The Photographer's Wife Page 15

  Barbara knows that she needs to concentrate because from time to time Joan throws a curve-ball and actually asks her a question. Much of the time she manages to get away with a noncommittal “hum”, or a vague, mumbled, “I suppose so,” but not always. Sometimes the questions require specific answers, typically answers that Joan already knows, often answers to questions that have been asked previously, and repeatedly.

  Like now. Joan is sitting on the edge of the bed, touching Barbara’s forehead and waiting for a reply. From some vapour trail left by the passing of Joan’s words, Barbara drags up, “iron pill” and answers, hopefully, “Yes, I took it with lunch.”

  Joan nods, apparently satisfied. “Good,” she says. “Mrs Davis was anaemic after she had the twins but she won’t take pills, says the devil’s in them. Ended up with terrible jaundice, she did! She was yellow as a daffodil, I swear to God. Had palpitations too. All kinds of horrors. They ended up taking her in just so they could force the pills down her. So you need to take them like the doctor said.”

  “I took it,” Barbara says again, even though she is now beginning to doubt herself. These days and nights of bed-rest merge together so seamlessly, so endlessly, that who’s to say if the pill she remembers was yesterday or today?

  Tony was here when she took it, she remembers. He had been about to go to London on a delivery. “Where’s Tony?” she asks, more to clarify the taking of the pill in her own mind than to ascertain his whereabouts.

  “Tony? He’s in London today. You know that. But he’ll be back in time for tea. For a late tea, he said,” Joan replies. “Now, though I’d love to sit and chat to you all afternoon, I’ve got to get down to the fishmongers. Lionel wants a kipper for his tea and if I don’t get there soon there won’t be any left. I’ll probably get us a bit of cod, maybe make a fish pie for the rest of us. How do you feel about fish pie for tea? Not so keen on the kippers myself. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for the smell. Has half the guests complaining and the other half wanting kippers themselves. But Lionel likes ‘em so...”

  Barbara yawns and listens to Joan’s voice fading as she retreats downstairs. She will wait until she hears the front door close and then she’ll see how well she manages the standing position today. Two weeks of bed rest, the doctor said, and though she’s already halfway through, she still can’t stand up without feeling dizzy. And she wants to get up. With each day that passes, her need to get up grows exponentially. She needs to escape the house before Joan drives her, quite literally, insane.

  On days like today, with the weekend approaching and Lionel and Tony home for tea, it’s not so bad. Joan has other ears to bend, other fish to buy and fry. It’s the weekdays Barbara fears – endless yawning empty days when the guesthouse is as empty as a church. Tony and Lionel are absent and Joan, with nothing else to do, sits and talks at her. It’s surprisingly torturous.

  Barbara hears the front door close and swings her legs to the edge of the bed. She needs to be up and about, specifically up and elsewhere by the time the weekend is over. She must talk to Tony about moving to a place of their own too. She needs to escape Donnybrook and, as a couple, now the momentum and trajectory the baby had imposed has vanished, they require some new destination, some fresh objective of their own.

  She grabs the brass knob on the foot of the bed and levers herself upright and waits for the nausea to hit. After twenty seconds, when it has passed, she murmurs, “Not bad.” She’s desperately trying to convince herself that she’s getting better. Her legs still have that jelly feeling but the nausea is less marked, more easily defeated, isn’t it?

  She pulls on her dressing gown and heads down to the next landing where the toilet is situated. She’s supposed to use the potty but she must make herself progress, even though the toilet is the very same toilet where the terrible thing happened.

  She sits on the seat and reads the awful toilet tapestry again and tries not to remember the sensation – the push and the rush; tries not to remember the sound and her scream; tries not to sense the void inside her, a void that says so definitively, so inescapably that she is a failure at the one thing that made Tony want to marry her. Perhaps not even “want” in fact. The one thing that made Tony marry her, then. If only he had known, he had said. And Barbara is pretty certain that she knows what he meant by that. If only they had known, they would never have had to bother with any of this silly marriage business. But married, they are, so she needs to get up and about and somehow make him proud of that fact.

