The Photographer's Wife (21 page)

“You’re
not
going to phone her,” Jon says. The older brother voice is back and it’s a voice Sophie finds surprisingly difficult to resist. “You’re going to chill out and then you’re going to come to dinner here next month so we can smooth everything out.”

“I’m sorry, Jon, but I don’t
want
to come to dinner and I don’t want to wait a month. I
want
to go through my father’s photographs and they’re in our mother’s attic.”

“Trust me. The best way to ensure that happens is for you to come here and for us to have a nice family dinner together like civilised adults. You know how this works, Soph. You know how
Mum
works.”

Sophie sighs deeply. “If I do, will you back me up? Will you be on my side?”

“Your side? This isn’t a war. And if that’s how you feel then you need to...”

“About the exhibition. Will you back me up. About it being a good idea? Will you tell her you think she should help me?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I’m not sure if it
is
a good idea to be honest.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, come on. Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. An intuition.”

“An
intuition?”
Sophie repeats. Because if the words
higgledy piggledy
had her mother’s footprints all over them,
intuition
can
only
be something Judy has said, a suspicion confirmed by Jonathan’s next phrase.

“We just feel that you’re setting yourself up for a fall,” he says. “We just feel that some things are better left as they are.”

“What
things are better left as they are?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Right,” Sophie says, now almost as angry as when she left her mother’s. “And who’s we anyway?” She has always hated Jon’s “we.” It has always seemed so much less personal, so much less honest than, “I.”

“We?”

“You said, ‘
we feel.’”

“Oh, Jude and I.”

“And Jude has an opinion on this because
…?”

“She
is
in the art world, Sophie,” Jonathan says. “She knows about this stuff.”

Sophie’s mouth drops. She pulls an astonished face, safe in the knowledge that Jonathan can’t see her.

“Sophie?” he prompts.

But Sophie is speechless. Or rather, nothing that she can think of to say would be acceptable here and for once, she manages to hold her tongue.

“Sophie?” Jonathan says. “Can you hear me?”

And this gives Sophie an idea. She is in a train, after all.

“Jonathan?” she fakes.

“Yes?”

“Jonathan?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Jonathan. Oh, look, I’m in the train. I don’t know if you can hear me but I can’t hear you. I’ll call you back from a landline.”

She switches her phone off and glances back at the guy opposite. He is running a beautifully manicured finger around the contour of his lips as he studies his crossword.

As the train rounds a bend, a brief ray of sunlight sweeps through the carriage and the blonde hairs on the back of his hand shine in the sunlight and his diamante cufflink sends out little morse signals of rainbow colour. Sophie imagines sitting on his lap and running her hands across his chest, slipping her arms around that crisp collar. She imagines his beautiful hands undoing her blouse. She wonders if Brett will be home. She could do with a shag. Yes, that’s what she needs.

1954 - Peckham, London.

“Oh, hello,” Barbara says, fumbling with a lock of hair that keeps falling into her eyes. “Gosh. I was working so... Come in, come in!”

Diane is standing on the threshold of their tiny two-room apartment looking pretty and relaxed and summery in a pleated halter-neck dress. Barbara, in skirt and pullover, with her hair tied back, feels dowdy and unattractive and flustered.

“Sorry about the mess,” she says, glancing nervously around the room at the piles of clothing in various stages of assembly. “But as I say...”

“It’s fine,” Diane says. “You should see my place!”

“And I’ve no idea when Tony will be home.”

“That doesn’t matter either,” Diane says. “It’s you I came to see!”

Barbara senses that she blushes at this and hates herself for it.

“How have you been?” Diane asks. “How’s London been treating you?”

Barbara is scooting around the room, reuniting all of the various piles of textiles into one single, unstable pile that she will have to re-divide later once Diane has gone. “I’m fine,” she says. “I feel a bit like I’ve become my mother, but other than that...”

“Because?”

“Oh, just all of this,” Barbara says, waving her arm in a gesture that is meant to encompass the small dingy room, the piles of cloth, the sewing machine, the tiny flecks of thread that stick to everything like dog hair.

