The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  And yet, here she was at the Fast, in charge, ordering them around for the photograph, her long hair cut short and sharp, worn like the hair of city girls of London which really was not how one imagined her. They were to be photographed at the bottom of the central staircase of the hotel. Willie stood behind Ashton. Two other men were positioned like angels on either side of Ashton’s shoulders.

  ‘Welcome, welcome everyone,’ Ashton said. ‘You are gathered here, my team, because I would like to introduce you to one another. We have the technical surveyors: draughtsman Mr Manamanam and surveyor Mr Prushansky.’ The angels nodded, twisting their heads around to smile at Willie.

  ‘For the artistic vision of the city, shall we say, I am employing Mrs Eleanora Rasul, wife of the eminent photographer Khaled Rasul, and a wonderful photographer in her own right.’ Eleanora squinted up from the camera and gave a wave, letting her arm hang in the air for a moment and then drop, apologising in its manner for her not being her husband.

  ‘And this is my pilot, Lieutenant Harrington. Wonderfully experienced flyer, we are just waiting for the craft to arrive from Cairo and he will be able to assist Eleanora in taking aerial photographs of the city.’

  Everyone looked awkwardly at one another. ‘Modernisation! Reparation!’ Ashton declared, and when he had finished this odd little outburst he signalled to Eleanora.

  ‘Remain still, gentlemen. Look at the camera, Charles, please,’ Eleanora said. Time was suspended as everyone waited for the photograph to be taken. Then they were not to move as she wanted more than one version.

  She was older, of course, but still with a fragile quality. He was relieved that her face was not tired or crushed, or, worse, strengthened. He liked in women something of the swift with a broken wing. For her part, she hadn’t flinched at his scars.

  Looking at her, Willie remembered a day aeons ago when they had climbed the highest sycamore on her father’s estate, hunting the elusive bird of their imagination, the golden oriole. She had paused, resting her head against the trunk. There was dew on her cheeks and arms and he could see the shape of her small breasts against the fabric of her dress. Her father’s voice came through the woods, scaring birds. When he saw them, up in the tree, he began to bawl and Eleanora pushed herself backwards. Her fall was not graceful; she cracked through numerous branches before reaching her father’s feet. She did not break bones but was twisted all over, ankles and wrists. Later, when he climbed through the window to see her in her bedroom she was angry with him, unfathomably, as if it were his fault.

  When the photograph was done, Willie sidled next to her, coughed to help his voice sound casual.

  ‘How did you learn all of this?’

  ‘Photography, you mean? I was hired because I knew nothing whatsoever about it and Khaled wanted an assistant who would do what he said. Later, as you know, we married.’

  She wasn’t looking at him. She found ways to look everywhere else. Smiling then not smiling.

  ‘And do you do as he says?’

  ‘Mostly. I took to the darkroom like a . . . well, like coming home, I suppose. It sounds silly now.’

  He had no idea how to respond to that.

  ‘Surely you need help carrying those?’ Around her feet were the scatterings of photographic equipment.

  ‘Ihsan is here,’ she said. ‘He sometimes works as an assistant.’

  For the first time Willie noticed an Arab man, about the same age as himself, leaning just inside the arched doorway wearing shoes made from exceptionally bright white leather, then Charles was upon them, clapping hands on Willie’s shoulders, tugging him away from Eleanora.

  ‘I expect the aircraft to arrive at Kalandia airfield in about three days,’ he said.

  ‘Righto.’

  Willie looked at him. Was Ashton a man to take seriously or not? Willie was undecided. Ashton had not served in the war. He was already too old. He was famous as far away as Cairo for being the Ingliz touched who travelled everywhere with a fly swat and for wearing a fez in the most embarrassing manner of an Englishman who described himself an anima naturaliter Levantina. At his first breakfast in the Fast Willie had been waited on by an astonishingly beautiful serving girl and Ashton, coming into the dining room just then, had instructed her to stand rigid in front of them both as he pointed to the exquisite fourteenth-century cross-stitching on the fabric that encased her breasts.

