A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 2004, 237 p.

One day Glyn Peters finds in his papers an envelope with his dead wife Kath’s handwriting on it, reading, “Don’t Open. Destroy.”

But who can follow such an instruction? Not Glyn. Fatefully he opens it. And there is the photograph. Of five people, two with their backs to the camera. Kath and a man, holding hands out of view of the other three. And the man is Kath’s brother-in-law Nick. There is also a note saying, “I can’t resist sending you this. Negative destroyed, I’m told. Blessings my love,” in what Glyn assumes is Nick’s hand

Glyn is immediately sent into a tail-spin, examining his past life for clues about his marriage, and into a quest for the truth about the affair, and who knew about it.

He starts with Kath’s sister, Elaine, a (very) successful garden designer, who already has beefs with the rather shiftless Nick, whom she throws out. Their daughter Polly, who had adored Kath, finds that something of an over-reaction, especially since Nick dumps himself on her and makes little effort to find a place of his own, despite her increasingly urgent promptings.

The story is told via several points of view, Glyn, Elaine, Nick, Polly, Nick’s erstwhile business partner Oliver, from whom we learn that “being a woman enabled her” (Kath) “to sail through life, setting her own course, following mood and fancy. Because she was a startlingly attractive woman.”  She had once been asked what it was like to be pretty but she laughed it off. But she had also asked Oliver if he was happy.

Clues begin to build that the characters’ knowledge of Kath needs revising; memories of her close relationship with Polly, the fact that she got on well with children generally. “She has become some mythical figure, trawled up at will to fit other people’s narratives. Everyone has their way with her, everyone decides what she was, how things were.”

The marriage with Glyn wasn’t close, both spent time on their own business, Glyn with his landscape expeditions, Kath on various projects of her own.

It’s not until Glyn meets with Kath’s friend Mary Packard, perhaps the only one who really knew her for who she was, that the full tragic picture becomes clearer, but this is withheld from us till late in the book. But, of course, this is when Glyn speaks with her properly for the first time.

At the end Oliver thinks about how something always set Kath apart. “Behind and beyond her looks, her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it back then. …. All you saw was her face.”

The different characters’ narratives – some rendered as one half of a dialogue – are all distinctive and compelling, revealing of their flaws and misapprehensions.

The Photograph is a demonstration of how difficult it is to truly know someone, even someone close to us, how impossible it is to detect their inner struggles, especially if we do not recognise the clues.

Pedant’s corner:- “squares and triangles and rectangles and oblongs” (A square is a special case of a rectangle so that’s fine; but an oblong is any non-square rectangle, so is not different from a rectangle that isn’t a square,) “Glyn Peters’ appointment” (Peters’s,) “regale lilies” (usually written as ‘regal lilies’, though the botanical name is lilium regale.) “‘Didn’t Kath use to go to…’” (Didn’t Kath used to go to…,)