The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘My mother was a teacher.’

  ‘Ursula? Oh yes, of course, I remember.’

  ‘What do you remember?’

  Go carefully, Vee. ‘Ursula would come to the flat, sometimes, but I don’t think she was sure what to make of us. She was working in a school, I remember, and she was married, so she had quite a settled lifestyle.’

  Erica has stood still at last. ‘What was it like? Living in the flat?’

  ‘It was . . .’ Where are the words? ‘It seemed very – free – to me. Leonie wrote and went to groups and did some teaching. And she helped women she heard about through the . . . through the—’

  ‘Grapevine?’ Erica supplies. She doesn’t seem to register that Vee couldn’t find the word. Maybe having a toddler does that to you.

  ‘Yes. No.’ Ah, here it is. ‘Network. It was organised. It had to be because not everyone had a phone. There was a list of people you called, for different things.’

  ‘What did people call you and Leonie for?’

  ‘Leonie, when they needed power. Straight talking. Clear thinking. Me to take photographs.’

  ‘Of what?’

  Vee remembers these vividly. ‘Injuries. Beaten women. So there was a record.’

  Erica pales. ‘Of course.’ She’s paying full attention now. The slow cooker could catch fire and she wouldn’t notice. ‘I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘There’s no record – I took them, developed them, but they were private. They belonged to the women, not to me.’

  ‘Could we include some?’

  Vee thinks of the women she visited, sitting silently in spare corners of their friends’ houses, how she had to coax them into the light. ‘I gave them to the women.’

  ‘Not the police?’

  ‘Things were different. It was a brave woman who went to the police. If they did, there was a good chance the police would ring their husbands to come and get them.’

  Erica shakes her head. ‘That’s awful,’ she says.

  ‘It still is. It’s different, that’s all.’

  Erica looks away and Vee wonders, for the first time in years, who got out from under and who didn’t. She remembers Kiki didn’t go back; she got a divorce, started over. Most women didn’t.

  ‘We should include some of these in the exhibition. Do you have any at all?’

  ‘I might,’ Vee says, ‘but they would need to be ones where people couldn’t be identified.’

  ‘Of course.’ Erica nods. ‘So, would you look for them?’

  ‘I’ll see.’ There are some boxes that she really needs to go through: the private photographs, the family and the moments she doesn’t want to share with the world. She’s left them because she doesn’t want to look at them again.

  ‘Thank you,’ Erica says, and then, after the smallest hesitation, adds, ‘I know you don’t want to talk about when Leonie died—’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’ Vee makes a point of not knocking determined women but oh, this is hard.

  Erica nods. ‘I’m not asking anything. Except – if you’re looking for photographs, would you see if you have the contact sheet for the first film you took that day?’

  ‘What?’ Vee has given her the contact sheet and film of the final photographs. She hasn’t even mentioned that there was a first film.

  ‘Your contact sheets. I’ve studied them. You usually take a few shots while the subject settles in, from a few angles, then you stick with one place or one pose. The contact sheet of – of my aunt’s death – it doesn’t feel like that. It looks as though there was a film before that one.’

  Vee shrugs. It hurts her head. Which serves her right. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. It’s an outright lie. She does know.

  Erica’s expression flickers, just for a second, something like pain; she can recognise a lie. She looks back at the Miss World photograph. ‘You were close, around that time? When you shared a flat?’

  ‘Yes.’ Once she started to live with Leonie, see more of her private self, she saw more of what would normally be hidden. Vee’s married friends back in Essex went to great lengths to keep what they considered unfeminine from their husbands; they hid razors, plucked eyebrows behind locked bathroom doors, talked about keeping romance alive with lace negligees and euphemisms for menstruation. Leonie broke wind at will, left greying bras hanging over the shower curtain, and ate cereal from packets with her hands. She teased Vee for her occasional skirts and the way she left a hairbrush by the mirror in the hall; she never let her forget the time she said she wanted to be ‘presentable’. And, if anything, all of these things made Vee love Leonie more than she had before she moved into her flat, taking the spare bedroom and, later, converting the box room to a darkroom. Vee’s father had been big on privacy, scant on touch, and so living with Leonie was the most physically intimate that Vee had ever been with another human being, before or since. From this distance – and with her punctured memories – she has to wonder whether she was in love.

