Caught in the Light (9 page)

"Yes. It's Marian."

"Or Eris. I suggest it will avoid confusion if we stick to the name she used here."

"All right."

"As to Marian Esguard, are you sure you've never heard of such a person in another connection a historical connection, perhaps?"

"I never have."

"Absolutely certain?"

"Completely."

"Very well. As I told you, Eris Moberly became a client of mine last summer. She came to me because of my work as a hypnotherapist. She saw an obvious application of hypnotherapy to her singularly bewildering experiences, in particular the concept of regression to a previous incarnation."

"You do that sort of thing, Daphne? Here in Harley Street? I thought reincarnation was the preserve of stage hypnotists."

"I do not do that sort of thing. Eris consulted me specifically because of my scepticism about reincarnation."

"I don't follow."

"She wanted me to supply an alternative explanation for her symptoms."

"And what were those symptoms exactly? Are you going to tell me she believed she was a reincarnation of the original Marian Esguard? You don't expect me to swallow that."

"What I expect you to do is listen to this tape." She ejected it from the machine and laid it on my side of the desk. "I asked Eris to record an account of the events that had prompted her to consult me. This was the result. Go away and listen to it. Try to relate its contents to the state of mind of the woman you met in Vienna. Then come back here and tell me what you think we, as the only people party to her secret, ought to do about it."

"Fair enough. I'll listen to it." I stretched out my hand to pick up the tape, and held the pose, my fingers resting on it as I looked her in the eye. "Are you sure you didn't regress her hypnotically? Are you sure this isn't some piece of para scientific dabbling that blew up in your face and mine, too?"

"I never hypnotized her. Not even for the most conventional of purposes."

"But she wanted you to?"

"Yes. As a kind of last resort."

"So why didn't you?"

"Because it would have been too dangerous. Listen to the tape, Ian. Then you'll understand just how dangerous it would have been. And still might be."

I listened to the tape lying on the narrow bed in my tawdry flat in Netting Hill Gate, wishing I could have had Marian lying beside me rather than Eris's voice rising and falling in my ear. I wanted her to come back to me. But it seemed she couldn't. Instead, I was condemned to follow, wherever her words took me. Into a life I hadn't known. Hers.

CHAPTER FOUR

My name is Eris Moberly. I'm thirty-two years old, married, with no children. That isn't a regret, by the way, either for me or my husband, as far as I know. I wouldn't describe our marriage as perfect. Conrad's too withdrawn for that. He isn't... emotionally demonstrative. On the other hand, he seems content with what we've got. So am I. What I'm saying is that this .. . problem .. . hasn't sprung from difficulties elsewhere in my life. I'm happy and healthy and, thanks to Conrad, wealthy. I've enjoyed the eight years we've been together. I don't want to say any more about it than that. It isn't relevant and Conrad wouldn't approve of me pouring out my secrets to a stranger anyway, so ... let's keep him out of it.

The same goes for my family background. It's all standard, boring, upper-middle-class stuff. I wasn't abused as a child. I had a good education and a stable upbringing. My parents did their best for me. My father's a civil servant, retired now. My sisters are both married, with children. I suppose I don't see as much of any of them as I'd like. Conrad can be ... difficult at times. Not that he'd stop me going on my own if I wanted to. Which I do. Just not as often as I should. You get... settled in routines, don't you? You think you'll do something some time soon, and then you find another year's flashed by and you still haven't done it.

What's happened to me recently has had that benefit, I suppose.

Routine's a thing of the past. Ordinary life has changed. I'm not the person I used to be. I suppose I never will be again. I mean, even if you can make this stop, it won't go away completely, will it? She'll never leave me. I'm not sure I'd want her to. But even if I did .. .

