The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  This was it: the villa.

  Moving again, for the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth time, and her mother had said: ‘Imagine a house in your mind and that is the one your father will build for us, eventually. You can trust in that one.’

  Prue walked through the entrance into a room with low domed ceilings. It was smaller than she had imagined a villa to be. She bent down and undid her shoelaces. A relief to have her toes out. She rolled each of her wet stockings into a ball and stood like a goose asleep on one leg, rubbing one foot to warm it as she looked around. Could she live here? Indeed, she could. She moved towards the remains of the fire and held her foot in front of it until her skin speckled with a heat rash.

  There was a sound. At first she thought it was the rush of her own blood in her head then she realised that it resonated through the bones of the villa. Hansel and Gretel came to mind: Nibble nibble, little mouse. Who is nibbling at my house? The noise was coming from the adjacent room. Prue walked slowly towards it, not nervous, but in an almost sleepy mode; empty of everything. In the bedroom, lying on the bed face-down, was a sleeping man, fully dressed, but with his boots neatly lined up on the floor beside him. With each rolling snore the mass of his large back rose, then sank, just as one might imagine a dragon asleep in front of a cave of treasure. Enormous feet.

  Prue stood rigid. The room was full of his breathing. The walls and ceiling had been painted white. The floor was covered in native tiles. Were these the magic tiles? She crouched down and ran her fingers along the grooves between the squares. A cowboy-style hat and a revolver were on the chair next to the bed. It was the Chinese emperor who trained mice. She took a step closer, and then a step back.

  Prue stood against the wall in her thin coat, looking at the gun. She had never touched one before. The volcanic snoring chimed through the room and she remembered the pressure of the man’s fingers against her neck in the cinema. She turned and looked out over the hills. The wadis, they were called here, deep dry riverbanks that led to nowhere; but there was no such place as nowhere, she knew that.

  ‘Hello.’

  It was the Chinese emperor. ‘Wee little girl,’ he said. ‘Am I dreaming?’

  Prue did not turn around immediately and she had an odd thought. I am the ballet dancer in a jewellery box. Round and round. When she looked he was half-sitting up and his large stomach hung in a way she had never seen before, dripping flesh. He smiled.

  ‘Would you come here, lovely?’ His skin was very bumpy-looking, as if each tiny pore was stained a light violet colour. Might she tell him that this was her villa, meant to be her home? A rested ship. He was patting the bed, his hands a blur. Pat pat pat. The walls were all around her and she stepped towards him, knowing she had no choice. Children do as they are told. Pat pat pat and the bed beneath him sagged, sprang up again. She was one step closer. He heaved himself up a little more so that the curl of flesh on his stomach grew even bigger and he rubbed his finger under his nose as he looked at her.

  She was close to him and he had a clever way of twisting her wrist so that she was forced to bend towards him, even though it seemed he had barely used any strength at all. Then he lifted her with both hands over the top of him until she was dropped into the space between his armpit and the large, squashy, curve of his stomach. His skin had a smell: it was tangy, like sausages. She was lying on her back, now, like Lulu, like a doll, and his face and gingery beard and gingery moustache and white eyebrows and wide red nose took up the whole of the domed white ceiling.

  ‘What have we here then?’ His finger pressed the tiny dip where her collarbones met. She said nothing, just stared upwards, and then he sang a song. Rest tired eyes a while. Sweet is thy baby’s smile. Angels are guarding and they watch ov’r thee. Sleep, sleep, grah mo chree. Here on your mamma’s knee. Angels are guarding. And they watch ov’r thee. An Irish song, a lullaby maybe. Perhaps his mother sang it to him when he was little? Or perhaps he heard it in the bedrooms of his own childhood. She did not know.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  They travelled by horseback as it would take too much time to arrange any other transport. Willie was mostly silent as they rode. His horse was calm, a solid plodder. There was a daytime moon; he looked up at it, abstractedly. It was cold, but he was oddly immune to the weather. In the depth of the dry valley Wicklow pointed out a small encampment.

  ‘There’s the photographic expedition, but where will Lofty be?’ Ashton said.

