The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  There are two bluebottles flying in spirals around the room we have taken at the nearest hotel to the Sandown airstrip on the Isle of Wight. On the flight, I surrendered. Skip and I, with our faces to the window, looking down at the curl of the land and the white stripe where it finishes and turns into the sea: the face of the earth; this is what it was. The chalk we walk on. I was furious with the boy, but I was holding him, his grubby fingers on top of mine, and the sweat of him near.

  ‘When we go up into the sky, the world becomes a map,’ I said.

  ‘See the world like a bird does.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  It occurred to me that Harrington might kill us, crash us, or keep flying until we dropped into the sea, but he did not. He landed neatly at Sandown, and we were met by the airmen there with smiling faces, nods, signatures on papers. As if we were on one of Amy Johnson’s joyrides.

  ‘We should talk,’ Harrington said.

  ‘Did you need to do all of this? Just to talk?’

  ‘I did. I’ll explain.’

  The hotel room is number seventeen and Skip, exhausted, is unhappy about being deposited in it.

  ‘I need to speak to Mr Harrington, Skip. I would prefer it if you stay in here.’ He is at the window looking down at Sandown, which, with its seagulls and sleepiness, feels the same as Shoreham.

  He flops on to the bed.

  ‘I should be very angry with you.’ I bend down, hold him by the arms and look into his face. ‘I’m asking you, please, stay in here.’

  ‘All right, Mummy,’ he says, the rims of his eyelids bright red, sore-looking. I close the door, and then I do something I could have hardly imagined myself doing before today. I turn the lock.

  Harrington is waiting in the hotel bar in this shabby, desolate place. The owner ducks in and out to see what we want and to attend to other things, surly, non-communicative. The room is damp, the carpet a black-brown colour. The chintz is dusty. We take a seat near the window.

  ‘Wicklow will be here soon,’ he says, with confidence, looking out of the window at a view of blackening sky and the grey sea in the distance. It is possible to sense the weather out there, rather than hear it.

  ‘All of that, for this?’ The envelope is underneath his arm. He shakes his head.

  ‘No. Well, yes.’

  He orders us each a small glass of bitter. I want to make a joke: here we are again. Old friends. This is getting to be a habit. He coughs.

  ‘This will sound very fantastical, but Wicklow has been authorised to “silence” me and so I needed to find a way of making it public, his insistence on getting hold of the remaining Rasul photographs.’

  I have no idea how to reply to this, but he says it in a low voice, weary, not trying to make an impact or a statement. I watch as he opens the envelope, pulls the photographs out. The first is of the Hotel Fast, the same as the one he showed me earlier. Flags: the swastika, the British emblem next to each other. Cosy, friends, and I think of Billy: half the fishermen in here are for Hitler. And my father: his arms around Frau Baum. Admissions relaxed, after the war. Harrington digs about in the envelope.

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the one that Wicklow wants.’

  I am distracted by the row of ceramic ladies perched along the mantelpiece and a smell of cooking vegetables coming from kitchens: cabbage or sprouts.

  This photograph is of four men in a row: one of them, Harrington, holding a gun, pointing it down at a woman crouching in distress below. Behind them, bodies on ladders. I flip it on to the back; there is the stamp: Khaled Rasul Photography. The young Harrington, young Wicklow, my father.

  ‘And here is the negative.’

  I hold it up.

  ‘British behaviour in Palestine – well, in particular the behaviour of the gendarmerie – has to be written out of history. There is a systematic cleansing. It is so tense in Palestine at this moment, the British are enemy number one, and these details are to be eradicated.’

  There is a clanging noise, a bell from beyond the bar, a man’s voice: ‘Anyone there? Service please.’

  ‘What we did. He wants it all destroyed. Ruins his plans for the next war that’s coming. No schoolboys will have this little period of history beaten by canes into their brains.’

  He looks out of the window again.

  ‘They will be here, very soon. They will have flown behind us, no doubt, once they’ve had it radioed in and discovered where we landed.’

