The Photographer's Wife (4 page)

“Wow!” Sophie exclaims, heading straight for the bay-windows. “A room with a view!”

“Yes, you can see right down to the river,” Brett says.

“I’m impressed.”

“It’s a rental,” Brett says, “and shared. So don’t be.”

“Right.”

“I’m not sure I’m staying yet, so...”

“Staying?”

“Yeah. I might be going back home.”

“And home is?”

“Manhattan.”

“Right. Well, I can understand the appeal of that.”

“But London’s fine for now,” Brett says, hanging his jacket on the back of a chair, loosening his gold tie and undoing his top button. "So, Drink? Food? Kiss? A spot of fiendish rope-work perhaps?”

“Let’s start with a drink,” Sophie says, “and see where it leads us.”

“Sure,” Brett says. “Let’s do that.”

1941 - Shoreditch, London

They can see the blaze from over three blocks away and as her mother’s hand tightens around her own, Barbara realises that something bad has happened. All three are thinking the same thing:
Is that coming from our house?
But as they trip along in the dingy morning light, no one says a word.

As the corner of their street comes into view, they can smell the smoke and see the fire hoses. Minnie starts to run, dragging her daughter along beside her. Glenda is already in front.

And now they round the corner and, just for a second, it’s as if they have made a mistake, as if they have come to the wrong place, because the street is unrecognisable. The house opposite – the Robinson place – is gone, just a pile of rubble. The house to the left of theirs, where the Smiths and the Havershams live, (lived?)
is gone as well. And the house to the right of theirs, number twenty-six, is a red ball of licking, crackling flame producing a dark column of smoke which twists and turns as it rises into the sky.

“Oh,” Minnie says – more an exhalation than a word. Because language has just failed her.

Five blackened firemen are pointing hoses at the blaze. They have clearly been here for some time now, as there is no apparent urgency – just the noisy rush and hiss of water jets hitting the base of the fire, jets which, though massive, seem entirely insufficient for the job at hand. They might as well be spraying petrol on for all the good it’s doing.

After a full minute of paralysis, Minnie says, “My tin!” and unexpectedly breaks free from the girls. “Stay!” she instructs as she starts to sprint towards their house, now skipping over fire hoses, now opening the gate to their front yard, somehow absurd amidst all this destruction. A gate to protect from what exactly?

Imagining the building collapsing, Glenda shouts, “Mum! No!” and lets go of Barbara’s hand to run after her.

The nearest fireman now turns to see what the commotion is and drops his hose, which snakes and buckles on the ground, then spins, briefly spraying Barbara with water, before backing up and lodging itself against the wheel of a fire-truck. He jumps over the small dividing wall between the two gardens and seizes Minnie’s arms just as she is trying to force the front door open.

A struggle ensues – an actual fight – where Minnie, held from behind by the fireman, buckles and kicks and shrieks about her tin as she tries, hopelessly, to break free. Glenda is pulling on her mother’s arm, shouting, crying, “Mum, please, no! It’s dangerous! I’m scared. Please, Mum,
please!”

Barbara stands on the wet pavement watching all of this, smelling the smoke, sensing the heat of the flames on her face, and listening to the crackle of burning wood and the pop of windows exploding with the heat. She sees when the fireman finally loses patience and slaps her mother hard across the side of the face. She sees how everything stops, how Minnie’s arms drop to her sides, how she doubles up and cries out a long warbling, “Nooo!” before allowing herself to be led, looking crumpled like an abandoned set of clothes, from the front door, then back into the street, first by Glenda and then by an air-raid warden who has run to them in order to join the fray.

Glenda returns for Barbara, and the fireman, who is still watching Minnie in case she makes a dash for it, (he’s seen it happen before) crosses the road to address them.

“You’ll be able to get your things tomorrow, alright?” he tells the girls. “So just get your Mum out of here. She doesn’t want to be here tonight. She doesn’t want to be seeing this.”

“Take her where?” Glenda asks. “Where should we go?”

“But that’s our house,” Barbara protests angrily, feeling that the nasty man who slapped her mother hasn’t understood this simple fact.

“Go to a friend’s or something,” the fireman says. “Or go to a shelter. And then come back tomorrow once the fire’s out.”

