Her tone of voice sets an alarm bell ringing, but only a muted one. This matter of upgrading his car? Probably. Nothing that can’t be sorted, if he goes about it in the right way.
It may be that the demise of Hammond & Watson was all for the best, in the long term. Of course it was tremendous fun, at the time—that nonstop activity, new books brewing, those heady moments when the first bound copies arrived, the pursuit of likely authors, all the comings and goings. But there had been also the endless niggling, tiresome background irritations of accountants and suppliers, and all those bloody figures which apparently forbade one to do this or that. Admittedly, Oliver took much off one’s back, but they were always there, like some po-faced inappropriate guest at a party, clouding things.
No, he doesn’t regret those days so very much. The time since has been something of a liberation, Nick now realizes. He has been able to give proper consideration to a project, drop it if it seems likely to become a bore in the end, instead of being obliged to plunge ahead because a publishing house must publish, after all. And then sometimes one got tired of the book or the series in midstream. No, he can take things as they come—do background work on some idea when he feels inspired, and accept fallow periods when nothing much springs to mind, but that’s not so bad because there are always plenty of agreeable ways of passing the time. He is aware that Elaine gets a bit uptight about this way of doing things, but it is so shortsighted of her. As he has tried to explain—but she never quite seems to get the point—you are actually much more productive if you pace yourself. He had never realized that was the case back in the Hammond & Watson days, when he used to be scurrying around like some demented ant—day in, day out. Of course, Elaine’s own style is one of relentless work. He’s always telling her she should let up a bit, take a few days off. But no—if it’s not client meetings and site visits, it’s paperwork with Sonia or sussing out some new supplier. And when she’s not doing any of that, she’s out in the garden, fossicking away.
“Oh . . . right,” he says. “Over supper, OK? I was just going to the health club.”
“
Now.
I’m away tonight.”
Mind, he’d be the first to agree that Elaine’s industry is remarkable, and that her success is a great blessing. All credit to her—he would never have believed that the outfit she’s got now could have arisen from those small beginnings. He got a bit of a shock the other day when he heard her discussing last year’s turnover with Sonia. And incidentally, given that, it really is a bit stiff to be getting all flaky about replacing the car.
Just occasionally, Nick looks at Elaine and is disconcerted. He gets this odd feeling that she is someone else, a person he doesn’t know all that well. Which is absurd; she is the woman with whom he has been getting into bed every night—well, most nights, admittedly Elaine is elsewhere rather more often nowadays—for God knows how many years. How long have they been married? He’d need to work that one out. And of course this is nonsense—Elaine is as she ever was, just older. But sometimes this stranger glances across the table at him.
She’s in the top league now, it seems, in her trade. There’s talk of a lecture tour in the States, and she’s designing a garden for next year’s Chelsea Flower Show. She’s busy. Which means that she is not always as attentive to what Nick may be saying or doing as she once was. Maybe that accounts for the sense of alienation. But it’s not a problem.
Nick has always given problems a wide berth. Problems should not be what life is about. When running a business, you hire someone else to deal with nuts and bolts, as good old Oliver did. Nick is always saying to Elaine that she should pass on much more to Sonia than she does, or bring in some troubleshooter. And, above all, you never allow yourself to get rattled if things aren’t working out the way they should. Just move on. Cut your losses and forget about it.
This is the best policy for personal life also, Nick reckons. The snag is that other people tend to ambush you, from time to time. They create difficulties. They misunderstand, they misinterpret. It has to be said that Elaine has a tendency in that direction. Some small thing can be absurdly inflated, an obstacle found where there need be none. Such as this nonsense about the car.
“In the conservatory,” says Elaine. “Sonia will be here in a minute.”
He follows her. Really, this is getting a bit out of hand.
How long
have
they been married? He must remember to check that out with her, though obviously now is not the moment. Nick is well attuned to Elaine’s state of mind, and it is clear that this morning is a bad patch, for some reason. The strategy will be, as ever, to be nicely propitiating, lower the temperature, and change the subject and, with any luck, whatever is riling her can be laid to rest.
