The Biographer's Tale

  You may know that a man in Paris

  Has discovered a way of taking portraits

  With the help of the sun. Either one can produce

  A direct picture, or else what they call a negative.

  In the latter, light and dark are reversed;

  And the result, to the ordinary eye, is ugly.

  But the image of the original is there.

  All that’s required is to develop it.

  Now if a human soul, in the course of its life,

  Has created one of those negative portraits,

  The plate is not destroyed. They send it to me.

  I give it treatment, and by suitable means

  Effect a metamorphosis. I develop it.

  I steam it and dip it, I burn it and cleanse it

  With sulphur and similar ingredients

  Till the picture appears which the plate was intended to give.

  I mean, the one known as the positive.

  But when a soul like yourself has smudged himself out

  Even sulphur and potash can achieve nothing.

  PEER: Then one must come to you as black as a raven To be sent back as white as a dove?

  These cards, as may be imagined, took me back to the shoebox full of photographs. As I said, some of these were in fact faded cuttings from newspapers, carefully pasted to postcards. There were photographs of General de Gaulle, Stalin, an African ruler in leopardskin ceremonial costume, two wartime weddings, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose as little girls. There were picturesque ancient peasant women, their faces furrowed with taut wrinkles, their eyes lost black dots. There were workmen in Sunday best, or brawnily stoking furnaces in picturesque clouds of steam. There were also cadavers on mortuary slabs and black-and-white reproductions of Mantegna’s foreshortened dead Christ and Holbein’s rigid horizontal one—both, it appeared, cut from illustrations in books. There were a great many babies, hairless and tufted, scowling and simpering. There were also several portraits of the dead, laid out before burial, amongst whom I was able to identify Galton and Ibsen. I have written that photographs partake of death. There were several postcards of Julia Margaret Cameron’s posed women, with heavy tresses and heavy arms and heavy breasts, representing Persephone, Pomona, Maia, ripeness. These were impressions on the photographic plate of living, breathing flesh, and warm hair, shadows of where sunlight had fallen on the lump of bosom or the hollow of collarbone or the red lips which appeared heavily black. Great bunches of roses and lilies, romantic tangles of ivy, domes of eyelids, all imitating the stillness of death for the long attention of the lady under the velvet pall, all now bones and dust, having passed through wrinkles and swollen ankles, unless they were taken early, as many were—all consigned, like Galton, to peaceful churchyards, under stone angels, of which there were also photographs in the shoebox, drooping or staring upwards. The photographs of the truly dead are not shocking as the photographs of the living are shocking. For one thing, their eyes are decently closed, and not dead paper spaces.

  Galton and Ibsen resembled each other in death, as they did not, much, in life, except in that sense Ibsen himself accurately remarked on, in which all people of a certain period resemble each other, like family portraits. Galton was a large man and Ibsen was tiny, but in these photographs Ibsen, in his frock coat as far as the taut white sheet across his stomach, is more imposing than Galton in a soft nest of white cloth, like snow against a grey sky. Both men—in life as in death—had lipless mouths, Ibsen possibly because he tightened his face perpetually in a rictus of bad temper, Galton because, it is clear, he was born that way, with a long, mild, slit of a mouth. Both faces, in death, have floating remnants of silver-white hair. Ibsen’s is a little tousled, which is touching, and the ghost of his immense mutton-chop whiskers floats above his collar. Both have the sharp noses of the dead—Galton’s is cavernous—and can be seen not to be breathing. How? Both have what I will call “the same” expression, which is one of complete (completed) exhaustion, so that those who look at the photograph are glad that it is all over, whatever it was. That is, those who look are glad that the dead man is now dead. I do not, as Karl Pearson did not, use the words “at peace” or “at rest.” Who knows? But they are not bad to look at, these death’s heads, and they resemble each other. In life, photographs of Galton show someone mildly vacuous, withdrawn a long way behind the chalky patient face. Ibsen is always combative, always cross, even in the photograph taken when he was paralysed, propped in his chair, in 1905. A composite of these two would approximate an elderly stone angel.

  None of the photographs in the box had any markings to suggest that it represented—had snapped—Scholes Destry-Scholes.

  Henrik Ibsen on his death bed, May 1906

  Francis Galton taken after death, January 1911

  There were, however, clearly also snipped from books, some of Galton’s famous composites.

