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Back The Woman in the Photograph Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for the previous work of
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. 24 April 2018
  6. Part 1: Subject
  7. 15 June 1968
  8. 20 June 1968
  9. July 1968
  10. 2 February 2018
  11. Part 2: Light
  12. 20 November 1970
  13. 20 November 1970
  14. 21 November 1970
  15. November 1970
  16. 19 February 2018
  17. Part 3: Focus
  18. 15 April 1977
  19. 18 April 1977
  20. 15 May 1977
  21. July 1977
  22. 26 February 2018
  23. 8 March 2018
  24. 8 March 2018
  25. Part 4: Distance
  26. 15 May 1979
  27. 15 May 1979
  28. 16 May 1979
  29. June 1979
  30. 29 March 2018
  31. 29 March 2018
  32. 27 March 2018
  33. Part 5: Movement
  34. 18 October 1981
  35. 10 April 2018
  36. 18 October 1981
  37. 10 April 2018
  38. 18 October 1981
  39. 10 April 2018
  40. 18 October 1981
  41. 10 April 2018
  42. 10 April 2018
  43. 18 October 1981
  44. 10 April 2018
  45. October 1981
  46. Part 6: Exposure
  47. July 1984
  48. 5 September 1984
  49. 24 April 2018
  50. 25 April 2018
  51. Part 7: Developing
  52. 26 April 2018
  53. Vee, in the lost place, 1984
  54. 26 April 2018
  55. Epilogue
  56. 5 February 2019
  57. Author’s Note
  58. Acknowledgements
  59. Letter from Author
  60. Stephanie Butland’s Readers’ Club
  61. For your Reading Group
  62. For discussion
  63. Select bibliography
  64. About the author
  65. Also by Stephanie Butland

For the few days Leonie stayed in hospital, she kept up the pretence of being interested in Erica, but she really, truly wasn’t. She imitated the faces that others made when they looked at their babies, and she never refused to hold her, just in case she was suspected of not loving her. But the only moment where she felt a tug of anything more than indifference was one morning when Erica was put into her arms, and instead of a sleeping baby or a wailing one, she found herself looking at those eyes just like her own, and putting her finger on the nose that had the makings of being just like hers. The baby looked at her, then yawned, and Leonie, much to her own amazement, laughed and kissed the top of Erica’s head. Yes, she did. A moment of the purest affection for the result of one of her zipless fucks. It soon passed.

Her body recovered. She got on with her life.

But Vee does not know any of this. She pretty much abandoned Leonie to her fate. There’s no way Leonie is going to make it easy for her now.

10 April 2018

10 April 2018

Vee

‘You’re not serious?’ Vee looks at the child strapped into a car seat in the back of Erica’s estate car. It’s an hour and a half’s drive to Greenham Common. Erica called and suggested this trip after she had been looking through Vee’s photographs of the Peace Camp. That’s what she said, anyway. Vee suspects that Erica feels sorry for her – she can’t want any more information for the exhibition now, it’s all gone to be printed and framed and it would be too late to change anything. But she had been overcome by a desire to see the place again, as acute and almost-sublime as the moment of out-of-body panic that wakes her most mornings. Those memories that remain of the place are good ones.

So Vee had agreed. She hadn’t thought there would be a child involved. She’s never been good with children, even before she was in the vice of a headache for most of every day.

‘My childcare fell through,’ Erica says. ‘So I thought, is it worse to cancel at almost no notice, or to bring Tom along? He’ll sleep.’