Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (13 page)

“What?” Tess twists around in bed to be able to see Annie and her Bible.

“This.” On the inside front cover of the book Annie has drawn the map of Ireland. She has put in all the detail she has remembered from the map in Mr. Dashell’s library, carefully pulling her pencil around all the inlets on the Atlantic coast. “It’s Ireland,” she says. “Where I’m from.” There’s no response from Tess. “County Clare,” says Annie helpfully. She tilts the candle down too far over the page and a drop of wax lands in the ocean just off Galway. “England is just over here,” says Annie, tapping the edge of the book. She thinks of the long, gnarled shape of England lying next to Ireland on Mr. Dashell’s map, a thick arm of water between the two of them. “I went across the sea to come here,” explains Annie. “I was small and don’t remember any of the journey. But surely I know it, somewhere inside me, as I was there, on the sea. I was here.” She bends her head over her faint pencil drawing.

“It looks like a stain,” says Tess rudely. She flops over, away from Annie. She has lost the warm sensation between her legs that is there whenever she thinks of Wilks for a time, and she is angry at Annie for this loss. She doesn’t care a whit about the sea. The house at Hastings was always damp. Nothing dried properly. Nothing was ever really clean. The house always smelled musty, no matter how many fires were lit and how diligently she cleaned the rooms. And those are the things she can bear to think about from her time there.

Annie closes her Bible and walks back over to her bed. She blows out the candle and climbs in under the covers again. She places the book open, face down, on her chest. Maybe the shape of Ireland will melt down into her skin. The weight of it is comforting. Her body must remember the sea, the voyage to England. She must have seen the coast of Ireland receding as the ship pulled slowly away from the docks. A stretching and tearing loose. Waving hands and the pattern of faces left behind. Annie lies still, willing her body to remember how that felt. How leaving felt.

The moon has lit another cloud into the shape of another world.

“It’s a series,” says Isabelle. “On the virtues.” Annie is seated on the studio bench. Isabelle stands behind her, looking up at the thin cream-coloured muslin, draped across the glass roof. The corners of it are clumsily wired onto the steel roof beams. It is not stretched tight, but sags from the ceiling, like the belly of the moon. The light, sieved through it, floats down, rests on Annie’s hair.

“No more stories, ma’am?” Annie has begun to rely on Isabelle’s brief passionate tales.

“Not now,” says Isabelle. She turns Annie’s shoulders to the right so the light will dribble down the left side of Annie’s face. “I want to see what you can do.” I want to see what I can do with you.

Annie feels instantly nervous. The bed sheet pinned around her shoulders flutters as she moves a little, anxiously, on the bench. Isabelle corrects this with her hands. “Don’t,” she says.

Isabelle is pleased with this new idea. It has come to her, free from associations with great art. She does not have to look at her staged scene and imagine oil paintings or plays. She has not been passed a character, down through the halls of time, so that when it finally gets to her it is sullied and worn out with the journey. She is not dealing with a character, but rather
with
character, with the character of Annie’s face. Isabelle had been thinking of Annie. She had been lying in her bed, awake just before dawn, watching the room grow paler by degrees, as though the night was constantly rinsing lighter and lighter, until she could see the familiar shapes around her. A washed-out, grey-stained room. The fireplace. The wardrobe. A jug of water on the washstand. And always, everywhere, the face of Annie Phelan. She has many faces, Isabelle thinks. Each one was different from the next. Each one conveyed something beyond her own emotions of the moment. Something huge. Isabelle is telling the truth to Annie. She wants to see what she can do. If she can make each expression of Annie’s represent a quality, then all of humanity can recognize the still point from the shifting fathoms of a single face.

“Grace,” says Isabelle.

“Who’s Grace?”

“No, no. Not a person. The virtue of grace. The quality. Don’t worry,” says Isabelle, seeing the look of concern on her model’s face. “You never get it wrong.” She stands beside the camera and looks at the scene she has arranged. The light floats from the ceiling, settles on Annie’s head like a halo. It is alchemy, she thinks. What happens between them when they make a photograph. It is as though she moves as far as she can towards an image, and, from the other side of it,Annie moves the rest of the way, so that when they meet up, the result is magical, stronger than the both of them.

