by Lily Hammond
The woman had tumbled out onto the street in front of her. Right in front of her. Some oaf had knocked her over, and Clemency shivered, looking at the picture and remembering scooping a hand under the woman's arm, heaving her back onto her feet and leading her up onto the footpath, out of the path of the oncoming crowd. She smiled, thinking about it. She'd even pushed one of her cards into the woman's hand, telling her if she ever wanted to be photographed...
Riley came into the room. 'There you are,' she said.
And Clemency nodded in agreement. 'Here I am. Riley – have there been any telephone messages?' The card had only the studio number on it, but she asked anyway. She was in the telephone directory, after all. If someone wanted to call while the studio was closed.
'Ruth called earlier,' Riley said. 'How did you know?' She shook her head and rolled her eyes at herself. 'You didn't know, of course. She was talking about something to do with putting up one of their women here?' Riley cocked a hip and settled one hand on it, raising a singular eyebrow in a pointed question.
Clemency had the grace to wince. 'I'm sorry, Riley. It was just something I said in passing to Max. I was going to run it by you so we could decide if it was something we really wanted to do.’ She rubbed fingers at her temples. ‘They’re out of beds there, and the women keep coming.’ She pulled her lips back in a smile. 'I said we'd only think about having one of the very quiet ones,' she added.
Riley sniffed, then straightened, her round, worn face softening. 'Well, it’s done now. I’ve agreed to it.'
Clemency straightened in surprise, knocking her hip on the table. 'You did?' she asked, her voice a high squeak.
A decisive nod. 'Since you'd already been generous enough to suggest it, I took it upon myself to agree.'
'You did?' Clem repeated, her voice back to its usual register, then closed her mouth and pressed her lips together, staring at the older woman, wondering what she’d gotten them into. 'Well. Tell me you specified a quiet one too, then?'
Riley gave a short shake of the head. 'I asked for one who liked a bit of gardening and knew her way around the kitchen.' Her smile was feline.
Clemency tried to match the smile and knew it looked more like she was gritting her teeth. 'When is she coming?'
Riley wore a little watch pinned to her habitual apron, and she looked at it now. 'In about an hour, when you've fetched her.'
There was a pause. 'Okay,' said Clemency at last. 'I guess I walked straight into that one.'
Riley nodded, then took pity on Clemency. 'Another body around here won't make much difference to you; I'll do my best to make sure of it. She can help me out in the garden and kitchen until she's back on her feet again and working.' She shrugged. 'Won't get under your feet at all.'
Clemency wrinkled her nose. 'You make me sound such a tyrant. I'm not that bad, surely?'
Riley laughed in genuine, affectionate amusement. 'No, not really. You just like to do your own thing – in peace.' She waved a hand in a vague gesture at the house.
Clemency nodded. It was a truthful statement. She tended to get lost in her work and took poorly to interruptions. She was like her father in that way, she supposed. He’d spent most of his time closeted in his study when he wasn’t at the office. She didn’t remember her mother.
'I'll go to Maxine’s and get this person now.' A nod of the head, mostly to herself. 'I did suggest it, so it’s only right.' She straightened and looked uncertainly at Riley. 'You will let her know not to walk in on me when I’m in the darkroom, though won’t you? I plan to be working from home here a great deal more.'
Riley was confused. 'Is business not good at the studio?' Clemency hadn't mentioned anything more than a slight downturn in clients at her photography studio on George Street. Her clientele were well-off, and the studio had one of the best reputations in town. Riley’s chest puffed out with pride.
Clemency shook her head. 'Not at all,' she said, with another, reassuring glance down at her photographs of the unemployed men's demonstration. 'I'm merely changing my focus. Of what I want to do.'
'What you want to do?' Technically, of course, Clemency didn't have to work for a living at all – her father had left her enough for a fairly decent income – but she’d been camera mad since the first time she'd understood what one was. Was Clemency suddenly going to run off and do something else now?
Clemency glanced again at the small stack of prints. 'I'm tired of studio work,’ she said. ‘I'll be looking for another photographer to take over the studio work while I concentrate on this new street photography.'