  Willie had been in Jerusalem for four days now, and so far, the only instructions he had received from Ashton were: make yourself comfortable, get to know the place and don’t listen to anyone who tells you Jerusalem is good for nothing but a bath and a train out of here. When he looked back, Eleanora was leaving with the man with white shoes and Charles was drifting away. He had travelled all of this way, expecting what? More, he supposed. He pressed his feet into the hotel carpet.

  In his room that evening Willie sat naked on his bed listening to the odd silence of Jerusalem towards the end of the day, rolling one of his tight little cigarettes. He liked to smoke this way, waving the red burning tip in front of his face. Most cities come alive at night, but not here. It locked doors and slammed gates as soon as dusk fell. Jerusalem was very different from Cairo, the filth and vastness of which could swallow a man and enable him – even a foreigner – to be lost and invisible for days. Here, he had the sense that everything was visible, witnessed inside the walls. He had no inclination to explore the streets and instead resolved to wait, so far in vain, for Eleanora to contact him. The Armenian concierge brought whiskies to his room; discreet, professional, a gentle tap on the door every hour to see if Willie needed a refill.

  He was unsettled, now he had time to think about it, at the thought of that disturbance on the train outside Jerusalem. He had experienced hallucinations before – malaria rages, days spent watching flies crawl from the eyes of pretty nurses – but this wasn’t mind trickery. It had been McLaughlin on that horse. Known as Lofty. Willie had last seen him in Salonika five years ago; they had not parted well.

  As a schoolboy at Lancing College, Willie had experienced a series of vivid fantasies in which a man, for some reason Italian, would magically arrive at helpful moments and offer to be his intermediario. This middle-man, a fixer or wizard, would plant himself between Willie and the rest of the world and sort everything out. He charmed the loathsome housemaster, tricked bullies, coaxed his father back from his ships, and then, when his father’s presence was altogether too much, cast him away again for four years and a day. At some undefined point, though, the intermediario had disappeared. He simply never returned, leaving Willie to navigate the large world alone. Lofty up on the horse had not noticed him inside the train but it was then that the ringing which Willie often suffered from, deep in his ears, began, though he had not been surprised; travel usually did this to him.

  Willie ran his hand along his leg, scratched at a mosquito bite on his knee. He remembered too the face of the odd little English girl. Her hair in plaits; terribly plain and dour-looking. Eleanora told me about you . . .You’re the bird-catcher. It was her name for him from childhood, a secret game, and the child’s face was sarcastic.

  Jerusalem.

  His letter of application to Ashton had been quite the moving piece about the new perspectives; a different way of seeing the earth from above which changed everything. He had with him a mosaic of images promised to Ashton, photographs taken from the air: Villa Cisneros, Cape Juby, Casablanca and swathes of the Sahara. What they heralded, he believed, was a new way of seeing. Of looking, a relief from the tyranny of roads and horizons. There was no vanishing point; the rules of perspective were quite scrambled. Well, anyway, so he thought and if he looked at them for long enough he might be able to fly again. He had omitted one detail in his application to Ashton, namely that he hadn’t flown for six months. Nor had he mentioned that if he so much as approached an aircraft he pissed himself: a trickle of urine down the leg whenever he heard the revolutions of the propellers. Even, sometimes, if he simply
caught a smell of oil.

  Draining the remains of his whisky, Willie stood near the window, at an angle so that he need not bother dressing but could watch the city outside. It was almost dark. He could see the wide, dark sky above the Old City and there was altogether too much of it. It went on and on. It needed containing. For the first time, doubt, regarding his mission. He had come to take Eleanora back, but it hadn’t occurred to him, when plotting all of this, how she might look amongst these Jerusalem stones: as if she belonged here, in all the dust and crumbling brick, as if she had no intention of ever leaving. He was the one who was out of place.

