The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  So she had said yes, with caveats. She wouldn’t talk to the press, she wouldn’t speak at the opening night. She would not give quotes, or be quoted, because that’s something she has never done, and would not begin to do now. Words are not her medium. And she would not, under any circumstances, discuss her final photograph of Leonie Barratt. Once the caveats were explored and her worries assuaged, and the exhibition proposal agreed, submitted, and accepted, she’d left Erica to get on with it, until today.

  Tap-tap-tap go Erica’s heels in front of her, making a knocking at Vee’s temples, a pressure waiting to turn into a headache.

  Erica turns, in the end space, indicates the far wall. ‘Here’s the obvious place for the Leonie photograph. It’s such a . . .’ she hesitates, and Vee sees how she is choosing her words ‘. . . it’s such a high-quality image that we’ll be able to blow it up to a good size. I want people to be able to make up their own minds.’ Her eye contact, which has been so unequivocal, falters: Erica is looking at Vee’s hairline. Erica is not quite as impartial as she would like Vee to believe.

  Vee’s own focus is rising, falling, as pain starts to swell behind her eyes. She still dreams of Leonie’s death sometimes, the sudden horrible blank of it: now I’m here, now I’m gone. In sleep is the only time she remembers it. Waking, there’s just a space of missing memory, like a photograph taken when the lens cap was still in place.

  The year after Leonie died is still the most terrible of her life. Not even dying, so far, is as bad – not so long as she can see. Many of Vee’s memories from the years before that period are lost, her first brain tumour twined around them, it seems, plucking them from her mind when it was removed. The life of the Veronica Moon of the early 1980s exists in photographs only; parts of the 1970s are barely there, either. She’ll never know whether her last photograph of her father – sleeves rolled up, checking the oil on her car before she set off to drive home, no doubt – was the last time she saw him. She imagines she would have told him that she knew how to check her oil. And he would have said, ‘Just humour your old dad, treasure.’ And she would have driven away. She has his death certificate, the paperwork from the sale of the house; she knows all that happened, can read her notes from her diaries, her own handwriting telling her she was there, she experienced it all. But there’s no memory of it. No memory of those last years of Leonie, either. Or of that last day. A therapist she saw, later, suggested that Vee might be blocking painful memories, and the brain was using the surgery as a convenient way to hide what she didn’t want to confront. She supposes that’s possible. But she cannot believe that any memories, however difficult, however painful, can be as enduringly aching as the absence of them. Plus, her recollections crash back in the immediate aftermath of Leonie’s death, during the worst time in her life she can remember. If she could block anything, it would be that.

  ‘Obviously we can discuss anything you want to add to this section,’ Erica adds. Vee refocuses on what Erica is saying. She cannot read anything into her expression. ‘And we are going to have to talk about my aunt’s death at some point. Not today.’

  ‘No.’ The word is sudden and loud. Even Vee is surprised. ‘I believe I was clear,’ Vee continues, and her voice is still loud but it’s steady. No sign of the shaking she feels. ‘Wasn’t I?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Erica says. Her eyes have become brighter – oh, that stubborn expression is so familiar to Vee, in the same way Erica’s voice is Leonie refracted – ‘but the exhibition visitor will need the facts—’

  ‘I’ve given you access to private material. I said I wouldn’t discuss anything related to your – to Leonie.’ Vee needs to get used to hearing her name again. ‘And there’s nothing I could add to . . . to what happened to Leonie, if you have the articles. Visitors will have the photograph. They can make up their minds from that. They always have.’

  Erica nods but Vee isn’t fool enough to think that means agreement. ‘There are so many questions around the photograph.’

  ‘More fool anyone who thinks I have answers.’

  Vee cannot have the truth: she cannot understand, or reconstruct, what happened that day with certainty. So why could she, would she, give anyone else an easy answer?

  ‘All I want,’ Erica speaks gently, quietly, as though she can coax Vee into line, ‘is for you to tell me what you remember.’

