Terms of Endearment (and Expiration): The Instagram Illusion

The notification chime sounded three times in rapid succession, each one a small silver bell that Henrietta had insisted on installing instead of the standard ping. Della Voss set down her teacup and watched the older woman retrieve her phone from the folds of a cashmere throw that had seen better centuries.

"Well," Henrietta said, her reading glasses perched at an angle that suggested imminent collapse. "Bunty has posted a photograph of herself holding a trout."

"Is that relevant?" Della asked.

"Nothing is relevant, darling. That is the entire point." Henrietta's thumb moved across the screen with the confidence of someone who had dictated columns for three decades. "Relevance died with the society page. What matters now is presence. Visibility. The merest suggestion that one exists."

Callum Voss emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray that bore three cups and a plate of shortbread arranged with the sort of geometric precision that betrayed his bookseller's soul. He set the tray down on the coffee table, which groaned faintly under the weight of accumulated issues of Tatler stretching back to 1992.

"You've both been at it since breakfast," he said, settling into the armchair opposite Della. His voice carried the soft vowels of somewhere north, flattened by years among the leather spines and floorboards of Charing Cross Road. "What's the verdict?"

Henrietta placed her phone face-down on the cushion beside her. The gesture carried ceremony.

"The verdict is that we require content," she said. "Photographic content. Of the sort that suggests happiness, leisure, and a relationship sufficiently established to warrant public announcement."

"Henrietta," Della began.

"I am aware of what I am suggesting." Henrietta's spine straightened, a movement that drew attention to the fact that she was wearing a silk blouse the color of eggshell and a string of pearls that had belonged to her late husband's mother. "I am suggesting that we pretend to be a couple on the internet. I am suggesting this because the alternative is watching the Whitfield estate crumble into a picturesque ruin while you, Della, continue to sell watercolours to women who think they look like Margot Fonteyn."

The afternoon had begun to slide toward evening, and the light through Callum's high-rise windows had taken on the quality of weak tea. Below, London arranged itself into grids and crescents, indifferent to the negotiations occurring forty-two floors above. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance, the sound climbing and falling before dissolving into the general hum of traffic and the distant clatter of a helicopter.

Callum reached for his cup. Steam curled from the surface, carrying the faintly bitter perfume of Earl Grey.

"So," he said carefully, "you want us to post photographs. Together. Looking as though we are, what, in love?"

"Looking as though you are tolerating each other with grace." Henrietta's voice warmed by a single degree. "The bar on these platforms is subterranean. Bunty holds a trout and receives four thousand endorsements. I assure you, the threshold is within reach."

Della watched Callum's face. Something moved behind his expression, not quite amusement and not quite resignation, but a territory adjacent to both.

"What does Della think?" he asked, directing the question across the coffee table.

Henrietta answered for her. "Della thinks I am being theatrical. Which I am. But theatricality has its uses." She picked up her teacup and held it without drinking, the rim hovering near her mouth. "The solicitor confirmed this morning that if the estate cannot demonstrate independent income within the fiscal year, the trustees will force a sale. The proceeds will fund my relocation to a residence the size of a cupboard in Bayswater, where I shall sit in a window and hold trout."

The shortbread sat untouched between them. Through the window, the sun continued its slow descent toward the rooftops of Mayfair, turning the glass of neighboring towers into columns of amber and rose.

Callum set his cup down. The china made a small sound against the saucer, precise and final.

"Alright," he said. "I'll do it. But I should warn you both: I have never taken a photograph in my life that did not look like a police composite."

Henrietta's mouth softened into something that was not quite a smile.

"That," she said, "is precisely why I am here."

---

By the time the hour reached half past four, the apartment had undergone a transformation. Callum had moved the coffee table against the wall, drawn the curtains to filter the light into something more forgiving, and retrieved a tripod from a cupboard that appeared to contain nothing but camera equipment and an alarming number of extension cords.