  “Composite made from Portraits of Criminals convicted of Murder, Manslaughter, or Crimes of Violence.” The plate has eight blurred images of what may on the whole be described as dignified, resigned and, perhaps to a lesser extent, apprehensive male figures. These are said to be made up of 3, 8, 7, 9 and 5 components each. Their faint imprecision makes them ghostly, more than ghastly. Galton noted that in his criminal composites “the special villainous irregularities have disappeared and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed.” Destry-Scholes had also acquired a copy of Galton’s Plate showing the composite images of officers and men of the Royal Engineers (5 officers, 12 officers, 11 privates, 30 privates), but not one of what Pearson considered his greatest achievement, the “Jewish Type.” There were three of the composites Galton had made of coins and medals, the images of Alexander I, Napoleon and Cleopatra, taken from coins and medals. Galton had photographed the collected individual coins—in Alexander’s case, dividing them into “Indian” and “Greek” collections, and had added his own composites in the centre. He commented that in each case the composite image was more lifelike and more handsome and ideally beautiful than any of the individual ones—adding that Cleopatra (hook-nosed, sharp-jawed) would be found hideous by any modern standards of beauty. It is hard not to agree with him that his superimpositions—possibly partly because of a stereoscopic effect, and a sense, to a modern eye, that the subject has moved at the crucial moment of the opening of the camera shutter—do have more liveliness and are better proportioned than their component images. (Though something is lost of the stylised horned and serpentine-curled heads of the Indian Alexanders.) Destry-Scholes also had two of Galton’s composite family images, one of three sisters, each taken full-face and in profile, then amalgamated to make what did look like a fourth sister, the Family Face, and one of a whole family, several generations, men and women, grandparents and children, uncles, nieces, amalgamated ingeniously into not one but several composites—“men,” “women,” “children,” “men and women together.” It was possible, I thought, to see why the subjects of these images resented them. Something had been taken away by being added.

  There was also a plate with photographs of eighteenth-century portraits of five women, all with the same long, oval face, composed mouth and elaborate high powdered hairstyle, except for one, who wore a sort of floppy bonnet with a rose at the apex of her brow. The composite, in the centre, was more animated than any of the single ladies. I came across them, much later, in my researches. They were Linnaeus’s wife Sara Lisa, and his daughters Lisa Stina, Louisa, Sara Stina and Sophia (his darling, the books say, the beauty of the family they say, too, though I prefer the severe carved look of the others). I have been unable to find any reference, anywhere, to Galton making a composite of Linnaeus’s daughters. Perhaps, nevertheless, he did. They are an excellent subject for one. The resemblances are striking, the differences subtle. Perhaps Destry-Scholes made the composite, for his own amusement, having collected the others. There is no evidence, no evidence at all, that any of the photographs are his work, or represent
anyone associated with him.

  Portraits of three sisters, full face and profile, with the corresponding composites

  I did, of course, ask Vera Alphage to look through the photograph collection for anyone she recognised.

  She did this, she told me, very carefully, and had found no one. She held up one blurred beach photograph, taken by a beach photographer at Scarborough (the address was on the back), of a huge poised family in front of a beach tent, the grandparents in deckchairs, the parents standing behind the chairs, the babies (two) in arms, the small children in swimming costumes squatting in the sand, brandishing buckets and spades. That family face rippled across grandparental wrinkles into weary maternal half-smiles into adolescent pouts, and infant grins. Dark, hooded eyes, curved lips.

  “I recognise that child,” said Vera Alphage, “including her swimming costume with butterflies on, because it is me. Except that I don’t recognise anyone else at all in the picture. But I dug out a picture of me—not in Scarborough, but in that swimming costume—I do think frills look silly round little girls’ bottoms—so you could see I wasn’t fantasising.”

  The little girl—aged maybe eight—clung to the leg of a tall, slender woman in a white halter-necked sundress. (If it was white. All the photographs were black and white. Vera told me the swimming costume with the butterflies was in fact yellow, with pink and blue insects, and viridian—she said specifically viridian—bindings to the neck and the frills. Grey on grey, in the picture.) The woman in the sundress bore a startling resemblance to Vera Alphage as she is now. I realised that I was seeing something of the face of Scholes Destry-Scholes. But it was blurred, in three-quarters profile, a bit beaky, with the wind wrapping long dark hair partly round it; how did it resemble him, how did it differ? Vera Alphage’s mother had wonderfully sexy legs. Poised on high-heeled sandals. A tall woman. The child was indeed, as far as I could see, the same child.

