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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Salt Modern Stories
- Sprache: Englisch
With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century. In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people – haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators. Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect. Christopher Burns' work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition if Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria. This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.
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Seitenzahl: 323
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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For Paul, and in memory of Judy, June, and Iain
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Contents
Mrs Pulaska
No one knew where she came from, or why she chose refuge among us. Perhaps she yearned for the tiny villages and small farms of her childhood, now denied to her forever by the forces of history; perhaps she merely sought escape.
For people such as us she was an emissary from an unknown world, a bizarre and wholly self-absorbed stranger with an impenetrable accent. The very planes and set of her face were different to the ones we were used to. She was angular, with bony features and long black hair like a witch’s. For my school friends and me she was a figure of both fear and scorn. We imagined she might be German, and for us all Germans were still enemies.
But her name was Mrs Pulaska, and she was Polish. Of Mr Pulaski, or of a wedding ring, there was no sign. For the time she was with us she lived in a narrow back room at the back of the butcher’s shop in the village. Because she always looked cold and undernourished the shopkeepers gave her scraps of food, despite rationing. She wore long-sleeved black clothes even in summer, always with gloves. 2In winter she wore woollen mittens, boots, and an outsize greatcoat scavenged from an unidentified army.
When she began to visit our farm I felt both threatened and guilty. I decided that there had been no cause for me to think or say such terrible things about Mrs Pulaska, for I feared that in some obscure way she had come to take revenge.
Instead she ignored me. She spent most of the time in the disused stone barn my father rented to her for a few shillings a week. When better times came, he often said, he would buy one of those new prefabricated buildings, one that would cost little, could be built quickly, and be a lot easier to maintain.
Although Mrs Pulaska had told my father that she wanted to work in the barn I couldn’t imagine what kind of work she could do in the cavernous and gloomy interior. But as soon as an agreement was reached she seemed to feel that the building was hers, and she painted the outer door a vivid, fiery crimson.
So every morning Mrs Pulaska would walk down the muddy track to our farm, unlock the crimson door and close it behind her. Often, too, I would see her scouring the fields, mysteriously examining stones or splashing calf-deep in water while she prodded the stream bed with a long stick. Usually she brought back a prize from these foraging missions, and returned cradling a piece of quartz or a length of barbed wire as though they were precious objects. From within the barn came a series of noises that only helped deepen the mystery – the rough scrape of heavy objects dragged across the floor, the muffled bangs of ladders or planking, and a sharply insistent noise, like a 3thrush’s warning call, as if she were a goldsmith beating metal with a tiny hammer.
At our evening meal I asked my father what Mrs Pulaska was building. He told me that she was not a builder but an artist. He spoke the word artist as if it were both a puzzle and an affront, and licked his fingers free of chicken fat.
‘An artist?’ I asked. For me, an artist was someone who drew the pictures in the Dandyor the Beano.
‘If that’s what she wants to call herself,’ my mother said. ‘Just let her.’
‘She’s no more of an artist than I am,’ my father told me. ‘She’s just a crazy Polish woman, that’s all.’
Finished with his part of the bird, he threw the bones into the fire.
‘But she’s harmless,’ my mother said.’ Just let her do what she wants to do. Why worry about what she calls herself?’
My father grunted. He could tolerate only a little disagreement, and if ever my mother persisted he would fly into a rage. I had often seen her abandon an argument because she hated his anger; usually I wished that she would stand up to him. The chicken bones, rich with fat, blazed and cracked.
Mrs Pulaska ignored me for months. In bright sunshine or ceaseless rain she always had the same intent, tight, preoccupied expression, as if the only things that mattered were held captive within her own imagination.
One day, however, she caught me spying on her.
My parents had agreed that we would leave her alone and not enter the barn. This made no difference to my 4father. He had no use for the building and no interest in whatever Mrs Pulaska was doing. He only knew that it must be both temporary and irrelevant. But I was consumed with curiosity.
I had looked at some books in the small public library – books by artists. Inside I found rich, luxurious images; lingering studies of disported flesh, sumptuous textures of skin, breasts, shadow, and hair. Quite suddenly I associated Mrs Pulaska with a kind of sensual comfort and with nudity. It did not matter that I found her unattractive, bony, spare; without warning she had become unnervingly physical. I realised that her body must possess its own secret history about which I knew nothing.
