On Tuesday Beth asked her to photograph a dress. Not the green jacket, which had apparently won itself a repeat order from a woman in the station café, but a blue dress Beth had rescued from the back of a client's cupboard.
“She's wearing it to her daughter's party,” Beth said on the phone. “I need you to make it look like the right decision.”
“Is it?”
“Come and see.”
Claire took her familiar camera. The other body stayed on the shelf in the workroom, its strap folded beneath it. She had put it there Sunday night after moving it away from the keyboard. She hadn't used it or called the dealer. Calling would require a problem she could describe.
On Monday a detective named Lewis had called about the wedding. The venue had supplied her number. Had Claire photographed Sam Hart? Had she seen him after the guests left?
“I don't know which of the workers he was,” she had said. “I can check the files.”
She had already identified Sam in the service-road image. She had told Lewis she didn't know him while looking at his name beneath the news picture.
Lewis asked for the wedding sequence, including photographs she would not deliver to the couple. Claire asked whether she could finish backing it up first. The delay sounded professional. Lewis gave her an address for sending copies and asked her to keep the cards as they were.
“Anything else you remember, even if it seems irrelevant, call me.”
Claire wrote the number on the dealer's receipt. She had put both problems on the same piece of paper and dealt with neither.
The studio was three streets over, in a brick building that used to have ELLIS DRESSMAKING written above the front window. Maris had taken down the lettering except for one S, which remained attached to the brickwork too high for any of them to reach without a better ladder. Beth had decided it could stand for several things. Claire knew at least one of them.
She entered to find Maris sitting in a low chair, eating a tomato with a knife and fork from a saucer. A woman stood on a square of carpet in front of the fitting mirror. The dress was a shade of blue that made her skin look warm. It was also too large through the chest and oddly narrow at the hem.
“You're the sister,” the woman said.
“Claire.”
“I'm Ruth. The fat daughter of a thin mother.”
“You're the daughter of a woman who bought this dress for herself,” Beth said, kneeling at her feet. “You were not the problem in its design.”
Ruth gave a surprised little laugh and looked at Maris, who continued eating her tomato.
“Lift your arms,” Beth said.
Ruth did. The dress climbed up her legs.
“There. That's why you can't dance.”
“I can dance.”
“In this.”
“Oh.”
Beth stood and opened a section of the hem she had basted earlier. Ruth looked alarmed at the sudden length of bare calf. Claire's first thought was that they ought to take a before photograph, safely, and make sure the woman understood the change. Beth was already turning the lower part of the dress outward.
“Your mother wanted to stand in a room and look thin,” she said. “You want to go to a party.”
“My mother went to parties.”
“I'm sure she did.”
“She had three husbands.”
Maris set down her fork. “There you are. Plenty of room to improve on that.”
Ruth laughed properly now, her arms falling to her sides. Beth lifted a length of yellow fabric from the cutting table, held it against the open seam, and pinned it inside.
Claire stared at the yellow. It was not something she would have suggested. A quieter blue, perhaps, one that looked deliberate without looking as though someone had declared war on the original dress.
“Walk,” Beth said.
Ruth took two tentative steps. The inserted fabric flashed and disappeared. She walked again, faster, across to the door and back. On the return she turned her hips a little, testing the swing.
“Oh,” she said. It was a different oh.
Beth crouched again to pin the other side.
The mirror had a broad wooden frame with a chipped crescent at the top. It stood on little feet near the fitting carpet, angled so that anyone inside could see herself without seeing the street. Claire had remembered it as enormous from visits to Maris when she was young. It was still enormous. Beth disappeared behind Ruth's blue skirt when Claire looked at their reflection.
“Can I?” Claire lifted the camera.
Ruth drew herself up and made a smile that entirely removed the pleasure from her face.
“You don't need to do that.”
“I always do it.”
“I can see.”
Beth held a pin between her lips, looked up, and widened her eyes in a wicked imitation of Ruth's expression. Ruth caught it in the mirror and began laughing. Claire took the picture.
“That's cheating,” Ruth said.
“It's my entire business.”
They worked for another twenty minutes. Claire found herself holding the yellow fabric clear of Beth's scissors, then fetching a reel of thread from Maris, then moving the chair so Ruth could sit without catching the pins. Beth took in the bodice a little. She asked whether Ruth would wear a bra with it and told her to bring that particular one back for the last fitting. She said nothing about slimming, disguise, flattering angles. Ruth stopped asking if each alteration made her look bigger.
