The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘Goodbye, Prudence Ashton,’ he said. She waved, but he couldn’t, his arms full of concertina. He continued downstairs as she went back up. As soon as he had gone she wished very much that she had thought of better things to say to him, talked to him more, and then she saw that she was back in the carpeted corridor she had just been trying to escape from. Defeated, she suddenly remembered that she had been requested at dinner and needed to go and dress.

  —–

  Prue and Frau Baum were alone at the dinner table. They were in the largest restaurant in the Hotel Fast and Prue preferred the smaller, less stuffy one. She made friends with the restaurant kitten, letting it pat at the laces on her shoes, and looked over the table at Frau Baum’s hands. She had rings on a finger of each of her hands that were made from something yellow that looked like a camel’s eye. Prue kicked her foot and shook off the kitten.

  ‘Do you have any news on Canon Brown’s villa?’ Prue said, picking up a spoon and looking serious, pretending to be a grown-up.

  ‘Ah that. I wouldn’t count on that.’

  ‘Oh, why?’ Secretly, under her blankets, Prue had invested a lot of time in imagining this villa, sketching what it looked like, dreaming of its doors and windows.

  ‘Well, there are a lot of questions about who owns it. The Church pays a subsidiary rent to a Mr Platzer but he in turn pays a nominal rent to a wealthy Arab, El Hassan, who has a number of houses in that area of Lifta. It is very complicated.’

  ‘Well,’ said Prue, grateful for being spoken to as if she were an actual person, but at the same time nearly knocking over the glass next to her napkin, ‘can’t we just pay the rent required?’

  ‘Alas not. There is an argument. The actual inheritance of that part of land belongs to one family but it is disputed because the old grandfather, despairing of his sons and grandsons fighting, has left the wiq al fad to the sisters. The law, however, states they are not eligible to own it and the canon is supposed to use it, but he doesn’t, and so it goes on.’

  ‘Why can’t we live in another villa then? Must it be that one?’

  ‘Not really my dear,’ said Frau Baum. ‘The Church that Canon Brown represents has an agreement with the British military that, in payment for another piece of land they have built a small church on, the civic adviser – your father – can use this as his home.’

  The restaurant kitten, forgiving Prue for her change of heart, tapped her ankle for attention, and the waiter leant over and asked if they would like more drinks. Frau Baum shook her head.

  ‘Besides, it is very charming. There is something special about that house. We visited it before you came.’

  Frau Baum was trying very hard to be kind to Prue, she could tell, but for some reason Prue found it difficult to respond to her dryness and could not bring herself to call her Elspeth. Frau Baum looked towards the restaurant windows and was no longer seeing Prue. She was quite a mystery. Had she been married once? Before the war? Was she a widow, or a divorcee? What did Prue know about her? Only that she went on walks up into the hills beyond Jerusalem, moving stones around and analysing them, rummaging in dust, hunting down ancient pots, and that she liked to wear hats with black feathers sticking out of them. That was the sum of it. She was not glamorous, like Eleanora, and she had stolen Prue’s father. She was not Eleanora, or her mother. It was simply that, perhaps.

  ‘Ah ha,’ said Frau Baum with obvious relief, ‘they have arrived.’

  ‘Darling,’ Ashton declared, although it was not clear which one of them he was speaking to, ‘so sorry we are late.’

  He was not alone; there was an unknown man with him. Tall, balding, a clipped moustache.

  ‘Prudence, this is Mr Wicklow, British Intelligence.’ The man scraped his chair backwards. Beneath the odd bristle of his moustache, his teeth were very white and sharp-looking and there was an awkward moment when he should really have said something amusing, but failed to.

  ‘Prudence has just been asking me about Canon Brown’s house,’ Frau Baum said, looking significantly at Ashton as the two men arranged themselves in their seats.

  ‘Yes, where the bloody hell is he? He’s buggered off into the interior with the keys to our house.’ Ashton summoned the waiter and made a business of ordering the food.