'Street photography? This has a name?'
Clemency flushed. 'It does, actually. It's quite the thing overseas. And there is plenty happening here in our country to document in this form.' She picked up her photographs and held them in her hands. 'I intend to do it. There may well even be travelling involved.'
'Travelling?' Riley watched Clemency move towards the door. 'Around the country, you mean?'
'Quite possibly,' Clemency answered, and felt that frisson of excitement again. The excitement of new places, new faces, new things. She glanced at Riley. 'Although there is plenty here in Dunedin to keep me busy as well.' A pause and she turned in the doorway. 'Dunedin and environs,' she said, deciding she should perhaps ease Riley into the new idea.
Maxine strode out to the driveway when she heard the motor car, lifting her hand in a wave, a broad smile across her face.
'Pays to be careful what you offer on the spur of the moment, doesn't it?' she said, laughing, leaning in the door of the motor car and leering at Clemency.
'Not even any warning,' Clemency grumbled good-naturedly, because truthfully, she didn't really care as long as whoever it was kept out of her way when she was working. 'It's probably the least I can do, really. Considering.'
Maxine nodded and withdrew from the doorway, letting Clemency get out. 'We found another, out on the beach today. In quite desperate straits, I think.’ She shook her head. ‘I do wish the men in charge would acknowledge that there are plenty of women who are unemployed and starving. Literally starving.’ She bit down hard on her lip to stop herself from getting on the soap box. Clemency had heard the complaints all before.
Clemency nodded her head in sympathy. But she was still feeling distracted, and on the drive over had put the ragtop down on the Ford and lifted her face to the sky and the wind and felt the premonition of something new coming her way. Of course, she’d thought, it wasn’t a premonition when you were thinking of something you were going to make happen, but there it was anyway. The winds of change, she thought, and not before time.
Tomorrow she'd call into the newspaper and put an advertisement in for a new photographer for the studio. That would free her from that obligation, without giving it up completely. Besides, she had another four years on the lease for the studio, so this was easily the best idea. She took a deep breath and pressed a careful hand to her heart. It was time for a new challenge. She needed one; something to keep her busy, get her engaged with life again.
'You know what else?' Maxine said, leading the way up towards the house. 'She can’t talk.'
That got Clemency's attention. 'Can't talk? What – not at all?'
'Not as far as we've been able to ascertain. She's currently got a mighty case of heat exhaustion and is resting in our bed.' Maxine stopped outside the house, far enough away so that any flapping ears might not overhear. 'Which is why, coincidentally, that you got the telephone call requesting you to follow through on your generous suggestion.'
Clemency found a smile. 'You're very welcome,' she said easily. 'Riley is surprisingly keen.'
'Riley is getting on in years, which you really ought to pay more attention to. She's probably mightily glad at the thought of some help.'
Clemency nodded on a sigh. ‘You’re right of course,’ she said. 'So this woman really can't talk? What's wrong with her?'
'No idea. We know next to nothing about her, except that what we do know is a tragic st
ory indeed.'
Clemency narrowed her eyes at her friend, knowing Maxine liked a tall story, although not usually when it came to her women. 'Is this a verifiable story, or one on which you've been forced to extrapolate and elaborate?'
Maxine leaned back and planted a hand on her ample chest. 'Extrapolate and elaborate? Heaven have mercy.' She rolled her eyes to the twilight sky above them, then laughed and looked back at Clemency. 'No, we actually have written evidence for the few facts we know.'
Clemency glanced towards the house. It was a grimy white stone, three stories not counting the attic, with windows in rather eccentric placements all over the facade. 'What are the facts?' she asked, interested despite herself. 'You found her at the beach, did you say?' The coastline bloomed in her mind, the water blue where it nibbled at the sand, then green and deep farther out. She often wished she could take photographs in colour.
Maxine’s voice interrupted her thoughts. 'Do you have to run off back home?'
'I don't have to run off anywhere these days,' Clemency answered.
Maxine flung an arm around her friend and gave her a squeeze. 'Come sit on the bench of contemplation with me. You can join me in my evening pipe.'
