The Photograph (24 page)

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
?”

 
Nick thinks that he has slept with six women, apart from Elaine. That seems modest enough. There is a possible seventh when he was eighteen, but he is not at all sure that she counts; it was a particularly inexperienced session. But this is not the track record of a libertine, is it? And three were premarital encounters that can be viewed as perfectly normal steps in sexual development. The other three are indeed infidelities and cannot be explained in any other way, though one is a borderline case, he feels, being a short-lived lapse triggered by getting drunk at a party and fetching up in this woman’s flat. The liaison with a publishing associate long ago is more reprehensible, looked at with detachment; but Elaine never knew, no one got hurt, the thing is dead and buried.

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.

 
Glyn took Kath to the Lake District for their honeymoon. There was a strategy to this choice; he was interested in early hill-farming at the time and needed to do some fieldwork on boundary systems. That week is now a blur, one image melting into another: Kath lying on her stomach to drink from a tarn, the attentive gaze of people in a pub as she comes in through the door, her rain-wet hair glinting in the light. She follows him up a valley; he looks round and sees that she has stopped, her back to him, hands on hips, wearing a scarlet jacket, a small vivid figure, like some romantic affirmation of human existence against the spread of sky, lake, and hills.

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
.”

And now, today, he is filled with outrage that all this survives only in the head. He wants to retrieve the moment. He wants to retrieve Kath, as never before.

 
“I’m going to have five children,” says Kath. “Mostly girls. A couple of boys—twins maybe. Not just yet. In a few years.”

Elaine listens with cynicism. She is pregnant: heavy, hampered, irritable. Kath has blown in; soon she will blow away again, off back to her unfettered life, to whatever it is she is up to these days.

Elaine observes that Kath may find that she requires a husband.

“Oh yes, definitely. I’m looking for one.” Kath is twenty-four. And spoiled for choice, Elaine assumes. On occasion, she is accompanied by some attentive man. Not today.

This is a time when Elaine’s feelings for her sister rampage from one extreme to another. If Kath disappears for weeks on end, Elaine is on edge about her. Why does she not phone? Where has she got to? When she shows up, need is replaced by a gust of annoyance: there she is—carefree, the fiddling grasshopper amid the striving ants, her beauty a repeated surprise. One had forgotten its effect.

“Well, look carefully,” says Elaine. She has little faith in Kath’s judgment. She sounds sour, and knows it.

Kath laughs. “Oh, I do. You’ve no idea how careful I am.” The laughter stops, abruptly. She is suddenly concentrated, serious. Her glance sweeps the room—the cluttered domestic place. It homes in on Elaine’s fecund belly. “Is it wonderful?” she says. “All this?”

“Look,” he says. “It’s Nick. I know I’m absolutely the last person in the world you want to have on the end of a phone, and I don’t blame you if you hang up, but I had to give it a try, OK? I just felt if you and I could talk a bit, and frankly you’ve every right to tell me to piss off, but I thought, No, I bloody well will, I’ll ring him up, there’s nothing to lose, things are bad enough anyway, at least they are at this end. And, Christ, I know what
you
must have been feeling. Believe me, Glyn. What I’m trying to say is—and I know you must be thinking this is a bit rich coming from me—I’m trying to say it’s . . . well, I’m trying to say it’s not absolutely what it looks like. I mean, I know it must look pretty wretched from your point of view, but that’s where I feel if I could only have a chance to explain a bit, just kind of talk it through, you might be able to see it differently, see
me
differently. It’s a question of perspective, really. The thing is . . . Are you still there, Glyn?”

Glyn growls that he is still there—wondering in fact why the hell he is.

“Oh God, thanks. Thanks for giving me a chance. Look, what I’m trying to say is . . . it was all so bloody stupid, it wasn’t such a big issue, it was a crazy sort of
mistake
. I don’t know what came over us—came over me. Oh, that’s what people always say, isn’t it—except I’m sure you don’t, you’ve got more sense, I always thought you were such a levelheaded sort of bloke, knew what you were doing, which is why I thought, Let me just try to
talk
to him.”

