The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  I can see there is no choice but to invite Billy in; he clearly doesn’t want to go home to his wife, if he has one, or whoever it is waiting for him. Amazingly, the wood burner is not quite out; a sole ember still swells in the heart of the ash as if exemplifying stubbornness and the room is almost cosy. In the warmth, I forgive Billy for the way he held the arm of that woman. Or, rather, I put it out of my mind and send it off to sea. Billy carries Skip to his cot-bed and it is strange to see a man other than Piers holding him that way, Skip’s legs dangling as if made from rags.

  ‘You’re too slim, girl,’ he says. ‘Need to eat more potatoes.’ I can’t tell if this is desire or disgust. I am not as slim as I would like, in truth. He is close, full of nascent intent, the skin on his nose greasy and red from cider. I undress self-consciously in front of him, still shy, with my back to him, taking the dress off so that I am left just wearing my chemise, wondering if the beads of my spine show through the fabric. ‘Won’t you tell me your secrets then? Instead of a stranger who’ll print it all out in some magazine,’ he says into my neck.

  As if you’re not a stranger, Billy.

  I let him handle the bone and edges of me, ribs and spine and wrists and neck, and I talk, because I like to talk under blankets with skin expanding all around. Sometimes, I tell him, in Jerusalem – because it is a place that has come back into my mind, like a bottle bobbing a return on a wave – I was woken in the night by beautiful music. Sa’id playing the oud and my father singing in Arabic until he got to the rude bits, which he sang in English, and it usually meant they were having a party in the room next door. I would creep out of bed to watch. The corridors of the Hotel Fast were long and red and the rooms were all the same. I liked to step into the corridor, look down from one end to the other and then return inside. Then do it all over again. My father’s room was next door to mine, and there was an interconnecting door, always locked.

  I remember women from the Consulate – French, English, Americans – in long dresses, dancing to music played on the gramophone. At one party I was carried to bed having flopped on the coats and Eleanora came in and sat near me. She put her hand on my forehead, leant down so I could smell her perfume and the Turkish cigarettes she smoked. I was sure, then, that it was the same smell as my mother.

  ‘Keep talking,’ Billy says, thumb under my jawbone and finger across my lips. My father liked to draw and redraw cities, I said. Cities with high walls and bridges that stretch beyond horizons. Cities with amber pipes. With subterranean lakes. Cities with squares crossed by young girls with long hair. Walkways and ramparts, airfields and harbours. Maps and plans. He liked to make inventories of roads and coastlines and an emphasis on dwellings. There is a comfort in maps, he told me, in drawing a line around the outside of things, and I drew him a house. We should live there, I said, but he wasn’t particularly interested. It was Ihsan I showed the plans to in the end.

  ‘You London girls, you London girls,’ Billy says into my hair and my neck, and I realise these names from the past mean nothing to him, he’s not remotely listening.

  ‘I’m not from London, Billy, I’m from nowhere.’ He carries on, hands underneath my chemise.

  ‘You girls from the city, then, you’ll let me do what I want.’

  In the morning I am bright and breezy and have decided: I need to know about Ihsan. Despite Billy’s dislike of visitors, a little rebellion, begun in my stomach, is moving up. Why should I not go and see William Harrington? If he is still there, that is. Once memories are invited in, I can see, there is no putting them away again until their temperature is understood: are they warming? Or are they intent on tearing apart? Also: I haven’t been able to work on my Saint Helena since the visit from the pilot. I don’t know why.

  ‘Skip, shall we take the bus to Worthing?’

  ‘To the bunker at the Warnes?’

  ‘Why not?’ He hops up and down on the bed so that he is a blur of woollen cardigan and hair.

  Skip draws snakes along the steamed-up windows of the South Downs omnibus. His cheeks bulge with boiled sweets the lady behind us insists on feeding him even though I have asked her not to.

  ‘I can’t wait to see the hotel,’ he says, through the mouthful of sugar. The rain is set in, the sky a dispiriting grey. Bumped and jiggled along the winding coastal road, I concentrate on looking at the rain-splashed houses as we pass.

