Girls Behind the Camera

by Adele Geras

  Cecily had never explained to anyone why she loved her doll’s house so much. It had been the one thing that had lifted her grief a little in the days after Mama died. The times that she and Papa had spent together on the floor of the nursery as he put the final touches to the doll’s house were the least terrible times of the terrible days after Mama’s funeral. She and Papa used to talk about the dolls. “Look at this wardrobe,” he said one day. “The da Pontes will hang all their fine clothes in it.”

  “They don’t have any fine clothes, Papa. Only what they’re wearing.”

  “Then we’ll ask your Aunt Lizzie to make them all the clothes they will need, never fear.”

  Remembering this, Cecily smiled. Her Aunt Lizzie was Papa’s older sister. It was Aunt Lizzie who’d planted the walnut that was now a big tree in the back garden. Cecily liked hearing the story about how ill Papa had been when he was a tiny baby. He’d nearly died and the day that he got better was the very day Aunt Lizzie noticed that her walnut had put out its first green shoot.

  It was their great good fortune, Papa had told Cecily, that they could still live here, in this fine house. It used to belong to Papa and Aunt Lizzie’s Uncle Percy, and Papa’s Cousin Hugh should have inherited the property after his father’s death. But poor Cousin Hugh died himself, in India, of a fever caught while he was climbing a very high mountain looking for a particularly unusual variety of butterfly. Cousin Clara, who’d been a nurse for many years and was now retired and living with her family in Scotland, had no desire to move back to London and Cousin Lucy had gone to live in Italy with her husband, who was a wealthy and aristocratic Italian gentleman. According to Aunt Lizzie, Cousin Lucy would not have considered marrying anyone who wasn’t wealthy and aristocratic. And so the house, which was really much too large for Papa and Cecily and Sam, was theirs for as long as they wanted it. Some of the upstairs rooms were closed up, and even though Nanny Mildred said they’d come in useful when visitors came, Aunt Lizzie was the only person who ever stayed overnight, as far as Cecily could tell. The furniture in these rooms was swathed in white dust sheets and Cecily avoided them for the most part. Sometimes, though, when Amy came to play, the two girls opened a door and went in to explore in secret, as they had today. Nanny Mildred would not have been pleased to know about these visits and Cecily was always relieved when they went back to the nursery.

  Aunt Lizzie lived in Sussex, in a small cottage built in the grounds of a large house. She was employed by the architect who had designed the house to oversee the design of the gardens and she found herself working with several under-gardeners who looked after the plants and trees on the property. The Brights went to visit her every summer, taking the train, which was a lovely treat for everyone. Sam was fond of engines and for days before they travelled he would go round the house, chuffing and puffing away to himself, pretending to be a steam locomotive.

  Aunt Lizzie could do everything, Cecily often thought. She’d made clothes for the dolls, just as Papa had promised, even if there were not enough of these to fill the wardrobe. Cecily wrote to her aunt every week, telling her the news from Chelsea and Aunt Lizzie always answered by return of post.

  Cecily liked playing with the da Pontes because she was able to make their lives happy. Above all, she could see to it that no one in her doll’s house ever died. Dying, she decided, was simply not allowed. Mama da Ponte was kind and pretty and did all the things that Cecily’s mama used to do.

  Cecily shivered and pulled her coat more closely round her. How cold it was! Sam didn’t seem to notice it, probably because he’d run on ahead of her.

  “Come here, Sam,” she called out. “We must start looking for poor little Mossy.”

  The two children had knocked on three front doors and asked three different housemaids about Mossy, but no one had seen her. Everybody they met was very kind and promised to look out for her, but Cecily was beginning to wonder whether they’d ever be reunited with their kitten again and she could feel sadness beginning to weigh her down, as though someone had draped a heavy blanket over her shoulders.

  Sam was pulling at her skirt. “Look, Cecily,” he said suddenly. “Look there! It’s that man!”

  “Which man? Where?”

  “Just beyond the lamp post. There!”

  Cecily peered into the mist, which had crept up from the river and was now making it hard to see clearly. “It’s Mr. Templeton,” she said.

  Sam was too young to know his name but he recognized him, of course. Everyone in the street knew Roderick Templeton by sight, and anyone older than Sam also knew who he was. According to Amy (who had the details from Jemima, the Chistlehursts’ parlourmaid), Mr. Templeton was a very well-known person indeed. He was a painter who specialized in portraits of society ladies, and scenes of town life which showed poor orphans seeking shelter from storms and being comforted by kind benefactors. This part of Chelsea was quite famous for being a home to painters, according to Jemima. There was Mr. James Whistler, for instance, who was an American and also spent a great deal of time in Paris, but nevertheless liked painting pictures of London and lived very close by indeed. Amy and Cecily had seen one of Mr. Templeton’s paintings reproduced in a magazine belonging to Amy’s father. This was, rather unusually, a picture of a woodland scene and there were some deer in the foreground.

