The Photographer's Wife (23 page)

“Yes, there was a tiny shop in the village.”

“Gosh, were you laid up in bed?” Judy asks.

“No, I... I went a bit mad, to be honest,” Barbara says. “A sort of agoraphobia thing. It happens to a lot of women during pregnancy.”

“So that’s something to be grateful for, at least,” Judy says, nodding at Jonathan. “I don’t have agoraphobia.”

“We used to get stuff for Diane, too,” Jonathan says. “We used to do two boxes of food. I remember that.”

“Diane?” Judy asks.

“She was Dad’s friend,” Jonathan says.

“And she went with you to Wales?”

“It was actually Diane who found the cottages,” Barbara explains. “They belonged to some distant aunt of hers or something. And she worked as his assistant sometimes.”

“Drink, Mum? There’s some rather nice white open,” Jonathan says, pulling the bottle from the fridge.

“What happened there, Jon?” Judy asks, nodding at the bottle.

“I used quite a lot in the fish parcels,” Jonathan lies.

“I’m OK for the moment,” Barbara says.

“I’m not drinking either, obviously,” Judy says, patting her belly.

“Oh, actually, go on then,” Barbara says, soliciting daggers from Judy. “Can’t have him drinking alone, can we?”

“Did Sophie manage to track her down then?” Jonathan asks, as he pours two glasses of wine.

“Diane?”

“Yes. I know she wanted to get in touch with her.”

“No. I don’t think she did. And please don’t bring it up in front of her. She’s been driving me insane about Diane.”

“What did this Diane
do
exactly?” Judy asks.

“She developed and printed some of his films. He was never very good at it,” Barbara says. “He never had the patience.”

“He must have been doing
very
well to have a travelling assistant.”

“No, not really. Not at all, in fact. As I say, the cottages were free of charge. Because they were in her family. And she was sort of a family friend more than an assistant.”

“Shall we go through to the lounge?” Jon asks.

Barbara leads the way and Jonathan follows her.

“I’ll just serve myself a drink then, shall I?” Judy asks, but Jon and Barbara are too busy talking to hear her, so she sighs, pours herself a glass of Perrier and follows on into the lounge.

“What time did Sophie say?” Jon asks her when she joins them.

“Seven-thirty,” Judy says. “I told everyone seven-thirty.”

“Everyone?” Barbara asks. “Gosh. Who’s coming?”

Jonathan laughs. “No one else,” he says. “Unless Judy’s invited Manchester United as a surprise treat?”

“I haven’t,” Judy says with a fake smile.

A silence falls across the room, born of the simple fact that all three people present, including Judy herself, are attempting to analyse why she said,
“everyone.”
Jonathan solves the riddle first and quickly attempts to change the subject before his mother decodes yet another disguised barb. “So... tell me more about Wales,” he says. “Other than the fact there was a treehouse, I don’t remember much.”

“There were two, actually,” Barbara says. “You loved those tree houses.”

“And did you actually
have
Sophie in Wales?” Judy asks, as if Wales were the Sahara, as if Wales might not have midwives or hospitals.

“To be honest, I’d rather talk about something else,” Barbara says, in a flat, controlled tone of voice. “It was a horrible time for me. I’ve been doing my best to forget it all.”

“Horrible? Because?”

“Mum
said
she doesn’t want to talk about it,” Jonathan points out.

“OK, OK. I just wondered what was so horrible. The holiday in Wales, or having a baby? Sorry.”

“The house was tiny and damp, and impossible to heat,” Barbara says, her tone a little exasperated. “The wood-pile was all soaked through because it had a leaky roof, so we could never get the fire to light. It rained almost constantly and, as I said, I wasn’t well.”

“Right,” Judy says. “Not good then.”

“And
please
don’t bring it up once Sophie’s here.”

“Why does Sophie want to contact Diane anyway?” Judy asks.

“For this silly exhibition of hers,” Barbara says. “But it’s utterly likely that she’s passed away.”

“Oh that would upset Sophie,” Jonathan says. “She really liked Diane.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like her now,” Judy comments, detecting some subsonic vibration from the direction of the porch and, sure enough, the doorbell chimes a moment afterwards.

