The Photograph (22 page)

Nick gazes across the table in silence. He becomes reproachfully dignified. “As you wish. Entirely up to you. I would have thought you might feel . . . well, a certain involvement. Never mind. So be it.”

The meal is finished to the accompaniment of a few constrained exchanges. When the bill arrives Nick has fallen into a depressed silence; Oliver pays it.

They part outside the restaurant. “Good seeing you, Olly,” says Nick. He manages to appear generous, forgiving, and leaves Oliver experiencing a grating mix of guilt and resentment.

“So what was up with your friend?” inquires Sandra.

“Oh, nothing really,” says Oliver.

“Come on—I know a man in a tizz when I see one.”

They are in bed. There is no escape route. “He always was a bit like that.”

“First that Glyn someone,” says Sandra thoughtfully. “Then this Nick Hammond. Your former partner, right? And Glyn was married to Nick’s wife’s sister? Her that died?”

No possible escape. Oliver agrees that this is so.

“And suddenly they’re all needing to see you. Has something come out of the woodwork?”

Fleetingly, Oliver considers telling Sandra about the whole business. Well, you see, the trouble is that Glyn found a photo taken by me which indicated that at one point Nick had an affair with Glyn’s wife, Kath. He knows immediately that he will not. Bald facts are a travesty, a distortion. That is what happened, but it is also misleading, confusing. Left out is what Nick was like, and what Glyn was like, and above all who Kath was, and how she was. Without the ballast of personalities, of how things were back then, such an account is threadbare, it invites a knee-jerk reaction. He knows just the sort of comment that Sandra would make.

She is waiting. This is evidently to be one of those rare occasions on which Sandra decides to pay close attention to Oliver’s past. He knows those indications of terrierlike purpose.

“It’s just a question of clarification,” he says. “People need to get straight about some dates—that sort of thing.”

“A publishing matter?” says Sandra. “To do with the business?” Her tone is deceptively bland.

Oliver is no liar. He is fluttering now. “Well, in a sense, I suppose . . . Not absolutely specifically. Sort of indirectly.”

There is a telling silence.

“I see,” says Sandra. Then: “That Glyn—striking-looking man. Laid on the charm too. An academic, you said?”

“That’s right.” Oliver contrives a suggestive yawn. “I’m wiped out, love. I think I’ll—”

“The wife,” says Sandra. “The one who died. Kath—is that right? I don’t have much impression of her, except that she was very attractive. You knew her well, I suppose?”

Oliver is now in full flight. He lays a calming, propitiatory hand on Sandra’s thigh, turns away from her with an exaggerated sigh of weariness, and hopes for the best. After a moment, Sandra too rolls over, and is silent.

It is a long while before Oliver sleeps. They all come crowding in—Nick, Glyn, Elaine. And Kath above all. He sees and hears Kath fresh and clear: “Hi, Oliver!” she says, breezing into his office back in the old days. “Where is everyone?” She sits on the window seat in Elaine’s kitchen, plaiting Polly’s hair. She is beside Nick in the group at the Roman Villa that day; he raises his camera. And when eventually he drifts on the interface between consciousness and sleep, she is still there, but now she has become very young—a girl Kath that he never knew—and she is talking about love. He cannot follow what it is that she is saying.

It is Glyn’s birthday. He does not remember this until he notices the date on his newspaper. Birthdays never rated highly with Glyn. But he knows how old he is—sixty-two. This reminder of the relentless process is unwelcome. The passage of time is indeed his stock-in-trade, but when applied personally it is as though there were someone out there gleefully chuckling: You too—oh, dear me, yes, you too.

It is Saturday. He plans a weekend dealing with paperwork and ordering his thoughts on a projected article. This will be therapeutic. Glyn is in a curious state these days. He recognizes this, knows that he is not operating normally, that application requires an effort, that his mind wanders, that it is willful, that he cannot seem to control its direction. He has always been able to work; work has been the imperative, ever since he can remember. He has been able to switch into work mode under any circumstances. No, it is not like that. He stares for long minutes at the screen, he does not turn the pages of the book in his hand, or he reads without comprehension.

