The New Confessions Read Online Free Page B

lugubrious, mangy camel in Corstorphine Zoo. I took a picture of my father, in full academic dress, shaking hands with Queen Mary when she and George V visited Edinburgh in 1911. I caught Thompson dozing on a sofa in a sunny room, his mouth gormlessly open, one hand cupping his balls. I took a portrait of Sandy Malcolm, a blind man who sold bootlaces on the Waverley Market railings. Round his neck hung a placard: “Please buy. Am blind from dynamite explosion in Noble’s works, Falkirk, 1879.” I snapped Oonagh with four other women and their children in the Canongate one day as they gossiped outside a milliner’s. They all wore tartan shawls, even Gregor, five years old and barefoot. I was not interested in landscapes, streets or panoramas. I took living things.
    Our shared hobby brought me closer to Donald Verulam. In 1912 he showed two of my photographs (Sandy Malcolm and a stonemason atwork) in the University Photographic Society exhibition in the Trade Hall on Leith Walk. On the evening after the exhibition closed, a Friday, and as a kind of reward, I spent a night at his home in Barnton. We planned to go out to Swanston the next day with our cameras to watch the haymaking.
    Donald lived in a large stone semidetached house with a long neat garden at the back. I remember it as dark inside, with walls the color of brown paper and with hard carpets of deep maroon and navy blue. After his housekeeper had cleared away our dinner dishes we went into the library. Donald smoked a pipe. I examined his new Ross Panross stand camera with its patent lens tilt. Donald seemed thoughtful, vaguely melancholy.
    “How old are you now, Johnny?”
    “Nearly thirteen.”
    “My God. Thirteen years. Is that right?”
    My father never mentioned my age. I knew what Donald was thinking. He looked at me. He had not changed much in the six years I had come to know him, except that he was now almost completely bald.
    “I should’ve shown you these ages ago,” he said. He got up and went to a glass bookcase and took down an indigo leather album. He handed it over. I opened it.
    Pictures of my mother. Close-ups, studio portraits, casual snapshots. I looked at her as if for the first time, as if I were a groom in an arranged marriage contemplating his distant bride. I saw wavy fairish hair, a slim small-breasted woman with eyes and eyebrows like mine. She had a hesitant smile in the portraits, her top lip tensed rather over her teeth. The reason for this was revealed in a snapshot where one saw small white teeth set in a wide gummy smile as she leaped down from a pony and trap into my father’s arms. It was strange too to see my father with a woman, his face somehow decades younger, his posture more supple and limber.
    Donald explained that my father had asked him to take my mother’s portrait. They had had several sessions, which explained the number of studio shots (he had used an empty upstairs bedroom as a makeshift studio, he said).
    “You mean she came here, was in this house?”
    “Many times.”
    I felt an odd tautening of my spine. I looked over my shoulder. I tried to see my mother in this room. I felt strange. I turned back to the album. The other pictures came from excursions and jaunts they allthree had taken as friends. There must have been fifty or sixty photographs in all. (Donald gave the album to me. It became one of my most treasured possessions and I kept it with me through all my travels and ordeals over the years, until a thief stole the suitcase in which it was contained from my hotel room in Washington, D.C., 1954.)
    “I offered the album to your father after she …” Donald said. “But he didn’t—said he couldn’t bear to have it.” He smiled sadly.
    I looked at him. I thought:
Why did you make and keep an album full of photographs of my mother?
Why? And how did I know then, aged nearly thirteen, that darkening summer evening in Barnton, that Donald Verulam had been in love with my mother? What made me