There was a narrow gap in the door where the planking had shrunk. Furtive and eager, I pressed my eye against it.
I don’t know what I expected to see, but in the event I saw nothing. A hessian sack had been nailed over the inside of the door, blocking even a partial view.
As I stood back, crestfallen, Mrs Pulaska bore down on me across the farmyard, her black hair trailing behind her like a sign of wickedness. Chickens scattered across the muddy cobblestones.
I froze with guilt. She put one gloved hand on my shoulder – not hard, but my imagination turned it into a fierce grip. I flinched because I thought she was about to hit me, but instead she merely stared, as though I were someone that she had never noticed before. Then she let go and her mouth opened in a sad lopsided smile. There was blood on her teeth,
She said something I did not understand. Her breath smelled of dandelions and earth.
5‘What?’ I asked, my voice shaking.
She pointed to the barn and spoke again, but her speech was hobbled and I could only pick out what I thought was the word wreck. I nodded rapidly as if I understood, took a few steps to one side, and then turned on my heel and ran away.
Now Mrs Pulaska began returning with other kinds of booty – shards of tile or the ribs and horns from a dead sheep. She began to pester my mother for unwanted cutlery, a smashed plate, or broken glass. Or she would come up the lane pushing a borrowed wheelbarrow containing a bag of cement and a tin of house paint. When my father’s friends arrived to slaughter our pig she watched in dismay and then scurried away rather than hear the animal killed. When it began to squeal in terror she was a long way away, a scarecrow in a distant field, but I could see that she covered her ears. Afterwards, however, she asked to be given the bones and the skull.
Winter came early that year. Sleet drove from the skies for days on end and the lanes lay beneath water. Inside the farmhouse the fire burned constantly, even though my father grumbled that the chimney should have been swept long before the weather had turned.
My mother took pity on Mrs Pulaska. One morning she wanted to invite her to eat with us, but my father objected.
The villagers had put an end to their charity, he told her; Mrs Pulaska might be poor, but she could afford to feed herself. Instead of that she squandered her money on 6ridiculous things, builders’ things. If she no longer had free food then perhaps she would see sense.
‘But she’s ill,’ my mother objected. ‘Anyone can see that. All you have to do is look at her.’
‘So let her feed herself and then go to a doctor,’ my father answered.
‘Don’t be heartless,’ my mother pleaded. ‘The poor woman probably doesn’t know what to do. Would you know what to do if you fell ill in Poland and were on your own?’
But my father was stubborn and bitter. ‘It’s not our fault that she’s here. We’re not to blame for what’s gone on in Europe. It’s time she moved on. And that’s what she has to do. I told her she could only have the barn temporarily.’
My mother asked what he meant.
There was an envelope on the table where my father did his paperwork. He tipped out the contents – several brochures with plans of prefabricated buildings.
‘That’s what we want,’ he told her. ‘We’ve got to move with the times.’
‘But Mrs Pulaska won’t understand this,’ my mother protested, ‘She probably didn’t even know what temporarily meant. And she’s still working in there.’
Furious at having his judgement questioned, my father strode to the front door and opened it.
‘I don’t care if she’s working. I don’t care what she’s doing. Because whatever it is, she’ll have to stop. And I’ll make sure she knows exactly what temporarily means.’
I sat looking at the fire because I did not want to see my mother’s face as she paced the floor.
7After a few minutes she went to the door. I followed, still not daring to look at her expression.
Pools of water had collected in the farmyard. My father, his face rigid with shock, was backing away from Mrs Pulaska, who was on her knees in front of him. Her black dress was spattered with mud and animal dirt and her hands were held high in supplication. It was the first time I had seen her bare hands. They were covered in white paint.
As we watched, my father took several more steps backwards. Mrs Pulaska pitched forward and sprawled across the wet cobblestones like someone no longer able to walk. Suddenly she began to cough harshly and repetitively. From her lips came a trickle of blood, bright as the paint on the barn door.
My mother ran across to the sprawled body. ‘She needs an ambulance.’ She told my father grimly; ‘she heeds one now.’
He walked to our telephone as though under protest.
We carried Mrs Pulaska into the house and sat her in a chair in the warmest part of the room. I put another log on the fire while my mother wrapped her in a blanket. Mrs Pulaska had quietened now. She gazed ahead unseeingly, but her face twitched when the log bark cracked as the flames took it. My mother wiped the blood from her chin but as soon as she had done so a little more trickled out of her mouth.