"Arthur bought it," he explained, as Henrietta examined the device with the critical eye of someone accustomed to professional photographers. "Before he decided photography was a vulgarity. Before he decided most things were vulgarities."

Della sat on the arm of the sofa and watched. The role felt familiar: observer, documenter, the one who noticed what others missed. She had been filling it for years, first at her mother's cluttered house in Leeds, then in the shared studios of art school, then in the liminal space of her twenties where nothing quite fit.

"Phone cameras are simpler," Henrietta announced, attaching her own device to the tripod with the confidence of a woman who had never met a technology she could not master. "The trick is the angle. One must always shoot from slightly above. It is more forgiving of the jaw."

"Henrietta," Della said. "I don't think Callum's jaw requires forgiveness."

Callum glanced up from where he was adjusting the height of the tripod. "Every jaw requires forgiveness," he said. "Mine especially."

Henrietta positioned them by the window, where the filtered afternoon light pooled in a way that suggested gentleness. She instructed Callum to stand with his shoulder against the frame, instructed Della to occupy the adjacent space, and then retreated behind the phone with the authority of a conductor raising a baton.

"Closer," Henrietta commanded.

Della shifted her weight. The gap between her shoulder and Callum's remained substantial.

"I said closer."

"My shoulder cannot occupy the same space as his shoulder, Henrietta. Physics forbids it."

"Physics is a suggestion, darling. Ignore it."

Callum moved first. He took a single half-step that closed the distance to something approaching intimate, then turned his head toward Della with an expression that hovered between apology and inquiry. His eyes were the color of strong tea, and in the amber light they seemed almost translucent.

"Better?" he asked.

Della considered the question. "Acceptable," she said.

Henrietta studied the screen. Her reading glasses had slipped further down her nose, and she peered at them over the frames with an intensity that might have been comical under other circumstances.

"Now," she said. "You must look as though you are enjoying yourselves."

"We are enjoying ourselves," Callum said. "Deeply."

"You are looking as though you are attending a planning meeting for a drainage system."

Della felt something move in her chest. Not quite laughter, but the precursor to it, a loosening of the muscles around her ribs that she had not realized were clenched.

"Try again," Henrietta said, raising the phone. "And this time, try to remember that human beings occasionally experience joy."

Callum looked at Della. Della looked at Callum. Something passed between them, not a word but a recognition, the acknowledgment that they were both standing in a high-rise apartment being directed by an elderly woman who believed trout were the key to financial survival.

Callum's mouth began to twitch.

"Don't," Della said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"Your face is doing something."

"My face is neutral."

"Your face is plotting."

The corner of Callum's mouth curved upward. A small movement, almost imperceptible, but Della caught it the way she caught the first brushstroke on a blank canvas, the moment before intention became form.

"Smile," Henrietta commanded from behind the phone. "Both of you. As though you mean it."

Callum tried. The result was a expression of such determined seriousness that it circled back around to absurdity. His eyebrows drew together, his lips compressed, and the overall effect was of a man attempting to lift a very heavy object with his face.

"Stop," Della said.

"I'm smiling."

"You are grimacing."

"I am smiling with restraint."

"You are smiling as though someone has threatened your books."

Callum's restraint collapsed. The sound that escaped him was not quite a laugh; it began somewhere lower, in the chest, and traveled upward through a series of aborted attempts before emerging as a huff of breath that shook his shoulders.

Della watched the transformation. The careful reserve that Callum wore in public, the bookseller's politeness, the measured distances he maintained between himself and the rest of the world, all of it loosened for a moment. His eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth opened. The laugh, when it fully arrived, was quiet and rough and entirely genuine.

And then it was directed at her.

"The smize," he managed, between breaths that were still catching. "You must smize."

"I don't smize," Della said, but her voice had lost its composure. Something was happening to her face, a treasonous movement of muscles she could not quite control. "Smizing is for people who have opinions about their cheekbones."

"Everyone has opinions about their cheekbones."

