The Photograph (18 page)

He remembers that they were standing around, and he found himself beside Kath. Found himself? Positioned himself, probably. And he had not been able to resist reaching for her hand—had reached for it and clasped her fingers and pushed their two hands back behind them, out of sight, hidden by her billowing skirt. The secret intimacy had given him a thrill, intensified perhaps by the fact that Elaine was there talking to them: he had felt guilt and euphoria all in one. For seconds only they had been like that, and then Kath’s hand slipped away. But Oliver had chosen that snatch of time in which to raise his camera to the eye and commemorate the outing. Unwittingly—that Nick is quite prepared to believe—but fatally.

It is so
unfair
. Elaine is being so unreasonable. He has been given no opportunity to persuade her that, in time, this thing could be seen in perspective. He is being quite disproportionately punished.

You should have considered this outcome back then, says another sultry voice. Did he? Did they? Well, yes, sort of . . . if guilt and the occasional bout of nerves amount to consideration.

One was so swept up in it, there was an inevitability about everything, it was unstoppable. Of course one was worried, of course one agonized, from time to time. But there was always this feeling that it would be all right, it would work out. . . .

And Kath? What about her?

Nick finds that Kath is inscrutable. He can see her and hear her still, but he has no idea what she is thinking or feeling—correction: what she thought or felt. He is annoyed with her; look, there are two of us in this, it was you too, and you kept that wretched photo and that note.

Why? This thought introduces a further level of disquiet. Were they kept because she was careless, or because they meant something to her? This notion makes Nick profoundly uncomfortable: he does not want to think that there was a dimension to their involvement of which he knows nothing. It was a temporary madness, that was all, something quite irresistible, and eventually quenched, as such passions are.

Indeed, the memory of passion makes him uncomfortable. There is recollection not with tranquillity, or yearning, but a sort of incomprehension. Had one really felt like that? Well, evidently. But he tunes in now as though to some alien persona. He hears himself with a certain incredulity. He hears himself saying to her: “I want you—God, how much I want you.”

She stares at him—considering. Those marvelous eyes. “Want . . .” she says. “Want . . .” And the look is not right; he needs responding fervor, not that querying gaze. He seems to have fallen short in some way. What is he supposed to be saying?

He can’t really remember what they used to talk about. Well, probably he did most of the talking: Nick is the first to admit that he does tend to go on a bit. He was up to his ears in publishing enthusiasms back then, there was always something absorbing on the boil, he would have assumed that she’d like to be involved. And there seems to be an impression of a listening Kath, of a Kath who sits across the table from him in some pub, smiling, apparently intent. Yes . . . and Oliver turns up there, which is a bit of a problem, and Nick has to deal with that later, have a quiet word.

“Is it
because
you’re Elaine’s husband?” Nick does not care for that. He would prefer not to have that still in his head—Kath going in for amateur psychology, which does no one any good, and anyway it wasn’t very flattering, was it? And he hears her again: “When I was younger I wanted to
be
Elaine. More than anything I wanted to be like her—to be organized and sensible and confident.” A little laugh, a rueful sort of laugh. “She won’t ever have realized that, I imagine.”

“Maybe I’m doing this because I still want to be Elaine,” she says. “What do you think?” She stares at him; she sits on the other side of a table in that pub, that quirky look on her face. But he does not think anything, not then or now.

He feels a touch resentful towards Kath. She should be with him on this; she should be in it with him. Instead of which, she is this impervious presence in his head, reenacting frozen moments. Saying the same things again and again. And it seems to him that there was something unreachable about her even then, even when she was flesh and blood beside him, beneath his hand. You never really knew where you were with Kath; she listened and she looked and she talked—oh, she talked, but she never told you much. Just inconsequential stuff, about where she’d been and what she’d done. And she was always slipping away; she was that suddenly vacated chair, the phone that rang and rang with no one answering, the car disappearing round the corner.

And, eventually, of course, she went altogether. Nick does not care to think about that, even now.