  Outside: the sky, dark, as if frowning. His face has changed, and something occurs to me.

  ‘I remember you coming into the villa on this day,’ I say, touching the photograph on the table between us. The weeds on the step, the snowflakes, and I do remember him, in that room, where I am broken into pieces smaller than the grains that make up the Jerusalem limestone, and then again, I remember him looking through the window at me. His eyes, and the deep recess of the villa window in the stone wall. He blinks, and lowers his head.

  ‘I am sorry, Prue, that I didn’t protect you from harm.’

  ‘It was not for you to do so.’

  ‘Still.’

  The rain outside has turned to hail which clatters on to the hotel window, a rippled tapping that makes us both jump. He takes the film negative from me and stands up. Looks around the room. Next to the unlit fireplace, which is guarded by ceramic dogs with the label Gog and Magog at their paws, is a bookcase. It is full of holiday romances and rows of Reader’s Digest titles. He pulls a book out, and tucks the negative into its back page. Puts it back on the shelf again.

  A song in my head: grah mo chree, here on your mamma’s knee.

  Harrington sits down. He runs his fingers over the other photographs, all the work of Rasul, and the last photograph at the bottom is a picture of Eleanora Rasul in a red dress, sitting at the window ledge of one of the upper rooms of Governance House. Her head is turned so she is looking out at the city, a contemplative sideways gaze, and because of the way the light is shining behind her, there’s a bright white line around her, as if she’s inside a flame and she herself is the red-hot burning pulse at the centre of it.

  We both look at the photograph. I touch the flat, unreal face.

  ‘I thought I had forgotten her,’ I say, ‘but I haven’t.’

  I tell Skip stories at bedtime about the secret ways we can talk to one another, using codes, or messages, or tugs. Invisible words can fly from one mind to another; it’s happened to me, it has, and Skip with his wide eyes is trying to believe me but already at six he is interested in the scientific proof of everything, the bone under the surface and the root in the soil, and I wonder if this man opposite me is talking to me in his head, and I just can’t hear it.

  ‘I am going to leave,’ he says, coughing. ‘Wicklow will be after me. Give him these photographs, although it won’t stop there; at least he will never know about that negative in this Isle of Wight hotel. There is a sort of satisfaction in that, don’t you think?’

  I shrug.

  ‘These are yours,’ he says, pushing letters written in my own childish handwriting towards me. He stands up again: that sense of a gate being opened, or a fence erected.

  ‘There is something you should know,’ he says, ‘although it will be officially denied by the authorities.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was Wicklow,’ he said, ‘who authorised the blowing up of the Hotel Fast, and Ihsan was inside.’

  When I think of Ihsan, I think of birds and dogs: a wing, a beak, a pant, the way a paw comes up and asks for more. William Harrington takes the drink glasses and puts them up on the bar and I am about to say to him: was it true, what you said, about him just using me? For information? But what is the good in knowing the answer to that? He pats the pockets of his trousers as if trying to remember where he has put something. He doesn’t seem agitated, as if running away; rather he has the air of a person setting off for the market.

  ‘Skip wanted to come wi
th you?’ I say, as he turns away. He looks back.

  ‘Yes, but I told him we could only go if you came with us.’

  I think of the Irishwoman I tried to give him away to. We try to lose each other, mother and sons, but we can’t.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ he says, ‘about that business with the men near the fishing hut. The fighting.’

  Billy: his face staring at me from the airfield, his usual tallness and brawn reduced by the fret and the wind from the propeller. Harrington gives me one more nod. Then he’s gone. I pick up the paper in front of me. Written in shifra, but I am not sure if I can remember how to decode it. The page underneath it, however, has the key.

  We are leaving Jerusalem. I am being sent back to London soon, Father will join me later, and so we are staying for a day in a German hospice on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. I am writing this on the veranda which is covered in bougainvillaea which grows here the whole year round. There are doves in the sky and it doesn’t feel like the end of February but rather summer. I do not say this aloud, but I don’t believe you are dead, and so I am continuing to write as before. Those other letters weren’t sent, but perhaps one day this will get to you. I do hope Graylingwell is treating you well, and isn’t as awful as its name sounds. I don’t believe you are dead, even though they have told me that you are.