  ‘Do you think people still remember the Miss World protest?’ Erica asks, when it’s clear Vee isn’t going to say any more. ‘Or are aware of it, if they weren’t born? It’s so important to get the level of detail right.’

  Vee can see, from where Erica has opened another of the folders, just how much Erica has been putting into this exhibition. Well, good. People talk about talent and luck, but as Dad used to say, it’s graft that makes things happen. There’s tightness across the top of Vee’s chest at the thought of what Leonie kept, the skin around old scars flexing. ‘I don’t know. Does it matter? It was about what the protest achieved, as much as anything else.’ Vee thinks of the humming of excitement in her gut for days afterwards, the way the disruption was all over the papers, reported on the news.

  ‘But,’ Erica says, ‘I think I need to find a way to contextualise that. From this distance, it looks . . . it’s difficult. It was still women attacking women. Not that that’s stopped. But it’s different. The protest looks – brutal.’

  It’s so hard to explain what it was like to people who weren’t there, who take so much for granted now. ‘We were working things out, then. We were trying to break the world down to make it again, and this was one of the obvious ways to do it. We saw women in heels and lipstick as . . . as bonded, trapped.’

  Erica shifts from foot to foot, and presses her lips together as if to hide the coral stain on her mouth. ‘You would never pick that fight now, though? Haven’t we understood that as feminists, as women, we respect each other’s choices?’

  This would be the time to mention Erica’s nose job, and the way she has lost something distinctive and strong for the sake of what the male gaze considers acceptable. But she hasn’t the energy. Instead she says, ‘If we’re feminists by making choices, instead of being limited by the patriarchy at every turn, then that’s a thin kind of feminism. It’s not what we were really about. We wanted a better world for women. Not one where we respected each other’s right to be oppressed.’

  Erica seems to flinch, but Vee can’t be sure. ‘From what I’ve read, women were hard on each other in the seventies, too. At least there’s a bit more live and let live now.’

  Vee sits in silence for a moment, leafing through the magazines that Erica has laid on the table, recognising her photographs on covers. ‘Leonie teased me for wearing dresses when I went to see my dad.’

  Erica laughs, ‘Really? I don’t think of her as teasing anyone. Listening to my mother talk, you’d think Leonie did nothing but . . .’ she casts around for the right expression, a precision that Vee likes in her, ‘verbal assassinations and scorn.’

  Vee tips her head, smiles, to show that Ursula had a point. The movement makes something in her head prick and sting. ‘In the early days, we weren’t worse to each other than men were to us, but we weren’t always better. And that was hard, because we expected better from each other. And I don’t think we grasped that – that if someone had spent years thinking about their appearan
ce, if they believed their value was in their beauty, then they didn’t see Miss World as exploitation. They saw it as achievement. We weren’t trying to undermine that, but of course women who had invested that way felt undermined.’

  Erica nods too. ‘I really want the exhibition to make people think about the way women are seen today. Miss World looks tame in comparison.’

  Vee thinks back to what she remembers of that time. ‘I think we hoped that the way women looked could become irrelevant.’

  Erica nods. ‘Do you think you were naive?’

  ‘Well, probably. And idealistic. But if you’re changing the world you need to start with the ideal you want, don’t you? Not begin by aiming for a compromise?’ It’s strange to be talking as though she had been an activist when she was really a hanger-on, at the beginning at least, horrified by Leonie and her friends and drawn to them, like a ten-year-old tagging along with shoplifting teenagers. ‘My generation did what we could. Your generation needs to take this fight further, I think. We gave you enough for it to be possible for you to do that. Not . . .’

