The Photographer's Wife Read online

  ‘I read that you brought limestone from Malta, is that true?’

  ‘Yes. I did. My father was stationed there and he arranged for various broken and disused saints to be sent to me. Malta has a remarkable number of unwanted saints.’

  ‘Was it difficult to organise?’

  ‘Not at all. They used them as ballast for the boat, and so they didn’t even charge. I had to pay to get them here from Portsmouth, though, and that was a huge sum. That nearly sank me, as it were.’

  ‘Why did you choose sculpture?’ He looks like a dog trying to understand, head tilted, ears up.

  ‘Oh. I was smuggled into classes at the Slade. My husband encouraged me, but soon I was working on my own. As a child, in Jerusalem, I fell in love with stone.’ I give him my dazzling smile, because I can do all that, if needs be. He has still written nothing whatsoever in that notebook of his.

  He leans forward and looks directly at me. ‘When were you in Jerusalem?’

  ‘When I was eleven. Not for very long, half a year, but it stayed with me.’

  ‘Where did you live in the Holy City?’ I pretend I haven’t heard. The old feeling is creeping up on me, as if he is wiggling his finger where I don’t want it to be: inside my ear, in the inner part of my wrist, high up inside my thigh.

  A string of shells clatters against the window, making us both jump. The wireless, balanced on top of a milking stool, crackles and then returns to its sleep. Each question from this man is a jab at my chest. Journalists. Questions. An insolent woman reporter asked me similar prodding queries in the middle of the New Burlington Galleries exhibition last year, when the furore was still ongoing – talk of the town, Surrealists offending everyone, Constructivists sulking, critics looking for unsavoury information to justify their columns, rallying against the Decay of Civilisation and the Degeneration of Art – and Piers, frothing and fizzing because he was in the wolf’s mouth of it all, forced me to sit up on a stage in the draughty hall on Endell Street and talk to the press. The Daily Mail called me ‘disgusting’ that day. I really did not want to be there and a woman in a red pillbox hat persisted in directing her questions at me, ignoring the men. You’re often making houses in your work, but they are always half-destroyed or ruined. They look like something made in secret, out of shame. Houses that might blow away. Is it a territory you are marking out? ‘Possibly.’ (How am I supposed to answer that?) Do you feel like a little girl, playing with furniture, when you create these homes? ‘Possibly.’ She continued. You are young to have achieved such success, what are you working on now? On she went, provoking me, even though it was obvious I wanted her to stop, until finally I stood up and shouted: HE HUFFED AND HE PUFFED AND HE BLEW THE HOUSE DOWN. I climbed down from the stage and left. Nobody followed me, not even Piers, the treacherous beast.

  ‘Miss Ashton, you lived in the Hotel Fast in Jerusalem?’ His words bring me back to Cecilia, and today. At first it seems a perfectly normal thing to say. I almost nod, but then a tightening feeling as if a thread is being pulled in and out of my skin.

  ‘My married name is Miller. Why did you call me Ashton?’ We are both silent. Through the inadequate walls of Cecilia it is possible to hear the itchy sea. The kettle lets out its fierce whistle; how we so often rely on a kettle to rescue us. It is almost four so I pull together tea of sorts. I am English, after all. I open a tin of stale biscuits, manage to find a dry cake and lone jar of jam, pile it all on to a tray, with a dirty knife and two chipped plates, appalled at myself, but there we are: he was not expected. Unsurprisingly he takes nothing to eat. Without smiling, I pour the tea, look out for Skip, but I still can’t see him.

  ‘I read that your father died last year. I was sorry to hear that.’

  I stare at him: what is this?

  ‘Yes, well. It was sudden.’ I refuse to look at him. The Daily Mirror, when reviewing my piece in the Beaux Arts Gallery exhibition, called me ‘delicate’, ‘fragile’, ‘pretty’ and ‘daughter of the civic adviser and architect Charles Ashton’. They did not comment on the art. The long grey beard of my father comes to my mind, and I am wearing, as it happens, a necklace he gave me many years ago. A filigree-silver chain whose links spell I give you the end of a golden string only wind it into a ball it will lead you in at heaven’s gate built in Jerusalem’s wall.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure I caught your name.’