Mrs Pulaska’s hands stuck out from under the blanket. The sleeve of her dress had been pushed back and I saw that something had been tattooed on the inside of her wrist. It was a series of numbers that made no sense to me but that stood out in vivid purple against the bloodless skin. 8My mother reached forward and pulled the blanket across as if she were covering something shameful. As she did we began to hear a muffled roaring noise. The soot in the chimney had caught fire.
My father looked outside. The wind had dropped and smoke covered the farmyard in a greasy swirling cloud,
We hardly spoke until the ambulance arrived. Mrs Pulaska did nothing as she was carried into it, but merely stared at a horizon that was out of sight of the rest of us.
We followed my father across the farmyard and paused before the red door.
‘She’ll not need this anymore,’ he said in the voice of a man finally proved right. He pushed the door open.
In the middle of the barn was a trestle table littered with implements – chisels, paintbrushes, metal files, a heavy hammer. Half-opened bags of plaster and tins of paint were scattered around the table legs. But it was the walls that had altered beyond all recognition.
On them were human figures, some of them painted and some built up in relief. All of them were naked. Skeins of barbed wire threaded across and through their bodies, and there was a subdued, ghostly glitter where the light caught tiny reflective fragments fixed in the vertical surfaces.
I was horrified and fascinated, and walked slowly round the walls. The more I stared, the more detailed and terrifying the work grew. Here was a face with stones for eyes and teeth of rusted metal. Here were children, their bodies splayed and dissected by hooks and claws. And here were tortured men with hearts of fractured tile, beaten women with skins of shattered glass. Ribs of animals protruded 9from their chests and the skulls of beasts showed beneath their faces. A hundred or more tiny bones had been set in plaster to resemble the shadow of an infant. One figure reached out, its fingernails delicately fashioned from filed portions of horn, but its face was a mere daub of paint in a white circle. These people had no dignity, no hope, and no escape. If ever I had any doubts about their fate, these walls would have told me what it had been.
I came back to the door. I was trembling and the smell of fire was in my nostrils.
‘I don’t understand this,’ my father said.
Glowing flakes of soot drifted around us.
‘It’s a record,’ I said.
He turned to my mother. ‘I told you it would be worthless. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.’
He walked to the table and picked up the hammer.
My mother took him by the arm. I could see the force in her grip.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said.
Nitrate
Old film is perishable and mutable, able to transform itself into liquid or powder or even to ignite spontaneously. The safety film archive is housed in air-conditioned vaults, but nitrate films are stored in refrigerated bunkers beneath water tanks that will empty and flood the racking if fire breaks out.
I have worked for the institute for twenty years and I am known across the world. Film historians, archivists and restorers seek my experience and advice. My name appears on the end credits of more than two dozen documentary compilations and in the acknowledgements of over thirty publications on the birth of cinema. I am a success, but I seldom talk about my work to my wife.
She knows, of course, that I spend my working life salvaging ancient images and writing the occasional scholarly monograph about subjects in which she has scant interest. In the early days, when I restored footage of the 1898 Boat Race and the 1900 Lord Mayor’s Show, she could see the point in what I was doing. Suzie appreciates pageantry, history, ritual; they offset her sense of fiscal prudence. Latterly, however, I have specialised in the work 11of pioneers who shot amateur dramas in their back gardens and developed the film in their kitchens. I have preserved short reels by Cecil Hepworth, R W Paul and other film makers whose identities will always remain unclear to us.
My wife regards such films as flippant and expendable, and she believes that preserving them is a waste of resources. For about two years I have not asked Suzie a serious question about her own work, and she has not asked one about mine. The smoothness of cliché is currency enough for us – several tax clients phoned, or it was a quiet day today, or a comment about driving conditions or the weather or what we each ate for lunch.
Perhaps that awareness of drifting apart also makes us keep our physical distance. Or perhaps it was mere familiarity, and its attendant twin of boredom, that led us into a separation from each other.
Suzie is still an attractive woman: I can see that plainly. On film, expertly lit and on a big screen, her good looks would be even more evident. But I no longer have any physical interest in her and we have not shared the same bed for three years. It is even longer than that since we made love.
