The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [39]
He read the monograph again. Edwin Poole had surprisingly little to say. His point seemed to be that Gibson-Hoare was technically accomplished in a way that few women photographers of the period were. And that she eschewed emotion in a way that few women photographers were capable of doing. Seaton was left with the view that the argument was more a way of dispelling the author’s prejudices than shedding any light on the artist under discussion. If Gibson-Hoare qualified as an artist. On this evidence, Seaton wasn’t sure that she did. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography predated this stuff by more than fifty years and was just as technically accomplished. And if you wanted the triumph of narrative over emotion, you could do a lot worse than look at Lee Miller’s war photographs. And Lee Miller had been all woman. He looked at the contents page again as Lucinda came back into the room, changed out of her tennis clothes and carrying two mugs of tea for them. Poole’s monogram had been published in 1937.
‘Her cousin,’ Lucinda said, sitting down. ‘There was just a decade between them. He had no artistic pretensions of his own. He was twenty-seven and something important at Lloyds of London when her messy suicide looked like it might hurt his career.’ She sipped tea. ‘So he produced this, at his own expense, and had a few hundred copies printed.’
‘It’s pretty worthless.’
‘On the contrary, it’s quite valuable. It was printed by some Bloomsbury offshoot on a press set up by Lytton Strachey.’
‘I meant it’s worthless as a source.’
Lucinda nodded. They both sipped tea. It was strong and malty. Like her vowels, her tea had a northern character. ‘Most of her best work is in the British Museum.’
‘So she did do good work?’
‘Oh, yes. She did great work. For a period.’
‘What were you hoping to find?’ He was aware that in saying this he was putting Lucinda’s efforts into the past tense. And she must have noticed because, for a moment, she didn’t reply.
‘More than exists in the public domain. Pandora painstakingly learned photography, the craft and science of it, to meet some artistic need or yearning in her that wasn’t being satisfied. She certainly didn’t need whatever income or profit her work could provide. And women photographers were regarded as dilettantes, so she wasn’t after status. She was an artist. And then she stopped.’
‘And you were seeking to explain why she stopped? To solve the mystery? That was the thrust of your dissertation?’
‘No, Paul. I think there’s a cache of work, somewhere. I think there’s important work of hers still to be discovered. And, stupidly, I was hoping to be the one to find it.’
Seaton put Poole’s book on the floor and held out his free hand and took hers and was gratified to feel his grip returned. ‘Does this conversation mean you’re going to let me help you?’
‘Help me cheat, you mean?’
‘If you like.’
‘Yes,’ Lucinda said. ‘I suppose it does.’
Later, Seaton walked to the newsagent’s shop on Lambeth Walk and rented An American Werewolf In London. And they wound back the tape and watched the scene when the two hapless Americans seek refuge in the Slaughtered Lamb three times, laughing more with every viewing.
‘I’ll bet you had a crush on Jenny Agutter,’ Lucinda said.
‘Ah, come on,’ Seaton said. ‘There’s barely a man alive didn’t have a crush on Jenny Agutter.’
Later, they walked into Kennington and met Stuart Lockyear and Patrick at the Black Prince pub where a singalong was staged on weekend nights. And Patrick sang ‘Blueberry Hill’, improvising the words because he didn’t know them, scat-singing in the end, Seaton watching his brother perform, weeping tears of laughter, with a Guinness in one hand and the other over his eyes, only daring to look through the gaps between his fingers. And Patrick finished to a standing ovation and, at closing time,