  His face erases its previous expression, allows a new look to break through, and it occurs to me that we are alone; he might do anything. I keep a hammer near the door. It is three, four steps from me. He extracts himself from the table, goes to the window.

  ‘Shoreham Beach,’ he says, as if talking to himself. ‘Bungalow Town, is it still called that?’

  ‘By some.’

  He turns to look at me and I fancy I can see his soul for a moment blinking at me, but I don’t really believe in souls. Not exactly.

  ‘Who are you?’ it has not gone unnoticed that he hasn’t given me his name, and the door handle twists, then in comes Skip smelling of rain and salt. Eeeeeeeeooooooowwwwww. He circles me, flying his cuttlefish aeroplane in an arc, eeeooooooooww. He stands dead-still when he sees the man. His bright red hair around his white moon-face never fails to make me want to draw him to me.

  ‘Mummy, there’s a dead seal cub on the beach.’ I put my hand out to touch him but six-year-old boys are mercurial, he slithers behind me, tugs at my hand, pretends to ignore the man although this is all a show for him. He comes very close to me, eyeball to eyeball: ‘There are ants in its eyes.’

  ‘I really don’t think there are seals in this part of the Channel.’ I get up to close the door and lean back on it as if keeping out demons. I give Skip a shove which is really a kiss and he throws himself down on the floor next to the wood burner, the soles of his feet unspeakably filthy. I am washed over with guilt. I was up with the light this morning, my head clear and correct for working, and so I banished him and told him to amuse himself until I was back. He looks up over his shoulder at the man with undisguised dislike. I feel the same, my darling. I do.

  ‘Actually, there are seals,’ the man says, still looking out at the sea. ‘I was at school not far away and we used to see them in the winter time, flipping, bellies up.’

  ‘See,’ Skip says, his expression towards the stranger changing now, affinities switching. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ the man says, looking down at Skip’s feet. ‘Does he not need shoes out there?’

  ‘Won’t wear them, I’m afraid. He’s a barbarian. A fully initiated inhabitant of Barbary.’ I smile, loosely in the direction of this intrusive man but not for him, for the love of my boy.

  I sense the man looking at me and as I live almost exclusively on cigarettes, tea and toast I am very slender. I must look half-feminine, half-wildwoman of the beach and, surprisingly, I have a pang for the old days of Schiaparelli dresses and evening gloves. My stockings have wrinkled up at the ankles again, my hair is not very well-set.

  I set about stacking up the cups and saucers. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been much use to you at all and I suppose you have the long journey back to London ahead of you?’

  Smile bright. Go away. Write what you like about my work. I don’t care. I pick a thin branch from the wood basket and poke it into the wood burner. The man straightens himself, becoming formal and cold.

  ‘I would like to talk to you about a friend of yours from Jerusalem. Ihsan Tameri.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Various words chime in my mind: Ihsan. London. Photograph. Dear Ihsan. I catch a sideways look at my face in the mirror on the wall. I seem strained, not like myself.

  ‘How do you know Ihsan? And anyway, you haven’t told me your name, exactly. Is Ihsan in trouble?’ I try a smile again but my face breaks into pieces of clay.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s rather worse than that.’

  I try to remember when the last letter from Ihsan came. Dear Prudence, ah habibti, it is so windy today, the wind
ow frames clatter, the doors have to be stopped with large pieces of rock to prevent them from bishing and bashing. It is as if something wants to take the Old City and fling it into the air. His letters have always been full of weather, inside and out. Weather and dreams, nothing practical or real; wishes and yearnings, but when did I last hear from him? A fair while back, a couple of years. I have been wrapped up in Piers and Skip and working. Art makes a person selfish. The man pulls away from the window as if stung by something.

  ‘I’m staying at the Warnes Hotel in Worthing rather than go back up to London. Might you come tomorrow at three?’ He has tired eyes. ‘There is something very specific I need to talk to you about.’

  He moves a foot, one at a time, backwards and forwards on the wooden floor.

  ‘Can’t you just talk to me about it now?’ And then I see what made him jump: Billy, bent over his bicycle which he is leaning against the clattered old fence in front of Cecilia, wearing fisherman galoshes, wiping the rain from his hair as he stands up with his wide-fisted hand that always makes me think of shovels or spades.

