Leaving the hospital, I took a walk along the seafront, still smiling, all wrapped up, my belly cosy in the fake-astrakhan coat I bought the other day in a charity shop. I felt like someone out of a Russian novel – more babushka than Anna Karenina, but that was fine with me.
Brighton was even whiter than usual, little flurries of snowflakes tumbling soft out of the sky. I walked along, my boots crunching over the pebbles, hands stuffed deep into my pockets. When I reached the nudist beach, mercifully deserted, I stopped and looked out to sea, and then something wonderful happened, Suze: I felt the baby move, a fluttering, like someone stroking my belly from the inside.
“I’m here, little bug,” I said. “Not going anywhere.”
Florence came over in the evening for dinner. It was the first time I’d had someone else in the flat, and it was nice, immediately easy. For once, I’d cooked, bœuf bourguignon from Edith’s old copy of Elizabeth David. The beef had braised all afternoon, filling the flat with smells that made it feel like home. I’d laid the table properly too, remembering Florence’s Christmas effort, putting out napkin rings and silver cutlery. She noticed, as I’d hoped she would, tracing the initials that were etched into the napkin ring with the tip of her finger.
Afterwards she wanted to see my Afghan photos. It was the first time I’d seen the images since I’d edited them in Kabul and they were good: striking, sharp. As we went through them, I told Florence the women’s stories. She listened, watching closely, saying nothing, concentrating hard.
The very last photo was a snapshot I’d forgotten about, of Rashida on the Ferris wheel at the Qargha Lake, laughing, her headscarf about to fall off. I thought of her translating at Leila’s photo shoot, smiling up at her grandfather, her worry as she told me that her brothers weren’t happy with her working, the green shalwar kameez she’d been wearing as I drove up to the refuge. Suddenly I was dizzy and gasping for breath.
I ended up telling Florence all of it, apart from what happened at the Gandamack – not that, not yet. She listened in silence and, when I’d finished, nodded slowly.
“Yes,” she said. “I can see why you freaked out. But you’re getting better. Now you’ve got to get these pictures seen.”
“It’s hard to find the right place. You need the context to make sense of them, but they’re more likely to sell just as separate images. But then I’d lose all control. If a magazine used them as a cover, they could put any caption they liked. A feature would be better, but that’s almost impossible without a commission.”
She smiled. “And? You don’t strike me as someone who gives up that easily. You’re in the second trimester. For the next couple of months you’ll be invincible.”
“Invincible?”
“Yep. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”
I sat for a moment, hearing myself breathe, feeling her close to me. Something had shifted. I felt better. Not quite all right, but better. It would do as a start.
And now? Now it’s New Year’s Eve, the biggest night of the year in a town that loves to party. I’m in my pyjamas, sitting by the fire, a blanket tucked around my legs. I had comfort food for dinner: tinned tomato soup and crackers with cheese. Florence asked me if I wanted to come to a party, but I wanted to be alone. New Year’s Eve’s a time for nostalgia, even without the whisky. I’ve been going through Edith’s old records, the ones she’d have listened to as a girl – Noël Coward, Cole Porter, the songs you used to tease me for liking. Do you remember dancing to ‘Señorita Nina’ at that wedding in the Cotswolds, doing a tipsy tango to music that didn’t match? I listened to that tonight, and thought of us kissing in a corner of the marquee.
While the music played, I indulged myself, typing my name into Google. I wanted to see myself on Wikipedia, listed for awards, featured in agency archives. I wanted to know that Jo Sinclair still exists and has done OK, even if I’m holed up in my great-aunt’s flat, accidentally pregnant and alone.
It was strange to look at my website, a carefully edited account of my life over the last two decades, a roll-call of wars. Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone. Rwanda, Kosovo, Liberia, Congo. Afghanistan, Côte d’Ivoire, Gaza, Iraq. Hundreds of pictures showing the worst of what people do to one another – or not the worst – not quite. Those are the images I never put on the website, just filed away on my computer and shielded with a password – the ones that are too brutal, the ones that have darkened my soul.
Tonight I forced myself to go through them. Afterwards I hovered over the folder with my mouse, wondering whether or not to click Delete. In the end, I didn’t. It wouldn’t help – they’re etched into my memory for ever – and deleting them seemed somehow a desecration of the people who are in them, the ones who suffered, who died. But I don’t need to look at those photos again. I don’t need to go to those places again. I’m through.
I’ve been looking at another folder too, also password-protected, but for different reasons. When we broke up, I put all the photos of us in there together. Hundreds of photos taken by you and me: our holiday snaps, blurry party images, comedy close-ups. The whole glorious series I did of you naked, draped on your studio couch like a modern-day Rokeby Venus.
Tonight I added some more pictures – more naked ones – of me and the bump. I want to remember this, this odd feeling of being taken over from the inside, the little thing that’s pushing out my body in weird ways. I’m not that big yet, really – not compared to the pictures I’ve seen online. I’ve discovered a whole industry that I never knew existed: women looking dreamy, holding their bellies – lots of draping, windows, shafts of light. Partners too – some looking as if they’d been forced into it, others stripping off and getting right on in there. I put the pictures of me in the folder with our other ones, because it felt as if that’s where they would have belonged, if things had happened like you wanted, like they should have done. It seemed like an end to our story, the end we never had.
