10 April 2018
Vee
Ah, here comes the rain. The traffic is heavy, and now there’s the sound of the water on the roads as well as the engines. The Peace Garden sits in a corner created by two roads that come off the access roundabout; every vehicle is braking, accelerating, braking as it goes. Together with the noise from the roundabout and the wind in the trees, Vee feels something like claustrophobic. It’s only weather, and traffic, she tells herself, you know what weather and traffic are. They won’t hurt you. Ignore what the tumour says.
Erica fetches an umbrella from the tray on the bottom of Tom’s pushchair. He is well protected from the rain, between the buggy hood and the plastic cover Erica pulls down over it. She hesitates before handing it over. ‘It’s pink, I’m afraid.’
‘Pink is only a colour.’ It’s a good strong colour, too, this one, throaty and vivid against the green-black of trees, grey of the sky. ‘This would look good. On camera.’ She remembers a woman in a photograph she took, the first time she came here. She wore yellow dungarees; how bright and sharp she seemed, even against the tie-dye and boldness of the others around her. It was one of the few times Vee thought seriously about switching to colour photography. She had begun her career in the days when black and white was stock-in-trade; even when colour photography started to be seen more widely, from the early eighties, she wasn’t interested. Instinctively, she knew that the way she had learned to work was the best way for her, and she could do pretty much anything with natural light. But she would have liked to have captured the yellow of those dungarees.
‘Some feminists don’t like pink,’ Erica says, pulling up her hood.
‘I think you’ll find that what feminists don’t like is the infantilisation of women,’ Vee replies. She wonders if the yellow sou’wester-style coat and cream knitted hat that Tom is wearing were chosen deliberately because they were not blue.
Vee strolls the perimeter of the garden under her pink shelter. It’s chilly, it’s bleak, she’s spent hours in a car, and yet today she is – not unhappy. Erica, pushing the pushchair now, joins her.
‘What was it like? The first time you came?’
This is a part of her past that Vee has always remembered. ‘The gates were huge, there were trucks going in and out all the time, a lot of soldiers and’ – she pauses, feeling the backwards pull of remembered happiness – ‘I liked the feeling of it. A lot of the women’s movement at the time was getting very discursive. There was still activism but there was a lot of debate. And I suppose that was important, but it was good to come here and see purpose and drive. It reminded me of the early days.’
‘And you were here at the beginning. That photograph.’ Erica pauses, and Vee knows the one she means; if Leonie hadn’t died the way she did, it probably would have defined her. ‘There’s just something about it. It’s iconic.’
‘I only pointed the lens in what seemed the most relevant direction. History made the story, afterwards.’
18 October 1981
Leonie
‘Thanks,’ Tanya says when she comes back from wherever she’s been. She scoops the child up, sits, and puts him in the crook of her crossed legs. She’s been absent long enough for the feeling to return to Leonie’s pins-and-needles calf. Leonie has never wanted to conform to patriarchal notions of beauty and what a woman should be – in fact, she has set herself against them, on purpose, her body her field of action. But when she watches people move the way that Tanya or Vee do, with no thought for getting up or sitting down, no sense of hauling more than their bones can bear, she envies them their ease. She’s been reading Andrea Dworkin, admiring the way she is showing the patriarchy that it has no agency over her. Dworkin wouldn’t be sitting easily on the grass, either. It could be that she has found an intellectual ally at last.
‘So, what’s new with you?’ Tanya asks.
‘I’m busy with the shelters. And I’m always writing.’
‘Cool.’
‘Kind of.’ Leonie resents every hour she spends working with the women’s shelters. Not because she doesn’t want to help the sisters. She knows she’s in such a privileged position, and can’t imagine having nowhere to go, not a penny, not even the certainty that you are drawing a safe breath. But she wants to fix things from the other end. No one would need to help these women if the world was equal.
‘Haven’t found anyone to shackle yourself to?’
This is why you should never have kids. Your brain goes to shit. She shakes her head. ‘Why is that even a question? I’ve no desire to. I never have had, and I don’t think I ever will, now. I’m forty-three, for chrissakes. Fuck settling.’
‘I respect that,’ Tanya says, then, instantly disrespecting, ‘I never would have thought that I would find someone. Not really. But Trev is something special. Not all men are bastards. And the babies . . .’
Don’t do the smile, Leonie thinks, please don’t do the smile. But Tanya does. Leonie has seen it on Ursula’s face, ever since she took Erica. It’s one-third serenity, one-third sanctimoniousness, and one-third genuine happiness. Leonie doesn’t need to look at it. At least Vee has earned her happiness through her own efforts, instead of letting her hormones do it for her.
She gets to her feet. Sweat sits in the small of her back; her arse is damp from the ground. Indoors is better. ‘I need to get on with the job,’ she says, and looks around for Vee. She’s probably got enough material to work with, from what she’s seen and what she’s been told; she’ll keep her views to herself, and quote the stuff that’s been said about solidarity and women needing to protect the planet because no fucker else is going to. (She won’t say fucker.) And what she hasn’t actually heard she can make up. It’s not like she doesn’t know what these conversations are. Christ knows she’s been part of them for long enough.