  ‘No, tomorrow is better.’ I can picture this man in his private moments, smearing off shaving soap, tasting blood on his tongue when eating a steak. My body is perfectly still, defiant. I am safe with Skip here, I could flog a lion to protect him, and now Billy is outside the bones inside me lighten.

  ‘Under the Warnes Hotel there is a cave, a bomb shelter,’ Skip says, twisting his head round and staring up at the man.

  ‘Really, who told you that?’ I say.

  ‘One of the pilots at the aerodrome.’

  ‘When do you talk to the pilots?’

  ‘Mummy, don’t be silly. I’ve spoken to lots of pilots at the aerodrome.’

  ‘I flew planes once upon a time,’ the man says, close to me now, and then he puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a shilling and offers it to Skip, like a tooth plucked from the sand.

  ‘Oh no,’ I shake my head, but Skip springs up, all surliness gone; bribed and easily won he snatches the coin.

  ‘Come to the Warnes with your mother and I’ll ask the manager to show you the smuggling caves.’

  Skip, coquettish, smiles, ‘Oooh, yes please.’ He puts his hand around my waist, squeezes me, the masculine possessiveness that little boys display with mothers. I touch Skip’s neck, his ear, lightly. The man pulls the collar of his coat up around his face.

  ‘I will wait for you at the Warnes at three.’

  He opens the door before I can question him further and steps past Billy, mutters a low Good afternoon. Cecilia expands as soon as he is gone and then Billy comes in and fills it again, eyes wide with questions.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘A journalist, wanted to interview me.’

  I want to go to the window to watch him walk away, but I don’t. My thoughts are shuffling about in parallel: Ihsan, at a party in Jerusalem, dancing with Eleanora in the middle of the dance floor, nobody else near them. Then: a series of balconies, rooms, doors, corridors, and the image of a man, tall and thin, skin very tanned, scowling into the light, like the unsettling feeling of trying to catch a memory provoked by looking at an old photograph.

  ‘People know you live here already?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Billy scowls. ‘You said you didn’t want none of that no more? That’s why you’re here?’

  I put my hand on his swollen lip. Billy Ludd. My boxer. His face even when not damaged from fighting is a gift for a sculptor. His skull seems to imprint itself outwards into his skin and it is easy to imagine my hands on the bone of him, manipulating the texture of his face and rearranging it from inside. I have these odd, dissembling thoughts possibly because I am yet to see him without a bash or bruise. There is always a spread of red or yellow-purple skin contouring his face like a map, or a swelling on the forehead that is sensitive if I press my finger on it. When I kiss him his saliva has a metallic taste of blood. When I hold him he flinches.

  He moves into the room, but does not settle. He turns around as if things have been stolen or shifted, as if something is awry. ‘Did you talk to him then?’

  ‘A little bit, but then I asked him to leave.’

  ‘But why tell him anything?’ He goes to the window, stares out.

  ‘To get money for the art pieces, it’s something I have to do sometimes. Publicity for Margot’s exhibition. They like to buy my secrets.’

  He looks at me through his bruises, through his damaged bones. ‘Do you mind giving them? Are they real ones?’

  ‘Billy,’ I walk towards him and put my hands on his back, ‘when I tell them my real ones they never believe me.’

  Skip jumps up on to one of the chairs, stands in the manner of a nobleman surveying his lands.

  ‘A bloody shilling, Mummy.’

  ‘Don’t swear.’

  I walk over and catch Skip’s hand and squeeze it as adults will do to find reassurance in a child’s hot little palm. It lasts an instant, and then Skip is off, bouncing on the chair, admiring his coin, it’s enough to go to the flicks in Brighton, and then he is flying away from me. Billy remains at the window, ignoring us both. He has taken up the stance of a male of the species warning off predators: legs slightly apart, fists rolled up into little balls, an expansion of the blood vessels under the skin of the neck, fingernails digging into the flesh of the hand.

  It is the low moment before dawn and there is no colour. The room hangs as if it is a still picture on a silent-movie screen. Skip. He is still asleep. I can see his foot dangling from his cot-bed. The smell of Billy is still on me, as is the memory of his hand on my stomach, almost a bruise left behind, but he has gone. He never stays the whole night. I want to get up and put the wireless on but I am pressed into the blankets, almost as if there were a weight on me. The creaks in the wood are the normal ones of the wind trying to move the house and the seagulls tap out despair on the roof as usual. I am sure there are rats in the cavity below the floorboards, but that is nothing new.