Diane brushes the fluff from the velvet of the armchair before asking, “May I?”

“Of course! Of course! Please. Sit down.”

“It must be nice to be able to work from home though?” Diane says, but from the perspective of someone at college, someone who doesn’t appear to have to work
at all
Barbara is unable to see how this can be a genuinely held opinion.

Diane spreads out her dress and sits and crosses her legs. She has lost a lot of weight this last year, Barbara reckons, and she wears more makeup these days too. If she just did something with those eyebrows, she’d look a lot like Suzy Parker. “That’s a lovely dress,” Barbara tells her. “Quite a change for you though, isn’t it?”

“I know!” Diane says. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s my room-mate’s. Her folks have a dress shop in Oxford and she has more outfits than she knows what to do with. Luckily we’re exactly the same size.”

“That
is
lucky,” Barbara says. “So, how
is
art college? Are you enjoying it?”

“It’s a lot more work than I expected,” Diane says. “That’s for sure.”

“Really?”

Diane nods. “Coursework, reading assignments, life drawing classes, essays…”

“You’re brave,” Barbara says. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“My room-mate is a help. She’s a second year, so when I get stuck I can ask her.”

“She sounds like the
perfect
room mate,” Barbara says.

“She is. Marie is great.” Diane smiles broadly at Barbara now, then scans the room, and Barbara imagines seeing the scene through Diane’s eyes and feels a little embarrassed, then a little angry that, for no reason she can identify, Diane ends up floating around art college in designer dresses while she sits in what is little more than a bedsit sewing shirt sleeves all day. She wonders how that came to pass. She wonders where she went wrong.

“And how’s Tony?” Diane asks.

“He’s fine. He’s a bit tired and grumpy at the moment to be honest, but don’t tell him I said so.”

“He can be like that. I know.”

“He’s had a lot of long trips recently. He was in Manchester on Monday and Dorset yesterday, then Manchester again today. I think he expected shorter ones, more around London.”

“What’s he in Manchester for?”

Barbara shrugs. “To get a package, I expect. Or drop one off. I don’t really know what’s in them. I’m not even sure Tony knows. But it’s newspaper stuff. Films and prints and things. Actually, that sounds like him now. That’s lucky.”

The door to the apartment squeaks open and Tony stomps into the room, downs his crash helmet, then pulls off his gloves. He looks from Barbara to Diane and back again, then says, “This is a surprise. What are you doing here, Diane?”

There’s something fake in his tone, something specifically about the way he said her name that makes Barbara wonder, just for an instant, if this wasn’t pre-arranged.

“I just thought I’d drop in. How was Manchester?” Diane asks. If they
are
lying, she’s much better at it than Tony.

“Raining,” Tony says. “It’s always raining in Manchester. Luckily I got sun all the way home, so I dried out.”

“Shall I make tea?” Barbara asks. “Are you staying to eat with us?”

“Of course she is,” Tony says. “And then we’re going to go out for a drink, aren’t we? There’s a lovely little boozer down the road.”

“Are you sure, Barbara?” Diane asks. “Are you sure it’s no trouble?”

And Barbara wants to reply that staying for tea is no trouble at all, but that she’d really rather not go out for a drink afterwards. She’s tired. And she resents the fact that all it takes is Diane’s appearance and suddenly Tony has the money and time to go out on the town. He hasn’t taken
her
for a drink in months. “It’s just omelette and chips,” she says.

“Have you got enough?”

She nods. “I got half a dozen eggs this morning.”

“OK then,” Diane says, beaming at her. “Thanks. Mum says they’re really hard to come by in Eastbourne.”

“Eggs?”

“My Mum said that too,” Tony agrees.

“It’s because they came off ration,” Barbara explains. “So everyone’s going a bit mad with them. But you can get them in London just about anywhere. You just have to go first thing.”

She removes the final pile of sleeves from the dining table and adds it to the tottering heap in the corner, then heads to the kitchen end of the room and switches on the Baby Belling. As she starts to peel and chop the potatoes, she listens to Tony and Diane talking behind her and feels a little jealous at their instant intimacy and at the way the tone of their conversation shifts as soon as she leaves it.

