A Division of the Light

by Christopher Burns

  “Almost right.”

  “Is this a copy of another photo? That Araki person?”

  “I’m not thinking of any other photographer. I’m just thinking of you.”

  Gregory had never intended to portray Alice as uninhibitedly sexual. Instead he had wanted to show her as cool, alert, her sensuality available only to someone she would choose. There was something not quite right about the pose at the moment.

  “Wait a few seconds.”

  He stood above Alice and studied the way in which the light fell across the curves of her shoulders, the long ridge of her backbone, the pale raised buttocks above which he could just see the faintest tracery of down. Below them her legs were parted at an angle, the raised blue vein just visible, the muscle swelling high at the back of her calves.

  Alice could feel his fascination. It radiated from him in waves.

  “Gregory,” she said languidly, her eyes fixed on the white sheet just in front of her face. It was so close that it was difficult to keep in focus.

  “What?”

  “This excites you, doesn’t it?”

  He did not answer. She asked another question.

  “You want to make love to me, don’t you?”

  Gregory did not know which truth he should admit. Momentarily he looked across the room. Sunlight had advanced a little further across the crumpled sheets. He imagined himself standing above Alice so that his hands traced every curve, every joint, every cleft, but dragging like a weight against the luxuriant vision came the suspicion that she could demand more commitment, more permanence than he would be able to give. And yet a hidden part of Gregory wanted an affair that was complicated, lengthy and cathartic—something that would take a torch to his memories and burn out all the longing from his memories of Ruth.

  “You think so?” he asked.

  “Don’t deny it. I can see right through your camouflage.”

  A sudden touch of vertigo made Gregory stand with his feet slightly apart.

  “Whatever I feel or don’t feel doesn’t matter,” he lied. “We’re here to take the best photographs that we possibly can.”

  Alice made a murmuring noise that sounded like a dismissal. “You can’t expect me to believe that you haven’t been in this situation before. There must have been times, maybe lots of times, when you finished your sessions by fucking your model.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. But as far as my present model is concerned, I’d be pleased if she would lift her head so that she could look at the far side of the room.”

  “Ah, we’re being unbendingly professional, are we?”

  As soon as Alice lifted her head Gregory framed her face and back and buttocks. Light touched her like a benediction. Her profile stood out sharp and confident against the unfocused background.

  “You must have carried condoms with you, just in case it happened,” she continued. “Maybe you’ve brought some today. I wouldn’t know.”

  “My sexual life is none of your business.”

  Between Gregory’s hands the camera felt like a casing for something that was alive.

  “You asked me to take this position,” Alice said as if she were just awakening from sleep. “You must have known it was awkward to get into. When I was on all fours and with my backside raised, I couldn’t help but imagine things, and those things made me tingle a little. When you saw me like that, didn’t you think the same? Don’t you think it now?”

  Gregory’s mouth was dry and even though his legs did not move they still seemed to be shaking as if an electric current was being pumped through them. He walked back to the tripod and fixed the camera on its apex. He wanted to put his hand down the front of his trousers and move his penis into a less restricted position.

  Alice maintained her posture but turned to look at him.

  “But that would be no way to start, would it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that the first time people make love, they should do it face to face, shouldn’t they? That’s the way I’ve always done it.”

  Gregory imagined walking across to the couch, dropping onto his haunches in front of Alice, and kissing her wetly on the mouth. Immediately he knew this would be ungainly and ineffective because she had taken the recumbent position he had requested. Perhaps he could kiss her shoulder instead. Or he could kiss the skin at the base of her spine. He could extend his tongue and place its tip just at the beginning of the cleft of her buttocks. None of her other lovers, he was sure, would have made first moves such as these.

  Alice sat up on the couch, knees tightly together, and placed her hands across her breasts to hide them. Gregory wondered if, impulsively, she had suddenly changed her mind. Or perhaps she was taunting him. There was an expression on her face that he could not quite read.

  “We’re hardly equal here, are we?” she asked.

  “I thought we were,” he said, not understanding.

  She clicked her tongue in mock reproof. “How can we be? You’re fully clothed and I’m not. I’m vulnerable.”

  Was this an invitation to undress? Dizzyingly, Gregory saw himself in double focus. Firstly as Ruth must have seen him all those years ago—young, confident, energetic; and then as he might seem to Alice—aging, somewhat overweight, his body no longer firm, and his erection perhaps unreliable now that he had once again remembered his wife.

  And Gregory suddenly imagined the reproving figure of Cassie observing him, silent and with her arms folded, her mother’s beads around her neck, distaste on her face.

  “So,” Alice said, “I think it would be better if I was wearing that bathrobe—don’t you? It would make us more equal.”

  Gregory tried to get all thoughts of his daughter out of his head.

  “What’s more,” Alice continued, “I don’t think I should be the one to pick it up.”

  Without a word, he walked to where the robe lay on the sheets. When he came back he held it just out of Alice’s reach. Tantalized but disappointed, she did not move.

  “This isn’t the time for games,” she said.

