The Photographer's Wife

by Nick Alexander

  ***

  The baby comes and the baby goes. Sometimes they tell her it’s because she needs to rest and other times they say it’s because the baby is overtired. But as daylight waxes or wanes, the baby and the visitors come and go and, with each arrival and each departure, Barbara feels a new set of emotions but never, she fears, quite the right emotions.

  “You’ll see,” Glenda had said, before the birth, “Seeing your baby is the most amazing thing that ever happens to a girl. Everyone says so.”

  But what to do if it doesn’t feel that way? Barbara wasn’t there for the birth. Well, she was present but she was not conscious. And the baby wasn’t with her when she came-to either, wasn’t visible, in fact, for days. And now everything seems wrong. She can’t put her finger on exactly why, but everything just seems wrong.

  She feels anxious when they take the baby away from her and, yes, terrified whenever anyone else holds him – this much is true. But she also feels anxious when they bring the baby to her, she also feels terrified when she is holding him. She’s worried, no, convinced, that this isn’t really her baby and that if he is, then she should be feeling something more here, something much more. Yes, everyone keeps telling her that this is Jonathan Michael Marsden, but well...

  So the baby comes and the baby goes and Barbara’s overriding experience of childbirth is one of anxiety and confusion and pain. And this in turn feeds into her cycle of anxiety and confusion and pain all over again because everything around her is saying that these are not the emotions she’s supposed to be feeling at all.

  Of course, there is no way to reasonably express any of this, not without appearing to be the worst, most selfish mother who ever gave birth. And would that not be the truth? So on top of everything else, on top of her exhaustion, which is so dramatic that she feels as if she has been drugged, and on top of her physical pain and her anxiety attacks, so devastating that she fears that she will suffocate, Barbara finds herself having to play-act.

  She jiggles the baby against her breast and smiles at Tony, emulating the kind of motherly contentment she has seen other women in the ward exhibit. She calls Glenda ‘aunty Glenda’ and Minnie ‘granny’ and the baby ‘Jonathan’ even though all of these things make her feel like a liar, despite the fact that all of these words make her feel like a fraud.

  And somehow, day in, day out, she manages to not say the only sentences that might make any sense here. She does not collapse in a corner. She does not weep. She does not say, “Help me!” She does not say, “I cannot do this.” In this, at least, she is strong.

  ***

  Back home, two weeks later, she lies in bed and listens to the baby screaming.

  Tony has gone to work and Minnie will not come by until her lunch break, so for the first time since the birth, there are no witnesses. For the first time there is nobody present to see what a terrible person she really is. And so she lies in bed and listens to the baby alone and crying and, as if she has split in two, watches herself to see if she cares.

  The milk-van is clinking past in the street outside and the baby is screaming louder, louder now than she has ever heard any baby scream. She wonders if the milkman can hear it. She thinks he probably can.

  A neighbour upstairs bangs on the floor, so in a way the witnesses are back. Someone somewhere now knows what a bad mother she is. She sighs and rolls from the bed.

  She groans, lifts her nighty, and as every morning before pulling on her dressing gown, she inspects her scar. Registering a brief, unexpected lull in the noise level, she pauses in the bathroom to pee and wash her face. She stares at herself in the pocked mirror of the bathroom cabinet. She looks terrible. People keep telling her that she looks well but she doesn’t. She looks truly awful.

  The baby catches his second wind and starts howling in a new ear-piercing tone that quite simply requires intervention, not through maternal instinct but as a pain avoidance strategy. This specific sound must have been designed by God, Barbara thinks, to be simply impossible to ignore.

  She runs a hand through her hair, inexplicably greasy since her return home, and then pads through to the nursery where she stands in the doorway for a moment. She closes her eyes and lets the ground-glass noise of screams, of the child’s gasps as it hyperventilates, wash over her. She asks herself again if she cares. She is definitely a terrible person.

