Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (15 page)

Isabelle looks across the studio at Eldon. He is blurry with shadow. He is the place where the light ends, where it bumps up against darkness like a boat nudging the shallows. Because you didn’t get in my way is what she wants to say. Instead she says, “Because I was expected to be a certain kind of person, to behave in a certain way, and you didn’t expect that from me. You didn’t expect anything from me.”

“And is that what happened?” asks Eldon. “I didn’t expect anything from you?”

“Isn’t it a good arrangement?” says Isabelle. “Doesn’t it suit us both?”

“We do our work. Your father bought us this house. We have his money. A good
arrangement.
” Eldon stretches the last word out. He thinks of all the Arctic expeditions, of the months and months of preparation required before the first step was ever taken on the ice. This is what his marriage to Isabelle feels like, preparation. But what’s it all for? What is the place that pulls them forward over the polar floes, over the ground cold with stone? “What if the children had lived?” he says.

Isabelle can’t think of this. She goes through each day never allowing herself to think this. Instead she concentrates on the photograph she is taking, the one she hauls from the developing bath. What she can create. What she can control. Life is accidental. Art is thick with purpose. “Would I have loved you?” she says, because this is the real question.

The garden outside the glasshouse is a tangle of moonlight. Leaves and vines, the angles of branches. The relentless intent of the natural world both reassures and frightens Isabelle. What if art is not the greater power? What if art is an excuse to hide from life? What if her babies had lived? Would she have been able to love them? “We’ll never know,” she says, “will we.”

The sun makes Isabelle drowsy as a flower. Her head droops forward, snaps back on its stalk as she tries to keep herself awake. Her photograph cooks on the path in front of her. If she falls asleep, it will burn away to black. She rises from the bench and walks briskly up and down in front of it. Her feet sound petulant on the stones.

All around Isabelle the garden opens its arms to the last traces of summer.
I’m here! I’m here!
Heat is a wish in the bones of all living things. A wish ached out through the skin. Isabelle stops walking. The flowers around her are open lenses, wide, wide open. It is the time of year, the moment even, when the garden is most fully alive. It is the moment right next to the one where everything begins to die. Flowers lose their hold on the air, curl inward, hold their small, dry, rattling thoughts to themselves.
Don’t forget me. Don’t forget me.
They stiffen and then collapse their shape entirely, as though the cost of remaining themselves for a motion longer is complete obliteration. Oblivion. A garden in winter is a state of oblivion.

Isabelle stretches her arms out, reaching with her fingers up towards the sun. It is as if she is the darkened window of the negative, the one through which the sun must pour to make the shape of her, to let her live.

In her studio Isabelle pushes the flimsy albumen positive under the surface of the fixative bath. The paper shudders with the motion of her hand and the liquid. The image blurs and then rolls back towards clarity, blurs again. The movement making it seem as though the photograph is breathing underwater.

This is where Isabelle likes to be, this moment when an image is swimming up towards her. When she is the light. This is the part of the photographic process that is the companion to the moment when the model is posed and the scene is set and hope is high that the photograph will look the way it is meant to look. It is the image finding its way back to the image.

Isabelle doesn’t care for the transition phase. She doesn’t like the tension and worry of it all, having to hurry the exposed plate to the darkroom before the collodion dries and the effort is ruined. Crouched on the cold floor of the coal cellar, her breathing loud in the darkness, from running through the garden with the exposed glass plate. Isabelle feels only anxiety as she plunges the plate into the developing bath. It is at this moment that the image is truly gone. She cannot make it stay. She has to let it go back into darkness and then she has to believe that it will return. It takes so much strength from her, to believe this. To believe that it still lives, that it will flutter towards her, like a thought not yet articulated, beating against a fluid darkness.

