The Photograph by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page B

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