The Photographer's Wife Page 26

  “I thought we worked out that the bus was better?”

  “It was packed, Tony. I couldn’t get the pram on. I waited for three buses and then gave up. So we got the train to Charing Cross.”

  “Is that a picnic?” he asks, pointing at the basket beneath the pram.

  “It is. Cheese and pickle sandwiches, and scones and jam.”

  “Nice,” Tony says, “But you didn’t have to. I told you not to bother.”

  Tony had said this morning, in his usual financially irresponsible way, that he would buy them lunch today. But it’s cheaper this way. And they avoid the risk of ending up in a pub. “I thought a picnic would be nicer,” Barbara says. “It’s such a lovely day.”

  “How about the gardens?” Tony asks, pointing over the road.

  “What about St James’ Park?” Barbara asks. “We’ve got time, haven’t we?”

  Tony glances at his watch. “Sure,” he says.

  It’s a week before the general election, just about the busiest that Fleet Street can be but he’ll take an hour today to do this. He’ll just have to make up for it this evening. Barbara’s right. It is a beautiful day. They start to walk.

  When they reach Trafalgar Square, they find a rag-tag band of protestors demonstrating in support of a Labour vote. Various groups are chanting and waving banners but their messages are diverse and confused and their hearts don’t really seem to be in it.

  “Can we go look?” Tony asks, patting his camera bag.

  “Of course,” Barbara says, turning the pram and steering it towards Nelson’s Column.

  As they reach the protest, Tony bends over his camera and starts snapping. “There don’t seem to be any other press people here,” he says, photographing a hippy with a placard which reads, “Labour Yes, Vietnam, No.”

  “It’s all a bit old news, isn’t it?” Barbara says. “I think everyone’s bored stiff with the election. Plus, we all know Labour are going to win again.”

  “They reckon it’s not as certain as everyone says. That’s what the guys are saying at work.”

  They walk around the edges of the demonstration and Tony takes a photo of a pretty girl with a “VAT at 20%? No thanks!” poster.

  “Look,” Barbara says, pointing at a small group of feminists to their right. Tony follows her regard and sees a woman with long blonde hair and a baby strapped to her chest. Stacked at her feet are a pile of placards awaiting distribution, the top one of which reads, “Keep Religion Out of My Womb. Yes to Women’s rights. Yes to Abortion. Vote Labour.”

  “Some of us will do anything for a baby and others just want the right to get rid of them,” Barbara says. “It’s strange when you think about it.”

  “It is,” Tony says, now turning to take a photograph of a group of policemen climbing out of a van.

  Sophie, awoken by the chanting, starts to cry. “We need to get out of here,” Barbara says. “It’s too noisy for her.”

  “Sure,” Tony agrees. “Just one second.”

  “I’ll head off that way,” Barbara says, pointing west. “You can follow on.”

  “OK. I won’t be long.”

  “Before you leave, I think you should photograph her,” Barbara says, nodding.

  “The chick with the kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s just something funny about a woman holding a baby while fighting for abortion,” Barbara says. “It would make a good photo. That’s all.”

  “You reckon, do you?” Tony says, sounding only half amused. He’s still a little up-tight about the photography thing, still hesitates between macho annoyance and gentle encouragement any time Barbara has an opinion. “Here,” he says, handing her the camera. “Take it.”

  Barbara takes the camera from his outstretched hand. She’s not sure whether he’s challenging her or encouraging her, or perhaps a little of both. “I do know how to,” she says.

  “I know you do. So take it.”

  She raises one hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight and frowns at him. She’s still not sure what she’s supposed to do here. He seems to be in a good mood today but that, she knows, can change suddenly.

  “Well, go on then,” Tony says, and so she gives up trying to work it out, shrugs and, kicking the lock on the pram wheel, crosses towards the group of women.

  2012 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

  Barbara stirs her tea and steels herself before returning to the dining room, mug in hand. Pensive, she sits before the pale blue folder. It glares at her; it dares at her.

