The Daily Quiz · No. 1
Two Plates from the Gala
Thursday, 14 March 1935 · R.M.S. Thessaly, four days out of Southampton
The flash lamp went off and for half a second the Verandah Cafe turned to chalk — six people at a table right aft, paper crowns and painted masks, every face white as plaster with the mouth open. Then the dark came back and they went on laughing. I shut the slide, wrote 9.14, table of six, Verandah in my log, and began folding the tripod.
My name is Nell Bray. I am twenty-six and I am the Thessaly's photographer, which means the purser pays me, the purser feeds me, and the purser owns every plate I expose. On a gala night I work the ship from end to end and sleep when the band stops.
At twenty past nine a bell-boy came up behind me with a message from Mrs Fenwick in first class — would I come to the Palm Court at half past and photograph her at the writing table. He was breathing like a man who had carried a trunk upstairs, and I said so.
Twice tonight, miss. The Verandah Cafe is right aft on the Boat Deck and the Palm Court is forward on A deck, so it is the whole length of her and two decks down to get from the one to the other — four minutes if I run it, five if the stairs are full, and nobody runs through a gala in evening dress.
The Palm Court is not a court at all. It is a bay off the Writing Room with one window, a wall clock, a big palm in a brass tub standing in the window corner, a pair of brass ash-stands on either side of the writing table, and the board where the wireless room pins up a fresh sheet of news every hour with the time it came in printed across the top. A boy was pinning up the quarter-past-nine sheet while I set my legs. Mrs Fenwick was sixty-three, in black lace with a jet comb in her white hair, and she kept one hand flat on a leather writing case at her elbow all the time I was focusing.
Plain, Miss Bray. I have no use for a photograph that flatters me. And I shall want it before New York.
I exposed one plate at half past nine and left her there. At a quarter to ten I was down in the Grand Salon, shooting the fancy-dress parade; I made four plates of it between then and five to, and the floor was packed the whole time.
At twenty past ten a steward went into the alcove for the ash-stands and found the palm standing across the doorway, and Mrs Fenwick behind it on the carpet with her temple broken in.
At thirty-five minutes past ten the master-at-arms — the master-at-arms is what the Thessaly calls her policeman — came for me and stood me in the doorway and told me to photograph the alcove before anything was touched. So I did, with her still lying there. Her right hand was shut on a torn corner of paper, and he opened the fingers with the point of a pencil and turned it to the lamp, and we read it together: the top corner of a bookmaker's reckoning, with a figure on it that would buy a motor car, and a name. J. Fenwick.
The nephew,
he said, and put it in an envelope, and then he took every plate I had exposed since dinner and walked me down to the darkroom and stood behind me while I developed them.
It was past midnight when he let me out, and instead of my bunk I went to the purser's office, because a print that leaves my hands has to be captioned with the names of the people standing in it, and on a night when nobody's face is their own that takes paper.
The purser lent me his. The parade programme. The stewardesses' station book, where a woman signs off the passenger decks for the night. The surgeon's day book. The tally the night steward of the Verandah Cafe keeps in his own hand, because he is paid on what he serves. I laid them along the counter beside my plate log, which gives the hour of every exposure I make to the minute, since plates cost money and the purser counts them.
Four people had been asked to stay up, and they were sitting along the alleyway outside in a row of chairs, not looking at each other.
Iris Kettleby, twenty-eight, Mrs Fenwick's paid companion, still in the parade costume she had not been given time to take off. Julian Fenwick, thirty-three, the nephew, smoking with the cigarette held straight up like a candle. Rupert Gildersleeve, forty-five, a picture dealer travelling first, who had kept his grey gloves on. Hattie Pinn, fifty-six, stewardess of the first-class ladies' staterooms, with her right hand bandaged to the wrist.
Ten minutes to ten was the one minute all four papers could speak to at once, and between them they named four rooms: the Writing Room forward on A deck, the surgery down on C, the Grand Salon with the parade going round it, and the Verandah Cafe right aft on the Boat Deck. I wanted the four of them stood in the four rooms, one each, before I wrote a single caption.