The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

Click, click, click. Vee can never resist unexpected movement smudged across a photograph, the way it plays across an image and gives it life and light.

  Erica gets a hand free, and tickles Leonie at her neck. Leonie moves her head to the side and takes Erica’s fingers in her mouth, a play-snarl. She looks as though she is actually enjoying herself; Erica’s whole body shouts out its laughter, its unexpected pleasure from an aunt she obviously doesn’t know that well. Her legs are flailing and her baby-toothed mouth is wide, her eyes bright, a hairclip working loose. And then Leonie puts her hand on Erica’s face, cups it, and the two look into each other’s eyes with – with what? Vee can’t identify it; it’s more complicated than love, both more and less than affection. She can’t identify it, but she can capture it. Click.

  Ursula, standing in the doorway, hesitates for half of a heartbeat before saying, ‘I think that will do.’ She’s changed out of her leggings and sweater into jeans, heels and a batwing top.

  Leonie gives another tickle, but Erica has stopped laughing as suddenly as she started, her face its resting small and sober shape once more. Vee risks a final photograph but Ursula notices and holds out a hand, one finger pointing, towards Vee, without even looking at her. There’s enough authority in the gesture to make Vee rest her camera on her chest. Ursula hasn’t taken her eyes away from her sister and her daughter.

  ‘We’re just playing,’ Leonie says. Erica makes a move to get down – Vee can see her legs wiggling – but Leonie is holding her on her lap as though she is a shield.

  ‘Really?’ Ursula says. The sisters are looking intently at each other now, Leonie defiant, Ursula furious.

  ‘Really. I don’t see anything like enough of my . . .’ and Leonie plays the pause to perfection – ‘niece.’

  ‘Well, whose fault is that?’ Vee glances at Erica, whose face is all bemused resignation, somewhere between ‘not this again’ and ‘I wish someone would tell me what is going on’. It’s a strange look to see on a child. She fidgets on Leonie’s lap, realises her grip has loosened, and slides to the floor. She might actually be trying to head for Vee – or, more likely, her camera – but Ursula’s arm, still stretched out and pointing Vee to stillness, drops on to Erica’s head, pulls her towards her. Erica stands against her mother’s body, Ursula’s hand more than resting on her shoulder to keep her in place. ‘We’ll discuss this later.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Leonie says, ‘I’m going as soon as the photos are finished. I’ve better things to do with my day than listen to your bullshit, again.’

  Ursula bends to Erica. ‘Come on, darling. We don’t want to listen to Aunt Leonie’s swearing, do we? This is part of why your daddy and I think she’s a bad influence.’

  ‘The lady with the camera said a bad word too,’ Erica says.

  ‘Woman,’ Vee and Leonie correct, in unison. Ursula ignores them.

  ‘Well, we really don’t want to listen to bad words.’

  Leonie smiles at Erica, and Vee doesn’t know what’s coming, but she knows it won’t be pleasant. ‘You don’t look much like your daddy, do you, Erica? You should ask him about that sometime. Most children look at least a little bit like their father.’

  For a second Vee is sure that Ursula will go for Leonie, slap her at least, and she’s damned if she will miss it, hands already raising her camera to her face. But Ursula turns away, propelling Erica in front of her: ‘Come on, we can get your dolls’ house out.’

  Erica isn’t going anywhere. ‘I want to know how the camera works!’

  ‘Not now,’ Ursula says.

  Oh, but whether Erica is her mother’s daughter or her aunt’s daughter, she has their stubbornness. It’s like she’s grown roots: she’s immovable. ‘I want to know,’ she says, then pointing at Vee, ‘she said she’d tell me.’

  ‘Well?’ Ursula glares at Vee. Leonie titters. Ursula turns up the glare a notch, switches it to Leonie, who refuses to look away. The tension nests into Vee, making a pain in her temple, another under her heart.

  Vee just wants this to end. She bends to Erica. ‘It’s to do with letting the light in in a controlled way, to make a chemical reaction that makes a photo. When I press the button on top it opens a sort of little door inside, and that lets the light on to the film, and that’s what makes the picture.’

