The Photographer's Wife Read online

  Silently, Sophie edges into the room. She sees that Butch has now noticed her presence – he grins at her but continues to powder his nose. Sophie hopes that Now won’t be wanting any smiley shots, because his grin is frankly creepy. But he doesn’t say anything, which is good because Sophie knows that as soon as Day spots her presence, this session will be over.

  “Did they choose you for that Monsoon shoot in the end?” Day is asking Skinny.

  “Nah. They chose some anorexic redhead,” Skinny replies, and Sophie pulls a face as she tries to imagine what a model who Skinny considers anorexic might look like. Auschwitz imagery comes to mind.

  Sophie edges along the right hand wall and manages to take a series of photos of the three models all in profile, all peering into their mirrors but with a different face in focus in each shot. If they work, it could make a great triptych.

  And then Butch, damn him, says, "So, what are those for?” and Eddi Day turns to face Sophie with one of the most terrifying scowls she has ever seen. No one even imagines that models can look like this, Sophie thinks, managing to snap three more shots as she lowers the camera.

  “What the fuck?” Eddi Day snarls.

  “They’re just for me,” Sophie says.

  “Fuck that,” Eddi Day spits. “That’s not in the contract.”

  “Calm down. This isn’t work,” Sophie says. “As I said, they’re just for me.”

  “They had better be,” Eddi says. “Or I will sue the arse off you.”

  Skinny turns to look at her now and nods exaggeratedly. “Me too,” she says.

  Butch shrugs. “I don’t mind,” he says, sending Sophie a wink. “Shoot away.”

  ***

  When Brett arrives at Sophie’s flat on Saturday morning, the screen of her twenty-seven inch iMac is filled with the gruesomely curled lip of Eddi Day.

  Brett hangs his coat up, then crosses the room and leans in to kiss Sophie’s neck. “Gees!” he exclaims, performing a double take. “Who’s that?”

  “Eddi Day,” Sophie says.

  “And who might Eddi Day be?”

  Sophie laughs. “You know Eddi Day even if you don’t realise it. You just never saw her like this before.”

  She clicks a few times on the mouse and finds an online advert for Noméa anti-ageing cream.

  “Oh, the face of Noméa, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “And she’s moving into horror movies or what?”

  Sophie snorts and restores her stolen photo. “A bit of a shocker, right?”

  “A bit of an understatement. And she has wrinkles!” he says, pointing at the fine lines around her eyes.

  “She is thirty-five,” Sophie says. “I have to Photoshop them out these days.”

  “But she still does the adverts for anti-wrinkle cream, right?”

  “Exactly. That’s why I Photoshop them out.”

  "So, w’happen?” Brett asks, walking over to the kitchen and pouring himself a mug of coffee. “You hit the shutter button by accident?”

  “No, I’ve been mucking around. Looking for an angle, as you would say,” Sophie explains.

  “And?”

  “This is part of an idea I had. The hidden side of the fashion industry. That’s my big idea. Well, currently it is anyway.”

  Brett leans back against the kitchen worktop and smiles. “Nah, that’s not a big idea. That’s just you being lazy. Thinking you can take a few extra shots while you’re at work and call it art.”

  Sophie leans back in her chair and swivels gently from side to side as she studies the photo. She feels vaguely mesmerised by Eddi Day’s scowl, specifically by the blob of saliva in the corner of her curled lip. “Art is all about the explanation you put on it,” she says. “If you explain it in the right way, it becomes art.”

  “Hum,” Brett says, sounding sarcastic. “Now let me see. Didn’t a certain Anthony Marsden say something different. Wasn’t his catchphrase something about–”

  “Well, that was Dad being clever,” Sophie interrupts. “Saying that art wasn’t meant to be explained, that it was just meant to be looked at... well, that was Dad’s clever deconstructionist explanation of what art is, wasn’t it? It was a double bluff.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But seriously, Brett, look at this. There’s something magnificent here, don’t you think? Imagine this blown up to three by three. Metres that is, not feet. Or more. Maybe five by five. You’d be able to see every pore. Every blackhead.”

