The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [38]
‘I can help you.’
Faintly, there was the familiar sound of music, ‘Red, Red Wine.’ from the flat upstairs.
‘Help me do what? Cheat?’
‘Help you get the degree your talent merits.’
She looked distressed. He had never seen her look so distressed. She looked trapped, in the heat, in the room, in his scrutiny.
‘Show me her pictures,’ he said, saying it to deflect attention from Lucinda, to get her out of the glare of her own exposure. She went over to a shelf above the television they had bought and took down a slim book with stiff card covers and handed it to him. Then she left the room. He could hear her fumbling in the bathroom cabinet for her asthma inhaler as he held the book between his fingers.
It was a monograph. The author was a man named Edwin Poole, his name etched in a typeface reminiscent, Seaton thought, of the Bloomsbury Group. Past the contents page, Poole had written around twelve hundred precise words about the photography of Pandora Gibson-Hoare. There followed twenty plates of formal portraiture taken in a rigid monochromatic universe that smelled of dust and remoteness rising in the heat of the bright June day from dead and brittle pages. There was a picture of a doleful escapologist burdened by chains on a bridge on the Seine, the river and city made recognisable by the skeletal tower in the distance behind the manacled figure. There was a picture of a circus clown, seated on a drum in a sawdust arena, the pompom buttons on his tunic absurdly large, somehow pathetic under such detailed scrutiny, what looked like blood sprinkled and dotted in the area around his giant feet. There was a picture of a ballerina poised in the wings of a lit stage. Her limbs were sinewy against the white flounce of her tutu and her face cadaverous under her black drawn-back hair as she sucked on a cigarette screwed into a tortoiseshell holder. A New York cop held the butt of a heavy revolver between finger and thumb with the disgust a man might display holding the tail of a suspended rat. A corpse was bundled in an overcoat at his feet. You could only guess at the sex of the apparent crime victim from the smallness and paleness of the one hand visible under the bulk of the coat. Seaton recognised the great French boxer Georges Carpentier, pictured eating a cream bun at a café table with brilliantine in his hair and a long gash over one eye coarsely stitched. There were some studies of a female cabaret artist with a fat python and one of a conjurer displaying a decaying smile and a glass orb that seemed to hang by magic in the air above a card table. A man posed half in shadow on the deck of a liner. There was no convenient lifebelt displayed to give the name of the ship. But Seaton recognised the subject as the English occultist Aleister Crowley. He was smiling at something. Or for the camera. Elsewhere, at an atelier, an audience of frosted women studied a thin mannequin pinned by fussing seamstresses into a gown.
There was power in Gibson-Hoare’s pictures, Seaton thought, but mostly it was the fascination the viewer felt at the sight of death, rather than any intrinsic quality in the work. There was something compelling about extinction, and these pictures, of course, documented a vanished world. It was what all the subjects had in common. They were gone. It was not a world, though, anyone was likely to feel much nostalgia or sense of loss for. It was too sad and grotesque for that. Maybe that was her art, her gift, to get not just under the gilt and glamour but beyond the nostalgic cosiness that characterised so many old photographs. Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s vision was not cosy or quaint. It was stark and unsettling. This was no sepiatinted series of artful reminiscences.