Kitabı oku: «The Book of Lost and Found: Sweeping, captivating, perfect summer reading», sayfa 5

3
London, May 1986

It was a year after Mum had died when it all happened. I had just about managed to convince myself that I was all right. Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t. I was twenty-seven, and my days tended to consist of an unvarying routine: work, and visiting Evie. But I was managing to present to the outside world a promising enough impression of surviving. It helps that after the first three months people tend to stop asking how you’re coping, and, if there isn’t strong evidence to the contrary, feel you must be getting on with life.

I saw hardly anything of my old art-school friends. It hadn’t been a conscious thing, but I can see now how I distanced myself from them incrementally. I began to decline the invitations to parties and exhibitions – even to the weekly gatherings at our pub. I had realized that my grief alienated me from them, understood the gulf it created between my life and theirs. Even if I had wanted to talk about Mum – which I didn’t – I could not have done so with them. Conversation revolved around mild gossip, who was sleeping with who, who had ‘sold out’ to a big-time collector … the many, minor intrigues of our small, incestuous world. The thought of bringing death into that happy, frivolous mix was inconceivable.

Until recently I had been one of them: young, carefree and ever so slightly selfish, in the most harmless way. I could not help feeling that my presence was a souring influence. I know that they would have been mortified to hear this was how I felt – and I saw that they went out of their way to treat me as though I were unchanged.

Despite my withdrawal from my friends and that old world, I did feel the need to keep busy. Busy meant that I didn’t have to spend too much time in the house in Battersea, where the quiet and emptiness had a peculiar, terrible weight. I spent more time than ever wandering the city with my camera – especially on those mornings when I woke in the small hours to the roar of silence that surrounded me, and understood that there could be no more sleep. The concentration necessary to taking a good photograph – the careful assessment of the light, the important decisions about exposure, the framing and focusing of the shot – was the only thing equal to forcing all other thought away.

Then there was the sanctuary of the darkroom afterwards. Mum had had it made for me in the Victorian cellar beneath the house as an eighteenth-birthday present. She’d had it installed in the week I was away on a school art trip to Rome and when I came back there it all was: two huge work surfaces, the enlarger, for projecting the film, a red-lensed safelight, the developing trays, and two shelves stocked with all the other equipment I might need. She had even got me my own set of specialist overalls. To use it was now an excuse to seal myself in that hermetic space for a few hours, and try to forget about the empty rooms gathering dust above my head.

I also spent more time than ever at work. This was in a camera shop off the King’s Road, which had seemed, when I applied, the next best thing to becoming a professional photographer. It was one of those shops run for love, not money, though my boss, Nick, had once been quite big in the industry. He’d taken iconic shots of people like Veruschka, Bianca Jagger, the Stones, and even my mother. He told me once that my mother was probably the most naturally beautiful woman he’d ever shot. ‘Because she was so at ease with herself,’ he’d said, ‘so graceful, so at one with her body.’

Many of the photos he took are common currency now – constantly dredged up for articles – even if the photographer’s name is not. Nick left it all behind, and that world quickly forgot about him. He left because he’d been rather too much a part of it all: had been at the same parties, taken the same drugs, suffered the same comedowns. He’d had what he called the three-year hangover, which nearly destroyed him. So he’d dusted himself off and found a new, simpler life.

Sometimes, when business was slow, Nick would give it up as a bad job, shut the shop and we’d go off on ‘tutorials’. We’d head down to the river and take photos from Albert Bridge, or try surreptitiously to snap the punkish kids – faint echoes of their seventies predecessors – who gathered on the benches near the fire station. Sometimes we’d get in Nick’s car and drive east to take photographs of old industry, à la Steven Siegel.

