by Karen Swan
Ro smiled as she decided, mercilessly, to hang it immediately opposite the front door. She propped it against the skirting board, ready to hang, and arranged the others at spaced intervals. With these images on the walls – and this one in particular – she could show customers exactly what she could do and win them over before she even opened her mouth – much less told them her fees.
She moved on to the next box. It was the heaviest, rammed with fully bound photobooks – the digital generation’s photo albums – which were tall, glossy and printed on thick non-fade photographic paper. The ones she had brought with her – again, a tight edit of her entire collection – showed the gamut of her clients’ experiences: one depicted the life story of an eighty-year-old university lecturer (and had taken over a hundred hours to edit), another a baby’s first year (almost as long, given the obsessive amount of photos taken of the precious child), a gap yah in South America, a country wedding in Somerset, a ‘leavers’ book for a group of public-school girls . . . Ro decided to leave them in the box for safe keeping until she could buy a large table to arrange them on and position in the centre of the studio for easy browsing.
The third box held some of her hardware: three small flat screens that could be wall mounted and rigged with headphones, playing the short films she’d made of the subjects on loop. She almost wept at the sight of her Apple Mac sitting at the bottom. It had been shockingly hard coping without it for three long weeks as it was air-freighted over, and she dusted it off lovingly, arranging it on the corner of the long counter, where it booted up without a hitch, thanks to the Square’s upgraded Wi-Fi and broadband connections.
Hump wandered back in, a cardboard tray of coffees and giant cookies in his hand. ‘I thought sugar too. You look like you need it.’
‘Charming,’ Ro quipped, accepting both her caffeine and sugar hits gratefully.
‘Whoa!’ Hump exclaimed, catching sight of the prints lined against the skirting board. ‘You did these?’
‘Indeed,’ Ro sighed, sliding her arms out on the counter and resting her head for a moment.
‘These are awesome. I had no idea you were so good! I mean, when I saw you at the wedding, you were so engrossed, so in the moment, you know? I thought it was cool, but . . .’ He turned back to her. ‘No, you can’t sleep! Not yet or you’ll be awake at four!’ Hump ordered, jogging over and pulling her hair back from her face. Her eyes were closed, her breathing already slowing down. ‘Drink up. Now.’
Ro groaned and reluctantly did as she was told.
‘Do you ever take that thing off?’ he asked, clocking the camera still hanging round her neck. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without it. You even drove with it on.’
Her hands automatically wandered to it, stroking it like a pacifier. ‘I’ve got to be ready. You can’t imagine how awful it would be for me to miss the moment because I didn’t have my camera with me.’
‘Huh.’
‘I know, it’s weird,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘It’s my thing. Matt doesn’t get it either.’
‘Matt’s this famous boyfriend of yours?’
Ro nodded, digging her teeth into the side of the paper cup as she wondered where Matt was right at this instant. Trekking through a jungle? Sleeping in a mountain-top monastery? What time was it even, over there? She was going to have to recalibrate now that she was another five hours behind him. They hadn’t spoken since Sunday, four days ago, and even that had been only their fourth call since his departure. She’d need to give him her numbers out here – both for the house and the studio. She couldn’t afford to miss his calls. They were rare enough.
Hump took her silence as a cue not to probe further. ‘So did you take any photos on the beach?’
‘What?’ She looked back at him, fuggy with tiredness.
‘Earlier, when you went to the beach. Did you take any photos?’
‘I—’ The humiliation rained down on her again. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘You must be picky. It was a killing sunset tonight.’
‘I know,’ Ro mumbled. The light had been so perfect when she’d been photographing the children, before their maniac father had assaulted her and—
With a small gasp, she grabbed her camera from round her neck, ejected the memory card and booted it into the computer.
‘What’s up?’ Hump asked, taking in her intense expression. He wandered round the counter to stand by her and see what she was doing. ‘“System Recovery,”’ he read aloud, watching the screen as she typed quickly. Obscure code was tracking along the bottom of the monitor. ‘So what’s all this?’
