The Photograph

  Myra appears, and they start their tour of the gardens, a couple enjoying an outing amid all the other couples and the families and the straggling coach party. The weather remains idyllic, the roses are out. Myra is high with satisfaction. “Well!” she says. “This was a good idea.”

  For Glyn, it is no longer Myra who is at his side, but Kath: Myra talks, but anything she says becomes irrelevant background interference; he reaches beyond it for Kath.

  “You’re not listening,” says Kath. But he is. He is listening with all his might. Listening and seeing. And along with the familiar signals that endlessly repeat themselves, the reliable structure of the years with Kath, the received interpretation, there come odd vagrant challenging flashes—like the hitherto undetected stars that periodically excite astronomers. But Glyn is not excited; he is disturbed, perturbed, awry.

  He hears Kath on the phone—a low voice that falters, crumbles. Is she crying? He comes into the room, and she is putting the phone down: “I’ll have to go, Mary.” Her face is odd, distorted. He is in a hurry, he is leaving for a conference in the States, and he has mislaid a crucial paper. He cannot dwell on Kath’s face, that shriveled look, but he must have stashed it away because now, here, today, it comes swimming up to him.

  Elaine and Polly

  Long ago, Elaine considered not having Polly. That is to say, she considered not having children at all. Being childless. There is a choice. She could see that life is a good deal less cluttered without that. One would be able to get on with work a lot more easily. She looked around at her contemporaries and took note. There were those who toiled from day to day, burdened with sleepless nights and howling days, and those who cruised free, accountable only to themselves.

  It could have gone either way. For a couple of years, she thought of the matter from time to time, but would push it to one side. And then she noticed that if she forgot to take the pill, she was not particularly bothered about the lapse. She forgot quite often.

  When she knew she was pregnant, Nick said, “Oh, good. What fun.” She had never discussed with him her own doubts about becoming a parent. Of course there were two of them in this, but it had seemed to her that in the last resort the issue was a personal one. She knew who would be taking the brunt.

  Nick was not a bad father. When he was around, and had nothing better to do, he fathered with a boisterous enthusiasm. From the age of about two, Polly saw him as some kind of engaging but wayward family pet—good for a romp, but not to be taken entirely seriously. As she grew older, this attitude firmed up into one in which affection and amusement rode upon an undercurrent of mild exasperation: “Typical!” “Trust Dad—” Polly seemed to shoot past him, becoming the responsible and efficient adult, while he remained in a time warp of feckless adolescence.

  Polly’s phone calls are now more circumspect. She has given up on direct appeals, defeated by Elaine’s polite deflection: “Can we not talk about this.” Instead she skirmishes around the edge of the subject. She mentions the trouble involved in fixing the washing machine ill-treated by Nick. Elaine offers at once to pay. “It’s not the money,” says Polly. “It’s the bother.” She describes how she has hauled Nick into the offices of a rental agency: “On Saturday morning, when actually I had a million things to do . . . And we went to see this really nice flat and he said yes, OK, fine. And then as soon as we’re back at my place again, he does a U-turn and it’s no, he’s not sure, maybe, he’ll sleep on it. And there’s my Saturday morning down the drain.” She makes dark references to drinking sessions. She says Nick has lost weight: “Not that he couldn’t do with that, but all the same—”

  All this has an effect on Elaine. She is distracted. Her resolve is faltering. Instead of concentrating smoothly upon work, upon the demands of each day, upon future plans, her thoughts come homing back to what Polly last said. She pictures Nick wandering aimlessly around London. She wonders about this weight loss, and the drinking.

  Polly visits. She visits at short notice, as usual, dashing down on a Sunday. “Dad knows where I’ve gone,” she says pointedly. “He . . . well, he sent his love.”

  She and Elaine sit and eat lunch in the conservatory. “I can’t believe Dad’s not here,” says Polly. “I keep expecting him to walk in. All right, all right, I’m not going to start up again. Just . . . well, it’s so unreal.”

  Elaine agrees, but she is not going to say so. Polly talks about a man. This Andy. “Not that I’m rushing into anything,” she says. “But it’s interesting, put it that way.” She looks speculatively at Elaine. “Did you and Dad fall in love with a great wham, or what?”

