The Photograph

by Penelope Lively

  Those years have been expediently glossed over in the CV that she supplies to prospective clients. Since then there have been bigger fish to fry, and her brochure lays them out for inspection. The brochure has had to be frequently updated. The first one of all was a fresh and innocent affair by comparison with the designer product of today. It was compiled with Nick’s help, tricked out with little decorative floral motifs done by a girl illustrator he knew, and printed by the people he used when he first set up the publishing house. Back in those heady early years of marriage, and of work: her work, his work.

  Elaine is now on the last stretch of the drive home. She passes the junction with the road that leads to their old place, the house in which family life was carried on cheek by jowl with a small publishing business and an embryonic garden-design venture. The busy, cluttered place in which every room housed filing cabinets, someone sitting at a desk, stacks of books. The kitchen where Polly was enthroned in her high chair or crawled about on the floor while people made out invoices and answered the phone.

  The old house sends out signals, an unquenchable Morse code that is always to be heard around here. She is not thinking of the house, but nevertheless fragments of that time tumble haphazardly in her head, mixed with consideration of planting schemes for the Surrey mansion. A bog garden? Species roses for that long bank? Hydrangea paniculata against the walls? And, alongside, the thought that she must do a major supermarket shop tomorrow. Now, as the fragments tumble, Nick swings into focus, perhaps because she is approaching that pub that they used to go to of a Sunday lunchtime, way back. There he is still, sitting at one of those tables with fixed benches, on a summer morning, wearing a dark-green short-sleeved shirt, hair flopping, holding a pint mug which he waves around, in full flow about this new project.

  “Roads,” he says. “Lost roads. Prehistoric, Roman, cattle roads. An entire series. Canals and railways have been done to death. The Lost Roads of Britain—how about that!”

  Oliver is present. The other half of the firm—friend, crony, partner. He is silent, in this clip from that time. He sits there, also with beer mug in hand, in quizzical silence. Not surprising—Nick in full enthusiastic spate was not to be stemmed. Sensible, pragmatic Oliver, who looks at the bottom line and deals with the nuts and bolts of the business, leaving editorial flair to Nick. Good old Oliver. Dear Oliver, Elaine sometimes felt, when Nick was being especially wayward or perverse, when he was in obsessive pursuit of some probably unviable plan. For Oliver was there then to provide reassurance and solace and to suggest that it will all blow over, like as not, and if it doesn’t, well, we’ll get it sorted out. Sometimes the shifty thought used to come that she might be better off married to Oliver, and, occasionally, when being counseled by Oliver, she was distinctly stirred. But Oliver would never betray his friend, not by thought, word, or deed. And in the last resort, Elaine loved Nick, didn’t she?

  “You’re not listening, sweetie,” he is saying, still waving the beer mug, looking directly at her. “You’re thinking about some blessed garden. I want you to think about roads.”

  She is past that pub now and the Nick of then is effaced by the Nick of today, who may or may not be at home, and if he is, she thinks irritably, you can take it as read that it will not have occurred to him that he might check the fridge and make a trip to the supermarket. Not a bit of it. He will have spent the day swanning around—reading the papers, playing with the Internet, conceivably writing a few words of a review or one of his hack travel pieces—that is, if he has any work to hand at the moment, which he probably has not. While Elaine has driven a hundred miles and spent four hours acting with constraint and civility in the face of a couple of morons.

  She goes through the village. She turns off onto the side road. The old house had neighbors. The new house—well, the new house of the last ten years—is elegantly isolated, folded into a particularly appealing valley, complete with stream and woodland. They had eyed it for years, she and Nick: a little Georgian building with several acres of grounds that Elaine itched to get her hands on. And then it came up for sale. She had commissions pouring in, she was buzzing with schemes; the time was ripe to take a risk.

  In ten years, a garden matures. Those covetable grounds are now Elaine’s most prized creation. It is young, as yet; the pleached-lime walk is a mere stripling, the ginkgos have to grow, there is infilling to be done and mistakes to be rectified. And she would make no majestic claims for it; this is not Hadspen or Tintinhull or Barrington Court. But it is a statement of her taste and talent, it bears her signature, it is her showcase.

