A Division of the Light by Christopher Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

teaching, but he doesn’t really like it. I don’t think his degree is all that good: that’s the real problem.”
    Gregory had a faint smile. “As long as he finds beauty somewhere. Even if it’s just in heaps of old stone.”
    Ready to move on, Alice became brisk.
    â€œI think it’s time I saw those photographs you promised, don’t you?”
    â€œOf course, we’ll do that now,” Gregory replied, as if his only true purpose were to keep her happy. “Remember to be careful of the stairs. They made them steep back when this was built.”
    They descended a bare echoing stairwell whose walls had beenleft unpainted for decades. Only a few minutes ago Gregory had led Alice past the door that he now opened.
    Behind it was a room that was the same size as the upper studio. Roller blinds the color of onion skin had been pulled down across the windows. He raised each one so that light gradually strengthened across files, cabinets, tables and computer screens. Copies of photographs, mostly black-and-white, had been placed around the room like offerings. Some were close-ups of faces that appeared familiar to Alice even though she could not put names to them, but most were of strangers. Some of these people, she realized, might already be dead. And for Gregory that might not even be important; what was important was the image they had left behind.
    For a few vertiginous moments Alice imagined that she had entered a region composed of nothing but surface, spectacle and deceit. And then she gathered her thoughts and told herself that she was meant to be here. The physical world had a shadow, a twin, an undetected ghost. Somewhere alongside this very moment there was an indefinable space that was both analogous and aloof. In a way that Alice could not comprehend, she was fulfilling an arrangement that had been determined without her knowledge.
    Alice believed in fate. She believed that lives crossed and became entangled in patterns that were not immediately detectable. She thought it probable that she had not been robbed merely by chance. Instead she had been humiliated and injured for a higher purpose; one that she could not yet discern, and one that the robbers would never appreciate because there was no need for them to understand. They, she and Gregory were all unconscious agents of an obscure force that lay outside the boundaries of the material world but which oversaw and guided it.
    Such a belief did not seem fantastic to Alice. It was as rational as Gregory’s faith in the immortality of the image, as certain as Thomas’s belief in the processes of time. It was even possible that neither she nor Gregory would ever grasp the true meaning of this synchronicity. Perhaps they were never meant to, for as Alice walked around his room any hint of purpose was clouded and puzzling.
    Gregory watched and wondered what was occupying her mind. “Take a good look round,” he said. “Feel free.”
    Alice wondered if the hidden intention of each event was to guide her toward a re-evaluation of her life. Perhaps her feelings had to be intensified, or an impetus given to decisions over which she was hesitating. Most unsettling of all, it was conceivable that the robbery had happened purely so that she and Gregory Pharaoh would meet and become involved, and that her choice of the Weston postcard had unwittingly sealed that pattern. Why else should she have suddenly decided to walk down that pavement at that specific time? Since she always carried her bag on the inside to lessen the chance of theft, why had she decided, without reason, to hang it from the other shoulder? It could not have been mere coincidence that she and a strange photographer had been in the same part of the city at the same time, just as it was more than just chance that had led her into being robbed. Gregory could just have stopped her, as he had said he would have done; but if so, she would undoubtedly