The Photograph

by Penelope Lively

  “Nick?” says Oliver, after a moment.

  “That’s up to Elaine. I am frankly not much interested in Nick.”

  Oliver takes a swig of beer, which does nothing for him. He wishes he were back in the office. He wishes Glyn were anywhere but here. He is irritated, and also faintly apprehensive. There is something evangelical about Glyn’s approach to this, the sinister evangelism of the obsessed.

  Glyn hammers on. “You must have seen a good deal of Kath, over the years?”

  “Well . . . yes. She was often around.” What is this leading up to? Good grief . . . is he going to accuse me of having it off with her too?

  Glyn leans back in his chair. He places his fingers tip-to-tip, rests his chin on them, becomes reflective and confidential. “Let me tell you, this revelation has stopped me in my tracks. You must understand that. I am confronted with . . . an unreliability about my own past. My past with Kath. I am not interested in recriminations. My concern is purely forensic. Do you follow me?”

  “Not really,” says Oliver.

  “I want to know if Kath was in the habit of infidelity. I want to know about her.”

  Oliver is shocked. But you were married to her, for Christ’s sake, he wants to say. It’s a bit late in the day to start talking like this.

  Glyn finishes his beer, rises, gestures at Oliver. “Drink up.”

  “Actually, I won’t have another,” says Oliver. “I’ve got an afternoon’s work to do.” But Glyn has ignored him, and is already heading for the bar.

  When he returns he is in full flow before he has sat down. “I have to look at this as I would at any other major piece of research. Every clue must be followed up. . . . I have to take a detached view, lay everything out for inspection, pay attention to even the most marginal pieces of information. . . .” Isolated phrases reach over, rising above the background buzz of the pub; Oliver wears an attentive expression, and allows himself to drift. What’s with the man? Was he always like this? Well, yes—somewhat. And the voice—great delivery. Generations of Welsh preachers behind that. “Method, patience. You start out with an open mind, prepared for whatever may turn up. Which doesn’t mean that you don’t follow a hunch, do you see? Now, seeking you out may take me nowhere, but it was worth doing. Kath is now my area of study—”

  “But she’s not an area,” Oliver interrupts, goaded. “She’s a woman. Was.”

  Glyn jolts to a halt. He stares. Annoyed, it would seem. But the mood switches. “Point taken,” he says. “That’s the whole trouble, isn’t it?”

  Oliver looks down into his unwelcome second pint. No answer to that one.

  “So tell me, then. Was she known for this kind of thing?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Before she married me she had . . . admirers. Par for the course.”

  “Quite,” Oliver agrees.

  “I’m concerned with a subsequent pattern of behavior.”

  Oliver is finding it hard to believe that this conversation is taking place. He surveys the room. He eyes other pairs of men, presumably having a comfortable postmortem on some business assignment, or talking politics or sport or last night’s television. While he is landed with the manic concerns of a bloke he thought he no longer knew.

  “You must have had a general impression about her, as a person.”

  No comment required, it would seem.

  “Did you know her friends?”

  Enough, thinks Oliver. “Look,” he says. “Kath is . . . dead. Not here. Can’t put up any sort of defense or explanation. Is this fair?”

  Glyn spreads his hands. “But that is the whole point about the dead. Precisely. They are unaffected. Untouchable. Beyond reach. The rest of us are still flailing around trying to make sense of things. Addicts like myself choose to do so as a way of life.”

  “Well,” says Oliver. “That’s your view. Not mine, I have to say.”

  Glyn takes stock. This is not going anywhere. Impossible to get one’s point across. Stonewalling—that’s what the man is at. Why? What’s his agenda? Is there something he knows? If so, he’s been pretty quick on his feet. Had no idea what I wanted to see him about until half an hour ago. Whatever . . . no point in spinning this out.

  He smiles—genial, equable. “And I respect your position. But I’m sure you appreciate that I’ve been somewhat thrown by this.”

  Actually, Oliver does. At least, at this moment he does. It must indeed have been a slap in the face. He manages a wan reciprocating grin.

  Glyn downs his beer. “Well—good to have met up again after all this time. Pity it had to be about this.”

