The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘Do please leave us alone, Lieutenant Harrington. There really is nothing I can do for you.’

  ‘Take it. Perhaps it will trigger your memory. I need the envelope and the rest of the photographs. I am completely serious.’

  I stand up; push my chair out of the way. We are going, I say to Skip with my eyes: we are going now.

  ‘Ihsan used you, you know.’ He stands too. He is smiling, and it makes his face look even more as if he is in a turbulent assault on himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ I try to ignore him, but I look up into his eyes.

  ‘All that information you handed across to Ihsan. Did it never occur to you that it was useful?’

  ‘I want to see the bunker,’ Skip says, with petulant lips.

  ‘Did you think he was your special friend?’

  ‘I want to see the smugglers’ bunker.’ Skip’s voice is whinier now, fortified by the sugar in the cakes, and I begin to gather my coat and my gloves and handbag.

  ‘Not today, Skip. We must go.’ The women in the room are looking at me, their eyes bulging slightly, thin lips being licked. Skip begins to cry out, loudly, and everyone openly stares. Harrington is frowning at me.

  ‘Do you remember a room?’ he says. ‘Frau Baum, coming towards you?’

  I grab Skip’s wrist, haul him up from the chair, away from the table, through the hotel restaurant and out on to the street where the wind whips at us and we are stunned momentarily by the sunlight. Skip cries, injured pride, injustice. I wanted to see the bunker. It’s not faaaaairrr. I am sorry, I say in my head, tugging him towards the omnibus station where – miracle of miracles – an omnibus destined for Shoreham is ready to go.

  Skip hops along the aisle, to the seats at the back, his face dark, his sulk deep-set. Then, dropping it all, as children can do, he springs to his knees to look out of the back window. It is only then that I see Skip is holding the photograph of the Hotel Fast.

  ‘Why did you bring that?’

  ‘He pushed it into my hand.’

  ‘Is he following?’ I say. We are the only passengers. He is bound to get on. He’ll sit near us the whole way, trying to frighten Skip. I put my gloves on, take them off, put them on again and gaze out at the sea, which is devastatingly hostile-looking as the omnibus rumbles into life.

  Skip at the back window says, ‘No, he’s not coming.’

  He walks back down and sits next to me. ‘Who is he?’ Skip still has pie crumbs on the side of his mouth. I gently wipe them off.

  ‘A madman. Don’t worry about it at all.’ I pull him close and he puts his head on my shoulder.

  ‘Is he a detective?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘But he says he knew you.’

  ‘Oh, a long time ago. So it doesn’t really count.’

  ‘He asked you if you remember a room, what did he mean?

  ‘I don’t know, darling.’ I look at him.

  ‘Is he following us?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m sure he’s got much better things to do.’

  We are as far as the Lancing part of the coastal road when he says, ‘Stop it, Mummy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hands, you keep shaking your hands.’ And I realise that they are doing something they haven’t done for many years: an odd involuntary tremble, and the only way I can stop them is to press my palms together, as if in prayer.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  Willie stood in the corner of the ballroom and tried not to look as though he was seeking her out. Perhaps Khaled Rasul would be at her side tonight? And why not? It would be perfectly proper. Eleanora was right, of course. It was the party. He could not avoid it; Ashton would consider it unseemly if he did not attend. It was snowing outside and this did not cheer him. He stood near the window while the Pro-Jerusalem Society members were gathering and had the illogical thought that snow did not belong to this city. It belonged to England. Warsaw. Alaska. Not Jerusalem.

  He was given a glass of red wine, rough as a dog’s arse, but still he swallowed it in one go. He resolved to stay for an hour, find an excuse and then leave. A roll-call was read out: Colonel Storrs, absent. The Mayor of Jerusalem, the Director of Antiquities, His Eminence the Grand Mufti, His Reverence the President of the Franciscan Community, His Reverence the President of the Dominican Community . . . Willie rocked back on his heels, felt the equilibrium of his body stretch over its balanced point; every part of him was on edge.

