The Photograph

by Penelope Lively

  Pause. “I did. She worked for us from time to time.” Further pause. “I was told she—”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m afraid so. Please forgive me for bothering you, but I wondered if possibly—” Glyn floats the idea of a memoir once more. He is getting adept at the memoir; he convinces himself, the work takes shape in his mind.

  “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find me,” says Clara Mayhew, after a moment.

  This is not quite what she is supposed to say, but no matter. Glyn agrees with her—he has indeed. He does not mention the systematic program of inquiry, and merely says that he is relieved to have struck lucky. “I believe you knew her fairly well?”

  “Did I?”

  This is unanswerable, which is presumably the intention. Glyn is now backing away from the idea of a meeting. Perhaps Clara Mayhew is another dead end. All the same, Kath spent many weeks and months at that gallery. He tries a shot in the dark. “I think she had a particular friend amongst the artists who used to show there, but I cannot remember the name. I just wondered if you might be able to help.”

  “Help?”

  “Help with the name of this . . . this person. This artist.”

  A sigh. “I seem to recall that Kath had a lot of friends. Always in and out of the gallery.”

  “I just have this feeling that there may have been—”

  “There was the portrait, I suppose. Did it ever get done?”

  “Portrait?” Glyn leaps to attention.

  “Ben Hapgood. Wanted to paint her. Mad keen. No doubt he did, I wouldn’t know.”

  It occurs to Glyn that this Clara is bored rather than obstructive. Not a particular mate of Kath’s, then. But productive—oh, distinctly productive. He becomes brisk. “Hapgood? That’ll be the chap. The name certainly rings a bell. Do you by any chance have an address?”

  But Clara’s patience has run out. No, she does not have an address. All she knows is that the man lived in Suffolk back then. And she’s afraid she really has to go, so if he will excuse her . . .

  Gracefully, Glyn does so. Ben Hapgood. Right.

  She married him because she found him charismatic, charming, because he made it clear that he was entirely focused upon her. She married him because he offered a different kind of life, because he wasn’t like the others, because he was a blast of energy.

  Sex?

  Of course.

  You were handsome.

  I was. Kath was outstandingly attractive. I was a good-looking man. There’s usually some symmetry about these things, one notes.

  All the same.

  All the same what?

  You weren’t the first, not by a long chalk. So why you? Why indeed?

  She married him because he insisted that she should.

  But the fermentation has had further effect. Something has come bubbling up from the vaults of memory—a lost moment, a vanished moment, a moment in which Kath is sitting in the garden on that red-striped deck chair. She wears skimpy clothes and dark glasses, her head is tilted back in the sunshine. She is talking. “Ben Hapgood,” she says. “He is such a good painter. And he’s just won this important prize. I’m so pleased. . . . You’re not listening, are you?” she says. And the rest is drowned out by that “You’re not listening, are you?,” the dark glasses turned towards him now, and a little exasperated smile. So what was he, Glyn, doing? Reading? Thinking? Also talking? Not listening, no. But now he is listening. He is listening hard.

  He listens day after day, but there is no more. Kath has gone silent. He listens all the way to Suffolk, picking his way through the hierarchy of the road system, from motorways to dual carriageways and eventually onto minor roads that have him reaching again and again for the map. Ben Hapgood is not expecting him. Ben Hapgood is expecting a person who is interested in his work, who happens to be visiting the area, wondered if he might call in . . . a person who did not give a name because, when Hapgood asked, the line unfortunately went dead. Cut off. What a pity.

  So Ben Hapgood will not be concerned, apprehensive, suspicious. Glyn is already visualizing Ben Hapgood; this man who was so keen to paint Kath’s portrait, so infatuated maybe, so involved. Glyn sees a man who complements Kath’s dark looks, as he does himself; he sees an Ur-Glyn, more louche, touched with artistic glamour. He sees this man in his studio with Kath. It takes time to paint a portrait, does it not? Many sittings. Many cloistered hours together.