  ‘I love hotels,’ he says. Then catches my hand and squeezes it for attention. ‘Don’t you, Mummy?’

  No. I do not like hotels.

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  Skip keeps it up the whole way: the Warnes has a famous smugglers’ bunker, the treasures and the secret rooms. He’s heard all about it, he will itemise the weapons of choice for smugglers: a musketoon, a blowpipe, a cutlass. I smile at him. I remember the hotel room at the suite in the Russell where the psychoanalyst, whom Piers had brought in for me, was waiting. I noticed he smelled of limes but I confused the word and said, ‘You smell of lies.’ This undid my plea for sanity in that moment, rather. I was in trouble for appearing naked in the lobby of the hotel. Piers gave him my notebook with sketches of spiral staircases.

  What does the spiral staircase mean to you?

  It is a point of tension. It’s the way down below, but also the way up and out.

  What does privacy mean to you?

  Nothing.

  How so?

  I would like to make everything secret inside of me public so that there is nothing left in there, festering. That is art.

  Do you think so?

  I do.

  Might it destroy you? What would be left?

  Nothing: that’s the point.

  Skip rests his head on the glass and I take his hand; we are weary travellers as the road winds up and down its bobbing course on the rolling Sussex downs. His marble-blue eyes looking towards the sea but not seeing anything. I try to make a game of catching the names of the seaside bungalows as we pass – Will o’ the Wisp, Sprite o’ the Sea – but he doesn’t want to play. Finally, we are ejected from the omnibus and here we are: the front at Worthing. A seagull pecks at a dead dogfish a yard or so from us and somebody has written in pen on a shelter wall I DID MY BEST OLD PAL.

  The Warnes Hotel, surprisingly, is swarming and buzzing with activity, packed full with women waiting to be met by someone or other. The reception desk is unoccupied so I lean over and look at the neat, slanting handwriting on the Rooms Ledger. A quick scan gives a flavour of the hotel. The front doubles, rooms 15 to 21, are taken by Miss Alma Letts, Miss Rothwell, Lady Oldhan, Mr and Mrs Raybourne. A string of Misses in the front single rooms. Back doubles for maids and secretaries and valets of the occupants of the front doubles. There are several captains, and there he is: Lieutenant Harrington. Beneath him, a couple of Irish – McCallum, McConnaghan – and a Cohen, even a Schottlander. Indeed, foreigners in Worthing! It is nearly three. Skip is examining a full-sized knight’s armoury on display and I have changed my mind. I wish, very much, that we had not come, and then I realise something that has not occurred to me before: I lived near here with my mother for a short time, when I was very young. In one of the many boarding rooms and lodgings we stayed in. Goring? Rustington? A Sussex nowhere place, with bleak grey drizzle every day and a chalky sense of the end of the world. Perhaps we took tea in this hotel? Perhaps there is a ghost of me here? A trace on the carpet?The doorman heaves open the vast oak door, there is a blast of sea air and through the crowding woollen-coated women I see William Harrington. He hasn’t noticed us. He is ragged-faced, damp and harassed-looking and I squint at him, trying to find a thread, a context for him: next to my father in the meeting rooms? In the corner of a room in the Hotel Fast? Yes, it is him, I can see it now. How did I miss it? Though he is undeniably addled, aged. Then his eyes meet mine.

  ‘Ah.’ He pats his hair, tries to arrange himself from the disruptions of the weather. He scatters rain from his coat sleeve, his face is twitching on the cheekbone.

&nbs
p; ‘Thank you for coming.’ As uncomfortable as he looks, I feel as though he has won an imperceptible struggle between us. Skip smiles at him – thinking of more coins, no doubt, the mercenary little soul – and I am firm in my mind: tea, smugglers’ bunker, ask him what this is all about and then we will be gone.

  ‘Thank you for waiting all this time,’ I say.

  ‘Well. It is important. Can you bear the garden room, or would you prefer the restaurant? There is, of course, my room, but it might be a little small, and closed?’

