The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

• There is still a gender pay gap – the gap for women of colour is considerably worse than the gap for white women; research in the US suggests that black women are paid thirty-eight per cent less than white men and twenty-one per cent less than white women

  • Three million girls worldwide are at risk of undergoing FGM

  • The #MeToo movement has provoked discussion and action about sexual harassment worldwide

  • The United Nations stated that, ‘No country in the world has successfully eliminated discrimination against women or achieved full equality’

  Veroinca Moon’s health is worsening, and Leonie Barratt has been dead for nearly thirty-four years.

  26 April 2018

  Exhibition opening day

  ‘I still can’t believe you came! Do you want to come and talk to people?’ Erica asks, breathless, as she hurries into the side room where Vee is sitting. ‘There are a lot here, you know. I recognise some of them from the photos.’

  Vee can’t believe she came, either. She was planning to drop off the envelope for Erica later in the week, or ask her to come over. But she was sitting at home an hour ago, thinking about how long she has waited to be have her work recognised, and realised that she did, after all, want to be here. And she had something to say to Erica, as well as something to give her. So what if she had lost her nerve when she arrived, waved at Erica and stepped behind the door marked ‘PRIVATE’, into an office stacked with boxes of catalogues and the trays the wine glasses were stored in? She can go out into the space later, if she feels up to it. When she’s done this.

  ‘Erica, I’m very proud of you,’ she says. ‘You’ve done a great job. You’ve – you’ve brought me back to life.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Erica says, ‘Vee, it’s been an honour.’

  Vee can’t trust herself not to cry, so she asks, ‘How did the press call go this afternoon?’

  ‘All good, I think’ – Erica squishes her eyes shut for a moment – ‘I can’t think about that now. You’re going to stay? Now you’re here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ On the one hand, it’s the last thing she wants to do. On the other hand, there are people coming who she will probably never see again: sisters from the old days, the only people who remember Leonie too. She would like to say goodbye to them.

  Erica is done up to the nines, of course, heels and a dress and she’s obviously had her hair done. Still, it’s her night, and this is how the patriarchy has made Erica thinks a woman looks on a special occasion.

  ‘I’m sure people would love to see you,’ and she adds, hurriedly, ‘not to make a speech, or anything. Just to be there.’

  Vee smiles. ‘I might come out in a while.’ She’s not sure that she will. But she does want to support Erica. She feels as though she should, as though she owes it to Leonie, in some odd way. And maybe, just maybe, she is ready to be proud of what she, Veronica Moon, has achieved, instead of angry at what she lost.

  Knowing at last that she did try to save Leonie makes her genuinely happy. If happiness is possible, and if the tumour isn’t tricking her. Whatever she thinks she has now is uncertain.

  Erica is waiting. ‘You should be out there. It’s your night.’

  Erica sits down, and looks straight into Vee’s face. ‘I haven’t said thank you. I will – out there. But I wanted to say it, now. This exhibition – all you’ve done for it. It’s more than I could have thought possible. And – you’ve helped me to understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Well, more about the history, of course, but that’s – that’s’ – Erica puts her hand to her temples – ‘that’s the past.’ Would that it were, Vee thinks – the tumour seems to be aligning all of the parts of her life that she still holds, childhood and adulthood and this creeping exhausting death, as though it’s all laid out in two dimensions in front of her. Too much flash, no depth of field. ‘But talking to you has made me realise things about my own life.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve been of some use, Erica.’

  ‘I feel as though I’ve woken up,’ Erica says, ‘and I feel as though I have choices, again. I haven’t felt like that for a long time.’

  Vee reaches out a hand, and Erica leans forward and takes it. ‘You have choices,’ she says, ‘and you’re allowed to make mistakes. Just make them because you chose the wrong direction, not because you stayed asleep.’

  ‘Yes,’ Erica says. ‘Yes. Thank you. For everything.’

  ‘If you cry, you’ll smudge your mascara.’

