My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman Page B

it to Tess.
    Lawson’s room was at the front of the house, and was sparsely furnished, with a bay window. The bed was unmade; it was single, a monk-like bed, with a thin grey blanket and a flat pillow. I saw his camera sitting on a table, but no evidence of his work.
    â€˜So where are these photos you took of me?’ I asked. Reaching down under the bed, he drew out a large folder and showed me the photos he’d taken of me on the stone lion. They were of my face. Just my face. In one I wore an expression of brooding intensity, my eyes cast downwards. I must have been reading Oscar Wilde’s letter to his mother. Another picture had me gazing into the distance (thinking perhaps of the beauty of the laundromat and Dr Dirt of Dunoon?).
    Lawson had other photographs, all of faces. He must have taken them in the street without people knowing, because each of their expressions said something they would not have wanted others to see. People always put on a special face for a camera, just as they do when looking into a mirror.
    One man’s face said, ‘You cannot help me.’
    Another’s said, ‘I am alone.’
    â€˜What does my face say?’ I asked Lawson.
    He looked at the picture of me reading Oscar Wilde’s letter. ‘I wish I was somewhere else,’ he said. And then the one of me staring across the road: ‘I belong here.’
    He handed them back to me.
    Looking at Lawson’s own face, I noticed again the grainy quality of his skin, as though someone had rubbed at it with sandpaper. I wanted to reach out and touch it. Impulsively, I leaned over and put out my tongue. It connected with his cheek for a moment. He tasted, as I’d suspected he would, of salt, as though he’d been standing in sea-spray, or wept so much that his skin was impregnated with tears.
    One of his eyes flickered, but that was the only reaction he made. Putting away the photographs he said, ‘Do you want to walk up to the park?’ Hetty had fallen asleep suddenly on the floor, her bottom in the air, and I picked her up and carried her to the pram without her waking. On our way out of the drive I saw Maggie Tulliver again. She was talking to someone, and affected not to notice me.
    We walked away from the voices and music, across the road to the park. There was a brick entranceway with iron gates, but you didn’t need to use it, as there was no fence. Immense fig trees, their roots making a maze in the bare earth, stood at intervals where a fence might have been. The park curved around a bend in the river; and through the trees I saw that it was diagonally opposite Samarkand, not far as the crow flies. But there were no crows flying that night. All the birds were silent. Within the park, several more spreading fig trees enclosed little areas of darkness and secrecy. Broad sweeps of lawn were lit by moonlight.
    We sat in the open, on the grass, and the air was so mild it was like being bathed in the sea on a summer day. We talked, this salty man and I, in a desultory, aimless, pleasing way. I lay down, stretching out my legs and staring at the sky. At some stage I must have fallen asleep, though I don’t remember it. I ended up sleeping the entire night in the park.
    It was laziness that led to my sleeping the night in the park; the laziness of not wanting to make my way home with my baby and my dog; the laziness of not wanting to move, of not wanting the balmy night to end; the laziness of enjoying talking softly to Lawson, speaking of nothing, my favourite kind of conversation. It was the laziness of simply being me, an abandoned, reading girl.
    When I woke in the morning, Lawson had gone, and Becky Sharp was asleep next to me. Someone had placed a rug over each of us, and we had pillows under our heads. Hetty was beside me, curled up with her hand inside the front of my dress. Tess was nowhere to be seen.
    I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so Becky Sharp appeared blurred and