Reflex (10 page)

Duncan had slowly grown less chatty, more quarrelsome and less good company, and one day he fell in love with someone else and walked out. Charlie's grief had been white-faced and desperately deep. He had put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me, and wept; and I'd wept for Charlie's unhappiness.

My mother had arrived within a week, blowing in like a whirlwind. Huge eyes, hollow cheeks, fluffy silk scarves.

“But you must see, Charlie darling,” she said, “that I can't leave Philip with you now that Duncan's gone. Look at him. Look at him, darling, he's hardly ugly, the way he's grown up. Darling Charlie, you must see that he can't stay here. Not anymore.” She'd looked across at me, bright and more brittle than I remembered, and less beautiful. “Go and pack, Philip darling. We're going down to the country.”

Charlie had come into the little boxlike room he and Duncan had built for me in one corner of the studio, and I'd told him I didn't want to leave him.

“Your mother's right, boy,” he said. “It's time you were off. We must do what she says.”

He'd helped me pack and given me one of his cameras as a goodbye present, and from the old life I'd been flung straight into the new in the space of a day. That evening I learned how to muck out a horsebox, and the next morning I started to ride.

After a week I'd written to Charlie to say I was missing him, and he replied encouragingly that I'd soon get over it; and get over it I did, while Charlie himself pined miserably for Duncan and swallowed two hundred sleeping pills. Charlie made a will a week before the pills leaving
all his possessions to me, including all his other cameras and darkroom equipment. He also left a letter saying he was sorry and wishing me luck.

“Look after your mother,” he wrote. “I think she's sick. Keep on taking photographs, you already have the eye. You'll be all right, boy. So long now. Charlie.”

I drank some champagne and said to Jeremy, “Did you get the list of the Pine Woods Lodge tenancies from the real estate agents?”

“Oh gosh, yes,” he said, relieved to be back on firm ground. “I've got it here somewhere.” He patted several pockets but stuck two fingers unerringly into the one where he'd stored the slip of paper he wanted; and I wondered how much energy he wasted each day in camouflage movements.

“Here we are . . .” He spread the sheet of paper out, and pointed. “If your mother was there thirteen years ago, the people she was with would have been the boy scouts, the television company, or the musicians. But the television people didn't live there, the agents say. They just worked there during the day. The musicians did live there, though. They were . . . er . . . experimental musicians, whatever that means.”

“More soul than success.”

He gave me a quick bright glance. “A man in the real estate agents' says he remembers they ruined the electric wiring and were supposed to be high all the time on drugs. Does any of that sound . . . er . . . like your mother?”

I pondered.

“Boy scouts don't sound like her a bit,” I said. “We can leave them out. Drugs sounds like her, but musicians don't. Especially unsuccessful musicians. She never left me with anyone unsuccessful . . . or anyone musical, come to that.” I thought some more. “I suppose if she was really drug-dependent by that time, she mightn't have cared. But she liked comfort.” I paused again. “I think I'd try the television company first. They could at least tell us what
program they were making then, and who worked on it. They're bound to have kept the credits somewhere.”

Jeremy's face showed a jumble of emotions varying, I thought, from incredulity to bewilderment.

“Er . . .” he said, “I mean . . .”

“Look,” I interrupted. “Just ask the questions. If I don't like them I won't answer.”

“You're so frantically direct,” he complained. “All right, then. What do you mean about your mother leaving you with people, and what do you mean about your mother and drugs?”

I outlined the dumping procedure and what I owed to the Deborahs, Samanthas and Chloes. Jeremy's shattered expression alone would have told me that this was not every child's experience of life.

“Drugs,” I said, “are more difficult. I didn't understand about the drugs until I grew up, and I only saw her once after I was twelve . . . the day she took me away from the homosexuals and put me in the racing stable. But certainly she was taking drugs for as long as I remember. She kept me with her for a week, sometimes, and there would be a smell, an acrid distinctive smell. I smelled it again years later . . . I must have been past twenty . . . and it was marijuana. Cannabis. I smoked it when I was little. One of my mother's friends gave it to me when she was out, and she was furious. She did try, you know, in her way, to see I grew up properly. Another time a man she was with gave me some acid. She was absolutely livid.”

