Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “Who are these adorable children?” he said, and the two of them startled.

  “Mrs. Fitch, this is my colleague, Mr. Hallam.”

  The mother held her hand out daintily. “Mrs. Fitch,” said Hallam, “it’s against nature to photograph blossoms out of their element.”

  “But they’re from my garden, sir.”

  “I don’t mean the flowers. What are your names,” he said to the children. One of them murmured, “Elizabeth,” the other, “Thomas.” “Beautiful names. Do you know I have a garden full of hummingbirds out back? With bright light and two very nice and comfortable chairs?”

  “Mrs. Fitch would like a studio portrait,” said Claudia.

  “We have two studios, though,” he said, continuing to smile warmly. It had become his job to sell; Mr. Ennis was too ill to present himself as the true proprietor, even though the equipment and expertise were mostly his. Claudia looked at Hallam mildly; that she was alone meant Ennis was only feet from them in her room, asleep, or awake and suffering on the mattress. Now that he thought of it, he could hear the man’s breath coming unevenly through the curtain. “It’s up to you, of course, madam, but don’t dismiss the possibility of a picture in nature that will be alive for years to come.”

  The decision being left entirely up to her (would Mr. Fitch have been so open to her wishes?), Mrs. Fitch was not against it. They carried the camera and a tripod onto the sidewalk and went down the narrow alley to the garden behind the gate. Mrs. Fitch admonished the children not to let their clothing touch the walls, and Hallam congratulated himself silently for having had the presence of mind to scrub those walls and repaint them. The two children could have sidled all the way along without threat to their summer linens.

  They went into the garden and the children sat on the two white-painted iron chairs; a throw pillow on each seat prevented small legs from burning. Mrs. Fitch approved; the change of location meant that the exposure time would be a mere fifteen seconds compared to forty inside. It meant the children could be themselves, and children appearing to be real children meant eager visits to Hallam, Ennis, and Rowe from other parents. He posed them and Claudia offered him the camera (she had a natural sense of what the mother would have wished: that Hallam had arrived and taken on the appearance of her employer dictated that he be the “expert” who took the picture), and within two minutes, four exposures were made. On the fourth, he took away the chairs and had the two sit together on the grass at the verge of the flowers. This would be the image that Mrs. Fitch would buy.

  She counted out her coins on Hallam’s counter inside. Claudia held the children’s hands on the sidewalk as they watched the horses trot by on King Street. “Your wife is very good with children,” said Mrs. Fitch. He thanked her. That “Rowe” was not another man never crossed the minds of most customers, and among the clientele Mrs. Rowe went mainly by “ma’am.” It remained an uncorrected error; it served the business.

  “I heard laughter,” said Ennis, walking into the studio. In the good light, the whites of Ennis’s eyes were the color of old bone. He watched Hallam put the coins into the locked box they kept in the studio. When Hallam opened the box, he saw the better part of three pounds within. Claudia came in from the street with a paper bag; she’d gone down toward Yonge Street and bought apples. She put one into each hand and they stood in a pleasant silence in the light of the front room, with nothing but the crisp sound of their teeth on the skins.

  There were no more appointments for the rest of the morning, and as Hallam no longer went to Jewell and Clow’s, he took his paper and coffee into the garden, sitting in one of the chairs out of the direct sunlight. Claudia helped Ennis out into the brightness and sat him in the other chair to shave him. The sun picked up the unkempt stubble on Ennis’s face and she shielded her eyes against the light, tucking a torn coffee sack into his collar and then washing his face gently with hot water. He tilted his head back and then side to side, trusting her with the razor he’d stropped, even though she already knew how to prepare a blade and shave a man. He sighed with pleasure, feeling the whiskers come off cleanly, the soap lifting the oils off his flesh and leaving him free to feel the air, the light.

