A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(13)
“I’ve thrown away a year of my life,” she announced. “I could have been working at a regular job, making money for once. I could have been taking wedding pictures or something. A debutante’s ball. Christenings. Bar mitzvahs. Birthday parties. Ego portraits of middle-aged men and their trophy wives. What else?”
“Tourists standing with cardboard cutouts of the Royal Family?” he ventured. “That probably would’ve brought in a few quid had you set yourself up in front of Buckingham Palace.”
“I’m serious, Simon,” she said, and he could tell by her tone that levity on his part wasn’t going to get them through the moment, nor was it going to make her see that the disappointment of one night’s showing was in reality just a momentary setback.
St. James joined her at the wall and contemplated her pictures. She always let him choose his favourites from every suite she produced, and this particular grouping was among the best she’d done, in his unschooled opinion: seven black-and-white studies at dawn in Bermondsey, where dealers in everything from antiques to stolen goods were setting up their wares. He liked the timelessness of the scenes she’d captured, the sense of a London that never changed. He liked the faces and the way they were lit by street lamps and distorted by shadows. He liked the hope on one, the shrewdness on another, the wariness, the weariness, and the patience of the rest. He thought his wife was more than merely talented with her camera. He thought she was gifted in ways only very few are. He said, “Everyone who wants to make a stab at this sort of career begins at the bottom. Name the photographer you admire most and you’ll be naming someone who started out as someone’s assistant, a bloke carrying floodlights and lenses for someone who’d once done the same. It would be a fine world if success were a matter of producing fine pictures and doing nothing more than gathering accolades for them afterwards, but that’s not how it is.”
“I don’t want accolades. That’s not what this is about.”
“You think you’ve spun your wheels on ice. One year and how many pictures later...?”
“Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-two. Give or take.”
“And you’ve ended up where you started. Yes?”
“No closer to anything. Not one step further. Not knowing if any of this...this ki nd of li fe...i s even worth my time.”
“So what you’re saying is that the experience alone isn’t good enough for you. You’re telling yourself—and me, not that I believe it, mind you—
that work counts only if it produces a result you’ve decided you want.”
“That isn’t it.”
“Then what?”
“I need to believe, Simon.”
“In what?”
“I can’t take another year to dabble at this. I want to be more than Simon St. James’s arty wife in her dungarees and her combat boots, carting her cameras for a lark round London. I want to make a contribution to our life. And I can’t do that if I don’t believe. ”
“Shouldn’t you start with believing in the process, then? If you looked at every photographer whose career you’ve studied, wouldn’t you see someone who began—”
“That’s not what I mean!” She swung to face him. “I don’t need to learn to believe that you start from the bottom and work your way upwards. I’m not such a fool that I think I’m supposed to have a show one night and the National Portrait Gallery demanding samples of my work the next morning. I’m not stupid, Simon.”
“I’m not suggesting you are. I’m just trying to point out that the failure of a single showing of your pictures —which, for all you know, will not be a failure at all, by the way—is a measurement of nothing. It’s just an experience, Deborah. No more. No less. It’s how you interpret the experience that gets you into trouble.”
“So we’re not supposed to interpret our experiences? We’re just supposed to have them and go on our way? Something ventured, nothing gained? Is that what you mean?”
“You know it isn’t. You’re getting upset. Which is hardly going to avail either of us—”
“Getting upset? I’m already upset. I’ve spent months on the street. Months in the darkroom. A fortune in supplies. I can’t keep doing that without believing that there’s a point to it all.”
“Defined by what? Sales? Success? An article in the Sunday TimesMagazine?”
“No! Of course not. That’s not what any of this is about, and you know it.” She pushed past him, crying, “Oh, why do I bother?” and she would have left the room, flying up the stairs and leaving him no closer to understanding the character of the demons she confronted periodically. It had always been this way between them: her passionate, unpredictable nature set against his phlegmatic constitution. The wild divergence in the way they each viewed the world was one of the qualities that made them so good together. It was also, unfortunately, one of the qualities that made them so bad as well.
“Then tell me,” he said. “Deborah. Tell me.”
She stopped in the doorway. She looked like Medea, all fury and intention, with her long hair rain-sprung round her shoulders and her eyes like metal in the firelight.
“I need to believe in myself,” she said simply. It sounded as if she despaired the very effort to speak, and he understood from this how much she loathed the fact that he had failed to understand her.