  Elaine is thrown. She is not open to this kind of exchange, nor is Polly in the habit of such questioning. Have normal family conventions been abandoned?

  “Oh—” she says. “It’s such a long time ago.”

  Polly is having none of that. “Oh, come on, Mum. Everyone remembers falling in love.”

  Elaine is busy over the salad. “All home produce,” she announces. “This is a kind of rocket I’ve never tried before. Grows like a weed.” She piles herbage on Polly’s plate. “And the first baby beetroot. Here—”

  Polly eyes her. “Mum, don’t mind me saying so, but you’d feel better if you let go a bit more. You’re so buttoned up. I mean, I know it’s the way you are, but it can’t be good for you.”

  Elaine is used to being scolded by Polly. Polly has been scolding her ever since she was about three. Usually it has been over questions of diet, or dress, or household management. Now, it would seem that she is going for basics.

  “I seem to remember a process of gradual drift,” she says.

  “Drift?” yelps Polly. “Drift! For heaven’s sake, Mum!”

  Actually, Elaine is trying to be honest. That is what she remembers. She searches for passion, and something does come smoking up: an incandescent day when she and Nick walked on the Sussex downs, not long before they got married, and she had brimmed with well-being, with anticipation—yes, with love.

  “Well, there was more than that.”

  “So I should hope,” snaps Polly. She becomes reflective. “I mean, I’ve been in love, but I’m accepting that I haven’t been definitively in love. Not the full five-star menu, the earth moving, the real thing. Just a few appetizers. I’m waiting.”

  “Plenty of time,” says Elaine. “How’s work going?”

  But Polly is not interested in talking about work. “Was Kath in love with Glyn?”

  Why is Polly so exercised about love? Is it love in the past or love in the future that concerns her? Elaine’s love, or her lack of it? Or a potential love of Polly’s own? Whichever, Elaine is uncomfortable.

  “I suppose—” she begins. “Well—she seemed very happy.”

  Kath comes down the register-office steps, again and again, smiling and smiling. She smiles into the camera, at Elaine on the other side of the road. Her skirt is crooked.

  “When didn’t Kath seem happy?” cries Polly.

  Elaine wants to stop this conversation, if conversation it is, but can see that Polly is in a relentless mood. Nor can she say, “Can we not talk about this,” because Polly is not doing so; she is keeping the matter of Nick at arm’s length.

  But now Polly plunges in another direction. “The thing is, I don’t understand. I don’t understand how people can be so . . . mysterious. I don’t understand people. You think you’ve got them pretty well sewn up, and then they go all flaky on you. They fly apart. They even fly apart in your head, for goodness’ sake! I don’t understand Kath. I mean, I knew Kath. I don’t understand Dad. I look at him—and he’s a real mess these days, Mum, I can tell you, grubby shirts, needs a haircut, doesn’t bother to shave—I look at him and I don’t know what’s in his head. And I don’t understand you, Mum. Absolutely I do not.”

  There is a butterfly tapping against the conservatory window, beating furiously up and down: a tortoiseshell. Beyond, in the garden, the sunlight sifting through the crab apple trees has turned the
lawn to a brocade of green and gold. Pam wheels a barrow across the end of the grass walk; some stuff falls off and she stoops to pick it up. Elaine is aware of all this, the stable and consoling backcloth to her daughter’s discordant presence. Polly no longer sounds thirty; this wail is coming from a person of eight, or ten, or twelve.

  “I don’t understand how everything can suddenly go completely off the rails. I mean, the point about life surely is that it moves on. It goes forward. On and on, regardless. It doesn’t . . . loop backwards. Which, as far as I can see, is what yours is doing. Yours and Dad’s. There’s Dad, and he’s a zombie. He’s completely out of it. I’m beginning to think therapy. There’s a woman I’ve heard of—”

  Elaine is jolted into reaction. “No. Definitely none of that.” She stares at Polly, who has pushed her half-eaten lunch to one side and is managing to look both martyred and mutinous.

  Elaine realizes that what she is now experiencing is guilt, and that she has perhaps been experiencing this for some while. She is feeling guilty about Nick. How can this be? She is the one who is sinned against, but there has been a reversal of roles. It is Nick who is apparently some sort of victim, who is at risk, who invites concern. Whereas she is unreasonable, implacable, unkind.

