Double Vision

Twelve

Despite his closeness to Ben, Stephen had met Kate Frobisher only twice, the last time in an art gallery where some of Ben’s photographs were being shown. Stephen had walked round the exhibition, finding some of the images very hard to take in this setting. You needed to be alone with them to achieve an honest reaction. He’d left as soon as possible after congratulating Ben.

Despite the map, he struggled to find Woodland House, which was set back from the lane behind a thick shrubbery that virtually hid it from sight. It was, as Beth said, isolated.

The spray of gravel under his wheels was as good as a burglar alarm. Kate emerged at once, arms crossed under her bosom, bending down to peer into the car with a shy, friendly smile. She was still wearing a surgical collar, though it must have been weeks since the accident. He looked for obvious marks of grief and found none, except for two broad white streaks in the dark hair that she’d bundled off her face anyhow. They hadn’t been there before, or perhaps they had, and she’d just stopped bothering to hide them. He wound down the window and she offered her hand and then immediately withdrew it, apologizing, laughing, wiping wet clay or plaster off on the already streaked side of her smock.

He got out of the car and, after a moment’s hesitation, they kissed, briefly, on each cheek. It felt foreign here, belonged in the overcrowded art gallery with trays of cheap white wine. Here in the country they didn’t know each other well enough to kiss. Answering polite inquiries about the difficulty of finding the house, he followed her over the threshold and into a stone-flagged corridor.

One ladder-backed chair, a small uncurtained window, an earthenware jug with three gigantic heads of hogweed casting an intricate pattern of shadows across the white walls. A cool, even chilly interior, but then she threw open a door and ushered him into a room full of deep reds and blues, pools of golden light from the lamps falling over books and paintings. Pale yellow sunlight flooding through the large windows made the fire burn dim.

‘Would you like a drink? Gin, wine…?’

‘White wine, please.’

While she poured, he turned to one side and there, on top of a carved oak chest, was a portrait bust of Ben — obviously her work — and powerful, he thought. Suddenly there were three people in the room, and this third presence produced a charge that was too strong, too complex, for the length of their own acquaintanceship. Stranded between small talk and the conversation they didn’t know each other well enough to have, they smiled and nodded, but found it difficult to think of anything to say. She had a streak of white plaster on her chin that was beginning to dry and flake. He was aware of wanting to brush it away with his thumb. His hand actually began to move towards her, but then he stopped, horrified by the inappropriate intimacy of the gesture.

‘That’s amazing,’ he said, pointing to the bust.

‘I’m glad you like it. I did it last summer.’

So easy and light the reference, but as she spoke the firelight leapt over the bronze face and for a moment the features seemed to move.

Lunch served at the kitchen table was simple but good. Chicken casserole, hot, crusty bread, followed by cheese and fruit.

He remembered Robert saying how much she loved the house so he asked her about that, and she became animated at once. Her face flushed — but she had been too pale before — as she told him about how she and Ben had found it, the state it was in, filthy, the old farmer who owned it had no children and so, as he sank into senility, the place had become not merely dilapidated but squalid. They’d walked round it with a torch on their first visit, dismayed by the dark rooms — the windows had been almost overgrown with ivy — but then, drifting out into the yard with an increasingly disconsolate estate agent in tow, they’d seen the outbuildings and immediately, in spite of all the work that would be needed to put it right, they’d known this was the place. Had to be. ‘Can you imagine what it would cost in London to get a place with two studios? Two million?’

‘More than that.’ It wouldn’t come cheap even here in the North, where you could get a country house with a deer park for the price of a three-bedroomed flat in Notting Hill. ‘Aren’t you nervous here by yourself?’

She shrugged. ‘People come for the weekends. Obviously, it’s quieter at this time of year.’

She genuinely didn’t seem to mind the isolation. He guessed her loneliness was the deeper kind that comes from the absence of one person, and she really didn’t care whether other people were around or not.

‘I’ve got an assistant,’ she said, after a slight pause. ‘He comes in every day except Sunday.’

‘Yes, Robert said you’d had an accident.’

‘I crashed the car — just down there, on that bend — and it’s left me with neck and back problems. So I just had to bite the bullet and take somebody on.’

‘You don’t like the idea?’

‘Hate it. I like to be able to walk up and down and shout and swear when it doesn’t go right.’