Letters and bundles of accounts arrive with Suzie’s name on them. She picks them up from behind the door as I am about to leave. She looks through them and I see a change in her stance when she notices particular envelopes. As the image is important to me so is the written word to Suzie. Every day she gets mail, but I get very little. Only at the archives am I sought after.
Without asking any questions I close the door behind me. I do not know what time I will return. If I am working 12on a particular tricky or interesting section of film, I often stay at my bench until the security officers tell me they must lock up.
Before we married, Suzie and I worked in cities a hundred miles apart and wrote to each other every few days. Although we phoned as often as we could, there was something especially intimate about writing, and in particular handwriting. In those days I said things that must have been over-ardent and hyperbolic and that Suzie insisted were paralleled in the very shaping of my script. Although I did not suspect it at the time, many of those things turned out not to have been true.
She has kept my letters somewhere. I don’t know where; but probably at the bottom of the upright metal cabinet in the room she uses as an office. Certainly her other personal files are locked away in there. I do not have access to her records, but I once stole a look at her keyring and made a note of the lock number. At the archive there are several cabinets from the same manufacturer. It was not difficult for me to obtain a key with an identical number to Suzie’s.
And her letters to me?
Why, I burned them years ago.
When I reach the archives I check the morning’s messages, answer some queries, and then visit the nitrate vaults. A particular stack of cans, recovered from the attic of an Edwardian house that was demolished two years ago, has interested me since it was donated to the institute. I have already restored several reels from the cans.
To modern sensibilities these recovered works are extremely naïve. There is no sense of the structure or 13ambition of Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903, and no awareness of the tracking camera that Nonguet and Hatot introduced into post-Meliès productions. Instead the films only last a few minutes, and almost inevitably the camera is fixed in position five feet from the ground and twenty feet from the subject. There are no close-ups, no pans, and no sense of montage; such arts were all being developed elsewhere.
Perhaps even more notably the narratives belong to a vanished age. Tales of loyal dogs, thieving vagabonds and ludicrous villains, and resourceful infants were the unquestioned storylines of popular newspapers and music hall sketches of the time. But the historical value and strange poignancy of the footage, with the performers long dead and the gardens vanished, become more potent with each passing year.
That evening Suzie asks what kind of film I’m working on.
I am taken aback and instantly suspicious. Why such a question now, after all this time?
When I demur she asks if I’m not pleased by her interest.
Her direct stare is a form of challenge. She has recently had her hair tinted so that when she turns I can see shining gradations of blonde, as if she has been professionally backlit.
I reply that I’m not quite sure what kind of film it is, because the can has not been labelled and there’s nothing on the feed. I suggest it could be a sporting event or the record of a celebration or a festival, rather like the material that Mitchell and Kenyon filmed in the early 1900s. But I concede that the likelihood is that it will be a pleasant 14little drama from the days when seeing images move was novelty enough for any audience.
I do not tell Suzie the truth. I have already taken a magnifying glass to several frames and found a man spying on a woman standing in an Edwardian bathing costume outside a beach hut. A large towel is spread on the ground. The film is evidently a piece of titillation for gentlemen’s clubs, a kind of WhatTheButlerSawwhich to modern tastes will seem either relatively or entirely innocuous, but still not the sort of find that my wife will consider viewing, let along salvaging.
‘Why don’t you know?’ she asks. ‘I mean, why don’t you just project it and see?’
I have been through this before. I’m sure she has not forgotten. More likely she is deliberately making conversation. I do not know why.
‘Because the heat from a projector bulb can make nitrate film burst into flames,’ I tell her. ‘The stock is dangerous; a kind of cousin to nitroglycerine. That’s why we have to transfer nitrate to safety before anything can be properly shown. Originally projectors had a scissoring device to isolate a strip if it suddenly ignited. If it did flare up then the fire couldn’t be stopped and that section of film was completely destroyed. All its images disappeared forever. If there had only been one copy, no one would ever find out what had been on it.’
Suzie nods as if she is only pretending to be concerned. I can tell that she feels she has done her duty, or possibly indulged me in a manner she thought I would appreciate.
‘I’m invited to lunch next week,’ she suddenly announces.
15But Suzie is often invited out to lunch or dinner. She is a freelance tax adviser whose clients are sometimes grateful enough to buy her meals. Six or seven years ago I sometimes accompanied her. Not anymore. I had little in common with the people I was required to socialise with.