I first got into photography when I sat in Mum’s choreography sessions after school and tried to capture the ballerinas stretching, leaping, even making mistakes. I had discovered early that I would never make a good dancer. I lacked the discipline, the instinctive grace – and, perhaps most important of all, I was no performer. To have my mother watch me put through my paces at the barre was agony enough, let alone anyone else. I pretended to enjoy myself, for her sake – but Mum quickly saw through it, and suggested I might want to try a new hobby. That was just like her. Another parent might have pushed, desperate for their child to share their interest, but Mum sought for honesty between us above all else.

Oh, but I loved to watch people dance, especially her. One weekend, she took me to an exhibition by the photographer Barbara Morgan: black-and-white images of dancers, starkly lit and caught mid-step and mid-leap. To this day I am still in awe of her work: how the fixedness of the medium – the inevitable permanence of the snapshot – serves to enhance the sense of movement. When I saw them for the first time, saw how she had captured the power and the gravity-defying athleticism of those dancers – had achieved the impossible and frozen a moment in time – I was electrified.

On Christmas day of that year, I unwrapped a new Nikon for Christmas – my own camera, with a special wooden box Mum had found and packed full of film. An interest became an obsession, a whole new way of looking at the world. Some of those first photographs, even those Mum had let me take of her dancing barefoot about our kitchen, made their way into my application portfolio for the Slade.

When Mum died, Nick was great. He was very gentle with me: didn’t push me to speak about it, though he intimated that he’d be ready to talk if I wanted to. Which I didn’t especially – he was my boss, after all, and though at times he felt more like a friend there was always a certain degree of professional distance that I was wary of traversing. More than anything I wanted him to view me as a promising photographer, not someone who needed his pity.

Nick had suggested at first that I might want to take some sort of sabbatical, but I think he soon understood that to be away from work – free to think about everything – was the worst thing that could happen to me. It would have been the excuse I needed to seal myself off from the world completely.

And there was Evie too, of course. The nursing home was a few minutes’ cycle ride from the shop, down towards World’s End, and I’d go almost every day after work to have a cup of tea and some increasingly surreal conversation. She’d deteriorated quickly after the crash: grief, it seemed, had hastened the progress of the dementia. Sometimes she’d talk about Mum as though she were still alive. When she then learned otherwise it was as though she had suddenly discovered the fact. This was terrible for both of us.

On that spring afternoon the day went much as normal. I bought some cannelés de Bordeaux – Evie’s favourite – from the French patisserie opposite the shop and cycled down to the home. Miriam, one of the carers, was waiting in the entrance hall.

‘She’s been asking for you all day.’

‘Really?’ If Evie asked for anyone, it was usually Mum.

‘Yes. I kept telling her, “She’ll be coming later, dear, same as usual.” She’ll be pleased to see you.’

‘I brought her some new photographs.’

These were of my mother. I collected them for her – and there were quite a number to be discovered in old magazines and performance programmes … some of them I had even taken myself. Evie craved them, and they seemed to have a positive effect on her. I found the process of discovering them at once soothing and painful, a strange combination.

‘She’ll like that. I should warn you though … she does seem a bit agitated.’

‘Worse than normal?’

‘Well, that’s the thing. She’s much better, in a sense – she doesn’t seem nearly so confused as she has been of late. It isn’t that, no. It’s as if something’s troubling her.’

I knew that something was different as soon as I entered the room: I felt it. The air was as close and dry as ever but it was charged with some foreign element, a sharper savour. Evie was waiting for me in her armchair, white-faced. She looked up at me with an expression that I didn’t identify at first because it was so unexpected. It wasn’t benign ignorance, or wrenching grief – the two states between which she veered. It took me some long moments to recognize it for what it was: fear.

‘Evie,’ I said, ‘are you all right?’

She didn’t answer me at first, but she slumped down lower in the seat and her gaze dropped towards her clasped hands. I stood there impotently as the seconds of silence dragged on. And when I noticed she had begun to tremble slightly I panicked, thinking she might be having some kind of seizure. I went to hold her shoulders but she shrugged my hands away, shaking her head, and I stepped back, alarmed.