  The next time Barbara wakes up, the daylight has faded and Diane is entering the bedroom. Tony will be home soon. She knows this instinctively, because Diane’s arrival precedes Tony’s arrival as night precedes day.

  “Hello. How are you feeling?” Diane asks, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Barbara’s hand in her own. Her touch is soft, her skin powdery and smooth – a surprising contrast to her tomboy haircut and bushy eyebrows, to her brusk, no-nonsense nature.

  “I’m OK,” Barbara says, stifling a yawn. “I feel a bit better each day. What are you doing here?”

  “I came to check up on you,” Diane says. “I thought you might need the company.”

  Something flutters within Barbara’s chest, a convoluted, conflicted flutter caused by a feeling that somehow, this would be lovely were it to be true, that this would be a little too lovely – abnormally, perhaps dangerously lovely. But it isn’t true. It isn’t true at all. So the lie is cause for both pain and pleasure.

  “What time’s Tony back?” Barbara asks, pointing as distinctly as she dares at the truth here.

  “I don’t know,” Diane replies, but even as she is saying this, the sound of Tony’s motorbike spluttering up the street outside provides a backdrop of irony to her words.

  Barbara sees Diane take note of the sound and sees the effort that she expends in order not to take note of the sound. She sees the willpower required for Diane to stay interested, in this moment, in Barbara. “Are the pills working?” she asks.

  Barbara nods. “A bit. I think. I made it downstairs today. Just for a cup of tea. But don’t tell Joan.”

  “Of course not,” Diane says, now winking and squeezing Barbara’s hand, and whatever it is that fluttered before now flutters again, only this time Barbara pulls her hand away. “That sounds like Tony now,” she says, and they both pause to listen to the front door, then to Joan’s voice greeting him. They struggle to capture the content of his reply but he is too distant and the sound waves are too jumbled by the stairwell for them to make out anything more than the excited lilt of his voice.

  As if to confirm this excitement, Tony is already bounding up the stairs as fast as his clompy motorcycle boots will allow. “Hello!” he shouts, bustling into the room and bringing with him a rush of cold air drifting off his clothes in waves. Tony often shouts when he gets home – the motorcycle, he claims, makes him deaf. He’s wearing his leather motorbike trousers and a vast waxed-cotton jacket. Barbara thinks he looks unreasonably sexy when he’s in his work clobber. She wishes secretly that she could sleep with him while he’s still dressed that way but there’s no way to say that to him and she knows that there never will be a way.

  Diane stands and pecks Tony on the cheek which means that she gets to him before Barbara can. “Good trip to London?” she asks.

  “Yes, I... Actually, I need to have a word with Babs,” Tony tells her, and Barbara watches and sees Diane’s smile maintained even as her eyes fast forward through a whole set of calculations, a whole batch of emotions. “Sure,” she says, breezily. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  Tony closes the door behind her and turns to face Barbara. His eyes look as blue as they ever have, a cold-enhanced, crazed kind of blue.

  Barbara props herself up on pillows and smiles and frowns simultaneously. “What’s happened?” she asks. “Has something happened?”

  Tony licks his lips and sits on the bed exactly where Diane had been sitting only seconds before. Tony too, takes he
r hand in his own and the contact is so very different. Tony’s hands are as cold and heavy as steaks from the butcher’s refrigerator. “Something has happened,” he says. “And I need to talk to you about it.”

  “OK,” Barbara replies, noting that he still hasn’t kissed her and fearing the worst.

  “Now, we don’t have to make a decision immediately. So I don’t want you worrying, especially not at the moment, not with you being tired and everything...”

  “Right.”

  “But I got offered a job today.”

  “Really?”

  “I had to take a package up to London. Film rolls, it was. To the Daily Mirror. And the boss there took me aside and offered me a job. Just like that.”

