The Photographer's Wife

by Nick Alexander

  Barbara, who has moved little more than a yard into the room before freezing, looks pale and anxious.

  “Hi Sophe,” Jonathan says.

  “Hi Jon. No Judy?”

  “No, she’s at home with Dylan. We had a babysitter booked but when push came to shove, she just couldn’t leave him.”

  “And how is Dylan?”

  “He’s great. Gorgeous. Noisy. You must come out and see him.”

  “I will. I’m sorry. I’ve just been so rushed off my feet with all of this.”

  “Of course. Well, Judy’s not that keen on visitors right now anyway, so there’s no hurry.”

  “Well yes, that’s what I understood when I called her,” Sophie says. “That’s a great dress, Mum.”

  Barbara nods weakly. “Thanks. Yours too.”

  “Are you OK?”

  Another nod. “The photos look, um, nice,” she says quietly.

  “Well, good.” Sophie had hoped for a little more enthusiasm than ‘nice.’ She glances enquiringly at Jonathan who blinks slowly at her, a blink which means, “Give her a moment and she’ll be fine.”

  “Drink, Mum?” Jonathan asks.

  Barbara fiddles with the clasp of her handbag. “Definitely.”

  “Wine or cava or–”

  “Wine, white, please.”

  Jonathan heads off on the wine mission so Sophie takes Barbara’s arm and leads her towards the first of the images. "So, what do you think, Mum?” she asks. “It looks good, huh?”

  “Yes,” Barbara says, sounding distracted. She glances over her shoulder. “Is that Phil?”

  “It is. And the other one’s Malcolm.”

  “Gosh,” Barbara says. “How old we all are.”

  “Well, you’ve weathered better than they have,” Sophie says. But in this moment, she realises that not only had she failed to imagine how old her father’s friends would be but she has been refusing to notice how fast her own mother is ageing too. She sees this now. She sees how small and frail Barbara is. “Do you want to go over and meet him? Talk to him, I mean.”

  “Just let me get my breath, dear. It’s a lot to take in.”

  “The photos, you mean? Or the people?”

  “Well, all of it.”

  Sophie gives her mother’s arm a squeeze. “OK. Stay there and I’ll go get that drink,” she says.

  At the drinks table, she finds Jonathan deep in conversation with Brett. “As you know, Brett,” Jonathan is saying tersely, “I don’t want to get involved.”

  Brett laughs and fiddles with his bow tie. “I’m not interviewing you, man,” he says. “I’m just making conversation.”

  “What’s going on?” Sophie asks, reaching for a glass of wine for her mother. “You two aren’t arguing, are you?”

  “Brett’s idea of conversation sounds suspiciously like digging,” Jonathan says. “Once a journalist, always a journalist, eh?”

  Brett raises the palms of his hands. “Hey, I was only asking why Jon didn’t follow in the family way. I’m not wearing a wire or anything.”

  Sophie shrugs. “You could have, I suppose,” she tells Jonathan. “You took good photos.”

  Jonathan’s face contorts as if this is the most ridiculous thing he has heard all year. “I did not,” he says. “I didn’t have the eye. Everyone knew that.”

  “That’s not strictly true. I found some of yours when I was going through Dad’s. The three kids on the wall? Do you remember that?”

  Jonathan nods but looks puzzled.

  “And the one of that bus conductor, smoking. That was yours wasn’t it?”

  Jonathan nods. “Sure, but you always said I was rubbish.”

  Sophie grimaces, sips at the glass of wine, remembers that it was destined for Barbara, glances guiltily across the room at her and then, seeing that she’s in conversation with Phil, takes another less-guilty sip. “Did I?” she says.

  “Yes! Always. Over and over. Every photo I ever took.”

  “Ooh, sorry ‘bout that. That would have been sibling rivalry. I don’t think I wanted the competition.”

  Jonathan looks exasperated; he looks as if this discussion is somehow important to him. Sophie can’t for the life of her work out why. “Aw, come on Jon,” she says, trying to ease her guilt. “You know what it was like. Mum was always going on about how clever you were. How good your school results were. You were always the favourite. I just wanted a little bit of… you know…” She glances at Brett for help.

