Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (11 page)

“I had a friend once,” she says, but it is futile to try and explain anything. She is silent for a moment. “I want you,” she says finally, “to take the photograph of me. Can you do that?”

Annie is tired tonight and that makes her less careful. Hearing the words of the poem and seeing Tess and Wilks in the garden have made her feel as though she wants to push against something, and this is what she has to push against—Isabelle, this room soft with firelight, the photograph that will come to hold all this. And then, somewhere underneath it all, she has thought, briefly, of her mother, thought that the one thing above all others that she wants to know about her is what she looked like. This is the one thing she can never know. What her mother looked like, and if Annie looks like her. All she can really imagine of her mother is the work she did. Annie cannot guess what it is her mother would have been thinking on that road in Ireland, or even what she would have been wearing, but Annie does know what the labour would feel like. The roughness of the stone would rub hands raw and bleeding. The stooping and lifting would make a back ache and force the body to move stiffly to accommodate the pain. Looking up would hurt. It was as simple as that. “Yes, I can,” she says.

Annie dresses in Isabelle’s robe and poses her near the fire, so the light from the coals will be behind her. Isabelle removes her evening dress and corset and sits, on the floor, in her slip. There is something so forlorn in the way she just sits there, looking as though she’s waiting for someone to suddenly appear before her. Annie doesn’t know how to change this. She asks Isabelle to shake her hair out. “Now look at me, ma’am,” she says. She stands beside the camera. She wants Isabelle’s defiant gaze, the one she had at Mrs. Hill’s when she told Wilfred to fetch her shawl. The look she has when she poses Annie.

“Now you know,” says Isabelle, for the third time, “that because this is indoors we’re going to have to do a long exposure. Firelight is not the same as sunlight. Four, maybe five minutes.”

“I know.”

“And make sure the collodion entirely covers the glass plate.”

“I know.”

“And…”

“Ma’am,” says Annie, looking through the camera at Isabelle, “if something goes wrong, you’re right here.” Trust me. Through the camera lens, Isabelle looks worried, anxious. Annie is not sure she can do this. “Look at me, ma’am,” she says again.

Annie fills the frame with Isabelle’s head. On the eleven-by-seven negative plate it will be life-size. She holds the focus of the lens only on the eyes, lets the background fall away to smoke. Even Isabelle’s hair, at the edges of the frame, is fuzzy and indistinct. It’s the eyes Annie wants, the directness of them. And underneath, a tremble of sorrow. “Don’t move,” she says, and opens the lens.

Isabelle stares into the camera. It is like looking into herself, a strangely disconnected feeling. She has always thought of that wooden box, that lens, as her mind’s eye. It belongs to her vision of the world. To be looking at it from this side is to have given over the power of it. She has closed her eyes and has let Annie Phelan guide her through this darkened room.

Let me tell you this: Someone in some future time will think of us.

Ellen.

Now it’s just me, thinks Isabelle, thinking of you. No one is thinking of us. We no longer exist to anything in the world. Maybe, in that forest there’s a tree that remembers your touch when you stood there, close against it, waiting for me, over twenty years ago. Maybe that patch of bark you laid the flash of your hand on is now farther up the tree than I could reach, right up in the tangle of branches far above my head.

Annie counts off the minutes on Isabelle’s pocket watch. She alone moves this future forward, fixes Isabelle’s face forever to this moment.

When she finally says, “Done,” Isabelle leaps up from her place by the fire, dresses hastily, rushes the plate out of the camera on its way to the darkroom. Annie can hear her running down the stairs and then the bang of the back door as she hurries from the house.

Annie carries the kettles of water from the bath down the hall to the lavatory and throws the water in. Then she scrubs out the tub, dries it, and leans it back against the wall of Mrs. Dashell’s dressing room. It is now so late there is almost no point in going to bed. She takes the kettles back to the kitchen and sits at the table, in the dark, waiting for the range to burn down so she can clean it out. She lays her head on her arms. This evening she was not thinking of work she had to be doing. This evening had been different. She had stood in the glow of Isabelle Dashell’s room and, although it had felt unnatural and vaguely sinful, she had been in command of four and a half minutes. This world, for that time, had been hers and she had never felt such a sense of possibility for herself, a sense that she was someone apart from what she did, that she was real. She had been trusted. She had been in charge and had not faltered. She had not faltered.