  ‘The garden room sounds just right.’ We are polite now, a shift. We follow him through gilded arched doorways into a glassy, cocooned area where the murmur of female conspiracy can be felt rather than specifically heard and the sound of the rain falling creates a rattling sense of being trapped inside a tin. As we enter many curious and wrinkled eyes are cast over us. They are, I guess, the occupants of the single rooms of the hotel, most likely those without a sea view.

  He fumbles about for a minute, looking for a suitable place to sit. I take a long breath and the women around us convey messages to one another, like shrimps disturbed in a rock pool. Finally, he chooses a table in the corner.

  ‘Can I go out, Mummy?’ Skip points at the garden outside; it looks like the worst, bleakest, English seaside sort.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I take off my gloves and settle down in the chair. ‘it might be for guests only.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ William Harrington says, ‘the rain has lessened.’ I shrug and Skip is gone. We both watch him stomping in the wet grass, bending down and examining the glistening red leaves of an acer tree, talking to himself.

  He offers me a cigarette and I take one.

  ‘I took the liberty of ordering a tea for us,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you. I worked out who you are,’ I say. ‘I didn’t recognise you at first.’

  ‘Yes. I thought you would.’ Outside, a seagull lands on the grass, hops close to Skip and I watch him turn to look at it.

  ‘What was all that Burlington business about then?’

  ‘It was the only way I could get your address from your art dealer in London.’

  I straighten my spine.

  ‘I will be clear with you,’ he lights my cigarette. ‘Ihsan Tameri visited you in 1933, am I right?’

  My body is perfectly still. He is talking about four years ago, when Skip was two. Piers was already sleeping with other women and it took every ounce of my being not to fling myself out of the window of the Russell Hotel every morning. I don’t answer.

  ‘I believe that Ihsan Tameri gave you something when he visited, and I need it.’

  The waiter comes into the room, scanning his domain. I fold and unfold my peach-coloured gloves. I do not particularly recall anything; and then I do. Yes. It’s for another day Ihsan had said, cryptic and mysterious, and I played along, caressing the sealed edge of the thick pink envelope that he gave me in London. I remember thinking that it still smelled of Jerusalem. Outside, in the sodden garden, a pigeon balances on the metal balcony behind Skip and advances with great purpose along the metal rim towards him; he now has a bird on either side but is looking into the grass, seemingly oblivious.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know really what you are talking about.’

  My voice is a little loud, and the two women closest to us noticeably drop their own conversation and bow their chins in concentration. Skip is in the foliage now, crouched down, grubbing his fingers in soil. As the waiter takes the order William Harrington pulls out one of the wilting red carnations in a glass, pushes the green stem with his fingernails, returns it to its water. He smiles. It is possible that it is a disturbing attempt at a seductive coercion, but it falls flat. I am annoyed, suddenly, at the intrusion and this elusiveness, all the pretending to be a journalist.

  ‘You’re going to have to give me more information, or credentials. Is Ihsan in trouble?’

  The two birds have stretched their wings and are advancing towards Skip, who is moving backwards, further into the leaves. William Harrington leans forward, towards me.

  ‘I’m sorry to inform you that Ihsan Tameri is dead.’

  I look at him, and then out at the garden. Those words, Ihsan Tameri is dead, momentarily have no meaning. They halt, in the air between us, as if each one is trying out a different position, manoeuvring itself in disbelief. I am disorientated, for a moment. The seagull is intent, I can see, on jabbing my son and I stand up from the table and go over to the window, slam my hand against the glass so that the spinsters of the hotel exclaim and flutter. Skip spins round and looks at me; I beckon him in and return to my seat.

  ‘How do I know what you are saying is true? When did he die?’

  ‘Last year, an explosion at the Hotel Fast in Jerusalem.’

  ‘An explosion?’

  ‘Yes. Things are . . . tense in Jerusalem currently, as I am sure you know.’

  I look at the man before me. His hand comes towards my arm and he touches it. Is he trying to threaten me? But there is something very broken about him, as if his internal clockwork had seized up, and this is difficult for him, I can see.

  ‘I know you were . . . close,’ he says.

  ‘Close?’

  ‘Ihsan Tameri looked after you, rather, in Jerusalem. When nobody else was particularly paying attention. At least, that is how I recall it. I may be wrong?’

