A Division of the Light (27 page)

Alice experienced a surge of relief. Thomas had held her sense of duty in his dead hands, but now they relaxed and her promise fell away. At long last he had become indistinguishable from all her other lovers. He had joined them in an irrecoverable and unvisited past.

“I can't do it,” she said.

Gregory put one foot on the bottom of the mound and turned to her like an instructor, his arms slightly spread. He spoke with amused disbelief.

“Of course you can.”

She shook her head. “No. I can't.”

He unscrewed the top and held it away from the flask like a magician demonstrating a prop at the beginning of a trick.

“It's easy. You don't even have to climb up on the stones. Just stand here at the edge and tip out the contents. Look at the design of the neck—they'll pour out steadily and evenly.”

“You do it.”

Gregory faked a laugh. “You said you wanted to.”

“I know I did. But I changed my mind.”

A gust of wind swept across them, bending the reeds, rustling their clothes, tangling Alice's hair, and then died around them as if the air would never move again. Gregory glanced at the sky and then looked back.

“You know what to do,” Alice said. “You've done it before, with your wife.”

“That was different.”

One way or the other, he didn't care how Thomas's remains would be scattered. With Ruth he had been gentle, reverential, and had taken his time. Even though Gregory had no belief in an afterlife, and no conception of a divine presence in the world, he could in those moments have been mistaken for a scrupulous and devout believer.

“Please do it,” Alice said.

“You're sure?”

She nodded. Gregory tested the stability of the rock beneath his feet.

“Where do you think? So that the ashes will fall down and disappear inside the mound?”

“Yes. Yes, that's right.”

Gregory stepped onto the stones. They were uneven and unsafe beneath his feet, but he was confident that he could empty the flask in one smooth unbroken movement and then step back onto the ground. The air was motionless and oppressive. He held the flask as near to the uppermost stones and as far away from his body as he could. He did not want any of the ashes to drop on his clothes or his boots.

“Right,” he said.

The ashes fell smoothly. Their speckled and variegated grains cascaded between the stones. A fine dust drifted from them like a final offering. Within a few seconds all that remained of Thomas Laidlaw had vanished into the mound.

Gregory turned. His lips began to tingle unpleasantly with tiny needle-like shocks. He wanted to say “That's it,” but unaccountably his mouth refused to open.

Around him the moor began to warp, as if he were viewing it from under water. There was a pressure beneath him that he felt could lift him free of the earth. Nothing was real and nothing could be understood.

His body was engulfed by a flame white as a furnace. Blindness fell like an avalanche into his eyes. He was transfixed within a roar or a silence and did not know which.

A woman's voice spoke not in his ear but inside his mind. “Gregory,” the voice said, “you do not need to live your life like this.” And he felt his soul pour upward in a glowing unstoppable spume.

Alice was picked up bodily and hurled backward through the
air. The tumulus burned as bright as magnesium. The sky detonated, the noise exploding through her eardrums into her skull, and everything collapsed inwards.

She could have been unconscious for seconds or for minutes; she was never to know.

At first Alice did not know where she was; she was not even certain
who
she was. Her face and hands were as raw as if she had passed through fire, and her head was filled with unformed images that hissed and sparked like severed connections. Gradually she became aware that the back of her head was wet, that damp was seeping into her clothes, and that she was lying on drenched grass, spreadeagled and with her feet apart. Her entire body was bruised and her nostrils and lungs had tightened as if she had inhaled steam.

It was painful to sit up, and when she did it was in unclear surroundings. An unequal blurring drifted across her visual field, as if lenses of different focal lengths were passing before her eyes.

Alice put one hand to her face. It was tender and she flinched at her own touch. Almost immediately she turned to one side and retched. A thin stream of spittle ran across her lips and, as it did so, she realized that they were dry and cracked. She struggled to get on to all fours and then she stared at the ground. The blades of grass now appeared fascinatingly infinite and welcoming, a sign that she was present in the world, that she was still alive.

