Eight Girls Taking Pictures (10 page)

“Poor old girl,” said the friend, tipping his head toward Lallie
Charles, who was genuinely charming the few people in her circle. Of course, Amadora was grateful to Miss Charles for all she’d done for her—the studio work and her experience at The Works. But it was more than that; it was having the chance to work for a woman who was making her own way in the world, to observe how she ran her business, how she dealt with her high-society clientele (always with grace and patience), and learning the business of the studio in the process. Art was Amadora’s desire, but business was the way to achieve it. Amadora admired Lallie Charles, despite the photographer’s repetitive approach to her work and her resistance to changing or pushing herself as an artist.

Lallie Charles took nothing for granted. Underneath all the pink, romantic glow was a woman as tough as any suffragette. Though Amadora was naturally inclined toward a kind of flirtatious charm, something more playful, hiding her truest self, her artist self, behind her quick sense of humor, none of this was so different from Lallie Charles using her sophistication and culture when dealing with people. Women, Amadora knew, were not admired when they showed how much they cared about their careers; no one wanted to see what it took to do everything yourself. Everyone preferred the illusion of effortless ease, and in some ways this was the most important lesson Amadora learned from Lallie Charles.

So it infuriated Amadora to hear the older man refer to the photographer as “poor old girl.” She wanted to confront the speaker, asking what he had accomplished that placed him in a position to condescend to this woman. She had decided to say something—not that Miss Charles would approve of such an outburst, something that Amadora knew from months of observation—when she heard the handsome young man say, “How can I be expected to write anything for the paper when there isn’t a single person here who seems even remotely interesting?”

At that moment, the young man turned to see Amadora, almost by his side, remembering her from when he’d first arrived.

“Pardon,” he said, “I’m writing a piece for
The Guardian
on Miss Charles’s studio change. I’m wondering if you can direct me to someone
who may work for Miss Charles.” With that, he handed his empty glass to Amadora, thinking her the help, and she accepted it because she wasn’t quite sure what else to do. “Apologies,” he said, noting the look on her face. “I mean someone who works for Miss Charles in a professional capacity.”

“That would be me,” said Amadora.

Now it was the young man’s turn to look confused. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Sorry.” He took his glass back. “I didn’t realize.”

“Why would you when you came in and decided who everyone was without even speaking to them? How would you know the difference between a serving girl and a photographer? But, then, I know what a burden it must be to be the smartest, most captivating person in the room.” Amadora snatched the glass back from the young man and made her way to the kitchen.

“Please,” he said, following closely behind. “Allow me an honest mistake and to apologize once again. I’m not usually this boorish.”

“Yes, you are,” said Amadora. She stopped and turned so abruptly they nearly collided.

“Pardon?”

“I saw you—with your friend—one day in the park. I was the girl with the little dog in pearls—you know, me and my pretensions.”

“I do seem to remember something like a dog in pearls . . . but I don’t recall you—”

“You don’t even remember those you insult? Well, if I’m not mistaken, that’s even
more
insulting.”

“I—” He took a deep breath, then shut his mouth.

As they stood in the kitchen, Amadora could see from the way he held his body and his struggle to say the right thing that his awkwardness was a result of trying not to compound his gaffes. His confusion at attempting to remember her was sincere. It crossed her mind that his proud, difficult demeanor masked a social discomfort, that is, she thought she could detect his decency despite everything.

She burst out laughing.

“Oh, God, it is more insulting, isn’t it?” he said, laughing along. “It
seems my pomposity knows no bounds. Look, may we begin again? Would you like to join me for supper tonight? You can tell me all about dogs in pearls and Miss Charles.” He offered his hand. “George Clifton.”

“Amadora Allesbury.”

“Amadora.”

“George.”

“Like a cheerful young rat deserting, I departed, but I felt sorrow, regret, and love for the sinking ship.” This is what Amadora said to George as she gave him the cut-rate tour of her modest Victoria Street studio. “I actually left just before Miss Charles’s studio closed, and have not yet quite come to terms with my departure, inevitable though it was to be.”

He walked around, taking in the camera with the Dallmeyer portrait lens (all brass and glass), lamps, chemicals, developing trays, and fixing tanks. Hypo tanks large enough for twelve-by-fifteen plates took up floor space. There was a old stove and ratty curtains and a darkroom with the dimensions of a phone booth. There were bottles of liquid, a dry-mounting machine, a desk, and a pink velvet sofa as a prop, along with a brass floor lamp, its shade made of opalescent glass sculpted to resemble fish scales.

He stopped at the sofa. “I see you’ve decided to continue on with the decorating theme of pink.”

“It was left over from the previous owner—a photographer. I bought everything.”

“You did well under Miss Charles.”

“My father,” she said as financial shorthand. Though Amadora had done a pair of pictures at Miss Charles’s, she had knowledge in lieu of practical experience, and the sort of confidence that is really only possible in a twenty-one-year-old girl who has not yet known failure. It was this fearlessness that convinced her father to stake his daughter in the winter of 1914, when she was the youngest female photographer in London.

