The Photographer's Wife Page 2

  “Right,” Minnie says, once the man, with a shrug and a disparaging wave over his shoulder, has turned his attention elsewhere and she has crossed to join Barbara. She picks up the suitcase and heads for the exit.

  “Aren’t we being ‘vacuated, then?” Barbara asks.

  Minnie pauses and, uncharacteristically, crouches down in front of her daughter. “Do you want to be evacuated? Do you want to get on the bloody train and go to Wales? Because believe me girl, you’re one step away from it. Just say the word.”

  “No!” Barbara says, starting to cry again.

  “Then stop your sobbing girl! I’m taking you home.”

  “And Glenda?” Barbara asks, trying to look over her shoulder as they pass through the echoey madness of the station hall.

  “She’s twelve. She knows how to make her own way home,” Minnie says. “And she’ll find a nice hard slap waiting for her when she gets there. The little cow!”

  Unexpectedly, Minnie stops walking, so Barbara peers up at her. “Where’s your things?”

  Barbara looks at her empty hand and tries to remember when she lost track of the basket. “The man,” she says, pointing backwards. “He put it in the train.”

  “Jesus! That’s all we need,” Minnie says. “We won’t be getting that back now. A right bloody waste of time this has all been. And what am I supposed to dress you in now? Honestly! As if times aren’t hard enough! You had better behave, girl. You had better be so bloody good. I swear, you cry once, you’ll be on that train to Wales and it won’t be just for the war, it’ll be forever!”

  Barbara squeezes her eyes shut to prevent more tears, so close now, from leaking out, and she fails as a result to see an uneven paving stone. She trips and is yanked upright again.

  “Walk nicely!” Minnie says.

  ***

  Barbara sits alone, her legs crossed, on the single bed they have moved into the shelter. She is supposed to be reading but is instead studying the reflection of the candle in a newly formed puddle on the ground. She is listening for the first bombs to arrive. The air-raid siren was five minutes ago.

  The door to the shelter opens and Glenda appears. “It’s ‘orrible out there,” she says, starting to pull off her wet coat, hesitating, then finally removing it after all. “It’s horrible in here too. Where’s Mum, then?”

  “Gone to get soup,” Barbara says. “She said don’t move a muscle.”

  “Mapledene Road got hit,” Glenda announces.

  “Really?”

  “Fell in someone’s back yard. Blew all the windows out. And blew the shelter right out of the ground too. They wasn’t in it though.”

  Barbara blinks at her sister, then looks around at the corrugated iron walls and tries to imagine them being blown out of the ground.

  “Don’t worry,” Glenda says, sitting on the edge of the bed and removing her shoes. “Lightning never strikes twice.”

  “Here they come,” Barbara says, cocking one ear to the distant whistle of an incendiary bomb.

  Glenda nods, waits for the explosion – it’s a long way away – then crosses her legs and sits opposite her sister. “Oh sister,” she says, dramatically. “Whatever am I going to do now?”

  Barbara folds her book – a tattered copy of Little Black Sambo – and looks up at Glenda, her wrinkled brow somehow exaggerated by the candlelight. “What’s happened, sister?” she asks.

  “Johnny's being evacuated tomorrow. They got hit three doors down and his Mum says it’s just too dangerous to stay.”

  Barbara nods seriously. Johnny is Glenda’s boyfriend and though she has never seen him, though, even now, she doubts his existence, she has heard all about him. “Is he going to Wales?”

  Glenda shakes her head. “Not everyone goes to Wales, silly.”

  “I knew that,” Barbara lies. “I just wondered.”

  “Oh, it’s the worst thing in the world when they leave you,” Glenda says. “I just want to die.”

  “Oh sister!” Barbara says, opening her arms and hugging Glenda awkwardly.

  “He was the only thing that held me together,” Glenda says, a phrase that she overheard her weepy teacher, Mrs Richardson, say that morning.

  “Don’t cry,” Barbara says, rather enjoying her role as confidante in this melodrama.