  Did these hours of intimacy take place here? Did Kath too pick her way down these winding side roads? It would seem so. And suddenly Glyn has a vision of Kath in that little Renault, off somewhere, going places, one hand out of the window, waving goodbye: “See you soon. . . .” And he feels a spasm of pain; he is clutched by an unfamiliar sensation. These glimpses of Kath do not provoke anything much, in the normal sense of things. He lives with them; they are a part of an interior landscape, they are simply there, and that is all there is to it. This is disconcerting. “See you soon. . . .” But she will not. Never again.

  He jams a foot on the brake. This is it. This is where Ben Hapgood lives. This is the white cottage with a picket fence, on the right of the lane after you have forked left.

  Two cottages knocked into one, more precisely, plus a rambling range of outbuildings in which, presumably, is the imagined studio. Glyn drives up onto the grass verge (did Kath too make this same maneuver?) and gets out. He stands for a moment, gathering himself, before he moves forward and lifts the latch on the gate. Precisely as he does so, the front door opens and out steps, presumably, Ben Hapgood. Who is short, ginger-haired, smiling cheerily, and behind whom hovers a woman. Both look to be in their mid-fifties.

  Greetings all round. “Glenda, my wife. And you are . . . ? I’m afraid I didn’t catch—”

  Of course you didn’t, thinks Glyn. “Peters—Glyn Peters.” He watches intently for recognition, but none comes. Fair enough—a not uncommon name, after all.

  They move into a farmhouse kitchen. Tea is made. More chat. Have you come far? Hope my directions worked all right. That sort of thing. A friendly couple, unexceptional, untouched on the face of it by artistic glamour. Kath liked artists, thinks Glyn. She had a bit of a thing about artists; she was by way of being a camp follower, I suppose. He considers Ben Hapgood who is swigging tea and talking about his vegetable plot, visible out of the window. Glyn notes the wife also, and wonders how long she has been around.

  Ben Hapgood supposes that Glyn would like to have a look at the studio. Glyn agrees that he would like to do so. The three of them move to one of the outbuildings. Classic studio stuff: smell of paint and linseed, canvases stacked up, others on the walls, clutter all over tables and shelves. Big easel with work in progress. Couple of old deal chairs, basket chair with grubby cushions. No chaise longue, no bed. At least, not today.

  Now is the moment. He will have to come clean, blow his cover.

  He does so, at length. He is charming, apologetic, a touch rueful. When he comes to the point, when he mentions the portrait, he is intent upon Ben Hapgood, with half an eye on this Glenda. He wants a reaction. He has already had a response to Kath’s name—the response with which he is becoming familiar: both register pleasure, affection, regret. . . . Glyn is by now experiencing doubts. But what about the portrait? What about that, eh?

  “Oh yes . . .” says Glenda. “She was such a marvelous subject. And Ben did her proud. One of his best—I can say that, he can’t.” She laughs, lays an uxorious hand on the artist’s arm. The artist smiles fondly.

  So. Glyn eyes them. Either they are putting up a show, these two, or she has not known what he was getting up to, or he, Glyn, is once again wrong-footed.

  “She came here?” he inquires.

  Yes, certainly, she came here, it seems. She stayed here a couple of times. She was such a lovely person to have around, they had a lot of fun, the children were teenagers then and Kath was so brilliant with kids, she’d suggest these crazy games, they still remember her. . . .

  When?

&nbs
p; There is consultation. Late 1980s, they think—summer of 1988? Yes, definitely, because the show at which the portrait was sold was 1989. Snapped up.

  Snapped up?

  Apparently. This bloke came to the opening view and just homed in on it. Or so it was said. Spoken for within the first ten minutes.

  Really? Really?

  Glyn moves quickly. He revises his position, in a split second. He sees where to go. He explains that of course all along what he had so very much hoped was to be able to acquire the portrait. He had of course been aware of it (“You’re not listening, are you? . . .”), but Kath had been vague as to what happened to it—only recently had he begun to wonder if perhaps by some miracle it might still be around. . . .

  Who was this man? The man who bought the picture outright, as though he had been waiting for it, as though perhaps he already knew about it, as though he knew Kath, as though he knew Kath so well that he must get his hands on her picture before anyone else did?

  “. . . obviously it was too much to hope that you might still have it. But someone has. Is there any chance you’d know who that purchaser was?”