“I’ll go,” Jonathan offers, already standing.

“Well,
thank you!”
Judy says.

“Anyway, you
do
look well,” Barbara repeats, once Jonathan has left the room.

“Yes,” Judy says. “You said. Thanks.”

It is just after midnight by the time Sophie gets home. Brett, who promised he’d wait up for her, clearly has not done so. Sophie can hear his snoring the second she opens the front door.

She’s disappointed about this. She’s feeling upset – a hard-to-define mixture of various unsettling emotions: insecurity, aloneness, inadequacy, irritation – a familiar set of feelings that only family dinners have ever managed to conjure up. She had been hoping, on her return, for a friendly ear and a supportive hug, something to allow her to feel that even if
that
family didn’t work too well, at least
this one
did.

She steps out of her shoes and hangs up her coat, then pads barefoot to the lounge where she’s surprised to discover Brett asleep in an armchair. He has an art book on his lap and his glasses are cutely skewed. He apparently
tried
to stay up, bless him.

She pours herself a slug of Brett’s whiskey, downs it in one and then serves herself a second shot. She spent most of the evening gagging for more alcohol to soften the pain of listening to Judy but like Jonathan with his dairy products, she found it easier to forego getting sloshed than to tolerate any additional sniping about her alcohol intake.

She passes behind Brett and gently lifts away his glasses, folds them and places them on the coffee table feeling a little surge of love for him as she does so. She moves across the room and takes a seat opposite him. She sips at the whiskey and studies Brett’s features, spooky in the light from the reading lamp.

Some muscle he must contract when awake has relaxed now, and his belly has expanded even beyond its normal generous dimensions. He looks fatter and older. But softer too. He always looks a little crafty when awake: sly and perhaps a little too pleased with himself. Asleep he looks innocent, childlike and geriatric all at once.

Sophie imagines him waking up and asking her how her evening went and she sighs. She wouldn’t know what to say if he
were
awake to talk to.

In the morning, when she wakes up, she finds herself enlaced in Brett’s hot arms. His body temperature seems to be a couple of degrees higher than hers which is a source of added ecstasy during sex, a supplier of comfort in winter and a sweaty irritation in summer. She yawns and stretches her legs and Brett says, “Awake?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You survived then?”

“Umh...”

It’s not until Brett has showered and dressed that they discuss Sophie’s evening and when Brett asks her, “So, how did it go?” she realises that some unconscious mechanism has been operating during her sleep which has allowed her to process the events of the night before. “It was awful and fine, both at once,” she says.

“Right...”

“Awful because I hated almost every second of it, and fine because it was successful.”

“Successful? You got them on board for the exhibition, then?”

Sophie laughs. “No. I didn’t mention it once. I was under strict instructions from Jonathan not to mention it and he was right. As official favourite child he knows much better how to handle Mum than I do.”

“How was it successful then?” Brett asks, now lifting his collar and pulling his tie around his neck.

Sophie sips her coffee before replying. “The thing with Mum, as Jon correctly identified, is not to let her realise that you need something from her. As long as you don’t need it, she’ll give it freely.”

“Because?”

Sophie shrugs. “Because there’s no power to be gained by denying it, I suppose.”

“Sure,” Brett says. “That makes sense. A sort of Woody Allen sense but sense all the same. So what did you talk about?”

“Jon’s job, the human rights – or fishy rights or whatever – of fish...”

“The rights of fish?”

“Yeah. Jon cooked salmon for the three of us and I don’t think Judy was thrilled about it. So she regaled us with tales of the environmental horrors of salmon farming whilst we ate.”

“Nice.”

“She’s probably right to be honest but she’s just so annoying, you can’t really help but play devil’s advocate.”

“My sister’s like that,” Brett says. “Except that unlike Judy she’s invariably wrong.”

“Oh Judy’s
generally
wrong about most things,” Sophie says. “I just meant she was probably right about salmon. But I’m not sure what you
can
eat these days. It’s all a bit fucked-up, isn’t it?”

“Brown rice maybe?”

“Well, quite. She showed us her latest paintings of course.”

“Of course. And?”