  Erica smiles, half-laughs. ‘Fuck my mascara,’ she says, ‘I’ve got better things to think about.’

  And for all that there’s so little Vee can trust in her mind anymore, she trusts this feeling, the one that is filling her, now, of pride in knowing this woman, of certainty that she is looking at Leonie’s daughter. ‘Go,’ she gets out before she starts to cry, ‘go and make the most of this.’

  While Erica is out there among the noise, talking to those who remain of Vee’s contemporaries, hearing from the people who claim to be influenced by her, Vee sits quietly, in the relative silence of this meeting room, surrounded by boxes filled with exhibition catalogues, and thinks about how, after tonight, she will never, ever speak to anyone that she doesn’t absolutely have to speak to, ever again. She’ll talk to doctors and to Marja. She will lie with her eyes open, when she’s awake, making sure that she can still see. And she will sleep, and she will take painkillers, more and more of them. If her sight goes, she’ll take too many. She’s already started to squirrel them away, getting prescriptions at every hospital appointment, popping the extras out of their foil and into a jar that she keeps in her bedside drawer. She can find it, and open it, with her eyes closed. She has practised. Because if she can’t have her sight, she won’t be stoic. She won’t endure. She’ll reach for silence, through the dark.

  When Erica starts to talk, she’ll go and stand at the back of the gallery. She might be proud of herself, a little, but she is proud of Erica too, and sure she’s done the right thing in leaving all of her papers to her. (She still hasn’t opened the boxes, but there are bound to be things in there she can use. Leonie’s letters, maybe some manuscripts. She can’t face looking, doesn’t trust her judgement, either, about what should stay and what should go.)

  She’s not sure about giving Erica the envelope, yet.

  Tik-tik-tik.

  The fork against the edge of the champagne flute goes through the sound in the gallery, taking the conversation level from din down to hubbub down to the closest you will ever get to silence at an event like this.

  Veronica stands. She will listen to Erica’s speech. She will say goodbye to the people she remembers, she will talk to Erica one last time, and then she will go home. And that will be the end of it.

  Vee, in the lost place, 1984

  IT HAD BEEN SUCH A TINY act of forgetting, and under the circumstances an entirely understandable one. Instead of including a note to the lab with her requirements, as she would have done with a more everyday roll of film, she had decided to call. She had wanted to say that the last five shots on the film were not to be used, to explain why, and to make absolutely sure she was heard, understood.

  But she hadn’t called. She’d gone home and got into bed. She wasn’t tired but she was cold with shock and grief, over-exposed to the world. She needed the dark. She’d dropped into a doze, a terrible half-sleep in which her brain reran the morning: Ursula crying, Erica being ushered away to her room, the sight of Leonie, quiet and clammy. Waking after an hour that felt like seven, she went downstairs and poured herself a glass of rum, and then another. Annabel had been to collect the films that were waiting to go to the lab, and drop off contact sheets for Vee to look at. And Vee was definitely planning to call the lab. She had another drink; she started to get the calls from their friends, as the news started to bleed out into their world, their friends, the women Leonie knew. She didn’t call the lab. She couldn’t, really, feel any sense of urgency about it. The tho
ught of the world continuing to turn seemed ridiculous to her. And every time she formed the intention to make the call, explain what needed to be done with the film, either the phone rang again, or the thought of having to sound businesslike, make a request as though this was any other film on any other day, felt too impossible. There was no Leonie any more. And there had always been Leonie. This was a new world, harsh, lonely, and impossible to navigate, and Vee found she had no will to try.

  The next day, she’d gone to work, because she didn’t know what else to do. She’d been photographing a girl band, with permed hair, ripped jeans and tanned stomachs. She caught their excitement, their exhausting happy exuberance, and she wished that she had the words to tell them all the ways they were betraying themselves and all that the generation before them had worked for. This was not what she had hoped for, the night she had photographed tearful beauty queens outside the Café de Paris, the night Leonie hurled flour bombs at Bob Hope. It was a tiring shoot, noisy and shambolic, with the band’s manager interrupting and the girls always needing something more, coffee or extra lipgloss. And maybe Vee forgot to make the phone call to the lab, or maybe it wasn’t even anything that deliberate, that active. She had just lost the intention to do it, among all the other things she lost with Leonie. Nothing had mattered, in those days. Just groping through to another sleepless night.

