Emma. Alexander McCall Smith
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haven’t seen one another for some time,’ said Mr Woodhouse, trying to remember when it was that he had last seen John and wondering whether he still had an unhealthy complexion and rather lank hair.
‘Ages,’ said John. ‘Yonks.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘I see your brother quite a bit, of course. He often comes round here.’
‘He hasn’t got much to do,’ said John.
Mr Woodhouse sounded peeved. ‘He keeps busy enough, I’d say. He runs the farm rather well.’
‘With a manager, yes,’ said John, and then added, ‘Good old George.’
Mr Woodhouse ignored this remark. ‘You still taking photographs, John?’
‘Yes, Mr Woodhouse. That’s my job. I’m a fashion photographer in London. Vogue. Vanity Fair. Tatler. That’s me.’ He paused. ‘You won’t have seen my work, of course.’
Mr Woodhouse cleared his throat. This was a very irritating young man – very different from his equable and well-mannered brother. ‘I need a photograph of my daughter.’
‘Which one? The tall sexy one?’
Again Mr Woodhouse bit his tongue. ‘Isabella. She’s seventeen.’
‘Great age,’ said John. ‘You want me to do it?’
‘Yes. Can you?’
‘Do dogs bark?’ replied John. ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
Mr Woodhouse frowned. ‘What?’
‘The answer’s yes. Happy to oblige, old son.’
The tone now became formal. Mr Woodhouse would expect John the following Saturday for the taking of a couple of portrait shots in the house and gardens. This was agreed and the conversation came to an end.
Mr Woodhouse sat and reflected. It was all most unsettling: John came from a good county family, and had he not gone off to London might well have ended up helping his brother run their small estate. He had had a perfectly good education, too; like his brother George he had gone to Marlborough, yet here he was using the language of a cockney barrow boy – if barrow boys still existed – and if cockneys still existed too. Old son! Is the Pope a Catholic? What had the Pope got to do with it? Mr Woodhouse asked himself. And of course dogs barked; did they not understand that in London?
Isabella required no persuasion to have her photograph taken. ‘In a mag?’ she shrieked. ‘He’ll put me in one of his actual mags? Are you serious?’
Mr Woodhouse realised that they were probably thinking of different magazines. He knew that Isabella liked to read glossy magazines full of ephemeral news about celebrities and their doings; he had come across these magazines left lying about the house and occasionally sneaked a look at their contents. They were absurd, of course, and the people they featured were without any interest at all – highly made-up, unhealthy-looking specimens who appeared to have no other purpose in life than to evade the paparazzi who pursued them. But occasionally the very same hounded celebrities opened their doors to admit the photographers to their homes, and the resultant features, plastered with high-definition pictures of white sofas and opulent swimming pools, gave an indication of just how little taste these people had. And yet there was a certain fascination in seeing them in their natural habitat and he had occasionally had to drop a magazine hurriedly and guiltily as a daughter came into the room. ‘Tidying,’ he would say quickly. ‘Why do you girls insist on leaving all these ridiculous magazines about the place?’
Isabella was rarely fooled. ‘What do you think of that photo of her?’ she might ask. ‘Can you believe that he actually bit her? Did you see the love-bite – it’s on her left shoulder – you can just make it out?’
‘Most unhygienic,’ he muttered. ‘A human bite can be a very toxic thing. There are numerous germs on people’s teeth.’
‘Not celebs,’ retorted Isabella. ‘A bite from a celeb is different.’
Now he was faced with something of a moral dilemma. Should he tell Isabella that the destination for her photograph was not to be some glossy gossip magazine, but Country Life, where photographs of humans are often outnumbered by photographs of horses and dogs, or sometimes of old houses?
He decided to be honest – or at least a bit honest. ‘It won’t be one of your glossy mags,’ he said. ‘It’s another magazine altogether. A bit more sedate, but still.’
He need not have worried. ‘I don’t care where it goes,’ she said. ‘It’s enough to have your photo in anything. Think what they’ll say when they see it at school. They’re all still sitting in the classroom and I’m posing! That’s seriously cool.’
‘I’m glad that you’re pleased,’ said Mr Woodhouse. ‘The photographer will be coming tomorrow. He’s George Knightley’s brother. You’ll remember him. He went off to London for some reason best known to himself.’
Isabella looked thoughtful. She did remember John Knightley. She remembered thinking that he was rather good-looking and had long hair when everybody else around him seemed to have his hair cut short. And he had gone to London, she thought. A London photographer is coming to do a shoot with me. With me.
While most people drove sedately up the drive that led through the parkland to Hartfield, enjoying the trees and the view of the shrubbery in the distance, John Knightley arrived at speed on a 1982 Ducati motorcycle, a throaty roar announcing him well before anybody saw the handsome Italian bike and its equally handsome rider. Mr Woodhouse went out to meet him and shook hands with the leather-clad brother of his neighbour.
‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ said John. ‘There was a pile-up on the motorway and I had to stop and get a few shots of it. Not my usual stuff, of course, but in my business you’re always looking for things you can sell to the red tops. They love a bit of gore, those editors.’
Mr Woodhouse struggled to keep his composure. ‘An accident? You took photos of an accident?’
John took off his helmet. ‘Yup. I don’t go in for anything too gory – not like some. There’s a chap I know in London who does the really bad scenes – you know, hands and stuff lying about. Not for me.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Mr Woodhouse.
‘You’re looking at respectability,’ said John, smiling. ‘You’re looking at the upper echelons of the profession.’
Mr Woodhouse availed himself of the invitation to examine John Knightley. He was a very striking-looking young man – tall, as he had remembered him, but with a bit more weight than he recalled him having. The face, though, was by no means chubby, but had a sparse, sculpted look to it, and the head was topped by a mane of flowing dark hair. John Knightley, he decided, looked rather like a lion; an absurd idea, he told himself, and then went on to think: Long hair requires frequent washing if it is not to become a sanctuary for microbial life. His gaze descended to the leather jacket and tight-fitting trousers and then to the boots with metal attachments on the heel – spurs? he wondered; surely not. How quickly, he thought, could one effect a transition from one world to another; from the world of George Knightley, with his faultless taste, his life of understatement and simple English decency, to this world of leather jackets and … He had noticed the tattoo; he had missed it at first because it was so discreet, but now, as the sleeve of the leather jacket inched up following a movement of John’s arm, he saw the small picture of an angel, or what looked like an angel, on his visitor’s wrist and underneath it a few tiny words, illegible at that distance. He caught his breath; the social descent seemed to him to be complete, and terrible. Tattoos were unacceptable; they just were. People could argue as much as they liked that conventions had changed and a tattoo now meant nothing; that they said nothing about you; but tattoos, in Mr Woodhouse’s mind, constituted a line in the sand that one simply did not cross. John Knightley had stepped across that line.
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