The Photographer's Wife Read online

  “They said it might snow tonight,” Barbara says.

  Tony pulls off his crash helmet, then removes his jacket and starts to remove the various layers of jumpers beneath. “No doubt about it,” he says. “You can smell it in the air.” The jumpers removed, he crosses to join Barbara in front of the fireplace. “So how are you?” he asks. “How was your day?”

  Barbara hates this how-was-your-day question. It always feels like a trick, like a trap even. For where Tony can say, “I rode to Liverpool and delivered this and then I rode to Derby and delivered that,” the only things that Barbara can think of to justify her existence are the endless litany of tiny, mindless tasks that take up her day as a mother. “I walked Jonathan to school, I changed the kids’ beds, I did the washing up…” These seem, individually, too insignificant to mention, yet together, too numerous to list. And so she always ends up saying, “Oh, nothing much. The usual,” or some-such. And then she spends the rest of the evening thinking that Tony has imagined her drinking tea and eating biscuits all day. And, of course, yes, she did that too. And so what?

  “You know. The usual chores,” she says. “How was your day?”

  “Amazing,” Tony says, now slipping his arms around her waist and pulling her tight, as if for a waltz.

  Barbara frowns. Such displays of enthusiasm are rare in the Marsden household and such displays of affection are even rarer. “What are you after?” she laughs.

  “I’m not after anything,” Tony replies.

  Barbara slides her hands down his back until they are resting on the back pockets of his leather motorcycle trousers. She forces one hand inside a pocket, enjoys, momentarily, the feel of the cold leather hugging his bum. “God, Tony, you’re freezing.”

  “So hug me,” he says. “Warm me up.”

  She pulls him tighter but then shudders with cold. “I can’t. It’s like hugging an ice-cube,” she says apologetically, breaking free. “Maybe you should take a hot bath. I’m worried you’ll catch a cold.”

  Tony pulls a face at this idea, then exaggeratedly sniffs the air. “Is that soup I can smell?” he asks.

  “Stew.”

  “Oh God, you’re a marvel. I was dreaming about stew the whole way home.”

  “I’ll fetch it. Stay in front of the fire.”

  “And then I can tell you my news,” Tony says.

  Barbara pauses, her hand on the doorknob. “News?”

  “Yep,” Tony says. “Get my dinner and I’ll tell you.”

  Barbara returns as quickly as she can with Tony’s steaming bowl of stew. He has pulled up an armchair and is toasting his hands within inches of the flames.

  “You’ll get chilblains,” she warns.

  “I really don’t care,” Tony replies, then taking the stew, “Aw, fabulous. Thanks.”

  Barbara pulls the orange vinyl pouf as close to the fire as she can without risking melting it, then prompts, “So? What’s this news?”

  “It’s good news, Babs,” Tony says. “It’s bloody good news, in fact. It’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”

  They have waited so arduously for so many things in their lives. They have waited for more money, a bigger flat, their first child, and then a sibling for him. But though a little more is always a little better, Barbara can’t think what single thing they might be waiting for right now.

  “I’ve got a new job,” Tony says, blowing on a spoonful of stew. “Starts after Christmas.”

  “You have?”

  “Staff photographer,” Tony says, between mouthfuls. “No more riding parcels around!”

  “Really?!”

  “Yes. What do you think of that, eh?”

  Barbara shakes her head. “I’m amazed. That’s brilliant news.”

  “They were so chuffed with my photos this year, they decided they want me doing it full time.”

  Barbara wants to ask him if he’ll be travelling less. She wants to ask him if he’ll be earning more as well. But she knows that such questions would seem calculating and inappropriate. Plus there’s something else troubling her and it’s taking her a moment to work out how to phrase it in a non threatening manner. "So, which photos did they like so much?” she finally asks.

  “Um, you know… the Festival of Light,” Tony says. “The mums at the school holding up ten fingers for the decimalisation thing. The kids with the empty milk bottles for Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher. Oh, and the postal strike ones. They didn’t really say, but I think those are the main ones. Those are the photos people kept patting me on the back about.”

