The Photograph

Samuel came into the shop on the Monday at eleven, having spent the morning walking up and down the Axis looking at the buildings, and stood inside the door looking round with exactly the expression the young woman in the summer dress had worn a month before, as if he had never been in a shop like it.

“This is it?”

“This is it.”

“It smells of paper.”

“It’s a map shop.”

Samuel went to the globe stand and spun the largest globe, slowly, with one finger, and watched the Pacific go past. “Which one’s the expensive one?”

“Don’t touch that one.”

“I’m touching all of them.” Samuel spun a smaller one the other way. “Whit, this is amazing. You didn’t tell me it was amazing.”

At the far end of the counter Mrs Pell looked up from the order book.

“Whit?” she said.

Samuel turned round. He had not seen her; she was very small behind the counter under the lamp, and very still, and people often didn’t. He went red above the beard.

“Sorry. Hello. I’m his brother. Samuel.”

“I can see you’re his brother.” Mrs Pell took her glasses off. “Whit?”

“It’s from school. Rugby. Everyone had a short name, and his was Whit, and it stuck.” Samuel came to the counter and held out his hand, and Mrs Pell considered it and then shook it, briefly, the way she did everything. “He’s been talking about you all weekend.”

“Has he.”

“Well. Not talking. He mentioned you. Twice.” Samuel smiled at her, which was a thing he did that usually worked. “He said you’ve never asked him a single question in two years.”

“That’s true,” said Mrs Pell.

“Not even about the…”

“About the stockroom, which he never tidies,” said Mrs Pell, without any change of tone, “or the chart drawers, which he puts things in the wrong order in.” She put her glasses back on. “No. I’ve never asked him about either. Would you like a cup of tea, Samuel?”

Samuel looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at his brother. Caleb was very busy with a box of road atlases and did not look back.

“Yes, please,” said Samuel. “Thank you.”

“Milk?”

“Please.”

She went through the curtain to put the kettle on. Samuel turned round and looked at Caleb with his eyebrows up as far as they would go.

“Don’t,” said Caleb.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to.”

“She knows,” said Samuel, in a whisper. “Doesn’t she. She knows.”

“I don’t know what she knows.”

“She knows, and she stopped me saying it.” Samuel looked at the curtain with something like awe. “That’s the most terrifying woman I’ve ever met.”

“She’s very kind.”

“Both,” said Samuel. “She’s both.”

Mrs Pell came back with three cups on a tray and a plate of biscuits, which Caleb had not seen in two years of working there and had not known existed. She gave Samuel the cup with the roses on it. They had tea at the counter, the three of them, between customers, and she asked Samuel about his degree and his dissertation and the Customs House records in Newport, and knew what a manifest was, and the difference between a coaster and a deep-water brig, and told him that the voyage he had been looking for would be in the Naval Office shipping lists rather than the Customs House, if it was anywhere. Samuel wrote it down on the back of his hand.

When he had gone out again, to look at the river, Mrs Pell washed up the cups.

“He’s a nice boy,” she said.

“He is.”

“He talks too much.”

“He does.”

“So did my husband,” said Mrs Pell. “It’s a very restful quality in somebody else.” She dried the cup with the roses on it and put it away at the back of the cupboard where, Caleb realised, it must always have been kept. “He can come in again. Tell him.”

---

On the Tuesday evening it rained.

It was the first cool evening for weeks, the first rain since July, and it came in off the river in the late afternoon in a long grey wall and settled over the city and stayed. The temperature dropped ten degrees in an hour. People in the street outside the shop stopped and put their faces up to it. Mrs Pell shut early, at five, because nobody would come in, she said, they’d all be standing outside getting wet on purpose, and she was right.

Caleb walked home in it with Samuel, who had come to meet him at the shop without a coat, and they were both soaked by the time they got to the stairs of the building and went up the three flights laughing at nothing in particular, leaving a trail of water.