  “I can’t help it,” Glenda says, leaning back just far enough for Barbara to see that she has managed to produce a real, single tear. The ability to form tears on demand is a gift that Glenda has and this is perhaps one of the reasons why Minnie has so little truck with them.

  “You mustn’t cry,” Barbara tells her. “If Mum catches you, you’ll be sent to Wales.”

  “Maybe I should cry,” Glenda says. “At least that way I’d see Johnny again.”

  “But Johnny isn’t in Wales,” Barbara says, confused now.

  Another bomb whistles outside, closely followed by a far-off explosion and then, without warning, there is a stunning, earth-jolting sonic boom that shakes the bed from side to side, makes the flame of the candle flicker, even makes the ground ripple. Afterwards, everything is deathly silent, and it is only after thirty seconds or so when their hearing starts to return that the girls realise that this is not silence because the world has ceased to exist but a silence born of the fact that they have been momentarily deafened.

  The girls remain immobile, cross legged and facing each other, until Glenda – looking genuinely panicked – swings her legs over the edge and starts to pull on her shoes.

  “Where are you going?” Barbara asks. “Mum said...”

  “Mum said, Mum said...” Glenda repeats.

  “She said to stay put. She said you mustn't.”

  “It’s Mum I’m going to check on,” Glenda says. “What if she got hit?”

  Barbara bites her bottom lip. She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know what to say.

  When the door to the shelter jerks open and Minnie appears, Barbara releases the breath she has been holding. “Did you hear that?” Minnie says, blustering into the shelter. “I almost spilt the soup. I swear the blast messed up me bleedin’ hair.”

  She puts the pan of soup down on a small stool, then turns and closes the door behind her. “You girls bein’ brave?” she asks, and Barbara turns away just long enough to wipe a tear – a genuine tear of relief – from her cheek. “Yes,” she says. “We’re absolutely fine, aren’t we Sis’?”

  ***

  The fear is so pervasive, so constant, that it begins to seem normal. But being scared, even all the time, is still being scared, and Barbara wishes she could be harder, like her mother, or even better, like her sister – apparently immune, apparently still thrilled by every bang, still excited by every near-miss.

  But the danger is undeniable, the signs are all around them now. The house at the end of the street is gone, the family within all dead; the gasometer around the corner is in flames. Barbara’s days at school are spent listening for distant air-raid sirens, which sometimes, if she concentrates, she can hear before anyone else. Sometimes she can hear them whole minutes before the local siren prompts their descent into the cellar where, despite the games and rhymes and distractions the teachers attempt to organise, Barbara listens, still, for clues from above. She’s trying to detect a secret sign that might differentiate this bombardment from all of the others; she’s trying to detect some dark, non-audible vibration which might reveal that everything has changed, that Glenda and Mum have not, this time, escaped.

  Once the air-raids are over, she walks home in the pitch black, past the vague shadows of bombed out buildings, past smoking, steaming remains, past shadowy figures who might be friends, only it’s too dark to see. Sometimes a blazing building provides light and she jumps over vast, snake-like fire hoses dragged by exhausted, blackened firemen. She tries not to notice the child’s toy poking from beneath a collapsed wall, tries not to worry about the origin of the red stain on the pavement. War provides no censorship, so Barbara tries to create her own. And now she
must round the final corner – she holds her breath. Will the house still be there? Will it be in flames? Or will it be flattened?

  She lets herself in and sits watching the door, waiting for Glenda and her mother to come separately through it, hoping that the siren won’t sound before they do so. And here they are, revealing that it has happened again: they have been spared – another daily miracle amidst the mayhem of bombed-out London. But today something is different. Barbara can sense a change. Minnie is holding Glenda’s hand, and Glenda is as white as a sheet.

  “Come on,” Minnie tells her. “Get your things. We’re going to the shelter tonight,” and Barbara doesn’t ask why; she doesn’t want to know what has happened, because she has learned that there is enough terror in each day for everyone and that sharing it around is superfluous, that sharing it around just adds to everybody’s burden. It’s one huge life-lesson that she will never forget.