  Leonie’s funeral had been a private family event, which was Ursula-speak for ‘no feminists’, and so Vee had got together with some of the old crowd, to drink and talk and miss their friend. Then she had gone back to trudging through grief, the plod and ache she remembered so well from the first weeks after her father died. She had seen the path ahead as a slow, sore journey to something like acceptance; she knew she hadn’t chosen it, but she had no choice but to keep walking along it.

  And then the article about Leonie came out, to coincide with the publication of her book, which had been delayed by a month. It was on the day Vee had a meeting with her publisher about her photography book. She had been so proud of Women in Photographs, so excited for the ways it would empower her sisters. But now it seemed unimportant, egotistical, and she could not have cared less.

  When she had got home, there were seventeen messages on her answering machine, most of them from journalists wanting a comment. Was it true that she had photographed Leonie Barratt as she died, watched her die, called for help only when it was too late? She’d sat on the floor and cried until she was empty. Then she played the messages again, and cried again. She didn’t know how to start. She had never been good with words, and now there were none.

  She didn’t respond to the messages.

  And then came the calls from friends, looking to find the truth, wondering how this could have happened. Surely Vee had not really done what Ursula accused her of, all over the newspapers, to anyone who would listen? Annabel offered to deal with them, but Vee knew it was her job. She made a list of everyone who called that week – forty-three people, in the end – and resolved to spend Saturday afternoon on the phone, explaining, explaining. Sort of explaining, anyway. It was easiest to say that she hadn’t known Leonie was dead than to try to articulate the denial and fear that kept her pressing the shutter: the deep sure knowledge that as soon as she stopped taking photographs, she would have to raise her voice, call for help, say the words. And as soon as she did that, Leonie would be gone for sure. It was impossible to explain, to a world not minded to understand – that it seemed that Leonie would not be gone, not really, until Vee called for help and made it so.

  Bea, Fen and Kiki had all understood that she would never hurt Leonie. But even with the people she was closest to now Leonie was gone, she couldn’t get the words out, couldn’t do anything but cry, a day-in day-out leaking of grief and sorrow for Leonie and, yes, sorrow for herself.

  And then came Ursula’s interview: billed as ‘the inside story from Leonie Barratt’s real sister’. In fairness, Vee wasn’t the only one who got the hammer. Ursula, had looked sadly into the camera for some sub-David Bailey hack photographer who made her look overtired and over-madeup at the same time. It could have been deliberate, but if so, it was cruel. The journalist had been cruel, too, encouraging Ursula to talk about how the feminist movement had not only robbed her of a sister but robbed Leonie of peace of mind and the happy life she could have had.

  ‘People don’t die of a heart attack, grossly overweight and terribly lonely, for no reason,’ Ursula was quoted as saying, ‘I blame the choices my sister made. And I don’t mean overeating. Her so-called friends didn’t really support her, and Veronica Moon, who was supposed to be her best friend of all, watched her die for the sake of her own career. My poor sister Leonie was brainwashed by so-called feminists and she paid the price.’ The idea of Leonie being brainwashed was, theoretically, laughable, but Vee was empty of laughter. She was angry with Ursula, of course, but with the newspapers too, for encouraging her to leak her grief, to spill her story, to hurt herself, and Vee, and most of all, the memory of Leonie. How terrible for the most important thing about you to be the way you die. It added insult to the injury, so strongly felt by Vee now, that Leonie’s brilliance was never appreciated in her lifetime.