  ‘No. It’s not up for discussion and it never will be.’

  Vee walks slowly to the end of the gallery, her soles squeaking. After a few minutes she hears Erica tap-tap-tap to catch up. They look at each other, and Erica nods. It’s a truce.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned a section of photographs of me.’ There’s a bench in this room and Vee lowers herself on to it, resentful and grateful at once. She used to spend hours on one knee or both, crouched or on tiptoe, all to make sure she got the best shot that she could. It’s as though she used up her knees faster than the rest of her; faster than a normal person would.

  Erica laughs, the relieved sound of someone back on safe ground. ‘I wanted to talk to you about that. There aren’t a lot of photos of you in the public domain. There’s your official self-portrait, and by the look on your face you took that under duress. A couple of press ones, from when you won the Political Photograph of the Year in ’84.’

  Vee nods. ‘I’ve got the trophy, somewhere. If that would do as an – as ephemera . . .’ oh no, that’s not right, it’s not paper, ‘an object.’ She can’t remember the night itself, but she has the evidence of it. Something about the thought of it scratches at her.

  ‘That would be good,’ Erica says, looking round the space. ‘Do you have any other photographs of you?’

  ‘I might have,’ Vee says. Heaven knows what’s in the loft. She was always meticulous about labelling and storing negatives, though. She must have something, somewhere, to change the way the end of the exhibition looks. She had hoped it might redeem her, but it looks as though its climax is going to be her greatest failure. ‘And maybe more of Leonie.’ Leonie alive. Leonie blazing and bright, ‘We knew each other for a long time.’

  ‘Her writing was . . . it was amazing. She was way ahead of her time.’

  Sadness knots at the back of Vee’s throat, pulling the pain from her temples downwards. ‘That’s what she used to say. She was very . . . she was unimpressed by the way she was treated.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. My mother never really talked about her much. Or you. Well, not in a . . .’ she looks sideways at Vee, measuring, decides it’s OK to say it, ‘. . . she wasn’t kind about you.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’ It all seems a long way away, now. Until Vee lets herself think about Leonie, properly, and then it’s as immediate as the ache of the stitched flesh around a two-day wound. ‘Truth be told, your mother and I never had a lot of time for each other. Even before.’ What Vee remembers most about Ursula Woodhouse is the way that she smelled of flowers, wore pastel colours, as though she was trying to be all of the feminine that she thought Leonie was not. Though she could fight her corner as well as Leonie. Ursula and Vee could never, ever find anything to talk about. Even before it all went to hell. Vee puts her hands to her head. Her temples feel tender to the touch.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ Erica’s tone tells Vee nothing about whether she wants to hear more. The noise in the gallery is growing, or maybe being amplified by the headache. Vee has painkillers in her bag, but no water to take them with. It’s probably too late for them to stop it now. Though there hasn’t been a headache as bad as this one threatens to be in years.

  ‘Ursula had a low opinion of most of Leonie’s friends.’

  Erica laughs, something sour running beneath it. ‘It was hard to square what my mother was like with what I knew about my aunt Leonie. It always seemed odd, that two sisters could be so different. I used to think of them as the feminist and the anti-feminist. But later’ – Erica runs her hand through her hair, her fingers tracking from her forehead
to the top of her spine – ‘I realised my mother wasn’t really anti-feminist. She was . . . I think she was anti-uncertainty. She didn’t like anything that made life unclear.’

  ‘No wonder she was so uptight,’ Vee says – it’s out before she can stop it, but she puts her hand to her mouth all the same – stable door. ‘Erica, I’m sorry. To me, your mother is someone very . . .’ oh, where are the words? ‘Very abstract. We hardly saw each other. We didn’t have much in common. I forgot that’s not the same for you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. She was your mother.’

  ‘She couldn’t have done more for me,’ Erica says.

  ‘Neither could my mother.’ Vee feels Erica’s body tilt towards her, ever so slightly, and tilts her own away by the same degree.