There’s a noise in the darkness of the kitchen. Someone coming in through the door, clumsily knocking into a pail and sending it skittering across the floor.

“Ma’am, is that you?” says Annie, thinking that it’s Isabelle, back from the darkroom.

“Annie?” says the voice. “It’s me.”

Tess. She bumps her way over to the table, feels with her hands for Annie’s shape, and sits down heavily beside her. Annie can smell the sweet musky bloom of alcohol on her breath.

“Can you see me?” says Tess. She’s looking right at Annie.

“Yes.”

“You see me. You saw me,” says Tess, swaying a litde on the bench.

“I did,” says Annie. “I saw you.”

“Don’t say anything. Because I could lose,” says Tess, swaying again. “My position.”

Annie grabs Tess and holds her firmly by the arm. “You could lose your balance,” she says. “Come on. I’ll take you up to bed.” She loops Tess’s arm around her shoulder and stumbles her up the stairs to their room. Tess is asleep before she falls onto her bed. Annie removes Tess’s shoes and then pulls the covers snugly over her. It is cool upstairs. Annie sits down on the edge of Tess’s bed. A moth thrums against the night window. The soft thump of it hitting the glass, like the beat of someone’s heart heard with an ear against her chest.
Are you alive?
What she had asked Mrs. Gilbey as she lay there on the drawing-room floor. The answer was yes. The answer was no.

Are you awake? thinks Isabelle, lying in the close darkness of her bedroom. Are you awake, Annie Phelan? Have I made these feelings happen? Are they mine, or will they disappear tomorrow when the sun pushes the image of Sappho out onto the coated paper?

All day long Isabelle has been imagining Sappho. The fragmented lyrics, brief as roses. All day she has been thinking how it would be to be lover to both men and women. She had fallen easily into it, having Annie Phelan fetch her home, arranging the bath so she could look fully on a woman’s body again, without shame. And then, she had been the one who was Sappho. All night Isabelle had been trying to conjure an atmosphere, forgetting that there were character considerations. There was lover and loved. It should have been obvious to her who she was in this scenario. In that old scenario.

Isabelle stretches her arms out from her body, feels the emptiness of her bed, the vastness of it. Has she made her own feelings happen? Has imagining Sappho made her become Sappho, even temporarily? These feelings she still has, the residue in her body, the trailing ends of desire, will they go with morning? Does she wish them gone?

Ellen, do you ever think of me?

And how much of this is due to her husband? How much to the fact that they no longer touch one another. It was not the first one that stopped this, or even the second. It was the third dead baby. It’s as though they are lined up on the mattress between her and Eldon, and when she puts her hand out she can’t reach him across their stiff, blue bodies. This is what has been made from her and Eldon’s love—a love that once seemed as fierce and bright as moving blood—three dead babies.

Tonight, when Annie arranged her by the fire, tilting her head up gently, it was the first time in over a year that anyone had touched Isabelle in an intimate way, that anyone had touched her with feeling, with purpose. To be Sappho is tempting. To love a woman is never to have the product of that love be death. She would never have had to have held them in her arms, their blood-slick bodies, slippery as fish, having swum from their dark ocean out into a light that killed them.

Annie can’t sleep. She lights a candle, descends the stairs, walks the familiar passage to Eldon’s library. She has travelled this route so often that she doesn’t really need a light to guide her. She could walk this, with confidence, through the thickest thicket of dark.

Tonight, for the first time, Annie feels too restless to settle to reading. She runs her hands gently over the books on the shelves, each spine a soft flash under her fingertips. There are no words to calm her here. Not tonight.

Annie leaves Eldon’s library without a book, walks the corridor back to the main part of the house. She goes to the room with the old prams and carriages and settles herself on the floor in her usual place. This room no longer seems sinister to her. When she first started coming in here she thought of it as the room of old baby things. Now she thinks of it only as the place she comes to read.

