The Misadventures of Margaret Finch, page 8
‘Hello?’ She can hear a man’s voice but can’t work out where it is coming from. It’s as if the sound is coming from the floor beneath her feet. ‘Hello? Is someone up there?’
She has the sensation of being watched, is suddenly aware of where she is standing and how it would look to anyone who found her. ‘Yes! I’m …’
Footsteps on the stairs. She has to leave the room. Shouldn’t be in here alone. But she can’t bring herself to put the fountain pen down until she has screwed the top on it. ‘… coming!’ Stepping out into the hallway, she is just in time to see the doorway under the stairs open, and James emerge.
‘Ah, Margaret, it’s you,’ he says, relief in his voice. ‘I thought I was going to have to fight off a burglar!’ He raises his fists and spars with the air, nervous energy running through him. He really had expected to find an intruder. She thinks him rather brave for coming to find out. ‘Gracious, it’s bright!’ he says, lifting a hand to shield his face. ‘It’s pitch black down there.’ He nods to the doorway behind him, still protecting his eyes with something like a salute. ‘Rather frightened myself when I heard someone walking around up here. Silly really.’
She doesn’t think it was silly at all, but she can’t understand why he was lurking in the cellar in the first place.
He turns and heads back through the doorway. She hears him walk down two steps and pause on the third. ‘Are you coming, Margaret?’
She is not sure she should be following a man into the dark. Even James. She hesitates and peers around the doorway. The hallway light touches the first half a dozen steps or so but below that she can see nothing.
‘Shut the door behind you,’ he says. She does as he asks, then turns back to find a head in the darkness. A head detached from its body: James illuminating his face with a torch. He directs the light onto her feet, then down onto the tread below them, to guide her. She follows its path, stepping after it. James walks backwards into the darkness, but as soon as she has safely reached the bottom he turns from her, snatching the light away. She fights an impulse to rush after it, forces herself to quieten her breathing, puts out her hand to find the wall, the bricks slick with damp. There’s a smell that catches in the back of her throat. A medical smell. A chemical smell. She edges her foot back and wedges her heel against the first step, in case she needs to find her way out.
The torchlight jerks around the room as James walks across it, flashing into cobwebbed corners. Margaret hears the bang of something metallic, and there is darkness. Sudden. Complete. At the same moment, James cries out. She has an instinct to run but she is not sure whether towards him or away.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes. Dropped it on my foot. Where’s the blasted light?’
She hears a click, then an amber glow spills from a lamp on a table set out in the centre of the room.
‘Sorry about that,’ James says. ‘So – what do you think?’
It takes her a moment to understand what she is looking at. A washing line pegged out beneath the low ceiling. A table covered in bottles and trays, tools and papers.
‘A darkroom?’
‘Yes. All fairly crude I’m afraid. I’m a beginner. But this is perfect timing. I had just got everything set out and was about to start.’ She recognises the spy camera he used a couple of weeks ago, as he lifts it from the table. ‘Are you quite all right, Margaret? You look …’
‘I’m … just surprised.’
‘We gave each other a fright I should think!’ He picks up something that looks like an empty cotton reel and puts it in his shirt pocket. ‘You remember the photographs we took?’
‘Of course.’
‘Time to see if that cloak-and-dagger routine paid off.’ He checks the temperature of the liquid then reaches across her. ‘Shall we?’
She says nothing but he seems to take her silence as assent. Another click and the amber light disappears back into the lamp. There is nothing but darkness. No chinks of light, no shadows. She can see nothing. Nothing at all.
‘A fiddly old business in the dark,’ James says, his voice suddenly a whisper. ‘The key is to have everything to hand and know exactly where to find it. Any light at all could damage the film.’
She waits for her eyes to adjust but there is no change; it remains as dark as if she were wearing a blindfold. She feels as though her body is swaying, set adrift. She wants to reach out and hold onto the edge of the table. But she dares not move in case she breaks something. In case she accidentally touches James.
‘Are you all right there, old girl?’
‘Yes.’ Old girl? No one has ever called her that before.
‘I’m opening the film cassette now. I just need to cut off the end and … hold on … not quite … that’s it … now I can roll it.’
There’s a rhythmic crackle as the film is wound. It is a trick of her brain. She knows it is. But she imagines she can see what he is doing, can see the look of concentration on his face. And she can hear every breath he takes.
‘Thanks again for helping. At the pier.’ His movements stop and she can sense he has turned his head to look at her. ‘It’s important we keep Harrisson happy.’ She smiles in reply then realises that, of course, he cannot see it. ‘He wants results,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘He hopes to prove certain … hypotheses. I’m concerned that I’m not quite giving him enough … how can I put this? I’m under some pressure to provide … colour.’
‘My report about the Golden Mile isn’t far off now.’ As she says the words, she is surprised to find they sound defensive. ‘I went to see The Headless Girl today.’
‘Ah – did you? What did you make of her?’
‘The crowd certainly found her convincing.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I could see how the illusion was achieved. A mirrored box and—’
‘But did you not find it unnerving?’
