The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  The second contact sheet is the photographs of Erica and Tom that Vee took at the Greenham Common Peace Garden. Developing them, along with the pictures from the rally, in the darkroom in her hollowed-out, blacked-out attic, she had known that it was likely to be the last time she went through this process of particular chemical magic.

  Vee would have been proud of these portraits of Erica, if she was still a photographer. The light, the way the rain in the air diffused it, the paleness and softness of the trees and sky mean that Erica’s face is strong and clear against a fading world. In Vee’s favourite – she has circled it, like she did in the old days, she couldn’t help herself – Erica is looking straight into the camera, eyes dark, hair made lighter than it is in reality by the spring light, mouth ready to ask a question. It is perfectly Erica, and at the same time, perfectly Leonie, despite the changes Erica has chosen to make to her face. In another, she is looking at Tom. It matches the way Erica and Leonie are looking at each other, on the other contact sheet. Displayed side by side, a connection is asking to be made.

  The pain is not worsening, but it’s changing, a series of tremors flecking at the edges of her consciousness. The noise from the adjacent gallery seems to be fading, as though Vee has become untethered, and is drifting away. Erica is still close, though, sliding the contact sheets over each other: there’s a smoothness to the sound of it, and then the pierce of air while Erica inhales. ‘Veronica?’

  Vee keeps her eyes closed; waits. The world is shrinking. It’s too late to wonder whether she has done the right thing. The thing is done.

  ‘Vee? Is this – was Leonie my mother?’

  Vee wants to think that Erica knows the answer. That she need do nothing more than provide the evidence.

  An unexpected sound: Erica is crying. Vee cannot-cannot-cannot open her eyes. The pain in her head is too much, a domino-effect now of one thing burning out after another, burn-burn-burn. She lifts a hand, hoping – hoping what? That Erica might take it, or at least see it? But Erica is sobbing now, the sounds muffled in a way that suggests her face is in her hands. She won’t see anything that Vee is signalling.

  So Vee summons her breath. ‘What do you think?’

  Erica pauses, drags breath into herself. ‘Why does it matter what I think? She was or she wasn’t.’

  ‘She was and she wasn’t,’ Vee says. And now, even though there is no new memory, she is finally sure. Ursula did the mothering, but Leonie was the mother.

  ‘What do you mean? Vee? Veronica? Please!’ Her eyes will no longer open, but she can feel the closeness of Erica, can imagine her face, touching distance away, with pain and questions and mascara all smudged on her skin.

  ‘Yes,’ Veronica says. Some things can only be black and white.

  She has never noticed how the catch of a crying breath and the sound of a camera shutter closing are almost the same, a rush and clutch of sound.

  And then, there’s the darkroom-quiet.

  Epilogue

  5 February 2019

  ‘WAS NORFOLK ALWAYS THIS FAR AWAY?’ Marcus asks as Erica parks the car near the entrance to the churchyard.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Erica says, stretching back her shoulders and reaching over to tousle Tom’s hair, ‘do you remember when we used to listen to Radio 4 when we were driving?’

  Marcus laughs, ‘Yes. And I think there was sometimes silence. Seems unlikely, though.’ He takes hold of her hand, kisses it. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way, you know.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Erica says, though to say that the first three months of baby Leonie’s life have been hard work doesn’t even come close to describing it.

  *

  Vee lasted for a week after being taken ill at the exhibition opening. Erica saw her the day before she died. Vee was in bed, at home, a nurse within earshot. Though Erica had known that she was ill, she wasn’t ready for her to be so still, lying tucked under a duvet even though the room was warm, her face a dying grey against the white bedlinen. She’d brought the reviews of the exhibition to show Vee, though she could have recited most of them. ‘A thought-provoking triumph’, ‘a must-see for anyone who cares about the past – and the future – of feminism’. She still couldn’t believe it. She’d spent a week doing three things: reading reviews, checking to see how Vee was doing, and looking at the contact sheets of her and Tom, and her and Leonie, and trying to make up her mind that Leonie truly was her birth mother. It had seemed certain, on the night of the exhibition opening; as the days passed, it began to look like more of a stretch of imagination. She’s checked her birth certificate, even ordered another copy just to be sure. Marcus said her mother was the one who raised her. She knew she shouldn’t even entertain the thought of Leonie as a mother. She’s an academic. There was no real evidence. Vee, with her missing memories and her dying brain, was not a reliable witness. And yet, she had not been able to leave the idea alone.