  She opens her eyes again and crosses to the cot. The child is red – shockingly, terrifyingly beetroot coloured. His nose is snotty and his chin is glossy with dribble. But he is still tiny – how can something this tiny make this much noise? How is it possible?

  “Oh Jonathan,” Barbara breathes, her voice hopeless.

  And then something miraculous happens: the baby stops crying. Instantly. Just like that. His tiny blue eyes swivel in her direction.

  A shudder runs down her spine, a shudder indistinguishable from a shiver of cold, only it isn’t cold at all.

  Frowning at the queer feeling, she reaches out and gently touches the baby’s cheek and he blows a spitty bubble and gurgles vaguely. Something in Barbara creaks and splutters, like water making its way through a rusty pipe; some emotion that seems to have been locked away for so long that it’s only barely familiar to her starts to rise up.

  She bends over the cot (the pain of the stitches makes her grimace) and lifts the baby out. He is soaked and stinky but she lifts him and pulls him towards her; she holds his cheek to her own and begins to sob uncontrollably.

  “I’m so sorry, Jonathan,” she says.

  When her tears subside, she is able to carry him through to the bathroom, where she removes the disgusting nappy before cleaning and talcing him. As she dresses him in fresh clothes, he stares at her wide-eyed – accusing or loving, she’s not sure which. But he does not cry once.

  Finally, she carries him through to the dining room where she sits and pulls him to her breast. “I’m so sorry, Jonathan,” she says, as he starts to suckle. “Mum’s been away. But she’s back now. She’s back for good.”

  The emotions Barbara feels towards her newborn are novel, unexpected and (even she realises) entirely unreasonable in their intensity.

  When the child is asleep, she’s overwhelmed by the fragility of the silken cord that attaches him to this life, to her life. She can tremble with fear at the mere thought that he might not wake up. She has heard of such things happening.

  When he’s awake and unhappy, she’s overwhelmed by feelings of guilt at her inability to calm him, as insecure in her own capacities as she has ever been. But when he’s happy, which is just over half the time, she feels a kind of ecstasy that she can’t even begin to communicate to anyone else. She watches his every gesture, yearning for recognition, almost crying when he seemingly looks her in the eye, gasping when he smiles and swooning with love when he grasps a finger.

  She has never known anything like this, and the whirlpool of emotions she suddenly finds herself in seems to encompass every possible combination: exhaustion, joy, fear, hope... There’s nothing left out.

  For the first three nights, they struggle to sleep three abreast in the double bed. Jonathan wakes them constantly, unremittingly. Often the lapse of time between Barbara managing to get back to sleep and the baby waking her anew is less than an hour. Tony – who claims not to be sleeping at all – heads off to work in the morning looking grey and forlorn. By the time he returns in the evening, he looks like a dead-man walking.

  By day five, Barbara and Tony are arguing about the baby, about where he should sleep, about sleep itself, and by day seven, Tony has moved, grumpily, to a camp bed in the nursery. Because Barbara will not, can not, leave the child alone in the next room.

  It’s not that she doesn’t want to, it’s that it’s a physical impossibility. The effect of his wailing on her nerves makes ignoring it out of the question. Trying not to go to him when he is crying is like trying not to breathe. And when he’s not crying, it takes less than five minutes for the terror of not knowing if he is still b
reathing for beads of sweat to appear on her forehead. So no, there are no options here. She has to be with him at all times.

  By week three, it has been universally agreed, even admitted by her, that she’s hysterical about the child. But Tony and Glenda have at least declared this hysteria a “normal” reaction to her previous miscarriages. Minnie, on the other hand – no-nonsense, practical Minnie – finding herself unable to visit without arguing about Barbara’s parenting techniques (she should leave the child to cry himself out, she insists) has started, simply, to stay away. And the surprising thing is that Barbara doesn’t care.

  In fact, Barbara finds herself unable to even think about anything other than the baby these days. Tony can sleep in the camp bed or he can stay over at Phil’s or he can come home drunk or not drunk... He can be in a good mood, or not in a good mood and it has about as much effect on Barbara as a drop of rain on the back of her hand.

