The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  Before she can even begin, though, Leonie says, ‘I think I might like men best. There’ve been a few. I’m wondering. Not that I’ll give up women altogether.’

  Just when Vee thinks she’s getting the hang of something, it changes. ‘That’s . . .’ she begins, but the only word that comes to her tongue is ‘good’, which she knows won’t do. So she switches to a question. ‘Do you have to choose?’

  Leonie slaps Vee on the knee. ‘Your education is progressing, sister. Some people don’t choose. If you were going to put a label on it’ – her expression shows exactly how little she thinks of that – ‘you’d call it bisexual. Swinging both ways. I’ve got enough on my mind without trying to work out if I want to shag everyone I meet, or only the ones with the pricks.’

  Vee nods. She has wondered, quietly, whether not shagging anyone at all might be what she wants. When Barry touched her, she liked it; if Leonie kissed her she’d be . . . interested. But she can’t seem to conjure up the hunger for sex that everyone else seems to have. And anyway, thinking about sex, and love, must cloud the vision. A clear eye is what a photographer needs, above all. ‘Fair enough.’

  Leonie begins to laugh, and every time she seems to have stopped, she starts again.

  Vee doesn’t like being laughed at, but in the end she can’t help asking: ‘What’s so funny?’ Vee can’t help but to be pulled into the laughter, though she doesn’t understand where it’s coming from. This is Leonie’s great power, it seems to Vee: not just her words, her cleverness, but the sheer force of her pulls you in.

  ‘You wouldn’t have said “fair enough” to that when I met you. And you wouldn’t have said it in that voice either. You would have been much more “Cor blimey, Professor Higgins”.’ The remains of laughter make Leonie’s voice warm.

  Vee rolls her eyes. ‘No I wouldn’t. And anyway, Eliza Doolittle was from the East End. Not Essex. How would you feel if I mixed up . . .’ Oh, if there was only an easy way to explain these things to Leonie. ‘Fulham and – and – Wales?’

  ‘I’d laugh myself stupid. Anyway, I was trying to be nice.’ She pours the last of the wine into her own glass; Vee is only halfway through her first. It has a dark, harsh taste; she didn’t really want it, but if she hadn’t taken it, Leonie would have drunk the whole bottle herself.

  ‘Were you? Trying to be nice?’

  ‘No need to sound surprised.’ Leonie is serious again, half-smiling, asking a question with her eyes. So Leonie wants to be liked, too, despite what she says. That’s reassuring.

  ‘It’s just that you’ve always been . . . anti-nice. So it’s weird when you are.’

  Leonie fumbles in her pocket for her tobacco tin, takes out a roll-up, lights it, and shrugs. ‘Trying to stop you from flirting with blokes in pubs so the landlord doesn’t get challenged isn’t about nice or not nice. It’s about right.’

  Vee nods. ‘I know that.’ She thinks of how she smiled at the security guard on their way into the Royal Albert Hall. After what she saw tonight, the insidiousness of it all, she won’t be doing that again.

  ‘Good.’ Leonie’s grin is back. ‘Anyway. I’m not going to come on to you, baby, you can sleep easy in your bed.’ She gets up, stretches, and kicks the pizza plate under the sofa. There are a few similar plates in the kitchen; Vee wonders if they ever make it back to the restaurant.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to write some opinions.’

  ‘Now? When you’re—’

  ‘What? Pissed? Horny?’ Leonie’s life may be cluttered but the desk beneath the window is neat. She switches on the anglepoise lamp, puts her hands flat against the desk and leans her weight down on them for a moment, head dropping. ‘Write drunk, edit sober. That’s what Hemingway said. But he was a know-nothing entitled prick so I say write any way you like, edit any way you like.’

  She turns, waiting for a response.

  ‘I say photograph sober, develop sober,’ Vee says. She’s entitled to her work ethic.

  Leonie nods. ‘Probably wise,’ and she sits down at her desk.

