AFTER THE DIVORCE
49 Cadogan Square, London
25th May, 1936
My darlingest Kate,
A very wonderful weekend and I only hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I have never been so happy – it’s really rather frightening wondering if it can possibly last at such a frantic high pitch.
I’ve never met anyone quite like you before. I can’t believe that I hadn’t even wanted to go to the Gunnington’s party and might have missed the chance of meeting you and redirecting the course of my life.
As I was writing this, I telephoned you up, my most beautiful one, but the maid said you were out for a drink with Jocelyn.Thursday will soon come, my only beloved.Take care of yourself, especially your hands and feet.
Your adoring,
Dominic
It took Henry a few tries, with much squinting, to read the letter.The old-fashioned writing in navy ink squiggled and jumped on the thin white paper, and it felt as if he were translating from a foreign language. Something in Henry’s distant childhood memory started to try to swim to the surface, and he wondered if he would push it back down or allow it some air. With hands that had started to tremble, Henry picked another.
Fettercairn, Aberdeen.
14th September, 1938
My most loved,
I long so much to see you again to delight my eyes and senses with the fullest of looks upon you. I am sorry not to have written before today, I was somehow not much in the mood for writing and have been so busy. But I took the hounds for a walk across the moors today and thought about you. My darling, the desperation I feel needing you, knowing you are still married is ripping me apart. I know I have been no innocent in my own past. The fact of a woman being married didn’t vex me before, I suppose because I was quite happy to while away my time in London until I knew I’d have to come back here and take over the estate. I imagined I’d marry a nice Scottish lass and things would tick over in a humdrum but pleasant way. But then, you.
You, who drinks like a soldier but has the unmistakeable figure of a woman.You, who is brittle and witty with a martini in your hands yet softens and yields in my arms.You, the only person with whom I want to grow old and faded.
Please, come up here again. I was so thrilled driving us through the village, everyone waving their hats at us as we passed. I shall buy you an owl of your own, to keep in the woods, and we shall train it to fly to your hand. Other men may have bought you diamond brooches in the shape of your favourite bird, but only I can give you one with a beating heart. You already have my beating heart.
All my love darling, your adoring Dominic
Henry read the letter twice through and then looked at the dates again. It couldn’t be what he thought. Could it?
Somewhere in France
17th June, 1943
My beloved Kate,
It’s difficult to go into poems of praise every time I write but please know that thinking of you makes me happier than I could otherwise be in this wretched place. Being with you on the last leave made me both exalted and terribly sad. It was almost a tease, to have a few days of normalcy with you, without fear of Bill coming through the door. I know it is wretched for you to have us both away fighting, but with him in another country, the simple pleasure of bringing you breakfast in bed, of us going for a walk in the park and to drinks and dancing in the Ritz… I hardly dare remember it. Here, I don’t have your
Rifling through the letters, photographs fell out here and there, in black and white. His mother was easy to find with her striking beauty, her dark hair with its white streak.
49 Cadogan Square, London
11th December, 1946
My own Kate,
I have just put down the telephone from you.You sounded somehow sad now that the decree nisi has arrived.That you should feel that way, even after everything that Bill has done to you, makes things complicated again.
I know I should feel happy that the first steps have been made towards us being together as we have so long wanted to be, but we cannot deny that it has also been fraught and difficult since the war ended. Not just you and me, but the world around us. I think everyone wants to get back to how things were before, but they can’t. I am ashamed you have heard me cry out in the night but the horrors that appear in my dreams do not always dissolve in the sunlight. I yearn for nothing more than a simple life in Scotland and I wonder, just occasionally, if that is possible. Sometimes I like it better when things haven’t been right between us, it seems more real and genuine. Or am I making myself believe that? How is Michael? I know you worried that divorce would bring him shame while he was still at school. Perhaps it’s more usual these days, since the war.
I will see you on Wednesday, for luncheon at the Regency, before I take the train home. Your own,
Dominic
Henry knew his mother had been unhappily married to his father, Bill. But a trickle of cold ice was running down his spine.
49 Cadogan Square, London
20th February, 1947
Kate,
Perhaps I should telephone but I don’t want to mix up my words or forget what I mean to say.
I’m going to be married to Helen Dashwood on Tuesday. I know this must seem rather sudden but we’ve been close for a long time and it’s the right thing for me to do.You met her, briefly, once or twice when you came up to Fettercairn. She grew up next door, as much as one does in our neck of the woods, and our families have known each other all our lives. I know you will say the decree absolute is mere months away. But things changed. I have not been certain we want the same things for some while now.
I shall think of you always with great fondness.
Yours,
Dominic
It was important now that Henry find the next letter in the sequence, if there was one. Had she told Dominic? This took some time, deciphering the writing still, ordering the dates.At last, he had it.
