The Orchard Pavilion smelled of cut grass and hot hair tools. Somewhere beyond the dressing room window a groundsman was trimming a hedge, advancing and retreating with the patience of someone paid by the hour. Leila sat in front of a mirror with half her hair pinned up and ate a cheese sandwich over a towel on her lap.
“My father won't be in a picture with my mother,” she told Claire.
“All right.”
“It isn't all right.”
“I mean I can work around it.”
Leila chewed. On the table, a page torn from a notebook listed the photographs she wanted. Her mother and father occupied the same line, joined by a plus sign. Claire had looked at that page during their last meeting. So had Leila, apparently without discussing it with either of them.
“They've been divorced fifteen years,” the bride said.
“Some people don't improve with practice.”
Leila laughed through a mouthful and caught a falling piece of cheese in the towel. Beth, standing behind her chair, lifted the curling tool away.
“That's why you need the towel,” she said. “Not the grease. The comedy.”
“Tell her it matters,” Leila said to Beth.
“It matters.” Beth looked at Claire. “She wants both of them there.”
“They will be there. Just possibly in two pictures.”
Leila looked back at the mirror. Her smile had gone. Claire had given a useful answer to the wrong problem.
“What is it about the one picture?” she asked.
“Daniel doesn't have his dad anymore.”
Beth set down the tool.
“He died two years ago,” Leila said. “And mine can't stand there for twenty seconds because someone might think he still likes my mum.”
She pushed the rest of the sandwich aside. In the mirror she looked unexpectedly young, not because of her age but because she was waiting for an adult to make something fair.
Claire heard herself say, “I'll speak to him.”
“You don't have to.”
“I know. I will.”
She took a photograph of Leila while Beth arranged the last loose section of hair. The bride had turned her face toward the window, giving Claire the light she needed without being asked. Her cheek was damp below one eye. Beth passed her a tissue and made a remark about the sandwiches getting more expensive if salted.
Outside, Leila's father was smoking beside a low wall, holding the cigarette down out of sight whenever anyone looked his way. He had the expression of a man whose jacket was hurting him. Claire introduced herself and asked about the family photographs.
“Leila's said what she wants,” he replied.
“She has. I'd like to do it near the orchard, after the ceremony.”
“You can do me wherever you like.”
“With her mother.”
He gave her a small, disbelieving smile. “I'm sure you'll have plenty of her.”
Claire resisted the urge to tell him what he'd already been told, perhaps by several people. She looked at the jacket. The sleeve had a tight fold beneath the shoulder.
“Do you mind if I fix that?”
He held still while she eased the trapped lining down. His shoulders lowered a fraction.
“Better?”
“Yes, actually.”
“It isn't a photograph of your marriage,” she said. “It's a photograph of hers.”
He drew on the cigarette. She waited.
“My wife is here too.”
“We can take one with her.”
“She won't be happy about the other one.”
Claire looked through the open dressing room door. Leila had risen, and Beth was holding the dress ready for her. Beyond them, two friends were clearing a space on the floor as though the cloth needed its own small country.
“Your daughter might be,” Claire said.
He looked where she was looking. She didn't remain to watch him decide. There were pictures to take and she wanted to go back to a room where people were glad to see one another.
The ceremony was under a pale awning, with a view across rows of old apple trees. Daniel looked at Leila from the moment she appeared. He had been polite to Claire, charming to the registrar, dutiful with his mother. Now his face did something it hadn't done for anyone else. Claire lifted the longer lens on the used body and caught it just before he covered his mouth with his hand.
She forgot to be afraid of the camera. She moved, knelt, stood, changed bodies without thinking. Leila's father made an awkward handover and caught his daughter's veil on his cuff. Beth, just outside the awning, saw it happen and untangled them without entering the aisle. The registrar waited. Daniel laughed. The photograph was better than a smooth arrival would have been.
After the ceremony, the mother and father stood beside their daughter in the orchard.
There was enough room between them to store a bicycle. Claire brought Daniel into the group and asked Leila to take her mother's hand. Then she asked the father to put his hand on Leila's shoulder. He did it gingerly, as though the shoulder too might have opinions about his divorce.
“Lovely,” Claire said. “Now everyone look at Leila.”
The mother looked first. The father followed, and Leila, caught between them, shook her head in disbelief. They all smiled, though not for the same reason. Claire took the picture before anyone remembered what was wrong.
Leila caught her arm afterward.
“Thank you.”
“You've got both. That's all.”
“It's not all.”
The father had gone to find his wife. Claire watched him take her hand and say something close to her ear. He looked relieved. She hoped relief might leave him kinder.
Beth joined her, carrying an emergency sewing kit and half a glass of something she said she hadn't chosen.
“He behaved?”
“For twenty seconds.”
“You're a miracle worker.”
“Invoice pending.”
Beth took a sip, grimaced, and handed the glass to a waiter with an apology. She had been booked directly by Leila, not through Claire, and this ought not to have been something Claire needed to remind herself of. When a bridesmaid beckoned, Beth went over and listened to a whispered complaint, then bent to deal with something at the waist of her dress. The woman watched Beth's hands with complete confidence. Claire photographed them with the used body: Beth squinting at a seam in the afternoon light, the bridesmaid laughing at whatever she'd said.
