‘Sure. Regularly on the last banking day of every month just like it say in the contract.’
‘But I don’t have any money. I haven’t earned any money in … How could I be paying you?’
‘No, you ’ave. You ’ave earned money.’
‘I have?’
‘Sure. I earn it for you?’
‘You earn it for me?’
‘Sure. I earn it for you. I run the studio, take pictures of babies, families, men who have joined the army. They pay me, I take thirteen dollars at the end of every month and the rest I put in your pants pocket.’
Somewhere, in the dulled recesses of his brain, Gilbert remembered that there always seemed to be money when he went to buy whisky. He had explained it away by some notion that liquor had become cheap because of the war, or that these were his savings or some such. Roberto pointed an index finger at him, shook it and began to laugh.
‘Ah – you think it was the, how you say it ’ere in America, the fairy godmother?’
He pronounced the second syllable of ‘America’ as ‘mare’. Roberto smacked the side of his thigh.
‘That’s a good one boss. That’s a good one.’
Gilbert felt himself smile. The tiniest smile. The muscle movements were unfamiliar.
‘But thirteen dollars … it’s not so much. It’s very little. Where do you live? How can you afford to rent a place here in Washington? Buy food?’
‘I live ’ere with you.’
Gilbert’s eyes widened.
‘Here? With me?’
‘Sure. You said I could.’
‘I did.’
He wasn’t sure whether he had intended it to be a statement or a question.
‘Sure. That’s right. I sleep in the darkroom at the back downstairs. At first the floor was hard but now I’m used to it. But boss, we’re wasting time. We gotta get on the road right now.’
‘The road? What road? It’s the middle of the night.’
‘The road to Gettysburg, boss. Before anyone else hears about this.’
‘We’re not going to Gettysburg.’
The eager expression on Roberto’s face didn’t change at all.
‘Of course, we are boss. It’s time we showed the world what great photographers we are. Mathew Brady. Puh.’
Roberto gestured as though he was swatting a fly away with his hand.
‘We beat them all to it. We get ready, we leave before dawn and we ’ave a ‘ead start on them. Hey, we’ll be coming back while they’re still on their way up there. So come on, get up. We’ve got lots to do and there ain’t no time to waste.’
Roberto stood up. The movement caused the flame of what was now a tiny stub of candle to flicker uncertainly. Gilbert made no move. His brain felt like it had been inflated and was about to explode through his eyes or through his forehead where the pain pulsed. He lay back down again, turning and burying his head in the soggy pillow.
‘B-o-s-s!’ said Roberto, his voice sounding plaintive, irritated.
From the depths of the pillow, Gilbert said, ‘Look, it’s a great idea, Leonardo, but we can’t do this. We don’t have the plates, the chemicals ––’
‘We ’ave some, boss. And we can buy more before we set out in the morning.’
‘We’ll need a portable darkroom, for god’s sake.’
‘You ’ave one, boss – out back in the yard.’
‘Christ, that thing,’ said Gilbert, talking into the pillow. ‘I bought it a year ago from a studio that went bust. I’d always meant to do it up. Have you seen it – there’s only one wheel, the shaft is broken ––’
‘We get those fixed, boss – in the morning before we start.’
‘There were pigeons nesting in it – leastways there were the last time I looked. And the hood’s all torn. It’s not a portable darkroom – more a portable light room.’
‘We can get all these things fixed, boss. We’ll be on the road by noon. That still gives us a day’s head start.’
‘What, pulling the wagon ourselves? Have you noticed there’s no horse out back?’
‘You let me worry about the horse, boss.’
‘Look – we’re doing okay here,’ said Gilbert. ‘Please go away. I need to rest. You keep photographing babies and soldiers and I’ll ––’
‘You’ll what, boss?’
‘I have to sleep. This pain is killing me.’