“‘Ugh’ pretty much sums it up.”

“It doesn’t sound like a very fun evening.”

“No. Well, it was never going to be fun. But it smoothed things over with Mum, so I can go down next weekend and carry on as if nothing happened. So in that, at least, it was mission accomplished.”

“Good,” Brett says, pulling on his jacket. “Sorry, but–”

“I know, you have to run.”

“I have to run.”

Sophie puts down her coffee cup, stands, pulls her dressing gown more tightly around her and crosses the room. She smooths out a crinkle in Brett’s collar. “I was hoping for a shag,” she says.

“No can do. Editorial meeting at nine.”

“OK. See you tonight.”

“See you
tomorrow.”

“Damn, I forgot, you’ve got that private view thing to go to in Liverpool.”

“I have.”

Sophie follows Brett to the front door, hands him his satchel, then kisses him goodbye and closes the door after him.

She turns back to face her silent apartment then stands, with Brett’s footsteps receding behind her, and stares at the interior. It looks somehow alien. It looks odd like a film set, odd perhaps, like a Kubrick film set. The emptiness of last night has returned, only this morning it is clearer to her where it comes from. Spending time with her family makes her feel like a child... No, not like a child but like an
impostor
– perhaps a child pretending to be an adult. Why doesn’t she feel as grown up as Jon and Judy, or her mother, or Brett even? She’s a pretend artist, in a pretend artist’s flat, with a pretend boyfriend. She sighs deeply, then frowns as she struggles to remember first what day it is, and next what her pretend artist’s schedule is for today.

“Monday,” she mutters, then, “Shit!” She strides through to the kitchen and checks the clock: 8:04. “Shit, shit, shit!” she spits. She’s supposed to be on the other side of London; she has a photo shoot at nine. She has a very
real
photo shoot at a very specific time.

1962 - Peckham, London.

“How many months is it now?” Phil asks. Phil is Tony’s best friend from work, a news photographer at the
Mirror,
and this being Barbara’s fourth pregnancy in the ten years he has known them, he knows better than to ask when it’s “due.” Because like Barbara and like Tony, he knows the sad truth is that it probably isn’t due at all.

“This is four months,” Barbara says, then, to answer some unspoken question lingering in the air, she adds, “So yes, this is the longest I’ve ever carried term. We’re keeping everything crossed.”

“Keeping everything crossed” – that oft repeated mantra, a mantra that doesn’t even begin to describe the hope and the fear, the terror and the yearning surrounding each pregnancy.

This time, her fourth attempt, Barbara feels ready for anything. She feels ready even for the heartbreak of another miscarriage. She knows the horror now, is familiar, even intimate with it, the way one is intimate with a devious, despicable relative. And though even a
familiar
horror remains horrific, the knowledge that she
can
survive this makes it at least possible to face up to the future; it makes it possible to go through all this hoping.

She is ready to be told that she can never try again as well. The doctors seemed doubtful that she would even be able to get pregnant again after last time. Her womb, they say, is “under-developed”; it is “damaged”. But when she asked the (rather abrupt) doctor if it was OK to keep trying, he said, “there’s never any harm in
trying
, dear. Just don’t get your hopes up.”

So try, they did. And now, getting their hopes up, they are.

She’s ready for Tony to leave her if it all goes wrong too. She has sensed his growing desperation for children, his growing impatience with her for failing to provide them; she has measured the way her failure to do so has gradually belittled her in his regard. She senses how Joan and Lionel have come to see their son’s marriage as a mistake, for the simple reason that it is “fruitless.” A fruitless marriage to a “barren” woman. She’s certain that this is what people say behind her back. Why would Tony choose to stay?

So yes, this fourth time feels like the last time. She can see it in people’s eyes, she can hear it in their sighs. She can sense it deep within – can detect it in the vibration of the space between matter, in an emptiness that longs to be filled. The last time. Her last chance. She’s keeping everything crossed.

“You make sure you take things easy,” Phil is saying.

“Oh, I’m taking things
very
easy,” Barbara replies. “Tony won’t let me do anything. I hardly even leave the flat these days.”

The front door opens and Tony returns, a clinking bag hanging from his hand.