A Division of the Light (29 page)

“That's fascinating,” Wells said admiringly. “It's not just the space, you see. It's alignment and illumination. Whatever religion you follow, light is always a sign for the eternal, for the numinous.”

Aware now that he had been too enthusiastic, he shrugged in self-deprecation.

“I talk too much, given the chance. I'm sorry if you're bored.”

“I'm not bored,” Alice said, but smiled to end the conversation. “I have to go,” she said.

“Of course. You knew Pharaoh too, did you?”

“Yes, I knew him.”

“And did he take your portrait? Is it on these walls? Will I recognize you?”

“Oh, I don't think you should look for me here,” Alice said.

As Wells nodded in an attempt to demonstrate that he was an understanding listener, she turned away.

Like lovers parting after an argument, they moved off in opposite directions. Other conversations, other approaches grew and flourished in the widening gap between them.

A waiter appeared with a tray. Alice put her empty glass on it but did not pick up a replacement.

In the next section of the gallery she came across a print of the skulls in the crypt. It had been taken at an angle that made them resemble smooth and uniform boulders, steeply raked like shingle after a violent tide. Only the empty eye sockets showed that these were human remains, and their cumulative and remorseless fate was emphasized by the inked numbers on the craniums. Gregory had been right.

A woman spoke close to her ear.

“They're going to bury them all.”

Alice recognized the voice, but did not respond.

“The decision was made last week. They're going to be boxed up together and buried in consecrated ground. There will be a short service.”

She turned. Cassie was standing much nearer than she expected. Their faces were uncomfortably close together, but neither woman stepped back or averted her eyes or blinked.

“I didn't know if you'd come,” Cassie said.

“I didn't think I'd be asked.”

“It wouldn't have been right to exclude you.”

“But you didn't expect me?”

“I didn't say that. I thought you might see this as an opportunity to draw a line.”

“I'm going to keep out of your way from now on, if that's what you're asking. Your father and I have already gone our separate ways. But there again, he's gone his separate way from everyone. Even from you.”

Cassie glanced to one side and appeared to soften.

Alice decided that perhaps she had been too abrupt. After all,
any stranger who looked at the two of them would be aware who was better equipped to live a full life. Alice thought that it must be obvious to every woman in the room that Cassie had not done herself justice, and that her hairstyle and dress and makeup were unflattering. Men would probably not notice such detail, but simply judge that Gregory's daughter looked too much in control to be approachable. Perhaps they would even conclude that she was indifferent to sexual intimacy. But women would speculate that there was a need in Cassie that had been denied for so long that it was no longer capable of expressing itself.

“Have you heard from him?” Alice asked. “Recently, I mean?”

“Not since the video. Have you?”

“I've heard nothing. He must want to keep silent. Maybe because he realizes now that we're all just part of a pattern.”

“What pattern?”

A distant feeling of responsibility sang within Alice, like a slow sequence of musical notes that Cassie would never be able to hear.

“I used to think that I was the focus of it all,” she admitted. “Until Sampson's Bratfull everything seemed to have been directed toward
me
, to my future, to my understanding. But I'm not the focus at all. I'm just an agent. An enabler.”

She stopped when she saw that Cassie's expression had remained neutral.

“You don't know what I'm talking about,” Alice said.

“Should I?”

“It doesn't matter. Just forget I said it.” Anxious to change the subject, Alice looked again at the rake of skulls. “I helped at that shoot,” she said.

Cassie had suspected as much but had never asked, and Gregory had never volunteered to tell her.

“He was wrong to involve you,” she said. “Dad never used his models as assistants before he met you. A lot of the decisions he made in those last few months were mistakes.”

“I'm ahead of you. You're going to tell me that I was the worst of those mistakes.”

“Weren't you?”

“No, I was good for him.” Alice leaned closer to Cassie and lowered her voice. “I wasn't like the other women who modeled for your father and then slept with him. I was out of the ordinary. I was special. He saw things in me that other people can't. That will always be true.”

“I admit this, Alice. I never thought a woman would be able to
lead
him. But you did. You're probably the kind of person who feels proud of that. Who knows what he thinks of you now? I don't know what Dad thinks about the past. I wonder if he thinks about it at all.”

“Maybe he's happy.”

“If you can say that a person is happy at the feet of someone he used to think was either disturbed or a fraud.”

“I remember that photograph. Did you select it for this?”

“Along here.”

They threaded their way through the crowded gallery. Twice Cassie had to stop briefly and promise other guests that she would return to talk to them soon. On the second of these pauses Alice looked to one side and recognized, high on the wall, the image of a naked back spread as if in crucifixion, the deltoid muscles emphasized by the angle and intensity of light, the elegant neck ascending to a dark screen of elegantly styled hair.

“I've marked it not for sale,” Cassie murmured. “I thought you
would prefer not to be part of a market. You and I know that it's you. No one else does. That was the day he borrowed my necklace.”

“He took it away.”

“I told him it wouldn't work.”

“I knew that the necklace belonged to you. I felt bad about wearing it.”

“Didn't you know that I inherited it? It was my mother's. His wife's. Ruth's. That's why it's important to me.”

Alice felt the muscles of her belly become tight. “I didn't know. He didn't tell me.”

“No, I can see that he wouldn't. For Dad, the image was all that mattered.”

“Like this one? He says on that video that you made all the choices for the exhibition. Is that right? Did you choose this?”

Cassie nodded.

“I look so muscular. It's the way that the light fell. Look at those shoulders.”

“That's why I chose it. They seem as though they could support wings.”

“Like an angel?”

“No, I don't think he ever saw you as an angel.”