  Past six, now swinging into the circular driveway in front of the house, she sees that everyone has gone home. Only Nick’s Golf is parked there. During the day, there is quite a lineup of cars. Sonia, Elaine’s personal assistant, drives from her home ten miles away. Three times a week there is Liz, who deals with the paperwork Sonia hasn’t time for. The red pickup belongs to Jim, who does the heavy garden work. And then there are the relays of horticultural students serving their apprenticeship in the workshop of a master, just as Elaine herself once did. The current apprentice is Pam, who is a little northern butterball, sturdy as an ox, and exuberantly sociable, which makes her good front-of-house material on Saturdays, when the garden is open to the public. Then, all hands are needed to patrol the grounds and to man the sales area, where plants are on offer, along with a judicious selection of garden implements, seeds, gift-shop paraphernalia, and books—not least a complete display of Elaine’s own publications. On those days, the paddock next to the driveway becomes the visitors’ car park. Sometimes Elaine herself is on hand in the garden to be graciously responsive to queries and compliments. Initially, she found this stimulating and good for the ego. Nowadays, she gets rather tired of being asked if this or that is an annual or a perennial, and how to prune a rose. She tends to retreat to the house and leave customer relations to the students, who enjoy it.

  When she first started opening the garden, three years ago, the idea was that Nick would come into his own. Nick, after all, is nothing if not sociable and enthusiastic. The enthusiasm could surely be channeled into visitor reception and salesmanship, or at the very least, car-park duties. And indeed, to begin with Nick was all compliance. He hung about the terraces, treating middle-aged women to dollops of boyish charm; he swept little parties off to the stream garden to display the primulas; he manned the till in the shop and added everything up wrong, but nobody minded because he was so patently a beguiling amateur. Jim took over the car park after Nick directed a BMW into the boggy bit at the bottom, where it stuck fast. And in due course Nick’s commitment to Saturdays withered and died. Elaine remonstrated, tight-lipped. “Sweetie, they keep asking me what this is called or whether that will grow on acid soil, and I haven’t got the foggiest idea. The girls do it much better. And we all know I can’t do money, don’t we?”

  Oh yes, she knows that. You cannot successfully keep a small publishing house afloat without a degree of business acumen. You must be able to gauge what will sell and what will not; you need to balance risk and costs and profit margins. You require a certain facility with figures, an aspect of the activity that Nick found distinctly tiresome. He tended to avert his eyes, for the most part. When Hammond & Watson eventually crashed, despite Oliver’s best efforts, the warehouse was full of unsold stock, authors and suppliers were owed, and what had started out as an enterprising small imprint with a name for topographical and travel writing had become a liability.

  It took a year to sort out the mess. Nick was chastened but buoyant. Never mind. It was good while it lasted. And he had plenty of useful contacts now, lots he could do in travel journalism, stuff for the Sundays, maybe guidebooks, that sort of thing: “Listen, Oliver, what if we—”

  “No,” said Oliver. “Count me out, this time round. No hard feelings. We had a run for our money.”

  To Elaine, Oliver said, “Sorry. I should have been able to keep things under control. I feel I’ve let yo
u down.”

  Since when, she had thought, has anyone kept Nick under control? I too should have seen the red light. From now on, there will be changes. She had felt older, harder, and, in some odd way, exhilarated.

  She collects her papers and clipboard from the back of the car. She goes into the house.

  Windows open to the summer evening. Music filtering from somewhere. Nick is in the conservatory with a drink in his hand and something emollient on the stereo. After his taxing day.

  Elaine goes into the office. Sonia has left a pile of letters for her to sign. There is another tray of letters and faxes that she must read. She gathers these up. She puts her notes from today into the appropriate file.

  In the kitchen, Pam and Jim have both left scrawled messages on the blackboard. Pam has finished tidying up the long border, but needs instructions about the box hedging and those fuchsia cuttings. Jim says the tractor mower has packed up again; he’s called in the mechanic and let’s hope he comes in time to get the grass done by Saturday.

