She wore a simple black dress in one picture and held a glass of sherry. A stole was draped over one arm, the only embellishment that added a theatrical flourish. One eyebrow was also arched in mock-disapproval at whoever held the camera, the eyes alluring and mischievous. She stood as if in the first position of ballet, her sling-back shoes pointy-toed and high-heeled, her slender shins shimmering in nylon. Elegant, quietly glamorous, even sexy, and posed before a large fireplace. Seb had not long shone his torch on that fireplace in one of the downstairs rooms.
The beauty wore a hat and veil in the sole headshot. Behind a gauzy veil, her painted eyes were made feline with eyeliner, and feminized further with false lashes. Shiny, dark and slightly parted lips smiled beneath the veil. The siren.
‘Diane? You think?’ Mark said. ‘The eyes and nose, same as the male persona. See?’ He pointed to one of the younger shots of the man.
He was right. This was Hazzard, and convincingly transformed into a fashionable society beauty. Nothing too dramatic or camp. This was an artful mimicry of the female without a hint of the spectacle of drag. It could have been the portrait of a film star.
In the final picture, the transvestite was older and dressed in a long mink coat, the glossy fur shimmering. Her hair was concealed by a hat, or white turban, the eyes completely hidden by sunglasses. A beauty spot had been delicately impressed beneath one eye. Long satin gloves covered the delicate forearms, and patent leather boots encased her legs, adding a subtle charge of the erotic and revealing the fetish at the heart of the persona. Age seemed to have transformed the alter-ego into something more imperious too. The gaiety and prettiness had vanished from this colder, fuller, but still handsome face.
The actual evidence of Hazzard’s eccentricity, the split gender and the feminine half, cultivated with such care and enthusiasm, startled Seb. He found it hard to equate Diane with the terminable morbidity of Hazzard’s second collection of ‘Strange Experiences’.
The life of the man seemed too large to be accommodated by any experience at his disposal. Despite his perilous situation, Seb couldn’t deny the compelling aura that this master of lies and subterfuge, of disguise and theatre, still managed to issue from old photographs. While enmeshed in a tawdry history of under-employment, imprisonment and fraud, Hazzard had also achieved something extraordinary inside a grand country house. He had accomplished something that no robed guru or bearded, self-proclaimed prophet of the same era, had ever mastered in their more celebrated compounds or temples. Hazzard was an original.
‘Just bloody incredible.’ Mark took photos of the portraits. Then switched his tablet for a small camera that he cupped in one hand. ‘You know who should come here and film this? That Kyle Freeman fella. I love his stuff.’
Seb looked at the ceiling. ‘Let’s go. Upstairs.’
‘Let us go out of here and enlarge upstairs.’
‘Mark. Please. Stop saying that.’
The bare floorboards became an amplifier of their footsteps. They might have been wearing shoes with tipped heels as they walked into the shrinking circles where their torch beams ended on the brown walls, the circles of light growing brighter as they narrowed, the darkness welling behind their shoulders. Both of them sneezed, as if one had set off the other.
The first floor existed in total darkness. Twelve rooms arranged around a broad corridor that ran through the building widthways, with the staircase opening in the middle of the floor. And like the hall below, these walls were wood-panelled, the doors large and thick with yellowing emulsion.
Every bedroom door had been left open, and inside each room the wood panelling ended at a picture rail. Wallpaper stained brown with age continued to the cracked and flaking ceilings. And, as if awaiting new guests and donors, the old SPR beds remained. All were neatly made with a white sheet folded over a cream blanket. Any other furniture had been cleared, leaving dark patches and scratches on the wooden floorboards.
‘This is where they projected from,’ Mark said in the first bedroom they entered, his eyes wild with excitement. ‘From these actual rooms. Incredible, isn’t it?’
It was something, for sure, and Seb’s own gaze flitted across the walls as if he expected to see a prostrate shape, still hovering above its earthbound double. He felt no admiration, only trepidation.
A locked door blocked the stairwell and any access to the top floor where Hazzard must have lived.
‘Don’t! Please. Don’t,’ Seb said, as Mark heaved and pushed at the door, rattling it within the frame. ‘Let’s look downstairs again. There’ll be a cellar.’ Seb realized he lacked the courage to go any higher. Whatever was up there, he wasn’t ready to see. He needed to go back down and regroup his wits before Mark forced his way into what remained upstairs.
Near the kitchen, behind a door they’d previously mistaken for a pantry, a staircase descended to a lower ground level and opened into a large storage room. The walls flaked and were lined with rusting pipes and a later addition of strip-lights.