Kath. Her fault. Except that something odd has happened also with the attribution of blame. He is finding that his former drive to discover her guilt, her duplicity, her involvement with a raft of suspected lovers has evaporated. His various encounters—with Claverdon and his companion, with the Hapgoods, with Kath’s portrait and its courteous guardian—have eroded his sense of purpose. They have left him feeling uneasy, even chastened. He is no longer interested in that obsessive pursuit of what she may have done, in whom she may have known. He is not even much interested in Nick, he finds.

He thinks about Kath. She rises up in front of the screen, she is superimposed above the page. He listens to her.

But this morning he will work. Grimly applied, he heads for his study.

The front doorbell rings. It is Myra. With a birthday smile on her face and a present in her hand, which turns out to be a rather nice piece of early Victorian china. He receives both with the best possible grace, but she is out of order. Very definitely out of order. The unstated terms of their relationship are that it is conducted at her place, and there alone. She has only visited this house on two or three previous occasions. If he runs into her in the university, he gives her the polite greeting he might give to anyone else on the staff; no doubt their association is known to some, but it is not to be asserted. On the rare occasions that they go out somewhere together, he ensures that it is well away from common ground.

Glyn takes her into the kitchen and makes coffee. He could hardly do less. And, truth to tell, her arrival has given him a lift. The significance of the date had induced a mawkish feeling of self-pity, a sense of solitude quite alien to his usual stern defense of privacy.

Myra is in her late forties, veteran of a failed marriage that Glyn does not wish to hear about; he has made this plain. She has dark, ripe good looks and a vivacious presence that he finds invigorating at the right moments. And the moments, normally, are chosen by him; during the several years of their association, Myra has acknowledged its boundaries. If she once sought a firmer commitment, she has now abandoned any expectations. And, equally, Glyn accepts that if something more satisfactory to her came along, he would no doubt be required to relinquish Myra. He does not think much about this; and if it happened, well, one would have to look around.

Glyn enjoys sex with Myra; Myra too gives every indication of satisfaction. There is a degree of intimacy between them, tempered by the recognition that this is an arrangement of mutual benefit, and that is all. When he is with Myra, Glyn obliterates any thought of Kath. It is not that Myra is no substitute for Kath; it is rather that she is not on the same plane as Kath, nor ever could be.

“You were working, I suppose,” says Myra.

“I was.” But some uncharacteristic note of apathy in Glyn’s voice gives her the advantage.

“Such a nice day.”

He notices that it is indeed. He begins to see where this is leading. And within a minute or two, he has somehow fallen in with Myra’s scheme. An outing. A sortie into the landscape. A walk, maybe—lunch at the pub. Or . . . As it happens, she has been doing a spot of research, and there’s this country house which is open today that hardly ever is. But I expect you know it already.

He does not. And actually he wouldn’t mind having a look at it. Myra is in luck. He agrees, surprised at himself. But first he must have a spell at the desk to deal with a few urgent letters.

Myra is entirely happy about this. She’ll find something to do. And within the next hour she has scoured his saucepans, removed various moldy items from the fridge, bagged up the rubbish, and had a runaround with the vacuum cleaner. This is just the sort of thing he has always anticipated, where Myra is concerned, and one reason why he has kept her away. His gratitude is not effusive.

She picks up on this, and is tactfully apologetic. “I’m afraid I got a bit carried away. You know what I’m like.” He does indeed, and she is reminding him that the appeal of her own place, for him, apart from the solace of her bed, is the provision of home comforts. “And you haven’t got the time or the inclination, have you? Your cleaning lady seems to have a few blind spots. Of course your wife would have—”

Now she is really transgressing; Kath is a forbidden subject. Glyn cuts her off: “Kath didn’t do that kind of thing,” he says shortly.

Myra is baffled, as well she might be. Does he mean that Kath neglected her domestic duties? Or that she was above such trivialities? But she sees that she has overstepped the mark and makes a judicious retreat by producing a road map with the suggestion that they check out a route to this country house.

