The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  I have always hated anyone coming into the rooms where I work and am tense as Mrs Deal takes it all in. Like everyone who enters a sculptor’s studio I can see she wants to touch things. She picks up my favourite mallet, its handle so well-worn that it is perfectly shaped to the curve of my palm. The dust cover has fallen from the main piece and she stares at it. I lean against the door and light a cigarette, feeling shy and idiotic and exposed, but I’m surprised how it looks. Positively dramatic, much better than I thought it was yesterday.

  ‘Is it a saint?’

  ‘It was originally a Saint Helena, from Malta. I had it shipped here. It was much damaged, they were going to destroy it. So I am enhancing it, changing it.’

  ‘It’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The face, and most of its head, has been toppled off. Not by me, but at some point in its tenure as a saint on the roof of a church in a fishing village. Mrs Deal walks around it.

  ‘May I touch it?’ she says.

  ‘Yes. By all means.’

  I have kept the main form and sweep of the stone, the swirl of the robes falling to Helena’s feet, and in various places limestone corrosions have created holes, the largest the size of a fist; in other places smaller, like honeycomb. For the past few weeks I have been extending the hole in the centre of the saint, where her stomach should be, and have carved a curl twisting through the middle. It resembles the twist of a spiral staircase, although it is still crudely hacked and needs much work. It is layered: the original sculptor, then the weather, neglect, erosion and now me.

  It is strange material, this Maltese al-Tanka, an in-between stone that is neither European nor Levantine. It feels as though it is alive and, here again, it brings with it a memory: Piers sneering, not understanding why I liked its decomposing, fragile element. I don’t know why Piers was so resistant to this project. This is when he began to interfere heavily with my method, wanting me to work from drawings when I preferred to respond directly from the material in front of me. I did not have a plan, and this offended him. Make your own work, I said to him, because his rages were coming more regularly since he had stopped pretending to make his own work, his dabbling with painting, his poetry, and his vague attempts at photography. He was entirely focused on me and what I was doing instead, until suddenly he wasn’t.

  ‘What does the staircase mean?’ Mrs Deal asks, but I don’t answer. This reworking of Saint Helena has been a tapestry of doorways opening up into places I did not want to remember, but without opening them, it seems I can’t finish. Mrs Deal looks at another partner piece I have pushed against the wall. For this I have submitted plans to Margot but haven’t begun it properly yet. It will be two men, hanging from their feet and suspended from a staircase. I want the heaviness of the stone to be contradicted by the lightness, the oddness, of the floating men, but I tell Mrs Deal none of this. She is quiet, as people often are in front of large pieces of stone, shrunken, humble even.

  ‘You are welcome to touch it.’

  She has bony fingers and ragged nails which she pokes into the honeycomb holes. Each chisel-shave a moment I have pushed Skip away. I lean outside the door and throw my cigarette into the shingle. On the highest tideline, where cracked oyster shells and fishermen’s ropes are straggled in a stripe, there is a layer of thick curly red seaweed and I have a superstition, I don’t know where from, that red seaweed is unlucky. Skip comes up the beach, dragging his bucket.

  ‘Oh Lord, what is it?’

  ‘Look.’

  Mrs Deal stands up, next to me, and watches Skip stagger towards us. Inside the bucket, clinging to the sides, are eight starfish.

  ‘Hinges the fisherman said there was a colony washed up, hundreds of them the last few days.’

  I put my finger into the water and touch the half-slimy, half-noble creatures. Skip’s eyes round with pride at his haul. Mrs Deal, admiring the magical starfish, smells lovely, of lavender, rose, older-lady soap. Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly. I used to sing that to Skip when he was three, four months old, in the days before I walked into Piers’s studio and found him with his face buried deep in the groin of one of his students. His hands on her thighs looked like starfish too.

  We say goodbye to Mrs Deal and I help Skip to roll up his paper world.

