Captured Shadows (16 page)

Of course we returned. We had no choice. The risk of being found out had always been there, but it had seemed a dim and faraway threat before. We had always been careful, and we had always been content, though not quite happy; the danger came with this new imbalance, our hatred of the work and the people involved set against Mr Whitlock's twisted insistence that we continue.

"He's so old," Archie said late that afternoon after we had finished developing Annie's negative, leaning against me in the darkroom with his lips just above my collar and his arms around me, although we were too tired and miserable to want to do anything more than be close to one another for as long as possible before Whitlock and Percival finished discussing the details of their blackmail with Mr Everett and called us upstairs to the studio. "He'll probably die soon. Can we stick it out until he dies, do you think?"

We probably could
, I thought,
but there is nothing in the entire world that I want less
.

"I don't want you to go near them," I said. There was a sudden, urgent viciousness in my whisper, a rampant jealousy I had never felt so strongly before, as though b
eing so close to freedom earlier
had broken the peace I had made inside myself with our situation. The thought of Archie touching Percival and being watched by Whitlock and his loathsome greedy gaze even one more time, never mind indefinitely, was abhorrent to the point of my wanting to cry tears of impotent rage, like a child denied a toy.

"I ain't that delighted myself, you know."

I felt I had to try and explain myself to him, yet the words seemed more elusive than usual and I started and stopped several times, frustration rising and ballooning within me until I thought it might consume my whole being. "If this concerned me alone I wouldn't do it and I'd take the penalties. But, your family—"

"—would be more upset I let someone
make
me do it," Archie said suddenly. In the red lantern light I saw the way his jaw was set tight, the ripple it made in his cheek when he clenched and relaxed his teeth in his passion. "It'll break their hearts, I reckon, and my mother might kill me and bury me with Annie, but ain't it better to stop doing something awful and try and make amends than carry on and on even when you know how wrong it is?"

"Archie," I said quietly. "You know I agree, but think this through."

All he did was shake my hands off him impatiently, then dart back in to kiss my mouth once before he began to straighten his clothes. "I'm going to tell Whitlock no and if he wants to tell the world about us he better be ready for them to hear all about him as well. Are you staying here or coming with?"

"Coming with, of course." There is no word in any language to describe what I was feeling in that moment: a vivid, turbulent mixture of exhilaration and terror and a sort of boundless, buoyant joy, even though I knew just how awful the consequences might be if Whitlock did act on his threat.

In the end the consequences were worse than any of us could have imagined, and they happened at an implausible speed. It seemed as though Archie
was
shouting at Whitlock and Percival in one moment, then in the next he was reeling back from a blow to the chin delivered by Whitlock. The old man looked murderous, towering above Archie with his fist raised again to strike, and all I could think of to do was to take hold of Percival at any point I could grab – his ridiculous billowing shirt sleeve, and his hair – and pull him from the studio in the hope that Whitlock would follow and leave Archie alone.

Behind us voices raised, three of them, and I couldn't tell whether they were fighting with one another or calling after Percival and me because he twisted in my grasp then and bit me hard near the wrist. He didn't wound me through the fabric of my clothes, but the pinch of it was startlingly painful and some reflex made me kick him hard in the shin in retaliation so that he howled and dropped ungracefully to one knee.

I wonder now what the likelihood was that the cigarette he was smoking – against all of Mr Everett's rules, unfortunately unenforceable in such a situation as this – should find the flammable flash powders in the room as he fell. It must have been an infinitesimal chance, and an infinitesimal spark, but it was enough and the burst was almost blinding.

By then the others were in the room, and Mr Everett swore like a sailor and began shouting instructions to beat out the fire that was spreading up the drapes on a pole that we used sometimes as a backdrop. We did try – at least Archie and Mr Everett and I tried; Whitlock and Percival vanished and faintly I heard the open and close of the front door as they escaped like cowards – but that tiny spark and that tiny chance of its existing at all were insidious and fierce in the crowded little storage space full of books and drapery and flammable powders. Another explosion sounded somewhere and beside me Archie flinched; then Mr Everett's hand was at his elbow coaxing him to stand up straight, and he was telling us to get out.

Already the room was filling with smoke. I had seen fires before, when as a boy some friends and I used to chase the brigade-men through the streets searching for excitement; I remembered how quickly it spread, always so much more quickly than one imagined it might, and as Mr Everett pulled us towards the stairs that led to the yard I felt a sickening dismay at the thought of losing the studio. We had come to hate what went on inside of it, and yet my final feeling as we left the cellar area, letting in a cold gust of air that fanned the flames even higher, was one of overwhelming loss.