  She sips her tea. Another minute can’t hurt, can it? There’s no one here to witness how much time she takes to find the courage to plunge into the past. It is her past, after all.

  She takes a deep breath and almost moves her hand towards the folder but fails. She surprises herself with the thought, Why couldn’t she just wait until I was dead? And then, in a rush, before that other part of her can interfere, she flips the cover open.

  So these are the ones you chose, she thinks, addressing Sophie in her mind. Tell me which photos you like best, and I’ll tell you who you are. Someone said that once. Phil perhaps?

  The first image: A woman in hot pants on a pushbike.

  Images flash up: A grazed knee. A kite. Another, different bike. Those bikes... Jonathan wanted one so badly. All the boys did. What was it called again? The brand escapes her. Pretty girls on bikes baring flesh – the seventies in a nutshell. She smiles to herself and, feeling momentarily braver, flips to the next image.

  A man this time – a man in a sports car. He’s wearing a white shirt, a tie and braces. Braces. Her mother had a photo of her father wearing braces. Nobody wears braces anymore. What was the point of them? Why didn’t they just use a belt? The man in the photo is smoking a cigar – he looks smug and wealthy and really rather horrid. What was it they called them? Yuppies! Yes, that’s it. Yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile something-or-others. The eighties then. The Thatcher years. She and Tony did alright in the eighties, but it was a terrible time for most.

  She flips another page. A couple of punks with mohican haircuts, kissing on Brighton pier. She had been beside him when he took it and some sweet, sickly sensual memory, the smell of candy-floss perhaps, comes back to her now. Yes, she had been there. Sophie was begging to go on the Waltzer and in the end, they had caved in. Big mistake. She had vomited all over the push chair.

  She flips another page and inhales sharply. This one has caught her by surprise. She had forgotten, momentarily, why she was nervous about this. And here it is. The past rushing at her like a freight train. 1969 or 1970? She’s not sure. Election year anyway. The year of Edward Heath’s surprise victory for the Conservatives. One of the worst governments in history, wasn’t that what people used to say about Heath? If only they had known what was to come, they might have gone easier on him.

  She remembers Tony taking this one. Or did she take it? Yes, she suspects that she did. She thinks (but isn’t sure) that she did it to spite him over some slight, real or imagined. For who, forty years later, can recall which moods were justified and which moods weren’t?

  She studies the photo and feels vaguely sick. Yes, she took it. And she developed it too. Tony had been run off his feet whizzing up and down the country picking up rolls of film and typed news stories from journalists covering the election rallies. So she had developed it herself in the cellar, the first time he had ever asked her to do so. Sophie, who was upstairs in a cot, cried throughout. Yes, it’s all coming back to her now.

  She remembers Tony excitedly announcing that he had sold a photo, remembers buying the Mirror and thrilling to see her photo in print. She hid that newspaper. She wonders when she lost it. It probably got used to light a fire at some point.

  Her throat feels dry, so she sips her tea. She can sense, again, the strange atmosphere around the flat at the time, born of the fact that they would not, could not discuss that photo. They both knew who had pressed the shutter release and they
both knew that the other person knew the truth as well. It was the only photo in the whole batch that she had taken and it was the only one the Mirror chose to publish. Women Voters Fear Roll-Back of Rights. She can still picture the headline in her mind’s eye. She spent hours looking proudly at that page of newsprint. She would get it out and sit and stare at it – her guilty pleasure.

  Tony had vanished after that, in theory to celebrate, but in reality it was a truth he needed to drown, a truth that came back to haunt them almost seven months later when that same photo won the damned prize. But by then they were pretending, even in private, even between husband and wife, that Tony had taken it himself. She can’t remember when the decision to lie to each other, to lie to themselves, was taken. It felt like it just happened. It was required, that was all. Rewriting history turned out to be a surprisingly easy thing to do and within a couple of years, she had struggled to remember quite who had taken the photo. But that must have been a choice because she certainly remembers now.