Nick is definitely fond of Elaine. Absolutely no question about that. He cannot imagine being married to anyone else. Time was—and he is prepared to admit this—he used to look around a bit, once in a while. But everyone does that when they’re younger, don’t they? There’s nothing of that kind now, hasn’t been for many a year. Elaine suits him nicely. Their sex life has rather gone off the boil, but presumably that’s true of anyone of their age. Though Elaine of course is a touch older than he is, not that he’s ever made anything of that.
Nick can’t quite remember how he and Elaine came to get married. No wonder he’s not certain how long ago it was anyway. An awful lot of years, that’s for sure. He’s never gone in for mulling over the past. What’s done is done. You can’t change what’s happened, so why keep hauling it out and looking at it? And he has never wished himself not married to Elaine; just occasionally it has been therapeutic to . . . look outside a bit. Back when he met her there was such a crowd of people about, melded now into an impressionistic blur. Lots of girls. Somehow it was Elaine he married rather than someone else, and he is inclined to feel that that has been nothing but a blessing. All right, she can be edgy at times, such as right now, but one can handle that. And she has always kept things running—he is absolutely prepared to hand it to her there, if it weren’t for the way she has got her own business off the ground they might well be in a bit of a pickle at this point. No, Elaine deserves all credit, no question. If she gets rather fraught on occasion, well, that’s understandable. She’s under a fair bit of pressure, and the thing is to be understanding and accommodating.
“Actually,” he says, “I’ve given it a bit of thought—this car question—and I reckon we don’t need to go for brand-new. A year or two old would do me fine.”
“We’re not talking about your car.”
It has to be said that Elaine can be just a mite governessy. Ever has been—and getting more so, Nick fears. One is going to have to be tolerant. It was never a good idea to make a stand when she got ratty about something quite trivial—best just to back off and, with any luck, it would blow over. In the past, he could always placate her, talk her down, be especially friendly and helpful and all that. Lately, this approach somehow doesn’t seem to cut so much ice. The best thing is just to keep his head down, go his own way, which is, after all, what he has always done, and take care not to get into antagonistic situations. Elaine likes to run a tight ship, she likes to know what’s going on around her, but nowadays she is pretty well taken up with the business, and frankly there’s no need for her to be bothered about Nick’s day-to-day arrangements. It would be a lot more sensible if there were some more fluid system over cash flow, and then he wouldn’t need to involve her when something crops up like this matter of the car. He’s suggested this more than once, but Elaine can be funny when it comes to money. Distinctly shirty.
“Oh . . . right.” He gives her a questioning look. An open, sunny, at-your-service sort of look.
Damn. That means the car matter has simply been put on hold, stashed away in one of Elaine’s mental “pending” files, and he will have to allow a judicious interval before he brings it up again. Which is a blasted nuisance. The Golf has over eighty thousand on the clock, one thing after another is going wrong, and he wouldn’t really want to do a long trip in it. Which means that he has got to get it replaced before he can go up to Northumberland and have a few days pottering around Lindisfarne and Alnwick and places like that, which he feels might be inspirational.
Elaine is silent. Nick waits. Back in the house, the phone rings, stops. Sonia has picked it up. Outside, Jim rides the tractor mower to and fro, to and fro.
“So the mower’s running OK now . . .” says Nick.
Which is all to the good. Bad news if it was packing in. God knows what those things cost. Not as much as a car, though, surely? But of course it’s not the car we’re here about, apparently. There’s something else.
