‘Oh, Cara took that one. She wasn’t very good at it. Look, you can see this is not as clear as some of the others.’ I could indeed. This was much closer to Hugh’s efforts with his Box Brownie, nothing like as beautiful as the picture of Cara in the house. Clemence cleared her throat. ‘She got very cross with me,’ she said, ‘when I tried to explain what she was doing wrong. I suppose I must have been lecturing. One does, doesn’t one, when it’s one’s passion. And then she flounced off. Look.’
The next picture was of the same scene with Cara disappearing into the french windows and Mrs Duffy caught between her camera smile and the expression of annoyance which was just about to replace it.
‘I didn’t really mean for this one to be in the album,’ she said, ‘since we were quarrelling.’
‘Oh, but such a little quarrel,’ I said, meaning it, thinking that this could not possibly be the quarrel of which Agnes Marshall had spoken. Indeed, it was hard to reconcile these touching pictures with the kind of quarrel Mrs Marshall had felt was going on. Perhaps she was a scandal-monger after all in her own small way.
‘Yes,’ said Clemence, still rather brittle. ‘And we made it up beautifully anyway. A man came past walking his dog – hideous little thing – and I asked him if he would take a snap of all three of us together, but he was hopeless! I tried everything except writing it all down for him. After he had wasted three plates we gave up, and by that time Cara had such giggles that she had forgiven me.’ She stopped tittering and sighed. ‘Of course if I had known that it was our very last chance, I should have persevered with the silly man.’ With that, she turned another smile on me, stretched lips and watchful eyes above. Before I was forced to think up something to say, however, we heard the muffled peal of the front doorbell which was clearly bound up in rags for mourning, and Clemence leapt to her feet.
‘Telegrams, she said. ‘Such heaps of telegrams and letters every day. I had better deal with them, if you’ll excuse me, Dandy. The parlour maid was in floods yesterday and forgot to tip the boy.’
‘Can’t your butler -?’ I began, thinking that the paragon of propriety who had admitted me on my first visit would not stand for the young mistress out on the step tipping the telegram boy.
‘He’s not fit to be seen, I’m afraid,’ said Clemence. ‘Drunk. He adored Cara.’ Her voice was cold, although whether from jealousy or from disapproval of the butler’s collapse I could not say.
‘We all did,’ I said, and then grimaced at my own sugariness. ‘She was -'
‘You hardly knew her,’ said Clemence, startling me with her vehemence, but as I peered into her face to see what she could possibly mean by such a thing, the shutters came down, the bell clanked again, and she left.
This was getting stranger and stranger by the minute. I did not recognize, and nor would anyone who had known Mama and the girls for more than a week, the joyous rustic trinity in these photographs. But there it all was, incontrovertible, interleaved with tissue and bound in leather for all to see. Unless, I thought. Unless… Of course! This was part of the cover-up. For after all, was this record of a perfectly ordinary week in the country not somewhat too complete to be believed? Was it not, in fact, a deliberate attempt to construct a fairy tale, told in pretty pictures, of a happy family and especially a happy Cara? And when one thought about it, really, the angelic beam of Cara in that close-up was rather an over-egged pudding. Even some of Clemence’s oddness began to make sense. The album had clearly been planned to dispel any suspicions of suicide. These suspicions had not arisen in the end (except in Alec and me) but Clemence was too proud of her own cleverness to resist showing off to someone. Hence my very warm welcome and invitation for luncheon at a time when one might more naturally have expected her to be shunning all company.
They had all the practical details very much off pat, I thought. But they just did not quite get the emotions right. Either too little, as when Alec and I first came upon them in the parlour at the Murray Arms, or too much as when Mrs Duffy suddenly took to her bed or languished in Grasmere sending her now only daughter home alone. And Clemence today was making the same hash of it: more interested in how her plates had turned out than in the face of her dead sister, and then brusque to the point of rudeness trying to amend things.
I perused the photographs again, this time somewhere between cynicism and a grudging admiration for how it had all been managed. Clemence really was an excellent photographer, and quite an actress besides. The little sisterly quarrel was a nice touch, as was the bumbling man with the dog. I wondered if he was real. Might it be worth going back down to Galloway, or sending Alec, to seek him out? Probably not, since whatever he had to tell us would not answer any of the big questions such as where Cara might have gone. Or where the diamonds had gone for that matter.
Thinking of the diamonds suddenly made me remember Silas and Daisy with a guilty start – I was disgusted with the way I kept forgetting about Silas and Daisy – but with them now in mind, I began to feel less generously disposed to these photographs. And their artistic merit did not actually bear repeated examination, I found, excepting perhaps the one of Cara posed inside the cottage. And something about that was beginning to bother me.
I turned back to the start to look through the whole collection again with an objective eye. There was another of Cara which I now saw for the first time. Another in the same pale dress, but this time leaning, laughing, over a wooden fretwork banister in a painted staircase, her hem drooped to her feet by her stoop, her hair ruffled out of smoothness and glowing as the sun shone through it from the elegant sash window on the landing behind her. In this picture she looked, quite simply, like an angel. A bobbed and shingled angel in a crêpe-de-Chine frock and comfortable shoes, to be sure, but again my conviction of her safety wavered.
I was still gazing at the angel-on-the stairs picture, when Clemence came back into the room and I saw a flare of something on her face as she caught sight of me bent studiously over the album. Aha! I thought. You didn’t mean to leave me alone with this for quite that long, did you?
‘This one is simply divine,’ I said, and showed her. I expected some kind of reaction, naturally, but not what came. She winced and then to get control of herself she made a sudden gesture which drew the corners of her mouth down and made the tendons of her neck leap out briefly. I tried to behave as though I had not seen this curiously unsettling little show but at the same time I tried to fix everything about it in my mind to pore over later.
‘You know, Clemence dear,’ I said, ‘you are very talented. I should love to see what you would be capable of in a studio if these snaps are anything to go by. Have you ever thought of it?’ Having thus praised her, I thought, into malleability, I went on: ‘And how about making another copy of this album for Alec Osborne? He would be utterly – well, I daresay enchanted is not quite the right word, is it? But I think it’s an idea you should consider.’ What I wanted, of course, was a copy I could study at leisure and I thought I could chance laying it on a bit thick; the worst that could come would be that she would think me a dreadful Victorian and this she probably did already. ‘After all they were engaged, and it would be a great shame if she just slipped out of his life completely. Even if it is too painful for him to look through just now, it would be something for him to treasure in years to come.’
Clemence stared at me, chewing her lip, and I thought I could imagine at least some of the conflict that fluttered inside her. She could not think of a single good reason why she should not make an album for Alec, but she could not agree to something so far outside her mother’s plan without at least asking Mrs Duffy first. And although she was sure that Mama’s answer would be the firmest possible ‘no’, Clemence’s own pride in her pictures made her want to say ‘yes’. Despairing of her ever answering, I took pity and said goodbye.