The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘I should think so. Your mother’s coming at twelve. I need to go by half past.’

  ‘You won’t be late, though?’

  ‘I’m meeting a seventy-year-old photographer to talk about her exhibition. It’s not a hen party,’ Erica says, more sharply than she probably should have. The timings are on the calendar on the wall, not that Marcus ever looks at it. She heads for Tom, to get the worst of the Weetabix off before it sets.

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  He asks in a way that suggests he cares, rather than having a dig at her for being sharp with him. So she answers accordingly. (When did their marriage become a protracted diplomatic negotiation?) ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ She laughs at herself. ‘I don’t think nervous is the right word.’

  He’s still looking at her, inviting her to say more.

  ‘I’ve worked so hard for this.’ Veronica Moon hasn’t been seen in public for decades – no exhibitions, no appearances, every invitation to lecture, to write or even to attend a party turned down. And yet she has agreed to this. Maybe she will talk about Leonie properly, at last. If she’s going to tell anyone the truth, it should be Erica, who would have said, when she began this project, that her interest was ninety per cent academic, ten per cent personal. This morning, those percentages are the other way round.

  ‘I know you have.’ He puts an arm round her, and kisses her forehead. She leans in, puts her head against his chest, listens to his heart, muffled by shirt and jacket and coat but hers to hear, if she concentrates. It’s as though they are twenty-five again, and nothing in the world could ever be as important as the love they found.

  And for a moment – just a moment – it’s lovely.

  Then Marcus steps away and picks up his briefcase. ‘Well, I can take over the babysitting from Mum if you’re not back.’

  Either he has moved away before he felt her body stiffen, or he’s chosen to ignore it.

  ‘It’s not babysitting,’ she says, loudly enough to make both Marcus and Tom look towards her; identical pairs of blue-grey eyes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not babysitting. Tom is your child.’

  Marcus puts a hand on the door handle, a clear sign that he doesn’t have time for this. ‘I know that. It’s just a figure of speech.’

  It doesn’t feel like one, today. Erica was up twice during the night with Tom. Marcus says he will get up if she wakes him, but he always proves unwakeable. ‘A figure of speech that suggests I’m the only one with responsibility for our child.’

  Every morning she gets up and is determined to make an effort. And every day something like this happens, and she’s sniping and carping. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at breakfast, but at dinner, and she’s started to count those days as wins. She has no idea when it changed. When Tom was born, they were joyful, delighted, united.

  Marcus sighs, ‘Maybe we made the wrong call, with you doing this exhibition. It’s such a lot of work. And not a lot of money.’

  ‘It’s important to me,’ Erica says. She’s thirty-eight; if she ever wants to be more than a part-time, associate university lecturer she needs to start making a name, building a reputation that’s more than ‘turns up on time and does what she is contracted to do’. Consultancy on the occasional TV series is fun, and well paid, but confirming that the right sort of pans are being used and checking the Bakelite is the correct colour is hardly a stretch.

  When she finished her PhD, she had such plans. And then she met Marcus. And then her mother became more ill. So now she teaches six hours per week during term time, delivering the modules on domestic changes that she taught before she had Tom. She really doesn’t think she was forced or coerced into any of it. And yet.

  She had wondered, for a while, if that would be her lot. But then she’d found the box of papers and photographs in her mother’s loft, and started to see another side of her Aunt Leonie: the one who was a living feminist, way ahead of her time, rather than a woman whose death was more important than any other part of her story. When she put together Veronica Moon’s work with Leonie Barratt’s story, she knew she had a real chance to have the career she deserved, and rescue two women from obscurity as she did it. Acceptance of her exhibition proposal, and the funding to go with it, felt like a triumph. ‘It’s really important to me.’

  ‘I know. And I’m supporting you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ She hears how tired she is. This isn’t the time to try to explain – again – why this grudging sharing doesn’t feel like support. Marcus is checking his watch. If he misses his train then she’ll have to give him a lift to Kingston so he can get a fast one. Erica washes Tom’s face while he is still in the highchair. There’s Weetabix on her coat, which she’d left within range. Great.