What does her reaction have to do with anything? It is not significant. She was there to study how other people behave, not to be entertained by the spectacle. ‘I suppose. When they first pulled the curtain back. Have you seen her?’
‘I … no. I’ve got a postcard from the show somewhere. All the tubes coming out of her neck and …’ She hears a soft gulp as he swallows. ‘I’d like to see her for myself … of course … but you see, I’m so busy here.’
A feeling comes to her now, a feeling that has been creeping up on her this past fortnight. Of thrill and unease. She should have finished her report by now. Should have typed up much more of it. She’ll put in more hours. It won’t take her long to catch up. She won’t let James down. ‘I’ve got a postcard you might like – for your collection.’
‘Oh?’
‘Harold Davidson, setting out his case.’
‘That will make a great addition. Did you go back to see his act?’
‘Yes.’ It is not a lie. But she doesn’t mention that Davidson gave the postcard to her personally.
‘So what do the people make of him?’
‘Very mixed in their opinions.’
‘That’s disappointing. I thought there might be a clear view.’
‘I’m sure there’s more I can gather.’
‘Leave it, if it’s not yielding anything obvious.’
‘Like you said – it could tell us a lot about people’s opinion on authority, religion. I think the crowds see something in his story.’
‘A diversion from the mess the world is getting into!’
‘Perhaps, but I think it is more than that.’
‘How so?’
‘He’s been treated pretty badly by the Church, by all accounts.’
He laughs. ‘By his account.’
Margaret can see he has a point. ‘But if he really has been made a scapegoat, then shouldn’t we—’
‘It’s not our place. The mission is to understand working-class views, not influence them. And Harrisson is looking for something quite specific – people away from home, in the holiday spirit … but there have been very few recorded sightings of … misbehaviour. Fights and … well …’
She knows what he is getting at. She wants to tell him that he needn’t be shy with her; she has heard a lot worse in the conversations she has eavesdropped on in pubs across the town. But she appreciates his attempt to protect her modesty. ‘I’ll be sure to keep an eye out.’
‘No, Margaret, I wasn’t suggesting that you … It’s just on my mind, that’s all. Oh, I shouldn’t be burdening you with my thoughts.’
How strange that he should think them a burden. This is her job after all. ‘I want to help. If I can,’ she says.
‘If your report is nearly ready, I’ll tell Harrisson to expect it. That would be help enough. Thank you.’
He returns to his task, talking her through every stage of the process and every tool at his disposal. She joins him in counting down the precise number of minutes that the film is processed in the chemical baths, and hears the liquid lapping against the sides of the tank as he agitates it (five seconds of gentle turning for every thirty seconds of development). He describes each stage of this conjuring act with a rigour that pleases her: the developer washes away the silver compounds of the unexposed areas, while the fixer freezes the rest so they are no longer light-sensitive. Every so often he asks if she is all right, but never if she is keeping up, never if she understands. And by the time he tells her that the steps are nearly complete, she realises that she has come to enjoy the lack of any light. While she has been busy learning the science of photographic development, the blanket of darkness that felt as if it might smother her has become a comfort. In the dark she does not shy away from asking questions about the composition of the fixing agent, or the effect of dust on the grain of the image. For those few minutes, the voice inside her head is silenced. In the dark she doesn’t have to observe other people; in the dark she doesn’t have to watch herself.
The moment James switches on the lamp again, she feels that she has been woken too soon, too violently. Her eyes hurt and she hopes that the sudden rush of light will blind him a little longer so that he doesn’t look at her before she has had a chance to compose herself. It’s a term that has always made sense to Margaret: as though she is a melody she can write and perfect. As soon as she came to see every interaction as a musical performance – laughter like the trill of a piccolo, condolences delivered with the solemnity of bow on cello – she started to see the patterns, to understand when a conversation suddenly dipped into a minor key or soared into a major.
‘Looks like they’ve turned out well,’ says James, inspecting the photographs hanging on the strings above their heads. ‘Good definition. Good contrast. It only takes one chink of light to get in and everything starts to blur.’
12
At night, the Golden Mile shines as brightly as its name: lurid yellow flaring so brazenly that the moon appears to blanch in shame. Businesses compete to over-stimulate the senses and stun passers-by into stepping inside. Everything is over-sized and dazzling. The biggest, the best, the brightest. Children (staying up far too late, in Margaret’s opinion) drawn by the promise of a treat or prize; parents turning to find their sons and daughters have disappeared into a shop or arcade. Organ music plays from an open window, a cluster of men sing in a doorway, stallholders overcome the weariness of the day to shout above the constant chatter. At this time of the evening, the briny air feels stagnant, lost beneath the smell of beer and tobacco.
