The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  Vee nods. ‘Lead the way,’ she says.

  Erica puts her hand to the wall as the movement of the lift begins; she wobbles, a little, and Vee puts out an arm. How good, to steady someone else. ‘Are you OK?’

  Erica gives a smile-not-smile. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vee knows that she is supposed to be congratulatory, but brain tumour or no, she can see from Erica’s face that it’s not that simple. ‘Well.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Erica says, ‘I don’t know what to think. I haven’t even told Marcus. Well, I haven’t told anyone. Except you.’

  The lift stops, and they step out into the exhibition space. Leonie greets them, her head double life-size on a repeat of the exhibition poster. They stand and look at it for a moment. ‘Leonie had an abortion,’ Vee says, ‘and she was absolutely unapologetic about it.’

  She feels Erica nod. ‘I know. But I don’t want Tom to be an only child, and I might not have a lot more chances.’

  ‘So why aren’t you happy?’

  Erica shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. What if I don’t love Marcus?’ She looks at Vee, and Vee wishes she were not out of her depth, wishes she had something to say that is helpful or at least not unintentionally tactless. Like talking about abortions. Erica’s eyes, even tired, are as lovely and as clear as Leonie’s were.

  ‘I don’t know either, Erica.’ Erica seems to understand, though, that Vee would say more, give more, if she could. She puts out a hand and rests it on Vee’s arm. The touch almost hurts.

  Erica straightens and says, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I want to focus on this. So. Here we are, at the beginning.’

  Vee sees her Dagenham picture blown up, the newspapers featuring it displayed below. Passes the beauty queens, still weeping, surrounded by photographs of early marches and protests. So many faces she might have known the names for, once. Portraits, of the great and the good, the forgotten who were taking their moment and the women as recognisable now as they were then. She pauses in front of Margaret Thatcher.

  Erica pauses too. ‘I know it sounds weird,’ she says, ‘but I love your Thatcher photo.’

  ‘I wish I remembered taking it.’

  ‘Why that one? In particular, I mean?’

  Vee smiles. ‘Because I think that might be Leonie’s scarf around her neck.’

  Erica laughs, ‘Let’s say it’s true.’ They walk on, quietly. It’s strange to be in a gallery empty of other people.

  And here, almost at the end, is Leonie Barratt.

  Still gone. Still the most important person in her adult life. The print must be three feet by two, smaller than it is on the poster but all the more impactful for that: concentrated Leonie. It’s like seeing the Mona Lisa in all its thirty-inch-by-twenty-inch glory after all the tea towels and jigsaws. Next to it, the contact sheet. It doesn’t exactly clear Vee’s name, but at least it doesn’t confirm the worst things she was accused of: watching her friend die as though it was a blood-filled horrific spectacle that she stood by and recorded without a second thought. Only the war photographers do that. And are praised for it. Oh, to be a man with a camera.

  Vee sits on the bench in front of it, and Erica sits down beside her. ‘I heard the story so often, about how you were taking your photographs, and Leonie died, and you kept on taking them instead of helping her, and then you published them.’

  ‘And you believed it?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Erica says, ‘who doesn’t believe their mother? But then, as I got older, I realised I’d constructed the memory. What I thought was a memory was a sort of’ – she scribbles at her temples with her fingers – ‘a sort of cartoon. A child’s cartoon. You were all big hands and Leonie was bleeding—’

  Vee puts a hand over Erica’s. She’s not sure which of them is shaking. ‘She wasn’t bleeding, Erica,’ she says. ‘There was no blood. You can see. Her heart gave out when she was sitting there.’ What a burden for a child.

  ‘I know that now,’ Erica says, ‘I knew it as soon as I was old enough to think about it properly. And then I looked at the photographs. They weren’t – it wasn’t obvious that she was dead. I could see how you could be – mistaken.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The next headache is coming, overpowering the painkiller in her system. That was quick. She can feel tension marching along her jawbone.