And now Alice remembered that she was on a remote, high moor, next to a pile of ancient stones, that there had been a man with her, and that the man's name was Gregory Pharaoh.

She could not see him and she could not see the mound. For a few seconds she was perplexed, and then she realized that she
must have landed so that she was facing in the other direction. If she looked to her left she could see only the moor, dark as murk, but when she looked to her right she saw a mound of stones that now appeared white and shiny as cut marble.

A motionless figure was stretched out next to them.

When Alice called Gregory's name it was so muted that it could have been imagined, like a cry from the world of ghosts. She recognized that she had been deafened. Her dulled ears felt as though they had been stuffed and tamped with wadding.

She almost got to her feet but then fell painfully onto her knees. She waited for a few seconds and then got up again. Unsteadily she walked to where the figure lay face upward on the grass. On the way she stumbled over a rucksack that was no longer in the place where she remembered it as having been left. Wispy smoke rose from the turf around the man's body. Some of the nearby reeds had been set alight and were burning like tapers with low flames that were dying one after the other.

For an incoherent moment Alice was not fully convinced that the man was Gregory. His eyebrows and the front of his hair had vanished. Across his forehead and cheeks were raw pink blisters and layers of peeled skin. His jaws were clamped together and the lips drawn back from the teeth. The tip of his nose and parts of his upper lip were burned raw.

Alice knelt beside him. “Gregory,” she said again. It was like a name spoken through a bandage.

His half-closed eyelids were trembling as though a small electrical charge was being passed through them, but the eyes were distant and loose. His hands also shook, as did one bare foot that protruded from a ripped trouser leg. Nearby was a formless object that Alice could not recognize, but which appeared to have been
turned inside out. She thought it could be the missing boot; only later did she begin to suspect that it might have been the urn.

Alice put her hands across her ears and then lifted them away three times, but it made no difference to her hearing. She bent close to Gregory and noticed that there was a ragged hole in one shoulder of his jacket. The hole was the size of a child's hand and its edges were scorched so that the cloth around it was the color of charred paper.

She did not know what to do. She began to search for her phone, but when she found it the screen was a jumble of meaningless runes, and whatever she pressed did not work. Gregory's hands shook as if they were palsied. It was frightening just to watch them tremble so helplessly.

Alice did not want to touch him. She was possessed by a fear that his stricken condition could somehow be transferred to her. Then she forced herself to take one of those shivering hands between her own. There was a coating of mud across his fingers. Even though Alice squeezed hard she still could not stop the hand from shaking.

She tried to think of what she could say. She did not know if Gregory could hear, and if he could then she could think of nothing to say that would make sense. After a few seconds, still unable to think clearly, she lied.

“You'll be all right,” she said.

Her voice sounded as though it had come from another room. She waited for a few seconds and then repeated the phrase. This time it was even less convincing, even more trite.

Gregory's right hand stopped shaking. She stared at it for a moment and then looked at his left hand. That had stopped shaking, too. The exposed foot gave a final tremor and was still.
Until she looked at his eyes Alice thought that the worst had passed. The lids had become still and drawn back; the eyes stared up at the sky but did not see.

“God,” Alice said.

She placed the palm of her hand across his lips but could detect nothing. Then she told herself that even if Gregory breathed out she would probably still not be able to sense it. Desperately she tried to remember what she had been taught on a first aid course. She could remember where it was held, and the name of the tutor, and even the texture of the fake skin on the dummy she had to practice on, but she could remember nothing at all of what she had learned.

It began to rain.

Alice parted Gregory's jacket so that she could feel his chest. He was wearing a buttoned outdoor shirt with a T-shirt beneath. After a moment's hesitation she put her hands between the buttons to see if she could feel a heartbeat through the T-shirt. She could not. She put her fingers into the waistband of his trousers and pushed both shirts up over his ribcage. They bunched in an unmoving wave just above the heart.