  Barbara silently pursues her thought process to it’s ultimate, worrying conclusion and then, despite it, forces a broad grin. “Anyway, that’s great news,” she says, wincing at her use of the word, anyway – a giveaway if ever there was one that certain doubts remain unexpressed.

  Thankfully Tony hasn’t noticed her anyway and so doesn’t ask Barbara what she meant by it. Barbara thus escapes having to point out to him what he must already know: that the festival photos he sold were in fact taken by Diane with her new high powered Nikon zoom lens. That the photos of the kids with their empty milk bottles were, in truth, Phil’s (he had failed to sell them to his own newspaper). And that, if the photos depicting decimalisation and the postal strike were his, the ideas for their staging were both hers.

  But this isn’t the moment to point that out. It isn’t the moment to point that out at all.

  2012 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

  “So, Mum,” Sophie asks. “What do we think then?”

  They are installed in Barbara’s lounge. The gas fire is hissing before them and Nut is wandering around trying to decide where he will be the most comfortable. On the coffee table sits Brett’s contract, which over the past week Sophie has decided is in fact a small price to pay. The only alternative is really just to cancel everything. But it’s immaterial really what Sophie thinks, because she’s pretty sure that her mother is going to veto Brett’s involvement and sink her boat, right here, right now. She is preparing to abandon ship.

  “About what?” Barbara asks. “About Brett, the contract, or the images?”

  Sophie shrugs. “Well, they’re all kind of linked really, aren't they? But let’s start with Brett. You don’t like him. Am I right?”

  “I don’t dislike him, Sophie. I just don’t see why we have to have a journalist involved at all. I don’t trust them. In general, I mean.”

  “Except when they work for the Daily Mail?”

  “That’s just silly. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “It’s not as if Dad was some secret serial killer, is it?” Sophie says. “It’s not like Brett’s going to find out that he killed Kennedy or anything!”

  “You’re still being silly.”

  “But you know exactly what I mean too.”

  “There are skeletons in everyone’s closets, Sophie. And I just don’t want his name sullied to satisfy some journalist’s need for print.” Sophie rubs her nose and frowns and Barbara suspects that she’s on the point of being rumbled. Perhaps she has gone too far.

  “Mum,” Sophie says. “Are you saying that there’s something specific hiding in Dad’s closet? Something that Brett really could find out? Something you haven’t perhaps told me?”

  Barbara laughs. “And now you’re being utterly ridiculous,” she says.

  “Well then! What’s the fuss about?”

  “You’ve said it yourself lots of times. They invent things. They make things up.”

  “But not about Dad. Not about some long-dead, half-forgotten photographer.” Barbara looks forlornly into her eyes and Sophie realises that she’s been indelicate to say the least. “Sorry, Mum. That came out wrong. I just mean that Brett has no reason to invent anything about Dad. There’s nothing to be gained from it. And he is, after all, my boyfriend. He would never do something like that anyway. Not to me.”

  “I’m sorry to say it, dear, but that’s not much of a love-letter he’s written you,” Barba
ra points out, nodding at the contract.

  “No… Well…” Sophie swallows with the same difficulty she has been having swallowing Brett’s contract. “Business is business, I suppose.”

  “Can you really not just do it without him?”

  Sophie sighs sadly. “I could,” she says. “But it would have to be some little gallery that no one has heard of, and I’d have to pay for the book to be printed instead of us being paid for it, and the Times wouldn’t be talking up what a big deal the whole thing is… And without all of that, it would be an entirely different proposition. That’s what Brett brings to the party.”

  “I see.”

  “And if you think about it, Brett’s twenty-five percent is our guarantee that he won’t do anything to diss Dad. Because he’ll want it all to be a success as much as we do.”

  Barbara nods. “I suppose. And what does Jonathan say? Have you spoken to him about it?”

