The Photographer's Wife Read online

  Barbara pulls her mother down the path and into the road, where a group of women from their building have congregated.

  “Oh, ain’t it marvelous!” Sylvie exclaims, hugging both Barbara and her mother simultaneously albeit awkwardly due to their differing heights.

  “It’s peculiar,” Minnie says quietly. “It’s... it’s hard to believe, really.”

  Barbara spots her sister in the distance talking to a young man in uniform.

  She releases her mother’s hand and runs over to her. “Glenda!” she shouts when she gets there. “The war’s over!”

  “I know!” Glenda says, grasping her hand. “Come on. We’re going to Trafalgar Square.”

  “Trafalgar Square? Why?”

  “Everyone’s going there,” Glenda tells her. “They say it’s going to be the biggest party ever.”

  “The biggest party ever,” the young man confirms, nodding seriously.

  Barbara turns back to look at their mother. “But what about Mum?” she says.

  “She’ll be fine,” Glenda says. “Nothing’s gonna happen to her now, is it? The war’s over!” And then Glenda takes the young man’s hand as well and they start to walk briskly away.

  As they head through the streets, the crowds become ever denser. This May evening, everyone has stepped outside; the whole of London has downed tools. Everywhere Barbara looks, people are laughing and singing, they’re dancing and waving flags.

  “Everyone’s so happy!” she says.

  “Of course they bloody are!” Glenda laughs.

  “Will Mum be OK?” Barbara asks.

  “Of course she bloody will!”

  “I’m worried about her.”

  “She’s with Sylvia and Mildred and all that lot, isn’t she?” Glenda says.

  But that isn’t what Barbara meant. She didn’t mean, will Mum be OK now. She meant, will Mum be OK in general.

  “Everything’s gonna be better now,” Glenda tells her. “You’ll see.”

  “Will it?” Barbara asks.

  “Yes. Dad’ll be home soon and there’ll be no more rationing.”

  “Yes, rationing will stop,” the young man says. “I’m looking forward to that!”

  “We’ll probably get our old house back too!” Glenda says, and Barbara begins, for the first time, to imagine what a future without war might look like. As she runs, she starts to throw an occasional skip into the mix.

  By the time they have made their way to Trafalgar square, the sun is setting behind the buildings, and the crowd is bigger than any Barbara has ever seen. If people weren’t so smiley, she’d feel a little scared.

  Helped by the man, Glenda climbs up on a pillar-box, then points to the east. “Over there,” she says, jumping down and taking Barbara by the hand again.

  When they get to the far side, the impromptu band of GIs and locals that Glenda spotted has started to play Harry James’ Two-O’Clock Jump, so, in an ever smaller space in the midst of the swelling throng, led first by her sister and then by an actual (and rather good looking) GI, Barbara jives for the first time in her life. The eighth of May is one date that she’ll never forget.

  ***

  It’s five pm and the heat of the day is starting to fade as Barbara reaches Willow Street.

  She runs up the stairs, then pauses with her hand on the doorknob. She takes a deep breath and launches herself into the room, determined that today her mother’s sadness will not make her feel sad. Today is election day and everyone has been talking excitedly about how much things will change should Clement Atlee be elected to replace Churchill. And even Barbara can sense that something needs to change soon. People are worn out, hungry and poor, and many are getting angry. Revolution is in the air.

  Though the fear of invasion and attack has lifted, their lives seem stuck since the war ended. They are still living in a single room and rationing has not come to an end as hoped. In fact, with the influx of returning evacuees, food, if anything, has become even more scarce. Minnie’s piecework has ended, so although Glenda has now found a job training in British Home Stores, they seem to be no less poor than before.

  Finding the room unexpectedly empty, Barbara drops her bag and runs downstairs in the hope that someone in the kitchen will know where her mother is.

  She finds Minnie alone in the kitchen. She’s in the process of spreading batter into a cake tin with slow, precise movements, crouching down so that her eyes are level with the tin.