  I said I saw what she meant. I did not want to ask if she had any more photographs of her mother. In some curious way this study of the two photographs of the little girls was an intimate moment.

  Vera said, “Of course, I don’t remember that photo being taken. I don’t remember what holiday it was on, or what it felt like to be me looking out of those eyes. I was given the photograph to remember my mother by, when she died. It was one my father liked. I expect he took it. I remember the swimming costume because I thought it was silly. But how did it—how did I—get into the other picture? We use snaps to remember who we were, but that causes us to remember only those snaps. I don’t remember how I looked to myself in the mirror at that age, if I looked in the mirror. It’s a memorial of me, as well as her.”

  She looked down again at the photographs we had taken out of the box. In a corner of one of Galton’s composites is a tiny image of his attempt to make a composite skull. It is very blurry and its neck and vertebrae appear disproportionately elongated.

  Vera Alphage said, “Would you like to see my work? I told you I made photographs.” She said, “I keep them in the bedroom. They’re not to everybody’s taste.”

  So I followed her, feeling rather worried, into her bedroom, which had a secluded view of the small, square back garden. She went across and drew the curtains, white musliny stuff, lined.

  “Better in artificial light,” she said, and put on one or two strategically placed, diffused lights, so that the room became a box of soft violet-blue light. The walls were covered with largish photographs framed in steel. They were essentially black-and-white photographs, but the grounds were blues and greens, submarine, ultra-violet. They were photographs of bones. With a haze of other organs hanging between them, curtains of translucent tissue. Vertebrae, jaws, pelvis and femur, collarbone and shoulder blade, fingers and toes. They were extremely beautiful, partly because of their symmetries, partly because of the veiling of the shadows, the depths of three-dimensional space shown by the searching X-ray, partly because she had so arranged them that there were waves and ripples of curves and links of joints and junctions, all round the room.

  “I am a radiographer,” said Vera Alphage. “By profession. Most people think my pictures are morbid. I don’t see why. They’re pictures of the living, not the dead. Some of them are worn or damaged, but they’re all alive, they’re pictures of our inner life, so to speak.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I turned to look at her. In this blue half-light she was extraordinarily beautiful. She had her mother’s sexy legs, whose wonderful tendons were discovered and illuminated. I stared. She smiled. I said, I seem to remember, “Beautiful,” meaning both the photographs and the woman. There was nothing in the room but a white bed and a white chest of drawers. We got into the bed. I was going to write we fell into the bed, but we didn’t. And I am not going to describe what happened, though I am going to record that it did happen, because I am not that sort of writer. I think. It’s becoming more difficult to know what sort of writer I am. Also, afterwards, I was not the same person.

  I had decided to keep mum about Maurice Bossey’s Web sites. I had decided to put a new punctilious formality into my dealings with him, I seem to remember. I got to thinking of him in cultural clichés, the vampire with the swirling cloak and opera hat, neither of which he had, though I think perhaps the image haunted and pleased Bossey himself. Or perhaps not. When he next came into the shop, he appeared to be agitated. I was talking to another customer—a young woman who was booking a mosaic-making holiday in Ravenna. I was telling her what Destry-Scholes had said about the angles of the tesserae in the shining haloes of the angels. Bossey lurked in the doorway. It is difficult to lurk in a small well-lit shop. When my customer had taken her train-tickets and hotel reservations, and the references to Destry-Scholes, and turned to say goodbye in the doorway, herself, Bossey could be said (figuratively) to be foaming at the mouth. He advanced on me. He said,

  “You spun all that out an unnecessarily long time.”

  “Good afternoon,” I said, pursuing my policy. “Is there anything in particular I can help you with?”

  “Of course there is, damn you, and I think you know very well what it is. I don’t really believe the solicitous Erik and Christophe went off without giving you at least a hint. I suspect time’s running out, I suspect I should be on my way. Would you care for some snuff?”

  He pushed an enamel snuff-box across the counter. Aggressively. It had a naked pink cherub (male) on it, in a sea of what might have been blood, or fire.

  I said I didn’t take snuff, and pushed it back.

  As I have said before in this document, I am not very good at codes in real life, or even any glaring semiotic system.

  He said I was a very stupid young man, and he was sure Erik and Christophe had told me that snuff was amongst the pleasures I needed to know about, in that job.

  “They provide what they provide. The full service. Even including snuff. You know that,” he said. His brow was damp.