  ‘It’s Erica,’ she said, taking Vee’s hand.

  Vee opened one eye, slowly, then the other, turned her head on the pillow, smiled. There was pain, and effort, in the movement; Erica felt an answering ache in her heart, knew it was grief, waiting. She wasn’t ready to lose Vee. She had barely found her.

  ‘Do you need anything?’

  There was a fraction of a shake. ‘My sight’s starting to go,’ Vee said, as though it was an answer: if I can’t see, everything is irrelevant, unwanted.

  ‘Oh.’ Tears in Erica’s throat stopped her from saying more. And if Vee wasn’t crying, she shouldn’t be. She wouldn’t ask Vee for anything: not comfort, not answers.

  Vee nodded, another tiny movement. ‘I’m leaving you my papers. I didn’t go through them. Leonie used to send me her writing, though. I never threw it away.’

  Erica squeezed Vee’s hand, and got out a ‘Thank you’, even though she was almost mute with misery. Ursula’s deathbed had been like this, too: not so lucid, not so serene, but every bit as impossible to endure.

  Vee closed her eyes. ‘Thank you. I didn’t think I cared that I was forgotten. But I did.’

  And then she seemed to sleep. Erica sat with her until the nurse came quietly up the stairs and touched her on the shoulder, dismissing her.

  Erica was not surprised, the next morning, to get the phone call to tell her that Veronica Moon had died, peacefully, in her sleep.

  *

  Marcus puts the sling on over his coat and nestles the baby into it; Tom says he wants to walk, because he’s too big for the buggy.

  ‘Do you want to do this on your own?’ Marcus asks. He already has a hand out to Tom.

  ‘I think so,’ Erica says, ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Be as long as you need to be. We’ll go and throw sticks in the river,’ he says, and then, kissing her on the forehead that’s accessible under her hat, ‘I’m proud of you. And I love you.’

  ‘Thank you. I love you too.’ The moment is warm and sweet enough for her to taste it on her tongue, where it melts the frosted air. The last few months, for all that they have been filled with tiredness and tag-team parenting, may have been her and Marcus’s happiest. It was as though Erica inherited some of Veronica’s uncompromising spirit with her archive. She told Marcus exactly what she needed; why she was unhappy; what she was afraid of. He listened. He changed his working hours; she signed a contract to edit Leonie’s and Vee’s unpublished books, to write their linked biographies. (Vee’s photography book had been a surprise. Erica can only assume she forgot about the manuscript.) Baby Leonie Sarah was born two days after Erica’s thirty-ninth birthday, and she was not easy, not peaceful, not calm. She was loud and determined and Marcus and Erica could not love her more.

  They arrive at the gate of the churchyard, where an older woman is just leaving, dead flowers in a basket on her arm. Erica steps back for her to pass through. She smiles at them both, says hello to Tom, and then looks in the sling at the sleeping Leonie.

  ‘Oh, bless,’ she says, then, looking up at Marcus, ‘Bo
y or girl?’

  Marcus smiles. ‘Baby.’

  *

  Ursula’s funeral would have been the last time Erica was here. Four years. And yesterday, and tomorrow. This place is as timeless as a photograph.

  The granite headstone lists Erica’s grandparents, then Leonie, then Ursula. The grass around it is short and sparse; the ground, where Erica kneels, pushes cold into her knees.

