The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  There the bottle goes, an arc, a small splash. Sinks, immediately resurfaces and then quickly settles into a gentle rock and lull. A shout: it’s her father, standing on the veranda of their villa.

  ‘There you are, Prue. Come now, breakfast is ready.’

  Prue glances at the sun, but she does not return to the house. She leaves the Bible and pen in the sand, runs along the beach, fast as she can, splashing at the edge of the water so that the hem of her dress is wet. Her lungs are full and she runs as far as the beach stretches before it is cut off by a peninsula of craggy limestone rocks. She climbs over them and drops down the other side, a smaller bay; more of a cove.

  There is nobody here, so she takes off her dress and lets the sun have her, walks into the water, shouts as it covers her, and goes down. Her hair is wide from her face and her skin feels free.

  If she opens her eyes underwater they sting, but after one or two tries she can do it. It is just a couple of yards before it is deep enough to swim properly, though her toes still scrape against a sandy seabed. Trails of light and ticklish seaweed wrap her ankle, as if to tug her under and curl between her toes, but she doesn’t remove them. She flips so that she is on her back, inflates her lungs to float. The sun wheedles out more freckles. She closes her eyes, bobs, feeling as she did long ago when Eleanora in Jerusalem photographed her: becoming nothing, reducing to nothing, delicate bone, weightless. Things in the water trace her, bump against her, nudge her, but she does not turn over. Like many seventeen-year-old girls, in her mind she sees herself in the frame of a silent movie. Or one of the photographs for sailors: a ready-made sweetheart for a long voyage. The shutter: click. The day: a dream. A photograph. Suspended in light, and what is not light.

  When she arrives back at the house, dripping sea water on to the marble floor, her father is sitting with his legs crossed at the breakfast table, irritated. His mistress Andrea, who is Croatian, gives Prue a wide-eyed stare, and then, as if in profound disapproval, looks down at her Italian newspaper.

  Her father puts down his copy of The Times, and glares. ‘We had agreed on the pictures today, Prue.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘I had it all set up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Andrea looks over and frowns. Then she leans across the table, picks up a packet of cigarettes and lights one. She has brown hair, and a square, perfectly arranged face, and is only seven years older than Prue.

  ‘Must you use your daughter as a model, Charles?’

  He swings round in his chair and rubs his hand along his beard. He stretches his fingers out.

  ‘It isn’t seemly, perhaps?’ Andrea says.

  ‘Just pictures, my dear.’ And Prue follows him through to the central room. He has arranged for her to be seated near the white marble fireplace which is never lit. There is a camera as well as his drawing equipment in front of him. She faces him and a breeze comes over her like a hand on her neck.

  ‘Like this?’ She sits: and as he draws her with his pencil, the water comes around her, the bobbing light sensation of being lifted up and then lowered a little down.

  ‘Father, I would like to live in London, at the end of summer. Do you think it is possible?’

  He murmurs, and is concentrating.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘London is no place for a young woman.’

  There is a faint droning sound. Prue lets the murmur of the sea around them come into her mind. She has heard a tale about a house near here, on the fishing coast on the west side of the island. Until recently people spoke of having seen pale lights above the house which was inhabited by a widow who wanted to escape. It was a part of her, floating away, they said. Each night a paler and paler light, until she was gone. Prue considers telling her father this story but does not.

  She stands up.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ he says.

  ‘Draw Andrea.’

  That night, Charles Ashton has fallen asleep on the sofa and Prue is left with the young woman who is his lover. They circle one another like cats. Prue is expecting Andrea to slope off as normal, but she doesn’t, as if she is making a statement.

  ‘You are keen to leave?’ Andrea says, walking towards her on the balcony. Prue is resistant to interaction, conversation. These women come and keep coming, since Frau Baum; after that Clara, now Andrea. She doesn’t want to get attached to any of them. Andrea is fragile, with a long thin neck; she talks often of falling down and she has a mysterious sickness which means she drops asleep at inconvenient times. Prue cannot see that Andrea will be in her father’s life for very long.