  “It would be awesome,” Brett says, “And she’d sue the ass off you.”

  “Her exact words, in fact.”

  “Uh?”

  “That’s what she said when I took the photo. That she’d sue the ass off me if I used it. Well, she said ‘earse’, actually,” Sophie says, doing a Liverpool accent. “She’s from Runcorn, not New York, so...”

  “So, you really can’t use it?”

  “Not this one, no. But I could probably get auth for some of them. Look at these.” She fiddles with the mouse until the screen is displaying the first of her three triple-profile photos, now converted to high contrast black and white. “Well, come on!”

  Brett sidles over and crouches down beside her and Sophie clicks through the three almost identical photos of the three models doing their makeup, the focus moving with each click from one face to the next. “I was imagining a huge triptych.”

  “It’s kind of cool when you click through them like that,” Brett says. “Video might be the way to go.”

  “Yes. You’re right.”

  “Is he actually powdering his nose?”

  “He is.”

  “Wow.”

  “And that’s just the first layer. The makeup artist came just after that and plastered them all with foundation. Look.” She shows Brett a series of photos showing the makeup artist applying foundation from a spray gun.

  “Wow!” Brett laughs. “They literally spray it on.”

  “Literally.”

  “And the final result?”

  Sophie lines up two photos side-by-side, one of Eddi Day in a Now black skirt and a sleeveless, orange, cable-knit jumper, and one of Patrick (Butch’s real name turned out to be Patrick Evans) wearing an off-the-peg, grey, three-piece suit with a white, round-collared shirt and a skinny, pink tie.

  “Huh!” Brett exclaims. “Foundation suits him. Nice suit too. Who’s is that?”

  “Now,” Sophie says.

  “Now?”

  “The high-street chain, yeah.”

  “Their suits don’t look like that in the window.”

  Sophie grins and bites her bottom lip. For once, she is the expert here and she’s enjoying it. She’s loving being able to reveal the secrets of the fashion world to Brett. “Look at this,” she says, selecting a different photo of Patrick taken from behind.

  “What are those?” Brett asks. “Clothes pegs?”

  “Yep,” Sophie says. “That’s how you get a Now suit to look good on a gym built model. Pegs all down the back so that the front hangs right. And if you look closely...” She chooses another photo taken from behind. In this one, Patrick is wearing only the trousers and the satin-backed waistcoat. Sophie zooms in on the waistband of the trousers. “You can see that they actually had to unstitch the waistband, yeah?”

  “Because it was the wrong size? Or he has exceptionally big buns? What?”

  “The fashion is skinnier this year than they expected. So to make the suit look skinnier they’ve pegged the jacket to pull the waist in and used an undersized pair of trousers. But to get him into them, they had to unpick the seams.”

  “So, if this guy goes into a branch of Now and buys this same suit–”

  “It will look like shit,” Sophie confirms.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Plus of course, I still need to Photoshop it.”

  “More nasal hair, huh?”

  “No. But his left eyebrow is thicker than the right one, see? So I’ll even that up. And I’ll get
rid of some of these creases here...” Sophie runs her finger down the inner thigh of Patrick’s trousers. “I’ll whiten everyone’s teeth too.”

  “And we wonder why we never look like the people in the ads,” Brett says.

  “I know. And I know I can’t use these because they’re professional models and everything, but if I did the same thing with some non-professionals... paid them for their time and did double shots, you know, before all the trickery and after... do a whole series of them showing the pegs and the foundation-from-a-can and the Photoshop stuff, don’t you think it could be cool?”

  “Hum,” Brett says.

  “Hum?”

  “Yeah. Hum.”

  “Hum what?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Honestly.”

  “OK, I see two problems. The first is that it’s a news item, not art. It’s a myth buster and it’s interesting... it’s, it’s... liberating, even. But it’s not art.”

  “Surely that depends how good the photos–”

  “There’s still too much narrative. It’s too useful. Too literal.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry, Hon.”