  *

  Vee is woken by the smell of frying bacon and the sound of Leonie’s loud, tuneless singing. It’s almost 10 a.m. Whether it was the wine, the thrill, the cold on the streets last night, or the lulling rumble of London traffic, she has slept like a stone. Leonie greets her with a smile, pours tea for her, and puts a plate of bacon sandwiches down on the kitchen table.

  ‘You were up early,’ Vee says. There are copies of the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Express on the table, along with a paper bag spilling apples and a box of Mr Kipling’s French Fancies. They’ve fast become one of Stanley’s favourites, and Vee feels a sudden ache at the thought of her father, who will be well into his Sunday morning routine now, cleaning out the fireplace and relaying it ready for later.

  ‘I haven’t been to bed, yet,’ Leonie says, ‘I’ll sleep later.’

  Just the thought of working through the night makes Vee want to cry with a sort of empathetic tiredness. Leonie seems fine, though; there are bags under her eyes, and as usual, her hair could do with a wash. The tips of her ears poke through it, which Vee finds endearing. ‘Good writing?’

  ‘Best column yet,’ Leonie says, biting into a sandwich, ‘that bitch editor from yesterday is going to read it and weep.’

  ‘Good.’ They chink their mugs together, and Vee turns to the papers. One has a front-page image of the protest, the other a smiling Miss World, with only the briefest mention of the protest in the text. ‘Look at that. And we were part of it.’ The feeling she had yesterday, whatever it was, has stayed in her, moving from her gut to her backbone, making her straighter, stronger.

  Vee reads the story, which includes the result, as they didn’t see the end of the show. ‘At least they let a black woman win it,’ she says.

  ‘There is so much wrong with that statement that I don’t know where to start.’ Leonie play-punches Vee’s arm; bacon falls from her sandwich. Vee shakes her head, laughs at herself. She must get better at thinking before she speaks.

  ‘Let me have a go. At all the things that are wrong.’

  Leonie sits back in her chair, crosses her arms. ‘I’m listening. Redeem yourself, my child.’

  ‘OK.’ Vee thinks back over what she said, ‘No one should be letting a woman do anything because it takes away her power—’

  Leonie nods. ‘Or?’

  ‘Or implies she doesn’t have any.’

  ‘Good. And?’

  ‘And she didn’t win because she was black, or she shouldn’t have done, because skin colour shouldn’t matter, just like sex shouldn’t.’

  ‘Gender.’

  ‘Sorry. Gender.’

  ‘And do you think it’s OK for you to say skin colour shouldn’t matter?’

  ‘Well’ – surely this is obvious – ‘I would never say it should matter. Because that would be racist.’

  ‘I mean,’ Leonie says, ‘do you think it’s OK for you to make those judgements? You’re white. There are things you can’t comment on. Like, if I hit you I’m not entitled to say how much it hurts.’

  Vee loves these conversations. She has the same feeling she used to when she was a little girl, watching her dad work, him explaining how he was dovetailing a joint. Later, at college, in her first darkroom sessions, she was bursting with that same sparkling sense of understanding how something works. And knowing that all she needs to do is pay attention to be able to do it too.

  Leonie tops up their mugs. Her teapot has a knitted cosy. Vee can’t imagine that she knitted it herself. It’s the sort of thing that her uptight sister Ursula might do, from what Vee has heard about her. ‘You said “at least” they let a black woman win. “At least” suggests we’re happy with a minimum. And, winning a beauty contest is not good, because—’

  Vee laughs, slaps her hand on the table as though she is throwing down a winning hand of poker, played for spent matches with her dad. ‘Patriarchal noti
ons of beauty!’

  ‘Exactly, sister. We’re getting there.’

  ‘Thanks, Leonie. I still feel stupid a lot of the time.’

  ‘We support our sisters. And sharing the knowledge is sharing the power. The education we get is through the patriarchy. Don’t feel bad. Because . . . ?’ Leonie tilts an eyebrow.

  ‘Because feeling bad is an expectation placed on women, and it comes from outdated patriarchal notions of society?’

  ‘Right on, sister.’ Leonie has finished her bacon sandwich, and pulls a French Fancy from the box. ‘Fen moved out a couple of weeks ago. Do you want to move in?’

