Captured Shadows (14 page)

I went to the studio the next day to see whether Mr Everett was there, but the place was closed as usual for the week-end. For a while I stood there staring in through the windows, unsure of what to do. I wanted desperately to know how Sally was, but short of wandering the streets and checking with every hospital I could think of, I saw no way of finding out. Eventually I even took an omnibus to Mr Everett's house to risk his wrath and ask him, but the maid who answered my knock said he was out; then I walked and walked for what felt like hours until I found myself back in the Dials outside the same pub from which Sally had called Sid and Jacky on the day of my strange lessons.

One of the girls I recognised, although not by name, waved to me as though nothing
were
wrong, and I wondered whether any of her friends even knew she was so grievously ill. I suddenly feared their blame, and like a coward I put my head down to hide my face and hurried on toward my boarding-house.

Sunday was almost the same, wandering the foggy streets with no idea of where to go, only a desperate need to stay in motion as though that
were
the same thing as being useful. I walked until I was footsore and my lungs burned, at one time even making it as far as the end of Archie's road before I thought better of it and turned away again to go back across the river.

By the time twilight descended on the city I realised this aimless search was a great waste of time and there was nothing I could do but wait for the morning, when my return to work would at least put me in the same building as Mr Everett and Archie, so I trudged back home and shut myself in my rooms.

At the writing-desk I sat with a pile of photographs I had been keeping in my drawer, fanning them out between my fingers like a hand of cards. Arranged like this I could only see us as a collection of strange and disjointed body parts: a white hand flung into the air and captured there by the camera, bent back at the wrist and with fingers curled, or abstract frills of fabric gathered around a knee. Whether it was my own or Archie's, I couldn't tell – and suddenly I didn't care, nor wanted to look. I shuffled the photographs back into a neat little stack, a dozen or so, and hid them between the pages of a book. This I closed into an old wooden trinket box that used to belong to my mother, and wrapped the box around and around with string, fastened with a knot tied so tightly that I knew I would need a knife if I ever wanted to open it again. I felt feverish once the task was done, flushed and weak as though I had just run up the three flights of stairs to my rooms. Then a strange sort of panic took hold of me that now I had locked the photographs away I would never see Archie look at me that way again; if I had been able to find my
scissors
I think I would have had the box open again at once, the photographs scattered on my desk and pinned to my walls for my landlady to see. I did look for
them
, fumbling through the pockets of all my clothes and dragging out my desk drawers with a frightful screech and clatter to rummage through their contents like a starving little mudlark scraping for treasure in the Thames, then I remembered that first photograph I ever took of Archie and turned my search towards that instead.

I found it on my bookshelf, resting on top of the volumes of Keats and Coleridge I had borrowed from Mr Whitlock's library and never returned. Back in my chair, calmed by its recovery, I touched my fingertips to the paper and traced the lines of Archie's face, the shape of his smile and the slight blur around his edges where he had accidentally moved.

I don't know how long it was before a sudden noise disturbed me, waking me with a start in my chair. I listened as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and blinked away a dream, wondering whether it might be one of the maids going to bed and stepping too heavily on the creaking floorboard outside my door, but then it came again: a rattle like hailstones against the corner of my window.

Suspecting it might be Archie, but not yet daring to believe so, I stumbled in the darkness to the window without bothering to relight the lamp – and there he was, a tiny upturned pale face several stories below, hand raised ready to aim another stone at the glass. I felt a lurch of joy, immediately replaced by a crushing sort of relief that made my lungs feel light and hungry for air; when I spoke his name there was a tremble in the word because of it, although I hoped not too obvious. I dared not raise my voice above a loud whisper for fear of waking my neighbours and landlady, leaning out of the open window with my hands gripping the sill tightly as if that would let me move close enough to him to compensate.

"Good Lord, what time is it?"

"I don't know."

"Did you walk all this way?"

"My old man drove me past the bridge but I walked from there, his horse lost a shoe."

There, the first flicker of unease settling in my stomach. Why would Archie's father drive him halfway to Bloomsbury in the middle of the night? It was a question I tried to turn my mind from, fearing the answer, but the answer danced maddeningly around my thoughts all the same.

"Ain't that funny?" Archie said, but he didn't sound as though he found it funny at all. He laughed, desperate and bitter like some abandoned Bedlam inmate. "A cobbler's horse losing its shoe."

"What's wrong?"

"James
... please, I need you."

"Wait there."

I had fallen asleep in my trousers and shoes and unbuttoned waistcoat, shirt sleeves rolled to my elbows and collar unfastened, and ran downstairs to the empty front hall as I was, opening the door as silently as I could. The latch was heavy and the door creaked on its hinges, but even the few servants were long asleep and there was nobody there to see me slip out into the night. The chill autumn air splintered my bare collarbones and chapped my skin, the icy wind stinging my nose and lips until they were so numb I could barely speak; Archie, though, was flushed in the cheeks, perspiration beading his forehead and making his hair bind together in messy rat-tails. Never mind walking from Lambeth, he must have run.

"What's wrong?" I said again, although by then I think I already knew. How could I not know? What else was there in the world that would make him like this? There was a lantern out on the street, near enough that I could see his eyes by its light: the raw redness and the desperation there, the smudge of tears lingering beneath his lower lashes. He wasn't looking at me, but looking all around like a panicked animal caught in a trap, and his hands came up between us to clutch at the front of my shirt, fingers tightening and releasing there and on my arms, my shoulders, the back of my neck, as though he needed to prove to himself I was there.

