The Photographer's Wife Read online

  “I’ve no idea. She was just a woman in a house. I spotted her and your father took a photo.”

  “Right. I like the backstory though. The hunt for Granddad.”

  Barbara wrinkles her nose at some memory, then hands the photo to Sophie revealing the next image, a row of pop-eyed policemen with lopsided helmets, struggling to hold back a crowd of women.

  “A Beatles concert,” Barbara says.

  “Really? I thought they all looked a bit hysterical.”

  “That one’s crying,” Barbara says, pointing. “Look. They used to get themselves in such a state. I never really understood it myself. I mean, Ringo was cute but...”

  “So, this was when, mid sixties?”

  “Sixty three, I think.”

  “The year Jon was born then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Dad sent to cover the concert? Do you think I’ll find more?”

  Barbara shakes her head. “He was still riding packages around back then. He will have been sent there to pick up some rolls of film, I expect. From the proper photographer. But he always had his camera with him.”

  “If this was sixty three, you were at home with the baby, right?”

  “I’m not sure if this was before or after. But it was around that time.”

  “Well, either way, you would have been at home with the baby. Either within or without...”

  “I suppose so,” Barbara says as she moves onto the next image.

  “Do you think I’ll find a box of negatives at some point?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t you use these?”

  “Not if I want to do really big prints,” Sophie says. “Or at least, not without specialist scanning and restoration work.”

  “I would assume that they’re up there somewhere.”

  “Oh, you know Diane?” Sophie says. “I found her on the web. She’s in Portland in America apparently. She has a photography site. I sent her an email but she never answered.”

  “No, well…”

  “The last update to the web page was in 2009 though.”

  “Are these the only ones you liked?” Barbara asks, definitively refusing the Diane detour.

  “They were pretty mundane for the most part.”

  “As I say, I’m not surprised.”

  “But I only looked in the first five boxes. There’s another twenty to go. I’m just assuming that all the good ones are grouped together somewhere.”

  “I think you may be disappointed.”

  “Mum...” Sophie whines.

  “He didn’t take as many good shots as you perhaps think he did. That’s all I’m saying. And the good ones got used. You already know about the good ones. Everyone does.”

  “Can’t you be even a tiny bit enthusiastic, here? Would that really be too much to ask?”

  “I’m just being realistic, love.”

  “And what about the Pentax tour? If I could find those...”

  “You won’t find those.”

  “But if I could, there must be hundreds. He was away for months, wasn’t he?”

  “Three weeks. But you won’t find any photos from that tour.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  “Because you burned them?”

  “You know what happened.”

  “But I might find the negatives.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Because you burned those as well?”

  “I really don’t remember, dear,” Barbara says, handing back the pictures. “It was thirty years ago.”

  “How can you not remember something like that?”

  “Because it was thirty years ago!”

  “I think you remember perfectly well,” Sophie says, aware that she’s getting carried away, aware now that she’s saying the one thing she promised herself she must not say but unable to stop herself lobbing the grenade into the room. “I think you’re just too ashamed to admit that you burned the largest volume of work that one of Britain’s best photographers ever took.”

  “Yes!” Barbara says angrily. “Yes, you’re right. I probably am. And yes, I probably did!”

  “But how, Mum? How could you have done that? I mean, I know that you were–”

  Barbara stands.

  “Mum. Don’t go off in a huff. I didn’t mean anything.”

  Barbara walks to the doorway, then pauses, her hand on the door-jamb. “He wasn’t a photographer to me, Sophie,” she says. “He was my husband! And he had just died! He went to France to take photos and came back in a coffin. Now I don’t expect you to have any idea what that feels like but...”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie says, finally wrestling her voice under control and actually managing to sound sorry. “I just want to understand. Surely losing him should have made you want to keep his photos all the more?”

  “Should? How dare you tell me how I should have felt when my husband had just died.”

  “Would then,” Sophie says.

  “I think you should leave now,” Barbara says, already turning and vanishing into the shadows of the house.

  Sophie blows out through pursed lips, then stands, slides the six photos into an envelope and follows her mother indoors. She finds Barbara wrestling the upright Dyson to the top of the stairs. “Here. I’ll do that, Mum. I said I would.”

  “Just go home, please.”

  “Mum, I wasn’t–”

  “I find you very hurtful today. It’s bad enough having you digging through all this stuff but when you then start having a go at me about things that happened thirty years ago, things you know nothing about...”

  “Mum, I know exactly what you went through but…”

  “You youngsters, you think you know everything, but you know nothing, Sophie, nothing.”

  “Mum, I think you’re being a bit–”

  “Don’t think you know what battles I had to fight to get where I am today.”

  “Battles? Now you’re definitely slipping into melodrama, Mum.”

  “Don’t think you can even imagine what suffering we had to go through, what secrets we had to hide... You think you know everything, but you know nothing.”

  “I know you Mum. And I know when you’re making yourself a self-pity sandwich.”

  “How dare you! You don’t know me. You don’t know anyone. Because that’s what life is. It’s thinking you know everything and thinking you know everyone, and finding out, the older you get, that you didn’t – that you had it all wrong. Ah, you’ll find out one day!”