  ‘And then when you let me have the contact sheet,’ Erica adds, ‘I was surprised by how relieved I was. When I saw the other images.’

  Vee nods. When she blew the images from that up and looked at them closely, she thought she could see the frames between which Leonie’s heart stopped. And she thought there were two images after death, not one. But she is the only one who knows/knew, really, and without her memories there is no record. During her recovery from brain surgery a decade ago, she had had nothing except the last few images on that film to tell her what happened. And they aren’t enough. Photographs on their own don’t tell the whole truth of anything.

  ‘I remember your camera was on the floor,’ Erica says quietly.

  ‘What?’ No. Never.

  ‘When I came in. Before you shouted at me to go. Your camera was on the floor.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure,’ Erica’s tone suggests that this is the least important part of this conversation.

  But Vee has felt something inside her break. Or mend.

  Because she would never, ever have put her camera on the floor. Just like she would never immerse it in water. In her hands, round her neck, over her shoulder, in her camera bag; these were the places her camera would be if she was away from home. Nowhere else.

  If the camera was on the floor then she did try to save Leonie.

  It’s as simple as that.

  You can’t do CPR with a camera swinging round your neck.

  You don’t put your camera on the floor, ever.

  She can almost remember it, now. Taking the portraits, before she knew Leonie was dead. Then, realising the scope of the silence. Only one set of breath: her own. Her voice, crying Leonie’s name. The bulk of her friend’s body sliding from the chair. Forcing Leonie’s jaw open, her small, neat teeth guarding the silent red cave of her mouth.

  Lavender. Sweat. Silence emanating from Leonie the way it never had before.

  Vee closes her eyes, tighter, tighter, tries to make the memory stay, but it won’t.

  It leaves something behind, though: certainty. Vee thought she would never have certainty. But here it is.

  She chose her friend above her craft, above her standards. That time, at least, she did not let Leonie down.

  That pain in her: it’s definitely a mending. It’s the fibres of her heart knitting together over a place that’s been raw for almost a quarter of a century.

  Vee takes Erica’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’ve given me,’ she says.

  It’s time for Vee to give some peace to Erica, if she can. ‘There are things I can tell from looking at the images,’ she says.

  ‘What can you tell?’ Erica is sitting very still, and the gallery itself is silent, though noises travel up the stairwells, making a city-background hum.

  ‘I can tell that she was relaxed. She would have been talking. I was moving around her; the position of her shoulders doesn’t move at all. I’d have had her facing a window, maybe a door open into a garden.’ Vee inhales, exhales, wishes the physical pain at least would dissolve. ‘I haven’t changed the set-up – she’s in the same clothes, sitting the same way, against the same background. So I would have been photographing all the time.’

  Erica is holding on to the edge of the bench where they are sitting, her gaze fixed on Leonie’s image. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  Vee isn’t sure that she does, either. Not completely. But she continues, ‘Look at the contact sheet. You can’t tell when she – goes. There’s no fall. There’s no cry. Lik
e you say in your notes, you only really know she’s gone when someone tells you. She didn’t suffer. You can see it.’ The ache is creeping round her face now, jawbone, sinuses, temples, forehead. Over the crown of her skull and down her neck.

  Erica nods. Those eyes, round like a child’s as she listens. Then, unexpectedly, she smiles. She’s not looking at Vee. She’s not really now: she’s then. ‘I remember she was always talking, and always looking. I remember her and my mother talking about me, a lot, because I felt . . .’ Erica puts her hand on her stomach, her face twisting, as though something is curdling inside her.

  ‘I think the morning you came, Leonie had said my mother was a bad mother. And my father was complaining about how Leonie never shut up and my mother never stopped complaining about her. And then they had to stop arguing and we had to tidy the house up, because you were coming.’ She scratches at her temples again, a gesture that little Tom will no doubt remember one day, look back on as being part of what made his mother what she was.