‘That’s good,’ I reply, uninterested.
I am thinking of my work and its dangers. Sometimes there are small nitrate fires when reels are being examined at the workbenches. Combustion continues even when the strip is submerged. Noxious yellow smoke streams from the water surface; breathe in those fumes and they turn to acid in your lungs. Those outside the profession never think of an archivist as leading a potentially hazardous life.
‘Why did you make a special point of telling me about a lunch invitation?’ I ask after a short while.
‘I did it because it could be important. Maybe I’ll be offered a job. It’s for an old friend, Steve Tiplady. Remember him?
Suzie is so eager for me to acknowledge that she is being open and honest that I immediately suspect there are things she is not telling me.
‘Tiplady? Didn’t you once work with him?’
‘Six or more years ago, yes. I reported to him, and sometimes we went to conferences together. Back in those days we did presentations on VAT returns for small businesses.’
‘I remember the name. That’s about all.’
‘I had a message from him a couple of days ago. Steve works at a very high-powered accountancy firm now. He sent me the publicity material they hand out to prospective clients and wondered if we might discuss matters. So I rang him to say yes and he invited me to lunch.’
16‘I thought you were happy being freelance.’
‘I am, but to some extent it depends too much on chance. Some part-time work for Steve’s company would provide a reliable income. I’m attracted to that.’
‘Yes,’ I say after a little consideration, ‘I can see why that would appeal.’
Sometimes one becomes an expert by chance. I have examined, authenticated, and preserved several dozen little dramas by now, and watched hundreds more. I recognise the beach hut. It is the same one used in a short diversion (one could hardy call it a comedy) in which an ardent young blade’s pursuit of two virtuous sisters is ruined by the girls’ dog, which runs off with the man’s hat, harries him to play games, and so on. Despite the beach setting the film must have been shot in a studio open to daylight. The hut is a theatrical flat, the background of dunes evidently painted, and the sand is thinly scattered over an all-too-obvious floor.
Perhaps I recognise the performer, too. The girl in my new film is very similar to one of the virtuous sisters. She wears an identical horizontally-striped bathing costume, with a similar if not identical ribbon tied in a bow above her forehead. It fastens up curly hair which would, I guess, be auburn in colour. She is quite heavy-set and with wide hips and thighs – the kind of sturdy figure that was much admired in the early years of the last century.
My detective work is not as extraordinary as it may seem. Sets, furniture and props were often used several times in the early days of cinema. For instance, historians recognise a particular feathered hat that makes its 17appearance in at least four works made by Film d’Art in 1908, the most famous of which is L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise.
So while Suzie meets her old friend and talks about tax laws, old colleagues, and the chance of employment, I begin to get my new film, my little piece of voyeurism, into as good a shape as possible so that a viewable copy can be made.
Almost from the start I know that it can be saved. Always when I open a can of nitrate stock there is distinctive and unpleasant smell, like unwashed underwear. I learned a long time ago not to be alarmed by this. But occasionally I have found the contents turned into dust, and often the entire reel has melted into an unusable mass of what restorers call honey residue. And sometimes only a few random frames can be saved as prints. At such moments I always wish that somehow, somewhere, I would be able to locate a near-identical copy. It is always a forlorn hope.
Lying in its circular metal can the new film has a strangely organic look, as if it is the remains of something that was once alive. The surface is coated with grime and several of the frames have shrunk. Parts have become brittle and some loops have stuck together. Certain sections have crumbled badly at the sides, destroying the sprocket holes and eating into the edge of the emulsion.
Several frames have become detached within the reel; perhaps at its last projection the film tore and was never spliced. I take the separated frames from the can as a pathologist might lift an organ from a body and study it under a magnifier. Deep scratch marks run down the 18surfaces, the image appears unclear, but I can still bring the film back to life. The frames show the girl rolling down the top of her bathing suit so that her breasts are exposed.
‘What happened?’ I ask Suzie.
She looks at me, startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you get the offer of a job?’
It seems at last that she understands me.
‘Oh, you mean from Steve. No. It didn’t quite work out in the way that I’d hoped.’
‘Oh?’
‘No, well, you see, it turns out that Steve isn’t happy working where he is. He sent me that brochure just as an illustration of the company structure. And his new manager is being very unhelpful. I didn’t quite understand that when we talked on the phone.’
