The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  Erica looks at the box the way a dog would look at a bone. But she pulls her gaze back to Vee as she stands, and asks, ‘Can I do anything? For you? You look . . . you don’t look well at all.’

  ‘Just be quiet,’ Vee says, and she sets off up the stairs, every step an effort.

  *

  Just be quiet? How much noise is one woman looking through one box of photographs likely to make? Vee should try living in a house with a toddler who has discovered what his toy hammer is for, and loves above all things his talking teddy bear.

  Erica boils the kettle – that can’t be considered noisy – and takes one of four plain, bone-white, bone-china mugs from a plain white cupboard. She spoons loose-leaf tea into a glass teapot. Vee seems to live the way magazines make you believe everyone lives: her house is pale, her possessions spare and beautiful. The fridge hums as though it has been tuned. Erica thinks of her own fridge, the door covered with invitations, newsletters, bin-day and recycling reminders and Tom’s works of art, and inside crammed with half-used jars of this and that, out-of-date fruit and salad leaves turning to slime. Vee’s fridge has a carton of milk and a bottle of rum in the door; on the shelves are tomatoes, pears, fresh pasta, and a carton of clam chowder. Erica wants to worship the simplicity of it, and the lifestyle it implies. She loves her family, she really does. But oh, for the time to taste the food on your tongue. When she goes home she will get rid of all of their chipped mugs.

  But now it’s time for the box. Erica tries not to think of the treasure she might find. She’s an academic. She’s an adult. She’ll wait and see.

  The contact sheets, roughly A4 size, are on the bottom, and individual prints on top, the four-inch by six-inch ones on top of the five by eight. They aren’t in date order, then: that doesn’t seem like Vee. But when Erica turns over the top photograph – an unremarkable image, a line of women linking arms, no distinguishing features, but her aunt Leonie second from left – she sees a date pencilled lightly on the back, along with an abbreviation that she assumes will make sense to Vee. (‘WLFC’. Women’s Liberation Front Conference? Probably. She’ll check.)

  Erica begins by looking at the dates on the back of the images and trying to put them into sequence, but soon she is overtaken by the need to look at the photographs, every one, as fast as she can, her gaze gobbling through them, knowing that she can slow down, later, go back through and examine them properly. But first there is the rush of noticing something in each image, letting her eye lead. Here, she is startled by her aunt’s scowl, her raised hand, as she was obviously being photographed when she didn’t want to be. She understands why people use words like ‘formidable’ with reference to Leonie: here, she seems terrifying. In another – there’s a heart-shock as Erica recognises her mother with her aunt – the sisters are standing in a doorway. Ursula looks as though she’s in charge, Vee having captured the moment where she is talking, Leonie listening, head dropped, meek. There may well be a photograph in Erica’s grandmother’s album of the two girls in childhood, where the same dynamic is visible.

  Here is Leonie, in her dungarees, hair tied back with a scarf, jabbing her finger at a man who seems to be confronting her; there are out-of-focus placards in the background. Here, Leonie stands on a table, with a raffia-wrapped bulbous bottle of wine raised high in one hand, mouth open in what has to be a victory cry. In another image, Leonie is slumped in a chair, eyes half closed, mouth half a smile, making a V-sign at the camera. Here, she’s marching: here, her face is caught among others, all looking in the same direction, all listening, focused, waiting. It’s the sort of photograph that makes you hold your breath, and wish you were there, hearing what those women were hearing.

  Erica lays the photographs of her aunt side by side, imagines them in the same section of the exhibition as the moment of death photograph. They will make the exhibition visitor feel the loss of Leonie all the more. To see her so very alive, next to the image of her so newly dead. Erica feels sadness rising in her, bloating her heart and making her vision soften and shake; she wipes her tears, quickly, so they cannot fall on the photographs. Though Erica doesn’t recall much about Leonie or her death, she lived with her mother’s grief for all of her remembered life. Grief wakes in Erica now, a slow low keening in her guts, as she lets herself think of all she will not have again. No mother. No answers to the question of Leonie’s death. She was a fool to think that Vee could be persuaded to talk to her about Leonie. She is more of a fool to keep hoping for it.

