The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  This is not OK, John. I’ve been reading the newspapers (yes, I can read) and watching the news (yes, I can afford a television, which I bought with money I earned) and I see that the sisterhood has been getting a bit of stick. I see we, the protesters, have been accused of being jealous. If we had legs that long, or hair that glossy, or could make an impression on the world just by standing on a stage and letting people look at us, you say, we would do it. But we can’t. So we behave exactly the way you would expect silly, envious girls to behave. Sour grapes, you say.

  This commentary (and I know it doesn’t all come from you, personally, but I also suspect that, when the men in your office or at the golf club have muttered about the way we ‘bloody feminists’ behaved, you haven’t stood up for us, which makes you part of the problem) presupposes that the best thing a woman can be is beautiful in the crippled, doll-like way the women at the stage on the Royal Albert Hall appeared. Men objecting to the protest on these grounds assume that women with cleverness, or curiosity, wit or bravery, would all willingly exchange those characteristics for a pert nose and a cute smile. Do you see how deep this all runs? Because that’s patriarchal thought in action, right there, and it’s wrong.

  We did not throw rotten tomatoes at our sisters, we threw them at the man who was belittling them. We did not cover them in flour or shout at them. We object to the idea of being judged on our looks. We object to a man making jokes about cattle markets. We wish, with all of our hearts, that women did not think that their value is in their looks. That’s why we were protesting.

  John, if there are women in your life that you love, next time you spend time with them, watch them. Do they eat less than you, or talk about the Grapefruit Diet? Do they always put on makeup before they go out? Do they ask you if they look OK?

  If the answer to those questions is yes, I’m afraid that you’re a part of the problem.

  Have you any idea how much time a Miss World competitor spends on her looks? (And make no mistake, she is a competitor, and it is a competition, woman against woman. Which is clever, because it stops women from seeing where the real battle is.) She will spend time every day moisturising and anointing different parts of her body with different potions, to make her skin softer or paler or sleeker. She will spend a long time in front of the mirror, trying to find flaws, not understanding that she is exactly as flawed, and flawless, as the rest of her sisters.

  She will think about each and every damn thing she puts in her mouth before she eats it, because – consider this – because someone is going to measure her, and look at her proportions, and judge whether she is the right shape or not. (She is never the right shape. If she is 36-26-36, that’s all well and good, but if everyone is 36-26-36, there is going to be a part of her wondering if it would be better if she was 36.5-25.5-36.5 or 35-24-35.) She probably never gets filthy drunk. Do you know how many calories there are in a sweet martini and lemonade, John? You can bet a beauty queen does, I bet she never eats candyfloss at the beach and licks the sticky residue off her fingers. I bet she doesn’t open the door without having put all of her makeup on. There’s probably a mirror in the hallway, so she can check that her hair is glossy enough before she goes anywhere.

  There’s a good chance that your beauty queen practises walking, John. If you are any shade of a decent man you must be able to see that that is not cool.

  She probably goes for days and days without anyone asking her what she thinks about the Vietnam War. If they ever have. But she probably has a view. Because she is more than her looks, and she deserves to be treated as such. Just like we – the feminists, the protesters, the ones who don’t get leered at in the street because we reject the game of prettiness – deserve to be credited with more than jealousy for our actions at Miss World.

  So, why not stick up for us, John? Why not admit – to yourself, to your colleagues, to the women in your life – that we had a point, and we made it, and we did it because the world needs to change? And don’t expect me to thank you for it. Because being grateful to men is a whole different area of wrongness that we need to talk about, some other time.

  Leonie

  19 February 2018

  In Dapchi, Nigeria, 110 schoolgirls are kidnapped by the extremist group Boko Haram. On 25 March, the BBC will report that most were released, after having been warned not to return to school. Five did not survive.

  HRH Queen Elizabeth II attends London Fashion Week.

  Model Eunice Olumide tells a BBC reporter, ‘We’re not able to represent reality in the industry . . . There’s no minimum wage for models, no requirement to make clothes in different sizes.’

