Reflex (17 page)

“Not very promising,” I said.

“No. Anyway, they told me where to find the director. Still working in television. Very dour and depressing man, all grunts and heavy moustache. He was sitting on the side of a road in Streatham watching some electricians holding a union meeting before they went on strike and refused to light the scene he wanted to shoot in a church porch. His mood, in a word, was vile.”

“I can imagine.”

“I'm afraid,” Jeremy said regretfully, “that he wasn't much help. Thirteen years ago? How the hell did I expect him to remember one crummy six weeks thirteen years ago? How the hell did I expect him to remember some crummy girl with a crummy brat? And much more to that effect. The only positive thing he said was that if he'd been directing there would have been no crummy hangers on anywhere near Pine Woods Lodge. He couldn't stand outsiders hanging about when he was working, and would I, too, please get the hell out.”

“Pity.”

“After that I tracked down one of the main actors in the play, who is temporarily working in an art gallery, and got much the same answer. Thirteen years? Girl with small child? Not a chance.”

I sighed. “I had great hopes of the television lot.”

“I could carry on,” Jeremy said. “They aren't difficult
to find. I just rang up a few agents to get the actor.”

“It's up to you, really.”

“I think I might.”

“How long were the musicians there?” I said.

Jeremy fished out a by now rather worn-looking piece of paper, and consulted it.

“Three months, give or take a week.”

“And after them?”

“The religious fanatics.” He grimaced. “I don't suppose your mother was religious?”

“Heathen.”

“It's all so long ago.”

“Mm.” I said. “Why don't we try something else? Why not publish Amanda's photograph in the
Horse and Hound
, and ask specifically for an identification of the stable. Those buildings are probably still standing, and looking just the same.”

“Wouldn't a big enough picture cost a lot?”

“Not compared with private detectives.” I reflected. “I think the
Horse and Hound
charges for space, not for what you put in it. Photographs cost no more than words. So I could make a good sharp black-and-white print of Amanda . . . and we could at least see.”

He sighed. “OK, then. But I can see the final expenses of this search costing more than the inheritance.”

I glanced at him. “Just how rich is she . . . my grandmother?”

“She may be broke, for all I know. She's incredibly secretive. I dare say her accountant has some idea, but he makes a clam look sloppy.”

We reached St. Albans and detoured around to the nursing home; and, while Jeremy read old copies of
The Lady
in the waiting room, I talked upstairs with the dying old woman.

Sitting up, supported by pillows, she watched me walk into her room. The strong harsh face was still full of stubborn life, the eyes as unrelentingly fierce. She said not
something gentle like “Hallo” or “Good evening,” but merely “Have you found her?”

“No.”

She compressed her mouth. “Are you trying?”

“Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I've used some of my spare time looking for her but not my whole life.”

She stared at me with narrowed eyes, and presently I sat in the visitor's armchair and continued to stare back.

“I went to see your son,” I said.

Her face melted for a passing moment into an unguarded and revealing mixture of rage and disgust, and with a sense of surprise I saw the passion of her disappointment. I had already understood that a non-marrying non-child-producing son had essentially robbed her not of daughter-in-law and grandchildren as such, to whom on known form she might anyway have behaved tyranically, but of continuation itself; but I certainly hadn't realized that her search for Amanda sprang from obsession and not pique.

“Your genes to go on,” I said slowly. “Is that what you want?”

“Death is pointless otherwise.”

I thought that life itself was pretty pointless, but I didn't say so. One woke up alive, and did what one could, and died. Perhaps she was in fact right . . . that the point of life was for genes to go on. Genes surviving, through generations of bodies.

“Whether you like it or not,” I said, “your genes may go on through me.”

The idea still displeased her. The muscles tightened along her jaw, and it was in a hard unfriendly voice that at length she said, “That young solicitor thinks I should tell you who your father was.”

I stood up at once, unable to stay calm. Although I had come to find out, I now didn't want to. I wanted to escape.
To leave the room. Not to hear. I felt nervous in a way I hadn't done for years, and my mouth was sticky and dry.

“Don't you want to know?” she demanded.

“No.”

“Are you afraid?” She was scornful. Sneering.

I simply stood there, not answering, wanting to know and not wanting, afraid and not afraid: in an absolute muddle.

