The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  Vee thinks of all she’s done, quietly, that she hopes no one will ever know about. That’s her real legacy. She touches Erica on the shoulder. (Why does she keep touching people? She’s never wanted to before.) ‘Let’s go out for a coffee. There’s a cafe on the corner.’

  She moves to get her coat – it wasn’t actually a question – but Erica hesitates. ‘Before we go, I want to know about your headaches, Vee. Your medication looks as though they’re something serious.’

  Vee inhales, exhales, and something starts to throb, behind her ear. She should probably be honest, even if she doesn’t want to say it. ‘Well, I have a glioblastoma. It’s a brain cancer. The prognosis isn’t good. I had it first in 2007. I was lucky then, because it was possible to remove it.’ Her fingertips go to her skull, as if magnetised, feel along the scarline behind her left ear where her hair grows in kinks. ‘It was always going to come back. It was only ever a question of time.’ She hears how her voice gets caught on the words ‘come back’ and ‘time’.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Erica looks upset, so Vee looks away. She’s not sure which of them she’s sparing. ‘You can’t have surgery again?’

  Vee shakes her head, not sure if it hurts. ‘Not this time. It’s inoperable.’ She shrugs. ‘I got an extra ten years.’ This time she manages to make it sound more matter-of-fact than it feels.

  ‘That’s something,’ Erica sounds unsure. ‘Did you – has it been a good ten years?’

  Vee laughs. (Is she laughing more? Is that a change? Does it matter? No. So long as her eyes keep working, nothing matters.) ‘I didn’t find a new gratitude for life. I tried. I travelled again. I got into . . .’ Oh, what’s the word, what’s the word? Stupid, stupid tumour. ‘Philosophy. No. Not that. I gave money to things. Set up some funds, some prizes.’

  ‘Philanthropy,’ Erica offers.

  ‘Yes.’ Her tongue doesn’t want to go around the word; she doesn’t make it try. If she has to lose something before she dies, let it be words.

  ‘I haven’t read anything about that.’

  ‘It’s all anonymous,’ Vee says. At least she has still got some vocabulary.

  Erica nods. ‘I’m sorry, Vee.’ She is wiping tears from her eyes, in that ridiculous way that women wearing mascara do, looking up and sliding her finger along the skin under her bottom lashes.

  *

  Erica had suspected, of course she had. The headaches, the swinging moods, the drugs, the objections to noise and light – they were always going to add up to this, if she had chosen to do the maths.

  And yet Vee seems so calm, holding it all in or dealing with it or whatever she is doing. She is striding ahead down the street, looking for all the world like – well, like someone who doesn’t have a brain tumour. Although, close up, there’s a sallowness to her skin that Erica should have noticed, a dullness in her eyes that doesn’t speak to health. If Tom looked like that, Erica would be torn between putting him to bed and taking him to the doctor. A cold shudder runs through her at the very thought of her baby with a brain tumour.

  Vee walks much faster than Erica. Maybe Erica needs DMs instead of these stupid boots, which she had thought might make her feel like a woman again, rather than a chewed-up mother. She could probably do with being more like Vee.

  *

  The cafe is noisy: a hissing, bean-rattling coffee machine, chatter, a baby half-crying, and wood floor bouncing the sound around.

  ‘You sit down,’ Erica says.

  Vee nods. ‘I’d like a coffee and a cheese scone. I can’t remember when I last had a cheese scone.’

  ‘What sort of coffee?’

  ‘Coffee.’

  Erica orders two flat whites and two cheese scones. Three weeks ago she would have been worried about eating a scone, because there’s still half a stone of baby weight she hasn’t lost. But the march changed her. Vee is changing her, Leonie’s words are changing her. She’s done with worrying about the calories in a cheese scone.

  Vee has found a table in the corner. At the next table along sits a couple, hands joined, a copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost between them; Erica can only see the back of his head, but she is animated, laughing, saying something about apples. It’s cheering and depressing in equal measure. When did Erica last see a play, or hold Marcus’s hand over a table? (When did she want to?) And why is she even thinking about such things – such trivial things – when the woman opposite her is dying?

