Frozen (6 page)

I clattered down three flights, and had almost reached the next floor down when the door above creaked open. I heard her boots on the bare boards.

“Harry?” Sam called. She sounded anxious.

I stopped and listened. There was a longish silence, which I suppose I could have broken. “Yes” would have done the trick nicely—but I didn't. After a while, I heard the door scrape shut again. I continued down, more slowly. The door to Norman's was open a slit. A wild and watery blue eye stared at me. I snarled at him and feinted a lunge. The door clicked sharply shut. That cheered me a little, and I rattled down the last stairs and out on to the street.

I had work to do.

*

It was a family portrait. The Carlisles: a simple enough job, but time-consuming—and most definitely not what I would have chosen to do that afternoon. I had rung to ask if they would consider rescheduling, but they refused. Mr. and Mrs. had both taken the afternoon off work; they had given the nanny a half-day, the elder child had been brought home early from nursery. I can't say I blame them, but I could have done without the lecture Mrs Carlisle gave me on the phone.

“Mr. Waddell—” This, despite my pleas to call me Harry; everything about the way she spoke was designed to put me in my place. “I'm sure we're all terribly sorry about your friend, but I really don't think you understand. It's all very well for you to change your plans at short notice, but some of us have other commitments. It cost a great deal of time and money to arrange this afternoon. I've had to cancel two very important meetings. Goodness knows how my husband managed to get the time off. We're paying for the nanny even though we're not using her, and we've already paid you—quite handsomely, I might add. We've had several far better quotes since we talked to you, but we'd already booked you and I always stand by my agreements...” She went on, but I shut it out. I know when I'm beaten. Her voice had a nervous edge, as though she was just barely keeping control of a chaotic and impossibly busy life. Her substitute for control, I thought, was an insistence on formality. The effect was of a woman so brittle that if you shook her hand it would probably shatter.

“That's fine, Mrs. Carlisle.” I tried not to snap. Perhaps she was just having a bad day. “I do understand. We'll stick to the original plan. I'll be with you at one-thirty.”

‘Well, good. Oh,
stop
it, Giles!” A small child's howl was building in the background. I hastily confirmed their address and rang off.

The conversation was still fresh in my memory when I pressed their doorbell. I'd had plenty of time to think about it because I'd arrived three-quarters of an hour early. I bought a sandwich and parked round the corner from their house, eating to kill time and listening to the news on the radio.

For me, severe hangovers bring with them a kind of self-hatred, and now, with nothing else to occupy me, it crept over me. I was still smarting from my conversation with Adam the night before. I had been angry. I had repaid his effort and concern with irritation at every question he asked, every point he made. I needed Adam, now more than ever, but I'd done my best to push him away. Fresh from that, I had sworn at Sam. Replaying the incident now, her behaviour seemed more like distress than disinterest. And with Sam thoroughly alienated, the crowning glory was that I had now also managed to piss off Mrs. Carlisle, a woman with whom I was going to spend the next several hours, being paid to make her and her family look good.

I groaned aloud.

On the news: some crucial negotiation or other had failed, violence was expected; stories of children lost or excluded or starving; riots, murders, arms, and executions. The old, relentless suffering, inflicted in the name of what someone somewhere believed was right.

I was ten minutes late ringing the doorbell, and my eyes were red. And, bless her, Mrs. Carlisle was kind to me. “Harry? Hi. Emma Carlisle. Thanks so much for coming. I'm so sorry we couldn't rearrange. You must have thought I was a real dragon on the phone...” She was charming. She talked without stopping until she had ushered me in, taken my coat, and led me through the house to a kitchen at the rear. Coffee and two children were produced: a baby, and a toddler who hid behind her legs and refused to talk to me. The husband thumped heavily downstairs and introduced himself—Tom. We chatted for a few minutes, and then Emma suggested we get on with it, briskly, but pleasantly enough.

