The Photographer's Wife (47 page)

“I need to chat to
that
guy over there,” Sophie says, nodding towards the man who purchased a print, the man whose name she has already forgotten, “But then I’m out of here. I’m shattered.”

“You want me to wait? So we can share a cab?”

Sophie shakes her head. “Actually,” she says, “would you mind very much if I went to Jon’s place instead?”

“You’re still worried about your ma, huh?”

Sophie shrugs. “A bit. But more, it’s just, well… I kind of feel we need to be together tonight. As a family. Not only for her but for me too. If that makes any sense.”

Brett nods. “Sure. Whatever. You want me to come?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How you gonna get out there, babe?”

“I’ll just get a taxi. I’m too tired to think about anything else.”

“It’ll cost an arm and a leg to get to Surrey.”

“I’m too tired to care about that either.”

“Fair enough,” Brett says. “Your call.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind though?”

“No, that works for me too, to be honest. I still have some work to do on Sunday’s centre spread.”

“I thought that was all done and dusted,” Sophie says.

“Oh, it kinda is. But I had a few ideas tonight,” Brett says. “Nothing major. Just tweaks. You know how it is.”

2013 - Guildford, Surrey.

By the time Sophie gets to Guildford, the entire household is asleep. When she sees the darkened frontage from the taxi, she almost considers returning to London and heading to Brett’s rather than waking them. But after all, she texted that she was coming. She can imagine Judy groaning at the announcement, nagging at Jon to come to bed all the same. Yes, it’s not her fault if Jonathan has become someone who’s asleep by midnight.

She pays the taxi driver and throws stones at the window until a bleary-eyed Jonathan appears at the front door.
They
didn’t see the text, he claims. But
they
don’t mind either. As long as she doesn’t wake Dylan they don’t, at any rate.

He fixes her up with sheets and a blanket – their mother is in with Dylan – and then before returning to bed, kisses her on the top of the head like she was five again.

Sophie lies staring at the lounge ceiling and wishes that she
had
gone to Brett’s instead. She tries to digest the evening’s revelations. That her father had a lifelong mistress. That he was a ‘wild one’. That he partied. That he was perhaps – because she can’t really believe this one – no great shakes as a photographer. That her mother, who she so long resented, was the rock he apparently leaned upon.

Like some barely remembered identikit photo, she’s finding it difficult to picture her father this evening. She’s having trouble creating a cohesive feeling about who he really was as well. And with so much of her own identity, both personal and professional, being tied up with his, she has a worrying sensation of not knowing who she is either. Do the questions over his career make her own limited success more or less of an achievement, she wonders. Perhaps they simply make the limited nature of her success more normal, less unexpected? Is she simply a mediocre photographer from mediocre stock?

Does his infidelity to her mother with Diane, who Sophie occasionally wished
was
her mother, make him a better father to her or a worse one?

What to do with all of this new information, as well? Is there even anyone she can discuss it with? With Jonathan perhaps? With her mother? With Brett?

And what about that other strange sensation, lurking at the back of her mind, that feeling that she has missed something, that she has heard and recorded a major clue, yet has no idea what it relates to, nor any idea how to hunt for it.

A noise awakens her and she rolls over to see a dim glow coming from the kitchen. She pulls the sheet around her like a toga then pads across the deep-pile carpet.

“Mum,” she says gently, from the doorway.

Barbara, who had been peering into the refrigerator, visibly jumps. “Ooh!” she exhales. “Gosh, I didn’t even know you were here.”

“I didn’t want to go home alone,” Sophie says. “Not after all that.”

Barbara nods thoughtfully. “Yes. I know what you mean. Dylan woke me.”

“Is he awake?”

“No. He just made some gurgling noises but it woke me all the same.”

“How come you’re in with him?”

Barbara shrugs. “Judy works in mysterious ways, her wonders to perform.” She waves a carton at her daughter. “Milk?”

Sophie smiles. She literally hasn’t drunk a glass of milk since she left home. “OK,” she says.