You said you wanted .. . what did you call it? ... A sequential account of how it started, so here goes. Conrad suggested we get out of London for Easter, which sounded great to me. We booked into a country house hotel near Bath for the long weekend and went down there on Thursday night. It all started as pleasantly and relax-ingly as you could want. On Good Friday we visited Wells and Glastonbury. We spent Saturday in Bath. Then, on Easter Sunday afternoon, we drove out to Lacock. I'm sure you've heard of Lacock Abbey, where Fox Talbot invented photography. We toured the house and looked at the oriel window, the subject of his famous first photograph. Then we visited the photographic museum they've set up in the lodge at the entrance to the abbey. I suppose you could say that's where it began, except, of course, that it came into my mind as something I remembered very well, something I'd always known. It didn't seem weird or worrying. It was just ... a piece of knowledge I'd carried about with me since .. . well, I couldn't have said when. A long time, for certain. It wouldn't have struck me as significant. It probably wouldn't have struck me at all, in fact, but for being at Lacock, where photography was invented. I'd never been there before, you see. I'd never consciously thought about it.

The museum has a section devoted to the history of photography. Not just Fox Talbot and the quaint old box cameras knocked up for him by the village carpenter, but displays and information about the other pioneer photographers and the inventors who paved the way for them. We were standing in front of an illustrated panel describing how close Thomas Wedgwood came to inventing photography about thirty years before Fox Talbot, when I turned to Conrad and said, without thinking there was anything the least remarkable in it, "I wonder why they've overlooked Marian Esguard."

"Who?" queried Conrad.

"Marian Esguard," I repeated. "It's only the lack of actual examples of her work that prevents her being acknowledged as Fox Talbot's forerunner." Then I added, making a joke of it and feeling completely light-hearted, "Male chauvinism in operation again, I suppose."

Conrad was surprised as well as mystified. He'd never heard of Marian and, what's more, he'd never heard me say anything before that suggested I knew the first thing about photographic history. But, then, if you'd asked me, I'd have denied knowing anything about it myself. The name and the remark had come to me quite spontaneously.

It might have ended there, as a soon-to-be-forgotten throwaway remark. But Conrad never likes other people especially me -knowing more than he does. He wouldn't let it drop, said I was making it up, though God knows why he thought I'd want to. In the end, we had some silly bet about it. I lost, and had to pay up. Conrad wouldn't let me off. I knew he wouldn't, of course, but I didn't expect to lose. I was utterly confident I knew what I was talking about. We went to the person serving at the counter and asked them. They knew nothing about it. We looked through a couple of reference books they had on display, which were comprehensive enough to include Marian. But they didn't mention her. Eventually Conrad insisted the curator be called. He tends to take things to extremes. And by then he sensed he was going to win, which he always enjoys. Anyway, the curator was away, not surprisingly on Easter Sunday, but somebody with a detailed knowledge of photographic history was unearthed. And he sided with Conrad. Nobody, apparently, had ever heard of Marian Esguard. He suggested I try the Royal Photographic Society's library in Bath, but he made it pretty clear he didn't think I'd find anything.

We had to go back to London on Monday and the library wouldn't be open till Tuesday, so I reckoned I'd have to drop the subject. It wasn't really very important, after all. Just a stupid misconception on my part. But it wouldn't go away. At first I thought it was pique at being proved wrong, but I knew it couldn't be. Conrad gave me too much practice at that. No, I was frustrated by the discrepancy between what I was sure I'd read or heard about Marian Esguard and the official record, from which she'd been mysteriously deleted. And I realized I wasn't going to be able to leave it there. I wanted to know why she'd been edited out of history.

The days are my own during the working week. Conrad's always very busy and I'm always very idle. He thinks I spend my time mooning around Bond Street and having lunch with friends. So I decided I could slip down to Bath for the day on the train without telling him, though I certainly meant to afterwards if I found any hard evidence of Marian's existence. I wasn't consciously being secretive.

The Royal Photographic Society has a museum, gallery and library all under one roof in the centre of Bath. The library's basically for members only, but I convinced them I was a serious researcher, so they let me in. I went through the index of every book they had on early photography looking for Marian's name. There wasn't a single mention of her. Thomas Wedgwood; Humphry Davy; Joseph Niepce; Louis Daguerre; John Herschel; William Fox Talbot: they were the names that kept cropping up, and I read enough to get a bluffer's grasp of how the invention came about and what they each contributed to it. There didn't seem to be room for Marian in any of the accounts. There weren't any obvious gaps she could fill or missing links she could explain. If I hadn't been so utterly certain of her existence, and her importance in photographic history, I'd have written her off there and then. In fact, I wouldn't have had much choice but to give up if the librarian hadn't asked me, as I was leaving, whether I'd found what I was looking for. I knew she wouldn't have heard of Marian, but I asked her anyway, just for the hell of it.