The last ones I’ve been looking at are the ones you didn’t want me to take, the ones you asked me not to, of the night that we split up.
New Year’s Eve 2009. You getting dressed, peering into the bathroom mirror, putting on make-up, doing your hair. Me cleaning my boots, making them shine. Us having dinner before the party.
I still find it odd that you went through the motions of dinner knowing what you were about to do. A sort of last supper, I suppose. Welsh rarebit followed by a chicken casserole you’d made that afternoon. You were beautiful, looking at me with sad, serious eyes, just like the Modigliani print that was hanging on the wall behind you. I tried to jolly you up, to make you forget the argument we’d had the day before about me going back to Iraq. You’d given me a deadline to decide about children. I said I hadn’t changed my mind, would never change my mind, that I couldn’t, wouldn’t do it.
“Let’s make our resolutions,” I said, getting down the book that we wrote them in every year.
“Jo,” you said, and it sounded like a warning, but I was so determined to make it better that I ignored you.
“Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’ve only got one resolution,” you said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m sorry. It’s to end things with you.”
And that was that – well, of course it wasn’t, not quite. There was silence, then tears, then explanations, recriminations, then you went off, all dolled up in your dress, to Lara, who was waiting, always there instead of leaving like me; Lara, whose mind was on you and not work; Lara, who was young enough and in love enough to talk about babies. Lara, who always listened to what you said.
I can’t say I blamed you. I’d have left me too.
I can hear the fireworks from the Pier. They don’t frighten me like before. I’m ready for the New Year, whatever it may bring. How strange finally to feel like this, after so long and after such a lot of angst.
Happy New Year, Suze. I love you. Always will.
Forty-Eight
ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY
’S DIARY
26th June 1915
When war begins one knows one’s life will change, and that is what has happened to me. Not through the blast of a bomb or being forced to flee my home, but through chance and the vagaries of love. Today I am utterly lost.
My reason for this despair is very simple: I am expecting a child.
After what happened at the boarding house I thought that Robert would stay away from the Pavilion, but instead he has continued to visit every day, talking easily to the patients and behaving as if nothing has happened, so convincingly that I have almost begun to question it myself.
I have sought refuge in work, both from Robert and from Hari. It has been painful for me to look at Hari. I harbour no illusions: his confession was clear enough, but my love for him is not a logical force. I still feel a thrill when he is near; the rest of the time I feel a strange, dull sadness.
It soon became clear that there would be repercussions from the other events of that afternoon. A week ago I began to experience a terrible itch. I knew it was not a thing to take to Dr Findlay, who has known me since I was born, and so I went to a place that I had heard of before the war, when I was working at the hospital, the private practice of a lady doctor.
No matter how often a doctor may say that they are there to treat the failings of a body, it is rare that there is no moral judgement attached; I know that from conversations between my father and his colleagues when they think no one is listening. And so I was nervous in the waiting room. But Dr Martindale was a kindly woman of learned appearance, with her grey hair tied up neatly in a bun and small spectacles perched on the end of her nose. Her rooms were inviting, lined with books and furnished simply with a screen for changing one’s clothes, an examination table and a large mahogany desk, like Papa’s. It was rather fine to see her, a woman, sit behind it.
The examination was quick. Afterwards, when I had dressed and she was back behind her desk, she looked at me over her spectacles and said that I had contracted a venereal disease.
“Do you know what that means?” she asked.
“I’m a nurse,” I said, trying to hide my horror. “I do.”
She went to a dispensing cabinet, unlocked it and took out a small bottle, then told me to apply the antiseptic lotion to the affected area twice a day, morning and night, after washing thoroughly with carbolic soap. If the itching persisted or if anything changed for the worse, I was to come back. The disease was not particularly serious, she said, but she wanted to take some blood to rule out the possibility of anything else.
I immediately imagined syphilis: lesions, tremors, daily injections of mercury or arsenic. Was that what she meant? I asked, and she nodded and said that she had taken a sample to test for gonorrhoea too.
I submitted to the blood test, a feeling of terrible shame creeping over me for what I had allowed to happen in the boarding house, combined with burning anger at Robert for what he had done.
As I stood to leave, the doctor cleared her throat and asked if the incident that had led to this might have had other consequences. I did not understand at first, until she asked directly if I might be with child.
“Oh!” I said faintly, and for a while was unable to say much else.
The doctor waited for a moment, looking at me, then asked when the incident had taken place.
I sighed, not wanting to remember, but of course I could: every detail of that afternoon is burnt into my memory.
“The twenty-fifth of May,” I said.
“You are not married?”
“No,” I said, because although a fiancé would have made it better, I did not want to claim Robert as mine.
“You should pay attention to how you feel. If you experience nausea or soreness in your breasts and do not bleed for another month, then it is likely.”
“Is there anything you can do to tell me for certain?”
“I’m sorry: the only way to find out is to wait.”
