The Light of Day: A Novel by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

leaning forward in the same huddling way you might to show snaps of your kids.
    How had she chosen? For “recognition purposes.” The one of him—of Bob—showed a man in a holiday pose: a loose shirt, the sleeves rolled up, a pair of sunglasses tucked in a breast pocket, a pullover round his shoulders. A smile just breaking. A good-looking man in his mid-forties. What do gynaecologists look like? What are the tell-tale signs? He looked like some lean and handsome cricketer, a good eye, a straight bat. A flop of dark hair across his forehead, which you could picture him smoothing back.
    What do you say? Some guff? Commend them on their choice of husband? I didn’t have to ask: it was taken two summers ago—before Kristina had arrived.
    The photo of Bob that appeared in the papers must have been from a professional file. For use in some medical brochure. Head and shoulders only. A picture of clean-cut reliability. A studio shot.
    The photo of Kristina was the poorer picture—even a little blurred. (Was that why she chose it? Were there so many to choose from?) A slim girl in jeans and sweater and an old outdoor jacket that didn’t look like her own. Sarah’s? Bob’s? It was in the garden at number fourteen. She seems to have been involved in some physical task—sweeping up leaves maybe. She’s holding the handle of some broom or rake. But she looks as though the camera’s surprised her, trapped her into an expression she can’t quite manage—she would have looked better if she’d been caught unawares.
    That first autumn (I guessed right), before anything had begun.
    I found these same photos again among all that stuff I never burnt. The one of her is the bigger mystery. A poor photo, or something blurred in her? Who took it, and why? (It was Bob who took it—it was his jacket.) Italian, you’d think—who would say “Croatian”?
    She could be eighteen, she could be twenty-five. She didn’t look like the woman I’d see three weeks later, if only briefly and never from closer than a few yards. Stepping in and out of a black Saab.
    But all that was after she’d—bloomed.
    And anyway (trust a detective) people don’t always look like they look.
    I studied the photo and nodded. What was I supposed to say again? That she looked like trouble, a marriage-buster? That she looked like some lost soul anyone would have wanted to take into their care?
    But I knew what we were both thinking (I think). There they were on my desk, like a couple, as if they’d been picked. There we were like judges. Were they a pair, a match? Was that how it was meant to be?
    I turn and drive along the edge of the Common. The light through the trees is like the light through the spokes of a wheel.
    How do you choose? How do these things happen? I think Rita will go and run a dating agency. It’s just my fantasy. The same job, but in reverse. One day, after extra-careful consideration, she’ll say to one of her clients: I’ve got just the woman for you.
    I heard Rita cough, that afternoon, outside. She can’t hear what’s being said in my office—any more than I can hear what she says on the phone—but she can hear when things get heated, desperate, hysterical. Nurse Rita. Or when nothing’s being said at all.
    I shuffled the photos matter-of-factly. Perhaps I coughed myself.
    “Good,” I said. “Now I’ve seen. And now we have a date and time.” Perhaps she noticed the “we.” “If the flight’s at seven-thirty and check-in’s an hour earlier . . . Fulham to the airport, that’s a straight run—but at that time of day . . . Will you have a way of letting me know when Mr. Nash will pick Miss Lazic up?”
    She gave me a look as if I was being slow.
    “He won’t ‘pick her up.’ He’ll be there.”
    “I see.”
    She took the photos and slid them back carefully, like precious objects, into the envelope. Then into the bag. There they go, back into their nest.
    “Yes—now you’ve seen.”
    A strange look, as if