Paddington Station
25th February, 1947
Kate
You put the wrong letters into the envelopes.You sent me the letter congratulating Helen on her wedding, with bland good wishes for future happiness.You sent Helen the letter meant for me, despairing for me of waking up next to such a plain woman every morning for the rest of my life.Helen very nearly cancelled our wedding,the letters arrived onTuesday morning. I had to go to her mother’s flat and persuade her that it is Helen’s fresh-faced prettiness that I adore so much. I’m writing this from Paddington station, and we are boarding the train to Scotland for our honeymoon and if you have any sense, I suggest you go straight to a church and pray for forgiveness. But if you get it from God, you won’t from me. Dominic
Henry put the letters back in the suitcase, and put the suitcase back in the cupboard under the stairs. It was his birthday soon, the fourth of April, and he’d always wondered why he looked nothing like his brother Michael, nor his father Bill. But he would try not to think about that again. Instead, he would be glad that his mother had been adored once.
Jessica Fellowes is the author of the bestselling The Mitford Murders crime series, translated into 15 languages and nominated for awards in Britain, Italy (published by Neri Pozza), Germany and France. She lives in Oxfordshire with her family, two big friendly dogs and a chicken.
I’ve always wondered how male and female anatomical differences translate into psychological ones, but every time I try to address the thought, I run into platitudes.The history of gender identity is one of constructed conformity told to us in binary oppositions by religion, the media, mainstream education, and socio-political and cultural systems: nature (women) versus culture (men), weakness versus strength, and feminism versus patriarchy.The real challenge lies in identifying non-binary differences. So, can a more nuanced, less black-and-white approach be taken? Pixy Liao’s Nipple Kiss, from her 2013 series For Your Eyes Only, suggests such a way. Unlike genitals, nipples are body parts that we – men and women – have in common. But this protuberance of the mammary gland is distinct in that females only have naturally open lactiferous ducts, from which milk is drawn by the infant.Though some movies of doubtful taste have attempted to portray the dystopian scenario of pregnant men – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gravid scientist in Junior (1994) comes to mind – male pregnancy is and should remain inconceivable. A nipple kiss consists of the encounter of two similar surfaces without penetration – without, that is, any “colonising” dynamics. Each nipple tenderly touches the other, yet maintains its independence. Hence, paradoxically, even though male and female nipples are alike, because of the different functions they perform, and the different symbology they evoke – i.e. maternity in women – they represent to me, emphatically in Pixy Liao’s image, a sophisticated metaphor for this challenging task of finding non-binary differences, and in preserving them.
Federica Chiocchetti is a writer, curator, editor and lecturer specialising in photography and literature.Through her platform, Photocaptionist, she collaborates with institutions such as the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) and Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (Foam). A PhD candidate in photo-textualities at the University of Westminster, she recently guest-edited issue 16 of Aperture’s PhotoBook Review.
The New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, Aperture and Wired.
Britain,
Magnum Artists:When Great Photographers Meet Great Artists, is published by Laurence King this autumn.
Some time ago, while sort of wrestling my two boys in a solo parenting moment, I met someone and she giggled, “Wow, you really are outnumbered now! Good luck, boys will be boys!” I zoned out looking at my oldest, back then rocking long golden locks, thinking of how many times I’d been told,“What a lovely little girl you have!”What did she mean? What she said felt weird and randomly stereotyping, but hit a nerve. Me and their father had long discussions before the first one was born, and we decided that our family would be an ongoing experiment.What happens when you educate kids in such way that no task or behaviour or colour or toy or emotion is associated with gender? What for me was a political necessity, something coming from a rational elaboration, for him was his personal revolution as a man and his instinctive approach on fatherhood. “This way”, I remember him saying, “we have better chances to grow decent, free human beings.”And over the years, I am discovering what it means when boys are free to be whatever they feel: they can be stubborn, sensitive, scared, proud, creative, hilarious, fragile, caring, annoying, petty, loving, binary and extremely complex.They can be superheroes, and dress like princesses. Is this surprising? Is this masculine? Is this feminine? They could not care less.This is our problem as adults using words that need a binary gender system to exist and be defined. I have often been defined as masculine, and my son as very feminine.These words mean nothing to me. But then, when trying to visualise how I wish my kids to be, the images of Casper Kofi come to mind.The absolute, simple and powerful joy of being free, the possibility to shine and evolve into the best version one wants, or can, be. Kind, caring, happy, strong superheroes. Whatever gender they will end up being.
Elisa Medde edits, curates and writes about photography.With a background in History of Art, Iconology and Photographic Studies, her research reflects on the relations between image and power. She has been a nominator for the Mack First Book Award, Prix Elysée,The Leica Oskar Barnack Award and MAST Foundation for Photography Grant amongst others, served in a number of juries and written for Foam Magazine, Something We Africans Got and other publications. Since 2012, Elisa is the Managing Editor of Foam Magazine.