  ‘They must have had the shoot-out the other side of the village, up there. Lifta is a little higher in the mountains. I doubt the American Colony people know a thing about it.’ Wicklow threw the remains of his cigarette into the bush.

  ‘Apart from Eleanora?’ Ashton said. ‘Elspeth is with them. I just can’t understand why Eleanora would have brought her here.’

  ‘Well, they look safe enough from what we can see,’ Wicklow said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charles, ‘but I would rather they were sent back to the Old City immediately.’

  Wicklow was in front, followed by Charles and then Willie. As they descended the narrow track, the horse rocked beneath him. There was an architectural element to the shape of a walking horse. He had forgotten that, the way the flanks shift up and down, the momentum of knees and rhythm of the hoofs, and he had an imprint of a memory: himself four, perhaps five, tugged into a farmer’s yard, way out on the perimeter of Pentrohobyn Hall. Beyond the confines of that large house was wild-land, full of wet thorns, big brothers, boys from poor families. A farmer had been trussed up against a fence and whipped for treating his young black colt badly and a gang of boys were jeering. The colt was nearby, its muzzle tied tight against a post so that it couldn’t shift or twitch and along its ribs four red stripes, slices. Willie’s elder brother Edward, already sixteen when Willie was four, pushing Willie back. Don’t look.

  Transfixed on the lumbering movement of the animal, Willie closed his eyes so that he was not an undistinguished, unribboned pilot who could barely fly in a godforsaken nowhere valley. He was on different, softer land, where grass grew over chalk, where the hoofs of horses gave off a softer resonance, a place where the spectrum of colours was a shimmering green leading to grey. Not yellow; not this pink-yellow dust. Not this smell of – what was it? He honestly didn’t know, couldn’t identify it. He shivered. It was bloody cold. He was disturbed; it rattled him that Eleanora had spoken to Wicklow in such a way. He could tell that Charles was disturbed by it too.

  As they got close they could see that Lars was waving both hands, but not in a friendly gesture, more along the lines of come quickly: trouble.

  ‘Ashton,’ Lars shouted, ‘thank goodness.’

  Ashton spurred his horse on and the filly let out a snort, a horsey breath of air.

  ‘I’m afraid Eleanora is rather ill. Come.’

  He was speaking to Ashton, but Willie also jumped immediately from his horse. He ran behind Ashton into the tent. Eleanora was wrapped in Frau Baum’s fur and was shivering, sitting on a stool. Frau Baum was crouched in front of her holding her hands. It was only when she glanced up, at Willie first, and then at Charles, that Willie realised how much he had been dreading seeing her. He regretted everything. He looked away. The world outside, the valley, was mostly empty. He knew this. ‘Oh, Charles?’ he heard Frau Baum say behind him. ‘What are you doing here? Never mind, we have to get Eleanora to the French hospital immediately.’

  Willie turned back to Eleanora. He began to kneel down, but she shook her head at him, her eyes moved left and right: no, keep back. His ears in a thunder: drum drum drum. His arms hanging useless, he hovered and he stayed where he was as Ashton knelt down next to Frau Baum and took Eleanora’s hands in his.

  ‘Oh, Eleanora, my dear,’ Ashton said. ‘What is happening?’

  Behind them, Wicklow pulled Lars from the group and began asking quick questions. Had he heard gunfire? Any disturbance? Lars shook his head. Any sounds of upset from the village? They hadn’t actually gone into the vil
lage, but set up in the outskirts, here, as they could see. Wicklow was oblivious to the grey transparency of Eleanora’s face.

  ‘Can you carry her on your horse?’ Frau Baum said to Charles. She indicated the puddle of red around Eleanora’s feet. Willie had not realised, it had not filtered through his brain what was happening, but now he saw the stained floor, the pale skin.

  Charles said, ‘There is something tremendously urgent, Elspeth, we have to go to the village and we will return immediately for Eleanora.’

  Frau Baum’s voice cracked. ‘More urgent than this?’

  ‘Lars can take her, perhaps?’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘It is too difficult to go into, it’s Lofty. There’s trouble.’

  Eleanora looked up then. ‘Yes, Charles,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘you should continue on up to Lifta.’