  And, yes, Ben Hapgood keeps a record of where his work has gone. He fishes a file from a drawer and starts hunting through it. Glenda is talking about Kath. She talks about that summer, when, it seems, Glyn was away a lot, involved with his work: “I’m sorry, I don’t remember exactly what you do, Kath did say . . . so she was rather on her own, I think she was quite glad to come here, once she took the girls off camping on the coast for a couple of days. What a shame it was she never . . . not that she ever said anything, but one always sensed—”

  Glyn is concentrated upon Ben Hapgood, who cannot lay hands on the stuff from that gallery—damn, did it get chucked out?—no, hang on, here we go. A Mr. Saul Clements—and here’s the address and phone number. London. Sounds an expensive address. Laughter.

  He has him. He has this man. This is the real quarry. Ben Hapgood was a distraction, but who was to know that? Ben Hapgood was simply the unwitting facilitator. He painted Kath’s portrait, had indeed been mad keen to paint Kath’s portrait, but for entirely painterly reasons, and who wouldn’t? But as soon as the portrait is put on exhibition, is offered for sale, it is pounced on. By whom? By someone waiting for it? Someone Kath had been talking to about it? Someone Kath was seeing that summer?

  All that remains is to disentangle himself from the Hapgoods. Who remain remarkably good-humored and hospitable, given it is now clear that Glyn’s interest in the artist’s work is entirely self-serving. In an attempt to improve his record, he pays belated attention to the works by which he is surrounded, asking questions, offering the occasional deferential comment. Hapgood is a figurative artist, and so presumably right outside the contemporary swim, judging from what is to be picked up from the Sunday newspapers. This deduction allows Glyn to line himself up on the side of the angels, with some disparaging remarks about unmade beds and pickled animals, which seem to go down satisfactorily.

  Hapgood is now distracted from discussion of contemporary art by a sudden thought. It has occurred to him that he will have a slide of that painting of Kath, should have, if he can find it. Let’s see now. . . . He plunges once again into drawers and files. Glyn finds himself mesmerized; somehow he had not reckoned with the actuality of the thing, in this form or any other. Kath. Here, now. Ben Hapgood shuffles through folders and albums; Glenda is saying something about Kath—she is saying that it was a problem for Kath, looking the way she did. Problem? Glyn notices this Glenda, briefly—she is dumpy, fresh-faced, wholesome-looking, she reminds one of a small brown loaf, she is the antithesis of Kath. Problem? But now her spouse is saying, Ah, here we go; he has opened an envelope and is holding slides up to the light. Should be here, he says, this is the lot from that exhibition. And then—“Yes!” He passes a slide to Glyn.

  Here is a tiny, jewellike Kath, glowing in the light from the window. The slide is too small to make out detail, but there is no mistaking that stance, the way she is sitting with her legs curled beneath her, head turned aside, chin on her hand, elbow on the arm of the chair. Glyn peers into this crystallized moment, this time when Hapgood saw Kath sitting thus, when Kath spent so many hours thus arranged, perhaps in that chair there, looking probably out of that window. He feels oddly excluded. There she was; there he was not. And now he is here, and she is not, and this fact is suddenly chilling.

  Hapgood talks about the painting. It was not so much her beauty, he says—one doesn’t necessarily want to paint someone because they are handsome—it was the way she composed herself. The way she stood, sat, moved. Arresting. And so absolutely natural. Like some elegant animal. He had agonized over the pose—had thought of having her sit, stand, be this way or the other—and then one day had noticed her settle herself like that in a chair and had thought, Yes, that’s it.

  Glyn scarcely hears him. He is intent upon the little translucent shape in his hand, this Kath preserved in amber light. He finds that he does not want to give it up. He searches for Kath’s features, but the scale is too small. Eventually he hands the slide back to Ben Hapgood. “Thank you,” he says.

  She came this way. Not once, but several times. She went to that house, talked and laughed with those people, played with their children, was welcomed. She sat in the basket chair in Ben Hapgood’s studio, for many hours, gazing out of the window. Thinking about what?