  Mr. Templeton was a red-faced man with fuzzy grey mutton-chop whiskers and a loud voice. He always wore a long, dark green cloak over his clothes and a tall hat and because he was a big man, you could see him coming from a long way off and sometimes hear him as well, as he was given to singing snatches of songs from the latest Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The famous painter lived with his daughter, who was tall and slender and could often be seen striding out in the direction of the river.

  Mr. Templeton was approaching his gate. Cecily was just wondering whether she dared go up to him and ask him about Mossy, when he raised his voice and called out to her and Sam.

  “I say! Children! Come here, please. There’s nothing to be afraid of!”

  Cecily looked round. There were no other children to be seen anywhere. He was talking to them. She took a deep breath and said, “If you please, sir, we’re looking for our kitten.”

  “Aha! I knew it! I knew that two young ’uns wandering like ghosts in the mist could only be searching for something very precious…for example, a kitten.”

  “Have you seen Mossy?” Sam asked. “She’s black and white. She’s very small.”

  “Well, bless my soul, I think I have. I think your search may be over. Just such a creature ran into my house not two hours ago. My daughter has found a basket for the little thing, I believe, and is feeding her with the very best milk a cow has to offer. Come in, come in, and you may take your pet home.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Cecily was filled with relief. “It’s very kind of you to look after Mossy.”

  “Not at all…and you’ve saved me the trouble of knocking at every house in the street. This calls for a celebratory cup of something…warm milk, I daresay, for this young man. And perhaps a cup of tea for a grown-up young lady such as yourself.”

  Mr. Templeton stood aside and gestured to Cecily and Sam to go up the steps to the front door ahead of him. Cecily felt as though she were one of the society ladies Amy had described, on her way to have her portrait painted. One thing was certain: it was impossible to feel nervous or frightened while you were talking to Mr. Templeton. He was a very comforting sort of gentleman.

  Cecily was making a mental note of how she would describe Miss Templeton to Amy. Very slender. Tall and with hair so dark and glossy that it shone in the lamplight. At first, she’d not thought her hostess very pretty, but the more she looked, the more she liked Miss Templeton’s face. I shall tell Amy she’s beautiful, Cecily decided. I think she is. Her skin is very pale and her eyes are blue. She knew that those words couldn’t possibly describe what she was truly like. If only Amy could meet this new acquaintance! Miss Templeton was quite plainly
dressed in a brown skirt and a white blouse, with a cameo brooch at the neck, but she’d wrapped herself in a shawl which was the colour of the sea: between blue and green and with long fringes on it that moved like fronds of seaweed when she raised her arms.

  They were sitting in the front parlour of the house. Cecily was waiting for the cup of tea on the small table beside her to cool down. Sam was on the floor, near the fire, stroking Mossy, who had curled up in the basket Miss Templeton had found for her, blissfully asleep and snoring a little. The parlourmaid who’d brought in the tea had also taken some toy soldiers and a kaleidoscope out of a corner cupboard and put them on the hearthrug ready for Sam to play with.

  The parlour was so full of furniture and ornaments that it seemed more like a shop than a room in someone’s house. You could scarcely see the wallpaper for pictures: portraits, landscapes, watercolours, oils, drawings, all of which, Cecily supposed, must be Mr. Templeton’s work. She knew that however hard she tried, she’d never be able to remember everything that was in them. I’ll tell Amy, she thought, that they were highly-coloured and full of interesting objects and people.

  “You’re admiring my father’s work,” Miss Templeton said.

  “It’s very…” Cecily couldn’t think of an appropriate word. She glanced at the mantelpiece, where she could see several photographs in silver frames, grouped around a clock. The photographs were of pretty girls wearing blouses with lacy collars. They had ribbons in their hair and were gazing at the world with soulful looks on their faces.

  “I like those,” she said, pointing. “They’re like real people who’re alive and might speak at any moment.”

  Just then, Mr. Templeton came into the room and Miss Templeton said, “Why, Papa…this young lady has praised my portraits of Gertie and Maud. She has great good taste, has she not?”

  “Nonsense, dear,” said Mr. Templeton. “She is – and no offence is intended, young lady, for you cannot help your age – an unsophisticated child. She cannot be expected to appreciate Art at her age. Although it has to be said that with her hair and her height she would have been an excellent model for Mr. Millais, for instance. How would you have liked to lie in a bath and pose for a portrait of Ophelia like Miss Lizzie Siddall? Not a bit comfortable, I shouldn’t think. But at least done in the cause of Art. One needs a certain training, a certain experience to appreciate painting. There are those who claim…my daughter is one of them…that Mr. Whistler, and even more than him, these Impressionists, as they call themselves…are the coming thing, but I believe in the classical virtues. An impression is all very well, but not what one requires from a painting, I feel. There needs to be great skill in imitating nature. And that skill is often only appreciated after much study. One can see all that’s in a mere photograph, on the other hand, straight away. It’s something that requires neither experience nor great delicacy of understanding.”

  He sat down and beamed at Cecily. Miss Templeton said, “My dearest papa is the best father in the world, but he is old-fashioned. And not a great admirer of Mr. Whistler and the others. As for photography, it’s the art of the future. He’s frightened that, very soon, Lady This and the Duchess of That will be summoning me and not him to make portraits of them and his nose will be thoroughly out of joint.”