  Erica walks away from the table, stands at the window and looks at the beginning of spring in the budding of the trees. She breathes deep. She would cancel the exhibition tomorrow, throw all of her work away, just to know what happened that day. Her own scant memories don’t feel right. Veronica could help. but she won’t. She won’t.

  And Erica could cry her heart out now, but she won’t. She goes back to the table, looks at her aunt with her academic’s eye. Leonie could be cold and clear. So can she.

  It would be possible to date the photographs, roughly, without looking at the back, or at least put them into chronological order: flares narrow and hair shortens as the 1970s wear on, slogans become more consistent and placards more sophisticated. Vee, too, changes where she focuses. She moves from taking groups, vistas, gatherings, to focusing on faces and exchanges. Often, in these photographs, Leonie is arguing with someone. Sometimes it seems good-humoured but very often it clearly isn’t, with Leonie’s bulk pushing forward, her face thrusting close, her hand in a fist by her side or raised and flattened in the air, telling the other person to stop. Stop talking, her body language says, stop resisting, stop disagreeing.

  Erica could also date the photographs, she realises, from Leonie’s size. She’s solid in the 1960s, and then in the early 1970s she’s starting to be – well, it would be called obese now. And still she grows: more chins, more girth, her fingers plump and then fat, the joints disappearing. She looks like Andrea Dworkin, though she came later, Erica is sure, becoming famous after Leonie died. Or is it wrong to equate the two so easily? Not all overweight women look the same, just as all thin women are different. If only it were simple. It should be, by now. That’s clearly what Veronica thinks. She’s right. But saying it should be sorted doesn’t make it so.

  There are other things to notice in the photographs: Leonie’s transition from dungarees to men’s shirts and loose trousers; the way Vee rarely took photographs when the subject was looking directly into the lens, preferring to watch them as they watched something else, or were absorbed in action. Erica could write another PhD on Veronica’s photographic decisions. Maybe a book.

  ‘I think that’s a bit better,’ Vee says, behind her.

  Erica wipes her eyes, just to make sure there are no traces of tears, before she turns around.

  Vee has dressed – jeans, a white shirt beneath a navy sweater, not very new but made of something (cashmere?) that isn’t meant to ever wear out. She’s wearing socks; her boots are next to a bag at the door, so she must have been planning to come. Despite all this, it seems as though she has not yet put her skin back on. She’s like Tom is in the mornings, when he wants to cuddle, before he sets off to conquer his toddler world. Or Marcus, after sex, when he pulls her in, kisses the top of her head, says something like, it’s not so bad, is it, darling? We’re lucky to have each other, aren’t we? It’s the only time he sounds uncertain; the only time, if she’s honest, that she really actively feels she loves him still. Oh, she knows she does. But feeling it is different.

  ‘Can I get you anything? Make you some tea?’

  Vee closes her eyes, longer than a blink. ‘Water, please,’ she says, then, ‘Damn. I forgot to bring my tablets down. They’re in the bathroom cabinet. Top shelf, white box. Would you mind?’

  The cabinet is as neat and tidy as the fridge. There are three boxes of medication on the top shelf, all different. Erica isn’t an expert, but she knows a serious health problem when she sees it. One of the packs is stero
ids, the other two both prescription painkillers, or at least she thinks they are. A shocked, roiling nausea rises in Erica: she had assumed that Vee was difficult, because – well, because she was that kind of woman.

  Erica puts the medication boxes down next to Vee, and goes to the kitchen and pours a glass of water. Vee nods her thanks, takes the glass with a slightly shaking hand, and swallows some tablets with a practised jerk of the head. She steadies herself with a palm on the back of a dining chair, closes her eyes. ‘I don’t know whether my headaches ever go,’ she says, ‘or whether I’m just so used to them that I stop noticing.’

  ‘This one doesn’t seem as bad as the day we went to the gallery,’ Erica offers.

  There’s almost a smile from Vee. ‘That wasn’t a headache. That was – an assault.’ The first assault of her last war. She puts a finger to her temple, gently, as though the very skin of her face is tender.

