“Mmn.”
Nick is now cheerfully concerned. “Don’t do all that wretched paperwork now, sweetie. Relax. Enjoy this gorgeous evening. Tell you what, why don’t I knock us up an omelette and a salad later on and then you needn’t bother cooking?”
“Yes, why don’t you . . .” says Elaine. She returns to her letters.
Nick’s concern hovers in silence for a while. He gives her a furtive glance. “Pesky clients?” he asks, with professional solicitude.
“Many clients are pesky, as you put it. If I let that bother me I’d soon go out of business.”
Nick changes tack. There is an element of self-preservation here.
“I’ve had someone called a fact-checker on my back today. Nitpicking away about could I verify this, and give a reference for that. Remember that piece I did for the
New York Times
travel magazine?”
“And could you?”
“Well, here and there I could,” says Nick. “But, I mean—what a sweat! On and on she went—‘Now can we look at paragraph two on galley three—’”
“An appalling imposition.” Elaine’s tone is level, inscrutable. She picks up another letter from the pile.
Nick’s strategy is not working out quite as intended: the establishment of his own demanding agenda.
“And of course I was wanting to get to the library. I need stuff on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I’m really excited about this book project.”
Elaine perceives that Nick will probably not be invited to contribute to the
New York Times
travel magazine again. His relationships with commissioning editors are frequently short-lived: he finds deadlines offensive and briefings tiresome. The book project will remain a gleam in his eye, which is no doubt just as well, since it is unlikely to thrill publishers, there being certainly a swathe of works already on Isambard Kingdom Brunel far superior to any contribution Nick might make.
Occasionally, over the years, she has asked herself if she should feel sorry for Nick. But Nick does not invite sympathy, because clearly he does not feel that there is any problem. When one area of activity sputters to extinction, he is blithely accepting: “Actually, it was a bit of a bore anyway, and I’ve got a rather good idea. . . .” Enthusiasm becomes itself an occupation. “What one should be getting into nowadays is desktop publishing. . . . I’ve got this marvelous scheme for up-market canal-boat holidays for rich Americans. . . . The really interesting thing would be to set up a travelers’ consultation service. . . .” Once in a while, such schemes get beyond the stage of exuberant speculation, and Nick goes in tentative search of the necessary funding. But potential backers are irritatingly uncompliant. They start asking for something called a Business Plan, which has Nick running for cover. The project in question ceases to be a preoccupation, it melts into obscurity, he retreats into writing the occasional letter soliciting a book review. He becomes immersed in transitory interests. His comings and goings are unpredictable; there is always some pressing need, some undefined engagement. But he appears to be a man at ease with himself and with the world. This is hardly a case for sympathy.
Elaine has been married to Nick for nearly thirty-two years. When she looks at Polly, their daughter’s firm assertive presence seems to be the expression of that expanse of time. She cannot now conceive of a world in which there was not Polly, and she cannot well remember a life without Nick. But these days it is Polly who is the most inevitable development. Polly is ineluctable; Polly of today—capable, positive, employed. Polly is a Web designer—“a here-and-now sort of job,” as she herself describes it—and seems to Elaine to have been ever thus: brisk, busy, slim, trim, an adult who has somehow entirely absorbed all her former selves. Elaine has to search for the baby, the child, the adolescent. Nick, on the other hand, Nick, who has not much changed, who is simply a weathered version of his younger self—Nick sometimes appears to Elaine to be oddly fortuitous.
From time to time she wonders how she came by Nick. Why is she with Nick rather than with someone quite other? Well—because we pair off with the person we come across when the time is right. The young are like dogs on heat. In your twenties, when the hormones are roaring, it could be pretty well anyone. That someone else who is also currently available, not otherwise committed, ready to pair-bond. Oh, love comes into it—but love is an opportunist. Love can be expedient.