  I doze in and out of sleep, each time falling into a lucid dream of a room where my husband, Piers, opens the doors of a balcony – it is our suite in the Russell Hotel – and looks at me before stepping off into London air, either to fly or fall. I turn on to one side, bring my knees up towards my stomach and, as I do, the face of the man, the journalist, the intruder, flickers like a magic-lantern projection. Then it is clear. My mind has finally shuffled through all of the cards. It is the pilot, William Harrington, a man from my past, much older now of course – I know him. I knew him. I would like to talk to you about a friend of yours . . . Ihsan Tameri. And there is Ihsan’s face, at the top of a stairwell, looking down at me, young, rubbing his hands together and laughing. He is standing next to Eleanora Rasul. They are speaking, laughing about something, but I can’t hear what they are saying. Eleanora’s lips are very red. She has around her neck a charm in the shape of a silver canary. Then a new room. I am posed in front of a fireplace, wearing a white dress. I am being drawn. Like curtains. Like a pencil.

  The Warnes Hotel, Worthing. Have I been there? No, I don’t think so. I don’t like hotels, avoid them these days and stay far away from their disconcerting, transitional rooms. Long curtains and doors that click shut, and lock. Mirrors that lie. When I wake properly Skip’s eyelashes are close enough to tickle my own eyelids. He is crouching over my face, inspecting me.

  ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You looked dead.’

  ‘I am definitely alive.’ My bearer of gifts, he uncurls his palm. In it, a perfect starfish, still moving.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Found it.’

  My brute with bruised elbows and blinking eyes, I stroke the pure, soft, freckled skin of his face and then he pulls away, goes to find a cup to fill it with water, to house his star and keep it alive.

  Jerusalem, 1920

  Willie was conscious that in civvies he looked not quite. His suit was
ancient and he was skinnier than he used to be so the shoulders hung badly. He took one step towards Eleanora but stopped and stood like a man at the wrong wedding.

  Her name was Mrs Eleanora Rasul now. He must remember that.

  There was perspiration on the top of his lip, he could feel it. They had all been summoned to be a part of Charles Ashton’s photograph, an image for posterity: the team responsible for Jerusalem’s aesthetic and architectural redesign to be recorded and preserved. It would be sent to The Times, read by everyone at Ashton’s clubs in London, at the Travellers, the Royal Geographical Society, and so forth. He touched the scar that travelled from his chest to his neck. Eleanora had her back to him, was crouched over her camera apparatus. Her dress was belted and from behind her rather boyish figure looked unchanged despite the years. Desire ran through him, made him contract his tongue, wipe his forehead. It was still there; undiminished. He walked towards her, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘William Harrington,’ she said in a voice from the past, standing back from her equipment, and he could not work out her expression at all. ‘Are you ready to be photographed?’

  He stepped back and lit his cigarette clumsily. He hadn’t meant to swoop in so close where he couldn’t see her properly. She gave him a sarcastic look and then began fiddling with the slides on the camera. There is her neck. Words came to his mind. Property. Ownership. Mine by right. He saw them stamped in red ink like a librarian’s date on a thin stretch of her skin.

  ‘Ah, ha.’ It was Charles Ashton, looking absurd in a fez. ‘My top-notch squadron.’

  His mother had written, Willie darling, honestly it won’t do, it really won’t, SUCH an inappropriate marriage, her mother is beside herself. And . . . well. What got into her? You have always been close, darling, and you are near – aren’t you? – Cairo is not so far away. Do what you can, and this cause had glowed through his veins for weeks, an opiate flushing through his visceral system. In his last days in Cairo he had taken to imagining Eleanora buried under great piles of religious stones, or crushed beneath photographic equipment, or locked up in an old house. He thought vaguely of dust, a donkey, of water-bearers; it was difficult to see Jerusalem in any other light. Always she was on her back, one arm over her eyes. There were variations: her lips parted, the top of her dress falling open. Well. Willie had every intention of releasing her from the sordid situation she appeared to have arrived at.