  She says, “You do remember what this is all about?”

  “Oh, Mum . . . of course I do. But look at you. . . . Frankly, Mum, you’re all over the place. I mean, I can tell—you’re twitchy, you’ve got baggy eyes, you’re not you.”

  Is this so? Elaine thinks of the way in which Sonia glances at her from time to time. She remembers Pam’s solicitous offers to take on extra tasks. Is this how she appears? Is this, indeed, how she is?

  There is a silence. “There—” says Polly. “That’s all. I’ll shut up.” She reaches for her plate and starts to eat again. “The salad’s good. Can I take some of this rocket stuff back for Dad and me?”

  Kath

  Oliver finds himself thinking about Kath’s men. Those who came with her when she turned up at Elaine’s house. They are a shadowy crew—for the most part he can no longer put a name to a face, and frequently the faces too are lost. There were not that many of them—four, five, six maybe, over the years. A couple who came only once; others more tenacious, who have left a stronger impression. An assorted lot—taller, shorter, younger, older—but the common denominator that Oliver remembers is a certain triumphal quality. They were men in possession of a trophy, successful competitors in some contest with which Oliver was not involved. Oliver knew that he was not the sort of man who aspired to a woman like Kath. These men were better-looking, rich with confidence, purposeful. Kath was their purpose of the moment, apparently. They accompanied her with complacent ease; she was their due, they were owed someone like this.

  He remembers an actor whose name he vaguely recognized, a roguish charmer; he remembers an urbane fellow with a BMW convertible. Both of these turned up on more than one occasion. And, homing in on recollections of these men and on the way in which they melted away, over time, he finds himself in Elaine’s garden, with Kath, companionably gathering windfall apples. She has come alone this time: no man. Polly darts round them, busy with apples. She rushes up, laden: “Look how many I’ve got!” “Clever girl!” says Kath. “Put them in the basket.”

  “Where’s Mike?” demands Polly. “He promised he’d give me a ride in his car without a top.”

  And Kath replies, “Mike’s not coming anymore.” Offhand, inspecting an apple. Polly pulls a face and goes back to the apple hunt.

  Kath turns to Oliver. Was he betraying interest? Or surprise, or sympathy? She smiles: “It’s all right, Olly—my heart is not broken. Did you like him?”

  And Oliver, flustered, prevaricates—unable to say that so far as he is concerned, they are jammy beggars who don’t know their luck, the lot of them.

  Kath sighs. She polishes an apple on her sleeve, takes a bite; he sees her white teeth against the shiny red. “The thing is to move away before it’s too late.” Is she talking to herself, or to him? He does not know that look: something anxious about it, lost.

  “Too late?” he says firmly, to bring her back.

  And she smiles—familiar cheery Kath. “Before they change their minds. Have you got a girlfriend, Olly?”

  How did Oliver reply? Oh, he can guess. He would have floundered about, and Kath would have laughed, and teased him, and they would have gathered up the apples, and Polly, and gone back to the house for lunch, or tea, or supper.

  Indeed, the whole scene is now a fluid mix of imagery and supposition. He sees Kath, and small Polly flitting about in the long grass, and experiences the satisfaction of lighting on a perfect apple—no bruising, no scabs or holes. He sees that alien look on Kath’s face. Snatches of what is said ring out: “My heart is not broken. . . . The thing is to move away . . . Before they change their minds.” The rest is unreliable—perhaps that is how it was, perhaps later wisdoms have imposed themselves, perhaps the need for narrative and sequence has stepped in. Suffice it that he was there, then, with Kath, and it was thus, or very like.

  Once, Polly wanted her to be something else. She wished that Kath was her mother. This is no reflection on Elaine, it did not mean a repudiation of Elaine, it meant simply that Polly wanted to have Kath with her all of the time, in an attentive, available mother role. She remembers this longing and she remembers also an accompanying guilt; she knew she must not voice this need, least of all to Elaine.

  Nowadays, Polly can see this with adult wisdom. She had doted on Kath, and so, naturally enough, wanted more of her. But she had been sufficiently mature—at six? seven?—to realize that there was a whiff of infidelity in this: you can only have one mother, you should love your mother most of all.

  And I did, she thinks, as one does. In the last resort. I suppose.