When it was time to change, she looked past Claire to Beth.
“Will you be here Friday?”
“It's my place,” Beth said.
“Yes, of course. I meant, will you do it?”
Beth's face changed. Not dramatically. She nodded and wrote Friday in the appointment book, but Claire saw her press her lips together for an instant before she did.
Ruth asked how much she owed, paid a deposit, and booked a second dress for after the party. Then she left wearing her own ordinary clothes and carrying herself differently enough that Claire wanted a picture of that too.
“She likes the yellow,” Claire said.
Beth ran a hand down the pinned seam. “So do I.”
“I wouldn't have thought of it.”
“You would have put her by a yellow wall.”
“Probably.”
“I don't have that many walls.”
Maris scraped the last tomato juice onto a piece of bread. “You two can continue this while unloading my trolley.”
They went through the side door into the rear yard. The pavement had a shallow channel that made the garment trolley's wheels stutter. Beyond it, the wide gate stood shut on a loop of chain. Beth undid the chain, pushed one half of the gate open with her shoulder, and pulled the trolley out of Maris's small car. Three hanging bags and a cardboard box came with it.
“I'm having a little preview before the public opening,” Beth said, lifting one of the bags. “A Saturday. Old clients, a few friends. Take some orders, I hope.”
“Are these for it?” Claire asked.
“Those are Maris's. Don't steal her customers.”
“I'm ninety percent retired,” Maris called from the doorway. “The remaining ten is better dressed than you.”
Beth lifted the box and climbed the short exterior stair to set it on the landing outside the storage door. The box contained curtain fabric, heavy enough that Claire reached to take one side, but Beth had already carried it. She came back down the steps and rattled the trolley toward the side entrance.
Claire held the gate open while Maris backed out. There was room for a delivery van here, if the bins were moved, and Beth had painted a yellow line near the stair to keep the unloading space clear. It looked like a place with a purpose. Not the temporary corner Claire had imagined when Beth first said she was taking Maris's workshop.
Back inside, Beth put on the kettle. She had no milk. Claire said there was some at her house and Beth gave her a look that made fetching it sound like a voyage.
“Black is fine,” Claire said.
“Well done.”
She wiped the cutting table with the side of her hand and laid down a folder of printed fabrics. Vivid loops of color, red against dusty pink, a blue that seemed to move. Vivian's designs. One had small shapes that looked like birds until Claire saw they were shoes.
“I thought we could have samples here,” Beth said. “Not stock a whole collection. People could choose a print and we'd make a shape they want.”
“Would Vivian make them?”
“We would. Depending.”
“That's a lot of work.”
“I know.”
“And people want clothes faster than they say they do.”
“I know that too.”
Claire turned over a sample, looking for a label. “Has she talked about it since the wedding?”
“A little.” Beth took the fabric from her, not roughly, but too soon. “Why?”
“Just wondered whether she was going away.”
“They postponed their trip.”
“Because of—”
Claire stopped. Beth watched her. They both knew a man had died at the venue. The silence between them made the fact seem to belong to someone else.
“It's been a horrible few days,” Beth said.
“Did she know him?”
Beth put the samples back in the folder. “People know people here.”
It wasn't an answer, and Claire had no right to want a better one when she had said so little herself.
She accepted the tea. Beth stood with her hip against the table, looking at the sample folder rather than at Claire.
“Listen,” Claire said. “If this gets expensive, you know you can do more with me.”
“It already is expensive.”
“That's what I'm saying. You could assist on another couple of weddings a month. Or do client appointments when I'm out.”
Beth drank, winced at the heat, and set the cup down. “For what money?”
Claire named the rate she paid her for a wedding day.
“And the appointments?”
“We'd work that out.”
“How?”
“Beth, I'm offering you work.”
“I have work. You just took pictures of it.”
“I mean regular work.”
“Your regular work.”
Claire felt the weariness of having said something kind and watching it become something else. She had paid Beth properly at every wedding. She had not called it helping out, though Beth had helped out before Claire could afford to pay. She had taken her to doctors, driven her to exams, bought a secondhand sewing machine when their father said the old one was adequate. None of this was a debt she meant to collect. It lived inside her, nevertheless, as evidence that she knew how to make things easier for her sister.
“I don't want you stuck with a lease you can't cover,” she said.
“Then book me for alterations.”
“I don't have anything that needs—”
“Look at your trousers.”
Claire looked. The left hem had come down and she'd held it with two safety pins since May.
