The Photographer's Wife (3 page)

Barbara nods and hopes that Glenda won’t tell her
who
has died. She doesn’t like to put names and faces to these stories, because once fleshed out she knows that they will have the power to haunt her dreams, turning them into nightmares.

“Poor Billy,” Glenda says, shaking her head and breathing erratically with the effort she is making not to cry.

Poor Billy
, Barbara repeats in her head and then, despite herself, the image of Glenda’s schoolfriend Billy Holt comes to mind, closely followed by Mrs Holt sweeping the front porch. She wonders about Billy’s sister Harriet – with whom she sometimes played – but decides, quite consciously, not to ask. All the same, she imagines Harriet, whose pretty dresses she was always so jealous of, buried somewhere beneath rubble, the crisp, starched cotton crushed by the weight of fallen brick. She imagines what that would feel like.

Minnie returns with mugs of watery soup and Barbara takes hers, grasps it between both hands, and counts to twenty so as to delay the first sip. Her anticipation of the soup is, she knows from experience, more powerful than its ability to actually satisfy her hunger. She likes to wait as long as possible.

“Eat your soup,” Minnie tells Glenda. She crouches down and pushes the hair from her daughter’s eyes – a rare display of affection reserved for exceptional circumstances such as these.

Someone at the far end of the cellar tries to start a singalong with a warbling rendition of
Doing The Lambeth Walk
but tonight it fails to catch on – it doesn’t always work – and the singer falters at the end of the first verse, then mutters, “Bugger you all then,” which at least provokes a few laughs.

“We’re all knackered, Annie,” someone shouts, and Glenda, who would have found a singalong hard to bear, feels relieved.

Minnie, who claims to be unable to sleep sitting, (even if the girls have frequently caught her doing so) heads to the far side to “have a natter” with Mrs Peters.

In the farthest corner from the gas lamp, a couple are discreetly canoodling beneath their coats and Barbara peers at the shifting shapes for a moment and wonders what
that
feels like, then turns her attention to the woman beside them who is knitting what looks like a glove.

Once she has finished her soup, she closes her eyes and, ignoring the rumbling of her tummy, tries to imagine her favourite scene of the moment, a farm in Wales.

“Do
all
farms have cows?” she asks her sister, momentarily opening her eyes, and Glenda, who knows as much about farms as her little sister, says, “Oh yes. They always have lots of cows. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any milk, would there?”

Reassured not only about her conjured image of a farm but also that her sister is talking again, Barbara closes her eyes anew and pictures a rosy-faced Welsh woman squirting the cow’s milk straight into a bottle. “Take that to the dairy would you, Babs?” the woman says. “And help yourself to some cheese if you fancy it.”

2011 - Shoreditch, London.

“Sophie, darling!” Genna Wild floats through the dazzlingly bright expanse of the gallery to where Sophie is shrugging off her wet coat. Behind her, rain is falling from a dark, October, London sky.

“You made it!” Genna says, helping her out of the coat and smiling beatifically, as if Sophie is her very favourite person on the planet. “How marvellous!”

“Are you kidding?” Sophie says. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Not even on a revolting evening like this one.”

Genna wrinkles her nose. “It is horrid, isn’t it? Come get yourself a drink. The white is rather special. It sounds German but it’s from Alsace, apparently.”

As Sophie follows her across the room, she takes in the assembled crowd – forty, perhaps even fifty people who have braved the weather to see Arakis’ photographs, or perhaps, like her, bask by association in the glow of his exhibition.

As she reaches the drinks table, she starts to notice the photographs themselves, vast, three-metre black and white prints, mostly of naked women, most of heavily
bound
naked women. To her right, the image is of a woman tied up in an enamel bath, to her left, it shows a nude suspended by rope from a ceiling.

She hates these photos. That is her first reaction, and she tries, as she sips at the wine, to analyse why this is so, tries to decide just how much of her aversion is political and how much is, well, for want of a better word, jealousy. As far as her eye can tell, these are porn shots – technically masterful, beautifully-lit porn shots but porn shots all the same.

“Aren’t they gorgeous?” Genna says, following her regard, so Sophie wrinkles her nose cutely and nods. There’s no point falling out with the owner of one of London’s most successful photography galleries – there’s no point at all.

