• Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin was published in America
And the Greenham Common Peace Camp was established to protest the siting of American nuclear weapons on UK soil. Leonie Barratt and Veronica Moon, commissioned by a national newspaper, went to report on it.
18 October 1981
Leonie
‘There it is,’ Vee says, unnecessarily. Leonie isn’t blind. Against the grey-brown late autumn trees, the squared-off cement of the air base, the protest site is bright with colour and sound, banners and purpose. You could miss it like you could miss a circus. ‘Do you want me to drop you here?’
When Vee proposed this job, she was half cautious and half-up herself, all ‘It’s my turn to help you out, now’. So Leonie had been half minded to tell her to stuff it, making like she’s a sister when she’s only out for herself. But she could use the work, and if she’s going to keep thinking, keep the ideas coming, she needs to be out there in the world, seeing what’s going wrong. She’s been writing something about motherhood and she knows it’s good, but if the world can’t understand that women need to escape male expectation and let their bodies be, there’s no way they are going to buy her ideas about why making mothering sacred is just another way of keeping women under control and out of the way. Friedan tried with The Feminine Mystique, so did Marilyn French with The Woman’s Room, and look what impact that’s had. Sod all. A lot of women talk like feminism has changed the direction of their lives, but then they meet a man with a better car than theirs, and they have a baby, and everything they used to believe comes out with the fucking placenta.
It’s more than a year since Leonie made that phone call and Vee didn’t come. She obviously felt bad afterwards. There were flowers, a phone call the next day that Leonie ignored, a dog-eared letter that arrived, weeks later, having been posted somewhere way out east, where Vee had been sent for some assignment straight afterwards. But she wasn’t there when she needed to be there. OK, so it was all done, then – the baby handed over, life back to normal – but maybe that’s why Leonie had needed her friend so badly. Vee chose prizes. She chose herself. And Leonie hasn’t seen her since. When Vee called and asked if she’d like to work on this article together, the discomfort in her voice was priceless.
She’d almost said no, but her column is coming to an end, so she needs to keep her name out there. The occasional piece for Spare Rib isn’t enough for her, and anyway, Leonie is sick of preaching to the choir.
The journey has been an hour and a half of Vee chattering about anything and everything except that night. Leonie sat in silence, letting her talk, giving her nothing. She was going to explain to Vee that there is a difference between being ambitious and being blatantly, hurtfully selfish – say what you like about Vee, she would always listen, learn. But first Vee talked and talked about all the things she’s been doing. (‘I took a bunch of photos’ would have been enough, and anyway, Leonie knows, because she collects everything Vee has published. One day, she will tell her friend how proud she is of all that she’s achieved. Even the photographs of the fucking idiot entitled men, and the women who are only famous because they let men think women are only about tits and arse, because she manages to make them look a little less confident and up themselves than they usually do.)
And Leonie is fine, now – has been fine all the time, really, that night was a glitch, a little moment where the patriarchy got under her skin with all of its ridiculous messages, and she was too tired to stop it. Vee isn’t to know that, though. And that still hurts.
Vee pulls over and switches off the engine, turns to face her. Although Leonie is secure in all of her choices – although she believes, absolutely, that she should fill her body, stretch its boundaries with food and thought and pleasure – the ease with which Vee moves makes her envious.
Vee has tears in her eyes. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I know I was wrong, Leonie. I made the wrong call.’
‘Oh yeah?’ She doesn’t get away with it that easily.
‘Yeah,’ Vee says. When she’s upset or under stress, her Essex accent comes out, and it reminds Leonie of when she first met her, with her skirt and her heels and her forelock-tugging, ‘am I allowed’ attitude. She’s come a long way, that’s for sure. ‘I just . . .’ She raises her hands, drops them. ‘I didn’t think you were as upset as you were. It didn’t – it didn’t fit with what I knew about you. When I saw you in the pub that day—’ she pauses, a question.
