Read Online Frozen by Richard Burke - Free Book Online

hazed, blunting the sharp edges of the shadows while keeping the colour and definition of the gardenscape.
    I put the family in the almost-shade of one of the denser trellises, three-quarters backlit, with a deep view behind them along one wall towards the house. I chatted with the parents as I settled them on a picnic rug, with the children half-on them, half-between. I clowned a bit for the children, pretending to be surprised by an elephant that I kept popping up behind the camera. I gave the toddler, Giles, an elephant exactly like my own, and told him that he had to make it say hello every time mine appeared. He forgot his earlier shyness and joined in with the game, if anything over-enthusiastically. Then I let the parents gradually take over their children, and began to shoot as the four played together, their smiles became slowly less forced until they had all but forgotten I was there. Occasionally I asked Emma or Tom to move slightly, or to move one of the youngsters, and once or twice I had to make the elephant perform a few tricks. I murmured to them from time to time, keeping them just aware enough of the camera that they would look at it—but I became uninvolved, an observer. I was on the inside of their lives, but just as a shadow.
    The trick with photography is to keep shooting. In an average one-hour shoot I might use four or five rolls of film—a hundred and forty-four exposures—and expect to get five or ten good pictures. But you are reading your subjects all the time, anticipating them. You come to know them. When she smiles, the toddler will sink on to her lap a little further and pout; when he makes a joke, she smiles. When the toddler tickles the baby, the husband's shoulders relax and the frown lines soften. It's a kind of trance. Your own reflexes become attuned to theirs. You release the shutter by instinct, again, again, again. And with each moment you capture you see a little more of them, and for each of those moments you feel wise beyond all words. I can't describe it. If I could, perhaps words alone would be enough and I would never feel the need to make pictures. But I cannot resist the lure of catching those instants when other people are truly themselves—at least, as much as any of us ever are. For an hour, almost without talking, certainly without listening, I sank into the Carlisles' lives.
    And I found that they were in love, all of them with each other.
    There were stresses, of course. Emma and Tom both had worry lines. They looked a little tired; there was tension in their necks and weariness in their movements. From time to time one of them would do something that the other clearly did not fully approve of. But there was patience and affection, and a kind of stillness—tranquillity is far too grand a word for it. They were happy. I knew that, when I developed the pictures, it would be there on every frame: four happy people, together on a sunlit day, together always.
    And in another part of my thoughts different images played themselves out, a counter-rhythm to every shot. “Damaged Goods”... battered people in a hostile world, the news on the radio. Verity running on the beach, caught in mid-stride. Or again, with her eyes wide and brown, lips half-parted, always so serious and so alone. Verity in stiff white sheets, bloated, bruised, and broken.
    It was intolerable, impossible to believe, a savage rip in the pattern of my oh-so-normal world. Something was so badly wrong. How could I just... accept it? And how could I not? After all, it was real; it wasn't about to change. Reality was not obliged to take my feelings into consideration.
    Get used to it, Harry.
    The trouble was that in order to get used to it, I knew I was going to have to understand it. And I wasn't at all sure I could face that much truth.
    When I got home my message light was flashing. I ignored it and sat staring at a wall as the sun slid quietly round the room. The shadows shifted restlessly. I had shot