‘Didn’t he make it clear?’
‘He can’t have done.’
To me this sounds odd.
‘So what’s happening?’ I ask. ‘Nothing?’
‘You’re quite interested in my work all of a sudden, aren’t you? I’m not used to this.’
‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t mind. Something is happening. Steve’s thinking of going it alone; that was always his ambition. In a way he’s been working towards it for years, and his current difficulties have helped make up his mind. He says he has the contacts and that a lot of his existing clients will follow him.’
‘So he’s doing the same as you did, but maybe more successfully.’
19‘That was a hurtful comment.’
‘I was just being honest. So what has this got to do with you?’
Even as I ask I know what the answer will be.
‘He has asked if I would be interested in joining him when it happens.’
‘As his employee?’
‘As his partner.’
‘I see.’
Now Suzie’s speech becomes quick and slightly nervous.
‘I’m quite honoured, really – and a little, well, touched. I knew Steve thought I was efficient, but I didn’t realise how much he actually appreciated my work. We haven’t discussed the details of any partnership but we’ll have to do that soon. I think he expects to take the leading role. I’ve no objection to that because he has more experience than I have – and more contacts. So we’ll have to have more meetings to try to sort everything out.’
‘But you’ll have to invest money into the arrangement.’
‘He’ll do the numbers on that and I’ll check them.’
‘You’re considering leasing office space?’
For a second Suzie appears bemused, as if such a move has not occurred to her.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘yes of course we’ll have to do that. Eventually.’
Later when she is taking a shower, I sidle into Suzie’s office and open her desk diary. The lunch date is marked. A very large M has been carefully written, almost crafted, beside the time and place. I close the diary and look around. Her tall metal cabinet stands in the corner. I don’t know why she feels she has to lock it.
20A laptop is open on the desk. I turn the screen on and read the list of her incoming mail. There is an unopened one from Steve Tiplady; the heading is Wonderful to meet again. I turn away and leave the office.
On the next day I take a spare reel of safety film and scissor from it several short, narrow strips that contain usable sprocket holes. These I fix onto the nitrate film, replacing those that are torn or missing. It is a delicate, laborious, time-consuming process. The alignment has to be exact and each strip has to be held in place with nitrate cement, a clear liquid that reeks of acetone and has to be applied with a very fine brush.
A few days later, when all the damaged sprockets have been replaced, I splice together the broken ends of film. And then, wearing kid-skin gloves, I clean the film with a soft absorbent cloth. This also takes days to complete, but the time does not pass slowly. Prior to cleaning the images have been difficult to make out, but now I know that what I saw earlier was no piece of mere teasing. Instead of a disappointing and jokily anti-climactic end, the last section of film shows a brisk emotionless copulation taking place on the towel in front of the hut.
When I am confident that the footage can be left to rest I visit the institute’s library to carry out some research. I consult catalogues, lists, histories and arrange special screenings in our private cinema: in my work a large screen is essential. Soon I am convinced that I have discovered the earliest extant film of a type that came into existence almost at the same time as cinema itself.
Within a few years of the very first films being shot, 21men and women were engaging in energetic sex solely because of the presence of a movie camera. Because of that subject matter, little material has been preserved. The earliest surviving example is thought to be La Bonne Auberge, sometimes known as A L’Ecu d’Or, made in 1908. Some authorities believe that the Eugene Pirouls 1896 LeCoucher delaMariéemust have been pornographic, although only the first two minutes survive: these show a bride disrobing to her petticoat.
I am certain that my own film belongs to a varied batch produced in England in 1905. I can imagine the sly complicity with which they would be distributed. Along with the entertainment reels for general exhibition a special reel for discerning customers would arrive. The film would be screened in a smoky room with only men present, each one noisily determined to prove himself a man of the world, each one secretly astonished and aroused. In both the explicit depiction of sex, and in the casual efficiency of the performers, the film would have been unsettling and audacious. Forget the staged idylls of family life; forget the silly dramas, the sporting events, the military parades. This shameless little act is more important. This is what really drives the world.
Before their transfer to a digital file many of the old nitrate reels have been copied onto cellulose acetate stock, but I am having my new film copied on polyester triacetate. Cellulose acetate breaks down too, with its own decay characteristic being a vinegary stench. Polyester triacetate, on the other hand is tough and virtually indestructible. This is the appropriate medium for my sequence of images. Why?
