A Division of the Light (6 page)

She wondered if this were true; Gregory had easily memorized other things about her.

“He's called Thomas.”

“And his surname?”

Partly as an avoidance tactic, Alice crossed to the shelves. In front of her were boxes with coded labels, a plastic tray overflowing with what looked like random objects, and a row of large-format photography books along with some on painting.

“Laidlaw,” she said.

Gregory's speech ceased to be discursive. They had reached the point he had wanted to reach.

“And if this partner of yours doesn't realize the potential of your looks, will he object to me photographing you? Do you need his agreement?”

“I make my own decisions,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Gregory said calmly, as if he had always known that for a fact. “The Weston is on the far right, after Stieglitz,” he added, “they're alphabetical.”

Momentarily Alice did not know what he meant, but then she read the name on a dust jacket spine and quickly realized that this was the man who had photographed the seashell. That was another thing that Gregory had remembered without effort—the postcard she had sent.

She had not deliberately sought it out; instead it had seemed fortuitous that she should chance upon a card that a professional photographer would find pleasing. She had not consciously intended the card to carry any message other than the few words that she had written. But now she wondered if Gregory believed that she had chosen it to demonstrate her taste and, by inference, an interest in him.

Alice took the book from the shelf and leafed through its pages. Here were shells that gleamed like silver, trees with bark furrowed as deep as a field, pebbles speckled like eggs, landscapes infused by dawn light, and discreet middle-distance nudes whose bodies had the cool texture of marble. And here, too, were unashamedly graphic shots of a thin young woman stretched out naked on grainy sand with her arms and legs apart to show dense black stars of pubic and axillary hair.

She closed the book and returned it.

“I thought you liked Weston,” Gregory said, and she wondered if the studied neutrality of his voice was in itself a kind of challenge. “Or maybe you know all the contents,” he added.

“Tell me, Mr. Pharaoh: is it just my face that you're interested in?”

“Of course it's not just your face. But whatever we did, and however you posed, it would be by agreement.”

Alice looked up through the skylight. High above the city a plane cut a thin white line across the sky, the vapor widening and dispersing behind it.

“Maybe your friend Thomas doesn't even photograph you. Does he?”

He had done, but Alice had decided that she looked undistinguished, with no trace of individuality, and ever since then she had avoided standing in front of a lens. But at least she now had an opportunity to lessen the tension by talking about Thomas.

“He takes photographs of archaeological sites. Wherever we go on holiday, he goes to see old forts, stone circles, barrow mounds. Things like that.”

“I see. Is it interesting to live with someone who is so bound up with the past?”

“It would be if he could get a decent job.”

“Ah. Problems.”

“Thomas lives on short-term contracts and low-grade work. He does some teaching, but he doesn't really like it. I don't think his degree is all that good: that's the real problem.”

Gregory had a faint smile. “As long as he finds beauty somewhere. Even if it's just in heaps of old stone.”

Ready to move on, Alice became brisk.

“I think it's time I saw those photographs you promised, don't you?”

“Of course, we'll do that now,” Gregory replied, as if his only true purpose were to keep her happy. “Remember to be careful of the stairs. They made them steep back when this was built.”

They descended a bare echoing stairwell whose walls had been
left unpainted for decades. Only a few minutes ago Gregory had led Alice past the door that he now opened.

Behind it was a room that was the same size as the upper studio. Roller blinds the color of onion skin had been pulled down across the windows. He raised each one so that light gradually strengthened across files, cabinets, tables and computer screens. Copies of photographs, mostly black-and-white, had been placed around the room like offerings. Some were close-ups of faces that appeared familiar to Alice even though she could not put names to them, but most were of strangers. Some of these people, she realized, might already be dead. And for Gregory that might not even be important; what was important was the image they had left behind.

For a few vertiginous moments Alice imagined that she had entered a region composed of nothing but surface, spectacle and deceit. And then she gathered her thoughts and told herself that she was meant to be here. The physical world had a shadow, a twin, an undetected ghost. Somewhere alongside this very moment there was an indefinable space that was both analogous and aloof. In a way that Alice could not comprehend, she was fulfilling an arrangement that had been determined without her knowledge.

Alice believed in fate. She believed that lives crossed and became entangled in patterns that were not immediately detectable. She thought it probable that she had not been robbed merely by chance. Instead she had been humiliated and injured for a higher purpose; one that she could not yet discern, and one that the robbers would never appreciate because there was no need for them to understand. They, she and Gregory were all unconscious agents of an obscure force that lay outside the boundaries of the material world but which oversaw and guided it.

Such a belief did not seem fantastic to Alice. It was as rational as Gregory's faith in the immortality of the image, as certain as Thomas's belief in the processes of time. It was even possible that neither she nor Gregory would ever grasp the true meaning of this synchronicity. Perhaps they were never meant to, for as Alice walked around his room any hint of purpose was clouded and puzzling.

Gregory watched and wondered what was occupying her mind. “Take a good look round,” he said. “Feel free.”

Alice wondered if the hidden intention of each event was to guide her toward a re-evaluation of her life. Perhaps her feelings had to be intensified, or an impetus given to decisions over which she was hesitating. Most unsettling of all, it was conceivable that the robbery had happened purely so that she and Gregory Pharaoh would meet and become involved, and that her choice of the Weston postcard had unwittingly sealed that pattern. Why else should she have suddenly decided to walk down that pavement at that specific time? Since she always carried her bag on the inside to lessen the chance of theft, why had she decided, without reason, to hang it from the other shoulder? It could not have been mere coincidence that she and a strange photographer had been in the same part of the city at the same time, just as it was more than just chance that had led her into being robbed. Gregory could just have stopped her, as he had said he would have done; but if so, she would undoubtedly have ignored him and walked on. Or he might not even have noticed Alice, not spoken, and allowed her to walk past. That was why it had been necessary to have the two of them thrust together in a manner dramatic enough to make it certain they would meet again.

