The Painted Bridge A Novel

THIRTEEN





Lovely’s clear eyes scanned Anna’s face. She pushed a strand of Anna’s hair back into its comb and straightened her lace collar with two big, gentle hands.

“He’s waiting for yer, miss. You go on in and I’ll take a turn around the garden.” Anna opened the door to the glasshouse and saw Lucas St. Clair down on one knee, adjusting a wooden stand, a pipe clamped between his teeth. He got up and walked toward her with one hand outstretched. He was taller than she’d realized and the sharp line along his whiskers left the shaved parts of his cheeks looking smooth and naked.

“Mrs. Palmer? We met once before, I think. I’m Lucas St. Clair.”

“Yes. I mistook you for someone else.” His fingers were splashed with ragged black stains, their grip strong. She felt embarrassed at the memory of their previous encounter. “You must have thought my behavior odd, Dr. St. Clair, but I was expecting another physician. I thought perhaps my sister had asked you to come and see me. To help me get out.”

He nodded. He was looking at her still.

“It generally takes people a few weeks to settle in,” he said. “Feel comfortable.”

She laughed.

“I won’t feel comfortable here if I stay for a thousand years.”

“I know what you mean. How long have you been here?”

“Three weeks. My husband brought me without my consent.”

He frowned.

“Oh, really? That doesn’t make it any easier. Thank you for agreeing to be photographed, Mrs. Palmer.”

“I didn’t agree to it. I asked to be photographed. I’ve seen your pictures on the walls.”

“What do you make of them?”

Dr. St. Clair didn’t seem part of Lake House. Anna wanted to be able to trust him, to believe in him and his methods. She would tell him what she thought.

“Some of the pictures are good. They show people as they are. I don’t agree with the labels you put on them, though. Dr. St. Clair, I don’t want my picture on the wall with the others. I’m not like them.”

He was still looking at her with the same intense interest. His eyes seemed to see right into her, make her forget what she had to say to him. She felt herself coloring and walked away, found an old garden bench and sat down on it, next to a stack of terra-cotta pots. The worn brick floor of the fernery was covered in a thin layer of dry sandy soil and the place smelled like the old conservatory at the flint house, the pleasing smell that as a child she had thought of as the breath of plants.

Dr. St. Clair was in front of her again, a velvet cloth thrown over his shoulders, one knee of his dark trousers smudged with sand.

“You said you asked to be photographed. Would you mind explaining why?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Dr. St. Clair? I want you to prove that there’s nothing wrong with me. So that I can get away.” She looked down at her hands. “You don’t have to try to make me look beautiful or anything. Just please don’t make me look mad. That’s all I ask.”

“I can’t make you look anything, Mrs. Palmer. Photography is the art of truth. The camera draws from nature, without interference from man. That is the beauty of it. Oh, Lord!” He swiped his forehead with his hand. “The collodion! Damn! I left off the lid. Please excuse me.”

He turned on his heel, rushed across the fernery and disappeared into what looked like a cupboard in the corner.

There were rusted hoes and rakes hanging on the walls, their wooden handles like long legs. A woodstove in the center of the room, the chimney running up and out of the glass roof, the flames visible behind an alabaster door. In the middle of it all, a grand, carved chair with a leather seat stood in front of a blank sheet of canvas suspended on the wall. She listened to the sound of Dr. St. Clair stirring and pouring and rattling in his cupboard just as if he was in a kitchen. She could see him through its yellow glass window, his head bent over a line of bottles, intent on something.

* * *

The last time she’d been photographed was before the wedding. She and Vincent stopped on the way to the church, at a studio in Hoxton. They stood in front of a canvas of Roman pillars and the photographer gave her a bunch of silk roses to hold. When the pictures were delivered afterward, she had been startled to see herself standing next to Vincent, so close that their arms appeared to be touching although they had not been. She never thought of herself as joined to him. She always saw Vincent as separate.

The photograph was taken outside, the canvas strung on a wooden frame and then hung so that the plain part of it covered the spring grass. There was no horizon; the canvas changed from painted to plain under their feet. She’d smoothed her hair in the mirror beforehand, as the photographer suggested. He was a lucky man, he’d told Vincent. Her husband-to-be had been embarrassed. Taking the mirror, he’d pretended to check his teeth for greens, looking at his moustache, the way the crucifix hung over his cravat. She couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t godly, or even manly, to mind the way Vincent did about his appearance.