  “And the second thing? You said you saw two problems.”

  “Oh yeah. You’d never work in the fashion industry again.”

  “No,” Sophie says. “No, I thought about that.”

  “So,” Brett says.

  “So?”

  “So, are you gonna suck my dick or aren’t you?” he asks, his sexy leer suddenly back.

  Sophie sighs, rubs her brow, then tears her eyes away from the screen. “Hum,” she says.

  “Gee, thanks for the enthusiasm.”

  “Hey, you can’t blow my entire project out of the water and then expect me to–”

  “To blow me?”

  “Exactly.”

  “OK! Then it’s a great idea!” Brett says. “It’s so good, I’ll bet they give you a one man show at the Tate Modern.”

  Sophie frowns at him.

  “So, now will you suck my dick?” Brett asks.

  1951 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

  Tony glances up at Barbara, his brow furrowed. He is crouched beside the motorbike with a soapy sponge in his hand. Barbara has waited until this moment to make her announcement, because, due to the fact that Tony has his hands full and can’t run away or strangle her, she somehow feels safer.

  “What?” he says.

  “I think you heard me,” Barbara says quietly.

  “I heard you,” Tony says. “But I don’t know what that means.”

  “You know,” Barbara says. “My woman’s trouble. It happens once a month. Only it didn’t this time.”

  “I still don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Tony says. “Are you ill? Do you need to see a quack?”

  Barbara covers her mouth with her hand and murmurs, “Oh Tony.”

  “You’re not trying to say... you don’t mean...” Tony coughs. “You’re not, you know...” he says, nodding at her belly. “Are you?”

  Barbara nods vaguely.

  “You are?”

  “I think so.”

  “But we haven’t even been trying,” Tony says.

  Barbara clears her throat. “I know. That’s what I thought. But I don’t think you need to actually try. I think you just need to do... you know... what we’ve been doing.”

  “Jesus!” Tony says.

  “Please don’t swear.”

  “I know. But... blimey. Just like that? Did you do it on purpose? Did you do it to get me to marry you?”

  Barbara frowns deeply and licks her lips. She shrugs. “Of course not. Did you?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Bloody hell, Barbara! I can’t believe you’re telling me this. Not this way.”

  “So you’re upset,” Barbara says. “I thought you might be pleased.”

  “Pleased?!” Tony splutters. “I don’t know what I bloody am.”

  Barbara turns and strides back into Donnybrook, then runs upstairs to her room on the top floor. She pulls the door closed and throws herself upon the bed.

  Were she someone who cried, she would cry. But unlike her sister, Barbara isn’t someone who cries. Even when she wants to, she can’t. Because she’s fully expecting Tony to follow her and she wants him to see how upset she is, she wets her finger and rubs it down the crease of her nose. She wants him to take her in his arms and tell her that it’s all going to be OK.

  Though she understood that she could get pregnant, she honestly didn’t think it could happen so quickly, so easily. She didn’t quite understand what the term, “trying for a baby” meant, but along with Tony, she did in some way imagine that you had to at least want to get pregnant for it to happen. But perhaps secretly she did.

  When her period had failed to materialise, she’d been unable to believe it was true, had assumed that there must be some other explanation. But with Glenda holding her hand, she had gone to the local library and together they had read through that well-thumbed pamphlet. Her tiredness, her nausea, her tender breasts... the conclusion was unavoidable.

  These last two weeks have been horrific. She has alternated between having thrilling visions of the perfect white wedding she and Tony will now be forced to have (Tony has repeatedly said he’s in no hurry but now the hurry has arrived of its own free will) and more often, feelings of sheer terror: the terror of the dark street and the coat-hanger. Or the terror of a trip to a convent somewhere in Wales, as happened to her schoolfriend Valery. For those are the only possible outcomes she can think of.

  After almost an hour, Barbara stands and crosses to the window. Outside she can see the motorbike, but Tony is no longer there.

  She splashes water on her face and heads down to the kitchen, where she finds Joan washing potatoes.

