The Photographer's Wife Page 25

  She wonders how her mother is doing. She wonders if there’s news from the hospital. She’s too scared to think about her mother so she thinks about the baby again. She wonders if the baby will be cute. She wonders if she’ll love her, or him, as much as she loves Jonathan. She wonders who the baby will resemble. Jonathan is so much her child. Everybody says so. Even now, even here, with her knitting baby clothes and Jonathan making a bird that looks like a train, this is visible. He has none of Tony’s uncontrollable energy. She loves that Jonathan looks like her, is like her. But sometimes she wishes someone would tell Tony that he looks like him, is like him, just for the purpose of reassuring him.

  The rain strengthens – it comes and goes in waves – and it lashes now against the window-pane. Both she and Jonathan look up at the sound. “Dad will be rained on,” Jonathan says.

  “You’re right. He’ll be drenched.”

  “What’s drench?”

  “He’ll be very, very wet. Like when you get out of the bath.”

  “Can I play with his camera?” Jonathan asks, apparently bored with the admittedly challenging task of making a bird from Lego.

  “You know you can’t,” Barbara replies. But of course, he doesn’t know. Tony has let him peer through the viewfinder at the upside-down world within a few times recently. She thinks this is a mistake. For various reasons, she’s sure this is a mistake. For one thing, it’s an expensive, fragile camera – one they can’t afford to replace. And for two (not that she could ever tell Tony this) she doesn’t want Jonathan “polluted” with any of this photography nonsense. She wants him to grow up learning a proper trade that pays proper money. She doesn’t want him to have to scrabble around for the rent money the way they do. She doesn’t want him peering into an almost empty refrigerator, wondering what he can possibly cook with two potatoes, five green beans, an egg and a slice of bacon (the answer is potato fritters).

  Tony doesn’t have the same relationship with money that Barbara has. He has never been bombed out of his house or had to work all night to finish piecework just to put money in the electricity meter. He has never walked to school in shoes so worn that he could sense the temperature of the pavement beneath them. So he doesn’t have her fear of going without. He doesn’t have her terror of being hungry, or cold, or wet. And he’s able, in a perfectly relaxed manner, to suggest that it might be “fun” to take a “gamble” on a new career path.

  Barbara sighs and glances at Jonathan who is already dismantling the bird. A gamble. A new career. Just as the family is about to expand. Just as another mouth will need feeding. Minnie told Barbara to just say, “no”, but Minnie overestimates the influence her daughter has on her husband. And she underestimates her daughter’s desire to remain married as well. For that is Barbara’s gamble. That’s her career path.

  Yes, as long as they stay together, they’ll be OK. As long as he doesn’t leave them, Jonathan will never have to know the poverty that she grew up in, will never even have to know that such poverty exists. And isn’t doing a little better, from generation to generation, ambition enough?

  The front door bursts open and the hunched, glistening form of Tony in a sou-wester (they found it in the woodshed) appears in the doorway. “Bloody hell,” he says, kicking the door closed behind him and dumping a half-full crate of vegetables onto the rough wooden table. “It’s raining like bloody Noah’s Ark out there.”

  Barbara raises one eyebrow at the expletive and the other at the failed metaphor. She tries to be careful what she says around Jonathan. He soaks everything up like a sponge and a part of her great plan for him includes the fact that, not only will he never go hungry and not only will he never be cold, but he’ll grow up speaking better too. All the posh jobs go to people who speak properly.

  Changing the way she speaks herself hasn’t been easy but she’s getting there for Jonathan’s sake. Putting on “airs and graces,” Minnie calls it, but Barbara doesn’t care, because someone has to do it and, let’s face it, it’s not going to be Minnie or Tony who will make the effort.

  “Still no bloody one-twenty film,” Tony says, now hanging his dripping coat on the back of the door. “He said it should come tomorrow though.”

  “You can’t really do photography in this weather anyway,” Barbara points out.

  “That’s true enough.”