"Henrietta has opinions about her cheekbones. I have opinions about other things."

Henrietta lowered the device. Her expression had shifted into something Della had rarely seen: genuine amusement, unperformed and slightly crooked, a smile that did not know it was being witnessed.

"Darling," Henrietta said. "You are smizing."

"I am not smizing."

"You are smizing with considerable commitment."

Callum made a sound. It was the sort of sound that preceded either laughter or surrender, and in this case it proved to be both. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway, traveling through his shoulders and into the frame of the window, which creaked faintly in response.

Through the glass, London continued its indifferent evening. The siren had returned, somewhere closer now, a rising and falling wail that punctuated the laughter like an off-key accompaniment. The helicopter had moved on, but another had taken its place, the blades chopping the air into pieces that drifted down through the curtains and across the three figures arranged by the window.

Della pressed her lips together. The effort was heroic. Her jaw ached with it.

"If either of you says smize again," she said, "I am leaving this apartment and walking directly into the Thames."

"No one is saying smize," Callum said, with the careful diction of a man who was about to say smize.

"I can see it forming."

"It is not forming."

"It is forming behind your teeth."

Henrietta lifted the phone again. The screen displayed two figures standing by a window in filtered amber light, and one of them was laughing with her hand pressed to her mouth, and the other was laughing with his hand pressed to his mouth, and the composition was entirely wrong for a photograph intended to suggest romantic harmony.

But it was, Della thought, a photograph that suggested something true.

"Again," Henrietta said. "But this time, try to look as though you are not auditioning for a comedy."

Callum turned to Della. His eyes were still bright with the remnants of laughter, and the light caught the angles of his face in a way that reminded her of the Dutch masters she had studied at school, the particular quality of attention that painters brought to ordinary moments.

"Right," he said. "No comedy. Pure romance."

"Romance," Della repeated, testing the word as one might test a floorboard.

"Romance," he confirmed.

The word sat between them. It was smaller than she had expected, and more manageable, and entirely without the weight she had assigned to it in her imagination.

Henrietta raised the phone.

The shutter clicked three times. In each frame, Callum and Della stood by the window with their shoulders almost touching, their expressions hovering somewhere between composure and collapse, and the light did what light does in late afternoon: it made ordinary things look as though they mattered.

Callum's hand found hers before she could catalogue the ways in which her body had begun to betray her. The contact was deliberate and cool, his palm against her knuckles, and Della discovered that the floor of the room had become significantly more interesting than any photograph Henrietta might compose.

"Right," he said again, very softly. "Romance."

Henrietta's thumb moved across the screen. She angled the phone, studied the composition with the critical eye of someone who had spent decades arranging society weddings, and made a small sound of professional satisfaction.

"Perfect," she pronounced. "Don't move."

Neither of them moved. The light shifted by degrees across the carpet, gilding the worn patches and leaving the rest in shadow, and somewhere in the house a clock chimed the half hour with the muffled authority of something that had been keeping time since before either of them was born.

The shutter clicked. Once. Twice. A third time, because Henrietta believed in redundancy.

"There," she said, and lowered the phone with the satisfaction of a general who had secured a strategic pass. "Now I require a caption, and I require it to be believable."

Della watched her grandmother retreat toward the escritoire, where a velvet pouch lay waiting beside the fountain pen Henrietta reserved for correspondence of consequence. The older woman's spine was straight, her step precise, and her expression suggested that the photograph had been a minor skirmish in a campaign whose outcome she had never for a moment doubted.

"She's terrifying," Callum murmured, still holding Della's hand.

"She's efficient," Della corrected.

"She's terrifying and efficient, and I am absolutely going to lose this negotiation."

"You were always going to lose this negotiation."

"That's not as comforting as you think it is."

Della looked at him. The light had moved again, and his face had changed with it, the earlier laughter settling into something quieter and more considered. He had the look of a man who had walked into a bookshop expecting to browse and found himself leaving with a first edition he could not afford.