  Oliver mumbles some similar sentiment.

  They get up and move towards the door. Outside, Glyn pauses. “The other couple—on that occasion. Woman called Mary Packard, I believe. Friend of yours?”

  Oliver shakes his head, wanting to make a bolt for the office.

  “Artist of some kind, is that right?”

  “Potter,” says Oliver desperately. “Lived in Winchcombe.” Oh, treachery. But what is Mary Packard to him? Anything to have done with this. “Have to dash,” he says. “Client due shortly. Good to see you.”

  Polly

  Kath! I can’t believe all this is about Kath.

  I mean, basically she was just such an amazingly nice person. I adored her. So possibly I’m prejudiced, but that’s how she was for me. I thought she was wonderful. Of course, that rather went down like a lead balloon with Mum. She and Mum . . . Oh well, old history now. Except that apparently nothing is. But it was all more on Mum’s side, you know. Always Mum being uptight and critical, and Kath going her own sweet way. I suppose that was the problem—Kath just carried on regardless and other people were left to look on, and they didn’t always look kindly. Though what business it was of theirs, frankly . . . I mean, Kath just lived life to the full and what’s wrong with that, say I?

  She was so attractive. That face. And the way she moved and sat and stood—you always found yourself watching her. Not that she was the slightest bit vain, never bothered about clothes or hair—well, she didn’t need to, but the point is she never realized she didn’t need to. Just didn’t much care. Of course you can only be like that if you are that compelling, so I suppose in a way she did know, kind of unconsciously—it comes full circle.

  But she wasn’t full of self-confidence—not a bit. It was more that she was . . . well, she had some kind of glow. And dash— always off somewhere, meeting someone, jumping in the car. She didn’t hang around. Almost as though she didn’t dare to, when one thinks about it. As though if she stopped, something would catch up with her. Anyway, “self-confident” isn’t the term—definitely not. But she must have known the effect she had. Men, after all . . . It was more as though that just didn’t have any effect on her. Or any sort of ego-boosting effect. She didn’t really seem to have an ego, come to think of it. Self-centered she was not, if that’s compatible with always doing pretty much what you want. Hmm . . . more complicated than one reckons.

  I remember when my first boyfriend dumped me, when I was at college. What? Oh yes, definitely he was a rat. Hey—are you having a go at me? Well, good, then. Anyway, it was Kath’s shoulder I wept on, of course, rather than Mum’s. Kath said, “That’s what they do.” And sort of shrugged, with that little odd smile. And I remember I said, “I bet no one’s ever dumped you.” And she thought for a moment and she said: “Not as such, I suppose, but there’s other ways of going about it.” I can still hear her saying that. I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t now. Women dump too? Well, of course. Too right they do. I’m not talking general theory, I’m talking Kath, do you mind? And then she took me out shopping and we bought me a crazy ridiculous dress I’d never have bought on my own and had an extravagant lunch in an Italian place. That was Kath all over—turn your back on life’s glitches, go out, go away, ring up a friend.

  Sort of thing that made Mum go all tight-lipped. Not Mum’s style, you see. There was something tortoise
-and-hare about Mum and Kath. Oh, but it’s the tortoise that wins, isn’t it? Hmm . . . food for thought there. Not that it was a race, or even the usual sort of sisterly-rivalry stuff. Frankly, they never even seemed like sisters. But there was some kind of eerie connection. Umbilical cord—no, that’s not right, but you know what I mean. I suppose it’s always like that, with siblings. I wouldn’t know, not having any.

  When I was little, Kath was where the fun was at, whenever she came to our house, always unexpected, out of the blue. Bringing lovely silly presents that I’ve never forgotten—paper flowers that opened in water, and a kite like a dragon, and a ginger kitten that just about had Mum hitting the roof. She made up games that we played, and she read me stories, and she did my hair in funky styles, and she discovered face-painting for kids before everyone else was doing it. When she walked in the door it was suddenly like it was Christmas, or a birthday.

  It’s funny she never had children of her own. She and Glyn. Mind, I can’t imagine Glyn with children. Doubt if he wanted any. It wasn’t something she ever talked about. I wonder . . . Well, whatever reason she didn’t, she didn’t.