'I'd rather join you in a cup of tea. Or glass of brandy.'
'Hmm.' Maxine thought about that for a moment, then brightened. 'I do believe there might be a mouthful or two left. I shall fetch it for both of us. Wait for me.'
Clemency shook her head on a smile and found her seat on Maxine's favourite bench overlooking the vegetable garden.
She leaned back and relaxed, looking up into the branches of the oak tree that overhung the pleasant spot. Between the rustling leaves, the sky was drawing up its blanket of stars and velvet, and idly, she made a wish on the first star she saw, a habit from childhood she hadn't revisited for years.
Maxine returned, passed Clemency a cut crystal glass half full of the gleaming brandy.
'Sorry they're not the right sort of glasses for the occasion,' Maxine said. 'I couldn't be bothered searching out the brandy ones. You’re rather lucky not to be drinking out of a Bovril jar.' She glanced up at the sky at the blooming constellations. 'Did you make a wish?'
Clemency widened her eyes in surprise. 'Why would you ask that?'
Maxine shrugged and settled down on the bench beside Clemency. 'Don't know,' she said. 'Was just a fancy.'
'We used to do that when we were girls, do you remember?'
Maxine couldn't hold back her cackle. 'So we did. And the things we wished for!'
That made Clemency laugh too. 'At six, it was sweets,' she said.
'And at 16, it was sweethearts,' Maxine added.
Clemency shook her head. 'You'd found your sweetie by then,' she said.
Max sipped her drink then tucked it down on the ground by her shoe and tugged her pipe out of the pocket of her cardigan instead. She tamped some tobacco into it and struck a match, inhaling the fragrant smoke appreciatively.
'You exaggerate,' she said.
'Only slightly.'
Relaxing – Ruth only let her smoke the pipe outside for an hour in the evening, Maxine smiled in remembrance. 'I was a bright young thing of twenty when I met my love.'
Clemency snorted. 'A bright young thing. We were never that. I wasn't – and neither were you, my friend, not if you’re referring to Flappers.'
'No,' Maxine conceded. 'Ruth was in no mood for kicking her heels up when she got back from France.' She blinked and took another deep puff on the pipe. 'She has the occasional nightmare still, can you believe it? After all these years.'
Clemency shifted uncomfortably on the wooden slats of the bench. 'There are whispers of unrest again, in Germany, if the newspapers are to be believed.'
Maxine shook her head. 'I don't want to think about it. That Hitler and his National Socialist party – he sounds like nothing but trouble, and we've enough of that here already, in our own backyards.' She gestured at the house and they fell silent, looking at the lights coming on in the various windows.
'Okay,' Clemency said at last. 'Who am I taking home with me?'
Maxine sat up straighter. 'Oh, good grief, I completely forgot the story I came out here to tell.' She picked up her glass and took a sip of the brandy. It was good. 'Our new lady – just a girl, really, 22 years old, recently arrived in this fine place from the mother country.'
'The mother country?' Clemency frowned. 'You mean, she came over on the boat from England?'
'That's exactly what I mean. Been here no more than a couple of weeks. What's more, she's completely on her own because her mother passed away on the crossing.'
'Died?'
'Correct. Dehydration, apparently. So says the death certificate the unfortunate girl was carrying around in her handbag.'
Clemency winced. 'Chronic seasickness, I suppose?' She didn’t suffer from the malady herself, but she’d been out in her boat with plenty who did, and it was always unpleasant watching them turn green then retch over the side.
'I would say so,' Maxine said. She also didn't suffer from the problem, but then, she also had little call to hop on a boat. Her life was spread out in front of her. The house, the garden, Ruth, now their women. She puffed on the pipe and tried to feel the familiar contentment.
'Ruth wants a baby,' she blurted.
Clemency sat up. 'What?'
Maxine shrugged, lowered the pipe to her lap. 'A baby.'
'Well,' Clemency said, glancing up to the sky and remembering the wish she'd made on the first star. It hadn't been for a baby, but for love, surely. 'That's a little awkward.'
'Indeed,' Maxine said, dropping into moroseness. 'The one damned thing I can't give her.'
