing behind but their bones. Their lives had vanished without an entry in a ledger, or a name on a gravestone, and, most cruelly of all, without an image.

  She found herself thinking of the book that Gregory had lent her, of the studies of Ellen Terry and Lee Miller, of women long dead but whose character and force were still visible on the page. There were bodies, thousand upon thousand of them, whose flesh had turned to dust but whose glamour still shone despite the silt of accumulating decades.

  The ossuary dead were beyond any form of recovery. This uniformity of bones had once possessed difference. Those nearby skulls had been home to a range of features: handsome to ugly, young to old. The color of their eyes and hair, texture of skin, expressions, even the way they walked, would have made them identifiable as individuals from a hundred yards away. The same fears and passions and hopes had swept through them as swept through everyone. Those heads could have lain together, side by side. Their arms could have held each other, their legs could have been intertwined. And yet, in the end, everything that had distinguished them had been stripped away. Whatever had defined them had been eliminated. These were frameworks and nothing more.

  Quite suddenly Alice felt neither distance nor revulsion but a strange kind of kinship. And then the feeling vanished as quickly as it had arrived, and was in its turn replaced by one of unexpected euphoria.

  Alice exulted that she was palpably, effortlessly, thrillingly alive. Blood coursed through the chambers of her heart. Sense impressions poured into her memory. Every movement she made was a gift that was her due, a triumph of the evolutionary drive and yet also somehow miraculous. The tips of her fingers tingled, as did her toes. There was pressure at the small of her back, a slight tugging around her nipples, an increase in the heat around her vulva. She was a compendium of sensation, emotion and thought. For a dizzying moment it seemed unbelievable that her body with all its energies and memories could ever be reduced to an unfeeling pile of bone. The dead were another country. Especially if she were nak
ed, Alice could have walked between these racks as an example of life at its fullest, of the senses at their most receptive, of the body at its most exemplary.

  Heat from the lights made the air grow warmer. Gregory hung above the ranks of skulls like a puppeteer. A lone spider with spindly legs ran across a cranium the color of excrement and then vanished into the latticework of bones. It seemed to Alice that she had been given a license, and that this had been Gregory’s secret purpose in bringing her to this chill hidden chamber.

  “All right,” she said.

  He looked across at her, his eyes drowned with reflected light.

  “I’ll do it,” she told him. “I’ll pose for you. I’ll do what you want.”

  Alice remembered daguerreotypes of women whose physicality was still vividly present a century and a half after they had posed. If you looked at them carefully you could study their hairstyles, fingernails, navels, their distribution of fat, their posture as they sat on a chair, the way they lay across a bed. None of them had been given names; everyone was anonymous.

  “I don’t want my name to be known,” she said forcefully. “Ever,” she added.

  “I can arrange that.”

  “And I don’t want the session to be held in that studio of yours.”

  “All right.”

  “Or have my photos stored on a memory card with photos of someone else. I’m my own person. I’m not just some model you could hire.”

  Gregory was still in position, suspended above the dead, his tongue protruding slightly from his lips. The numbers on the skulls were like an account. Alice went on.

  “You said I deserved to be photographed at a special place. You agree?”

  “I’ll find somewhere unusual. Just for you.”

  “There are other conditions.”