The Idea of Perfection (29 page)

She peered out, shading her eyes with her hand.

Hello?

The blank whiteness of the light swallowed up the word.

Hello?

Being under the lights made you see yourself in a different way. She had learned that, doing the shoot for the Palmolive ad. You looked at yourself from the outside, as if you were someone else. You watched the various parts of yourself moving:
Head up, dearie! Just put that leg forward, yes, lovely,
but the person tilting her head up or putting her leg forward was not quite the same as you yourself.

Mr Chang?

That sounded ridiculously formal, and for some reason her voice had a tiny quaver in it.

Alfred?

That sounded much too familiar.

Is anyone there?

Alfred Chang stepped forward into the light, short and chunky, a roll of flex over his shoulder like a mountaineer. Light engulfed him, made him crisp and unreal, his face flat, without shadows. She could see a few black whiskers on the side of his cheek where he had missed a patch, shaving. His stiff black hair swallowed the light.

She felt a little pulse of something when she saw him. Like apprehension, or stage-fright, but it was not those.

It was knowing he was in love with her. There was always something rather exciting about having a man, especially someone as strange as a Chinese man, in love with you.

She could not help noticing that there was a button missing on his shirt so that it yawed open. She could actually see a crease of honey-coloured stomach and his neat little navel.

She looked away quickly.

She wished she had not called him by his first name. She had never done it before and she did not know why she had done so now. It would only encourage him.

He unhooked the flex from his shoulder and laid it on the floor.

Call me Freddy, he said. I’m only Alfred on the awning.

He came nearer and watched her face closely as if measuring the light falling on it.

She had been told more than once that she was one of those people the camera
fell in love with.
The man who had taken the photos for Palmolive had told her he had never seen anyone the camera
fell in love with
quite so much.
Irresistible
was the word he had used.

Thank you,
she would say, if he suggested photos.
It’s terribly kind of you to offer, but I don’t think it would be appropriate, do you?

Appropriate
was such a useful word.

His hair was very dry and brittle-looking. She had never been this close to him before, to notice. She knew just the conditioner he should use. Also, he needed a haircut. Being a little short of stature he would be better off with a nice neat head of hair. She could almost feel the scissors in her hand, and had the thickness of his hair sitting neatly over his ears.

As well as having the missing button, the faded paisley shirt was too tight, and you could see big peg-marks on the shoulders. She realised she had never seen him before without his striped apron, not this close anyway, except of course the night of the Museum meeting, and he had been sitting down then, so you would not have noticed a thing like a missing button. Or a navel.

I’ve always been Freddy, he said. Like the frog.

He kept pulling up his jeans, as if they needed a belt. When he did that, hoisted them up, you could see a bulge just there. They were frayed just there, too, around the zip.

She looked away, naturally, but could not help noticing. It was really very badly frayed.

She heard herself giggle.

Alfred was my father’s name, he went on.

She thought he was probably trying to spin things out, poor thing, to make this little meeting with her last as long as possible.

So one of us had to be Freddy.

Felicity went
Oh?
in an interested way. That did not seem quite enough, and he was still watching her, so she added
really?

That sounded just a bit too much. She smiled, and tried to think of something to say that was neither too much nor too little. He might think she was over-conscious of his being Chinese if she made a comment about his name, which was obviously not Chinese, not the Alfred part of it anyway, and that might be tactless. She thought that if you were Chinese you would want to be as normal as possible in every other way.

She knew he lived with his mother, out of town somewhere, and his sister or auntie, someone like that. He was definitely not married. But you would think the mother or the sister would sew the button back on his shirt, and perhaps try to do something about the fraying zip, too.

In her mind’s eye she had the shirt off and was matching the button with the ones in her box. It was a standard pearly men‘s-shirt button, not hard to match. Now she was threading her Number 7 Crewel with her Dylko Reinforced Thread, colour white — being careful not to purse or hunch — and was stitching away.

Now she was knotting the thread on the button and snipping it off, and he was pulling the shirt back on.

He was still watching her. She felt the light falling full on her face from the source beyond the screen. She made herself smile slightly, the way she knew smoothed out the skin of her face in a nice way. She tilted her chin up, just fractionally. It was only in certain lights that her chin was inclined to let her down. She did not know what sort of light this was but she thought it was possible that it was the kind in which her chin let her down.

Is that your family, the photos out there?

That was polite but neutral, and broke the silence that was developing.

She wondered if he knew that she knew that he was in love with her.

He nodded.

My sister, he said. Her family.

He did not seem very interested. His hair blazed backlit in one of the lamps. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

They’re lovely photos, she heard herself gushing. So ... intimate.

That was not really the word she had meant.
Intimate.
It did not sound quite right. She hurried on, before the word could become large in the silence.

About the quilt, she said. When should I come back for it, do you think?

She had thought of the word now.
Informal.
That was what she had meant.
Informal.
It would look funny, though, to go back and explain that she had meant
informal
rather than
intimate.

How would Friday be, Mrs Porcelline?

She thought perhaps he did know that she knew. She had a sense that he was trying to catch her eye.

Excellent! she said.

In trying not to catch his eye, she felt she was looking rather shifty. She gave him one of her
lovely smiles,
to make up for looking shifty.

That seemed to be all, but he did not go back to coiling the flex.

Bit of a mess, he said cheerfully, looking around.