  Hallam watched them quietly and felt a prick of shame. Her tenderness with Ennis was a sign of love, a daughterly love. It was as Ennis had avowed: he would never have touched her. Her nakedness in his studio, however strange and inexplicable it had been to Hallam, had been a sign of her trust, and Ennis’s position behind his camera was a promise of succor. Although his awareness of the truth as it had always been made him feel he’d disgraced himself, Hallam was also aware that these two people were the entire ship of his life now, and he had accepted this. He felt, for once, that there was a plan for him. If he’d only allowed himself to be bent by another will earlier than this, his suffering might have been less. There were a great many things he was supposed to be, that he ought to have been. But this life had always been waiting for him, it now appeared, waiting to be lived, and not even his fumbling judgments, his benighted actions, could affect its unfolding.

  Claudia toweled Ennis off, and he seemed fresher, more alert. He drew Claudia’s arm down to him, pressing it against his chest and belly, and kissed her on the shoulder. “I am human again, for the moment.”

  “You think a shave entitles you to change species, Sam? Maybe later, after Jem has bathed you properly. Right, sir?”

  Hallam started from his thoughts. “Beg pardon?”

  “When it is dark enough that you won’t be visible from anywhere, but still light enough that you can tell the dirt from the hair, I’d like you to put Sam in the tub out here and get him washed up. I want us to take pictures of ourselves, tomorrow.”

  “I should be remembered as I am,” said Ennis.

  “Probably so,” said Hallam. “Show fidelity to the subject.” Claudia stared patiently at the two of them, grown men afraid of a bath.

  “Jem, you’ll scrub this man until he gleams. He’ll feel better.” She fingered off a dot of soap under Ennis’s ear. “And you’ll feel like living a while longer.”

  “’Tis hot,” said Ennis to himself. Fifteen minutes in the sun and he was flagging. The sun gave vital nutrient, but a body too ill to make use of it will sap in the light. Claudia went in with the cloth and brought it back out, dripping and cold. She instructed Ennis to go back into the dark and lie down. In an hour, they would wake him up for his medicine. He shuffled back inside without aid, and yawned deeply at the door before vanishing into the inner gloaming.

  A haze filled the sky between buildings. Claudia moved the coffee bag off Ennis’s chair and sat down, her eyes on the doorway. It looked cool there, though she knew better. For some time, Hallam had been used to a shared silence with Claudia. In the two months they had lived together in his small flat, they’d had no choice but to respect each other’s quiet. He went about now reading the columns in the Globe unselfconsciously. He glanced up at a windy sound and watched a huge bee stumble onto the lip of a pale purple iris (what some people here called a fleur-de-lis, but which was, in fact, a true iris and not a lily), and it tucked itself under the soft upper lip of the petal. Its black, exposed behind throbbed with seeming delight. He stared at it sleepily, mesmerized by being so close to such a communion.

  “Any call for a talented domestic?” called Claudia.

  “I don’t read those classifieds,” Hallam said, and he looked up to see her smiling at him. He turned back to the paper. “But there is a new shipment of French velvet at Gordon & McKay.”

  “Am I to make you both handsome pink smoking vests?”

  He snapped the paper smartly. “There are also new whiskeys at Leask’s.”

  He continued reading, but the words just passed beneath his eyes. He could sense her gazing at him. Her look felt like a word spoken through honey. “I called you Jem,” she said. “Did you notice? Before?”

  “Did you?”

  “And I call Sam Sam. Do you even know my first n
ame?”

  “I know your first name, Mrs. Rowe.”

  “Are you able to form it with your lips?”

  “I could if I —”

  “Try it. Claaaw . . .”

  He turned his face down further, anxious not to be made to laugh. “I know your first name perfectly well.”

  “For two months you called me Mrs. Rowe, in the privacy of your own rooms —”

  “Room,” he said.

  “And without there being the slightest chance of anyone hearing you be familiar.”

  “I am just more comfortable —”

  “With someone whose life you saved, just about. Why the formality? Aren’t we partners? In business?”

  He nodded vigorously — yes, they were, that was certainly true. But some barriers one did well to observe, although he could not put it to her that way. “Maybe it is right to think of ourselves as just that, though. Equals in a business concern. Perhaps that demands a certain kind of mutual respect.”

  “And calling me Claudia does not show respect?”

  “If I get into the habit of it, and it shows in front of our clientele, then perhaps not. We don’t want to appear immodest.”

