Ross laughed and smiled again in a way that Olivia didn’t want to think about too much because she wasn’t sure where her thoughts might lead. “Deal.”
As they shook on it, Olivia wondered why it was that some hands felt right together, like pieces of a jigsaw slotting into place, and she remembered how Pappy always said that we didn’t always have to look for an explanation. That sometimes it was far nicer to just let things be.
THE BRISK MORNING breeze became a reckless wind as Olivia made her way to St. Bridget’s that afternoon. It propelled her forward, blowing her doubts and disappointments away, out of reach. She felt wild and free, like the scudding clouds above.
Still slightly breathless and with her cheeks flaring scarlet, she stood for a moment at the dayroom door, watching Nana as she straightened the magazines and newspapers into neat piles before plumping the cushions. She worked methodically, from one chair to the next, picking up a cushion, giving it a shake followed by three sharp bangs on one side, and settling it back onto the seat of the chair. She went around the seats three times, having forgotten which ones she’d already done. When her little task was complete, Olivia walked into the room and gave her the bunch of sunflowers she’d brought with her, disheveled and windswept now. Nana thanked her and said it wasn’t every day you got flowers from the bus driver, and would she mind helping her back to her room before it was time to go.
Olivia took Nana’s arm, leading her along the corridor while Nana talked about the visitors she’d had in the week. Nana often had imaginary visitors. The President had even been last month. Olivia was used to these muddled memories, although it didn’t make them any easier to hear.
“You’d like him,” Nana said.
“Who?”
“You know.” Nana waved her hands in front her, conducting her memories into some sort of harmonious order. “What’s his name? The one with the smart tie.” She forgot who she was talking about then and turned to say hello to a gray-faced man in a tartan dressing gown who shuffled past with the aid of a walker. “Poor bugger,” Nana remarked, a little too loudly. “He was in those Olympic Games, you know. Won a silver medal.”
Olivia smiled at him as he passed them and pulled Nana a little closer to her. She sometimes thought it must be quite nice to exist in a world of your own imagination, where everybody used to be somebody, and nobody went home without a medal.
Nana’s room was neat and functional. She’d hated it at first but had gradually accepted it as her own. The doctors had told Olivia and Pappy about self-reflecting rooms—medical speak for ways in which little reminders of home would help Nana settle in. In a painstaking process in which Olivia became something of an archaeologist of Nana’s life, mementos and trinkets—including one lucky china dog—were carefully excavated from the cottage and brought to the nursing home. Most days, Nana looked at these things with the emotional response of a fish. But occasionally—increasingly less so in recent months—she would pick up a photograph or an ornament, scrutinizing it until she was able to drag the associated memory from wherever it was hiding, or until she gave up searching and put it down again.
Olivia settled Nana in her favorite chair beside the window, positioned so she could see the oak and rowan trees in the gardens. She liked to watch the world beyond the window, complaining of feeling “strangled” if she couldn’t see the sky. It was one of the few parts of Nana’s condition that Olivia understood. She often felt the same way in London. Suffocated by the soaring buildings and high achievers and the nagging sense that her property developer fiancé was constructing not only a new apartment building they would live in as Mr. and Mrs. Oliver, but was also constructing her life. It was ironic that she often heard Jack talking about solid foundations while it appeared that their impending marriage was built on nothing more than the flimsy premise of mutual contentment.
With Nana settled, Olivia perched on the windowsill beside her and continued to read from Frances’s memoir. Nana, as usual, listened in silence. Olivia was never sure whether she was asleep or listening, or a little of both. Either way, it gave Olivia something to do, and the story was so interesting, it was a pleasure to read on . . .
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. July 1917.
I said my story had many beginnings, and the day the camera arrived was one of them. After all, without the camera, there wouldn’t have been any photographs. Without the camera, I wouldn’t have a story to tell.
I first saw it when I came back from a morning playing at the beck. It was sitting on the table in the scullery like a magician’s prop, unfathomable to me with its dials for aperture, focus, shutter speed, and other things I didn’t understand. I walked around the table to look at it from all sides, inquisitive fingers reaching out to touch the smooth black box. Whenever I’d visited the photography studio in Cape Town, I’d wondered about the mysterious machine concealed beneath the dark cloth. It was all so strange: the pop of the flashbulb, the backgrounds I had to pose in front of, the props I had to hold, the same emotionless expression, frozen on my face for endless minutes. I was wary of cameras and the men who operated them, not least because when my image was captured on the glass plate, it would be there forever, whether I liked it or not, and I didn’t like most of the photographs I’d had taken of me. They didn’t look like the girl I saw when I looked in the mirror. Daddy laughed at me when I complained, and said the camera couldn’t lie. I wasn’t so sure.
“Quite something, eh?”
I jumped as Uncle Arthur appeared in the doorway. “I didn’t touch it,” I said. “I promise.” It wasn’t a complete lie. I’d only brushed the tips of my fingers against it.
“I should think not. Expensive equipment, that. You and our Elsie are not to touch it or go anywhere near the darkroom beneath the cellar steps. The chemicals would strip your skin off.” I winced at the thought. “It isn’t a toy. Not to be messed with. Do you hear?” I said I did. “Right so. Now, be off with you.”
I scampered upstairs, leaving Uncle Arthur to twiddle dials and press buttons and curse under his breath as he tried to figure out how to work the blessed thing.
When Elsie came home from work, she explained that the camera had arrived with Uncle Harry the previous night. He was a local timber merchant who often traveled to the port in Hull and came back with a collection of tall tales and new inventions. Everyone agreed that the Midg camera was the most interesting thing he’d brought since the leather tobacco pouch with a zip fastening, which Uncle Arthur liked to impress visitors with whenever he had the chance.
“I bet you’re itching for a go with the camera,” I said as we settled down to sleep that night.