The Photograph - Rilegato

Lively, Penelope

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670032050 ISBN 13: 9780670032051

Casa editrice: Viking Adult, 2003

Riassunto

Penelope Lively is a grande dame of British letters whose novels have attracted readers of Ian McEwan and Iris Murdoch-as well as those enthralled by her insight into relationships and family. The Photograph brings her talents into a whole new page-turning realm.

It opens with a snapshot: a young woman, Kath, at an unknown gathering, hands clasped with a man not her husband, their backs to the camera. Its envelope is marked DO NOT OPEN-DESTROY. But Kath's husband, Glyn, does not heed the warning. The mystery of the photograph, and of Kath herself and her recent death, propels him on a journey of discovery that sends shock waves through the lives of her family and friends. The elfin Kath-with her mesmerizing looks and casual ways-moves like an insistent ghost through the thoughts and memories of everyone who knew her: self-centered Glyn, past his lusty, passionate professorial prime; her remorselessly competent sister Elaine, a doyenne garden designer married to feckless ne'er-do-well Nick; and their daughter Polly, beloved of Kath, who oscillates between home and family and the tumultuous new era she inhabits.

The Photograph, with Lively's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, explores issues that extend far beyond its London suburban setting: a woman's beauty and its collision with her own happiness, sisters' rivalry and lovers' cooling, a marriage in supreme crisis, and the cost of professional "success" as life unfolds. It is Penelope Lively at her very best, the dazzling and intriguing climax to all she has written before.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Penelope Lively is the author of numerous award-winning novels as well as many works of nonfiction, including A House Unlocked, and children's books. Her short stories have appeared in many periodicals. Born in Egypt, she has spent most of her life in England and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Glyn
Kath.
Kath steps from the landing cupboard, where she should not be.

The landing cupboard is stacked high with what Glyn calls low-use material: conference papers and student references and offprints, including he hopes an offprint that he needs right now for the article on which he is working. The strata in here go back to his postgraduate days, in no convenient sequential order but all jumbled up and juxtaposed. A crisp column of Past and Present is wedged against a heap of tattered files spewing forth their contents. Forgotten students drift to his feet as he rummages, and lie reproachful on the floor: "Susan Cochrane's contributions to my seminar have been perfunctory. . . ." Labeled boxes of photographs-Aerial, Bishops Munby 1976, Leeds 1985-are squeezed against a further row of files. To remove one will bring the lot crashing down, like an ill-judged move in that game involving a tower of balanced blocks. But he has glimpsed behind them a further cache which may well include offprints.

On the shelf above he spots the gold-lettered spine of his own doctoral thesis, its green cloth blotched brown with age; on top of it sits a 1980s run of the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal. Come to think of it, the contents of the landing cupboard are a nice reflection of his own trade-it is a landscape in which everything coexists, requiring expert deconstruction. But he does not dwell on that, intent instead upon this, increasingly irritating, search. He tugs at a file to improve his view of what lies beyond and, sure enough, there is a landslide. Exasperated, he gets down on hands and knees to shovel up this mess, and suddenly there is Kath.

A brown foolscap-size wallet file, with her loopy scrawl across the flap: Keep! She smiles at him; he sees her skimpy dark fringe, her eyes, that smile. What is she doing here, in the middle of all this stuff that has nothing to do with her? He picks up the file, stares. He cannot think how it got here. Everything of hers was cleared out. Back then. When she. When.

Hang on, though. Here underneath it are a couple of folders, also with her handwriting: Recipes. Since when did Kath go in for serious cooking, for heaven's sake? He opens the folder, flicks through the contents. Indeed, yes-cuttings from newspapers and magazines in the late 1980s, but petering out fairly rapidly, which signifies. He investigates the second folder, which contains receipted bills, many of them red-flagged second demands, which signifies also, and an incomplete series of bank statements, indicating a mounting overdraft.

It would seem that this assortment of her things got pushed in with his papers by mistake during the big clearing-out operation. The hurried, distracted clearing-out operation. Elaine had volunteered to sort out and dispose of Kath's possessions. She missed this lot. And here they have lain ever since, festering.

Well, no, not exactly festering, but turning a little brown at the edges, doggedly degrading away as is everything else in here, doing what inanimate objects do as time passes, preparing to give pause for thought to those whose business is the interpretation of vanished landscapes.

The wallet file is brown anyway, so degradation is not much apparent. He dumps the folders on the floor and goes to sit on the top step of the stairs, holding the file. He opens it.

Not much inside. Various documents, and a sealed brown envelope containing something stiff. Glyn sets this aside and goes through the rest.

A jeweler's valuation for a two-strand pearl necklace and a pair of drop pearl earrings. Originally her mother's, he seems to remember. Kath wore the earrings a lot. Her medical card. And her birth certificate. Aha! So this is where that was, the absence of which caused considerable nuisance back then, necessitating a visit to Somerset House. No marriage certificate, one notes. That too had gone missing, making difficulties. And is still lost, it would seem. Not that that is, now, a problem.

