Chapter 1

The Damaged Photo

He came into the studio on a Tuesday in March, at eleven twenty, and left the door open behind him, so that the wind off the seafront sent three prints flying from the counter.

I remember the time because I'd just looked up at the clock above the light table and was wondering whether to close for lunch or carry on with the Dierickx negatives, two hundred and twelve glass plates from the thirties that a granddaughter had brought me in a beer crate. I remember the three prints because they all flew off in the same direction, like gulls, and he caught them in mid-air, one, two, three, without letting go of what he was holding in his other hand.

“Sorry,” he said.

He pushed the door shut with his foot. He laid the three prints on the counter, perfectly flat, and squared them up with his fingertips. Broad fingers, battered, with a white scar running diagonally across the left forefinger, and varnish or dried resin in the creases of the knuckles. The hands of someone who works with something harder than paper.

“You restore photos,” he said. “It says so on the window.”

“It says so on the window,” I agreed.

He smiled. Not much. Half a smile, one corner of the mouth, as if he didn't quite trust his own smiles and only let them out halfway.

My studio is four metres by six, on the ground floor of a narrow house in the rue des Mouettes, in Knokke, a hundred and twenty metres from the seafront. There's a window where I display old prints I've restored, a counter, and behind it, beyond a black curtain, my darkroom, my light table, my flatbed scanner, my two screens and my loupe. On the window, in gold letters, a sign-painter from Bruges wrote, four years ago: Aubry — Photo Restoration & Prints. Hugo had chosen the typeface. He used to say the ampersand was the prettiest letter in the alphabet and that nobody ever used enough of them.

My name is Camille Aubry. I was thirty-six that Tuesday, and I had been a widow for sixteen months.

I say it straight away because it was the first thing people found out about me in Knokke, before they even learned my first name, and in the end I'd taken to saying it myself, so nobody had to go looking for it. The Verhaegen widow. I hadn't taken Hugo's name when we married. It made no difference: here, I was the Verhaegen son's wife, and then I'd become his widow, and nobody in the bakeries ever called me anything else.

He set down on the counter whatever he'd been holding in his other hand. A brown A5 envelope, which he opened carefully, and from which he drew a colour print, ten by fifteen, curled up like a crisp.

“It got wet,” he said. “I'd like to know if it can be saved.”

I put on my cotton gloves. I took the print by the edges. It was a boat. A white yacht, slender hull, moored to a wooden pontoon, with a row of masts behind it and a very pale morning sky, almost pink. An amateur's photo, slightly tilted, taken from a little too far away. The water had left a great brown tidemark across the whole bottom third, where the hull met the sea, and the emulsion had lifted in flakes along the side of the boat, exactly where you paint the name.

I looked at the boat for a long time.

There's something people don't know about photograph restorers, and that I didn't know either until I became one: you never look at what's in a photo. You look at the photo. The paper, the surface, the grain, the damage. When someone sets their dead grandmother's face in front of me, I don't see their grandmother, I see a fibre-based print from the fifties with a spot of mould on the left cheek. It's what lets me do this job without crying all day long.

That day, for the first time in a long while, I looked at what was in the photo. And I had a strange feeling, not quite a memory, more of an itch behind the eyes, like when a word is on the tip of your tongue and won't come.

“Do you know this boat?” I asked.

“No. I found it at a flea market. In Ostend. In a box with some other photos, a euro for the box.”

“And you want to have it restored.”

“Yes.”

“A photo of a stranger, found in a one-euro box.”

“Yes.”

He didn't add anything. He didn't explain himself. He just looked at me, hands flat on the counter, with a quiet patience, as if he had all the time in the world and my question was perfectly reasonable, and so was his answer.

“I'll do you a quote,” I said. “It could take a week. The bottom third is very badly damaged, I can't promise I'll recover what's under the stain.”

“I'll pay up front,” he said.

His name was Adrien. He told me when I opened the order book and asked him for a name. He said Adrien, and waited for me to look up, and didn't give a surname. I wrote Adrien in the column, and a phone number he dictated, and in the remarks column I wrote yacht, water damage, 10 × 15.