Their garden had crumbling red brick walls, softened by flowers and climbing plants. It must have been about seventy feet long. There were a couple of small trees, plentiful shrubs, trellises of jasmine and roses. The house itself was four storeys and double-fronted. This was a smart area of Fulham; the Carlisles weren't short of a few pennies. For my purposes, the garden was perfect. The early afternoon sun was slightly hazed, blunting the sharp edges of the shadows while keeping the colour and definition of the gardenscape.

I put the family in the almost-shade of one of the denser trellises, three-quarters backlit, with a deep view behind them along one wall towards the house. I chatted with the parents as I settled them on a picnic rug, with the children half-on them, half-between. I clowned a bit for the children, pretending to be surprised by an elephant that I kept popping up behind the camera. I gave the toddler, Giles, an elephant exactly like my own, and told him that he had to make it say hello every time mine appeared. He forgot his earlier shyness and joined in with the game, if anything over-enthusiastically. Then I let the parents gradually take over their children, and began to shoot as the four played together, their smiles became slowly less forced until they had all but forgotten I was there. Occasionally I asked Emma or Tom to move slightly, or to move one of the youngsters, and once or twice I had to make the elephant perform a few tricks. I murmured to them from time to time, keeping them just aware enough of the camera that they would look at it—but I became uninvolved, an observer. I was on the inside of their lives, but just as a shadow.

The trick with photography is to keep shooting. In an average one-hour shoot I might use four or five rolls of film—a hundred and forty-four exposures—and expect to get five or ten good pictures. But you are reading your subjects all the time, anticipating them. You come to know them. When she smiles, the toddler will sink on to her lap a little further and pout; when he makes a joke, she smiles. When the toddler tickles the baby, the husband's shoulders relax and the frown lines soften. It's a kind of trance. Your own reflexes become attuned to theirs. You release the shutter by instinct, again, again, again. And with each moment you capture you see a little more of them, and for each of those moments you feel wise beyond all words. I can't describe it. If I could, perhaps words alone would be enough and I would never feel the need to make pictures. But I cannot resist the lure of catching those instants when other people are truly themselves—at least, as much as any of us ever are. For an hour, almost without talking, certainly without listening, I sank into the Carlisles' lives.

And I found that they were in love, all of them with each other.

There were stresses, of course. Emma and Tom both had worry lines. They looked a little tired; there was tension in their necks and weariness in their movements. From time to time one of them would do something that the other clearly did not fully approve of. But there was patience and affection, and a kind of stillness—tranquillity is far too grand a word for it. They were happy. I knew that, when I developed the pictures, it would be there on every frame: four happy people, together on a sunlit day, together always.

And in another part of my thoughts different images played themselves out, a counter-rhythm to every shot. “Damaged Goods”... battered people in a hostile world, the news on the radio. Verity running on the beach, caught in mid-stride. Or again, with her eyes wide and brown, lips half-parted, always so serious and so alone. Verity in stiff white sheets, bloated, bruised, and broken.

It was intolerable, impossible to believe, a savage rip in the pattern of my oh-so-normal world. Something was so badly wrong. How could I just... accept it? And how could I not? After all, it was real; it wasn't about to change. Reality was not obliged to take my feelings into consideration.

Get used to it, Harry.

The trouble was that in order to get used to it, I knew I was going to have to understand it. And I wasn't at all sure I could face that much truth.

When I got home my message light was flashing. I ignored it and sat staring at a wall as the sun slid quietly round the room. The shadows shifted restlessly. I had shot five rolls. The dark room waited.

I ignored my work, though, and went to see Adam.

*

I waited in Rita, his secretary's, room while he finished off his day's work. It was eight o'clock by the time I arrived at Wandsworth town hall, and Rita was long gone. I poked my head round the door to let him know I'd arrived. He looked surprised, and then waved breezily, mouthing, “Just a minute,” and turned back to the phone.