  Barbara raises her eyebrows in surprise. Her mother has not so much as boiled an egg since they had to leave their old house.

  “Hi Mum. Is that a cake?”

  Minnie looks up at her but remains level with the cake. “It will be. Hopefully.”

  “Gosh. Is it somebody’s birthday?”

  “No,” Minnie says. “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you manage to find some eggs?”

  “This is Elsie’s Tottenham Cake recipe. It doesn’t need eggs.”

  Barbara nods and watches as her mother continues to smooth the surface of the batter with a spatula. “Does it need to be very smooth?” she asks.

  Minnie nods. “It needs to be perfect,” she says quietly. She squints at the cake, turns it and smooths a little more. “This cake has to be absolutely perfect.”

  “Can I lick the bowl out?” Barbara asks.

  “I suppose so,” Minnie says, her eyes flicking briefly at the bowl and then back at the cake tin.

  Barbara pulls the bowl towards her and then runs her finger around the inside. She lifts a blob of the sticky, sweet mixture to her lips. “Umm. Tastes lovely,” she says, then, “Everyone says Clement Atlee’s going to win the election.”

  “Good,” Minnie says. “Things can’t get no worse than they are now.”

  “Is that what the cake’s for? Is it for the election?”

  “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” Minnie says, mysteriously.

  “Is it a surprise?”

  “Looks that way,” Minnie says.

  The cake, once iced, is the shiniest, pinkest, most beautifully smooth cake that Barbara has ever seen. She hadn’t known that her mother was such a good cook.

  When Glenda gets home at six thirty, Barbara immediately informs her that their mother has baked a cake. But rather than serving up the cake as Barbara had hoped, Minnie crosses the room and lifts the tin to place it on top of the wardrobe. “If either of you touches that, you’ll get such a hiding, so help me you will...” she says. “That’s a special cake for a special event.”

  It’s not until Minnie goes to the toilet that night, that Barbara is able to ask Glenda, with whom she still shares a bed, who she thinks the cake might be destined for.

  “I think it’s for Dad,” Glenda whispers back. “I think he’s been demobbed. Mildred said there was a telegram came this morning or something.”

  Barbara lies awake until the early hours with a strange mixture of excitement and fear elicited by the potential return of her father, but Seamus doesn’t return that night and he hasn’t returned when Barbara gets home the next day either.

  Despite the much celebrated change of government, rationing continues and even worsens, the room on Willow Street remains home, Minnie still spends her days staring out of the window, and the tinned cake sits untouched on top of the wardrobe. Neither Barbara nor Glenda ever dare mention the cake, or their father for that matter, again.

  2012 - Piccadilly, London.

  “Jesus!” Sophie exclaims. They have just set foot in the first hall of the David Hockney exhibition and already Sophie is overwhelmed by the scale of the paintings.

  “Not so small, huh?” Brett says.

  “The exhibition is called A Bigger Picture,” Sophie says, “so I suppose we were forewarned.”

  In front of them is a vast painting of an autumnal forest: fifteen metres by three of purple, orange and red trunks rising from a vibrant, almost fluorescent ferny undergrowth.

  “You never saw any big Hockneys before?” Brett
asks, glancing at the programme then back at the painting.

  “Not for real,” Sophie says, leaning in to study the quality of the paint before retreating across the room until she can see the entire scene without turning her head. “I mean, we studied Hockney at college but this is just so... vast.”

  “I saw his Grand Canyon stuff at the Smithsonian,” Brett says. “They were kinda Cinemascope too. I think there’s one here, somewhere.”

  Sophie glances left and right and notices again the emptiness of the gallery. Being able to see an exhibition alone is really rather special and she feels a little bubble of warmth towards Brett for having smuggled her in with his journalist’s pass.

  “So snap each of the biggies,” he says. “Maybe one with me standing in front for scale – yeah, I like that. And then we’ll see what we use at the end.”

