The Photographer's Wife (31 page)

Minnie, her mother, mocks her. “The way you talk to that boy!” she says. “He’s not your bleedin’ husband.”

But Barbara thinks it’s good for him. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating. People are already saying how clever Jonathan is.

“It was during the war,” she continues. “And all the children in London were sent to Wales to escape the bombs. We was – we
were –
ever so happy not to be sent away. And then a friend of mine got herself sent to Wales as well because she had done something a bit naughty. So it became almost like a joke in our family. Aunty Glenda used to tell me, ‘Buck your ideas up, sister, or it’ll be The Wales for you.’ We always called it
The
Wales
.
I don’t know why.”

Jonathan, who has been watching and apparently listening attentively, stares at her blankly now. “I think I prefer London,” he says.

“You didn’t say that yesterday.”

“I did.”

Barbara shakes her head. “No you didn’t. You said the tree house was the nicest place in the whole wide world.”

Jonathan considers this. “The tree house
is
very nice,” he admits. “Can I go and sit in it?”

“Not until it stops raining. It doesn’t have a proper roof.”

“Can we get one from the shop?”

“One what?”

“A proper roof?”

Barbara smiles. “We’ll ask Dad when he gets home if he knows how we can fix it.”

Jonathan frowns. “Until Dad gets a roof for the tree, I think I like London,” he says.

“Why don’t you play with some toys? Why don’t you build something with the Lego?”

“OK,” Jonathan says, climbing down. “What can I make?”

“Make me... a bird!” Barbara tells him.

“A
bird
?”

“Go on. I bet you can do it. You’re ever so good with Lego.”

Jonathan twists his mouth sideways, a facial expression he has learned from Minnie. “A bird is hard,” he says. “But I’ll try.”

Barbara glances up at him between stitches until he settles on the rug with his Lego, and then loses herself in the sound of the rain and the clicking of her knitting needles – in the vague, swirly thoughts that occupy her mind at times like this. She tries to imagine the baby wearing the garment that she’s knitting. It seems barely possible that in a month’s time he or she will be here. She wonders, for the thousandth time, if it will be a boy or a girl. She’ll love either, but she’d secretly like a girl. It seems absurd to want one of each, as if it were a stamp collection not a family. But want one of each, she does.

She wonders how her mother is doing. She wonders if there’s news from the hospital. She’s too scared to think about her mother so she thinks about the baby again. She wonders if the baby will be cute. She wonders if she’ll love her, or
him
, as much as she loves Jonathan. She wonders who the baby will resemble. Jonathan is so much
her
child. Everybody says so. Even now, even here, with her knitting baby clothes and Jonathan making a bird that looks like a train, this is visible. He has none of Tony’s uncontrollable energy. She loves that Jonathan looks like her,
is
like her. But sometimes she wishes someone would tell Tony that he looks like him,
is
like him, just for the purpose of reassuring him.

The rain strengthens – it comes and goes in waves – and it lashes now against the window-pane. Both she and Jonathan look up at the sound. “Dad will be rained on,” Jonathan says.

“You’re right. He’ll be drenched.”

“What’s drench?”

“He’ll be very, very wet. Like when you get out of the bath.”

“Can I play with his camera?” Jonathan asks, apparently bored with the admittedly challenging task of making a bird from Lego.

“You know you can’t,” Barbara replies. But of course, he doesn’t know. Tony has let him peer through the viewfinder at the upside-down world within a few times recently. She thinks this is a mistake. For various reasons, she’s sure this is a mistake. For one thing, it’s an expensive, fragile camera – one they can’t afford to replace. And for two (not that she could ever tell Tony this) she doesn’t want Jonathan “polluted” with any of this photography nonsense. She wants him to grow up learning a proper trade that pays proper money. She doesn’t want him to have to scrabble around for the rent money the way they do. She doesn’t want him peering into an almost empty refrigerator, wondering what he can possibly cook with two potatoes, five green beans, an egg and a slice of bacon (the answer is potato fritters).

