The Photographer's Wife

by Suzanne Joinson

  ‘You came from my past and tricked me. You knew I was married.’

  ‘I did know that, it’s true.’

  He was grieving already because he would never know certain elements about her. He wanted to know, for instance, how her mouth tasted after she had smoked a cigarette. Did she eat much at breakfast (he doubted it)? She was a person who craved adoration, wanted it daily, to drink it up, and yet had chosen to be married to a man who disappeared for long periods of time and, even when he returned, it was not her he came back to. Willie was mortified that Rasul would have the whole of her. Was there consolation in the fact that he knew the worst of her?

  Not much.

  All around them the Holy City was groaning under the weight of snow. He looked at the cinema screen.

  To be perfectly truthful, what he had to say was this –

  Nobody will know you better than me. Nobody will love you more than me. It is for life. You are my girl. But it wasn’t true because Rasul now took the whole of her.

  ‘Don’t ever think it has cost me nothing,’ she said; her hand was shaking, cold fingers touched his. ‘To not be with you.’

  He said nothing to that.

  ‘My husband is a steadying force. Without him I would be dead.’

  It was like a gentle but thorough drowning, that remark. He did not say anything; perhaps it helped her to be cruel. It was true that he was filled with a desire to puncture her: a masculine force, like the pin in the centre of a delicate butterfly. They were both silent for some time.

  ‘Why do they only play this film?’ he said.

  ‘It’s because it takes so long to get a new film reel from Cairo.’

  In his head he was walking along the rambling corridors and landings and stairwells of Pentrohobyn. It was alarming how accurately he could see himself as a small boy, running as fast as he could through the cold empty spaces of that echoey house. He took the stairs quickly. The topmost points of tree branches rattled the glass windows, nettles everywhere outside and whatever he did, no matter how much he wanted it, he could never hold on to this place. He was not entitled to a room full of ashtrays piled with cigarettes and the cushions, still with the imprint of heads on them, and the oriental throws on old leather chairs, and heaps of books next to fireplaces and a grand oil painting of ships on the great wide sea. By refusing him, she was condemning him to walk and walk and walk and be forever displaced, and she didn’t even know it.

  ‘There’s such crookedness in me, darling. I am not whole, I’m a blurred thing. I couldn’t give myself to you, even if I wasn’t married to Khaled. I don’t want you. There is nowhere to put you, there never has been. The way you want me, that me, I’m afraid it doesn’t exist.’

  There was another creaking from the beam above them, a little further back behind them, and then there was a more serious cracking sound. He took her hand.

  ‘Quick.’ He hauled her up. The ceiling near the screen collapsed, a great rending noise of the corrugated roof giving way to the piled, heaped snow. The screen fell to the floor, but it was possible to hear the winding screech of the little projection wheel still making its revolutions. The shock of the exposed cold was like a baptism and the night sky was shimmering and intense in its blackness.

  ‘Eleanora.’ he pulled her towards the doors and they went out into the street. They stood, blinking at the strangeness of suddenly being out in the Jerusalem sky with the black night above and people standing pointing, looking at what had been inside but was now outside. As she dusted the snow from her coat she was pale and beautiful. He would be loyal to nothing, if not her. Each betrayal was a closer step to death and he understood that she was all the days of freedom before the war, all the summers, all the rooms in the great house; in other words, she was the past, and that is what he desired most.

  She looked like a fragile bird in the snow, and he said, ‘I don’t understand why you wanted me to be there, to meet Khaled up at Lifta.’

  She turned, rubbing snow from her eyelid. ‘It was Khaled who requested it.’

  ‘But why? Did he know about us?’

  ‘He did not say. But he was very specific about you being included in those photographs. He wants to send them to prime ministers, to I don’t know who.’

  He looked away from her and saw a black dog, slinking along the edge of the wall, paws in the snow, ears flat. He hadn’t seen many dogs in Jerusalem, he realised. It tended to be cats here. And the endless birds.

  ‘You think I wanted to hurt you?’ she said, softly. He watched the dog crouch low as two men passed it, and then continue the delicate placing of its paws in the snow.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. From this point onwards, we live in memories and our own stories for each other; we will either die or live. Did she say this, or did he think it? He was no longer sure.

