The Photograph by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online

infilling to be done and mistakes to be rectified. And she would make no majestic claims for it; this is not Hadspen or Tintinhull or Barrington Court. But it is a statement of her taste and talent, it bears her signature, it is her showcase.
    Past six, now swinging into the circular driveway in front of the house, she sees that everyone has gone home. Only Nick’s Golf is parked there. During the day, there is quite a lineup of cars. Sonia, Elaine’s personal assistant, drives from her home ten miles away. Three times a week there is Liz, who deals with the paperwork Sonia hasn’t time for. The red pickup belongs to Jim, who does the heavy garden work. And then there are the relays of horticultural students serving their apprenticeship in the workshop of a master, just as Elaine herself once did. The current apprentice is Pam, who is a little northern butterball, sturdy as an ox, and exuberantly sociable, which makes her good front-of-house material on Saturdays, when the garden is open to the public. Then, all hands are needed to patrol the grounds and to man the sales area, where plants are on offer, along with a judicious selection of garden implements, seeds, gift-shop paraphernalia, and books—not least a complete display of Elaine’s own publications. On those days, the paddock next to the driveway becomes the visitors’ car park. Sometimes Elaine herself is on hand in the garden to be graciously responsive to queries and compliments. Initially, she found this stimulating and good for the ego. Nowadays, she gets rather tired of being asked if this or that is an annual or a perennial, and how to prune a rose. She tends to retreat to the house and leave customer relations to the students, who enjoy it.
    When she first started opening the garden, three years ago, the idea was that Nick would come into his own. Nick, after all, is nothing if not sociable and enthusiastic. The enthusiasm could surely be channeled into visitor reception and salesmanship, or at the very least, car-park duties. And indeed, to begin with Nick was all compliance. He hung about the terraces, treating middle-aged women to dollops of boyish charm; he swept little parties off to the stream garden to display the primulas; he manned the till in the shop and added everything up wrong, but nobody minded because he was so patently a beguiling amateur. Jim took over the car park after Nick directed a BMW into the boggy bit at the bottom, where it stuck fast. And in due course Nick’s commitment to Saturdays withered and died. Elaine remonstrated, tight-lipped. “Sweetie, they keep asking me what this is called or whether that will grow on acid soil, and I haven’t got the foggiest idea. The girls do it much better. And we all know I can’t do money, don’t we?”
    Oh yes, she knows that. You cannot successfully keep a small publishing house afloat without a degree of business acumen. You must be able to gauge what will sell and what will not; you need to balance risk and costs and profit margins. You require a certain facility with figures, an aspect of the activity that Nick found distinctly tiresome. He tended to avert his eyes, for the most part. When Hammond & Watson eventually crashed, despite Oliver’s best efforts, the warehouse was full of unsold stock, authors and suppliers were owed, and what had started out as an enterprising small imprint with a name for topographical and travel writing had become a liability.
    It took a year to sort out the mess. Nick was chastened but buoyant. Never mind. It was good while it lasted. And he had plenty of useful contacts now, lots he could do in travel journalism, stuff for the Sundays, maybe guidebooks, that sort of thing: “Listen, Oliver, what if we—”
    “No,” said Oliver. “Count me out, this time round. No hard feelings. We had a run for our money.”
    To Elaine, Oliver said, “Sorry. I should have been able to keep things under control. I feel I’ve let you down.”
    Since when, she