  Erica’s face is interested but there’s something hard in it too, a Leonie look. ‘Not what?’

  Vee shakes her head. She feels shaky, and her soul is exhausted by this conversation, and the memories it brings back. ‘I don’t know, Erica. I think we imagined that your generation would be – free. More free than we were. Sometimes I think you have it worse.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she replies, and Vee wonders whether, if she were a people person, if she was Leonie, or Ursula, she would put all talk of the exhibition aside and ask Erica how she was.

  Erica nods, and then, laying out the contents of the Miss World folder – handwritten notes, printed notes, permission forms, newspaper clippings – says, ‘I haven’t got a contact sheet for this one. I wondered if you still have it? If you’re looking through them anyway. For the other photos we talked about.’

  ‘I should have that one.’ Vee always kept good records, unlike most of the newsrooms of the 1970s and 80s, which were uninterested in anything once it was yesterday’s copy. Once she started working for the newspapers directly, she always made friends with the lab technicians in the hope that she would be able to get her original films and contact sheets back. It worked until she was doing well and getting the good jobs. Then her films and contact sheets were filed more carefully, according to the celebrity she’d photographed. Even her most established contacts in the lab, the closest people she had to friends at the papers and magazines, didn’t dare return them to her after that.

  Apart from that one time.

  ‘Did you know, the lab technicians used to go through the films at the end of the year, pull out the ones they thought no one would want again, and strip off the silver to sell, to pay for the Christmas party?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Erica’s not listening, not really; she’s scrutinising the images Vee took outside the Café de Paris: blurred faces, greyscale banners, but a sense of purpose all the same. After a moment she says, as though it’s nothing, ‘I’ve never actually been on a march.’

  ‘What?’ Vee hears that her voice is a bark. Making allowances for the world changing is one thing. This is another, ‘You’re not serious? Nothing?’

  ‘I write letters,’ Erica says, holding a file to her chest in defence. ‘I go to see my MP and I sign petitions. I do a lot of sharing on Facebook. I’m active.’

  ‘You haven’t been on a march? Never?’ Vee searches through recent memory. ‘Not even Trump? Stop the War? Me Too?’ Jesus.’

  ‘Was Jesus a march?’ It’s nice that she and Erica are relaxing around each other a bit, enough to make jokes, but—

  ‘Do not be flippant about this, Erica.’ Vee is half-here, half in a memory she cannot quite hold on to, Leonie livid about her sister’s way of ignoring anything inconvenient, difficult, not immediately personal or threatening. And if you lived like Ursula did, cushioned and not exactly ignorant, but in a well-ordered, well-off world, nothing felt personal or threatening. Well, nothing except Leonie.

  ‘You’re making a lot of assumptions about my beliefs and my life.’ Erica’s not making eye contact, and her tone seems too mild for the conversation, as though she’s placating her child, or her child-husband.

  ‘Maybe,’ Vee says, ‘but you’re clever. And clever people usually care about the world.’

  ‘You think because I didn’t make a placard I don’t care?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’ Well, not exactly. ‘But I can’t imagine living without protesting.’

  ‘You see? This is what I mean.’ Erica’s hands are on her hips and her voice is still quiet, but it’s angry now, and a little sad, too. ‘I did a PhD and worked part-time through most of my twenties. Then as soon as I got my first university teaching job, my mother became ill. I did what I could for her. She died. I was dealing with her estate and clearing her house while I was planning my wedding. I was pregnant while I was putting the proposal together for this. It seems like a long time since there was one thing that needs my attention. So no, I have never been on a march. Neither has Marcus. But he’s on the PTA and we give money to charity and we are really, really trying to be good people in the world. Doesn’t that matter more?’

  ‘More than equality for half of the world’s population?’

  Erica looks up to the ceiling. ‘Of course we need feminism, I wouldn’t have proposed this exhibition otherwise. We need to look back to look forward. We need to understand. But we need compassion, too. And, if it makes you feel any better, things are hard.’