‘I remember,’ Leonie says. Vee reacted to the offer of the kid like it was nothing. She must have realised that Leonie meant it, but she just shrugged it off, like Leonie was trying to give her some old shirt she knew she would never wear. It had seemed like a good option – Vee must be loaded these days, and she was never really as cool with rejecting the conventional as she makes out. There was another life where she would have married some Essex welder and had a girl and a boy, and named the girl after her mother and the boy after his father. Leonie had thought that a kid might appeal to that part of her. But no, Vee had turned her down without blinking. She’d made more of a drama when her fucking darkroom door was opened that time.
Ursula, on the other hand, made it some kind of honour, with the tears and the ‘are you sure’s and the ‘we’ll never be able to thank you enough’s. Funny how fast that got forgotten, too, and Aunt Leonie became an interfering pain who had no idea how hard it was to be a real parent. Well, that might be true, but Leonie is pretty fucking sure that it’s not that hard to buy clothes for girls that aren’t pink, and give them Lego as well as dolls. But Ursula and Alec are doing their thing, and Leonie has to let them get on with it. She doesn’t think she really cares about Erica, except in the way that she cares about all of the children – abstractedly, because they matter, as part of the fight. Everything will get fixed a lot faster if kids learn that they are the same, from the beginning. It’s so bloody obvious, but nobody gets it. Not properly. Even the ones who are trying to raise their kids equally walk round like they need a medal for it.
It had all gone exactly as planned. Ursula and Vee had gone to the Norfolk house as soon as they’d agreed that Ursula would take the baby. Leonie had assumed they would do a private adoption, but her sister had surprised her with a plan that took her back to the mischievousness of their childhoods, made the whole thing feel like a game. What clever sisters they were, fooling the adults. They had registered Leonie with a local Norfolk GP using Ursula’s name. She’d been referred to the local maternity unit straight away and given a strict talking-to about not seeing the doctor earlier in her pregnancy. And then they’d waited two and a half months out. That time in Norfolk was when Leonie had written the beginnings of her book on why everything women believe about motherhood is wrong, lumbering from desk to loo to bed and wondering, before she fell asleep at night, whether she would be looking back at this version of herself when the thing was born, laughing at her ignorance, brain turned to mush and her whole world centred on a baby attached to her nipple. Manuscript in the bin. She may as well have done. No one has wanted the other three.
But it didn’t happen that way, thank goodness.
It had actually all been easy enough. Well, apart from pushing the little slimy squib of a thing out. That had hurt. But the drugs were good, and after she told them to fuck right off when they tried to shave her and give her an enema, she got all the drugs she wanted. Ursula had been reading something about how they might not be good for the baby but she had told her to fuck right off, too.
In an ideal world, she would have never looked at the kid when it was born, and let Ursula take it away straight away and get on with raising it. But there was a pretence to keep up, so the baby was wrapped in a towel and given to Leonie to hold. She looked into its face and felt – relief, that she felt nothing. She had never understood the cooing that went on over babies – had never played with a doll, come to that – so she had first assumed, and then, as the pregnancy progressed, hoped that she would feel nothing. And
she didn’t. She kept her gaze on its hairline to begin with, in case its eyes held an ambush. But when she looked, cautiously, at them, as brown as her own, she felt nothing more than interest. It was a baby. It looked like one. The bits of it – fingernails, ears – she could admire the way she admired anything intricate and thoughtfully made or grown: a Frida Kahlo painting, or the reading room at the British Library, which she likes to think of as a tribute to a clitoris.
‘What are you going to call her?’ the midwife had asked.
‘Erica,’ Leonie said, with the sort of smile she imagined most new mothers would have on answering the question, but looking Ursula straight in the eye. The name had been the chip that she exchanged for agreeing to go along with pretending to be her sister. That gave Ursula absolute, irrefutable ownership of the kid.