  Last night’s raids were local and lethal, and the youth club shelter, in the arched tunnel of the basement, is packed solid. There is sitting room but no more. Minnie tells Barbara to look after her big sister and starts to tiptoe to the far side to fetch soup from the WVS ladies. Everyone around them looks exhausted; no one slept much last night.

  “Are you OK, sister?” Barbara asks, a little unnerved by Glenda’s silence. She hasn’t said a word yet.

  Glenda nods and blinks slowly. “They were asleep,” she says quietly. “The whole family. It was an unexploded one from the night before, so they wasn’t even in the shelter. Not that it would have done ‘em any good. That was flattened too.”

  Barbara nods and hopes that Glenda won’t tell her who has died. She doesn’t like to put names and faces to these stories, because once fleshed out she knows that they will have the power to haunt her dreams, turning them into nightmares.

  “Poor Billy,” Glenda says, shaking her head and breathing erratically with the effort she is making not to cry.

  Poor Billy, Barbara repeats in her head and then, despite herself, the image of Glenda’s schoolfriend Billy Holt comes to mind, closely followed by Mrs Holt sweeping the front porch. She wonders about Billy’s sister Harriet – with whom she sometimes played – but decides, quite consciously, not to ask. All the same, she imagines Harriet, whose pretty dresses she was always so jealous of, buried somewhere beneath rubble, the crisp, starched cotton crushed by the weight of fallen brick. She imagines what that would feel like.

  Minnie returns with mugs of watery soup and Barbara takes hers, grasps it between both hands, and counts to twenty so as to delay the first sip. Her anticipation of the soup is, she knows from experience, more powerful than its ability to actually satisfy her hunger. She likes to wait as long as possible.

  “Eat your soup,” Minnie tells Glenda. She crouches down and pushes the hair from her daughter’s eyes – a rare display of affection reserved for exceptional circumstances such as these.

  Someone at the far end of the cellar tries to start a singalong with a warbling rendition of Doing The Lambeth Walk but tonight it fails to catch on – it doesn’t always work – and the singer falters at the end of the first verse, then mutters, “Bugger you all then,” which at least provokes a few laughs.

  “We’re all knackered, Annie,” someone shouts, and Glenda, who would have found a singalong hard to bear, feels relieved.

  Minnie, who claims to be unable to sleep sitting, (even if the girls have frequently caught her doing so) heads to the far side to “have a natter” with Mrs Peters.

  In the farthest corner from the gas lamp, a couple are discreetly canoodling beneath their coats and Barbara peers at the shifting shapes for a moment and wonders what that feels like, then turns her attention to the woman beside them who is knitting what looks like a glove.

  Once she has finished her soup, she closes her eyes and, ignoring the rumbling of her tummy, tries to imagine her favourite scene of the moment, a farm in Wales.

  “Do all farms have cows?” she asks her sister, momentarily opening her eyes, and Glenda, who knows as much about farms as her little sister, says, “Oh yes. They always have lots of cows. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any milk, would there?”

  Reassured not only about her conjured image of a farm but also that her sister is talking again, Barbara closes her eyes anew and pictures a rosy-faced Welsh woman squirting the cow’s milk straight into a bottle. “Take that to the dairy would you, Babs?” the woman says. “And help yourself to some cheese if you fancy it.”

  2011 - Shoreditch, London.

  “Sophie, darling!” Genna Wild floats through the dazzlingly bright expanse of the gallery to where Sophie is shrugging off her wet coat. Behind her, rain is falling from a dark, October, London sky.

  “You made it!” Genna says, helping her out of the coat and smiling beatifically, as if Sophie is her very favourite person on the planet. “How marvellous!”

  “Are you kidding?” Sophie says. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Not even on a revolting evening like this one.”

  Genna wrinkles her nose. “It is horrid, isn’t it? Come get yourself a drink. The white is rather special. It sounds German but it’s from Alsace, apparently.”

  As Sophie follows her across the room, she takes in the assembled crowd – forty, perhaps even fifty people who have braved the weather to see Arakis’ photographs, or perhaps, like her, bask by association in the glow of his exhibition.