Claire loved her sister in that picture. She loved knowing how Beth's mouth moved before the laugh came, and loved the pleasure of catching it. She also felt, for the first time all week, that she could simply take a picture and let it be a picture.
At dinner she was seated with the musicians and a friend of Leila's who had agreed to look after the couple's dog. The dog wasn't allowed in the dining room and had expressed its disappointment on a pair of borrowed shoes. The friend told the story with such injured gravity that Claire nearly put down her fork laughing.
There were ordinary things to be worried about. Waterproof shoes. The father's wife leaving early, but apparently because she had a migraine. Beth asking whether she could borrow one of the sample albums for the studio and Claire offering three, then correcting herself and asking which she wanted. There was a small cake that tilted after someone bumped the table. Daniel held it level with one hand while Leila cut, and Claire got that too.
Near the end of the evening, Beth stood beside her on the edge of the dance floor.
“Good day,” she said.
Claire nodded. The music was too loud for much else.
“You can still dance.”
“I'm working.”
“They won't sue if you move your feet.”
Beth took her free hand and made her turn once, slowly, under it. Claire's camera swung against her hip. Two guests applauded as though she had done something impressive. She bowed, and Beth was laughing when Claire turned back.
For a few seconds they were neither employer and helper nor older and younger. They were two women who knew the same ridiculous song.
*
At home Claire put her bag beside the desk and her shoes neatly by the kitchen door. Beth had repaired the trousers without putting yellow in them. Claire sent her a message saying this was a disappointment. Beth replied, Next time I charge double.
She started the transfer before making tea. It was late, but not yet eleven, and she wanted the files in their place before she let herself become too tired to remember what she'd done.
The first picture she opened was Daniel seeing Leila arrive. His face pleased her more than it had at the ceremony. She selected it, then the veil caught on the cuff, then the family group. She was going to send that one early, so Leila didn't spend her first married Sunday wondering whether she'd got it.
The extra image appeared among the later files.
She knew before opening it that the building wasn't the Orchard Pavilion. It was a narrow brick house, with a bay window downstairs and a plain sash upstairs. There was a crack in the painted sill. A pot of rosemary stood beside the front door.
Her house.
Claire put the tea down. Some spilled over the rim. She didn't wipe it up.
She opened the image and looked first at Beth.
Her sister stood outside, on the short front path, alive and unmistakable. She wore a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled, one hand open beside her thigh. Her face was tilted slightly upward. She was looking straight toward the camera, or toward wherever a person would have stood to take that photograph from across the street.
There was no smile. No sign that she had agreed to be photographed. The look had something hard in it that Claire had seen only a few times before, never directed quite like this. Someone had said something to Beth. Someone was being answered.
Behind her, through the upstairs bedroom window, stood Claire herself.
For a moment she failed to recognize her own body. Not her face, which was clear enough in profile, but the familiar white shirt on an unfamiliar woman. A shirt she had bought because it didn't need ironing. Her arm was raised. She stood close to a man, close enough that the space between them seemed private even at this distance.
He faced her. Dark hair, broad shoulders in a gray shirt, one hand at the edge of the chest of drawers. He wasn't quite smiling. He was looking down at her with an attention that made Claire feel she had interrupted something.
She had never seen him before.
She knew she hadn't. This wasn't a guest whose name she had forgotten, someone she passed at the station, a client's husband in different clothes. Something about his face would have stayed with her: the uneven eyebrow, the strong, slightly crooked line of his mouth. A face she would have wanted to photograph.
Claire pressed her fingertips to the underside of the desk.
She was looking at herself wanting to be close to a man she hadn't met. Or helping him. Or trying to push him away. Her raised arm could mean any of those things. At this distance her hand was near his forehead. It did not tell her what it was doing there.
Beth looked at the camera. Claire looked at him. The man looked at Claire.
Her bedroom window was open behind the woman in the image. The cream curtains were pulled aside. She could see the corner of the blue quilt on her own bed.
She checked the date although she knew what it would say.
Sunday. Tomorrow. Late afternoon.
Exactly a week ago she had sat in this chair with Vivian on the screen and persuaded herself a file could be wrong. The milk was now in the fridge. Sam Hart was dead. Beth was pictured outside her house in tomorrow's clothes, while someone she had never met stood in the room where she slept.
She looked toward the hall. Upstairs, that room was empty.
Claire called Beth.
The phone rang long enough for her to decide she would tell her. Long enough for the decision to become frightening, then necessary. Beth answered with music behind her.
“Did you find the yellow?”
“Where are you?”
“Still here. Leila's got me trapped.”
“At the wedding?”
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
“Very. Are you?”
Claire looked at the photograph. Beth wasn't frightened in it. Angry, possibly. Resolute. These were the guesses of someone who knew her, and none of them explained the upstairs window.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
Beth's voice changed. “What is it?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Claire.”
“Can you come over tomorrow?”
“I've got things to do. If it's important, tell me.”
Someone called Beth's name in the background. She said, “A second,” away from the phone, then came back. “Do you need me to come now?”
Claire wanted to say yes. She wanted her sister at the kitchen table, drinking tea, wearing her own real face instead of this expression someone else had yet to put on it. But she also wanted the bedroom to remain empty until she understood how a stranger could enter it.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Please.”
“I'll come when I can.”
They hung up, and Claire put down the phone beside the spilled tea. She hadn't lied. She hadn't told the truth either.
On the screen, Beth continued looking straight at her.