‘I’m recovering some photos I deleted earlier,’ she murmured, her brow deeply furrowed.
Hump looked astonished. ‘You can do that? I thought when they were gone, they were gone?’
Ro shook her head. ‘Not necessarily. When you press “delete”, all you actually lose is the pathfinder to the photo in the system, not the file itself. I’ve got data-recovery software that I bought for precisely this reason. It’s my insurance policy. I can’t afford to lose images from a shoot,’ she said, never moving her eyes from the screen. ‘As long as you don’t take any new photos, you should be able to recover them; if you do, the new ones will write over the old ones and then they are gone for good.’
An image of the two silhouetted children standing by the water popped up on the screen. ‘Aha!’ she cried, clapping her hands together delightedly. ‘Gotcha! You can’t bully me, mister!’
‘Who’s bullying you?’ Hump asked, looking around the room as though to check whether he was missing anyone.
Ro turned to face him, rubbing his bare arm with her hand. ‘I’d love to tell you,’ she said, beaming, ‘but . . . it’s a long story.’
Chapter Six
She was awake at four. It wasn’t the sound of a sparrow pecking on the windowpane that did it, or even the distant cymbal crash of the waves on the beach, but the vast, spreading emptiness of Matt’s side of the bed that blew over her like a cold breeze. Her right hand had habitually reached behind her, her right foot exploring the space for his legs, but only the smooth expanse of uncrumpled cotton had met her touch – she could still only sleep on her side of the bed – and the realization he was gone had shattered her sleep for the night.
Ro groaned and blinked blearily, her face half smothered by the deep, feathered peach pillow, her left arm dangling over the side of the bed to the floor. Without moving her head, she swivelled her eyes slowly, taking in her surroundings and trying to remember how the rooms in the house joined together, but she couldn’t. Last night’s tour had been brief to say the least – they had stayed at the studio longer than expected, Hump intrigued to see more of her work and insisting she show him her back catalogue, and she was so tired on their return (3 a.m. London time), she’d felt almost punch-drunk. Hump’s plans for supper on the porch had had to be drastically revised. That cookie had been her dinner, the coffee her nightcap, and Hump had no sooner shown her her room – the largest guest room on account of her living there full-time – than she had started untying her shoelaces, drawn to the bed as though hypnotized. Hump had only just managed to bolt from the room before she’d pulled her T-shirt over her head, too tired even to care whether her new housemate saw her in her underwear.
She saw now the floor was wooden with wide, glossy boards the colour of treacle and had a pale green cotton rug atop it. Her bedstead was brass – creaky when she turned over – and the old, tumbled linen sheets were covered with what seemed to be a hand-stitched eiderdown decorated with faded yellow, green and blue diamonds arranged in a star. Both Bobbi and Greg had to bring their own bedding and towels, but Hump had agreed she could use his linens and save on the hefty cost of transporting her own over from the UK or having to buy new here. She noticed a thick bundle of forest-green towels folded neatly on a rattan chair by the window, her own cargoes, T-shirt and bra strewn across the floor like a breadcrumb trail.
She
swept a leg across the fitted sheet beneath her – it was so old it had a silken feel to it now – and turned over with another groan, the pillow billowing either side of her face like an airbag. The ceiling was boarded white, with a plain brass pendant light and peach shade, and a pair of unlined curtains hung from a metal pole, not quite meeting in the middle so that a column of strengthening light was drawn along the floor and up the opposite wall, beside her head. There was a narrow pine wardrobe in the far left corner, with a matching chest of drawers with heart-shaped handles and two bedside tables.
Strictly speaking, the decor wasn’t Ro’s thing. She liked twenty shades of taupe and reindeer-hide rugs – at least, that was what she’d been planning for the sitting room before Matt had interrupted her with his ‘pause’ – but even so, the room had warmth and a personality to it that she liked. Hump had said this was his grandfather’s house, but she was pretty sure this room had a woman’s touch.