  I am sure that the seeds of my son’s love of maps were sown years ago by my father when he laid his own maps out across the marble floor of his house in Malta. We visited when Skip was two, perhaps three. The trip was a disaster: my father hated Piers. Piers hated him. I didn’t want to be there. Skip cried for his nanny whom we had foolishly left behind in London, and was cross with me because I did the bedtime business all wrong. My father, however, adored Skip. As soon as they met they touched each other’s faces, explored eyes and ears and hair. My father sat him on his knee and talked him through the contours of his maps. This is the famous city, Alexandria. The Corniche, the Great Harbour, the lake, the municipal gardens, the line of the coast, and I could see Skip thought he had the power to draw all the cities of the world in sand, with a stick, and then knock them down and destroy them if he wished, and probably he could. Skip’s fat little two-year-old fingers danced over the pages in awe.

  Your mummy used to help me with my maps, shading and drawing and colouring.

  I realise, now, that this was the last time I saw my father before he died. It was the first time I had returned to his house after leaving when I was eighteen. Not much had changed: large shutters, maids to wipe surfaces, drivers to transport him, gardeners to bring the roses to bloom, housekeepers smoothing down the beds, mopping the clean marble hallways cleaner. Piers and I were engaged in a harsh, wordless battle which expressed itself in movement – namely, one person coming into the room and the other one leaving – and I also avoided being alone with my father.

  Of course, he had a mistress. On that holiday I had told him not to bother introducing us but I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye: an impressively exotic-looking woman who was only about four years older than me. Very thin and dusky, her hair covering her face as if she had something to hide, and indeed she did. She was married to a diplomat on the other side of the island. This woman, I remember, was always leaving through the gate, or closing a door, or driving away in a small green convertible sports car just as we arrived back at the house.

  It doesn’t take much for the familial edges of your life to fall apart. I distinctly recall thinking that in Malta, Piers furious by then with me for not being what he wanted. What did he want? A poupée? A doll to bend over? To walk behind him? I occupied myself by exploring the villages, looking at the saints carved from the limestone of Malta, so soft it almost crumbles into nothing, quick to corrode and yet strong, and lovely colours too, a blackish dark hue or a light yellow. This was one of the things that infuriated Piers. It enraged him. He was a purist: use the Italian marble, not this crumbling chalk, as if I was sullying him or his reputation by wanting to work with this al-Tanka, the hybrid stone. It was on the final night that my father finally spoke to me, alone in the corner of his vast living room.

  ‘I know you are angry with me,’ he said, ‘but what I don’t know is why. And why wouldn’t you let me introduce you all to Tessa?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t mind if we acknowledge it, but you expect us all to sit and pretend she’s your “friend” and lie about it to Skip.’

  ‘He’s two. What does it matter?’

  ‘It matters because it’s the message you are sending him. That it’s normal to lie.’

  ‘Some relationships are complicated. They don’t need to be spelled out to a two-year-old.’

  ‘I’m averse to the thought of children growing up and all the adult relations around them being a lie.’

  ‘So it’s about you. It’s not at all about Skip, or whatever moral stance you are taking.’

  ‘It’s all combined. We’ll obviously never agree. You just take things as you want them.’

&n
bsp; It was too thorny to unravel. He had always had a mistress, and thinking about them I tended to spiral back, to old thoughts, of living with my mother in guesthouses, whilst he was away, with whoever. On our last evening my father and Piers made an effort with one another, buoyed because they knew soon it would be over. Drinking whisky together, looking out over the balcony, speaking in a manly fashion of manly things, legs apart, jaws raised, the bright fishy smell from the Mediterranean floating through the window. My father invited Piers into his studio. Inside there was a single canvas in the middle of the room with a portrait of the exotic-looking mistress, naked, blackest black between her legs. He had always sketched, but now apparently he had taken up painting.

  ‘That’s Tessa,’ he said.

  Piers looked closely at it, and then called me in, said he admired it. I could tell from the silken feel of his voice that he was genuine. Then my father, drunk, pulled out all of the initial drawings and sketches that he had done in preparation for the painting and laid them around the floor.