Silence descended. Gilbert was desperately thirsty. He knew there was no more whisky in the place. He needed to go out and get some but he felt terrible and a violent sweat had broken out all over his body. Maybe he dozed because suddenly he woke with a start. His face was still in the wet pillow. He turned over slowly and started with fright. Roberto was standing where Gilbert had last seen him.
‘Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. You still here?’
‘I’m not going without you, boss.’
‘Look, you want more money, is that it? Well, give yourself a raise. Twenty dollars a month. Thirty, if that’s what it takes. Just leave me some money to …’
He let the sentence tail off.
‘Why won’t you try, boss?
‘Look, what’s the point, if we’re first with photographs of dead people or not?’
Gilbert was suddenly angry. His voice rose.
‘Why do people want to see dead people anyway? Do you? Do you want to see dead people?’
‘We gotta show people how terrible war is. That’s why it’s important.’
‘That’s not important. Showing people pictures of dead soldiers isn’t going to stop any war. It’s not going to change anything. The only effect death has is on the people who loved the dead person.’
Roberto stood with his hands clasped in front of him. He said nothing but he had a hard, slightly disdainful look on his face.
‘After the last dead person I saw,’ said Gilbert quietly. ‘I never want to see another one.’
‘Boss –– ‘
‘Look,’ shouted Gilbert. ‘That’s the end of it!’
He jumped out of the bed, oblivious now to the headache and the sweats. He went over and thrust his face in Roberto’s. Gilbert was conscious of how badly he stank – not just the urine but everything. As he opened his mouth to speak, he smelt a rush of bad breath that would have floored a horse. Roberto flinched but whether it was from the smell or the anger, Gilbert wasn’t sure.
‘I don’t want to hear any more about this!’ he shouted.
And now his voice became a scream.
‘Go back to Florence, go to hell for all I care, but leave me alone!’
He stared into Roberto’s eyes until Roberto looked away.
‘Now, get out of here,’ said Gilbert, and he watched while Roberto disappeared down the rickety wooden staircase that led from the attic to the studio below.
2
The pianist and the other men run towards a slight rise up ahead, about two hundred yards away. On it a line of six cannon stands pointed at them – low slung cylinders between high wheels. They look like giant scorpions. The men who serve these engines work them frantically, all slightly out of step with each other. Some shove ramrods down the barrels of the cannon, others withdraw their ramrods while still others have finished and stand by their guns. The piano player looks from gun to gun trying to figure out which one will fire first. But before he can make a judgement there is an explosion and one of them disappears in clouds of white smoke. A sound that is both a groan and a scream goes up from the men around him.
Over to the pianist’s right a line of heads and bodies disappears to be replaced by a shower of pink which hangs in the air for a moment. A cannonball – solid shot. Now all of the other guns go off so that all that can be seen is a great billowing wall of smoke. A second cannonball strikes just to his left. Again men vanish, exploding into a pink haze that smells of blood and excrement. The stinking pink fluid splashes onto his uniform, drenching it. He continues running forward. There are screams and shouts for the ranks to close up but they all sound very
distant.
Now suddenly, as if out of the ground in front of them, a line of infantry stands up. The running men hesitate, stop, try to form a line. Officers scream orders. The opposing line of infantry levels their muskets. The pianist and his fellow soldiers begin to level theirs. But it is a race that the pianist knows they have already lost. As he cocks his musket, the opposing line vanishes in a wave of white smoke.
The blow that strikes him winds him and knocks him to the ground. He feels stupid sitting on his ass with his legs at ten before two. He is confused and can’t understand what hit him. It didn’t feel like what he had expected a minie ball to feel like.
He goes to get up but it is like he’s in a dream and can’t move. When he commands his legs to move they do nothing. He looks down and sees that his uniform has been ruined. The whole front of it, from the belly right down to the groin is drenched in blood. Glistening and dark red. There is the smell of a butcher’s shop. He puts his right hand onto the ground to lever himself up but he can’t feel his fingers and there is no push in them. When he looks to see what the problem is, he sees that there is no hand at the end of his right arm. It lies in the grass, palm upwards, a couple of feet away, a vivid pink and red in the dull green of the grass. It looks like a crab that has flipped over onto its back. Ridiculously, he wonders if there are tunes that can be played with only the left hand.