  As she reaches the drinks table, she starts to notice the photographs themselves, vast, three-metre black and white prints, mostly of naked women, most of heavily bound naked women. To her right, the image is of a woman tied up in an enamel bath, to her left, it shows a nude suspended by rope from a ceiling.

  She hates these photos. That is her first reaction, and she tries, as she sips at the wine, to analyse why this is so, tries to decide just how much of her aversion is political and how much is, well, for want of a better word, jealousy. As far as her eye can tell, these are porn shots – technically masterful, beautifully-lit porn shots but porn shots all the same.

  “Aren’t they gorgeous?” Genna says, following her regard, so Sophie wrinkles her nose cutely and nods. There’s no point falling out with the owner of one of London’s most successful photography galleries – there’s no point at all.

  “Must circulate,” Genna says, turning, then scooting back to the entrance in order to greet a new arrival – a slightly overweight and extraordinarily pale man with round glasses and a very wet, grey-checked suit. “Brett!” she exclaims. “Oh how wonderful that you could make it!”

  Sophie moves to the right and positions herself in front of a vast photograph of a naked, pregnant woman, bound again with generous quantities of rope.

  “Such energy!” a man beside her says as he peers over his half-moon glasses at the photo.

  “Yes,” Sophie says, thinking, Really? Where?

  But she must go to these events – she needs to understand what is happening here. She needs, more than anything, to find a way to inject some of this excitement into her own career. But how to do that? How to get people to start randomly eulogising about her work? Perhaps one really does need to shock, she thinks. Perhaps she should start tying up men and photographing them. That would make a bloody change. But no, too obvious, too derivative. But then, isn’t this?

  “Sophie, this is Brett,” Genna, who has reappeared beside her, says. “I don’t think you’ve met, have you?”

  Deciding that Genna is palming Mr Blobby off on her, Sophie conceals a sigh and takes Brett’s cold, damp hand in her own and forces a smile. She’s not here to date, she reminds herself. She’s here to network and she knows better than to let her disdain – disdain based on mere physical appearance – show. “Sophie Marsden,” she says.

  “Brett Pearson,” the man replies, shaking her hand limply, then letting it go.

  Sophie resists the desire to wipe her hand on her dress, then squints at him vaguely. “Brett Pearson,” she repeats. “Now why do I know that name?
”

  Brett shrugs. “The Times, maybe?”

  “Ah, that’s right! You’re the new arts correspondent.”

  “Junior arts correspondent. Yeah.”

  “How fabulous,” Sophie says, wincing at her choice of superlative. She mustn't overdo it. She mustn't sound like Genna. It’s important not to appear sycophantic.

  “Marsden,” Brett says thoughtfully. “You know, there’s a photographer called Marsden. Well, was. Anthony Marsden. You know his stuff at all?”

  “Vaguely,” Sophie lies.

  “He died way back,” Brett says. “But he was good. A lot of social comment stuff. In the seventies.”

  Sophie squints and shakes her head vaguely. “I just, you know, know the name really,” she says.

  "So, what do we think of these?” Brett asks, waving his glass towards the photo before them with such largesse that the wine almost slops out.

  “I’m not sure,” Sophie says, tracking the sloshing wine from the corner of her eye just in case, and waiting for Brett to provide a cue. “What do we think of these?”

  “Three words, one letter,” Brett says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, it’s, you know, a game,” Brett explains. “I play it when I’m stuck for an angle for a piece. The first three adjectives that come to mind. But they all have to start with the same letter.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Sophie says. “You go first.”

  “Doleful, dysphoric and dirty,” Brett says.

  “Ha, OK. I get it.”

  “And yours?”

  “Um...”

  “No hesitation,” Brett says. “That’s the whole point.”

  “OK, then... enigmatic, exploitative and, um, empty,” Sophie says. She scans the room to check that Genna is out of earshot, then pulls a face and raises one hand to her mouth, Japanese style. “Did I really just say that?” she asks. “About the great Arakis?”