The Photograph

by Penelope Lively

  But it was, now.

  No one else must know: that was paramount. He knew, who had no wish to, but there must be no others. Above all, not Elaine. Above all, not Glyn Peters—a man who struck Oliver as being quite likely to come charging in with a horsewhip.

  The matter was never raised again between him and Nick. Except that once, tacitly. The business with the photograph. That had been his warning shot. Nothing said. Just that silent indication: Watch it, stop it. And, eventually, he assumed, that was just what had come about. It ended, as these things do.

  Oh well . . . long out of the way, all that, thinks Oliver. Laid to rest, thanks be. No harm done, in the end.

  “I’m off out,” says Sandra. “I’ve got to go to the bank. Mind the shop for half an hour, will you?”

  And she is gone. Oliver makes himself a cup of coffee. He yawns. He is drifting rather this morning—he will need to go over those pages carefully. He stares out of the window for a moment, remembers that call. He picks up the phone.

  “Oh—Glyn? Oliver Watson here, returning your call.”

  Elaine and Nick

  Nick goes to a health club these days. This is on account of ick goes to a health club these days. This is on account of his paunch, which has been causing him disquiet. He is also disturbed about his bald patch, and while he is aware that visits to the health club will not do much for that, he feels that all the same there may be some general knock-on effect. Nick cannot understand how he has come to be fifty-eight. This is ridiculous, frankly. Time has been stalking him, but the thing to do was to give it the cold shoulder, pay no attention. And now suddenly it has reached out and clobbered him. He does not care for what he sees in the mirror; he is pained and affronted.

  At the health club, Nick jogs and cycles and pumps. He plows up and down the gold-dappled blue waters of the pool. He is bored to desperation while doing this, and the jogging and pumping make him ache, but he is satisfied with his own strength of mind. He weighs himself frequently, finds that he can definitely chalk up the loss of two and a half pounds, and buys a new pair of jeans to celebrate the fact. Elaine has made it plain that she thinks men of his age should not be wearing jeans, which is unkind, he feels; why should he give up the habit of a lifetime?

  The boredom of the health club is somewhat tempered by idle observation of those around him. Most are much younger—in their twenties or thirties. Many of the girls are tattooed—a butterfly on the shoulder, a spray of leaves on the thigh, a star on the ankle. To pass the time, Nick makes a mental inventory of these tattoos, which means he needs to look quite closely at the girls, though he is careful to do so discreetly, knowing how easy it is for men to be misconstrued these days. He has listed clover leaves, and ivy and daisies, and a single rose. He got a fleeting glimpse once of a dragon round the midriff, which needs a confirmatory sighting. The girls themselves are of course pleasing, though that is about as far as it goes. He can honestly say that while there is the odd frisson of sexual interest, he is not tempted. Occasionally, he exchanges a few words with one of them in the cafeteria—Could I take that paper if you’ve done with it? Were you wanting this chair?—and the girl will be polite enough, though not what you might call encouraging. In transitory glum moments, Nick wonders if he is emasculated by the paunch and the bald patch.

  But Nick is not constitutionally glum, never has been.

  All his life, he has woken up each day with a renewed surge of interest. When he looks back—which in fact he does not much do—he has this gratifying sense of busyness, of teeming schemes and projects, of some unquenchable source of stimulation. Admittedly, plenty of schemes and projects never came to fruition, and indeed he has forgotten now what most of them were, but it is the general effect that counts. He has never been bored—or, if he has, he has quickly sidestepped. Which is why he is proud of his tenacity at the health club.

  And he has plenty still to do. He has two or three ideas on the go that just need some more research. A gazetteer of eighteenth-century follies; the definitive series on hill walking; a photographic survey of World War II pillboxes. Truth to tell, it is a blessing that with Elaine doing so well for years now the pressure is off, he can take his time, play around with any new inspiration, and look really carefully at what might be involved. And there’s no need to do too much hack stuff, where the money, to be honest, is neither here nor there. Quite a good idea to keep one’s hand in with the odd piece of journalism, but no point in becoming a slave to it.