  Prue let the words dissolve around her. Why was she here, exactly? In this room, at this table? She had an odd feeling of floating. It’s always marvellous having dinner with Wicklow. He knows who every damn person in the room is. Perhaps the things that were real – a garden in that grey place by the sea surrounded by stones when she was very small; a mother who sat on the piano stool and played alongside you – were not in the end real? Well I know the notables. That blond man over there is Monty Parker. Old Etonian, son of a Cabinet minister in Gladstone’s last government. Prue looked under the table for the kitten. It seemed important to find it, but it had given up on her. He’s a flaming idiot. He is staying with a French couple, Roux and his wife, but do you see the man standing by the bar? He has been working for many years on the Book of Ezekiel. He has convinced Parker to help him find a cipher. He is extracting funds that Parker is bringing in from London. It’s a tremendous con. Everyone knows apart from Parker who is panning all of his friends in London for the readies. Her hands beneath her thighs were going numb.

  Prue glanced up: through the arched entrance to the restaurant she saw Eleanora, hovering. Holding her fur in her hand, wearing a sleeveless piqué dress in a filmy coffee-colour that looked much too flimsy for the weather, and there he was: Khaled Rasul, next to her. Had she found the photograph on the stairs? Prue’s hands were on fire beneath her thighs but she did not move them. She trained her eyes on Eleanora and Khaled as they moved slowly towards the table, Eleanora with a bright false smile, not noticing Prue. The whole world looked over at them: all the men in the restaurant, all the waiters behind the bar, the ladies being helped to their seats.

  ‘Good evening,’ Eleanora said. Her lips red, her neck decorated with a black choker.

  Prue’s father stood up and shouted, ‘Rasul. What an unexpected but thoroughly wonderful surprise.’

  Everyone was introduced to Wicklow who stood up and shook hands with Rasul and Eleanora. There was much clapping of shoulders. Rasul himself was collected, polite, Prue noticed; it was the Englishmen who were frothing over him. Prue slid herself lower in her chair and watched. Khaled looked like a king staring down at visitors from far-off lands. He was laughing in his eyes, Prue thought, and even though he was silent it was interesting to see the way the men – her father included – all turned continually towards him, directed all of their conversation and questions his way. She willed him not to look at her, and then of course he did. She slipped even further down in the chair, crossing her fingers under the table, hoping that he would not say anything to her father about the Al-Muntada meeting. Would he mention the photograph – the dead children, the broom, presumably used to roll dead children’s bodies away? He had asked her to give the photograph to her father, and here he was, but Eleanora was tugging his arm and he turned away from Prue. Eleanora wanted the attention of the assembled company.

  ‘Tomorrow I will be joining the American Colony photography department to take a new photograph of the bulrushes psalm. Would you all come? Make a day of it?’

  Frau Baum interjected, ‘Is that near Lifta?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘We’ve just been talking about that village. You could come too, Prue?’

  Finally, the villa; she would see it.

  ‘Oh yes please,’ Prue said. She released her hands finally and lifted them up towards Eleanora, who was looking down at her with strange eyes. The colour of water.

  ‘I would rather Prue did not come,’ Eleanora said.

  And it was Frau Baum who piped up: ‘Surely it would be a shame to leave her out of it.’

  But Eleanora had moved on already and was talking, in her most gracious, charming voice, to the man from British Intelligenc
e, who was sitting perfectly upright, nodding back at her. Prue’s right hand began a flap and so she curled it into a fist and the conversation rattled around her. I would rather Prue didn’t come. Eleanora was not meeting her eye.

  On one of their Tramps with Camera, before the pilot came, when it was just the two of them, Eleanora had told Prue a story. When she (Eleanora) was a little girl, in Wales, she had taken to feeding a crow that regularly visited a tree near the kitchens. She begged the cook for stale bread, then leftovers. She stole meat to mix in. She left the food for the crow under a beech. The same tree, every day. Eleanora was aged five, or maybe six. At first several crows came, then more of them, ten, fifteen. She continued to feed them and then one day there was a piece of glass left at the bottom of the tree. The next day a broken earring. The day after, a fragmented sliver from the inside of an oyster shell, and from them on they always left her gifts.

  ‘When did they stop?’