Annie sits on the floor, pulls her knees up to her chin. The evening still flashes around her, like the tiny stings of light from fireflies. The bath. The camera. What is it Isabelle had said about that poet? A lover of both men and women. Annie thinks of Wilks and Tess out by the laundry wall. Then she thinks of herself and Isabelle, of Isabelle pushing her up against the bricks. How that might feel, to have Isabelle’s skin on her skin. The thought of this panics her. The thought of this makes her hold her breath. Makes her breathe.

The next day Annie moves slowly through her work. She drags her body around as though it is a heavy sack, not something she lives inside, but something she must haul unwillingly through her day. By the afternoon she is woozy with exhaustion and pleads with Cook to allow her an hour to lie down. She says she isn’t feeling well. She isn’t.

She sleeps hard and fast, waking to someone’s hand on her shoulder and her name spilling out into the room like a stone. The rattle of it in her ears moving her out of sleep.

“Annie.” It is Isabelle there, by the side of her bed, shaking her awake. “Annie.”

“What is it, ma’am?” Annie struggles up, makes it halfway to sitting, and then falls back against her pillow. She is crossing from sleep to the waking world and is still not sure she isn’t dreaming.

Isabelle lays something on Annie’s chest. A photograph. Annie picks it up gingerly. The head of Isabelle as Sappho fills the paper. The face softens away from the eyes, sharp as stars.

Isabelle sits on the edge of Annie’s bed and Annie shifts over to make room for her there.

“There it is, Annie.”

“Do you like it, ma’am?”

“Do you?” Isabelle looks straight at her and Annie looks down at the photograph again. The bigness is right, and the softness. The look is sadder than she’d meant, but it is not wrong. She remembers last night, remembers her thoughts about Isabelle when she was sitting in the carriage room. Her skin flutters hot.

“Yes,” she says.

“Art finds us out,” says Isabelle.

Annie thinks she must be blushing.

Isabelle puts her hand on Annie’s where it holds the photograph. “You have made something of me that has surprised me.” And it’s a bit too good, she thinks. That has surprised me also. She stands up, leaving the photograph in Annie’s hands. “Keep it. It’s yours.” She goes out of the room.

Annie sits up in bed. She still feels disoriented from her brief nap. She looks at the photograph again. It does not look like the memory of Isabelle posing that she holds in her head. The firelight. The warmth of the room. And yet, there is something of last night there. Here. The way Isabelle looks out. The way she looks out at Annie, almost as if she loves her, almost as if she could.

Annie’s dress is twisted from lying in bed. Her hair is falling from its pins. She had better tidy herself before she goes back downstairs. She swings herself out of bed, feet first. Before she stands up she puts the photograph of Isabelle under her pillow, underneath her neglected Bible. For safe keeping.

What is holy to me now?

Before Eldon takes the train home from London he does two things. He goes to a public house and drinks three glasses of whisky, and then he goes next door, to a place he has never before imagined going.

Up the long, shabby flight of stairs from the street to the second floor. His breath catching in his throat from the effort. His sweaty hands out to press against the walls either side of him, to keep him on a straight ascent.

The room is bright. Eldon blinks from the sunlight rushing the windows.

“Whatever you desire,” says the woman, and Eldon chooses an object from the curio cabinet in the corner of the room, stands with his hand covetously on the round slur of it.

“Is this what you want?” asks the photographer, from behind the camera. He motions his assistant out of the way and she scuttles off to one side.

Eldon feels the hard surface of the globe beneath his sweaty palm. The pack ice of the Arctic Circle burns against his fingers. “Yes,” he says. “This is what I want.”

When Eldon bursts into his wife’s bedroom, Isabelle is sitting on her bed, head bent over something in her lap. She looks up, startled, when the door flaps back on its hinge, bangs against the wall.

“Eldon,” she says, surprised to see him. He stands in the doorway, as though now that he has announced his entrance in such a dramatic fashion he doesn’t know what to do next. His suit is crumpled. His beard is unkempt. “What happened?”

Eldon doesn’t move from the doorway.

“What happened?” asks Isabelle again.

“No,” he says.

“No?”

“No. Dunstan said no. No to my proposal. No to my map. No to me.”

Isabelle stretches out her hands and Eldon comes over and sits on the bed beside her. She holds his hand. “Can you not go to another publisher?”