  “Rosalind is a stout fighter in the cause of her craft.” Mr. Templeton smiled and took a sip from his teacup. “But craft, not art, is what it is and the enthusiasm will pass, I’m sure of it.” He turned to his daughter. “You will marry, my dear, and this foolishness, this traipsing hither and yon carrying baskets of heavy equipment will be forgotten.”

  “I may marry, Papa,” Miss Templeton said, and Cecily noticed that in spite of her calm tone, she was frowning and trying not to sound irritated. “But married or not, I will continue to photograph the world as I see it.”

  “But why should that be necessary?” Mr. Templeton nearly jumped out of his chair. “The world is all around us. Any one of us may see it and wonder. It takes a painter’s art to transform it into something…something more than the ordinary. More than simply what we see. And besides,” he announced as though he were a conjuror drawing a rabbit out of a top hat, “all your photographs are black and white and shades of grey and sometimes that brownish colour you dignify with the name of ‘sepia’ but that is not what we see with our eyes. We see an entire spectrum of colour… You cannot match a painter for colour. Try to deny it.”

  Cecily opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Mr. Templeton was right about the colour, but nevertheless… Miss Templeton noticed her and said, “My dear, you want to say something…what is it?”

  “I was only going to say that those young ladies will never be seen quite like this again and when they’re old this will remind them of how they were…exactly how they were…on this one day. When they were young.”

  Miss Templeton jumped up from the sofa and ran to where Cecily was sitting and took her hand. “You are a very clever girl…you see exactly what I’ve been trying to tell my father for years. The moment…that moment…lives for ever. That’s it! Exactly.”

  “Why is my painting not capturing a moment in the same way? Eh? Answer me that, if you can!”

  “Because we have no assurance that you haven’t tinkered with the reality of the scene before you, for some reason of your own. Some artistic reason.” Miss Templeton smiled. “Why, you might decide to change the colour of a flower so as to make a harmony with someone’s dress. You might make it quite different from what it is in real life.”

  “Real life,” said Mr. Templeton, “is not the point. Beauty is the point.” He said this with an air of someone who wasn’t going to discuss the matter any further and indeed, he turned to Cecily at once and said, “I’m sorry, my dear. We’ve been so busy revisiting our old battlefields that we’ve been most remiss about asking your names.”

  “I’m Cecily Bright,” said Cecily. “My brother’s name is Samuel. We call him Sam.”

  “How delightful!” Mr. Templeton beamed. “I was at the theatre last night, at the first night of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s new play, which is called The Importance of Being Earnest. I’m quite sure you’ve heard of Mr. Wilde…in my opinion, quite the wittiest man in London. And an admirer, I may say, of my work. And in last night’s play, one of the heroines was called Cecily, just like you! A remarkable coincidence, I call that!”

  “Papa,” Miss Templeton said, “I think the children should be getting along now. It’s almost dark outside and their parents will be wondering where they are.” She turned to Cecily. “I’ll take you home directly, but first would you like to visit my studio?”

  “Oh, yes, I would love to! Thank you!”

  “We must be quite quick then…”

  Cecily jumped up from her chair. The clock on the mantelpiece stood at half past four. “I forgot about the time.” She didn’t say because I was enjoying myself so much, but that was what she meant. “But I would love to see your studio.”

  “A lot of boxes on stilts up there…strange machines with lenses that you look through and which show you the image upside down! Newfangled nonsense!” This was Mr. Templeton, who had moved to the hearthrug to play soldiers with Sam.

  Miss Templeton laughed. “Take no notice, Cecily. Follow me to the second floor. Rather a lot of stairs, I’m afraid, but the light up there is just what I require.”

  The room that Miss Templeton called her studio took up most of the second floor. It had two enormous windows whose curtains hadn’t yet been drawn. Cecily could see a wide expanse of violet sky, and the occasional snowflake drifted across the glass. The room was full of so many interesting things that Cecily could scarcely take them in at once. There were cameras, of course: two of them, one smaller than the other. Miss Templeton said, “That’s the one I take about with me when I go outdoors. It’s lighter than the big one and takes photographs just as well.” Each camera was a brown wooden box, with a concertina-like part on the front of it (“the bellows”
Miss Templeton said that was called), and bound about with very shiny brass fittings. Cecily could see a tripod, like a set of skinny wooden legs, with a black cloth draped over it.

  “I have to cover my head when I’m composing a photograph,” Miss Templeton explained, “and when I look through the lens I see my subject upside down, but of course it all comes out the right way up when the photograph is developed. Then, when I’m sure I have the precise image I want, I come out and stand beside the tripod to take the picture. After that, the glass plate needs to be developed in the dark room. That’s in the basement, and it’s where I keep my chemicals, too, because Papa hates the smells. How dark or bright the photograph appears depends on the amount of light I allow in through the lens. Photography means ‘drawing with light’…did you know that? It’s from the Greek. I have to dip my photographic plates into all sorts of strange substances to make the picture appear and then soak them in a fixer, which means I can keep the image for ever.”