"Archie," Mr Everett said urgently, "run now to the fire station," and Archie darted away so quickly that he stumbled and bounced off the wall of the tiny passage that led from the back yard out onto the street; then Mr Everett and I rushed to our neighbours to hammer upon the front doors and peer anxiously through the windows to see whether anybody
was
s
till
there
.

I don't know where the thought came from, but when it struck it was as clear as though someone
were
standing beside me and speaking directly into my ear:
Annie's still inside
.

If I had taken a mere second to think I would have given her up for lost, but my feet reacted before my sluggish brain did and I flew back around to the yard, where smoke was beginning to curl under the edge of the door, and flung it open.

I don't know how I made it into the darkroom and out again and I certainly don't know how I managed to find the correct plate in the darkness; we had turned the lantern off when we left, only ten minutes earlier, but of course the glow of fire was bright enough to see and I took up several negatives in my hands, checking each one until I found her and dropping the rest to the ground. Even as I did so I was running for the door again; but something exploded, something hit my head, and for a time I was dizzy and too stunned even to feel the heat or the passing of time.

When I came back to myself I realised what a mistake I had made; it was a well-intentioned one, but in the moments I had been stunned to near-unconsciousness the blaze had become an inferno. I twisted all around trying to find my way, but the door I had come through from the yard was on fire, and the rickety old wooden staircase leading up to the main building was on fire; even as I found it, the thing seemed to fold in on itself with a sort of guttural, demonic roaring sound.

Tears streamed from my eyes, stung from me by the noxious smoke. Somewhere behind me I heard another explosion, the cracking of wood and the glassy spray of shattering negatives. The air I pulled into my lungs was hot, almost too hot to bear; I felt I was roasting alive from the inside out.

Then I heard somebody calling my name and for a moment, even as I was choking on smoke and flinching back from the flames, I felt a paralysing thump of horror that Archie had come inside after me and now we were both trapped in a burning room full of explosives. The stinging smoke was making my eyes flood and I tried to close them as much as possible, peering through the tiniest of gaps so that everything around me, the collapsed staircase and the rush of orange flames on either side, shimmered and doubled behind a prism of scalding tears.

The voice called me again and I stumbled towards the sound, although every instinct told me the flames were hotter that way and I should turn back and brave the darkroom, fill every bottle I could find with water and try to calm the fire enough to climb the ruins of the blazing staircase. It was Mr Everett, I realised when he shouted my name once more; he must have come in the front door and through the building where the flames had not yet reached.

"Quickly, Jim, give me your hands." He was flat on his belly on the solid floor at the top of where the stairs used to be, reaching down in vain; there was still a foot of space between his hands and mine, even when I jumped in desperation. "Find something to stand on, a chair or..." His voice faded. I could see him looking around the room through streaming, half-closed eyes at the chairs against the other wall, already on fire, and the warping
, smouldering
table between them that even before now had barely been able to hold the weight of a teacup, never mind a person; then a second later I saw the bottom of his shoes, the hem of his shirt hanging loose, the redness in his face as he hefted himself over the edge. He landed beside me awkwardly, turning his ankle and grimacing.

"Stand on my shoulders," he said, crouching down so I could use his knee as a step up. The flames were roaring ever closer but I felt frozen, bolted in
to
place like a statue, until Mr Everett took my face in his hands and pressed a rough kiss on my forehead. "You must leave," he insisted as I clung to his wrists, "my dear boy,
please
."

Dumbly I obeyed, hauling myself to a safer footing up above; the tiled floor by then was so hot that it scorched some of my clothing away and burned the flesh of my belly so badly that it scarred in an ugly red map of welts and bumps. I wish I could say
that
I tried to save him, or even that I looked back, but I knew it was too late and any attempt would be an insult to his sacrifice. Instead I ran, stumbling and heaving and coughing through a throat that felt shredded and raw, flinching at the sound of explosions and shattering glass behind me until I made it through the open front door and into the night.

There were people there shouting and praying, brigade-men already tumbling out of the fire engine to connect their hose to the nearest street-plug – but as I flew through the door pleading uselessly for someone to go into the flames and fetch Mr Everett it was Archie who raced to meet me, pulling himself free from the arms of a stranger who had been trying to keep him from going back inside the burning building and running into mine instead, mindless of the crowds. The force of him toppled us both over so we landed in the mud of the street; he helped me sit back up and grasped me by the shoulders, then the face, his touch for the first time feeling rough and unwelcome on my blistered skin. He was crying, red raw eyes and frantic heaving breaths, and for a moment I thought he might strike me.