  Erica is still standing; she isn’t sure what will happen now. She could go to the march on her own, of course she could. She’s not a child. But she doesn’t want to do it without Vee. She says, ‘Thank you for letting me look at the photos.’

  ‘What did you think of them?’

  Maybe because Vee sounds as though she doesn’t care, or because her eyes are still closed, it’s easy for Erica to be honest. ‘I thought my aunt looks hostile in a lot of them. She seems to be spoiling for a fight.’

  The fraction of a nod from Vee, the foreshadowing of a smile. ‘And does that surprise you?’

  ‘Not really. Like I said, I know her mainly by reputation. And her writing. Which was – is – pretty uncompromising.’

  ‘Hmm.’ It’s half-sigh, half-question.

  In the peace of this room, talking becomes irresistible. Plus, Erica doesn’t really want to think about what those pills mean. ‘Her essay on abortion, in particular. Not the column, the piece in her book. That made me think. She was very clear. That it’s only a transaction. No more important than having a tooth out.’

  Vee doesn’t give any sign that she’s listening. She doesn’t speak. And Erica can’t stop. ‘I remember when I was first pregnant. My mother died eighteen months before and it was only a year after we got married. It was so emotional. Leonie wrote rationally about abortion. It made me see how irrationally we think about babies. I can see why people wouldn’t like that kind of – of forthrightness.’ Erica herself had put down the iPad she was reading Leonie’s book on, her hand shaking, and looked across at Tom, who was sleeping on the sofa, battened in by cushions so he didn’t roll off and hurt himself, his perfect shells of ears sticking through the straight, soft hair that she cannot bear to have cut. She’d wondered whether, if she hadn’t had him, she might be less unhappy.

  There’s a pause. Vee opens her eyes, looks towards the window, the light. When she speaks, her mouth hardly moves, as though she is trying to keep her jaw still. ‘That’s depressing. Women of your age, your education and means getting swept up. It’s the opposite of what the movement was fighting for.’

  This again. If Erica doesn’t start to confront it, she will be trampled. She won’t be able to look Tom or Marcus in the eye when she gets home, as it is. ‘Weren’t you fighting for the right not to be judged? It sometimes seems to me that you only wanted that in theory. I get judged every which way, and much more by women than by men.’ She thinks of Marcus’s mother, Sarah, who considers it shocking that she employs a weekly cleaner. An older former colleague told her that she was letting the side down by having a baby. Whereas most of the men she works with couldn’t give a toss about her childcare arrangements or the moral compromises she has made, so long as she turns up when she’s supposed to. ‘You would say you spent the seventies fighting for women’s freedom but that only seems to be true if we are the right sort of free.’

  ‘That’s probably a fair point,’ Vee says, after a pause so long Erica thought she was ignoring her.

  Erica can’t help but nod, with a kind of ‘ha!’ abruptness.

  They stand in silence for a moment, then another. Erica goes to the table and leafs through the photographs again. It’s the first time in a long time that her aunt has seemed more than an abstract figure, the family icon/tragedy. ‘She looks . . . dynamic. And angry, a lot of the time. My aunt.’

  Vee half-laughs, an affectionate, remembering sound. ‘She was. We all were, to an extent, in that we were all trying to make changes, and we were aware of how unjust the world was, and we couldn’t believe it wasn’t changing faster. If you’d told me then that I was going on this march today, I’d have written you off as a pessimist. Leonie would have hauled you over the coals for not believing in the power of the sisterhood.’ She smiles, looking straight at Erica for the first time today. ‘Do you want to call a cab while I put my boots on?’

  ‘Are you up to it?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Vee says, ‘but I sorted out my camera last night, so I’ll give it a try.’

  ‘You’re going to take photographs?’ Erica must have misheard. Vee doesn’t photograph. In an early email about the exhibition, she’d written: ‘I haven’t taken a photograph in more than twenty years, and I won’t again. You may not quote me on that, as you may not quote me – directly – on anything.’ She’d read the email out to Marcus. ‘You’ve a heart like a lion to be doing this,’ he’d said.

