Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (3 page)

Tobias looks at her with contempt in his eyes. “I am the Angel of Death,” he says.

“But Alfred is already dead,” says Isabelle. “You don’t need to kill him again. You are only supposed to guide him out of his mortal self.”

“His what?” says Tobias. Alfred’s arm suddenly drops over the side of the bench and hits the floor.

“Oh, wake him up.” Isabelle steps back from the box and rubs her forehead. “Infidels,” she says to Annie. “Disaster.”

Annie notices, again, the blackness of Isabelle’s hands. “Silver nitrate,” says Isabelle. “It dyes them black. Permanently.” She waves them under Annie’s nose. “Blacker than yours after cleaning the grates, aren’t they?” Annie feels she is being challenged somehow, that there is something cruel in Isabelle’s voice. She looks away, looks at the scene coming undone on the bench.

“Ma’am, why do you have an angel and yet you don’t have prayers?”

“Ah.” Isabelle glances briefly over at Tobias and Alfred, who are wrestling. “Stop that,” she says to them. “Symbolism,” she says to Annie. “Religious symbols stand for moral values. The symbols are still useful, even if the religion is not.”

Annie shakes her head.

“You don’t understand?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Come here.” Isabelle leads Annie over to the box. “Look.” She slides the cover from the small hole in the wood and makes Annie look through it. “See. The Angel of Death is helping the dead boy out of this life. He is a passage between this world and the idea of another world. He is a sense of possibility. A looking up. A wonderment. An angel does not just belong to God. It is a feeling in us. A striving.” Isabelle’s voice is airy, lifts with her excitement at what she is saying. “When I have made this photograph, I want it to be that feeling of looking up. When I show it to people, that’s what I want them to feel—the possibilities that could exist beyond this life.” She pauses, puts her hand lightly on Annie’s shoulder. “Do you see?” she says.

Isabelle has sent Tobias and Alfred home in a fly with Wilks. Back to their mother’s house in Tunbridge Wells. She sits on the bench with the black cloth behind her, poking stray feathers back into the goose wings. Tobias and Alfred. They are not obedient enough because they know her, feel they can play when they come here instead of work, don’t understand what it is she is doing. Trying to do, thinks Isabelle, threading the bone of a feather through the weave of the wing. What I am trying to do. It is so frustrating. Her ideas are sound, she is sure of that. What is it that happens between her idea and the finished result? What goes wrong? It is as though the moment she sets up a scene it starts to leak away. The image in her head burns brighter, is true. When she looks through the viewfinder of the camera, she sees her image coming undone, trailing threads of smoke, disappearing. How to make it stay. What will hold it until she is able to render it completely?

Isabelle looks up at the lens of the camera. It is supposed to see what she sees, that is the point. It is supposed to be her eyes.

The afternoon light is beautiful now. It slants into the henhouse, all current and moving lines. The air swims with light. That is the half of it, thinks Isabelle, bending over the white feathers. Light. The rest is shape and shadow. Intent. The raised arm that curves up out of the frame is the heart leaping forward, is the moment before arrival and the quickening of anticipation.

Isabelle puts the wings aside and walks over to the wall of the henhouse. There are still boards against the glass and bits of straw wedged in the steel supports from when the hens were there. Now they have eggs delivered from the farm down the road instead. The branches of the trees through the glass, the trees in the orchard, look like lacing pulling together a corset of sky. Apples. That’s what the painters do. Mounds of apples and lemons. A blue jug of wine. Still life. Isabelle puts her hand up to the glass. Now she is a tree against the sky.

The budding apples are higher up the trees than she’d expected. The fallen ones from last year still on the ground, a brown, pulpy mass. Wilks probably hasn’t been down here in ages. There isn’t a single ladder or climbing aid anywhere. Isabelle manages to haul herself up onto a low branch of one tree and stretching up high into the boughs she is able to get to the apples. They are small, but she finds a nice, round, red one, and another with a couple of leaves still attached to the stem. But what to do with them? She can’t throw them out of the tree as they might break or bruise when they hit the ground. Isabelle stands in the apple tree, holding the two apples, her feet on one branch, her body angled into the trunk of the tree. There are twigs probing her, and the bark is rough against her cheek. All around there is the soft hum of bees and the warm smell of last year’s apples running to earth.

