The Photographer's Wife Read online

  “We?”

  “You said, ‘we feel.’”

  “Oh, Jude and I.”

  “And Jude has an opinion on this because…?”

  “She is in the art world, Sophie,” Jonathan says. “She knows about this stuff.”

  Sophie’s mouth drops. She pulls an astonished face, safe in the knowledge that Jonathan can’t see her.

  “Sophie?” he prompts.

  But Sophie is speechless. Or rather, nothing that she can think of to say would be acceptable here and for once, she manages to hold her tongue.

  “Sophie?” Jonathan says. “Can you hear me?”

  And this gives Sophie an idea. She is in a train, after all.

  “Jonathan?” she fakes.

  “Yes?”

  “Jonathan?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Jonathan. Oh, look, I’m in the train. I don’t know if you can hear me but I can’t hear you. I’ll call you back from a landline.”

  She switches her phone off and glances back at the guy opposite. He is running a beautifully manicured finger around the contour of his lips as he studies his crossword.

  As the train rounds a bend, a brief ray of sunlight sweeps through the carriage and the blonde hairs on the back of his hand shine in the sunlight and his diamante cufflink sends out little morse signals of rainbow colour. Sophie imagines sitting on his lap and running her hands across his chest, slipping her arms around that crisp collar. She imagines his beautiful hands undoing her blouse. She wonders if Brett will be home. She could do with a shag. Yes, that’s what she needs.

  1954 - Peckham, London.

  “Oh, hello,” Barbara says, fumbling with a lock of hair that keeps falling into her eyes. “Gosh. I was working so... Come in, come in!”

  Diane is standing on the threshold of their tiny two-room apartment looking pretty and relaxed and summery in a pleated halter-neck dress. Barbara, in skirt and pullover, with her hair tied back, feels dowdy and unattractive and flustered.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she says, glancing nervously around the room at the piles of clothing in various stages of assembly. “But as I say...”

  “It’s fine,” Diane says. “You should see my place!”

  “And I’ve no idea when Tony will be home.”

  “That doesn’t matter either,” Diane says. “It’s you I came to see!”

  Barbara senses that she blushes at this and hates herself for it.

  “How have you been?” Diane asks. “How’s London been treating you?”

  Barbara is scooting around the room, reuniting all of the various piles of textiles into one single, unstable pile that she will have to re-divide later once Diane has gone. “I’m fine,” she says. “I feel a bit like I’ve become my mother, but other than that...”

  “Because?”

  “Oh, just all of this,” Barbara says, waving her arm in a gesture that is meant to encompass the small dingy room, the piles of cloth, the sewing machine, the tiny flecks of thread that stick to everything like dog hair.

  Diane brushes the fluff from the velvet of the armchair before asking, “May I?”

  “Of course! Of course! Please. Sit down.”

  “It must be nice to be able to work from home though?” Diane says, but from the perspective of someone at college, someone who doesn’t appear to have to work at all Barbara is unable to see how this can be a genuinely held opinion.

  Diane spreads out her dress and sits and crosses her legs. She has lost a lot of weight this last year, Barbara reckons, and she wears more makeup these days too. If she just did something with those eyebrows, she’d look a lot like Suzy Parker. “That’s a lovely dress,” Barbara tells her. “Quite a change for you though, isn’t it?”

  “I know!” Diane says. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s my room-mate’s. Her folks have a dress shop in Oxford and she has more outfits than she knows what to do with. Luckily we’re exactly the same size.”

  “That is lucky,” Barbara says. “So, how is art college? Are you enjoying it?”

  “It’s a lot more work than I expected,” Diane says. “That’s for sure.”

  “Really?”

  Diane nods. “Coursework, reading assignments, life drawing classes, essays…”

  “You’re brave,” Barbara says. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “My room-mate is a help. She’s a second year, so when I get stuck I can ask her.”

  “She sounds like the perfect room mate,” Barbara says.

