Black Mirror (10 page)

 

Anna dear, let me tell you; I have just remembered.

Jules and I went once on a short holiday together. He had a large job — a wealthy family, whose wedding was spectacular — and with the payment bought rail tickets from Paris to Venice. It was low season, winter, and we booked a room somewhere in a backstreet, very near the centre, very near St Mark's. I remember mist rising from the canals and the floating buildings. The quicksilver sky. The boats riding on reflections. I had never seen anything quite so beautiful. Jules took photos and developed them by borrowing a darkroom; he photographed doorways, church spires, the dark cave-shapes of alleyways. Bits and pieces of buildings; nothing whole or complete. I remember noticing at the time that he loved incompletion. Worn walls. Rooftops. A particular pattern in the paving stones. He also took a series of portrait photographs of me. I still have them; I'll show you. Without my feathers, of course, but I was still impressive. We looked, I think, like a couple of honeymooners. Every day I powdered my face and drew scarlet on my lips; and I bought a new hat, a scarlet cloche, which I wore incessantly.

In any case, this is what I want to tell you:

On our third day in Venice it rained and rained,
and St Mark's square began to fill up and flood. We stayed all afternoon in a café reading, just wasting time, waiting for the rain to stop, and when we set out in the evening to return to the hotel, the square was inundated, completely underwater. It was extraordinarily black and shiny, like India ink. Lights reflected everywhere: twinkling stars. Jules hoisted me up like a child and piggybacked me across the water. We were both laughing, slightly hysterical; we were both very happy. The rain was still falling, and I held an umbrella, a scarlet umbrella, high above us …

Do you know the Surrealist game called Exquisite Corpse? Participants compose a fantastical body by contributing a drawing of some body part to a folded-over piece of paper. You can't see what the others have drawn and when the paper is opened out, there it is, a hybrid creature, something new and amazing. This is what I thought:
We compose our own exquisite corpse
. I was thrilled by the inky water, and the piggyback, and the absurdity of it all.

The next morning, our last, it was still softly raining. Jules took one of his photographs of me, folded it into a boat shape, and set it floating upon the bright watery square of St Mark's. I can see it now, my own face, boat-shaped and marvellous, drifting slowly away from us.

Honey-moon, Anna. Why do you think they call it that?

Anna was reminded instantly
of those paintings by Max Ernst, in which women have the peaked and almost monstrous heads of birds, and flounces of iridescent feathers streaming like cloaks down their backs. When she entered the drawing room Victoria was wearing her feathers, standing in birdlike silhouette, an optical illusion, peering out of the window. For the first time Anna wondered if other people had considered her mad, if this propensity for display, this pompous mummery, had ever enabled others to hurt or disqualify her as a crazy woman. The feathers were so dark they had an oily sheen.
Where had it come from, this head-dress?

An hourglass, commanded Victoria. I want you to buy me an hourglass.

She was having a good day, and was up and about, alert, perky, dispensing orders.

So I can observe and calculate how much time I have left.

She moved behind her Cocteau screen — her eye appeared in a star-shape — paused for thirty seconds or so, and then reappeared.

Well? What are you waiting for? Toot sweet! Anna Griffin, toot sweet! toot sweet!

 

So Anna is on an errand for imperious Victoria; she sets off to scour the second-hand shops of London to find her prize.

The seasons are now in shift; the air is chill and diaphanous, but there are the beginnings at last of a spring moderation: buds have begun appearing, there is a milky quality to the light. In the past two months there were times in which Anna believed quite seriously that she would not survive the English winter. Her chest heaved with ice; her breath was frosty; she felt herself freezing inside-out. Winston had reassured her: if a Jamaican — who carries the sun of his home in his bones — can endure it, so too can a sunny Australian. They put their hands inside each other's jackets, as children do, for the swathe and the enclosure of a warming embrace.

In the first store the owner tries to sell Anna an eggtimer; and in subsequent shopping she has no luck at all. True hourglasses, it seems, no longer exist. She enters a phone booth papered over with advertisements for busty prostitutes, and begins ringing antique shops, one by one. It feels a fool's errand; yet she is anxious to placate the feathered old woman for whom the hourglass is somehow the colophon of every loss in
her life. After fifteen calls Anna has almost run out of money, but one of the dealers suggests she place a request in the Antique Society newsletter. She does so with her very last coins, in a desperate measure, over the phone. When she returns to Hampstead it is late afternoon and already almost dark.

Winston was sitting with Victoria, drinking tea. The two turned together, guiltily, like co-conspirators.

Victoria says:
The Comedy of Errors
, Winston tells me, is all about identity, about hazarding loss as a premise for the possibility of redemption. That's right, isn't it?