"Comforting was never the objective," she said.

He turned his hand beneath hers so their palms met, a small adjustment that changed everything and nothing. His thumb traced the edge of her knuckle, and Della felt the sensation travel up her arm and lodge somewhere behind her ribs.

"Henrietta," she called, without looking away from him. "What are you going to write?"

The scratch of the fountain pen paused. Henrietta did not turn around.

"Something tasteful," she said. "Something suggestive. Something that will make your mother ring within the hour."

"Mother doesn't ring within the hour," Della said. "Mother rings within the quarter hour, and she rings twice."

"Then I had better make it suggestive indeed."

The pen resumed. Henrietta wrote with the unhurried deliberation of someone who understood that the choice of a single word could alter the course of an evening, a week, a family.

Callum released Della's hand. The absence registered as a change in temperature, a small coldness at her knuckles that had nothing to do with the room.

"Should we," he began, and then stopped, because the question he had been about to ask was one he did not have the right to ask.

"Should we what?"

"Should we warn her."

"Warn her of what? Of Henrietta?"

"Warn your mother that Henrietta is composing something."

Della considered this. She considered the likely tenor of Henrietta's caption, the certainty with which it would arrive in Helena Voss's inbox, and the speed with which it would be interpreted as evidence of an engagement.

"She'll survive," Della said. "Mother has survived worse."

"Name one thing worse."

"Father's first marriage."

Callum made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had been allowed to complete itself. He turned toward the window, and the light found him again, and Della thought about how strange it was to know someone for years and then to see them properly, as though a veil had been lifted from every surface at once.

Henrietta cleared her throat. The sound carried the particular weight of a woman who had been waiting to be noticed and had decided, charitably, to permit herself a small cough before demanding attention.

"It is done," she announced. "Come and see."

They crossed the room together. Their steps did not synchronize, but they fell into a rhythm that suggested they had been walking side by side for longer than either of them could account for.

Henrietta held the phone at arm's length, presenting it as a gallery might present a canvas. On the screen, Della and Callum stood by the window in a wash of amber, and the composition was, against all expectation, precisely what Henrietta had demanded: two people who had learned to laugh in the same key, captured in a moment that suggested more than it disclosed.

Beneath the photograph, in a font that managed to be both elegant and insistent, Henrietta had written a caption.

Della read it twice.

blessed to be spending the afternoon with family and friends. Some partnerships are written in the stars. WhitfieldEstate AutumnLight

"That's not subtle," Della said.

"I did not intend it to be subtle."

"You intended Helena to ring."

"I intended Helena to understand that her son has finally found his footing." Henrietta lowered the phone and met Della's eyes with a directness that belonged to a different century. "Whatever else she chooses to conclude is her own affair."

"And if she concludes an engagement?"

"Then she will ring to congratulate you, and I will accept her congratulations, and the situation will become, through repetition, a fact." Henrietta tucked the phone into the pocket of her cardigan. "Repetition is the foundation of reputation, Della. I did not learn that from society columns. I learned it from sixty years of watching people become what others assumed they were."

Callum had gone very still. Della could see the thought moving behind his eyes, the careful calculation of a man who understood that he had been conscripted into something he had not agreed to.

"Henrietta," he said carefully. "My mother is not going to assume an engagement from a photograph and a caption."

"No, my dear. Your mother is going to assume an engagement from a photograph, a caption, and forty years of hoping." Henrietta's voice softened by exactly one degree, which was the most sentiment she ever permitted herself in company. "She has wanted you settled since you were four years old and announced that you intended to marry the girl who sold programmes at the theatre."

"I was four."

"You were decisive. Some qualities improve with age."

Henrietta pressed the button. The phone emitted the small mechanical sigh of a message sent, and the sound traveled through the room with the finality of a door closing.

Della watched the older woman, and something in her chest, some tightly furled thing she had kept in order for years, began to loosen.