  ‘The island, I mean. You want to leave?’

  ‘Yes.’ They are both silent.

  ‘I saw some pictures of your mother,’ Andrea says. ‘She looks very much like you.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Prue won’t stoop; she won’t be reduced to asking: what pictures? And, do I? Do I look like her?

  ‘Would you like to go out for dinner?’ Andrea says. ‘Your father is clearly not going to wake again tonight.’

  A drop in Prue; a shrug. She agrees and Andrea drives them in a little farmer’s truck that she uses to the other side of the island, to an inlet. They have dinner in a restaurant at the end of a stone pier with the sound of water lapping throughout the meal of fried octopi. This woman who is not much older than her, with strong black eyebrows and a steady hand, dabs her attractive lips with her napkin.

  ‘It was such a terrible way your mother died, I was so sorry to hear about it,’ she says.

  This is it: this is why Prue has been brought here. Boats are dipping and rising in the mini-harbour next to them. A moth rests on Prue’s thumb knuckle and then flies away to kill itself in a light somewhere else.

  ‘Choking on bread,’ Prue says. Looking at the bread basket in front of them, almost as if a joke could be made, of the coincidence of it.

  Andrea’s eyes open a little more. ‘No,’ she says, ‘your father told me that she died from having a feeding tube forced into her, in hospital.’

  ‘She died from that?’

  ‘Well, yes, it was the feeding tube that killed her, it punctured a lung.’

  Prue stops listening to this woman who has a dark look in her eye; she hears a popping in her ears. Closes her eyes and empties herself of all being, all sound, all thought, and she is simply light, as delicate and empty as a bird bone dried in the sun. Her mother used to eschew food; she would take the bread from the table and pull it into tiny pieces and say, ‘Give it to the birds, Prue. They need it more than me.’

  Her father asks her for a walk the next morning. It is not comfortable; he makes pleasantries, she ignores them, and they descend into gloom. They walk past the doorway of a small room. It is full of chalk and dust and hammering. It is the sculptor Karsten Azzopardi at work. He trained in Italy, as all the Maltese sculptors do, but he is one of the few to return. The artist himself comes to the door, sees them, smiles.

  ‘An early walk?’ he says, in Italian.

  Her father, who is loosely proficient in many languages, master of none other than English, says, ‘Ah yes. Refreshing.’

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She is allowed to touch everything: the hammers and the scales and the buckets of water and the saint he is working on, a commission for a church on the smaller island of Gozo, though it is only yet lightly sketched into stone. It is possible to see the swathe of the saint’s robe and the way it will fall, the line of her chin, but there is only a hint of the shape of her face, or her hands. Prue touches the stone and is surprised at how alive it feels. Al-Tanka, it is called, he tells her. It is sandy-pink, with stains on it, russet.

  As they walk back to the villa along the dusty path, the heat already too much for their English blood, Prue says, ‘Father, choking on bread is not quite the same thing as being put in a home and being force-fed with a tube.’

  He turns, looks at her. There is his face. His long beard, a
nd blue eyes with a red dot in the whites like a signal for a pilot, and she has this thought: when you take the details of the land you think you own – here in Malta, for instance, walking around the port of Valletta as the British Civic Advisor – measuring the stones and the distance and the bridges and the steps down to the harbour’s water and counting the number of churches and considering how to rearrange this, how to rearrange that, then you control it with your bird’s-eye view. You control it. A walk around Tiberias. The thick-armed muscle of a police force to do your bidding so that you can instigate your plan – cultivating the waqf lands, the stitching of this settlement to the unclear ownership of that land there – and she knows all of this because she has been sneaking into his study. Reading the memoirs he has begun. His working title is Orientations, Constellations.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says, as if he can read her thoughts.