Tony doesn’t have the same relationship with money that Barbara has. He has never been bombed out of his house or had to work all night to finish piecework just to put money in the electricity meter. He has never walked to school in shoes so worn that he could sense the temperature of the pavement beneath them. So he doesn’t have her fear of going without. He doesn’t have her terror of being hungry, or cold, or wet. And he’s able, in a perfectly relaxed manner, to suggest that it might be “fun” to take a “gamble” on a new career path.

Barbara sighs and glances at Jonathan who is already dismantling the bird. A gamble. A new career. Just as the family is about to expand. Just as another mouth will need feeding. Minnie told Barbara to just say, “no”, but Minnie overestimates the influence her daughter has on her husband. And she underestimates her daughter’s desire to remain married as well. For that is Barbara’s gamble. That’s her career path.

Yes, as long as they stay together, they’ll be OK. As long as he doesn’t leave them, Jonathan will never have to know the poverty that she grew up in, will never even have to know that such poverty exists. And isn’t doing a little better, from generation to generation, ambition enough?

The front door bursts open and the hunched, glistening form of Tony in a sou-wester (they found it in the woodshed) appears in the doorway. “Bloody hell,” he says, kicking the door closed behind him and dumping a half-full crate of vegetables onto the rough wooden table. “It’s raining like bloody Noah’s Ark out there.”

Barbara raises one eyebrow at the expletive and the other at the failed metaphor. She tries to be careful what she says around Jonathan. He soaks everything up like a sponge and a part of her great plan for him includes the fact that, not only will he never go hungry and not only will he never be cold, but he’ll grow up speaking better too. All the posh jobs go to people who speak properly.

Changing the way she speaks herself hasn’t been easy but she’s getting there for Jonathan’s sake. Putting on “airs and graces,” Minnie calls it, but Barbara doesn’t care, because someone has to do it and, let’s face it, it’s not going to be Minnie or Tony who will make the effort.

“Still no bloody one-twenty film,” Tony says, now hanging his dripping coat on the back of the door. “He said it should come tomorrow though.”

“You can’t really do photography in this weather anyway,” Barbara points out.

“That’s true enough.”

"So, how is she?” Barbara asks. By common accord,
she
doesn’t even get referred to by name anymore. Though that’s strange, Barbara doesn’t want to think about the nature of that strangeness any more than she wants to think about
her
in any great detail. Which is probably selfish of her.

Tony shrugs. “She’s fine,” he says. “Tired. And a bit cold. She couldn’t get the fire going but she’s fine now. Oh, this came for you.” He pulls a soggy envelope from his pocket and crosses to Barbara, who stops knitting to take the letter from his still-wet hand. It’s addressed with her mother’s unique mixture of upper and lower-case handwriting. She places it on the mantelpiece, then resumes her knitting.

“Open it then,” Tony says, crouching in front of their wood-burner, then opening the little door and poking it around.

“Not yet,” Barbara says. “I need to prepare myself.”

“Prepare yourself for what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be such a misery guts. It might be good news. It might be nothing.”

“I know that,” Barbara says flatly. “I’ll open it in a bit. Once
you-know-who
has gone to bed.”

Jonathan, who currently believes that he has two names, Jonathan Marsden and
You-Know-Who
, looks up expectantly.

When his mother fails to address him despite having used his nick-name, he asks, “Mum, can we ask Dad about the roof?”

Barbara smiles weakly. “Jonathan here wants to know if there’s any way to fix the roof in the treehouse.”

“It rains inside,” Jonathan explains. “If it didn’t, I could play in it.”

“You really like that treehouse, yeah?”

The boy nods. “I could live there all the time perhaps,” he says, hopefully.

“You can’t live there
all
the time,” Tony tells him. “But when the rain stops, we’ll see what we can do. We’ll see if we can fix something up.”

Jonathan wrinkles his nose as if Tony has just said the daftest thing that he has ever heard. “If the rain stops, we won’t
need
a roof, stupid,” he says, and Barbara wonders if Tony will get angry at his son for cheeking him like that. But Tony just smirks. “He’s a quick one alright,” he says, proudly.

After dinner, Barbara puts Jonathan to bed, then retrieves the letter, now dry, from the mantlepiece. Tony, who is reading a book about darkroom techniques, has forgotten about the letter, which somehow gives her the space to brave its contents.

When eventually he looks up, he finds Barbara staring at the flames behind the window of the stove, the letter on her lap.