"I need you," he repeated, cracking the words in half with a choked sob. I found his hands with my own, thankful for the shadows of the house and the late, silent hour, kissing the freezing flesh of his fingers. I would have given anything two days ago for him to say such a thing to me; but not now, not like this.

"I'm here," I kept saying, mouth pressed to his palms and warming his fingertips with my breath. "What can I do? What do you need?"

"Annie died." The words came like a blow to the stomach, even though I had suspected. "It weren't even her breathing after all, she – James, she just fell down the stairs, ain't that the most unfair fucking thing you ever heard in your whole life after everything she went through? She's fell down the stairs and she's dead and I don't want to put her in the ground and forget what she looked like." His cold hands, slipping out of my grasp and back around my neck like fluttering wounded birds, threaded through my hair to hold me there, nose to nose with him like all those times before – the mirror, the studio, the bathing machine, my rooms – but horribly, urgently different. He spoke as though he thought I needed convincing, as though I wouldn't have carved out my heart with a knife if I thought it might ease his sorrow. "I know I've been a hateful jealous bastard twice now and you owe me nothing, I know that, but I need you, please, and I swear I'll never bother you again
if you don't want me to
, will you bring your camera? My mother's crying and I can't make her stop, I don't know what to do or who else I can ask."

I felt disoriented as I raced back upstairs to my rooms to dress properly and bring a spare coat for Archie. The helplessness I felt seemed somehow more excruciating than the loss of her, and with a strength of will I didn't know I possessed I managed to force myself to work methodically, as though crossing off a list inside my mind and gaining clarity with every step. I dressed, that was step one. Finding my camera was step two; thankfully I had a packet of prepared plates already, and I put this into my bag.

Step three was descending back to the street and trying on the way to think of something to say to Archie; but when I returned to him he was calm, as though a shutter had been closed over his heart,
and
he accepted my coat in
silence.

I wished I could reach for his hand as I had done so many times before, but even given the lateness and darkness of the night I knew such an action would be unwise. Instead I led the way through the streets to where the theatres and music-halls began, hoping to find a cab still out at this time; when I found one and gave the driver Archie's address and we were safely hidden away inside, I finally let myself reach for him and he leaned heavily against me, taking the hand I offered him and holding it tightly all the way to Lambeth.

I had been steeling myself to see Annie dead, that peculiar and unnatural stillness never achieved by even the heaviest sleeper; yet when I entered the living-room and saw Mrs Wilkes dressing her, the illusion of movement was such that for a moment I could almost believe it had been a mistake or a horribly cruel trick, until I saw the dreadful wound to the side of her head. There was very little blood, Mrs Wilkes must have washed it away already, but there was a queerly crooked angle to her skull above her ear and the sight of it was sickening.

"Dad's taking the children to Granny's house," she said, sounding quiet and haunted, as we entered the room. "I didn't want to leave her."

"Please don't ask me to help you," Archie said suddenly to me, staring hard at the floor and not at Annie. "Can you do it on your own?"

I told him yes, and his breath left him in a pained sigh before he turned and went upstairs. After that there was nothing I could do but set up my things, as Mrs Wilkes finished fitting her dead daughter's limbs into her Sunday dress.

Photographing the dead was something I had done many times
in my work
, and the macabre feeling had only lingered for the first few before it began to seem not merely normal, but extraordinarily poignant as a memorial to a person too precious to forget. It was a task I always carried out with the utmost care, thinking every time how lucky I was to have so many photographs of my own parents to remember them by. I remembered Annie telling me while we were in Margate that she had never had her picture taken before, and my promise to her that Archie and I would make sure we kept some spare plates so we could take care of that when everybody was together again in London.

Blurred suddenly with tears at the memory and the regret that we hadn't kept our promise in time for her to enjoy it, I blinked them back and instead focused on setting up the tripod and attaching the camera.

"Will you be in the picture too?" I asked Mrs Wilkes, and she looked up from where she was fastening Annie's boot-buttons and tried to smile.

"If this is the only picture we're ever going to have of her, we don't need my sad old face ruining it." Then, very gently, she sat Annie in the armchair nearest to the fire, and carefully began to arrange the little white hat and the golden curls of her hair in such a way that the terrible wound she had suffered in her fall became invisible to me. One always hears people say of dead loved ones that she looks as though she might be sleeping, but not Annie; she looked peaceful, she looked as pretty as she ever did, but she was unmistakeably dead even after her mother had crossed her little legs and rested her hand upon the arm of the chair to give the impression of life. I wished there was a way to manipulate her eyes to look as though they were seeing, or to close them and hide the terrible blankness of her dead stare, but she had been alive such a short time ago that, although she had turned pale, she had not yet become stiffened enough for her eyelids to stay where they were coaxed.

It was Mr Wilkes who cried as I took Annie's picture, hunched over in the other armchair with his face hidden in his hands from the moment he returned from outside, and Mrs Wilkes who stood there at his side, solid and stoic with a hand on one of his heaving shoulders. Her face seemed drawn and haggard, suddenly, and it made her look ten or twenty years older than she was, but her eyes, although deadened with grief, were dry, and when she spoke to me her voice was steady.

"Thank you, Jim," she said quietly, "for coming out in the middle of the night." I felt as though I didn't know where to look; the blankness in her eyes was awful, but looking at Annie felt somehow wrong now my business was done, as though I were a stranger trespassing on a family's sorrow, and looking at Mr Wilkes was worse even than that.

"Of course," I managed, and stood there awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what to say or how to take my leave. "Is there anything else I can do?"

She shook her head, but then changed her mind; the ghost of a smile touched the corner of her lips, although not her eyes, and she said, "You might go upstairs and keep Archie company. He's taking it terribly hard."