She looked round for the photographs he had taken of the robbery, but found none. Instead the first print that caught her attention was a portrait of an adolescent girl wearing what looked like a communion dress. The girl stared out of the limits of her life with a kind of mute integrity.

“This was taken a couple of weeks ago,” Gregory explained.

“Who is she?”

“She has visions of the Madonna. Some believe that she's been singled out and touched with holiness. It's the usual kind of setup. It won't be long before her village will be marketed as a shrine.”

“She looks as if her mind is elsewhere, as if she doesn't even belong to this world.”

“You think so? I don't know what to believe about her. Maybe her story is a fantastic lie that she has to maintain because everything has gone too far and now there's no way out. Or maybe she really did see something. Or imagined she did.”

Looking at the pinched, closed face, Alice became certain that the girl had indeed witnessed something extraordinary, and that she would always be convinced of the integrity of her vision. It was only the rising clamor of the encroaching world that she could not deal with.

“She's not making it up,” Alice said.

“Well, schizophrenics don't, do they? They truly believe in godlike voices that only they can hear.”

“I'm sure it's not just saints and martyrs who hear voices. Ordinary people must have had visions too. They must have had them before history even started.”

“Ah, this is your boyfriend talking.”

Alice was irritated by his presumption. “No, Mr. Pharaoh, it's
me
. And what I was going to say is that their minds must have
been filled with beliefs that would seem alien to us. Just like this girl's mental world couldn't be understood by you.”

“Photographers can't enter an internal world, but we
can
demonstrate its surface effects.”

Alice nodded at the surroundings. “And all these demonstrations were arranged to impress me?”

“It took a long time to set it all up,” Gregory answered. She was not sure if he smiled as he said it.

“And
my
photographs?”

“Look at this one first.”

And he indicated a large print of a serious-faced man wearing bishop's regalia. Every line on his face was clear as a contour on a map. The lens had captured a variance in the sheen of his vestments. An ornate ring demonstrated a jeweler's art.

“I'd been photographing him just before we met. That's why I was carrying the 5D; it's designed for close detail.”

“You must specialize in taking religious subjects. But I don't know who he is.”

“Actually I'm much more interested in the worldly. As for this subject, well, the photograph tells you all you need to know—his position in the Church; his character. You can't read that kind of formal information in the shots I took of you.” Gregory indicated a desk with a screen and printer. “I left the best copies there. Should I ever want to exhibit one, I'd pick it from them.”

Aware of his judgmental stare, Alice approached the desk with deliberation. Now that the promised images were in front of her, now that she could study them closely, even touch them, she was unsure how she would react.

At first she hardly recognized herself. The prints had been
arranged to give prominence to extreme close-ups, and each had been scrupulously balanced for tone and form.

“This could be anyone,” she said after a few seconds. “They're like . . . pieces of me. Although it's not really
me
at all.”

“You're wrong,” Gregory said.

She lifted one of the prints to peruse it. Light from the high windows flexed along its surface.

“It's what
was
me. You've reduced me. I'm nothing but a kind of geometry.”

“You're not reduced at all. I've taken aspects of you and enhanced them.”

“Like what?”

“Like your hair. Look at the way the light flows across the frame from the upper left quadrant, and how the strands of hair pick up on that motion and break parts of it into tiny fractures. Or this one here. The fallen sunglasses suggest that something unusual has happened, or that it may still be happening. A sense of unease, of the incorrect, is magnified by the tension in the hands below the fallen body. And the next print, where—”

“That's what I mean. None of them give any idea of what I'm
like
. There's nothing of my personality in these.”

“If you want your personality to be shown, then you have to let me take your portrait in a studio session. You know I want to do that.” After a short pause, Gregory added: “I'm being honest and I'm being straightforward.”

Alice put down the photograph and picked up another before she answered.

“But you don't even know what my personality
is
.”

“The lens will show it. It showed the bishop and it showed the girl who has the visions. You saw that it did. People will look
at your face and they'll know, just as
you
knew when you looked at the face of the girl. You could see the past and the present in her face, and maybe you could see her future, too.”

Alice stared hard at the sleekly doctored fragments of herself.

Only one photograph showed her entire body. It was pitched forward with outstretched arms. It appeared to Alice that she was not falling but rising, borne aloft on invisible wings. Only one foot was still in contact with the ground, and that was lifting from her shoe as if to abandon it.

“A portrait can't show a whole personality,” she objected. “It would be just an aspect, as incomplete as these are. And maybe just as misleading.”

“A portrait is never misleading; it's illuminating. If the photographer is good then the subjects will discover things about themselves. Things that they had never known.”

“Do you say that to all your sitters? They must think you unusually arrogant.”

Gregory raised an arm to show that she should look more carefully around the room.

“You see those faces? They didn't think I was arrogant when they saw the results. They knew I was speaking the truth. Deep inside, so do you.”

Outside the immediate world something weighty and mysterious gathered momentum. Alice could sense its motion, but neither its direction nor its mass was clear.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about decisions before I make them,” she said.

Gregory nodded.

“For instance,” she continued, “before I made any decision, I'd want to know if your daughter would be present.” Alice waited
a moment before she went on. “I know you told me her name, but I've forgotten it.”