"Now," Henrietta said, smoothing the front of her cardigan with both hands, "we will have tea. And we will wait. And we will not, under any circumstances, answer the telephone until the third ring, because a Voss who has to wait is a Voss who reflects."

"And if mother doesn't ring?"

Henrietta looked at Della over the rim of imaginary spectacles.

"My darling," she said, "your mother has been waiting for this photograph since before you knew how to hold a teacup. She will ring. She will ring, and she will weep, and she will say something perfectly awful about the state of your hair, and then she will ask if Callum has finally settled down."

The words landed with the precision of a thrown dart.

From somewhere deeper in the house, the telephone began its quiet electronic pulse, muffled by walls and distance, the sound of a line opening onto something inevitable.

The sound cut through the quiet of the room, three rings pulsing soft as a heartbeat, and Della crossed the carpet before the third had finished. Her fingers found the receiver, and she lifted it to her ear with the careful breathlessness of someone accepting a prize.

"Mother."

There was a silence on the line, the kind that held weight, and then a sound that was unmistakably Helena Voss drawing breath the way one does before weeping.

"Oh, love," Helena said, and her voice was rougher than usual, smoker's rasp thickened to something almost unrecognisable. "Oh, Della, love, I saw it. I saw the photograph. I have been staring at it for what feels like an hour, and I cannot make my hands stop shaking."

Della pressed her free hand flat against the wall, feeling the cool plaster through her fingertips, the solidity of a house that had held her family for generations.

"Your hair looked beautiful," Helena continued, and there it was, right on schedule, the perfectly awful thing. "Absolutely beautiful. Your father would have had opinions about that hat, but we shall not consult him."

A sound escaped Della that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob, something between, something that lived in the throat and asked nothing of the world.

"Mother, I need to tell you something."

"You are engaged."

"I am engaged."

"I have known since Tuesday." Helena's voice was calm now, almost matter-of-fact, the way she always became when delivering news she had long since made peace with. "Your Aunt Margaret rang me in a state because Arthur rang her, and Margaret rang me because she could not possibly contain it. I have had four hours to become accustomed to the idea. I rang Callum's mobile and got his voicemail, and I have composed a speech I shall deliver at the wedding."

"Mother."

"I have prepared remarks about his hands. He has lovely hands, Della. I noticed when he was eight and broke your father's greenhouse. Steady hands. Good for painting, though he will not paint. Good for other things."

"Mother, please."

"I am allowed remarks. I am the mother of the bride. Beatrice will have remarks. I shall have better ones."

From across the room, Henrietta had drifted closer, moving with the unhurried precision of a woman who knew exactly how near to stand without appearing to eavesdrop. Della could feel her there, a presence like the scent of tea, comforting and faintly astringent.

"Tell her I am here," Henrietta said, her voice low enough not to carry into the receiver. "Tell her I should like to speak with her, if she has a moment."

"Mother, Lady Whitfield is here."

A pause. Then a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a sob, might have been Helena Voss discovering that her cigarette had gone out and lighting another with the patience of the long-suffering.

"Put her on," Helena said. "Put her on at once. I have been waiting twenty years to speak with that woman about a hat, and I am not wasting the opportunity."

Della crossed the room and pressed the receiver into Henrietta's waiting hand, and the older woman's fingers closed around it with the care of someone accepting a christening cup.

"Helena," Henrietta said, and her voice was warm in a way Della had not heard before, warm in the way of old friendship, of shared history, of years that had passed without ceremony. "My dear. I believe congratulations are in order."

"Lady Whitfield," Helena's voice came thin and tinny through the speaker, but unmistakable. "I have been composing objections for two decades. You have ruined them all."

"I have a talent for that."

"You have ruined my objections and my speech and my entire capacity for surprise. I sat in that kitchen this morning and told myself I would not hope. I have not hoped for anything since Arthur's father died and the world became a quieter place. And now I have hoped, and I find I cannot remember how to do anything else."