  He sniffed, shivered. Put his knuckle into his mouth and bit it, hard. He waited. Finally, the message came. She would come to the Fast in the morning.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  To escape the Church ladies who congregated in the lobby of the Hotel Fast with leaflets, Prue avoided the central staircase area and took the back stairs, hopping in twos, fours, sixes, eights. Down the bare steps she went, along a low-ceilinged passageway that smelled of mice, dragging fingers along the Jerusalem stone walls – a mixture of pink-grey grit and ash – until coming to the entrance of the courtyard garden. Here, in this secret, enclosed part of the hotel, Prue installed herself in a gap between a well-worn wicker chair and a large ceramic pot which housed the trunk of a palm whose uppermost leaves poked high above the hotel roof and settled down to spy.

  She had overheard Eleanora arranging to meet the pilot here this morning. The waiter with the three gold teeth walked past, looked down at her, and said nothing, walked on. The hotel staff tolerated her because of her father, and because she was English and the English did odd things, which (so Ihsan had told her) the Jerusalemites, on the whole, tolerated.

  She opened her knapsack and took out her best fountain pen, and a book plucked randomly from her father’s bookcase: The History of Architecture in all Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. She dabbed at the first page of the book, smearing ink. It was a new nib and she hadn’t got it right yet, it was still too scratchy. Her hand did its usual involuntary twitch and a blob of black bubbled out. Her fingertip stained, she wiped it the width of the page, obliterating printed words, and then she heard Eleanora’s voice.

  ‘Will this do?’

  ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  Prue tucked her feet in, feeling clever, but was quickly thwarted as they took a table on the other side of the courtyard.

  Every now and then Eleanora’s laugh shot out. William Harrington coughed regularly, an explosive splutter, followed by wheezes, but otherwise it was difficult to hear what they were saying. Finally, she risked peeking. They were arranged à deux. The pilot’s long legs stuck out of the side of the table and ash fell from his cigarette to the ground. Eleanora was wearing her green shimmery dress with tassels along the hem. Prue knew from previous examination that each tassel had a beaded eye sewn on to its end.

  On seeing Eleanora properly, Prue darkened. When they were last together they had quarrelled. Or rather, Prue had tried to but Eleanora muttered silly child and dismissed her. The disagreement was about how to photograph a dead bird, of all things. Eleanora’s husband was away and she had taken to asking Prue to join her for what she called Tramps with Camera, usually just outside the Old City walls, or towards the top of the Mount of Olives cemetery.

  ‘I’ve found an organ,’ Eleanora had said, crouching in tufty grass, her finger touching a bloody little mass. ‘It could be a heart, or a tiny liver?’

  It was next to a recently disembowelled sparrow and Prue had not wanted her to touch it so they could photograph it as found. In the manual that came with her Kodak there was a section on ‘Snapshots’: when making instantaneous pictures the object must be in the broad open sunlight, but the camera should not be. Take the photograph to capture the moment. Take the photograph as you find it. Prue had quoted this, but Eleanora disregarded it and held up the bird-carcass by its scrawny foot, ruining everything. Prue had picked up the lung, or heart, not at all revolted by its sinewy feel, and held it in her hand. There was a dot of blood from the bird on Eleanora’s cheek and this was when Eleanora had said: ‘An old friend of mine has written that he’s coming to Jerusalem. Lieutenant William Harrington, to work on this project for your father.’

  Prue still had the bloody stuff in her hand. She dropped it, rubbed her palm on her dress, knowing the stain wouldn’t come out in the laundry. She saw, then, that it would have been a useless photograph. Not enough light, or contrast, or context.

  ‘So I’m afraid I shan’t be able to do these walks any more,’ Eleanora had said, and began packing up her equipment. ‘But you’re working on your Arabic with Ihsan, are you not? So you’ll be quite all right, Prue darling?’

  They had walked back to the Hotel Fast together, tired and Prue had the very great sense of having been dropped. She recognised the feeling. Her mother used a similar tone when she got out the ‘good’ knives and forks because there was a visitor for dinner, a man Prue did not know, and as a three at the table they would eat fish, slowly pulling bones out of heads, until her mother said Go to bed, Prue which translated as Go away, Prue.