  “Attention?” he suggests, unhelpfully.

  “No! I mean…”

  “Real estate?” he offers.

  “Yeah, kind of. I wanted a corner of the garden for myself. I wanted photography to be my thing not yours. That’s all.”

  Jonathan is staring into his glass. He looks like he’s about to cry. Sophie catches Brett’s eye again and he pulls an ‘oops’ face.

  “Well,” Jonathan says, forcibly snapping himself out of it. “Dad never taught me. He taught you. So he must have thought you were better anyway.”

  “He didn’t teach me,” Sophie says. “He dragged me around with him occasionally. But I don’t remember him ever specifically teaching me anything.”

  “He didn’t know how.”

  They turn to see that Barbara has joined them. She reaches across the group for a glass of wine. “Apparently it’s self service,” she mutters. “Thanks for that, you two.”

  “Sorry. We got sidetracked,” Jonathan says. “Anyway, what do you mean, he didn’t know how? Of course he–”

  “Oh, he was a terrible teacher,” Barbara interjects.

  “That’s true, actually,” Sophie agrees. “He used to get annoyed in seconds.”

  “And he was awful with anything technical,” Barbara says. “Motorbikes, tape recorders, cars…”

  “Cameras,” Sophie adds.

  “Oh yes!” Barbara agrees.

  “I showed him how to use the Pentax. Do you remember that, Mum?”

  “I do.”

  “I must have been, like, five or something.”

  “More like thirteen, I think.”

  “Sophie says I was your favourite. Which is why she had to hog Dad all the time,” Jonathan says.

  “My favourite?”

  He nods.

  “I didn’t quite say that,” Sophie protests.

  Barbara smiles. “We didn’t have favourites,” she says. “We loved you both equally.”

  “That’s not how it felt,” Sophie says. “I was always trying to measure up to whatever miracle Jonathan had just managed.”

  “Huh!” Jonathan says. “You were always the clever one. Clever arty Sophie. Daddy’s little girl. You’re the one who inherited all of this.” He gestures at the exhibition around them.

  “I didn’t inherit this, Jonathan,” Sophie says, feeling vaguely outraged. “I made this happen. And with no help from you.”

  “Children!” Barbara exclaims. “Stop it! We loved both of you.”

  “OK, maybe,” Sophie concedes. “But admit it was in different ways. Admit that you had a soft spot for Jon, and Dad had–”

  “That’s simply not true. We both loved Jonathan. And we both desperately wanted you, too. We would have gone through… actually, no, we did go through hell to have another child. And when you arrived, we were both so happy we cried. We actually cried.”

  Sophie shrugs. “Well, it still didn’t feel like that.”

  “That was just you,” Barbara says. “Even as a baby, nothing was ever enough, was it Jon?”

  Jonathan, who is lost in a traumatic world of parallel could-have-been-a-photographer lives, hasn’t been listening. “Sorry?” he says.

  “And what does that mean anyway?” Sophie asks. “You went through hell? How?”

  Barbara shakes her head sadly. “You kids,” she says. “You think everything’s so easy. You think things just happen.”

  “Um, pregnancy? Well, yeah, it’s not that complicated, Mum.”

  “Isn’t it?” Barba
ra asks, casting around the room for escape. “Oh Gosh! Is that Janet?”

  “Yeah,” Brett says. “Janet French, apparently. She says Sophie went skinny dipping in her fishpond.”

  Barbara nods at the memory. “You did! You absolutely did do that. Gosh, it’s Janet!” She wanders away. “Hello Janet!”

  1983 - Hackney, London.

  Barbara stirs the pan and swipes onion tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. She glances over at Sophie who, pen-in-hand, is staring from the kitchen window.

  “So are you doing your homework there, or just daydreaming?”

  Sophie swivels her head, zombie-style, to face her mother. “Uh?”

  “That’s my answer,” Barbara says. “Get on with it, girl.”

  “It’s maths. I hate maths.”

  “It’s your last week, Sophie. This time next week you’ll be on holiday. And a week after that, we’ll all be in France. So just bite the bullet and get on with it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Bite the bullet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It means to get on with something you don’t like doing.”

