She doesn’t like Derek Davison very much. He didn’t thank his secretary, who brought in a tray with teapot, teacups, sugar in a bowl and milk in a jug, and left it on a table close to the end of his desk. If he’s waiting for Vee to pour it, he’ll wait a long time. He’s reading through the papers; Vee would have expected him to have done so already. She doesn’t turn up to a shoot and then start loading film into her camera.
‘It’s Ms, not Miss,’ Vee says. ‘We had discussed what would happen, when he died, and I was aware of what was in his will.’
The solicitor nods. ‘Of course, there is only you. As a beneficiary. Which makes things simple, from a legal point of view. Will you be selling the house?’
Vee notes how he’s sidestepped her correction to ‘Ms’. ‘Do you need to know that?’
‘I’m sorry?’ He looks up at her, surprised, and Vee almost smiles. It’s as though the existence of her father in the world was the last thing that tethered her to tolerance. Since Stanley’s instantly fatal heart attack three months ago, she’s challenged everyone who’s made assumptions, from her aunts who lamented her single status at the funeral, to the bank manager who had asked if she would need anything explained to her when she had gone in to close his accounts. (‘Would you ask a man that?’ she’d asked, and when he’d apologised she’d turned away and started reading. She was too deep in sadness, in trying to balance on a world without ballast, to bother to listen.)
‘I don’t think it’s your business what I do next,’ she says. ‘And I suspect that if I was a son, not a daughter, you wouldn’t have felt the need to check.’ Is she a daughter, though, now that she has no parents at all? She doesn’t dare wonder. She’s on a narrow track, one foot in front of the other, not looking left or right, not daring even a full, deep breath or a glance towards the sky. Grief must be accepted. This is the knowledge that shaped hers and Stanley’s lives.
‘I apologise.’ She can see he’s panicking at the thought of calling her Ms. It’s amazing how many men can’t – won’t – get it, saying ‘Muzzzz’ in an exaggerated way, as though the word is a joke. This prick tries to sidestep it altogether. ‘Veronica. If we can do anything else for you, please let me know.’
‘I’ll be using my London solicitors in future,’ Vee replies. Fen’s niece, newly qualified, is setting up a practice out of her mother’s spare room and the sisters are bringing her their wills, powers of attorney, divorces, house purchases, and anything they can to help their sister out. ‘And it’s Ms Moon.’
5 September 1984
‘VERONICA. EARLY AS EVER.’ Ursula, who opens the door to Vee in leggings and a sweater with a stain down the front, has mascara smudged under one eye. She wears an expression that reads ‘I could really do without this’. She looks like a woman who has fought five battles this morning, and won three.
Vee thinks about her own morning: a shower, coffee, putting on a white shirt, a grey V-neck, black jeans, DMs. All without the radio, or music, because she likes quiet in the mornings, and all achieved in a relaxed half an hour. Ursula must have children by now; she was never the kind of woman who would do anything else. Each to their own.
‘Come through.’
Vee follows. She starts to form a question about how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other, but decides not to bother. To Ursula, she has always been one of Leonie’s feminist friends, a separate category, presumably, to merely ‘friends’, who must be the ones who don’t upset the status quo. Though all of Leonie’s friends are feminists, because Leonie wouldn’t waste her energy on anyone who wasn’t. Ursula steps aside so Vee can make her way in to the kitchen-diner at the back of the house. ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ she says, and then she makes for the stairs.
Her old friend is sitting in a chair by the window; she raises a hand, but doesn’t get up. Vee is filled by an undamed hot rush of love for the woman who put her on the path to where she is now. Leonie is all she has left.
‘Leonie.’ She bends and embraces her; the familiar warm eyes, bright and quick, have never changed, and neither has the smell of lavender, clean and a little antiseptic, which Vee associates not just with Leonie but with the years they spent together in that flat. It’s hard to remember how infuriating Leonie was, now; she remembers only her friend’s generosity, her need to make the world understand how urgently women must be freed, not only from the patriarchal structures they inhabited, but from the ones in their minds.
