The Painted Bridge A Novel

EIGHTEEN





Lucas St. Clair bought a bag of hazelnuts from a boy with his feet wrapped in bundles of pudding cloth and told him to keep the change. Regent Street curved away in front of him, alive with people. He would have liked to seize the beauty of the moment but the exposure would be too long. By the time they’d left their mark on the plate, the women in their colorful shawls and cloaks would appear to be wraiths; the strolling men, specters.

He continued on his way, eating as he went. He wasn’t due at Vigo Street, at the gallery, until eleven, but it was hard to rid himself of the permanent sense of hurry with which he lived. Lucas couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a morning off but he was fulfilling his resolution for the new year—to get out for at least a couple of hours on Saturdays and do something that was not work.

Some of the shops still had Christmas fir trees over their doorways; others displayed curling branches of pine and laurel in their windows. New photography studios were opening everywhere. At the point where the wide street swerved toward Piccadilly, he stopped in front of one. The p had come off the painted sign outside; it advertised hotography. He found himself looking at an image in the window of a girl wearing a dress tied with a satin sash. She was aged about ten and had been pictured stepping through a huge, ornately carved frame as big as she was, passing through it as if it was a doorway. She was half in the frame, half out of it, in the act of escaping it even as it captured her. The picture was a jest at photography’s expense. He stared at it, throwing nuts into his mouth from the palm of his hand until he’d emptied the bag.

* * *

At the gallery, there were too many pictures. Landscapes sat shoulder to shoulder with still lifes; portraits jostled Eastern antiquities for space. They hung five or six deep around the walls of the long room, with more propped against the skirting boards. The profusion irritated Lucas; it suggested that the merit of photographs lay in their existing at all, that no selection procedures were appropriate.

Maddox hadn’t arrived. The only other visitor was an elderly man, baby-faced with a bald head and ebullient salt-and-pepper whiskers framing his face. He walked around the room stooped forward with his hands linked behind his back and his nose pointed at the pictures.

The early photographs were grouped together. Mr. Fox Talbot had supplied both the calotype negative and the print for his study of an oak tree in winter. They hung side by side, the eerie beauty of the paper negative perfectly matched by the delicate fascination of the positive.

The old gentleman had appeared beside him.

“Wonderful work, isn’t it, sir?” Lucas said.

The man nodded. “I’m glad you think so.”

Lucas wandered on. Was it Fox Talbot himself? Just to think about Fox Talbot, his persistent experiments with silver and salts, his lace and leaves offered up to the sun in the Wiltshire countryside, made him cheerful. Fox Talbot was part of the magical quality of photography, its human alchemy. He had assisted at the birth of the medium; it was up to the next generation to develop the uses to which it could be put.

As schoolboys, Lucas and his friends had coated pieces of paper with silver nitrate, held them up to the classroom window with their hands in front of them, watched the outlines of their fingers take shape like white gloves as the surrounding paper turned black and dense. The image was fugitive; like childhood afternoons, their hands quickly disappeared, darkened to nothingness. He’d found it entrancing—the apparition of a negative shadow, a faithful record. Its subtle vanishing. His father, when he informed him of his desire to become a photographer, had let him know it was out of the question. Lucas had put aside his passion and concentrated on his medical studies.

After Archie died it didn’t seem to matter anymore what his father or anyone else thought. The smudgy picture of Archie that Lucas had made with a pinhole camera on the day he left for the Crimea was the only image of him they had. It became his mother’s most precious possession, carried with her everywhere in a locket. That was when he’d taken up photography again—seriously.

He felt tired. He sat down on the Chesterfield in the middle of the gallery, wincing as his fingertip encountered the leather. He’d given himself a splinter while cutting plates and had tried to extract it with a scalpel tip but his flesh had closed stubbornly around it. And he’d slept badly. The talk to the Alienists’ Association was approaching fast. It loomed up at him in the night asking what he planned to say and whether it was true.

He was rattled by Mrs. Palmer’s rejection of her image and her insistence that she didn’t recognize herself in it. He hadn’t been able to forget her face or the look in her eyes—not in the photograph but by the filtered light of the dining room, gold on her hair, her skin, the shadows moving, changing with every passing minute and her face changing too, her expression as fluid and evanescent as the unscientific, beautiful light.