Vee’s nowhere in sight and Leonie is thinking of heading back to the car. She spends so much time on her own these days that even an hour of this sort of sociability tires her, makes her shoulders ache with the effort of not curling in around herself. But then another voice calls her name, and she turns to see Bea.
In the Dagenham days, when they had their little fling, Bea had always given the impression of playing at being a feminist, and Leonie wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d married her own trust fund to another and gone off to the country, limiting her Good Works to local charities, if she bothered at all. But no, Bea had surprised her. She’d done a PhD on the feminist movement as a reaction to poverty, rather than patriarchy; spent a few years teaching in the US; come back and is running a department at a London university, where she gets her way with a combination of charm and refusing to listen to anyone who disagrees with her. Bea hugs her; Leonie clings to the embrace.
‘Hey,’ Bea says. ‘What brings you here?’
‘An article. Veronica Moon is doing the photos.’
‘Oh yes.’ Bea looks around. ‘She took some at the meeting we were having. I’m just down for a couple of days.’
‘Were you there at Dagenham? When we met her?’ Leonie doesn’t know why she’s talking about Vee, unless it’s that she doesn’t want to talk about herself. Not to the towering feminist achievement that is Bea, anyway.
‘Oh God, yes, I’d forgotten! She was very – new, wasn’t she?’ Bea says. ‘What else is happening? What have you been doing? It’s been – how long has it been? I feel like I hit thirty-five and everything just accelerated.’
Leonie shrugs. ‘I wrote some books. Nobody wants them.’
‘Why not?’ Bea looks concentrated, all of a sudden. She was always the one with Sellotape, a spanner and a spare pair of knickers in her handbag. She mostly used the spanner to break things. She could do a lot of damage to a porn shop.
‘Too radical. Too much. Nobody wants to hear my ideas about why there’s no such thing as a mother.’ She wants it to sound casual, joking, but there’s thinness in her voice that Bea doesn’t miss.
‘They should.’ Bea offers Le
onie a Marlboro, takes one from the pack herself, and lights them both with an old Zippo that might have belonged to Fen, originally. Those were happy days. Fen was a good woman, too. She’s abroad now – South America, maybe – working in a jungle. Or something. She didn’t last long in publishing; it was too tame for her. Leonie should pay more attention.
Leonie inhales. It’s been three years since she smoked. Ursula made her give up when she told her about the baby; she tried to make her lay off the wine too. The taste of the smoke in her mouth is as warm as the words of a half-forgotten song. ‘I know.’
They stand in silence for a minute, looking back at the camp. Bea gives the finger to three men in a passing car; there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the gesture. Seeing Leonie notice, she says, ‘I’m trying out the male experience. See something, react to it however I like, assume I’ll get away with it.’ She stubs out her cigarette, and adds, ‘I’m setting up a women’s studies degree. You interested?’
‘I might be.’ If there’s one thing Leonie’s learned this morning – apart from the fact that she was right to give the baby away – it’s that she’s a bit out of the action. And though she has no desire to sleep next to a campfire or dig a hole to shit in, she needs to find a way to keep being part of the movement. It’s made the shape of her adult life.
‘You’re a great teacher, Leonie.’
At the edge of the camp there’s a circle of sitting children, a woman leading them in a song about counting. ‘My mother wanted me to be a teacher,’ she says, nodding towards the woman, ‘that sort.’ By the time Erica was born, Leonie and Ursula’s mother had barely a finger’s grip on reality, so accepted a granddaughter without question or thought, calling Erica by the names of either of her daughters.
‘Well, come and subvert her expectations,’ Bea says. ‘Call me.’ She kisses Leonie and walks back towards the camp, something darkly floral in her wake.
10 April 2018
Erica
Tom has a look in his eye that tells her he isn’t going to settle. So she takes him in her arms – he’s getting heavy, she feels her body ‘oof’ at the effort – and holds his still-small form, dense with half-sleep, against her own. His body moulds against hers, his forehead against her cheek when she tilts her head towards him. It is not easy to hold this softness within her, for her child, when there is so much in the world that expects her to be hard.
Erica watches Vee as she walks from standing stone to standing stone, the umbrella a press of hard colour against the drab day. The older woman looks calm, meditative. And so, so ill. She seems thinner even than she was two weeks ago, when they last saw each other; greyer, too. Watching Ursula die taught Erica that death is cruellest as a fading.
The traffic is getting heavier, but at least the rain has stopped. Erica holds Tom a little closer and walks towards Vee, who has made her way back to the central sculpture, and is folding the umbrella, shaking raindrops from it. ‘I don’t think he’s going to go back to sleep,’ Erica says, and Tom confirms this with a yawn and three steady blinks before looking around. ‘What would you like to do?’ She braces for some sort of ticking-off: organisation, having a child, bringing it with her, even though the women who lived at the camps raised families here.
But Vee just smiles and indicates her bag. ‘Why don’t I take your photograph?’