‘Hey, sister.’ Leonie puts a hand to Vee’s shoulder. ‘It’s good to see you.’
‘It’s good to see you too.’ Vee straightens. It’s strange, to tower over Leonie. ‘And I’m so glad about – about how it’s all worked out.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Leonie says, but there’s a smile there. Vee’s glad. It seems that America has been good for her friend.
‘Yeah well nothing,’ Vee replies, ‘you deserve this.’ She’s looped the camera around her neck now – she’s never seen any reason to move on from her trusty OM-1 – and she’s going to take a few shots just to get Leonie relaxed. There’s a blotch of colour on the side of her neck which suggests she’s embarrassed; sweat on her lip, though it’s anything but warm in here. Vee’s assistant, Annabel, had scouted the location earlier in the week, and come back with a sketched plan of the kitchen-conservatory, and light readings. It looked good on paper and it looks good in person.
‘Does that chair swivel? If you can move so you’re facing the window, we should have everything we need.’
Leonie laughs, ‘From your mouth to God’s ear. Not that she exists.’ She shuffles her feet so the chair is facing towards the window. Spring light and enough cloud to soften the sun: Vee can work with this.
‘When’s publication?’
‘Fifteenth.’
‘How’s it going to go?’
Leonie sent her drafts, still, airmail from the American university where she now teaches. In April, Vee had received a proof, and seen herself in the acknowledgements: ‘Thank you to VM, my sister and my friend, who sees everything.’ She’d sat down and read the book, there and then, even though she’d seen its earlier version. But printed like this, it was different. Real. Vee understood, now, what her father meant when he said he was proud of her. She remembers his face, when she told him she’d been approached by a publisher to write a book about photography, a guide for people with their first real camera. (‘I’ll write a book for women with their first real camera’, she’d said.) This winter, her own book has absorbed her free time, and a lot of time she should have given to Stanley. And so when she held Leonie’s book, she knew, more than before, what had gone in to it.
And it’s a feast of a book for anyone who is a Leonie fan, knows her work and her views. Vee can’t say how it will read to someone who has never had the experience of sitting in a room with this clever, uncompromising force of intelligence, felt something like seduced by her words. This Is What You Need To Know About Women (Especially if You Are a Woman) is an abrasive, uncomfortable, unapologetic take on where women should be by now, and all the reasons they are not. Thatcher gets a pasting, which is fair enough, but so does almost everyone else. Women who work, women who don’t, lipstick wearers, closeted lesbians, men who don’t yet understand the whole thing, men who do. And as for feminists: Leonie is unimpressed by them, too, mostly for supporting the patriarchal structure, instead of razing it to the ground, but also for excluding the experience of their sisters of other colours and cultures. Vee enjoyed every word, but Vee knows that Leonie is a blast of cold shower that you know isn’t going to last forever. Anyone who stays under there too long is going to hurt.
A lazy, rippling shrug, but the makings of a smile, too. Leonie can’t hide how pleased she is, and Vee loves her all the more for it. ‘How do polemics ever go? The people who like it are the only ones you don’t need to reach. It’s preaching to the fucking choir.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Vee says. She wishes more people understood the sparkling, bracing h
umour of Leonie. If you don’t, she could sound vicious.
‘Why?’ Leonie looks half-curious, half-hostile; that means it’s safe to proceed. And it’s a great photo. Click.
‘If people are put off because they feel under attack, they might not understand your message, might not read it—’
‘Then they’re not ready.’
Leonie sits forward, eyes a little narrower, but brighter too, bird-of-prey readiness. Click.
‘Are you saying my work means nothing? Because it will do nothing? In your terms, anyway, which seem to be how famous they make you—’
Vee ignores the last bit. She’s not going to get sidelined into a debate about whether she should be photographing people who aren’t out-and-out sisters: they’ve done that one to death. ‘I didn’t say either of those things. But—’ she hears herself sigh. This isn’t what she’s here to do, today. And Leonie’s book is what it was always going to be: clever, correct, and sometimes hard to stomach. Just like Leonie.
