The Photograph (2 page)

He is left with a semiopaque folder which turns out to hold a sequence of studio portraits of Kath. She is looking at him in glossy black and white, now made manifest entirely. Young Kath. A backlit Kath with bare shoulders, head turned this way or that, eyes to the camera or demurely lowered, provocative smile, contemplative sideways gaze. These would date from the aspiring-actress days, long before he knew her. Very young Kath.

Glyn studies these photos for quite a while.

Kath.

He returns everything to the file. There is now just this brown envelope. He notices for the first time that something is written on it. In her hand. Lightly penciled.

“DON’T OPEN—DESTROY.”

And for whom is this second instruction intended?

He opens the envelope. Within are a photograph and a folded sheet of paper. He looks first at the photograph. A group of five people; grass beneath their feet, a backdrop of trees. Two members of the group, a man and a woman, have their backs to the photographer. Of the other three, Elaine can be identified at once, visible between the two whose faces cannot be seen. Near to her stand another man and woman, whom Glyn does not recognize.

One of the back-turned pair is Kath—he would know that outline anywhere, that stance. The someone else, the man, is at first a bit of a teaser. Familiar, surely—the rather long dark hair, the height, a good head taller than Kath. A slightly hunched way of standing.

Glyn brings the photo closer to his face for more minute inspection. And then he sees. He sees the hands. He sees that Kath and this someone, this man, have their hands closely entwined, locked together, pushed behind them so that, as they stand side by side in this moment of private intimacy, this interlocking of hands would be invisible to the rest of the group.

Except to the photographer, who may or may not have been aware of what had been immortalized—the freeze-frame revelation.

And now Glyn recognizes the someone, the man. It is Nick.

He turns to the folded piece of paper that accompanied the photograph. He feels as though gripped by the onset of some incapacitating disease, but this paper requires attention.

Handwriting. A brief message. “I can’t resist sending you this. Negative destroyed, I’m told. Blessings, my love.”

No signature. None needed. Neither for Kath then, nor, now, for Glyn. Though confirmation is needed. Somewhere he will have an instance of Nick’s handwriting. A signature. A letter from way back when he was a consultant, or some such nonsense, on that landscape-history series Nick published and of which he endlessly and ignorantly enthused, as Nick always did.

The disease now has him by the throat. The throat, the gut, the balls. What he feels is . . . well, what he experiences is the most appalling stomach-churning, head-spinning cauldron of emotion. Rage is the top note—beneath that a seethe of jealousy and humiliation, the whole primed with some kind of furious drive and energy. Where? When? Who? Who took this photograph? Who presumably passed it on to Nick and destroyed the negative?

The telephone rings, down in his study. Such is Glyn’s powered state, his consuming purpose, that he is at once on his feet and halfway down the stairs to pick it up and snap: “I am not available. Sorry.”

I cannot be doing with you right now, because I have just learned that the woman who was once my wife had an affair with her sister’s husband apparently—at some time yet to be identified. I am evidently a dupe, a cuckold. My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined. You will appreciate that for the foreseeable future this requires all my attention.

The phone stops. Of course. The answerphone is on.

Glyn returns to the top of the stairs. He sits holding the photo and the sheet of paper, looking from one to the other. Kath is everywhere now, the landing is full of her, and the staircase, and the big brimming treacherous cupboard; there are dozens of her, from different times and at different places, all talking at once, it seems. She curls up against him in bed, chattering about some film she has just seen. She puts her head round the door of his study, sunnily smiling, offering coffee. She skids ahead of him down a Cumbrian hillside, a small brilliant figure in a red jacket.

Questions are pouring through his head. When and where and who? But also—who else? Who else knew about this? Did Elaine know? Did Elaine connive? Was this matter common knowledge? Was he the innocent, the fool? Did people mutter to one another, throw him patronizing glances?

And for whom did she pencil that scribble on the envelope: “DON’T OPEN—DESTROY”?

For herself?

For me?

Did she plan this, step-by-step? Did she plan this moment? That she would fall from the landing cupboard, set me ablaze?