  All of these aspects to her day, aspects that used to fill her world, things that made a day a good day or a bad day, have become as irrelevant to her as the weather.

  It’s as if an entirely new reality has been revealed to her, one that is so powerful, so absorbing, so exhausting, that anything that happened to her before Jonathan has no more bearing on her now than a story she perhaps heard on the radio, then half-forgot.

  Her world is here and now. Her world is Jonathan. Nothing else matters one jot.

  Logically, she can see how this is hard for Tony; she can sense that his nose has been well and truly put out of joint. But she thinks that if Tony can’t feel the same gasp-inducing bond of responsibility that she feels, if he can’t get over his petty feelings of jealousy, then there’s little she can do about that. And the same goes for Minnie.

  She worries, vaguely, the way one worries about something one has forgotten to add to a shopping list, that Tony is drifting away, that Tony is being perhaps pushed away, that Tony, even, might leave them. Occasionally she thinks back to the grinding poverty of her own fatherless childhood and understands, on a rational level, that this would be a catastrophe, and that she should probably be doing something differently here. But even these anxious imaginings can’t find traction in the sea of hormones swirling around her body.

  It’s as if every spot of fertile land where thought processes might take root has been taken. It’s all occupied. For now, inexplicably, there is no outside world. There is only Barbara and Jonathan, Jonathan and Barbara.

  Sometimes she’s consumed with loving him and sometimes she’s consumed with fear but everything else and everyone else will just have to wait for normal service to resume.

  2012 - Trafalgar Square, London.

  Sophie wipes her sweaty palms on her black trousers and glances again at the door at the end of the room. Brett had to pull serious strings to get her this meeting and she only has one chance here. She needs to not blow it.

  She pulls the folder of her father’s work towards her because, rather stupidly, sensing its presence (reminding herself that it’s still there beside her, within reach) reassures her.

  Doctor Nicholas Penny. The curator of the National Gallery, no less. She can barely believe that she’s about to meet him. She checks her watch. She checks her phone. She checks her email. She checks her watch again. A single minute has gone by.

  She thinks about the folder within the folder – ten of her best shots. She wonders again if she’s going to have the nerve to show them. In her mind’s eye, she can see herself leaving with the second folder still unopened. She can see herself chickening out.

  Brett hasn’t helped by remaining uncharacteristically non-committal about whether she should show them or not. “They might find the whole father-daughter thing interesting,” he had said, the implication clearly being that, then again, they might not.

  The door finally bursts open and someone who is not Doctor Nicholas Penny appears – a young, bob-cut woman with a broad, professional smile on her face. She crosses to Sophie, who stands and shakes her hand.

  “Sophie Marsden, right?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “Claire Freeman,” the woman says. “Please! Come through.”

  Sophie follows her through the door, down a long corridor and into a small, cluttered office. Sophie expects her to leave; she expects her to fetch Dr. Penny. But instead she sits down behind the desk. “Please,” she says. “Take a seat.”

  Damn, Sophie thinks. I’m being fobbed off with his secretary.

  “You’re Anthony Marsden’s daughter, right?”

  “Yes. Do you know his work?”

  “A little.”

  You so don’t, Sophie thinks.

  “So, what can I do for you?” Claire asks.

  “I...” was expecting to meet Dr Penny, Sophie thinks. She runs the phrase through her mind but decides against it. She just wishes she knew who this Claire Freeman was but there’s no polite way to ask that. She should have researched the staff list at the National more thoroughly but the meeting was supposed to be with Penny, so she only swatted up on him. “I... wanted to chat with you about your thoughts on organising a retrospective of my father’s work,” Sophie says.

  “Of course.”

  “We’ve been going through all of the archives and there’s a whole body of work that people have never seen. We thought it would make an amazing show.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Claire says. She’s still smiling, which Sophie takes to be a good sign.