And that is when the pain comes.
Thursday 2 July 1863
3
Afterwards, after he had come to know her, he often thought how unlikely a chance it was that they had met. There was such an improbable sequence of events, a series of causes and effects that, had any one of them been different, their paths would never have crossed.
Life had become stale in New York. A love affair had ended. The woman had been perfect in every way – perfect except that he felt no attraction to her. Not that she had been ugly or unattractive – quite the contrary. Merely that when Gilbert saw her, perhaps waiting for him at a place where they had arranged to meet, he felt no magic, no jolt of electricity. There were never any Romeo and Juliet moments, as Sarah had called them – not like those that were to come. And so he had ended it, saying that he hoped they would remain friends. It didn’t happen of course. Maybe it never did. She told him he was dull and uninteresting – him and his photographs. He decided to move. New city, new decade, new start.
He arrived in Washington on the first of January 1860 with enough money to set up a small studio. He was twenty nine. Within a week, he had found a place that would serve as both studio and a place to live. The empty shop with a room overhead was on the north side of D Street South. Its main attractions were a large plate glass window, the southern aspect – it would have sunlight for a lot of the day – and a reasonable passing trade.
A week of frantic cleaning and painting followed. A carpenter created a darkroom and an area to take photographic portraits. The rest of the downstairs space would be an exhibition area and Gilbert would sleep upstairs. He bought a bed, a bedside locker and a wardrobe. An Irish sign writer who was always drunk by lunchtime took the best part of a week to do a sign over the door. Gilbert had watched like a hawk as – mornings only – each letter in turn was painstakingly added in gold paint until it read ‘Gilbert Owens Photographic Studio’. It had done nothing for Gilbert’s confidence that the man kept referring to what he was putting on the sign as ‘Gilbert Owens Pornographic Studio’. Thus it had been a particularly tense moment when the ‘P’ of ‘Photographic’ had been done and Gilbert waited to see what letter would come next.
‘That’s going to be an ‘h’ next, Mister O’Sullivan, okay?’ he said anxiously.
‘Right you are, Mister Owens,’ a voice called down from the ladder. ‘I’ll spell it whatever way you want it. The customer is always right I always say.’
And so Gilbert Owens Photographic Studio was born. He paid some kids a few cents to distribute handbills advertising the place and slowly – much slower than he’d planned for, so that he had a few terrifying months where there had been days when he hadn’t eaten – the place began to generate some revenue. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep body and soul together.
Then of course, came the War and suddenly everyone wanted their picture taken. Sweethearts with pictures of each other to have as keepsakes, men who had just enlisted wearing brand new uniforms, groups of friends who had enlisted together, proud parents with their sons, family groups wanting to be photographed because, though it remained unspoken, they might never get the chance again. Some days there were lines of people queued up along the street. The money poured in. Gilbert was married by then and they had money in the bank. But it had all started that January of 1860. And of course, if it hadn’t been for the studio he would never have met Sarah in the first place, because it had been a key part of the sequence of events – one of the links in the chain.
Gilbert often wondered if, one day, somebody would invent a process that would enable photographs to be taken in color. Until then, apart from earning a living as a photographer, he painted – water colors of landscapes, as precise as a map. Indeed, it was painting that had led him to photography. He had drawn since he was a child, begun to paint after his parents bought him a box of paints for Christmas and then he had discovered photography. The possibility of being able to capture the actual reality, not just a representation of it no matter how accurately drawn, was just too alluring for him. He saved up and bought his first camera.