“I have hated your father since before you were born,” she said bitterly. “I can hardly bear even now to look at you, because you're like him . . . like he was at your age. Thin . . . and physical . . . and with the same eyes.”

I swallowed, and waited, and felt numb.

“I loved him,” she said, spitting the words out as if they themselves offended her. “I doted on him. He was thirty and I was forty-four. I'd been a widow for five years . . . I was lonely. Then he came. He lived with me . . . and we were going to marry. I adored him. I was stupid.”

She stopped. There really was no need to go on. I knew all the rest. All the hatred she had felt for me all those years was finally explained. So simply explained . . . and understood . . . and forgiven. Against all expectations what I suddenly felt for my grandmother was pity.

I took a deep breath. I said, “Is he still alive?”

“I don't know. I haven't spoken to him or heard of him since.”

“And what . . . was his name?”

She stared at me straightly, nothing in her own persistent hatred being changed a scrap. “I'm not going to tell you. I don't want you seeking him out. He ruined my life. He bedded my seventeen-year-old daughter under my own roof and he was after my money. That's the sort of man your father was. The only favor I'll do you is not to tell you his name. So be satisfied.”

I nodded. I made a vague gesture with one hand and said awkwardly, “I'm sorry.”

Her scowl if anything deepened.

“Now find Amanda for me,” she said. “That solicitor said you would, if I told you. So go away and do it.” She closed her eyes and looked immediately more ill, more vulnerable. “I don't like you,” she said. “So go away.”

 

“Well?” Jeremy said, downstairs.

“She told me.”

“The milkman?”

“Near enough.” I relayed to him the gist of it, and his reaction was the same as mine.

“Poor old woman.”

“I could do with a drink,” I said.

I
n printing color photographs one's aim was usually to produce a result that looked natural, and this was nowhere near as easy as it sounded. Apart from trifles like sharp focus and the best length and brightness of exposure, there was the matter of color itself, which came out differently on each make of film, and on each type of photographic printing paper, and even on paper from two boxes of the same type from the same manufacturer: the reason for this being that the four ultra-thin layers of emulsion laid onto color printing paper varied slightly from batch to batch. In the same way that it was almost impossible to dye two pieces of cloth in different dye baths and produce an identical result, so it was with light-sensitive emulsions.

To even this out and persuade all colors to look natural, one used color filters—pieces of colored glass inserted between the bright light on the enlarger and the negative. Get the mixture of filters right, and in the finished print blue eyes came out blue and cherry lips, cherry.

In my enlarger, as on the majority, the three filters were the same colors as the colors of negatives, yellow, magenta and cyan. Using all three filters together produced
gray, so one used only two at once, and those two, as far as my sort of photographs were concerned, were always yellow and magenta. Used in delicate balance they could produce skin colors that were neither too yellow nor too pink for human faces, and it was to a natural looking skin color that one normally geared one's prints.

However, if one put a square of magenta-colored glass on a square of yellow-colored glass and shone a light through both together, one saw the result as red.

Shine a light through yellow and cyan, and you got green. And through magenta and cyan . . . a pure royal blue.

I had been confused when Charlie had first shown me, because mixing colored light produced dramatically different results from mixing colored paints. Even the primary colors were different. Forget paint, Charlie had said. This is light. You can't make blue by mixing other colored paints, but you can with light.

“Cyan?” I'd said. “Like cyanide?”

“Cyanide turns you blue,” he said. “Cyan is a Greek word for blue.
Kyanos
. Don't forget. Cyan is greeny blue, and not surprisingly you get it by mixing blue light with green.”

“You do?” I'd said doubtfully, and he had shown me the six colors of light, and mixed them for me before my eyes until I got their relationship fixed in my head forever, until they were as basic in my brain as the shape of letters.

In the beginning were red, green, and blue. I went into my darkroom on that fateful Sunday morning and adjusted the filters in the head of the enlarger so that the light which shone through the negatives would be that unheard-of combination for normal printing: full cyan and full magenta filtration, producing a deep clear blue.

I was going to print George's blank color negatives onto black-and-white paper, which would certainly rid me of the blue of the oblongs: but all I might get instead were gray oblongs.

Black-and-white printing paper was sensitive only to blue light (which was why one could print in black and white in red safe-light). I thought that if I printed the blank-looking negatives through heavy pure blue filtration I might get a greater contrast between the yellow dye image on the negative and the orange mask covering it. Make the image, in fact, emerge from its surroundings.