  Erica looks as though she is framing another question, but Ursula isn’t having this go on for a second longer than it has to. ‘Now you know,’ she says, and then she’s moving towards the door, Erica held firmly by the hand. Vee exhales, stretches; her body is full of knots, as though she’s spent a day on a job, instead of half an hour in a conservatory on a converted farmhouse in Dorking. She and Leonie look at each other as they listen to the footsteps slamming their way upstairs.

  Leonie might be crying; it’s the fact that she is trying to hide it that makes Vee hurt. She asks quietly, ‘Did it bother you? Giving her away?’

  Leonie shakes her head. ‘Nope. Babies aren’t interesting.’

  ‘The woman she’s going to be might be.’ Vee raises the camera to her face again. Leonie is gazing out into the garden: rain is starting to spit and spot on the window, the light is a more solid grey than it was. She’ll give it another ten minutes and then, if she needs to, she’ll put a light reflector on the floor, angle it to bounce the light up to Leonie’s face. The skylights should still be enough, though.

  Leonie shrugs. ‘Well, you opted out of that too, as I recall.’

  There aren’t many things that stop Vee when she’s focused on photographing, but this does; she looks at Leonie over the top of the camera. ‘You can’t seriously have wanted me to take your baby?’

  ‘The baby. A baby. Not my baby. They’re all just – bits of evolutionary necessity. And I’d rather you’d had it than she get brought up in pink ribbons by my fucking sister.’

  God. Leonie had been serious in her offer. Vee has wondered about this, sometimes. It’s always been hard to tell when Leonie is joking, or testing you, or testing herself. ‘You say that now,’ Vee says, ‘if she was with me I’d never see her. She’d be raised by nannies. That has to be worse.’

  Leonie shrugs, non-committal.

  Vee has taken the last shot on the reel; she winds it back, facing away from Leonie, clicks the back open and takes the film out. She puts it safely into its container before sliding a fresh film in to the waiting space. Click, then wind on. Click, wind on. She puts the black cassette into her pocket; that’s not for the lab, she’ll develop it herself. The shots from before Erica came in might be worth using, and if they are, she’ll pass them on. Back to work.

  Leonie is looking out on to the rain in the garden.

  ‘When I’m back in the States, try to keep an eye out for Erica, will you?’

  ‘Why, aren’t you coming back?’ Vee hears panic in her voice. Her father’s death is a greyscale tint to every thought and sight. She cannot lose the other person she loves most in the world.

  There are tears in her eyes and she turns away. But nothing gets past Leonie. Vee hears her exhalation as she gets to her feet, and turns to see her friend waiting, open-armed, to hold her.

  When she’s cried, Leonie squeezes her again – her body is soft, hot, sweat-and-lavender like always – and sits back down. ‘Nothing is forever, Vee. Not you. Not me.’

  ‘I know.’ There’s knowing in your head and knowing in your being, though.

  ‘So, whatever happens, look out for Erica?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Leonie is watching the sky, it seems.

  Vee drops to her knees, her lens on a level with Leonie’s eyeline. The image she captures of her friend is serene: Vee would say statesmanlike, if she dared. She takes another shot, then stands and moves a step away, the viewfinder taking in Leonie’s bulk in its dark navy shirt, her cropped hair showing her high forehead, the way her browbone juts. But Leonie doesn’t look like Leonie unless she’s talking. Unless there’s a conversation, this phot
ograph is never going to be anything special. It’s certainly not going to be worthy of a cover. More importantly, it’s not going to justify the brain in that head, the vision in those eyes. The camera does lie. It’s Vee’s job to make it.

  ‘My book’s coming out next year.’

  ‘Your book?’ Leonie’s face is perfect when it turns towards her: curiosity, bright attention, a benign sort of rage. Click.

  ‘I told you. In a letter.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  Vee is pretty certain she did. ‘I was asked to. It’s nothing like what you do.’

  ‘No, because mine took me twenty years—’

  ‘You know I didn’t mean it like that, Leonie.’

  ‘Oh well that’s OK then.’

  Click. ‘Is it?’