  ‘Your photographs,’ she says, because she needs to say something about them, ‘they are so important. To everyone.’ Not least because Vee pointed her camera, when she could, at the unnoticed, and the unimportant. That’s what makes her Greenham archive so special. Everyone who was there knew that they were all changing the world: Vee captured that like no one else. And those women in the shelters, beaten by their husbands, had no recourse to the law, but they had a record of what had happened to them with Vee’s unflinching images. Erica had almost cried when she’d unpacked the envelopes Vee had couriered over to her: contact sheets of unidentified women, photographed with bruises flowering across their faces. And more, from later, when Vee returned and took photographs when these victims were happy and whole again.

  Vee makes a gesture that Erica has learned means ‘I choose not to engage with that’: a slight pushing out of the lower lip, a dip of the head a fraction to her left. Instead of replying, she asks, ‘And what did you think of your first taste of activism?’

  ‘It was – I can’t believe I did it. I’m the most law-abiding person there is.’

  ‘You look more cheerful than you have done all morning,’ Vee says, with a smile that tells Erica that it’s OK to not talk about dying.

  Erica laughs, a release of tension as much as anything else. ‘It was weird. I was so angry when I thought that policeman was having a go. And the next thing I knew I was in handcuffs.’

  ‘They didn’t charge you, though?’

  ‘No.’ She often thinks of those few hours, the fear and the excitement, the waiting with the other women and the smell of old sweat and industrial cleaning fluid, but it’s nothing, really, in the scheme of what people like Vee and Leonie did. ‘It must all seem tame to you,’ she says.

  ‘I never got arrested,’ Vee says, ‘at least, I don’t think I did. There are – holes, I suppose you would call them, in my memories.’

  ‘Holes? That must be awful.’

  ‘Well, you don’t know what you don’t know,’ Vee says, her hand going to her head again, the same place as before, where the scar must be, ‘and it’s been a long time, so I’m used to it. But there are things that I just have absolutely no recollection of. My father’s death. I know he died, and when, because I’ve got the certificate. It was a few months before – before Leonie. And I miss him, the way I would if I remembered his dying. But there’s just . . . a space.’

  ‘That is—’ but there’s no word significant enough. Weird/awful/terrible are words that Erica probably uses most days, when talking about things that are nowhere near as bad as that.

  ‘Yes.’ Vee nods, slowly; it seems she’s treating her head with caution. ‘It is.’

  ‘You might not have been arrested,’ Erica says, ‘but you were definitely more of an activist than me.’ As soon as that ‘were’ is in the air she wants to snatch it, swallow it, turn it into ‘are’. ‘You are—’

  ‘I talked a good game,’ Vee says, showing no sign of caring about Erica mixing her tenses up and really, why should she? ‘. . . once Leonie had taught me the words. And I marched and shouted. Really, though, taking photographs was my activism, and then it became my career. Your aunt called me a pimp, once. Or it could have been a whore. Or both.’ She laughs, ‘I was furious at the time but she was right.’

  ‘Those are awful things to say, though.’

  ‘Leonie said a lot of awful things.’

  ‘That’s what my mother always said. She said Aunt Leonie never thought before she opened her mouth, and the things that came out were ne
ver kind.’

  ‘I don’t remember it being like that,’ Vee says. ‘They didn’t have a lot in common. And your mother didn’t buy into a lot of Leonie’s views.’

  Erica laughs, ‘I can’t imagine Leonie let that go.’

  ‘No. and I think Ursula was pretty determined, too. Leonie walked all over me – she was always late, she cancelled things – but she did as Ursula told her.’ Vee puts her cup down, and half-misses; it sits awry in the saucer. The expression on her face changes, from sure to hesitant.

  ‘Vee? Are you OK?’

