“Well, I didn’t know at the beginning.” Barbara shrugs. “Anyway, I’ve explained as best I can. You’re probably just a bit in shock. We all are.”
"There wasn’t some other secret? There’s nothing else going to jump out of the closet at me? I mean, say Brett tracks everyone down and interviews them all and everything. And he probably will do that. You’re not Diane’s secret sister or something? That really is everything, is it?”
Barbara fiddles with a box of matches on the coffee table, pushing it around with one finger like a toy car. She senses that Sophie is on the verge of figuring it all out. She thinks that even if she doesn’t, then it’s true, Brett just might. All he’d have to do would be to get Diane drunk. To get Diane drunker. So perhaps she should tell her. Even though they all swore that they would never tell anyone, perhaps the time has come.
Tony, Minnie, Glenda… they all took that secret to the grave. Only she and Diane remain to tell the story of how their lives got tied together forever. And they swore it should never be told.
“There is something, isn’t there?” Sophie says.
Barbara sighs deeply. There’s still time, she can still obfuscate here. She could tell her some minor part of the whole thing to put her off the scent. She could tell her about the true contents of the photos from Paris for example. Or she could tell her about the drugs. Either would do the trick.
Then again, she could tell Sophie the one thing that might make sense to her – the one thing that might help her to understand who she is. Because though people these days like to pretend that everything is about how you bring children up, Barbara knows that it isn’t. She can see – has always been able to see – just how much of it comes down to genes.
“Mum?” Sophie prompts.
“Well, there is perhaps one other thing,” Barbara says.
1969 - Llanelwedd, Wales.
Barbara sits, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She watches the door to the cottage. She waits. Beside her the fire sizzles and splutters. The wood is damp. The room is damp. Beyond the door she can hear the rain falling, always falling.
Other than a brief trip to her mother’s bedside, she hasn’t been out of this horrible house for months. Other than her mother, her sister, Tony and Jon, she hasn’t spoken to anyone for months. She’s on the verge of insanity. She can feel it lingering around her, waiting to take over. But it will soon be over. And it will soon be worth it.
She never wanted anything more than this.
Just after five, the door to the cottage finally opens and Barbara inhales sharply then holds her breath.
Tony stands in the entrance, silhouetted against the dim daylight beyond. Behind him, water falls in sheets from the blocked guttering. He seems hesitant to step into the room.
“Tony?” Barbara says. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he says, then, “It’s a girl.”
He steps inside and kicks the door closed behind him, then crosses and crouches down beside Barbara.
She leans across and pulls back the swaddling. She inhales sharply. “God, Tony, she’s beautiful!” she says, tears unexpectedly welling up.
Tony nods and sniffs. “I know,” he says, his voice croaky.
He hands over the baby and Barbara takes her in her arms, fiddling already, to unwrap the blanket.
“She’s fine, Barbara,” Tony tells her, his voice struggling against the emotion of the moment.
“I know. But I need to see for myself,” Barbara replies, lifting the baby free and allowing her blurred vision to roam over every tiny detail of her.
“You see?” Tony says.
“Yes. She’s huge compared with Jonathan,” Barbara says, swiping at her eyes with the back of one hand.
The child screws up her features and starts to cry, so Barbara stands and crosses the room to wrap her in a new, fresh blanket. She doesn’t know why but she needs to do this, she needs to get rid of this other blanket, the blanket that she came in.
“Jonathan was early,” Tony reminds her. “Sophie’s right on time. Are we still going with Sophie?”
“Yes,” Barbara says. “Yes, I think so. Is she OK?” She nods towards the second cottage.
“Diane? Yes, she’s fine. She’s knackered but fine.”
“And she’s still OK about this? She hasn’t changed her mind?”
Tony shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Have you?”
“Of course not. Do you need to get back to her?” Barbara asks. She feels an urgent need to be alone with the baby.
“The midwife’s still there,” Tony says. “So I’m OK for a bit.”
“And Jonathan?”
“He won’t be back till late. Mrs Llewellyn said she’d bring him back at sunset.”
“And you’re sure she doesn’t know either?”
“No one knows, Barb. No one except us. And the midwife, of course. But she won’t say anything. She’s paid not to say anything.”
Barbara nods gently and rocks the baby at the same time. “I think I should get into bed before Jonathan arrives,” she says.
“Yes,” Tony agrees. “That’s a good idea.”
“You should go. You should make sure she’s OK.”
“Alright,” Tony says. “If you’re sure you’re OK?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Barbara replies. “That was the easiest childbirth ever.”
By the time Mrs Llewellyn brings Jonathan home, Barbara is in bed without makeup and Sophie is sleeping beside her.
“Come and meet your little sister,” she tells him, and Jonathan sidles across the room. “She’s very wrinkly,” he says, peering in.
“Babies are very wrinkly.”
“Did I look like that?” he asks, disdainfully.
“Yes,” Barbara says. “Yes, you looked exactly like that.”