“I’ve just been to an exhibition,” Diane is telling Tony now. A case in point. Because Diane could perfectly well have told
her
about the exhibition if she had wanted to.

“Canaletto,” she continues. “He was Venetian, so there were all these beautiful paintings of Venice and the canals – incredible skies and reflections on the water.”

“I saw a photo-reportage on Venice in the
Sunday Post
,” Barbara offers, over her shoulder. “It looks beautiful. I’d love to go there.”

“Yes,” Diane says, “I’m sure it’s great.” Then, to Tony, she continues, “He liked to paint outdoors, whereas most of the masters did their work in a studio. They say that’s why his work feels so much more real. Why there’s so much
light
in them.”

“Sounds really interesting,” Tony says.

“It is. You should take Barbara. It’s at the British Museum.”

“We don’t have much time for exhibitions, do we Babs?”

“No,” Barbara laughs. “Not much.”

“I don’t have much time for day trips to Manchester,” Diane says. “At least you’re getting around. And least you’re seeing the country. I’ve never even been up north.”

“I suppose so,” Tony says, doubtfully.

“And I have to write five thousand words on Canaletto by Friday,” Diane says, “so...”

“Five thousand?” Barbara asks. “How many pages is that?”

“About twenty, I think,” Diane says.

“What will you say?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll probably get a book from the library and see what they say first and then take it from there.”

“But you’re enjoying college, then?” Tony asks, groaning now as he strains to pull off his boots. “Sorry if my feet smell.”

“They don’t,” Diane says. “And yes. College is great. It’s completely different from school.”

“That’s good.”

“They treat you much more like adults. And the people there are more fun, more interesting than at school. But it’s hard work too. I have to do a lot of things I’m not very good at.”

“Such as?”

“Such as drawing and–”

“Your drawings are OK,” Tony says.

“Well, I thought so too until I saw everyone else’s. And landscape painting. I
hate
oil paints. They’re impossible to do anything with. And writing. Which I’m useless at. And being a girl, I feel a bit like all eyes are on me.”

“Are you the only girl, then?”

“No. There are two of us in my class. And twenty men.”

“What about photography?” Tony asks.

“St Martin’s isn’t big on photography,” Diane says. “They don’t consider it proper art, I don’t think.”

“No one does, really. It’s a shame.”

“In America they do, apparently. A bit anyway. And what about you? Are you still taking pictures?”

“Yes,” Tony says. “Yes, quite a lot.”

Barbara frowns and wonders how it could be possible that she doesn’t know this, or if perhaps it isn’t true – if perhaps it’s an invention that reveals that Tony feels as insecure in the face of Diane’s art-college evolution as she does. “I’ll show you some,” Tony says. Barbara pauses peeling potatoes and looks over her shoulder to see where Tony keeps these pictures she has never even heard of. He pulls a folder from behind the sideboard. “I’m having trouble with the camera though,” he says. “It keeps getting stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“Yes. So you can’t turn the knob to move the film on.”

“Show me,” Diane says, so Tony reaches in his saddle bag and pulls the old Rolleiflex out.

“Oh, yes, that
is
stuck,” Diane says. “You need a darkroom, really. How thick are these curtains?”

“Not very,” Tony says. “In the bedroom maybe.”

Barbara glances back and watches as they disappear from view. Feeling more and more angry but not quite sure why, she continues to peel potatoes, dropping them ever more violently into the strainer, but when she hears giggles coming from the bedroom, she can take it no more. She dries her hands on a tea towel and moves to the arch between the bedroom and the lounge. The bedroom curtains have been closed but just enough light remains to see what is happening. Tony and Diane are on their knees beside the bed, their heads beneath the quilted bedspread.

“There,” Diane is saying, softly. “Feel there. It’s a bit of paper or film or something stuck in the cog.”

“I can’t feel anything.”

“There. To the left of the roller. Give me your hand.”

Tony snorts with laughter.

“There, see?” Diane says.

“Oh yes... I think... yes.”