A Place of Hiding

“No closer to anything. Not one step further. Not knowing if any of this...this ki nd of li fe...i s even worth my time.”


“So what you’re saying is that the experience alone isn’t good enough for you. You’re telling yourself—and me, not that I believe it, mind you—

that work counts only if it produces a result you’ve decided you want.”

“That isn’t it.”

“Then what?”

“I need to believe, Simon.”

“In what?”

“I can’t take another year to dabble at this. I want to be more than Simon St. James’s arty wife in her dungarees and her combat boots, carting her cameras for a lark round London. I want to make a contribution to our life. And I can’t do that if I don’t believe. ”

“Shouldn’t you start with believing in the process, then? If you looked at every photographer whose career you’ve studied, wouldn’t you see someone who began—”

“That’s not what I mean!” She swung to face him. “I don’t need to learn to believe that you start from the bottom and work your way upwards. I’m not such a fool that I think I’m supposed to have a show one night and the National Portrait Gallery demanding samples of my work the next morning. I’m not stupid, Simon.”

“I’m not suggesting you are. I’m just trying to point out that the failure of a single showing of your pictures —which, for all you know, will not be a failure at all, by the way—is a measurement of nothing. It’s just an experience, Deborah. No more. No less. It’s how you interpret the experience that gets you into trouble.”

“So we’re not supposed to interpret our experiences? We’re just supposed to have them and go on our way? Something ventured, nothing gained? Is that what you mean?”

“You know it isn’t. You’re getting upset. Which is hardly going to avail either of us—”

“Getting upset? I’m already upset. I’ve spent months on the street. Months in the darkroom. A fortune in supplies. I can’t keep doing that without believing that there’s a point to it all.”

“Defined by what? Sales? Success? An article in the Sunday TimesMagazine?”

“No! Of course not. That’s not what any of this is about, and you know it.” She pushed past him, crying, “Oh, why do I bother?” and she would have left the room, flying up the stairs and leaving him no closer to understanding the character of the demons she confronted periodically. It had always been this way between them: her passionate, unpredictable nature set against his phlegmatic constitution. The wild divergence in the way they each viewed the world was one of the qualities that made them so good together. It was also, unfortunately, one of the qualities that made them so bad as well.

“Then tell me,” he said. “Deborah. Tell me.”

She stopped in the doorway. She looked like Medea, all fury and intention, with her long hair rain-sprung round her shoulders and her eyes like metal in the firelight.

“I need to believe in myself,” she said simply. It sounded as if she despaired the very effort to speak, and he understood from this how much she loathed the fact that he had failed to understand her.

“But you’ve got to know your work is good,” he said. “How can you go to Bermondsey and capture it like this”—with a gesture towards the wall—“and not know that your work is good? Better than good. Good God, it’s brilliant.”

“Because knowing all that happens here,” she replied. Her voice had become subdued now and her posture—so rigid a moment before—released its tension so that she seemed to sag in front of him. She pointed to her head upon the word here and she placed her hand beneath her left breast as she said, “But believing all that happens here. So far I’ve not been able to bridge the distance between the two. And if I can’t do that...How can I weather what I have to weather to do something that will prove me to myself?”

There it was, he thought. She didn’t add the rest, for which he blessed her. Proving herself as a woman through childbirth had been denied his wife. She was looking for something to define who she was. He said, “My love...” but had no other words. Yet those alone seemed to comprise more kindness from him than she could bear because the metal of her eyes went to liquid in an instant, and she held up a hand to prevent him from crossing the room to comfort her.

“All the time,” she said, “no matter what happens, there’s this voice inside me whispering that I’m deluding myself.”

“Isn’t that the curse of all artists? Aren’t those who succeed the ones who’re able to ignore their doubts?”

“But I haven’t come up with a way not to listen to it. You’re playing at pictures, it tells me. You’re just pretending. You’re wasting your time.”

“How can you think you’re deluding yourself when you take pictures like these?”