  Not that there was anything particularly maternal about Kath. You could not imagine Kath pushing a buggy, dishing up a family meal, waiting outside the school gates. All of which Elaine did as a matter of course, alongside her other concerns. Polly recognizes this, and gives Elaine her due.

  Once, Polly and Kath sit drinking coffee in Polly’s college room, during her student days. Kath has come to visit. Polly has shown her off, displayed her around the campus, and now they are having the leisurely heart-to-heart that Polly so relishes. She lays out various friends for Kath’s inspection. She is heady with the whole student experience. But she is working, she tells Kath sternly, she is working like crazy. Already, there are objectives, there are goals. She will maybe aim for business, for finance, for the City. Or possibly journalism. Web design has not yet raised its head, though Polly is a whiz with technology.

  Kath listens. She sits cross-legged on the bed, with a mug in her hand, as to the manner born. She could be twenty, not forty-something. She listens, apparently rapt. “Lucky you,” she says, and there is an unfamiliar note in her voice. Polly is brought up short: lucky? her? But it is Kath who is lucky—just for being Kath. To look like that, to be like that—breezing through the days, through life.

  They talk about love. Polly thinks she may be slightly in love; not madly, desperately, mind—but there is a definite disturbance. She is interested in her symptoms, and questions Kath. There is no sleep loss, but she does find that she thinks about him a lot and in . . . um . . . a sexual way. She cannot help making a point of engineering that their paths cross. Is this a low-grade response, unlikely to escalate? Do you know at once when it is serious? She is assuming that Kath is an expert.

  Kath laughs. “Oh, all that—” She says that she first fell in love when she was five, with the postman. And then with the Rentokil man and with the vicar and eventually with the boy at the paper shop when she was fifteen, and that lasted all of two months. But Polly is not interested in this juvenile stuff, and she senses flippancy. She is after informed guidance. But now Kath seems to withdraw; she is not so much evasive as oddly muted. “All I know is that I’m no good at it,” she says. “Mistakes
, mistakes—” She stares at Polly: “The thing is, do they love you?”

  His eye has wandered, during married life—he is quite prepared to admit that. He has looked, and occasionally lusted. He has entered into understandings that have somehow stopped short of sex, and he would admit also that these might well have progressed, if the opportunity had arisen.

  It is not a particularly admirable record, but neither is it despicable, surely? There are worse husbands, for God’s sake.

  If it had not been for Kath, Elaine would have reacted otherwise, in all probability. If that photograph had shown some other woman—some neutral, impersonal figure—Elaine would have been angry, he would have groveled, but he would not be here in London, exiled.

  Why? he asks himself. Why did it happen? But he knows. He looked at Kath one day and saw her afresh. And now he cannot see her thus anymore. That fatal compulsion is quite gone; the Kath he experiences today is neutral, and the Nick to whom she responds is not himself.

  Kath sits on the window seat in the kitchen at the old house, with Polly on her knee—an infant Polly. This is in the time of innocence, long before he looked differently at Kath. Nick has come into the room and he thought at first that this was Elaine. He says as much. “I thought you were Elaine,” he says, or must have said. And Kath looks at him over Polly’s head: “No. It’s me.” She says it thereafter, again and again, and he is arrested still by her tone, by how she is. She is not vibrant Kath, but is suddenly bleak.

  They climb: the steep grassy slope, the winding trail. “Does this thing have a name?” she asks. “They all have names. This is Cat Bells.” There is soft, caressing wind, and sunlight that flees across the hillside. She comes close and wraps her arms around him. They kiss. Pressed up against him, she runs her hand down and finds his erection: “I think we’d better get off this mountain,” she says. They skid back down the track. Somewhere below there is a low stone wall, sheep-cropped grass and bushes beyond. They are over the wall; she is laughing; she says, “I can’t take all my clothes off—it’s freezing!” He spreads his coat on the grass, puts her down on it. She kicks off her trousers. It is the most urgent sex he can ever remember, a glorious immediacy, pinned forever in that place—the wind, the smell of crushed grass, some small piping bird, sheep moving about. Afterwards, he is suddenly euphoric, richly alive; he hugs her to him, pushes his hands under her sweater, feels her warm skin. She is laughing again: “Oh yes,” she says. “Yes.”