The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘Right,’ is all Leonie can get out. Wow, she must be tired, if she’s as emotional as this. She needs to get a grip. She clears her throat, hoping it sounds more like a cough than a cry, raises an eyebrow. She didn’t know how deeply she felt Vee’s abandonment, until now.

  Vee is still looking straight ahead. ‘What I’m saying is, what you thought – felt – about the baby, that was something I needed to think about. But I did, and I understood it, and I – I admired you for it. So that phone call – I didn’t think it was as serious as it obviously was. I didn’t know that I was letting you down so badly.’ Vee looks as though she might cry. Well, good.

  ‘And what would you have done? If you had realised how serious it was? Would you have given up your precious prizegiving night?’

  Vee turns to Leonie so she can look her in the eye, sighs, and asks, ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, a lot, and I still don’t know,’ she sighs. ‘I keep thinking – would we ask a man not to go to something like that? And would we be surprised, would we mind, if he refused?’

  And Leonie, caught in her own trap, feels the tears she’s holding in vanish, and finds that she can only laugh. Vee is right. It was only one night, unimportant then and unimportant now.

  ‘What happened? With the baby?’

  ‘Fuck off, Veronica. You’re too late.’

  ‘Please, Leonie.’

  Oh, life’s too short. ‘My sister helped me out,’ she says, and then, because she really doesn’t need to talk about this anymore, ‘Come on. Let’s go and see what’s happening out there. Let’s work.’

  10 April 2018

  Vee

  There’s a sign at the gate of the Peace Garden, saying that it is on the site of the first of the women’s protest camps. So this must have been where Vee took the first photographs. And the gates to the air base, the fences that women chained themselves to, were here. But you wouldn’t know it, now. The boundaries and the buildings have been replaced by a Land Rover garage and an auction house. There are signposts to other businesses, selling cars and kitchens. It’s as soulless as any other business park. It’s hard to believe that so much emotion had its home here, for so long: such struggle, such fear and hope and determination. Now it’s a blank.

  It seems impossible, too, that it is so long since she came here for the first time. Thirty-seven years. But of course, that’s what all old people think. Is it wrong of Vee to envy Leonie her death, just for a second? To die so suddenly and so young seems like a gift. She has achieved almost nothing in the years since Leonie died. She may as well have gone then, too. (Is that the sort of thought that only a diseased brain would have?)

  Towards the bottom of the sign are the words: ‘. . . We hope the time you spend here will refresh your spirit.’ Vee hopes so too. It feels like a lot to ask.

  Erica is trailing behind with the pushchair, fussing over Tom with chatter and toys. Vee pushes the gate open, walks down a small scrubby path, and finds herself in a circle of half a dozen standing stones and a central sculpture which is made up of women-forms, flexing and curving like flames. Further on is a fountain, although it’s not working: it’s a stone spiral, and the words ‘You can’t kill the spirit’ are carved into it. And then there’s the memorial to Helen Wyn Thomas, who was killed on the site when she was run over a military vehicle during a protest. That was 1989. Vee remembers reading about it. She was away at the time, in Canada, still trying to fall in love with landscape photography. She had felt a long way away: she missed her sisters, her country, Leonie. She’d looked at the photographs in the days-old newspaper that had found its way to her Quebec hotel, and thought about how much better they could be, if the photographer had thought more about the framing of the shot. There had been too much sky, not enough detail of the shocked, grieving faces. The camera should not be shy of showing the detail of hard things.

  The memorial is part of a flowerbed, which even on this drab March day has enough plants, in enough shades of green, to make the place feel alive and at least partly protected from the world without.

  Erica has caught up, and parked the buggy by the central sculpture. She comes over to join Vee.

  ‘The first time you came – were they happy to see you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The women. The camp. The newspaper hadn’t sent just anyone to photograph them. They had sent Veronica Moon.’

  ‘They were probably glad I was a woman. But they had more important things than me to think about.’

