The Photographer's Wife (19 page)

Barbara sees Diane take note of the sound and sees the effort that she expends in order
not
to take note of the sound. She sees the willpower required for Diane to stay interested, in this moment, in Barbara. “Are the pills working?” she asks.

Barbara nods. “A bit. I think. I made it downstairs today. Just for a cup of tea. But don’t tell Joan.”

“Of course not,” Diane says, now winking and squeezing Barbara’s hand, and whatever it is that fluttered before now flutters again, only this time Barbara pulls her hand away. “That sounds like Tony now,” she says, and they both pause to listen to the front door, then to Joan’s voice greeting him. They struggle to capture the content of his reply but he is too distant and the sound waves are too jumbled by the stairwell for them to make out anything more than the excited lilt of his voice.

As if to confirm this excitement, Tony is already bounding up the stairs as fast as his clompy motorcycle boots will allow. “Hello!” he shouts, bustling into the room and bringing with him a rush of cold air drifting off his clothes in waves. Tony often shouts when he gets home – the motorcycle, he claims, makes him deaf. He’s wearing his leather motorbike trousers and a vast waxed-cotton jacket. Barbara thinks he looks unreasonably sexy when he’s in his work clobber. She wishes secretly that she could sleep with him while he’s still dressed that way but there’s no way to say that to him and she knows that there never will be a way.

Diane stands and pecks Tony on the cheek which means that she gets to him before Barbara can. “Good trip to London?” she asks.

“Yes, I... Actually, I need to have a word with Babs,” Tony tells her, and Barbara watches and sees Diane’s smile maintained even as her eyes fast forward through a whole set of calculations, a whole batch of emotions. “Sure,” she says, breezily. “I’ll leave you to it.”

Tony closes the door behind her and turns to face Barbara. His eyes look as blue as they ever have, a cold-enhanced, crazed kind of blue.

Barbara props herself up on pillows and smiles and frowns simultaneously. “What’s happened?” she asks. “Has something happened?”

Tony licks his lips and sits on the bed exactly where Diane had been sitting only seconds before. Tony too, takes her hand in his own and the contact is so very different. Tony’s hands are as cold and heavy as steaks from the butcher’s refrigerator. “Something
has
happened,” he says. “And I need to talk to you about it.”

“OK,” Barbara replies, noting that he
still
hasn’t kissed her and fearing the worst.

“Now, we don’t have to make a decision immediately. So I don’t want you worrying, especially not at the moment, not with you being tired and everything...”

“Right.”

“But I got offered a job today.”

“Really?”

“I had to take a package up to London. Film rolls, it was. To the
Daily Mirror
. And the boss there took me aside and offered me a job. Just like that.”

“The
Mirror
newspaper?”

“Yes. They do the
Sunday Pictorial
too. Same place. Now it’s just delivering packages. Same as now. But it’s double the pay.”

“Double?”

Tony nods. “
Almost
double. Give or take some small change.”

“And delivering packages the same as now?”

“Yes. On a motorbike. A better one, I reckon. I saw some parked outside and they had some nice BSA’s. A couple of them were those new Golden Flashes I like.”

“Tell me about the job though.”

“Like I say, it’s just deliveries, really... going and getting rolls of film from journalists and rushing ‘em back to the paper. Stuff like that.”

“That’s great news, isn’t it?”

Tony nods and shrugs. “I think so.”

“We could rent our own place,” Barbara says. “Specially if I get a job as well.”

“I don’t reckon you’d have to. Not with all I’d be earning. He said it was nine quid a week.”

“Is there a catch though?” Barbara asks. “I’m sensing a catch.”

“Not really,” Tony says. “Maybe. Sort of. I suppose. It depends.”

“Yes?”

“It’s in London.”

“Yes, you said.”

“
All
the trips are to or from London. So I’d need to be in London all the time.”

“Oh.”

“So we’d need to move.”

