The Photographer's Wife (17 page)

“Horrible croissants,” Brett says, pulling a face.

“It’s the 7-Eleven,” Sophie points out. “Not the Sept-Onze.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning this is England. You’re safer with crumpets than croissants round here.”

“Crumpets?”

“They’re an English thing. Like muffins. Or bagels. Actually, they’re not really like anything.”

“Crumpets, huh?”

“I’ll get you some. You know, I keep thinking... Dad could have been so great.”

Brett slurps at his coffee before replying. “He
was
pretty great, Sophie.”

“Sure. But he could have been
really
great, I reckon. If he’d just been with someone who understood his art. Mum was a good wife and mother and everything but as far as his work was concerned... well...”

“Well?”

“Suffice to say that she was more motivated by taking him shopping than going on a photo shoot. That’s why he used to hang out with Diane so much. And he never really travelled anywhere. That will have been because of Mum. He could have done so much more.”

“He was up there. Don’t dis the guy, babe. He’s gotten a bit forgotten now, is all.”

“Gotten forgotten. I like it. And whose fault is that? That he’s gotten forgotten?”

“That’s a lot of responsibility to pin on your ma. I’m sure she did her best.”

“Are you?”

Brett shrugs.

“OK, maybe I'm being a bit mean. But you see my point?”

“Yes, I see your point.”

They drink the rest of their coffee in silence, then Brett asks, “D’you want to finish what we started before?”

“I’m sorry? Oh. I’m not sure to be honest.”

Brett reaches for a tin box on the shelf beside him. “Perhaps this will get you in the mood?” he says, pulling a tiny bag of cocaine from the tin.

Because Sophie knows that what he’s saying is true and because it’s the weekend and she has no other plans, and because she’s feeling guilty about before, she agrees. “Just a small one then,” she says. “I don’t want to be feeling wired all day.”

Brett lifts a framed photograph from the wall behind him and uses it, along with a business card, to lay out the lines, and as soon as they have snorted them, Sophie does feel different: enthusiastic, euphoric, confident and, yes, aroused.

“Come!” Brett says, standing, rubbing his nose, then taking her hand and leading her through to the bedroom. He heads straight for the “naughty” drawer and Sophie stands in the doorway, her expression one of wry amusement, as Brett retrieves the two pairs of handcuffs and the dog collar. “Time to ring the changes, babe,” he says.

“Does this mean we’re now
officially
bored?” Sophie asks.

“Bored?”

“When I asked you about those, you said that they were for when we got bored.”

Brett pouts and shakes his head. “I’m not bored at all here, babe,” he says. He pulls off his sweatshirt, then adds. “Maybe it’s just that now I trust you enough to share this with you. You could choose to feel flattered.”

“But do I trust
you
enough?” Sophie asks, picturing herself tied up and at Brett’s mercy and surprising herself by not finding the image displeasing.

“I can’t see you need to, really,” Brett says, now fiddling with the handcuffs and then clipping the end of one pair to his right wrist, then one end of the second pair to his left wrist.

Sophie frowns at him, naked from the waist up, handcuffs dangling from each arm. “I don’t get it,” she says. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Whatever you want,” Brett says, now climbing onto the bed and spreading his arms so that the handcuffs clank against the iron of the bed-head. “I’m at your mercy, mistress.”

“Oh,” Sophie says, suddenly embarrassed that the penny has taken so long to drop. “Oh, I see!”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Brett says, “But there are various torture devices in that next drawer down. So if you did feel like I’d been a
bad
Brett, well, you could take it out on me. Get your own back, so to speak.”

Sophie sighs and crosses the room to peer in the drawer. Thinking that this isn’t what she expected, she lifts a small chain connected to metal clamps from the drawer, pokes, slightly disgustedly, at a set of love balls, then at a ball-gag. “Is this meant to be for you?” she asks, lifting the pink dildo and flopping it from side to side, comically.

“If that is your wish, Mistress,” Brett says, for some reason speaking in a strange, science-fiction, robot voice.

“Hum,” Sophie says, as she wonders if, even if it
isn’t
her wish, if it could be if she tried hard enough. But she’s not at all sure she wants to. What she
wants
here, what she
feels like
here, is simply a good, long shag. That’s what she really needs.