  Charles frowned at her. ‘Why, Eleanora, did you come here when you – ?’ But Frau Baum stopped him speaking; the air around them felt warped.

  ‘You too, Willie,’ Eleanora said softly. ‘You should go up there. I can go to the hospital with Lars.’

  It seemed that there were hazards behind her words. Willie thought of all that he would do for her; all he would have done for her, if she had allowed him.

  ‘Where’s Prue?’ Frau Baum said.

  ‘She was here a moment ago.’ Eleanora let out a small pant as she spoke.

  Charles sprang up into the air, and Willie noticed something he never had previously: there was something odd about his right hand. Often he was wearing gloves, or long sleeves; his silk suits were specially tailored. The little finger on his right hand was slightly withered. His face was red with shock.

  ‘Do you mean to tell me that Prue is here as well?’

  Frau Baum, looking strained, glanced over her shoulder and then said, ‘I suspect she’s gone to find that villa; I had said I would go with her – you need to call her back, Charles.’

  ‘Prue has gone that way?’

  Wicklow stood behind Willie. ‘Harrington, come.’ Willie did not move. He was looking at Eleanora and something in him, something private and natural and childlike, was severed and died instantly. That was how it felt, a quick slice, an immediate death, because this display was her decision, it was clear to him now.

  ‘I could take Eleanora,’ Willie said, swinging round to stop his own thoughts, speaking to Ashton. ‘You go on and I’ll take her to the hospital?’ But Wicklow stepped towards him.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we all need to go. I think we had better go and find this old cohort of yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ashton said. ‘Lars, can you take her?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Eleanora was not looking at Willie. What was she looking at? He couldn’t tell; her eyes were abstract. The edges of her were blurred. Like those photographs she insisted on printing. The edges rubbed out.

  Wicklow offered Willie a loaded revolver and he took it as their horses made their first philosophical steps forward. Willie followed the rhythmic plodding of Ashton’s dark-brown filly, tensing the reins every so often. Each step felt like an unpicking from Eleanora. The scars on his body fired up, reminded him of their existence. The sight of Eleanora’s blood around her feet was in his head; difficult to think past.

  Wicklow relayed further information as they continued along the path. Canon Brown was dead. Shot in what might be called a small incident with one of the many false Messiahs that inhabited the desert. An English-speaking man, robed in white, stood preaching and carousing in the village square. It was illegal to preach, or to have any form of public gathering under the British military administration, and Canon Brown had walked up to the imitation prophet and politely suggested that he was committing an offence, trying to warn him. The man, who lived in his mind entirely in biblical times, addressed Canon Brown as a centurion: What do you wish of me, centurion? God knows, the worst of it was that he actually had followers and the crowd gathered around was tense. The followers, it turned out, were devout because a shot was fired and Canon Brown fell forward so that his head went into the prophet’s chest.

  Before long there were signs of the first houses of Lifta, a lone dwelling half-buried into the side of the hill.

  ‘Which one is Canon Brown’s villa?’ Willie said.

  ‘Not sure. I think it’s further in.’

  On a cold January day like this the land looked dead, but it was possible to see that the soil was heavily cultivated. Lines of dead thistles stood in rows. Prickly-pear cacti clustered around the large boulders of Jerusalem stone. They heard a banging noise, coming from further down in the valley.

  Wicklow called out: ‘Gunshot?’

  Nobody answered. Ashton and Wicklow increased their speed along the central pathway which led along a crevice that wound higher and it was possible to see more stone houses sprouting from the hillside. Willie’s horse objected. It did not want to go on. Willie pushed his ankles into its flank, he smacked the side of its neck, but the creature was stubborn and unresponsive. The olive trees surrounding them were ancient enough to have split and bowed.

  ‘Come on, old girl,’ he said, and jabbed his boot into the horse’s ribs but the horse stayed firm. ‘I sympathise, but we really need to move.’

  Ashton and Wicklow disappeared ahead. There was another loud banging noise and Willie heard a voice behind him. It was Frau Baum, in her large black fur, running towards him, her cheeks red and her black hair blown out and unruly.

  ‘It’s that one,’ she said, pointing towards the stone house up on the higher path. There was a pile of wood near the door.