I had a feeling that whatever was hidden by the mask would not itself be sharply black and white anyway . . . because if it had been it would have been visible through and in spite of the blue. What I was looking for would in itself be some sort of gray.

I set out the trays of developer and stop bath and fixer, and put all of the first thirty-six unblotched negatives into a contact-printing frame. In this way the negative was held directly against the printing paper when the light was passed through it, so that the print, when finished, was exactly the same size as the negative. The frame merely held all the negatives conveniently so that all thirty-six could be printed at once onto one eight-by-ten-inch sheet of paper.

Getting the exposure time right was the biggest difficulty, chiefly because the heavy blue filtration meant that the light getting to the negatives was far dimmer than I was used to. I wasted about six shots in tests, getting useless results from gray to black, all the little oblongs still stubbornly looking as if there was nothing on them to see, whatever I did.

Finally in irritation I cut down the exposure time to far below what it was reasonable to think right, and came up with a print that was almost entirely white. I stood in the dim red light watching the white sheet lie in the developer with practically nothing happening except that the frame numbers of the negatives very palely appeared, followed by faint lines showing where the edges of the negatives had been.

Sighing with frustration I left it in the developer until
nothing else emerged, and then feeling depressed dipped it in the stop bath and then fixed it and washed it, and switched on the bright lights.

Five of the oblongs were not entirely white. Five of the little oblongs, scattered at random through the thirty-six, bore very pale gray geometric shapes.

I had found them.

I could feel myself smiling with ridiculous joy. George had left a puzzle, and I had almost solved it. If I was going to take his place, it was right that I should.

If I . . . My God, I thought. Where did thoughts come from? I had no intention of taking his place. No conscious intention. That thought had come straight from the subconscious, unbidden, unwanted.

I shivered slightly and felt vaguely alarmed, and without any smile at all wrote down the frame numbers of the five gray-patterned prints. Then I wandered around the house for a while doing mindless jobs like tidying the bedroom and shaking out the beanbags and stacking a few things in the dishwasher. Made a cup of coffee and sat down in the kitchen to drink it. Considered walking down to the village to fetch a Sunday paper, and instead went compulsively back to the darkroom.

It made all the difference knowing which negatives to look at, and roughly what to look for.

I took the first one numerically, which happened to be number seven, and enlarged it to the full size of the ten-by-eight-inch paper. A couple more bad guesses at exposure times left me with unclear dark gray prints, but in the end I came up with one which developed into mid-gray on white; I took it out of the developer as soon as it had reached its peak of contrast, and stopped it and fixed it and washed it, and carried it out to the daylight in the kitchen.

Although the print was still wet, one could see exactly what it was. One could read it without difficulty. A
typewritten letter starting, “Dear Mr. Morton” and ending “Yours sincerely, George Millace.”

A letter typed onto white paper with an old grayish ribbon, so that the typing itself looked pale gray. Pale gray, but distinct.

The letter said:

 

Dear Mr. Morton,

I am sure you will be interested in the enclosed two photographs. As you will see, the first one is a picture of your horse Amber Globe running poorly in your colors in the two-thirty race at Southwell on Monday, May 12th.

As you will also see, the second picture is of your horse Amber Globe winning the four o'clock race at Fontwell on Wednesday, August 27th.

If you look closely at the photographs you will see that they are not of the same horse. Alike but not identical.

I am sure that the Jockey Club would be interested in this difference. I will ring you shortly, however, with an alternative suggestion.

Yours sincerely,
George Millace

 

I read it through about six times, not because I didn't take it in the first time, but simply as an interval for assimilation and thought.

There were some practical observations to be made, which were that the letter bore no heading and no date and no handwritten signature. There was an assumption to be drawn that the other four pale gray geometric patterns would also turn out to be letters; and that what I had found was George's idiosyncratic filing system.

Beyond those flat thoughts lay a sort of chaos: a feeling of looking into a pit. If I enlarged and read the other letters, I could find that I knew things which would make
“waiting to see what happens” impossible. I might feel, as I did in the case of the gray-smudge lovers, that doing nothing was weak and wrong. If I learned all George's secrets, I would have to accept the moral burden of deciding what to do about them . . . and of doing it.

