The Photographer's Wife

Author

One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever.

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Jerusalem, 1920

The man opposite Prue was trying to force a canary through the train window and such a hash he made of it: a yellow fluttering blur, bright black accusatory eyes, and then – pouf – gone. The empty birdcage on the table in front of him was a perfect dome with a wooden swing in its middle suspended for a bird to rock and pretend to fly. She longed to touch it, but didn’t dare.

He hadn’t remotely noticed her, despite the fact that they were the only two Europeans on the train. Most passengers appeared to be Armenian, Egyptian, Jerusalemites and others Prue couldn’t easily identify. She watched him steadily, hoping he would look over at her, but he never did. His cheeks were awfully red and he was sweating despite the cold; she guessed he was English. A framed picture on the back of the train door stated RAPID AND COMFORTABLE TRAVELLING FACILITIES TO ALL PARTS OF PALESTINE with connections to EGYPT, SYRIA AND BEYOND, wherever BEYOND might be, but the train was not particularly comfortable and had been still for some minutes now. There was no sign of the purser. The slam of a door could be heard further along the carriage. The air was suspended, everyone waited.

Prue was travelling alone, despite being just eleven years old. Her father had given her permission to visit a village called Yibna for the day to photograph a Mamluk tower. it had gone well, all things considered. She was intact, not murdered. Not a person had spoken to her. Bandits had not stolen her much-cherished camera, a Kodak Eastman. True, she had been unprepared for a flurry of snow that left her damp and cold, but now she was returning to Jerusalem full of hope that it would be friendlier, warmer.

She could see from the luggage tag dangling from the suitcase in the rack above that the man had travelled from Cairo, via Alexandria and Kantara. The handwriting was clear, very black, and looking at it Prue realised who he must be. She had overheard him saying to the purser earlier that he was going to Jerusalem. He must surely be the new pilot, then. Eleanora’s great friend. There were no other Englishmen on the train, and he was due about now. She tried again at getting his eye, but he avoided hers, and the loneliness which had lifted for an instant resettled on her, like dusk.

She looked out of the window. Steam from the train’s engine dispersed to reveal a stretch of stony ground, the suggestion of hills in the far off, a pure, blank sky. Prue was still not used to the lack of grass. She missed hawthorn blossom and damp tree bark and ladybirds and the hairy strength of daisy stalks so much that she was sickened by the memory of these things. Might she ask him? Hello, sir, are you the man my father has employed to fly aircraft over Jerusalem? just as she was about to speak the man jumped back in his seat.

‘Good heavens,’ he said. A face was pressed against the train window, a bottom lip dragging along the glass, revealing gums, teeth, and then just as quickly it was gone, dropped down presumably towards the tracks, and all that remained was a streak of spit on the window. Nothing happened for a moment. The man, who might or might not be Eleanora’s friend, put his finger on the glass near the smear, and then, in a surge, all the passengers in the carriage rushed over to that side of the train to see what was happening. Prue did the same, and found herself between the Englishman’s elbow and the cane of an Armenian clergyman.

Outside, soldiers in a strange uniform were in a circle around a man on the ground and great boots were kicking deep into his stomach. His head was twisted towards the train and Prue saw his tongue shoot in and out of his mouth each time a foot touched him. The Armenian clergyman, disregarding Prue, pointed his cane at the Englishman.

‘You,’ he said. ‘What is happening?’

‘Devil if I know,’ he said, shaking out his trousers, irritated, finally registering Prue, his eyes opening wide as if surprised to see an English child next to him even though she had been there the whole time.

A procession was coming into view. Prisoners, shackled at the ankles. Exhausted, dirty, stooped. Prue had never seen men like these. They were local, she guessed, villagers. No women. They were being herded along by a couple of the soldiers wearing the curious uniform made up of revolver belts of Wild West pattern and large-brimmed hats decorated with scarlet ribbons. The prisoners trudged slowly past the man on the ground, they were carrying something over their shoulders. Not a cross, surely? Not a pilgrimage, something else. The purser shoved his way through the aisle behind Prue now, a Turkish-looking official, letting out a whistle each time he moved.

‘British gendarmerie,’ the purser said, whistling and breathing near Prue. ‘They’ve caught an outlawed criminal. They do this to show everyone what manner of men they are.’ He wiped his hands on the red velvet waistcoat of his uniform as if to clean himself. ‘But it is unnecessary. We already know what kind of men they are.’

The Englishman would surely speak to her now. He had looked at her. Now, I exist. But no. He closed his eyes, as if to shut out what was happening. A man on horseback emerged alongside the weary, walking prisoners, also wearing the odd, semi-official hat. The Englishman had opened his eyes and straightened his back and Prue saw that he was staring at this man on the horse.

The prisoners did not look up from the ground as they paraded past. They did not see the faces at the windows of the train, gawping and gaping. They were carrying a ladder, propped on the shoulders of four of the men, and strapped to the top of it was a body. She guessed it was dead, because she didn’t think otherwise the arms and legs of a body would jangle at such an angle. She had never before seen a dead man. She wanted very much to photograph it.