Henrietta lowered herself into the chair by the window, the receiver pressed close, and her free hand found the arm of the chair and rested there with the stillness of someone listening to music only she could hear.

"You hoped," Henrietta said. "That is the correct verb. And Della has chosen well. I would not have permitted anything less."

"You permitted nothing. You simply watched."

"I watched. I approved. The distinction is technical."

Della stood in the centre of the room and felt the conversation move around her like weather, like weather she had somehow summoned without intending to. Her mother was weeping in a kitchen in the north of England. Lady Whitfield was sitting in a chair in the south, holding a telephone and the future in equal measure.

"I should like to meet you properly," Helena said. "Not on a telephone. Not through a son. I should like to sit across from you and drink whatever dreadful thing you drink and discuss the hat."

"I drink Darjeeling," Henrietta said. "First flush. And the hat was my grandmother's."

"Then I shall wear something equally foolish, and we shall be two old women in impossible hats, and our children shall have to bear it."

"They shall have to bear a great deal."

"They shall. They shall bear it beautifully. Della has always borne things beautifully. It is her one flaw, though I have learnt not to mention it."

Henrietta laughed, a sound that came from somewhere unexpected, somewhere deep, and Della realised she had never heard it before.

"Then we are agreed," Henrietta said. "We shall meet. We shall drink tea. We shall pretend we had nothing to do with any of it."

"We had everything to do with it."

"We had less than we imagine. But we shall accept the credit. It is what mothers do."

The conversation lasted another quarter of an hour, drifting through subjects that mattered and subjects that did not, touching on Callum's hands and Della's hat and the particular shade of cream that would be appropriate for a June wedding, and when it ended, Henrietta set the receiver down with the reverence of someone closing a hymnal.

Then she looked up at Della.

"Your mother," she said, "is a remarkable woman."

"I know."

"She said something about a greenhouse."

"Callum was eight. He was aiming at a wasp."

"He was aiming at a wasp and broke your father's greenhouse, and your father forgave him, which means your father saw something in him that even Callum has not yet learnt to see. That is a considerable inheritance."

Della crossed the room and sat on the footstool at Henrietta's feet, the way she had sat as a girl, the way she had sat before the world required her to sit in chairs meant for grown women.

"Lady Whitfield," she said, and her voice was smaller than she would have liked. "Thank you. For the photograph. For the announcement. For everything."

Henrietta's hand came to rest on Della's hair, the touch light as paper, light as the touch of someone who had not allowed herself such gestures in years and was not entirely certain of the form.

"My darling," she said. "I have been waiting a very long time to do something useful with a hat. You have given me an occasion. We shall all have occasions. We shall have so many occasions that we shall hardly have time for the ordinary days, and the ordinary days are where the living happens."

Outside, the light was changing, sliding toward the amber of late afternoon, and somewhere in the distance a church bell marked the hour with the unhurried confidence of something that had been marking time for centuries. Della closed her eyes and let the sound wash over her, and she thought of Callum in his bookshop, of her mother in her kitchen, of Arthur somewhere being terribly proud in his quiet way, of Beatrice planning menus with the focus of a general.

She thought of her father, who had been gone five years now, who had never met Callum but who had, apparently, seen something worth forgiving in an eight-year-old boy with a stone in his hand and a wasp in his sights.

"We should ring him," Della said. "Callum. He should know that mother wept and that Lady Whitfield laughed and that we are all of us apparently doomed to become our parents."

"We shall ring him," Henrietta agreed. "But first we shall have the tea I mentioned. And we shall sit in the quiet for a moment. The quiet is important. The quiet is where the new things grow."

Della did not argue. She sat on the footstool with her hands in her lap and the afternoon settling around them like a shawl, and she waited for the kettle to boil, and she did not reach for her telephone, and she did not check her notifications, and she let the quiet be quiet.

It was, she discovered, quite enough.