There was Nick, when Elaine was twenty-six. There he was, always the animated center of any group, always good-humored, always game for any proposition, gleaming with good health and well-being. In other species, choice of a mate concentrates upon physical attributes—the indicators of good genes. Nick signaled good genes, if you went by surface appearances. And Polly does have his height, his good facial bones, his teeth that do not decay. But Polly, thanks be, does not have his lack of application, his idleness, his capacity for diversion. Polly is focused, in the language of her day and of her trade.
A question of timely collision. The two of you being in the same place at the same moment. The intersection of trajectories. The conjunction of Nick and Elaine took place during the 1960s, a good time in which to be young, according to legend. It now seems to Elaine that Nick was more resolutely young than ever she was. Even at the time, she felt herself to be on the margins of progressive action, reading about it in magazines, observing posses of contemporaries who had clearly got it right. And, when first she met Nick, he was a member of just such a posse: the center of attention at some party where she was a more tentative bystander. But he had noticed her, he had sought her out—this appealing, entertaining, personable man, two years younger than she was but never mind. “Maybe he likes mother figures,” a friend had joked, causing offense. Elaine had been cautious; for months their association had been spasmodic, undefined. And then something habitual had crept into it, and an unstated assumption that this was probably permanent. Over a pub lunch one day he said, “You know, honestly, we should get married, we really should.” Thus had she come by Nick.
Nick has not matured well. Sometimes Elaine feels that he has not matured at all. Behavior that is engaging in someone of twenty-five becomes less so at forty, let alone at fifty-eight. Where once she was beguiled, she has for many years been exasperated, though exasperated in the tempered, low-key way of longstanding acceptance. It could be worse, she has thought: he could be a drunk, or a crook, or a philanderer. He is merely feckless, and short on judgment.
He is on the sidelines of her life, in a crucial sense. She shares a bed with him at night, she eats a certain number of meals in his company, but he is excluded from the onward rush of things. He is not part of the faxes and phone calls, the consultations with Sonia, with Jim, with the gardening apprentices, the juggling of time and energy. He knows little of her cross-country journeys to client meetings or the production process of a book. “You’re going where?” he says. “Warwick? You should look at the canal near there. Longest flight of locks in the country—amazing!” He steers clear of the books after an unwise surge of interest a few years ago: “You know, we could do these ourselves.
I
could. Desktop publishing. Cut out the middleman. Simple . . . OK, OK . . . it was just an idea. . . . Forget it.”
Oh no, she had thought. No way. I’ve been there once. Not again. And this is my operation—books and all.
The sun is going down. The evening light has intensified over the garden. Elaine spares a moment for an appreciative look. Next year, some late tulips down by the yew hedge would be a good idea, to light up that dark corner. She returns to the letters. Nearly done now, sorted into two piles—one for Sonia to deal with and another with those to which she must draft a personal reply. An invitation to speak at a literary festival; yes to that—books will be sold and it is useful publicity. Would she attend the end-of-year prize-giving at a horticultural college as principal guest? Probably—for similar reasons. Could she please visit the garden of a couple in Shropshire (“. . . a bit out of your way, we realize, but we’d love to put you up for the night . . .”) who have written four pages about their tedious planting theories and probably have no conception of her consultation fee, or indeed that such a thing is appropriate: over to Sonia. Faxes from clients; faxes from contractors; a blizzard of promotional material that must be glanced through at the very least, in case there is something she should know about.
Nick has refilled their glasses. He is about to sit down again.
“How about that omelette?”
“Omelette?” Nick sounds surprised. “Ah. Yes. Omelette and salad. Right, then. Shall do.”
“Good,” says Elaine. She picks up some stuff about a new brand of fertilizer, skims through it, throws it in the wastepaper basket. Nick is still standing there. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. For a peculiar moment you looked like Kath. OK—supper coming up.” He goes.
This is profoundly irritating, for reasons that she cannot or perhaps does not wish to define. She does not look like Kath, and never did, which is why Nick has called the moment peculiar. They both know that she and Kath were about as unlike as sisters can be. Nevertheless, she knows what he means. She has seen it herself, in the mirror. Something about the mouth. A particular expression. Some genetic quirk—an arrangement of lip. When, otherwise, it always seemed as though she and Kath shared no genes whatsoever.