  “I know that,” Sophie says. “I mean, why do we say bite the bullet?”

  “I think they used to give soldiers a bullet to bite on when they had to operate on them in the field,” Barbara explains. “I think it was to stop them screaming. Now, homework!”

  She glances at the kitchen clock. She’s feeling nervous. She wants Sophie’s homework out of the way before Tony gets home from his meeting with Pentax. She fears tantrums and in a way, cooking lasagne, which requires four different pans on the go, is her way of biting the bullet. It’s her way of attempting to think about something else.

  Sophie is chewing the end of her pen and staring at the sheet of figures in front of her. “I hate simultaneous equations,” she mutters. “There’s just no point to them.”

  “Well,” Barbara says, alternately stirring the white sauce and the frying onions. “The sooner you get it over with, the sooner it will be over with.”

  “That’s easy enough for you to say,” Sophie says. “You don’t even know what simultaneous equations are.”

  Barbara winces at this and slices and dices a red pepper into the frying pan. But she doesn’t fight back, because Sophie is entirely right about this. Barbara has absolutely no idea what a simultaneous equation is. To her never-ending shame, she gave up trying to help Sophie with her homework when she was about eight.

  “Oh, I get it!” Sophie says. “The answer’s forty-two. Of course it is.”

  By the time a harried looking Tony arrives, the kitchen is filled with the smell of baking lasagne. He puts his bag down on a chair and plonks a Pentax camera bag onto the sideboard, then crosses the kitchen to the refrigerator. He pulls out a can of beer.

  “Hello,” Barbara says, wiping her hands upon her apron. “How did it go then?”

  “How do you think it went?” Tony asks, now pulling off his coat.

  “I don’t know,” Barbara says, blankly.

  “Have a guess. Go on. Have a guess,” Tony says.

  Sophie looks up from her maths homework. “You said you don’t like the camera and they said you have to use it and you said you don’t want to and they won, which is why you brought it home,” she says. “Right?”

  A silence ensues as Sophie waits for an answer, as Tony struggles to control his anger and as Barbara prepares to duck for cover.

  “Very good,” Tony finally says. “If you fail your O levels, you can get a bleeding hut on Eastbourne pier and make a living as a fortune teller.”

  Barbara bends down to peer into the oven and, knowing that no one will see, raises an eyebrow. Only Sophie can ever get away with cheeking Tony, or telling him the truth for that matter. There’s something about her delivery, something about her broad open features, the naivety of her regard, that he simply can’t be angry with.

  “And what about France?” Barbara asks, quietly. “Did they say anything?”

  “I still have to go to bloody France too.”

  “Well, that’s OK,” Barbara says. “We’ll make a holiday out of it like we said. It’ll be lovely. I’ve always wanted to go abroad.”

  “I can practice my French,” Sophie says. “Bonjour Monsieur. Je voudrais le ice cream s’il vous plaît. Can’t remember what ice-cream is… It’s glass or grass or something stupid like that.”

  “Yes,” Tony says, now fumbling in his bag to avoid eye contact. “About that. I’m afraid there’s been a change of plan.”

  Barbara pulls on her oven mitts and bends down to pull the lasagne, which she has decided is baked to perfection, from the oven.

  “What change of plan?” Sophie asks.

  “They’re sending me with, um, an assistant,” Tony says, scratching his ear. “Someone to help with all the logistics. Someone who can sort out any problems with the camera.”

  Barbara carries the lasagne to the kitchen table. “You’ll have to put that homework away now,” she tells Sophie. “You can finish it afterwards.”

  “What, someone’s coming with us?” Sophie asks, grimacing. “But I can help with the camera. You know I can.”

  “No, he’s not coming with us,” Tony says. “He’s coming with me. I’m afraid it looks like it’s just going to be the two of us now.”

  “But what about me and Mum?”

  Tony shrugs. “Sorry,” he says. “But it’s work, sweetheart.”

  “Mum?” Sophie says.

  Barbara feels like a wall of glass is forming around her. She feels suddenly very separate from the events in the kitchen, isolated, as if she’s perhaps not here at all – as if she’s perhaps just watching all of this from above.

