Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (12 page)

All afternoon, travelling down from London, Eldon has thought of, and dispensed with, every possible avenue of redemption. “Not possible,” he says flatly. “My history is all with Dunstan. I don’t have the credibility with another publisher.” Eldon looks down at the blue patterned carpet, at his shoes floating there. “I thought, all this time, that he respected me, that my work on the atlas was important to him. But he doesn’t want to allow me a vision. He wants me to work for him. That is what he thinks I do.”

Isabelle squeezes his hand.

“There’s still the theme map,” says Eldon bitterly. “I could redeem my good name by pointing the way to rubies and emeralds in Africa.” He feels frustration climbing through his blood again. His wife’s hand in his is an irritation, not a comfort. He shakes it off, sees the photograph she has lying on her lap. “What is that?”

Isabelle passes the photograph over without a word.

“A self-portrait?” Eldon has never known his wife to photograph herself. She is always constructing some vignette, some allegorical scene. “This is something new.”

“No,” says Isabelle. “It’s not a self-portrait.”

Eldon looks closely at the photograph. It is Isabelle as he has never seen her. The expression in her eyes is so private it makes him want to turn away. If she hasn’t taken the photograph herself, then where is this look directed? “Who took this?” he says.

“Annie Phelan,” says Isabelle. “Under my instruction, of course. Look how complex it is. My new technique is quite effective for portraiture. The life-size head. The focus only on the eyes—that’s one story. How the face and the background soften and disappear, are blurred to a kind of smokiness—that’s another story.”

“Annie Phelan?” Eldon looks down at the photograph again, at his wife’s face full of gentle feeling. “The maid took this photograph?” Isabelle has never let him near the camera. Once, when he suggested he take some photographs of her, she refused, shrugged him off. She has never allowed him to see her in this way. And the few times she has photographed him, before he protested too often that he was too busy to be King Arthur or the North Wind, she had never looked at him with that much intensity. Eldon feels his body go cold, flash with heat, go cold again. When his meeting with Dunstan was failing, when he felt that he was losing his hold on the argument, slipping down the side of that cliff, he had remembered the story of Annie Phelan, the story she had told him on the afternoon they had walked out together. This had made him feel better, had strengthened him. Now the warm thoughts of her have been dissolved by this evidence of feeling between her and his wife. She had been his secret, and now he fears she belongs, as does everything else in this house, to Isabelle. All the disappointment he has held back from his meeting with Dunstan spills out now. He is reckless with feeling. “She’s a maid,” he says. “She should not be taking photographs. And especially not of you.”

“Yes, well, you know I’ve never been good at that sort of thing,” says Isabelle, a litde guiltily. “Servants.” She and Ellen had been found out, had been discovered one evening walking down the lane by her father on his return from town. The next day Ellen and her mother had been sent away. There had not even been time to say goodbye. Isabelle hadn’t known it was happening until after it had happened.

“I’m just not very strong on the whole servant business,” says Isabelle. “Sometimes I don’t have the heart for any of it.”

“Grow up, Isabelle,” says Eldon harshly. “You are the mistress of this house. Act like it. Keep the maid in the position she belongs. Maids are maids.” He stands up, the photograph in his hand. “They are not artists. Or friends.” Methodically, and without looking at Isabelle once, he tears the photograph slowly into bits, tosses the torn photograph up into the air, and marches from the room.

The pieces of photograph flutter down. Isabelle puts her hand out and a few land in her open palm. Like broken stars come to earth. Like snow falling from heaven, bright and turning in the shaft of window light, drifting down on wings of air. The breath that has left her body.

Eldon sees Annie Phelan from his library window. She is hurrying along the path from the glasshouse, back towards the kitchen. He raps on the glass, but she doesn’t hear him, doesn’t look up. He fumbles with the latch, flings the window open wide, and leans out over the sill.

“Annie!” he calls. “Annie!”

She looks up, startled, trying to locate the shout, tipping her head, like a bird, towards the sound.

“Annie!” he calls again. “Over here.”

She turns off the path, comes to stand near enough to hear him properly, his body arched over the window sill, anchored in the warm mustiness of his room, thrust forward into sunlight and the scent of roses.