Glyn realizes that the excursion has been well planned; he cannot but admire her strategic skills. He has been ambushed. That said, he is not as resistant as he would expect to be. Once again, he recognizes his own abnormal state. He has allowed himself to be manipulated by Myra, something which does not happen. But there is this unusual lethargy, where work is concerned, and he would not be averse to an inspection of the house, which, he recalls, has fourteenth-century origins and will undoubtedly throw up something worth his while.

Glyn drives. Myra navigates, making much of it; she is exuberant with the success of her plot. Perhaps she sees this small triumph as an erosion of Glyn’s position, where the conditions of their alliance are concerned. At any rate, she fails to note that he is quieter than usual and she rattles on uncurbed. Her talk skates the surface of things, as always, glancing from one train of thought to another; this has never too much bothered Glyn, for whom her conversation is not her appeal and who is abundantly well qualified to dominate where talking is concerned, when he so wishes. But today he does not so wish, and Myra has full rein, until arrival at their objective and the dictation of a guided tour eventually force her into silence.

A country house, for Glyn, is a fine assemblage of coded references. The roped-off furnishings and the artworks pillaged as successive generations undertook the Grand Tour are of little interest to him; he is busy sniffing out the implications of this accumulation of wealth and patronage. How has this particular pile affected its environment? What has been obliterated by its parkland and its lake? How far has it determined the local economy?

For Myra, it becomes apparent, a country house is merely the decorative extension of a decent cafeteria and an inviting gift shop. The tour is the necessary preliminary, an agreeable enough hors d’oeuvre which she undertakes in a businesslike way, with housewifely attention to detail. She is gratified to spot a cobweb or a grubby surface. But she does pay attention to the pictures, and joins Glyn as he inspects the art displayed in the building’s most lavish public room.

The paintings are all about either sex or fame, except for the few that celebrate a woodland scene, a vase of flowers, or some idle arrangement of slaughtered animals. Sex comes in the guise of mythology; but there’s no doubt what it’s all about, thinks Glyn, wandering from a rosy recumbent nymph being eyed up by Bacchus to an ivory-fleshed Leda tucked beneath a sinuous swan.

“Oops!” says Myra. “What’s going on!”

He ignores her, thinking now of fame, which blazes all around. A giant cloaked Napoleon glowers from a rocky crag; Nelson dies on a bloody deck; an armored Caesar glitters amid a thousand spears. Glyn has never paid too much attention to fame, being more concerned with the effects of the toiling masses, but as he prowls from painting to painting he sees that fame displaces its subjects—they float free of any context and become iconic figures. Everyone knows them, but as images, as symbols. This is how these people are perceived, and thus are they portrayed, forever.

Myra is getting a mite restless. She wants her lunch. She draws Glyn on through the next room, and the next. He is unusually compliant, intent upon his own thoughts, which are no longer directed towards the surrounding display—the tapestries, the weaponry, the inlaid cabinets—but in feverish pursuit of quite other matters.

Myra sorts things out in the cafeteria. She installs him at a table and goes off to forage, returning with a tray of food and a couple of glasses of wine. Glyn pulls out his wallet, reminded of decent procedure.

“Birthday treat,” says Myra expansively. She raises her glass: “Here’s to it!”

Now she looks closely at him. “You seem off color. You’re not coming down with something, are you?”

Glyn gives himself a shake. He replies briskly that he is fine, fine. Myra has occupied quite enough new ground today. He is not going to cede any more. Confidences are out of the question, and ever have been. All Myra knows from him about Kath is that she died. No doubt she knows a fair amount more from others.

He forces himself back on course. He remembers where they are. He gives Myra a simplified account of the changing fortunes of the landed gentry since the Middle Ages, to which she listens with apparent interest, though she asks no questions. His intention is to clarify her perception of this place, but by the time he has got to the Victorians his own commitment is waning. Myra takes advantage of a pause to suggest coffee, and goes off to fetch it. She returns talking determinedly of her son, who is reading engineering and about whom she needs Glyn’s advice. Glyn has always resisted being thrust into any sort of pseudofatherly role and avoids visiting Myra when the boy is in residence. His only defense now is to speed up the coffee stage and suggest that they get out and see the gardens.