The next day the sickness came, and with it the realization that my future was set, that no matter how I feel about Hari, no matter how I feel about Robert, no matter how he has changed, my life will be with him and with our child.
I sat in the lavatory in the Pavilion, thinking it all over, looking for answers and finding none. I cannot bring up a child alone. I would have no money and nowhere to live: the shame of it would be too much for Mamma and Papa to bear. After long and painful consideration, I saw that there was no way out. I would have to learn to be like our patients and to accept my fate.
This morning I asked Robert to meet me on the seafront after work. In his new, accommodating way, he agreed, but by the time we met I could see that his mood had changed. I had thought hard about how to break the news to him, but now I knew that nothing would be right, so I decided simply to say it.
“Robert,” I said. “I have something to tell you.”
His face was dark, and he was frowning. “I know,” he said. “It’s all so perfectly obvious. I cannot believe I didn’t realize before.”
He turned to me, bringing something out of his pocket, which he thrust at me, saying that he had been stupid not to notice what was going on under his nose.
I turned over the piece of paper. It was one of Mr Fry’s postcards.
“A.H. Fry, Brighton,” it said, along the bottom, “Official Photograph.”
Seven of us stood behind the operating table, dressed in our surgical gowns. I was at the end of the line, next to Major Williams, and next to me was Hari. I felt a wave of sadness at the sight of it, and of longing for how we had been at the start of it all, how we had worked side by side and become friends. How strange to be captured for ever, to become part of the history of the Pavilion, with a photograph that says so much and yet, in reality, nothing at all.
Robert jabbed his finger at the postcard.
“You – and that Mr Mitra, who believes himself to be such a gentleman! How could you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s quite clear that you’ve been having a love affair. That’s why you’ve been so distant. That’s why you introduced him to me: to put me off the scent.”
My face was burning. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
“Ridiculous? I saw you in the gardens walking together, discussing something that was clearly important.”
I knew I couldn’t tell him the truth: that if I ever admitted to how I had felt, it would be the end of everything. As for the rest of it, Hari’s own truth, it was not mine to tell. But he persisted, asking about the afternoon when I had come to him.
“What had happened, a lovers’ quarrel?”
“Stop shouting, and listen to me! You know very well what happened that afternoon. You are the one who should be ashamed. You took advantage of me, and now there will be consequences.” For a moment I hesitated. “I’m going to have a baby.”
An extraordinary look passed over his face, a combination of hope and fear and disbelief. Then he said, slowly: “Is it mine?”
I was so shocked that it took me a moment to answer. When I did, my voice was bitter.
“Of course.”
He began to pace up and down, muttering to himself, occasionally pausing to grip the railings and stare out to sea. Then he turned to me and began to talk very quickly.
“It will be obvious when it’s born, that’s for sure. If it’s mine, I can’t abandon it: you’re my fiancée, how would that look? It would ruin my reputation and yours.” After a long pause, he added: “There is only one solution: we must marry, very soon. I’ll talk to Colonel Groves about a transfer back to India.” He looked at me: his blue eyes were hard and cold. “If I find that you have made a fool of me, there will be other consequences, do you understand?”
“Yes, Robert,” I said.
“And I will see to the Bengali.”
I sit here tonight in something of a daze. I don’t know if I have done the right thing or not. I wish I could talk to Hari, but that would be impossible. I have made a
choice, a hard choice, but one that means some chance of a future. My child will have a father and I a husband, at least of sorts. All I can do is hope that Robert will recover from whatever it is that is making him like this, and that I can forget these few short months when I felt alive in the company of Hari, when for the first time in my life I saw other possibilities. That is my only hope now: that I can try to forget.
Forty-Nine
I started off the New Year feeling hopeful, determined to get my photographs out there. As soon as I knew people were back in the office, I got on the phone. It was hard going.
“You know, they might work,” said John from one of the big agencies. “The press is going to want to drum up support for our boys there. The troops aren’t looking too great at the moment. The Taliban beating up women would work in their favour.”
“It’s not the Taliban who’re beating them. It’s their husbands.”
“Hmm. Not going to work.”
The magazines weren’t much better. After a week of bugging everyone I could think of, all of them had said no. I was sitting in the gulkhana with a cup of tea, plotting my next move, when the phone rang. It was Theo.
“I’ve been talking to Florence. She said you’re trying to get your pictures published.”
“I haven’t done very well,” I said. “It’s difficult. The press isn’t much into Afghan women at the moment.”
“I noticed. It’s all about American soldiers pissing on dead Taliban, right?”
I’d seen the YouTube video – four soldiers in combat gear and sunglasses standing over three corpses lying in the dust, legs splayed, clothes torn, plastic sandals dangling off their feet. The soldiers were laughing, playing to the camera as they peed over the bodies, telling them to “have a great day”.
“I’ve had an idea,” Theo went on. “My chambers have handled a few domestic-violence cases. One of them last year was pretty high-profile – a celebrity was involved. I think I could get them to sponsor an exhibition in a London gallery. We’ve done it before. It went really well.”
The Repercussions Page 21