  Her tone of voice sets an alarm bell ringing, but only a muted one. This matter of upgrading his car? Probably. Nothing that can’t be sorted, if he goes about it in the right way.

  No, he doesn’t regret those days so very much. The time since has been something of a liberation, Nick now realizes. He has been able to give proper consideration to a project, drop it if it seems likely to become a bore in the end, instead of being obliged to plunge ahead because a publishing house must publish, after all. And then sometimes one got tired of the book or the series in midstream. No, he can take things as they come—do background work on some idea when he feels inspired, and accept fallow periods when nothing much springs to mind, but that’s not so bad because there are always plenty of agreeable ways of passing the time. He is aware that Elaine gets a bit uptight about this way of doing things, but it is so shortsighted of her. As he has tried to explain—but she never quite seems to get the point—you are actually much more productive if you pace yourself. He had never realized that was the case back in the Hammond & Watson days, when he used to be scurrying around like some demented ant—day in, day out. Of course, Elaine’s own style is one of relentless work. He’s always telling her she should let up a bit, take a few days off. But no—if it’s not client meetings and site visits, it’s paperwork with Sonia or sussing out some new supplier. And when she’s not doing any of that, she’s out in the garden, fossicking away.

  “Now. I’m away tonight.”

  Just occasionally, Nick looks at Elaine and is disconcerted. He gets this odd feeling that she is someone else, a person he doesn’t know all that well. Which is absurd; she is the woman with whom he has been getting into bed every night—well, most nights, admittedly Elaine is elsewhere rather more often nowadays—for God knows how many years. How long have they been married? He’d need to work that one out. And of course this is nonsense—Elaine is as she ever was, just older. But sometimes this stranger glances across the table at him.

  She’s in the top league now, it seems, in her trade. There’s talk of a lecture tour in the States, and she’s designing a garden for next year’s Chelsea Flower Show. She’s busy. Which means that she is not always as attentive to what Nick may be saying or doing as she once was. Maybe that accounts for the sense of alienation. But it’s not a problem.

  Nick has always given problems a wide berth. Problems should not be what life is about. When running a business, you hire someone else to deal with nuts and bolts, as good old Oliver did. Nick is always saying to Elaine that she should pass on much more to Sonia than she does, or bring in some troubleshooter. And, above all, you never allow yourself to get rattled if things aren’t working out the way they should. Just move on. Cut your losses and forget about it.

  This is the best policy for personal life also, Nick reckons. The snag is that other people tend to ambush you, from time to time. They create difficulties. They misunderstand, they misinterpret. It has to be said that Elaine has a tendency in that direction. Some small thing can be absurdly inflated, an obstacle found where there need be none. Such as this nonsense about the car.

  He follows her. Really, this is getting a bit out of hand.

  Nick is definitely fond of Elaine. Absolutely no question about that. He cannot imagine being married to anyone else. Time was—and he is prepared to admit this—he used to look around a bit, once in a while. But everyone does that when they’re younger, don’t they? There’s nothing of that kind now, hasn’t been for many a year. Elaine suits him nicely. Th
eir sex life has rather gone off the boil, but presumably that’s true of anyone of their age. Though Elaine of course is a touch older than he is, not that he’s ever made anything of that.

  Nick can’t quite remember how he and Elaine came to get married. No wonder he’s not certain how long ago it was anyway. An awful lot of years, that’s for sure. He’s never gone in for mulling over the past. What’s done is done. You can’t change what’s happened, so why keep hauling it out and looking at it? And he has never wished himself not married to Elaine; just occasionally it has been therapeutic to . . . look outside a bit. Back when he met her there was such a crowd of people about, melded now into an impressionistic blur. Lots of girls. Somehow it was Elaine he married rather than someone else, and he is inclined to feel that that has been nothing but a blessing. All right, she can be edgy at times, such as right now, but one can handle that. And she has always kept things running—he is absolutely prepared to hand it to her there, if it weren’t for the way she has got her own business off the ground they might well be in a bit of a pickle at this point. No, Elaine deserves all credit, no question. If she gets rather fraught on occasion, well, that’s understandable. She’s under a fair bit of pressure, and the thing is to be understanding and accommodating.

