After early enthusiasm, Alain now hated England, she deduced, because nobody recognized him. Maybe two dozen ads and dialogue-free parts in three music videos meant he didn’t have to walk far back home before inspiring double-takes, but fame apparently ended in U.S. territorial waters and it was eating him alive.
He sulked. He was depressed by British television — not enough channels and he claimed he couldn’t find anything but snooker tournaments and sheepdog trials. He logged epic phone time calling home to reassure himself that his world still existed. She’d thrust the keys to the rental car at him — “Take it, go, go find something you
Meanwhile, Kate settled day by day into this green and misty autumn sojourn, realizing, Alain’s kvetching aside, she’d not been this content in … she couldn’t remember.
Nigel Crenshaw entrusted her with a spare key to the church so she could come early or stay late if she pleased. He loaned her books about the region, which she eagerly perused at the bed-and-breakfast in Craven Arms and in the area pubs. Little, if anything, was said about Geoffrey Blackburn, but they did help her lift him farther out of the vacuum of dry intellect and make him into a fuller person, in the context of a real time and place.
With every day, the more her camera captured of his labors, the more Kate wondered about him: What had driven him to such excellence instead of settling for being a merely competent artisan; why he’d so thoroughly committed himself to rendering the grotesque instead of threatless, tranquil beauty.
She thought she understood after a few days, understood as one can only after admitting to infatuation with someone not only never met, but who never could be.
Perhaps, despite the institution behind his commissions, he had seen enough of the world to harbor no illusions of any divine goodness, and spent a lifetime chipping its cruelty into something more manageable. Or making intimate friends of its harsher faces. Or telling everyone else what he knew in metaphors they would understand.
She could identify. So maybe Geoffrey Blackburn wasn’t so much ancestor as mirror.
Despite everything it had brought her, she often felt that winning the Pulitzer for that hateful photo had been the worst thing that could’ve happened to her, at least at such a young age. Not that recognition itself was harmful; more that she’d been left with the inevitable what-next syndrome. The odds against her ever again being in such a right time and place were astronomical.
And she doubted she would have the stomach to again witness anything comparable. Even the first time, she’d shot the picture like a pro, but later cried for a day and a half.
She’d shot news only for another thirteen months.
Commercial photography paid better, after all, and nobody died in front of the lens. Only their careers, if they’d had the audacity to age badly, or even at all.
*
At least once per day, while working outside the church, she caught him watching from varying distances and differing vantages: the man Crenshaw seemed to believe he’d run off.
Some days he stood in the meadows, others near the treeline. Never any threat, hardly a movement at all out of him, he’d stand with his hands in his pockets while autumn’s bluster flapped his coat about his knees; stand there like a displaced and rough-hewn Heathcliff.
At first she ignored him, turning away nearly as soon as she saw him. He’d be gone the next time she checked. Day by day she grew bolder, returning his gaze unfazed, and finally snapping his picture, then crossing arms over chest, determined to outstare him. He threw his head back with a hearty laugh, then walked into the trees until trunks and leaves swallowed him up.
She inquired about him of the locals — as long as there were pubs, there was no shortage of opinions on anything — finding that no one knew much about him, only that if he made his home nearby, none could tell you how to get there.
“Jack” was the best anyone could do for a name — this from a man who swore his good friend’s cousin had been drunk with the fellow. Popular opinion pegged him as a full-time wanderer — maybe a refugee from one of those rolling communes that motored up and down Britain — most certainly on the dole, and that the area around the Church of St. Johnny B was the crossroads of his travels.
“Fixate on an area, some of ‘em, they do,” she was told amid the warm, rugged timbers of the Rose & Thistle. It boasted more Jack-sightings than anywhere else, until the next pub. “Get it in their heads it’s a holy place, from back before God had whiskers, and next thing you know, you’re up to your bollocks in Druids.”
“Bollocks is right,” countered another. “You wouldn’t know a Druid if he hoisted his robe and showed you his own two.”
She joined in the beery laughter, but still, this could’ve been close to the truth. Many of these medieval churches had been built on the ruins of far more ancient sites. Some contended it symbolized a triumph over pre- Christian beliefs, others that it was a way of coaxing stubborn pagans toward conversion.
If this was Jack’s interest in the place, she approved, even found something endearing about it, the romanticism of clinging to what time had rendered obsolete before you ever had a chance to call it yours. Longing to reclaim it despite the world’s derision.
Kate thought of Jack from that first day inside the church, however brief the encounter. Recalling his smell, of all things, a not-unpleasant musk of maleness and the outdoors, as though he’d slept beneath a blanket of decaying leaves, on a pillow of moss.
Alain’s liberal dousing with cologne seemed more ridiculous every day, and the nights when they made what passed for love, in a kind of energized mutual loathing, she wondered how he would react if she came to bed with that green and woody scent on her. If he would recoil in disgust, accuse her of going native. If his rejection would be her own rite of passage, an emancipation to proclaim:
The next day there was no good reason to devote time to more exterior shots, but she did it anyway, working until he was simply there, Jack on the crest of a green-domed rise. She took a chance.
“I’ll bet you know things about this church,” she called to him, “that even Crenshaw doesn’t.”
“Not much challenge in that,” he called back. “But don’t get me started on what you won’t want me to finish.”
She waved him forward, and he came, in nearly every way the antithesis of Alain. Quick to smile, with the