  His suit, as usual, was entirely wrong. His torso underneath it looked like a screwed-up piece of paper with white scars in crinkled lines across his chest and back and pointed scars – two fingers to the world, he thought of them privately – reaching towards his Adam’s apple. He closed his eyes and was back in the cockpit: the dense cloud-bank that came from nowhere. In the white-heat of the moment when he realised his engine was on fire, instead of concentrating on the winking lights below, all he could think of was a manuscript he once saw which showed the logbooks of whalers. For each whale butchered that day there was a lovingly drawn inky woman, portraits of prostitutes, and that was how Willie saw death: inky women, the lull, the sinking. Sirens, he supposed. Concentrate. Fuck. When Willie opened his eyes he was being looked after by women with black-brown eyes whose names he never learnt and the pain from under his bandages was not stabbing, but pure, consistent. He swallowed a mouthful of the awful wine to shut down the memories.

  Faces swam near him, like weeds coming up to the top of water after a disturbance, and he responded as required, nodding and agreeing, but perhaps he was giving off an unsociable air because no one stayed with him for very long. Arabists and archaeologists swooped this way and that, everyone with the starry look of people recently in snow. The roll-call for the meeting continued: His Beatitude the Greek Patriarch, His Beatitude the Armenian Patriarch, the President of the Jewish Community, the Chairman of the Zionist Commission, Le Rev. Père Abel (Ecole Biblique de Saint-Etienne), Captain Barluzzi M. Ben Yahuda, Musa Kazem Pasha el-Husseini (the ex-Mayor of Jerusalem), various members of the American Colony, various members of the British delegation (including Lt Col. E. L. Popham). . .

  ‘What is she doing?’ A woman was talking to him; one of the indistinguishable European archaeologists in a large hat with blue flowers on it. She was from a village near Ghent. He forgot her name the instant she told him. She was pointing at Prudence Ashton and tutting. Willie looked. Charles Ashton’s daughter, in her white party dress, hair in blue ribbons, was crawling on her hands and knees beneath the white starched cloths of the large circular tables that were lined against the wall. Each was topped with an impressive vase filled with lilies.

  ‘An odd little child,’ he said, thinking aloud, and the woman agreed with him.

  Eleanora came in then, alone, looking very thin in a long white dress, with a cluster of white jasmine flowers in her hair that might have worked on a girl of sixteen, perhaps. He felt disloyal at that thought, but when she turned he saw her dress was backless and she wore a long string of beads which trailed down her spine. Blood fired around his body, as if setting the edges of his scars alight, and when she met his eye it seemed to him that she knew she had this effect on him. She shimmered, a low smile. The music in the room was too loud and from the periphery of his sight he was conscious that Eleanora was weaving her way towards him, but just as she came near Charles Ashton swooped on her and took her arm.

  ‘So pleased you’re here,’ Ashton said. ‘No Khaled still tonight?’

  ‘Not yet, I’m sorry, just little old me.’

  ‘Well we are much the better for it.’

  ‘You’ve got the great and the good, Charles, congratulations.’

  A newly arrived German architect, Herr Kaufmann, was introduced and then he and Ashton were tugged towards the stage. Willie lit Eleanora’s cigarette and smoke encircled them like a magic cloak. They stood together, very close, both looking directly ahead at Ashton who was waving a pointer stick at maps hung behind the pod
ium in the manner of a public-school teacher.

  Eleanora used to prowl Pentrohobyn Hall like a thief, unafraid of the dark. An acute sense of social inferiority, a worry passed on by his mother, meant that Willie was overly concerned with manners and pleasing people from a young age, whereas Eleanora, spoilt little madam of the vast Pentrohobyn estate, ran everyone ragged. From the very start she impressed him with her badness, her ability to steal, lie, climb and throw, but this was when they were children, before her father locked her away. Before she used silence as a protest, and was not allowed to read or write, was given crochet to do. He remembered her indignation. Willie was the only person allowed in and he smuggled her Greek textbooks which she grabbed off him in a fury.

  The entire room, he realised, was looking at him. He was being introduced to the company. He bowed and received applause although he did not know what for. He forced himself to listen. Ashton waved his stick at a large rectangle on a map which had been coloured in green.

  ‘Lungs. What is needed is a park system, based on a similar model used in Ruislip.’

  Ruislip, England. In Jerusalem? The unspoken question – is he serious? – hung in the air.