Kath is no help whatsoever, and Elaine has turned into someone else. She has become this implacable stranger, who has pronounced judgment against which there is apparently no appeal. Nick has had to tread warily for some while now—for the last few years she has been getting ratty for no good reason at all—but this is of another order. He sees her stony face in the conservatory that morning: “I want you to go.”

It is
so
unfair. He is too old to be treated like this. Old? And as the word comes swarming in, Nick’s distress is notched up higher still. Yes, he is getting old. Oh,
shit
.

Elaine is full of vigor. She feels calm and purposeful. She has done the right thing, of that she is certain. She has done the only thing that rang true, under the circumstances. To have continued to live with Nick as though nothing had happened would have been impossible; the thing would have stared her in the face every day, each time she looked at him, each time he spoke. As it is, she will be able to give herself entirely to work, and that will enable her, in time, to digest this business. She is revising her decision to wind down, to do less; on the contrary, she will do more. She will firm up that American lecture tour, plan a new book, make a determined pitch for a space at the Hampton Court Show next year.

Today she is judging a garden competition in a prosperous London suburb. This is an exacting process—not so much on account of the footwork, the relentless progress from garden to garden, but because of the diplomatic neutrality of manner that is required. She must remain polite but noncommittal; her reactions must be tempered—all right to indulge in the occasional indication of approval, but aversion must be contained. The garden owners are hovering, smiles glued to their faces, laser eyes trained on her. They would dearly like to get a look at the notes she makes on her clipboard. The organizers move around with her, a protective cohort. The atmosphere is fetid; the whole area steams with rivalrous emotion. A charity is involved here—most of these gardens are open in aid of something this weekend—but charity is not much in evidence right now.

Elaine walks amid roses. She notes the black spot on “Madame Alfred Carrière,” assesses “Paul’s Himalayan Musk,” suppresses a shudder at “Peace” and “Piccadilly,” communes with “Cardinal de Richelieu.” She winces before a blaze of pelargoniums, appreciates some
Dicentra eximia
and
Polemonium carneum,
deplores a ghastly magenta
Lavatera
, takes attentive note of an unfamiliar
Corydalis
. It is impossible to sideline personal taste, but she tries to give proper credit to the demonstration of gardening skill and commitment, even when the products of these are a tortuously constructed rockery or a rash of carpet bedding. The nation gardens according to whim, and there is whim on show today by the spadeful, though the dictatorial hand of television is also much apparent. Water is being moved around on the scale of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: rills, channels, miniature rapids, fountains, ponds. Contemporary gardening is a question of engineering quite as much as of plantsmanship. The furnishings are diverse and elaborate; some gardens are ankle-deep in gravel, others have absorbed a lorry-load of beach pebbles, one has a fifteen-foot plastic totem pole, in another a Roman bust rears from a shrubbery. Occasionally Elaine finds herself in a time-warp space of rectangular lawn surrounded by a border of annuals; the accompanying organizers glance nervously at her, wearing deprecating smiles. They hurry her along the street, where a wild garden is on show, a tangle of poppies, scabious, oxeye daisies, and meadowsweet tucked into the end of a fifty-foot plot.

She is looking for structure, for imaginative use of plants, for interesting color combinations, for evidence of horticultural prowess along with individuality. She seldom finds all of these together. Too often the gardening skills have been applied to some disastrous concept, or a promising design is betrayed by unfortunate plantings. Take this long, narrow back garden, for instance: its length and narrowness have been quite cleverly disguised, the space broken up by bold groupings of shrubs, a wandering path to one side leading away to a focal point at the end. But the focus is a clump of pampas grass, that old stalwart of the suburban front garden, which sits there harsh and uncompromising amid the bosky setting. What went wrong here? Elaine frowns at the pampas grass, and makes a note on her clipboard. At the same moment, Kath floats into her head, along with another garden.

 
Kath says, “Can I do it too?”

