The groom's mother had closed her eyes in every photograph except the one in which she was telling someone else to smile.
Claire moved between the three best versions of the family group. Open eyes, open mouth, eyes closed again. Beside the mother stood an uncle whose tie was almost horizontal, lifted by the breeze from the river. Everyone else had managed to look delighted. Even the little boy who had spent the ceremony threatening to swallow a pebble was smiling, though the pebble had remained in his fist.
She marked the open-mouth picture. There were things she could fix and things she would rather leave human.
It was twenty past eleven. Her shoes were under the desk, far enough back that she would have to crawl to retrieve them. A ridge on the inside of her right heel told her that she ought to have brought the other pair, as she ought to have done at every wedding since June. The tea beside the keyboard had a skin on it. She drank it anyway.
Vivian had said she wanted pictures with life in them.
Not natural, she had added, pulling the veil back over her shoulder. Everyone says natural and then sends you a list of things their face isn't allowed to do.
Claire had liked her immediately.
Now Vivian laughed on the screen, one hand hooked in the crook of Graham's arm. Her head was thrown back enough to show the small gold stud in her upper ear. The dress was beautifully made and slightly wrong for her. Claire couldn't have said why until Vivian changed for the reception into a red silk skirt printed with large, uneven white flowers. In the white dress she had been a bride. In the skirt she had been a woman who would have turned Claire's head in a train station.
The flowers were her own design. Claire had asked.
“They were supposed to be peonies,” Vivian had said. “Then they started looking hungry.”
“Graham likes them?”
“Graham likes the idea that other people will like them.”
She had smiled as she said it, and Graham, arriving with two glasses of wine, had caught only the end.
“Other people will love them,” he said. “You're allowed to say love.”
There was a picture of that too. His hand at her waist, Vivian looking up at him, the red skirt bright against the dark terrace doors. It would be one of the pictures they chose for a frame. Claire had known it while taking it.
The Alder Rooms had given them the long dining room and the river terrace, and Graham had done something to the price of everything so that nobody mentioned it in front of Vivian. Claire had heard enough exchanges with the manager to recognize a man accustomed to people finding solutions when he asked. He had also carried his grandmother's chair down two steps, fetched a dry napkin for a child, and found Claire a plate of food when she was beginning to believe the caterers had mistaken her for part of the furniture.
At the end he had thanked her with both hands around hers.
“You've been everywhere,” he said. “I don't know how you do it.”
“Good shoes.”
He looked down.
“Those?”
She had laughed. It had been that sort of wedding. Good food, enough money, a slight anxiety in the early hours that eased as the wine came round. Vivian's friends had danced barefoot. Graham's relatives had watched them until one uncle joined in and took his tie off with a flourish that suggested he had never before been allowed.
Claire advanced through a run of dancing pictures. Faces disappeared behind raised arms, returned, became something unexpected. An older woman with serious lipstick lifted her chin into the music. Two men who had barely spoken all afternoon leaned on one another laughing. A wedding gave people permission to be witnessed wanting something. She could endure the chair covers and speeches for that.
Her phone lit up beside the cooling tea.
Beth had sent a picture of a green jacket laid on a table. One sleeve was pinned inside out. Beneath it: Would you wear this or arrest it?
Claire enlarged the picture with her fingers. Beth's hands had crept into the lower edge, one holding the cuff. She wore three cheap rings when she wasn't sewing and none when she was. Tonight the rings lay in a little row beside a mug.
Wear it, Claire replied. Where?
Outside. In public. That's generally where clothes go.
I mean where are you working?
At the studio.
Claire looked at the time again. Their mother would once have said it was too late for either of them to be working. Their mother had also taken in hemming at the kitchen table after supper and denied that this counted.
Lock up when you leave, Claire typed, then deleted it. She sent a thumbs-up to the jacket instead.
Beth replied with a photograph of her own face, eyes wide, thumb raised against her cheek. A close copy of Claire's profile picture. Claire laughed, alone in the workroom, and felt better than she had ten seconds earlier.
The house was quiet around her. She had turned the downstairs sitting room into a place where clients could believe their lives were worth a large album: pale walls, one comfortable sofa, a low shelf of sample books. Her actual life was visible only from this side of the desk. Bills beneath a lens cloth. A grocery bag containing something that might once have been a peach. Her upstairs bedroom waited beyond the narrow hall, and she pictured reaching it without first plugging in anything, checking anything, moving anything off the bed.
Instead she took another drink of cold tea.
She wanted six pictures to send Vivian tomorrow. A small preview, enough to hold the couple through the longer edit. The family group wasn't one of them. She chose the red skirt; Graham brushing a strand of hair from Vivian's lip; the grandmother on the terrace with her shoes off; a wide picture of the dining room with the candles lit. The photograph of Vivian waiting alone before the ceremony was beautiful but private in a way Claire didn't quite trust herself to send tonight. Vivian had been studying the seam inside her wrist, where a little thread had caught on her bracelet. She had looked up when Claire spoke and immediately smiled. Claire preferred the moment before that.