  Vee has imagined what it would be like to be Leonie’s flatmate. Or her sister. Or, once – she doesn’t know what got into her – her girlfriend. ‘I’d love to!’ If being with a woman who knows all the ways the world needs to change could be Vee’s life, she would be ecstatic. And she’d be part of the fight. Properly, in the middle of it. But – ‘What’s the rent?’

  Leonie shrugs. ‘Just pay your half of the bills.’

  ‘But that’s – do you mean that?’

  ‘Sure.’ Leonie grins. ‘That’s what I do. It’s a family place. My folks bought it when they used to live in Norwich. For when they were in London. Then they moved to London and bought a house, but they kept this.’

  Vee nods as though people owning flats in cities they might visit is as everyday as Leonie makes it sound. ‘I’d love to,’ she says again.

  And then the phone rings. Leonie goes to the hall to answer it and, after a brief conversation, comes back into the kitchen, face tight, running a hand through her hair, ‘Still got film in your camera?’

  ‘Always. Why?’

  ‘We need to get over to Jo’s. Kiki just arrived. Her husband cut up rough when she got back last night.’

  ‘Kiki’s husband? I thought he was OK. She said he was cool with her doing this.’ Not that it’s up to him, of course.

  ‘So did she.’ Leonie is pulling on her boots, the DMs Vee covets (although she’s not sure she could carry them off). ‘Seems he was horny when she got back. She said she didn’t want it but he took it anyway. Jo’s going to see about finding her a place to stay. I’m going to write her account. You can take photos of the damage. She’s got cuts on her face and bruises on her thighs and her wrists.’

  Vee swallows bile. Kiki is a kind of wonder-woman to her: clever, sparky, bright. The thought of her being hurt is almost too much. But, women help women and this is something useful she can do. ‘Has anyone called the police?’

  Leonie hesitates for long enough to look straight at Vee. ‘Kiki’s married. He hasn’t done anything wrong, legally.’

  ‘Right.’ Except of course it’s not right. ‘I’ll need to go back in a couple of days. When the bruises have come out more.’

  Maybe Leonie hears something in her voice, because when she comes back from the living room with their coats, she holds Vee in a brief, tight embrace. ‘Not everyone could do this, you know. Thanks, Vee.’

  21 November 1970

  ‘WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU move out?’ Vee was prepared for her father to be hurt, or angry. Confusion, she is finding more difficult to handle. It’s always been obvious, to her, that this was going to happen at some point.

  Stanley has been more strict about her paying half of the bills since she split up with Barry: it’s obvious he thinks she is going to be alone forever, so he needs to make her self-sufficient. But she didn’t really think that he assumed she would live here until – well, until he died. (Her body shrinks in on itself at the thought.) It seems she was wrong. He, apparently, thought she had two options: marry and leave home, or not leave home.

  In fairness, he’s never treated her like a girl; she can use a hacksaw and a lathe, light a fire, change a fuse, top up the oil in the car. But those were things he showed her because she asked, or because she was keeping him company in the garage while he worked on a chest of drawers for her bedroom, or mended a neighbour’s bedside table. They were things that stopped both of them from being alone. Now he seems to be preparing her for the dry spinster life, although it’s obvious from the way he drops Barry into the conversation whenever he can that he hopes she will see sense and settle down. ‘Settle for’, she had said, and she doesn’t want to do that.

  Your London friends won’t be there when you’re old, he had said. Your fancy feminists won’t be able to build you a dining table or fix a faulty fuse box.

  You don’t know that, she had said, and anyway, I’m not sure Barry was much good with a screwdriver. Estate agents aren’t, usually. She’d hoped that he would call her out for making assumptions, so she could point out that he was doing the same. But he’d just smiled and said, you know what I’m saying. And she had known: he was saying that he cared. She knew, too, that the only way to convince him that she could manage was to do it: move out, work, make a name.

  ‘I just don’t know what to make of this, Veronica,’ he says, now. ‘I know we have our differences, but I didn’t think . . .’