22Why, because I am dealing in retrieved history here.
Suzie and Tiplady have begun to meet regularly. Sometimes they meet in the evening so that Steve need not take time away from his present employer, and often one of his friends, a solicitor, joins them to give advice. Usually my wife returns late. One night I sit up for her, but she tells me I need not have worried; it was just that the meeting went on longer than expected.
‘You can come with me if you want,’ she tells me blithely, ‘but you’ll be terribly bored if you do. Remember what happened last time.’
I shake my head and she explains.
‘You didn’t get on with Steve. Not at all.’
‘No?’
‘You said he was boring.’
‘Did I?’
‘Of course you did. I thought it was mean and spiteful of you to talk about my colleagues like that.’
But I’m not even certain that I remember Steve Tiplady. And many of Suzie’s colleagues were invariably much too confident, slightly overbearing, and absorbed only by their own narrow interests.
I wonder if my wife has a photograph of Tiplady somewhere. There’s probably an old one in her cabinet. If I could see it then perhaps I might remember him and put a face, and a body, to his name.
‘Exactly when is this new partnership of yours likely to happen?’ I ask later.
‘There are still a few details to sort out. Nothing’s straightforward, you know.’
23Suzie is stripping lacquer from her nails. I am so familiar with the reek of acetone that I do not usually sense it, but this time it is so pungent that my eyes feel as though they are beginning to water.
‘And I have to go on a short course,’ she adds. ‘It’s only over a weekend. Steve thinks it would be a good idea.’
I can hear the hands move on the dial of the clock.
‘What kind of course?’
‘It’s one for professionals running a small partnership – legal matters, insurance; things like that. It’s supposed to be very good.’
‘Don’t you know all that anyway?’
‘I know it for my own business. Working with another person is different. You have to have agreed protocols, decide responsibilities, sort out areas of decision-making and dispute; that sort of thing.’
‘I see. You’re both going on this course, are you?’
‘It would be wise.’
‘Together?’
‘That would make more sense, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose it would,’
After a while I ask another question.
‘Is it within easy travelling distance?’
‘It’s residential.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Suzie answers, affecting mild irritation, ‘some coastal resort somewhere.”
But I’m sure she knows the answer.
I think of the first time that Suzie and I made love, and I wonder if she and Tiplady will meet at the same resort. An autumn wind tasting of salt buffeted the seafront and 24rattled the windows of our cheap hotel as we lay together, our arms round each other. Suzie giggled and said that she wanted to make love in the open air, among the sand and marram grass to the north of the resort, but I said it would be too cold and beside, we might be disturbed. She coaxed me and made me promise that one day we would do that, but we never did. Three days after we returned home I took up my job at the institute.
The reel is being copied now. At this very moment it is being transferred onto stock that will last forever. The nitrate footage is being coated with perchloroethylene, which has an identical refractive index and will eliminate scratch marks by effectively filling them in. Inch by inch the drenched sock is being fed into a printer; frame by frame a stronger and immortal twin is being created. Drying boxes and fume extractors cradle the unspooled films at the far side of the printer. When the processes are completed the nitrate reel will be returned to storage, but the images on polyester triacetate will be available to anyone with a serious interest in the development of cinema, legal and social history, or human behaviour.
This is what they will see.
A young woman in an Edwardian bathing suit is standing in front of a beach hut. A man, dressed as though he has been strolling on a promenade, peers at her from the top of a fake dune. She strikes poses that are meant to be coquettish, at the end of which she pulls down the top of her bathing suit. The man approaches with the exaggerated walk of a music-hall Lothario. There is a certain amount of pretended coyness and extravagant gesturing 25between the two. The woman rolls the costume down to her ankles and steps naked from it. She has a surprisingly large patch of pubic hair. Then she lies down on the towel while the man strips off his trousers and shoes. He seems curiously embarrassed by his erection and contrives to hide it from the camera. They copulate quickly. The man’s overlong shirt, which he has pulled up round his midriff, creeps down across his buttocks as he thrusts. Just as there is no foreplay, there is no languorous satiation afterwards. When he has finished the man stands up, picks up his trousers and shoes, and walks quickly off camera. The woman struggles awkwardly into a sitting position, her face suddenly averted. The film ends. The reel unspools. It has lasted less than three minutes.