He paid cash. Eighty euros. He put the notes on the counter and smoothed them out with the flat of his hand, the way he'd smoothed the prints that had flown away.

At the door, he turned round.

“Are you Aubry?”

“That's me.”

“It's nice, the ampersand on the window.”

And he left. This time the door closed by itself behind him, pushed by the wind. I stood rooted behind my counter with eighty euros and a photo of a boat, and I realised my heart was beating fast, a little too fast, for an eighty-euro job.

He came back the following Tuesday to collect the photo. It wasn't ready: the emulsion had lifted more deeply than I'd thought, and I'd had to re-fix it flake by flake with a fine brush, under the loupe, before I could scan it. He said it didn't matter. He stayed twenty minutes talking about the sea, the wind, the beach in winter, the boatyard in Ostend where he worked, teak that never rots and oak that always does. He didn't ask when the photo would be ready.

He came back on the Friday. It still wasn't ready. He brought two coffees from the bakery next door, without knowing how I took mine, and he'd guessed right: black, no sugar.

On the Monday he came back for no reason at all. He said he was passing by. Nobody passes through the rue des Mouettes: it's a cul-de-sac that ends in a flight of steps up to the seafront.

That Monday, getting ready in the morning, I put on make-up.

I only noticed when I caught sight of myself in the oven door at midday, heating up my soup. A little mascara. A little lipstick, barely any. I hadn't worn make-up since Hugo's funeral, sixteen months earlier, when I'd put it on so as not to look like what I was. I stood there looking at myself in the oven door, spoon in hand, and I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry and I did both, a little, alone in my kitchen, while the soup boiled over.

I finished the photo on the Wednesday evening, late, after closing.

The last stage is always the stain. Once the emulsion has been re-fixed and the print scanned at very high resolution, you have to rebuild what the water has eaten away: the colours, the outlines, the details. You can't invent. You deduce. You look at what's left around it, the edges of the stain, the tiny traces that have survived under the brown, and you work your way back. I work layer by layer, at four hundred per cent, pixel by pixel, for hours, with the music turned very low and a cup of tea going cold.

At a quarter past midnight I started on the side of the boat. The place where you paint the name.

Under the tidemark there were ghosts of letters. Fragments of curves, the beginnings of downstrokes, thick and thin strokes barely darker than the brown. I pushed up the contrast. I isolated the colour channels one by one. In the red channel, where the brown almost disappears, the letters surfaced, grey on grey, as if rising from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Seven letters. One capital, six lower case. A slanting hand, painted with a brush, with a little loop on the last letter.

I put my cup down.

I pushed my chair back. I looked at the screen from a distance, then close up, then I picked up my loupe and held it against the screen, which is pointless, a loupe on a screen, I know, it's a reflex, and I looked through it.

On the yacht's hull, it said Camille.

It was Hugo's boat. It was Hugo's boat in the harbour at Nieuwpoort, on a very pale morning, almost pink, with my name painted across the hull by a sign-painter from Bruges, the same one who'd done the window, because Hugo loved beautiful lettering and wanted everything that bore my name to be lovely. It was the boat that had sunk off Nieuwpoort on the fourteenth of November, sixteen months earlier, with my husband on board.

He came for the photo the next day. I handed it to him in a glassine sleeve, with the original print and the restored one, and the name on the hull, sharp, brought back into the light.

He looked at the restored print. For a long time. I watched his face. He gave nothing away. Nothing. Not a muscle.

“That's my name,” I said. “On the boat.”

He looked up.

“I know. I saw it when I bought the box. The C was still there, and the tail of the e. I thought it was beautiful, a boat carrying a woman's name. I wanted to know which one.”

“It was my husband's boat.”

And then, for the first time, something moved in his face. Not surprise. Something else, slower, heavier, that passed behind his eyes and withdrew at once.

“I'm sorry,” he said softly. “I didn't know.”

I believed him.

I believed him because he had his hands flat on my counter and a white scar across his forefinger, because he'd guessed how I took my coffee, because he'd caught three photos in mid-air without damaging a single one, and because it was the first time in sixteen months that someone had looked at me without thinking the Verhaegen widow.

I believed him because I wanted to believe him. That's the only reason that counts, in the end, when you believe someone. I learned that later.