  “She is. Marie is great.” Diane smiles broadly at Barbara now, then scans the room, and Barbara imagines seeing the scene through Diane’s eyes and feels a little embarrassed, then a little angry that, for no reason she can identify, Diane ends up floating around art college in designer dresses while she sits in what is little more than a bedsit sewing shirt sleeves all day. She wonders how that came to pass. She wonders where she went wrong.

  “And how’s Tony?” Diane asks.

  “He’s fine. He’s a bit tired and grumpy at the moment to be honest, but don’t tell him I said so.”

  “He can be like that. I know.”

  “He’s had a lot of long trips recently. He was in Manchester on Monday and Dorset yesterday, then Manchester again today. I think he expected shorter ones, more around London.”

  “What’s he in Manchester for?”

  Barbara shrugs. “To get a package, I expect. Or drop one off. I don’t really know what’s in them. I’m not even sure Tony knows. But it’s newspaper stuff. Films and prints and things. Actually, that sounds like him now. That’s lucky.”

  The door to the apartment squeaks open and Tony stomps into the room, downs his crash helmet, then pulls off his gloves. He looks from Barbara to Diane and back again, then says, “This is a surprise. What are you doing here, Diane?”

  There’s something fake in his tone, something specifically about the way he said her name that makes Barbara wonder, just for an instant, if this wasn’t pre-arranged.

  “I just thought I’d drop in. How was Manchester?” Diane asks. If they are lying, she’s much better at it than Tony.

  “Raining,” Tony says. “It’s always raining in Manchester. Luckily I got sun all the way home, so I dried out.”

  “Shall I make tea?” Barbara asks. “Are you staying to eat with us?”

  “Of course she is,” Tony says. “And then we’re going to go out for a drink, aren’t we? There’s a lovely little boozer down the road.”

  “Are you sure, Barbara?” Diane asks. “Are you sure it’s no trouble?”

  And Barbara wants to reply that staying for tea is no trouble at all, but that she’d really rather not go out for a drink afterwards. She’s tired. And she resents the fact that all it takes is Diane’s appearance and suddenly Tony has the money and time to go out on the town. He hasn’t taken her for a drink in months. “It’s just omelette and chips,” she says.

  “Have you got enough?”

  She nods. “I got half a dozen eggs this morning.”

  “OK then,” Diane says, beaming at her. “Thanks. Mum says they’re really hard to come by in Eastbourne.”

  “Eggs?”

  “My Mum said that too,” Tony agrees.

  “It’s because they came off ration,” Barbara explains. “So everyone’s going a bit mad with them. But you can get them in London just about anywhere. You just have to go first thing.”

  She removes the final pile of sleeves from the dining table and adds it to the tottering heap in the corner, then heads to the kitchen end of the room and switches on the Baby Belling. As she starts to peel and chop the potatoes, she listens to Tony and Diane talking behind her and feels a little jealous at their instant intimacy and at the way the tone of their conversation shifts as soon as she leaves it.

  “I’ve just been to an exhibition,” Diane is telling Tony now. A case in point. Because Diane could perfectly well have told her about the exhibition if she had wanted to.

  “Ca
naletto,” she continues. “He was Venetian, so there were all these beautiful paintings of Venice and the canals – incredible skies and reflections on the water.”

  “I saw a photo-reportage on Venice in the Sunday Post,” Barbara offers, over her shoulder. “It looks beautiful. I’d love to go there.”

  “Yes,” Diane says, “I’m sure it’s great.” Then, to Tony, she continues, “He liked to paint outdoors, whereas most of the masters did their work in a studio. They say that’s why his work feels so much more real. Why there’s so much light in them.”

  “Sounds really interesting,” Tony says.

  “It is. You should take Barbara. It’s at the British Museum.”

  “We don’t have much time for exhibitions, do we Babs?”

  “No,” Barbara laughs. “Not much.”

  “I don’t have much time for day trips to Manchester,” Diane says. “At least you’re getting around. And least you’re seeing the country. I’ve never even been up north.”