  You can imagine not wanting children? Oh, you can, can you? I see.

  Thinking about Kath, I suppose one thing that sticks out is that she never worked. Not properly, that is. I mean, for most people—for practically everyone—work is what you are, in a sense. What you have to do, day in, day out, decides everything else. How much money you’ve got and therefore how you can live. And it either builds you up or grinds you down, doesn’t it? Personally, I consider myself pretty lucky, work-wise. I like it. I get paid not too badly for doing something I don’t at all mind doing. And I get an odd sort of kick out of knowing that what I’m doing is absolutely a here-and-now sort of thing. A today kind of job. I mean, if you’d said to someone twenty years ago, She’s a Web designer, they’d have gone: Eh? They’d have been thinking crochet work. It’s like operating the spinning jenny at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—or stoking the first steam engine or whatever. Nobody’s done this before, I say to myself. Nobody’s spent their days sitting in front of a box with a glowing window, flicking images around. What I’m doing is precisely where the human race is at, today.

  OK, laugh. I knew it was pretentious when I said it. Oh—funny—right.

  No, you’re not. Excuse me, but no way is estate agent cutting-edge stuff. Estate agents have been around since the Ark. There’d have been an estate agent on Mount Ararat, telling Noah this was a prime development site. Sorry, Dan.

  Don’t worry, you’ll always make lots more money than I do. But I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else. It beats stoking engines any day—if this is the new technical revolution, then we slave workers have certainly got it easier this time round. In fact, the slave workers are somewhere else now, aren’t they? They’re out there mending the roads and carting rubbish and heaving bricks, like they always were. Of course, it helps to have had an education a cut above the average. Three years at college and all that. I was never going to end up on the checkout at Tesco, whatever.

  Kath. I’ve got right away from Kath. Her not working. Or not working in any serious sense. Just stuff she’d do for a few weeks or months and then pack it in—temping with a publisher, front-of-house girl in an art gallery. God knows how she managed, income-wise. But she never went in for mortgages or rent either. She just seemed to perch—here, there, and everywhere. Mum was always fussing because she didn’t know her address.

  No, actually some guy was not paying the bills. You’re quite wrong there. Not that there weren’t plenty who’d have been glad to. There was always someone hanging around. But Kath wasn’t one for commitment, or at least not for a long time. Frankly, I think she had a problem.

  Excuse me, Dan, but you are so wrong. Of course a person has a problem if they apparently can’t commit themselves to a relationship by the time they’re thirty-five.

  And there was no question of career motivation in Kath’s case. Way back, when she was very young, she was going to be an actress. Why, oh why, is it that for any girl with definitely above-average looks it becomes inevitable that she’s going to be an actress? Nowadays it would be modeling, wouldn’t it? Kath would be talent-spotted in Oxford Street. Back then, people must have kept saying, “Honestly, with your looks, you just have to go for acting. . . .” Until it became what she had to do.

  I mean, that’s so stupid. The idea that what a person looks like decides what they ought to do. You might as well say that red-haired people should drive London buses. And it happens to women more than men. Above all it happens to ultradecorative women. A good-looking guy can ride it out. He can end up as prime minister, or governor of the Bank of England, or whatever you like. I’m not saying that they do, but you get the point. If a girl is very, very pretty, then that’s going to put a particular spin on everything that happens to her. She’s privileged, but there’s a sense in which it’s a curse as well. She’s directed by her looks. In Kath’s case the actress stint meant that there was no college, no learning how to do anything, just muddling along until that becomes a way of life.

  All right, I daresay a nice-looking girl does get on well in the property business. Which doesn’t prove much, if I may say so.

  And then she met Glyn. Do you know, I’ve no idea why she up and married him. I mean, he was an academic—not really her scene at all. Mum knew him first, apparently—I’ve never known quite how. Not that he was your straightforward scholarly type, Glyn. He was on the telly a lot, back then—climbing around Roman forts and stuff, holding forth. Actually, when I was a teenager he made quite an impression. All that talk—and a whiff of Richard Burton about him. Richard Burton meets Heathcliff. And apparently he made a dead set at Kath, soon as he saw her. But she’d had that happen before, often enough, for heaven’s sake. Anyway, this time she gave in. Commitment, finally.