10 April 2018
Vee
The look on Erica’s face is priceless; surprise/shock/delight/puzzlement in a flickering slideshow. In the old days, she would have been ready, and she would have caught it on film.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’ Vee almost laughs at the surprise in Erica’s voice. ‘I am a photographer.’
‘Wow,’ Erica says, looking at Tom, licking her finger and wiping something from his face, then tucking her own hair behind her ear. ‘OK. What do you want me to do?’
‘Just do what you’re doing.’ Vee looks through the viewfinder, takes a shot just to see how Erica reacts. The protest photographs from a couple of weeks ago were nothing special, but she had enjoyed being in the darkroom again.
The sight of the camera has Erica standing as though she is in a queue for something unpleasant: unsure, anxious, straight-spined. Vee plants her feet, balances her body with her breath. ‘Tell me what you remember about Leonie.’
‘Not much,’ Erica says, and as soon as she speaks her face finds its usual shape, chin slightly up, the slightest of tilts to the angle of her head. Vee presses the shutter. It’s not a keeper, but Erica didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of it, which is good. And Tom is looking around, half asleep still probably, but obviously used to being photographed. ‘Leonie always seemed a bit scary. I mean, she was big – she was physically big, the biggest person I knew, probably. But . . .’ She glances towards Vee, as though she is forming a question. Vee presses the shutter again, and she’s getting closer to the image she wants to take; there’s something of Leonie in the expression, but there’s Erica’s own intelligence there too, softer than her aunt’s but no less formidable.
‘But?’ Vee prompts.
‘But I used to feel she watched me all the time. Then when I looked at her, she would pretend to be doing something else.’
Vee moves to the side, and somewhere above and behind her the clouds shift and the light is brighter, warmer. Erica turns her head to Vee. ‘I suppose it was because she hated children so much.’ She kisses the top of Tom’s head, as though in apology. ‘She couldn’t be seen to be interested in one.’
‘Did you see much of her?’
‘Not really. Not that I remember. Most of my memories of her must be from the few weeks before she died. She was staying with us while she was back from America. She’d let her own flat. Years afterwards, my mother told me how much she’d missed Leonie when she was teaching in the States, so she insisted she stay with us when she came back. She said she regretted it almost straight away, because it was easier to love Leonie when she was on the other side of the world than when she was in the spare room.’
Erica tries to put Tom down, but he mews and clings. She shifts him to her other hip. He wriggles, and Erica is starting to tense up, so Vee asks, ‘Look at the sculpture?’ Erica does so, a faster move than Vee expected, and there’s the shot: a strand of hair has stuck to her lipgloss, making a dark trail on her cheek, and something about looking at the flame-forms has sharpened her attention, the muscles at the corners of her eyes contracting and her expression both focused and faraway. Vee exhales; her body remembers this feeling, the washing of her senses in relief because there it is, the shot you want, there it always is, but until you find it you are never quite sure that it’s going to show up for you this time. You might have taken your last good photograph. Except you never have.
Well, maybe this time.
It’s such a shame Erica had a nose job. But of course – Vee hears herself sigh – she’s within her rights to do so. Her body, her choices, her pain.
Erica has become silent, deeply so, it seems; Vee takes another photograph, another, and she lets her think. Heaven knows the woman must get little enough quietness in her life. Oh, it’s always so good to hold this camera, to feel the chafe of the strap at the back of her neck as she moves. It always has been.
And then Erica looks directly at Vee’s lens. The click is pure instinct, because the shape of her face and the play of the light, a hard dark something in her eyes and a mouth ripe with words not yet said – actually, that’s the shot. Never presuppose, Vee says to herself, you forgot that. Don’t think you’ve got it. Don’t go home too soon.
‘Meeting you has made me think differently,’ Erica says, then adds, ‘you’ve changed my life, Vee.’
Vee lowers the camera, ‘Good,’ she says, then, as a feeling of relief she doesn’t understand brings tears to her eyes, ‘you’ve changed mine, too.’
18 October 1981
Vee
When Vee gets back to the car Leonie is waiting, sitting on the verge
. ‘I couldn’t find you,’ she says.
‘Until now.’ Leonie squints a smile up at her, holds out a hand, and Vee takes it and pulls her to her feet, her other hand braced against the car behind her.
‘Did you get everything you need?’ As soon as she’s said it, she wishes she hadn’t, because Leonie was sensitive enough about getting this job via Vee as it was.
But her friend just smiles. ‘Did you?’
Vee smiles back. ‘Time will tell.’
‘Are you going to go and bolt yourself into your darkroom?’
Vee declines the bait. ‘The Guardian will develop it. My assistant comes in tomorrow. She’ll take them.’
‘Assistant, eh?’ Leonie actually sounds impressed.
‘Of course. I need to make sure I have time for the important things. Like reading your manuscripts.’ Leonie doesn’t speak, but Vee can feel that she’s pleased. They’ve known each other for so long. ‘Thank you,’ she says into the silence.
‘What for?’
The Woman in the Photograph Page 22
