The Photographer of Our House

He appeared in October: an elderly man, tweed cap, with a proper film camera on a strap — not a phone. Every morning at 7:40, give or take a minute, he stopped on the pavement opposite, raised the camera, took exactly one photograph of our house, wound the film with his thumb, and walked on. No menace in him. Ritual in every line of his body.

We watched from the window for a week, cataloguing theories over cereal: surveyor, developer's scout, hobbyist documenting the street. But it was one photograph, one house — ours — every day including Sundays, including the morning of the first frost when he stood there with his breath clouding and did his single frame and left.

On day eleven I went out. He lowered the camera when he saw me coming and waited with a courtesy that dismantled my prepared tone.

I asked why he photographed our house every morning. He looked at me with gentle confusion. 'Your house?' he said, and turned and pointed his cap-brim across the road, at the pavement where he stood each day. 'I photograph where my house was, from my house. I stand in my kitchen.' He said it as one states an address. Then he thanked me — thanked me — 'for keeping the view so nice,' wound his film, and walked up the street with the unhurried gait of a man in his own hallway.

Our terrace was built in the 1990s, that much I knew, on cleared land. The local history group filled in the rest without my finishing the question: the previous row — demolished, gas explosion, decades ago — stood on the OPPOSITE side, and its kitchens faced where our house now stands. Number 14's kitchen window, the archivist calculated from the old plans, would have been on the exact spot of pavement where a man in a tweed cap stands each morning at 7:40.

Number 14 had one fatality in the explosion. An amateur photographer. We do not watch from the window anymore, but I confess I keep the front garden immaculate now. He is, after all, keeping the view.