"I can't say I do," she replied. "But I do know a man called Esguard, strangely enough. It's an unusual name, so maybe he's a descendant of your Esguard. He's also interested in photography. In fact, he's a member of the society."

You can imagine my reaction. I actually hugged the poor woman, I was so delighted. She said Milo Esguard was an elderly amateur photographer who'd been a regular user of the library until the last few years, when he'd got less and less mobile and had moved into a nursing home. A secretive and rather grumpy old chap, according to her, but with a charming side to him when he could be bothered to show it. She gave me the address of the nursing home: Saffron House in Bradford-on-Avon.

I wanted to go there straight away, but there wasn't enough time if I was to get back to London before Conrad came home, so I had to make another trip the next day. I took my car this time and got to the nursing home by late morning. It was a big old place up on a hill on the northern side of Bradford-on-Avon. The weather was exceptionally warm for April. Some of the residents were sitting out in the grounds having their elevenses, Milo Esguard among them. Except he wasn't actually among them. He'd rolled his wheelchair off to a distant corner of the lawn, where he was sitting reading the Daily Telegraph in a patch of sun, sheltered from the breeze by an overgrown rhododendron. The nurse positively encouraged me to go and speak to him. "If you can cheer him up," she said, 'we'll all be grateful."

He was a big, heavy, white-bearded old fellow, done up in several woollies, mittens and a hat that looked as if it had been chewed by a dog. He was gruff and not at all welcoming. "What do you want?" was his idea of a courteous introduction. He seemed to think I was some kind of social worker and took a lot of talking out of the idea, which was made more difficult by his come-and-go deafness. But his hearing and his temper both improved dramatically when I mentioned Marian. Then he became a different man, inviting me to pull up a chair and offering to arrange a cup of coffee. He had bright blue eyes and a twinkling grin, but whether the old sweetie or the old curmudgeon was the real him I couldn't tell.

He was amazed I'd heard of Marian and wanted to know how. My explanation didn't satisfy him at first. I think he may have suspected I was holding something back, which was understandable, because my story didn't make a lot of sense. But eventually he seemed to come round. That's when he began to open up. Still, he wasn't sure about me. That was clear. He didn't trust me and he didn't distrust me. He was trying to make up his mind. I think what helped was how relieved, how overjoyed I was when he confirmed that, yes, Marian had really existed and, yes, she'd been a pioneer photographer. Or might have been. He implied her photographic achievements were basically just a family legend. His own researches had turned up nothing to verify them. What baffled and excited him all at the same time was that I knew about Marian quite independently. But his suspicious nature got in the way. I had to go back there twice the following week to win his confidence sufficiently for him to tell me as much as he ever did.

This is what it amounted to. Milo was a bachelor in his early eighties. Until recently, he'd lived in the same house in Bath as four previous generations of Esguards. His nephew Niall was now in occupation. He'd converted the place into flats after inheriting a half-share from his mother, buying out Milo and packing the old fellow off to the nursing home. A lot of Milo's conversation was devoted to character assassination of Niall. Anyway, the first Esguard to own the house was Milo's great-great-grandfather, Barrington Esguard, younger brother of Joslyn, who'd lived in some splendour at a country mansion in Dorset called Gaunt's Chase with his wife .. . Marian.

Gaunt's Chase dated from the family's golden era as bankers, speculators and East India Company men back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Joslyn's time their fortunes were in decline. He was the last Esguard to live there. The house burned down in 1838. Joslyn died in the fire. As for Marian .. . nobody knew for sure. It was believed she'd deserted her husband by then. Why, and where she'd gone, was a mystery. But what about her photographic activities? Was the fire the reason no trace of them remained? Milo's answers to those questions were bound up with what he described, rather melodramatically I thought, as 'the tangled enigma' of his family's past. In truth, I realized later, that's exactly what it was.