  “Mum?” Sophie says again. “Tell him.”

  Barbara picks up the largest kitchen knife and the fish slice, then returns to the table. She looks at the lasagne, steaming so perfectly. It looks like a cookbook illustration. It looks like an idea of a lasagne, just as she is an idea of a photographer’s wife. It seems a shame to slice into it, a shame to reveal all those messy layers beneath the topping.

  “I haven’t been listening, really,” she says and it’s a lie but also not a lie. For though she has heard the words, they have somehow remained outside the bubble.

  “Dad says we’re not going to France with him anymore,” Sophie says. “He’s going with some assistant bloke.”

  Barbara nods. “Is that right?” she says. “Who are you going with now, then?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Tony says. “They haven’t told me.”

  “So you don’t know if it’s a bloke at all.”

  Tony catches Barbara’s eye, then looks away. He shrugs. “I’m really sorry,” he says. “I’ll make it up to you both. We’ll go away somewhere else later in the summer.”

  Barbara runs her finger along the blade of the knife. She watches Tony’s Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and looks at the razor rash around his throat. She senses the weight of the knife in her hand.

  “Well, that is a shame,” she says, turning and slicing the knife through the lasagne in a single, decisive gesture. She watches as the red of the bolognese sauce spills into the pristine white of the béchamel. “That is a shame,” she says again.

  2013 - Bermondsey, London.

  By eight o’clock, the noise in the echoey gallery is such that everyone is shouting just to be heard, which of course is something of a vicious circle. About fifty people (Brett thinks more) have arrived now. A large group of journalists are yabbering in the middle of the room, various grouplets of Anthony Marsden’s peers are dotted around the place, and a widows’ club is commiserating in one corner. Only about five individuals are actively looking at the photos.

  Though they have sold ten books, not one print has gone yet, but when Sophie asks Sarah Stone about this, she just smiles and says, “Well, it’s not that sort of exhibition, is it?” Whatever that means.

  Sophie takes a glass of wine
from a passing waitress and catches Brett’s eye across the room. “What?” she asks him when he reaches her. “It’s only my third. And that’s since six.”

  “Didn’t say a word, hon,” Brett says. “Anyways, no matter how much you drink, you’ll never catch up with her.” He nods towards the crowd of oldies.

  “Who?”

  “The chick with the wig in the middle. She was blasted when she got here.” Sophie moves to the right but still can’t see. “Go look,” Brett urges. “That hairpiece is priceless. You need to see this.”

  Sophie weaves her way through the crowd to the edge of the circle. Phil, who is closest, steps aside to let her in, then, realising who she is, taps the woman with the wig on one shoulder. She is busy waxing lyrical about a photograph.

  “Hey,” he tells her. “Look who’s here.”

  The woman turns to face them. She looks haggard almost beyond recognition and much older even than Phil. She looks shrunken, an impression her outsized military coat and badly fitting wig do little to help. But her dark eyes, the curve of her mouth, the snub nose… it’s still definitely her. “Auntie Diane!” Sophie squeals, crossing the group and wrapping her arms around her, noticing as she does so that beneath the coat there’s little more to her than skin and bones. “You came!”

  “How could I not?” Diane drawls.

  “I didn’t know if you’d even got my messages,” Sophie says. “I kept sending emails to that bloody website of yours.”

  “Huh!” Diane says. “Email shemail.” She has a vague American accent and the gravelly voice of the chain-smoker but above all, Brett was right – she is utterly sloshed.

  “Mum’s here,” Sophie says, scanning the room. “Did you–?”

  “I saw her,” Diane says. “She nipped out for some air. Said she’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Oh?” Sophie glances towards the entrance. “Is she OK?”

  Diane nods. “Uh-huh. Now,” she says, pulling Sophie away from the group. “Tell me about you! I’ve been looking at your photos. They’re very good.” Diane links her arm through Sophie’s in what feels like a very permanent fashion, more, Sophie suspects, to steady herself than for pleasure. “And I love your self portrait.” She gestures with her free hand at the vast print on the end wall.