‘Everything in life is a bit odd, when you come to think of it.’ I was quoting my father — it was something he’d say from time to time.
Millicent stood up, cigarette between her lips, and squeezed her small breasts.
‘I just can’t imagine a man doing this to me. . Rubbing my bosoms. How would I feel, react? I might want to punch him.’
‘That’s why it’s just as well we try everything here, first. One day we’ll get out of this jungle, we’ll be free. We need to have some idea of what’s going to be what.’
‘It’s all right for you,’ Millicent said, grudgingly. ‘The world you move in — writers, society photographers. . My father’s a timber merchant.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me.’
‘Minx! Queen of the minxes!’
‘I’m not a snob, Millicent. My grandfather was a Staffordshire miner.’
‘I’d rather my father was a writer than a timber merchant, that’s all I’m saying.’ Millicent carefully removed her false moustache and stubbed out her Woodbine.
‘Any more kissing?’ she asked. ‘We haven’t tried it with tongues.’
‘Bitter woman! You should be ashamed of yourself.’ I clambered to my feet and went to look at my photographs drying on their line of string. A bell rang in a distant corridor.
‘I think I’m meant to be supervising some of the younger specimens,’ she said. ‘See you later, darling.’
She left and I carefully unpegged the photos. I didn’t print every negative I developed as I didn’t want to waste paper on contact sheets. I would scrutinise the negative with a magnifying glass and was often very confident of the choice I eventually made. The decision to print was somehow key to what I felt about the photograph and each one that I selected would be given a title. I don’t know why I did this — some vague painterly connection, I suppose — but in bestowing a title the photograph lived on in my mind more easily and permanently. I could recall almost every photograph that I’d printed — a memory archive — an album in my head. I think also that the whole process of photography still seemed astonishing at that stage of my life. The abidingly magical process of trapping an image on film through the brief exposure of light and then, through the precisely monitored agency of chemicals and paper, producing a monochrome picture of that instant of time still possessed its alluring sorcery.
Now, Millicent having gone, summoned by her bell, I took down my three new photographs — stiff, dry — and laid them out on the small table at the end of the box room. I had called the three photographs ‘Xan, Flying’, ‘Boy with Bat and Hat’ and ‘At the Lido’. I was pleased with them all, particularly ‘Xan, Flying’.
One hot day the previous August we’d gone down to the Westbourne Swimming Club Lido in Hove where they had a one-acre, unheated salt-water pool with a twenty-five-foot diving board at one end. It took Xan three jumps before I was happy that I’d truly captured him in mid-air.
I wrote the titles on the back of the prints in a soft pencil, added the date, and slipped them into my loose album. All three photographs were similar in that they were candid shots of people in movement. I liked taking photographs of people in action — walking, coming down steps, running, jumping and, most importantly, not looking into the lens. I loved the way the camera could capture that unreflecting suspended animation, an image of somebody halted utterly in time — their next step, their next gesture, next movement, forever incomplete. Stopped just like that — by me — with the click of a shutter. Even then I think I was aware that only photography could do that — so confidently, so effortlessly — only photography could pull off that magic trick of stopping time; that millisecond of our existence captured, allowing us to live forever.
Two days later I was in the sixth-form study room taking part in a staring match with Laura Hassall. It was her challenge but I knew I would win — I always won staring matches. We were allowed to speak to each other, deliberately to provoke a lapse in concentration or to distract so eye contact was broken.
‘Stanley Baldwin’s been assassinated,’ Laura said.
‘Poor. Very poor.’
‘No. He has.’
‘Good. Horrible man.’
‘Xan, Flying’, 1924.
‘At the Lido’, 1924.
‘Boy with Bat and Hat’ (Xan Clay), 1924.
We kept staring at each other, faces two feet apart, chins propped on our hands, eye to eye. Everyone else in the room was working at their prep, not bothering remotely with our contest.
‘Laura?’
‘Yes?’
‘Romulus and Remus. Heard of them?’
‘Ah. . Yeshhh.’ She said it as a dullard would, irritated.
‘Then, imagine,’ I said, in a speculative tone, as if the idea had just occurred to me, ‘imagine that Rome had been founded by Remus — and not Romulus.’
‘Yes. . So what?’
‘In that case, the city would be called Reme.’
Laura thought about this, instinctively, and lost. Her gaze flickered.
‘Damnation! Shit and damnation!’
There was a knock at the door and a junior specimen appeared. She looked straight at me. Junior specimens were not allowed to talk unless spoken to.
‘What is it, you odious child?’ I said.
‘God wants you.’
‘God’ was our headmistress, Miss Grace Ashe. I was wary of Miss Ashe — I suspected that she saw through me, saw my very nature. I knocked on the door of her office and waited, conscious that I was a bit on edge, that I was feeling nervy, not at my best. Such an evening summons was rare. I heard her say ‘Come!’ and I checked my uniform, smoothed the creases from the knees of my beige lisle stockings, and pushed the door open.
Miss Ashe’s ‘office’ did not live up to the name — it was a sitting room, with a large burr-walnut bureau covered in papers and files set in an alcove. I could have been in a country house. The carpet was a navy blue with a scarlet border; a sofa faced two armchairs, all in white linen loose covers, across a long padded tapestry stool with books placed on it. The wallpaper had a cream and coffee-coloured stripe and the room’s paintings were real and modern, stylised landscapes and still lifes painted by Miss Ashe’s brother, Ivo (who had died in the war). Pale blue hessian curtains were allowed to bulk their hems on the floor and the table lamps burned dimly behind mottled parchment shades. Taste was being exhibited here, I realised, confident yet understated.
Miss Ashe was in her early forties, so we had calculated, pale and slim with her dark auburn hair combed tightly back from her brow to be gathered into a complex knotted bun. We all agreed she was ‘chic’. Millicent and I had decided she looked like a retired prima ballerina. We were all, in truth, rather frightened and in awe of her and her elegant, impassive demeanour, but I made it my strategy never to show this. I tried to be uncharacteristically breezy and gay with her and I think she was consequently rather annoyed by my attitude, aware it was feigned for her benefit. She was always rather short and stern with me. No smiles, as a norm.
But she was smiling now as she waved me to a chair. I was disarmed, for a second or two.
‘Evening, Miss Ashe,’ I said, trying to regain the upper hand. ‘That’s a beautiful bracelet.’
She looked at the heavy silver and Bakelite bracelet on her wrist as if she’d forgotten she’d put it on.
‘Thank you, Amory. Do sit.’
She sat down herself and reached for a cardboard file and opened it on her knee. She was wearing an emerald-green afternoon frock, trimmed with a lemon-yellow scarf at the neck. She flipped up the lid of a silver cigarette box on the table beside her chair, took out a cigarette, searched for a lighter, and lit her cigarette, all the time keeping her eyes on the open file. We’d noticed how Miss Ashe pointedly smoked in front of the older girls — it was a provocation. Thus provoked, I spoke.