  ‘I was forced to visit my aunt, in Shropshire, for a month. When we came back, the crows were gone.’

  And it was this story, about the gifts from crows, that had made a part of Prue want to attach herself to Eleanora and to cling there, hang on, whatever the weather, wherever Eleanora was going, even though Prue knew well enough that Eleanora pushed her off like a person who strokes a dog and then tires of it and shoves its snout away. Prue listened in to what Eleanora was saying to Mr Wicklow. ‘Oh, Khaled wanted to have a word with you about something.’

  Wicklow, smiling, stood up, ‘Of course,’ and together the two men went towards the bar and leant in close as old women.

  ‘What are they whispering about?’ her father said to Eleanora, openly annoyed at being excluded, but she just laughed, shrugged and patted him on the back.

  When Khaled returned they took a long time to say goodbye to everyone; kisses, shoulder pats, nods, smiles, nothing particularly in Prue’s direction.

  ‘Well,’ her father said when they were gone. ‘The great Rasul is back. I shan’t imagine our pilot likes that very much.’

  Frau Baum stretched back in to her chair. ‘Indeed,’ she said, significantly. Then she glanced across the restaurant. ‘Who is that over there, smoking cigarettes and holding a cane?’

  Wicklow spoke up. ‘That is Ragheb Nashashibi, ’ he said, ‘and in front of the Fast you might have noticed his green American limousine sat waiting; that is his Packard.’

  Frau Baum moved closer to Prue, making an obvious attempt to include her in the conversation: ‘The Englishmen who come here bring their feuds from boarding school. They like to employ members of the big Jerusalem families because they remind them of home. They are boarders, fighting over territory and Houses.’

  Ashton glared at her but Wicklow merely laughed and then carried on talking to Charles as if the women had not spoken. I’m going to slip off now. Have to go into the interior for the night. Then he spoke in low whispers so that it was not possible to hear what he was saying. Prue, sick of being excluded from everything, put her napkin down.

  ‘Father,’ she said, ‘do you mind if I leave you now? I suddenly feel like a rest.’

  They all stopped and looked at her. ‘Of course, my dear, if you wish.’

  Frau Baum said, ‘Would you like some company?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Prue used her politest voice and counted to fifty before standing up. Her feet on the floor reminded her that the ground was stable and that there was an element – something flat, rock, and holy or not – that could be relied on. When she was out of their sight, in the reception area, she ran upstairs.

  Once she had closed the door Prue stood in the centre of her room, breathing fast from the exertion of running. She had made a home for the mouse in an emptied drawer but it had lasted less than an hour before the creature escaped. The paper cone and a few peanuts were all that was left. She lit a candle on the dressing table and watched the flame flicker and dot for a while then she sat on her bed, feeling unsettled.

  The room was cold and she remembered that her mother claimed to believe in ghosts. Used to see them in the gardens, own up to talking to them. Black thoughts were coming down on Prue, she rubbed her face with her hot little hands to stop them, but it didn’t work. She recalled her mother on a piano stool, turning and saying to Prue, Who are you? Are you a little ghost, or a little devil?

  The black thought was a realisation. Now her mother was dead it was likely – more than likely, possible – that Prue would never go home. The full knowledge of this cloaked her. If she had known this, when she was packing her things to come to Jerusalem, she would have thought about it all a little more carefully instead of just putting dresses and shoes in the suitcase. She might have brought photographs with her. Treasures.

  Prue looked around the hotel room. It seemed she didn’t have much to hold on to, apart from the fact that she felt distinctly unsafe, exactly as she did when she was being sketched, or photographed, or told to stand in front of a camera lens and be still. A horrible feeling, but it was at least familiar. Prue thought of Eleanora no longer wanting her; Eleanora with an unborn baby, a seed growing in her, her pilot friend, no room for Prue.

  She had an idea. She shoved, with much effort, the dressing table into the middle of the room, taking care not to destabilise the flickering candle, and then she knelt in front it, as if for prayer. But it didn’t work, because she was too low, so she pulled over the chair from the desk and sat on it. The growing seed in Eleanora was keeping her away. Prue concentrated: a wish. Real, vivid as possible, but she paused. Opened her eyes. In order for it to work it must be changed, transformed. One thing needed to become another.