‘But what?’
Vee puts the camera down, and it lies against her body, weight held by the strap. ‘I don’t see the point of giving people things they can’t relate to. It’s just a waste—’
‘Not all of us sold out.’
Vee holds up a hand. She would never usually dare to stop Leonie: maybe that’s why Leonie stops. ‘I mean,’ she says, and she didn’t realise that her voice was going to sound so soft, that there might even be tears in it, somewhere deep, ‘it’s a waste of you.’
Leonie glances away. ‘Like I said. It’s a polemic. I’m ahead of my time. That’s my job. I’m in front. I don’t see that as a waste.’
The light from the window against Leonie’s face is sharp, suddenly; a cloud has shifted on this blowy September day. The side of her forehead, the bridge of that mighty nose, the top of her cheek are warmed by the light. Click. It’s time to make her subject laugh. ‘I’m not sure that you’re going to have much of a choir for this. I can’t think of a single person you think is doing it right.’
‘Well.’ There’s something borderline flirtatious in Leonie’s look, and Vee thinks she’s caught it: the cupid’s bow, the fuck-me eyes. ‘I’m pretty cool.’
And now they’re both laughing, and the years have slid away from them. They’re in the Fulham flat, the windows open to the blazing summer of ’76, and Leonie is taking the mickey out of some hapless man who tried to explain economics to her. They’re in Vee’s first car, driving back from a demo in Leeds, and Leonie is drinking but not drunk and they have the radio on, and they’re trying to count all the sexist references in songs and it should be depressing but it’s funny, so funny, because they are repeating them in deepened voices. They’re friends, again, and for all the places where it hurts and goes wrong and they have let each other down, they cannot, in this moment, argue with the fact that they chose each other, keep on choosing. When the picture editor called to book Vee for this shoot, she let slip that Leonie asked for Vee to do it. Vee moved two other jobs to be here. She’s never stood in this room before and yet she’s home.
‘What’s so funny?’ The voice makes them both jump. There’s a child standing in the doorway. She is looking from Leonie to Vee, ready to smile, ready to frown, depending on what the grown-ups do next. She has the stance of someone who does not want to be sent away.
Leonie’s laughter barely falters: she can’t seem to stop it. But Vee straightens up, as though it’s not a child but a teacher who has walked into the room and caught her misbehaving.
Maybe if she had met Erica’s father, she would see his contours in the face of this kid. But it’s all Leonie, writ small, in this child’s eyes, that nose, the jut of the chin.
Vee’s first thought is that Leonie kept her baby after all – it wouldn’t be the first time a plan for adoption had fallen through, and a mother had changed her mind. And it would be typical of Leonie to try to keep it quiet if that had happened, because it didn’t exactly go with her ‘maternal instinct as product of the patriarchy’ line.
But this is not a child mothered by Leonie Barratt. That child wouldn’t be wearing a pink ra-ra skirt, or have her hair held back with hair-slides, her feet in cherry-red patent-leather shoes. Leonie’s child would be one step up from feral, wild-haired, sharp-eyed, and more than a match for anyone who put her down.
Of course. This kid must be Ursula’s. Vee hopes that this child has cars as well as dolls to play with. She cannot begin to imagine how seeing this conditioning happening, in her family, under her nose, must gall Leonie. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is Erica,’ Leonie says, then adds, ‘did you ever read Fear of Flying?’
‘I did.’ Vee only got around to it recently, and it made her laugh.
Oh. OH.
Erica Jong.
Zipless fuck.
‘How old are you, Erica?’ Leonie asks. Erica holds up a hand, fingers spread, thumb against palm, ‘I’m four. I’ll be five on the seventeenth of November.’
Leonie tilts an eyebrow at Vee, nods. ‘There you go. Straight from the horse’s mouth.’
Vee scrabbles back through her memory, to the conversations she had with Leonie at Greenham Common. ‘So, Ursula? Why didn’t you say?’