  The New Movements in Art Exhibition at the London Museum (Lancaster House), 1942

  Margot Eaves was fussing in her usual manner but it was clear to see from the glimmer around her eyes and the redness of her cheeks how excited she was. She was the type of woman to pile her hair on her head in great swoops and then fix within its webby matter pins and odd bits of glittering stuff so that she quite resembled a decoration. To pull off an exhibition of this nature, at these times, with so much happening, and just to get the parts into the right place, just to complete the permission, the rights, the negotiations with Lancaster House, was no small feat.

  The room was a crush of people, there was a tinkling of glasses, but Skip and the little girl, Betty, did not want to stay. Skip ducked Margot’s embrace and scurried past the spirals of Gabo and the work of Hepworth. Saint Helena, by Prudence Miller, had a central position and the twist of it was impressive, he could see. It dominated the room, and the light shone across it in exactly the way it was supposed to, but Skip had seen it so many times, he had watched it when it was a mouldy old lump of stone brought from Portsmouth and his mother had chipped and bashed away at it for so long that he did not remotely care to look at it. She had been preparing work for this exhibition for years.

  An old woman with lipstick the colour of potted shrimp put her scaly fingers in his hair: Are you proud of your mother? He squirmed away, escape! Ducked under a table and there, as he guessed he might, he found Betty, sitting quietly with her feet tucked beneath her, sucking her thumb.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. Together they crawled underneath the long table towards the doors, which were very grand. When they emerged, Skip took Betty’s hand, to help her. On the whole he did not agree with holding the hands of girls, but she was only six and he guessed that she was feeling strange because this was the first time she had come back to London since being billeted with them; every household in Shoreham had been forced to take an evacuee. She was from Bermondsey, which she said, being better than him on the geography of London, was one hundred miles from here, Lancaster House SW1. He tugged her, to get away from the ghastly room, but near the door a hand caught him by the neck and hauled him backwards.

  ‘Daddy,’ he said. It was Piers, laughing.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Piers said. ‘What are you little horrors up to?’

  ‘We’re just going for an explore, we shall be quite safe.’ His father smiled down at them both, and Betty, who did not speak to adults, put her thumb in her mouth and pretended to be invisible. The woman standing next to Piers had green powder over her eyelids so that she looked like a mermaid, if a mermaid were to be found in the middle of London on a hot summer’s day, and for a moment Skip was mesmerised by her and the way her hand came around his father’s waist, like a cowboy’s lasso.

  Piers called across the room to Prue, gesturing, Can they go? Skip looked round at his mother. She was standing surrounded by a group of people, wearing a very blue dress which she called her ‘indigo number’. She looked not at all bad. She mouthed to his father, it’s fine, smiling at them with her eyes.

  Betty followed Skip. She adored him, so he needn’t boss her too much. They
ran out of the grand hallway of Lancaster House, away from the old, and it was only when they were outside that Skip realised he had forgotten his gas mask, but perhaps it didn’t matter. Betty said, with a knowledgeable air, ‘I’ve been here before, you know. A celebration, I think. Something like that.’ And then, after all that explanation, her little face clouded. To shake her out of it, because he knew these memories caused her trouble, he gave her a shove, and they ran down the steps.

  An entire corner of the street opposite was surrounded by fences. A bomb had blasted the inside of the building but left the walls so that it looked like an outdoor theatre. They continued along a narrow passage, which opened out on to a covered area, and Skip counted the signs: barbers, haberdashers, saddlers, tailors, bookshops, brewers. It was a higgledy-piggledy jumble of chaos, and Skip rather liked it. He felt at home here. He found a good rock, not quite perfectly round but a nice weight, and lobbed it, right into the heart of a crater.

  Dust, everywhere, and dirt. People moved slowly, stepping over boulders and things in the wrong places: a concrete block in the middle of the road, a wall tipped down. Betty picked a wild blue flower growing from around the edges of a wall and twirled its weedy, spindly stalk. Skip paused at a metal gate and from inside they heard a wireless crackling. Betty’s eyes widened. Skip pushed his shoe on to the dusty ledge at the bottom of the wall and then heaved himself up, so that he could see over the top. He jumped back down again.