She turns to face Brett, about to pierce his bubble, about to explain, gently, that dominatrix isn’t really her bag. But then she sees his dick, throbbing, jumping, begging inside his jogging trousers and realises that just because Brett is tied up, just because he has a dog collar on, clamps on his nipples and a gag in his mouth, it doesn’t mean that she can’t get what she wants too. It doesn’t mean that at all.

She walks around the bed and attaches the handcuffs, one after the other, to the extremities of the bed-head. “OK, you little slut,” she says, yanking down his jogging trousers and watching his dick spring forth. “You’ve asked for it.”

“Please, mercy!” Brett says.

“No
mercy,” Sophie says, straddling him. “You’re going to bloody well get what’s coming to you.”

1951 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Barbara loves living in Eastbourne. She has walked all the way to Holywell this morning (she thinks the spot where the cliffs meet the sea is the prettiest place she has ever seen) and is now on her way home. But this thought, that she
loves
living here, has filled her mind since the second she got up and opened the curtains.

For a moment there, specifically for the first week of her marriage, it was hit and miss – she really did think that everything might fall apart. The worst moment of all had been her return, alone, to Donnybrook the morning after the wedding – having to face her mother, her sister, her new in-laws, and explain to them all, one after the other, that she had no idea
whatsoever
where her new husband was, nor where he had spent the night. Everyone was outraged on her behalf, so outraged in fact, that her own indignation became of little importance when compared to the obvious necessity of calming everyone down before Tony got back, which he did eventually, just before two p.m. He had passed out drunk at Hugh’s, he claimed. He looked poorly enough that this might be true.

It was unforgivable, everyone agreed. “Unforgivable” – that was the word they all kept using. But given the choice between packing her bags and returning to London (an option that Glenda kept repeating would be, under the circumstances, perfectly justifiable) and forgiving and forgetting, Barbara has chosen to forgive and forget. Happiness is a relative concept and after having lived through a world war in the East End of London, Tony’s absence registered as a mere blip on her personal Richter scale. And today, as she wanders along South Downs Way with the waves crashing to her right, with the taste of sea-salt on her lips and with Tony’s baby just starting to demonstrate her presence (Minnie has swung a ring over her belly and declared that it will be a girl and Barbara believes her), she just
knows
that she has made the right choice.

Of course, Tony’s behaviour at the wedding has concerned her, and having now met and spent time with his father, Lionel, she’s worried, more profoundly, that she may have married into some kind of genetic fault-line as far as alcohol is concerned. So she watches Lionel and tries to understand. Like a keen botany student, she’s observing the world around her and making mental notes about what works and what doesn’t. Already, she has identified that Lionel gets grumpy just before he starts to drink. She knows, too, that the first beer makes him normal, the second funny, and the third, euphoric and overbearing. The fourth quietens him down, the fifth leaves him maudlin and then either he falls asleep or carries on to the sixth and the seventh in which case it’s time to escape, because it can only end in an explosion of anger or, if you’re lucky, vomiting.

She watches Joan, too, to see if she has developed any coping strategies, but other than an inexplicable need to talk all the time (is it the silence that scares her, or the thoughts that might manifest if she shut up for a moment?) she just seems to hunker down and brave her way through each storm as if it were the first and hopefully the last.

But while Lionel hasn’t spent a single night sober since the wedding, now two weeks ago, Tony, for his part, hasn’t had a single drink. In fact, Tony has been as funny and helpful, as sweet and doting, as he ever has. Glenda told her that she must insist Tony apologise for his disgraceful behaviour but Barbara has never understood Glenda’s need for a clean-cut victory in these things. Tony’s efforts to redeem himself, his constant attentions towards her, are as much apology as Barbara needs.

When she reaches Donnybrook, the front door is open. Barbara climbs the steps and sees that Joan is in the process of mopping the black and white checkered floor-tiles.

“Hello. I’m back to give you a hand,” she announces, and Joan stops mopping and turns, fag-in-mouth to face her. “Hello love,” she says. “Nice walk?”

Barbara nods and smiles sweetly. “I went all the way to Helen Gardens again.”