  If she points out that it’s not the work that makes her life hard, but the way their home life is organised, he’ll be wounded, and then she’ll definitely have to give him a lift. She doesn’t have time for that. And anyway, she doesn’t know if he will understand how, some days, she can feel her brain starting to atrophy. She has nothing in common with the women she is meeting at coffee mornings. They’re not stupid, by any means, it’s just that they are absorbed into motherhood as though they have worked for it, are entitled to it. Or as though it is their new job. Erica cannot find that in herself. Somewhere else she is failing. When she’s at work she’s tired. And at home, reviewing the exhibition, she’s afraid that she’s making mistakes, or missing her chances to make Vee’s work shine, and to shine too. Motherhood has made her mediocre. And it shouldn’t have to be that way

  ‘You need to go,’ she says, ‘we can talk later.’ And when he bends to kiss her she moves her head, just a fraction, so that he kisses the side of her cheek rather than her mouth. It’s petty, but she doesn’t care.

  *

  ‘Erica?’ Vee frames it as a question, but the woman walking towards her could be no one else.

  ‘Ms Moon? Veronica? It’s an honour to meet you at last.’

  Vee debates whether to stand, but it was work enough for her knees to get her to a sitting position on this bench.

  ‘It’s Vee, please. Good to meet you, Erica.’

  Erica’s hair is the colour of a milky morning coffee, and it hangs straight and fine. Her eyes are big, warm and wide, a dark complement to her hair. A narrow mouth, smiling, small teeth, white. High cheekbones, narrow chin, pink lipstick. Imagine her face rounder, without the makeup . . . Only the nose is wrong. Vee hears herself inhale, a sharp shocked sound. She should have been prepared for the resemblance.

  ‘It’s an honour,’ Erica says, again, ‘and such a privilege to be trusted with this retrospective.’

  Vee has never known what to do with compliments, so she just nods at them, as she does to dogs and children. She moves her bag to the floor by her feet, so that Erica can sit if she wants to. She does. No wonder, wearing ridiculous heels like that. ‘Have you had a nose job?’ she asks. She realises, as soon as she has said the words, that she shouldn’t have; but she is truly out of practice at conversation, forgets that you don’t just say what’s come to mind.

  Erica’s hand goes to her face, and she traces the bridge of her straight, unassuming nose with her finger. ‘Absolutely,’ she says, making steady eye contact with Vee. There’s a smile in her voice, a glint in her eye, and Vee feels a grudge of admiration for Erica’s style, even if she doesn’t approve of her actions. ‘And you would have done too, if you had my aunt Leonie’s nose.’

  Vee nods, stops her tongue.

  It’s busier than she would have thought a gallery would be on a Tuesday afternoon. There’s a constant stream of people interrupting Vee’s view of the media wall. It’s showing a piece about the nipple, how we hide it and eroticise it.

  She still always arrives everywhere early, even though it’s a long time since that mattered, much. She wished she’d waited somewhere else. She’s not really likely to be recognised, now, but, if she was, the Photographer’s Gal
lery would be the place it would happen. Strange, how she fears to be spotted, and at the same time burns for the recognition that should have been hers.

  While Erica unwinds the long navy scarf from her neck, Vee takes a sideways look at her. She must be nearly forty. Though Vee finds it harder to tell how old people are, these days, because they all seem young. Erica is wearing boots with heels high enough to tip her off balance, jeans, and an emerald-green coat, new-looking, but with a crust of something spilled and dried near the hem.

  ‘I’m sorry you had to wait,’ Erica says.

  ‘You’re not late. We said two, and it’s two.’ This generation apologising for everything is something the sisterhood of Vee’s younger days wouldn’t have believed. Along with the heels. Women of 2018 still crippling themselves for the sake of a patriarchal notion of beauty? It beggars belief.