Well, no. Because Kath was not like that. Kath never planned. Kath never looked beyond tomorrow. Kath seized the days as they came and discarded them when done.

No, she came across that file one day, into which she had shoved various items. She flicked through them—looking for something, maybe—and saw that envelope. Took out the photo and the sheet of paper, thought “Oops!,” scribbled on the envelope, shoved everything back.

But why not just kill the photo, there and then?

Because she might want to look at it again. Because it meant something to her. Something? A great deal? Everything?

This file was a safe deposit in which she stowed away things that she needed to keep for reasons of expediency or convenience or . . . sentiment.

Why not segregate the categories? One file for documents, another for matters of the heart.

Because Kath never operated like that—in a careful, considered, rational way. She simply pushed these things into the same file because she wanted or needed to hang on to them. And on the occasion when she wrote these words on that envelope, perhaps the phone rang while she was riffling through the contents. She put everything back, then had a sudden thought. She pulled out the envelope, quickly scribbled on it, returned it to the file, put the file in the drawer or the cupboard or wherever she kept it at the time, and forgot about it. She picked up the phone, cried out, “Oh,
hello
. . . How lovely to hear you, I’m so glad you’ve rung. I was going to . . . Listen, what are you doing today? I’ve got this sudden yen to go to—” And off she spun into another spontaneous activity, some more uncalculated hours.

But in writing these words—in thinking of writing them—she had some subliminal notion of a person who might at some point be going through her things, might come upon the envelope, might open it.

Me.

So she tells me not to open it.

And does she expect me to comply? Or does she assume—with a little curve of her mouth, a tiny shrug, a roll of the eyes—that I will open it?

Be it upon his head, she thinks. I
told
him not to.

All in a matter of seconds. As the phone rings. As she picks up a pencil.

Glyn has been sitting on the stairs now for so long that his backside is beginning to ache. He gets up, returns to the cupboard. He picks up from the floor the landslide of files and puts them in a pile on the windowsill. Kath’s file he lays to one side, along with that envelope and its contents. He sets about a search of the area behind the files, which is silted up with miscellaneous papers alongside which, finally, there do appear to be some offprints.

That initial incandescent shock and rage have given way now to a sense of consuming purpose. He knows what he is going to do—but first things first. He is still raking over what he has seen and all that that implies, but at the same time he will grimly keep to its appointed course this day, which has turned out to be a day apart. He will find that bloody offprint.

He burrows through the detritus of thirty-five years. Paper, paper, paper. Entire forests that have died for him. Oak, ash, and thorn have perished to sustain his career—well, no, Scandinavian pine, more likely. In this heightened state he finds himself able to think in complex ways. Thoughts hurtle in parallel; thoughts shunt one another aside. He homes in on the photograph: when? who? He spots a box of slides, remembers a lecture he has to give, pulls them out.
Where
was the photo taken? Where are they standing, the pair of them? No offprint, so far. He returns the stack of files to their place and moves up to the next shelf. Newspaper cuttings, bulging boxes; another forest has been felled. He imagines the axes—no, chain saws, it would have to be. There were trees in the background of that photograph, he remembers. What kind of tree? A clue; check later.

He takes down a box, opens it. Notes—reams of handwritten library notes from the days before photocopying facilities. Work. His own laborious hours of work. Heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands of hours of work the contents of this cupboard represent: his work, the work of others. And his work is in its turn the reflection of the work of countless nameless dead. “A landscape historian deconstructs the physical evidence of work done by generations of nameless people. The daily application of a faceless horde, century after century—laboring away hour after hour, year after year, hot, cold, wet, hungry, with aching limbs. Digging and shoveling and hauling. Fetching and carrying. Hacking and chopping. Loading, stacking, lifting. Herding animals, tending animals, butchering animals. Felling trees, quarrying stone. Turning wood and rock into houses and barns and churches and cathedrals. Heaving stone and glass up into the sky. And all this manipulation of the physical world carried out by scurrying, driven people, set only upon survival, upon working in order to eat in order to live from one day to the next, in order to feel the sun and the rain and the wind, get a bellyful of food, catch a few hours’ sleep, wake to see another day.”