  Vee looks straight at her – she has such wise eyes – ‘I’d forgotten. Ursula once came to give Leonie a lift somewhere. They might have been going to their mother’s. Leonie tried to get out of it. Ursula looked at her and said, “I spent yesterday afternoon getting twenty-one seven-year-olds to their swimming lesson and back. Do you really think you’re going to get out of this?” I thought Leonie was going to flip, but the two of them just started laughing. And Leonie did what she was told.’

  Erica laughs, ‘That sound plausible. From my mother, I mean.’

  ‘It drove Leonie crazy, that her own sister wasn’t a feminist. We thought we could change everything. We didn’t understand why all women wouldn’t get on board. Not just women like Ursula. We had no idea of how privileged we were. Women working two jobs can’t come on marches. Single parents can’t always afford babysitters so they can come to meetings. Women who weren’t white might not have wanted to be the only different face. We made a lot of assumptions. And we definitely didn’t see what a long road we were on. We didn’t imagine we would ever end up with people like you.’

  She doesn’t say it like an insult, but Erica feels it as one. She thinks of the ‘Doctor’ title she doesn’t insist on, the fact that she is the one with babysitters’ numbers in her phone. She would apologise, if she didn’t know that Vee would tell her off for it.

  Vee picks up her cup and sets it carefully in the centre of the saucer. ‘I miss Leonie,’ she says quietly, and she looks straight at Erica, as if to tell her that she knows what she is saying, that she is breaking her own rule by offering to talk about her friend like this.

  ‘I don’t remember much about her.’ Erica speaks quietly, too, as though loudness might scare Vee away from this conversation. Oh, how she longs to know what really happened, on the day Leonie died.

  ‘She really wasn’t part of your life?’

  ‘Not really. She and my mother argued a lot. My mother said that for someone who had no maternal instinct, she definitely had a lot of advice for her about all the ways that she was going wrong.’

  Vee laughs, a sudden, sweet sound. ‘Leonie was never afraid of having opinions.’

  ‘I never used to understand why my mother got so annoyed with her. I do now.’ Erica thinks of her mother-in-law’s interventions, kindly meant, no doubt, and how they make her both furious and desolate with the loss of her own mother, over and over.

  Vee looks straight at her again, and Erica feels as though her photograph is being taken, her image held, just by the older woman’s gaze. The cafe around them gets louder. Erica is as self-conscious as she would be if she was actually being photographed. She sips at her coffee, for something to do, although she doesn’t want the rest of it; it’s got too cold and there’s a bitterness in the flavour that doesn’t taste quite right to her.

  ‘You know people thought you had died? Or committed suicide?’ she says, because she has often thought about this, and there might never be a better time to mention it. ‘After the photograph of Leonie’s death was published, I mean, and it all came out.’

  Vee laughs, harsh and quick. ‘They might have thought it. They didn’t consider it. I still live in the same house I did when Leonie died. I was never hiding. I was just – private.’

  ‘No one tried to contact you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. I unplugged the phone for weeks, and my neighbours complained about the noise of the knocking at the door. But I didn’t answer and they stopped trying, soon enough. Went away and speculated about suicide.’

  Vee puts her hand to the side of her head, a sharp action that suggests a sudden pain.

  ‘Are you OK? Do you need anything?’

  ‘I’m – I’m fine,’ Vee says, but her smile is odd, dislocated. Her skin has gone a pantone paler in the last two minutes. Erica should get her home.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says, and Vee rises without a word.

  27 March 2018

  Late afternoon

  Vee is walking along the Thames Path. When days are limited, a morning walk may as well take place in the evening. She can’t afford to be fussy about time of day anymore.

  She hasn’t got far, though, when the dizziness hits, sudden as lightning. She gropes for balance, grabbing for a fence, and closes her eyes.

  But that makes it worse. She feels sick, scared, as though the world is flipping her over and over, and she cannot tell if she is standing or falling, standing or falling. Is this how it will be, if she does go blind? And is it normal to be more afraid of blindness than death, or is it the tumour that makes her think so? Surely any life should be better than none?