  “We’re not talking about your car.”

  It has to be said that Elaine can be just a mite governessy. Ever has been—and getting more so, Nick fears. One is going to have to be tolerant. It was never a good idea to make a stand when she got ratty about something quite trivial—best just to back off and, with any luck, it would blow over. In the past, he could always placate her, talk her down, be especially friendly and helpful and all that. Lately, this approach somehow doesn’t seem to cut so much ice. The best thing is just to keep his head down, go his own way, which is, after all, what he has always done, and take care not to get into antagonistic situations. Elaine likes to run a tight ship, she likes to know what’s going on around her, but nowadays she is pretty well taken up with the business, and frankly there’s no need for her to be bothered about Nick’s day-to-day arrangements. It would be a lot more sensible if there were some more fluid system over cash flow, and then he wouldn’t need to involve her when something crops up like this matter of the car. He’s suggested this more than once, but Elaine can be funny when it comes to money. Distinctly shirty.

  Elaine is silent. Nick waits. Back in the house, the phone rings, stops. Sonia has picked it up. Outside, Jim rides the tractor mower to and fro, to and fro.

  “So the mower’s running OK now . . .” says Nick.

  When Elaine comes on all heavy like this, the thing is to play it down. Nick does not like rows. In fact, he never has rows—not with anyone. If a row situation threatens, he somehow just is not there anymore. This technique has worked with Elaine, up to a point. It is difficult for anyone to get satisfactorily confrontational with someone who will not confront back. Nick is aware that he is rather skillful at marital peacekeeping, at the avoidance of overt hostility, at the adroit use of diplomatic initiatives. On occasion, he has wondered if he ought not to be exploiting this experience, this facility. When lifestyle publications became a boom industry, he thought of stepping in with a really definitive book on married life from the man’s point of view. With a pushy title—How to Stay Married, that sort of thing. A combination of wry humor with practicality. And a literary slant as well—cite some famous abiding marriages and look at the ups and downs. D. H. Lawrence and what’s-her-name. Tennyson was married for donkey’s years, wasn’t he? Dickens—no, that went off the rails. One would have to get it all up, but that could be quite amusing. In fact, the thing was definitely a promising idea, but somehow it was a project he had never felt able to run past Elaine. Normally he gave her a progress report on any scheme he was working on—not that there was ever very much of a comeback, not much constructive input from her, put it that way. Sometimes you could even feel that she wasn’t giving the sort of attention that she should be. Anyway, he’d somehow had this sense that she wouldn’t really get the point of the marriage-book idea, so it was never mentioned and eventually he’d abandoned it. It was something one could always pick up again, if there was nothing much else in mind.

  But Nick knows that he is sensitive to the coded language of married life. He can negotiate. And so he is not going to allow whatever is at issue just now to get out of hand. Easy does it.

  So why, all of a sudden . . . ?

  There is this heave of the gut. The room seems to swing a little. The troop of Kaths is quite gone. It is just him and Elaine, sitting there in the conservatory, with the tractor mower going up and down outside, a bee buzzing in the blue plumbago. Everything is quite real and precise, unfortunately. It is Tuesday morning, about half past ten. He should be on his way to the health club. Instead, he is here, with a sick feeling in his stomach.

  What is going on? Not . . . Surely she can’t have . . . How could . . . ?

  Get a grip. Take control. This is bad, but it is nothing that cannot be contained, like everything else. Naturally Elaine is upset; she has had a shock. It will take a while for her to digest this; he is going to need all his resources.

  “I don’t want to know,” says Elaine. “I don’t want to know when, or where, or for how long. It’s enough that it was.”

