Free The Photographer's Wife by Nick Alexander Page A

store in the East Village, Connie, his sister, now married to an evangelical Christian in Wyoming. But Sophie is only half-listening, because her mind is buzzing with the idea of an Anthony Marsden retrospective.
    It’s not until the bill has been paid and they are walking home along sparkly, frosted streets that she mentions it again. "How much interest would there be, do you think? In a Marsden retrospective?”
    Brett laughs.
    “What?”
    “I just knew we’d be revisiting that one,” he says.
    “And?”
    “How much media interest, d’ya mean?”
    “I suppose.”
    “Quite a lot, I guess. You’d need some really mega Hockneyesque prints of some of his famous shots.”
    “The summer of seventy-six, the abortion demo, stuff like that?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’d have to contact the rights owners. A lot of them belong to the Mirror or the Times .”
    “And a batch of stuff people have never seen. You’ll still have rights to those.”
    “That might not be so easy, actually.”
    “Really?”
    “Mum burned them all.”
    “Really?!”
    “Actually, no that’s not true. But she did destroy some. All the stuff from the Pentax tour went up in flames. You never heard that story?”
    Brett shakes his head.
    “Pentax sponsored him to do a big show. In the eighties. But he died halfway through the shoot and Mum lost the plot and burned everything.” Sophie slips on the icy pavement and Brett grabs her arm and pulls her upright. “Careful there,” he says.
    “Thanks.”
    “That’s interesting,” Brett says, “about the Pentax tour.”
    And Sophie can hear in his voice a different tone, the tone of Brett the journalist. “It’s not a scoop, Brett,” she explains. “The story was all over the papers at the time.”
    “Oh,” Brett says, sounding disappointed.
    “But Mum has boxes of other photos and negatives and stuff. Jon has some too. So I’m sure we could find some good stuff.”
    “I guess you need to start there,” Brett says. “See if there’s enough material.”
    “Could we get someone big interested, do you think? The R.A. or the National Portrait Gallery, or the V and A?”
    “Possibly,” Brett says. “He was a big name. It would help, of course, if you knew someone at a major newspaper who could help you publicise it...”
    “Like someone at the Times ?”
    “Like someone at the Times ,” Brett says, with a wink. “But again, it depends on the work you can put together. And it would be a big old game to organise it all.”
    Just in front of them, a cab is dropping someone off. Brett starts to walk faster. “Shall we jump in this one?” he asks.
    “Yes,” Sophie replies. “This pavement’s lethal.”
    Once they are seated and on the move, Sophie says, “I suppose that’s the problem. It’s loads of work and there’s no money in it.”
    “You’d have to get a sponsor. Maybe talk to Pentax again.”
    Sophie snorts. “Pentax wouldn’t go near it with a bargepole. He died, remember. The return on their investment was nil once Mum had burned the photos.”
    “Someone else then. And you’d have to budget in a salary for yourself to cover running the whole thing.”
    “Right...” Sophie says, vaguely.
    “Of course,” Brett adds, smiling wryly, because he knows that this is the elephant in the room that Sophie has been pretending to ignore. “Ideally you could find a way to link your own work into the mix, make it a father-daughter thing and use it to launch your new career as an arty-farty Milly Colley lookalike. So that could make it worthwhile.”
    “You reckon?” Sophie asks, as if the idea is only now crossing her mind.
    Brett just laughs and rolls his eyes.

1950 - Eastbourne, East Sussex.
     
    Barbara awakens to the screeching of seagulls and momentarily can’t work out where she is. She rubs her eyes and looks up at the unfamiliar, pale-blue ceiling, then across the room at Glenda, sleeping in the single bed beside her.
    And then she remembers: she’s on holiday.