The Photograph (14 page)

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.

 
Elaine takes the phone through into the conservatory, where Sonia cannot hear. Sonia’s polite constraint is becoming a mild irritation—her determined pretense that everything is as usual. The instrument bleats on as Elaine walks, as she sits down, as she looks out towards the pergola and sees that the wisteria is starting to show color. Polly’s agitation seeps into her ear, creating jagged unrest on that side of her head.

“—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.”

 
For Polly, it seems as though a virus is at work. Order and expectation have been violated. Nothing is as it should be. Alien data have flashed up on the screen—uninvited, unwelcome—and they cannot be dismissed. People are not behaving as they should; moreover, it appears that they never did. Polly has always believed in forward planning, which requires a reliable infrastructure. Now there are fault lines all over the place. Her mother has apparently flipped; her father is camping on her sofa, with no spare socks, and his shaving kit is all over her bathroom. She does not know whether she should rush home this weekend and exhort her mother further, face-to-face; she will have to put on hold the planned supper party for friends, so long as her father is invading her space. She dotes on them both, of course she does, but they should not be doing this. They have broken the rules. They have ceased to be the essential backdrop, the calm, still center; they have become a further perverse element, impeding smooth progress.

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.

Polly fumes and fusses. She rehearses further appeals to her mother. She yanks the Habitat sofa into its bed mode, which means that her sitting room is barely navigable. She knows that she will sleep badly tonight, and be fouled up for work tomorrow.

And another thing. Dan is not coming out of this well. Probably she needs to stop seeing Dan sooner rather than later.

Glyn is concerned with time. He is also worried about the time: it is twelve-forty-five, he is sitting on the side of a Dorset hill, and at two o’clock he has a seminar in the university, which is well over an hour’s drive away. He should be getting a move on, instead of which he is sitting here brooding about time.

Time is his most essential professional tool, he reflects. Without it he would be faced with a chaotic and incomprehensible medley of evidence, much like the confusing juxtapositions of the landscape itself. Time is the necessary connection between events. Time is the device that prevents everything from happening at once. Pioneering archaeology went all-out for the establishment of chronology, and no wonder.

A kestrel hangs in the wind, level with his line of vision. Beyond it, in the distance, the green complexity of field patterns is interrupted by a large, long building with tall chimneys which he knows to have once been a nineteenth-century mill, today a development of luxury apartments. Just below him the hillside ripples away in a series of ledges; these he recognizes as the eroded ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort, which is why he is here at this moment. He is working on an article for which this hill, which he has not visited for some while, can provide some useful references.

The kestrel evokes Kath. He came here with her once: another kestrel performed similarly, and Kath remarked on it. “It stays still,” she had said. “The wind is rushing past it, and it stays still. How?” He sees today that other bird, and Kath’s hair blown across her face, and feels her hand on his arm. “Look!” she is saying. “Look!”

Glyn is now diverted from his reflections on the functions of time; he notes that his flow of observation—unconsidered, uncontrived—is a nice instance of the tumultuous, spontaneous operation of the mind. He knows enough of the theories of long-term memory to identify his recognition of the mill and the hill fort as the practice of semantic memory—the retention of facts, language, knowledge, without reference to the context of their acquisition. He simply knows these things, along with everything else he knows that makes him a fully operational being—a being considerably more operational than most, in his view. Whereas the vision of Kath sparked by the kestrel is due to episodic memory, which is autobiographical and essential to people’s knowledge of their own identity. Without it we are untethered, we are souls in purgatory. Those glimmering episodes connect us with ourselves; they confirm our passage through life. They tell us who we are.

Glyn stands up, impelled by his own circadian clock, which is muttering away about that seminar. The kestrel swings suddenly sideways and down. Glyn heads for his car, which he will recognize thanks to a further spurt of semantic memory, and which he will be able to drive because procedural memory keeps all such skills alive. Without that, we would fall over, be struck dumb, stare bemused at the driving wheel.