  At the time of course, (so it was 1970 then) she had far more important things to worry about. Who actually pressed the lever was neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things.

  She inhales sharply. She wasn’t expecting that. She wasn’t expecting the physical sensation of Minnie’s boney hand to suddenly leap out of her memory at her. Her last physical contact with her mother. She remembers begging the nurses for more morphine, remembers laughing hysterically (in the true sense of that word) when the ward sister informed her that any more morphine than Minnie was already taking would kill her. Her eyes are wet now, her eyesight unfocussed, her mind’s eye projecting above the soft, grey blur of Trafalgar Square, the full horror of Minnie’s slow death.

  She swipes at a tear and even this provokes a memory, the physical sensation of crying at the time, not from sorrow but from a profound sense of relief that it was all finally over.

  She realises that she has been holding her breath and forces herself to exhale. It’s just too hard. This whole thing is just too hard for her heart to bear. It truly would have been better if Sophie had waited until she was gone but how could Sophie even begin to understand that? Barbara has made it her life’s work, after all, to protect her from all of this.

  She had braced herself, yes. She had known that certain images would bring up specific memories of particular moments in time. That’s why it has taken her a week to sit down and do this. But no, she had not prepared herself for this. She had not imagined the way each image would lead to every other image and lead in turn to wholesale submersion in the most powerful sensations – the smells, the sounds, the feelings – of the harshest most dreadful highlights (or lowlights perhaps) of her eighty years on this planet. She hadn’t expected to find herself transported back in time.

  There’s no way around it now, though. That train has left the station and she certainly can’t stop it. The exhibition is undoubtedly going to happen. She closes her eyes for a moment and stretches her neck from side to side before continuing rapidly through a few more images.

  She pauses next on an image of Sophie, perhaps five years old, on the beach. She’s holding a plastic spade and staring directly into the camera lens. She grew up with cameras, was entirely relaxed around them, and here her expression is completely neutral – her innocence still complete. Such a beautiful child. She still is. Barbara sighs.

  Perhaps the time has come for her to tell Sophie part of the truth. Not all of it, of course. They all agreed a long time ago that that would never happen, that it could never happen. But just enough to warn her off? Just enough to avoid Brett sniffing around? Just enough to make sure that the rest, the important stuff, the stuff with the power to harm the lives of the living, remains buried?

  The trouble is, Barbara realises, still staring into those big, dark eyes, that never mind Brett, Sophie herself is like a sniffer dog. Give her even a whiff of intrigue and she won’t stop digging until she’s unearthed everything. Best, without a doubt, to say nought.

  1971 - Hackney, London.

  Barbara is feeding Sophie at the kitchen table. She has a snotty nose and the beginning of a cold. She looks pink and angry and ready to burst into a tantrum – it’s just a matter of time. Jonathan, beside her, at the end of his cold, is making dams and rivers amidst the peaks of his mashed potato.

  “If you keep playing with that, it’ll get cold,” Barbara reminds him. It amazes Barbara how many times you have to tell children things before they remember them. Even things about danger – warnings about hotness or sharpness – she has to tell them over and over again. Sometimes she tires of telling before they learn and resigns herself instead to watching them burn or cut themselves just so that they can find out on their own.

  “It’s the Thames,” Jonathan says. “Look.”

  “Yes,” Barbara tells him. “Lovely. Now eat it!”

  The door to the cellar opens. Tony, unusually, is home for lunch, not to see Barbara or to spend time with the kids but to use the darkroom. There’s a postal strike on and he’s hoping to sell some pictures he has taken.

  “Yours is in the oven,” Barbara tells him. “But be careful. The plate is hot.” And how many times has she said that? And how many times has he burned himself all the same?

