Free The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien

staring down at the ring, the diamond no bigger than a grain of sand. The photographer with his coffee-colored skin and his coffee-colored suit beamed when he saw us, said he would take us last. He walked with a waddle.
    The room where he took the photographs was almost dark, the camera on a tripod with a big black cloth over it and an opened black umbrella, which at home was always deemed unlucky. Incense wafted from the nostrils of a bronze Buddha, which, as he said, was for the ambience. Everything was ambience.
    We were star material, he saw that at once. Our two faces, Solveig’s ivory cheeks and my peaches and cream, would be mounted side by side on a white card, embossed with violets and put in the showcase in the entrance hall. The masculine and feminine world of passersby would be set agog at the sight of us. We were lucky to catch him in. Stars of stage and screen were forever vying for his services, often he had to shut shop and dash to snap a famous screen actress during her lunch break. He was number one in his field, his tones, his shadowing, his definitions, unique, his competitors crazy to find out the secret that was his
    alone. But to us he would reveal it. He grasped the personality, the soul, he looked into the eyes, the windows of the soul, and saw what girls were dreaming of.
    Might we step into something dandier, more eye-catching, he wondered. From a trunk he pulled out boas, fox tippets, capes, and frocks and ushered us behind a screen to change, telling us to be as daring as possible.
    “I am a little boy now,” Solveig said as she appeared in a sailor suit. It thrilled him. Boy and girl. Bride and groom. He ran to get a cigarette case, made her practice opening and shutting it, like a swain. Then he stood her on a box to be taller and put me sitting, made me cross and uncross my legs several times to show to advantage the green silk shoes that matched the peppermint-green satin dress.
    When I sent the photograph home my mother wrote back, aghast, asked was it a streetwalker I had become and who was the insolent boy with me.
    The photographer urged us to think of our sweethearts. We were bound to have sweethearts, what with our skins and our complexions, oodles of sweethearts. Solveig raved about her grandparents, their cottage in the countryside where she spent her holidays and the small lake and the small boat, her grandmother reading her stories of princesses, reading only nice stories, not wanting to scare her, her grandmother combing her hair, and telling her there was gund in it, and gund signified gold, which meant that she would marry a very rich prince. Her grandma, her mother, and herself at Christmastime carrying a small sheep or a small cow to the pastor, to give to baby Jesus and the shepherds, then home for the feast, meatballs, tiny sausages, sliced potatoes with anchovies, and then the big treat that her papa handed out, marzipan pigs with red ribbons on their bellies that would make people richer in the year to come.
    He wanted us to kiss. He said it wasn’t like kissing him, it was just two young girls on the brink of stardom. He saw only riches,
    our names in lights, “It” girls, snapped up by some Hollywood agency and heading for Tinseltown. On the cusp of being discovered, but still we wouldn’t kiss.
    He said if Hollywood seemed too far afield, too outre, he could find us attractive work in our spare time, as he had contacts with the advertising people, all crying out for new faces, fresh faces to model soaps and face creams, or even lingerie in private homes, a tempting nest egg, as he put it.
    “You are a little bit of a scoundrel,” Solveig said. God knows where she had heard the word. He was fuming. He pulled down his shirtsleeves, pulled up the blind, pointed to a photograph of his wife, a sallow woman with a child in her arms. Then he got very businesslike and demanded the deposit, which earlier he had promised to forgo.
    Walking up the hill toward home, the