Isabelle puts the apples down the front of her dress. It is a slow, cautious walk back to the studio to unload her cargo on the black bench. The apples are warm from having been next to her skin. She curls a white sheet around them and goes to look through the camera lens. What she sees are apples. A mound of apples with a white sheet coiled around them. The fold in the sheet as it holds the shapes of them is pleasing, but the apples themselves are just apples. They aren’t hopeful or faithless or awakening from a feverish dream in which they have glimpsed the afterlife. They are apples only, round and red, flecked with sun. What is so beautiful about apples? What human truth could rise out of this pile of fruit?

Isabelle leans her forehead against the wooden box of the camera. The sullen apples squat on the black cloth. Nothing moves. Still life.

“Beautiful!”

Isabelle turns to see Robert Hill in the doorway of the henhouse. He strides across the floor towards the apples on the bench, waving his arms as though he is conducting an orchestra. “Lovely composition! Look how the sun rolls off the fruit.”

Isabelle instandy feels guilty for doubting her apples. If Robert Hill, acclaimed painter and peer of the realm, thinks her composition lovely, then what right has she to complain? “Do you approve of the suggestiveness of the drapery?” she asks her neighbour, trying, really trying, to believe in the apples, but they still stare balefully at her from their seat on the bench, like so many red, angry eyes.

“Oh, wholeheartedly. I most definitely approve.” Robert Hill moves behind the apples and bends to tuck the sheet a little closer to the form. “But I think it could benefit from a little shaping.” He fusses with the sheet and Isabelle watches him. The sunlight runs through his white beard like water. His long fingers stroke the folds of the sheet to his bidding.

Time, she thinks. Time persuading Beauty to decay.

Robert Hill would not agree to be her subject. He is famous, would consider it demeaning to sit for a portrait. And for all his bluff encouragement, he does not take Isabelle seriously. He does not believe her to be an artist. She is a woman. And she is a photographer. Women do not have the proper souls to be artists, and photographers are only useful to produce a likeness of something. A photograph cannot be a work of art. A year ago, when Isabelle first started taking photographs, she would argue with Robert Hill about his strict opinions on the subjects of women and photography. She had expected greater tolerance from a respected artist. Now, although she still admires his work, she no longer heeds his words. “I was attempting something new,” she says. The apples don’t glare at her quite so strongly after she has said this. “I’m not sure that I’ve succeeded.”

“Oh, my dear. Beyond your dreams.” Robert Hill waves his arms again over the pile of fruit as though he’s offering a blessing upon it. “This is so much more worthy of you than those odd scenes. This is”—he searches for the correct words, doesn’t have to look far—“so much more,
domestic
.” He looks right at Isabelle, his eyes cold and watery.

There are days when Isabelle will parry with Robert, deflect his blows with a casual comment or a laugh. Today she can’t find the strength to counter him. “Eldon’s in the library,” she says instead. “I’m sure he’s expecting you.”

*

“It is good to see that Isabelle has finally succumbed to more suitable subjects,” says Robert, seated in Eldon’s most comfortable chair, the black leather wing chair by the library window.

Eldon is standing over a long table, looking down at large sheets of paper. “Angels,” he says. “The ascension of the spirit.”

“No, no. Apples.”

“What?” Eldon looks up.

“Still life.” Robert pushes the word “life” off his tongue so that it stretches out into the room, and then snaps shut. “That is much more appropriate for a Lady than live models.”

“I wouldn’t get too jubilant.” Eldon knows his wife, knows that she doesn’t think much of photographing the static world. “I’m sure it’s just a temporary setback in her pursuit of artistic excellence.”

“Artistic excellence,” says Robert drily. “Ah, but you believe women have souls and that public education will bring about social reform. And that social reform is desirable.”

“Yes, well, my utilitarian ideals have not helped me much lately.” Eldon taps the topmost sheet of paper. “A theme map. Dunstan wants me to make a theme map. All the work I’ve done on the atlases. This was to be my vision. A map of the world.
My
map of the world. And instead they want me to show mineral deposits and native trees. They think that maps are starting to repeat themselves, that there is nothing left to show of the world. Nothing new.” Eldon looks at the map in front of him, the carefully delineated boundaries between the countries, the blue of the oceans. How can Dunstan think that all has been shown that is worth showing when the top of the map is still thick with white space? Not much detail. The descriptor of
Arctic Icy Ocean
looping through its empty rooms.