“You seem to be doing just that,” says Glyn. “To what end?”

“Ah. Well, it’s kind of several things, you see, Glyn. I mean, firstly, me and Kath. What you’ve got to understand is, it was all over almost as soon as it began. It wasn’t some great long-drawn-out business. And it made absolutely no difference to—to other things. Me and Elaine. You and Kath. Those were what mattered, believe me. We both knew that, at the time. She . . . well, I tell you honestly, and I absolutely mean this . . . I always knew her heart was never in it. And for myself, well, I got carried away. She was after all incredibly . . . I just sort of lost my head. But only temporarily, that’s what I’m trying to say. It was just this brief kind of lunacy. And that’s really the point of my getting in touch, Glyn. I mean, it’s long since over and done with, and Kath’s not here to . . . Surely the sensible, reasonable thing is just to bury it, let it be, and all of us get on with life—”

Glyn interrupts to say that, personally, he is doing precisely that.

“And that’s where you’re so sensible, Glyn. I mean, you’re seeing it in proportion, you’re being rational about it, and frankly I’m so relieved, talking to you, thank God I did phone, and, believe me, I’ve had to screw myself up to this, but I feel so much better now. But the real trouble is . . . Elaine’s taken it rather differently, and that’s what I wanted to talk about too. She’s really gone over the top about it all, completely overreacted. Actually, Glyn, she’s thrown me out.”

Glyn has swung from extreme irritation through contempt to boredom. Now, he is interested. Well, well. That’s a turn-up for the books.

“I’m staying with Polly. I don’t mind telling you, Glyn, I’m in a pretty bad way. It’s so . . . well, I just feel it’s so extreme. I mean, yes, of course, I can see how she feels, but does it have to be like this? She won’t talk to me—nothing Poll says has any effect. What’s occurred to me, Glyn, is . . . Elaine always had a lot of time for you, she respects you, I know that—maybe what’s needed is someone a bit more detached, like yourself, to sort of have a word, put it to her that she’s going too far. I just have this feeling that she’d pay attention to you, Glyn.”

“Do you, now?” says Glyn.

“And of course it was through you that she knew about it.”

“Oh, I see. It’s really all
my
fault,” says Glyn.

“Christ, no—that’s not what I mean. I can entirely understand why you felt you had to—”

“Good,” says Glyn. “Just as well.”

“. . . of
course
I understand that. And you and Elaine have known each other a long time—though I wish you’d come to me first, if you and I could only have had a talk at that point—”

That does it. “Quite,” snaps Glyn. “Elaine and I go way back.”

“Sorry?”

“We . . . considered one another for a while. But you may be aware of that.”

“Actually, no—I wasn’t.”

“Again, no big issue, put in perspective. You take my point?”

Afterwards, Glyn has no idea why he said this. Exasperation? Mischief? Somehow, the words just fell out.

“Oh,” says Nick. “You and Elaine—” And is silent.

“So, I could, I daresay, have a word, as you propose—but on the whole I think it inappropriate. You have to deal with this for yourself, if I may say so.”

 
“Mum? Look—I’m worried about Dad. Nothing new about that, but I’m differently worried. He’s gone all quiet. Not that I see him that much—I’m flat out this week, working all hours, someone’s off sick and . . . oh, never mind—but when I do, it’s as though I’m not there. He just looks at me—as though he’s miles away. I’m thinking therapists again, frankly.”

 
“It’s me. I’ve got to talk.”

When Elaine puts the phone down she can hardly believe that this conversation with Nick has taken place. In which she has had to agree that, yes, she and Glyn were once . . . interested in one another . . . that, yes, she met Glyn on a few occasions. But that, no, they were never lovers. She is experiencing a brew of emotions: fury at Glyn, embarrassment, defensive cool with Nick, who has bypassed the answerphone because she forgot to put it on. But now that their exchange is over, and she is angry and undermined, she realizes that Nick’s tone was not what she might have expected. There was neither challenge nor reproach; rather, he seemed bemused, incredulous. He was not out to make capital from this, it would appear. The phone call was to seek confirmation : “I thought he might be making it up.”