  ‘No. It’s not your job to write books! Just like it’s not my job to take photos.’ Something like pleading sounds in Leonie’s words. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’ This is just ridiculous, and Vee doesn’t need it. She’s shaken enough by seeing the living fact of what had seemed a very hypothetical problem of what to do about Leonie’s pregnancy. ‘I was never supposed to get out from under, was that it? I was supposed to be your protégé forever?’

  Leonie looks genuinely angry. This isn’t one of her play-furies, one of her tests. She’s moving her face away from the camera every time Vee goes near. Fine. She’ll tell the editor that the film was over-exposed when she took the back off the camera, that the winding mechanism had gone wrong. These things happen. This can be The One Time Veronica Moon Didn’t Nail It. Or she’ll hope there’s something from the first roll of film that she can use, and she’ll hand the specific negatives over, keep the ones of Erica and Leonie private.

  ‘No,’ Leonie says quietly, ‘but you were supposed to—’

  ‘What? Come on, tell me.’ Looking down on Leonie is a strange feeling, wrong, like looking at the negative of an image you know well.

  Leonie looks down. ‘You were supposed to care.’

  Vee turns away, opens her bag in preparation for nuzzling the camera back in to the protective foam that has made a millimetre-perfect nest for it over the years. She picks up her light meter, tucks it back in its slot in her camera bag, ‘You know I care.’

  ‘How do I know that? From when you cancelled your stupid assignments when I needed you? From all those times you called?’

  The guilt that has been filling Vee since Stanley died washes up to its high tide mark, threatening to drown her. She goes over to the chair, kneels on the floor, and leans against Leonie’s knees. ‘I meant to. And I assumed you didn’t want to talk about it.’ It sounds thin, even to her. She tries harder. ‘You’ve never seemed to need me. Or anyone. And anyway – your book. If anyone lives what they believe, it’s you. Motherhood is a construct of the patriarchy, you said, and I knew that you knew you were right.’

  ‘Did you ask?’ Leonie might be crying. She’s looking away.

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘If I was OK?’

  She’s sure she did. But she also feels as though she’s being – what’s the expression they use now, for when the rules change and you’re made to think you’re wrong – gaslighted. ‘Did you tell me? If we’re getting out from under the patriarchy are we not owning what we’re feeling? Telling our truth? Where was yours?’

  Leonie wipes at her face; it’s not tears, but sweat, on her skin, but her voice has true hurt in it. ‘Would you have listened? You could have tried a bit harder.’

  ‘You could have been honest about what you needed,’ Vee says. She can hear tears in her own voice.

  ‘Didn’t you think it would be hard?’

  It’s the she-devil and the sea. ‘Didn’t you think that me thinking it was hard was undermining everything you had taught me about women and motherhood?’

  She reaches for her friend’s hand. Leonie’s skin is clammy. ‘You’re cold,’ she says.

  ‘You were always cold.’ Leonie smiles as she says it, so although that ought to hurt it’s a comfort, a return to familiar ground. This is how Leonie talks. Vee gets up. Although her body is used to moving into uncomfortable shapes for the sake of a shot, and to staying beyond comfort in squats and stretches, today she’s aching. Maybe it’s the tension, creeping into the creases in her body, solidifying there.

  ‘You were always impossible to contradict,’ Vee replies, ‘and anyway, if I was a man, being cold would be good.’

  Leonie laughs, and Vee takes her camera out again. She takes a photograph, another, as her friend sits back in her chair, eyes closed, half a smile on her face. She looks like a lazy, self-satisfied cat; the only one who knows where the cream is. The sun has come out; it’s moved higher in the sky and beams down through the skylight, so Leonie is lit sharply, brightly, an uncompromising strength in her face. And Vee understands that this is the way to take her friend’s photograph: to let the details of her face show, the bags under the eyes and the blotches on her neck, the way her temples shine. Because this is how she would photograph a man. Every line and blemish. On a man, it would be character, not flaw.

  ‘Look at me,’ she says, ‘like I’m Thatcher.’

  Leonie smiles, opens her eyes, then leans forward, a little, her face all fury. ‘You owe me, you fucking scarf snatcher.’ Click. Leonie will look mad as hell and only they will know what the joke is. Vee grins. ‘Now look at me like you’re Thatcher.’

