by Ann Swinfen
The reception seemed to drag on for hours. Tirza felt the muscles of her face growing tired from maintaining a fixed smile and she heard herself repeating the same banal mutters of thanks for the praise the guests seemed to feel bound to bestow on her. After a while she realised that the hired waiters had been topping up her glass of champagne just too often. The next time one passed with a tray she substituted her glass for one of orange juice and clung to it firmly for the rest of the evening. Gradually she managed to back away from the crowd into a corner of the room displaying her pictures of India and Bangladesh, from where she could see Colin and Max dealing expertly with the guests, without any need for her presence. A door behind her led into the hallway. The ladies’ cloakroom was opposite. Tirza retreated thankfully into this sanctuary with her orange juice and a bowl of crisps she found on a table in the hall.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Nina in exasperation when she found Tirza there nearly an hour later, ‘what are you doing in here? Practically everyone has left. Come on, we’re all going off for dinner.’
‘I couldn’t possibly eat any dinner,’ said Tirza. ‘My head is splitting. I just want to go to bed.’
‘Too much booze on an empty stomach,’ said Nina, taking her firmly by the elbow. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat.’
They made their way to Colin’s favourite restaurant in Rose Street – Tirza, Max and Nina, Colin and the gallery staff, and a few of the guests who had lingered to the end and then attached themselves to the party. Tirza sat silent in the midst of their excited chatter, nibbling at her trout with almonds. She felt hungry and yet nauseated by the sight of food.
‘Now, don’t forget your interview tomorrow,’ Max was saying. ‘Nina will put you into a taxi at ten. Or would you like me to come with you?’
‘No, thank you, Max,’ said Tirza clearly. ‘That will not be necessary. And I think I’ll be getting back to my hotel now. I want to get some sleep before making a spectacle of myself tomorrow. Can I pick up a taxi outside here?’
One of the guests stood up as well. Martin... something. ‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my car just round the corner. The North British, is it, where you’re staying?’
Martin’s car was low-slung and sleek and black under the streetlights. Tirza sank down into the seat, which was almost on a level with the pavement. She closed her eyes as Martin started the car and drove off through the empty streets.
It was difficult to climb up out of the car when they reached her hotel, and Martin put a solicitous arm under hers.
‘Thank you,’ said Tirza, a little brusquely. ‘I’m most grateful.’
‘The pleasure was entirely mine,’ said Martin, suddenly and unexpectedly putting his arms around her.
Tirza went rigid. Sweat began to pour down her back and she arched away from him. Then she raised her hands and pushed him hard in the chest. She was breathing fast in short gasps.
‘Hey, no need to get so high and mighty,’ he said in tones of offended arrogance.
‘Take your hands off me,’ said Tirza furiously. She twisted away and ran into the hotel. The man at the reception desk was reading a thriller and looked half asleep. He seemed to notice nothing amiss with her. With a professionally bland smile, he handed her the key to her room, wished her good-night, and turned back to his book.
In her room Tirza threw down her handbag and jacket and kicked off her shoes. The bathroom held a faint scent of good quality hotel soap, and the virginal white towels were mossy thick. She washed her face and hands over and over until she felt clean. Then she sank into the armchair, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking back and forth on the cold imperial damask. Hating herself.
Tirza had been interviewed on radio, off and on, for years, but she had never before agreed to a television interview. Radio interviews were easy. You were shown to a reception area outside a studio, where the interviewer could be seen like an overblown tropical fish behind the thick glass window, kitted up with headphones and mouthing into a microphone. At an appropriate moment, during a break or a record, you were shown in, sat down and did a voice test on the mike – enumerating solemnly what you had eaten for breakfast. A couple of days ago, going through this charade in the local radio studio, Tirza had intoned, ‘Soft-shell crabs, little-neck clams, salted eel bait, two ton of cod.’ The interviewer had not batted an eyelid, fiddled with knobs and said, ‘Let’s try that once more.’