  “He said to do whatever I think is best,” Sophie says. “I don’t think he’s very interested in it all, really. Which is disappointing, frankly.”

  Having tested the other options – Barbara’s lap, next to the fire, the red velvet cushion – Nut now jumps onto Sophie’s lap, turns twice and then begins, rattlingly, to purr.

  “I liked your choice of images, by the way,” Barbara says.

  “You did?”

  “It was hard for me to look at some of them. Very hard, sometimes. But I think they’re a good selection.”

  “They will look great in a book, won’t they?”

  “They will.”

  “We’re still a few short, though. I could do with another ten or so.”

  “Do you think that you’ll find them? Because you’ve pretty much finished going through them all now, haven’t you?”

  Sophie nods. “I might take some of the rejects and put them in anyway. I know I’ve asked you this already, but you’re really sure, aren’t you, that there’s nothing else lying around?”

  Barbara licks her teeth and then, the decision confirmed, she stands and crosses to the sideboard. She returns with two blue photo-store pouches which she hands to Sophie. “Here,” she says. “You’re going to be disappointed, but I know how much you wanted to see these so I got them printed.”

  Sophie looks shocked. “Mum?”

  “They’re of Paris. But they’re very poor.”

  “They’re not! These aren’t… Are they?”

  Barbara nods. “The Pentax tour.”

  “But I thought you said…”

  “I just didn’t want them to become public. Go on. Have a look.”

  Sophie tips the cat from her knees – somehow the better to concentrate – and brushes her hair behind one ear. “God!” she says, sliding the wadge of prints from the first pouch. “I knew you wouldn’t have destroyed those negatives. I just knew it.”

  “They’re just cheap, normal prints from Tesco,” Barbara says. “But you can get enlargements done if you want to.”

  “Of course. God, this is brilliant, Mum.”

  “That, I rather doubt.”

  Sophie frowns at the first photo. “Colour!” she says. “And thirty-five millimetre too.”

  “It was for Pentax,” Barbara reminds her. “They dictated everything. That was half the problem.”

  As Sophie leafs through the first ten or so images, her brow increasingly, furrows. “These look like someone’s holiday snaps,” she finally comments, flashing a poorly framed image of Notre Dame cathedral at her mother.

  “I know.”

  “And half of them are out of bloody focus.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Sophie continues to work her way through the photos, her expression increasingly distraught. “How can they all be out of focus? Was he drunk or something?”

  “Very probably,” Barbara says, then, “But it was the camera mainly. He couldn’t get on with it at all.”

  Sophie snorts. “How hard could it be?” she says. “I mean, look at that!” She holds up a different print – an image of two women sitting in an archetypal Parisian brasserie. The lighting is gorgeous, the bar is elegant and the women are perfect, beautiful, bitchy looking icons of Parisian life. They’re even smoking Gitanes, the packaging of which lies between them on the table. Were it not for the fact that the focal point of the photo is on a potted plant in the foreground and everything else is out of focus, it could have been an image taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

  “If I remember correctly,” Barbara explains, attempting to mitigate Tony’s posthumous shame, “it was one of the first autofocus cameras ever. Pentax were desperately trying to push it. But your father hated it. He said it drove him crazy.”

  Sophie nods. “I think I actually remember that,” she says. “Did it have loads of batteries in a huge, chunky lens? Did it beep all the time?”

  Barbara nods. “Yes, I think that’s the one. They discontinued it shortly afterwards.”

  “He could have just switched the bloody autofocus off,” Sophie says, feeling angry now. “These are shocking.”

  “Oh, you know what he was like with technology.”

  Sophie is flicking through the photos rapidly now. “God Mum,” she says. “These really are appalling. There’s not one.”

  “And that, love, is why I kept them out of sight. I hope you understand now.”

  “Too right… Jesus. Didn’t he take any with his Rolleiflex?”

  “No,” Barbara says, glancing at her feet. “Not one.”