  Nine weeks and three days to exhibition opening

  ‘Cheer up, love,’ says the man at the ticket barrier.

  Vee can tell from his face that he means no harm, but that’s not the point. Never miss a chance to educate, as Leonie used to say. ‘I appreciate that you’re trying to be friendly,’ she says, ‘but you have no idea what’s going on in my life, so telling me to “cheer up” isn’t appropriate. And neither is calling me “love”.’ She walks on, before she can see his reaction, but she imagines it: rolled eyes, the person behind her at the barrier saying something like ‘that’s what you get for trying to be pleasant’. Well, Vee might not be able to do a lot for the movement these days, but she can stop it going backwards when she sees the opportunity.

  She should have thought today through better. For years her life has been quiet. She knows that she is ill and her emergency appointment with Dr Wilding after meeting Erica for the first time only confirmed it. And still she’s agreed to spend the afternoon with Erica, despite having spent this morning at hospital, being scanned and tested, questioned and touched. Every now and then Vee gets drawn into something, a meeting of old colleagues or a fundraiser, and she thinks it will be OK, because, she says to herself, how difficult, really, how trying, can spending a couple of hours with other people be? And then she does it, and she remembers. There are so many places where it’s such hard work. So many ways that you need to be thoughtful, and she just doesn’t think that way anymore. She used to. She used to do it too much, and Leonie helped her to see why she was allowed to put her own needs first, because that was her right. Not her right as a woman, but her right as a person, equally as important (and unimportant) as the next person. ‘Except you,’ Vee had said, walking home to their flat after a Woman’s Liberation Front meeting in the month after she moved in. Leonie had laughed, and looked straight into her – those eyes, sepia, so clever and so bright. If Leonie had kissed her, properly, then, Vee would have kissed back.

  What Vee hadn’t known, of course, when she agreed to Erica’s exhibition, was that Erica would be so very Leonie-like, or that that resemblance, from eyes to tilt of head to timbre of voice and the way her stride lopes, would make Vee think about all the things she has banished from her mind for so many years. If only her memory was better, or more of it had remained after the surgery. Though knowing for certain might not really help.

  She steps on to the train and takes a seat, takes off her coat, and rubs at the crook of her elbow, where cotton wool is taped over the place where a needle went in. Vee is unused to touch. (Apart from Marja, who comes to her house to massage her pain away.) Even though she knows what she has endured this morning are objective medical processes, that the concentrated pressing of fingertips was exploration, quest, she still felt them as unwanted intimacy. And she knows, more or less, what the tests will show. Mr Wilding had said as much. He’d looked through her notes, listened to her description of headaches and moods, odd appetites and new blanks in her memory, the way she is grasping for words. And he’d said, ‘Well, we knew this was a possibility, Ms Moon. There are other things that it could be, but a recurrence is, I’m afraid, the most likely. Let’s do some tests and then we can see exactly where we are.’

  Two hours of hospital, tests and questions but no conclusions yet, is horribly uncertain. Especially when she is so horribly cert
ain, herself, and confirmation will be something like relief. It’s just a question of how many steps to the grave. A decade’s survival of glioblastoma is such a best-case scenario that she should almost be pleased.

  In two days she’ll go back to Harley Street and talk practicalities and likelihoods.

  Between now and then, she needs to wait.

  At least this afternoon is filled up. Even if she shouldn’t have agreed to go to Erica’s. (‘Any lapses in judgement?’ one of the nurses today had asked. ‘How am I supposed to know?’ Vee had bitten back. ‘Everything makes sense to me.’)