And it’s true. They have remarkably similar features. Barbara struggles to push the comparison from her mind. Because the fiction that they have created here, the thing she has pretended to believe, the great untruth they have all, for different reasons, decided to act out, namely that the father of this baby is Diane’s ex boyfriend Richard, requires that she never look for resemblances. Ever.
–––
Postscript. 1968 - Lambeth, London.
Tony struggles to open his eyes. His eyelids seem, in his sleep, to have been pasted shut with some kind of glutinous gunk. He rubs his fists against them, then tries to open them again. The desolation of the room comes slowly into focus.
He works his mouth and then manages to call for Diane but there is no answer.
Still having difficulty focussing, he looks around the room and remembers why he feels so bad. They have been partying for two days. The ash trays are full and the remainders of joints have burned fresh holes in the carpet. Emptied, crushed beer cans lie around. Dirty plates fill the gaps. His jumper, new for Christmas, is lying on the floor in front of him. It is stained with vomit.
In search of Diane, who could still be out for the count, he rolls to the other side. The rest of the room is strewn with rubbish as well: more plates, empty crisp packets, records without sleeves, sleeves without records, three remaining tabs of LSD and a half-smoked joint.
Right next to him is the cover of Led Zeppelin II, one side of which he now remembers they played in a loop for almost twenty-four hours. Diane must have switched off the record player. So she’s up and alive then. A few grains of coke are strewn across the record cover and he dabs at them with one finger, then rubs it into his gums. He pulls a face at the bitter, numbing taste of the drug. He could do with a boost this morning. He could do with a bit more of a boost than this. But the only remaining drug is LSD and that won’t help him get straight. It won’t help at all.
Diane enters the room from the bathroom. She is naked except for a towel wrapped around her middle. Her hair is wet. “Hello, you’re back in the land of the living then,” she says. She sounds miserable.
“Um,” Tony says. “I feel ter
rible though.”
“Me too.”
She sits cross-legged in front of him. He can see beneath the towel and he guesses that, knowing Diane, this is intentional. But he feels too rough to care, too hungover and sick and fluey to be interested in any way in anything that she has to offer this morning.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Diane says, biting her bottom lip in an approximation of cuteness.
“Not now, Di,” Tony says. “Whatever it is—”
“I’m pregnant,” she announces.
Tony blinks exaggeratedly.
“I am. I’m pregnant,” she repeats.
Tony laughs sourly. “You’re pulling my plonker,” he says.
Diane reaches for a packet of Chesterfield to her right and pulls one out with her lips, then lights it from her Zippo lighter. It wobbles up and down as she speaks. “No, I really am pregnant,” she says.
Tony groans, grimaces and finally manages to sit up straight. “You can’t be. We were careful.”
“I think maybe we weren’t one time. When we were out of it.”
Tony stares into her eyes and even though he knows that this is true, knows, even, that it wasn’t just one time, he says, “I don’t think so. It can’t be mine.”
“It is,” Diane says. “There’s been no one else.”
Tony sniffs, clears his throat, and then pushes the stained jumper away from him. He can smell it from here and it’s making him feel queasy. “Are you sure?” he asks.
Diane nods. “Totally,” she says.
Tony shakes his head. “Well, how bloody stupid is that?”
“Don’t say that. I thought you’d say–”
“What?” Tony interrupts. “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah? What a wonderful day?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might be glad.”
“Glad?” Tony says, now struggling to control his anger. “Glad?!”
“But it’s our baby, Tony,” Diane says. “It’s…”
Tony is standing. He’s hunting for his missing shoe.
“You’re not going?”
“Yes, of course I’m going. I have to work.”
“But I just told you something really important. You can’t go, babe. I just told you I’m pregnant.”
“Just… just don’t talk to me Diane,” Tony says. He pauses and turns to look at her. His face is red. He looks angry. He looks really angry. “I mean, h… how?” he splutters. “How the hell could you even think of doing that, Diane? How?”
Diane’s eyes are beginning to glisten. “Don’t say that, Tony,” she says. “You did it too. And we’d be good together. We are good together, you and me. You know we are.”
Tony gestures at the room. “Look around you,” he spits. “Look at the bleeding mess. This is what you and me would be like together. This is what we are like together. And you want to bring a kid into this? You don’t even like kids. Christ!” He taps at the side of his head. “You’re out of your mind, woman.”
“But you don’t love Barbara,” Diane says, standing now and letting her towel slip to the floor. “You’ve never loved her. Not properly. It’s me you love. You said so. You told me. That’s why I thought maybe…”
Tony kneels to peer under the sofa. “Where’s my shoe?” he asks. “Where is it? And Barbara, for your information, is the only decent idea I ever had.”
In search of the shoe, he limps to the bathroom where he suddenly realises he needs, urgently, to pee. This done, he returns to the lounge and holds out one hand. “Give me my shoe,” he says. “I know you’ve got it.”
Diane, now sitting cross legged in an armchair, shakes her head. Her expression is cold, calculating. “Not till you tell me you’re going to leave her,” she says.