Once Tony has (finally) kissed her and left, Barbara starts to weigh up the pros and cons of moving back to London. A place of their own. More money. Escape from Joan. Safety from Diane. But
London!
No seafront, no seagulls, no sea air, no sea anything... Just smog and grime and the same gritty, grim, determined people she grew up with. She feels miserable even imagining it.

Downstairs she can hear Diane, apparently now in on the news as well, raising her voice. She stands, then, despite the dizziness, moves out to the landing to listen. Both Joan and Diane are talking at once. “Double money’s not to be sneezed at,” Joan is saying. “Not that I’m pushing you out or nothing but it’s not to be sneezed at is all, and we could always use the extra room, you know that. But talk to your father first, he...”

Alongside this, is Diane’s voice. “... what you want...” she is saying. “But think about all your mates here. Think about the fact you won’t know anyone in London. Think about all the summers on the beach you’ll miss. It’s all very well earning more but being happy is what counts, I reckon. And my guess is that you’ll be lonely as hell in London.”

“I’ll be with Barbara, won’t I?” Tony tells her. “And she knows people in London as well.”

“Barbara?” Diane says. “Do you really think that would be enough for you?”

And Barbara realises that she already knows, has known even before the question was raised, what needs to be done here.

2012 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Sophie sits on the tiny landing, her back against the bannisters, and pulls a sleeve of photographs from the first of the five boxes she has lugged down the ladder.

The landing is hardly ideal for the job of curating her father’s work but Barbara has made such a fuss about her “tramping dust” over the new carpet that she has had to cave in. Her mother has never been “easy” but as she gets older, the rules and limits she imposes seem to Sophie to be ever more arbitrary, ever more random, and more and more irritating to comply with. But yes, Sophie will look through the photos here on the landing and then she will put the boxes back in the loft
and
vacuum the floor. And perhaps successful completion of these stages as dictated will bring authorisation for her to go through another five boxes next weekend, and another five the weekend after that. And hopefully, by the time all twenty-five boxes have been done, enough gems will have been unearthed for an exhibition.

The first sleeve contains a thoroughly disappointing batch of mundane imagery. Some are interesting as historical relics: a nineteen-fifties corner shop with vegetables piled outside, a man on an old motorbike, a baby in puffed, striped knickerbockers (did babies still look like this in the fifties?) but these photos have no art to them. They are snaps. They are not in any way photographer’s photographs. She shuffles quickly through the pile, then returns them to the plastic sleeve and selects another package containing larger prints.

These are more hopeful, indeed a few images almost make the grade. One, of a small group of farmhouses in the midst of a vast field of wheat, looks more like the American midwest than England. The sky above the farmhouse is complex and really rather beautiful, but the print has a missing corner and, damaged, its value to Sophie will depend on whether she can find the corresponding negative for a reprint.

The next pack contains a series of what look to Sophie like failed attempts at art photography. A detail of some bricks in a wall, a rusting bath overgrown with weeds, a close up of somebody’s elbow... They remind her of the photos she took herself when she was about ten. Perhaps they
are
photos she took when she was about ten. This memory, of going out with her father to take photos on a Sunday morning, takes her by surprise. Some muscle deep within, near her heart (perhaps her heart itself) spasms, and she winces and struggles to push her memories of her father from her mind and to blink back the resulting tears, suddenly, surprisingly present in her eyes.

In the next pack she strikes lucky. These are stark, aggressively architectural shots from the early sixties and she feels a little pride that her father took these. One senses the excitement of a new era: men in sharp suits, women dressed in simple tube-shaped dresses with lopped off sleeves. One particular photo in the pack reminds her of a film. It’s of a woman with a beehive, silhouetted in the window of a new-build home, with sharp angles throwing shadows across an immaculate lawn. She stares at it for a few minutes before the title comes to mind. “
Stepford Wives
,” she murmurs, putting the photo to one side. The next image actually makes her break into a grin. “Yesss!” she says. “Now that’s more like it, Dad.” The photo shows two overweight women in floral dresses – sisters perhaps – on deck chairs on a pebble beach. Next to each is an old-fashioned, sprung pram complete with floral parasol and behind all of this, a pier.
Not Eastbourne,
she thinks.
Hastings perhaps?