Her O-level certificate. Seven subjects, A grades in all but one. Glyn scans this with some surprise. Well, well. Who'd have thought it?

The injunction on the file's flap was presumably to herself. This was the repository for items she knew that she must hang on to, but-knowing herself-that she knew she was only too likely to lose. He experiences a stir of fondness, which disconcerts him. And he has been entirely diverted from the hunt for that offprint, which is a matter of some urgency. Fondness is overtaken by annoyance; Kath is getting in the way of his work, which was not allowed, as she well understood.

There is also a National Savings Certificate for £5, bearing a date in the mid-1950s. When she was about eight, for heaven's sake. And some checkbook stubs and a Post Office savings book showing a balance of £14.58, and a clutch of letters, at which he glances. The letters are from Kath's mother, the mother who died when Kath was sixteen. Glyn sees no reason to be interested in these and pushes them back into the file unread.

He is left with a semiopaque folder which turns out to hold a sequence of studio portraits of Kath. She is looking at him in glossy black and white, now made manifest entirely. Young Kath. A backlit Kath with bare shoulders, head turned this way or that, eyes to the camera or demurely lowered, provocative smile, contemplative sideways gaze. These would date from the aspiring-actress days, long before he knew her. Very young Kath.

Glyn studies these photos for quite a while.

Kath.

He returns everything to the file. There is now just this brown envelope. He notices for the first time that something is written on it. In her hand. Lightly penciled.

"don't open-destroy."

And for whom is this second instruction intended?

He opens the envelope. Within are a photograph and a folded sheet of paper. He looks first at the photograph. A group of five people; grass beneath their feet, a backdrop of trees. Two members of the group, a man and a woman, have their backs to the photographer. Of the other three, Elaine can be identified at once, visible between the two whose faces cannot be seen. Near to her stand another man and woman, whom Glyn does not recognize.

One of the back-turned pair is Kath-he would know that outline anywhere, that stance. The someone else, the man, is at first a bit of a teaser. Familiar, surely-the rather long dark hair, the height, a good head taller than Kath. A slightly hunched way of standing.

Glyn brings the photo closer to his face for more minute inspection. And then he sees. He sees the hands. He sees that Kath and this someone, this man, have their hands closely entwined, locked together, pushed behind them so that, as they stand side by side in this moment of private intimacy, this interlocking of hands would be invisible to the rest of the group.

Except to the photographer, who may or may not have been aware of what had been immortalized-the freeze-frame revelation.

And now Glyn recognizes the someone, the man. It is Nick. He turns to the folded piece of paper that accompanied the photograph. He feels as though gripped by the onset of some incapacitating disease, but this paper requires attention. Handwriting. A brief message. "I can't resist sending you this. Negative destroyed, I'm told. Blessings, my love."

No signature. None needed. Neither for Kath then, nor, now, for Glyn. Though confirmation is needed. Somewhere he will have an instance of Nick's handwriting. A signature. A letter from way back when he was a consultant, or some such nonsense, on that landscape-history series Nick published and of which he endlessly and ignorantly enthused, as Nick always did.

The disease now has him by the throat. The throat, the gut, the balls. What he feels is . . . well, what he experiences is the most appalling stomach-churning, head-spinning cauldron of emotion. Rage is the top note-beneath that a seethe of jealousy and humiliation, the whole primed with some kind of furious drive and energy. Where? When? Who? Who took this photograph? Who presumably passed it on to Nick and destroyed the negative? The telephone rings, down in his study. Such is Glyn's powered state, his consuming purpose, that he is at once on his feet and halfway down the stairs to pick it up and snap: "I am not available. Sorry."

I cannot be doing with you right now, because I have just learned that the woman who was once my wife had an affair with her sister's husband apparently-at some time yet to be identified. I am evidently a dupe, a cuckold. My understanding of the past has been savagely undermined. You will appreciate that for the foreseeable future this requires all my attention. The phone stops. Of course. The answerphone is on.

Glyn returns to the top of the stairs. He sits holding the photo and the sheet of paper, looking from one to the other. Kath is everywhere now, the landing is full of her, and the staircase, and the big brimming treacherous cupboard; there are dozens of her, from different times and at different places, all talking at once, it seems. She curls up against him in bed, chattering about some film she has just seen. She puts her head round the door of his study, sunnily smiling, offering coffee. She skids ahead of him down a Cumbrian hillside, a small brilliant figure in a red jacket.

Questions are pouring through his head. When and where and who? But also-who else? Who else knew about this? Did Elaine know? Did Elaine connive? Was this matter common knowledge? Was he the innocent, the fool? Did people mutter to one another, throw him patronizing glances?

And for whom did she pencil that scribble on the envelope: "don't open-destroy"? For herself?

For me?

Did she plan this, step-by-step? Did she plan this moment? That she would fall from the landing cupboard, set me ablaze?

Well, no. Because Kath was not like that. Kath never planned. Kath never looked beyond tomorrow. Kath seized the days as they came and discarded them when done. No, she came across that file one day, into which she had shoved various items. She flicked through them-looking for someth...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Adult
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670032050
• ISBN 13: 9780670032051
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 240