  Vee doesn’t usually mind the overground lines out of London – she used to know them as well as she now knows the names of all the pills in her bathroom cabinet – but today, it’s hard work. Two families gaggle onto the carriage at the last minute at Waterloo, and Vee is not far enough away to tune them out, so she has to listen all the way to Hampton, where they get off. The mothers are talking to their offspring in that quasi-educational way that people do now: yes I see the bus, what colour is the bus? Do you see what the number is on the front? Yes, it’s a bit like a 45, but have a look at the second number again . . . The two fathers (or uncles, or brothers, or friends) sit in seats across the aisle from their families. One is on his phone, and the other slouches, hands in pockets, looking out of the window, as though the children squawking less than five feet away are nothing to do with him. Maybe he will hoist one of them on to his shoulders, later, when they are tired, and expect the mother to be grateful. Vee is composing the photograph of it in her head, now, the man with the child held aloft, smiling, talking, the woman carrying bags, her body partly cut out of the image by his, her tiredness clear in the way her shoulders drop, her switched-off face.

  Bloody men.

  Oh, she’s tired.

  She hires a cab from Hampton station, even though it’s not far to Erica’s house. She is driven through streets of stately, semi-detached houses, most with loft conversions, two cars on the drive, tidy front gardens and shining windows cleaned, in all likelihood, by someone who isn’t the owner. They scream middle-class convention. Erica has ended up in a life that is surely not the one Leonie would have wanted for her, though Ursula no doubt would have been perfectly content. Well, it was ever so. Parents want safety for their children. Vee’s father would much rather she had settled down with a man, after all.

  Marja, a masseuse Vee has used since her last illness, came to the house and worked her magic yesterday. The gripe of the headache was driven away, and Vee slept for ten hours without the trace of a dream or the shadow of a pain. It was bliss. But today, she feels worse, and it’s partly because of the hospital, of course, its synthetic light and lack of air, all of the people she has never met touching her and calling her by her first name. But it also feels though her brain is punishing her for the respite that a long sleep brought. Maybe this is how it’s going to go: a back and forth of headache and rest from it, with the balance shifting, day by day, until there is never peace but only pain and lesser pain. Maybe it’s already happening; maybe her perception is shifting, and her head always hurts. That might explain the towering impatience she is feeling this afternoon.

  ‘Here you go,’ says the cab driver, ‘visiting your grandkids, are you? I’ve got a dozen of ’em. It’s all my wife ever does, go to see them. It’s a new lease of life.’

  ‘I’m going to work,’ Vee says, ‘and you’re making a lot of assumptions.’ She gives him the exact money.

  It is all, still, such a great effort.

  *

  Vee takes in the silence and the space, walks down the path to the house, steps slow and quiet. Although the day isn’t warm there’s something gentle and soothing in it. Spring, perhaps.

  Air and light. She hasn’t had enough of them today. Her daily walks along the river, from Battersea Park to Putney and back, have been part of her routine for years, but lately she hasn’t had the energy, or her sleep has been so bad that she hasn’t been able to face it. And morning, early, is really the only time: everyone is doing their walk or run or dog-exercising before the day begins, so there are nods of recognition but no risk of conversation. It suits her perfectly. Suited.

  She rubs at the place on her arm again. Her scalp is itchy with the aftermath of sweat and scrutiny. Straightening her shoulders, she rings the doorbell. She’s exactly on time.

  Erica opens the door with a smile. ‘Come through!’ she says, and turns, leading Vee through a hallway into a kitchen-diner that must run the length of the back of the house. It’s a bright room, with deep windows the length of one wall, and skylights too. It would be great for a photoshoot; Vee never stopped being anti-flash and a space like this would be a dream. A good quarter of it is given over to a great dining table, solid and dark, which has files and folders stacked along one side. There’s a pile of family detritus at the other edge – letters, opened and unopened, mugs, a plastic bowl with cereal in it, a cuddly animal of some sort. Erica, who is barefoot, hair in a pony-tail, wearing jeans and a shirt but still madeup, sees where Vee is looking, ‘I’m so sorry about the chaos. Marcus’s mother arrived late to collect Tom and I’m behind with everything. I’m nearly there.’

  ‘Take your time,’ Vee says. She could so easily be annoyed. But she knows how to wait. She likes it. Patience was her technique, really, the way she got her best photographs. Watch, wait, let the artifice fall away; wait for the people to be the people.