  Sophie nods and raises the Nikon to her eye, and for a few seconds she is lost in the technicalities of taking the photo. But when she lowers the camera and sees the autumnal scene again, unframed by the viewfinder, she senses an unusual feeling rising in her chest. Because she can’t immediately identify the source, she strokes the camera and thinks about it for a moment: yes, she’s actually welling up here and it’s a direct emotional response to the picture. “God that’s beautiful,” she croaks, shaking her head, and Brett, who has already moved on to the next picture, looks back at her and grins wryly.

  “Are you actually getting teary there?” he asks.

  “Yeah, a bit. It’s strange,” Sophie says. “I don’t think that ever happened to me before. Not with a picture.”

  Brett nods. “He’s one clever dude,” he says, then, “Take a shot of these too, will you? The whole wall. I’ll be next door.”

  As Sophie walks towards the wall of smaller (but still large) woodland scenes, she glances over her shoulder at the autumn panorama again. “That’s extraordinary,” she murmurs. I wonder how you could do something that awe-inspiring in photography, she wonders. Only the vast photos of Andreas Gursky come close and they’re huge too. So maybe scale has everything to do with it. Perhaps if you blew up a simple photo of a face to thirty square meters, it would suddenly become art.

  “Come on!” Brett is poking his head back through the doorway. “We only have half an hour, remember?”

  As they continue around the exhibition, the sensation of being moved, of being emotionally destabilised, comes again and again and Sophie is able to analyse it further. It’s the same feeling she’s had once or twice when, lacking in sleep, she’s been up early enough to see a beautiful sunrise. Something about being overwhelmed, just momentarily, by the beauty of existence. Could it really be within the power of these Hockney paintings to do this to her, or is something more happening here? Is it perhaps because she’s here with Brett? Is she finally falling in love?

  “Wow,” she mutters, when in another room, she wobbles on her feet in front of the fifteen metre rendition of the Grand Canyon, as she struggles as if suffering from actual vertigo to remain standing.

  As they leave, only half an hour later, (Brett has an article to pen before midnight) they cross paths with a posh, frumpy female journalist and her twenty-something bearded photographer. Brett air-kisses them both.

  “Any good, Brett, darling?” the woman asks and Brett just shrugs and says, “Enjoy!”

  Outside in the crisp, January evening, Sophie asks, “Who were those two?”

  “Telegraph,” Brett says, buttoning his overcoat.

  "So, the enemy?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Why did you shrug when they asked what you thought? You did like it, didn’t you?”

  Brett shrugs again. “I haven’t got an angle yet. And if I did have one, I wouldn’t tell those assholes.”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” Sophie says. “One of the most beautiful exhibitions I have ever seen.”

  “Sure. But beautiful,” Brett says, in a soppy, mocking voice, “isn’t an angle.”

  “It was too big for me,” Sophie says, shaking her head. “I couldn’t take it all in. At least not in half an hour.”

  “Now that,” Brett says, “is an angle.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Too Big A Picture,” he says, with a wiggle of an eyebrow. “Geddit?”

  Sophie rolls her eyes. “Yeah. I geddit. And I’m freezing out here.”

  “Food?” Brett asks, glancing at his watch.

  “Sure, I’m hungry.”

  “Dolada?” he asks, nodding across the street. “I don’t have too much time.”

  “Sure,” Sophie says, starting to walk. “I could have spent all day in there. You will give it a good write-up, won’t you?”

  “Maybe. Probably. It’s all about working out what people want to read.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course. Hockney’s amazingly lucky as well,” Brett says. “That’s the first time the Royal Academy has ever given the entire place to a single artist.”

  “And while he’s alive too.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well, retrospectives are usually reserved for dead artists, aren’t they? It’s pretty rare for it to happen when they’re still alive.”

  “It’s not technically a retrospective,” Brett says, as they cross the pavement towards the cosy glow of the restaurant. “A lot of that stuff’s brand new. But yeah, I guess. Did anyone ever organise one for your father?”