  Gregory leaned further forward to allow Alice to take the robe from him. As soon as she had done so she wrapped it quickly round herself, and then stood up so that it draped the lower part of her body. Her nakedness was once more completely hidden.

  “There,” she said, “that evens things up.”

  They stood facing each other across a ruche of crumpled white sheet flecked with blue like a broken wave.

  “Well, Mr. Pharaoh, what now?”

  Whatever happened, Gregory wanted to be absolved of responsibility.

  “You seem to be driving this,” he said.

  They stared at each other as if they were both waiting for the other to break and confess whatever was the truth.

  “I’m used to taking the initiative,” Alice said.

  “I see.”

  Time gathered in the room, layer pressing down upon layer.

  “I don’t like the obvious,” Alice told him. “I like to be different. Sometimes, I like to shock.”

  He nodded and said nothing.

  She crossed the space between them in three wide strides, paused in front of Gregory with their eyes still locked, and then slid her hands under his shirt and around his midriff. He felt an inner breathtaking jolt but did not know if it would transmit to Alice’s hands.

  “I like to do this,” she said, pushing his shirt high up his ribcage so that he was sure she could feel the shallowness in his lungs. Then she bent and touched his left nipple with the tip of her tongue. The sensation was teasingly charged, but even as Gregory was enjoying it he wanted to step back, without knowing why.

  Alice gently fastened her lips, and then her teeth, around his nipple. He wanted to break away from her at the same time as he wanted to pin her to the ground and ravish her. She sucked and slowly tilted her head from side to side. Gregory’s mind grew fuzzy, as if full of cloud, and at the edge of his hearing there was an insistent, repe
titive, annoying noise that made him think of a circular saw whirling as it cut through wood, withdrew and then sliced through wood again.

  She stopped and leaned away.

  “I have to answer it,” she said.

  Only at that moment did Gregory realize that he was listening to the ringing of a mobile phone. Muffled and insistent, it echoed from within the bathroom.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, reaching out to place his hands on Alice’s shoulders as if this would prevent her. Beneath the toweling the contours of her body were like an invitation. She broke away from him.

  “Of course I have to. I left the number on the landline answerphone. I’m just doing what you would do. And for the same reason.”

  “Whatever the job is, it can wait,” Gregory said, but she took no notice.

  For a few seconds he thought that Alice would not reach the phone in time and would be forced to ring back later, but then he heard her speak from the bathroom. At first he tried to ignore what was being said, and instead pretended to busy himself by dismantling the tripod and placing the camera back in its case, as if everything were happening as planned.

  But as the conversation went on Gregory edged closer and closer to the open bathroom door.

  Alice had not recognized the incoming number, but told herself that there was no reason why she should. She had approached almost twenty companies and organizations, and it could have been any one of them that was ringing. But the caller’s voice, when it came, was neither neutral nor formal. Instead it was hesitant.

  “I’m looking for Alice Fell.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s me.”

  “I’m sorry to ring you like this. We’ve never spoken.”

  Alice waited. She did not know the voice even though there was an unclear suggestion of familiarity about it.

  “I’m Richard.”

  Still thinking of how she and Gregory would resume in a few minutes, she said nothing.

  “Richard Laidlaw,” the man said.

  For the briefest of moments she made no connection with the surname, but then she immediately knew there was something wrong.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  As he stood at the door Gregory began to realize that everything was changing. Alice’s voice and the way she held her body were indicators that could not be ignored. An instinct for self-protection made him pretend that this was of little consequence. What did it matter that he would not be having sex with her that afternoon? It was bound to happen soon.

  The thought immediately vanished into a regretful melancholy. Gregory knew his own mind now. He truly needed to make love to Alice. He wanted her presence to be imprinted on his body and his memory. Emotions rose within him that he had not wished for, and wanted to suppress, but he was helpless before them.

  Much later Alice came to believe that the call had been made at that particular moment because it was part of a hidden design. Richard could have rung ten minutes later. Or she need not have answered. And that would have altered everything. If she and Gregory had actually made love before the call, then Alice would have had to look on their intimacy as something she should have been wise enough to refuse.

  But they had not made love, and when she looked at the photographs taken that day she was able to view them as indicative of a certain kind of cleansing ritual. Although unaware that she was exactly where she needed to be, Alice had been unconsciously preparing for Gregory’s future.

  9

  Almost two hundred images are stored in the small Kodak that Thomas kept in a side pocket of his rucksack. The first dozen are studies of the interior of a city flat, including a view from a window and one of the inside of the front door. The living room and bedroom have each been photographed from several angles. There are no means of identifying the flat, and few would recognize that it belongs to Alice. A succeeding image could be either a deliberate abstract or a mistake, but is actually a photograph of a river taken by zoom at dusk. The yellowish smears on the formless gray are lights reflected in the moving water.

  The remaining pictures are of remote archaeological sites. To a non-specialist the most recognizable location, and certainly the most dramatic, is the stone circle at Castlerigg, although this features in only three shots. Perhaps Thomas felt that the site was too well known. Covered in much greater detail are the circle at Swinside and the megaliths of Long Meg and Her Daughters. Other photographs show what remains of tumuli, cultivation terraces, settlements and hill forts. The untrained eye, however, will see only low mounds of earth, grass and broken stone, like evidence that has become so degraded that it is no longer decipherable.

