The Photographer's Wife

by Nick Alexander

  As Barbara turns to leave the room, a hand reaches out to stop her. It’s Jonathan.

  “I put it on, Mum,” he says.

  She forces a smile. “Thanks, son.”

  “I hate him,” he says, shooting a glare at Tony, now whooping it up on the far side of the room. “I hate him so much I could kill him.”

  “Thanks,” Barbara tells him, “but that won’t be necessary. Enjoy the party. Good night.”

  From the bedroom, Barbara listens to the party next door. A part of her regrets her retreat, thinks that she should have stayed behind and fought her corner. But you can’t win with a drunkard. Ever. What was it her mother used to say? Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get covered in shit but only the pig enjoys it. A pig. That’s what he becomes when he drinks. A pig. And yes, in these moments she does hate him.

  She glances at the tie-die dress hanging on the handle of the wardrobe and decides that she will never wear it again. The dress is so much more than a dress. It is a symbol of her attempts to change, to please, to fit into Tony’s new world.

  She had a vision of herself looking and feeling sophisticated in this dress. She saw herself mingling confidently with these people, discussing perhaps the television program, or Tony’s photographs, or maybe even darkroom techniques.

  But she has understood, tonight, that though Tony is managing to move into a different world, that’s not enough to feed his ego. His sense of advancement requires that he leave her behind as a marker, as something he can point back to so that he can say, “Look how far I have come!”

  Art, like some evil mistress, is stealing her husband. But like all men with mistresses, he needs the wife to remain back home. For without a wife, where is the thrill of the mistress?

  There comes a thud of someone falling against the partition and Barbara glances nervously across the room as if someone might fall through the wall, fall right into her treacherous thoughts and witness them.

  She closes her eyes. The room spins, so she opens them again and focuses on the lampshade hanging above her.

  She remembers how small her dreams had been, how honest and practical her ambitions. She came from nothing, from nowhere, from shared beds and outdoor toilets, from bombs and hunger… And from there, she had dreamt of little more than a comfortable home and a friendly, reliable man beside her. She wouldn’t ask for much from this man, just a regular wage packet, a comfortable silence, a sense of relative safety. And she wouldn’t ask for much from life, either: a little money in the gas meter, some food in the larder; perhaps if she was lucky, some hot water from a tap. These were the aspirations of girls of her generation growing up in the East End.

  She wanted to escape the grinding poverty of her childhood, that was all. She wanted to raise children who would never know what it felt like to be hungry, who could wash or change their clothes whenever they needed to.

  With their music centre and their stocked refrigerator, they have so much more already than she ever dreamed of. But in some way that she can’t quite put her finger on, they have so much less as well.

  2013 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

  Barbara caresses the glossy cover of the book. It’s just a proof copy but it looks beautiful. She runs her finger across the raised contour of the letters, like a blind person reading braille. Anthony Marsden.

  Though she could never explain it to anyone, it seems strange, like a printing error almost, that her name isn’t there beside his. It’s as if she has been written out of the story, a story which was so very clearly their story.

  In a way, of course, she let that happen; in a way, she was very much complicit in writing herself out of his life even though she had already abandoned her own in favour of his. It had been – and if only she had realised this earlier – a two-stage trip towards oblivion. But she’s not innocent, she knows this. There were specific moments when she retreated instead of advancing, specific forks in the road where she had a choice to assert herself, to put her foot down, to demand some other outcome. But she didn’t, did she?

  Bit by bit, she stepped out of her own life in favour of his and then bit by bit she let herself get pushed to the sidelines of that life too.

  Tony hadn’t been a monster all of the time. Much of the time, things had been neutral – they had behaved like a well oiled machine, like a couple of partners running the business that was their marriage. And aren’t most marriages like that most of the time? The good ones, at any rate. Sometimes, perhaps as often as he showed his dark side, he perceived what was happening and tried to make amends. “Do a night class,” he would urge her. “Learn to draw.” “Let me buy you your own camera!”