  She peeked again. He was leaning towards Eleanora, sipping tea. Now, Eleanora’s voice came clear and bright.

  ‘Charles Ashton’s daughter, Prue? Yes, she’s a dear thing. He summoned her from England but appears to leave her adrift to do what she likes, with no programme whatsoever. She’s heartbreakingly awkward. I sometimes have to rather shake her off.’

  The man responded in a low voice, and they shifted, ankles crossing, tassels quivering, the eye-beads revolving, looking for the sky. More cigarettes were lit.

  Heartbreakingly awkward. Prue wrote it down. Was that Eleanora’s way of telling Prue that she knew she was spying? No; she thought not. In the margins she wrote: ‘I am like a pigeon with a sore foot, or one of the pitiful kittens poking in the bins. I am Prudence Ashton. I came by boat. I was sent for. My mother was not.’

  She felt a great lurch, as if the entire hotel was about to either collapse or set sail. Prue put her hand on to the floor below to steady herself, but the imbalance came from inside, not the building, or the bricks, or the earth, or the floor of the courtyard of the Hotel Fast or the bottommost deck of the SS Aronda which was the boat that had brought her from Portsmouth to Port Said. Eleanora and the pilot moved slightly, their chairs shunted closer to one another. she could not hear them again.

  When he spoke his hand moved sideways in the air near Eleanora’s face, as if cutting something.

  Prue put the cap back on her fountain pen and then took it off again and wrote: One should never tell anyone anything, or give information, or pass on stories. An elderly Spanish man on the SS Aronda had told her that. Telling is a gift and a gift leads to betrayal. then the flapping began, not just in her fingers, but in her wrists, fingertips, judders all the way up to her elbows, so that she had to squeeze the skin on the back of her hand to stop it. Once, a long time ago, her mother had asked if they could sleep together and climbed into bed with her. A new sister had been born, but then immediately died. Prue had curled up next to her mother’s warm skin under blankets, hoping that when they woke up the next day the alarming fact of the dead sister would be forgotten, but her mother did not stay very long in her bed. She complained because Prue’s hands flipped and flapped as if they confused themselves with wings and her mother left her alone. To stop her twitching, difficult hand, Prue lay on it to force it to be still, but it didn’t work. It shook all night.

  Later, Prue waited for Ihsan in the street as agreed near the gates with the blue lions on the pillars and when he came, late as always, he took her freezing gloveless hands, held them tight and breathed on them. He led her towards the narrow passage with the stone stairs, up to his oda.

  ‘I haven’t been in here since we last visited,’ Ihsan said. He heaved open the wooden door, agitating the air which seemed full of pollen and spiders. He had explained the firs
t time she came: it is the custom for men here to rent a space, one or two rooms away from their family, for relaxation and peace and study. She had been here just twice before, for Arabic lessons, and she liked the sense of being let inside the Jerusalem stone walls, rather than her usual feeling of being a foreign insect landed on the wrong flower.

  The building was south-facing and Ihsan opened the blinds so that the light came in. It was cold. There was a fireplace, but no firewood. It was Ihsan’s habit to always have with him sweets and, humming, he arranged a line of glistening nougat and baklavas across a table and then surprised her by opening a bag and pulling out firewood and tea supplies. This building had been the Commissariat offices during the war but neglected since the English came, so Ihsan said. There was a low sofa along one wall, otherwise the room was full almost entirely of books and paper. Purple cushions on the sofa were embroidered with silver stars. the more Prue looked at them the more the stars seemed to move about in their purple sea.

  As he lit the fire, Ihsan chatted about friends and cousins, people she had never met, never would, but still, she liked to hear about them. Hadid is a disgusting scavenger. He dredges through the belongings of old mothers and aunts who have been left after the war with no sons to protect their useless crates of family treasure. At this moment Hadid will be shouting: Ihsan, you bastard, where are you? You promised to help me clear out the house of Umm Diabis Abbud. Prue smiled at him. Dear Ihsan.