  She opens her eyes, slowly, and almost cries out with relief when she sees the river, the sky, her boots on the path and the sun on the water. And the couple hurrying towards her. She must look like a heart attack in action. The man, slightly ahead of the woman, takes her under the arm. ‘What’s happened?’ he asks.

  ‘I’m just dizzy,’ Vee says, ‘I’ll be fine in a minute. Thank you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ the woman asks.

  ‘I just need a minute.’

  ‘I’m calling an ambulance.’ The man is speaking to the woman with him, not to Vee. He pulls out his phone.

  Vee collects all of her breath. She is not sure of many things but she knows there are plenty of times when she has felt worse over the last few weeks. And if she isn’t OK, the last place she wants to be is in the company of a man with straining shirt buttons and hot beer breath.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I don’t need an ambulance. Thank you. I only live five minutes from here.’ If she stares at the same spot on the ground the world steadies a little.

  ‘I think we had better walk you home,’ the man says. The pressure of his hand on her arm increases. ‘Which way?’

  Vee takes as deep a breath as she dares to keep her in equilibrium, and looks into the man’s face. ‘Please take your hand off me.’

  ‘We were only trying to help,’ the man says, and turns to walk away, saying to the woman with him, ‘You’d think an old woman would be grateful for help.’

  The woman says nothing, and looks back towards Vee, apology on her face.

  Vee ignores her. She’s done appeasing. She’s channelling Leonie, who feels closer and closer as the days spin, aching, by.

  Part 5: Movement

  When you photograph movement, you will have both sharpness and blur. A photograph of a runner, for example, will show intensity of effort in her face, a sense of movement from the lack of sharpness in her arms and legs, and a blurred background. Movement on film requires that some things are sharp and some are lost.

  Veronica Moon, Women in Photographs (unpublished)

  ‘Greenham Common Salute’

  Veronica Moon

  Exhibition Section: A Protest in Pictures

  Camera: OM-1

  Film: 200 ASA

  First published: Guardian magazine, October 1981

  The words ‘Greenham Common’ are now synonymous with the anti-war, anti-nuclear and women’s liberation movements of the late twentieth century. For almost two decades, from 1981 to 2000, women camped, blockaded and protested at the US Army base in Berkshire where nuclear missiles were sited.

  This photograph was taken within weeks of the protest beginning, on Moon’s first visit to the peace camp. This was the cover shot of the Guardian Weekend magazine on Saturday 31 October 1981, with the strapline, ‘Greenham Common: A
New Generation is Angry’. It was her only official collaboration with author and journalist Leonie Barratt.

  The now-iconic image shows a group of women in deep discussion: one has a clipboard, one is pointing; their faces are intent and focused. One woman is holding a sleeping toddler, another carries a baby in a sling. In the background, the chain-link fence to which the women took it in turns to be chained is visible. Only one person has noticed Moon: a girl of around eight years standing next to her mother. She looks directly into the lens, giving a V-sign to the camera. Her face is serious and staring.

  The photograph spawned cartoons and comment among the right-wing press which was part of the mockery of the early protest at Greenham Common. However, the peace camp lasted for almost twenty years and claimed victory when the American air base was decommissioned and demolished. Moon returned often and took many photographs, some to form part of the protesters’ official record and some for her own archive. Even when she stepped back from her career, she kept coming back to Greenham Common.

  In 1981:

  • Baroness Young became the first female leader of the House of Lords

  • The SDP (Social Democratic Party) was formed, with Shirley Williams one of the four founding members

  • The first London Marathon was held

  • Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were married

  • Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest

  • Brideshead Revisited was a TV hit

  • Cats opened in London’s West End

  • Susan Brown was the first female cox in the Oxford-Cambridge boat race – and her team won

  • There were riots in Brixton and Toxteth, fuelled by social and racial discord. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher authorised the use of rubber bullets, water cannon and armoured vehicles against protestors.