Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

to escape, and the photographs she began taking were different from her previous ones. Luke couldn’t understand what would make someone who had taken pictures of random objects suddenly want to photograph poor people standing at factory gates. He’d seen examples of both. He remembered seeing prints when he was a child and drawing on the back of them and never knowing where they came from.

She fell in love and it changed her style. That much he’d gleaned before they set out, reading the letters, thinking her thoughts. But he didn’t know why she gave it all up again in 1963. He felt there must be an answer lurking quietly in her current confusions, but it lay deep down. When he was growing up he had questioned her about the photographs and she said it had become important to capture real lives. The conversations between them had made them close. It was like a kind of teaching. Yes, he thought: she gave him lessons in how to aim above himself. She made him unusual, and she helped him to believe that a readiness for art was equal to a capacity for life. ‘Art is a moral adventure,’ he said to her in his university days and she’d winked at him. He’d got it. He was hers. She had no suspicion that this kind of hope would lead him into the world in a different way, but she supported him when he joined up, feeling it was all part of some secret quest that both of them understood.

‘Harry liked the shipyards,’ she said as they drove along. ‘And they were lovely people.’

‘The workers?’

‘Harry and the men.’

‘And did you sell any pictures?’

‘Bert worked for the

Picture Post

.’

‘And Harry would help you?’

‘Harry was in the war. Same as you.’

The horizon was orange and the crowd at Blackpool was already on the promenade. He slowed the car and saw the dirty sea through the painted railings. He saw the North Pier, the new public art, the laughing men with their mates and their chips. A sudden feeling of excitement filled the air between them and Anne giggled before Luke turned right at a bookmaker’s shop. It was late afternoon and the greyness of the town was expiring before their eyes. Kids had glow-sticks and coloured windmills made of light. ‘In one hundred yards you have reached your destination,’ the sat nav said. Anne sat up and craned her neck to see above the buildings.

‘Tower,’ she said.

He parked in York Street and Sheila answered the door. ‘Ee, Mrs Blake!’ she said. ‘Lord Jesus, Mrs Blake, come in.’ The paint was peeling on the door and the hall was filled with orange light as Anne stepped inside. Luke wasn’t sure if she had any proper memory of Sheila, or her sister, who was standing in the hall with a tea towel and a glass of beer. But she certainly recognised the house and was beaming into the carpet and the stairs. It was as if they’d walked in on a family celebration. ‘You’ll see some changes, Mrs Blake,’ said Sheila. ‘Tony’s a builder. He’s renovated, God, a dozen times, since Mam died. Did you know Mam died, Mrs Blake?’

Anne just smiled. She saw the lady talking and then wiping her nose. ‘Don’t mind me, I get emotional,’ Sheila said.

‘I know your mum,’ Anne said.

‘Of course, you did. Of course. And she spoke fondly of you all her life, Mrs Blake.’ The woman looked at her sister and bit her lip and took the towel to dab her eyes. ‘Look, I’m away again!’

Anne stared contentedly down the hall, as if seeing a great deal there, her own life and the lives of other people, and when she turned to the old hall mirror she remembered Harry. She asked herself if the bed upstairs would still be the one they bought.

Luke went out to get the bags and stopped to look up. It seemed for a minute that everything around him was available, and he knew, just there, standing at the open boot of the car, that this was a night he would always remember. Years on, perhaps, when it happened he was sixty or seventy, he would remember York Street and the look of the promenade and would still see Anne in the lighted hall with those women. The house was tall and it looked like an old B&B with lace curtains. Before he went back in he thought about Harry’s letters. They were full of advice about how she could develop her photographs, about how to work with contrast not only to get at life but to enhance it. Luke saw their past with Harry’s voice in his head, and realised he could hear a conversation between them. When he brought the bags in to the hall he could see Anne standing apart from the women, contented but lost, and he returned Harry’s words to her without opening his mouth.

I love you darling for your promise and the things I never had. It takes courage to be a true artist and I don’t even have enough to catch the train.

Don’t talk to me about what’s true, Harry. No more, do you hear me? No more about the truth. Life isn’t a photograph.

Isn’t it, darling?

Anne reached over and touched some scarves that were hanging on the pegs, a few coloured scarves, one of them with mittens sewn in at each end. She took off her glove and gently put her hand into one of the mittens, and smiled.

‘Will she be okay with the stairs?’ Sheila asked.

‘No bother,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’ She reached up and kissed his cheek, then turned to Anne.

‘I’m leaving you to get settled in,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be here, Mrs Blake, if there’s anything you need. If there’s anything at all you want you just tell me, okay?’

Anne moved with surprising steadiness up the stairs and Luke came behind with the bags. At one point, on a high landing, she stopped and he waited a few steps behind. When he looked at her face he saw a trace of something young, as if the landing light knew and liked her. For a moment he imagined a young woman contemplating a fresh start, coming up the stairs with a vision of work and the man she loved. Did he ever come? Framed drawings of seabirds were hung around the landing.

It was warm inside, curiously warm, as if the heating had only recently been turned on again in the room. When they stepped inside Anne just walked to the middle and stopped. ‘Don’t put the light on,’ she said. He closed the door and stood with his back against it and watched her step around the bed and put her hands on the window. The sky outside seemed blue in the way time itself can be blue, a perfect dusk with Blackpool framed in the windows. Anne looked out as if the scene was something she had always known. She didn’t move. And after a moment she turned.

‘Is that you, Harry?’

A MIND OF WINTER

The truth would keep for another day. Anne was sitting by the window with a cup of tea in her lap and Luke was unpacking the bags and placing things in the bathroom. On the keyring there

were smaller keys which Sheila said were for cupboards above the sink. She said they were full of old things belonging to Anne. ‘Mostly papers, I think. My mother warned the whole family not to interfere with Mrs Blake’s privacy.’ Luke asked her why her mother was so strict about it. ‘I’ll tell you when we sit down and have a drink, love. Your grandmother was good to us. She was good to us and we don’t forget.’

He’d never seen one before, a bedsitter. That’s what it was, a fine old bedsitter in Blackpool. The bed was under the windows and was made up with a fresh white eiderdown. There was a table with two chairs and a vase of roses Sheila had placed there. Anne bent down to sniff the flowers and she said how nice and warm it was in the room. Along the wall on the other side was a bed settee that Sheila had made up for Luke. The light was dim and perfect, Anne thought: just enough to make you concentrate on the view, because that’s what you came for. ‘I’ll tell you,’ Anne said. ‘We got a lot of things wrong but we got a lot of things right.’