  “It’s not 1820, Jem Hallam. You can call a woman by her name.”

  “Well, yes,” he said, reddening. “I’ll work on it.”

  “It would be wonderful if you two would settle on nomenclature and let a sick man sleep,” came Ennis’s voice from inside. Claudia burst out laughing.

  “Sorry! Mr. Ennis! Sir!”

  She waited a moment, gazing into the room where he lay, then rose from her chair and put the coffee bag down closer to Hallam, where he remained in the shade. She arranged her dress around her legs and sat on the cloth. Insects looped in slow paths around the two of them. “I don’t mean to make myself unpleasant,” she said, looking up toward him in his chair.

  “You are baiting me, Mrs. Rowe, which is unkind.”

  “You would have to be a hook to be baited, Mr. Hallam. Or a trap.”

  He flattened his paper on his lap. For a moment, he had the illusion that the two of them were sitting on the deck of a boat moving slowly across the lake, a weekend sojourn to Rochester, perhaps, to pick pears. “How would I be a trap, Mrs. Rowe? Or you to me, or Ennis? My formality is not a form of caution. I’m just more comfortable this way.”

  “I’ve been too familiar, then. I apologize.” There was remorse in her words, but not in her voice. “Do you want me to go back inside?”

  He shook his head. “It’s only that it is not becoming for us to — I think you know.” He believed she found his squirming discomfort a delight, and he marked her mock-serious face staring up at him. “Mrs. Rowe, it’s bad enough . . .”

  “I know,” she said, and she lowered her voice. “Don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Hallam. I know you will go home, in time. I presume it. But in the meantime, we are shipwrecked, and I must have a friend! I am being quite plain and you needn’t fetch out your slide rule to measure my intent. I’m a social person; I like to laugh, I like to dispute. And I don’t want to choke off that part of me because my erstwhile patron is coughing blood in the next room and can’t have a drink with me, and the only other person I have to talk to is standing daily on ceremony for fear of falling pell-mell into boiling sin! Be my friend, Jem Hallam. If you had anything to fear from me, I could not talk to you like this anyway. Don’t be full of worry.”

  “I am not full of worry.”

  “You are an old woman full of worry. Tell me something you would tell a friend and let me listen. You can do that. I will lie back here under the bees and dragonflies and you can talk to me.” She lay back and waited, but he stared over his crushed paper into the air.

  “I can’t believe you would say I haven’t been a friend to you.”

  “I take it back. Now tell me a story and make it a good one.”

  “I don’t know what it is you’d like me to say.”

  “How about I give you a word, then — no, I will give you two words, two nouns, and you will extract by association from your memory a pleasant personal experience that tells an unthreatening morsel of yourself. All right?”

  “I think you will find me uniquely uncreative.”

  “It is not a creative task, Jem, it is one of filing. And since you were born, it seems, with the mind of a clerk, it shouldn’t present too great a difficulty.” He nodded his silent, exasperated consent and she paused for a moment, then said, “Key. And horse.”

  He let the two words into his mind, and saw them both as objects. A series of keys: gray iron ones, little silver ones for jewel boxes and personal diaries, house keys, a heavy rusted gate key that fit into the lock of a swinging metal pasture door. He heard it shut with a bang. Easy to get to the horses then — his grandfather’s Shetlands — but also the gleaming black horses he saw daily in the streets in Camden Town — not just the hacks and hansoms, but the big brown drays dragging heavy tanks of water to a fire, or once in a while an escaped palomino darting over the cobbles from someone’s sheds, its eyes wild. Metallic keyness and large, hard, nostril-clouded horseness went clanging and galloping through his mind like a magic lantern show where someone had pulled the slide through too fast. He tried to recall whether he’d ever unlocked a horse, or seen a key shaped like a pony, and then all at once his mind stopped turning over and he was standing as a boy of perhaps ten in front of the house he lived in with his parents until he was sixteen, the house in Clapham. Pale gray stone; vines climbing the walls; it was early summer, and close and hot. He remembered wondering why he’d been brought to this house, fearing that he was to be dropped off there, as he had been at a boys’ farm the previous summer, but that was in the countryside, and although he had found the roughness of the other boys a shock, he’d enjoyed himself, and this: this looked like employment of some sort. He asked his father what was happening, and his mother hushed him.