Glenda nods rigidly. “Thank you,” she says, and Barbara blinks up at her in confusion.

She starts to lead Barbara along the road, towards where Minnie is now sitting on a wall being spoken to sternly by the air-raid warden, but as they pass the collapsed house – the Robinson place – Barbara freezes.

“Come on!” Glenda prompts, pulling at her hand, then, “What?”

With her free hand, Barbara is pointing, and Glenda now follows her gaze, her features forming a frown in the flickering light. “Oh,” she says.

“Look,” Barbara says.

“Yes. Um, go to Mum and I’ll... I’ll tell the fireman. He’ll know what to do.”

Barbara walks robotically on, her head swivelling as she does so, unable to tear her eyes from the horrific sight. Behind her, she hears Glenda shout to the fireman. “Excuse me! Excuse me! Mr Fireman!”

“Yes?” the man replies.

“There’s someone stuck under that door,” she says, her voice quivering with emotion.

“What?”

“There’s a hand sticking out. Over there. Someone’s under that door.”

“Jesus!” the fireman says, walking backwards so that he can look at the door in question while still pointing his hose at the fire opposite. “Alright love,” he says calmly, reasonably, as if this is all quite routine. “Don’t worry. We’ll get them out. You just go with your mum now. Off you go!”

As Glenda runs to catch up with Barbara and takes her hand again, they hear him shout, “Jack! JACK! They missed one over ‘ere. There’s another body. Can you come give us a hand?”

Minnie does not go to work that day and the girls do not go to school. For want of a better idea, with Minnie still in a worrying, trance-like state that Glenda has no idea how to deal with, they return to the youth club shelter. Being daytime, and with no warnings having sounded, the shelter is almost empty now.

Minnie lies down on an empty mattress and, as far as the girls can see, sleeps all day.

“What’s wrong with Mum?” Barbara asks.

“She’s just tired,” Glenda tells her. “She didn’t get any sleep last night. She can’t sleep sitting up. You know that.”

But Minnie isn’t tired. And she isn’t sleeping either. She has simply run out of courage. It’s not, as everyone keeps pretending, an unlimited resource.

Because the hours in the shelter are so horrifically slow, Glenda takes Barbara, who has been getting fidgety, for a walk. They ramble aimlessly through the empty streets, some untouched by the bombing, some missing houses or shops, and a few, like their own, so unrecognisable that Glenda worries they are lost.

In Liverpool Street they see a demonstration by communists demanding access to the underground stations for shelter, so they stand and watch and listen to the chanting until the police arrive and things start to get raucous, whereupon Glenda shepherds them back towards Shoreditch.

As the daylight starts to fade, they pass back down their own street. The flames have been extinguished now and their house, though blackened and windowless, is otherwise undamaged. Sandwiched between the smouldering remains of number twenty-six and the pile of rubble that is number twenty-two, it makes a forlorn sight.

The girls independently cast glances at the collapsed house opposite to check. They both see that the door and the hand have gone.

Looking at their own house, Barbara asks, “Can we go inside?”

“We’re not supposed to. It’s unsafe, I think.”

“Unsafe?”

“It might fall down.”

Barbara nods. Seeing that Glenda is furtively checking left and right, she says, “But you’re going to go inside anyway and get Mum’s tin.”

“Yes,” Glenda says. “Yes, I think so.”

“It’s in the cooker.”

“I know. If someone hasn’t nicked it. I want to get my nice dress, too, before someone nicks
that.”

“Your birthday dress?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have Lucy Loop?”

“If I can see her,” Glenda says, glancing left and right again, then sprinting past the burned-out building and around to the back of the house.

When they get back to the shelter, Minnie is still lying on her back staring at the ceiling. The place is filling up now and her occupancy of an entire mattress will soon be cause for jealousy.

“I got the tin,” Glenda tells her proudly, and Minnie’s face starts to animate as if someone has swapped in new batteries. First her brow wrinkles, then her eyes widen, then she sits up and stares peculiarly at Glenda as if she has perhaps spoken some foreign language that she doesn’t quite understand.

“Everything’s still in it, I think,” Glenda says, proffering the tin and nodding encouragingly.