  "So, how is she?” Barbara asks. By common accord, she doesn’t even get referred to by name anymore. Though that’s strange, Barbara doesn’t want to think about the nature of that strangeness any more than she wants to think about her in any great detail. Which is probably selfish of her.

  Tony shrugs. “She’s fine,” he says. “Tired. And a bit cold. She couldn’t get the fire going but she’s fine now. Oh, this came for you.” He pulls a soggy envelope from his pocket and crosses to Barbara, who stops knitting to take the letter from his still-wet hand. It’s addressed with her mother’s unique mixture of upper and lower-case handwriting. She places it on the mantelpiece, then resumes her knitting.

  “Open it then,” Tony says, crouching in front of their wood-burner, then opening the little door and poking it around.

  “Not yet,” Barbara says. “I need to prepare myself.”

  “Prepare yourself for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t be such a misery guts. It might be good news. It might be nothing.”

  “I know that,” Barbara says flatly. “I’ll open it in a bit. Once you-know-who has gone to bed.”

  Jonathan, who currently believes that he has two names, Jonathan Marsden and You-Know-Who, looks up expectantly.

  When his mother fails to address him despite having used his nick-name, he asks, “Mum, can we ask Dad about the roof?”

  Barbara smiles weakly. “Jonathan here wants to know if there’s any way to fix the roof in the treehouse.”

  “It rains inside,” Jonathan explains. “If it didn’t, I could play in it.”

  “You really like that treehouse, yeah?”

  The boy nods. “I could live there all the time perhaps,” he says, hopefully.

  “You can’t live there all the time,” Tony tells him. “But when the rain stops, we’ll see what we can do. We’ll see if we can fix something up.”

  Jonathan wrinkles his nose as if Tony has just said the daftest thing that he has ever heard. “If the rain stops, we won’t need a roof, stupid,” he says, and Barbara wonders if Tony will get angry at his son for cheeking him like that. But Tony just smirks. “He’s a quick one alright,” he says, proudly.

  After dinner, Barbara puts Jonathan to bed, then retrieves the letter, now dry, from the mantlepiece. Tony, who is reading a book about darkroom techniques, has forgotten about the letter, which somehow gives her the space to brave its contents.

  When eventually he looks up, he finds Barbara staring at the flames behind the window of the stove, the letter on her lap.

  “So what’s the old bird got to say for herself?” he asks.

  Barbara takes a deep breath before replying, “I’ll have to go see her.”

  “What?”

  “It’s cancer, Tony.”

  “Don’t be daft.”

  “I’m not being daft. It’s what the hospital said. They told her it’s cancer.”

  “I mean, you can’t go see her,” Tony says softly.

  “I have to.”

  Tony puts down the book and crosses the room. He crouches beside his wife and takes her hand. “You can’t, Barbara. We talked about this.”

  “She didn’t have cancer then.”

  “Tony sighs and kisses the back of her hand. “What does she say. Is it bad?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I have to go.”

  “But if you go, you’ll have to tell her.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So you can’t. Just wait a month and...”

  “I can’t wait a month.”

  “Bloody hell, Barbara,” Tony says. “What if she tells everyone?”
r />   “She won’t,” Barbara says. “She won’t tell a soul.”

  2012 - Shoreditch, London.

  Sophie wiggles the fingers of her outstretched hand. “Give me that,” she says.

  Opposite, Brett is waving a letter around above his right shoulder. “I want to talk to you first,” he says.

  “Give it to me!” Sophie repeats, sharply.

  “Just calm down,” Brett tells her. “We need to have a brief chat and then–”

  “That letter is addressed to me. It was just delivered through my letterbox. So bloody well hand it over. Afterwards we can talk about whatever you want.”

  Brett rolls his eyes and, with a gasp of despair, as if caving in to a three year old, he lowers his arm and proffers the letter. “You’re impossible,” he says as Sophie snatches it from his grasp and crosses to the far side of the room. She throws herself onto the sofa and caresses the envelope. It bears the elegant monicker of Thames and Hudson Publishing.