They sit on opposite stools at the fold-out kitchen table. They sip their milk in the dim glow from the counter-lights and talk in hushed tones. It feels nice. It feels intimate.

"So, were you happy with it?” Barbara asks.

Sophie nods. “I guess,” she says.

“You don’t sound too sure.”

“I didn’t expect it to be so emotional to be honest, Mum. I didn’t prepare myself enough for that aspect of the whole thing.”

“The worst for me was seeing all his old friends,” Barbara admits.

“Phil and Malcolm? And Janet? All that lot?”

“Janet was OK. She was Dave’s wife and everything but I always liked her. I always felt like she was my friend too. But the rest of them… I never saw them once after the funeral. So that was a bit difficult. That was really hard, actually.”

"Why didn’t you stay in touch?”

Barbara shrugs. “They were your father’s friends, not mine. They wanted to hang out with the big crazy artist, not the big crazy artist’s stay-at-home wife.”

Sophie nods. Though she can now see how cruel this is, she understands. For most of her childhood she felt pretty much the same way.

“Someone told me that
you
were good with a camera,” Sophie says. “In the darkroom too. I don’t think I knew that, did I?”

“Oh, I only dabbled, really. Who told you that?”

“It was Diane, actually.”

“Really,” Barbara says, in a faux-disinterested voice. “Did she, um, say much else?”

“No, not really,” Sophie lies, unsure even as she does so, quite why.

Barbara nods and sips her milk.

“You don’t like her much, do you?” Sophie asks.

Barbara shrugs. “She’s OK, I suppose. If you like those arty types.”

"There isn’t some other reason you don’t like her? There wasn’t some big falling out?”

Barbara frowns. “Not at all. Anyway, what sort of falling out?”

“I don’t know. Just a funny feeling I had.”

“No, we were never that close. And she moved to America
years
ago. So we completely lost touch. I didn’t even know she was still alive.”

“No,” Sophie says. “Right.”

“Anyway, I think I’m going to have another attempt at sleeping now,” Barbara says, standing. “I expect Dylan will have us all awake soon. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“OK.”

“Oh, and well done for the exhibition. I didn’t say anything but I thought it was really very good. And I thought your photos were the nicest of all. By a long shot.”

“Thanks Mum.”

“Night night.”

The next morning, it’s all, “Dylan this,” and, “Dylan that.’ No one mentions the exhibition once. It’s as if it never happened and, after letting Sophie have the briefest of cuddles with her new nephew, Jon and Judy rush off to a meeting with the paediatrician.

After a quiet breakfast, Sophie accompanies her mother to the station. They share a train as far as Clapham Junction where Barbara swaps for the Eastbourne line.

The atmosphere during the journey is strained, as if their inability to discuss the elephant in the room is stealing the oxygen of every other possible subject matter, so Sophie finds herself feeling relieved when their ways finally part.

She is supposed to call into the gallery by lunch time but as she needs to change, she heads home first.

As she inserts her key in the lock, a queer feeling comes over her. She pauses and sniffs the air like a wild animal as she attempts to work out what strange vibration she is picking up.

She wonders, briefly, if she has been burgled in her absence, and scans the door jamb for traces of forced entry before, deciding that her nerves must just be jangled, she opens the door and steps inside.

It’s there again – the strange feeling. She stands on the threshold and scans the room. Everything looks tidy. Everything looks normal. She closes the door behind her.

She makes a cup of tea and, standing looking out of the window, she sips at it, occasionally glancing back into the room, just in case. The sensation that something is wrong, that the air within the room is perhaps the wrong shape, remains.

Once she has finished her tea, she moves to the bathroom where, still peering through the bubbles for hidden assailants, she showers and washes her hair. The powerful jet from the shower-head washes away the feeling and by the time she steps onto the bathmat she has all but forgotten her strange sense of unease.

She wipes clear a patch of the misted mirror and stares at herself. She looks older this morning. Of course, like most women, she often thinks she looks older than she should. When you’re competing with all the Photoshopped beauties on the billboards, it’s impossible to feel any other way. But today, she really does look older. It’s as if she has moved from one of those categories you see on forms to another. No longer 25-44. Now 44-60 perhaps.