  Elaine walks through into the conservatory, where the plumbago is a sight to behold. Beyond, the garden is glorious in the evening sunshine. Elaine is able to pay only token respect; her head is jangling from her day and her focus is on Nick, positioned precisely as she had anticipated. He has not heard her enter, but catches sight of her as she sits down.

  “Hi! You’re back. I didn’t realize.”

  “Naturally not. Do you think you could turn the music down a notch?” She starts to go through the mail.

  Nick does so. He gets up to refill his glass, then has a sudden thought. “Drink?”

  She nods.

  “We’re out of that nice Australian white you got. Let’s get some more.”

  “Thank you for reminding me,” says Elaine.

  The touch of frost in the air is apparent to Nick. He gives her a wary glance. “Poll rang. Says she’ll call back.”

  “Mmn.”

  Nick is now cheerfully concerned. “Don’t do all that wretched paperwork now, sweetie. Relax. Enjoy this gorgeous evening. Tell you what, why don’t I knock us up an omelette and a salad later on and then you needn’t bother cooking?”

  “Yes, why don’t you . . .” says Elaine. She returns to her letters.

  Nick’s concern hovers in silence for a while. He gives her a furtive glance. “Pesky clients?” he asks, with professional solicitude.

  “Many clients are pesky, as you put it. If I let that bother me I’d soon go out of business.”

  Nick changes tack. There is an element of self-preservation here.

  “I’ve had someone called a fact-checker on my back today. Nitpicking away about could I verify this, and give a reference for that. Remember that piece I did for the New York Times travel magazine?”

  “And could you?”

  “Well, here and there I could,” says Nick. “But, I mean—what a sweat! On and on she went—‘Now can we look at paragraph two on galley three—’”

  “An appalling imposition.” Elaine’s tone is level, inscrutable. She picks up another letter from the pile.

  Nick’s strategy is not working out quite as intended: the establishment of his own demanding agenda.

  “And of course I was wanting to get to the library. I need stuff on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I’m really excited about this book project.”

  Elaine perceives that Nick will probably not be invited to contribute to the New York Times travel magazine again. His relationships with commissioning editors are frequently short-lived: he finds deadlines offensive and briefings tiresome. The book project will remain a gleam in his eye, which is no doubt just as well, since it is unlikely to thrill publishers, there being certainly a swathe of works already on Isambard Kingdom Brunel far superior to any contribution Nick might make.

  Occasionally, over the years, she has asked herself if she should feel sorry for Nick. But Nick does not invite sympathy, because clearly he does not feel that there is any problem. When one area of activity sputters to extinction, he is blithely accepting: “Actually, it was a bit of a bore anyway, and I’ve got a rather good idea. . . .” Enthusiasm becomes itself an occupation. “What one should be getting into nowadays is desktop publishing. . . . I’ve got this marvelous scheme for up-market canal-boat holidays for rich Americans. . . . The really interesting thing would be to set up a travelers’ consultation service. . . .” Once in a while, such schemes get beyond the stage of exuberant speculation, and Nick goes in tentative search of the necessary funding. But potential backers are irritatingly uncompliant. They start asking for something called a Business Plan, which has Nick running for cover. The project in question ceases to be a preoccupation, it melts into obscurity, he retreats into writing the occasional letter soliciting a book review. He becomes immersed in transitory interests. His comings and goings are unpredictable; there is always some pressing need, some undefined engagement. But he appears to be a man at ease with himself and with the world. This is hardly a case for sympathy.

  Elaine has been married to Nick for nearly thirty-two years. When she looks at Polly, their daughter’s firm assertive presence seems to be the expression of that expanse of time. She cannot now conceive of a world in which there was not Polly, and she cannot well remember a life without Nick. But these days it is Polly who is the most inevitable development. Polly is ineluctable; Polly of today—capable, positive, employed. Polly is a Web designer—“a here-and-now sort of job,” as she herself describes it—and seems to Elaine to have been ever thus: brisk, busy, slim, trim, an adult who has somehow entirely absorbed all her former selves. Elaine has to search for the baby, the child, the adolescent. Nick, on the other hand, Nick, who has not much changed, who is simply a weathered version of his younger self—Nick sometimes appears to Elaine to be oddly fortuitous.