  “Mum, just calm down. All I was saying…”

  “And don’t tell me to calm down. Just go, please. Go!”

  “But Mum, I...”

  “GO!” Barbara shouts. She kicks at the Dyson and it roars into action, and Sophie, knowing when she’s beaten, returns to the hallway and reaches for her coat.

  Sophie sits on the train and watches as Eastbourne station slides from the window. There’s something dream-like about train travel, she reckons. She feels like she’s dreaming about herself sitting on a train.

  Two overweight girls in pink tracksuits with visibly pierced navels burst into the carriage chewing gum and talking loudly, talking spectacularly, determined that everyone should benefit from their wit.

  “... jus’ fucking tell ‘im,” one is saying. “Jus’ fuckin’ tell ‘im that you don’t fuckin’ fancy ‘im.”

  “Haha,” her friend/sister/cousin says. “I might just do ‘im first. I ‘avent ‘ad a shag since Wayne went off with that slag Denise.”

  Sophie prays that the girls will continue their way along the carriage, but instead, one of them points at the seats across the aisle from her and says, “‘ere?”

  Sophie waits until they reach a station called Polegate where she has seen many girls like these two get on and off, but when, with Polegate receding behind them, one of the girls starts playing music on her phone (Rihanna maybe?) Sophie gives up. Her dream of Sophie on a train has been pierced. It has been turned in
to a nightmare. So she waits until the train reaches Lewes (she must not let the girls know they have won) and then moves through to the next carriage and seats herself opposite an incredibly fit looking man in a crisp, white shirt and tie. Unfortunately, he barely glances at her before returning to his crossword.

  Finally seated in silence, she allows herself to think about her mother. Of course, she shouldn’t have mentioned the Pentax tour. The Pentax tour, along with a few other subjects (namely her grandfather vanishing after the war) must never be mentioned. It’s an unspoken rule, something they grew up simply knowing. Perhaps that knowledge is inscribed in their DNA.

  And she had foreseen the danger, had promised herself that she wouldn’t mention it, not at least until she had finished searching the archives. So why, she wonders now, as she glances at the young man’s suited thigh, did she do that? Why does she always have to run her tongue over the most sensitive tooth until it screams?

  Of course, she’s justified in a way. If the Pentax photos did exist in some form, then they alone could provide the justification for the entire exhibition.

  Just think! An entire new body of never before seen work. The first (and last) continental photos ever taken by one of Britain’s most famous photographers, some of them perhaps even taken on the day of his death. Not to be morbid, but they could end up defining the exhibition. Hidden Marsden, she thinks. The Missing Marsdens, perhaps. Marsden: The Final Farewell.

  But what if her mother is telling the truth? What if no trace of the tour exists? What if she really did burn all of the negatives? But even then she owes it to her to at least be up-front about it, Sophie reckons. She could at least tell Sophie, once and for all, what happened.

  And now Sophie has upset her and that’s something that could last until she apologises, until she repents, until she grovels on hands and knees. She will pay for today and she knows it. Barbara can sulk for years if need be. It could even prevent her accessing the rest of the boxes. She needs to get Jon on her side. Her mother listens to Jon. Jon will talk her down.

  God! Jon! Her mother will try to phone Jon immediately and if Sophie doesn’t get there first... She pulls her phone from her pocket and chooses Jon’s name from the contacts list.

  “Hi Sophie,” Jon says, answering almost immediately. “I’m on the other line. I’ll call you back.”

  “Is it Mum?”

  “Yes, it’s Mum.”

  “But I need to talk to you, Jon.”

  “I can imagine. I’ll call you back.”

  Damn! Sophie runs a hand across her face and groans, soliciting a peek from the guy with the newspaper. “Sorry,” she murmurs.

  He smiles vaguely and shrugs, then lowers his gaze to the newspaper again, and Sophie allows herself a longer glimpse. There’s something incredibly sexy about the starched whiteness of his shirt, the silky grey tie… something about the way his clothes envelope his body, the way his wrist appears from thick double cuffs. He’s gym built underneath, Sophie thinks. That’s why he looks so good. He’d make a good model.

  Sophie remembers guiltily that she’s dating Brett, and forces herself to look away, forces herself instead to think about her mother talking to Jon, right now.

  He spoke to her in his special, older brother voice, a voice that says, “I find you trying, sister. I find our mother trying too, but I find you more so. But I shall deign, as ever, to be reasonable in the midst of your unnecessary, self-inflicted drama because I am the older brother. I am the sensible one.” All of this was contained in his tone of voice and Sophie is pretty sure that she’s not imagining it.

  Jon was different when they were younger. As a kid, he had been a cheeky daredevil. No one ever roller skated faster than Jon. No one ever climbed higher or grazed his knees more often. As an adolescent, no one could cheek you more wittily – so wittily and so subtly, that you didn’t realise what had happened until it was over. And even then you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  But all of that changed when he met Judy. Smiling, shallow, manipulative, artless Judy.

