The Photographer's Wife (22 page)

“Gosh, your hands are really cold,” Diane says.

“It’s because of being on the bike.”

“Anyway, you need a pin or something. Or a needle. So we can fish that out.”

“Perhaps you’d like me to get you one!” Barbara says loudly, and she sees with satisfaction that both Diane and Tony jump at the proximity of her voice.

Tony withdraws from beneath the bedspread looking flushed.

“Um, yes. That would be good, um, sweetheart,” he says.

The camera fixed and dinner eaten, Tony shows Diane (and incidentally, Barbara) his photos. They are shots of brick buildings and rusty railings, of anonymous strangers queuing for buses, of men with sandwich boards advertising the
Evening Standard
, of stray dogs digging through dustbins in Salford… The truth of the matter is that Barbara doesn’t understand these photos. She can’t see what the point of taking such photos might be, nor can she imagine who would want to look at them. She certainly wouldn’t want any of them on
her
walls.

Diane, for her part, declares them “not bad” if lacking a little “heft or drama” whatever that might mean. She promises to bring Tony some books from the library that she says will “inspire” him.

And then Tony asks Barbara if she is “coming to the pub” with them and she replies that, no, she doesn’t think so, and just like that, without a struggle, they are gone.

Barbara watches from the window as they head down the dimly lit street until they vanish beyond the puddle of light cast by the street lamp. She wonders why she declined to go with them. It was something to do with the fact that Tony asked her, to do with the fact that he didn’t
assume
that she was coming. That seemed to make her presence optional in a way that she hadn’t even imagined possible and she had felt insulted by that and somehow obliged to refuse in order to mark her disapproval. Not that she’s sure anyone even noticed.

They left less than five minutes ago but she is already regretting her decision, in fact, she’s coming to think that it’s one of the most stupid decisions that she has ever made, that she was perhaps manipulated to react in exactly the way she did. If she had any idea which pub they were heading to, she would run and join them right now. But she doesn’t know and, in some strange way, she’s enjoying feeling righteous, enjoying feeling angry.

She starts (furiously) to do the washing up and, once this is done, she will tidy the apartment and once
that
is done, she will sit and wait until closing time, upon which she will watch from the window as various drunks stumble along the street. And she will try to decide if she hopes that one of them is Tony, or if she hopes one of them
isn’t
Tony.

2012 - Guildford, Surrey.

“Please don’t sigh like that. You know how guilty I feel about this.”

Jonathan, who is in the process of pulling fishbones from salmon with tweezers, straightens, then turns to face Judy who has appeared (looking pained) in the doorway.

“I didn’t know I did sigh,” he says.

“Well, you did. It was your special, big,
oh-it’s-such-a-drag-having-to-do-this-all-on-my-own
sigh.”

“It actually wasn’t,” Jonathan replies. “It was a special,
whoever-wrote-this-recipe-has-never-attempted-to-remove-bones-from-uncooked-salmon
, kind of sigh.” Virtually all of his discussions with Judy revolve around intent. She’s a great believer that every throwaway remark must have been designed with intent, as if phrases were Cruise missiles, as if sighs were attack drones.

“It still made me feel guilty,” Judy says.

“Then I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, now downing the tweezers and crossing the room to his wife. “That was not my intention.” He’s making extra special efforts, now that she’s pregnant, to avoid conflict.

Judy rears away from him as if repulsed. “Don’t touch me with your fishy fingers,” she says. “I’ve just changed my clothes.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan says again, now putting his hands behind his back and pulling a face as he leans in for a kiss.

Judy pecks him chastely on the lips, a kiss limited in scope by her ongoing reproach. “And I still don’t see why we have to have fish,” she says.

Jonathan restrains another sigh and turns back to the chopping board so that Judy won’t see his eyes rolling. “Because Mum doesn’t think a meal is a meal unless multiple deaths have occurred,” Jonathan says. “You know this. We’ve been through this.”

“It’s time your mother learned a little more about nutrition.”

“She’s nearly eighty,” Jonathan says, running his finger along the top of the salmon steak, then leaning down close to tweezer out another bone. “The woman’s not going to learn anything new now, so we just have to fit around her ticks.”

“Ageist, or sexist? Hum. I’m not sure...” Judy says. “Maybe both.”