Minnie swallows, then snatches the rusty Jacob’s Cracker tin from her daughter’s grasp.

She pulls off the lid and starts to empty the contents: a roll of pound notes with an elastic band around them, a pile of dog-eared photos, the girls’ birth certificates, her mother’s headband, Seamus’ broken watch... All of these, she casts aside. They are not her primary concern.

And then she finds her wedding ring. She slips it onto her finger and says, “Thank God for that. That won’t be coming off again.” She looks up at Glenda and manages a weak smile. “You’re a good girl, Glenda,” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” And Barbara wishes that it had been she who braved the danger of the house to recover the box.

“Can we look at the pictures?” Glenda asks.

Minnie sighs, then nods and pats the mattress beside her. “Course you can,” she says, then addressing Barbara and spotting the doll under her arm, “You too. Bring Lucy Loop and come sit on my lap.”

Barbara slides between her mother’s arms and for the first time today, feels safe again.

“That was our first trip out,” Minnie says, pulling the first tatty photo from the pile. “That’s Margate pier, that is.”

All three stare at the picture, a plain but pretty woman smiling sheepishly, holding hands with a good looking lad all buttoned up in his best Sunday suit.

Barbara reaches out and runs her finger across the image of her father, as if perhaps she might touch him, as if perhaps that might make him seem more real to her.

The image is so alien, so detached from everything around them, that none of them can think of a word to say, so they just sit, a little awed, the mother and her two daughters. They stare and wonder, each in her own way, if things will ever be that simple again.

By the time of their return to the house the next morning, someone has painted “Danger!” across the front door in dribbled, red letters.

Mrs Haversham and her son Bertie are next door in what used to be their front room, sifting through the still smouldering remains for intact possessions.

“Alice!” Minnie exclaims, climbing over the burnt remains of the front door and hugging her. “You’re alright then. I thought you’d come a cropper.”

“We was down the shelter,” Alice replies. “Thank God for small mercies.”

Minnie nods thoughtfully as the true meaning of the phrase hits her for the first time. She looks around, then up past where the ceiling and roof should be at the sky. “You poor things. And the Smiths?”

“She evacuated the little-uns just last week. So
they’re
OK. But...” Here she glances at Barbara, pulls her mouth downward and shakes her head.

“Oh those poor babbies,” Minnie says. “It’s shameful what they’re doing to us. Shameful.”

“We’re off to my Mum’s place in Dorking,” Alice says. “Happy to get out of London, to tell the truth.”

Minnie nods.

“You should get out too,” Alice says. “Or at least send the kids.”

“I can’t,” Minnie replies. “I’ve got my job, ain’t I? Someone’s got to keep coats on our boys’ backs.”

“I found this,” Bertie says, holding up a dusty shoe.

“That’s good,” Alice shouts, then, to Minnie, “Half the stuff’s already gone.”

“Looters?”

“Just people like us. People with nothing. They took me coat though, the buggers. Only one I had, as well. I chased them out of your place too.”

Minnie nods, sighs deeply, then, unable to think what to say that could possibly help Alice, she mutters, “Bloody Hitler,” and steps back outside.

Inside her own house, everything is blackened and sooty and she can see that some things have already been taken.

“Can we fix it up?” Glenda asks.

“No,” Minnie says. “No, I don’t think so.”

"What are we going to do, Mum? We can’t live here like this, can we?”

“No. No, we can’t live here,” Minnie agrees.

“We could live in the dugout,” Glenda suggests, screwing up her nose.

Minnie shakes her head and scans the room once again, noticing now how all of the wallpaper on the left side of the house is singed. She runs her left hand across the wall and feels that the bricks are still warm.

Glenda picks up a framed photo and rubs the soot from the glass with her finger, revealing their father’s face. “Where are we going to live, Mum?” she asks.

“I don’t know. I need to go talk to that bloke from the council,” Minnie says. “See what he says.”

“Shall I gather stuff together?”

“Yes,” Minnie tells Glenda. “Yes, make a pile on the doorstep. Anything we can carry. Anything we might need. Anything that’s worth something. And don’t let no one nick nothing.”

“I can help,” Barbara says.

“Yes, you ‘elp your sister. And if there’s a raid, go to the shelter.”

“The dugout, or...?”