  Memory: her mother, sewing. Napkins or handkerchiefs or linen, or something, and she hadn’t come down from the attic room of the house they were lodging in for days; it might have been a week. Prue spent the days going up and down to the char and landlady in the basement who made horrible comments about the heating and the draughtiness. Prue took breakfasts and dinners up, but her mother barely ate anything. Late one afternoon her mother had fallen asleep where she was sitting, chin dropped to her chest, her face still. Her hands laid out neatly on the handkerchiefs; her spine must have been a line of perfectly arranged bones because she was not leaning forwards, or slumped: upright, asleep. Prue picked up one of the napkins and on it was embroidered the word EVIL. The one below that EVIL too. All of them: Prue looked down into the basket; there were very many, it seemed to her hundreds, but she was little, perhaps it was simply one hundred.

  Who was evil? What was evil?

  Later, she had asked her mother what it meant. The needle going up and down, the long line of red cotton making holes; not a pause, not showing surprise at the question, her mother had said: ‘I came to a conclusion that it was the most soothing word.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Her mother held her work up to the light. ‘Live,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ Prue said. She always saw words the wrong way round and sometimes, when writing, the words would flip backwards, or the first and last letters would fall off. Which was what might have happened in this case. It should have been ALIVE. Or LIVED.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  Nothing but a white stillness over the whole of Jerusalem. After weeks of sporadic snow showers it was now a thick deep blanket, alarmingly white. It had been layering without a pause, covering every tree, every bicycle, every fence. People walked slowly, navigating the steep hills in the ice. The domes and walls of Jerusalem were hidden, changing the atmosphere of the city: less leaden and weighed down and exhausted under the struggle of being a symbolic place. Snow brought it peace, perhaps. It was so freshly landed on the streets that Willie’s footsteps squeaked as they imprinted themselves in the recent powdering.

  There was no warmth to be found inside the Zion Theatre. It was freezing. Willie chose a middle seat. There were several couples dotted about and a few children on the front row. He didn’t want to be anywhere remotely near them. But for the fortunate ones who seek within . . . the blue bird of happiness. This film had been running for so long that everyone in Jerusalem had seen it four or five times, so he was amazed that there was anyone in here. He lit his cigarette, paid no attention to the screen in front of him.

  As a boy at Lancing he used to climb on to the wall that surrounded the school, and the view of Salt Farm fields and the roll of the downs always looked to him like a woman lying on her side. Not a particularly curvy woman, a narrow-hipped one, a boyish one with a waist for shaking. That was when he first flew. In a contraption that Piffard invented, as shambolic as could possibly be imagined; the first time he saw the land beneath him, the hip of the woman from above, the swell and scars of the earth, rather than the curve.

  The door to the Zion Theatre opened and he knew from the footsteps that it was her. Clipped, light, definite, because we can tell the people we love from a crowd of thousands, from one step of their foot, from the silhouette of their arm. He glanced round. She was wearing a fur coat. Darker than previous coats of hers he had seen, which tended to be russet, foxes. This was dark, bearish.

  He had resigned from the position on Ashton’s team. Ashton had called him in, shortly after the Lifta affair. It is true we are looking to rethink certain aspects of the city, he had said, but what was really needed was a cadastral survey. An intensive survey of Southern Palestine using aerial photography and revision of the old maps. He was bringing in a team from Egypt who had experience in compiling maps in Sinai and Galipoli. The cosmetics, the moving of the clock tower, the polishing of the ramparts, were merely a superficial topping on a serious consideration of reforming ownership of these lands. On Ashton had gone, on and on. Willie wanted to fly with Eleanora again, to capture something: what? What if they could have rearranged the scars of the world beneath them to their own order? But Ashton was intent on scars more vivid than anything etched on to Willie’s chest, and Willie had swallowed his drink, put his glass down. I’m sorry, Charles. I might have to bow out.