  She blows gently through pursed lips, then rips it open and pulls out the letter (top quality, bonded paper – a good sign?) She closes her eyes briefly, then flips open the sheet of paper. “Following our interesting meeting...” she mumbles, scanning the dense print. “Blah, blah... offer... Oh!” She turns to Brett now. “Bloody hell! It’s a yes!”

  Brett nods serenely and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugs. “I rock, is all.”

  Sophie frowns, then turns her attention back to the letter. “Contract to follow... blah blah... standard terms... six percent of cover price, plus, um, reproduction fees to individual rights holders...” Sophie glances up at Brett again. “Six percent. Is that good? It sounds a bit rubbish.”

  Brett shrugs again. “It’s at the low end. But it depends what they pay for the image rights. Most of those are yours, so...”

  “Mum’s,” Sophie corrects.

  “Yes,” Brett says. He clears his throat. “Which brings us rather nicely to the thing we need to talk about.”

  “It’s fine,” Sophie says dismissively. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “You’ll talk to her,” Brett repeats.

  “I’ll explain to her that it’s my project and that she can have a cut, or whatever, of the exhibition proceeds but that the book royalties are mine.”

  “Yes. I think you’re forgetting something though,” Brett says.

  “Yes?”

  “I think you’re forgetting me.”

  “You?”

  “I got you that book deal, Sophie.”

  “We got that book deal.”

  “You almost lost it, in fact,” Brett reminds her. “If I hadn’t called him afterwards to apologise for you–”

  “You what?”

  “I phoned him. I blamed it on your highly-strung, artistic temperament. He was very nice about it considering you called him a wanker.”

  “Arsehole,” Sophie says.

  “What?”

  “I called him an arsehole, not a wanker.”

  “Oh, that’s fine then,” Brett says.

  Sophie can feel the heat of anger mixed with a dash of embarrassment rising from within. She shakes her head and stands and crosses the room to face Brett. “Anyway, how dare you contact him!” she says. “You didn’t even tell me about it. Let alone ask me.”

  “It was necessary, Sophe. And I knew you wouldn’t like it. What matters here is that I saved the god-darn deal, donchathink?”

  Sophie opens her mouth to say something insulting but momentarily regains control of herself and closes it again. "So, how much do you want?” she finally asks. “What’s the going rate for a sorry about my girlfriend but she’s a hysterical bitch call these days?”

  “And now you’re being disingenuous,” Brett says.

  “Disingenuous. That’s your word of the month.”

  “You’re right. It is. I like it. I like how it rolls off the tongue. Though if people stopped being it, then I’d be happy to stop using it. Now, if you’ll calm down a second, I have some more cool news for you. I’ve gotten you a gallery. A really rocking gallery. And the owner has already agreed in principle to host the exhibition.”

  Sophie freezes. She’s stuck halfway between outrage and excitement and she doesn’t know which way to swing. “You have?” she says.

  “Uh huh.”

  She bites her bottom lip – the excitement is winning out. “Is it White Cube?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “It is, isn’t it! It’s White Cube. Tell me it’s White Cube?”

  Brett laughs lightly. “I’m not saying until–”

  “God, I love White Cube. You’re a genius, Brett.”

  “OK, look. It is not White Cube.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Then where? Is it–”

  “We need to talk first. We need to talk about my involvement in this project, Sophie. I’ve been spending a lot of time on this. I’ve lined up meeting upon meeting for you. I got you that darned book deal (he nods at the envelope in her hand, here) by offering to push it in the Times. And I got the gallery by telling them we had the book deal lined up. None of this would be happening without me.”

  “OK, OK, Brett. So you want to be paid. I get it. And here was I, thinking that you were doing this for love.”

  “No, Sophie,” Brett says. “This isn’t love. In there is love,” he points to her bedroom. “This bit, here, is work. So yes, I do want paying. And I want a written, signed contract before I go any further.”

  “A contract?”

  “I want exclusive interview rights to you, your mother and Jonathan. And I want the exclusive right to negotiate image rights to the Sunday Times. You’ll get paid for that if I can make it happen. Minus my cut, of course.”

