‘Holidays. That’s what I remember. We went down to Cornwall — two, three years running. Last time with the Irvings. A hotel on a cliff. Steps down to a beach. (Jokes about the Beeches on the beach!) I was supposed to have nearly drowned there once, but I don’t remember. Just Harry rushing suddenly into the water, and shouting at Mum who was swimming, further out, and grabbing me and carrying me up the beach. He held me so tight. Then Mum and Uncle Frank and Auntie Stella came clustering round and he held me so tight, as if he didn’t want to let me go, even when Mum wanted to take me, and I cried. But I don’t remember nearly drowning.
‘I remember. I remember when the world was just sun and sand and sea and salt air. I remember when the world didn’t exist except where I was. I remember all of us playing games with a beach-ball, and thinking the world was like a coloured beach-ball, you could catch it in your arms. And Uncle Frank putting me on his shoulders to carry me. And I remember Harry taking photos of me. Just holiday snaps. My hair blowing. Giggling, licking ice-cream. He used to take that kind of photo too. It’s hard to think of him taking photos like that.’
Harry
When you put something on record, when you make a simulacrum of it, you have already partly decided you will lose it.
When I am not with Jenny, when she is away for only one night visiting her mother in Bristol, I play the game of trying to imagine exactly how she looks. I never can. When I see her, she is always so much better than the picture in my head. But I don’t know if this is good or bad. If it’s good that reality outshines the image, or if the fact that I can’t imagine her means that I don’t know her.
I used to say once, on those few occasions when I was persuaded to make public statements, that photography should be about what you cannot see. What you cannot see because it is far away and only the eye of the camera will take you there. Or what you cannot see because it happens so suddenly or so cruelly there is no time or even desire to see it, and only the camera can show you what it is like while it is still happening.
She wants me to take ‘real photographs’ again. We climb up the hill behind the cottage, the wind is riffling and polishing the grass, and she says, pointing at the downs and the clouds and the shafts of sunlight probing through them, ‘You could start right here.’ And I say, ‘Why?’ And she says (as if I don’t have eyes), ‘Because it’s beautiful.’ And I say, ‘So, if it’s beautiful, why photograph it? If you have the reality, who needs the picture?’
She looks at me, the breeze catching her hair, and I know what she’s thinking. That I have never taken a photograph of her.
Joe writes to me about every six months. I haven’t seen Sophie for ten years; I’ve never seen my grandsons, Tim and Paul. But twice a year or so Joe writes these cryptic, diligent reports. In his last letter he said Sophie had had some ‘trouble’. But I was not to worry. It was okay. She was going to an analyst. I wonder: ‘going to an analyst’? Problem solved or problem continuing? Or whether it’s just some kind of announcement of status. Like saying: And now we have our own speed-boat.
I’m not to worry. He wouldn’t tell me if I should. His letters are imbued with confident good cheer.
I don’t think he tells Sophie he writes to me. I don’t reply and I don’t think he expects me to. I haven’t worked out his tenacious mixture of motives. He is sorry for me? He wants to sting my conscience? He hopes by this process of rationed, honourable communication to hold me at bay, so I will never suddenly intrude on whatever life they have made for themselves over there? Or that if some belated reunion should occur, he will be seen, like some fairy godfather, to have worked quietly, patiently for it to happen?
Is he a good man? I don’t know. I used to call him ‘the holiday merchant’.
And what — or who — did I want for Sophie anyway? That she should have gone to university in ’66 and become a true, hip child of those high, heady times? And suffered the discomfort and the dilemma of being both the daughter of her father and the grand-daughter of her grandfather. I can see now why she never hurried back from that trip to Greece, eager to join the liberated generation that was just turning Harry Beech into one of its minor idols.
She went to Greece to find her mother. To-find Anna. But she didn’t find her mother. She found Joe. Joe and Argosy Tours. And she married him in ’67.
That summer I’d got my sun-tan in the Sinai Desert, snapping young Israeli soldiers, whooping and singing, racing armoured cars over undefended sand, not believing war could be so easy. But I was there that September, in that same Surrey church, to give my daughter away. (Give her away?)
She linked her bride’s arm in mine. I squeezed it. And it was strange how, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our first forced, let’s-pretend smiles, the occasion conspired to make it seem that we had always been that close. As if it were our reunion.
A high street photographer, unctuous, fussy, bow-tied, took the pictures, never looking me once in the eye, and my heart went out to him.
I thought of how Anna and I were married, frugally if gladly, in that makeshift chapel in Nuremberg, and how later she regretted never having had the full, white, dressed-up English performance. The church porch, the bells, the tables laid on the lawn at Hyfield. She would have liked that, for Uncle Spiro’s sake. Sent him the photos to gratify his old, Anglophile feelings.
In my morning suit and grey tie I must have looked dressed for the wrong part. Dad looked like the old soldier who might suddenly start to weep. Joe looked like the original lucky man.
And whatever Joe thought of me, whatever Sophie had told him about me, he must have blessed his luck that Sophie was the grand-daughter of Robert Beech. In ’71 Dad put money into Argosy Tours. I know that. Just when Argosy Tours was starting to look like a shaky investment. A separate and discreet transaction, so you could never have said it was BMC money shoring up people’s escapes to the sun. And not enough to stop the crash three years later. But enough to buy Joe time to make other arrangements and get out before things looked messy.
Not that there wasn’t, suddenly, a far worse mess. A quite different mess. But even then some hidden part of him must have been counting his luck. He had fixed by then that job in New York. He had nobly declined, more than once, Irving’s offer of a job at BMC. Unentangled. It was even luck that he wasn’t there that morning at Hyfield. Though he kept repeating obstinately afterwards: I should have been there, I should have been there. As if there were some desperate magic he might have employed to prevent it all. Whereas his whole dazed demeanour was actually saying something else: I don’t want to be here. I’m not really here, am I, Harry?
I see him coming out of that hospital ward where Sophie is lying groggy with shock and sedation, and his own look of shock hardens for an instant into one of absolute and infantile hate. As if I were to blame, I’d caused it all, I was the Jonah who’d put the ship smack on the rocks.
How much did she say?
And I see him the next night at the same hospital, when they let her go. My God, how I envied him that arm round her waist. She looked right through me, she looked at me as if she didn’t know me. But he’d recovered by then. Had a role by then. There was that little glint of unextinguished luck in his eye. Sophie is okay. And the baby’s okay. And if I can just hang on for however long this nightmare takes to fade, I really won’t be here any more, we’ll all be far away, in another continent, on the other side of the Atlantic.
Now he sits in a New York office, offering credulous Americans the charms of cosy old England. While I sit in a Wiltshire cottage which might be a picture from one of his brochures come to life.