This conversation was taking place in the Preserve. While he was speaking, Tom was conscious of many things, of the sound produced by Nelly’s teeth biting into an apple, for instance, and of the unexpected mildness of the evening. Someone had placed a double row of candles all down the long table on the dais, the only illumination in the cavernous room. Tom’s eyes kept returning to that bright, unstable path. But what he was seeing had no material form. Over the years, as he worked on his book, he had begun to picture James’s oeuvre as a massive, stooped figure, its progress along the passage of time impeded by a dragging shadow. Tom understood that the name of this darkness was history; that it represented unwelcome aspects of the past that blundered into James’s fi ction.
Nelly said, ‘But isn’t that the way it works? I mean, doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’
Her almost magical divination of the halting colossus Tom had pictured so astonished him that he couldn’t reply. The lurching figure advanced in his mind again, a grotesque portrait stepping clear of its frame. The vision was central to his argument, and it frightened him. He feared being unable to convey its force in reasoned prose; and of this fear, he said nothing to Nelly.
I used to be Nelly Atwood. It had sent Tom to his university library early the next morning. There he learned that sixteen years earlier, in 1985, the disappearance of a man called Felix Atwood had made headlines across Australia. A graduate student in the States at the time, Tom had missed the story. Now he began piecing it together from archived newspapers, leaning over the shining glass of a microfi lm reader.
Atwood, aged thirty-three, a trader in bonds at an investment bank that had financed the Napoleonic wars, vanished while spending Easter with his wife and young son at their holiday house in the bush. His wife was reported to have been unconcerned when she woke on Saturday morning and found her husband missing and no car in the drive. Atwood, an early riser, liked to go bushwalking on his own. The property was surrounded by forest. It seemed likely that he had left the car at a trail head, and set off into the bush. Equally, he might have driven down to the coast. He was a keen swimmer, and half an hour away was a beach he favoured.
Mrs Atwood, who suffered from headaches, had woken to familiar symptoms that morning. With an effort she dressed; stumbled with her child to a neighbour’s farm, where she left him. It was not an unusual arrangement; the four-year-old had a pet lamb there and was spoiled by the farmer’s teenage daughters.
Atwood’s wife said she returned to bed. Around noon she woke to find herself still alone in the house, and started to wonder if something had gone wrong. The Atwoods were expecting a visitor from the city later that day, and surely only a mishap could have kept her husband from being there to greet him.
Still the woman did nothing. She was quoted as saying she was not thinking clearly. The Atwoods’ friend arrived; and, learning what had happened, went immediately to the farm, where he made the call to the police.
The machinery of process clicked on. In the days that followed, the police interviewed the missing man’s relatives and friends, and began sorting through the reports still coming in from people who claimed to have seen him. Atwood’s BMW was found almost at once, parked in ti-tree scrub by the beach where he liked to swim. His clothes lay folded on the passenger seat. Forensic testing yielded numerous traces, none of them of use in determining what had happened to him.
Then a statement issued by Atwood’s employer revealed that he was under investigation for irregular dealing. While his managers had supposed him to be exploiting low-risk arbitrage opportunities, Felix Atwood had in fact been gambling spectacular sums in directional bets. These unauthorised activities produced substantial profits at fi rst, consolidating Atwood’s reputation as a trading star. What greed, complacency and lax internal controls failed to discover was the secret account he had opened. Here he hid the monumental losses that his high-risk strategies produced, while posting fabricated profits in the account where his performance was evaluated.
Atwood was clever and lucky; just not enough. The bank’s auditors presented their findings within a week of his disappearance, causing a fresh wave of speculation. For as the auditors closed in, Atwood could scarcely have failed to notice the stench blowing his way. It was an old story: a man faced with public ruin walking away from his life. Perhaps literally; for suicide was quickly mooted as a solution, Atwood wading into the sea as his wife and child slept, preferring death to disgrace.
It was discovered that the Atwoods’ house in the city was double-mortgaged. There were personal loans and credit card debts, and irregularities in income tax; the tax office was about to launch an enquiry of its own. Ready-made phrases appeared on the sheet of light under Tom’s eyes: luxury lifestyle, cocaine habit, assets seized.
Tom studied the photographs. Felix Atwood: curly hair, an angular, inviting muzzle. He was pictured on a beach with long breakers at his back and a surfboard under his arm; bowtied, with curls slicked down, outside a concert hall. He looked straight into the camera and smiled. He had good, or at least expensive, teeth. Somehow it was clear he did not make the mistake of underestimating his effect.
The Atwoods’ friend from the city was identifi ed, predictably, as Posner: dark hair emphasising his pallor, but for the rest astonishingly unchanged, as if that large, smooth face had repelled even time. Posner was in fact everywhere: escorting Mrs Atwood to a car, at a fundraising dinner with her husband, grave-eyed outside police headquarters in Russell Street.
But it was Nelly who held Tom’s attention. In the early photographs she was anonymous in sunglasses. But as events gathered speed and density, a different set of images prevailed. She appeared in an ugly ruffled dress with jewels at her throat: a photograph taken at the same opening night at which her husband had been snapped, with this crucial difference, that she gazed stonily at the lens. To Tom’s eye she looked-oddly- older than she did now, her cropped hair and frumpish frilled bodice making her seem dated; compounding the rigidity of her stare.
Elsewhere she was pictured in such a way as to bring out the prominence of her jaw. Then a new photograph showed her with her arm raised and mouth wide, screaming at the camera. She might have been trying to hide her face, but the gesture, coupled with that glimpse of her tongue and teeth, suggested a harridan’s attack.
In this way, from multiple images, a single portrait was being composed: of a hard-faced, alien female, operating from unfathomable motives, capable of losing control.
Nelly was never photographed with Rory. He was always pictured alone, and looked, as children do in such circumstances, fearful and exposed.
There would have been other pictures, gleaming and persuasive. But what television had made of Nelly was left to Tom’s imagination.
His university archived most of its newspaper holdings on positive film. However, a two-week period was stored on negatives. Their velvety darkness coincided with the least fl attering images of Nelly. Bat-black with silver-foil lips, she hung inverted in the machine’s overhead mirror.
Tom avoided microfilm whenever possible; was thankful for the digital imaging that had replaced it. There was the fi ddle of loading the film onto the spools and threading it correctly.
Librarians breathed at his shoulder with ostentatious forbearance as his hands thickened into paws. The film jammed or slipped from its reel.