“Yes, yes, I do understand the problem, Gavin. We all understand. We all know it's a problem. But the problem is that it's not
our
problem; it's yours. And I'd like you to make the problem go away.” Adam waved me away and frowned at the phone. I withdrew, closed the door gently, and sat on an uncomfortable red nylon sofa to wait, profoundly glad that I had no interest in local politics.

The room was large, cheap and ill-proportioned, with an ungenerous window behind the secretary's desk, cut in half by the recently added partition which had created Adam's office. On the wall there were large cork message boards, several with advice leaflets about citizens' rights, health and the like, and one with Adam's electioneering material from last year. Pamphlets, rosettes, newspaper clippings, shots of Adam with half-famous politicians, strip-banners in blue—“Adam Yates,
the
choice for Wandsworth” writ large. All this paraphernalia was pinned round the edges of a campaign photograph, which was so unflattering that I'd always been astonished he was re-elected. Like the banners, it was trimmed in blue. His name was printed in blocky blue letters beneath it, with another blue strap-line below that. Everything was designed to frame and enhance a two-foot-high photograph of him. The simple bold design was clearly intended to make a powerful statement about the force of the personality of the person in the picture.
Here is Adam Yates,
it seemed to suggest.
Adam Yates is all you ever need to know. Life is that simple. Adam Yates.
Strong stuff. Except, of course, that the picture was crap. It was black and white, it gave the impression of being slightly out of focus because it had been printed so cheaply, and it had been shot against a blank wall. If you'd put a number round his neck you could have put up Wanted posters for him in police stations. The photo had lost everything that made him who he was: there was no generosity, no laughter, no charm. He looked like a badly drawn cartoon. I'd told him all this; he'd mumbled something about how it was always done this way, and the need to understand the common man. It sounded like standard reactionary bollocks to me, so I shut up. And, to be fair, the opposition's posters were just as bad, so I suppose it made no difference.

“Harry, sorry.” Adam burst out of his office. He dumped paperwork and a dictation tape on his secretary's desk. “Thursday's always the day from hell, God knows why. The judge was already pissed at ten this morning and we never got past lunch. So I had all afternoon here, which should have been easily enough time to get everything done except I've just had Gavin Tosspot on the phone for an hour, the fuckwit who runs Finance, telling me my own office—this one—doesn't exist.” Adam frowned. “Would he deign to come up and see for himself? Would he hell—and that was before he got on to whingeing about some subcontractor who's defaulted. All his problem, all his fault, except the subcontractor's appointment was political, so now it's my problem.”

Adam paused in his rant long enough to look at me closely. He frowned and chewed his lower lip. “Harry, you look terrible. Has it been rough?”

“Yes. No. Sort of. Hangover.”

Adam, true to form, was showing no sign of suffering; he could drink a distillery dry and bounce out of bed the next morning as though he hadn't touched a drop. He winced in sympathy. “And here's me rabbiting on about some arsehole in Finance. What an idiot.” I tried to shake my head, which turned out not to be a good idea.

“That bad, huh?” Adam tutted. “Come on, let's get you out of here.” He strode out of the office, waited for me to emerge, and then locked up and marched off. He paused when he spotted that I was having trouble keeping up. My head was beating with every step. I reached him, and he set off again, more slowly.

“Adam, don't say you're an idiot,” I said. “If anyone's an idiot, it's me. Actually, I came to apologise.”

“Hmm?” Adam spotted someone he knew and waved at them. “What on earth for?”

“Last night. I was pissed off. When you kept saying the whole thing was just normal. I mean, I know that's what the police thought, but I didn't want to hear it from you. I was upset. I never even thanked you for taking the day off to go down there with me.”

Adam stopped again and looked at me silently. He chuckled. “Harry, you're too polite, that's your problem. I'm a politician, remember? My hide is the envy of rhinos everywhere.” He was lying, of course, but I knew from past experience that there was no point in pressing it. He steered me down the halls of regional government towards the world outside.