  At Vee’s wake, Bea had proposed that there was no one place for Veronica Moon to rest. In the months since, her ashes have been taken, by one of the sisters or another, to the places that were important to her. Fen went to the Colchester graveyard where Vee’s father was buried, Bea to the Peace Garden at Greenham Common; Gloria to the gardens opposite the Royal Albert Hall. And Erica is here.

  From her handbag she takes a trowel that looks as though it will be no match for the freezing earth. But she finds a place near the bottom of the gravestone that is already lower than the rest, and she scrapes away until there’s a hole the size of her fist. She reaches in her pocket for the envelope Bea gave her, tips the contents into the hole she has made, covers it, and tamps the dry earth down.

  Author’s Note

  The Woman in the Photograph makes me rock back on my heels and laugh because I am so damned proud of it.

  This is my fifth published novel, and I am an intelligent, capable, professional woman who knows for a fact that she can write. But there is a part of me that wants to delete that sentence, or make a joke of the fact that I am proud, because—

  Because what?

  Because even though it’s 2019, and women all around us, all around the world, are kicking all kinds of ass in all kinds of ways, owning our power isn’t easy. There is still a message, under all of the ‘you can be anything’ and ‘women are amazing’ rhetoric, that what women need to do, before anything else, is to be likeable. Likeable is a Trojan horse with flowers woven into her mane; she disguises our fierce and fine capability.

  Too often, likeable means: modest, self-effacing, quiet. Expert, yes, but backwards-in-high-heels expert: as though the only way we can display our power, our strength and our cleverness, is by making what we do look easy or pretending our achievements are negligible or answering questions in interviews about juggling work and childcare. Questions that men would never be asked.

  Likeable is not okay if it means shucks-it-was-nothing apologetic. Or don’t-be-mean-to-me-on-Twitter apologetic. Or feminist-but-oh-my-god-the-calories-in-that apologetic.

  I was born in 1971. At school boys did woodwork and girls did cookery, but still my dad taught me how to develop film in his darkroom, and there was never any suggestion that I wouldn’t go to university.

  As I played with Sindy dolls, women were marching to get girls like me the right to be more than a mother. The feminists of the 1960s and early 1970s gave me the life I have now.

  And as I started to work on this book, I wondered what those feminists would think of me: a woman who still does not know how to take a compliment about her work, though I am fine if you say nice things about my hair.

  Writing The Woman in the Photograph has changed me. It’s given me new respect for the women who bellowed and marched and organised, and changed the law. And changed the world. I thought I had educated myself about feminism, but there was so much I didn’t know. Spending time in archives and reading the work of women who were uncovering and exploring the things I take for granted was humbling. It’s made me determined to be a better feminist myself. It’s made me frustrated at how far there is still to go. I’m furious about the ways women are mistreated, and exhausted at the insidious sexism of our day-to-day lives – and I know how sheltered I am from most of it, by dint of being white in the West. I know that makes it easy for me to write this letter: to own my achievement.

  The world has changed, but it has not yet changed enough.

  We need more unapologetic women. We need them in fiction, and we need them in the world.

  I’m proud of The Woman in the Photograph and I worked hard on it. I hope it means something to you too.

  Stephanie Butland

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you:

  When I was small, I used to ‘help’ my dad when he took photographs, then I used to ‘help’ in the darkroom. In the writing of this book my dad was a great help to me (without the inverted commas). Veronica’s ability and understanding of her craft come from him, as do the words of her unpublished book.

  For expertise, advice, and/or outings: Luke Dodd, Clare Grafik, Shelley Harris, Rebecca Leete, Clare Macintosh, Louise Williams.

  You know what for: Carys Bray, Sarah Franklin, Shelley Harris.

  For patience, wisdom, and general knocking it out of the park: Oli Munson.

  Bonnier: especially Sarah, Katie, Margaret, Clare, Sahina Felice, Imogen, Alex, Kate, James, Nico, Vincent, Angie, Victoria, Jeff, Graham, Sarah and Jennie.

  A M Heath: especially Florence, Alexandra, Prema, Mairi and Vickie.