Lucas rose to examine the modern work. Wet collodion provided far greater detail than the old paper negatives; the exposures were much decreased. He admired a picture by Frith, each huge slab of the Cheops pyramid sharp as lump sugar. But he felt dissatisfied with the portraits. The camera was faithful in its way and yet it recorded a world that no one had ever seen. The qualities he found inspirational about the medium, the way it ordered life, flattened and clarified the world into planes of light and shade, stopped time, also frustrated him.

He stopped in front of a picture of a man propped in a chair, his eyes closed, chest bare. The man’s torso looked as vulnerable as the flesh in one of the Old Masters, his pale body contrasting with his darkened face and hands. He was slumped at right angles to the camera. It was refreshing to see a man who wasn’t standing like a statue, moustache waxed, wife clamped to arm. A man who wasn’t trying to prove he was a fine fellow. Self-portrait as a Drowned Man, he read, and he felt his faith strengthen again. Photographs could show the inner man, the inner woman, display the deeper truth of human existence. It was possible.

“What kind of fellow would make an image of himself dead?” came a voice from behind. “Is that how he wants to be remembered?” Lucas turned as Maddox clapped him on the back. Maddox gestured toward the room, his eyes sweeping the walls. “There’s a damned lot of them. Quite remarkable what they can do these days.”

The old gentleman was still stooped in front of the two oak trees. He straightened his back and left, tipping his hat at them. Maddox made a quick turn about the room and flung himself down on the couch in front of a tableau of a group of women draped in wet gauze, their hair parted over their breasts. The title on the mat was The Water Nymphs.

“You’ve got to admit it’s a thing of beauty, the female form,” Maddox sighed.

Lucas did admit it but not to Maddox. And the way he wanted to appreciate it wasn’t behind glass, posed by another man—or posed at all. Not that there were other options open to him. He stared at a picture of a foam-topped sea, two dark and distinct clouds sailing across the sky above. Something about the image didn’t convince. The line between sea and sky was confused, overlapping. In the next one, the waves were stilled and flat but the sky contained the same two sailing clouds. It had been constructed in the dark chamber.

“Do you think it’s right, to take two different photographs on two different days and splice them together? Present them as one?”

Maddox dragged his eyes away from the nymphs.

“Don’t see the harm in it if it makes a better picture.”

“Yes, but is it true? Don’t you think when you look at a photograph that you’re looking at a record of the truth?”

“Depends what you mean by truth, old man.”

Maddox looked tired too, Lucas noticed.

Lucas had seen a photograph that meant something to him. It wasn’t the Drowned Man. He puzzled over it as they walked out into a light rain and along Regent Street, racked his brain while Maddox hailed a cab.

“Grieve had a word with me the other day,” Maddox said, once they were in the cab. “Reckons you’re not pulling your weight.”

“What do you mean?”

Maddox looked out of the square of smeared glass at a couple of women hanging on to umbrellas turned out by the wind, the ribbons of their bonnets streaming.

“You know Grieve. He plays the numbers game. Makes him look good to the commissioners. He’s after fifty percent of patients discharged within a year, certified as cured. Says you’re marking too many discharged uncured, and keeping too many more of them in.”

St. Clair snorted in disbelief.

“Where’s the merit in discharging people when they’re still ill? Or saying they’re well when they’re not? It’s pointless. It’s dangerous.”

Maddox shrugged.

“It isn’t about patients’ welfare. It isn’t even about getting the diagnosis right. It’s about what the politicians want.”

“I know but I don’t accept it, Doxy. I can’t work like that.”

Maddox sighed.

“It’s not easy for any of us, Lucas. How’s your research coming along?”

“I’m working on it. I thought you weren’t interested.”

“I told you I’d keep an open mind. I’m not saying it doesn’t have a use—only that you’ll have to convince me.”

“I intend to. You and a lot of other people. Remember, I’m making a presentation shortly, to the Alienists. Shall I reserve you a seat?”

Over a late breakfast of coffee and kedgeree at the Pall Mall Club, talking with Maddox and some friends they encountered about the new anesthesia, smoking his pipe and wondering whether leisure was really worthwhile after all, it came to Lucas. It wasn’t any of the pictures at the exhibition. It was the girl in the window, stepping through the frame. She’d given him an idea.