  Tony crosses the kitchen, touches the plate and gives an unconvincing, “ouch” before using a tea-towel to carry it to the dinner table. He places a contact sheet next to his plate then, while studying the rows of photos on it, begins to eat.

  “So how did it go?” Barbara asks.

  “Not good, I’m afraid. They’re all misty,” Tony says, through a mouth of steak and kidney pie.

  Barbara swipes the spoon across Sophie’s mouth to remove the excess, then leans in to study the photos herself.

  “Isn’t that b–” Barbara says, then, “Never mind.”

  “Yes?” Tony asks.

  “No, nothing. I’m really not sure.”

  “Go on,” Tony says. “Really.”

  “Um, is the fogging on the negatives? Or just the contact sheet?”

  “Both.”

  “Then you didn’t fix it long enough.”

  “I did a full six minutes,” Tony says. “A bit more maybe.”

  Barbara wonders at that use of the word maybe. Minutes are real things. There were six of them or there weren’t. If she had done it, she would have known exactly how many minutes had passed. “Was the temperature right?”

  “For the developer, it was,” Tony says. “I don’t think it matters for the fixer.”

  “Hum,” Barbara says, returning to feeding Sophie. “Well, it looks to me like it might matter.”

  “It was a bit cold maybe,” Tony says. “Bloody annoying though. I really thought I was going to flog those.”

  Barbara loads up Sophie’s tiny rose-bud mouth, then puts down the feeding spoon and lifts the sheet so that she can study it more closely. “Ooh, they are foggy. Is that a sorting office?”

  “Yep. The big one in Bethnal Green. There’s no way to get rid of that, is there?”

  “The fog? No, I shouldn’t think so. Not if it’s on the negatives. I suppose you could always go down there and take them again.”

  “I expect everyone’s gone home now,” Tony says. “Bloody annoying. I liked all those undelivered boxes piled behind them.”

  “Yes. It’s good,” Barbara says. Then taking her life in her hands, she adds, “If you did go back, you could get one of the strikers to actually sit on those parcels in the foreground. Maybe even put a mug of tea in his hand and one of those strike placards at his feet.”

  “What, you mean stage it?”

  “Maybe,” Barbara says. “It would make for a good photo, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll have time to go back there now. I’ve got to take the van up to Manchester, then Liverpool, then Rugby,” Tony says.

  “But that’ll take forever, won’t it?”

  Tony nods. “It’s the postal strike, is
n’t it,” he says. “It’s the only way to get stuff around at the moment.”

  “Any sorting office would do. I’m sure they all have strikers. And piles of boxes.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I just really liked that one in Bethnal Green. The light was good.”

  Sophie starts to wave her arms manically, so Barbara hands back the contact sheet and resumes feeding her. “I take it you’re going to be late then?” she asks over her shoulder.

  “Eight or nine at the earliest,” Tony says, already finishing his plate and standing. “Don’t bother with tea or anything. I’ll grab something at the roadside.”

  “Well, drive carefully.”

  “I always do.”

  In the end, it’s almost midnight by the time Tony gets home.

  Because Barbara suspects that he’s been drinking, she feigns sleep, even snoring lightly for added effect. After a minute or so, Tony, who she can tell is wide awake beside her, whispers, “Barbara? Are you asleep?” and because he sounds sober and because he sounds excited, she pretends to stir from her slumber, stretching and yawning theatrically.

  “Hello,” she says. “You’re home.”

  “I sold that photo,” he says immediately. “I sold the whole roll.”

  “Which photo?” Barbara asks. “Which roll? Did you go back?” She suddenly remembers that she’s supposed to be half asleep, so she throws another yawn into the mix.

  “Yes. The one you said about. The strikers on the boxes, drinking tea and that.”

  “How did you develop them? Where did you develop them?”

  “I didn’t. They bought them on spec. I just gave them the roll straight out of the camera. Just like the agency guys do. I told them what was on them and they took it. Said it was exactly what they wanted. There were definitely some crackers on there, even if I do say so myself.”