‘With Bella for a middle name,’ Ursula-masquerading-as-Leonie added, in her guise of doting sister/aunt, ‘our mother’s name is Isabella. So she could go by that, if she chose to.’ Leonie suspects that Bella is also an up-yours to her, an assertion that Ursula may be grateful but she will give no ground. Because what name would gall Leonie more than ‘beauty’, when women judged by their bodies – how they look, what they can do – is everything that she has set her life up to fight against? And that’s leaving aside the ‘Ursula is the pretty one and Leonie is the clever one’ that has dogged and limited them both from the very beginning. The pretty one had been clever enough to get herself out of childlessness and Leonie out of a corner. The clever one hadn’t worked out she was pregnant until it was too late to do anything about it.
Leonie was tired and thoroughly sick of her aching, leaking body. Her breasts were bound, and she had stitches in her perineum, and piles. She’d like to think she would otherwise have the energy to argue with the ‘Bella’. But maybe it was best that she didn’t. She wouldn’t be surprised if Ursula is testing her, making sure that she is going to be as good as her word as far as interfering is concerned.
The midwife had nodded. ‘Erica Bella Woodhouse,’ she said, as though she was approving. Although actually it was none of her business, and neither of them cared at all what a midwife they would never see again thought of the child’s name, at that moment both Ursula and Leonie knew they’d got away with it, smiling at each other in a way that no doubt looked like simple gladness at this new baby.
For the few days Leonie stayed in hospital, she kept up the pretence of being interested in Erica, but she really, truly wasn’t. She imitated the faces that others made when they looked at their babies, and she never refused to hold her, just in case she was suspected of not loving her. But the only moment where she felt a tug of anything more than indifference was one morning when Erica was put into her arms, and instead of a sleeping baby or a wailing one, she found herself looking at those eyes just like her own, and putting her finger on the nose that had the makings of being just like hers. The baby looked at her, then yawned, and Leonie, much to her own amazement, laughed and kissed the top of Erica’s head. Yes, she did. A moment of the purest affection for the result of one of her zipless fucks. It soon passed.
Her body recovered. She got on with her life.
But Vee does not know any of this. She pretty much abandoned Leonie to her fate. There’s no way Leonie is going to make it easy for her now.
10 April 2018
Vee
‘You’re not serious?’ Vee looks at the child strapped into a car seat in the back of Erica’s estate car. It’s an hour and a half’s drive to Greenham Common. Erica called and suggested this trip after she had been looking through Vee’s photographs of the Peace Camp. That’s what she said, anyway. Vee suspects that Erica feels sorry for her – she can’t want any more information for the exhibition now, it’s all gone to be printed and framed and it would be too late to change anything. But she had been overcome by a desire to see the place again, as acute and almost-sublime as the moment of out-of-body panic that wakes her most mornings. Those memories that remain of the place are good ones.
So Vee had agreed. She hadn’t thought there would be a child involved. She’s never been good with children, even before she was in the vice of a headache for most of every day.
‘My childcare fell through,’ Erica says. ‘So I thought, is it worse to cancel at almost no notice, or to bring Tom along? He’ll sleep.’
Vee laughs, although it hurts her head and she’s nauseous, as she has been non-stop for the last three days. ‘He’s going to sleep? All the way in the car, all the time we’re there, the drive back? I don’t know much about children but I do know that’s not likely.’ She looks at the child through the window. It’s chilly, standing in the street, but she doesn’t want to get into the passenger seat because that will be a commitment. Tom looks back at her, his expression somewhere between boredom and contempt. It doesn’t look as though he fancies this road trip much, either. Well, that’s something.
‘Vee,’ Erica says. She looks not unlike Tom, the tiredness/frustration on her face forming much the same expression as the boredom/contempt on his.
‘I wish your generation didn’t feel they had to apologise all the time,’ Vee says, and she gets in and tries not to slam the door. Erica’s not an idiot, and so she hopes that she wouldn’t have suggested this if she couldn’t make it work. And Vee likes her, for herself, as well as for the Leonie in her. Still, she doesn’t want to think about what might happen to her head if the child starts crying.
Since the riverside dizziness, which wiped her out for forty-eight hours, she has barely left the house, and seen only Erica and Marja. She’s been sorting through papers and books, clearing out old clothes, taking painkillers whether she thinks she needs them or not. Marja is coming, early this evening, to coax her body to sleepfulness.
