Caught in the Light (3 page)

Nor was walking away from Marian at the end of my week in Vienna, though. We'd been together for just twenty-four hours, yet already I couldn't bear the thought of us being apart. A chance in a million, she'd called it. And she'd been right. It was also a chance I knew, soberly and surely, I wasn't going to let slip.

"I have to take some photographs today," I said over breakfast back in her room. "The publisher wants the job wrapped up next week."

"Then you'd better jump to it."

"Will you come with me?"

"I'd like to. But look what happened at Schonbrunn. Not a lot of pictures."

"I'll have to go back there."

"Why don't you hire a car? It would give us more time ... for other things."

"My budget won't run to it."

"Mine will."

"Actually, there's another problem." This was how it was bound to be, I knew: the spilling and sharing of secrets, one by one. "You remember the accident I told you about? The woman I killed."

"You never said it was a woman."

"Didn't I? Well, it was. And I... I've not driven since."

"You lost your licence?"

"No, no. It wasn't my fault. At least, not officially, although I've often wondered ... I lost my nerve, if you want to know the truth. The thought of how easily it happened just wouldn't go away."

"Does it upset you to talk about it?"

"Not any more. But, like I told you last night, I'm not very good at forgetting."

"Some things you have to forget." She reached out and touched my cheek with a gentleness that seemed to soothe some wound of her own as well as mine. "Sounds like you need a driver. Can I apply for the job?"

"The pay's lousy, the hours are diabolical and the boss won't be able to keep his hands off you."

"I'll take it, then."

So I got to have my cake and eat it, too. Marian hired a smart Mercedes and took me out to the farthest suburbs and beyond, as well as round all the obvious, and some of the not so obvious, photogenic corners of the city. The weather held in finest winter mode and everything went too smoothly to be true. I took some pictures I reckoned I'd be proud of, and Marian and I... Well, what did we do? Fall in love? Develop an addiction to each other? Indulge a seductive compatibility of mind and body? I wouldn't know what to call it. But I know what it felt like: the real thing, experienced for the first and surely only time.

"You haven't tried to take my photograph again," she goaded as we explored the snowy grave-lined avenues of the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna's vast central cemetery, halfway through the week that was already accelerating towards its end and our crisis. "Why's that?"

"You made your views pretty plain on the subject, as I recall."

She pouted. "But that was before we'd been properly introduced."

"I'd like to take your picture, Marian. I'd like you to want me to."

"You talk as if it really matters."

"I'm a photographer. It's bound to matter."

"Why?"

"Photographs the best ones capture the reality of things. And of people."

"How long have we had them?"

"Photographs? Oh, a hundred and fifty years or so."

"Who was the first person to have theirs taken?"

"I'm not sure. Fox Talbot's wife. Or one of his servants at Lacock. Then again, Daguerre might have '

"Lacock Abbey, near Chippenham?"

"Yes. You know it?"

"I went there once. I... can't remember much about it."

"William Fox Talbot invented photography at Lacock during the eighteen thirties. There's a museum at the house devoted to the subject."

"It can't have made much of an impression on me, I'm afraid. Sorry."

"Never mind."

"But I'll make up for it." She ran skittishly ahead and turned round, smiling back at me. "Take my picture here."

"Why the sudden conversion?"

"Because half the people in this cemetery must have died before photography was invented. But they were just as real as you and me. Maybe more so."

"How could they be more so?" I raised the camera to my eye and stepped to one side, widening the angle to capture the long, pale perspective of bare trees and brooding gravestones beyond Marian,

in her blood-red coat. She was grinning at me stubbornly. "You're real enough for me."

"It's just that I'm so happy I reckon there's a good chance I'm dreaming all this."

"Well, you're not." Her smile was the making of the photograph. It looked so genuine, and yet so glaringly inappropriate in that snow-draped avenue of the Viennese dead. "And now we have the proof." I took the picture in that instant and felt a ludicrous sense of triumph that she'd allowed me to do it. "Thank you, Marian."