“What?” Tony asks, incredulously. “What? Oh, you’ve hidden my shoe. You win! I’ll divorce my bloody wife? You really have lost your marbles, haven’t you?”
“You can’t expect me to have it on my own,” Diane splutters.
“I don’t expect you to have it at all.”
“I can’t abort.”
“Er, actually, you can. And if you don’t give me my shoe, I swear I’ll bloody–”
“I’m Catholic,” Diane says. “You know that.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m Catholic. I can’t abort.”
Tony gasps. “You? Catholic?” he says. “That’s news to me. It’ll be news to the bloody Pope as well. Catholic? Honestly!”
Diane starts to cry now. The tears form and tumble down her cheeks and neither does she wipe them away, nor does she turn her face to hide them. She wants Tony to see this. She wants him to share the pain. She wants him to change his mind.
“Don’t…” Tony says. “Stop crying, Diane. Stop bloody crying. You know I can’t stand it when you cry.”
But the softening of his voice only encourages her. She lets herself weep ever more freely. And when she reaches the peak of what genuine tears will allow, she adds a few manufactured sobs into the mix. Soon enough, Tony has given up searching for the shoe, which she knows, because she hid it there, is beneath a cushion. Soon, he is kneeling at her side, his forehead pressed to hers, his arms around her shoulders.
Later, when she has cried herself out, when she can no longer even force out fake tears, when the last joint has worn off and the alcohol in her system begins to vanish, they talk more reasonably.
“We’ve been really silly, haven’t we?” Diane says.
“Yeah,” Tony agrees. “We really have. And you know I can’t leave Barbara. You always knew that.”
“I don’t think I even want you to, to be honest,” Diane says. “I don’t think I’m made for washing and ironing and mending socks.”
“Or bringing up a kid.”
Diane sniffs. “Or bringing up a kid,” she agrees. “I really can’t abort, though.”
“Honestly Diane. What are you gonna do with a kid? You hate bloody kids. You know you do.”
“I know. But I can’t abort. It’s just instinct.”
“But think about it. Think about bringing up a little’n on your own. Like I said, look around.”
Diane surveys the devastation of the room. The cold light of day is streaming through a gap in the curtains throwing the dirt and jumble of the room into stark relief. She shrugs. “I could clean up my act, maybe?”
“Yeah. Maybe you could. But would you want to? You? Really?”
Diane groans. “I’ll get it adopted then,” she says.
Tony laughs.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just the irony of it all,” he says.
“Irony?”
“Yeah. Barbara’s banging on about adoption. Because she can’t, you know, have any more. And you’re the one who gets bloody pregnant.”
Diane shrugs. “There’s your answer then,” she says quietly.
“Where?”
Diane doesn’t reply. She simply nods upwards with her chin as if the answer is just behind him.
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment as he tries to work out what she means, then exhales despairingly and says, “You know, you really need to cut down on the pot, Di. You really, really do.”
“But think about it.”
“Just try to be logical here, OK? I know it’s hard but try, just for me. How can you even imagine that Barb would go for that?”
“She might,” Diane says, apparently in all seriousness.
“What, like, ‘Hi sweetheart. I got my girlfriend knocked up. Any chance you could bring up her kid?’ Something like that?”
“She needn’t even know it’s yours.”
“Of course she’d bloody know it was mine.”
“We could say I’ve got a boyfriend. Think about it. I get a boyfriend, I get pregnant, I tell Barbara. I could get Richard to pretend he’s the father or something.”
“What, your friend from college?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s… you know… one of them, isn’t he?”
“Barbara doesn’t know that.”
“Just stop, Diane. Please stop,” Tony says. “You’re driving me barmy here.”
“I could convince her. I know I could. She really likes me. And she loves kids.”
Tony stands now and shakes his head. “I’m off,” he says. He holds out one hand. “We’ll talk about this later but right now give me my shoe. Because if I have to leave barefoot, I swear you’ll never see me again. And I really mean that, Diane.”
She fidgets to one side and removes the shoe from beneath the cushion. For a moment she holds it out of Tony’s grasp. “Just think, Tony,” she says again. “Barbara gets the baby she wants and we get to carry on like nothing’s happened. It’s perfect. For everyone.”
Tony lurches now and snatches the shoe from Diane’s hand. “Like nothing happened?” he says. “Just get rid of the thing, Diane. I’ll pay. But that’s the only way here. You’re gonna have to get rid of it.”
“I’m sorry,” Diane says. “But that’s my child you’re talking about. And it’s your child too. It’s our child. It’s half you and half me. Just think about that. Just think about what that means. There’s just no way, Tony. There’s just no way I could ever do that.”
THE END
A note from the author
Dear Reader.
I do hope you enjoyed reading The Photographer’s Wife.
Life as an indy author isn’t always easy, so if you did enjoy this, please think about posting a review on the store you bought your ebook from. There’s nothing more brilliant, as an author, than getting feedback from readers.
Here’s the official guide to what those star ratings mean:
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