Held

After returning to Helena in England, John suffers from insomnia due to his leg injury and his haunting memories of the war. He feels lost and directionless: abandoned by the resilience that had always given him hope and strength. He remembers his first leave from active duty, when he visited the chalk cliffs of Molk Hole with Helena. At that time, she suggested that he could desert the army and the two of them could run away together and hide in a cave. Now, visiting the same cliffs with her in peacetime, he feels “gutted,” like a fish that has been tossed back.

John and Helena still live above the Yorkshire photography studio that was his livelihood before the war. Resolving to reopen the studio despite his inability to stand for long periods, he hires an assistant named Mr. Robert Stanley. The man has no family and no references and claims that his previous employer was killed in the war, but he proves a quick study and has a keen eye for lighting and photography. John finds the aloof Stanley hard to read; the latter reveals very little about himself, aside from his leftist politics, which he likes to flaunt. Meanwhile, John, who remains despondent in the aftermath of the war and is increasingly troubled by the unceasing pain in his leg, broods on death and the existence of the soul. He has difficulty in conceiving of the soul as its own entity or as a being of “pure emotion” that is separate from the sensual life of the body. To him, emotion is grounded in specific experiences (e.g., the terrors of war or the tactile details and pleasures of Helena’s body). Even as he worries about his own mental health, Helena remains mostly unaware of his internal struggles and is blissfully grateful to have him back again.

John’s reopened photography studio attracts many customers, largely veterans of the war who are eager to recapture a sense of normal life. Frequently, the wounded ask him to disguise their injuries by concealing their missing arms or eyes via tricks of angle or décor. This deceit disturbs John, who would prefer to “outrage” the viewer with the ravages of the war. Stanley, though usually secretive, is contemptuous of John’s high-mindedness and of John himself.

The narrative flashes back to John and Helena’s first days of marriage, when Helena took up painting and discovered a knack for depicting natural scenes, such as a leafy grove painted on their bedroom wall. (Later, she would use this burgeoning talent to paint backdrops for John’s photo portraits.) John’s mother moved to Halesworth on the east coast, where Helena frequently visited her while John was away on active duty. When he came home to England on leave, he could not cleanse his thoughts of the squalor and horror of the trenches, and his double life seemed to him increasingly surreal. When he was away, Helena fell into the superstitious ritual of imagining his death, as if to inoculate him against that possibility. One day, John, who was at the Front, received a letter from Helena, describing the death of his mother, who was killed in a bombing raid on Halesworth by a German Zeppelin.

The narrative shifts back to the postwar present, where John develops a solo portrait that he took of a young man and discovers a ghostly image hovering in the background. The image shows a middle-aged woman with an “expression of intolerable longing” (56). He examines his photo materials and equipment and concludes that they could not have been tampered with. Shaken to the point of tears, John, who has never before seen a “spectre” of any sort, wonders why this “sign” was shown to him, and in this form: not even the ghost of his own mother, but someone else’s. This fact, and the scientific verity of its inexplicable appearance on his film, upend many of his longtime views of life and death. Grappling with various theories of how it could have happened, he finally writes a letter to Sir Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer in the study of radioactivity, asking if the camera might actually be sensitive to “invisible” states of being. (Rutherford never answers his letter.) Feeling himself being carried away into a “sea” of belief, John keeps his discovery a secret from Helena, not wanting to mire her in its possible fraudulence.

When shown the photo, the young man in the portrait rapturously identifies the ghostly figure as his mother, who recently died. Mr. Stanley at first accuses John of faking the photo, but soon purports to become a believer and suggests that they publicize this “miracle,” an idea that John forcefully resists. Stanley argues that they could do a lot of “good” by giving hope to the grieving, and he accuses John of being “selfish” for refusing. He even hints that they could “be sure” that more miracles occur, presumably by faking them. In the days that follow, a “spirit” appears on two more of John’s photo portraits. Finally, John asks Stanley to take his photo, hoping against hope that his own mother will appear, but she does not. After the euphoria of the first “miracle,” John’s mingled hopes and doubts begin to torment him, and he takes his anguish out on Helena, whom he still has not told about the “spirit photos.” Perplexed and hurt, Helena begins to wonder if he has stopped loving her.

Finally, John’s doubts and suspicions coalesce around Mr. Stanley, whom he has seen talking privately with the young man whose mother supposedly appeared in the photo. He also learns that Stanley has made his own key for the photo lab, which he visits surreptitiously. Confronting Stanley, John feels an atavistic “recognition” pass between them. He finally tells Helena the whole story, and she tries to comfort him, insisting that she has many times felt her dead mother’s “presence” and has recently sensed John’s mother as well. Newly reconciled in trust and love, the two of them sleep late into the morning, and for a time, John feels the presence of the “miraculous” whenever he plies his trade, feeling that he is making “visible something invisible” (74). However, one night he is seized by a sudden instinct and suspects that Mr. Stanley has lied about everything, including about being in the army. Running downstairs, he discovers that Stanley has skipped town, taking with him all the plates and copies of the spirit photographs. In despair, John goes to the River Esk to drown himself after leaving a jar of wildflowers in the kitchen for Helena. The moonlit surface of the river reminds him of a photographic plate shining with silver iodine. Thinking of his mother, whom his service in the army failed to protect from a German attack, he feels her spirit come to him, and they nestle together in the river. Then he opens his arms to Helena, who takes her place beside him. Soon he no longer feels cold. John’s corpse is later found sprawled against a weir, half out of the water. Afterward, the widowed Helena can no longer wash herself in water that came from that river. 

The novel backtracks to John’s thoughts just before he dies. He remembers walking with his mother soon after his father’s death, both of them suddenly noticing the strong scent of his father’s tobacco on the empty beach. Just before drowning, John realizes something that he previously failed to perceive in the faked “spirit photo” of the young man’s mother: the beautiful look of longing on her face, which somehow made the image “true” and even revelatory despite the “corruption” of its forgery. He feels warm now, with Helena beside him. Death, when it comes, feels to him like “a very small correction” (81).