The idea of it, the wild possibilities spiralling in his mind, wouldn’t let go of him. Yes, he was to blame for leaving the house. But was someone else to blame for his daughter’s death? And was that someone Michael, their quiet, listening, watching neighbour? Because of these suspicions, Josh knew that for as long as Michael lived next door to his wife and daughter, then he must keep them close, too, also watching, also listening, waiting for when he might learn more about Michael’s intentions and where he’d really been on that hot Saturday in June.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“IT WAS JUST experimenting at first,” Samantha said, leafing through the prints in their box. “But after a while it became something else. A kind of meditation, I suppose. Certainly a routine.” She paused at one of them. It was taken in autumn, the pond skinned with fallen leaves. A single child, a boy in red Wellingtons, apparently alone, was looking at his reflection in the water. “And then they became something else again,” she said. “A kind of story.”
“It’s the accumulation,” Michael said, picking up the print and looking at it more closely. “It builds a narrative, whether we want to or not.”
It was an evening in January. Rachel had only just come home from school, but already the Heath beyond the kitchen windows was dark. A clear sky was discovering its stars, the lights of aeroplanes blinking above the city. The year was young, but London had already been covered by snow once since Christmas and, according to forecasts, would be again that night.
“I like that,” Samantha said, picking up her wine. “A narrative of accumulation. I might steal that.”
Michael had been wrong about Samantha. Her promises had been for the keeping, not just the making. And in their keeping she’d grown, become more herself. They hadn’t, after all, been a vehicle of transition, but rather had become that transition, a change in her and her life.
“Why didn’t you show me these before?” Michael said, placing the print of the boy in red Wellingtons back in the box.
Samantha took it out again, slipping it back in its chronological order. “I don’t know,” she said, looking at the photographs as if for the first time. “I suppose I wanted to keep them mine. To discover what it was. Get some distance.” She looked up at him. “Isn’t that what you’re always saying? You need distance to see anything clearly? To become your own editor.”
She’d recently cut her hair shorter. She wore jeans now, more than dresses. Michael remembered something his bereavement counsellor once said — about how after a death men tend to change their place, women their appearance.
“And now you’ve got that distance?” Michael asked.
“I want to share them,” Samantha said proudly, with the assertiveness of a child. “I thought, fuck it, even if they aren’t any good, I want them to be out there. I want them to be looked at, otherwise there’s no point, is there? They’d only be half cooked.”
“Not necessarily,” Michael said, picking up another print. It was of the same pond as before, at the same time of day. Only this time it was winter, the trees bare above the water. A low mist clung to the ground.
He offered her more wine. She declined, putting a hand over her glass, so he filled his own instead. “Is a story half cooked,” he asked her, “if it’s only been written but not read?”
“Absolutely!”
He laughed, thinking she was joking, but then saw that she wasn’t.
“Without the reader, it’s just thoughts on a page,” she said. “Imagination in ink. A printed tautology.”
“Tautology? How?”
“Well, a repetition then. Of what was in the writer’s mind when they wrote it. But when it’s read…”
“Yes?”
“Well, then the words gather new imagery, don’t they? The meaning gathers new association. It’s like a chemical reaction. It all depends on how they react with the reader, their life, their mind.”
“Let me guess,” Michael said, narrowing his eyes in mock estimation. “Susan?”
Samantha laughed. “Yes, okay, but with some of me thrown in, too.”
Susan was a member of Samantha’s book club. When the group had learnt that Samantha knew Michael, they’d asked her to invite him to speak to them about BrotherHoods. The session had been far from an easy ride, but Susan, an ex — English professor, had been particularly dissective of his writing, and of what she’d called “creative nonfiction” as a whole.
“But she’s right, isn’t she?” Samantha said. “Surely you must have seen it with BrotherHoods? How it becomes other books in other people?”
“Yes, but as a book in itself, it was done,” Michael replied. “Or at least done to the best of my ability. I’d probably change it now — actually, I’d certainly change it now, but at the time I finished it, it was finished. It wasn’t the book itself that was half cooked,” Michael said, warming to his theme. “So much as the experience.”
Samantha shook her head. “Now you’re just getting into semantics.”
“No, no, I’m not.” Michael put down his glass and picked up the top photograph, the pond beneath bare branches, the mist like cannon smoke. “All I’m saying is that these are far from half cooked. They’re quite the opposite. They’re bloody good, and they’d be that good, that true, whether people saw them or not.”
He handed the print to Samantha. “The communication was made when you took this, when you printed it. From then on it exists in the world, seen or not.”
He took another drink of his wine, looking for the right phrase.
“Its weight has been added,” he said eventually.
“Its weight?” Samantha looked doubtful, but she could tell Michael was being serious.
“Yes.” He picked up another print, the same pond, at the same time of day again, a swan and her cygnets drifting across the foreground. “Its telling has happened. That’s how I see it, anyway. The vision, your intention, your motivation, whatever you want to call it, is no longer purely internal. So regardless if I or anyone else looks at it, its story has still been told. Its purpose served.”
―
Samantha started taking photos of the pond shortly after Josh moved out. It had begun as a way to get to know the new camera she’d bought for her MA. She still wasn’t sleeping, so early one morning, a few hours after dawn, she’d set up a tripod next to the fence at the bottom of the garden. She stayed there for an hour, experimenting with exposures and timings as the Heath altered under the rising light. The next day she’d found herself awake at the same time. On coming into the kitchen, she’d noticed how different the Heath looked from the day before. It had rained overnight. The light, it seemed, had been washed, cleaned. The water of the pond, dark the previous morning, was metallic, polished. She took her camera to the fence again and, setting the tripod legs in the holes it had made the day before, began taking photos.