  She took a piece of paper from her notebook, held it above the candle flame and watched the edge of the page quickly curl, smoke, and then, panicked by the enthusiasm of the flame, blew on it until it was gone. Paper into ash to smoke. That would do. She did not bother sitting down again, but stood in front of the candle and the singed page. She squeezed her eyes shut. She held her breath. In her mind she sang: Begone seed, wash away to the sea, return my Eleanora back to me. A childish, silly spell, but she repeated it again and again and then she changed it for a while, bring my mother back to me, until the clock let out its reminders and Prue shivered, hating the cold.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  The tap on the door was Wicklow, who amazingly appeared to be entirely dressed in Bedouin gear, the full regalia flapping around his head, his skin dusky and dark and his eyes desert-whipped.

  ‘May I?’ He stepped into Willie’s room. ‘Bloody hell, you look shocking.’

  Willie had drunk a good deal of whisky through the small hours of the morning, but it had not eradicated the vision that was scraped into his mind like a tattoo: Eleanora, breaking like a crystal ornament over his fist. His skin crawled with shame and he could make no sense of Wicklow standing looking at him.

  He had said he needed to think, but then Eleanora had returned again the following night, last night. After spending the day with Khaled who was asleep, she had said. She did not have much time.

  ‘Tomorrow we are going to Lifta,’ she kept repeating and Willie could not understand the reference.

  ‘So?’ he had said.

  ‘Please. Please.’

  Are you sure are you sure are you sure? Stand by the window, then. Be quick. As he prepared his hand and flexed the muscles of his fingers the thought of what he was about to do almost derailed him. Did she belong to him, or to Khaled Rasul? That is what he had wanted to ask, but then there was a sliver of consolation in the fact that Willie was the one who knew the truth, who was prepared to do this for her.

  The first hit had been hesitant, although he could see from her face it still hurt. She had tried very hard not to cry, but it came anyway. Then he thought of Khaled Rasul opening her, pushing in, withdrawal, and the next punch carried in his knuckles very real intent.

  He had wanted to stop, but she asked him to keep going, to be sure. When she fell, over his fist, it had been l
ike snapping a flimsy piece of wood and saliva flew from her mouth and landed on his cheek. He had touched it with his finger and finally she staggered from his room, refusing to let him help her. Afterwards, he had vomited. His breath stank now, his teeth were furry. He blinked at Wicklow.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Quick,’ Wicklow said, not bothering to hide the fact that he was disgusted at Willie’s state. ‘Harrington, now: up to Ashton’s suite, it’s urgent.’

  ‘Why are you dressed like that?’

  Wicklow did not reply, and for a moment the two men, standing very close, opposite one another, might as well have been boys in the school refectory.

  ‘Give me five minutes. I’ll be there.’

  —–

  In Ashton’s suite Willie watched both men shed their various garments. Charles took off his linen suit jacket, exposing a lavender-coloured silk shirt with sweat patches. Wicklow was rapidly decanting from his dusty desert gear.

  ‘Where on God’s earth have you been?’

  ‘The interior, obviously. Undercover last night moving through the villages outside Hebron. Had a tip-off.’

  Willie slumped on to a leather chair and fumbled about in his trouser pocket for a cigarette. He squeezed the bridge of his nose and tried to focus his eyes on the men in front of him. Wicklow had the infuriating face of a man in possession of superior information, and he was clearly holding on to it, relishing the moment. Willie, although irritated by him, could not help but be impressed at Wicklow’s seeming ability to disguise himself and go thoroughly native.

  ‘Do you speak the lingo?’

  ‘The dialects? Of course. Madani. Hauran. Ajloun. Badawi, language of the Bedouins.’ Willie had meant Arabic, or Hebrew or Turkish. Ashton poured each man a glass of whisky despite it not yet being noon. Silence in the room, aside from the swallowing. The swill of the liquid in his mouth greatly vivified Willie; it straightened his vision and stabilised his blood.