  Tears clump Vee’s throat. Pain travels down her spine, up again, reaches her crown.

  Erica shakes her head. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Look at her, though,’ Vee says, even though remembering Leonie, really thinking about her, hurts, ‘you can see everything that she was. Clever, thoughtful, and just – just a force. And I think that if I saw that, probably even if I knew she was dead, I wouldn’t have been able to help but photograph it. I don’t know if it was shock or instinct. But it’s what photographers do. Female photographers get . . .’ what’s the word? ‘Monstered for it. Male ones get applauded for being unflinching.’ She adds, because she can, now, ‘If my camera was on the ground, I know I tried to help.’

  Vee pauses. She looks at Erica, who might be crying, but the sparks and flares of light at the edges of her vision have begun, so it’s hard to tell. She’s not saying anything, though, so Vee continues, ‘And if you had come in, of course I would have shouted at you to go. I wouldn’t have wanted you to see. One of my aunts made me go to see my mother in her coffin and I never forgave her for it. If you were going to be a child without a mother, you didn’t need to see it. So yes, I might have shouted at you. But it would have been to save you from something I didn’t think you should see.’

  God, this pain. All of it, inside and out. Drugs, then sleep, and if tomorrow never comes, well—

  ‘My mother,’ Erica says, and she takes Vee’s hand in her own. Vee can feel a shaking in her skin, vibration in her palm, as though every cell of her has become held breath. ‘Was Leonie my mother? You just said, you knew what it was to be a child without a mother.’ Erica’s body is leaning into Vee’s, her weight against her shoulder, as though she is a child again, waiting for comfort, for love.

  Vee closes her eyes – the lights in her vision don’t switch off, just shine brighter against the blessed black – and pulls a breath in, deep. This would be the time. If she was certain. Would Leonie thank her for it, if she was?

  She can feel how Erica is waiting.

  Now is the time.

  She puts a hand to her face, and reaches for the bench with the other, holding tight. Vertigo, or worse, ‘I need to get home.’ It’s like unlatching a door that the wind has been teasing its way around: there’s a rush and thud of pain, head, neck, face, spine, and she isn’t in this room anymore, isn’t anywhere except in this burning darkness at the back of her left eye socket. Please, not her sight. Not yet.

  25 April 2018

  ‘I’M SORRY I’M LATE,’ Erica says, almost as soon as her key has moved the front door away from its frame, ‘I just wanted to walk it one more time, and then I got talking to some of the staff, and it just felt as if I couldn’t leave. Once this week is over, I’ll be more . . .’ she pauses, because she’s not sure what the word is. More present? More reliable? More undemanding? Not for the first time, she’s glad Vee doesn’t see her at home. She bends and unzips her boots, slides them off. Her feet exhale and relax to flatness on the floor. It must be four months since she went to a yoga class. She hangs up her coat, then stretches her arms above her head. She has been hunching over the vitrines, poring over the detail.

  There’s no sign of Tom but there is the sound of his half-snore, half-breathing coming through the monitor, eerie in the space when Erica has stopped talking.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Marcus says.

  ‘And when I got out, they were limiting how many people were going down to the tube, so I had to wait. I should have got a bus, really, but by the time I realised how long it was going to take . . .’ she couldn’t have cared less, really. She was thinking about Vee, Leonie, her mother, three women who made her own history, all either dead or dying. She’s tried to tell herself that when Vee described Leonie as her mother, she was just confused. It was no more than another symptom of the tumour. Erica has never had any reason to doubt her parentage. She has a birth certificate that declares in confident type that her mother is Ursula Woodhouse, her father Alec George Woodhouse.

  And yet, she cannot leave the idea alone. She stood among the mass of people waiting to get on the tube and she felt – what? Something calmer than confusion, bigger than wondering. Something that, along with the little life nestling in her pelvis, was weighting her world, at the same time as making sense of it.