“Must circulate,” Genna says, turning, then scooting back to the entrance in order to greet a new arrival – a slightly overweight and extraordinarily pale man with round glasses and a very wet, grey-checked suit. “Brett!” she exclaims. “Oh how
wonderful
that you could make it!”

Sophie moves to the right and positions herself in front of a vast photograph of a naked, pregnant woman, bound again with generous quantities of rope.

“Such energy!” a man beside her says as he peers over his half-moon glasses at the photo.

“Yes,” Sophie says, thinking,
Really? Where?

But she must go to these events – she needs to understand what is happening here. She needs, more than anything, to find a way to inject some of this excitement into her own career. But how to do that? How to get people to start randomly eulogising about
her
work? Perhaps one really does need to shock, she thinks. Perhaps she should start tying up men and photographing
them
. That would make a bloody change. But no, too obvious, too derivative. But then, isn’t this?

“Sophie, this is Brett,” Genna, who has reappeared beside her, says. “I don’t think you’ve met, have you?”

Deciding that Genna is palming Mr Blobby off on her, Sophie conceals a sigh and takes Brett’s cold, damp hand in her own and forces a smile. She’s not here to date, she reminds herself. She’s here to network and she knows better than to let her disdain – disdain based on mere physical appearance – show. “Sophie Marsden,” she says.

“Brett Pearson,” the man replies, shaking her hand limply, then letting it go.

Sophie resists the desire to wipe her hand on her dress, then squints at him vaguely. “Brett Pearson,” she repeats. “Now why do I know that name?”

Brett shrugs. “The
Times
, maybe?”

“Ah, that’s right! You’re the new arts correspondent.”

“
Junior
arts correspondent. Yeah.”

“How fabulous,” Sophie says, wincing at her choice of superlative. She mustn't overdo it. She mustn't sound like Genna. It’s important not to appear sycophantic.

“Marsden,” Brett says thoughtfully. “You know, there’s a photographer called Marsden. Well,
was.
Anthony Marsden. You know his stuff at all?”

“Vaguely,” Sophie lies.

“He died way back,” Brett says. “But he was good. A lot of social comment stuff. In the seventies.”

Sophie squints and shakes her head vaguely. “I just, you know, know the name really,” she says.

"So, what do we think of these?” Brett asks, waving his glass towards the photo before them with such largesse that the wine almost slops out.

“I’m not sure,” Sophie says, tracking the sloshing wine from the corner of her eye just in case, and waiting for Brett to provide a cue. “What
do
we think of these?”

“Three words, one letter,” Brett says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, it’s, you know, a game,” Brett explains. “I play it when I’m stuck for an angle for a piece. The first three adjectives that come to mind. But they all have to start with the same letter.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Sophie says. “You go first.”

“Doleful, dysphoric and dirty,” Brett says.

“Ha, OK. I get it.”

“And yours?”

“Um...”

“No hesitation,” Brett says. “That’s the whole point.”

“OK, then... enigmatic, exploitative and, um, empty,” Sophie says. She scans the room to check that Genna is out of earshot, then pulls a face and raises one hand to her mouth, Japanese style. “Did I really just say that?” she asks. “About the great Arakis?”

Brett grins at her strangely. It’s half grin, half sneer, Sophie decides. She’s surprised that she finds it such a sexy combination.

“I kinda know what you mean,” Brett says. “It’s a fine line, I guess.”

“I’m overreacting, probably,” Sophie says. “I just get a little bored with the abused-women-equals-art thing. It just all seems a bit eighties to me. Do you know what I mean?”

“Madonna? Erotica? Feel the pleasure, feel the pain?”

“Exactly!”

“But very much in vogue now,” Brett says. “Ha! Vogue! Did you see what I did there?”

“I did, actually.”

“But what with Fifty Shades of Grey and all...”

“Sorry?”

“Fifty Shades. The S&M novel?”

“Sorry. I don’t read as much as I should.”

“Oh you don’t need to read this one. Unless you’re into that kind of thing. But it’s huge back home and no doubt coming to these shores shortly.”