“Some of these are gorgeous, Mum!” she calls out excitedly.

There is no reply. Barbara may have gone out.

By the time Sophie has rooted through all five boxes the light is fading. She is feeling demotivated by the limited flecks of gold she has been able to sift from the mud and a little depressed from the unavoidable melancholy of spending a rainy day looking through her dead father’s work. She hauls the boxes back up into the loft, folds the ladder away and then searches through the house until she finds Barbara in the rain-spotted veranda. “Gosh, you’re knitting,” she says.

“I am,” Barbara replies without looking up.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you knit.”

“It’s for the baby,” Barbara says, and Sophie hears accusation in her voice, the accusation of her failure, as a daughter, to produce grandchildren. She quickly analyses this and decides that she’s imagining things.
“It’s for the baby,”
Sophie repeats in her head.
“That’s all she said.”

“It’s pink,” she comments.

“Yes.”

“Do they know the sex now, or something? Because the last time I spoke to Jon...”

“It’s going to be striped,” Barbara says, nodding at the knitting pattern on the coffee table.

Sophie looks and sees the image of a boy and a girl wearing identical blue and pink striped jumpers. “I hope it doesn’t get gender confused,” she says. “I hope the jumper doesn’t make the baby gay or transsexual or something.” But she knows as soon as she has said it that it’s not the kind of humour that her mother is capable of even recognising as such.

“What a silly thing to say,” Barbara replies.

“Joke, Mum.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Not much,” Sophie admits with a sigh. “Six images.”

“I thought as much.”

“I’ve only done the first five boxes though. But to be honest, most of these are going to be unusable unless I find the negatives.”

“Show me.”

Sophie drags the pouf next to her mother and sits down. Barbara lays down her knitting, fumbles for her bifocals on the chain around her neck and places them on her nose, then takes the photos from Sophie’s grasp.

“Ah, I remember that,” she says immediately. “I was with him.”

“Really?”

“It was in Harlow. It was a new town back then. It didn’t even exist before the war. We went there to see if we could find my father. Tony thought we should tell him about the wedding and Harlow was the last address we could find for him.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Did you find him?”

Barbara shakes her head. “The house had changed hands a few times and they had no forwarding address. People moved around a lot after the war, especially builders. They went where the work was.”

“And the woman? In the window?”

“I’ve no idea. She was just a woman in a house. I spotted her and your father took a photo.”

“Right. I like the backstory though. The hunt for Granddad.”

Barbara wrinkles her nose at some memory, then hands the photo to Sophie revealing the next image, a row of pop-eyed policemen with lopsided helmets, struggling to hold back a crowd of women.

“A Beatles concert,” Barbara says.

“Really? I
thought
they all looked a bit hysterical.”

“That one’s crying,” Barbara says, pointing. “Look. They used to get themselves in such a state. I never really understood it myself. I mean, Ringo was cute but...”

“So, this was when, mid sixties?”

“Sixty three, I think.”

“The year Jon was born then.”

“Yes.”

“Was Dad sent to cover the concert? Do you think I’ll find more?”

Barbara shakes her head. “He was still riding packages around back then. He will have been sent there to pick up some rolls of film, I expect. From the proper photographer. But he always had his camera with him.”

“If this was sixty three, you were at home with the baby, right?”

“I’m not sure if this was before or after. But it was around that time.”

“Well, either way, you would have been at home with the baby. Either within or without...”

“I suppose so,” Barbara says as she moves onto the next image.

“Do you think I’ll find a box of negatives at some point?”

“I don’t know. Can’t you use these?”

“Not if I want to do really big prints,” Sophie says. “Or at least, not without specialist scanning and restoration work.”

“I would assume that they’re up there somewhere.”

“Oh, you know Diane?” Sophie says. “I found her on the web. She’s in Portland in America apparently. She has a photography site. I sent her an email but she never answered.”

“No, well…”

“The last update to the web page was in 2009 though.”

“Are these the only ones you liked?” Barbara asks, definitively refusing the Diane detour.