  Other than when a brief moment of sunlight passed across these barren places, the colors are muted and the landscapes drab. Some shots have been taken during rain, with muddy puddles collected in every depression. Only twice does Thomas himself appear, posed self-consciously against a mound to give it scale. These pictures were taken early in his journey, at the Leven’s Park Ring Cairn and the Bronze Age farmstead at Sealford. After that, he appears to have abandoned the idea of standing in front of the lens.

  For more than a week he had been visiting forlorn, out-of-the-way sites known only to a few. The Ordnance Survey map had become dog-eared, the compass face was smeared, and the laces of his scuffed boots were stiffened and discolored by mud. Thomas had no transport of his own, but relied on infrequent bus services and, twice, offers from strangers in cars who had taken pity on him. At night he stayed at B & Bs in villages or farmhouses and in the morning ate full English breakfasts whenever he could. For the rest of the day he survived on either bought sandwiches or Indian restaurant takeaways that he ate at bus stops with a plastic fork. Much of the time he was searching wet fellsides or moors for modest archaeological remains that were so difficult to spot that many walkers would have marched straight past. He habitually lingered at these locations for longer than was necessary.

  Always sensitive about bodily functions, Thomas had developed a protocol for urinating in the open air, making use of tree plantations or dry stone walls as screens. Once, in an act that had subsequently seemed to him the most absurd of follies, he had stood at the center of a collapsed and deserted earthwork and masturbated with a kind of clinical frenzy, as if he were somehow taking an obscure form of revenge. Only afterward did he feel ashamed, and hurry on as quickly as he could to his next destination.

  Whenever he visited a site he circled or boxed its location in ink on his map and graded its interest with his own symbols. He did this so systematically that the map’s red contour lines were now patterned with what looked like runic markings. By doing it Thomas could pretend, at least for some of the time, that his journey had a serious academic purpose.

  On the day of his journey to Stockdale Moor he began by photographing a Celtic cross in a village churchyard. The weathered sandstone held both Norse and Christian symbols; a crucifixion was fading back into the stone. The cross was a thousand years old: by Thomas’s standards relatively recent, but he had been required to teach several historical periods and the cross was important, so it seemed sensible to visit it before he began his climb to the settlements. It would join his other photographs of Norman castles, Georgian houses and sites from the Industrial Revolution. At this moment, and for most of his walk, Thomas believed he was certain to return to something like the life he had once led.

  He stood among the mottled gravestones and checked his map. The thin blue squiggle of the Bleng rose below Caw Fell and Gowder Crag and flowed along the southern edge of the moor. Sampson’s Bratfull was indicated in Gothic lettering, while symbols for cairns were pocked across the gradients and plateaux. All around were moors, farms and fells with names belonging to a grimly functional past during which matters of the intellect or of the heart must have been indulgences—Stone Pike, Raven Crag, Hawkbarrow, Scargreen.

  Thomas folded his map and walked to the end of the village. At a signpost he struck off the main Wasdale road and set off into
this bleak heartland along a narrow road that was marked as private. After a few last bungalows and a farm he could see nothing ahead but hedges, trees, fields and the sides of a shallow valley. A large bird wheeled in the sky for a long time before it was lost to sight behind the edge of the forest. Once again he found himself thinking of Alice. He could not help it. She was with him always.

  Last night he had stayed at a B & B used by long-distance walkers. On a shelf there had been a scruffy collection of local guidebooks. As he leafed through one in a desultory fashion the name of Alice Fell had leapt out at him like an alarm: Wordsworth had written a poem of that name. The discovery seemed not so much of a coincidence as a goad.

  For some distance the road resembled a lane and passed between wooden posts strung with wire and grassy banks topped by hawthorn. After five minutes he had to step off the metaled surface and stand close to a wooden gate when a muddy Land Rover drove toward him. Thomas moved back onto the road as soon as it had passed. He could hear the sound of water from beyond the trees on his right, and in the field to his left a few incurious sheep with ragged coats methodically cropped the grass. There seemed to be no one else around. When he reached the first conifers he looked to their uppermost branches and saw their tips sway in a breeze he could not feel at ground level. Above them the sky was cold and gray. He began to think about Alice again.

  Often Thomas revisited his lost love affair like a detective searching for motivation, but this time he tortured himself by wondering what Alice was doing at this particular moment. Safe and warm in the flat that he had once called home, he imagined, and perhaps with Gregory Pharaoh, a man who was far too old for her, a man whose promises must have been exciting, confusing and misleading. Perhaps even now she was naked and straddling him. Thomas tried to imagine the scene because he knew it would cause him pain, but each time the details were about to resolve themselves they slipped out of focus. The most hurtful thought of all was that Alice could be whispering in Pharaoh’s ear the endearments and invitations that she had once whispered to Thomas, and which he had always wanted to be for him and him alone.