  ‘There is a swathe of more or less open land between a mile and half a mile deep that I have designated park area from Mount Zion, through the village of Siloam and the Garden of Gethsemane, to Mount Scopus in the north-east. The bulk of the land will, it is hoped, remain under fellahin tillage or even in its present wildness.’

  ‘Is it wild?’ someone, possibly Captain Barluzzi, shouted. ‘No land belongs to nobody. Not even here.’

  Ashton ignored him, and on stage – trim, compact, debonair, loud – he looked wily, focused.

  ‘Advancing the walls, increasing the gardens, accenting the stonework, a tremendous sequence of open lands, spaces and parks – gardens! – which will isolate the Holy City, formulating the importance of it, the sense of it as . . .’

  ‘One might,’ Eleanora whispered, ‘consider the foolishness of an English garden in a desert perhaps?’

  Ashton began a curious intoning, as if praying, rocking on his heels back and forth. The place where a great city stands is not the place of strech’d wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely . . . Everyone in the room looked awkwardly at one another. Finally, when it became clear that he had finished, hesitant laughing and music began. The concertina player stared at the ceiling as he pressed his buttons, the violinist kept his eyes to the floor as his bow flickered up and down. Standing near the stage, looking at Willie, was Ihsan; and when their eyes connected Ihsan turned quickly away.

  ‘El . . . Ellie,’ Willie said, using her childhood name, but a woman’s hand came between them, splitting them apart. She was introduced, a Miss Lucy something who spoke in a sarcastic, high, daggered voice, but Willie did not respond to her because through a gap in the crowd he saw Lofty. McLaughlin. He was aware of Eleanora’s cool stare on him.

  Lofty hesitated on the threshold of the doorway to the ballroom, wearing the full-uniform get-up, two revolvers clearly displayed on his belt. In his hand a black baton. It was the Irish weapon, Willie recognised it, the shillelagh, and in his other hand a Turkish-style whip. The music stopped just as Lofty came in and so the atmosphere shifted; glasses could be heard chinking and voices echoed. Willie watched as Lofty made his way quickly through the room, clearly heading for Ashton, who looked up at that moment from talking to one of the deans from the School of Archaeology. Lofty’s mouth close to Ashton’s ear and then both men glanced around the gathering.

  Something was happening. Willie instinctively looked around for Eleanora, but she had already drifted away from him, with the woman, arm in arm, towards the doors. Lofty and Ashton were turning, necks twisting, as if looking for someone, and then Lofty’s strong Irish voice, shouting, ‘Evacuation. Evacuation.’

  Everyone in the room stopped talking at once.

  ‘Out. Get out: unexploded hand grenade.’

  There was an odd little pause, immediately followed by a confused clamour for the door; the room seemed to tip, to be swooped upwards. Ladies squeaked as they shoved past, Willie saw Eleanora herded along; she was stretching up, looking over her shoulder for him. A clearing materialised around a green device on the floor.

  ‘You,’ Lofty said, catching Ihsan’s white-suited arm as he moved past him. ‘Arab. Lie on it now.’ He gave Ihsan a fierce shove towards the grenade. ‘Lie flat on it.’

  ‘Old boy,’ Charles called out in protest. ‘He’s a friend of ours.’

  Willie, propelled by instinct and training rather than thought, dived forward, picked up the grenade and threw it at the window. It exploded on impact, glass showering everywhere, there were cries from the men and women still running from the room. Willie stood near the unexpected cold air and examined his palm. Only then did he shake. He had thrown grenades many times, but had not before picked up a live one. Ashton was upon him. Good God, man, I don’t know how to thank you. Other voices, fingers on the skin of his hands; he was being congratulated and patted. Hotel staff peered down through the smashed window.

  ‘Nobody hurt,’ someone called out.

  Lofty still had his hands on Ihsan’s collar, as if readying for a dance or an embrace, and Ihsan, with his judgemental glasses, was staring at the Irishman. Lofty’s eyebrows so fair they were white and the skin on his face sunburnt: they made a strange couple, standing close enough to be almost embracing, and then with no warning Lofty punched Ihsan directly, in the stomach. Ihsan let out an ouf sound and folded in on himself. Willie caught his arm and stopped him from reaching the floor. From behind, Ashton’s voice.