  But if she did attempt any of these things, it embarrassed him in some way she could never quite understand – some confused emotion stuck halfway between her showing him up by being too good, and her showing him up by being not good enough. Perhaps it was simply that, as a man having grown up in the forties and fifties, his brain struggled to catch up with the times. Yes, there were women all around him doing clever things. But they weren’t his wife.

  And so came the slights, the digs, the good-humoured criticism. With her ego being so fragile, these always hit home with so much more force than any word of encouragement ever could, and that surely wasn’t his fault.

  So she came to feel embarrassed about herself. She hadn’t noticed it happening, it had been so gradual but that had been the end result. She had come to feel ashamed of who she was, of where she came from, of her class, her family, her friends…

  Her sister, Glenda, would appear on the doorstep, effing and blinding, and Barbara would wince at every word and then wince again as her own accent relapsed when she replied.

  Once or twice – it really wasn’t more – she had asked Glenda not to swear in front of the children but once or twice was enough. Glenda, who felt perfectly fine about who she was, had no desire to put that confidence at risk.

  A memory flashes up of Glenda calling her Little Miss Lardydar and Barbara glances out through the bay window at the garden as she tries to remember when this had happened, what had been the cause. Cups and saucers, that was it. Yes, cups and saucers. She had served tea in cups and saucers instead of mugs and Glenda had said, “Ooh, get you, Little Miss Lardydar. Me ‘usband’s a photographer and I only drink tea from a bone china cup, me.” They had laughed at that. But they had both known that it wasn’t a joke and they had both understood that they weren’t discussing cups and saucers at all. And that, pretty much, had been the end of her relationship with Glenda, or, at the very least, the beginning of the end.

  They had phoned for a while. And Barbara had gone (Tony had been working) to Glenda’s wedding to Billy the Aussie. But when the news came that she had died, Barbara hadn’t even known that she was ill, hadn’t even known what continent she was on, in fact. That was how far apart they had let themselves drift.

  Glenda wasn’t the only mooring point from which Barbara had unleashed herself. Friends, neighbours, other mothers from the school – none of them ever seemed quite good enough to hold their own around Tony and his friends. Barbara remembers with a shudder, a neighbour, (Anne perhaps?) entering the room. Tony and Phil had been discussing modern art and Anne had deigned, had dared to comment. “I don’t know nothin’ about art,” she had said, “but I know what I like. And it ain’t piled up bricks.”

  Funnily enough, that, couched in more intellectual vocabulary, had been pretty much what Tony and Phil had been saying themselves about the pile of bricks that the Tate had so infamously purchased. But Barbara caught the glance between the two men when Anne spoke and had shuddered then as she shudders now, with something akin to shame.

  Though she essentially gave up her own friends, Tony’s were always very much his friends. There were only the vaguest of pretences that they were her friends as well. It was always shall we go to Tony’s place. It was always Tony and Barbara, never Barbara and Tony.

  So, lost in the limbo between his friends, who sh
e believed thought themselves too good for her, and hers, who with their casual racism and dismissive attitudes seemed an embarrassment to her, it had been a lonely life, really. It had been just Barbara and the children and even there, Sophie had grown up to be very much Tony’s daughter. And so she struggled to talk to – to measure up to – Sophie, even as she struggled to talk to her husband’s friends. Yes, for much of her life it had been her and Jonathan playing second fiddle to clever, arty Sophie and unpredictable Tony.

  Barbara’s biggest fear, growing up, had been of finding herself alone, but alone is very much how she ended up feeling. It’s almost as if putting so much energy into avoiding being alone was the very thing that had made that loneliness manifest.

  She caresses her husband’s embossed name once again and then sighs and opens the book. And there he is. A full-page, black and white photograph of Tony, taken in 1977. It’s a beautiful photograph of a handsome man. She stares into his eyes for a moment. “Where are you, Tony?” she murmurs. “Where are you now?”

  She reads the tiny caption beneath the photo. “Anthony Marsden. Self portrait. 1977.”