  Much of her Greenham memory has gone, but Vee smiles at one of the few memories she has of her and Leonie here. It’s more of a photograph itself, really, the resurfacing of only a second or two of the hours they would have spent together that day. Vee with her camera bag, one camera in her hand, another over her shoulder, so she never missed anything; Leonie asking her if she had a pen. But Leonie’s article was excellent, of course it was. And Vee is sure something else happened. When she thinks about their friendship, here, in this place, it feels as though something was saved.

  ‘I think your work does such a lot to make people see the reality of this place. Rather than the idea of it.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘So many female voices – and faces – have been written out of history. I want this exhibition to put them back.’

  ‘That’s good.’ It is. Vee is glad, most of the time, that so much of what she has forgotten is still available to her, through the photographs she took.

  ‘Your voice too, Vee,’ Erica adds.

  ‘Yes.’

  They walk in silence, slowly, tracing the perimeter of the circle, Erica glancing towards the parked pushchair every few steps. There is no one else here.

  ‘What do you remember about my mother?’ Erica asks.

  Something in Vee’s mind awakes, whispers to her to be careful, oh, be careful.

  She never saw that much of Ursula, really only when she came to the flat, which was always to collect Leonie, never to stay. But she must have something better than that to offer Erica. (Something safe, her mind whispers, something safe.) Ah, ‘I remember offering to take Ursula’s photograph, once. She was waiting for Leonie to get ready, and we were . . . well, we were trying to talk, you know, but neither of us were very chatty people and we didn’t have a lot in common. So I said, shall I take your photo while you’re waiting?’

  Erica looks almost hungry. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen those.’

  Vee laughs, then wonders if she’s misjudged this, because now she’s going to disappoint. ‘She turned me down. Flat. She said, “I’ve seen your work, Veronica, and you’re very good, but you’re not for me.” ’

  ‘Not for me.’ When Erica repeats it, it’s like an incantation. ‘She said that all the time. About everything. Cake? Not for me, I’m watching my weight. Watch a film? Richard Gere’s not for me.’

  Erica smiles, and Vee does too. You never know what you’re giving people when you offer them a memory. Or a photograph. ‘They weren’t as different as they thought.’

  Erica’s laugh has a taste of sadness to it. ‘Yes. My mother said Leonie was strident.’ She says the word in a tone that shows Ursula didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘But it never occurred to her that she was, too.’ She sighs, then, with a movement that makes her an inch taller, and a woman rather than a bereaved daughter, asks, ‘Tell me about when you were here with Leonie. How did you see yourselves?’

  There’s a second – a mind-trick’s worth of time – where Vee can almost see Leonie here, on that day, hugging an old friend she didn’t expect to see, easing herself down onto the ground, straight into conversation, making a note or two but making it seem as though the interview part of what she was doing was secondary. Later, holding forth, laughing. Leonie was always best with a crowd of other women. If it was a performance, she didn’t know it. She’s sure there was something – something unpleasant – but right now she can’t bring it to mind. ‘She
saw herself as right.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Me? No, I was just looking.’ Always looking.

  Vee’s hands seem colder, these days. But Erica is dressed for spring rather than winter. She hasn’t done up her coat; her blouse is open at the neck. She’s wearing a necklace Vee has seen her in before, an open heart with a chain passing through it. It’s spring, of course. But Vee feels permanently on the cusp of winter. She pulls on her gloves, wondering whether her hands really are cold.

  Maybe this is how people come to terms with their deaths. If you cannot trust your senses, if your memory is like your own shadow under a clouded sky, life is all but over. Funny how attached to it it turns out you’ve become, though. Even after thirty-odd years of self-sufficient solitude and a who-cares-anyway attitude.

  Erica is looking around, taking everything in as though it’s all happening around her right now. Which it still is, really. ‘Was this place happy? I know it sounds strange, but it feels happy.’

  ‘There was singing and hugging, if that’s what you mean. But it wasn’t all campfires and tie-dye. And anyway, the women who came weren’t here to enjoy themselves. Feminism then was about liberty and justice, not the right to be happy.’

  Erica glances towards the silent pushchair. It seems as though she’s going to say something, challenge what Vee has said, but she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. To her, Vee is a dying woman, to be coddled and humoured. Probably slightly more trouble than a child.