Robert is half bored by Eldon’s indignation. He turns to the bright world outside the window and sees Annie Phelan walking tentatively past the rose bushes.

“Who is that?”

Eldon sighs, looks up at Robert and then out the window. “The new maid,” he says.

“Lovely.” Robert presses his hands together in excitement. “She looks lost.”

“She probably is.”

“She needs saving,” says Robert. “We should save her.”

Eldon looks down at the map again. “All she needs,” he says. “All any of them need, is a proper education.”

Robert knows what comes next, the long speech about the benefits of education for the lower orders. “Oh, please,” he says. He runs a finger over his thin lips as Annie trails from view. “Spare me.”

The road is hard earth. It twists ahead of Annie. It twists out of sight behind her. The bit she stands on is cracked from the heat of the summer sun. All around her the air swims with dust from the pickaxes swinging into the hard rind of road, swinging clear. The arc of the bodies as they heave the axes through the air looks like a kind of dance.

None of the workers on the road faces towards Annie. What she sees from where she stands are the backs of the men and women, the sharp start of the axes at the top of their arc, the surge downwards to earth. Annie is the only one on the road who is not working. She looks around for her axe, thinking she may have left it on the grass at the edge of the road, that she must have put it down for just a moment. But, no, it is not at the side of the road. It is not anywhere.

The dust rises like smoke above the heads of the workers. Roils like water. Rises into clouds and muscles away into the far blue of the sky.

Annie touches the shoulder of the woman nearest to her. Perhaps she will know where Annie’s axe has got to. The woman turns towards her, and in that moment the whole crew of road workers also turns and Annie sees, to her horror, that all of them, men and women alike, have her face. All of these people are her.

Annie wakes, lies in her bed, listening to the dark. Her breath stoppered in her throat. At Portman Square the noises were all above her basement-kitchen room. Lying in her cot there she heard the house creaking and shuddering over her, Mrs. Gilbey walking among the rooms with tiny, sharp steps, like the sound of tacks being hammered in. At the Dashells’, Annie is as high as sound can go. Above her is the roof, above that the night sky. Her thoughts can leave her head and rise right up into the trees, into the dark clouds covering the moon. There is nothing to net them.

This new house is noisier than Mrs. Gilbey’s. It is bigger, sprawls out, isn’t straight up and contained like the brick town house in Portman Square. Someone always seems to be going up and down the staircase. A window shuts. A window opens.

“Tess,” whispers Annie. She wants to be reassured that this is the real world. She wants to know that Tess, curled up on her side in her bed across the room, doesn’t have Annie’s face, too. But Tess is asleep. Annie can hear the deep shaking of her breathing.

When she lived with Mrs. Gilbey there would sometimes be days when Annie never spoke a word. Mrs. Gilbey wanted her Marys to do only what was required. She never asked Annie anything, or engaged her in conversation. Sometimes, when she hadn’t used her voice for a while and was suddenly required to, it would come out all hoarse and ghostly and not like hers at all.

“Lord,” she whispers into the darkness. “Take this dream away from me.” Annie closes her eyes, opens them again. The room ripples with her words, each one eddying gently around her. If she twists her neck towards the window, she can just see the bright thorns of stars in the sky. If she closes her eyes, she can see the road and the flail of axes, like swimmers crawling through the dusty air.

At the beginning of Annie’s first work-day she gets up at 6:30, says a few furtive prayers as she washes her face, and then goes down to the kitchen. Cook has already cleaned, black-leaded, and lit the range, gives Annie a cup of tea before she sends her off to sweep the front hall. At Mrs. Gilbey’s, Annie was forbidden to drink tea because it had been rationed once years before and that had made Mrs. Gilbey consider it too valuable to be wasted on a maid.

Mr. Dashell rises early to get work done before breakfast, so there is no need to wake him. At 7:30, Annie is sent up with hot water and tea for Isabelle. She knocks on the door. No response. She knocks again. Finally she puts her tray down, opens the door, and enters the room. Isabelle is asleep, lying on her side, curled up in a ball under the covers. Annie sloshes the hot water into the basin. She bumps the jug against the basin, pours the tea, and sets the teapot down on the bedside table. Nothing. She picks up the teapot and sets it down again. Louder.