  Vee feels something twist in her. It’s a relief, almost, to feel emotional instead of physical pain. She nods. ‘I’m sorry, Erica. I shouldn’t judge.’ She has patience; she should try for compassion. It’s not as though she’s never been misunderstood.

  ‘You do, though. I’m fighting. You might not see it. I’m trying to make Marcus see that it’s not my job to be in charge of every damn thing.’ Erica sags. ‘But you’re right. I’ve never been on a march.’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  Leonie will never forgive her – from wherever she is now, the place where Vee will be before long – if she doesn’t show Erica what she’s missed.

  *

  Marcus has brought flowers home: a bouquet of roses and gypsophila, red blooms against a gauzy white background, wrapped in brown paper; Erica panics for a second, not knowing why, and then remembers how her mother thought that red and white flowers together were unlucky. It’s a good thing she isn’t superstitious. Even if she does feel as though she’s been ambushed by Ursula’s ghost, shaking her head in the corner. Marcus brought flowers, though. Erica feels something in her unlace, so that she can breathe a little more easily.

  ‘Thank you.’ She pushes her nose into them, even though she knows that, at this time of year, hothouse roses will smell of nothing much.

  ‘How did it go today?’

  Lovelier than the flowers is the fact that Marcus remembered Vee was coming today; they’d barely spoken this morning, and he was home late and drunk last night after a work night out, so he slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her. That’s what he said, anyway. When did she start looking for other motives in kindness? ‘She can be a bit . . .’ she considers ‘. . . sharp. Unpredictable. But today was useful. I think.’ Every time she spends time with Vee, she is left with more things to think about. That’s good though. It gives her more choices when it comes to creating the story she will tell at the exhibition. With eight weeks until the opening, and less than six weeks until everything needs to be signed off, she needs to start firming her thoughts up. She’ll book Marcus’s mum for a couple of days next week. (Why, even in her own head, does she never call her Sarah? And why does she never ask Marcus’s father to help with childcare? He’s retired too.)

  ‘That’s really good.’ Marcus tousles her hair, and she tries not think of a dog who came straight back when called. ‘Where’s Tom?’

  ‘He’s
asleep.’ So asleep that Erica took him out of the car seat, out of his zip-up suit, and carried him up to his cot without him even flickering an eyelid. ‘Sarah let him drop off in the car on the way back. She was very apologetic. I told her it didn’t matter.’ They have always tried to have ‘adult evenings’ – having agreed, when they decided to have a baby, that they wouldn’t become one of those couples who do nothing but talk about, and think about, their child. They would still go to the cinema. They would strap the baby on and walk along the Thames for a lazy weekend lunch as they often did when it was just the two of them. Their sex life might enter a new phase, of course it might, but they would keep on pleasing each other.

  In reality, ‘adult evenings’ usually mean falling asleep on the sofa in front of the TV.

  Erica secretly likes it when Tom has a nap late in the afternoon, because Marcus will happily entertain him while she takes a glass of wine and a book and has a long bath, as though she has no needs but her own to consider.

  ‘Ah well,’ Marcus says, and he pulls her in, ‘us time.’ He still smells a little like the morning after, under the last traces of his aftershave and the commuter-train sweat. ‘How about we go to bed for an hour? Then I’ll order us a pizza.’

  He takes off his jacket and drops it onto the chair where Vee was sitting, just a couple of hours ago. Erica looks at his back, the broadness of his ribs and the way his shoulders knuckle as they move under his shirt. She asks herself if she feels like sex. She doesn’t really know. But if they have pizza tonight they can eat what’s in the slow cooker tomorrow, and that makes it worth trying to work up some enthusiasm.

  Part 3: Focus

  The photographer must know what she is trying to create. The act of photographing is the act of placing a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional space, in a way that will have meaning for the person observing the finished image. It’s a complex task. You won’t achieve it unless you have some sense of what it is you are aiming to portray.