  18 October 1981

  Leonie

  It was good to get it all said. And the pain of that night had long since washed away, anyway, in the river of blood and time that being a woman entails. Leonie takes out her notebook and the pen she bummed from Vee. Even Vee’s pens are expensive these days. ‘River of blood and time: how motherhood washes women’s lives away.’ It won’t help this article but it could work in the book. That would put the cat among the sisters.

  Vee has got leaner since they last saw each other, more muscular, and the cropped hair suits her. A few times during the drive Leonie had wanted to put her hand on Vee’s head, rub her palm along the grain of the stubble then against it. Her friend has always had the body of a skinny pre-pubescent boy, and the non-threatening presence to go with it. Maybe that’s why she’s gone so far, slipping through the gaps in the status quo with her flat chest and straight hips, hiding in plain sight, an acceptable woman-man for success within the patriarchy. She carries that camera bag as though it’s nothing, whereas Leonie knows it isn’t – she moved it off the front seat of the car this morning, and it weighed a ton. (Vee had said she thought Leonie would be ‘more comfortable in the back’. A euphemism for ‘too fat for the front’, so Leonie sat in the front just to show her. The car is ridiculously small, though, her thighs shoved by the door on one side and the gear stick on the other.)

  Vee has seen that Leonie is watching her, and she grins, the way she used to when they were first friends, and Vee had saved up all her stories of the male chauvinist pigs she’d met and couldn’t wait to talk to Leonie about. Leonie smiles back – it’s good that Vee is here, that she wanted to come, that she invited her. It’s good to be in the thick of it, to be reporting from the front line for a change. Leonie knows the movement needs her; it needs people who strategise, and look at the big picture rather than reacting. But living in her head can be lonely, especially when the world won’t read her words.

  The sunshine is feeble but it’s here, halfway to warm. She turns away from Vee and looks at the sprawl of tents, the banners flapping and snapping in the breeze, and the people everywhere, purposeful and vivid. Tanya, a friend from the old days, is coming towards her. ‘Leonie?’

  She opens her arms. ‘Who else?’

  The next hour is a madness of old faces and new, bits of news and catching up. She barely has time to give the finger to a watching squaddie. She’s aware of Vee, lurking and clicking like she does, but she ignores her. Because what could be better than women protecting the planet, women against bombs, women being a fucking force in the world? There are a few men, hangers-on, but they keep out of the way. They know their places. Leonie can see a time, in the future, when it’s all equitable, but what she is hoping for is that the see-saw tips the other way first. Just give them a taste of what it’s like to be second-class citizens. When one of them brings some tea for her, she takes it without saying thank you.

  It must be a while since she’s seen Tanya, because she has two children now. She points out the older one, who’s running around with the pack of kids that was always going to come with a camp like this. Well, they may as well be activists. The younger one is a baby still. Tanya and Leonie are soon joined by others, and it’s almost like the old days, when they would sit in the pub after meetings, talking about all that was wrong with the world, all they would do to fix it. Except now it’s fennel tea and what they have done: some things they’ve surprised themselves with, some compromises, progress and a way to go. Leonie has stories from the women’s shelters where she volunteers that make the others wince. They talk about the riots in Toxteth, and the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Plus, of course, the possibility of nuclear fucking war, and nobody with a cock seems to want to stop it. ‘That’s unfair,’ a woman Leonie doesn’t know says, ‘my husband’s just as active as I am. And there’s Bruce Kent at CND. He’s doing great things.’

  Leonie sighs, because it’s better than snarling. ‘And that’s the argument men use for everything. “Women have come so far. Look, you’ve got Thatcher and Shirley Williams and Esther Rantzen, and the barristers must be in double figures by now. You’ve done it.” ’

  ‘Leonie,’ Tanya says, ‘I think Jacqui is right. We need to accept men as part of our movement.’

  Leonie glances towards Tanya, which is a mistake, because she’s breastfeeding, exuberantly, indiscreetly, shirt open to her waist, and of course, why shouldn’t she? But it makes Leonie’s guts squirm. She focuses on her old friend’s face, or tries to, but Tanya is gazing down at the child now, like it’s the new fucking Jesus. Leonie hates how babies do this to women. It’s not necessary. She’s proved it. She makes a non-committal noise, in her throat, and Tanya looks up then, and laughs. ‘We need the uncompromising too,’ she says, ‘to keep us true.’