TV was different. She had donned the green suit again and for once had taken the trouble to put on make-up, but as soon as she reached the studio she was whisked away to the make-up room, where they wiped her face clean and started again from the skin up, through several layers. She lost count of how many. Relaxing in the comfortable chair with her head back was deceptive. It almost made her feel she was here to be cosseted, instead of being put on display like a circus animal. They tried to ply her with ‘hospitality’ – gin and tonic, vodka... It was not yet eleven o’clock in the morning. She shook her head; it was still aching from last night.
She was introduced to Mathilda Goldberg, who seemed pleasant enough, though too absorbed and anxious about the programme to show much personal interest in Tirza. For which she was grateful. Then a woman holding a clipboard and various men with their sleeves rolled up fussed around with the position of the cameras and the arrangement of the seating area. It began to get very hot under the lights. The studio audience was admitted and the woman with the clipboard explained proceedings to them. Then suddenly they were on air.
In an instant Mathilda changed from a harassed presenter to a charming hostess, introducing Tirza and talking about the exhibition. The questions were skilful, drawing out Tirza’s reluctant answers, enhancing them. Mathilda smiled easily. Tirza began to relax. She knew that Max had briefed Mathilda not to ask questions about Vietnam, and she did not – or at least not directly. But she skated around the subject, so that Tirza became more and more uneasy.
‘Cambodia. I believe you went there in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict,’ said Mathilda, ‘yet I notice that many of your pictures show peaceful city streets, rather than the killing fields.’
Tirza felt again the strange atmosphere of Phnom Penh, the sleepy French colonial town, lovely with ironwork balconies and heavy with the scent of blossom. It had reminded her powerfully of the old parts of New Orleans. Mathilda Goldberg must have glanced only casually at the Cambodian pictures. Nina said that she had looked in at the private view for about twenty minutes, during the time Tirza was hiding in the ladies’ cloakroom.
Tirza cleared her throat.
‘The war in Cambodia was really an extension of the Vietnam war, not its aftermath. The whole of Indo-China was disintegrating. In fact, events during this last year or so are all part of the same pattern. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge retreat to the jungle.’
She paused.
‘What I was trying to capture, in the pictures of Phnom Penh, was the gradual destruction of what was once one of the most elegant and cultured societies in the world. It was heart-breaking. The Cambodians were a wonderful people – charming, funny, very attractive. Great company.’
Mathilda cocked her head intelligently and expectantly, so Tirza went on.
‘In the third photograph in the sequence you’ll see a very beautiful young girl coming down the steps of a house with a wide veranda. She’s wearing a silk sarong and carrying a paper sunshade. I seem to remember that she was on her way to the Bibliothèque Nationale. She was the daughter of a local doctor. Much further on in the Cambodian sequence – amongst what you might call the “killing field” photographs – you will see several that look as though they were taken at a demolished factory.’
Tirza stopped. The scene sprang up so clearly before her that she could smell the foul odour of burnt flesh and explosives. The wall of one of the buildings had collapsed behind her just after she had taken the last picture.
‘It was, in fact, a fine
suburb of the town – after Pol Pot’s soldiers had razed much of it to the ground during the final siege. The crowds being herded down the street were the inhabitants of Phnom Penh, driven out of the city to work as slaves in the countryside, where most of them died. In one of the pictures there’s a gaunt woman with a terrible scar down her face, dressed in rags. It’s the same girl. She had been taken prisoner the previous year. The village where her family had a country house fell to the Khmer Rouge. She was forced at gunpoint to become one of their army whores, till she caught syphilis. The scar was a knife slash from an over-enthusiastic client. After that she had no way left to survive but by begging. For me that girl – she was only nineteen in the second photograph – says everything that needs to be said about war.’
Mathilda gaped at her. She fumbled for a question, forgetting her carefully prepared script.
‘Tell us about how you started as a photographer. How old were you, and what was your first camera?’