  Erica nods. ‘She never went to university, you know, when she was young. She got a job as an administrator in a private junior school when she was eighteen. When I was studying GCSEs she started a degree at the Open University, so she could keep me company, she said.’

  ‘That’s really something,’ Vee says. She can’t square it with the Ursula she remembers, but being a mother changes people.

  ‘It was,’ Erica half-laughs, ‘I didn’t appreciate it at the time.’

  Vee can’t think of anything to say. She concentrates on her breath, making its way down to her belly and up again, and tries not to think about her headache.

  Erica sighs, ‘The generation that is coming up now – people younger than me, people I teach – they lack context for the past. The world is nuanced now. I think it’s important to look back to when things were . . . black and white. No pun intended.’ She smiles. ‘When men were the enemy, and—’

  But Vee doesn’t hear anything else. The headache, that has been licking at her temples since she entered the gallery, opens up its jaws and bites.

  Part 2: Light

  To be a photographer is to be a student of light. If you want to be a good photographer, all you need to do is learn to see the light. Study it, understand it, anticipate what it is going to do when you expose film to it. Light is equally accessible to all.

  Veronica Moon, Women in Photographs (unpublished)

  ‘Weeping Beauties’

  Veronica Moon

  Exhibition Section: Early Days

  Camera: Nikon F1

  Film: Kodak 400 ASA

  First published: Marie Claire magazine, 1970

  It is 1970. The paparazzi has yet to invent itself. Photo-calls are respectful. Beauty queens are seen in carefully orchestrated settings, where they are groomed, polished, always smiling.

  Now, consider how radical this photograph is.

  It was taken late in the evening following the Miss World contest in 1970, which was disrupted by feminist protesters opposing the objectification of women. After the demonstration and stage invasion at the Royal Albert Hall (see video, left), the protesters moved to the Café de Paris in the West End of London, where the after-party was being held.

  Moon left this second demonstration, where she had been photographing her fellow protesters, and went around to the back of the building. There she came upon two of the beauty queens who had participated in the contest, still wearing their evening dresses. Moon captures the women in the harsh strip light coming from the fire escape, though she used fill-in flash to bring sharpness to the image. The faces of the subjects have a pale, flat quality that makes them appear ghostly. Both are crying, their heads tilted towards each other. Capturing contrast – the glamour of the gowns, the jewellery, and the makeup, against the backdrop of a fire escape and the distress and disappointment on the faces – is typical of Moon’s emerging style. Marie Claire magazine (displayed to your right) ran this photograph in December 1970, with their article ‘Woman Beware Woman: the new face of feminist protest?’. The photograph was passed on to a writer there by Leonie Barratt, who sought Moon’s permission to use the image, and in doing so, reintroduced Moon’s work to mainstream publishing. This time, unlike when the Dagenham protest photograph became an image used worldwide, Moon was in a position to capitalise on her exposure. She had established herself as an independent photographer, and grown in confidence in her own ability. Shortly after publication of this photograph, Moon moved from her family home in Essex to London.

  At this time, Moon was the only female wedding photographer in Essex. A few of Moon’s wedding photographs are displayed in this section, along with early independent journalistic work. Notice her impulse to capture the informal, at a time when traditional wedding portraits were the norm.

  In 1970:

  • The Equal Pay Act (a direct result of the 1968 action at Dagenham) came into law

  • The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett and Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, were published

  • The age of majority in the UK dropped from twenty-one to eighteen and a general election in June led to a surprise victory for the Conservative Party, led by Edward Heath

  • The first jumbo jet landed in Britain

  • The half crown ceased to be legal tender, in preparation for the introduction of decimal currency in 1971

  • The Methodist church allowed female ministers to be ordained for the first time

  • The first Glastonbury music festival was held in September

  • The first Page Three girl was featured in the Sun newspaper in November

  • ‘In the Summertime’ by Mungo Jerry was number one in the charts for seven weeks

  And the newly formed Women’s Liberation Front made a plan to disrupt the Miss World competition, held in London. Veronica Moon and Leonie Barratt, by now good friends, were there.