She was smiling, but he guessed she meant it.

‘But he’s all right. It seems to be working.’

She looked strained. If this had been an interview, he’d have been on to it at once, probing what was obviously an area of doubt. But it wasn’t. He was visiting a friend’s widow. And he was beginning to like her a lot. He liked her lack of pretension, the brisk, workmanlike approach.

He didn’t mention the reason he’d come till they were back in the living room and she was serving coffee. Then he said, ‘Have you had time to think about the photographs?’

‘There’s nothing to think about. I know Ben would have wanted you to have them. And that’s good enough for me.’ She handed him a cup of coffee and sat down with her own. ‘He often talked about you.’

‘I miss him.’

A pause. ‘I’ve got some of his Afghanistan stuff over in the studio. The last things he took.’ Her voice stayed steady, but her eyes were bright. He looked away, giving her time to recover herself, but there was something she had to say first. ‘And I want to thank you for sending this back.’ She touched the amulet round her neck. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You found him?’

‘Yes. It was instantaneous. He couldn’t possibly have suffered anything. I doubt if he knew.’

She nodded. ‘I hoped it was like that. They said it was, but you don’t always get the truth, do you?’

‘No, it was.’

‘I’m glad.’ A deep breath, ‘So what’s the book about?’

‘Ways of representing war. It’s not what they want me to do, they want me to write anecdotes. You know: Amusing Mass Murderers I Have Met.’

‘But this is the one you need to write?’

‘Yeah. I can even tell you what started it. Jules Naudet, the guy who was following a rookie fireman round New York on 9/11 and just found himself filming the attack on the towers? Well, something he said haunted me. At one point he turned his camera off — he wouldn’t film people burning — and he said, “Nobody should have to see this.” And of course immediately I thought of Goya.’

‘“One cannot look at this”?’

‘Yes — but then “I saw it.” “This is the truth.” It’s that argument he’s having with himself, all the time, between the ethical problems of showing the atrocities and yet the need to say, “Look, this is what’s happening”… and I thought, My God, we’re still facing exactly the same problem. There’s always this tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being sceptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be.’

‘Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I had this conversation with Ben… oh, hundreds of times.’ The sadness returned. ‘You should be doing this book with Ben, really.’

‘If I use his photographs, I will be. In a sense. And I’ll talk about things that happened, you know, making the ethical decision when you’ve only got a second to make it. You see, the thing Ben and Goya have got in common is that they went on doing it. Whatever the doubts, it didn’t stop them.’

‘Rightly.’

‘Yes, I think so.’

A short silence. He was aware of the flicker of firelight across Ben’s features.

‘Would you like to see where he worked?’

‘I’d love to.’

He finished his coffee and stood up. They walked across the yard, the brief thaw already giving way to night and frost. The ruts were harder now, crusted on top. His feet bit into them, then held. A low building faced them across the yard. Kate got out her keys, fumbled with the lock and stood aside. He thought she was just letting him go first, but no, she stayed outside. Was she being tactful and giving him a few minutes to himself? Or had she not been in since Ben died?

He stepped over the threshold, thinking that perhaps the last person to breathe the air in this room had been Ben. The carpet held flakes of his skin, hairs from his head must lie on the cushions of the sofa over there. The forensic science of grief. We shed ourselves all the time, he thought, shed and renew and shed again until that final shedding of our selves.

Dust everywhere, and a cobweb in the corner of the window. The last rays of the setting sun caught the glass and turned the death trap into a thing of beauty.

‘The light switch is on your right.’

He flicked on the switch, hating the glare of light that dissipated the shadowy presence he’d sensed in the room. But he pulled himself together and went across to the table. Computer, scanner, a printer — far more advanced than anything he ever needed to use — but along the wall facing the desk there were box files neatly labelled: date and place. The archive of a working life.

What was missing was the one box he hadn’t come back to label: Afghanistan, 2002.

He heard a man’s voice behind him speaking to Kate. Then she called from the door: ‘I’m just going across to the studio. I won’t be a minute.’

He pulled out the file on Bosnia and looked through some of the prints, recognizing places and people. A chandelier in a devastated ballroom; an old Serbian woman surrounded by icons, scraps of food on the table in front of her; a queue of women and children waiting their turn at the tap; an old Muslim woman, tottering down the street with a milk bottle full of water, the only container she was strong enough to carry; and then, without warning, there she was: the girl in the stairwell.