  And why didn’t Vee answer? Was it really the headache or was that an excuse? Erica will ask again, and she won’t take no for an answer next time.

  ‘Erica.’ Marcus walks towards her, and she almost steps back; the shock of her reaction makes her look at him, properly, for the first time since she got home. (The first time today? This week?) He looks tired. He’s smiling. He puts his hands on her shoulders, gently, ‘Erica, it’s OK. I texted you to say to take your time. Tom and I were fine. We talked about global politics. He’s got some surprisingly radical views for a twenty-month old.’

  She laughs and tilts in towards him, lets the top of his chest take the weight of the front of her shoulders. Her head sits sideways against the base of his throat. ‘I didn’t see your text. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Is everything set? My mum’s staying over, for the opening, so we can stay out as late as we like. Or I could book a hotel. But I didn’t want to book it without checking with you.’ She thinks of the baby she’s concealing from him. Whether she has it or not, she needs his understanding, and his support. Otherwise the two of them are as good as done.

  She shrugs further into him, feels his arms wrap round her shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I thought it was good, but now I don’t know.’

  ‘You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?’

  She looks up at him. Before she met Vee, she might have said yes, automatically, but – ‘Actually, I don’t think I do. I’ve felt as though you’d rather I hadn’t taken it on.’

  Marcus sighs, ‘I know.’

  ‘What do you know? That I felt that way, or you did?’ This exhibition has sharpened Erica’s attention to detail, woken her research muscles again. And though she wants to shower, to sleep, she wants her marriage to work, more. Well, that’s a relief. There have been times lately when she felt she would have exchanged everything except Tom for twelve hours’ sleep.

  ‘Both,’ Marcus says, and adds, ‘We need to talk, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes. We do.’ The new life in Erica makes itself known in an urgent desire for cereal with hot milk. There’s no point in trying to keep this to herself, and anyway, it’s not fair. Marcus isn’t her enemy. ‘And I’ve got something important to tell you.’

  Part 7: Developing

  There are things that a competent photographer can do in a darkroom to alter an image. You can crop to show what you want, and exclude what you would prefer the viewer not to see. What you cannot do is get detail from a negative, if the detail isn’t there in the first place. Don’t be afraid to look closely; examine your subject. Interrogate it.

  Veronica Moon, Women in Photographs (unpublished)
r />   ‘Veronica Moon winning the Political Photograph of the Year Award, 1979’

  Exhibition Section: Focus on the Photographer

  Images of Moon are few and far between. Like many photographers she was, and is, if not exactly camera-shy, then wary of handing over control to another photographer. She’d rather be behind the camera, deciding what is seen.

  In this section of the exhibition you will see images of Moon, some of which were taken as self-portraits with a timer on the camera (if you look closely, you’ll see that in the full-length self-portraits she has the remote shutter in her right hand). Some are press photographs taken at public appearances, including the awarding of the Political Photograph of the Year Award in December 1979 for the portrait she took of Margaret Thatcher earlier that year. The remainder are from Moon’s private collection. Many were taken by Leonie Barratt during the years the two shared a flat in London (1970–1977). It’s clear from Moon’s expressions in several of these that she was taken unawares.

  Photographs on film could not be as easily cropped, filtered or deleted as they are today. When you leave the exhibition, next time you take a photograph, challenge yourself to do what Veronica Moon did:

  Spend some time thinking about what you want the image to capture.

  Take one photograph.

  Accept it.

  In 2018:

  • A survey finds that ten per cent of girls aged 14–21 have been unable to afford sanitary protection

  • Fewer than a third of the UK’s most influential jobs are held by women

  • Theresa May is Britain’s second female prime minister. She and her husband, when interviewed, refer to ‘girl jobs’ and ‘boy jobs’

  • In the UK, there are 208 women MPs (thirty-two per cent of the House of Commons) and 206 female peers (twenty-six per cent of the House of Lords)