  Vee looks at the boots again – Erica has stretched out her legs in front of her – and she must make a sound, a tut or a sigh, because Erica sees where her gaze is resting, and says, ‘I like heels.’ That stubbornness – the particular timbre of it, the tug and fall of the consonants against the vowels, each word a fight – runs deep into Vee. It lands in her brain and heart and gut, and strikes a note through her body that she never thought she’d hear again. She closes her eyes for a moment, against the memory. Opens them, and looks at the toes of her own boots. She’s worn Doc Martens since 1972, when Leonie bought her her first pair, for her birthday. They only came in black, then. This latest pair, electric blue, must be five years old. They might be her last. She wonders how many there have been. It’s such a pleasure to never have to think about your feet; just to let them take you where you want to go.

  Erica pulls a notebook from her bag. ‘I’d like to walk the space with you today, and tell you what I’m thinking. How the exhibition will be laid out, what I want to bring forward, and how I plan to use the ephemera and objects—’

  ‘Ephemera?’

  Erica smiles. ‘Sorry. Jargon. Paper-based items that relate to the prints. So, a lot of Leonie’s archive of your work. The contemporaneous things that she kept. Magazines, newspapers and so on. The objects are the equipment. I mentioned them in my initial email? And I sent you a breakdown.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ Vee says, ‘I just need reminding sometimes.’

  Erica accepts this – oh, she is young, and thinks she will never be old, and forget things in her turn – and continues, ‘It’s mostly the things I found in my mother’s loft after her death. In a box with “Leonie” on the side. I don’t think it can have been opened since my mother cleared Leonie’s flat.’

  ‘I do remember.’ Vee does, now. Leonie had had very little good to say at the time about how newspapers reported stories, how women were portrayed in magazines, or the way Vee had sold out by working for them. Today, the thought of Leonie quietly buying and carefully keeping a record of Vee’s work feels almost unbearably touching; like finding a lost love letter when the lover has died, Vee imagines, though she wouldn’t really know.

  Reading the first email from Erica about the exhibition had set off a series of explosions in Vee’s body, from mines that had been buried deep. A shock of memory behind her eyes, showing Leonie at her shining, smiling best. A thud of pain low in her pelvis, grief making her heavy and slow. And in the space between her sternum and her heart, a fizzing burst of loss, relived as though it was yesterday that she took the final photograph of her friend. She could be overwhelmed again, if she allowed it to happen.

  She takes a deep breath and focuses on the media wall. A bare breast fills the space, then the image is broken up as individual screens are replaced with text. They look to be quotes about identity. Vee closes her eyes. It’s hard to believe that this still needs to be debated. Or that women are still wearing heels and having nose jobs.

  ‘And an artefact is anything that isn’t a print or an object, basically,’ Erica continues. If she noticed how Vee was almost overcome, she doesn’t show it. ‘You said you thought you might have some other things? Cameras? Images from your own archive?’

  ‘Did I? I remember you asked.’

  Erica looks at her hands for a moment. Vee sees that she paints her nails, but it doesn’t look as though she takes very good care of them – the polish is chipped, and the cuticles are red, rubbed or worried at. Hands, eyes, teeth, feet – they are the tools you need most in your life, and they need to be cared for the way Vee’s father used to care for his carpentry tools, clean and sharp always. Erica will learn.

  ‘Shall we go up?’ Erica hands Vee a pass, and they take the lift to the second floor.

  The current exhibit is a collection of photographs about cross-dressing. It must be years since she’s been to an exhibition that she hasn’t been expressly invited to. And even then, if she’s honest, she would only show up so that she could feel her own sense of injustice, rub the wound raw again at misogyny in action. She wonders who will come to one about her.

  Erica says, ‘I know a lot of curators frown on a purely chronological approach, but I think it makes sense for your work. We will trace your growing confidence as a photographer as we trace the growth of the women’s movement.’

  Vee takes a breath and looks around. The space is long and narrow, divided into sections and rooms. The light here is good: not natural, but neutral, plentiful, well directed.