“We will make a series of virtues,” says Isabelle, deciding that everything looks as full of grace as she can make it look. “Then I will have enough photographs to submit an entry to the Dublin exhibition. I have never had anything worthy to send out before now.” Isabelle smiles at Annie. “Before you.”

The light, drizzling down through the muslin, is as particulate as dust. Annie can see the specks of it hovering before her eyes.

Isabelle is struggling to get the stopper out of her bottle of collodion. “Stuck,” she says. “The blasted liquid is just like glue. They used to use it for closing wounds. Before photography.” She hands the bottle across to Annie. “You try,” she says. “You have stronger hands than I do.”

Annie, without moving her shoulders from the position Isabelle has arranged them in, easily twists the stopper out of the collodion bottle. “Here you are, ma’am,” she says, passing it back to Isabelle. She likes that moment of feeling she is stronger than Isabelle, of feeling that Isabelle needs her strength.

“We’re going to use your method, Annie,” says Isabelle, resting the stopper lightly on the top of the bottle, so she can get access to the collodion easily, and when she needs it.

“What method, ma’am?”

“The new focusing technique,” says Isabelle. What you used on me, is what she should say, but she feels suddenly wary in crediting Annie for the Sappho photograph. What if this maid suddenly had illusions about herself as a photographer? “The one that was used in that photograph of Sappho,” is what she says instead. “The close lens. The blurriness.” She is carefully shifting the camera nearer to Annie as she says this. The lens is now as far from Annie’s face as a person would be if she was engaged in conversation with her. Isabelle remembers the Sappho photograph and how she felt like flinching from the lens when it was that close to her. “Do you mind?” she says suddenly. She wants to make sure that Annie Phelan is thinking of herself as a model, not as an artist. “Do you mind that I take photographs of you?”

Annie doesn’t think of it this way. She doesn’t think of the photographs as being of her. They are of Guinevere and Ophelia. Even this
Grace,
although a quality, seems more to do with someone else. They are not about her. But there is something so pleasant about sitting on this bench in the glasshouse, with the light drifting down around her. She is here, on this soft morning, with Mrs. Isabelle Dashell, and that seems such a perfect thing. “I don’t mind,” she says.

Isabelle has already moved past her question. She is no longer hesitant or uncertain. That moment has passed. She has passed it.
Grace,
she thinks, looking through the lens at Annie’s face filling the frame. Grace through divinity. Grace through love.

When she was trying to be a painter, Isabelle had grown frustrated with her subjects. They all seemed so stagnant. A bowl of fruit. A vase of flowers. Even painting outdoors, the trees and fields looked flat and devoid of feeling. Of course there was the light, always galloping away so she had to use quick hands to throw a bright line after it, try and drag it back to the fenced pasture of her canvas. But even that was a disappointment. Too much was left up to her. The subjects did nothing to help the effort, didn’t in fact care whether there was a painting of them or not. The occasional time she had worked with a live model (mostly Eldon) the pose had to be held for so long that all feeling and expression drained completely out of the model. She was using her brush then to stop the holes where the subject’s essence leaked out.

Photography was entirely different. Even when the models were largely uncooperative—Isabelle thinks of Tess and of her cousin’s children—the poses were short enough in duration that the subjects retained their energy. This energy helped to make the photograph happen, to keep it faithful to the living thing it portrayed. She could control how this energy was used. Isabelle could control her models. She told them what to do and they followed her instruction. She could even control the light around them. Unlike painting, she wasn’t merely recording what was there, but creating what was there.

Someone like Robert Hill could never understand what she did. He had been schooled in the masters, had himself apprenticed with the great painter, Edward Arlington. He was passed, hand to hand, from one great man to another. He never had to doubt his place among them. His confidence and sense of his own genius was so great that when he used live models he didn’t need to feel their energy. He didn’t need even to see them. What he saw was himself, painting them. He wouldn’t understand that Isabelle needed Annie Phelan to look how she looked, to be herself, and also that Isabelle needed to be projecting a quality onto her. To control what was happening. To let it happen.