“How long have you been here?” asked George Clifton, making himself
at home on the pink sofa, unaware that his position was almost identical to the one on the park bench the first time he had waved to Amadora.

“Since the week after we went to supper. Three months, four days, and two hours,” she said, “if I were keeping track.”

“I wasn’t aware that you thought enough of our supper to keep track,” he said, his body losing the relaxed, expansive pose as it closed in on itself.

“You would’ve known if you’d rung me.”

George got up and crossed over to a number of black-and-white photographs hung from a thin rope, like laundry. She could see the awkwardness again, the discomfort. He said, “You’ve been busy.”

“Not yet,” she said, standing beside him. “I have to appear as if I have clients in order to attract clients.”

“Who’s this?” George pointed to a portrait of a girl, maybe sixteen, posing with a large, long-haired dog wearing a wreath of hand-tinted flowers.

“That’s Violette. My sister.”

“And this?” He pointed to a picture of a young woman in a sparkling ball gown, her hair done up in an elaborate style.

“That would be Violette.”

“Hmm. Quite different,” he said, comparing the two photographs.

“That’s the point,” said Amadora.

It was then he stared harder at the remaining pictures, all of young women or girls, hair down or pinned back; in casual clothes, formal clothes, even a beautiful robe; one sat primly on the pink velvet sofa, another played with a parrot, while another clasped a rose in her mouth, or held a glass orb, or rested a hand on a large library globe. They were smiling, thoughtful, serious, laughing. “Violette?” he said.

“One must be resourceful.”

“And your sign outside—
Madame Amadora—Portrait Photographer
—more resourcefulness?”

“I wanted to stand apart. I’m not the only one taking pictures in London.”

“If the photography doesn’t work out, perhaps you can tell futures.”

“Or run a house of ill repute.”

“You have more imagination than that.”

“More than you know.”

“Actually, I quite like the new name. Doesn’t truly suit you at the moment, but I suspect one day it will.”

“I suppose it’s by great good luck I’ve adopted an art-trade-profession-science that, like myself, is not properly grown-up.”

“Amadora,” he began, “I wanted—I wanted to bring you something—to wish you well—” He shyly handed her a narrow box.

When they had gone to dinner (“Three months, four days, and two hours”), they had had a wonderful time. George Clifton was twenty-four years old; a reporter for
The Guardian,
he was assigned all manner of random stories, covering a variety of topics, many of them, to him, pure fluff. He didn’t want to be a features reporter as much as he wanted to write a serious, political column. One of the weightier subjects he had been allowed to write about was the recent conflict over women’s rights. He absolutely supported the vote and thought the government’s dealings with many of the suffragettes were despicable. Saying as much was the very thing that had forced him back onto light human interest stories.

But he told none of this to Amadora, saying only that he was a reporter who longed to be a playwright.

When he began telling her stories about his job, his subjects, and his life, she noticed a self-deprecation that had been absent in their previous encounters. He asked her questions, encouraged her opinions. He himself was an easier laugh than she had imagined. He kidded her. He was, in short, one thing and another and Amadora found herself completely charmed by him.

But when he didn’t get in touch after their dinner, she supposed that what she’d felt must have been one-sided, though she could’ve sworn he enjoyed her company as much as she enjoyed his. She kept her disappointment to herself, reminding herself of her decision never to marry, to make her own way, and quickly became distracted by leaving Miss Charles. And, shortly after that, laying the foundation for her own business.
George Clifton became someone she thought about in the odd moment, sometimes dreamt about and sighed for without truly allowing herself to want him. How it was possible to feel the absence of someone she barely knew was a mystery.

Now here he was, in her little studio, offering her a gift.

Inside the slim box was a string of fairly gorgeous pearls. She took them out, held them aloft as they tangled in her fingers.

“In case you decide to get a dog.”

She threw herself on him, her arms around him as she pressed her face into his jacket, holding him as tight as she could, hoping he hadn’t heard the small sob that she tried to hide.

Within months—months that Amadora spent taking pictures for free of well-known figures, mostly in entertainment, which the local papers ran, and which Amadora believed George had influenced, though he claimed otherwise—the Great War broke out. With the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo that June, every European country began to line up, each with its own established political alliance.

As a consequence, Madame Amadora’s primary clientele went from stage stars to soldiers and sweethearts, young wives and mothers. Fathers. All those pictures that found their way into rucksacks, helmets, shirt pockets. And their counterparts, the photographs of the soldiers themselves, which ended up in purses, and on mantels and dressers, so serious, so young.

Amadora had worked hard in the preceding months to shake off the romantic techniques she had learned from Lallie Charles, as well as to teach herself to use materials that allowed her images to remain fixed. Her lighting made people look like themselves, instead of some dreamy versions of themselves, and this was the best thing she could’ve mastered for all those wartime separation pictures, in which the thing most needed was the real face of someone you loved.