She made a sixth selection of the couple coming down the terrace steps. Graham was laughing at something behind them. Vivian looked straight ahead, her skirt lifted clear of the gravel, going somewhere.
Then Claire returned to the later reception files.
She had used the recently bought body with the longer lens, keeping her familiar camera for the wider pictures. Two bodies meant fewer hurried lens changes and less chance of opening one to rain. The used one had arrived in a plain box with a dealer's receipt and a strap someone else had worn smooth at the edges. She had tested it on the workroom window, on a bowl, on her own knee. It had behaved like a camera.
It had behaved like a camera today too.
The last shots were people leaving. An aunt balancing the leftover cake on a palm. Vivian's red skirt between the terrace doors. Graham leaning down to say something to a man in a dark suit. Claire remembered making each picture, the last three in particular: she had been putting off walking to her car because the case was heavy and her feet hurt.
The next thumbnail showed the service road.
She opened it.
Vivian stood outside the Alder Rooms. Not on the terrace. Around the side, where deliveries came in, near the low stone edging that separated the road from a strip of neglected grass. She was alone, turned a little away, one arm hanging straight beside her. The other hand was raised to her throat.
She wasn't wearing the red skirt. She was in a pale shirt and trousers.
Claire leaned forward.
The daylight was wrong. Sun on the wall, a hard shadow under the gutter. She had been through that part of the grounds in the afternoon to move her car out of the caterers' way, but she hadn't photographed Vivian there. Vivian had been upstairs in a dress then. Beth had been helping her step into it, lifting the fabric away from a heel as if they were getting a sail on a boat.
Perhaps it was a picture from another job. Except that was Vivian. The upper-ear stud was there, and the dark little freckle below the corner of her mouth, details Claire had been looking at all afternoon.
She checked the capture time.
Tomorrow. Early afternoon tomorrow.
“Oh, come on,” she said.
The house gave her the small settling sound it sometimes made after the heating pipes had cooled. The heating wasn't on. She glanced toward the hall, annoyed with herself.
She had checked the camera clock when the body arrived. Hadn't she? She remembered setting something, moving through the menu with her thumb while waiting for a lens delivery. It was entirely possible she'd got the date wrong. Or the file information had become corrupted in the transfer. She didn't understand every fault a piece of equipment could develop and didn't need to. It was not a betrayal of professional competence to buy a machine that went wrong.
But Vivian's clothes were still wrong.
Claire went back to the picture before it: Graham and the man in the dark suit, outside the terrace doors in the evening. Today's date. She returned to the service road. Tomorrow's date.
She pulled the image larger, looking first at the bride's face. Vivian's mouth was slightly open. Her hand wasn't holding a necklace; the fingers pressed the hollow above her collar. She looked neither at the building nor at whoever should have been taking the photograph. Her gaze was directed out of the frame, toward the road.
That was when Claire saw the man.
He lay behind Vivian, farther along the stone edge. Part of his body had merged with the shadow beneath a shrub in the small version. Now she could see his blue shirt, one sleeve folded up, an arm stretched into the grass. His face was turned partly toward the ground. One shoe pointed at the camera, showing a worn pale patch on the sole.
She sat back so abruptly that the chair rolled against the shelf.
The man could be asleep. Drunk. Unwell. The picture didn't tell her. The position was ugly, but people fell asleep in ugly positions. She had photographed a best man asleep in a hedge with a paper plate of sausages on his chest. Everyone had bought that picture except the best man.
This man didn't have sausages. Vivian didn't look amused.
Claire enlarged the area again, then stopped. His face remained a face turned away. A larger picture could not give her what wasn't in it.
She remembered the service road under her tires, the stones too close to the side where she had wanted to park. The late sunlight on the wall. A man carrying a stack of folding chairs past the kitchen door. Was this that man? She couldn't hold the memory still enough to compare it.
She picked up her phone.
Vivian's number was in the wedding information sheet. Beth knew her. There were three easy ways to reach a real person and ask an absurd question.
Did you go outside in trousers this afternoon? Did someone fall down? Did I take a photograph of it without remembering?
If something had happened, surely the venue would have known. Surely Claire would have known. She had been everywhere; Graham had said so. She had moved through those rooms with her attention open and made more pictures than anyone would ever want to look at. She had not found a man beside the road.
The phone darkened in her hand.
She woke it and opened Beth's jacket picture again. Green wool, pins, a cuff being made better. It steadied her for a moment, then made the other image seem worse. Ordinary things were still ordinary. She was the person sitting here with something wrong on a screen.
She put the phone down.
The six preview photographs waited in their selection. She would send those in the morning. A daylight problem could be dealt with in daylight, and a tired woman could be tired without giving that a larger meaning.
Claire left the service-road image unselected. She didn't delete it. She wasn't willing to do that either.
At ten minutes to midnight she shut the editing window, and Vivian disappeared before the man did, because Claire had been looking at him.
Upstairs, she found one sock inside the duvet and a receipt on the pillow. She moved them, undressed, and lay down with the hall light on.
She tried to think of the red skirt.