  Vee has photographed her father several times, usually when she’s trying out a new piece of kit, and images of him are always compelling: there’s something about the proportion of his face, the straightness of his brow, the angle that his nose makes to it. His earlobes are long and his left eyelid droops a little more than the right. And now he looks sad, weighed down by her decision, and she wants to do three things: photograph him like this, tell him that it doesn’t matter, just to see him smile – and explain. She takes the hardest option. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Dad. I just want to be independent. And I want to have a career. London’s the best place.’

  He shakes his head. ‘You’ve changed, treasure. I don’t know what to make of you.’

  She puts her hand over his. She is so small, in comparison; she knows this is what he is seeing too. ‘I’m still me, Dad. I’m just finding my way. Changing with the world. Isn’t that what happens? Did Gran and Gramps never say they couldn’t understand you?’

  A smile; a chink.

  ‘It’s all different now. Women have more options. They don’t have to get married and have babies anymore. There’s the Pill. They can make choices.’

  Fen says they should talk about sex and contraception in front of men, to ‘normalise it’, and Vee agrees. Plus, she and her dad have had to about to talk about things she would have normally discussed with her mum, periods and bras, so she thinks it should be all right.

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and then she looks into his face and realises what she’s said. Her parents got married when they found out her mother was pregnant; her father sometimes says she was the best accident that ever happened, usually when he has drunk too much at Christmas, or on the anniversary of her mother’s death. ‘Oh, Dad. I didn’t mean—’

  He gets up, pushing his weight against the table, and she has no choice but to move her hand away. ‘I know,’ he says, but his face has become a blank and he won’t look at her. ‘I’ll talk to Johnny at the allotments and see if I can borrow the van. It’ll save you making a few trips. Just let me know what day.’

  November 1970

  This Month magazine

  Leonie Barratt: Letters from a Feminist

  Our monthly column from the front line of the Battle of the Sexes

  Dear John,

  Well, Miss World was quite a ride this year. Did you spot me, John? I was there. I didn’t quite get to the stage, but one of my flour bombs did. In the excitement I forgot about the rotten lettuce in my handbag, but battles rarely go completely as planned.

  I wonder, were you impressed by the way my sisters and I took action? That we variously lumpen, big-nosed, gap-toothed women wanted to show that we are all valid members of the human race? Or were you upset that your night of looking at ‘perfect’ women in swimsuits and evening dresses was disrupted? Did it make for even more excitement? Did you imagine yourself wiping away the tears of those poor, frightened ‘beau
ty’ ‘queens’? In your dreams, did they look at you, pale but still beautiful, and whisper, ‘I’m afraid, John. All I want, really, is a good man to love me. Will you hold me?’

  John, we need to talk about beauty contests. We really do. Because they are not, in any way, shape or form, cool.

  Whereas women themselves, in any way, shape or form, ARE cool.

  It’s not the way we look that matters.

  I’d like to think I don’t have to explain this to you, but I’m going to spell it out, just to be on the safe side. Then, next year, if you notice that Miss World is on TV, you can go and do something more useful with your evening. Something a bit less oppressive. Like, have a conversation with a woman you know and like. Maybe go out for a meal. Maybe split the bill, because a lot of us feel a little intimidated at being ‘treated’. Listen as much as you talk. Just general equality in action, you know? (You don’t have to wait until next year to do that, though. Do it tomorrow, if you like.)

  Unlike some of my sisters, I don’t think that you are automatically A Bad Thing, John, just because of the testosterone. I think you have been conditioned into thinking that women have a certain role to play in your life. Like: being beautiful. Wearing swimsuits and turning around so you can get a good look at their behind. Tricking, cajoling or nagging you into marrying them. And then doing all they can to not lose their looks, because we all know that if they put on a couple of pounds and realise lipstick is just another tool of oppression, you will be entirely justified in going back to the Royal Albert Hall and picking yourself a better beauty queen, next year. That’s the patriarchy. That’s how it works. If you have something that shape-shifts that you keep in your Y-fronts, you can just cruise on through your life, doing exactly what you like, surrounded by women doing what they’ve been trained to do. Please you, make you comfortable, do all they can so that you never, ever question your entitlement to taking anything you like from the world.