  And it stuck. Until she—until that awful time. I’ve told you. They got married and stayed married. It seemed to work. Mind, it was a very coming-and-going sort of marriage—Glyn off doing what he did, and her hanging out with friends like she always had and getting involved with this and that. Kath wasn’t going to sit at home doing the devoted-housewife bit. She never talked about him much. Just little throwaway remarks—“Glyn’s off conferencing somewhere, so I’m on the loose. Hey, let’s go up to town. . . .” And she’d sweep me off on some spree. You always had such fun with Kath. And do you know, even in the middle of all this, I can’t feel any differently about her. I mean, because of her there’s this almighty fuss—well, because of her and Dad, let’s get things into perspective. And for me she’s still the same person. Kath. I can’t somehow relate this to her.

  All right, we’ll talk tomorrow. Actually, it’s not that late, but never mind. I’m really, really worried about my parents, that’s all. And now I’m wondering how far you’re there for me on this, Dan.

  “—and it’s all so long ago!” wails Polly, grinding to a halt.

  “Up to a point,” says Elaine. In fact, it is not so long ago. It was fifteen years ago, or thereabouts, which in the context of her life is a mere trifle. Odd things happen to time, as you get older. Time compacts. Where once it was elastic, and ten years seemed an eternity, it has become shrunken, wizened—nothing is all that long ago. But for Polly fifteen years is an age.

  Polly is off again. “—and I know it’s a shock and it’s hard to come to terms with, but does it have to matter so much? I mean, you and Dad are still the same people.”

  “I’m finding that we are not,” says Elaine.

  “Mum, I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Elaine notes that the grass is patchy under the crab apple—some reseeding needed there. Pondering the sight line down through the pergola, she wonders about the crucial focal point beyond: that acer is not earning its keep.

  “I don’t understand,” cries Polly. “Well, of course I do understand, I understand entirely how you feel, Mum, of course I
do, but . . . does it have to be like this? Couldn’t you—”

  “No,” says Elaine. “I can’t. I’ve explained. Just as I’ve explained to your father.”

  “But one cannot imagine how he . . . I mean, how’s he to manage?”

  Elaine abandons consideration of the acer and that sight line. It is not that she is seeking distraction, or is impervious to Polly’s distress. Rather, she is interested to find that normal preoccupations continue alongside the current clamor. This is surely a healthy sign. And, today, Kath is nowhere in evidence. She does not come swimming up; she is silent. Contrite? Defensive?

  “I’ve made an arrangement with the bank,” says Elaine.

  “Oh, I know, I know. Dad said. I don’t mean money. I mean, how’s he to sort himself out? Do you know where he is?”

  Silence.

  “Here,” says Polly. “He’s here, in the flat. Until he can fix himself up with somewhere else. Or at least that’s the idea. On my sofa. The new one from Habitat.”

  “Ah. I see.” Elaine’s composure is now ruffled. “I see,” she says again. “Your sofa.”

  “He’s gone out to buy some socks. At nine o’clock in the evening. He forgot to bring any. He seems to think he can buy socks at an all-night petrol station.”

  Elaine is groping now. She has no comment. The socks are a blow below the belt.

  “I’ll have to go,” says Polly. “He’s back.”

  People split up. Naturally people split up. All around, relationships are in a state of fission—that is to be expected. But not these people, that relationship. And not because of a distant transgression, a mishap long ago, something packed away into the past, over and done with. What has got into them? Why can’t they be grown-up about it?

  She scolds Kath. What were you thinking of? she says to Kath. How could you? Now look what you’ve done!

  But Kath is impervious. In Polly’s head, Kath does what she always did: she flies the dragon kite; she plucks a dress from a rail and cries, “This one!”; she laughs across a restaurant table. She is beyond the uproar of the present, except in blame. And Polly cannot be angry with her. The scolding is a ritual gesture. Why? she says to Kath, just once. And still Kath is unreachable. But Polly glimpses something in Kath’s eyes that perhaps she never saw before. Someone else looks out of them, someone sad. But Kath was never sad—not Kath.