“So what’s the old bird got to say for herself?” he asks.

Barbara takes a deep breath before replying, “I’ll have to go see her.”

“What?”

“It’s cancer, Tony.”

“Don’t be daft.”

“I’m not being daft. It’s what the hospital said. They told her it’s cancer.”

“I mean, you can’t go see her,” Tony says softly.

“I have to.”

Tony puts down the book and crosses the room. He crouches beside his wife and takes her hand. “You
can’t,
Barbara. We talked about this.”

“She didn’t have cancer then.”

“Tony sighs and kisses the back of her hand. “What does she say. Is it bad?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I have to go.”

“But if you go, you’ll have to tell her.”

“Obviously.”

“So you can’t. Just wait a month and...”

“I can’t wait a month.”

“Bloody hell, Barbara,” Tony says. “What if she tells everyone?”

“She won’t,” Barbara says. “She won’t tell a soul.”

2012 - Shoreditch, London.

Sophie wiggles the fingers of her outstretched hand. “Give me that,” she says.

Opposite, Brett is waving a letter around above his right shoulder. “I want to talk to you first,” he says.

“Give it to me!” Sophie repeats, sharply.

“Just calm
down,”
Brett tells her. “We need to have a brief chat and then–”

“That letter is addressed to me. It was just delivered through
my
letterbox. So bloody well hand it over. Afterwards we can talk about whatever you want.”

Brett rolls his eyes and, with a gasp of despair, as if caving in to a three year old, he lowers his arm and proffers the letter. “You’re impossible,” he says as Sophie snatches it from his grasp and crosses to the far side of the room. She throws herself onto the sofa and caresses the envelope. It bears the elegant monicker of
Thames and Hudson Publishing
.

She blows gently through pursed lips, then rips it open and pulls out the letter (top quality, bonded paper – a good sign?) She closes her eyes briefly, then flips open the sheet of paper. “Following our
interesting
meeting...” she mumbles, scanning the dense print. “Blah, blah... offer... Oh!” She turns to Brett now. “Bloody hell! It’s a yes!”

Brett nods serenely and smiles. “Yes,” he says. “I know.”

“How
do you know?”

He shrugs. “I rock, is all.”

Sophie frowns, then turns her attention back to the letter. “Contract to follow... blah blah... standard terms... six percent of cover price, plus, um, reproduction fees to individual rights holders...” Sophie glances up at Brett again. “Six percent. Is that good? It sounds a bit rubbish.”

Brett shrugs again. “It’s at the low end. But it depends what they pay for the image rights. Most of those are yours, so...”

“Mum’s,” Sophie corrects.

“Yes,” Brett says. He clears his throat. “Which brings us rather nicely to the thing we need to talk about.”

“It’s fine,” Sophie says dismissively. “I’ll talk to her.”

“You’ll talk to her,” Brett repeats.

“I’ll explain to her that it’s my project and that she can have a cut, or whatever, of the exhibition proceeds but that the book royalties are mine.”

“Yes. I think you’re forgetting something though,” Brett says.

“Yes?”

“I think you’re forgetting
me.
”

“You?”

“I got you that book deal, Sophie.”

“
We
got that book deal.”

“You almost lost it, in fact,” Brett reminds her. “If I hadn’t called him afterwards to apologise for you–”

“You
what?”

“I phoned him. I blamed it on your highly-strung, artistic temperament. He was very nice about it considering you called him a wanker.”

“Arsehole,” Sophie says.

“What?”

“I called him an arsehole, not a wanker.”

“Oh, that’s fine then,” Brett says.

Sophie can feel the heat of anger mixed with a dash of embarrassment rising from within. She shakes her head and stands and crosses the room to face Brett. “Anyway, how
dare
you contact him!” she says. “You didn’t even tell me about it. Let alone ask me.”

“It was necessary, Sophe. And I knew you wouldn’t like it. What matters here is that I saved the god-darn deal, donchathink?”

Sophie opens her mouth to say something insulting but momentarily regains control of herself and closes it again. "So, how much do you want?” she finally asks. “What’s the going rate for a
sorry about my girlfriend but she’s a hysterical bitch
call these days?”