Ro had slept with the windows open – more by accident than design – and she swung her legs out of bed, crossing the floor in a curious jog as every floorboard she touched creaked. She pulled the curtains back – which rattled like cargo trains on a track – and leaned on the sill. The sky looked as bleary as she felt – pasty white with just a hint of colour – still shrouded by a thick sea mist that wasn’t yet on the retreat; the grass on Egypt Green opposite was beaded with dewdrops and glistened like it had been threaded with crystals in the night; small brown-tummied birds she couldn’t identify pecked at the ground for worms; a battered white pickup truck drove slowly past with a posse of Hispanic labourers wedged inside, all wearing baseball caps, their brown arms hanging out of the cab. She watched as they hooked a left and then a right past the junction and motored towards the standalone grand building she’d passed yesterday. Through the trees on the opposite side of the street, she could just make out the form of the vast neighbouring house – grey-cedared, white-windowed, a turquoise pool unwrinkled by the breeze.
Looking left and right at her own house, she saw that her room was in the middle of the row of three dormers, the other guest rooms presumably either side of hers. She vaguely wondered at what time Bobbi and Greg were arriving and how it would be seeing Bobbi again. Things had felt so easy with Hump last night, but Bobbi was more intense, demanding. More New York. Ro yawned and stretched. Right now, she was feeling very Barnes.
She turned away from the window with a shiver. It was chilly at this hour and she was in just her knickers: she had been too sleepy last night even to think of bringing her bag upstairs. She eyed yesterday’s clothes with disdain – they had dried stiff with salt, and the cargoes had tide marks on them from the seawater. Every time she looked at them she was reminded of the horror on the beach. She had to get some fresh clothes from her bag.
Pulling the eiderdown from the bed, Ro wrapped it around her shoulders, opened her door tentatively and peered out. The landing area was square, with the staircase rising from a void in the centre, and was framed with balustrading all the way round. Again the floor was wooden, with a couple of lamps standing on small tables and various stippled oil paintings on the walls – all of them seascapes, clearly worked by the same hand. It was apparent no designer had ever been let near the place, yet it had a look of substance about it, that the person who’d arranged it last may not have known about trends, but had known their own mind.
On the far side of the staircase, a door opposite – Hump’s room, she assumed – was closed, as was a door to the right; she vaguely recalled Hump saying his room was ensuite. To the left, she could see through the gap, was a bathroom. Ro tiptoed across, tripping on the corner of the eiderdown as she approached and falling forwards with her arms outstretched so that the door banged loudly against the bathroom wall.
‘Dammit,’ she muttered, using the facilities as quietly as she could, even putting a flannel beneath the water from the tap so that it didn’t make a noise hitting the porcelain bowl. The last thing Hump needed was to be disturbed by his jet-lagged lodger.
She crept down the stairs, her body hunched beneath the quilt, grimacing every time a floorboard groaned beneath her weight. She frowned as her feet touched the downstairs floor and she took in the hall, as though seeing it for the first time. She had clearly passed through here last night, but she had no recollection of it at all. Had she sleepwalked up the stairs?
The cottage was far roomier than it appeared from the street, with as much depth as it had width, and downstairs shared the same square layout as upstairs, with rooms flanking off from the central hall. The front door – to her left – was half glazed behind a porch screen, the walls a dark olive green and hung with a few sepia-tinted photographs of a sailing yacht. In the corner to her right, beneath the turn of the staircase, stood an old writing desk, a stack of papers on it gathered into a messy pile and secured by a large McDonald’s Coke cup, the straw bent at a jaunty angle.
Ro walked into the room immediately opposite the bottom of the stairs. Three small sofas covered with a faded blue and pink floral print were arranged in a U-shape, a round, glass-topped coffee table between them ringed by coffee mugs. A bowl of potpourri – potpourri? – was gathering dust on the mantelpiece of a brick-front chimney, and curling copies of crossword magazines were slotted into a magazine rack.
