The Photographer's Wife (8 page)

“Are you actually getting teary there?” he asks.

“Yeah, a bit. It’s strange,” Sophie says. “I don’t think that ever happened to me before. Not with a picture.”

Brett nods. “He’s one clever dude,” he says, then, “Take a shot of these too, will you? The whole wall. I’ll be next door.”

As Sophie walks towards the wall of smaller (but still large) woodland scenes, she glances over her shoulder at the autumn panorama again. “That’s extraordinary,” she murmurs.
I wonder how you could do something that awe-inspiring in photography,
she wonders. Only the vast photos of Andreas Gursky come close and they’re huge too. So maybe scale has everything to do with it. Perhaps if you blew up a simple photo of a face to thirty square meters, it would suddenly become art.

“Come on!” Brett is poking his head back through the doorway. “We only have half an hour, remember?”

As they continue around the exhibition, the sensation of being moved, of being emotionally destabilised, comes again and again and Sophie is able to analyse it further. It’s the same feeling she’s had once or twice when, lacking in sleep, she’s been up early enough to see a beautiful sunrise. Something about being overwhelmed, just momentarily, by the beauty of existence. Could it really be within the power of these Hockney paintings to do this to her, or is something more happening here? Is it perhaps because she’s here with Brett? Is she finally falling in love?

“Wow,” she mutters, when in another room, she wobbles on her feet in front of the fifteen metre rendition of the Grand Canyon, as she struggles as if suffering from actual vertigo to remain standing.

As they leave, only half an hour later, (Brett has an article to pen before midnight) they cross paths with a posh, frumpy female journalist and her twenty-something bearded photographer. Brett air-kisses them both.

“Any good, Brett, darling?” the woman asks and Brett just shrugs and says, “Enjoy!”

Outside in the crisp, January evening, Sophie asks, “Who were those two?”

“
Telegraph
,” Brett says, buttoning his overcoat.

"So, the enemy?”

“Kind of.”

“Why did you shrug when they asked what you thought? You did like it, didn’t you?”

Brett shrugs again. “I haven’t got an angle yet. And if I did have one, I wouldn’t tell those assholes.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Sophie says. “One of the most beautiful exhibitions I have ever seen.”

“Sure. But
beautiful,”
Brett says, in a soppy, mocking voice, “isn’t an angle.”

“It was too big for me,” Sophie says, shaking her head. “I couldn’t take it all in. At least not in half an hour.”

“Now that,” Brett says, “is an angle.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Too Big A Picture
,” he says, with a wiggle of an eyebrow. “Geddit?”

Sophie rolls her eyes. “Yeah. I geddit. And I’m freezing out here.”

“Food?” Brett asks, glancing at his watch.

“Sure, I’m hungry.”

“Dolada?” he asks, nodding across the street. “I don’t have too much time.”

“Sure,” Sophie says, starting to walk. “I could have spent all day in there. You will give it a good write-up, won’t you?”

“Maybe. Probably. It’s all about working out what people want to read.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. Hockney’s amazingly lucky as well,” Brett says. “That’s the first time the Royal Academy has ever given the entire place to a single artist.”

“And while he’s alive too.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Well, retrospectives are usually reserved for dead artists, aren’t they? It’s pretty rare for it to happen when they’re still alive.”

“It’s not technically a retrospective,” Brett says, as they cross the pavement towards the cosy glow of the restaurant. “A lot of that stuff’s brand new. But yeah, I guess. Did anyone ever organise one for your father?”

“A retrospective?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No,” Sophie says thoughtfully. “Maybe we should.”

“Yes, maybe you should,” Brett repeats, with meaning.

When they enter the restaurant, Brett’s glasses steam up so completely that he is rendered momentarily blind, so Sophie grinningly leads him to the table the Maitre d’ is indicating.

“It’s weird no one ever put together a Marsden retrospective, really,” Brett says, once he has polished his glasses and the menus have been handed to them.

Sophie shrugs. “No one even suggested it. And it’s hardly Mum or Jon who are going to organise something like that.”

“Because?”

“Well, Mum’s pretty old now. And she was always a bit of a heathen to be honest.”

“A heathen?”