“Realist maybe?”

“People can learn at any age, Jon. Even women like your mother. You know that as well as I do. Some just choose not to.”

“Well, she’s been choosing not to for almost eighty years. So all I’m saying is that the probabilities of the situation as regards my mother favour stasis as opposed to revolutionary transformation.”

“I still don’t see why–”

“Judy! It’s meat or fish or half-an hour attempting to explain why there isn’t a ‘main’ course. So a bit of fish is the lesser of two evils here, OK?”

“Not for the fish it isn’t,” Judy says, a smidgin of humour in her voice.

“No,” Jonathan says with a grin. “No, I suppose not.”

“Anyway, it’s her karma, not mine,” Judy says. “I’m not eating it.”

“I know you’re not,” Jonathan agrees, reaching for his glass of chardonnay.

“And don’t get drunk before the meal. Please don’t get drunk before they arrive.”

“I won’t.”

“It’s unfair. Especially when you know I can’t drink.”

“I’m not getting drunk,” Jonathan says flatly. “This is my first glass and that was my second sip.”

“Sure,” Judy says, her voice full of doubt.

“You can check the bottle if you want,” Jon offers. “It’s in the fridge.”

“God, Jon! You make me sound like the wine police or something.”

Jonathan chuckles. “The wine police. I like that.”

“I’m just saying, don’t get drunk before they even get here. Is that too much to ask?”

“No sweetheart,” Jonathan says, lifting the wine and placing it on the farthest corner of the windowsill, out of temptation’s way. “So, I’m wondering. If I feed Mum fish, whose karma gets fucked the most?” he asks, feeling suddenly devil-may-care and vaguely feisty, perhaps due to the now out-of-reach glass of wine.

“You’re being silly,” Judy replies. And it’s true. He is being silly. But all the same, the question seems like a good one. Whose karma does get butchered the most here? The fisherman for fishing it? Him, for pulling the poor thing’s bones out? His mother for eating it? Judy perhaps, for not stopping him – for letting him buy it with money from their joint account? Where do the chains of cause and effect and responsibility end here?

“Anyway,” Jon says, momentarily forgetting and starting to reach for the wine before reigning in his erring hand. He reaches for the pepper instead: an alibi. “Maybe it’s the salmon’s karma that was stuffed. Maybe he was a really bad salmon in a previous life. Maybe that’s why he ended up on this chopping board in the first place.”

“Your grasp of karma is about as good as your mother’s grasp of nutrition,” Judy says.

“Yes. You’re probably right.”

“Just don’t let them gang up on me like last time, OK?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m your wife. And they’re your family. So I’m not allowed to fight back. So I need you to stand up for me.”

“I didn’t let anyone gang up on you last time,” Jonathan says.

“Well, they did.”

And this is true. 

Sophie had launched a minor attack against Judy, breaking into sacred ground via one of the weaker portals – homeopathy. It had been nothing initially but a border skirmish, but egged on by their mother (who loves her pills) and a little too much chardonnay, and backed up, seemingly, by the whole of western cartesian logic, and sensing Judy’s vulnerability on the subject, Sophie had gone in for the kill. And Jon, despite believing vaguely that homeopathy probably did work (because Judy said it worked for her and why would she lie?) had found himself mechanically unable to take position in defence of his wife, had found himself unable, when faced with Sophie’s mathematical explanations of the absence of any active compound in homeopathic remedies, to defend Judy’s floundering theories about water having memory of having once had a molecule of Thuja near it but not apparently of having passed, since time began, through hundreds of mammals’ stinky bowels. Judy had gone to bed early and made his life hell for almost a week after that one. And Jon had secretly stopped taking the Thuja 10ch pills her naturopath had prescribed (without any noticeable change to his health.) And there had not been another family meal since.

“I promise I won’t let them gang up on you,” he says. “Now go and put your feet up.”

“You want me out of the kitchen?”

“No. You’ve been saying you’re tired all day. So I’m saying you should make the most of the calm before the storm. That is all.”

“I
am
tired. Pregnancy is exhausting.”

“I know. Just don’t say it when Mum’s here or you’ll have the whole diet thing to deal with.”

“What diet thing?”

“Oh come on. You know this. If you say you’re tired, she’ll say you’re anaemic and that it’s because you’re vegan and then...”