When it had all passed, the Englishman took his belongings, including the birdcage, and moved to a different carriage without saying a word.

The driver waiting for her from the Hotel Fast was an ancient English serviceman called Gibbons, decked up with war decorations.

‘Collecting one more,’ he said, not offering to carry Prue’s knapsack. Two minutes previously the platform at Jerusalem station had been a blur of suits and robes and sun helmets, the floor covered in packages and luggage largely made up of bundled sheets, but in an instant it had all vanished. Now the light was fading, Prue was hungry, regretting the whole film she had used on the Mamluk tower which was just that: a tower, surrounded by nothing. The driver gestured over Prue’s shoulder. She turned. Here came the Englishman walking slowly towards them. She had been correct then. She knew it.

‘Hello,’ he said, as if he had not stood next to her at a window just half an hour ago. His travelling coat was very crinkled. ‘I’m Flight Lieutenant William Harrington.’

‘Yes. I guessed who you were on the train,’ Prue said. Gibbons took his suitcase without saying anything and moved towards the dust-covered Crossley.

‘I’m Prudence Ashton,’ she said. ‘You will be working for my father.’ He did not reply and so she continued, ‘Eleanora told me about you. You’re the bird-catcher.’

The man – William Harrington – jolted at that, which was a satisfaction.

Sharing the back seat meant both of them having to cling to the handles inside the door to avoid being thrown into one another’s laps as they bumped along the road.

‘How is Eleanora?’ William Harrington said finally, it was obviously a tremendous effort.

‘She’s well,’ Prue said, deciding to say no more and to remain mysterious to punish the man. Then, mischievous, without looking at him, she said, ‘You know, of course, she is married to the great photographer, Khaled Rasul?’

The man coughed, nodded, said nothing more. Prue watched him stare at the bare rocky landscape that quickly changed into grey stone houses on either side of the road. He was very pinched and thin-looking and he kept cupping one of his ears with a hand. Did it feel significant, his arrival here? Most people – she had discovered – gave it great symbolism, arriving in Jerusalem. They had planned it and read and dreamed and thought about it for such a long time before coming and they all seemed to have such hopes about the famous city and when they got here it was never quite what they were looking for. Maybe, for him, just as it had been for her, it was like any journey: exhausting, tedious, difficult.

‘Why did you let that canary go?’ she said. He sniffed, looking displeased at the question, and then sighed. ‘I bought it for Eleanora in the market in Cairo, but then it suddenly seemed not quite the thing.’

They sat for the rest of the journey in silence. Prue pulled from her knapsack the piece of paper that Ihsan had given to her. It contained a list of character shapes and their meanings which she was in the process of memorising under the cover of Arabic lessons. She held the paper in such a way that the men couldn’t see it.

Finally the motor car splattered to a stop. Prue folded up her paper. There was the sign saying Messrs COX & KINGS Shipping and Travel Agents nestled in front of the Hotel Fast and standing under its awning was her father, wearing, as he always did, a white suit and a fez, flapping a fly swat around his face. Next to him was Frau Baum.

‘That,’ Prue said to William Harrington, hoping to shock, ‘is my father’s German lover.’

‘Oh,’ he said, eyes widening. She then twisted her neck to look further along Jaffa Road and saw Eleanora coming along the street. the low winter-afternoon sun shone into her coat so that the tips of the fur looked like fire.

‘There,’ Prue said. ‘Eleanora.’

‘Hotel Fast,’ the driver said at the same time and William Harrington let Prue get out first. She waved at her father and his lover and at Eleanora heading towards them as they waited to welcome the new arrival, but Prue did not stop. she swooped past and although her father called something out to her, she did not catch it, and she carried on regardless. When she looked back at them from inside the hotel, they had forgotten about her already.

Shoreham, 1937

The man at the door is dressed like London in a crumpled but expensive suit that no Shoreham man would ever wear. I pull back from the gap in the wooden door panel, stand perfectly still as he tries the handle. His voice easily penetrates the rotten wood.

‘Mrs Piers Miller?’

Oh do bugger off. Astonishing, how quickly that name has dissolved. I am Prudence Ashton again. The person I was before Piers, the person I am afterwards. I can hear his feet shunting loose shingle about and then I remember. It’s the journalist who telegrammed in advance. I ignored it and now, here he is. Touch my lips: no lipstick. Touch my head: hair still in curlers, under a scarf. I force my shoulders to drop, open the door. With his back to the light I can’t see his face, just a tall person and an inconvenience.

‘Mrs Miller, hello.’ His foot is over the threshold before I say a word and he peers past my shoulder into the fishing hut that is my studio. ‘Interview with the Burlington magazine? I understood from my assistant that it was all arranged.’

In the centre of the hut behind me, propped up on two railway sleepers, is part of the main sculpture I am working on for Margot’s exhibition: a vast lump of Maltese limestone, a broken saint that I just doused with a bucket of sea water, the remains of which are pooling along the grooves of the wooden floorboards. I do not want him to see it.