  ***

  “One cappucciiiiino!” the Barista announces. He says it with such flourish, that one might think he had just managed to convert coffee to gold. Which in a way, Sophie realises, is exactly what Starbucks has found a way to do. “And one faaaabulous, double espresso!!”

  “Thanks,” Brett says flatly. Being American, he must be used to such over-the-top service, Sophie figures. He takes his mug and scans the room. It’s lunch-time and this is Soho, so the only seats available are those at the dingy end of the room next to the toilets. “Looks like we’re over there,” Brett says, glumly.

  Once they are seated, he smooths his tie then sips his coffee before saying, “So. You wanted to talk?”

  “Yes,” Sophie says.

  “About?”

  “I had a rethink,” she announces. “We accept your conditions. Well, Mum and I do. Jonathan wants nothing to do with the whole thing.”

  “You accept my conditions,” Brett repeats. “You mean the need for a contract, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you think an apology might be in order?”

  Sophie shrugs.

  “You told me to ‘fuck off’, Sophie,” Brett reminds her. “You said I had a ‘stinky ego.’”

  Sophie snorts at this and, as a result, cappuccino goes up her nose.

  “Am I laughing here, Sophie? Do you see me smiling?”

  She sighs and gives a little shake of her head. “Anyway, what I was–” she begins.

  “Come on Sophie,” Brett insists. “Apologise.”

  Sophie gasps. “Do you have any idea how difficult this is for me, Brett? I mean, just coming here and saying I was wrong? Can’t you show a little… I don’t know… compassion?”

  Now it’s Brett who snorts. “I don’t think that’s really my problem, Sophie. I think you got into this mess all on your lonesome. Now just say ‘sorry’ and we can move on.”

  Sophie gasps. “OK! Sorry Brett.”

  “Say it like you mean it.”

  Sophie laughs again. She can’t help herself. “You sound just like my mother! Now just lighten up, will you?”

  “You hurt my feelings, Sophie,” Brett says.

  Sophie notes how often he uses her name when he’s being earnest and she notes how much she hates it. It sounds so patronising. “Well, Brett,” she says. “You hurt my feelings by asking for a contract. Now can we please just forget it?”

  Brett shrugs. “So y
ou don’t know how to apologise. What’s new?”

  “Can we?”

  “OK. Whatever.”

  "So, are we OK? Can we go ahead? With the project?”

  “I guess,” Brett says reluctantly. “But what about Jonathan?”

  “It’s not like he’s going to talk to anyone else. You’ll still have exclusivity. He just doesn’t want to get involved. He’s got a kid on the way and he wants a quiet life, that’s all.”

  “Do you think he’d sign a disclaimer to say that? That he won’t talk to anyone else.”

  “Probably,” Sophie says. “But I can personally guarantee that he won’t.”

  “OK,” Brett says. “And your mom’s onboard now, huh?”

  “Just about. I wouldn’t want to ask her for much but at least she’s not going to throw any spanners in the works. And that at least is something.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Hey, look at these,” Sophie says, reaching into her bag for the photos. “I finally got them from Mum. We can’t use them or anything, but it shows she’s changed her mind a bit.”

  “These are?”

  “These are the famous Pentax photos.”

  “Oh!” Brett says, flipping open the first pouch. “I thought they had all been destroyed.”

  “That’s the official story. But…”

  “And we can’t use them because?”

  “Have a look.”

  Brett slides the photos out and leafs quickly through them. “Your father took these?”

  “Pretty shocking, huh?”

  Brett pulls a puzzled expression. “It looks like something went wrong with the camera.”

  “It was a Pentax ME F. I looked it up on the net. Their first ever autofocus camera. It was meant to be revolutionary but it was just one big fail, really. The technology wasn’t ready and lots of them had technical problems. Dad wasn’t the only one who hated them.”

  “Hum,” Brett says. “But I doubt many people failed quite so spectacularly.”

  “No.”

  “Gee, these are baad!” Brett laughs and Sophie, despite herself, despite that fact that in essence she agrees, starts to feel offended.