“Yes, sir?”

“Could you come in here a minute, please.” Eldon regains his dignity, heaves his body back into the room as though it is an empty net he has cast into the ocean and he is hauling it back in full of fish. He closes the window, stands by his map table, waiting for her small knock on the door. “Come in.”

Annie is nervous to be in the library in daylight with Mr. Dashell. What if he has found her out? What if he knows that she has
David Copperfield
jammed under the mattress of the perambulator in the baby-carriage room?

The first thing Annie notices, once she has become accustomed to the dull light after the brightness of the glasshouse and the outdoors, is how dusty the room is. The stacks of papers, like gills, opening and closing in the breeze from the door when she entered the room, breathing in and out, dust.

“Yes, sir?” she says again. “Is there something you want me to do for you?” She is late getting back to the house, having helped Isabelle drape muslin from the roof of the studio all morning, and there is work she needs to help Cook with to get ready for dinner.

“No, I don’t want you to do anything,” says Eldon. “I just thought you might like to see this.” He taps the topmost map on the table. “It’s a map of Ireland. Where you’re from,” he says, chiding himself silently for a fool as he says this. Of course she knows that’s where she’s from. “Have you ever seen a map of Ireland?”

“No, sir.” Annie catches her breath. It flutters free.

“Well, come here, then,” says Eldon.

Annie stands beside him at the table. She has thought and dreamt so much about the road her parents worked on that she has only imagined Ireland in terms of that road. She looks down at the map and is surprised that Ireland is not long and thin, loping off the top of the page into distance. Instead the shape is squat and strong-looking, a little longer than it is wide, the coast chewed into bays and peninsulas by the Adantic Ocean, calmer and smoother on the side of the Irish Sea.

“Here.” Eldon puts his finger down on the left-hand side of the map. “This is where you’re from. County Clare.”

County Clare is coloured pink. It has a long bit of land trailing out into the ocean, and the rest of it is thicker, looks like a piece of paper that has been crumpled and tossed down onto the blue floor of the sea.

Ennis Killaloe Kilkee Rineanna

These are names that mean nothing to her now. But maybe one of them was where she lived. Annie puts her finger down, gently, on Kilkee and traces the jagged outline of the Loop Head.

Eldon watches her. He understands this, it is what he does as well. How he has to touch something to make it real, to really see it. “It’s all right,” he says. “You won’t hurt it.” Annie’s hands aren’t black with photographic chemicals like Isabelle’s.

“It’s so small,” says Annie, slowly dragging her finger around all the indentations on the Atlantic side of the county. She wants to feel the sharpness of the rocks in the coves, the stringy flags of seaweed hanging from the walls of the low-tide caves.

“No,” says Eldon. “Stop.” He lightly touches her arm and she pauses her moving finger on a small nodule of land near Ennistown. “Each one of these litde bumps is a vast headland, where you could stand and look out over a sea that goes on and on, that opens before you and is endless, so that you are the smallest possible point in the landscape.” He lifts his hand from her arm and they both look up towards the window, as though beyond it is the flat blue of the Atlantic, stretching its fluid muscle across the garden. “Do you see?” says Eldon.

“Yes, sir.” There is the bright blue flare of sky through the window. Surely, it is the same blue as the sea would be. A sea Annie has never seen.

They look out across the sea. Eldon can almost hear the murmur of the surf, feel the rough hand of the wind in his hair.

“Have you been there?” asks Annie, looking down at the map of Ireland again, trying to burn the shape of it into her mind.

“No,” says Eldon softly. “I haven’t been there. Or anywhere. This is how I travel.” He puts his hand down on the map. It entirely covers County Mayo.

“Do you think,” asks Annie, “that I’m less from there because I’ve never been?”

“Not at all,” says Eldon. “Some of the early map-makers themselves were never there. Lied and said they’d surveyed Ireland. Produced maps that were mostly invention. One of them, Baptiste Boazio, wrote the name of one of his friends across most of County Down. As though he owned it.” Eldon thinks of the map he is never to make, which would have included Boazio as a cautionary note in the margin. “People can believe something,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be true for that to happen.”

He doesn’t say
God,
but Annie is sure this is what he means.