  “I suppose so,” Tony says, doubtfully.

  “And I have to write five thousand words on Canaletto by Friday,” Diane says, “so...”

  “Five thousand?” Barbara asks. “How many pages is that?”

  “About twenty, I think,” Diane says.

  “What will you say?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll probably get a book from the library and see what they say first and then take it from there.”

  “But you’re enjoying college, then?” Tony asks, groaning now as he strains to pull off his boots. “Sorry if my feet smell.”

  “They don’t,” Diane says. “And yes. College is great. It’s completely different from school.”

  “That’s good.”

  “They treat you much more like adults. And the people there are more fun, more interesting than at school. But it’s hard work too. I have to do a lot of things I’m not very good at.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as drawing and–”

  “Your drawings are OK,” Tony says.

  “Well, I thought so too until I saw everyone else’s. And landscape painting. I hate oil paints. They’re impossible to do anything with. And writing. Which I’m useless at. And being a girl, I feel a bit like all eyes are on me.”

  “Are you the only girl, then?”

  “No. There are two of us in my class. And twenty men.”

  “What about photography?” Tony asks.

  “St Martin’s isn’t big on photography,” Diane says. “They don’t consider it proper art, I don’t think.”

  “No one does, really. It’s a shame.”

  “In America they do, apparently. A bit anyway. And what about you? Are you still taking pictures?”

  “Yes,” Tony says. “Yes, quite a lot.”

  Barbara frowns and wonders how it could be possible that she doesn’t know this, or if perhaps it isn’t true – if perhaps it’s an invention that reveals that Tony feels as insecure in the face of Diane’s art-college evolution as she does. “I’ll show you some,” Tony says. Barbara pauses peeling potatoes and looks over her shoulder to see where Tony keeps these pictures she has never even heard of. He pulls a folder from behind the sideboard. “I’m having trouble with the camera though,” he says. “It keeps getting stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Yes. So you can’t turn the knob to move the film on.”

  “Show me,” Diane says, so Tony reaches in his saddle bag and pulls the old Rolleiflex out.

  “Oh, yes, that is stuck,” Diane says. “You need a darkroom, really. How thick are these curtains?”

  “Not very,” Tony says. “In the bedroom maybe.”

  Barbara glances back and watches as they disappear from view. Feeling more and more angry but not quite sure why, she continues to peel potatoes, dropping them ever more violently into the strainer, but when she hears giggles coming from the bedroom, she can take it no more. She dries her hands on a tea towel and moves to the arch between the bedroom and the lounge. The bedroom curtains have been closed but just enough light remains to see what is happening. Tony and Diane are on their knees beside the bed, their heads beneath the quilted bedspread.

  “There,” Diane is saying, softly. “Feel there. It’s a bit of paper or film or something stuck in the cog.”

  “I can’t feel anything.”

  “There. To the left of the roller. Give me your hand.”

  Tony snorts with laughter.

  “There, see?” Diane says.

  “Oh yes... I think... yes.”

  “Gosh, your hands are really cold,” Diane says.

  “It’s because of being on the bike.”

  “Anyway, you need a pin or something. Or a needle. So we can fish that out.”

  “Perhaps you’d like me to get you one!” Barbara says loudly, and she sees with satisfaction that both Diane and Tony jump at the proximity of her voice.

  Tony withdraws from beneath the bedspread looking flushed.

  “Um, yes. That would be good, um, sweetheart,” he says.

  The camera fixed and dinner eaten, Tony shows Diane (and incidentally, Barbara) his photos. They are shots of brick buildings and rusty railings, of anonymous strangers queuing for buses, of men with sandwich boards advertising the Evening Standard, of stray dogs digging through dustbins in Salford… The truth of the matter is that Barbara doesn’t understand these photos. She can’t see what the point of taking such photos might be, nor can she imagine who would want to look at them. She certainly wouldn’t want any of them on her walls.

  Diane, for her part, declares them “not bad” if lacking a little “heft or drama” whatever that might mean. She promises to bring Tony some books from the library that she says will “inspire” him.