  ‘That is the villa Prue was searching for. I think you should look for her.’ She was out of breath.

  ‘Which house?’

  She pointed once more. It was closer than he thought. Willie dismounted.

  ‘But Eleanora, aren’t you accompanying her?’

  ‘Lars has fixed her on to his horse and they’ve gone. They’ll get a cart or a motor as soon as they can. I just have a bad feeling about Prudence, you know?’

  Willie did not care about Ashton’s child. His horse raised and lowered its head rapidly. He did not know what to make of this woman always attached to Ashton, but something about her, her frayed manner, her bony fingers, the sense that emanated from her of clinging, made him pause. He nodded.

  ‘Stupid beast.’ He climbed off, tugged the animal towards a fence. He tied her up and left her bowing her head, looking for grass to chew.

  ‘Eleanora,’ he said, and then, ‘is she going to be . . .?’

  ‘She’s in a terrible state.’

  They looked at one another. He knew he was blushing – like an idiot – and he was aware that she was studying his face very closely. She pushed her glasses to the top of her nose. She was about to say something; he interrupted her.

  ‘Why did she bring everyone here if she knew there would be trouble?’ he said.

  Frau Baum’s shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. ‘For Khaled?’

  The word Khaled echoed around the trees, bounced off the leaves and the dry dead bark. She pointed again at the house. ‘We should look for Prue?’

  The air outside the villa was heavy and dead, as if the wind had given up on it. Instinctively, Willie did not knock, but opened the door silently, with Frau Baum close behind him. He gestured for her to wait; it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior.

  It was a neat room with bare furniture. A peasant house, simple but attractive. It was warm. He was about to call out, but instead he moved towards a door in the corner which led to another room. She was there: Prue, curled on the bed like a small cat. There was an odd smell in the room, metallic. He looked down at the incongruous sight of Ashton’s daughter sleeping in this room, but only then did he realise that she looked strange, her face white. ‘Prue?’ He went over to her. There again, that distinctive smell. He was holding the revolver but his hand was shaking. He touched her arm and, as he did, the whole of her body convu
lsed, shivered, and she drew her knees in closer to her chest.

  ‘Prue?’

  She did not respond. Her little dress was ripped, her underclothes were twisted, she was exposed. He breathed in, closed his eyes.

  ‘Frau Baum?’ he called. He went to the door. Frau Baum was standing, with her chalky white face, painted eyebrows and dyed black hair, looking concerned.

  ‘She’s in there,’ he whispered, and he shook his head, his mouth tasted bitter. ‘I think she’s been hurt.’

  Frau Baum stepped past him into the bedroom. Willie went out along the wall of the house, his feet snapping twigs, until he found a small window and looked in. Frau Baum was crossing the room like a shadow-puppet in a children’s story. She could be either the bringer of dreams and good fortune or the thief who steals something precious in the night. The scene was almost normal, a mother checking on a sleeping child. Willie glanced around. Was Lofty near? He shivered.

  Willie watched as the child rose up, as if in a dream, and a moment later they emerged together into the cold air, Frau Baum holding both Prue’s boots. Prue had Frau Baum’s handkerchief to her face because she had begun, upon standing, to have a nosebleed. Her dress, twisted around her body, reminded him of the sanatorium gowns worn by the patients in the military hospital in Cairo. The branches of the tree near the house creaked. Prue, coming to properly, was confused and began to cry.

  ‘I’ll take her back up,’ Frau Baum said, removing her bear-fur and wrapping it around Prue’s shoulders, steering her along the path.

  ‘I spoke to the gardener, an Arab who has worked here for fifty years,’ Prue said. ‘Did you meet him?’

  Willie heard Elspeth speak softly: ‘No, he wasn’t here.’

  Willie was unsure what to do. There were rooks in every tree, it seemed, their confident posture an assault, their belonging an offence. He realised that it was snowing again, light hesitant snow, and when he looked up along the bank of the hillside he could see Lofty-shaped shadows behind every trunk. Trees, skeletal and unfriendly, and then a noise, cracking the sky in half. Clear, distinct: gunshot.