  “The Mirror newspaper?”

  “Yes. They do the Sunday Pictorial too. Same place. Now it’s just delivering packages. Same as now. But it’s double the pay.”

  “Double?”

  Tony nods. “Almost double. Give or take some small change.”

  “And delivering packages the same as now?”

  “Yes. On a motorbike. A better one, I reckon. I saw some parked outside and they had some nice BSA’s. A couple of them were those new Golden Flashes I like.”

  “Tell me about the job though.”

  “Like I say, it’s just deliveries, really... going and getting rolls of film from journalists and rushing ‘em back to the paper. Stuff like that.”

  “That’s great news, isn’t it?”

  Tony nods and shrugs. “I think so.”

  “We could rent our own place,” Barbara says. “Specially if I get a job as well.”

  “I don’t reckon you’d have to. Not with all I’d be earning. He said it was nine quid a week.”

  “Is there a catch though?” Barbara asks. “I’m sensing a catch.”

  “Not really,” Tony says. “Maybe. Sort of. I suppose. It depends.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s in London.”

  “Yes, you said.”

  “All the trips are to or from London. So I’d need to be in London all the time.”

  “Oh.”

  “So we’d need to move.”

  Once Tony has (finally) kissed her and left, Barbara starts to weigh up the pros and cons of moving back to London. A place of their own. More money. Escape from Joan. Safety from Diane. But London! No seafront, no seagulls, no sea air, no sea anything... Just smog and grime and the same gritty, grim, determined people she grew up with. She feels miserable even imagining it.

  Downstairs she can hear Diane, apparently now in on the news as well, raising her voice. She stands, then, despite the dizziness, moves out to the landing to listen. Both Joan and Diane are talking at once. “Double money’s not to be sneezed at,” Joan is saying. “Not that I’m pushing you out or nothing but it’s not to be sneezed at is all, and we could always use the extra room, you know that. But talk to your father first, he...”

  Alongside this, is Diane’s voice. “... what you want...” she is saying. “But think about all your mates here. Think about the fact you won’t know anyone in London. Think about all the summers on the beach you’ll miss. It’s all very well earning more but being happy is what counts, I reckon. And my guess is that you’ll be lonely as hell in London.”

  “I’ll be with Barbara, won’t I?” Tony tells her. “And she knows people in London as well.”

  “Barbara?” Diane says. “Do you really think that would be enough for you?”

  And Barbara realises that she already knows, has known even before the question was raised, what needs to be done here.

  2012 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

  Sophie sits on the tiny landing, her back against the bannisters, and pulls a sleeve of photographs from the first of the five boxes she has lugged down the ladder.

  The landing is hardly ideal for the job of curating her father’s work but Barbara has made such a fuss about her “tramping dust” over the new carpet that she has had to cave in. Her mother has never been “easy” but as she gets older, the rules and limits she imposes seem to Sophie to be ever more arbitrary, ever more random, and more and more irritating to comply with. But yes, Sophie will look through the photos here on the landing and then she will put the boxes back in the loft and vacuum the floor. And perhaps successful completion of these stages as dictated will bring authorisation for her to go through another five boxes next weekend, and another five the weekend after that. And hopefully, by the time all twenty-five boxes have been done, enough gems will have been unearthed for an exhibition.

  The first sleeve contains a thoroughly disappointing batch of mundane imagery. Some are interesting as historical relics: a nineteen-fifties corner shop with vegetables piled outside, a man on an old motorbike, a baby in puffed, striped knickerbockers (did babies still look like this in the fifties?) but these photos have no art to them. They are snaps. They are not in any way photographer’s photographs. She shuffles quickly through the pile, then returns them to the plastic sleeve and selects another package containing larger prints.