  ‘She looks a little like your mother Isabel.’

  I hovered near the door. Their two backs crouched together, peering at the various drawings of a woman who almost looked like my mother and in the half-light of the evening they did not seem like fully formed human men, but rather creatures who fed on the skin and bodies of women. They leant towards each other and their shadow was a two-headed beast. What was confusing, though, was that I wasn’t sure if I was offended that it was not my body painted or posed in front of them, or if, once, it had been.

  —–

  I climb on to the bicycle that Billy left on my veranda; I am going into the New Shoreham town. Skip wants to stay here with his starfish. I blow him a kiss, but he is oblivious, too wild and free for kisses now. When I look back over my shoulder at him his head is bowed, almost as if praying, although I know him to be a heathen.

  Shoreham village has a post office that doubles as a bookshop known enigmatically as Ships and it is the centre of all local knowledge and activity. I cycle across Norfolk Bridge towards it, cursing the fact that the rain never stops in this part of England. It swells from the Channel and dampens everything like wet blankets. Soggy, dripping, I enter the dry capsule of Ships. It is one of those post offices that sells a little of everything: flypaper, eggs, cigarettes, envelopes, castor oil, panama hats, canvas shoes for children. A coughing noise comes from the counter in the corner of the room followed by banging. The postmaster is beckoning me.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘You are the new lady in Cecilia, am I right?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Mrs Prudence Miller?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ There is a concoction of familiar smells in the shop: paraffin, sulphur, coal smoke, something recently baked, Clorox.

  ‘Mrs Miller?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I heard that your friend Billy Ludd was in a fight last night.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid he fights for money.’ I shake the rain from my hair, impatient at this intrusion, and turn to look through the items on the shelf, having completely forgotten what it was I came in for.

  ‘No, I mean in the street, with a man.’ I sigh. Billy’s bruises when they come are like changeable maps.

  ‘But who was he fighting?’

  ‘I believe, according to Mrs Radcliffe’s son who was there, that it was the journalist who was staying at the Warnes in Worthing. The one who telegrammed you about an interview.’

  Really. The sense to which one’s own business is discussed in this town, the sense to which every single person does not even attempt to hide their interest in one’s affairs, the evidence which clearly shows that the postmaster openly reads – and discusses the contents of – all telegrams that come through him is truly quite astounding. What’s more, there was a sneer with which he had said ‘your friend Billy Ludd’ and it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Whatever Billy says, of discretion, and all of his creeping out of Cecilia at dawn, it is very clear that the whole town knows of our liaison. My ears, cheeks, neck and chest burn and I have a strong desire to shock him, this vague gentleman, with white hair, so overly concerned, so knowledgeable about affairs of my life. I have a compulsion to undo my dress and let it drop, to take off my scarf and wrap it around his mouth and yank back his head and to either kiss him or slap him, but I don’t. I leave and the bell on the door rings like an angel falling to its death as it closes behind me.

  I walk over to the mermaid outside Jimmie’s and rest my hand on her head. I can’t exactly explain why I dislike her so. Perhaps I am jealous because Skip loves her.

  A boat is coming into harbour, and even though I am staring right at it, it takes me a moment to work out that it is Billy waving from the prow. I wave back, although no mechanical tune comes from me, and he signals for me to wait for him. I watch him clamber out of the boat, exchange a few words with the fishermen and then come towards me. I am used to him looking a bit swollen or walking oddly as if creaking after one of these fights of his, usually near Horsham, or Crawley, in male theatres that I have no interest in visiting, but this is different, I can see even at this distance. This time his face is a red mess and the entire right eye has disappeared behind a huge swelling, bloody and seeping. My hand is on his face as if I might kiss him there and then, even though the woman who gives out the milk tokens near the school is watching us.

  ‘What happened?’

  He takes my hand. ‘A fight, you know.’ I tug him towards me, away from the edge of the harbour water which laps darkly.

  ‘But the postmaster told me it was the man who came to visit me.’ Billy scuffs at the quayside with his feet.