  Shortly, being drawn by a broad-chested cabhorse, came a man, who stepped out of his cabin and walked sullenly over to Hallam’s father. “I’ve been to the solicitor’s,” said the man. “It’s in order.”

  “Tell Mr. Sullivan we hope that with his new capital he will make himself a good start.”

  The man nodded and handed Hallam’s father a small yellow envelope. Then he began walking back toward his cab. He stopped before the door a moment and turned back. “Mr. Sullivan’s capital is being poured out in little rills from one hand to the other, in order of largest debt to smallest. He is broken, Mr. Hallam, but I will pass on your warm thoughts anyway.”

  “Horrible man,” said his mother as young Jem watched his father empty the contents of the envelope out into his hand. It was a single black key. The three of them went to the door. His father told him they had a new home. That summer (Hallam remembered as he told Claudia the story), he had been sent back to the same boys’ farm. But was that still part of the story of key-and-horse?

  “Go on,” she said, and he continued, time sliding away from one spot to another, enjoying the taste of memory moving over his mind’s palate. He felt the pull of a trout on the end of a fishing line, the smell of the coniferous forest, and the light slanting down hard between branches. All of this was somehow in him, and as he spoke it, it was as if it were the light itself falling on a plate and seizing that surface — yes, this was what making a picture was like, it was a form of telling.

  He looked up and saw Claudia Rowe staring at him, her mouth almost in a smile, and the horses in his mind bolted from the stable and hit the streets in disarray. “It’s time for Mr. Ennis’s pills,” he said.

  “I don’t get two words of my own?”

  “I haven’t had the time to think of them yet.”

  “Then take the time and let me know. I’ll go raise him.” She pushed herself up and swayed a little, dizzy from lying down in the heat, and then went into the house.

  PLATE NINE

  We are in King Street now, and the rain has finally stopped. You must see the Gol
den Lion, as it is known, a shop that would be at home on Camden High Street.

  (I had intended to give you this picture, thinking of you standing with me near the end of our little tour, but in amazement I tell you now that I have had to retreat to offices across the way, the bulky camera tucked up under my coat. Just a mere half-mile from where I had been standing began a rally of calls that a bear was in the street! As if on a Sunday promenade. So think of us now, caught up in an unplanned adventure, making for cover. Cecile is in my arms chattering like a monkey, and the four of us have bounded up the stairs in the building behind us. By good luck we’re in the offices of the Leader, whose clerks have thrown open their doors and allowed us to crowd in at the windows with them. And there she is: Ursus canadensis, as a learned gentleman says beside me, the common black bear. You may be displeased to learn: the sight of one of these gargantuan mammals lumbering down our civilized byways is not entirely unknown. Especially in inclement weather, the whole city smells of dirt and forest and it all seems much of a muchness to a bear. This is my third U. canadensis this year. So let us take a picture and we will try to catch two beasts in one snare: the golden lion, the black bear. The light is poor under a purpled sky and I cannot get a fast image, but you see him anyway, there behind the sign for Paterson’s Dry Goods. He is in no hurry. Some brave souls are returned to the street, believing that they are not to the animal’s taste — although I fear for the man in the berry-colored suit standing in front of McNab’s. I am afraid the animal is nothing more than a greyling ghost in your picture: as if the camera itself were struck with wonder at the sight of him.)

  Now he is gone, let us go back down to the street — come, Jane, come, Cecile, now we can go down to squint in the windows of the Golden Lion. The sun is cooperating at last. Jane, you will have that dress in red that I have seen there in recent days, thinking of you in it, the fine silvery brocade at the neck and hem. And Cecile will do justice to a pair of white gloves with the small bone buttons, which I know are there lying in the velvet at the bottom of the case. And for your mother — am I to say what your mother will wear? No, let us all go down together, down to the Golden Lion, and we will help her choose a summer frock that will force the rain to stay in England for a change! Come now, the coast is clear.