How odd, that Kath should survive thus—in the twist of someone else’s lip. What would she have to say about that? She’d make some throwaway remark—one of those oddball witticisms.
She’d laugh—that wry little laugh. Hanging on like this in the shape of my lip, thinks Elaine. And in my mind. And in Glyn’s and I daresay in Nick’s and I suppose in Polly’s and in those of a great many others. Many different Kaths. Personal Kaths. She is fragmented now. The dead don’t go; they just slip into other people’s heads.
It occurs to her that there is an eerie connection between Kath’s presence in her mind nowadays and the way things were in their childhood, when Kath was a permanent, peripheral feature of the domestic landscape. Back then, when she was relegated simply by that matter of age, the wedge of years that sat between them, prescribing and directing. A twelve-year-old does not play with a six-year-old, or that particular twelve-year-old did not. A person of sixteen is not much interested in someone of ten. Elaine remembers the closed door of her own room, the edgy contrived accommodation of family holidays. That time consisted of the long years when Kath was merely a tiresome feature, an occasional source of jealousy, a local climatic effect to be ignored or irritably tolerated. She got more than her fair share of parental attention: “Do remember she’s only five . . . seven . . . nine. . . .” Her existence meant that there was always this unstable element within the household, generating concern, requiring other people’s energies and help.
And then that time came to an end. Quite suddenly, it now seems. Kath grew up. One day she was no longer that annoying appendage but a person. She had fledged, grown wings—or rather, she had metamorphosed. This girl had appeared. From the child chrysalis there had emerged this spritelike creature—elfin, gamine, all the well-honed terms applied. There she was, slim and quick, with long legs and small perfect body and that pointed face with the thin, neat nose and those lake-green eyes and the high curving brows and the brown-black crop of hair—the ensemble that had everyone looking, and then looking again, homing in on her when she came into a room. You saw people glance, and then keep glancing back, with surprised interest, attention, pleasure. And she had no idea. No more idea than has a bunch of flowers, a picture on the wall, a jewel—anything that seizes the eye, that gives a momentary uplift.
“You’re
so
unalike,” they began to say. “No one would realize you’re sisters.” This by then would, perhaps, have been better thought than spoken.
Nick is now in the kitchen. Elaine can hear his inexpert clattering with pans and plates. She is still here in the conservatory sifting the final tranche of paperwork, which does not require much attention, so that she is also elsewhere, in another time and place, dispatched there by Nick’s provocative remark. He did not of course intend to provoke. Nick never does. That is one of the things about Nick—something that is in itself an aggravation.
She hears her mother’s voice. This is unusual; her mother is not much with her these days, nor has been for many a year.
“Our ugly duckling is turning into a swan,” says their mother. “Look at her!”
And Elaine, home from college for the vacation, takes a look and sees that this is so.
“People have said she ought to think of going to stage school,” their mother continues.
Elaine is consumed with annoyance. Typical! she thinks. Typical Mum. Typical people. “Why?” she snaps.
Their mother blunders on. She has come to be mildly afraid of Elaine, but has never learned how to step cautiously.
“Well, because she’s so pretty, I suppose.”
“And can Kath act?”
Their mother refers to a supporting role in a school nativity play, some while back. She speculates that after all you go to stage school to be taught how to act, don’t you?
Kath did go to stage school, in the fullness of time, perhaps because of their mother, perhaps because of these anonymous people with their unconsidered opinions, and much good it did her. But by then their mother was dead.
The trouble with Mum, thinks Elaine, was that she took everything at face value. Literally, in that instance. Her views were simplistic, if one is being entirely honest. Not her fault. A restricted education; a life centered upon family and home. And Dad, not exactly stimulating, was he? I don’t remember any kind of discussion ever taking place, except about what color to paint the kitchen, or where to go for the summer holiday. They were comfortable and unambitious. Mum looked after Kath and me, put food on the table, and saw that everything was in prime
Good Housekeeping
condition; Dad went to his office, brought home a salary, piled up a pension. They were entirely satisfied.