  ‘Nosy bastard,’ he says, and glances over at men from the boot factory walking past, all looking at us.

  ‘I found him near your shed, Prue, trying to break in.’

  ‘But I was just there now, with Mrs Deal. I didn’t see any sign of anyone breaking in.’

  ‘No, he was just about to, I think.’

  I put my hand on Billy’s cheek. The scarlet parts of his bruises meld with a thick yellow middle. The rain intensifies, and so we move from the harbour edge and stand under the awning in front of Mr Snelling’s butcher’s shop where an entire pig hangs from a hook in the window; its back looks human and beneath it, as if in mockery, is a tray of pink-purple sausages.

  ‘Listen, I should have kicked him in the head and thrown him in the river. I knew I should’ve. It was my instinct to, but I let him live.’

  Billy kicks the pavement with his foot as if trying to damage his own toe, scuffing chalk. Skip asked me recently: Do you know what chalk is made from? What? It’s a soft, white limestone, he said. And what is that? It’s made up of fragments of an unimaginable number of skeletons of sea creatures. Clever boy. Think of that, Mummy. Billy pulls a black leather wallet out from his pocket.

  ‘This fell out in the fight, though. We got his papers. He’s not a journalist at all.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He’s someone I . . .’

  ‘He’s a Ministry man.’

  I take the wallet from Billy and open it up. Inside are identification papers – Lt W. R. Harrington, Ministry of Information – and folded behind is a pink official envelope of the sort that office secretaries use to exchange internal mail. ‘Thank you, for trying to stop him. I’m so sorry.’

  He squints out at the river. ‘What is it he wants, this man?’

  ‘I’m honestly not sure. He gave me a photograph; he wants the other ones that came with it. That’s all I know.’

  I think of what Mrs Deal said about Billy being the father of Walter. Why had he not told me this? I have never been able to determine the shifting sands of trust. I sometimes believe that we are designed to betray the people we love, just as sometimes we hand everything over, like a bright unclipped purse, or a secret part of our body, to a stranger.

  The river has changed shape with the rain and the tide is moving in quickly so that the mud banks are disappearing and soon the
path closest to the river’s edge will be covered in water. Billy tells me the full story: he was on his bicycle last night, it was dark and the sea was crashing; he was heading to Flo’s Club when a friend of his, Sam, shouted that there was someone near my studio with a piece of wood. Together, Billy and Sam ran towards my hut, past Cecilia in fact but did not want to alarm me. The man – Harrington – was wearing a long overcoat and had picked up a large piece of driftwood and positioned himself so as to ram the door. Billy had called out and told him to stop but then, as Billy approached, with no warning the man had swung round and quickly begun battering at his head with the wood, several blows. Billy, despite all of his fighting experience, had not expected it. The man had then run off along the spit, and it took Sam a moment to get Billy up. They chased the intruder, calling out for back-up from Flo’s: Hinges and the others. Four of them all together rounded up on him near the bridge. They circled in, and then he’d pulled from his pocket a small pistol and pointed it directly at Billy. Everyone stood still. The man had then calmly got into a black car that was waiting very close and had been driven away.

  ‘Driven away? With a driver?’

  ‘Yes, think so. Let’s go into Snelling’s,’ he says, ‘and we can work out what he wants.’

  But I resist. There is a shift in the sky as the rain shower lessens. Clouds rearrange themselves, swap places, move up and down. Egrets stalk the riverbank like detectives looking for clues and the sun breaks through the cloud and highlights the harbour section of the river. I feel as if I’m meant to be somewhere, meant to be doing something. Mr Snelling is coming to the door. Billy has known him since childhood; old comrades.

  ‘Where’s Skip?’ Billy says, turning around and looking at my legs, as if he might be hiding behind them, as small children do, but Skip is too big for that.

  ‘At Cecilia.’

  ‘Alone?’

  And this is when I call his name, Skip, but all I hear in return is the inane seagulls crying out for food.