  She snorts sourly and turns the page. Because that caption on this photo (a photo she remembers so vividly taking herself) pretty much says it all.

  1979 - Hackney, London.

  Barbara sits on the edge of the creaking bed and pulls on her boots. A gale is blowing outside and the rug beneath her feet lifts and flutters whenever a gust hits the house. It looks like a magic carpet attempting take off.

  It was Minnie’s parting gift, a secret life-insurance policy, which paid the deposit on the place. There is no doubt that this purchase – a home of their own – was the right thing to have done. Everybody agreed that they needed to stop paying rent, that they had to get “one foot on the housing ladder.” But with the mortgage rate at seventeen percent, they’re now stretched to the hilt, and even if the kids do finally have rooms of their own, comfort-wise they’ve jumped back almost fifteen years.

  Barbara zips her second boot then stands and looks in the mirror, cracked during the move. It’s lucky she’s not superstitious. She looks fine. With the wind, she’s going to be cold but once they get there, she’ll be fine. Yes, she swore she would never wear this dress again but these days it’s shoes for the kids or caulk for the windows or fish for tea, or… the list goes on. And the money’s not there to pay for the half of it. New dresses aren’t even on the list.

  Tonight she will accompany Tony to a private view of his friend Malcolm’s work. Barbara has been to a number of these events and she knows what to expect. There will be clever, wild-haired women painters, and wiry, serious men who went to public school, who inexplicably pause for whole seconds mid-sentence before suddenly gushing out all of their words in a rush. “And Bar’bra,” they will say, crisply. “Do (pause) tell-me-a-little-about-yourself. Do (pause) tell-me-how-you-spend-your-days-here-in-fabulous-London.”

  She has done everything that she can to be excused from this event (apart from feigning illness, an excuse she has overused lately) but Tony keeps insisting that it’s important, that people will expect her to be there. Plus it’s supposedly their last chance to see Diane.

  Barbara sighs, tugs at the dress (a little tighter than the last time she wore it) and then leaves the relative comfort of the rug to cross the rough floorboards.

  On the landing, she pauses to take in the sounds of the new house, the whistling in the eves, a creaking from the attic, the sound of the television set below. A sense of deja-vu swamps her and she struggles to remember a different landing in a different house but she’s momentarily unable to place it. Automatically, she glances at the place on the wall where the photo should be. A photo of the royal wedding. Gosh, that was a long time ago. How the years slip by!

  She takes a deep breath. She can do this. She starts to clomp her way down the uncarpeted stairs.

  When she reaches the lounge, she finds the kids and Tony all watching Grange Hill – grubby schoolchildren being mean to each other. She can’t see the attraction. Tony looks up first. “Ah, there she is!” he says. “You see, you still look great in that dress.”

  Barbara smiles weakly as Sophie, prompted by Tony’s remark, drags her attention from the screen as well. “Oh, wow!” she says, innocently. “It’s your dancing dress!”

  Barbara smiles and frowns simultaneously. She’s not quite sure what Sophie is referring to. “Dancing dress?” she repeats, a physical sensation of dread rising in her chest even as it precedes the comprehension of why.

  Sophie nods eagerly. “Yes, that’s your special dress. For doing the Zulu dance. Ouch!” Jonathan has whacked her across the head. “What was that for?” she asks.

  “Yeah!” Tony says. “Why are you hitting your sister like that?”

  Barbara slips from the room and heads, out of habit, to the kitchen. There’s something about the cold surfaces of a kitchen that reassure her at moments like these but this isn’t her kitchen, this kitchen is dingy and sad, more in need of decoration than any other room in the house. She takes in the peeling paint and the chipped stone sink and then moves to the dining room but it’s not much better there.

  The Zulu dance! How can Sophie possibly remember that? She feels miserable – no, hopelessly utterly depressed, as if she has been suddenly emptied of every emotion except despair. Nothing, it seems, is ever done; nothing is ever achieved, not definitively. No embarrassment is ever forgotten either. It’s all just swimming against the tide, it’s all just clawing and grasping and dragging yourself out of the mud, and for nothing. You always find yourself back where you started. She’s still (and always will be) uneducated Barbara from the East End, living in a draughty, miserable house, wearing a stupid dress made of curtains.