He gaped at the print, unable to understand why it was there. Obviously Ben had gone back the next morning, early, before the police arrived, to get this photograph. He’d restored her skirt to its original position, up round her waist. It was shocking. Stephen was shocked on her behalf to see her exposed like this, though, ethically, Ben had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t staged the photograph. He’d simply restored the corpse to its original state. And yet it was difficult not to feel that the girl, spreadeagled like that, had been violated twice.

Quickly, he replaced the photographs and went out into the yard.

The long shadows cast by the house and trees were creating an advance guard of deep frost. Chickens, stepping out cautiously on their cracked yellow feet, were pecking about on the frozen ground, where wisps of straw shone like gold. The cock looked up at him with a bright amber eye.

Kate came across the yard, smiling. ‘Would you like to see the ones I had framed? Have you got time?’

Her studio was a taller building on the third side of the farmyard. A narrow door led into a small lobby used to store raw materials: bags of plaster, bales of hessian, yellowing piles of old newspapers. Through another door into a vast barn, one wall made entirely of glass. Outside darkness was falling — only the crests of the hills still caught a glint of light.

The studio was heated by a wood-burning stove whose flames flickered all over the dim interior. Kate switched on the lights. In the centre, partly obscured by scaffolding, was a huge, crudely carved male figure.

‘That’s it,’ Kate said sighing, hands pressed hard into the small of her back, like a peasant woman who’s been doing hard physical work all day. He’d noticed her hands over lunch. They were certainly not glamorous. Thick veins, rough skin, splitting nails — you’d expect to see hands like hers on a building site.

Clustered in the corner was a group of white plaster figures, striding out. Extraordinary figures: frightened and frightening.

Kate, meanwhile, had walked over to the far corner where there was a screen displaying some of Ben’s photographs. He joined her there and glanced across them. As she’d said, these were mainly from the last trip to Afghanistan. One showed a group of boys on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, ragged, thin, peering out at the camera from behind a fence, and flashing mirrors into the sun to blind the photographer. A flash of light had whited out the face of the boy holding the glass, so in a narrow technical sense the picture was a failure. Further along, a man’s face, distorted with anger, one hand half covering the lens. Another was of an execution. A man on his knees staring up at the men who are preparing to kill him. But Ben had included his own shadow in the shot, reaching out across the dusty road. The shadow says I’m here. I’m holding a camera and that fact will determine what happens next. In the next shot the man lies dead in the road, and the shadow of the photographer, the shadow of a man with a deformed head, has moved closer.

This wasn’t the first execution recorded on film, nor even the first to be staged specially for the camera, but normally the photographer’s presence and its impact on events is not acknowledged. Here Ben had exploded the convention.

‘I’d like to use those,’ Stephen said. He was thinking that Ben might almost have taken them for the book.

‘They were sent back after…’

Right at the bottom left-hand corner he saw another photograph, this time of Soviet tanks, disused, rotting, corroded with rust. This mass of military debris filled most of the frame, so that from the viewer’s angle they seemed to be a huge wave about to break. Behind them was a small white sun, no bigger than a golf ball, veiled in mist. No people. Hardware left behind after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan: the last war. But the composition was so powerful it transcended the limits of a particular time and place, and became a Dies Irae. A vision of the world as it would be after the last human being had left, forgetting to turn out the light.

‘That’s a great photograph,’ he said, knowing he would have to find a way to use it.

‘Yes.’ She was struggling with tears again, not looking at it. He wondered if she knew it had been taken seconds before Ben died.

All this time he’d been aware of the plaster figures on the edge of his vision, and when he turned round he felt compelled to count them again. No, still seven. They hadn’t been breeding while his back was turned. He remembered reading that Arctic explorers sometimes suffer from the delusion that there is one more person present on the trek than can actually be counted. He couldn’t see any reason why that would apply here, unless the overwhelming whiteness of the room was a factor.

Everything was white, even the floor. During the day the northern light would bounce off every surface, leaving the room, as far as possible, shadowless. Perhaps that was enough to create a mild form of sensory deprivation. He wondered if Kate was aware of it, whether she too suffered from a compulsion to count the figures.

‘Would it be all right if I came over sometime and looked through the prints?’