In the flat Caleb put the kettle on and went and found dry clothes. The only warm thing he had was a rust-coloured jumper of their father’s, which their mother had given him after the funeral without saying anything, and which he had never worn, because it was their father’s. He put it on now, over a shirt, because he was cold. It was too wide in the shoulders and the right length in the arms, and it smelt very faintly of the house at Newport, and of something else he couldn’t name and didn’t try to.

He came back into the front room in it with dark trousers and socks and no shoes, and Samuel, who was standing at the window in a towel drying his hair, turned round and looked at him and didn’t say anything for a moment.

“That’s Dad’s,” he said.

“Mum gave it me.”

“I know. I was there.” Samuel looked at it. “It looks right on you.”

“It’s too big.”

“He was bigger than either of us. He’d have said that’s the point.” Samuel went to his bag, which was open on the sofa, and found his telephone. “Stand there.”

“Why?”

“No reason. The light.”

The light was grey and even and came in through the wide window behind him from a sky the colour of slate, over the wet roofs of the old commercial quarter, and the dome of Parliament House was out of sight at the left-hand end of the window, where you had to lean to see it. The room was the same as always. The sofa with Samuel’s bag on it, the bookshelves, the radio from the boathouse on the side table, the evidence file on the floor by the chair where he had been reading it on Sunday night.

“I look ridiculous,” Caleb said.

“You look fine. Stand still.” Samuel held the phone up. “Don’t smile. You look like an idiot when you smile at a camera. You always have.”

“I’m not smiling.”

“You’re about to.” Samuel lowered the phone. “Look at the floor or something. Put your hands in your pockets. Like you do when you’re thinking about something and pretending you aren’t.”

“I don’t do that.”

“You do it all the time. You did it at the cemetery. I watched you from the gate.”

Caleb stopped.

“You were there?”

“I went up after you. I didn’t want to interrupt.” Samuel’s face didn’t change. “Hands in your pockets. Head down. Go on.”

Caleb put his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor, at his own socks on the boards, and stood there square to his brother in his father’s jumper with the rain coming down on the roofs behind him. He heard the small sound the phone made. Then he heard it again.

“Done,” said Samuel.

“Let me see.”

“No.” Samuel looked at the screen for a while. “It’s good.”

“Delete it.”

“No.”

“Sam.”

“It’s good,” Samuel said again. He came and stood beside his brother and held the phone so that they could both see it. A tall fair young man in a rust jumper and socks, standing square in front of a wide window full of grey roofs and grey sky, with his hands in his pockets and his head down, as if he had been told something and was deciding what to think about it. There was nothing else in the picture. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the man, nothing in the room to say who he was or what he did on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

“It looks like you,” Samuel said.

Caleb looked at it.

“It looks like Dad,” he said.

“Yes,” said Samuel. “That too.”

---

They had spaghetti, because it was the only thing Caleb could cook that Samuel would eat, and afterwards they sat in the front room with the window open a little for the smell of the rain and the radio on low. Samuel talked about the dissertation and the Naval Office shipping lists, and about a girl at King’s College who was reading geography, which he seemed to think Caleb would find significant and which Caleb, to be kind, did.

They talked about their father. Not about the illness, which they had talked about for two years and which neither of them wanted to talk about any more, but about before: the ferry to Jamestown on Saturday mornings, the time he had run the catboat aground on Gould Island explaining the Battle of Rhode Island and refused to accept that it was his fault, the history lesson about the Peace of Boston that he had given every September for thirty years and that both of them could still recite.

They did not talk about the barony, beyond a joke on a boat. They never really had. Their father had told Caleb about it at the age of ten in the middle of a conversation about something else, and told Samuel the same way four years later, and after that it was simply a fact about the family, like the roof, something that cost money and was nobody’s fault.

At eleven Samuel yawned and went to bed on the sofa, and Caleb turned off the radio and stood by the window for a while in the dark, still in the jumper, looking at the rain on the roofs.

His telephone buzzed on the table. It was a message from his mother, who did not send messages, and who must have been sent the photograph by Samuel within about four minutes of his taking it.

It said: Socks.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed, very quietly, so as not to wake his brother, and went to bed.