‘No, no,’ she fibbed. She would see this to the end at least.
‘Now for the fun part,’ Will replied. Gently, slowly he pulled the film out of the canister, emptied the solutions and discarded it on the side. ‘The film is obviously old so please don’t be too upset if this hasn’t worked.’
‘Why wouldn’t it work?’ Lucy asked.
‘So many reasons: the way it’s been kept over the years, it could be foggy or it might just be too old to have developed properly. Too exposed to light or moisture.’ He pulled the roll out, and Lucy was surprised to see the brown images on what looked like a long sheet of negatives.
‘Oh,’ she said in confusion.
‘What were you expecting?’
‘Photographs,’ she said foolishly.
He laughed but not unkindly. ‘That’s the next bit.’
‘I’d have got bored and probably given up halfway through,’ she said, and then felt a chill go through her in realisation. Is this what Clara meant? She saw herself through her sister’s eyes. She really did give up on things that easily; really never quite finished anything. Before she’d put her sister’s comments to one side but, actually, now she understood. She brushed that thought away, knowing she’d have to analyse this later, fix it somehow. But what if that was just who she was? She forced her mind onto the task in hand.
‘You know,’ Lucy said, ‘I have another photograph, at the house. Taken in 1930, it’s a picture of a very young Persephone and Dido, on the beach with two friends. Maybe boyfriends?’
‘Do you?’ he asked distractedly as he pulled the roll gently, fixing the top of the roll to a set of clips he’d hooked onto the shower curtain. ‘I’d like to see that.’
‘It’s funny,’ Lucy said, watching as the images on the roll slowly started appearing. ‘There’s no personal trinkets really in the house. No jewellery, but there’s that one photo that Dido kept hold of this entire time and then there’s …’
‘Eight more,’ he said.
‘Eight?’ She looked closer as eight images slowly started appearing. ‘Of what?’
‘Can’t tell yet. Some people … here … do you see?’ Will said. ‘And then it looks like a lot of scenery. Is that an airplane? This one looks like a bloody large gun, but there’s a blurry bit in front of it. I can’t even tell what this one is.’
‘How do you …?’ Lucy wanted to ask a question, but didn’t want to look stupid so she didn’t.
‘You want to know how they get turned into photographs, don’t you?’
She nodded.
‘I need to leave them hanging here overnight, let the chemicals dry then—’ He stopped and laughed. ‘Are your eyes glazing over?’
‘No, it’s interesting,’ she said, although she could understand why digital photography was now so popular. Click. Done.
‘In short,’ Will said, ‘by tomorrow morning I’ll have photographs for you.’
If Will had been hinting that she should get back on the dating scene, the offer of a date had not materialised, leaving Lucy to return to an empty but freshly painted Deux Tourelles feeling as if the afternoon had just been one strange anticlimax. They wouldn’t even be able to ascertain what was on the roll of film until Will worked some magic by tomorrow morning. As far as keeping her on tenterhooks went, Will was not a beginner.
Lucy decided not to tell Clara she was going to sort the headstone.Instead, she just got on with it. That was one job she could finish. All she needed to do was choose and pay. She went to the stonemason’s and quickly grew overwhelmed with choice, the stonemason politely suggesting she have a look at the graves that surrounded Dido’s to see what was there so anything she chose for Dido would look in keeping with those of her family.
Of course. She could do that. She couldn’t remember what the other graves had looked like at the funeral and so Lucy drove Dido’s Renault 5 to the churchyard, stopping at a florist on the way and purchasing some flowers to lay on the fresh grave. It felt like the right thing to do.
Lucy laid them down and stood by the mound of soil that was slowly forming itself back into the earth. She admired the churchyard, its bountiful trees framing the low wall dividing it from the country lane. She’d spent a lot of her youth in this churchyard. Some of the taller headstones had been the perfect place to sit and drink bottles of dubious cider with some of her school friends and she smiled at the memory of her misspent days. It was a wonder she’d got any exam results at all – she’d spent far too much time playing truant instead of buckling down and getting on with her work. But then, she reasoned, she’d not been old enough to know better.
She wandered around the graves close to the family’s few plots, one simple elegant one made of an expensive-looking material, possibly white marble Lucy thought, said, ‘In loving memory of Werner Graf, friend, beloved’, along with a birth date and a death date in the 1970s. She made a mental note that when she died she would quite like someone to call her ‘beloved’.
She took a picture of the grave that sat alongside Dido’s, a joint grave for Margery and Pierre Le Roy. If Dido had been Lucy’s first cousin once removed, what did that make these two? She was no good at following the invisible lines of a family tree but she reasoned these were Dido’s parents. The father had died in the 1930s and Dido’s mother had passed away in 1940. Lucy lookedat the date more closely. She couldn’t remember the exact date of the start of the German Occupation but this death was certainly around the very early days of it. How ghastly, to lose your mother and gain a German army. Not at all a fair trade. ‘How awful,’ she muttered.
‘Hello,’ a man’s voice came from beside her and Lucy turned to see the vicar who had conducted Dido’s funeral service.
‘Hi,’ Lucy said.
‘I recognised you from the funeral. Didn’t have a chance to talk then,’ he said.