“I’ll look out for it.”

“Anyway, as far as these are concerned, I’m not sure about exploitative
per se
,” Brett says, as they move on to the next, even more shocking photo. “I mean, she’s a professional model, presumably. No one made her do that shit. She even looks like she’s into it.”

And suddenly, arts correspondent for the
Times
or not, Sophie can’t help herself. “So here we have a woman being paid by a rich
man
to be naked, being paid to be
tied up
naked, being paid, on the photographer’s whim, to let him stick the tail of a plastic dinosaur inside her ...
Inside her!
Oh, and being paid, while we’re at it, to look like she’s, what was it you said? Oh, ‘into it.’ That’s it. And this is
not
exploitation?”

“You’ll have to excuse Sophie,” Genna says, moving between them in what looks like a precise damage-control intervention. “She’s terribly political. Like father, like daughter.”

“Oh, I kinda think she’s right,” Brett says. “But you know, as long as the press chatters, the buyers buy, the punters get hard and the credit card machine keeps spitting out those little slips of paper (he nods here at the terminal in Genna’s hand), then who cares, hey?”

Genna freezes for half a second, clearly unsure how to react, then licks her lips, smiles and laughs. “Brett! You’re terrible!” she says. “Just terrible! Now promise me that you won’t be saying
that
in your write-up.”

“I promise I won’t be saying that in my write up,” Brett repeats, sotto voce. “Any chance of another glass of that white?”

“Of course!” Genna says, taking his arm and physically pulling him away from Sophie. “It is rather gorge, isn’t it?”

Damn,
Sophie thinks.
You screwed that up.

***

“So Genna tells me that Anthony Marsden was your father,” Brett says. “Were you offended that I didn’t know that, or were you just jerking me around?”

“Just... winding you up,” Sophie says, wondering how she ended up leaving the gallery with Brett. Does she find him attractive now, or was it just that third glass of wine? Or even worse, does this have something to do with the fact that he is the arts correspondent at the
Times
. And what if it was a mixture of all of these things? Would that make it OK?

“The rain has stopped,” Brett says, folding his umbrella. “We could walk it instead. If we’re going to my place, anyway. I’m in Hoxton, so it’s, like, ten minutes from here.”

Sophie looks at him and thinks about pretending to be outraged, thinks about saying, “Now why would you even think that I’m coming to yours?” But then he does the smile-cum-sneer thing again – a
leer
, that’s the word – and she hears herself say, “Sure, let’s walk. I like to walk and I’ve been cooped up all day.”

It’s cold and damp but there’s something rather lovely about these early winter nights, something about the reflections of the lights on the wet pavement, about the swishing of the passing cars and the clip-clop of her heels on the pavement, that Sophie can’t resist. London always feels so much more like itself once winter starts to close in, when the streets are shiny with rain.

“And you’re a photographer too, I hear,” Brett says. “That’s some pedigree to live up to, right?”

“Yes,” Sophie says. “But I do fashion shoots mainly. So it’s, you know, a different world.”

“Huh!” Brett says, buttoning the top button of his jacket, folding his collar up against the cold and then yanking on his tie so that it juts out a little more from his collar.

“Huh?”

“Fashion. Just doesn’t really fit with the discourse. About Arakis. I would have expected you to be photographing starving kids or lesbians or something.”

“Yes, well...” Sophie agrees, shocked that Brett has so quickly placed his finger on her weak-spot, the one spot that can actually make her want to cry. “We all have to make compromises, don’t we?” she continues. “And we’re all full of contradictions. It’s part of being human.”

“I guess,” Brett says, doubtfully. “And you don’t carry any equipment?”

“I’m sorry?”

“All my photographer pals have their cameras with them at all times.”

“Oh, I have this,” Sophie says, pulling her Leica compact from her inside pocket, then dropping it back in again. “But I don’t carry the big one around unless I’m actually going on a shoot. Why? Did you want me to photograph you?”

“Maybe,” Brett says, raising one eyebrow and shooting her another cocky leer.

***

His flat is beautiful. They step from a dingy, external walkway that looks like it might feature in a Mike Leigh film, into a vast lounge that is so white, so chic, it almost resembles a gallery.