Once, I might have taken my picture and gone, and in the printing seen his whole history in his face, past and future. Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft. I had seen too much in Greene for me to be satisfied with a picture.
I said, “I think I ought to tell you that this is my last picture. I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”
“Whatever for?”
“I’m too old to travel, for one thing.”
“Which Frenchman said, ‘Travel is the saddest of the pleasures’?”
“It gave me eyes.”
“I understand that well enough,” said Greene. “Not long ago I saw an item in a newspaper about Kim Philby.”
“Always wanted to do him,” I said.
“I worked for him during the war in British Intelligence. Anyway, in this item Kim said what he wanted to do more than anything else was split a bottle of wine with Graham Greene and talk over old times. I fired off a cable saying that I would meet him anywhere he named if he supplied the wine. I felt like traveling — it’s as you say, an awakening. Kim cabled back, very nicely, he was busy. Some other time. I was sorry. I was quite looking forward to the trip.”
“As soon as I leave home my eyes start working. I can see! It’s like music — I don’t really listen to it, but I can think straight while it’s playing. It starts things going in my head.”
Greene was listening carefully, with his fingers poised like a pianist’s on the edge of the table.
“But there’s something else,” I said. “They’re thinking of getting up a retrospective — fifty years’ accumulation of pictures! I have a fella digging them out. It was his idea. I don’t dare look at them — I know what they’ll add up to.”
“Oh?” he said, and started to smile, as if he knew what I was going to say next.
“Nothing,” I said in a whisper, “nothing. They’re failures, every last one of them.”
“The long defeat of doing nothing well,” he said, and sounded as if he was quoting. But he was still smiling. “Does that surprise you?”
“Goddamit, yes!” I said. “I don’t want to be famous for something I’ve failed at.”
“It’s all failure,” he said, speaking a bit too easily for my liking, as if he’d said it before and was getting so bored with it he suspected it of being untrue. Perhaps he saw my scepticism. He added, “Why else would you have started again so many times?”
I said I saw his point, but that I expected more than that from all those years of work. It was a bit late in the day to talk so easily about failure, I said, and it was obnoxious to me to realize that while I thought I had been truthful I had only been deceiving myself. I said I felt like an old fool and the worst of it was that no one else knew, and that was a sadness.
While I had been talking the food arrived. Novelists, I knew, ate what they wrote about; Greene had lemon sole and a cold bottle of Muscadet. Before he started he leaned over and took my hand gently in his. He had long fragile hands, like beautiful gloves, and a pale green ring. He held on and said, “May I ask why you’re taking my picture?”
“I wanted to, and you agreed,” I said nervously. “It will complete the exhibition.”
“What makes you think that?”
I wanted to say a hundred things. Because we’re both as old as the hills. Because you’ve lived a charmed life, as I have. Because no one wanted me to come to London. Because you’ve known what it is to be rich, famous, and misunderstood. Because anyone but me would violate you. Because you’re alone, blind, betrayed, vain. Because you’re happy. Because we’re equals. Because you look like my poor dead brother.
“Because,” I said—because people will see my face on yours— “it’s the next best thing to taking my own picture.”
I was grateful to him for not laughing at this. He said, “I’m afraid you’re wrong. Deceived again, Miss Pratt. You’re an original.”
I said that was all very well but that I still couldn’t do a self-portrait.
“Of course you can — you have,” he said. “Your self-portrait will be this retrospective, not one picture, but thousands, all those photographs.”
“That’s what they say. I know all old people are Monday morning quarterbacks, but I also know the life I’ve had, and it ain’t them pictures.”
“No?”
“No, sir. It’s all the pictures I never took. It’s the circumstances.”
He put his fingertips together thoughtfully, like a man preparing to pray.
“When I did Cocteau, know what he said to me? He said, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ And I know goddamned well what he meant, pardon my French.” I took a few mouthfuls of fish. “When I take your picture, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to be you. All I can shoot is your face. If I took my own picture that’s all mine would be, an old lady, looking for a house to haunt.”
“With a camera,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I said, if you did your self-portrait with a camera.”
“What else would I use — a monkey wrench?”
“You could do a book,” he said, and dipped his prayerful hands at me as if pronouncing a blessing.
I said, “What do I know about that?”
“The less you know, the better,” he said. “You have forgotten memories. What you forget becomes the compost of the imagination.”
“My mulch-pile of memories.”
He smiled.
“Renounce photography, the gentleman says.”
“Exactly.” He said it with perfect priestlike certainty.
He made it seem so simple. It was as if he had led me through a cluttered palace of regrets, from room to shadowy room, climbing stairs and kicking carpets, and when we reached the end of the darkened corridor I’d feared most he’d thrown open a door I hadn’t seen and shown me air and light and empty space: hope.
“All you have to do,” he said, and now he turned, “is open your eyes.”
He was staring in the direction of the door.
I saw eight Japanese gentlemen gliding noiselessly in. They wore dark suits, they were small and had that deft, precisely tuned, transistorized movement. They took their places around the large table in the center of the room and sat down.
Greene said, “There’s my Japanese!”
“I see them! I see them!” I said. They were angels embodying the urgent proof that I write and remember. They were Greene’s own magic trick, eight creaseless Japanese conjured from thin air and seated muttering their gum-chewing language. So the evening had gone from salutation to reminiscence, subtle, solemn, funny, coincidental, and here it paused at valediction, to show my Speed Graphic as more futile than an eyeball, a box of peepstones that could only falsify this two hours. Any picture I took of Greene would be flat as a pancake. I knew that now; but I could begin again.
Greene was reddening and laughing that rich laugh, as if he was amazed by his own success, by how perfectly his trick had worked.
I said, “No one will believe this.”
And, by a professional reflex, saw my angle: Greene in Bentley’s; his other half on the wall mirror; the sacrificial fish staring up at him; the half-drunk bottle of wine; Greene’s face animated by laughter, all his features working at once, creating light; and in the background, just visible, his triumph, the circle of Japanese, their, tiny heads and neatly plastered hair. The perfect photograph pausing in a gong of light, the artist at the foreground of his own creation: Greene by Pratt.
There were tears in my eyes as I found the right f-stop and raised my Speed Graphic. I was humbled, just another crafty witness giving permanence to her piece of luck.