When did I write that? he wonders. Not bad, eh? He seems to remember saying it to camera, when they did the first television series. That heady time. Those were the days. Being whisked around with that attendant entourage—the pretty, feisty girls with clipboards, and the director and the camera people and the sound people—and himself always at the hub of it all. Holding forth on hillsides and halfway up cathedrals and realizing that he loved every minute of it. Being recognized by strangers once the programs had gone out: that sideways glance in the street or on a railway platform. Snide remarks from colleagues, for which he didn’t give a damn. Jealous, weren’t they? Oh, it was a helterskelter, full-pelt time, that was.

But work, all of it. Well, there’s work and work. And I’ve been wet and cold too, thinks Glyn, and I’ve done a spot of digging, though I pass on shoveling and hauling, and hungry hasn’t much come into it. But there’s not a day of my life in which I haven’t worked.

And here Kath comes in, dead on cue.

It is her voice that is clearest. What is said. Why is it that words hang in the mind forever? A sentence that is spoken over and over again. In his head, Kath is words quite as much as she is flesh and blood.

“You’re not going to come with me?” The tone shoots up—a high emphatic note: “. . .
with
me?” And now he sees as well as hears. She is sitting at the other end of the table in the kitchen in Ealing, a letter in her hand. It must be summertime; her skin is very brown against her white shirt. That gold chain is round her neck. Her hair is damp from the shower, flattened against her neck.

“You’re not coming with me to Devon for a lovely weekend with the Barrons?” Now she gives him that teasing look—never pleading, oh, never that, just a take-it-or-leave-it quirky glance. “Plenty of landscape in Devon.”

And he explains—no doubt for the second or third time—that there is this conference.

“Never mind,” she says. “Too bad. Toast?”

Kath did not work. Kath was not fettered by obligation, by responsibility, by having to be in a certain place at a particular time, by having to do things she might not especially wish to do. In the mind’s eye, Kath is forever breezing down the street, smiling, traveling light, while all around her is perforce and necessity: the postman dealing out mail, door-to-door, the van driver heaving cartons into the corner shop, the patrolling traffic warden, the gang busy with hydraulic drills and JCB, the estate agents displayed at their desks, the driver of the taxi panting at the lights. All except Kath, who is bound for some destination of her choice, to do something she prefers to do.

And even when Kath did work she did not appear to be doing so. When she had a job—in those interludes when she was employed, gainfully or otherwise—it was because she had elected to do so. It had seemed suddenly interesting or entertaining to help out in an art gallery or a craft center, to get involved in a music festival, to do picture research for a publisher. And when the interest and entertainment faded, somehow Kath was no longer there. She had simply melted away, from one day to the next—perhaps with a vague apologetic smile, perhaps not.

Glyn knew these episodes, because he was sometimes on the receiving end of the inquiring phone calls, which could range from perplexity to indignation.

How did she do it? Well, thinks Glyn, she managed nicely for ten years because she was married to me. I paid the bills. I fed her and housed her and clothed her, pretty well. But before that? After all, Kath was a fully fledged adult by the time she came into my hands. She was thirty-six, she had been on the loose for twenty years, given that the home more or less broke up when the mother died. The girls each had a bit from her, of course, but not enough to live on. Well, not quite, but enough to scrape by, perhaps, in a hand-to-mouth sort of way. With the occasional top-up from somewhere or someone. I suppose that is the answer. And Elaine, being Elaine, set to and learned a trade and worked for the next forty years—very lucratively, these days, one understands—while Kath, being Kath, did not.

Glyn is still ferreting away in the cupboard, but if the offprint comes his way he is in danger of missing it entirely, so dense are his thoughts. He is finding that these thoughts are nothing new, but that everything is somehow skewed by what has just happened. This illness that he now has—this fever—has given everything a twist. Kath is both what she ever was, and she is also someone else. He is looking differently at her—he is looking differently for her.