Her eyes were used to the lights now and she followed his glance. Just out of range of the lights there was a jumble of tawdry grubby things: a chair with ragged tapestry upholstery and carved wooden claws, a red velvet chaise-longue, a spindly palm in a pot. She recognised the fluffy sheepskin from the baby photo, and the barley-twist table the smiling family was grouped around. There were black metal lamps heaped up in an angular pile, a bag full of squares of yellow cardboard, a heap of striped fabric, a litter of polystyrene wig heads, and clots of grey flex everywhere.

Hugh’s mother had often said, looking out the window of the car on Sunday drives,
No one is so poor they can’t sweep up their yard.
But clearly, Freddy Chang had never bothered to get himself organised. Perhaps he thought it made him artistic, a romantic figure.

It was funny, really, and rather sad, a Chinese trying to cut a romantic figure.

The white backdrop that the shirt lay on was just a length of thick paper pulled down like a kitchen towel from a long tube hanging above. The edge was ragged and dirty, stuck down to the floor with bits of masking tape, and she could see dirty fingerprints and footprints on the white.

None of that would show in the photo, though. The shirt lay on the middle of the paper, where it was clean. The photo would show nothing but clean brilliant light. You would never guess the dirt that was beyond the image. It was a kind of magic.

Her own feet were the centre of radiating wedges of shadows that overlapped and interlinked and re-formed themselves around her feet, half-shadows and quarter-shadows. When she moved, they moved too, but they stayed attached to her feet so that she was always at the centre of a web of light and dark.

She wondered whether you could get rid of all the shadows, if you used enough lights, and arranged them scientifically. They would have to be forced under your feet. They would still be there, under the soles of your shoes. But no one would see them.

She imagined how it would be, to look around yourself, front, back, sides, and not see a single shadow anywhere. She would like to ask him if it was possible, but he might think it was peculiar.

Oh well, she said.

That was good as far as it went, but the silence seemed to call for something further.

What sort of thing do you normally photograph?

That was a good question: interested, but not too interested.

Portraits mainly, he said. I do a fair number of portraits.

He was watching her closely.

Life studies. You know.

Did
life studies
mean
nude
? She had a feeling it might.

You’d be a natural, you know, he said. I can tell.

She already knew that, but it seemed modest to pretend.

Oh? Really? Do you think so?

From when she was young, people had always said
You take a nice photo,
looking through the album. Later on she had been able to show them the Palmolive ad, and they always said the same thing:
Oh, you’ve got good bones,
which was really missing the point, as the Palmolive ad had not been interested in her bones.

No one ever saw the ones where she had not
taken a nice photo,
because she had always popped those straight in the incinerator. Anyone could be caught at an unflattering angle.

Under Freddy Chang’s gaze, she tried to keep her chin up in the way she knew gave her a rather nice yearning sort of look.
Look as if you’re thinking about white lilies,
the Palmolive man had said from behind the camera.
Smooth white lilies.
When she had lifted her chin and obediently thought about lilies, he had called out
Lovely! Perfect, dearie! Now just push the dress off the shoulder, sweetheart, that’s the way. Just a bit more, there’s a girl.

Lovely, Alfred, or Freddy, said. You’d come up beautifully.

He put his hands up to make a frame and looked at her through it. Somehow it was not like simply being stared at, if someone was pretending you were a photograph.

Lovely, he said again.

After a moment he dropped his hands and came over to stand next to her. He pointed at the sad old shirt lying under the light.

That’s the shirt they shot him in, he said, and moved closer, as if to see it from her angle.

Ben Hall.

She did not like to move, because he might be offended, but she felt he was a little close.

Hard to get the blood-stain to come out sharp.

The dense black shadow of his body lay over hers.

Not squeamish about blood, I hope, he said solicitously, putting a hand on her arm for a moment.

It was probably the moment he would especially treasure later on, when he thought privately about the time she had come to see him: the moment he had touched her.

Oh no! she exclaimed, too brightly.

Didn’t think so, he said, and watched her.

There was a silence. She could not think of anything to say about blood, or not being squeamish about it.

Didn’t think you’d be inhibited. About that sort of thing.

Oh no! she said again, and laughed, and under cover of the laugh she moved away a little. No point in tantalising the poor man.

When he left her to go over to one of the black-draped windows and rattled the heavy curtains back along their rod, the daylight that fell into the room seemed cold, gritty, almost dirty beside the hot thick light from the lamps.

She hoped he was not offended that she had moved away, and it seemed only polite to move over next to him and look out the window too. Out there she could see the flaking brown-painted brick of the side of the Caledonian, so close it looked as if you could touch it.

Not much of a view, Freddy said, but he kept looking out.

She glanced down into the narrow brick-cobbled alley that ran between the shop and the Caledonian, where a broken rubbish-bin lay on its side, but then she remembered that looking down could give you a double chin, or the appearance of one, even if you did not really have one, so she tilted her head up. She was confident that she had smoothed the foundation into her neck this morning, as the magazines told you to, so there was no line between the
flesh colour
out of the bottle and the
flesh colour
that was the colour of your actual flesh.

There was even less to see looking back up at the wall of the Caledonian: a rusting fire escape, a small window, the woodwork painted the same flaking brown as the wall, and above the window, the sign that said CALEDONIAN, with the D hanging upside-down above the window.

Nice and private, Freddy suggested.

She had just been thinking the very opposite, that it was not really private at all with the hotel window so close, so she agreed too vehemently.

Yes! Oh yes! Lucky, isn’t it!

Then there’s always the curtain, Freddy said, and suddenly dragged it across the window again.