It was an innocent enough question, and Tirza should have seen it coming. She felt as though she had been kicked in the stomach. Max knew he was supposed to warn people not to ask questions about her childhood. She cleared her throat.
‘My first camera was a Box Brownie. I guess that was most people’s first camera in the forties. I was just going on thirteen.’
‘Did you buy it yourself?’
‘No,’ said Tirza with difficulty. ‘No. It was given to me. By a British airman who was convalescing near my home after being rescued at sea. He left Maine soon afterwards and I never knew what became of him.’
By nine o’clock the next morning Tirza was driving north towards Perth. She had rolled down the windows and opened the roof, and from the spring-warmed Fife countryside an interwoven fabric of scents floated in – newly ploughed earth, young leaves and the distant salt-scent of the sea – filling her with a heady sensation almost like the beginning of joy. She had left the city behind with thankfulness, and with it the tensions of the last week and a half. The same sense of escape lifted her spirits as when she had run down the path from school after it closed for the summer. She had arisen from her tangled bed before seven, showered, thrown her belongings into a suitcase and gone down to breakfast. While eating she had dashed off quick notes to Max and Colin, saying (not altogether truthfully) that she had been called back to the island urgently. Colin might believe her. Max would not, but would be resigned, as always, to what he regarded as her eccentric behaviour. Sometimes she wondered why he continued to act for her. Certainly his commissions had been substantial in the past, though he had not earned much recently. She suspected he felt towards her the same tender but irritated responsibility he would have felt towards a wayward child.
Setting up the exhibition had been a strangely unsettling experience and one she had not as yet come to terms with. During the difficult evening of the private view she had begun to feel that it somehow diminished her work. Classified, listed, displayed, it became too cold, too analytical. It endeavoured to make coherent sense of the incomprehensible, the instinctive and the intuitive after which she had been striving all these years.
Just before she had retreated from view during the party, she had overheard two women discussing a photograph of a girl, aged about ten, whom she had photographed in Calcutta when Tirza herself was already in the first, feverish stages of malaria.
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ one of the women had said.
‘Yes, Tirza Libby certainly has a talent for bring out the charms of the world’s down-and-outs, hasn’t she? You might almost see a child like that in your own street.’
‘Well, not quite!’
And they had laughed.
Tirza had photographed the girl on a day of searing heat as she stood patiently outside the railway station. Like many of the child beggars, she had been deliberately maimed by her elders to elicit the sympathy of the passers-by. Her leg had been broken and allowed to set at a distorted angle, and two fingers had been cut off her left hand. Tirza had given her food – not money, which would have been taken away from her immediately by the adults. And she had waited until the child had eaten it, aware that somewhere nearby they were being watched. The girl had looked at her with a curious mingling of gratitude and dignity, and expressed her thanks with a stiff little bow which Tirza returned.
The crass comments of the women seemed to sum up for her the underlying frustration of the exhibition. Sweet? The maimed child was herself, and she was the child, and neither of them was sweet.
6
Maine: Spring 1942
Martha Halstead made her way to Maine by train with her five-year-old son Billy. It was a hot and maddening journey. Their departure from Washington was delayed because a troop train was scheduled to leave first, and several politicians were due to come and see it off. The official cars had been held up by a snarl of traffic. Everyone waited. The station, packed fuller than at the start of the school summer vacation, grew airless. Every seat was taken and GIs put their kit-bags down anywhere they could find a piece of wall to lean against, and fell asleep – their mouths hanging open and the sweat patches spreading on their uniforms. Passengers arriving for later trains fell over the sprawling legs, clamoured for Cokes and coffee at the food stalls and used up more of the air.
When a man got up from a seat on a bench to go and complain to one of the station officials, Martha seized the space just ahead of an elderly woman with a stick. She fixed her gaze on the ceiling, ignoring the woman and trying to keep Billy on her lap. He squirmed and protested that he was too big to sit on her lap, that he wanted a seat of his own, why couldn’t he have a seat of his own? He glared balefully at the woman sitting next to Martha, who had propped her swollen legs up on her suitcase. To make his point, Billy began to kick Martha’s shins with his heels.