Cassie had carefully studied each of Alice's picture files, had perused each image as if it held within it a code that would explain why her father had become so obsessed. Naked, Alice Fell was no great beauty, but her unembarrassed displays flaunted a physical confidence that Cassie would never have wanted to match. Secretly, however, she had found that she grudgingly admired that confidence and was perhaps even in awe of it.

“And the other shots of me that are stored in his library,”
Alice asked, “the ones taken in a hotel room with dust covers?”

“I've kept his promise to you. That's why there are none on display here. Someday you'll change your mind and want to have them exhibited.”

“I don't think so.”

And Alice thought of the hours that she had spent looking at the pictures taken in that shrouded, paint-spattered room. It was the first time she had studied herself as a lengthy display of static images, and as her reactions had swung from uncertainty to fascination she had begun to have a clearer insight into what men found so exciting and so humbling about the nude female body.

She could not know what her reactions would have been if she had found an identifiable image of her naked self displayed on these walls. For the near future she would continue to insist that those photographs not be shown, and yet a part of her imagination relished the impact they would have. Gregory had been right about that, too. Alice had always thought of herself as special, but she had never assumed that a part of that singular nature could be expressed in explicit terms. And if Gregory had been able to find and exploit that pictorially, then it must also be possible that others could detect further aspects of her uniqueness and wish to express them in different ways.

Cassie and Alice walked further along the gallery to where an image of Little Maria was hung. They had to wait silently for a short while until other guests moved out of the way and they could see it clearly.

The photograph was slightly different from the one that Alice had seen when she had first visited Gregory's studio, but must have been taken within a few seconds of it. Little Maria's pinched,
undernourished face displayed a kind of stunned suspicion. There was no sense of holiness, of being chosen, or of revelation. Instead she appeared to be trapped.

“This has been sold,” Cassie said. “I didn't expect that. One of her future disciples, maybe.”

Alice read the descriptive card:
Girl Who Sees Visions
.

“People must ask,” she said.

“They do,” Cassie answered, “and if they do, I tell them that's where Dad is living. But I don't talk about all those other misguided dreamers who camp out there as well.”

“Do you want him back?”

Cassie shrugged. “Would he listen to me, or to you? No. That part of his life is all over. Whatever we think and whatever we do, we have no influence with him now.”

“I don't want influence, Cassie. Not any more.”

“That's a difference between us. I do.”

Little Maria's eyes were as impenetrable as glass. Just by looking at her, Alice began to feel the chill of renunciation.

“It may be all over,” Alice said, “but in the end, you got what was due to you.”

“His business? That wasn't my due. We talked about it, but I didn't think it would happen. I wasn't even sure that I wanted to take over the Gregory Pharaoh company. But I carry it on, and fulfill his contracts, and I'm good at what I do. Someone had to pick up the pieces and it had to be me. I can't just walk away from responsibility.”

Alice knew what Cassie was thinking—that unlike her, Alice could easily walk away. That she had a history of walking away. But Cassie could have no idea of how difficult that was, and how each time it tore at her heart.

“A lot of people in this room would say that you got what you deserve,” she said.

“Maybe,” Cassie answered. “But what have you got? Nothing?”

“I've got rights over a few photographs. That's all. I deserve more. I
always
deserve more.”

“You don't have any rights, Alice. You don't even have a veto.”

“He promised.”

“That means nothing. None of Dad's promises meant anything. He could never keep them. Oh, he wanted to—he made them in good faith. But if there was ever a good reason to break a promise, then he would break it. Surely you could see that?”

Alice did not answer. Cassie shook her head.

“That's why I never let him take my photograph. I would never know what he would do with it.”

“Are you saying that he would have released those hotel studies, no matter what I felt?”

“Of course he would. Maybe not for a while, but eventually ambition would overcome everything else. In a way, I agree with him. They're part of a portfolio that is too good to be hidden away for years in a digital file. They have to be published sometime. And if you were honest with yourself, you'd want them to be published, too. Otherwise you wouldn't have posed, would you?”

“Are we talking years?”

“I'm not sure. I need to think about it.”

“You'll consult me?”

Cassie considered for a few seconds. “All right,” she said. “When I decide, I'll ask your opinion. But that doesn't mean that I'll take it.”

Alice imagined gallery walls hung with life-size images of her body. She saw herself as sculpted, immediate, yet untouchable.
The vision brought a flush to the skin across the top of her ribcage. She hoped it was not visible.

“Before you leave,” Cassie said, “there's another display I want you to look at—over there, on that far wall. None of these are available for sale. I couldn't bear it.”

She led Alice to the triptych of her mother.

Ruth had been seriously ill in the first photograph and was dramatically worse in the second. In the third she was shrunken, comatose, on the point of death itself. To look at them made Alice feel like a blundering intruder, as if she were a stranger who had opened the door onto a tragedy she could not fully understand. This was the woman who had dominated Gregory's life, and his daughter's too, and yet Alice knew nothing about her. Ruth had always been a blank, a cipher, and Alice had always had scant interest in her. Now she had been given a face and a fate and suffering. Alice became slightly dizzy with the knowledge, and with the unsettling realization that Gregory could take photographs of his wife as she was dying.

“I didn't want to see these,” she told Cassie. “You shouldn't even have them on display.”

“I had to. Dad would have wanted it.” Cassie paused for a moment before she went on. “Now you can see what he was willing to do.”

Alice looked away.

Cassie leaned closer to her. “My mother was the only woman he ever truly loved,” she said quietly. “I want you to know that. Everyone else was a substitute. Even you.”

“You know nothing about what we felt for each other,” Alice answered.

Cassie smiled, distant, aloof and superior. “I know enough. You'd
be surprised how much I know. And now I think you've seen everything here that you would have wanted to see.”