Double Vision (12 page)

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?’