It has been a long day and Margaret wants to escape. It is all too much. She could never hope to capture it all, and disappointment has been taking hold. A feeling that she can only liken to indigestion. A physical sensation of burning in her chest, a growing unease planted when she found a memo pinned up on the noticeboard at HQ. ‘More evidence on promiscuity,’ it said. And though the request was directed at the entire team of researchers, she read it as a criticism of her alone. Harrisson’s theory, that people lose their inhibitions on holiday, is certainly sound, but she has done little to help James prove it. So far, her reports have contained nothing more than sightings of kissing couples. She is not significantly knowledgeable about the subject to judge whether they are French kisses, or those denoted by another nationality. So, she has devised her own scale of measurement: where the two participants do not part for air for a period exceeding eight seconds she lists it as ‘passionate kissing’ (she recorded no fewer than eighteen examples on a single night after a dance at the Winter Gardens). It is common for her observations to be peppered with ‘sexual touching: uninvited/unwelcome’. Men grab at women’s body parts with no more ceremony than one might scratch an itch. She wonders whether they even realise they are doing it. Margaret has, on occasions, felt a hand on her breast or a sharp pinch on her bottom. She cannot fathom why such an act would give a man pleasure and why it has to be done with such force. Perhaps it is nothing more than an involuntary compulsion, an occurrence so common that she need not make note of it at all. She has failed to confirm sightings of any touching beneath clothing, or removal of garments, but Maude’s implication, a few weeks ago, that couples go under the pier for consensual sexual interaction, has set her thinking. She wants to record a sighting of illicit commune, veering between fascination and fear at the thought of witnessing the act.
Margaret walks into the nearest pub to find a corner to sit and think, and orders what her father would refer to as a ‘stiffener’. She begins by making a note of the competing risks and benefits of venturing under the pier, careful to consider what could have happened had she not been rescued from those men in the alleyway. But the objections grow quieter with every whisky, their edges blurring. Any voice of consternation now almost inaudible. She can do this. Wants to. For her career. For James.
Male researchers are encouraged to participate in this kind of research directly: to fraternise with young female holidaymakers and report back on how far they manage to take their courtship. Sexual intercourse is often performed standing up, against the outside wall of a dancehall or public house; it is referred to in reports as ‘a knee-trembler’. But relieved that, as a woman, there is no expectation for her to deploy such sordid tactics, Margaret resolves to gather evidence from a distance.
Heading back to the pavement of the Golden Mile she takes the steps down to the covered pathway that runs behind the beach. Benches are positioned at intervals, looking out to sea between stone arches. Courting couples sit holding hands, one pair sharing the same ice cream, another the same coat that covers their laps. She supposes they might consider the view romantic. The light spilling from the prom snags the crests of waves, which soothe the night with an insistent whisper.
The tide has gone out, pulling back the curtain on the South Pier’s illusion: exposing the metal struts that make it appear to hover just above the surface of the sea. Margaret steps onto the sand and walks towards the pillars, the pale moon lighting her way through strands of seaweed discarded by the waves. In the daytime, she has watched groups of children on the pier, seen them lying on their fronts and putting their eyes to the gaps between the wooden slats with delighted terror. Now, she is the one looking up through the cracks, glimpsing stars floating on a midnight sky. She feels that the world has been turned upon its head and that she could fall right through them. The pillars are scarred with the shells of living creatures, hanging on until the sea returns again. There’s a smell of sulphur, of stagnant water. An empty bottle lies unbroken at her feet. In a few hours, she thinks, it will be dashed against the metal posts, shattered into a hundred pieces and swallowed by the waves.
She should perhaps have brought a torch, but that would make her presence too obvious. Fearing that even the moon might give her away, Margaret walks in line with the posts, and peers around them before continuing. Silhouetted beside a pillar further ahead, she can see something moving against the metal, flapping back and forth like a flag. She would have said it was a figure, but the proportions are all wrong: height stunted, legs misshapen, head missing. Its movement is becoming more rapid, more insistent. Noises carry across the still air. Ragged breaths like the rhythmic panting of the sea. The damp sand muffles her footsteps and she is able to make her way closer. And what she sees suddenly makes sense. Two figures. One pressed flat against the metal of the post, the other pushing against it. The head is not missing but bent over the shoulder of the other person. The legs are not misshapen, but half covered with trousers which have been unbuttoned and left to drop to the floor. And all she can think is that they have fallen into the seawater that pools around the man’s feet. That when he pulls them back up he’ll have wet trousers.
This is what she came here to see. She should be delighted. But she is surprised to find that she is not. She has a feeling of having failed somehow. She had wondered whether actually seeing the act being committed might excite her in some way, that it might ignite a sensation that she had long feared she would never feel. But it hasn’t. Just the opposite, in fact.
She can hear the rolling sea, taste the salt on her lips, but she can no longer see it. The moon has hidden its face altogether, cringing behind a single strip of cloud, and Margaret turns away, heading back towards the walkway. Since moving to Blackpool, she has taken very little notice of the landscape. But at night the distractions are packed away, and what’s revealed is wild and untameable. She has come here to observe people when they aren’t pretending. To see what they do when they think no one is watching. To hear whispers in the dark. And now all she can hear are her own.