  I stop reading, because the door flings open. It is the two policemen; it is Mr Wicklow.

  ‘Did you have an enjoyable flight?’ I say.

  Wicklow fills the bar with bad temper and rain; he slams his briefcase on to the table, pulls out papers, sits down.

  ‘Here you are,’ I say. ‘It’s all here.’ The two policemen hover near the door. ‘You are vulnerable to charges of treason, Prudence Ashton.’ At first I laugh, but then I put my hands on my knees and try to understand what he is saying. The barman has returned, and for the first time is listening in to the conversation, eyes switching from me to the policemen and back again, cheeks red. I want to get back to Skip. I rest my hands on the table, breathe.

  ‘You provided information to pro-Arab nationalists at a time of extremely tense negotiations in Jerusalem.’

  I look at his face. Long-nosed. Parrot.

  ‘When I was eleven? I don’t understand. What information?’

  ‘Advanced notice of your father’s plans for the development of Jerusalem under British rule.’

  I don’t speak, I chew at the inside of my cheek. ‘Am I to be put on trial for being a lonely child in a city a long time ago? It seems unthinkable.’ Ludicrous.

  ‘You gave Ihsan Tameri outlines of all the proposed architectural plans of the city so that the Muntada group would know how to intercept, how to interrupt, how to disrupt. These plans were largely taken up by the following administration even after your father’s departure from Jerusalem in 1922, and the information was used by terrorist activists.’

  ‘Plans? I was a child, Mr Wicklow. You know that well enough, because you met me. You saw me.’

  ‘I know that the hotel staff used to call you the Little Witness. A pertinent title, perhaps?’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  Wicklow rummages in his pocket for cigarettes and gives me one. He lights them both, and I don’t know why but I am rather surprised that he smokes. He seems rather too stiff to have a weakness for tobacco.

  ‘War is coming again, Mrs Miller,’ he says, blowing out smoke, ‘even though many of us are ready to deny it.’

  Should I simply run back up to the room to be with Skip? He will only come following, banging on the door. I try to swallow saliva but my tongue, my mouth and my throat are terribly dry.

  ‘Mr Wicklow, I am just getting a glass of water.’

  ‘I shall get it.’

  He goes to the bar, causes a commotion, finally hands me water in a dirty glass. Ihsan in a pile of rubble, a destroyed hotel on the corner of Mamila in Jerusalem. I imagine the light on the dust and wreckage and the burial mounds of the people who were blown up inside. Although, if they were blown up, their bodies exploded into small bits of skin and bone, there would be nothing to bury. So perhaps there were no mounds, in their name, in the Mount of Olives cemetery. Mr Wicklow has his hands in his pockets now, attempting to be informal. He is very minimal in his movements. I have no idea what it is he wants.

  ‘We can come to an agreement, perhaps?’ I take a breath. So he has been leading up to something. I wait.

  ‘You might find a way to forget the image of the swastika and the Union Jack together at the hotel in Jerusalem? How shall I put it? The government’s position at one time was more fluid, particularly overseas, and it of course does not chime with our current mode of thinking.’

  ‘You mistake me for a political person, Mr Wicklow. Those sorts of things do not concern me.’

  ‘Yes. I imagine so.’ He leans against the wall and looks at me. Oddly, I remember the smell of oilskin and the profile of Mr Wicklow’s face reminds me of something.

  He glances down at the picture of the square; in the corner of the frame the dog, barking at something. I uncross my legs, cross them again, and sit up straighter in the chair, breathing in and rolling my shoulders back a little.

  ‘I should forget that memory too.’

  He says nothing else, and I feel, when looking at the sharp jut of his shoulder line, that the pose in which he is sitting has changed, and has become a direct threat.

  ‘It is not that easy to ignore the past, Mr Wicklow.’

