The meeting, appointment — whatever — she was still at odds with herself over its presumption, thrusting her life upon a stranger — was for the afternoon. Fiveish, he had suggested. She decided she would stay the night in London at a hotel, inventing some excuse for missing the evening event at the conference.
ON the train she was inwardly shaking her head over herself; what was she about. She had some rhetorical suspicions. Is there prurience somewhere sneaking hidden in the woman making this visit. Oh why wound herself with such an accusation. She had emphasised it over the phone: nothing personal. Intimacies left understood; those had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her man when he entered her and she took him. Nothing personal. Certainly the photographer accepted that, or he would not have agreed to the meeting.
When the taxi from Waterloo delivered her to the address — she did not think it would have been this, a majestic Victorian house advanced to the present with extensions of a sun-room, an adjoining roof-terraced flat, and as she took the path to the main portico, the glimpse past the house walls of a green sweep of garden and trees. The word ‘Crescent’ on her piece of paper had meant to her a semi-circle of dreary London terrace houses sharing identical façades and joined in a single common unit. This house turned its back on the street and apparently shared nothing but access to a large round park exclusive to itself and its circle of neighbours. Could a photographer afford such a place; he must be famous — but what would she know about the economics of the publicity professions. A tile inset on the entry wall flourished the names:
HAYFORD LEIDEN
CHARLES DEVENMORE
She heard his footsteps coming to her before the door opened.
There had been no photograph of him to go by: thick white hair and thick black eyebrows, bold as in a Japanese print. A man who had aged well smiling on what were still his own teeth. The face was smoothly dull-tanned (acquired under a sun-lamp in a male beauty salon no doubt). But no, the back of the hand that came out to greet hers was darker. He wasn’t tinted by African bloodline, which she would always recognise, but by some other, Oriental. Still handsome as he once must have been beautiful.
The voice was careless and pleasant, as if to convey, I am ready for you, I know who you are, we know who we are, vis-à-vis one another.
As they sat in Corbusier-design chairs regarded by masks from some Eastern culture and West African ones she knew familiarly, there was small talk about what she was doing in England — holiday assumed.
She was at a conference. Her line (his phrase)? Historian. Ah. That seemed to allow this visit an acceptable context for both these strangers, let them off the hook of whatever linked them. Some aspect of her professional inclination. That would do. The dates, places, of an individual life which go to make up what Tolstoy defined as the collective life of the aggregate of human beings. — I met Marc at a conference, used to do some lined-up group photography in those days, as well as what I really wanted — don’t remember what that particular talkshop was all about.—
— You wouldn’t have an old diary with the title of the conference? He must have mentioned it but there’s no note among his papers, and I didn’t pay attention…—
A kindly smile quickly became a dismissive turn-down of the lips, keeping his distance. — My god, no, there were so many I could say bye-bye to and see the world instead.—
She understood he was telling her, if she somehow didn’t know, that he was a news photographer of repute who had himself, far and wide, contributed images to history.
— Marc stayed on a while after the conference. In this country. Can you tell me where he lived? In London. I’d like to see the house, or the street.—
For a moment he was arranging his reply. — I think some small hotel in Kensington.—
He gauged her.
— My flat was in Notting Hill. He moved in. Some months.—
— What was he doing. Work, I mean. With a firm of architects. Or…? He was someone who was always caught up in his projects. — Her hands opened slowly on the space of his death.
— Oh he was recovering from that mess in his life, we had some good times, he got on famously with my crowd then — all gone our particular ways now. USA, Australia, Spain — South Africa. — This last reference apparently reminded him that this one of the crowd, he had just been told, was dead. — Oh good times, there was the project we did together with an artist friend of mine — I think it might even be around still today, second-hand in some museum somewhere — it was a kind of demountable ‘environment’—very ahead of our generation — that’s what we called it, he did the architectural shell, the artist did some sort of objets trouvés interior stuff, I did the photographs, it was supposed to represent the essential mishmash of our style of living at the time. I think some institute in Manchester — imagine, of all places — commissioned it and it was exhibited here in London, too. Hardly made waves, but we were wild about it together.—
— I thought he took a special refresher course at an architectural institute for a few weeks. Oxford.—
— Not that I know of. He was here in London. Maybe it was something… Yes, there was the idea we’d also do a book together, I’d photograph buildings and he’d write the text on their — what’d he call it — architectural relation to the politics of their period. I even had a publisher friend who pretended to be interested… The bits of text, maybe even the designs for the ‘environment’ thing must have lain around in that little flat until I cleared an accumulation of all sorts of stuff when I moved to one of the others I lived in before — here. Finally. He didn’t bring anything like that back with him?—
— Not among the papers I’ve found. It would have been interesting as part of his vision as an architect I’m hoping to put together; there’re all the conventional plans that he designed in his practice. I have those.—
Her host became hostly, or backed away from the rising past he had summoned. — Wouldn’t you like a drink? Or tea, coffee? Whisky? Vodka?—
— Thank you. If you are having one — vodka, please, with tonic.—
An antique butler’s tray table was crowded with liquor bottles and glasses. He left her to fetch ice and tonic water; in the brief absence she could take the chance to look round at what the room held — but they could not be relevant, these Lucian Freud and Bacon nudes, these photographs of the host and another man (Charles Devenmore?) enlaced on a beach, or each individually, one behind his camera in a ruined city, the other on a stage, Shakespearean open-mouthed with rage (the lover evidently an actor) — these could not have been the objects her man had lived this other life among; in that small shared flat, too long ago.
He prepared the drinks and when he had given her hers lifted his own in the social ease therefore supposed between them — a moment in which he might have been going to toast — the past: her man, his man — quickly dismissed so that she might not notice. But she had; the moment lay between them to be examined. He approached it in a generalised way, side-lining what she had said on the telephone. Nothing personal. Only dates, places, professional activities in those months in the shared flat, to bring her man back, piece him together, his life that must continue to exist for her survival.
— It’s always a problem to get people — other people — to understand the kind of commune of gays. What someone from outside can find in it that I don’t think — I know — doesn’t function among the other groups. Something to do with a minority, the healing to be found with us — I don’t mean some solemn holy-male thing…—