  That might be so, but Jacqui still looks pissed off. Maybe it was her husband who brought the tea, or it could be that she’s just the pissed-off sort. Well, Leonie has nothing against that. ‘How old’s the kid?’ she asks Tanya. Not that she cares, but she really hasn’t the energy to put Jacqui right – she looks a lot less likely to listen than Vee – and anyway her leg has gone to sleep under her and she couldn’t get up and walk away. She stretches both legs straight out in front of her.

  ‘Three months,’ Tanya says. She’s unattached it now and is holding it over her shoulder: it burps, she smiles. Then, with a movement Leonie didn’t see coming or she’d have deflected it, her friend is on her feet and the baby is being dangled at her, so she can do nothing but take it. ‘Hold him, will you? I just need to check how Saffron’s doing.’

  The others have gathered into another conversation, so Leonie sits with the baby lying along her legs, contained in the valley made where her thighs are pressed together. She pulls her knees up a fraction and puts the soles of her feet flat on the ground, leaning the weight of her upper body back on her hands, so that the baby is contained and secure but she doesn’t need to actually touch it. It’s a fist-faced thing, still, doesn’t look like anything much.

  She looks away, and spots Vee, who is circling with her camera. When she sees Leonie, she raises it to her eye. Leonie sends her a look that says, I will actually kill you if you take this shot. Vee doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t look as though she does. She lowers her camera and turns away.

  Last time she held a baby was when she gave Erica to Ursula. They’d managed the whole deception pretty well, staying in Norfolk for the six weeks after the birth, so the health visitor could do her
thing, and Leonie-as-Ursula could have her check-ups. Leonie wrote, and Ursula looked after the baby, and kept her out of Leonie’s way most of the time. Alec came down at weekends, and apart from one awkward thank-you to Leonie, was soon behaving as though he had forgotten that the child wasn’t, technically, his. (When the sisters had first talked about Ursula taking the baby, Leonie had asked what Alec would think. Ursula had responded with a tart, ‘Since when did you care what a man thinks?’ Which was both unfair and true. So she never asked again, and she never really found out. She assumed that he would be happy if Ursula was happy. And he was probably sick of being prodded to hell in Harley Street, too, as the campaign against their childlessness gained pace but no ground under Ursula’s command.) After the six-week checks, they had moved back to a London readying itself for Christmas. Ursula registered with a new GP and showed up with her daughter, and that was it. Ursula’s pregnancy after a history of apparent infertility was easily explained, it seemed, thanks to the still unsolved mysteries of the female body, and the fact that pregnancy after giving up on ever having a baby was a frequent anecdote in fertility circles.

  When they returned to London, Ursula had surprised Leonie by insisting on a physical handover of the baby, so that symbolically, as well as legally, Erica was Ursula’s child. Feeling slightly awkward, Leonie picked Erica up from the Moses basket in Ursula’s front room – it was in the bay window, as though Erica was an aspidistra, and required light to grow – and stood opposite her sister, whose tired face was solemn, as though waiting for sentence to be pronounced. Like Leonie was going to suddenly decide she wanted a kid, now.

  Erica’s head had sat in the crook of her elbow and her backside had been in her hand. She hadn’t even wanted to look at her, not really, but it had seemed as though she must. There had to be a bit of pretence for the sake of what Ursula believed her sister was giving up. She made the face she used to use at the hospital, after the birth, in front of the nurses. Ursula had watched her closely in those few days, anxious for any signs of attachment. But Leonie really hadn’t felt a thing. Just looked at the funny squishy mass of person-waiting-to-happen and felt a bit sorry for her. Better if she’d been born with a cock. She’d be having an easier life. She had stepped towards Ursula, whose arms were crooked, ready. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and Leonie nodded. Ursula left the room, carrying Erica. Leonie looked at the empty Moses basket, and then she left the house and went back to her own flat. She drank a bottle of wine. And then she called Vee. In retrospect, the tears, and the need, were probably nothing more than relief. But Vee didn’t know that.