“Acid,” Jeremy said. “Do you mean LSD?”

“Yeah. I could see all the blood running through my arteries and veins, just as if the skin was transparent. I could see the bones, like X-rays. It's extraordinary. You realize the limitations of our everyday senses. I could hear sounds as if they were three-dimensional. A clock ticking. Amazing. My mother came into the room and found me wanting to fly out of the window. I could see the blood going around in her, too.” I remembered it all vividly,
though I'd been about five. “I didn't know why she was so angry. The man was laughing, and she slapped him.” I paused. “She did keep me away from drugs. She died from heroin, I think, but she kept me free of even the sight of it.”

“Why do you think she died of heroin?”

I poured refills of champagne.

“Something the racing people said. Margaret and Bill. Soon after I got there I went into the sitting room one day when they were arguing. I didn't realize at first that it was about me, but they stopped abruptly when they saw me, so then I did. Bill had been saying, ‘His place is with his mother,' and Margaret interrupted, ‘She's a heroin . . .' and then she saw me and stopped. It's ironic, but I was so pleased they should think my mother a heroine. I felt warmly towards them.” I smiled lopsidedly. “It wasn't for years that I realized what Margaret had really been going to say was, ‘She's a heroin addict.' I asked her later and she told me that she and Bill had known that my mother was taking heroin, but they didn't know, any more than I did, where to find her. They guessed, as I did, that she'd died, and of course, long before I did, they guessed why. They didn't tell me, to save me pain. Kind people. Very kind.”

Jeremy shook his head. “I'm so sorry,” he said.

“Don't be. It was all long ago. I never grieved for my mother. I think perhaps now that I should have done, but I didn't.”

I had grieved for Charlie, though. For a short intense time when I was fifteen, and vaguely, sporadically, ever since. I used Charlie's legacy almost every day, literally in the case of photographic equipment and figuratively in the knowledge he'd given me. Any photograph I took was thanks to Charlie.

“I'll try the television people,” Jeremy said.

“OK.”

“And you'll see your grandmother?”

I said without enthusiasm, “I suppose so.”

Jeremy half smiled. “Where else can we look? For Amanda, I mean. If your mother dumped you all over the place like that, she must have done the same for Amanda. Haven't you thought of that?”

“Yes. I have.”

“Well, then?”

I was silent. All those people. All so long in the past. Chloe, Deborah, Samantha . . . all shadows without faces. I wouldn't know any of them if they walked into the room.

“What are you thinking?” Jeremy demanded.

“No one I was left with had a pony. I would have remembered a pony. I was never left where Amanda was in the photograph.”

“Oh, I see.”

“And I don't think,” I said, “that the same friends would be pressed into looking after a second child. I very rarely went back to the same place myself. My mother at least spread the load.”

Jeremy sighed. “It's all so irregular.”

I said slowly, unwillingly, “I might find one place I stayed. Perhaps I could try. But even then . . . there might be different people in the house after all this time, and anyway they're unlikely to know anything about Amanda . . .”

Jeremy pounced on it. “It's a chance.”

“Very distant.”

“Well worth trying.”

I drank some champagne and looked thoughtfully across the kitchen to where George Millace's box of rubbish lay on the dresser; and a hovering intention suddenly crystallized. Well worth trying. Why not?

“I've lost you,” Jeremy said.

“Yes.” I looked at him. “You're welcome to stay, but I want to spend the day on a different sort of puzzle. Nothing to do with Amanda. A sort of treasure hunt . . .
but there may be no treasure. I just want to find out.”

“I don't . . .” he said vaguely, and I got up and fetched the box and put it on the table.

“Tell me what you think of that lot,” I said.

