A Place of Hiding

St. James had attempted to put a good face on all this for his wife, as had the gallery’s owner, a bloke called Hobart, who spoke Estuary English as if the letter T did not exist in his alphabet. Deborah was “No’ ’o worry, darling,” Hobart said. “Show will be up for a month and i’ is quality, love. Look how many you’ve sold already!” To which Deborah had replied with her typical honesty, “And look how many of my husband’s relatives are here, Mr. Hobart. If he’d only had more than three siblings, we’d be sold out.”


There was truth in that. St. James’s family had been generous and supportive. But their purchase of her pictures couldn’t mean to Deborah what a stranger’s purchase would have meant. “I feel like they bought because they pity me,” she had confided in despair during the taxi ride home. This was largely why the company of Thomas Lynley and his wife was so welcome to St. James at the moment. Ultimately, he was going to have to act the part of advocate to his wife’s talent in the wake of the night’s disaster, and he didn’t yet feel equipped to do so. He knew she wasn’t going to believe a word he said, no matter how much he believed his own assertions. Like so many artists, she wanted some form of outside approbation for her talent. He wasn’t an outsider, so he wouldn’t do. Nor would her father, who’d patted her on the shoulder and said philosophically, “Weather can’t be helped, Deb,” on his way up to bed. But Lynley and Helen somewhat qualified. So when he finally got round to bringing up the topic of Little Newport Street with Deborah, St. James wanted to have them there.

It wasn’t to be, however. He could see that Helen was drooping with fatigue and that Lynley was determined to get his wife home. “Mind how you go, then,” St. James told them now.

“ ‘Coragio, bully-monster,’ ” Lynley said with a smile. St. James watched them as they headed up Cheyne Row through the downpour to their car. When they reached it safely, he closed the door and girded himself for the conversation awaiting him in his study. Aside from her brief remark in the gallery to Mr. Hobart, Deborah had put up an admirably brave front until that cab ride home. She’d chatted to their friends, greeted her in-laws with exclamations of delight, and taken her old photographic mentor Mel Doxson from picture to picture to listen to his praise and to receive his astute criticism of her work. Only someone who’d known her forever—like St. James himself—would have been able to see the dull glaze of dejection in her eyes, would have noted from her quick glances to the doorway how much she had foolishly pinned her hopes on an imprimatur that was given by strangers whose opinion she wouldn’t have cared a half fig for in other circumstances. He found Deborah where he’d left her when he’d accompanied the Lynleys to the door: She stood in front of the wall on which he always kept a selection of her photographs. She was studying those that hung there, her hands clasped tightly behind her back.

“I’ve thrown away a year of my life,” she announced. “I could have been working at a regular job, making money for once. I could have been taking wedding pictures or something. A debutante’s ball. Christenings. Bar mitzvahs. Birthday parties. Ego portraits of middle-aged men and their trophy wives. What else?”

“Tourists standing with cardboard cutouts of the Royal Family?” he ventured. “That probably would’ve brought in a few quid had you set yourself up in front of Buckingham Palace.”

“I’m serious, Simon,” she said, and he could tell by her tone that levity on his part wasn’t going to get them through the moment, nor was it going to make her see that the disappointment of one night’s showing was in reality just a momentary setback.

St. James joined her at the wall and contemplated her pictures. She always let him choose his favourites from every suite she produced, and this particular grouping was among the best she’d done, in his unschooled opinion: seven black-and-white studies at dawn in Bermondsey, where dealers in everything from antiques to stolen goods were setting up their wares. He liked the timelessness of the scenes she’d captured, the sense of a London that never changed. He liked the faces and the way they were lit by street lamps and distorted by shadows. He liked the hope on one, the shrewdness on another, the wariness, the weariness, and the patience of the rest. He thought his wife was more than merely talented with her camera. He thought she was gifted in ways only very few are. He said, “Everyone who wants to make a stab at this sort of career begins at the bottom. Name the photographer you admire most and you’ll be naming someone who started out as someone’s assistant, a bloke carrying floodlights and lenses for someone who’d once done the same. It would be a fine world if success were a matter of producing fine pictures and doing nothing more than gathering accolades for them afterwards, but that’s not how it is.”

“I don’t want accolades. That’s not what this is about.”

“You think you’ve spun your wheels on ice. One year and how many pictures later...?”

“Ten thousand three hundred and twenty-two. Give or take.”

“And you’ve ended up where you started. Yes?”