The exposed skin was mottled and deathly pale. Alice was both repulsed and ashamed of her reaction. There was a layer of fat across his belly and several random hairs that he had let grow long. She realized with a shock that even though Gregory had studied every inch of her own body, she knew nothing of his apart from his head and his hands. Rain fell on the pale flesh and tricked it out with faint light.

Alice placed her hands together and pressed them down with as much force as she could muster above Gregory's heart. His flesh was slippery. She began to count, did not know when to
stop, finished at thirteen and then tried again. She did this several times and then paused. She thought she could feel a beat, but her own heart was racing so strongly that she could have been mistaken.

Gregory's mouth opened slightly. Again Alice held her hand above it but could detect no outward breath. Maybe there was no point in going on. Her hand was shaking almost as much as his had been. Around them rain began to fall more heavily. A mist rose from the grass.

She took Gregory's chin between her hands so that she could steady his head. Then she put her lips to his, made the seal as airtight as she could, and exhaled steadily. His mouth tasted of blood and smoke. She lifted her head and searched for a response. Nothing came. She tried again. After she had done it a dozen times she put her ear to his mouth. Was that a shallow breath she could feel? Once again she could not be certain. Rain began to hiss against the mound.

They would both die, Alice thought. It was like this: Gregory could be dying or already dead, and if she did not get off the moor she would die too. She would perish from shock and exposure.

She got back to her feet. His body seemed to be lying in a slightly different position, but that could be an illusion. In the time that she stared at him he did not move, did not even twitch. In that posture, and with his clothing awry, he resembled photographs of battlefield corpses.

Mist rose higher from the moor. Within a very short time she would become disoriented and lost. Dozens of tiny clicks could be heard on the rocks; hail was falling with the rain.

She bent down and touched the side of Gregory's head with extended fingers. A tiny sliver of his skin became stuck to her
hand and she dashed it away.

“Help,” she said in a croak, and then swallowed. “I'll get help,” she went on.

He did not look as if he had heard. Maybe he had already gone beyond hearing. Alice turned away and began to walk as quickly as she could back to the road.

After several yards she began to tremble violently. Her limbs lost energy with each passing second, the moor sucked hungrily at her feet with each step, and the mist and rain grew ever thicker and more unforgiving. Maybe both she and Gregory were meant to lose their lives here, she thought. She had imagined that they had been drawn to the moor for a beneficial purpose, but perhaps all the time it had been destined to end this way, in deaths that were pointless and cruel.

She was still thinking this when she found herself standing on the road.

Reddish puddles of water were deepening on its surface and a stream was sluicing from the moor and down the hill. She had not expected to reach the road so soon. Now that she had, she was seized by a terrible uncertainty. She did not know what to do. Faint twin lights wavered on the road, their beams dissolving in the rain. Behind them a shape that was darker than the mist began to emerge from it. She fell onto her knees and did not feel the hurt.

Later, the driver of the Land Rover was to tell Alice that she had been almost invisible in the fog, and that his headlights had only picked her up when she was standing just a few yards in front of him. And that both he and his colleague could hardly believe what they were seeing.

Many of the prints are strikingly large—much larger than Gregory would have chosen. He would have filled the space with smaller, more numerous images. Cassie, however, had measured the walls, weighed up the sight lines and concluded that fewer photographs in larger formats would have a greater impact. Whenever she sees guests pause before the more dramatic compositions—the near-abstract depiction of numbered skulls, say, or a statuesque nude—she is satisfied that she has made the right choice.

Cassie has also ignored her father's decision not to give any clarifying detail. Instead she has described each print on information cards fastened to the walls alongside them. Portraits quote the name of the sitter and buildings are given a location, so that a bishop and a damaged church are clearly identified. Some other nomenclatures are deliberately brief. Three photographs of a dying woman are called
Ruth I–III
; various nudes, usually of different models, are simply called
Nude
, and numbered
I
to
XIV
. Each print is fine-grained and with subtle gradations of contrast, so that every image has a tactile quality—velvety jets, whites as glossy as albumen, grays like fine volcanic ash.
The occasional color prints all use vivid primaries to focus attention.