  “Of course!”

  “And I want twenty-five percent of all other proceeds.”

  Sophie blinks exaggeratedly and feigns outrage by dropping her jaw. She takes a step back. “You’re out of your mind,” she says.

  “It’s a very fair–”

  “Fair?!” Sophie gasps. “Twenty-five percent? That’s not fair, that’s daylight robbery.”

  Brett snorts. “It’s actually not, Sophie. I feel that it’s fairly generous consider–.”

  “No. The answer is no.”

  “No?”

  Sophie nods. “Yes. I’m saying no to your offer. So how do you feel about that?”

  Brett shrugs. “That’s OK,” he says. “I can cancel the gallery easily enough.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Sure. If that’s what you want. And cancelling the gallery will cancel the book deal. You can always rebuild this whole shebang from scratch on your own. You’ll end up with a few photocopied pages and some shitty little gallery in some place no-one can even find, but hey, what do I care?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Good. Go ahead.”

  “OK. I think you should leave now.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Seeing as this – what I thought was a relationship – is actually a business relationship, and seeing as our business meeting is over, I think you should leave.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then I’ll make it simple. Fuck off to your own place, Brett.”

  “Oh,” Brett says, pedantically. “I see. Personally, I was thinking more in terms of a quick bang followed by a celebration meal somewhere but if that’s how you want to play it...”

  Momentarily, Sophie struggles with herself. One part of her watches two other seemingly independent parts slugging it out in the wrestling ring of her ego. It’s like this sometimes. It’s as if her body, specifically her mouth, becomes possessed by some alien force whose only desire is to push every argument to the ultimate, destructive limit. What she really wants now is exactly what Brett is suggesting. Sex, celebration, happiness. But that part of her loses the battle and she hears her mouth say, “Just f
uck off, Brett, will you? Just take your huge, stinky ego as far away from me as possible before I throw up, will you?”

  “My huge, stinky ego, huh?” Brett repeats, his mouth still smiling, just, even as his eyes burn with anger. He picks up his bag, pulls a stapled document from within and places it on Sophie’s desk. “The draft contract,” he says. “Call me when you’ve come to your senses.”

  He strides across the apartment then, embarrassingly, has to return, first for his keys and then for his phone, and then again for his coat, before finally making it to the front door. “You know what, Sophie?” he says, his hand on the latch.

  “Oh, just shut up and go, will you?”

  Brett groans and vanishes from view. He does not slam the door behind him.

  1970 - Embankment, London.

  Barbara is standing at the Embankment end of Waterloo Bridge. She is rocking Sophie’s pram back and forth as she waits for Tony to arrive.

  She can see Big Ben in the distance, her daughter is smiling as she sleeps and she’s meeting her husband for a picnic on a beautiful June day... And yet all that she can think of is her mother. They (she, Glenda and Minnie) have a meeting with the cancer surgeon tomorrow and Barbara already knows, just from looking at her, that it’s going to be bad news. She can tell from the pallor of Minnie’s complexion that despite the radical surgery her mother has undergone (and there is no surgery more radical for a woman than this, after all) they did not “manage to get it all.”

  She’s been expecting bad news since the operation and now, today, she’s struggling to think of anything other than the fact that she’ll have more bad news by this time tomorrow.

  She hears Tony calling her name and turns to see him crossing the road towards her. “Hello!” he says, a little breathlessly. “And how are my girls today?”

  Barbara forces a smile. Her sorrow at her mother’s failing health has been making Tony irritable. He has never said so, but she can tell that he believes her joy over Sophie’s birth should somehow outweigh the illness of her mother. She can hear it in the way he insists that Minnie will “probably be fine.” She can sense it in the way he shuts off any discussion of Minnie’s cancer with a diametrically opposed discussion of Sophie’s loveliness. Tony can’t deal with death or illness. Or rather, ignoring it is Tony’s way of dealing with death or illness. So, “We’re fine,” is the reply Barbara gives. “She’s been asleep since I got on the train.”