‘I don’t think so. I mean, I received no exact confirmation.’

A seagull waddles towards us, opens and closes its mouth, begging. The sea-wind makes its usual effort to deafen and blind.

He steps back, makes a business of looking at the papers in his hands, flapping a copy of the Burlington as if it proves a thing. Behind him the tide is out, the sea filthy. I scan the coastline for Skip but can’t see him. The man’s manner suggests: Well! I’m here now, come from London. Perhaps? Might we? A nervy little punch in the air. I sigh, pull my cardigan around me.

‘Would you wait here while I pack up?’

‘Of course.’

I close the door on him, walk to the limestone, spread out my palms flat on its damp cool surface. It is particularly frustrating because today, after weeks of being frightened and preternaturally tense about it – Margot giving me the heavy lean to finish, sending daily letters of enquiry, evading my requests to be ignored until I’m ready – today, something in me shifted, or at least began to, and finally I am less afraid of this intimidating lump of stone.

I poke my finger into the back of Billy’s work boot and heave it off, then the second one. I’ve taken to wearing his thick boots in the fisherman’s hut, his socks too. I don’t mind a man with feet the same size as me; a man the same height as me. I squeeze my own shoes back on, pull off my headscarf, quickly prise out the curlers, shake out my hair.

Ignoring his So kind of you, terribly sorry to bother you, thank you as he tries to keep up, the pebbles and chalk unsteadying him, I beckon him into my chalet with the half-thought: was Skip wearing his woollen cardigan this morning? The wind is nasty today.

The chalet’s name Cecilia was carved into a piece of driftwood and hung up by owners long gone. This sign clatters in the wind day and night. I should take it down, but never do. I slam the door behind us.

‘Take a seat. I’ll make tea.’ I will not be friendly but I can be civil. I clear Skip’s cuttlefish bones from the only chair that isn’t broken and fill the kettle from the water butt. His breathing is shallow. I can smell him too: aftershave, tobacco, something medicinal. The windows are splattered with spray, the sea-light shows how slovenly we are, how lax I am as a mother.

‘I’m very grateful,’ he says again.

‘Yes. Well, one cannot say no to the Burlington.’

He is much too tall to fit into the room and can barely get his legs under the table. Skip’s collections of whatnots are everywhere: whelk shells, crab bones, chalk. The usual stink of seaweed, or sea-rot. Everything damp and one of my brassières is poking out from under a cushion. Cecilia was once a disused railway carriage, now extended into a haphazard, wooden one-room home. Along the inner wall it is still possible to see remains of the velvet lining that long ago studded carriage panels. I thought it romantic when I was first shown it by Billy, my landlord – now my lover, though quite how it has happened I can’t exactly say – but it was summer then. Not a whiff of the red slimy seaweed to come, no foreshadow of the months of low-hanging sea frets. I push the brassière down the side of the cushion and can see him getting his face ready to pretend that Cecilia is quaint and that there is wisdom in attempting to build a home for my son out of rotten wood on shifting shingle.

‘We should begin, then?’ I want to hurry him on. I run my hands over my yellow dress, which is not particularly clean, and sit in the unstable chair opposite him, ignoring the bowl of shrivelled apples in front of us.

‘Yes. Indeed.’ He writes in his notebook so that I can clearly read: Interview with Prudence Miller, 4th October 1937.

I look at him properly for the first time. He has a rash, or a skin condition, quite severe, along his neck. Old scars, probably. We all have them. In a sense he is generic, like any of the men from the art world constantly courting my errant husband, Piers. All the same: gallery owners, critics, dealers, journalists, their little beaks opening and pecking to be fed. It occurs to me: is Piers behind this? Is he affiliated with the Burlington? Sending a stranger to harass me in the guise of an interview is just the sort of thing he might do and this man is everything I have left behind. He is all the people at the exhibitions and the endless London noise, eyes too close to my face in the upstairs snug at the Chandos on Trafalgar Square or the Pillars of Hercules in Soho. He is the swinging lanterns in the Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place where I once took my clothes off to an audience of six drunken, revolting Surrealists; all the men watching, including Piers, shouting Bravo Bravo Encore Encore. Piers had been blindfolded for the evening, so he wasn’t even looking, the fool.

‘You are newly arrived in Shoreham, I understand?’ the man asks. His face is not open, somehow; he doesn’t quite meet my eye.

‘I’ve been here just a few months.’ My throat is tight.

‘Life is rather different down here, I imagine?’

‘Indeed.’

He holds his pen over the paper but writes nothing. He shifts in the chair. ‘What is the piece you are working on at the moment called?’

I answer to the effect that I keep changing my mind, which is not the same as saying I haven’t settled on a name. The name evolves. Sometimes it is Stairwell, sometimes Spiral, sometimes Axis Mundi, and then I think: less literal, or even, more literal and I just want to call it Hanging Stairs with Saint Helena. It has an accompanying piece, currently called Hanging Men. I have been working on the exact angle of the head in relation to the rope, precisely how it looks when a person has been hanged, but I don’t mention that.

‘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 window 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