  These are more hopeful, indeed a few images almost make the grade. One, of a small group of farmhouses in the midst of a vast field of wheat, looks more like the American midwest than England. The sky above the farmhouse is complex and really rather beautiful, but the print has a missing corner and, damaged, its value to Sophie will depend on whether she can find the corresponding negative for a reprint.

  The next pack contains a series of what look to Sophie like failed attempts at art photography. A detail of some bricks in a wall, a rusting bath overgrown with weeds, a close up of somebody’s elbow... They remind her of the photos she took herself when she was about ten. Perhaps they are photos she took when she was about ten. This memory, of going out with her father to take photos on a Sunday morning, takes her by surprise. Some muscle deep within, near her heart (perhaps her heart itself) spasms, and she winces and struggles to push her memories of her father from her mind and to blink back the resulting tears, suddenly, surprisingly present in her eyes.

  In the next pack she strikes lucky. These are stark, aggressively architectural shots from the early sixties and she feels a little pride that her father took these. One senses the excitement of a new era: men in sharp suits, women dressed in simple tube-shaped dresses with lopped off sleeves. One particular photo in the pack reminds her of a film. It’s of a woman with a beehive, silhouetted in the window of a new-build home, with sharp angles throwing shadows across an immaculate lawn. She stares at it for a few minutes before the title comes to mind. “Stepford Wives,” she murmurs, putting the photo to one side. The next image actually makes her break into a grin. “Yesss!” she says. “Now that’s more like it, Dad.” The photo shows two overweight women in floral dresses – sisters perhaps – on deck chairs on a pebble beach. Next to each is an old-fashioned, sprung pram complete with floral parasol and behind all of this, a pier. Not Eastbourne, she thinks. Hastings perhaps?

  “Some of these are gorgeous, Mum!” she calls out excitedly.

  There is no reply. Barbara may have gone out.

  By the time Sophie has rooted through all five boxes the light is fading. She is feeling demotivated by the limited flecks of gold she has been able to sift from the mud and a little depressed from the unavoidable melancholy of spending a rainy day looking through her dead father’s work. She hauls the boxes back up into the loft, folds the ladder away and then searches through the house until she finds Barbara in the rain-spotted veranda. “Gosh, you’re knitting,” she says.

  “I am,” Barbara replies without looking up.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you knit.”

  “It’s for the baby,” Barbara says, and Sophie hears accusation in her voice, the accusation of her failure, as a daughter, to produce grandchildren. She quickly analyses this and decides that she’s imagining things. “It’s for the baby,” Sophie repeats in her head. “That’s all she said.”

  “It’s pink,” she comments.
r />   “Yes.”

  “Do they know the sex now, or something? Because the last time I spoke to Jon...”

  “It’s going to be striped,” Barbara says, nodding at the knitting pattern on the coffee table.

  Sophie looks and sees the image of a boy and a girl wearing identical blue and pink striped jumpers. “I hope it doesn’t get gender confused,” she says. “I hope the jumper doesn’t make the baby gay or transsexual or something.” But she knows as soon as she has said it that it’s not the kind of humour that her mother is capable of even recognising as such.

  “What a silly thing to say,” Barbara replies.

  “Joke, Mum.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Not much,” Sophie admits with a sigh. “Six images.”

  “I thought as much.”

  “I’ve only done the first five boxes though. But to be honest, most of these are going to be unusable unless I find the negatives.”

  “Show me.”

  Sophie drags the pouf next to her mother and sits down. Barbara lays down her knitting, fumbles for her bifocals on the chain around her neck and places them on her nose, then takes the photos from Sophie’s grasp.

  “Ah, I remember that,” she says immediately. “I was with him.”

  “Really?”

  “It was in Harlow. It was a new town back then. It didn’t even exist before the war. We went there to see if we could find my father. Tony thought we should tell him about the wedding and Harlow was the last address we could find for him.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you find him?”

  Barbara shakes her head. “The house had changed hands a few times and they had no forwarding address. People moved around a lot after the war, especially builders. They went where the work was.”

  “And the woman? In the window?”