  “I think you will have to ask elsewhere,” I said, “for the sort of services you require.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’ve paid. Through the nose and every other part of my anatomy. Very considerable sums. They pocket the sums, you deliver the tickets and the contacts. The dogsbody delivers, that’s the arrangement. I shall miss the event. I’m quite sure there’s a code somewhere in your documents. There has to be.”

  I said, naturally I would do my best. But I didn’t think so. I said I was by no means sure that Erik and Christophe knew what he was talking about. I said I didn’t.

  “One of Christophe’s favourite sayings,” said Maurice Bossey, “is that schadenfreude is a human universal. Isn’t that so?”

  It was. I nodded.

  “I am only after my own form of pleasure. It’s ancient and universal. You shouldn’t be working here, if you don’t understand that.”

  “Please,” I said, “go away.”

  “Have you any idea how much I’ve paid out?” he said then. “Look into it, dogsbody.”

&n
bsp; He went.

  Leaving in my anxious mind the insinuation that “dogsbody” too was part of a code, like peaches and snuff, knives and screws.

  I had been happy in my work.

  I do not know very much about what I believe are generally known as “snuff movies.” I had met them in contemporary cultural lists of urban myths, like alligators in the sewers, and the grandmother on the luggage rack. But alarming news about recent events in Belgium had led me to suppose they were real enough. Maurice Bossey was complaining about having missed the recent events in Belgium. There may have been no connection, but I thought there was. No literary person who has read about Roman bread and circuses, or Japanese tortures, or Turkish imperial households or the Holocaust, or for that matter what went on in the Tower under the Tudor queens, can suppose that such things are impossible. You just do not expect to come across them, let alone to be asked, over the counter, to provide them. I see, looking back, that there were many sensible, practical things I could, or might have done. But like a bullied little boy in a school playground (and I was, of course, a bullied little boy in a school playground) I kept mum, and panicked, and suffered. I wonder what the origin of the phrase “kept mum” is? It is a nice paradox that a bullied child might want to squeal to mum, but must keep mum. I see as I write that of course there is another circle to this spiral. There are schoolyards which contain prototype snuffers, snuff directors, snuff audiences, infant Bosseys, who may be, as I was, at that stage the victim. Bossey’s excitement caused me, I now see, somehow to see myself as the little candle to be snuffed. And in my sleep he and Erik and Christophe were the Big Boys with the bicycle chains and the penknives and the matches, and that certain smile.

  Anyway, there was no mum to squeal to. Ormerod Goode had nothing to do with any of this. It is true that I was now regularly making love to Vera Alphage in her crisp white sheets, but this does not mean that we had become—conversationally, so to speak—intimate. She was a tentative and a delicate lover—it is probably clear that I don’t have much to compare her with, but I don’t think that kind of gentleness and attention can be faked or misinterpreted. But it was all largely in silence. She is, I think, naturally very reserved. She does not talk about her personal history, her family, or how she came to choose her profession. She does sometimes, under stress, relate incidents that have happened at the hospital, patients whose agony has distressed her, dangerous procedures that have turned out well, or badly, deaths of accident victims, or victims of domestic violence. She never gossips about colleagues, or complains about organisational problems. It took some time for me to see that this was so. I never talked to her about the university (I didn’t really go there anymore) and because of my distress, I didn’t even mention Erik and Christophe. I am not the sort of writer, and this is not the sort of writing, to make the most of the undoubtedly fantastic elements of my situation at that time. There I lay, in the bed of the niece of the man whose biography—whose life-writing—I was vainly trying to piece together, surrounded by anonymous photographs of living skeletons, of heart muscles and lung tissue and the roots of teeth. I began to think in a mad way that a biography was a kind of snuff movie, that there was an element of schadenfreude in piecing together long-dead pleasures and pains. I had a dream—once or twice—in that bed, of that kind which fuses many images into one image, and thus strikes the watching mind as a kind of indisputable vision of the truth, although all it is, is a stirring and cooking together of disparate things by the unconscious (the sleeping) mind. I dreamed I was watching Destry-Scholes pouring head-first into the Maelstrøm, which, although immense, dark and boiling, was also the beautiful formal spiral of Erik’s origami Maelstrøm in the window, which was also a spiral blade, made of Maurice Bossey’s corkscrew and penknives on an immense scale. And I was swimming in the inky water, trying to get safely nearer, to see the unseen face, to see who he was, and my limbs were not under my control, I was being swept towards the funnel of blades and water …