“Jon, I’m sure your mother knows how tiring it is being pregnant.”

“Yes. I’m sure she does. But that’s still what she’ll say. And you know how she’s the world’s expert on pregnancy. And nutrition.”

“She’s the world’s expert on everything.”

“You’re right. She is.”

“What was she like with Sophie?”

“I’m sorry?”

“When she was pregnant.”

“Oh, I don’t remember much.”

“But you were old enough. You were five or six, right?”

“Six, yes. But I was too busy hiding in tree houses, I think.”

“Tree houses? You had a garden?”

“No, we went to Wales. For three months. We came back after Sophie was born.”

“Wales? I never knew that. Why on earth did you go to Wales?”

“Mum was tired or something. I think the doctor prescribed lots of fresh air.”

“Huh!” Judy says.

“Huh?”

“You see, even with her half-cow per day, she was still so tired you had to retreat to Wales. It’s called being pregnant. It’s exhausting, Jon.”

“I know,” Jonathan says. “So please go and sit down!”

“OK, OK! I’m going. Just shout if you need me, alight?”

“Alright.”

Jonathan waits until he hears the sound of the television (a game show) and then sidles over to the glass of wine. He glances guiltily at the doorway, then lifts it and downs the contents in one. “Family dinners,” he thinks. “Ugh!”

 Jonathan straightens from the delicate operation of folding over the aluminium foil seam of his third fish parcel and sips the final dregs of his second glass of wine. He wonders if Judy will do a wine bottle audit. He wonders if she’ll give him hell.
She really is the wine police,
he thinks.

The doorbell chimes, so he calls out, “Can you get that, Jude? I still have fishy fingers.”

“OK,” Judy calls back. “But if it’s your family, they’re a bit early.”

Jonathan imagines one or other members of “his family” beyond the front door and imagines them hearing Judy’s shrieked words and winces, then heads to the sink and begins to wash his hands.

“... no, she’s not here yet,” he can hear Judy saying. “But then we did say seven-thirty and it’s not even seven.”

“You look well,” Barbara replies, ignoring Judy’s barb about the early hour. Barbara is good at bulldozing through difficulty, at not taking umbrage, which is one of the reasons she “gets on” so well with Judy where so many other people don’t. It’s a trait Jonathan has inherited,
thank God.
“Pregnancy is making you bloom, dear!” Barbara tells Judy.

“So people keep telling me,” Judy replies. “Yes, just hang it there. Come through. Jon’s in the kitchen wrestling with dead things.”

“Dead things?” Barbara says, her voice now loud as she enters the kitchen.

“It’s just fish, Mum,” Jonathan says, drying his hands on a tea-towel.

“Hello dear,” Barbara says, crossing the room and kissing him on the cheek.

“Hi Mum.”

Judy appears in the doorway behind her, raising her eyebrows comically. “Your
Mum’s
already here,” she says.

“Yes,” Jonathan replies. “Yes, I spotted that.”

“I was just saying how
well
Judy looks,” Barbara says, blustering through the strained atmosphere. “She looks positively ruddy.”

“She does.”

“I’m
actually
feeling...” Judy starts, but Jonathan catches her eye and despite her annoyance that no one is actually
asking
her how she feels, she wrestles her sentence under control before it escapes her mouth. “... quite well,” she says, wide eyeing Jonathan and tilting her head sideways.

“Well, it’s still early days but that’s good,” Barbara says.

“Jon was just telling me how you got so tired when you were pregnant with Sophie that you went off to Wales,” Judy says.

“I didn’t
exactly
say that,” Jonathan says. “I didn’t say it was because you were tired.”

“Was there another reason?” Judy asks.

“Wales? I... No...” Barbara stumbles. “I wasn’t
tired
as such. We just needed a break.”

“Sounds quite luxurious,” Judy says. “I wish Jon would whisk
me
off somewhere for three months.”

“It was just a little cottage,” Barbara says. “A little damp cottage. It was hardly luxurious.”

“All the same.”

“You didn’t go out much, did you Mum?” Jonathan asks. “Or have I got that wrong?”

“No, not much. It rained a lot.”

“But even when it wasn’t raining, you never went out. I remember going to the shop with Dad.”