“You’ll walk yourself out,” Joan admonishes. “A woman in your state should be resting. When I was pregnant with Tony–”

“The doctor said walking was good,” Barbara interrupts. Joan has already told her how she spent three months in bed before Tony was born. Repeatedly.

“Yes, well. I’m sure he didn’t mean you to be running a marathon every day either. In my day–”

“Should I go round the back?” Barbara asks, cutting short another dreaded “in my day” speech. “I don’t want to spoil your nice clean floor.”

Joan shakes her head and a small clump of ash from her cigarette falls to the floor and is instantly removed with a swipe of the mop. “No, you can come through on one condition.”

“Yes?”

“That you go straight to your room and rest-up.”

Barbara nods. “OK,” she says. “I’ll help you this afternoon though.”

Joan dries her fingertips on her pinny, then seizes the cigarette and takes a long, visibly satisfying, final drag before stubbing it out in the ashtray on the hall table. “You can peel the spuds and carrots for me,” she says. “You can do that sitting down.”

As Barbara crosses the hall to the staircase, Joan re-mops the floor in her wake. “Sorry,” Barbara says, glancing back.

“It’s fine, go on, go on! It’s fine!” she insists.

Once inside Tony’s bedroom (her old single room has been commandeered for paying guests now the season has started) Barbara unlaces her saddle shoes and kicks them off. She massages one foot, then the other, then crosses the room to open the window. There is no sea view at Donnybrook but she can still hear the gulls, she can still sense the waves crashing against the beach not two hundred yards away and, just occasionally, when the wind is in the right direction, she can hear them too, rushing up the beach, then sinking into the pebbles. It sounds like the sleepy wheezing of some vast, distant giant.

She sits down and holds her breath and listens for a moment, then throws herself back onto the bed. She stares at the ceiling, then slides one hand over her belly. It feels somehow tighter than usual. Perhaps she
has
overdone it a bit.

“Sorry about that,” she says, gently rubbing herself. “You can rest now, baby.”

By the time Barbara wakes up, the sun has moved around far enough that it is shining onto the bed. A glance at the clock reveals that she has been asleep for almost two hours. She should get up but she feels woozy and strange, feverish and crampy. She closes her eyes and lifts her knees to see if this position will ease the pain, then, when it doesn’t, she slides one hand down to her belly, then further down until it reaches the dampness. She swallows with difficulty, then wrinkles her brow, bites her bottom lip, and sits up to look. Her knickers are spotted with red, just like when her time of the month used to arrive. But that shouldn’t be happening today. She knows this much.

She tries to imagine herself asking Joan about what’s happening – a toe-curlingly embarrassing thought. She pulls open her knickers and peers inside. There is very little blood. Perhaps this is normal. Perhaps she’ll be OK.

She feels overly full though, almost like indigestion. She feels a sudden need to ‘spend a penny’ too. Yes, perhaps that’s it. Perhaps she simply needs to pee.

She stands, feels dizzy, and has to reach out to steady herself against the wall before she manages to cross to the dresser, where she retrieves a fresh pair of undies and a clean flannel mitt she can use as a pad. She crosses to the sink, cleans herself up, then changes. Once the blood is all gone, she feels better. She feels, for a moment, like the scare is over.

She’ll mention it to Joan later, but at least there’s no hurry now.

She opens the door and steps out onto the landing. Downstairs she can hear the upright vacuum cleaner being driven, beating and screaming, around the dining room.

When she reaches the lavatory, she sits down and notes with dismay that the flannel is already spotted with bright, almost fluorescent blood. She’ll have to talk to Joan, after all.

She reads, for the umpteenth time, the framed embroidery above the toilet roll holder. Who waits outside the door / One may never know / So tarry not my friend / He too may need to go. She wishes it wasn’t there, because, for some reason, she’s incapable of ever sitting here
without
reading it, and she didn’t find it funny the first time around. By now, she has read it so many times that reading it again makes her feel a little bit sick.

She’s just about to stand up when she feels a fresh cramping sensation, strong enough to make her gasp. She sits back down, then wipes her forehead upon which beads of sweat are forming. “That’s not right,” she says quietly. She wishes Glenda was here. Glenda would know what to do.