  “Mrs Marsden,” she says. “Have you seen Tony?”

  Joan pouts and shakes her head. “He went off with Diane, I think. I thought you was with them to be honest. I saw them head off and I thought you was all together or something.”

  “No. I was upstairs having a snooze,” Barbara says.

  “You OK, love? You look a bit peaky.”

  “I think I might be coming down with a cold. I caught a chill when Tony was doing the motorbike, I think,” Barbara lies.

  “Well, before you take to your deathbed, how about peeling some spuds for me? I’ve got so much to do today and I’ve barely even started. I’ve no idea how I’m going to get it all done.”

  “Sure,” Barbara says, moving to Joan’s side. “I’d be happy to.”

  Tony doesn’t return at all that evening, so, to avoid the embarrassment of eating alone with Joan, Barbara walks to the seafront and dines on a bag of chips instead. The pamphlet said she has to eat healthy food full of vitamins if she wants a healthy baby but it can’t matter just yet, can it?

  When she gets back to the house, Joan asks her if she’s seen Tony. “You’ve not had a row, have you?” she asks.

  “I think he said he had to help Diane with some photo developing or something,” Barbara fibs. “I think I just forgot. Yes. I’m sure he said something like that.”

  Joan looks unconvinced but nods all the same. “Do you want some tea? I could knock you something up; can’t have you going to bed on an empty stomach.”

  “I had fish and chips, thank-you,” Barbara says. “I might go to bed though. I think I need an early night.”

  Barbara lies staring at the cracked ceiling and listens to the wind whistling under the gaps beneath the sash window of her room.

  Her thoughts are a-whirl and she doesn’t think she will get a wink of sleep tonight, but as the light fades, her fatigue overtakes her and pulls her into a world of tormented dreams where babies are ripped from their mothers and stacked, on shelves, like jumpers.

  She awakens at first light and checks her watch: it’s just before six am. She rises, washes her face and pulls on her clothes.

  On her way downstairs, she peers into Tony’s room – the bed has n
ot been slept in – and then continues down to the kitchen where she knows Joan will already be preparing breakfast. She discovers Tony leaning in the doorway talking to Joan, who is in the process of shaping potato cakes on the kitchen worktop.

  She touches Tony lightly on the shoulder and he jumps and turns to face her. He looks pale and blotchy. His eyes are red too. He reeks of beer.

  “Have you been out all night?” she asks him.

  “Go on, go to bed,” Joan tells her son.

  “But–”

  “Go to bed!” she says again, only more sharply this time. “Barbara and I need to have a chat.”

  Tony nods and then, without catching her eye even once, squeezes clumsily past her and on down the hallway.

  “Is he drunk?” Barbara asks.

  “Never mind him,” Joan says. “Come wash these dishes will you?”

  Barbara watches Tony swing around the bannister and then vanish from view as he clomps his way upstairs in his motorcycle boots, then turns back to Joan. “OK,” she says. “Of course.”

  The countertop to the right of the sink is piled high with dishes from last night’s dinner service, so Barbara extracts a pile of plates and begins to wash them as Joan, beside her, continues to shape the potato cakes.

  “So Tony thinks you’re up the duff,” Joan says suddenly and without warning.

  Plate and scrubbing brush in hand, Barbara freezes. Her mouth drops. She forces it closed, swallows with difficulty and then resumes washing the dish with slow, circular movements.

  “Well, are you?” Joan asks.

  Barbara raises her shoulders. “I think I might be,” she says quietly.

  “You’ve missed your period?”

  Barbara bows her head shamefully. She has never had a conversation about sex in her life. Not with Minnie, not with Glenda and not with anyone else for that matter. The closest she has ever got has been to tell Glenda she hasn’t had her troubles this month, upon which Glenda led her to the library.

  “Yes,” she says. “It just didn’t come.”

  “Any sickness in the mornings?” Joan asks.

  Barbara nods. “And I hurt a bit, here,” she says, lightly touching her belly with the back of her wet hand.