When Elaine comes on all heavy like this, the thing is to play it down. Nick does not like rows. In fact, he never has rows—not with anyone. If a row situation threatens, he somehow just is not there anymore. This technique has worked with Elaine, up to a point. It is difficult for anyone to get satisfactorily confrontational with someone who will not confront back. Nick is aware that he is rather skillful at marital peacekeeping, at the avoidance of overt hostility, at the adroit use of diplomatic initiatives. On occasion, he has wondered if he ought not to be exploiting this experience, this facility. When lifestyle publications became a boom industry, he thought of stepping in with a really definitive book on married life from the man’s point of view. With a pushy title—
How to Stay Married
, that sort of thing. A combination of wry humor with practicality. And a literary slant as well—cite some famous abiding marriages and look at the ups and downs. D. H. Lawrence and what’s-her-name. Tennyson was married for donkey’s years, wasn’t he? Dickens—no, that went off the rails. One would have to get it all up, but that could be quite amusing. In fact, the thing was definitely a promising idea, but somehow it was a project he had never felt able to run past Elaine. Normally he gave her a progress report on any scheme he was working on—not that there was ever very much of a comeback, not much constructive input from her, put it that way. Sometimes you could even feel that she wasn’t giving the sort of attention that she should be. Anyway, he’d somehow had this sense that she wouldn’t really get the point of the marriage-book idea, so it was never mentioned and eventually he’d abandoned it. It was something one could always pick up again, if there was nothing much else in mind.
But Nick knows that he is sensitive to the coded language of married life. He can negotiate. And so he is not going to allow whatever is at issue just now to get out of hand. Easy does it.
“Kath,” says Elaine.
It is curious how her name instantly summons her. She is right there, for an instant, looking at him. And he feels . . . Well, there is a pleasant sense of well-being, a little lift of the spirits. Kath could always do that. A whole troop of Kaths flit about him, stemming from different times and places. She is dancing with Polly—a child Polly. She has just married Glyn, and stands hand in hand with him, beaming. She sits cross-legged in the garden here, making a daisy chain. She . . . And then again she . . .
“Kath?” he says.
They seldom talk about Kath. At least not deliberately, as it were. She crops up, often enough. Naturally. Some casual mention. “Wasn’t Kath there when . . . ?” “Didn’t Kath used to go to such-and-such . . . ?” Polly talks about her quite a lot. She and Polly were always thick as thieves.
So why, all of a sudden . . . ?
“You and Kath,” says Elaine.
There is this heave of the gut. The room seems to swing a little. The troop of Kaths is quite gone. It is just him and Elaine, sitting there in the conservatory, with the tractor mower going up and down outside, a bee buzzing in the blue plumbago. Everything is quite real and precise, unfortunately. It is Tuesday morning, about half past ten. He should be on his way to the health club. Instead, he is here, with a sick feeling in his stomach.
What is going on? Not . . . Surely she can’t have . . . How could . . . ?
“I’ve seen a photograph,” says Elaine. “And a note from you that was with it.”
Oh God. It comes rushing into his head as she speaks. That photograph. Of course. He can see it. He remembers laughing when first he saw it. And he couldn’t resist sending it to Kath. She didn’t keep it? The silly girl didn’t go and hang on to it?
“I see you know what I’m talking about,” she says.
Jesus Christ. But . . . Hang on, how did . . . ? Oliver. It was Oliver who handed over the photo. And one—well, one sort of squared Oliver. And he said he’d binned the negative. So has bloody Oliver . . . ? Otherwise it has to be that it has somehow turned up. Where?
“Glyn found it,” says Elaine.
Now the whole place whirls. The floor rocks. That bee makes a shrill, insistent din, like a dentist’s drill. This shouldn’t be happening. But it is.
Get a grip. Take control. This is bad, but it is nothing that cannot be contained, like everything else. Naturally Elaine is upset; she has had a shock. It will take a while for her to digest this; he is going to need all his resources.
“Ah . . . Glyn,” he says.
Now it is Glyn’s turn to come surging in. Nick can see him plain, and he is looking like thunder. Nick cannot hear what he is saying, which is probably just as well. Glyn—a nasty complication there. But first things first.
“Look, love,” he says. “What we have to do is get this thing into perspective. OK—I’m not going to defend myself or tell lies. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but now that it is . . . well, I’m just going to be entirely honest. Yes, Kath and I once, just for a while, we—”
“I don’t want to know,” says Elaine. “I don’t want to know when, or where, or for how long. It’s enough that it was.”