  “A retrospective?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No,” Sophie says thoughtfully. “Maybe we should.”

  “Yes, maybe you should,” Brett repeats, with meaning.

  When they enter the restaurant, Brett’s glasses steam up so completely that he is rendered momentarily blind, so Sophie grinningly leads him to the table the Maitre d’ is indicating.

  “It’s weird no one ever put together a Marsden retrospective, really,” Brett says, once he has polished his glasses and the menus have been handed to them.

  Sophie shrugs. “No one even suggested it. And it’s hardly Mum or Jon who are going to organise something like that.”

  “Because?”

  “Well, Mum’s pretty old now. And she was always a bit of a heathen to be honest.”

  “A heathen?”

  “That’s probably not the right word. I just mean that she’s not very arty.”

  “Oh, OK. And your brother?”

  “He’s a quantity surveyor. So he has no interest in art either.”

  “Which is weird. Coming from your background.”

  Sophie nods thoughtfully. “Dad was pretty low-key about it. And they kept Jonathan well away from the art business. Mum wanted him to have a proper reliable career. And so he did. Very sensible, my brother.”

  “But not you?”

  Sophie shrugs. “I was pretty determined,” she says. “And I wouldn’t say that I am in the art business really.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” she agrees.

  “Fiorentina,” Brett says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Pizza Fiorentina,” he explains, folding the menu shut. “Spinach and egg. Can’t beat it. Then home to write Too Big A Picture.”

  During the meal, Brett chatters about his own family: his father the banker, his mother who runs a whole-food store in the East Village, Connie, his sister, now married to an evangelical Christian in Wyoming. But Sophie is only half-listening, because her mind is buzzing with the idea of an Anthony Marsden retrospective.

  It’s not until the bill has been paid and they are walking home along sparkly, frosted streets that she mentions it again. "How much interest would there be, do you think? In a Marsden retrospective?”

  Brett laughs.

  “What?”

  “I just knew we’d be revisiting that one,” he says.

  “And?”

  “How much media interest, d’ya mean?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Quite a lot, I guess. You’d need some really mega Hockneyesque
prints of some of his famous shots.”

  “The summer of seventy-six, the abortion demo, stuff like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’d have to contact the rights owners. A lot of them belong to the Mirror or the Times.”

  “And a batch of stuff people have never seen. You’ll still have rights to those.”

  “That might not be so easy, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “Mum burned them all.”

  “Really?!”

  “Actually, no that’s not true. But she did destroy some. All the stuff from the Pentax tour went up in flames. You never heard that story?”

  Brett shakes his head.

  “Pentax sponsored him to do a big show. In the eighties. But he died halfway through the shoot and Mum lost the plot and burned everything.” Sophie slips on the icy pavement and Brett grabs her arm and pulls her upright. “Careful there,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s interesting,” Brett says, “about the Pentax tour.”

  And Sophie can hear in his voice a different tone, the tone of Brett the journalist. “It’s not a scoop, Brett,” she explains. “The story was all over the papers at the time.”

  “Oh,” Brett says, sounding disappointed.

  “But Mum has boxes of other photos and negatives and stuff. Jon has some too. So I’m sure we could find some good stuff.”

  “I guess you need to start there,” Brett says. “See if there’s enough material.”

  “Could we get someone big interested, do you think? The R.A. or the National Portrait Gallery, or the V and A?”

  “Possibly,” Brett says. “He was a big name. It would help, of course, if you knew someone at a major newspaper who could help you publicise it...”

  “Like someone at the Times?”

  “Like someone at the Times,” Brett says, with a wink. “But again, it depends on the work you can put together. And it would be a big old game to organise it all.”

  Just in front of them, a cab is dropping someone off. Brett starts to walk faster. “Shall we jump in this one?” he asks.

  “Yes,” Sophie replies. “This pavement’s lethal.”

  Once they are seated and on the move, Sophie says, “I suppose that’s the problem. It’s loads of work and there’s no money in it.”