Under a Watchful Eye(81)
Reluctant to be left behind, Seb followed as best he could, tracking the excessive noise of Mark’s feet into a long dining room in which a table without chairs awaited. The cabinets also offered nothing more than bare shelves behind dirty glass. Beneath the window the indentations of a sideboard’s legs still pocked a threadbare rug that covered most of the floor.
Mark rushed out as soon as Seb arrived. From further along the passage that bisected the width of the building, he called out, ‘Seb! In here! Quick,’ as if he’d found what he was looking for. ‘Check it out. His study? Do you think?’
That room had once been an office for someone. A desk remained, an antique hardwood. A Remington portable typewriter sat uncovered beside two pencils, a large stone paperweight and an empty blue glass. The shelves above the small desk were empty.
‘And look. Still here.’ Mark’s torch lit up a table beneath the shuttered window. Upon it a cluster of framed photographs stood upright. Mark began to raise them and blow away dust. There were nine portraits.
‘That was Prudence Carey when she was younger,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve seen that picture before.’ It had been shot in black and white and featured an attractive woman with dark hair, seated in a stylized pose, looking over her shoulder. Seb guessed it had been taken no later than the thirties.
Two of the colour pictures captured an elderly woman beside a flower bed, and perhaps this was part of the Tor’s now neglected gardens. It had probably been taken in the early seventies. ‘I’m guessing that could be her when she was older,’ Mark offered.
‘There he is,’ Mark said so suddenly he made Seb jump. He held up another picture frame and jabbed his pudgy hand at the portrait of a small, smartly dressed man with a slender face, sharp cheekbones and dark eyes. He was handsome in a way that was pretty. ‘The Master.’
In another photograph the same figure wore a carnation on the jacket of his suit and stared dreamily into the distance, his hair immaculately styled with brilliantine. It looked like a portfolio shot taken some time after the Second World War.
In another gilt frame the same man, though much older, was standing beside an E-Type Jaguar and wore a pale macintosh coat and a small alpine hat. The print was blanched by sunlight, but Seb estimated that it had been taken in the sixties. Gloves and oblong sunglasses also issued signs of a subtle though deliberate concealment. One hand rested on the roof of the sports car. The dandy grown up.
‘So who’s that?’ Seb asked. The final three portraits featured another woman. Slender, near willowy, her face heavily but tastefully made-up in each photograph.
She wore a simple black dress in one picture and held a glass of sherry. A stole was draped over one arm, the only embellishment that added a theatrical flourish. One eyebrow was also arched in mock-disapproval at whoever held the camera, the eyes alluring and mischievous. She stood as if in the first position of ballet, her sling-back shoes pointy-toed and high-heeled, her slender shins shimmering in nylon. Elegant, quietly glamorous, even sexy, and posed before a large fireplace. Seb had not long shone his torch on that fireplace in one of the downstairs rooms.
The beauty wore a hat and veil in the sole headshot. Behind a gauzy veil, her painted eyes were made feline with eyeliner, and feminized further with false lashes. Shiny, dark and slightly parted lips smiled beneath the veil. The siren.
‘Diane? You think?’ Mark said. ‘The eyes and nose, same as the male persona. See?’ He pointed to one of the younger shots of the man.
He was right. This was Hazzard, and convincingly transformed into a fashionable society beauty. Nothing too dramatic or camp. This was an artful mimicry of the female without a hint of the spectacle of drag. It could have been the portrait of a film star.
In the final picture, the transvestite was older and dressed in a long mink coat, the glossy fur shimmering. Her hair was concealed by a hat, or white turban, the eyes completely hidden by sunglasses. A beauty spot had been delicately impressed beneath one eye. Long satin gloves covered the delicate forearms, and patent leather boots encased her legs, adding a subtle charge of the erotic and revealing the fetish at the heart of the persona. Age seemed to have transformed the alter-ego into something more imperious too. The gaiety and prettiness had vanished from this colder, fuller, but still handsome face.
The actual evidence of Hazzard’s eccentricity, the split gender and the feminine half, cultivated with such care and enthusiasm, startled Seb. He found it hard to equate Diane with the terminable morbidity of Hazzard’s second collection of ‘Strange Experiences’.
The life of the man seemed too large to be accommodated by any experience at his disposal. Despite his perilous situation, Seb couldn’t deny the compelling aura that this master of lies and subterfuge, of disguise and theatre, still managed to issue from old photographs. While enmeshed in a tawdry history of under-employment, imprisonment and fraud, Hazzard had also achieved something extraordinary inside a grand country house. He had accomplished something that no robed guru or bearded, self-proclaimed prophet of the same era, had ever mastered in their more celebrated compounds or temples. Hazzard was an original.
‘Just bloody incredible.’ Mark took photos of the portraits. Then switched his tablet for a small camera that he cupped in one hand. ‘You know who should come here and film this? That Kyle Freeman fella. I love his stuff.’
Seb looked at the ceiling. ‘Let’s go. Upstairs.’