Winston simply grinned.

And it's about error as the condition of all identity, yes?

Yes.

(Jesus, thought Anna. Now she's a literary critic.)

We've been talking about our countries, too.

She's been telling me, said Winston, about the black people, the Aborigines.

(Jesus, thought Anna. What could she possibly know?)

About spirits, persists Winston. Why have you never told me?

Anna is trying not to look exasperated.

I couldn't find one, she said. I couldn't find a fucking hourglass.

Victoria is supercilious.

Don't worry, you will, Ms-darling-Anna-chronos.

They sleep secretly together, in Winston's single bed, and Mrs Dooley is ignorant of the romance that has reshaped her establishment.

This ephemeral wedding, claimed against an authorised marriage. It is the cramped cosy dream of spaces more expansive.

Their couple, their star-crossing.

They are absentmindedly happy, pretending against pretence that their parting will not happen.

 

That night Winston awoke from a nightmare that set his whole body trembling.

I dreamt my wife and son were held captive in Mr Allfrey's red car.

Son?

My son James. They were pressing their faces to the glass and calling my name, but for some reason I couldn't move my body at all. Both my legs were completely frozen. They were cold and stiff. I was trying to use my arms to drag myself forward, but still I couldn't move. James began crying. His face distorted.

Son
, Anna is thinking.
Winston has a son.

This was not the time to ask. Yet she feels a vague, ignominious pang of jealousy. She feels excluded. And she thinks irrelevantly of the hourglass she failed to locate, its soft soft draining, its obscure symbolic claims, its empty/full, empty/full resemblance to a body. Anna stretches to enclose Winston in the compass of her arm.

Sleep, she says. It sounds like an instruction to a child.

But he rises away from her, turns on the bedlamp, and reaches, still trembling, for a cigarette. Anna watches as he fumbles with a box of matches.

Let me, she offers. These things will kill you.

In the long run, as Keynes says, we're all dead.

Some consolation!

Winston turns now and looks at Anna for the first time since awakening; for her benefit he manages a wry half smile.

I'm sorry. It upsets me. It's pathetic, I know.

They are moving closer. The more we say to each other, Anna is thinking, the harder it will be to part later on.

Winston switches off the light and smokes hidden in the darkness. The shawl of night wraps them protectively, as though they have become lovers in a fairytale.

I should have told you about James, I'm sorry. It just seemed so private.

Yes. Private.

But it is already forgiven. Anna is so in love with this man that even his firmest secrets, even what he will not share, have become of inestimable value to her. A spotlight of red ash tracks the route of his hand.

Sleep, she says again, this time more tenderly.

 

In Victoria's memory it was a day towards the end of winter, just as the seasons were beginning to change. She and Jules were walking together along the quays, along the right bank. The Seine was churned up, swift, and
brown. They crossed to the Île St Louis, then to the Île de la Cité, and sat on the small ironwork seats arranged in rows at the back of the Notre Dame. Daffodil and crocus bulbs were beginning to unfurl in the garden; it was reassuring to see colour in the cold grey soil. The air was brittle and fair. A few tourists were looking up, exclaiming, snapshotting gargoyles and spires. Jules was already a soldier; soon he would leave.

It was the beginning of 1940, during the period known as the
drôle de guerre
, the phoney war. Although Britain and France had already declared war on Germany, there were at this stage few signs of wartime in Paris. Air raid sirens sometimes sounded their high nervous wail, filling Victoria with a kind of imprecise dread, and there was occasional anti-aircraft fire at German planes on reconnaissance. But over all it was a dull winter-time, a period of anxiety, boredom and existential inertia. Jules had been called up, but the exodus from Paris had not yet begun, nor had the rations, or the curfews, or the German soldiers in the street; nor too had the bombings, the terror, the forced wearing of yellow stars. The season was changing, lighting up, but history was veiling France — this was how Victoria thought of it — in deeper shadow.

Jules and Victoria were having a friendly argument about painting. Beneath the dreary façade of the Notre Dame, Victoria was railing against conservatism and romanticism as the twin enemies of art.

Beauty must be
convulsive
, Victoria pronounced, or not at all.

Merde
, responded Jules. Surrealists are tricksters, frauds.

He favoured art that was still, contemplative and above all, luminous. He adored the paintings of Claude Monet; each bold pastel daub on each gorgeous waterlily was an act, he claimed, of spiritualised concentration.

Victoria sneered: How conservative, how predictable.

Surrealists! I hate them all, said Jules good-humouredly. He leant forward and kissed Victoria playfully on the lips.

 

Jules remembers going as a child with his mother to see a Monet exhibition. He says he stood before a painting of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and saw only an incomprehensible haze. Hélène explained that this was a painting of the effects of steam; the obscured train at the station, hidden almost entirely by clouds of blotchy paint, was the consequence of an artist enchanted by steam.