  ‘Let’s go in there,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty, his loyal follower, ‘let’s go in there.’ She had his mother’s doll, Lulu, with her. They ran through the narrow entrance together, kicking up dust, and the path opened up. There was another great pile of rubble with pipes sticking out of it and a cat tiptoeing like a ballerina across the top. The passage went under an archway and then popped out into a courtyard. Skip and Betty stood rooted. In front of them was a church, magnificent, still, with the arches where the stained-glass windows once were, but most of the front was gone, and it had no roof, just the walls forming a shell. They walked inside and as they approached there was a fluttering of bird-noise. Pigeons: hundreds of them, up in the ridges of the walls, flapping and jesting. There were pigeons bobbing their heads and hopping around the floor too. Skip shooed them. He took Betty’s hand.

  A church with no roof is a wonderful thing. It is the world topsy-turvy. Skip ran into the centre of the wrecked building. Fragments of Bibles lay scattered, the covers torn, thin pages fluttering. Betty was a little awed; she stood at the entrance and would not move, and when Skip looked round at her he saw how tiny she was, and went back and brought her forward, gently by the elbow. There was a bicycle, leaning against the altar, and a makeshift fireplace full of ash; signs that somebody was perhaps living here.

  They sat together on the altar steps, Betty bringing her ankles together and wrapping her fingers around her feet. A man appeared then, nodded at them, but didn’t say anything. He pulled a bag out of his pocket and threw seeds into the air. They scattered and landed with a patter, like rain, and in response the pigeons flew down, a cloud of wing and pecking beak, making the odd curling noise that pigeons like to do. Ccrrrrruuu crrruuuu and alongside the raggedy old pigeons were some tiny London finches.

  Skip heard his name being called, and he stood up.

  ‘We’re here,’ he shouted. Coming round the edge of the pathway was Mrs Deal, who was looking nice for her, with her hair brushed through and a smart summer jacket rather than the shapeless dresses she tended to wear at home. She had insisted on wearing a bright yellow hat, however, and looked like a sunflower turning in the sun, but Skip did not tell her that.

  ‘Have you got Betty?’

  ‘Yes, she’s in here.’ Mrs Deal was smiling, so he knew he wasn’t in trouble.

  ‘We should get back to the show,’ she said, ‘they are just about to start the toasts and whatnot. Your mother would like you there, I expect.’ She stared around at the smashed-up church and all the broken figures on the floor.

  ‘Goodness, look how marvellous it is,’ Mrs Deal said.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like ruins and broken buildings, Mrs Deal,’ Skip replied.

  ‘I’m learning to, darling.’

  His father was with the mermaid-woman waiting on the steps of Lancaster House for them.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘come on. Speeches.’

  Skip watched his mother as she was being helped on to a stage, alongside a lot of other people in suits and bright-coloured dresses. As the talk began, he looked at the art all around him, some of which he liked, most of which he didn’t. He left Betty standing next to Mrs Deal and sidled off. This was the main room of the exhibition but there was also another, smaller room, with additional ‘pieces’, and this is where his mother’s second piece was. The titles meant nothing to him on the whole. Abstraction. Studio. Wheels. One called Esplanade was rather good because he recognised it as a broken-down image of the seafront: a pier, a bandstand, the beach. But the others? Two Circles. Composition. Really: the names were mostly idiotic.

  This room was empty because the people had all cleared out to listen to the speeches. In the furthermost corner was the fisherman’s hut that his mother had used as her studio on the beach. She had decided to turn the hut itself into the artwork. It had been disassembled, and brought in here and reassembled again. He had been allowed to help and how different it looked inside, in the city, away from the seagulls and the wind. Quite eerie, he had to admit. He ran his hand along the wooden planks. There was a peephole in the door; he used to look through it to spy on his mother working sometimes.