Now it is here again, the image. Isabelle has pulled it back to her, from the mouth of darkness. It swims under the light in the glasshouse, limpid, the dull colour of blood seen through water. When Isabelle hauls it up into the air the colour has shushed to a red the shade of bricks. She pulls it into the air, like something she has conjured up. She pulls it up and then plunges it down into a water bath, to clean all the fixative chemicals from its surface. Her hands are puckered from the liquid, blackened from the silver nitrate of the developer. Her hands are in worse shape than a maid’s. When Isabelle is forced to attend social functions she tries always to wear gloves, or keep her hands crawled into the cave of each other, out of sight on her lap. Last night at the party, she had had a moment of forgetfulness. She had held her hands up to explain something and her hands had jumped like black fish under the light of the dining-room chandelier. Mercurial and slippery with light. She had seen the dismay on Robert Hill’s face when this happened, the disgust on Letitia’s.

Now, the black fish are where they live, swimming in the small tank of the water bath, bumping the albumen paper up and down. The black fish flex their tails and lift the print right up out of the water. Isabelle shakes the loose drops from it and then carefully lays it into the final bath. This is the toning bath, where Isabelle adds gold chloride to the water to cool the red colour of the print and to intensify the shadow areas. It is a constant experiment, the toning bath. How much gold chloride to use? Too much and the shadows will stiffen to black, lose definition. Too little and there will be no noticeable distinction, not enough contrast between different areas in the photograph. Isabelle tries a varying amount of gold chloride each time. She records it carefully in a litde book. Which photograph. How much toner. How long in the toning bath.

Isabelle bends over the toning bath. The light from the roof of the glasshouse distorts her view of the photograph in the gold chloride, makes it seem lighter in shading than it really is. Sometimes it is more a matter of feeling than of knowing. When the rush of anxiety runs into her, Isabelle pulls the photograph from the bath by its corner. Liquid runs down it like rain on a window. She carries it before her, arm outstretched, carries it over to the line that bisects the end of the glasshouse, and pins the photograph up with a clothespin. It drifts on the line, moving a litde from the motion of it being pinned, from the act of it drying, curling inward, stiffening.

The line is full of photographs. Annie as Humility. Annie as Grace. Each photograph slighdy lighter or darker than the one beside it. Every one the same and different. They stutter towards the blank eye of light. They stutter towards the closed fist of darkness. Each one a word said a different way. The emphasis in a different place.

Isabelle stands in front of the row of photographs. Which is the one that is the closest to the image she saw in her mind before she created the image in the flesh? Which is the articulation of her soul?

Sometimes it feels to Isabelle, at the end of the two hours it takes to wash, tone, and dry a print, that she is the thing being made. The black fish of her hands have swum through fixative, through water, through gold chloride. They have breathed underwater. They have twisted their way up to the light, and here she is, standing now on the shore where they have pushed her, looking at the world anew. The wet heat of them flopping in her breast, turning inside her like a wish.

As Christmas approaches it becomes obvious that Tess is pregnant. In their attic bedroom she removes her dress and Annie can see the flesh pulled tight across her belly, the circle of baby under the skin.

“I could pray for you,” says Annie, from her bed. “I could pray for you and the bastard child.”

“Oh, shut up.” Tess pulls on her nightshirt and plunks down angrily on the edge of her bed. Being pregnant hasn’t improved her mood any. “You’re not allowed to have God in this house. Don’t you listen to rules?”

“But it’s helpful,” says Annie, meaning, really, that she is trying to be helpful.

Tess just snorts with contempt. “Where was your God in the beginning?” she says. “Before this happened. When he
could
have been helpful.” She gets into bed and kicks under the covers for a few minutes to warm up the sheets. “Don’t be praying for me in your head,” she says, which is just what Annie is doing. “I don’t want none of it.”

It is chilly in their bedroom. They lie on their backs in their beds and their breath smokes in the cold air. The sheets are damp, and although Annie has piled extra bedclothes on, to the extent that the weight of them actually bends her toes, it is still impossible to feel warm. There is no fire in their attic. In the mornings the windows are laced with frost.

There has been a lot of work in the Dashell house to prepare for winter. All fall Annie has helped Cook pit fruit for jam, the juice of damsons inking her fingers, the smell of gooseberries sweet in the kitchen. Now the jars are carefully lined up in the larder, plush with fruit. The kitchen garden has been harvested, vegetables lumped in burlap sacks into the root cellar so that in the middle of January there will still be carrots, potatoes, the hard, bitter truth of an onion. They have prepared for winter as though it is an expedition, as though they must have enough supplies to cross the cold, barren stretch of it before arriving on the warm shore of another year.