Because the photographing of Annie has been going so well Isabelle suddenly has the confidence to send her art out into the world, for the first time. She will be judged, no doubt, by men such as Robert Hill, but she will try anyhow. She feels that in taking these photographs of Annie Phelan she is finally doing something right and she wants a stranger to confirm that this is indeed so. She cannot imagine these new photographs as anything other than they appear. Surely this means she is getting it right?

And Annie Phelan? She makes it all possible. The more Isabelle looks upon her, the more there is for her to see. Every room she enters, Isabelle can immediately imagine how she would photograph Annie there. That face opens and opens, just as Isabelle twists the lens open, the wide eye of it staring Annie down. The sun an open shutter poised above them.

“Don’t move,” says Isabelle.

Isabelle is in a bad humour. She sits in the parlour, squeezing her hands together in an effort to keep from throwing something at the vicar who sits opposite. His voice drones on and on. She isn’t paying attention. His wheedling, reedy voice sounds as foreign to her as if it belonged to an animal, was the song of some plain, undistinguished sparrow.

There is nothing Isabelle detests more than this, losing a perfectly good morning’s work to a local plea for money. That’s all it ever comes down to—money. Never mind that it’s the vicar, supposed agent for God in this small corner of Sussex. Isabelle is the daughter of gentry, will always be expected to furnish the small hopes of those who live nearby.

Isabelle has done her best to escape this fate. She purposefully married a man with few prospects, a dreamer whose father had squandered his fortune on some wild scheme to import curios from the East. But because Isabelle was an only child her father could not afford to disown her. He needed someone to leave his money to, and even if Isabelle was largely unsatisfactory in this regard, perhaps, even with the ne’er-do-well Eldon, she would produce a suitable heir. So Isabelle’s father had bought her and Eldon this house as a wedding gift. Shrewd, thinks Isabelle, squirming in her chair across from the vicar. That way he kept her in the part of the country she belonged to. He kept her responsible to the duties she’d been born to.

The vicar clatters his teacup down nervously onto its companion saucer. He has cake crumbs stuck to his left cheek. “Steeple,” he says.

“What?”

“The steeple is full of bats,” he says, his voice shaking slighdy with the effort of finally stating his case.

You’re full of bats, thinks Isabelle. She stares hard at his puffy, pink face. Who would ever want to photograph that? Thank God she isn’t forced to make a living taking those horrid
cartes de visite
of people like this village idiot. Vicar, she corrects herself. Idiot, she thinks again, and smiles.

The vicar, heartened by Mrs. Dashell’s smile, by her obvious sympathy to his cause, presses forward. “We would just require enough to repair the damage,” he says.

Here it is, thinks Isabelle. The inevitable grab for money. “And why,” she says, “should I support a church that caters to a God I don’t believe in?”

The vicar makes litde popping sounds with his breath. Outside the room the clock runs down the hour, the whole notes of the bells dropping ripe into the silence.

The vicar recovers nicely. “Your father,” he says, “always helped our cause. Your father understood his duty to the parishioners, to the people of this village.”

Of course, thinks Isabelle. He is wily. He knows exactly what to say to make her comply with his request.

Being her father’s daughter has been such a mixed blessing. If she’d been a man, she would not get away with all she did, would be that much more tied to obligation, to having some credible career and carrying on her father’s good name in conduct and deed. As it is, she is able to live comfortably off his money, is able to do exactly what she pleases. Perhaps the inconvenience of village responsibility, manifested this morning by the puffing presence of the toady vicar, is small measure against what she has been allowed. She remembers when her father had told her he was buying this house for her and Eldon. So you’ll be settled enough, he said, to give me an heir.

Isabelle remembers her babies less and less now. The pain of them ebbs away from her and it’s as if they have drifted off, floating on the wide sea of her grief. Gone. Her body can’t call them back as it could in the first days after they’d been born. Or even her heart. Even her heart. And she wants to forget them. She wants to cancel their image entirely. Each photograph she takes now, each time she imagines and sets up a scene, pushes the memory of them farther and farther back, layered deep under all these new pictures of Annie Phelan.