To postpone the decision I went upstairs to the sitting room and looked through the form books to find out in which year Amber Globe had won at Fontwell on August 12th; it had been four years previously.

I looked up Amber Globe's career from start to finish, and what it amounted to on average was three or four poorer showings followed by an easy win at high odds, this pattern being repeated twice a season for four years. Amber Globe's last win had been the one on August 12th, and from then on he had run in no more races at all.

A supplementary search showed that the trainer of Amber Globe did not appear in the list of trainers for any subsequent years, and had probably gone out of business. There was no way of checking from those particular books whether “Dear Mr. Morton” had subsequently owned or run any more horses, although such facts would be stored in central official racing records.

Dear Mr. Morton and his trainer had been running two horses under the name of Amber Globe, switching in the good one for the big gambles, letting the poor one lengthen the odds. I wondered if George had noticed the pattern and gone deliberately to take his photographs; or whether he had taken the photographs merely in the course of work, and then had noticed the difference in the horses. There was no way of knowing or even guessing, as I hadn't found the two photographs in question.

I looked out of the window at the Downs for a while, and wandered around a bit fingering things and doing nothing much, waiting for the arrival of a comfortable certainty that knowledge did not involve responsibility. I waited in vain. I knew that it did. The knowledge was
downstairs, and I would have to acquire it. I had come too far to want to stop.

Unsettled, fearful, but with a feeling of inevitability, I went down to the darkroom and printed the other four negatives one by one, and read the resulting letters in the kitchen. With all five in the drier I sat for ages staring into space, thinking disjointed thoughts.

George had been busy. The sly malice of George's mind spoke out as clearly as if I could hear his voice. George's ominous letters must have induced fear and despondency in colossal proportions.

The second of them said:

 

Dear Bonnington Ford,

I am sure you will be interested in the enclosed series of photographs, which, as you will see, are a record of you entertaining in your training stables on Sunday afternoons a person who has been “warned off.” I don't suppose I need to remind you that the racing authorities would object strongly to this continuous association, even to the extent of reviewing your license to train.

I could of course send copies of these photographs to the Jockey Club. I will ring you shortly, however, with an alternative suggestion.

Yours sincerely,
George Millace

 

Bonnington Ford was a third-rate trainer who by general consensus was as honest and trustworthy as a pickpocket at Aintree, and he trained in a hollow in the Downs at a spot where any passing motorist could glance down into his yard. It would have been no trouble at all for George Millace, if he had wanted to, to sit in his car at that spot and take telephoto pictures at his leisure.

Again I hadn't found the photographs in question, so there was nothing I could do about that particular letter,
even if I had wanted to. George hadn't even mentioned the name of the disqualified person. I was let off any worrying choice.

The last three letters were a different matter, one in which the dilemma sharply raised its head: where did duty lie, and how much could one opt out.

Of these three letters the first said:

 

Dear Elgin Yaxley,

I am sure you will be interested in the enclosed photograph. As you will see, it clearly contradicts a statement you recently made on oath at a certain trial.

I am sure that the Jockey Club would be interested to see it, and also the police, the judge, and the insurance company. I could send all of them copies simultaneously.

I will ring you shortly, however, with an alternative suggestion.

Yours sincerely,
George Millace

 

The one next to it on the film roll would have driven the nails right in. It said:

 

Dear Elgin Yaxley,

I am happily able to tell you that since I wrote to you yesterday there have been further developments.

Yesterday I also visited the farmer upon whose farm you boarded your unfortunate steeplechasers, and I showed him in confidence a copy of the photograph, which I sent to you. I suggested that there might be a full further enquiry, during which his own share in the tragedy might be investigated.

He felt able to respond to my promise of silence with the pleasing information that your five good horses were not after all dead. The five horses which died had been bought especially and cheaply by him (your farmer friend) from a local auction, and it was these which were shot by Terence O'Tree at the appointed time and place. Terence O'Tree was not told of the substitution.

Your farmer friend also confirmed that when the veterinary surgeon had given your good horses their anti-tetanus jabs and had left after seeing them in good health, you yourself arrived at the farm in a horsebox to supervise their removal.

Your friend understood you would be shipping them out to the Far East, where you already had a buyer.

I enclose a photograph of his signed statement to this effect.