Annie yearns for spring already, lying in her damp bed with the suffocating bedclothes heavy on her body. Tess’s baby is to be born in the early spring. It seems that it was no surprise to the rest of the house, that only Annie didn’t know of it before now. She feels foolish in her ignorance, foolish when Cook says, I guessed, didn’t I; foolish when Isabelle dismisses it so easily—it was to be expected, really. No one says what is to happen after the baby is born. Will it be sent away? Will it stay here with them in the house? Tess herself seems only angry at her pregnancy, ignores it as much as possible, even though, physically at least, this is becoming more and more difficult to do.

Annie wants to know what Tess really feels about the baby. If she is pleased at all, because Annie can imagine how she could be, how this baby, growing inside of Tess, will know her completely, will know her better than anyone. Right now, Tess is the baby’s entire world. “Tess?” says Annie, over the cold darkness of the room, but Tess doesn’t answer.

*

Early one morning, before the household is awake, Annie is in Eldon’s library looking for a book to borrow. The feeling of reading burns through her like a kind of resdessness. She walks up and down the shelves, trolling her hand along the leather spines, but nothing seems perfectly, exactly right for this cold, dreary day.

As she’s walking by Eldon’s desk she sees something that makes her stop. A sheet of photographic paper lying on top of its envelope. The sheet is divided into a dozen small photographs, each one the same image, each one showing Eldon Dashell standing on a strip of carpet in front of a bare wall, his right hand resting on the top of a globe. Annie bends down to get a closer look. A
carte.
Mr. Dashell has had a
carte
made of himself. He has that stiff, awkward stance she recognizes from Cook’s collection of
cartes,
but his expression is in complete contradiction to this. His expression is almost gleeful.

“Yes,” says Eldon’s voice from behind Annie, making her jump. “I succumbed to the fashion of the studio fantasy.”

Annie turns and looks at him. She doesn’t have a bucket or duster, no equipment to prove her reason for being in this room. But he doesn’t ask why she’s here, seems embarrassed that she has seen the photograph of him. Annie wants to ask if Isabelle knows about these
cartes.
She is certain that Isabelle would consider this as a betrayal, to be photographed by someone else, to be posed in a studio by another photographer. But she doesn’t say this. “You look happy,” is what she says instead, desperately thinking of an excuse to offer for her presence here.

Eldon puts a hand out and holds on to the back of a chair to steady himself. “I am a foolish man,” he says.

“Why?”

“Have you ever wanted anything, Annie Phelan?”

“To be a good person, sir,” says Annie.

“Not like that,” says Eldon. “Not that general. Something specific, small and hot, that burns through you. And the longer it’s not satisfied, the hotter it burns.” Eldon picks up the sheet of photographs, puts them down again. “Did you ever hear of the Franklin Expedition?” he says.

“The man who went to the North Pole?”

“Not the Pole, but to find the Northwest Passage across the Arctic ice.”

“And they died, sir?”

“They died.”

“I recall hearing of it.” Annie remembers the reverend from Portman Square talking about it once, praying that some recovery expedition would discover the final fate of Franklin and his crew. But what does this have to do with Eldon and the photographs of Eldon with his hand on a globe? “I’m not sure that I know what you’re meaning,” she finally says.

“Sit down.” Eldon taps the chair back and Annie settles there.

The fire pulls in the hearth, sends a steady pulse of light into the room.

“I was a young man when Franklin left England in 1845,” says Eldon. “It was the most exciting thing to me. I was sick at the time, confined to bed for days on end, and all I thought about was John Franklin and the voyage of the
Tenor
and
Erebus.
I followed all reports of the expedition in the papers.” Eldon walks over to the window and looks outside. A wind moves the branches of the rose bush on the other side of the glass, a slow wave, the rise and fall of words in his head.