“But it’s ending,” Eldon says. “I fear it is all ending.”

“What is?”

“Journeys. Maps. The getting there. Isabelle is right. The future is the photograph. And a photograph is always a destination. It’s not concerned with getting there, but being there.” Eldon looks up at Annie, who is still looking out the window at the sea. “To look at a photograph,” he says, “is to always have arrived.”

Annie thinks of the glasshouse, of how sometimes she is standing so still that her very breath seems to race around her like a wild, dangerous thing. Her breath draws a ragged line around the shape of her. “Your map,” she says, “is better than a photograph.” But the moment she says this she feels guilty, as though she has betrayed Isabelle. “What I mean,” she says quickly, “is that your map of Ireland is both far away and close by. It is something in my head, and there it is.” She taps the page. “There. Looking like that.”

After Annie has gone, Eldon sits down in front of the map of Ireland and looks at it carefully. There is such detail around each bay on the Atlantic side of the island. This map would have once been a chart. It would have been important to show the shape of the coastline. Where one could land a vessel. Where one should keep clear of the rocks. A lot of maps evolved from charts. But it’s not the same, Eldon thinks for the first time. All the bearings taken from a rolling deck were supposed to be the same as the bearings taken from a hillside. But how could they be the same? Those at sea were using the land to know where they were. On land there wouldn’t be the same sense of opposites. Far inland, in a vast country, where you are would depend, not on the sea at all, but on other land-forms, geography. One wouldn’t be thinking about where they were in the same way, using the same set of relational codes.

Eldon imagines sailing past Ireland, watching each sharp intake of bay for danger or a safe mooring. It was all like that, that absolute—being wrecked upon the rocks, or finding a safe harbour. Always moving, with the heft of the sea, and trying to ascertain a bearing, a solid footing, from this constant shift beneath you. Sextants and celestial navigation. Taking bearings from the heavens, how odd that was, trying to position oneself in relation to the expanding, unending universe. An invisible line cast between the solid, known earth and the ethereal imagined stars. Tying oneself to the infinite skies. Using the unseen to locate oneself in a place we already are.

The bearing was latitude, a horizontal line. Longitude, the vertical line—an upright human being, a straight, tall tree—required an accurate clock so that it could be worked out from a comparison of local time with a solar-position observation. An accurate clock proved one of the hardest things of all to invent. The position of longitude attached to a precise notion of time. Lines and spaces. The sweep of the second hand. The ruling on the map.

Eldon runs his finger gently around the coastline of County Clare. How can a physical self be entrusted to the distant, shifting fathoms of the sky and to a time honed so fine that it cannot be sensed or felt?

Perhaps knowing where you are is less a science than an act of faith? A line. A space. Step forward. Tell yourself that this is where you are.

All day long Annie sees the shape of Ireland. It is in the ghosting coal smoke, and the shifting flames themselves. The dough that Cook rolls out for the pastry looks like County Clare. The attenuated flicker of the coast is there in each feather of Annie’s duster. She bangs it against the outside wall of the house and a cloud of dust rises into the shape of Ireland, floats down, and is gone.

At night she lies in her bed and watches the moon glow behind the silver clouds outside her window. The shiny length of cloud looks like the headland she had imagined herself standing on.

“Have you ever seen the sea?” she whispers across to Tess. “Have you ever gone there?”

Tess is thinking about Wilks. She is planning their next meeting and can’t decide if she is imagining what they will do or is merely remembering what they did the last time they met. What did happen? What will happen? “The sea,” she says, vaguely.

“The sea,” repeats Annie. “Have you ever been there?”

“I worked for a family in Hastings once.”

“And?”

“It makes everything damp,” says Tess. “It’s hard to give things a proper airing out.”

“But how does it look?” says Annie impatiently.

“It looks…” Tess is a little annoyed. She is losing the delicious feeling of Wilks pressing up against her. “It looks like the sea,” she says.

Annie is quiet for a moment. She lights a candle, reaches under her pillow, and pulls out her Bible. The candle flame stutters as she crosses the room to Tess. She sits down on the edge of Tess’s bed. “Look,” she says, opening her Bible and tipping the candle’s light down towards it.