Erica gets in to the driver’s seat and slams her door. ‘I’m apologising because your generation thinks working mothers have so much to apologise for.’
It’s raining, only spits and spots, but Erica switches the wipers on to what must be the highest speed, and they thwack back and forth. Vee winces. If Erica notices, she ignores it. Vee thinks of where they are headed: Greenham, the women, the children. ‘You’re right,’ she says, and then, even though twisting around in her seat makes her ache, she looks at the child and says, ‘Good morning.’ Erica starts the engine, and it’s too late for Vee to change her mind.
It’s not too late for her to try to do a bit better, though. ‘Not long now. Until the exhibition,’ she says. ‘Are you pleased with it?’ There was a flurry of last-minute emails a week ago, and now it’s all fixed, finalised, whatever the word is.
Erica smiles, shrugs, sighs, all in one movement. ‘Advance sales are good. They’re going to timed tickets at the weekend. The gallery is happy, everything has gone to the printer, the installation plan’s agreed.’
‘Do you have to do much more?’
‘I go in the Friday before the opening. By then they’ll have built the new walls and painted everything. We’ll make sure the layout is right, the technicians will hang the prints, install the vitrines . . .’ Erica might be annoyed with Vee, she might be tired, but excitement is bubbling through her voice as she talks.
‘You’ve worked so hard.’ Vee used to work like this, but with only one job, not the two Erica is juggling, and without the complication of a family.
‘I have,’ Erica says, and just as Vee is thinking that she’s not sure she’s heard her take credit for herself before, Erica adds, ‘and I’ll take you round, a couple of days before, to see it all. If you’re sure you don’t want to come to the opening.’
‘I’m sure.’ It occurs to Vee that Erica has also had to manage Vee. ‘I suppose exhibitions are easier to curate when the photographer is dead,’ she says.
‘Vee!’ Erica sounds pained.
Oh. She should have thought of how Erica would interpret that. ‘I didn’t mean me! I was just thinking generally. If you’d been able to do this without—’ What is she trying to say? That
once people are dead, their history is fixed, in that nothing can be added to it, they cannot try to skew it or protect it or take things away from it. Dead photographers don’t need to be looked after; they don’t need day trips to Greenham Common, they don’t refuse to come to opening nights. That’s all she meant. But Erica has taken it differently, is thinking, no doubt, of how much time Vee does not have, how close her own death might be. Vee doubts her own ability to explain this, though, so she says, ‘I’m sorry.’
Erica laughs, ‘You’re sorry?’
She deserved that. ‘For upsetting you. I didn’t mean—’
‘I know. But for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have prepared for this exhibition any other way.’
The tumour is definitely making Vee more emotional. ‘That means a great deal.’
Vee looks out of the window, and watches the landscape get gradually greener. She might never leave London again. She looks and looks. She has come to terms with a lot, these last weeks, but she cannot bear the thought of even a single day in an enforced darkness, not knowing who is near her, and maybe in pain.
The wheels eat the miles and Erica is quiet beside her. Vee is lulled into a sleepful waking by the movement, and the sound of three sets of breathing. She could easily have slept, if she had been willing to close her eyes.
When the car pulls to a stop, and Erica says, ‘We’re here!’, Tom laughs and Vee feels herself smile, surprised by her own pleasure at the sound.
18 October 1981
Leonie
Vee says, ‘You just seemed so – OK with it all. It was like being with you in the old days, at the beginning, when you knew everything and I knew nothing.’ She says it as though life is the opposite now, Vee the authority and Leonie the learner. Leonie would challenge her, but her mouth has, without her noticing, become dry with tears that would fall if she let them. So she waits for Vee to continue. ‘I thought about what you said, afterwards. I thought about it a lot. And about how if I got pregnant I would want to be as—’ Leonie sees Vee’s mouth hesitate, start to form one sound, then make another, ‘detached.’
The Woman in the Photograph Page 20