  She had put the hut on two railway-carriage sleepers that had caused quite a lot of trouble getting here because they were so heavy. Margot, who was always squeezing him and poking his nose and hair, made a fuss about woodworm and rot, but his mother had won in the end, and here they were, holding up the hut. There was a sign on it that he himself had painted for her. YOU ARE ENCOURAGED TO ROAM AROUND THE BEACH HUT AND COME INSIDE. He had had to do it twice because on the first sign he had written RAOM. Inside the beach hut there was a secret, which only Skip knew about. Only his mother, and him. Not Betty. Or Mrs Deal. Or Margot.

  ‘There is a secret compartment,’ she’d said. ‘No one else in the world knows it’s there.’

  The sound of applause broke through from the other room, and Skip climbed up the rickety steps to the hut and crawled inside. It was spidery, damp still, and despite the sign outside, he had the feeling that not many people had bothered to roam. There was a fake wall at the back of the hut, and he tapped the panels to find out which was loose. There it was. He pulled it off. Inside was a small cavity about the size of a Punch and Judy theatre and in this black recess, hanging from a stick, were two upside-down men, tied with rope, dangling. He tapped them so that they swung and bumped into one another. Their little heads wobbled like gooseberries hanging from a bush.

  ‘But why have you put it there, Mummy, if you’re going to hide it?’

  ‘Because someone once told me I couldn’t and I don’t like to do as people tell me.’ She had smiled at him mysteriously. ‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘A secret from me to you.’

  ‘Why are they hanging?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she had said, ‘but let’s remember, we’re alive.’

  Shoreham-by-Sea, 1942

  The train home from Victoria station is delayed by fifteen minutes so that by the time we are finally installed in the carriage Betty already looks exhausted and Mrs Deal is burrowing in her bags to see if there is a blanket that can be wrapped around her so she can have a sleep. The train is full of grey men wearing grey suits and carrying briefcases and I have drunk rather too much champagne. Saint Helena has sold already; a princely sum. Cause for celebration.

  Skip fidgets; he will neither settle into sitting nor stand at the window but hops between the two. Running from one window to the other, looking over towards Chelsea, and then back, over towards Batterse
a, but after a while, though, he calms down and sits next to me, putting his head on my shoulder and patting my wrist in that oddly grown-up way he has.

  ‘It will be a relief to be out of the city,’ Mrs Deal says, ‘and back into the sea air.’

  ‘It will,’ I say, watching the river disappear and the trees from Battersea Park change into the leafless roofs of endless houses.

  —–

  Arriving at Shoreham has vivified us; we are no longer tired. It is late, nine o’clock, but the sun is not yet down in this heart of summer and we have unanimously decided to climb to the top of the small hill behind the station to have a look at the sea before heading home. Just off the coast a large battleship is moored, and the entire beach is decked in barbed wire.

  ‘In a way,’ I say to Mrs Deal, ‘it looks rather pretty.’

  She whacks me on the hand for that comment.

  ‘Where was Cecilia, again?’ Skip asks and Mrs Deal points down; there, she says, there. Skip, who is a sensitive little chap, gives her hand a squeeze because he knows she always gets sad looking down at Shoreham spit. The night that the bungalows and chalets were demolished by the army, dismantled first and then bulldozed, was a terrible one for Mrs Deal. No more Kangaroo or Puss-in-Boots. In their place is a line of ugly concrete blocks, all along the coast as far down as Brighton and beyond.

  ‘Mrs Deal, your face is getting its melancholy look,’ I say, and she laughs. There are midges coming at us, clouding our heads, and Skip and Betty, who is full of energy after sleeping the whole train journey, hop up and down, waving hands wildly to fight them off.

  ‘You look like fools,’ says Mrs Deal, being kind, pushing glasses up her nose.

  There are mines on the beach so the children cannot play there, though they only feel bad about it on a hot day like this. It is me who misses the rustle and uproar of wind and shingle the most. I watch Skip move away from us towards the edge of the grassy mound where he can get a better view of the aerodrome. It is a place he returns to, and then pulls back from. Billy told him how the Home Guard have been ordered to make the airfield look like farmland, with make-believe hedges, so that when the Luftwaffe fly overhead and take photographs they won’t think it’s a target, and now he sits and watches the sky, all day long, looking out for the planes above and their cameras.