  For sharp and intelligent copyediting and proofreading: Genevieve Pegg and Jane Howard.

  The unsung heroes of publishing are the bloggers and booksellers who champion the books they love. Thank you.

  Kate Beales, Alan Butland, Clare Grafik, Tom Nelson, and Susan Young, my trusted beta-readers.

  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, because it’s still true: being the family or friend of a writer is not easy. Honourable mentions go to: Alan, Ned, Joy, Auntie Susan, Lou, Jude, Rebecca, Scarlet, Tom, Kym, Donna, Victoria.

  This novel has its roots in the faith and creative egging-on of my extraordinary editor, Eli Dryden. She takes everything I do and shows me how to shape it into something better and brighter. I am more glad of her than I know how to say.

  Hello!

  Thank you for choosing The Woman in the Photograph. Although I’ve always been an avid reader, I don’t think it really hit me how many books there are in the world until my first novel was published. SO MANY BOOKS! I’m honoured that you chose mine.

  My intention for The Woman in the Photograph started with a desire to write a feminist novel about feminism: a novel that was about the feminist movement, but also feminist in approach, centring women and telling their stories in an unapologetic way.

  How, though? I’ve always loved photography, and in 2016, I went to ‘The Radical Eye’, a photography exhibition at Tate Modern. It was fascinating in many ways, but the thing that caught my eye most was a single, framed negative of a print. The collector (Elton John) had taken the trouble to buy not just the print, but the negative. He owned the image.

  That got me thinking about how different photography has become. The power of a photographer to create, and own, an image, was so much greater on film than it is in the digital world, when everyone has a camera in their pocket and can take hundreds of photographs in a day without much thought. As I walked around the gallery, I thought: what if the world chooses to see a photograph in one way, but the photographer knows that something else happened? And it struck me, too, that ‘the camera never lies’ is, simply, untrue. Especially as the photographer is the one choosing where to point the lens, what to focus on.

  So, if I were to write about a female photographer – and if she chronicled an era of the feminist movement – and if there was one image, that suggested a certain truth, but the reality was different . . . that was the first glimmer of The Woman in the Photograph. I spent a couple of hours in the exhibition, and then I walked along the South Bank, and by the end of the afternoon, although I didn’t know what exactly the novel would be, I knew I had the beginnings of it.

  I’m immensely proud of The Woman in the Photograph. The writing of it was absorbing, interesting, and at times difficult, especially as I moved between the 1960s and ’70s and the present, and reflected on how, although much has changed for women, it’s probably not as much as the feminists of the second wave hoped for. I came out of the writing changed: more fierce, more unapologetic, more likely to call out
sexism and inequality when I see it.

  I hope you love it, and I hope it speaks to you.

  You’ll often find me hanging out on Twitter and Instagram if you want to talk books – any books, not just mine! And please tag me in your reviews and chats – I’d love to hear what you think about The Woman in the Photograph, and for us to join in the wider conversation about women in the world.

  Thank you again for reading The Woman in the Photograph.

  Be well,

  Stephanie xx

  P. S. If you would like to keep in touch with my writing life, you can visit http://www.bit.ly/StephanieButlandClub and join my Readers’ Club. It’s free to join, and we won’t spam you – we’ll get in touch now and again with bookish news and exclusive content. (Small print: Zaffre will keep your data private and confidential, and it will never be passed on to a third party. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

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  For discussion

  1. From Women’s Lib to #MeToo – in the novel, the fight for women’s rights seems as needed in 2019 as it was in the 1960s. Vee appears surprised when she looks at Erica’s life to find that despite the victories they won in the last century, today’s women still have a lot to protest, a lot to fight for. Do you agree with Vee that equality is still a cause that needs battling for?

  2. Has the novel made you more or less likely to think of yourself as a feminist? And why do you think people still find it a controversial term?

  3. Has the novel made you think differently about photography?

  4. Writing about a different medium always requires skill and invention. How well do you think the author managed to bring the photographs to life with her words? How clearly could you see the key pictures in your mind?