Next to the sitting room, at the back of the house, was a small dining room. It boasted the same wooden floor and subtle cream wallpaper of the sitting room, but was dominated by a long mahogany table with eight spoon-back chairs. A pair of silver candelabras still held the stubs of cherry-red candles – wax tears dripping down their sides and puddling in soft pools below – and elaborately swagged curtains were held in place by brass scroll tiebacks.
The dining room led into the kitchen – a blue vinyl and veneer 1950s job that seemed not to have been touched on the last redux thirty years earlier. On the plus side, it looked spotlessly clean and had a certain retro cool to it. Ro made a beeline for the kettle. She realized she had left her ‘morning box’ of teabags and marmalade at the studio with the other items she’d had air-freighted over. She rummaged the overhead cupboard, trying to find something that would pass as tea. Green tea didn’t cut it, nor did camomile in her opinion. She had no idea what ‘rooibos’ even was. She filled the kettle, but the water clattered through the pipes like children down slides and with an accompanying whistle as the pressure was released. Bloody hell, was nothing in this house quiet?
‘Yo,’ a voice behind her said, and Ro turned to find Hump yawning, wandering into the kitchen as he stretched his long, bare – really very defined – torso, like a big cat.
‘Oh my God, Hump!’ Ro cried, sagging against the worktop, her hands clapped over her hammering heart. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack! What are you doing out of bed at this hour?’ she whispered furiously.
He raised a bemused eyebrow. ‘Why are you whispering? We’re the only people in the house and we’re both up.’
She narrowed her eyes in a ‘ha, ha’ response. ‘Why are you up? I was being so quiet.’
‘Yeah? I’ve heard quieter bulldozers,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘What are you doing up? I thought that was the point of you staying up till the point of delirium last night. I was beginning to think you were on drugs.’
‘I was trying to find my bag.’
‘Well, it’s not in there,’ Hump wise-cracked, looking at the open cupboard behind her.
‘And I also thought I would make a cup of tea,’ she added. ‘Not that I can find any tea with tea in it.’
He grinned. ‘Your bag’s in the hall, by the desk.’
‘Oh. I must have missed it.’ She realized she was standing before him wearing just the quilt, and pulled it tighter around her shoulders. It was still odd, this sudden intimacy between them – they had become friends online, but were scarcely past ‘strangers’ in real life, living together after just two fleeting meetings when it had taken her seven years to live with the man she loved. She briefly wondere
d what Matt would say if he could see her right now, standing in just a quilt opposite a man wearing only a pair of cut-off trackie-bums.
Hump clearly had no such reservations. ‘So, what do you think, then?’ he asked, spreading his arms wide and gesturing to the house.
‘Love it. So charming.’
He looked pleased. ‘Thanks. Yeah. I love it too. I mean, I know it needs doing up . . . updating, but—’ He shrugged and she knew he meant money he didn’t have. ‘Besides, I kinda like having it how they had it.’
‘They? I thought you said it was your grandfather’s?’
‘Yeah, he left it to me. My grandmother died a few years before him.’
Ro nodded. ‘Did she make this?’ she asked, looking down at the quilt.
‘For their twentieth wedding anniversary apparently.’
‘Cool!’ She twisted her head to get a better look at the pattern down her back. ‘I can see why you didn’t want a load of reprobates trashing the place. It feels like a home.’ The kettle began whistling even more insistently. ‘Fancy a cuppa?’
‘“Fancy a cuppa?” That’s tea, right?’ Hump echoed with a big grin, mimicking her accent but sounding more like Lord Grantham instead. ‘No, thanks. I’m strictly a Joe guy.’
‘Ha! Backatcha! That means coffee. I know that – you can’t fool me,’ Ro said, pointing a finger at him. She reluctantly took a camomile teabag from the box – the least of all evils on offer – and dropped it in her cup. ‘By the way, where can I buy some hammers and nails and things? I need to get some stuff before my car’s picked up by the hire company later.’