  Leonie holds up a hand, still smiling. ‘Enough’s enough, Vee.’

  Maybe it’s their laughter that brings Erica back to the door; when Vee looks that way, she’s standing, quiet and still, taking everything in. She decides to ignore her. Erica can watch, and Vee will claim ignorance if Ursula tries to tick them all off again. She puts a finger to her lips and Erica nods and mirrors the gesture, solemn as death itself.

  24 April 2018

  A statue of Millicent Fawcett, intellectual, activist, political leader, writer, and suffragist, is unveiled in London. It is the first ever statue of a woman to stand in Parliament Square.

  Two days before exhibition opening

  The sight of Leonie’s face on the poster, here in the street for anyone to look at, has shaken Vee. And she knows she’s been overdoing it. She saw the solicitor yesterday. Fen’s niece has grown into a formidable woman – not that that is really a surprise. She now heads a firm of solicitors who specialise in working with women, and do a lot of pro-bono work for those who are still being abused by the world. She’s the media’s go-to person to comment on legal matters relating to women’s rights, whether domestic, reproductive or working. A check of a living will, and a change to a dying one, are way below Gloria Wolf’s pay grade. But she made time for Vee, like she always makes time for the women who helped her to make a start. That was followed by packing up the darkroom, and the hospital this morning. Now this.

  Vee doesn’t know if she even wants to see the exhibition, really. But it wouldn’t be fair on Erica, who has been so meticulous and conscientious and – well, and kind. Erica deserves her support, and she’s going to get it. Vee deserves to be remembered, she knows she does. Erica has done that for her. She’s more grateful than she knew she would be.

  Just this, then the session with Marja early this evening. And then sleep.

  She hopes death will be a sudden switch, like clicking off the bulb in the darkroom and feeling the absence of light everywhere. She does not want a gradual diminishing, the opposite of watching an image emerge when the film is laid in the chemical bath to develop. Foolish to think that she has any choice, though.

  There had been an almost giddy frankness to her conversation with Mr Wilding this morning. None of the usual hedging around ‘impossible to say’ and ‘factors at play’. Just straight answers to straight questions. It reminded Vee of the old days, conversations with editors who had two minutes to brief her, handovers to the lab who needed photographs in a hurry and just had to know how fast the film was, how it should be exposed, to ge
t to the truth of the photograph that Vee took.

  Yes, it had been all business with her consultant this morning. She’d reported the viciousness of the headaches, the nausea building and her vocabulary and memories being nibbled away at. Maybe. It’s not like it was after the surgery in 2007, when Vee was aware of great craters of darkness where her memories and her knowledge used to be, and known that nothing would return them to her. If she hadn’t fallen out of love with photography after Leonie died, she would have done it in the aftermath of surgery. She had spent night after night, looking at photographs, sitting with colleagues and old friends from the movement, asking them to tell her the truth that the images swore to. And knowing that, at the moments she pressed the shutter, then wound the film on, she was choosing what to see.

  What’s happening to her now is of a different order. This is the imperceptible alteration in the twilight that means your first shot might be OK, but the last on the film will be grainy and barely usable. Vee had asked the questions she had brought. They might have been the ones she asked last time.

  The straightness of the answers had been comforting, in the way that a clean wound is comforting when you thought it was going to be a ragged cut.

  Expect to become more tired, and for your memory to be affected. Know that your judgement is impaired. As for your sight – we can scan you again, but really, you’re the best judge.

  I don’t think it will be more than two months.

  *

  Erica is teetering on those boots again. Well, if this is what gets her through the day, so be it. She looks terrible, pale and tired. But when she sees Vee her eyes brighten; instead of waiting she comes out onto the pavement. They look at the poster together, and with Erica next to her, Vee can suddenly see what she sees.

  She may, finally, have arrived at wherever she set out to, on that sunny day in Dagenham in June 1968. Some people never get an exhibition. Some people are truly forgotten. And that would be worse, even if there have been times when she thought it would be better.

  Erica looks down at her hands. ‘Do you want to come in?’ she asks. ‘I mean – I know you do, that’s why you’re here. I’m – I’m just nervous.’