“That’s probably not the right word. I just mean that she’s not very arty.”

“Oh, OK. And your brother?”

“He’s a quantity surveyor. So he has no interest in art either.”

“Which is weird. Coming from your background.”

Sophie nods thoughtfully. “Dad was pretty low-key about it. And they kept Jonathan well away from the art business. Mum wanted him to have a proper reliable career. And so he did. Very sensible, my brother.”

“But not you?”

Sophie shrugs. “I was pretty determined,” she says. “And I wouldn’t say that I
am
in the art business really.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet,” she agrees.

“Fiorentina,” Brett says.

“I’m sorry?”

“Pizza Fiorentina,” he explains, folding the menu shut. “Spinach and egg. Can’t beat it. Then home to write
Too Big A Picture.”

During the meal, Brett chatters about his own family: his father the banker, his mother who runs a whole-food store in the East Village, Connie, his sister, now married to an evangelical Christian in Wyoming. But Sophie is only half-listening, because her mind is buzzing with the idea of an Anthony Marsden retrospective.

It’s not until the bill has been paid and they are walking home along sparkly, frosted streets that she mentions it again. "How much interest would there be, do you think? In a Marsden retrospective?”

Brett laughs.

“What?”

“I just knew we’d be revisiting that one,” he says.

“And?”

“How much media interest, d’ya mean?”

“I suppose.”

“Quite a lot, I guess. You’d need some really mega Hockneyesque prints of some of his famous shots.”

“The summer of seventy-six, the abortion demo, stuff like that?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d have to contact the rights owners. A lot of them belong to the
Mirror
or the
Times
.”

“And a batch of stuff people have never seen. You’ll still have rights to those.”

“That might not be so easy, actually.”

“Really?”

“Mum burned them all.”

“Really?!”

“Actually, no that’s not true. But she did destroy some. All the stuff from the Pentax tour went up in flames. You never heard that story?”

Brett shakes his head.

“Pentax sponsored him to do a big show. In the eighties. But he died halfway through the shoot and Mum lost the plot and burned everything.” Sophie slips on the icy pavement and Brett grabs her arm and pulls her upright. “Careful there,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“That’s interesting,” Brett says, “about the Pentax tour.”

And Sophie can hear in his voice a different tone, the tone of Brett the journalist. “It’s not a scoop, Brett,” she explains. “The story was all over the papers at the time.”

“Oh,” Brett says, sounding disappointed.

“But Mum has boxes of other photos and negatives and stuff. Jon has some too. So I’m sure we could find some good stuff.”

“I guess you need to start there,” Brett says. “See if there’s enough material.”

“Could we get someone big interested, do you think? The R.A. or the National Portrait Gallery, or the V and A?”

“Possibly,” Brett says. “He was a big name. It would help, of course, if you knew someone at a major newspaper who could help you publicise it...”

“Like someone at the
Times
?”

“Like someone at the
Times
,” Brett says, with a wink. “But again, it depends on the work you can put together. And it would be a big old game to organise it all.”

Just in front of them, a cab is dropping someone off. Brett starts to walk faster. “Shall we jump in this one?” he asks.

“Yes,” Sophie replies. “This pavement’s lethal.”

Once they are seated and on the move, Sophie says, “I suppose that’s the problem. It’s loads of work and there’s no money in it.”

“You’d have to get a sponsor. Maybe talk to Pentax again.”

Sophie snorts. “Pentax wouldn’t go near it with a bargepole. He died, remember. The return on their investment was nil once Mum had burned the photos.”

“Someone else then. And you’d have to budget in a salary for yourself to cover running the whole thing.”

“Right...” Sophie says, vaguely.

“Of course,” Brett adds, smiling wryly, because he knows that this is the elephant in the room that Sophie has been pretending to ignore. “Ideally you could find a way to link your own work into the mix, make it a father-daughter thing and use it to launch your new career as an arty-farty Milly Colley lookalike. So that could make it worthwhile.”

“You reckon?” Sophie asks, as if the idea is only now crossing her mind.

Brett just laughs and rolls his eyes.

1950 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Barbara awakens to the screeching of seagulls and momentarily can’t work out where she is. She rubs her eyes and looks up at the unfamiliar, pale-blue ceiling, then across the room at Glenda, sleeping in the single bed beside her.