  It’s not that Sophie has any reason to dislike Judy, she has never been anything except polite to her. It’s what Judy has done to Jon that Sophie can’t stand, the way she winds him around her little finger, the way she never says what she wants (and thus always passes for a wholesome queen of cool) while simultaneously always getting exactly what she wants all the same, through low level, discreet, grinding warfare. “Do you think it’s a good idea to be eating so much dairy?” Judy would say. “Another yoghurt? Really? OK... Well, go ahead!” “Are you sure you don’t want to try soya in your tea?” she would ask. And just six months down the line, Jonathan announced that he was vegan, and Sophie knew that this was not because he wanted to be vegan and it wasn’t in any way because he believed in veganism either. It was simply because being vegan was so much less tiring than having to hear Judy bang on about dairy products all day long.

  And then there was Judy’s “art”. Jon had reasonable taste until he met Judy. Sophie knows that he hated Judy’s horrific paintings at first sight. She knows this because Jon told her so after his first ever date with her. “The only thing that might be difficult,” he had said, “is that she thinks she’s a painter. And she really isn’t.”

  And Judy did think that she was a painter and, as ever, Jon’s belief system proved to be the most malleable thing around. Now he claims to “believe in her” as an artist and denies ever having said otherwise. “Nope,” he says. “Nope, her art was one of the things that attracted me to her. Definitely.” He believes in her to the point of having let her give up work so that she can “paint.” To the point of subbing her exhibitions and paying for her framing. And to the point of expecting his friends and family to turn up to Judy’s toe-curlingly amateur private views (the horror!), expecting Sophie to look at what amounts to shit-on-canvas and be full of praise.

  Sophie isn’t sure if the real Jon is still hiding somewhere deep within, waiting for the thought police to vanish in order to show himself, or if Judy has managed to definitively obliterate him. Perhaps she will never see Jon again. Perhaps she just needs to get used to that idea.

  Her phone rings, so she glances at the cute guy, sends him an apologetic shrug, and answers.

  “Oh, well done,” Jon says. “You’ve done yourself proud this time.”

  “I...”

  “I thought you wanted Mum’s help with the exhibition.”

  “Help? Now that would be a fine thing.”

  “All the work is in her loft. How do you think you’ll get to it unless you keep her on-side? I know it’s a challenge for you, but you have to actually be nice to her.”

  “I wasn’t being un-nice, Jon. You know what she’s like. I was just trying to find out if she thought any of the Pentax photos were–”

  “Do you ever think of anyone but yourself?” Jon interrupts.

  “That’s unfair. I’m doing this for all of us. And for Dad.”

  “No you’re not. You’re doing it for you. But that’s not my point, Sophie. My point is that he died on that tour. He died, so just try to think how that must have felt for Mum. Try to imagine how she felt about the fact that that tour took the last three weeks of his life away from her.”

  “But I–”

  “I haven’t finished,” Jon says. Not having finished is one of his specialities. Sophie rolls her eyes.

  “How do you think Mum felt about never being able to say goodbye to him? This is painful stuff, Sophie. It’s painful for Mum and it’s painful for me. Those boxes are all we have left of him and you’re lugging them down from the attic and spreading them all over the floor higgledy-piggledy and leaving everything in a state when you leave.”

  “I did not leave the house in a state and if that’s what Mum’s saying...”

  “Mum didn’t say anything. I’m just imagining.”

  “Oh, come on, Jon. Higgledy-piggledy? And that’s supposed to not be Mum?”

  “She didn’t say
anything.”

  “She so did.”

  “Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” Jon says. “The point is...”

  “It does matter. Because she’s lying to turn you against me. I’m going to phone her and...”

  “You’re not going to phone her,” Jon says. The older brother voice is back and it’s a voice Sophie finds surprisingly difficult to resist. “You’re going to chill out and then you’re going to come to dinner here next month so we can smooth everything out.”

  “I’m sorry, Jon, but I don’t want to come to dinner and I don’t want to wait a month. I want to go through my father’s photographs and they’re in our mother’s attic.”

  “Trust me. The best way to ensure that happens is for you to come here and for us to have a nice family dinner together like civilised adults. You know how this works, Soph. You know how Mum works.”

  Sophie sighs deeply. “If I do, will you back me up? Will you be on my side?”

  “Your side? This isn’t a war. And if that’s how you feel then you need to...”

  “About the exhibition. Will you back me up. About it being a good idea? Will you tell her you think she should help me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I’m not sure if it is a good idea to be honest.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, come on. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. An intuition.”

  “An intuition?” Sophie repeats. Because if the words higgledy piggledy had her mother’s footprints all over them, intuition can only be something Judy has said, a suspicion confirmed by Jonathan’s next phrase.

  “We just feel that you’re setting yourself up for a fall,” he says. “We just feel that some things are better left as they are.”

  “What things are better left as they are?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Right,” Sophie says, now almost as angry as when she left her mother’s. “And who’s we anyway?” She has always hated Jon’s “we.” It has always seemed so much less personal, so much less honest than, “I.”