But it was too late for that.
We went down to my studio, taking the dog. I couldn’t bear to be near the front door, with its smeary residue of vandalised milk that shamed and frightened me.
In the studio I put the heater on this time, embarrassed in front of Zhang to indulge in the pre-dawn masochism that had compelled me to sit in the cold while I looked online.
Zhang told me about the letter then, and about the dawn raid that had turned up a dying hoaxer.
‘He was a broken person,’ she said. ‘His child died during surgery, when Mr Finch was operating.’
‘Was it John’s fault?’
‘No. It was a very risky operation. The father had been informed of that, and the child would have died without it. John wasn’t at fault. Nobody was.’
‘Was it a boy or a girl, the child?’
‘I don’t know. Apparently the death drove the father mad. He’d been bringing the child up alone anyway because the mother had died. Also to cancer. He wrote a series of letters to the hospital threatening legal action, but he had no case against them, so it was hopeless. And now he has terminal cancer himself. The whole family, wiped out by that disease.’
‘How did he know about Ben?’
‘He saw it on the telly, recognised John, and he thought it was a chance to get back at him. That’s all it was, a spiteful act. I’m sorry. We’re not back at square one though. We’ve got other avenues to pursue.’
Her words were reassuring in themselves, but I could see that it cost her an effort to arrange her features into an expression of optimism.
As she stood up to leave, my photographs caught her eye.
On the wall above my desk was a collage of pictures I’d taken over the years, and almost without exception they were portraits of Ben. They were my best work.
They were mostly in black and white, and mostly taken on old-fashioned film and developed and printed by me, in a dark-room I’d rigged up in the garage of our family home. John had been happy to hand the garage space over to me. He wasn’t a DIY man.
My camera of choice had been a Leica M20, given to me by Ruth and Nicholas. I processed the films myself, and spent hours poring over the negatives, deciding which ones to print.
The printing process was a joy: the murky red light in which images of Ben emerged from the chemical soup, a kind of alchemy, painting with light, bringing something from nothing. It was a wobbly, unreliable, unpredictable process, yet it yielded images of such beauty and power, and I never tired of it.
The photographs I took weren’t the brightly lit studio prints that are ubiquitous now, where families are pictured against glaring white backgrounds, mouths agape, dental work on show, in poses they’ve never before adopted. Artifice, all of it.
I preferred to work with light and form, with what was there already. I started with the idea that I would be lucky to capture just a scrap of the beauty of my child.
Once, when Ben was about five years old, I came downstairs very early one summer morning to find a dawn light so softly crystalline that it seemed to have an ethereal presence of its own.
I roused Ben gently and before he was fully awake I asked him to sit at the breakfast table. It had been a hot night and he wore just pyjama shorts. He sat and gazed at the camera with a frankness that was perfect. In the finished photograph, it’s as if you can see into his soul. His hair is messy, his skin has the texture of velvet and the contours of his slender arms are perfect. There are no harsh lines in the picture. Blacks fade into greys and into whites, and shadows draw the features of his face and torso. They describe sleepiness and innocence and promise and truth. Only deep in Ben’s eyes is there a glint of something that is of its moment. It’s a flash of light, a white pearl, and although nobody else could tell, I know that the pearl is the reflection of the window, and of me, taking the photograph.
It’s the best photograph I’ve ever taken, and probably the best I ever will take.
Zhang stared at that photograph for a very long time. She held her coffee and stood in front of it and in time steam stopped curling above her hands. Then she looked at the others too, the various manifestations of Ben, of Ben as he was to me.
He was a toddler examining something on a summer lawn, with a lightly furrowed brow just visible under a sun hat; he was a close-up of two chubby baby feet and a study of hands with tiny, fragile fingernails and knuckles that had new-born wrinkles but not yet any solidity; he was his profile, the softness of the skin on his temples, the crisp curls of his eyelashes just visible behind; he was a distant silhouette jumping a rock pool on a spectacular cliff-edged winter beach.
There were so many and Zhang studied each one. Occasionally her radio made a sharp noise, a crackle or static or a voice. She ignored it.
‘These are just beautiful,’ she said.
I was lost in the pictures myself when she said it, and her sincerity was unexpected, and felt unfiltered.
‘You’re the first person outside the family to see them,’ I said.
‘Truly? I’m honoured. I really am.’
Her voice caught. She had to take a moment to compose herself.
‘I tried to learn photography when I was younger,’ she said. ‘My dad bought me a camera, an old-fashioned one. It was a film camera. I was fifteen years old. He set me a project. He told me to go out and take photographs. He drove me to a place called Old Airport Road, in Singapore, where I grew up, because he was in the army you see. Anyway, on Old Airport Road there’s an old-fashioned food court, so you know what I mean, lots of stalls selling street food of every different kind, a photographer’s dream really. My dad told me to take photographs of the food. I had to ask permission from the stallholders and my dad sat and watched while I spent ages preparing my shots and looking at the different angles and shapes, and after two hours I’d taken my twenty-four photographs. We dropped the film off to be developed and I couldn’t wait to go and collect it the next day, I was so excited. I had one of those ideas you have when you’re young, you know: I’m going to take one roll of film and be a famous photographer. I was that excited. But when I went back the next day and the girl in the shop gave me my packet of photographs, I pulled them out, and every single one of them was black.’
It was the most I’d ever heard her talk. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Well, I looked at my dad, I had the same question on my lips, and he said, “That will teach you not to leave the lens cap on.” I was so angry with him for not telling me.’
‘Did he know? While you were taking the photos?’
‘He did. That’s what he’s like though. He believes you should learn things yourself, do things the hard way.’ She smiled wanly. ‘It worked. I never did it again.’
‘That’s what I was trying to do for Ben,’ I said. She kept her eyes on the photographs. ‘In the woods, when I let him run ahead. Because I thought that being independent would let him feel life, be enchanted by it, not fear it, or feel that he has to follow a set of rules to get through it. Because it’s tough.’
She said nothing. She turned away for a moment and the silence was awkward. When she turned back her eyes were red and she put a hand on my arm, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. I really am.’
Once Zhang had gone I went back into the house, driven by the need to be near the landline in case of news. The silence was hard to bear and I tried to console and calm myself by looking at Ben’s books again. I revisited the page where he’d drawn himself spending the whole day in bed, before I turned over to see what he’d written next.
The following page was startlingly colourful by comparison. Greenery filled every corner: trees and plants in strong confident lines, and a dog that was obviously meant to be Skittle. Short straight lines slanted across the page, over the other images, as if somebody had spilled blue hundreds and thousands across it.