  ‘Really, Lofty, was that quite necessary?’

  ‘This is an outrage,’ Ihsan said, puffing out the words. Willie supported Ihsan as he straightened leant against him for a moment. Willie could feel him panting and he felt a corresponding gesture, a pushing back towards him. Then Ihsan stood up, still clutching his stomach, but if Willie expected a thank you it was quickly quelled. A black look from Ihsan, and Willie saw that he was being blamed in some way. Lofty, who was picking at his gingery eyebrows, scowled, and looked as if he might be considering another punch. Willie caught his eye. His breath stopped. He must remember him? But Lofty’s gaze moved immediately on. He was turning towards Ashton, and beginning to rant and rail: ‘You can’t catch a rat unless you’ve got bait.’ Ashton put his hands out like a preacher to calm everyone and then span around.

  ‘Where’s Prudence?’

  Willie noticed a movement from behind a curtain near the window, an impress against the thick weighty fabric. He walked over and poked his head round the thick mustard-yellow velvet. The child was on the floor, knees under her chin. She was whispering: ‘I am Prudence Ashton, aged eleven. I travelled by boat. I was sent for.’ Willie knelt down. She did not look at him, but continued her low song.

  ‘Prue?’

  She blinked at him. He did not know how to talk to children and she made him feel particularly awkward. ‘The concertina player tried to convince me to come with him, behind the stage. He kept insisting, but I wouldn’t, and then finally his friend came and pulled him away. They ran through that door there. He hurt my wrist, he was pulling it, but he wasn’t unkind, that was the strange thing. I didn’t know what to do.’

  Willie took her wrist and there was a light red mark on it. ‘Come on,’ he said, and took her cool, pale hand, gently tugging her from behind the curtains.

  ‘She’s here,’ Willie called. Ashton was without his fez for once so that the bald top of his head was exposed and looked rather shimmery. ‘I think someone tried to take her.’

  ‘Oh, Prudence,’ Ashton rushed forward and was upon his daughter, ‘but who?’

  ‘No,’ Prue said, ‘he wasn’t taking me. He was trying to help me.’

  Lofty was gone. That was just the sort of thing he would do: charge in, demand an Arab lie on a grenade and then disappear. Ihsan had been helped into a chair and was swearing in
five different languages.

  Ashton stretched his back and let out a groan. ‘What a business.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Willie.

  ‘Lofty had a tip-off, dear boy,’ Ashton said, his hands shaking. ‘Goodness, I need a drink. It was supposed to be an assassination but they muffed it.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘Don’t know: could be the Arabs or the Jews. They both have grievances against us at the moment.’ He pushed his hand on his chest, above his heart. ‘To be frank, it could be the Greeks or the Armenians or the French or the Syrians for that matter too.’ Then he drew himself up, as if to bring himself together. ‘You have to hand it to Lofty. He’s irascible, but he’s bloody good.’

  ‘No. I mean, who was it aimed at?’

  ‘Me, old chap,’ Charles said, letting out a wheeze, and he pulled Prue towards him. The room was completely empty apart from one of the hotel boys standing in front of Ihsan with a glass of water, being shouted at.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  Prue longed to photograph the dead pigeon on the kerbside but her father strode on; they were late for the service at St George’s. He had demanded she accompany him as Frau Baum did not want to come. I circulate! Keeps everyone happy! Haven’t been for a few months!

  ‘Chop chop, come on,’ he said. ‘Morbid child.’

  Two security men had been allocated to him since the incident of the grenade: a large Englishman who walked behind them saying nothing, and a thin native gendarme, who skipped about in front, scanning windows and buildings and the sky. Somebody had attempted to kill her father. She held that thought, like a caught butterfly, and wondered at it as she tried to keep up with him. Were people, hidden behind the shutters and windows, ready to throw more bombs at him, at her? It gave her an illuminated, excited feeling, as if she had been lit up as a target. Her father was wearing his bright white suit and fez as usual and every passer-by looked at them, but were some of those faces hostile? The sun was behind them so that their shadows stretched, making their legs tremendously long and their heads tiny pins. That is me and that is him. Turn a corner and the stick-men shadows were obliterated.