  There was her smell. Tea? Grass? Freshly cut leaves? Mingled with Turkish cigarettes. She was hovering behind him and he would not look up. He pushed fingernails into palms. He remembered a walk along the promenade in Brighton, lifetimes ago, when he was training in Shoreham. The sea grey and the girl he’d picked up changed her mind abruptly, pulled back and swivelled on her ankles. Her name was Florence, for some reason he recalled this detail, and her little pearl-coloured hand with red nails had dropped his hand. She stared at him as if he were an absolute stranger (well, he almost was). There was even horror in her face and without explaining a thing she ran away, bird-like feet clipping on the prom, leaving him alone with the grim grey sea and the conviction that he was the most grotesque creature in the world. He recognised the moment: a beauty in bed turns, becomes bored and then repulsed. Rejection: a slipper around the face, and stamp on the toe, reasons vague, explanations untrue, coming down to: I don’t want you.

  All it amounted to in the end was a change of mind (change of heart, his mother used to say: Have you had a change of heart, darling? We all do, trust me, we all do).

  Eleanora sat down next to him, protected by her fur. He looked at the screen, but he was shocked by the ferocity of his body’s response. Darts pricking his skin all over; every part of him awake. A sideways glance, and finally a capitulation. He turned to her. She will always have this demeanour, he realised: serious, quizzical, entirely her own person. In other words, untouchable.

  She had been recovering at home for three weeks; he dared not visit. He had dispatched a message with Ashton’s daughter, who was being sent back to England in ten days’ time. She was to stay there until the following year when Ashton would be posted to either Cyprus or Malta and she would join him. It was not conducive to his land-survey plans to have her here under his feet, under the tables, always having to worry about. Or so Willie understood. The child had made no reference to the day in the stone villa, to the square in the village, and he rather thought she didn’t know that he’d been there. He felt culpable, sad, whenever he thought of it. Eleanora crossed her legs. Was she real, Eleanora? Or was she a hope, a first dream? Was she in fact a place, like this theatre, this shed, this walled city?

  ‘You’re here.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Are you well again?’ And he meant to say it with tenderness but it did not come out that way. They both stared up at the screen where a thousand unborn children were drifting around a mother on a throne, and he flushed all over.

  ‘This is the last thing you need to see, shall we leave?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she spoke in a low voice, ‘I’m not looking at it.’

  She said that, but she was watching the flickering screen.

&
nbsp; ‘I told Khaled everything.’

  ‘What?’ He turned to her. ‘Ellie . . . what did he say?’

  ‘He disappeared for a week again.’

  ‘He’s good at doing that.’

  She looked at him with a cold, still expression. She loosened her bear-fur slightly. The dress underneath had buttons along her neck and right up to her chin, as if to claim her unmovable and unreachable.

  ‘You told him about . . . what you asked me to do?’

  She turned, in the cinema seat. ‘God no. No.’ She blinked at the screen. ‘He will never know that.’

  Willie did not know what to say. What had she told him then?

  ‘You know,’ and she pulled from her pocket the Turkish cigarettes and, fumbling, he lit one for her. ‘I had not previously understood my marriage as an architectural place, a curated castle or a city or a house. A swirl of rooms, a number of memories, an infinite number of delicate portions of time. You coming here shook the foundations of the house.’

  What rot.

  You’re sure, old man? This is what Ashton had said to him, unconvincingly, when he had followed up with a formal letter of resignation. Been called back home, you know, the mater and pater, stamping their feet. And when he had returned to his hotel room, there was a flare, like the fireworks he had watched one night from the bank of the Nile, a crackle and explosion in the sky. Hope: that she might still come, but now as she spoke, this awkward, clearly prepared speech, this talk of rooms and refuge, all he felt was the hope dying, and then gone. Extinguished.

  She was rejecting him for ever; that is all he heard. He stopped listening to what she was saying. The odd word filtered in. I was lost. Confused.

  She was flesh: tainted, stained with a long thick line of blood, she was bones. Her breasts were small, her ankles thin. Why the hell hadn’t he slid her on to the bed rather than that other thing? The silk dress ruffled up, the attached stockings loosened. He looked up at the rafters of the Zion. They seemed to creak.