– Photographs

I hadn’t seen Rosanne for years. Our affair had been brief, before she was married, but we’d kept in touch through her brother. Since my divorce she’d written more often, been more interested. Less in me, I realised, than in my situation, living alone, living my own life.

She showed me round the house. It was tastefully furnished, with a careful mix of the enduring old and the classically modern, an Eames chair next to a Tudor blanket box for example, each room finished, complete. Time standing still. Even the ticking of the long-case clock marked time. The boy’s playroom was formidably equipped and immaculately neat and tidy, uninhabited, silent. Mark was doing very well in his career, she emphasised. With not a little help, she implied, from herself.

Then she got out the photograph albums. Every photograph was dated and annotated. Monochrome gravestones and Kodacolor paving slabs from then to now. I was there, at their first party, pissed and glassy-eyed, looking at once naïve and corrupt, a fallen angel. And I’d thought I’d been one helluva guy, then. I can still feel the flashbulb exploding in my face.

Among the moments pinned down and named by Rosanne were the photographs Mark had taken in California, on his sabbatical, on his own. He showed them to me as Rosanne made tea. They lived and breathed. They rested on the page like butterflies. When he turned the page I felt them slipping away, living their own lives. Yet when the page was turned back, there they were, in place, glowing. He displayed a double spread that he was especially pleased with, proudly. The photographs were still. And then they were stirring, slipping free of the corner mounts, and fluttering up. The sun came out, a window opened, and the air flooding in was balmy and soft. The photographs rose up and fluttered around Mark’s head, dancing and shimmering. He sat, helpless and amazed, speechless.

‘Oh Mark, how wonderful!’ Rosanne exclaimed, approaching silently from the kitchen. She stood behind his chair. Then she moved her hand in a mesmeric circle and the fluttering photographs came to her hand. Very carefully she led them back to to the album, watched over them as they settled back into their places on the page, secured themselves under the corner mounts. Then she closed the album.

’Tea?’ she said, brightly.