But he never lost his love of painting, and so one day a week he paid Elisabeth, a young Dutch woman, to mind the studio and he would set off into the countryside. Given that he knew nobody in Washington, there wasn‘t much else to do anyway. He would pack a satchel with his paints and some lunch, tuck his easel under his arm and cross the Long Bridge to the south side of the Potomac. Here he would catch the Orange and Alexandria as far as Manassas Junction. Leaving the station he would find some stream or hill or woodland and lose himself in the sounds and smells as he tried to capture on paper or canvas what he saw and felt.
It was on a cold February day in 1861 that he sat on the banks of a torpid muddy little stream that he afterwards discovered was called Bull Run. He tried to capture the coldness of the day in the picture. A few shreds of foliage left over from the winter, the unmoving water the color of biscuits except for a small patch that reflected the chill blue of the sky. He had reached the point – sometimes it never came but today it had – where he knew that the picture was going to work. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the idea came to him. He would have an exhibition – an exhibition of his water colors at the studio. They were certainly good enough to sell – he had seen much worse at other exhibitions. As well as generating some welcome revenue, they might also raise the profile of the studio. He would run his exhibition over two weeks and open it in early April. That gave him about two months to prepare.
The next link in the chain was Mrs Dana. She had come into the studio a few weeks later to have a portrait taken of her four year old son. While there she noticed a poster advertising the exhibition.
‘Why, you’re a man of many talents, Mister Owens.’
‘Maybe you should wait until you see the pictures before you say that, ma’am.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I won’t be disappointed. When does it start? Let’s see, what does it say here, grand opening, April twelfth? My word, “grand opening” indeed.’
‘So tell everybody you know, ma’am. Bring all your friends.’
And so she had. Well, one friend anyway.
If he hadn’t chosen Washington over half a dozen other cities; if he hadn’t painted; if the idea of mounting the exhibition hadn’t occurred to him; if Mrs Dana hadn’t come in; if Sarah hadn’t been a friend of hers and if Mrs Dana hadn’t brought her along to the exhibition … if, if, if, if.
For him that Friday had been a mad flurry of activity. Late into the afternoon there was still framing to be done but he finally got all the pictures hung whi
le Elisabeth laid out bottles of wine and some titbits for people to snack on. He had often tried to imagine how that Friday must have been for Sarah as she began the day, little knowing what lay in store for her.
It had probably been a Friday just like any other. She had woken early – maybe after not sleeping too well. As he came to realize afterwards, she rarely did. She would have had a bath and he imagined her dressing. Then into her kitchen for a quick cup of coffee before she began her working day. She was probably looking forward to the weekend. That morning her head was probably crowded with the things she planned to do over the next two days. She was always busy – always doing things round her house or in her small garden, always had lists of things she was working her way through. That evening she had gone to Mrs Dana’s for supper before continuing along to the opening.
And so the stage had been set. It was so amazing to think what Fate was about to do – in fact, what it had been doing it for a while – moving the pieces like some cosmic game of chess that would result in their meeting that evening.
4
The photographs! The girl!
Gilbert drifted between sleeping and wakefulness trying to remember when he had hired Roberto. He had absolutely no recollection of it. But he had suddenly remembered something else. The girl. And the photographs. Had it been a dream? Was it a memory?
It had begun with needing to go to the toilet – this was before he stopped caring. The chamber pot under the bed was full and needed to be emptied. He was drunk and there was no way he felt he could get down the stairs with it. Even getting it to the window to tip it out would have been beyond him. So instead he decided to go downstairs to the privy which was out back in the yard. He also needed to drink some water and get more whisky. Maybe he could do all of this while he was downstairs – or get the man from Florence to do it.
Gilbert had the usual headache and in addition today, his gut ached. He wondered if the rotgut had finally done exactly that – eaten through the lining of his stomach so that now his body was beginning to rot from the inside out. Would this mean he couldn’t drink any more? Better to end it all if that was the case.
Sunlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 2) Page 2