  ‘In this case, it is important that you do,’ and he gets hold of his chair and drags it so that he is sitting very close to me. He puts his briefcase on top of his knees and rummages through it again and then snaps it shut.

  ‘It is part of my job, Mrs Miller, to conduct thorough research around people we are particularly in communication with and in doing so I had a little conversation recently with your benefactress Mrs Margot Eaves.’

  ‘Oh?’ He is like an octopus, pushing into every strain of my life. Like the journalists, like Piers.

  ‘She was kind enough to talk me through your ideas for her forthcoming exhibition.’

  ‘Mr Wicklow, please just say whatever it is you are planning to say.’

  He sniffs. ‘It seems that your provisional ideas, some of your sketches and thoughts, revolve around a series of ladders and spiral staircases.’

  ‘You want to have a discussion about my art?’

  Mr Wicklow produces from his magical briefcase a sketch I recognise. It is my own, given to Margot months ago, the design for the second part of my contribution, the two hanging men, which I intend to suspend from a stairwell.

  ‘Why on earth do you have that?’

  He pulls out another photograph. This one was not with the pile in the envelope, but it is still clearly the work of Rasul. It is of two men, hanging from their ankles by ropes from beams.

  ‘It is almost exactly the same as the image in your show.’

  ‘But I’ve never seen that photograph before in my life.’ My hands are sweating and Wicklow, until now perfectly calm, is perspiring a little on his temples.

  ‘You must remove these images and any like them from your show. You must speak to nobody, ever, of anything you might have witnessed in Jerusalem in the time you were there, and in doing so, I will refrain from reporting the inappropriate exchange of information by you with the pro-Arab nationalist and anti-British campaigner, Ihsan Tameri.’

  I sit perfectly still. ‘I did not know this image came from that time.’

  ‘I do not believe that.’

  What can I say to this man who looks like a person just returned from a long hunt? He wants to control what is inside my memory. He wants to control how my memory bleeds into what I make.

  ‘I have all the evidence,’ he continues, ‘and if you don’t stick to these conditions then I will be able to arrest you at any time. In terms of treason, particularly with such long-standing consequences, it does not matter that you were a child, I’m afraid. Children are moral
beings in their own right.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Wicklow. I agree to it, then.’ I push the photographs of the Fast and of the village of Lifta towards him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I will keep my childish notes?’

  ‘No, I am sorry, anything you wrote in the military encryption codes is now the property of the British Government.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, consigning to him my descriptions of doves and bougainvillaea written to a mother who was dead.

  He gathers his belongings and gets up to go, and as he does, as if to applaud the relief of his absence, a valve on a pipe for the bitter behind the bar judders and spits out froth and I stand up too, appalled at myself for having locked my child in a hotel room.

  Malta, 1926

  The Mediterranean is unusually choppy today. Several boats drift by, each with an eye painted on the bow. On Prue’s knee is a soldier’s Bible. She opens it randomly – Genesis 19: and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose – and across this page she copies the eye, draws it with her black fountain pen, surrounding it with swirls and dashes.

  Her drawing becomes not quite a map, but the outline of a house, a home she will one day have: a gable and a roof and an entrance and a stairwell. Saint Paul’s Islands are in the distance, low purple shadows, and beyond them Sicily, the Levantine coast, Alexandria and Jerusalem. She rips the page out and rolls it so that it looks like a long cigarette, pokes it into the glass bottle she brought with her from the kitchen, though it has no stopper or cork. It once contained French vinegar. Gulls at the shoreline poke beaks into the sand. An island for magpies: the fishermen dangle blue beads on their boats, strings of glass bracelets, charms to warn off the evil eye.

  She makes her way to the water’s edge. The dawn happened not so long ago. A British naval officer is coming with his girl linked into his arm; she is swinging her sandals. They both smile at Prue; they have been out having fun all night, probably at a party at the Grand Harbour, and as she passes them the officer swings round and winks. The girlfriend gives him a playful shove. Hey, look at me. Because Prue is beautiful today: seventeen, made up of skin, and it is so very rare that she feels like this.