  And then Tony asks Barbara if she is “coming to the pub” with them and she replies that, no, she doesn’t think so, and just like that, without a struggle, they are gone.

  Barbara watches from the window as they head down the dimly lit street until they vanish beyond the puddle of light cast by the street lamp. She wonders why she declined to go with them. It was something to do with the fact that Tony asked her, to do with the fact that he didn’t assume that she was coming. That seemed to make her presence optional in a way that she hadn’t even imagined possible and she had felt insulted by that and somehow obliged to refuse in order to mark her disapproval. Not that she’s sure anyone even noticed.

  They left less than five minutes ago but she is already regretting her decision, in fact, she’s coming to think that it’s one of the most stupid decisions that she has ever made, that she was perhaps manipulated to react in exactly the way she did. If she had any idea which pub they were heading to, she would run and join them right now. But she doesn’t know and, in some strange way, she’s enjoying feeling righteous, enjoying feeling angry.

  She starts (furiously) to do the washing up and, once this is done, she will tidy the apartment and once that is done, she will sit and wait until closing time, upon which she will watch from the window as various drunks stumble along the street. And she will try to decide if she hopes that one of them is Tony, or if she hopes one of them isn’t Tony.

  2012 - Guildford, Surrey.

  “Please don’t sigh like that. You know how guilty I feel about this.”

  Jonathan, who is in the process of pulling fishbones from salmon with tweezers, straightens, then turns to face Judy who has appeared (looking pained) in the doorway.

  “I didn’t know I did sigh,” he says.

  “Well, you did. It was your special, big, oh-it’s-such-a-drag-having-to-do-this-all-on-my-own sigh.”

  “It actually wasn’t,” Jonathan replies. “It was a special, whoever-wrote-this-recipe-has-never-attempted-to-remove-bones-from-uncooked-salmon, kind of sigh.” Virtually all of his discussions with Judy revolve around intent. She’s a great believer that every throwaway remark must have been designed with intent, as if phrases were Cruise missiles, as if sighs were attack drones.r />
  “It still made me feel guilty,” Judy says.

  “Then I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, now downing the tweezers and crossing the room to his wife. “That was not my intention.” He’s making extra special efforts, now that she’s pregnant, to avoid conflict.

  Judy rears away from him as if repulsed. “Don’t touch me with your fishy fingers,” she says. “I’ve just changed my clothes.”

  “Sorry,” Jonathan says again, now putting his hands behind his back and pulling a face as he leans in for a kiss.

  Judy pecks him chastely on the lips, a kiss limited in scope by her ongoing reproach. “And I still don’t see why we have to have fish,” she says.

  Jonathan restrains another sigh and turns back to the chopping board so that Judy won’t see his eyes rolling. “Because Mum doesn’t think a meal is a meal unless multiple deaths have occurred,” Jonathan says. “You know this. We’ve been through this.”

  “It’s time your mother learned a little more about nutrition.”

  “She’s nearly eighty,” Jonathan says, running his finger along the top of the salmon steak, then leaning down close to tweezer out another bone. “The woman’s not going to learn anything new now, so we just have to fit around her ticks.”

  “Ageist, or sexist? Hum. I’m not sure...” Judy says. “Maybe both.”

  “Realist maybe?”

  “People can learn at any age, Jon. Even women like your mother. You know that as well as I do. Some just choose not to.”

  “Well, she’s been choosing not to for almost eighty years. So all I’m saying is that the probabilities of the situation as regards my mother favour stasis as opposed to revolutionary transformation.”

  “I still don’t see why–”

  “Judy! It’s meat or fish or half-an hour attempting to explain why there isn’t a ‘main’ course. So a bit of fish is the lesser of two evils here, OK?”

  “Not for the fish it isn’t,” Judy says, a smidgin of humour in her voice.

  “No,” Jonathan says with a grin. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Anyway, it’s her karma, not mine,” Judy says. “I’m not eating it.”