She nodded at once. ‘Good idea.’

She sounded cheerful, as if the prospect of somebody working in Ben’s room revitalized her. This had been so much a place where two people lived, worked, talked, squabbled, drank, cooked, made love. And yet Ben had been away for six weeks at a time. She must be used to being alone.

The place was making him uneasy. He went to the window and looked down at the pond, where the last light of evening clung to the water. The overhead lights were reflected in the glass, making him feel vulnerable to the outside world, to the dark hillside. He turned and saw a man standing in the doorway. He was wearing a dark coat and had come in so quietly that he might have been there for a while before Stephen noticed him.

Kate followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Oh, come in, Peter. This is Stephen Sharkey. A friend of Ben.’

Peter was tall, good-looking, with pale, watchful eyes. He nodded to Stephen.

‘I’ve got the hessian, but they only had the really thin stuff. I said I’d take a roll and ask you.’

‘I’ll have a look.’

Stephen and Peter were left alone in the cavernous interior, surrounded by the white figures.

‘So you’re Kate’s assistant.’

‘Yes, I do the lifting. It’s just a temporary job.’

‘I can’t imagine how it happens. I mean, how does that’ — he pointed towards the huge, plaster figure — ‘turn into bronze?’

Peter smiled. ‘The lost-wax method. Just don’t ask me what it is.’

‘You’re not a budding artist, then?’

‘No, I just do odd jobs. Gardening, mainly.’

Kate came back. ‘That’s fine. I don’t mind it being thin as long as the weave’s coarse enough. We could do with another two bales.’

‘Do you want me to get them now?’

‘If there’s time.’

‘No problem.’

He raised his hand to Stephen and went out. A moment later they heard the cough and sputter of an engine.

Kate smiled. ‘I don’t know how he keeps that thing on the road.’

She sounded preoccupied, gazing up at the big figure. Stephen took the hint and went back to the photographs, but continued to watch her out of the corner of his eye. Now that she was absorbed in her work, he felt he was seeing her clearly for the first time. Not an easy woman to get to know. The rather jolly outgoing manner disguised a formidable inner reserve. If he’d met her at the church fête, or organizing a jumble sale, or whatever women like her — he meant women with that rather clipped, upper-class accent — found to do in the country, he wouldn’t have attributed very much to her in the way of an inner life. Yet obviously she had, and not a comfortable one either. She’d got the chisel out now and was trying to reshape part of the upper thigh, but almost at once she stopped, grimacing with pain. ‘Bugger it.’

The sound of her own voice seemed to remind her she was not alone. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said, with a slight, embarrassed laugh. ‘I’m too tired.’

‘It’s time I was off anyway. I’ll give you a ring, shall I, to arrange when I can come over?’

‘Any time. I’m always here.’

They walked together to the door.

‘What’s Peter’s other name?’

‘Wingrave.’

‘He’s very striking-looking.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘You didn’t like him.’

He shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen enough of him.’

It was acute of her to detect the reserve he’d felt on meeting Peter, though it wasn’t a matter of dislike. He hadn’t asked himself whether he liked him or not — though remembering the sudden, warm smile he rather thought he had — but he sensed instability. He’d been in so many dangerous places he’d learnt to decide on the spot whom he could trust, and he wouldn’t have wanted Peter watching his back.

‘It’ll be nice having somebody using Ben’s room,’ she said, as they walked out into the yard.

‘You don’t use it?’

‘No, I just leave it locked up.’ A twist of the dry lips. ‘Sometimes I think he’s in there, you see, working, and it’s quite a soothing feeling. I’m in the studio, he’s over there, and in a few minutes we’re going to meet and have a drink. And as long as I think that, I can keep going.’ A little self-conscious laugh. ‘I know it’s not healthy.’

‘People survive whichever way they can. I’m quite sure a lot of the things I do aren’t healthy.’ She looked so sad standing there that once again he had the urge to reach out and touch her. Instead he said, ‘I don’t know if Ben mentioned it, but my marriage broke up.’

‘He did. I’m sorry.’

He nodded, and they walked to the car. This time they shook hands, which he found rather touching, a sign that they were groping their way into their own relationship, one that didn’t depend entirely on knowing Ben.

‘See you,’ he said, slipping into the driving seat.

He saw her in his mirror, waving, and then she turned and walked back into the house.