“Nothing a bit of makeup can’t fix,” she mutters, attempting to force a positive attitude.

She takes the toothbrush from the mug and applies toothpaste. She raises it to her lips. And then she freezes. Because something really
is
wrong.

The mug is empty, that is all.

The mug is empty. And the mug, which generally contains
two
toothbrushes and a razor, should not be empty.

She opens the bathroom cabinet. Brett’s shaving foam and aftershave have gone too.

She turns and gently opens the bathroom door again, then peers back out at the lounge and this time she can see what is wrong, this time she can see why the space within the room is distorted. Brett’s psychology book has gone. His jumper has vanished. His dope box is missing.

Her heart flutters. She walks, naked, through to the bedroom and opens the wardrobe. Brett’s section is empty.

Barely able to breathe now, she attempts to remember their conversation last night, runs it through her mind word by word looking for any tiny hint of conflict. “That’s mad,” she murmurs.

She returns to the lounge and like a police crime-scene expert, she scans the room anew. It’s too tidy. It’s too empty. And there in the bowl are Brett’s keys. And there on the keyboard is a folded Post-it note.

She crosses to the computer. Sophie, it says, simply. It’s folded in two.

She sighs deeply, looks around the room again, then shakes her head and unfolds the slip of paper.

2013 - Powys, Wales.

Sophie looks out through the spotless windscreen at the rolling countryside beyond. She stares at the pale blue sky, at the rolling hills of green, at this day, somehow familiar, yet entirely unknown, pinned to the cork board of her life forever more. It feels cinematographic, epic even. Some days are like that and you can sense, right from the moment you awaken that they are not going to be like any other day.

She drives well, not too fast and not too slow. She will not add tragedy to this screenplay. She checks the rear-view mirror, indicates and pulls out around the truck. She notes, but tries not to think about, the hundreds of miserable muzzles peeping through the gaps in the crates – tries not to think about the terror of hundreds of imprisoned animals being shipped to a place of destruction. But the thought manifests anyway: why, simply because we can’t understand their screams, is this OK? Perhaps she should become vegetarian. Judy would like that.

“You’re feeling more comfortable with the car now?” Barbara asks from the passenger seat, interrupting her thoughts.

The manoeuvre successfully accomplished, Sophie pulls back in and cancels the indicators. “Yes. it’s fine. It’s just the first half an hour, really,” she says. “After that, it’s just like any other car.”

“Good,” Barbara says, remembering Tony and the Sierra many years before.

They pass a road sign to Llanwrtyd Wells and Sophie points and says, “Isn’t that where I was born?”

“Not quite,” Barbara replies. “You were born in Llanelwedd. They’re all Llan something of other in Wales. It’s probably not that far, though.”

“Maybe we could try to find that cottage you stayed in. That could be fun.”

“Yes,” Barbara says. “I suppose we could, if we could be bothered.”

“It’s funny, really. I mean, that I haven’t been back here since I was born. Not once.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Barbara says. “I was never a great fan of Wales, myself. We always thought being sent to Wales was some kind of punishment. It was a bit of a family joke.”

“You used to threaten
us
with Wales when we were little.”

“I don’t think
I
did,” Barbara says.

“Yes. You did.”

“I would have just been joking. It was because of the evacuations during the Blitz. We didn’t want to be sent away, and your grandmother said we could stay in London as long as we didn’t make a fuss. So any crying or misbehaving, she used to say, ‘Watch it, or it’ll be The Wales for you my girl.’”

“You never told me anything about the Blitz,” Sophie says.

“There’s not that much to tell. Bombs fell. People died. A
lot
of people died. But
we
survived it all.”

“You must have some great stories. The things you saw, the air raids and all of that.”

“I’ve been trying to forget about it most of my life.”

The female voice of the GPS interrupts them. “At the next junction, go, straight on, on A483.”

The stuttering interjection over, Sophie glances across at Barbara. “I suppose that’s understandable,” she says. "And how do you feel about coming to Wales? You don’t feel like it’s a punishment, do you?”