  Editors called to cancel their commissions with her, just until things blew over, they said, but they never called again. Her wider circle of friends in the movement, too, got colder; or it could be that Vee had never been part of them, never more than a hanger-on. It could have been that, because she wouldn’t – couldn’t – talk about it, they thought she had something to hide, and the newspaper accounts of Leonie’s death were true.

  She knew that in some quarters she had never been forgiven for photographing Thatcher, and that because she was successful, she seemed to be a sell-out. For all that Leonie had accused her of betraying her sisters, from time to time, it had been nothing more than provocation, really: a flexing of intellect, a poking at Vee to test that she was really solid, sound, a true sister. And Leonie never once gave her a hard time about earning good money, something Vee had always suspected was behind the hostility of some of the other women she knew in the movement. She had always been scrupulous about donating royalties to the causes she photographed, but that brought no warmth to some earth-mothers’ hearts.

  Vee’s publisher called to say they thought it best to delay publication of her book. She agreed. She tried to care, but she couldn’t. She hunkered down over the winter, and when the phone didn’t start to ring again, she drove to Scotland in the spring, photographed skies, cliffs, seas, wondered at the beauty of nature but in an intellectual, headbound way. Nothing touched her heart. Her lens didn’t capture anything remarkable, or if it did, she couldn’t see it. She came home to a still-silent answering machine, rented out her house, and went to Canada for a year; more space, more beauty, more lack of inspiration. First, she stopped taking film to be developed, then she stopped taking photographs at all. Instead she walked, and looked, and breathed deeply. She had money, but it wouldn’t see her out. She had twenty, maybe thirty years left to live. She needed to do something.

  She went back to Essex – not the place where she grew up, not those streets, not that anyone would know her there. She bought a house, another, turned them into flats, rented them to young women who were trying to set out in life without using marriage as a means to doing so. She charged a rent that was below the market rate; she vetted the applicants herself, looked for the ones who needed a stepping stone. She made money, bought more houses in more places, turned them into flats, and rented them out too. She employed a female manager, and a maintenance team made up of women. When she couldn’t find female plumbers and electricians, she set up bursaries to train them. The men she employed she used on an ad-hoc basis; she interviewed them herself, first, was at her frostiest and least compromising. One ‘love’, one patronising explanation of how water needed to be under pressure to travel upwards, and they were out. She went travelling again. China, this time, then India. She didn’t bother to pack a
camera.

  When she got home after one of these trips, there was a message on the answering machine from Bea. They were going to run courses in photography at the university, she said, as part of their new media degrees. Would Vee be interested in teaching on portraiture and on photojournalism? Could she design and teach a module on the technical side of photography, drawing on her specialism of flash-free images?

  Vee’s first instinct was to refuse. But then she looked at her diary. It was tiring, to fill her time. She called Bea back. She taught. She wasn’t terrible at it, and it wasn’t terrible. Five years passed, ten.

  The housing market boomed. She had an offer she couldn’t refuse for her properties. She was minded to refuse it, all the same – weekends would have to be filled, without the business to keep an eye on – but then the headaches started. That was in 2005. She was lucky, they said, the tumour was operable and treatable. So she was operated on, treated. She gave her solicitor’s name as her next of kin. Women in the hospital tried to make friends with her, but she had no appetite for friendship. There was a gap in her memories when she woke from the surgery, as she knew there would be: a space that made her unconfident when she was with people she was supposed to know. She looked through her old photographs. They didn’t help. If anything, they made her feel lonelier than ever. A photograph was worth nothing if you couldn’t find the emotions that went with it. Sometimes she’d look at an image and feel as though a wind was blowing through her. Mostly, she just felt as though she wasn’t a real person anymore: surgery had reduced her to two dimensions.

  She found undeveloped films, and developed them, for the sake of something to do. One of them was mainly shots of Leonie and little Erica. Looking at it hurt, every bit as much as it should, and there was something about the child that Vee knew was important. She almost posted it to Ursula, but her instinct told her to put it away, somewhere safe, instead. No one could tell her anything about what happened when Leonie died, because she hadn’t told anyone.