  He had never been jealous of her friends, had never resented that shifting pack who drifted in and out of the house, who kept her forever on the phone. They did not much interest him, truth to tell. Lovers would have been one thing; friends were neither here nor there. He is in pursuit of lovers right now, but it is these others who are unsettling his life, stirring up these unaccustomed feelings of . . . of what?

  Feelings of exclusion, of ignorance, of deprivation. He is glimpsing a Kath whom apparently he did not know, a Kath known to these others who are themselves mysterious, so far as he is concerned. Strangers, who were nevertheless entirely familiar to the person with whom he lived in that ultimate intimacy.

  You knew that at the time. You knew she had friends.

  Of course.

  So why is this now causing difficulties?

  How should I know? How the hell would I know? Glyn sweeps onwards round the M25. Counties wheel past to one side; London lurks out there on the other. He sees none of it. Faces are streaming through his mind, the alien faces of the Hapgoods, of Peter Claverdon, faces that are underpinned by words, the continuous repetitive refrain that plays unprompted—from just now, from long ago: “What a shame it all went wrong. . . . It was a problem for her, looking like that. . . . You’re not listening, are you?”

  The door to the flat is already open. And there stands the ugliest man Glyn has ever seen. This man is a toad, a gnome, a troglodyte. He is as squat as a barrel, his nose is bulbous, his mouth is a letter box. He is seventy-five years old at least. This man was never Kath’s lover?

  The troglodyte leads Glyn into a room whose furnishings are deep and rich and darkly gleaming. The world beyond has been turned into exterior décor—a glimpse of the London skyline framed in thick glowing brocade curtains, the faintest purr of traffic sound. There are velvety sofas and chairs, desk and tables of museum quality, all the wonders of the Orient underfoot. Oh, there is the smell of money here. And the walls are covered with paintings, each softly and precisely lit. This is perhaps a William Nicholson, and that one maybe an Ivon Hitchens, and over there is possibly a Lucian Freud. This man likes art, it seems. He likes it a lot. He has splashed out, over the years.

  It is impossible to imagine Kath in this room. Except that there she is, there in that corner, suspended above a delicate little eighteenth-century davenport. Spotlit Kath. Kath framed about two foot by three, wearing a plain green dress, arms bare, legs tucked under her, sitting on the basket chair that Glyn saw in Ben Hapgood’s studio, her face in semiprofile, turned to the light of the window, the light of another time, a
time of which Glyn knew nothing.

  The man who cannot have been Kath’s lover steers him over to the painting. He is speaking. His voice is firm, patrician, modulated—as elegant as his appearance is uncouth. Glyn finds himself silenced. He feels suddenly chastened. He feels like the guest who has committed a solecism, he feels like some hapless schoolboy. He wants out, but he is here now, he got himself into this, he has only himself to blame.

  Glyn gazes at Kath. He sees her face—pensive, abstracted. Oh, he knows that sideways look, that partial removal of herself, that retreat into reflection. He stares at Kath, at this vanished Kath, who lives on in this man’s gilded cage, who has lived here for years, locked into another time, other days, sealed within a frame by Ben Hapgood. He wonders about those hours. What did they talk about, she and Ben, and Glenda, who perhaps wandered in and out with cups of coffee, or a summons to a meal? He strains to hear Kath’s voice. In the most bewildering way, he wants, he needs that voice—here in this alien place, amid the man’s great sofas and his groomed antique furniture.

  The man is talking. He says that when he bought the painting Ben Hapgood’s work was not familiar to him, but that as soon as he saw this painting in the exhibition he was at once struck by it. He was entranced: “A quick and easy decision. One rather welcomes those—the knowledge that one must have this picture and that is all there is to it.” He smiles at Glyn, a collusive look as though to a fellow collector. He draws Glyn’s attention to the modeling of the face. He indicates the use of light, the way that it falls upon the arm, upon the protruding corner of a yellow cushion.

  He is all courtesy, this man. His letter was all courtesy, in which he replied to Glyn’s inquiry—Glyn’s ever-so-carefully phrased inquiry as to the whereabouts of the portrait of his late wife, which he has been given to understand Mr. Clements purchased back in 1989, and which he would so very much like to see and photograph. Glyn’s camera is in his pocket.