  “Listen,” he says. “It was a flash in the pan. A silly, idiotic, passing thing. It was all over, long ago. Long before she—”

  “No doubt.”

  “It makes absolutely no difference to us,” he says. “Neither then nor now. It was a stupid mistake. Kath herself would say that. Believe me. I know she would.”

  “Very likely.”

  The bee is silent. Jim and the tractor mower have gone. The ground is steady, the room no longer rocks, but it feels alien. Everything is just the same, but not the same at all.

  “I want you to go,” says Elaine.

  He gazes in total disbelief. “Go where?”

  “That is entirely up to you. Away from here. Away from this house.”

  He is about to say, “But this is my house,” when he remembers that it is not. It is Elaine’s house. Elaine put down the deposit, Elaine pays the mortgage.

  “So long as you are here,” says Elaine, “I shall be reminded of this every time I look at you. I shall have all the feelings that I am having at the moment. And I don’t propose to remain in this condition for the foreseeable future. I have better things to do.”

  “But I live here,” says Nick.

  “At the moment.”

  Stay cool, that’s the thing. Sweet reason. Elaine is a reasonable woman. She must see that this is . . . exaggerated. Of course it’s shaken her up, of course she’s angry. She has every right.

  “You apparently have been doing so for years, quite comfortably,” says Elaine. “Personally, I don’t feel so confident about that.”

  Back in the house the phone rings again. It stops. Nick sees Elaine shoot a glance at her watch.

  “Honestly, sweetie,” he says. “This is all a bit over the top. What we need to do is wind down, sleep on it, and have a little talk in a few days’ time.”

  Elaine gets up. “In a few days’ time you won’t be here,” she says. “I’m off shortly. I’ll be back late tomorrow afternoon, and I expect to find you gone. Money is being paid into your account, and will be each month. Enough to rent a place and meet modest living expenses. Take your car. And your books. We can sort out what else belongs to you at some later point.”

  And she goes. Outside, Jim is back with the tractor mower. The bee is joined by a friend. The day marches on.

  Glyn and Oliver

  Bloody hell? What a mess. After all this time. Just because of a wretched photograph.

  Oliver feels trapped. Here he is in his own familiar pub along the road from the office, and nothing is as it should be. Instead of a pint and a quiet half hour with the newspaper, he is eyeball-to-eyeball with Glyn Peters. The pint is there, but he is not enjoying it. Gly
n is a heavy presence, grilling him. He leans insistently across the low shiny round table, moving beer mats with one finger. He fixes Oliver with those glittery dark-brown eyes.

  “What I need to know—” he says.

  You’d be a damn sight better off not knowing, thinks Oliver. Just leave it alone. Nothing to be done about it now. All over with. And, no, I don’t know how long it went on for and I don’t want to know and nor should you. It’s nothing to do with me, never was. Anyone would think I was some sort of accessory to the crime.

  “Why did you photograph them?” demands Glyn.

  For heaven’s sake! “Look, I didn’t see until after I got the prints. I just snapped the whole group, standing there chatting to each other. I hadn’t noticed that Kath and Nick were—” He shrugs.

  And when you did, thinks Glyn, you got into a right old panic, didn’t you? Your business chum and his sister-in-law. And you all matey with everyone—always in and out of the house . . .

  Years since he set eyes on Oliver Watson. The man much the same as ever—that slightly apologetic manner, self-deprecation tinged with complacency. Running some sort of small printing outfit these days, it seems. Little office with computers. Lady who appears to be rather more than an assistant, taking a distinct interest in one’s arrival. Oliver rather keen to get them both off the premises sharpish: “Glyn Peters—Sandra Chalcott. Sandra’s my partner. We’ll push off to the local, shall we, and have a chat there?”

  “How did you find me?” Oliver inquires. “Given that we’ve rather lost touch?”

  “Elaine.”

  “You’ve told Elaine!”

  “I needed to establish certain facts. There was no alternative.” Glyn is impatient rather than defensive.