The glass negatives

Source: an original fiction extract.

At ten on Friday, Sasha arrived at the photography archive to help label a new donation. The collection contained twelve boxes of glass negatives from a local portrait studio. Her supervisor, Mr Ellis, asked her to begin with box three and copy the numbers from its paper sleeves into a catalogue. She was not to remove the glass plates herself. Sasha put her lunch bag in the staff cupboard and sat at the desk beside the scanner. The first break would be at eleven, when Mr Ellis planned to explain how the images were digitised.

The sleeves carried names as well as numbers, though some handwriting was too faint to read. Sasha copied what she could and left spaces where she was uncertain. She had expected old photographs to arrive as finished pictures, their subjects already visible. Instead, the people were hidden inside packets that looked like folded receipts. At eleven, Mr Ellis placed one plate on the equipment and showed her the image on the screen. A woman appeared beside a chair, one hand resting on its carved back. Her expression was so direct that Sasha looked away first.

The catalogue gave only a surname and a year. Sasha tried to guess the woman's occupation from her clothes. Mr Ellis said they should record what they could establish and keep guesses separate. He enlarged the edge of the image. Beside the woman's sleeve was a faint blur where someone had moved during the exposure. Sasha had not noticed it before. There might have been another person just outside the frame. The possibility made the carefully arranged portrait seem less complete, as though a conversation had continued beyond the picture's border.

In the next sleeve they found a second plate of the same woman, this time seated with a small child beside her. The chair had not moved, but she had. Her shoulders were turned, and the child held two fingers of her hand. Sasha wanted to call the first image severe and the second affectionate. Looking again, she realised that the first had not told her enough to justify its label. She wrote the two plate numbers together and noted the repeated chair, the changed position and the child, leaving the relationship unconfirmed.

At the end of the day she checked the empty spaces in her transcription. There were more than she liked. Mr Ellis said unanswered questions were better than confident inventions, provided the gaps were clearly marked. On the bus home, Sasha looked at a photograph of her family on her phone. A cousin had been cropped out because he was pulling a face. Anyone seeing only the finished image would never know he had been there. She saved the uncropped version beside it, giving both files names that included the date.

Refer only to the first paragraph. Choose one answer for each item. Write the four letters in order, labelling them 1 to 4.