That was what she had said:
enchanted by steam
.

The mystery, Hélène continued, is that not everything we see is altogether clear; some things present themselves as nebulous instances of the beautiful.

Nebulous instances of the beautiful.

Jules still remembers his mother's words because it was an occasion of understanding. He had looked into the painting and seen the train, there at the station, heavy, formidable, heading directly towards him, even though it was barely visible as an impasto smear. He
still remembers, too, exactly what his mother was wearing: she wore a tawny belted dress with a white lace collar, and shoes with sequences of buttons, covered in leather. She carried a coral pink embroidered handbag, which rested at her hip.

Soon, said Jules, all this, all this art-talk, will be irrelevant.

Never, my Jewels.

 

This was the day, Victoria says, this day on the cusp of spring, the day before war-time eclipsed Paris with invading emergency, that Jules took her with him to see something special.

A
transparent instance
, he joked, of the beautiful.

He was both pleased and annoyed by his Anglicised nickname, but said that if Victoria would persist with it she must see the real Parisian jewels. So after their talk on the ironwork seats behind the Notre Dame, Jules led her a little further along the Île de la Cité to the Palais de Justice. There, inside its crudely formal, strict and ugly boundaries, they came upon the church of Sainte Chapelle. Jules led Victoria inside, first to the lower chapel, and then to the upper. The lower was lovely enough — gilded groined buttresses, rich orange columns decorated with fleur-de-lys and the towers of Castille, a statue of the Virgin, faded and thoughtful-looking, in a lapis robe — but it was the upper level which invoked the experience of entering a jewel. The upper chapel had walls entirely of stained glass, mostly in tones of azure and rose. With the light, even in win
ter, even just before war, it was a space of pure refracted brightness. In lancets reaching upwards were depictions of Bible stories, rendered in garnet, emerald, sapphire, gold, and they cast a flush of coloured light into the chapel chamber.

For the King, explained Jules. For Louis the Ninth. This is his palatine chapel. It was completed in 1248 and built to house the holy relic of the Crown of Thorns.

Victoria turned towards him; he was looking up at the ceiling, which was covered in thousands of fine gold stars.

What? You think a Jew shouldn't know such places?

Victoria took his hand. He led her around the chapel, naming each of the Apostles, pointing out special details, whispering the Bible stories.

What you see here are mostly Old Testament, he said with a smile. My stories, too.

His face was enamelled by the heavenly tones of stained glass.

Not as beautiful, of course, as the main Synagogue of Paris.

Jules was still smiling.

This place makes you happy.

Yes, how could it not? There are no shadows, have you noticed? And there is Isaiah and the Jesse tree. A sign of God's faithfulness. The Israelites were worshipping idols and falling into sin, but he ordained a tree of which King David was the fruit.
He shall not judge according to the sight of his eyes, nor reprove according to the
hearing of his ears
. Book of Isaiah, chapter eleven. Out of desolation, promise.

That was what he had said:
Out of desolation, promise.
Victoria still remembers, since it was an occasion of understanding.

Coloured light shone down on them. Light from trifoils, quadrifoils, diamonds and rectangles. Victoria stretched her hand into a beam of violet, then Jules, like a medieval courtier, bent forward and kissed it.

There
are
shadows, she said.

You Surrealists, he replied, so damn literal-minded.

 

Jules once argued that photography takes its power from attention to shadow, rather than the mere capture or registration of light. The placement of shadow, he claimed, is what produces the image. Shadow is no reduction but the adjective of the image. The transfer, the mysterious transfer, of ambient accentuation. Like ice whorling upwards, he said, from a skater's bright path.

 

Within a week Anna had a phone call, offering her an hourglass. It was a splendid thing, an eighteenth-century specimen from Avignon, in France. The ampoules were bulbous and firm, and of a glass which had within it traces of bubbles and imperfections; and the frame was of ornate brass fashioned with two phoenixes, one facing up and one down, curved slenderly and protectively around the phials. The stands were heavy circles of blood-veined marble, slightly
chipped. Inside was not sand, but finely ground eggshells, sieved so that each grain was exactly the same size. The old man in Covent Garden who held it before her said that hourglass ‘sand' was often difficult to manufacture: sometimes it was marble dust from the quarries of Carrara; sometimes it was lead, or tin, or even river sand; sometimes it was the black sawdust from the carving of marble tombs. In each case it had to be dried, rid of impurities and rendered in grains the same size. Often these substances were boiled in wine, skimmed, dried, then boiled again, up to nine times. The phoenix hourglass contained its original egg-shell.