"Why did you go back in? I thought you were dead, I could feel the fire from out here, you stupid—"

I interrupted him, hoarse and painful and tasting of smoke. "I needed Annie."

"You... what?" Inside, I had barely felt the pain of being burned; out here, now my heart was slowing, the pain was immense and I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out as I reached my raw hand inside my coat and brought out the negative plate to give to him. For a long moment he looked at it in silence, touching the inverted shades of her face, then finally back at me; I could see fresh tears in his eyes and a strange sort of emotion, confusion and wonder and anger and love all combined
and fighting for space. "You
bloody idiot, Jim, why would you do that, this ain't worth getting killed."

"I didn't get killed," I managed to whisper, but it only made me think of Mr Everett and how he may as well have been my father for how much I had loved him,
even with all his faults,
how I had never told him so, how I hoped with my whole heart that he knew it all the same, and I started blubbering so hard onto Archie's sho
ulder down there in the mud
of the gutter that I felt sick with it, guilt and regret and hatred of myself for my limitless ability to make a mess of every good thing I tried to do; then Archie's hand was there at the back of my neck, fingers just touching my hair, and although some part of me was still clear enough to know that we could go no farther than this in such a public place, that faint brush of fingertips was like words:
I'm here. We're both here
.

"Your face is burned," Archie murmured softly. "Do you remember that day in your room?"

Then I laughed, although it hurt to do so – hurt my conscience, which would torment me about Mr Everett for many years to come, and hurt my parched throat – and, just like that early silver morning on Margate beach, Archie curled his finger gently around mine until he remembered where we were.

Archie died in
November
. There's so much death around these days, young soldiers shot in their uniforms and mothers and children found crushed in the rubble of bombed houses, and Archie died in his sleep, an old man, with his last breath tasting of salt from the sea breeze reaching through the window. There's a sort of comfort in that. No illness, no pain, no goodbyes, just an aching emptiness I try to fill with words and photographs and the remembrance of those long-ago days when it was safe to walk on the streets of London and Margate beach – when my biggest worry was that somebody might see his hand brush my hand in the dim dawn light. Now there are deadly planes in the sky and lads from town, the lame and half-blind ones who weren't allowed to fight and the ones who stayed behind to keep the country fed, taking their fishing boats across the Channel to rescue their fathers and brothers.
How the world has changed
we always used to say, as old men do, but I'm glad we were able to face all these changes together.

We kept up the pretence, of course, that we were bachelors living together for convenience and companionship who had
simply
never got around to finding wives: we kept separate bedrooms and spent our nights in each one by turn so as not to make our cleaning lady suspicious, we made jovial comments about pretty girls on the beach and in the pictures whenever there was somebody within earshot, we even politely went along with all the people insisting "You have to meet my cousin, she's ever so lovely" until we became too old to bother with. There were people who suspected, of course, I'm certain there were rumours – and Archie's sister Bessie and her husband knew, after an unfortunate encounter when they invited themselves to visit us by train and never thought to send a letter or telegram first – but after the strangely public way we spent our first year together, half-clothed and touching and pasted onto countless cards for other men to crave, we were content for the rest of our days to live as quietly as possible in our little house by Margate beach, left to me in Mr Everett's will.

Still, there are things that need to be hidden, for Bessie and Edward have been gone over twenty years now, and Sally too, and there is nobody else I can think of to confide in and ask to take care of matters when it's my time. The photographs from Mr Everett's studio, the few that weren't lost in the fire because they were at my house or Archie's and the do
zens we managed to buy back
from collectors, have been safely locked away in my keepsake box all these years; but we all know how eager heirs are to pick locks after old men die and, although sometimes I amuse myself by imagining the shock it would give Archie's nieces and nephews to see the pictures, I know I must part with them before it's too late.

This stack of photographs, as thick as a bible, I split up and hid in Archie's suit pockets, a few in each so as not to be visible. I fastened my old pocket-watch to his waistcoat with that scrap of frayed old black ribbon curled up inside the gold case, too afraid to wind and knot it around his finger the way I did
almost
sixty years ago. Instead I put the photograph of Annie in his hands. He had carried her with him every day of his life since th
e
morning
several weeks after the fire
when we made the print from the flame-blackened plate, and I knew that even now he would want to have her with him.

Some days I forget what I meant to do as soon as I step into a room, or I forget the name of a person I recognise in the street. These memories I send with Archie are the ones I fear losing the most – but he is all around me, his face smiling from every wall of this house, and the scent of his hair, at least for a little while longer, still lingering on the pillows.

Jim Sinnett, September 1943

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