The photographs were her idea. She had wanted a record of the day and she insisted, despite Vincent’s protests that it was a waste of money, that the ceremony was for God’s eyes, not the eyes of man. When Vincent asked about the cost, the photographer offered to make small pictures. Cartes de visite were cheaper, he said. Anna didn’t want that. She wanted one big picture, to put in a frame. Evidence of her marriage. Something to make it real. Afterward, she thought it never was so real again as it was for that minute in front of the Roman pillars with the roses that were soft from other people’s hands around the stems, the wire poking through green sugar paper.

The service was an anticlimax. Only the curate and Louisa as witnesses, the Vicar hurrying through the words as if they might wear out in his mouth. Anna herself, standing there with a sense of not knowing what it was she didn’t know. Thinking about God’s eyes.

* * *

St. Clair was out of the cupboard, his fingers blacker than ever, holding a lit pipe in one hand and a dark slide in the other. Tobacco smoke joined the smell of soil and brick and leaf mold.

“Are you ready? We’re always working against time. The collodion dries out and the light … it fades fast on winter afternoons. Did you know it was almost the shortest day?”

“I suppose it must be close to the solstice. Every day is long here, though, Dr. St. Clair. Incurably long—I think I could go mad just from boredom.”

“Are you not a needlewoman or a watercolorist?”

“Not really. I never have been, actually.”

She wouldn’t try to explain to Lucas St. Clair that she had a calling. Catherine Abse’s response had shown her how easy it was to be misunderstood here. To unwittingly provide evidence for what people already assumed. He shifted the carved chair forward slightly and gestured for her to sit down. In front of the chair was a camera on a tripod, its round brass lens covered in a leather cap. He began moving from one side of her to the other, coming close and retreating, holding up a white board. He put down the dark slide on a trestle and stood behind her. She felt the touch of his fingers as he adjusted the set of her head against the posing stand behind the chair; the warmth gave way to the press of two cold metal thumbs behind her ears.

“It’s meant to help you keep steady, Mrs. Palmer. Just adopt the expression that comes naturally to you. When you’ve found it, try to hold still.”

He threw the cloth over the back of the camera and stepped under it. Anna didn’t know what she looked like, what he saw. Should she stare straight at the camera? Gaze into the distance, as if she saw nothing? She couldn’t think what a rational female face looked like. She would not adopt Mrs. Button’s trusting cooperation, LM’s furtive, convalescent glance. She would look as her mother had when she was dead. Like a person free of trouble. A Sphinx. Arranging her face in a rigid composition, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth unsmiling, she tried to empty her mind.

“Do I look rational?”

Lucas St. Clair poked his head out from the back of the cloth.

“The face contains muscles of expression. If the mind is troubled, so are the features.”

“Does it mean one is a lunatic, if the mind is unquiet?”

“No, no … I don’t believe it does.” He had disappeared again; the glass eye on the front of the camera was shifting back and forth in tiny movements. “But the face is the mind unveiled. It is the best aid to diagnosis we have, in my opinion.”

Anna’s mouth began to tremble with the effort of keeping it stiff. Her hands felt clumsy on her lap. Empty.

“Can’t you give me a flower? Something to hold?”

Dr. St. Clair ducked out from under the velvet, reached the low brick wall of the glasshouse in two strides and pulled a last, late fern from the mortar. He came toward her, brushing dust off its root and bowed as he presented it.

“Will this do? Granted, it has no scent.”

“Thank you. The scent won’t show on the image—or can you even see that, Doctor?”

He gave a muffled laugh from back inside his velvet tent, adjusted the lens again and emerged, replacing the cap over the eye of the camera and inserting the dark slide.

“Ready? We must proceed before the plate spoils.”

“Wait a moment.”

She wouldn’t try to look like her mother. She would look like herself. Her true self. Anna jerked her neck free of the stand and pulled out her combs. Her hair fell around her, to her waist. She held the fern across her chest, raised her chin and looked at the glass, her gaze strong and steady. She could see herself reflected in the lens—upside-down and shrunk inside a circle.

“I’m ready. If you really can photograph the mind, Dr. St. Clair, you’ll discover there is nothing wrong with mine.”

He pulled out the slide cover, removed the lens cap and began to count.

It was easy now to keep still. Anna felt more comfortable in the fernery than she’d ever felt in the dayroom, despite the draft whistling through the broken windows, the chill penetrating her feet from the brick floor. Sitting on the chair with her hand on the cool spine of the leaf, her heart beating steadily behind it, breathing in the odor of earth and smoke, she had a feeling she hadn’t had for a long time. As Lucas St. Clair reached sixty and replaced the cap on his camera, announcing that the exposure was complete, she realized what it was.

She felt at ease.