Free The Photograph by Penelope Lively Page B

She takes that scribbled note. She looks first at the photograph. She looks at it for quite a while. Then she reads the note.
    She says nothing. She holds them, one in each hand, looking, not speaking. Then she looks across the table at Glyn.
    “In a file in the landing cupboard,” he says. “Must have been there since she—since then. They were in this.” He pushes across the table towards her that envelope. “DON’T OPEN—DESTROY,” Elaine reads.
    “So . . .” says Glyn. “So here’s a turn-up for the books.” He watches her.
    Elaine looks back at the photograph. Something strange is happening—to her, to the figures that she sees. She sees people who are familiar, but now all of a sudden quite unfamiliar. It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis. A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside, everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.
    “Or perhaps you knew?” says Glyn.
    “No, I didn’t know. Assuming that there was indeed something to know.”
    “Well, what does it look like?”
    Elaine has seen enough. The hands. The handwriting, the language. She picks up the photograph and the scribbled note and puts them in the envelope.
    “I suppose it looks like—what it looks like. And, no, I didn’t know.”
    “Then I’m sorry. This is as much a shock to you as it was to me. I’d begun to think I was the only one in the dark.”
    Elaine makes no comment. The ripples are widening; the reflections become clearer. But, at the same time, they are not clear at all; they are ugly, distorted, deceptive.
    “When was it? Where were you all?”
    “It must have been in the late 1980s—’87 or ’88. We’d gone to the Roman Villa at Chedworth. I forget quite why. Mary Packard was there, and the man she was with then. Do you remember her?” Elaine speaks dully. She would prefer not to speak at all.
    Glyn shakes his head. He is not interested in Mary Packard. “Who else was there? Who took the photograph? And passed it on to Nick?”
    Elaine is silent. At last she says, “Oliver.”
    Oliver. Even as she speaks, Oliver falls apart and is reassembled—in a nanosecond, in a single destructive instant. He too becomes someone else. The Oliver who has been in her head these last ten or fifteen years disintegrates and is replaced by a new and different Oliver, one whom she does not know. Did not know.
    “I see. Him. Nice, reliable old Oliver. In collusion, apparently.”
    The waiter is hovering, menus in hand, proposing dessert. Elaine feels now as though she had fallen from a great height and were picking herself up, gingerly testing limbs. “Nothing else,” she says. “Just coffee.”
    Never mind Oliver, thinks Glyn. I’ll get to him in due course. The point is that there are now two of us in this. He looks guardedly at Elaine; she has been rocked all right, he saw that in her face, but there is no sign of collapse. Well, Elaine is not the type to run weeping from the room.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s a slap in the face, isn’t it? I’ve had a few days to digest. Not that I find that makes a great deal of difference.”
    “Difference to what?” This is not so much a question as a prompt. Talk, thinks Elaine. Just talk and let me consider. Let me do some steady breathing and take stock. I seem to be intact, more intact than I would have expected.
    “—point is the suggestion that nothing was what it seemed to be,” Glyn is saying. “That what one has been carrying around in the head is apparently fallacious. That one was, that we were, unaware of a significant fact, namely, that your sister—my wife—at one time had an evidently intimate relationship with your husband, to put it baldly. Suddenly everything has to be looked at in a different light.”
    “Some might prefer not to look,” says