"What for?"

"For letting me capture your reality."

"Oh, you've done that all right." She was still smiling, more broadly than ever. "Didn't you know?"

On our last full day together in Vienna, we went out to the Donaupark. From the top of the Danube Tower, its railings bristling with frost, I got some crisp and effective shots of the UNO-City office blocks and an evocative view of Stephansdom's spire, as distant now as our meeting beneath it seemed. More distant, for sure, than our parting.

Over lunch in the tower's revolving restaurant, with Vienna slowly tracking round below us, we each waited for the other to say what had to be said. Eventually, I told myself as well as her, "There's no way I can avoid leaving tomorrow."

"I know."

"I wish '

"I know that, too."

"When will you go?"

"I have a flight booked for Friday."

"And then ... we can meet?"

"There's a problem, Ian."

"Your husband."

"Jose wouldn't..." She gazed out through the window at the snow-bleached horizon, struggling to compose her thoughts and words. "He lets me do much as I please. Like this trip, for instance. But... there are limits."

"And I'm beyond them?"

She looked back at me. "In England, you would be. He'd feel I was making a fool of him. As I suppose I would be. And that would make him very angry. Which wouldn't be a good idea. Not at all. Believe me, I know. From bitter experience."

"Do you have to tell him?"

"Look at me, Ian. What do you see?"

"A beautiful woman."

"If that's true, it's because of you. I wouldn't have to tell Jose I was having an affair. He'd know at a glance."

"I'm not going to give you up."

"I think you may have to. Unless .. ."

"What?"

"It's all or nothing, as I see it."

"I'm ready for that."

"Are you? What would your wife say? And your daughter?"

"Whatever they wanted to say. It wouldn't make any difference to me. I've made some mistakes in my life, but this wouldn't be one of them. Come away with me, Marian. We'll make a clean break of it. A fresh start. Together."

"Can we really do that?"

"I don't think we can do anything else."

"You're right, of course." She reached across to clasp my hand. "We can't. I've known that all along."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

She smiled. "Because I wanted to hear you say it first, I suppose."

We went back to the Imperial and made love. The sex was searing and committed, like two drowning people clinging to each other. The experience had deepened every time, until now it took us to places I wouldn't have believed existed. She let me photograph her afterwards, lying naked on the bed, her lover's eyes playing with the camera lens. The pictures, too, were a proof of our sincerity. What they meant could never be denied.

"What time is your flight tomorrow?" she asked as we lay together in the encroaching twilight. "One o'clock."

"I'll drive you to the airport."

"No. Let me say goodbye to you here. In the best kind of way. Let me have that memory to hold in my head."

"When will you tell your wife?"

"Straight away."

"You're sure?"

"Oh yes. I'm sure."

"Me, too. Amazing, isn't it? I love you, Ian. Do you realize that?"

"I realize I love you."

"I wish I could fly back with you."

"Why don't you?"

"Because Jose is away on business until Friday. I can't tell him until then. And I'd rather wait here to do it than in his house."

"Isn't it your house, too?"

"Not really. Esguards have lived there for generations. And I've never been one of them. Not where it counts, in the blood. It might have been different if I'd produced a son and heir, but..."

"You don't have to tell me why that never happened, Marian. Unless you want to."

"I want to, but I'm not going to. The less we know about each other's marriages the better. By Friday night they'll be history."

"Three days from now. It sounds a long time."

"Just long enough' she rolled onto her side and stretched out her hand to me 'to put a real edge on your performance."

"I think I can guarantee that."

"You can phone me here in the meantime and tell me what to expect."

"Where shall we meet?"

"You've got this irritating practical streak, you know." She let go of me and sighed. "It must be your photographer's mind. Exposure times. Light readings. Focal points. All that detail."

"Well, talking of photography, you mentioned you'd been to Lacock. Could you get there on Friday night?"

"Lacock? Easily. Why?"

