The Wake at Harrow House

The letter had come to the studio on Westgate Road on Monday morning, black-edged, on thick paper that smelled faintly of camphor, and it had said what such letters always said. Mrs. Harrow of Harrow House, Bellingham, begged to inform the photographer that her husband, Mr. Silas Harrow, had departed this life on Sunday evening, and would be grateful if the photographer could attend at the house at the earliest convenience to take his likeness, and that of the family, before the funeral. A carriage would meet the afternoon train. Terms as advertised.

Terms as advertised. Elias had read that line twice. It was the kind of thing a person wrote when they had never had to put a price on grief before and did not mean to start now.

So on Tuesday Elias took the train out of Newcastle with the cases in the guard's van and a carpet bag on the rack, west along the Tyne to Hexham, where the line for the Border Counties branched off and climbed north beside the other river. The North Tyne was low and brown between bare alders. The carriage was cold. A farmer's wife with a basket of eggs got off at Wark, and after that there was nobody else in the compartment, only the rattle of the wheels and the window steaming and clearing and steaming again.

Elias had done this work for nine years now. Long enough to know the shape of a house in mourning before the door was opened: the drawn blinds, the stopped clocks, the mirrors turned or covered, the black crape on the knocker, and the way the servants lowered their voices even in the kitchen. Long enough to know that the family would be stiff at first, and then grateful, and then, a month or two later, would write to ask for more prints, because the picture was the only one they had of him and it was going on the piano. There were the other things, too, the ones nobody wrote in a letter: the widow who asked for the eyes to be painted open on the print afterwards, the father who would not leave the room, the old servant who straightened a collar that did not need it, just to touch him once more. Elias had learned to wait for all of that, and to set up the tripod slowly, so that nobody felt hurried. People said it was a morbid trade. Elias had stopped arguing with them. It was a quiet trade, and a careful one, and it came down in the end to light, stillness, and the courage to look at a face for a long time.

At Bellingham the platform was empty except for one lamp, already lit at half past three, and a man in a long coat beside a flat cart and a brown cob that stood with its head down as though it had heard the news too.

"Harrow?" the man said.

"Harrow," said Elias.

He was old and thick-shouldered, with a face like a walnut, and he gave his name as Snaith, carrier, and said that Mrs. Harrow had sent to him because the carriage horse was lame and the coachman was no use on the moor road after dark anyway. He loaded the cases himself and would not let Elias take an end. He handled them gently, the way he might have handled eggs. When the last one was roped down he looked up at the sky, which was the colour of an old pewter plate, and then away to the north, where the hills were going soft at their edges.

"We'll be up before it comes down," he said. "Likely."

They went out of the village past the church and a row of grey cottages and over the bridge, and then the road turned uphill and the trees fell away and there was nothing on either side but brown moor and black stone walls running away into the distance, and sheep, and the cold.