  ‘Thanks.’ Erica clears the table, bowl into sink and toy lobbed into a basket, everything else added to a pile of papers on the kitchen worktop. It looks as though it might be made of granite. Vee wants to rest her forehead on it, feel the coolness, the uncompromising hardness.

  ‘Coffee?’ Erica asks. There’s an elaborate red-and-chrome machine, which doubtless makes coffee a thousand times better than the stuff Vee boredom-drank at the hospital this morning, but caffeine isn’t exactly known for being the headache’s friend. She shakes her head.

  ‘Right, let’s get started.’ But Erica pauses and takes the lid from a slow cooker, stirs it. Seeing Vee look, she says, ‘Marcus is more of a child than Tom. If I don’t feed him within twenty minutes of him getting home, he’s a nightmare. But he doesn’t always know when he’s going to arrive. So – slow cooker.’

  ‘Well,’ Vee says, because – where to begin? She reminds herself that she has not had a child, a husband, has never had anyone to please but herself. It’s depressing, though, that this woman should think this is OK. She is curating an exhibition about the second wave of feminism. She is a university lecturer, and an expert in a corner of modern history in her own right. ‘Do you think of yourself as a feminist, Erica?’

  ‘Of course,’ Erica says, replacing the slow-cooker lid, wiping her hands on a cloth, and walking across to the table, ‘but the meaning has changed, hasn’t it? It’s not the . . . blunt instrument it was. In your day.’

  ‘Better a blunt instrument than a feather duster.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Erica looks like Leonie but she doesn’t have the scrappiness. No way would Leonie have let Vee get away with a comment like that.

  Erica spreads the folders around the table. There are seven, each with a photograph on the front – the prints Erica has chosen to be the focal part of each section of the exhibition. She’d sent Vee an email about framing and sizing last week. Vee had been desperate to go to bed – it wasn’t just her head that ached that day, but her whole body, in a way that was more than the aches of being an old woman – and, though it wouldn’t be fair to say she didn’t care at all how the work was framed, she has reasonable confidence in Erica to do a reasonable job. So she hadn’t read the email properly, and hadn’t therefore seen which images Erica was leading with. And now, here they are, laid out in front of her in manila folders, each with a poorly reproduced print on the front, apart from the last one, on which Erica has written ‘Self-Portraits (?)’.

  Her work can all be boiled down to this, then. Veronica Red
ux.

  Vee pulls the Miss World one towards her, for no reason other than that she hasn’t thought about it in a long time.

  ‘This was not long after the Women’s Liberation Front started, wasn’t it?’ Erica asks.

  ‘It must have been,’ Vee says.

  ‘Did my aunt Leonie get you involved?’

  Vee feels herself smile, ‘Leonie got me involved in everything. She was the first active, unapologetic feminist I met. She pulled me in. My life wouldn’t have been what it was without her.’

  She’s just used the past tense about herself. Well, may as well start now.

  ‘She was a kind of a mentor to you, then?’

  ‘I suppose she was. Though I wouldn’t have called it that then. It’s one of the words I wouldn’t have known. Leonie helped me in a very – basic – way.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Erica is sorting papers; it seems that she’s looking for something. Vee looks back at the photograph and thinks of all the things she didn’t know in 1970. She didn’t even know the words. She had started looking them up in her old school dictionary: ‘patriarchy’, ‘misogyny’, ‘eunuch’ when she read Greer. She once went to a meeting where people were talking about a new lexicon for an equal world. She didn’t know what ‘lexicon’ meant.

  ‘I hadn’t been educated in the way that a lot of the women in the movement had. The ones I was mixing with, anyway, through Leonie. I felt quite honoured that she had taken me under her wing and I didn’t want her to think I was so ignorant that I wasn’t worth the bother. So I looked words up and I started reading the news. There was a programme called What the Papers Say on TV, so I would watch that, and listen to discussions on the radio. And I asked your aunt a lot of questions, too. She always took me seriously. Some of her friends weren’t so nice to me. She saw herself as a writer but really I think her gift was for education.’