"There's a wonderful old inn in the village. The Sign of the Angel. You know the kind of place: oak beams; creaking floors; log fires; antique furniture; and nice cosy bedrooms."

"Sounds great. Especially the cosy bedrooms."

"I'll book the cosiest one they have."

"You'll be able to show me round the Abbey. Explain all that stuff about Fox Talbot I seem to have missed."

"Fraid not. The Abbey will be closed at this time of the year."

"Never mind. There'll be other opportunities."

"Lots, I hope."

She kissed me lightly on the cheek and settled her head on my shoulder. "As many as you want, Ian. Starting Friday."

We went no further that evening than the Cafe Schwarzenberg, where we lingered over wine and coffee and our vaguely formed plans for the future. But the complexities of life in England seemed too many to grasp while we still had one Viennese night to savour. We'd resolved to meet at Lacock when a decisive break with our pasts had been made, and that seemed as much as we were capable of for the moment.

"Tell me how Fox Talbot came to invent photography," said Marian, as we finished our last coffee. "I'd better start boning up on this kind of thing now I'm going to be living with a walking authority on the subject."

"I'm hardly that. And it's a long story."

"Give me the potted version."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. I'd like to know."

"Well, ever heard of a camera lucida?" Getting no answer, I went on. "It was a drawing instrument popular with amateur artists in the first half of the last century. Basically an adaptation of the camera obscura. I don't suppose you've heard of that, either."

She pouted. "As a matter of fact I have. Besides, I know enough Latin to have got ahead of you. Camera lucida: light room. Camera obscura: dark room. Right?"

"I'm impressed. Anyway, it works like this. Paint one wall of a darkened room white and drill a pinhole in the opposite wall. Given decent light, an inverted image of the scene outside the room will be cast onto the white wall. Put a lens in the pinhole and you can turn the image upright and focus it. Install a mirror in the room and you can reflect the image onto a sheet of paper and trace it. Shrink the room to a box and you have a portable drawing device. That's the camera obscura. It was in widespread use by the end of the seventeenth century."

"You know it all, don't you?"

"You did ask."

She smiled. "Go on."

"OK. The camera lucida on the other hand comprised a small prism mounted on a telescopic stem. You stood it on your drawing board, adjusted the angle and looked down into the prism at the reflection of the scene in front of you. Then you moved your eye just far enough towards the edge of the prism for the images of the scene and the sheet of paper below to merge, apparently on the paper. All you had to do was trace what you saw. It was invented by a man called Wollaston at the end of the eighteenth century."

"But we're still a long way from photography."

"Not really. It just took a few decades for someone to have the idea. Why not try to fix the images created by these devices as permanent pictures? William Fox Talbot, Wiltshire squire and amateur scientist, spent his honeymoon in the Italian Lake District in the autumn of 1833, trying unsuccessfully to rival his wife's drawing skills using a camera lucida. When he got home to Lacock, he started experimenting with ways of removing his dodgy draughtsmanship from the equation altogether. The light-sensitive properties of silver nitrate were well known to him. What he did was treat a sheet of paper with a salt solution of the stuff before exposing it in a camera obscura. The result was a negative photographic image light for dark, because light darkened the silver chloride. But if the paper was transparent, it could be re-exposed to create a positive image on another sheet below it the key to photographic reproduction."

"So that was it?"

"Essentially, yes. But it took him several years to get that far. And several more to find a really good fixing agent. Outdoor photography of people and objects didn't become a practical possibility until about 1840. And it was complicated by the simultaneous discoveries of the Frenchman, Louis Daguerre. He achieved the same results using copper plate rather than paper. But the daguerreotype,

as it was called, couldn't be reproduced. That's where Fox Talbot had the edge."

"You make it sound simple."

"It was. Beautifully simple. But the best ideas always are. Someone else could have thought of it before Fox Talbot. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the potter, seems to have gone a long way towards achieving the same thing thirty years earlier, but he died before he could make much of it. Tragic, really. We'd give a lot now for thirty extra years of photographic history, I can tell you."