At last the politicians arrived, accompanied by newsreel cameras. The train departed to the playing of a dispirited band, and the crowds thinned a little. Martha’s train left an hour and a half late, which meant she missed her connection in New York and had to wait another two hours there. Billy demanded more and more Kool-Aid, then wet his pants and was outraged when she changed him in the women’s washroom. Martha longed grimly for her maid, Lulu-May. She had handed over the insalubrious parts of Billy’s care to Lulu-May when he was three weeks old, and she had never had to deal with anything like this before. She had wanted to bring Lulu-May to Maine with her, but her maid had been surprisingly determined not to come.
‘I’m sorry, Miz Martha, but my mommy is hankerin’ for me to go back home. My sister has gone and got herself in trouble, and the baby’s due in three weeks. And there’s nine of my brothers and sisters still at home, and the youngest ain’t but three. My mommy wants for me to get a day job in Charleston and help her the rest of the time. I’se just goin’ home like you is, Miz Martha.’
Offers of better pay and shorter hours could not move her. Now, rolling Billy’s sodden clothes up in a ball and stuffing them down in a corner of his suitcase with distaste, Martha reflected that at least she could pass him over to her mother at the end of the journey. Harriet would not mind the dirty jobs associated with a child. Not after some of the things she had to do on the farm. Martha still wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, going back to Maine, but she had felt trapped, living in their latest apartment with Billy. If things didn’t work out she would look for somewhere else to wait out the time till Will came back and they could pick up the easy, sociable life they had had to put aside for the war.
She unwrapped a piece of Lux soap from her purse and washed Billy’s hands and her own, fastidiously, then dried them on a small towel. Everything felt dirty – the seats in the station, the handles of the faucets, the air itself. After wrapping the soap in greaseproof paper and stowing it with the towel in her purse, she gathered up their luggage and steered Billy out into the waiting room again. It had been Lulu-May’s idea to bring the soap and towel. The girl was no fool. But she had behaved like one in giving up he
r job.
By the time they had waited again in Boston and taken the last train up to Portland, it was dark and Billy had, blessedly, gone to sleep. Martha looked out of the window as the train pulled into Union Station and saw her father standing under a dim dangling bulb. The relief at the thought of handing over responsibility warmed her to him, despite the fact that he had come to meet her in his dungarees and working boots.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, brushing his stubbled cheek briefly with her smooth one. ‘We’ve got three suitcases with us. I sent a trunk on ahead. Did it get here?’
‘Ayuh. Yesterday.’
Martha frowned briefly, but held her tongue. She had lived away from Maine dialect long enough to be ashamed of it. Tobias gripped the smallest case under his arm and picked up the others in either hand.
‘I’ve got the pickup out front.’
‘Haven’t you got a real car yet? Honestly, Dad.’
‘No place for a car on a farm, Martha. You know that. Don’t have enough gas to run the truck and the tractor as ‘tis.’
He did not mention that he had been stuck in Portland for five hours waiting for her, without gasoline to go home and come back. Five wasted hours when he could have been getting on with the spring ploughing and the milking.
Billy was tugging at his mother’s skirt and whining.
‘I wanna go home, Mom. Can’t we go home?’
Martha took him by the hand and began to lead him towards the waiting Ford truck.
‘I don’t want to go in that truck,’ said Billy on a rising shriek. ‘I want to go in a car.’
‘Come on, now, Billy boy,’ said Tobias with an attempt at cheerfulness. ‘You can sit with Mom and Grandpa up front. We’ll be home in no time. Grandma’s got a bite of supper ready and then you can have a sleep in your bed with the striped cover. You remember. Tomorrow you can see the new foals – two baby horses.’