  “I brought some along,” Sophie says. “Would you like to have a look?”

  “Um, OK...” Claire says. Looking confused, she stands and rounds the desk to Sophie’s side.

  Sophie takes a deep breath and flips the folder open. She has spent weeks choosing, changing, ordering and reordering these photos. But now she’s swamped by doubt, convinced that she’s chosen the wrong ones.

  “Gosh, what a lovely shot,” Claire says, sliding the first print towards her – a photo of a group of kids in their underwear playing beneath the spray from a ruptured water pipe. “You must be very proud.”

  “Yes, a bit,” Sophie admits. “That’s nineteen-sixty-four.”

  “These days, they’d all be at home on their Playstations,” Claire says.

  “They would!” Sophie slides the second print over the first and Claire sighs. It’s a fabulous picture of a punk complete with safety-pin piercings and pointy hair, climbing onto a “brand new” Intercity 125 train sometime in the seventies.

  “That’s great,” Claire says. “He certainly had a good eye.”

  Emboldened, Sophie continues to hand her the photos one by one, and Claire considers them and makes appropriate appreciative noises. She does, however, spend a little less time on each shot than the last. When finally she reaches the sub-folder at the back, she strokes it and glances up at Sophie. “And in here?”

  “Oh, those are just some of mine,” Sophie says in as casual a manner as she can manage.

  “You’re a photographer as well? Of course you are!” Claire says, slipping a fingernail beneath the elastic. “May I?”

  Sophie swallows hard and nods, happy at least that Claire has asked, happy at least that she’s not having to force her to look at them. Claire flips open the folder to reveal the first image, Sophie’s triptych: three photos of the three models, still her favourite work of the last twelve months. “That’s great,” Claire says, then with a fingernail on Eddi Day’s chin, “She seems familiar.”

  “Yes, she’s a fairly well known fashion model.”

  Claire nods and flips quickly through the remaining shots. “Yes,” she says, when she reaches the end. “Yes, they’re nice. Really nice.”

  “Thanks,” Sophie says. Nice. Ouch!

  “So!” Claire says, returning to her own side of the desk. “I had a look at our database and as far as I can see we only have one photograph of your father’s. Does that sound about right to you?”

  “I actually didn’t know you had any,” Sophie admits. “Do you know what
it’s of?”

  “A demonstration – an abortion demonstration, I believe. If that means anything to you?”

  “Sure. It’s quite a famous one; it won the best photo-journalism prize that year.”

  Claire nods and her smile fades and is replaced with something similar to concern. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again and works her jaw a little before saying, “I’m sorry, Sophie. But if you didn’t know we had any of your father’s work, then I’m a little confused about why you’re here today.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I assumed you wanted to organise a loan.”

  “A loan?”

  “Of your father’s work. For your retrospective. But as we only have the one...”

  “Oh God, no!” Sophie says. “As I say, I didn’t know... so it didn’t cross my mind.”

  “Right.”

  “No, I...” Sophie clears her throat, a little mortified that she is going to have to spell out the reason for her visit. She had hoped that it was obvious. “I thought the concept might interest the National Gallery,” she says.

  “Interest us?”

  “I thought you, the National, might want to host the retrospective.”

  Claire’s eyebrows have risen almost to her hairline, but they now fall as recognition slides across her features. “Oh, I see...” she says.

  “He would have been eighty next year, so I... we thought that it was a perfect opportunity. And we thought the National was the perfect venue.”

  Claire nods slowly. “Um,” she says. “Yes. Of course.”

  Sophie fiddles with the folder to fill a few seconds of uncomfortable silence.

  “Then that would be, twenty-thirteen?” Claire finally says. “The anniversary?”

  “Yes.”

  She pulls a strange face as if constraining a grin and then shrugs as she explains, “I’m afraid to tell you, Sophie, that we schedule our exhibitions at the National many years in advance. So if your father’s work was something we wanted to show, I’m afraid we’d need two or three years notice. At least.”