  ‘Yes. I am a photographer.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t photograph anymore.’ There’s a thrum of excitement in Erica, where grief was a few minutes ago.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  *

  It would be more accurate to say that her mind has changed. More accurate yet to say that disease has changed it. There is no reason for her to be doing this. But as she sorted through her equipment yesterday she had thought, why not? She won’t get the chance again. No one is going to notice her, or care about her, at a march. They’ll have bigger, better things to care about than what Veronica Moon is doing. And press photographers now won’t recognise her. They might have heard of her, studied her, but she looks like just another old woman. So, she’s going to take some photographs today. If the tumour is making her do it, squashing her memories and blocking her fear, well, she’s going to let it.

  The trouble with having a tumour chewing through your brain, Vee thinks – putting aside impending death, for a moment, and worse, the threat of blindness – is that you know you cannot trust anything you think. At home, as Erica talked, Vee had seen, so clearly, so simply, that she was lonely, she was afraid, she needed someone the way Vee had once needed Leonie. And so coming to the march seemed more important than anything else. She’d had an odd thought, floating in from nowhere, that perhaps she owed Leonie this.

  But then, in the cab, she’d become certain that the rattle and swerve of motion was doing sudden, terrible damage to her ailing brain. She holds on, hard fists and closed eyes, until the taxi driver drops them on Great George Street.

  As soon as her feet hit solid ground again, and she begins to walk, her camera bag bouncing on her hip, she knows she can do this. They cut across to Parliament Street, walking with it just as it is changing form, turning from a flowing, street-bound river to a sprawling, square-edged pool of women.

  The patches of song, the laughter and the chants taken up, shifting and swelling and quelling, work like a balm as she and Erica make their way towards them. There is nothing in the world like the sound of women protesting.

  The air grumbles and sings under the weight of noise in it: there’s so much energy that Vee feels circled, surrounded, her steps easy. The rhythm of her pace next to Erica’s settles into a steady harmony. Vee feels her breath deepen, her spine straighten. She’s forgotten exactly how good it is to march: how important, how scary, how real. Her edges dissolve into the sound and light around her. She tastes petrol fumes, breathes in the shouted-out breaths of the women around her. ‘The women, u-ni-ted, will ne-ver be de-feat-ed.’ How long since she was in the midst of the sisterhood like this? When th
e chant starts again, she opens her throat and lets her voice join it.

  The pain in her own head is there, all right, and it’s not nothing, but it’s as though it has moved to the other side of her skull, taken up by shouts and jeers, chants and drums, and is nothing to her anymore. Erica is next to her, silent but wide-eyed as they join the women making their way into Trafalgar Square. It’s time to yell and shout for justice and autonomy and the right to not be ogled, harassed, spoken down to, blackmailed or abused. She should be bellowing for every damn thing that should be hers by right, like the women around them. Vee reaches out an arm to touch Erica’s, smiles when the younger woman looks around and smiles back.

  The police presence thickens as they approach the entrance to Trafalgar Square: horses in pairs, vans watching darkly from side streets, uniformed officers in clumps, alert, attentive groups. The world knows women can be dangerous. Vee’s smile spreads wider – her face is probably aching, but she can’t feel it, can’t feel anything. She sees how Erica glances at the police, then back to her, for reassurance. ‘We’re the ones with the power here,’ she shouts, close to Erica’s ear, ‘we don’t need what they have.’ She hopes she’s right.

  The marchers spread around Trafalgar Square, pooling into the space at the front of the stage and washing out. Vee puts a hand on Erica’s arm – touch is easy, once you start. ‘I’m going to stand at the side,’ she says, ‘where I can get a bit of height. If we get separated, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Email me tomorrow.’ Erica nods, and looks around – Vee sees her taking in the scale of this, the seriousness of it, with more police lining the space as it fills, and TV cameras in place, recording it all. And she thinks of what Erica’s day to day life is. She does whatever you do with a child, and she lectures, and researches. She is a library-dweller, an only child, and probably a solitary soul, even if she is married. Vee knows what some parts of that are like. ‘Enjoy it,’ she says, with the hope that she sounds reassuring. And then the noise starts to build and build as the first speaker strides onto the stage.