“No,” says Elaine. Kath is four; she is ten. And she is making a garden. The base of the garden is an old tin tray. She has lined it with soil and she is now intent upon the design and the planting. The lawn is made of moss; there are little clumps of hairy bitter cress, some forget-me-not, a tussock of sedum from the garage roof—Elaine knew the names of things, even back then. The tray garden is clear in her head, to this day. She can see it. Maybe that is how it all began for her, on that spring morning when she was ten. But now as she fetches it up, sees the sprig of catkins that was a weeping willow, she becomes aware also of Kath, lurking on the periphery.

“Shall I find more of that stuff?” says Kath, pointing to the moss. She has crept closer—a small, insignificant figure. Pleading.

Elaine ignores her. Kath is a local disruption on the fringes of her vision. Elaine is pondering what might serve as a tree, just there, and how to do a pond. Of course! A mirror! How is she to get hold of a tiny mirror, like the one her mother has in her purse? Is it conceivable that her mother would let her have it?

Kath is there again. “I’ve got this.” She is holding out a pansy—a great, fat, blowsy pansy. It is her offering, for the garden.

Elaine frowns. “You shouldn’t have picked that,” she says. “You know you’re not allowed to pick things.” And can’t she see it would ruin the whole garden? It is wrong in every way—size, shape, color.

 
A kind older sister would have taken the pansy, thinks Elaine. Incorporated it, adjusted, accommodated. She stares at the discordant pampas grass in this London garden, and wonders if someone arrived triumphant with it as an unsolicited gift—spouse, mother-in-law, friend.

Her view of this garden is now skewed. She can no longer judge dispassionately. She cannot give it a gold medal, or indeed a silver, but finds herself awarding a bronze, despite the pampas grass, or perhaps because of it. Kath has intervened, again.

The tour of inspection completed, Elaine is taken to the house of one of the organizers for rest and refreshment, and to pronounce judgment. She is treated with great deference and solicitude, which is rather good for the ego, and she has of course given her services free: good public relations, and you never know what may spring from such an appearance. Book sales, naturally, but possibly some interesting commission. So she remains resolutely polite and cooperative, over and beyond the call of duty, even to the extent of a supernumerary visit to the deplorable garden of the chairman, to advise on a problem with a recalcitrant pittosporum. She is allowed a period on her own with a cup of tea and her notes, for the judging process—a welcome interlude, since it is now five o’clock, she left home at seven, and still has to fight her way back through the South London traffic. She allocates the gold, silver, and bronze medals—a decision which will no doubt further fuel the animosities in this Arcadian suburb. And then at last it is time to be extensively thanked, to smile and smile again, and to get gratefully into the car.

A working day. And a relatively lenient one, in the general scheme of things. I could have been stacking supermarket shelves, thinks Elaine, or pushing millions around on a screen in the City. Instead of which, I come and go as I please, and have done so for many a year—subject, of course, to commitments made, and to the overriding need to earn a living.

She cannot now detach herself from what she does. Her work identifies her, both for herself and, presumably, for others. She cannot imagine a life that was not dominated by the requirements of the occupation. If it were removed, if it had never been there, she would not be the person that she is. She sees herself as shored up by alley and arbor and knot garden, by pergola and parterre, by vista and axis and drift and focus. She is activated by emphasis, harmony, contrast. She flourishes on the rich compost of all that she knows—a library of botanical knowledge into which she can dip at will, bolstered by pruning lore and growth habits and species attributes and a thousand plants that she can conjure up in the mind.

Elaine finds herself considering this as she picks her way out of London and onto the familiar route home. Her current state of heightened purpose is owed entirely to the fact that she is fortunate enough to have something to be purposeful about, she supposes. Without clients and engagements and plans and schemes and the trainees and the Saturday garden openings, she would be at the mercy of what has happened. She would spend all her time in resentment and bitterness. Instead of which, she is able to sideline the whole business, put it away out of sight and out of mind.

Except that that is not quite what is happening.