  From time to time she wonders how she came by Nick. Why is she with Nick rather than with someone quite other? Well—because we pair off with the person we come across when the time is right. The young are like dogs on heat. In your twenties, when the hormones are roaring, it could be pretty well anyone. That someone else who is also currently available, not otherwise committed, ready to pair-bond. Oh, love comes into it—but love is an opportunist. Love can be expedient.

  There was Nick, when Elaine was twenty-six. There he was, always the animated center of any group, always good-humored, always game for any proposition, gleaming with good health and well-being. In other species, choice of a mate concentrates upon physical attributes—the indicators of good genes. Nick signaled good genes, if you went by surface appearances. And Polly does have his height, his good facial bones, his teeth that do not decay. But Polly, thanks be, does not have his lack of application, his idleness, his capacity for diversion. Polly is focused, in the language of her day and of her trade.

  A question of timely collision. The two of you being in the same place at the same moment. The intersection of trajectories. The conjunction of Nick and Elaine took place during the 1960s, a good time in which to be young, according to legend. It now seems to Elaine that Nick was more resolutely young than ever she was. Even at the time, she felt herself to be on the margins of progressive action, reading about it in magazines, observing posses of contemporaries who had clearly got it right. And, when first she met Nick, he was a member of just such a posse: the center of attention at some party where she was a more tentative bystander. But he had noticed her, he had sought her out—this appealing, entertaining, personable man, two years younger than she was but never mind. “Maybe he likes mother figures,” a friend had joked, causing offense. Elaine had been cautious; for months their association had been spasmodic, undefined. And then something habitual had crept into it, and an unstated assumption that this was probably permanent. Over a pub lunch one day he said, “You know, honestly, we should get married, we really should.” Thus had she come by Nick.

  Nick has not matured well. Sometimes Elaine feels that he has not matured at all. Behavior that is engaging in someone of twe
nty-five becomes less so at forty, let alone at fifty-eight. Where once she was beguiled, she has for many years been exasperated, though exasperated in the tempered, low-key way of longstanding acceptance. It could be worse, she has thought: he could be a drunk, or a crook, or a philanderer. He is merely feckless, and short on judgment.

  He is on the sidelines of her life, in a crucial sense. She shares a bed with him at night, she eats a certain number of meals in his company, but he is excluded from the onward rush of things. He is not part of the faxes and phone calls, the consultations with Sonia, with Jim, with the gardening apprentices, the juggling of time and energy. He knows little of her cross-country journeys to client meetings or the production process of a book. “You’re going where?” he says. “Warwick? You should look at the canal near there. Longest flight of locks in the country—amazing!” He steers clear of the books after an unwise surge of interest a few years ago: “You know, we could do these ourselves. I could. Desktop publishing. Cut out the middleman. Simple . . . OK, OK . . . it was just an idea. . . . Forget it.”

  Oh no, she had thought. No way. I’ve been there once. Not again. And this is my operation—books and all.

  The sun is going down. The evening light has intensified over the garden. Elaine spares a moment for an appreciative look. Next year, some late tulips down by the yew hedge would be a good idea, to light up that dark corner. She returns to the letters. Nearly done now, sorted into two piles—one for Sonia to deal with and another with those to which she must draft a personal reply. An invitation to speak at a literary festival; yes to that—books will be sold and it is useful publicity. Would she attend the end-of-year prize-giving at a horticultural college as principal guest? Probably—for similar reasons. Could she please visit the garden of a couple in Shropshire (“. . . a bit out of your way, we realize, but we’d love to put you up for the night . . .”) who have written four pages about their tedious planting theories and probably have no conception of her consultation fee, or indeed that such a thing is appropriate: over to Sonia. Faxes from clients; faxes from contractors; a blizzard of promotional material that must be glanced through at the very least, in case there is something she should know about.