  She feels dizzy. Perhaps she’s forgotten to breathe. It happens. She sits on a dining chair and struggles to unzip her boots. They seem, somehow, to be strangling her. She has to get them off, and quickly. The boots cast aside, she silently returns to the bedroom where she locks the door and lies down on the bed.

  Soon Tony will come. He will hammer on the door for a while. He’ll be concerned and then apologetic, and then he’ll move through pleading to anger.

  And eventually he will leave, alone.

  He will punish her for this by not coming home tonight. And this is absolutely fine by her. Let him go to his damned party alone. And let him stay there forever if need be.

  Once the hammering has stopped and the front door has slammed, Barbara changes, then returns downstairs. All she really wants to do is sleep but she can tell from the noises coming from the lounge that the kids have not gone to Anne’s as planned, so she needs to get down there and feed them.

  She finds them both glued, as ever, to the television. “Anne came,” Jonathan tells her, “She was worried that we hadn’t come over. She wanted to come up and see you but I said you were sleeping.”

  “Thanks,” Barbara says. “I was, actually.”

  “Is it my fault you didn’t go?” Sophie asks. “Jon says it is.”

  “No, Sweetie. Nothing’s your fault. I just didn’t feel very well. Now, I’m going to make some tea and then I want that television switched off, OK?”

  “But it’s The Good Life,” Sophie protests.

  “They’re all repeats anyway. You’ve seen them all.”

  “But it’s my favourite, Mum.”

  “OK, well, after The Good Life then.”

  She makes the kids an omelette (she’s not hungry herself) and lets them eat it, unusually, in front of the television. She has no energy for such futile battles this evening.

  They are just digging in when someone hammers on the front door. Everyone looks up. “Anne maybe?” Jonathan suggests.

  Barbara shrugs. “Stay there. Eat your tea,” she says. “I’ll go.” As she stands, there comes another round of banging. She chews her lip nervously. Surely Tony can’t be too drunk to find his keys already, can he?

  She heads out to the hal
lway and closes the lounge door behind her. Beyond the door, through the patterned glass, she can see a vague form, too short to be Tony. “Hello?” she calls out, reluctant to open the door. You hear things about what happens to people who open their doors too readily.

  A desperate sounding voice replies – a woman’s voice. “Tony? Tony?”

  Barbara opens the door to find Diane, one arm outstretched, prepared for another round of knocking. She’s swaying from side to side in the gusty breeze, now tottering backwards and steadying herself against the wall.

  Her hair has blown over her eyes but steadying herself and brushing her hair away is, in her drunken state, just one challenge too many. She lurches sideways and her hip collides with a pot plant which she fumblingly reaches out to steady. “Is Tony in? Oh! Barbara!” she says. “Is Tony home? He’s s’posed to be taking me.”

  Barbara steps towards Diane and sniffs the air. People say that you can’t smell vodka but it’s not true, she can smell it from here. “Diane!” she says. “The state of you! Whatever’s wrong?”

  Diane, suddenly self-aware, attempts to demonstrate her sobriety by standing upright but instead totters forwards then takes a nifty looking square-dance step to the left before collapsing back against the wall again. This, she slithers down until she finds herself, with visible surprise, on the floor. “Where is he?” she asks again.

  “Mum? Are you OK?” Jonathan has followed his mother to the door.

  “Go back inside. Everyone’s fine. And get Sophie away from that window, please,” Barbara tells him.

  “Tony’s gone,” she tells Diane, once Jonathan has nodded silently and obeyed. She glances up and down the street. A man opposite, walking a dog, is watching them. “I think we need to get you inside, Diane.”

  Diane tries to look up at her, then bows her head and pushes her hair aside. “No,” she stumbles. “I… I want Tony. There’s a… there’s a thing. Tonight. I’m meant to be there. I’m s’posed to go to the thing. We all are.”