‘I did say.’
‘I’d have remembered.’ Erica is watching them, gaze tick-tocking from face to face. Leonie is waiting, watching Vee too. It’s uncanny, the two of them. ‘I asked and you told me to fuck off.’
‘Don’t swear in front of my niece,’ Leonie says, with a not-quite-smile, and Vee glances towards the child, who is standing there with three shocked rounds where her eyes and mouth were a moment ago.
Do you apologise to a child? Vee doesn’t remember anyone ever apologising to her, except to say they were sorry her mother had died.
‘And then I said?’ Leonie asks.
‘You said a sister helped you out.’
‘I said my sister helped me out.’
‘Oh.’ Vee looks at Erica, her fists on her hips, now, her shock at Vee’s swearing dissipated and her original curiosity, apparently, returned.
‘What were you laughing about?’ the child asks. ‘I could hear you from upstairs. You disturbed me when I was playing.’ And Vee can’t help it, but she starts laughing again, because Erica looks so outraged. And because her mind is trying to absorb this apparent living, breathing truth, in front of her: Ursula helped her sister out, by taking her baby. And Leonie helped her sister out. Ursula must have wanted a baby.
‘So, Ursula is your sister’s—’ how to phrase the question, ‘only child?’
‘Yes.’ Leonie nods. ‘There were problems, so—’
‘What problems?’ Erica asks.
‘The adults are talking,’ Leonie says. The sharpness in her tone would have most children running for cover, but Erica, it seems, really is her mother’s daughter.
‘Yes,’ she says, feet unmoving, hands on hips, ‘but you’re talking about me.’
Then, the most unexpected thing from Leonie, who holds out her arms in awkward invitation. There’s a second when birth-mother and birth-daughter are eye to eye, but Vee isn’t quite quick enough with her camera to catch it. Erica goes across to Leonie, and rather than climbing into her lap, turns and waits to be lifted. Leonie puts her hands under Erica’s armpits and hauls; Vee takes a photograph then. It’s not going to be a good shot – she really just does it to see if Leonie objects. Leonie doesn’t. Over Erica’s head, Leonie says, ‘I should have thought about putting a clause in the agreement. About pink. And all that goes with it.’
Click. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t.’
‘I thought about it. But I wasn’t at my best.’
Erica looks from one woman to the other. ‘What are you two talking about? How does your camera work?’
‘Nothing important,’ Leonie says.
At the same time, Vee offers, ‘I can show you, after I’ve taken Leonie’s photograph.’
Erica nods. ‘Are you going to take a pictur
e right now?’
Vee drops to one knee, so her lens can be level with Erica’s face. ‘Yes, I am.’
So Erica – that precious only, that child whose every move is special, who must hardly spend a day unphotographed, judging by the studio portraits on the walls, the clusters of framed family images on shelves and tables – does what she knows to do. She poses. First there’s a grin, wide and fake, and then she turns to Leonie and kisses her on the cheek. Vee thinks she has caught the second before Leonie looks startled/horrified, pulls away. She definitely gets the next, where Leonie wipes her cheek and Erica laughs, and Leonie smiles too, though it’s directed towards Vee, not her daughter: a rueful, ‘what can you do’ smile, an expression Vee has never seen on Leonie before. Click.
‘Erica!’ Ursula’s voice makes them all jump. It’s followed by the tap of her shoes down the stairs, through the house, coming closer.
‘I’m in here, Mamma. They won’t tell me why they were laughing.’
Vee gets to her feet, waiting for Leonie to let go of Erica, and for Erica to run to her mother, whose footsteps are speeding up, the way they would to a forgotten pan left on the hob.
But Leonie pulls Erica closer, tickles her at her waist, and Erica squeals, laughs. ‘Vee and I were laughing because we were tickling,’ Leonie says to Erica in the kind of voice that she obviously imagines women use towards children they love, high-pitched and wheedling, ‘like this!’
The Woman in the Photograph Page 24