  I can taste in my mouth the sweets that Ihsan Tameri used to give me many years ago, pistachio-flavoured nougat with a secret ingredient which he refused to tell me, until one day he did. Camel hooves, he said, but don’t tell anyone. Then laughed to himself, pointing at my shocked expression, squeezing my cheeks. Look, I remember him saying, highly amused, look at your English little face. My body feels as though it is lowering down, sinking with sorrow when I think of him.

  Skip is coming through the door, back into the room, his cheeks bright red, lips wet, panting. He looks cross, accusatory. ‘Did you see those birds? They were attacking me.’

  ‘Yes, I saw just then.’ I take Skip’s hand. ‘Did they hurt you?’

  ‘Not quite.’ He flops down, despondent, into a chair just as the tea arrives. It is an excessive affair. The lower tier of the cake stand is covered in tiny square sandwiches; the higher levels are layered in slices of quivering lemon meringue pie, two different types of sponge cake and a row of French petits fours.

  ‘I bet you would like some lemon pie first?’ William Harrington says to Skip.

  ‘I would.’ He looks at me, as if pre-empting that I am about to insist on him having a sandwich first, but I simply smile.

  My mind is flicking, flicking: what do I remember about this man? He worked for my father? When nobody was paying attention to me? What does he mean? Ihsan’s face the last time I saw him, a few years ago in London, comes back to me. I sit up. I cough. It occurs to me that I need not believe this man.

  ‘I am terribly sorry, Mr Harrington. I’m afraid you haven’t convinced me. Do you have more formal confirmation?’

  Skip, whose mouth is as full as it is possible to be with lemon meringue pie, says something to me, but I have no idea what it is.

  ‘I am aware it’s probably a shock for you,’ he says, not taking anything from the cake stand. I fold and unfold my gloves on my knee.

  ‘What’s a shock?’ Skip says, swallowing meringue.

  ‘The death of your mother’s old friend,’ says William Harrington, then he turns to me. ‘I need the envelope. Will you be able to give it to me, Prudence?’

  He was in love with Eleanora Rasul, I remember now, but then of course so was I. Why were we both drawn to Eleanora? What did Ihsan write about her? I can’t recall. Not much, latterly. Ihsan dead? The weather in William Harrington’s face changes. He nods at Skip.

  ‘You look a lot like your mother did, when she was a child, I mean.’

  Skip’s eyes grow wider. ‘Did you know Mummy when she was little?’

  ‘I did,’ Harrington says. ‘Funny litt
le thing, always scrabbling about under tables. She made friends with the wrong kind of people, although Jerusalem at the time was very confusing.’

  I speak quietly to Skip. ‘Eat it quick, darling, we have to go, something important has come up.’

  I turn back to Lieutenant Harrington. ‘I’m sorry. I can see that you very much want this envelope you speak of, but I’m afraid it is a long time ago. My life has changed hugely in the last few years; if I even have it – and I don’t remember it – then I certainly don’t know where it is.’

  I take hold of Skip by the elbow, try to pull him up and away, but he scowls at me, squirms lower into his seat, staring at the cakes. He is now working on a piece of Victoria sponge. Harrington catches my wrist and pulls it towards him, looks down at it, with his thumb on the vein, and underneath, where Skip can’t see, his nail is digging into my skin. Then he sits back, abruptly, and rummages in his coat pocket. His face exhausted, haunted. He pulls out a photograph.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’ It is a picture of Jerusalem where I lived with my father all those years ago. A black sign and the words HOTEL FAST in white letters.

  ‘What is this?’ I say, and the oddness of this man being here strikes me as so incongruous and unlikely in Worthing, with the sea whipping up into its angry froth, a place where everything withers not through violence or passion but through too much salt, and loneliness.

  ‘How did you trace me here? Did Piers send you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘His Majesty’s Service, it’s all I can say. Ihsan Tameri gave you an envelope with photographs printed at the same time as this one.’ He turns the photograph over and points at the small insignia at the back. Khaled Rasul Photography, 1920, Jerusalem. I push his hand away.