The Photograph by Penelope Lively

Elaine.
    “Unfortunately, I don’t find that possible. Do you?”
    A pause. “Probably not.”
    “I can’t tolerate a misconception. Everything is thrown into doubt. At least that is what I’m finding. Everything.” He stops abruptly. He is finding also that he does not wish to pursue this line. Personal breast-beating was never on the agenda. There was an entirely practical motive for this meeting, and that has now been satisfied. He knows what he needs to know. Or rather, he has begun to know what he needs to know. He is sidetracked now by a new line of thought.
    “Professional conditioning, to some extent, I suppose. We don’t like the status quo to be upset. Some new and vital piece of information comes along and the whole historical edifice is undermined. Take carbon-fourteen dating. They’ve got everything nicely worked out—what is contemporary with what, a chronology set in tablets of stone—and then along comes dendrochronology and the whole thing is shot to pieces. Stonehenge is earlier than the Pyramids, the Neolithic isn’t when they thought it was. Throw it all out. Think again.” He gives Elaine an interrogatory glance. “You know about carbon-fourteen dating?”
    “As much as I need to know at this moment.”
    “Recent history is less vulnerable. More a question of constant raking over of the ashes. Reinterpreting. Arguing. The sudden reversal is less likely. It’s the early stuff that is the shifting sand. Let alone when you get back to paleontology. A minefield. That said, nothing’s sacrosanct. There’s always the possibility of startling new evidence that moves the goalposts. The drought summer of 1975 made possible aerial photographs that showed up a whole range of early settlements on the southern gravel terraces that were completely unsuspected. Prehistoric-population estimates had to be entirely revised. You follow me?”
    “I take your point. Your personal goalposts have been moved, right now.”
    Glyn stares across the table at her. “Is that not how it seems from your perspective?”
    Coffee has arrived. And with it, for both of them, a further presence. Kath is around. Or rather, several Kaths have arrived. For Glyn, she is for no apparent reason sitting on the roof of a narrow boat, somewhere in a Northamptonshire reach of the Grand Union Canal. Her arms are wrapped round her legs, she wears rope-soled canvas shoes, her tattered straw hat has a bright-blue scarf tied around the crown. And what was he doing? Steering the boat, presumably, which Kath never learned to do, and if the other couple he hazily remembers to have been there on that weekend outing are present, they are not evident in this slide. Kath sits alone, and she is gazing at a couple of children running along the towpath. Quite small children—oddly, he still sees them also. Kath gazes, and presumably he, Glyn, was yanking away at that wheel and anticipating the next lock, while Kath’s mind is patently on something quite other.
    Elaine is experiencing several Kaths, which tumble in her head. Kath is not under control, she will not be dismissed. She is a continuous effect, as she was in childhood, a glimmering presence, flickering away there on the perimeter. She cannot be disregarded; “Here I am,” she says. “Here I was. Look at me.”
    And Elaine looks. She sees a new Kath, who is colored by what Elaine now knows. She is angry with this Kath: angry, resentful, frustrated. But she is also baffled and a touch incredulous. Why? Why Nick? Kath hardly noticed Nick. Or so one thought. Nick was simply a person who was around, as far as Kath was concerned. Familiar, and inevitable—my husband. But apparently all the time . . . or some of the time.
    Elaine summons up that day, the day of this photograph. In a snatch of time—as she stirs her coffee, sets down the spoon, lifts the cup to her lips, drinks, returns it to the saucer—she recovers those hours. But there is not much to recover—tracts of it have