  ‘We’ll start with your 1968 Dagenham photograph, and then we’ll move through to the 1970 Miss World, then into the portraits, then Greenham,’ Erica says. ‘We’ll have a different configuration of walls than this current show’s, obviously, to demarcate the sections. And I’d like to have a single photograph to lead into each section, with text to contextualise, which I’m working on at the moment.’

  Vee has never had a wall moved for her convenience. She’s always worked with what she can see.

  ‘I’ll be giving a whole section to the Greenham archive. I’m going to put the artefacts from your darkroom there, too.’

  ‘The darkroom . . .’ no, Vee cannot bring herself to say ‘artefacts’ ‘. . . kit is from when Leonie and I shared a flat. So it’s a good five years before the Greenham peace camp started. Most of those photographs would have been developed at labs. I didn’t have time to do much of my own developing by then.’

  Erica nod-shrugs, stepping aside to let a group of chattering tourists pass. ‘We’ll date and label them correctly. And we’ll end with the photograph of Leonie.’

  ‘Must we? I mean . . .’ Vee knew this was coming, she’s not a fool, ‘I understand it needs to be there, somewhere. But at the end?’

  ‘Well,’ Erica says, and she presses her lips together, as Leonie used to when she was thinking, ‘if we’re being chronological, it’s the obvious thing to do.’ She turns away, walking to the other end of the gallery. Vee might own the photographs – it might be an honour for Erica to work with her – but there’s no question of who is in charge in this space. Well, Vee’s the one in charge of herself. She lets Erica walk away, and pretends to study the images on the wall, though she is thinking of her own work.

  That final image of Leonie is another reason why this exhibition was a bad idea. Vee knew, even as she was typing the email to say she would go ahead, that she should just say no. And yet, she did it. She knows she has holes in her memory, and not just the usual spaces a woman of her age might expect. A surgeon carved years out of her brain when he took the tumour tissue back in 2007. She thinks sometimes that she has holes in her reasoning, too. No gaps in her feelings, though – oh, no. The lack of Leonie is raw, cut-flesh raw, whenever she comes up against it.

  Maybe she wants to be remembered. She’s been invited to one too many retrospectives, book launches and exhibitions of the male photographers who were her contemporaries. She has never gone. Why would she? Why spend an evening standing to one side with a warm glass of wine, knowing that even if she hasn’t done anything to speak of since 1984, she’s achieved easily as much as the men being adm
ired left, right and centre? More. Taking photographs in a war zone is too easy. Point and click and you’ll get something. The same with photographing beauty, or fashion. The work is done for you. Stylists, makeup, studio lighting, a digital camera that will take thousands of shots in an hour – any fool can shoot a Vogue cover. Natural light, real film, real people – that’s where you see real skill.

  And she had skill. Maybe has it, still, if she wasn’t too afraid to pick up a camera.

  Erica had been very clear in her proposal: she would manage everything, she would seek other permissions, track down materials, negotiate with the gallery. All that Vee would need to do would be to give written agreement for her images to be used, and clarify any areas where Erica might have questions.

  So she had said yes to the exhibition of her work. Not recklessly. She’d read Erica’s email and studied the attached CV. Erica had a doctorate in social history, and had lectured at several universities. Overall, she had seemed credible. She was Leonie’s niece: that fact woke a protectiveness, a sense of duty, almost, in Vee that she could neither explain nor dismiss. And she wanted to exhibit Vee’s work. She wanted to excavate the box of cuttings, prints and magazine portraits that Leonie had, apparently, kept, and turn them into an exhibition. At the point Vee was approached by Erica, she hadn’t put herself in the public eye for more than thirty years. She had been retired from lecturing for fifteen. So the thought of fading into nothingness – the possibility that seemed so achingly desirable for so long – was becoming a reality. At the time her career ended, Vee was too absorbed by other griefs to care about how she and her work would be remembered. She wanted to be forgotten. But in the years since, she has wondered at the way her career was stopped rather than having the chance to end her way.