  20 November 1970

  Colchester

  Vee is just getting into the car when Barry rounds the corner of the street. Even though it’s three months since she called off their engagement, her body doesn’t always remember, and she feels a little lurch of familiarity when she sees him, followed by another, of regret. Not that she wants him back. It’s just that she’s sorry.

  Barry hadn’t taken it well.

  Vee had assumed he would have seen it coming. She’d been putting off setting a date for the wedding for two years. Her excuses were getting thinner and thinner, even to her own ears. First, she had said she wanted to wait until she got her business established. Her friends used her for their weddings, but couples she didn’t know often seemed puzzled by her – ‘So, who actually takes the photos?’ – as she showed her portfolio. ‘I do,’ she would reply, and she would smile and hope for the work, and think of how Leonie would tell her off for reinforcing old ideas about women. ‘What would Leonie think?’ has become a guiding principle of her life, in the two and a half years since they met.

  Building her business bought her some time. Then Barry was promoted, and she said she didn’t want him to be worrying about helping her with planning a wedding while he was getting on with his new job. He’d looked puzzled, said he’d assumed she would do most of the planning, and then quickly added that he knew she was all for women’s lib so actually he would like to be involved. She’d felt terrible.

  In March, when he had brought it up again, she had almost said that she had changed her mind. But she hadn’t changed it enough to be sure, and she was always sure that she did love Barry. Maybe not enough; maybe not in the right way. But she wasn’t certain enough to say she didn’t want to marry him. She’d got used to wearing her engagement ring, too; it kept a lot of pests away when she was working on her own. There was a tender circlet of white skin at the base of her finger when she took it off at night.

  After another summer of watching brides and grooms, the looks on their faces and their steadfast conviction that they had chosen right for their whole lives, Vee was sure that she wasn’t going to marry Barry. She wasn’t sure how she would tell him, or tell her dad, who called Barry ‘son’
and had bought him a season ticket for the football. She was going to have to choose her moment.

  But then the moment chose itself.

  The final straw had been – well, straw-like. They argued about Late Night Line Up when Barry said Joan Bakewell, the presenter who had been called ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’, was too clever by half and no one would ever marry her. Vee retorted no one would marry him if that was the way he thought, and anyway ‘crumpet’ was derogatory.

  He’d sighed, in a long-suffering way that he’d been doing lately, and got right on Vee’s nerves. There was no way she could put up with that for another fifty, sixty years. ‘It’s all changed since you met that friend of yours. Leanne. You never used to use words like “derogatory”. You used to be a laugh.’

  ‘Leonie. You know her name, don’t pretend you don’t.’

  ‘Well yeah, I should, because I hear it often enough. She’s turning you into a lesbian.’ Every time she’d planned a trip with Leonie, Barry had opposed it, and when she told Leonie, all she’d done was raise an eyebrow, or say, ‘do you think that’s good enough for you?’, or, ‘do you think that’s the way women deserve to be treated?’. That was all. And that had been enough to help Vee to – well, to wake up to what Barry was like.

  ‘Barry’s not a bad person, though,’ she’d said to Leonie, once.

  ‘He doesn’t have to be,’ Leonie had replied, ‘he’s grown up in a system that makes him think he’s more important than you. Or any woman.’

  The night her engagement ended, Vee decided against ignoring his dig at her friend, ‘Don’t be ignorant, Barry.’

  ‘I’m no more ignorant than I’ve ever been. You’re the one who’s more la-di-da. If you’re too good for me, you should just say so.’

  There was never going to be a better time. Vee took a breath, found her balance, the way she does before she takes a photograph, ‘I ain’t a lesbian. And I ain’t too good for you,’ she’d been trying to talk more neutrally, more like Leonie, but when she was under stress her Essex came out. Breathe. Keep trying, ‘I’m not right for you, though, Barry. Surely you can see that.’