‘Is this you?’ she said as she handed the veil over as though she were cradling a delicate new-born thing in her hands.
‘That’s me. Nineteen sixty-seven. I caused a stir because I was with child at the time. Handy, because the Duchess herself is pregnant for part of the play. The critics went wild. It was the Summer of Love, the height of the permissive society, supposedly. That’s what some people called it, anyway. You see, I wasn’t married, and there I was, barely nineteen, up in the spotlights, big-bellied and not a bit ashamed.’ Blythe’s eyes flashed. ‘I was magnificent. But, that’s when my career began to falter. The permissive society was only really for the boys. Shame nobody told me. I didn’t have many starring roles again after that. A lot of long memories in this town. It doesn’t do to rock the boat.’
As Blythe spoke, she arranged the veil over her hair, artfully folding the material without the aid of a mirror so that it framed her face without covering it.
Kelsey looked again at the picture. ‘You were beautiful.’
This was greeted with a loud tut. ‘You young ones assume that’s a compliment for an old bird like me. Youwerebeautiful! I amstillbeautiful, if only people would take the time to see it.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.’
‘Tsk,tsk,little matter.’ Blythe waved the moment away with a studied flourish of her wrinkled hand.
‘May I open the shutters a little more, please?’ Kelsey asked, switching to professional mode, the place where she felt safest. Her camera was already in her hands, its lens cap unscrewed. She pushed the white wooden shutters apart and the afternoon light dappled by the trees surrounding St.Ninian’s Close seeped in, bathing Blythe in soft pink warmth.
‘Can I take a few warm-up shots with this one first?’ Kelsey held up her old camera. ‘I’ll give you copies to keep?’
Blythe simply shrugged her agreement and rearranged herself for the shot, saying, ‘Haven’t seen a camera like that in a quarter of a century.’
‘It was my dad’s. He left it to me when he died, and it was old even then.’ Kelsey mounted the square flash unit to the old camera, sliding it onto the hot shoe plate above the viewfinder and flicking its switch, sending the bulb within into a high-pitched frenzy as it charged up ready for the first shot. ‘I love this camera more than I could say.’
Blythe smiled, her lips pressed together. It wasn’t the kind of smile Kelsey was used to when she told people about her father. She usually got the lowered eyes, the awkwardness and the sympathetic thin lips. Instead, Blythe’s eyes sparkled. A look that saidI know exactly how you feel, and it’s all right. Kelsey felt strangely comforted by it.
Raising the camera to her eye, she positioned herself in front of Blythe in a low crouch and let her breathing settle. Turning the focusing ring brought Blythe’s features into greater and greater clarity. Kelsey always found she could see people most clearly through a lens.
Blythe was right; shewasbeautiful. Beautiful right now; not just as some relic of a golden age of her beauty, but a truly beautiful woman. Her skin was thin and her flesh pale and plump. The lines around her eyes were lightly tanned from the summer and had the look of sunrays beaming out from her violet eyes which were soft-lidded and vibrant. Her hair was purest white and her nose long and Roman. Kelsey held her breath and pressed the shutter button, activating the bright flash of light, forcing open the aperture window inside the lens and closing it again in an instant, the light, and Blythe’s image, now impressed on the film.
The romance of old-school photography never failed to speak to Kelsey of better times, and she could tell from the look on Blythe’s face that she too had been caught up in it.
The actress turned her face to the window and tilted her jaw downwards, letting the natural light catch in her irises. This was a woman who, once upon a time, had been used to having her photograph taken.
Kelsey knew, even though she couldn’t see it there and then, even though she’d have to wait a few days for the film to be processed, that she’d caught a perfect shot. And she also knew she’d have to switch to her digital camera soon if Mr Ferdinand wanted his pictures emailed to him by five o’clock, but she still had time, and there was something in Blythe’s distant, dreamy expression that told Kelsey she needed to hear the sound of the flashbulb charging and the shutter snapping again, so she raised the camera to her eye once more and Blythe posed, no longer a septuagenarian surrounded by dusty memories and remnants of a bygone era, but a woman bathed in flash light sinking back into the days when she was a sixties stage siren, the hottest new talent, a darling of the golden age of English theatre. Blythe Goode: beautiful, talented, fierce and fearless, the leading lady of the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
The phone rang to voicemail, and Kelsey pressed it close to her ear so she could revel in the deep drawl of Jonathan’s voice. ‘Leave a message,’ he said with his optimistic upwards inflection. ‘And if that’s you, Kelsey, I love you.’
This never failed to make her smile, but she didn’t leave much of a message, other than an echo of his ‘I love you’. She’d call him again later. She wanted to tell him all about her meeting with her wonderful, eccentric neighbour, about the second and third glasses of gin that Blythe had pressed upon her, and how the two of them had sat chatting until nearly five o’clock, Blythe telling her increasingly risqué back stage gossip, all fifty years out of date, but still surprisingly shocking.
‘And Larry! Wonderful stage presence and so photogenic, but Kelsey, an absolute rogue and a terrible kisser,’ Blythe confided.
‘Larry?’ Kelsey had asked, squinting now, possibly very squiffy from the gin.
‘Olivier, darling. Like kissing a tailor’s dummy.’
‘You acted with Laurence Olivier?’ Kelsey had gasped.
Blythe cackled wickedly. ‘I didn’t say I’dactedwith him.’
Kelsey knew Jonathan would love her neighbour’s stories, even if they were, as she suspected, peppered with exaggeration. She also knew he’d be proud of her scoring freelance work with the newspaper. She’d emailed him the digital images at the same time as she’d sent them to Mr Ferdinand at exactly five to five – it wouldn’t do to miss the deadline on her first commission. They were beautifully quirky and characterful portraits of Blythe in all her dramatic lacy head-dress glory.
Kelsey had been pleased with the pictures for the newspaper but she knew the images she’d taken on her new digital SLR wouldn’t be a patch on the deeply saturated glossy depth of the pictures hidden away in her dad’s old manual Canon AE1.
Tossing her phone onto her bed, she reached for the heavy retro camera, so very comfortingly solid and metallic, and she wound the spool back into its metal case before flipping open the camera’s back. If she made a dash for the high street she could get the film in the last post of the day to the specialist developer she’d used since moving to England, and in a week or so she’d be sent the traditional silver gelatin prints all the way from the lab in Cheshire, one of the last of its kind in the country. Kelsey grabbed the film, stuffed it in an envelope and ran for the door.
Chapter Six
‘Though those that are betray’d do feel the treason sharply,
yet the traitor stands in worse case of woe’