Clemency was silent, considering it. 'You think they'd let you adopt? There are always plenty of babies about, or so I hear.' She made a mental note to put an orphanage on her list of places to visit with her camera.
But Maxine snorted. 'Do you think they'd find us suitable? A female couple – we’re unnatural.' She took a mouthful of brandy. 'And if that isn't difficult enough, then there's me being Maori.'
'Half Maori,' Clemency said, reminding Maxine of her Scottish father.
But Maxine shook her head and held up one bare wrist to the darkening sky. 'The skin is brown. That's enough.'
Clem shook her head. 'You should go along and make enquiries anyway.' She took a swallow of her own drink. 'There must be a way, surely.' She blinked. 'How set on it is she?'
Maxine sighed. 'You know Ruth,' she said. 'She's a trooper. She won't say it, because she knows it's impossible, but she very much wants a child. I see it in her eyes every time I look at her.'
'I don't think I'd be a good candidate for children,' Clemency mused. 'I think I may have missed out on the maternal drive.'
'Probably just as well, considering the impracticality of getting one of the things.' Maxine picked up her pipe, and puffed on it again, disconsolately this time. They sat in silence for a while, sipping their brandy, the smoke from Maxine's pipe drifting upwards in gentle eddies to meet the sky, spreading out in white tendrils and disappearing.
'Maybe I should get that dog,' Clemency burst out suddenly.
Maxine turned on the seat and stared at her. 'A dog? Are you joking? You just said you had no maternal instinct in you.'
Clemency scowled at the mild night. 'It was you who suggested a dog, if I remember correctly.'
'I doubt it,' Maxine averred. 'I think it was a lover I suggested.'
'Well. A friend of some description.'
Maxine shook her head. 'There's a rather noticeable difference between a dog and a lover, my dear girl. Believe me, it's not a dog you need.'
'But it would be nice to have a companion. Even if it had to come with four paws and a tail.' It was as close as Clemency could come to articulating her loneliness.
'And the need for walkies and ball-fetching. Clem, darling, you work too much to own a dog. And you’re allergic to cats.'
‘I’m allergic to being on my
own.’ Clemency sighed and thought of the woman in the photograph. There was just something about the girl that struck a blow at Clemency’s heart. It wasn't just the perfect heart-shaped face, or the glorious, although unfashionable stack of red hair that had been escaping from under the young woman's hat, or the soft heat of her skin where Clemency had touched her to help her up – all that had been wonderful; but it was the expression in the stranger's eyes that kept Clemency going back to the impulsive photograph she'd taken. She'd puzzled over that expression, and still couldn't decide what exactly it was. One look and she'd think it was fear, a second glance and it was defiance, desperation, confusion, and back to defiance again. Always though, when she leaned over the photograph, she saw the same loneliness she knew from the mirror. The same wordless plea for what? – Something.
'You all right, old girl?' Maxine asked. 'You're away with the fairies.'
Clemency shook her head. 'I'm fine,' she said, standing up and stretching, the brandy glass, empty now, dangling from one hand. 'Best get this done, I expect. Riley will be wondering where we've gotten to and sending out the fire brigade to look for us, in case we've fallen into the harbour again.'
Maxine laughed in the gloom that had gathered around them as they'd talked. 'We only did that once, you know. And the motor car going off the road into the harbour was an accident.'
'Sure. An accident fuelled by your father's good Scotch whisky,' Clemency said with a brief laugh. 'And she's never let me live it down.'
Chapter Sixteen
She was dreaming of home, of the soft eiderdown, of the cat purring on top of the covers, its whiskers tickling her neck as it stretched and tucked its head under her chin. She dreamed that her mother was in the other room where the chipped enamel kettle steamed away merrily on the cooker. She dreamed her mother was frying eggs and buttering hot toast.
There was a gentle touch on her arm and she smiled sleepily, knowing her mother had come to fetch her to the table, and that everything was all right again, and that after breakfast, they would pull on their coats and hats and set off for the laundry. They still had jobs and their cosy little home, with the cat that liked to sneak in Eliza's window in the middle of the night.