He opened the box and poked through the contents, lifting things out and putting them back. From expectancy his face changed to disappointment, and he said, “They're just . . . nothing.”

“Mm.” I stretched over and picked out the piece of clear-looking film which was about two and a half inches across by seven inches long. “Look at that against the light.”

He took the piece of film and held it up. “It's got smudges on it,” he said. “Very faint. You can hardly see them.”

“They're pictures,” I said. “Three pictures on one-twenty roll film.”

“Well . . . you can't see them.”

“No,” I agreed. “But if I'm careful . . . and lucky . . . we might.”

He was puzzled. “How?”

“With intensifying chemicals.”

“But what's the point? Why bother?”

I sucked my teeth. “I found something of great interest in that box. All those things were kept by a great photographer who was also an odd sort of man. I just think that maybe some more of those bits aren't the rubbish they look.”

“But . . . which ones?”

“That's the question. Which ones . . . if any.”

Jeremy took a gulp of champagne. “Let's stick to Amanda.”

“You stick to Amanda. I'm better at photographs.”

He watched with interest, however, while I rummaged in one of the cupboards in the darkroom.

“This all looks frightfully workmanlike,” he said, doing the eye-travel around the enlargers and print
processor. “I'd no idea you did this sort of thing.”

I explained briefly about Charlie and finally found what I was looking for, a tucked-away bottle that I'd acquired on an American holiday three years earlier. It said Negative Intensifier on the label, followed by instructions. Most helpful. Many manufacturers printed their instructions on separate flimsy sheets of paper, which got wet or lost. I carried the bottle across to the sink, where there was a water filter fixed under the tap.

“What's that?” Jeremy asked, pointing at its round bulbous shape.

“You have to use ultra-clean soft water for photographic processing. And no iron pipes, otherwise you get a lot of little black dots on the prints.”

“It's all mad,” he said.

“It's precise.”

In a plastic measure I mixed water and intensifier into the strength of solution that the instructions said, and poured it into the developing tray.

“I've never done this before,” I said to Jeremy. “It may not work. Do you want to watch, or would you rather stay with the bubbly in the kitchen?”

“I'm . . . ah . . . absolutely riveted, as a matter of fact. What exactly are you going to do?”

“I'm going to contact-print this clear strip of film with the ultra-faint smudges onto some ordinary black-and-white paper and see what it looks like. And then I'm going to put the negative into this intensifying liquid, and after that I'm going to make another black-and-white print to see if there's any difference. And after that . . . well, we'll have to see.”

He watched while I worked in dim red light, peering into the developing tray with his nose right down to the liquid.

“Can't see anything happening,” he said.

“It's a bit trial-and-error,” I agreed. I tried printing the clear film four times at different exposures, but all we got
on the prints was a fairly uniform black, or a uniform gray, or a uniform white.

“There's nothing there,” Jeremy said. “It's useless.”

“Wait until we try the intensifier.”

With more hope than expectation I slid the clear film into the intensifying liquid and sloshed it about for a good deal longer than the required minimum time. Then I washed it and looked at it against the light: and the ultra-faint smudges were still ultra-faint.

“No good?” Jeremy asked, disappointed.

“I don't know. I don't really know what should happen. And maybe that intensifier is too old. Some photographic chemicals lose their power with age. Shelf life, and so on.”

I printed the negative again at the same variety of exposures as before, and as before we got a uniform black and a uniform dark gray, but this time on the light gray print there were patchy marks, and on the nearly white print, swirly shapes.

“Huh,” Jeremy said. “Well, that's that.”

We retreated to the kitchen for thought and another drink.

“Too bad,” he said. “Never mind, it was impossible to start with.”

I sipped the champagne and popped its bubbles round my teeth.

“I think,” I said reflectively, “that we might get further if I print that negative not onto paper, but onto another film.”

“Print it onto a film? Do you mean the stuff you load into cameras? I didn't know it was possible.”