Beth smiled, but Claire couldn't quite join her.
“I'm serious,” she said.
“So am I. Take them off. I'll charge you.”
Then Claire did laugh, against her will, and Beth took a chalk pencil from the table and marked the hem while she was still wearing them. She knelt the same way she had knelt for Ruth, with her attention on the cloth. Claire stood and tried to allow that attention to belong to someone who was good at a job.
“Friday,” Beth said, standing. “You can come after Ruth. Bring trousers you don't need to wear home.”
“Are you going to put yellow in them?”
“I might.”
*
That evening she called the dealer before she could postpone another day. She described an image she didn't remember taking, with a later date than the rest of the batch.
“Later by how much?”
“A day.”
He asked about the clock, the card, her import settings. He did not laugh. She could have told him the rest, and did not.
The body had come from a local house clearance, he said. He had bought a case containing two cameras and several lenses. This one had passed his shutter and card tests. No, there had been no report of stray files. He could contact the person who had sold the case, if she wanted, or take it back for examination.
She wanted the person's name now, before the offer could become a week of waiting. He would not give out a customer's details. He would pass on a question.
“Ask whether it ever produced pictures they couldn't account for.”
“That's what I'll ask.”
At home she removed her wedding card and put in an empty spare. She checked the date against her phone, then photographed the workroom clock, the bowl beside it, the dark window. Twelve exposures. She counted them on the back screen before importing them into a new folder. Twelve files, all of what she had photographed. She disconnected the computer from the network and imported again. The same twelve.
She sat waiting for a thirteenth until the clock she had photographed struck eleven. There was no sound from the camera. There had never been a sound from it except the ones she knew how to explain.
She emailed the dealer the body number and asked him to preserve the sale record. Then she put the test card away separately from the wedding card.
On Wednesday Claire returned to Vivian's wedding pictures. She worked with the workroom door open and the radio on. The announcer's cheerful small assurances filled the gaps between songs. She found a photograph of Sam.
Not the service-road picture. An ordinary one from Saturday, taken before the ceremony.
He was near the terrace doors, carrying the end of a folded table. Another worker held the far end, obscured behind a guest. Sam's blue shirt was loose at the collar. He was looking across the room, and Claire could now see what he had been looking at.
Vivian stood half-hidden by a doorway, with Beth behind her holding the veil. Vivian's face was turned toward him. There was no smile. Nor did she look frightened, exactly. Her attention had a fixed quality, as though she were listening to a sound none of the other people could hear.
Claire moved to the next picture. Sam had turned away. Beth's hand rested between Vivian's shoulders.
She opened the service-road file in another window. Pale shirt. Hand at throat. The same two people, with a night between them.
The radio told her it would rain later in the week.
Claire closed the second window. She marked the table picture out of the client selection. It wasn't a good wedding photograph. The bride's face was partly concealed, the worker too prominent. She would have rejected it before Sunday.
That explanation was true. It let her go on working.
She made a second selection for Lewis, with Sam left in it. She sent the photographs from her familiar camera first, then the used body's wedding sequence up to the last terrace shot. The service-road file stayed on her computer. Lewis had asked for the complete sequence, not just the photographs Claire could explain. She checked that she had spelled the detective's name correctly and pressed send.
On Friday she photographed a family with a new baby in their garden, using her familiar body. The father asked whether she could make him look less tired. She said she could make him look like a man with a new baby. He was happy with that.
Afterward she took the trousers to Beth and paid for them. Ruth was leaving as she arrived; her blue dress stayed on its hanger for one last seam. She told Claire the photographs were wonderful.
“They'll be on Beth's page?”
“If you don't mind.”
“I want my friends to see them. I want them to know who made it.”
Beth looked down at the receipt she was writing. Claire saw the little press of the lips again.
Later, as she was leaving, Claire almost told her about Sam's ordinary picture. It would have been an easy opening. I found him in the files. Did you notice him there?
Beth was holding the door, one hand above her head, admiring the newly painted sign through the window.
Claire said, “The lettering looks good.”
“Ruth said it needs a light. For winter.”
“It does.”
“I'll get one.”
At home Claire packed for the Orchard Pavilion wedding. She put both bodies in the case. She knew one had cost less than a repair to the other, and she knew it had worked well in low light. She could not make a decision about equipment on the basis of something she wasn't willing to describe.
She checked the lenses, charged what needed charging, and laid the trousers Beth had finished over the back of a chair.