And then she remembers: she’s on holiday. She smiles to herself and stretches with cat-like contentment. It’s the first time in her entire sixteen-year life that she has been on holiday and though they only arrived by train late last night, she’s already loving the sensation of a different bed with different sounds. She thinks about getting up to look outside but instead falls asleep again. Lie-ins are rarely permitted at home.

When she awakens next, the sun is streaming in through the salt-splattered bay window and Glenda, wrapped in her dressing gown, is silhouetted against the blue sky beyond.

“Morning,” Barbara says, through a yawn.

Glenda turns her head to look back at her. She looks puffy and indistinct without her makeup but also a little less severe, a tad more friendly.

“It’s a lovely day,” Glenda says. “I think I’d like to go swimming. Before breakfast. What do you reckon?”

“Ooh! Yes!” Barbara says, sitting sharply upright. “Let’s do that!”

There isn’t a single cloud in the sky as they cross the main road from the Sea View (No Vacancies) and descend the few steps to the pebble beach. “Will it be cold, do you think?” Barbara asks.

“Freezing,” Glenda says. “But I don’t give a damn.”

“Me neither.”

Barbara swivels her head to take in the vista: the sun rising to the left, the vast, empty pebble beach before them, the pier to the right... It’s all so crisp, so clean, so refreshing after London. A simple change of vista can, she is discovering, make you feel like a completely different person.

They remove their dresses revealing the one-piece swimming costumes they wriggled into before leaving, then linking hands, they run shrieking across the painful pebbles and into the murky, green water. It is indeed freezing. The morning dip is short-lived but exhilarating.

After a fried breakfast complete with bitter, over-stewed tea and watered down orange juice, the sisters head back out and walk along the seafront in the direction of the pier.

“I love the seaside,” Barbara announces. “I think I’d like to live here one day.”

“I know what you mean,” Glenda replies. “But I think you’d get bored. There’s lots more to do in London that in Eastbourne.”

“I suppose,” Barbara says, even though she can’t think of a single thing that she would prefer to “do” in London than simply being here today.

Halfway along the pier, just after the candy-floss booth with the organ music, they are approached by a young, blond beach photographer. “Come on girls,” he says. “You’ve got to have a picture to take home to Mum.”

And because he’s about her age and good looking with it, (Barbara loves men with beards and they’re pretty rare in 1950s England) she asks, “How much?”

“For you lovely ladies, a shilling,” the man says. “And I’ll take three for the price and let you choose your favourite. I promise you’ll look like film stars.”

“A shilling!” Glenda laughs. “We can get lunch for that.”

“Oh, come on,” Barbara pleads, looking into the photographer’s blue eyes. They seem to contain a hidden smile. “It’ll be a present for Mum when we get back.”

“We can’t afford it,” Glenda says. “You know we’ve got just enough for the—”

“Please?”
Barbara pleads.

“Sixpence, then,” Glenda says, addressing the man. “Not a penny more.”

The man’s mouth slips into a cute grin.

“And we get to keep all three photos,” Glenda adds. “They’re of no use to you anyway.”

“All-right, all-right,” he says. “You drive a hard bargain girls but because you’re both so gorgeous, I’m gonna let you have what you want.”

Once the photos have been taken – two leaning against the railings with the wind blowing Glenda’s hair around and one posing with a fake, full-sized bull (thoughtfully provided for this exact purpose) – the man hands the girls his card, then, as an afterthought, tags along as they start to walk along the pier.

“Did anyone ever tell you, you look like Claudette Colbert?” he asks Barbara.

She senses that she is blushing as she replies, “No, no one ever did, actually.”

“Don’t listen to his smooth talk,” Glenda tells her. “He’s only after a bit of slap and tickle. They all are.”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t mind,” the man says, shockingly, making Barbara blush again. “But you really
do
look like Claudette Colbert. It’s uncanny.”

Barbara glances at Glenda and smiles coyly. “Do I?” she asks, and Glenda just pulls a face.

“Can I take your photo over there?” the man asks, pointing to a bench seat in a small wooden shelter. “The light’s lovely over there.”