The Rain Before it Falls (17 page)

She and I are in the foreground of this picture, sitting on a bench towards the back of the lawn, just in front of a wonderful border of red and yellow verbenas. We are both dressed rather formally – I wonder why? I am wearing a navy-blue jacket and long grey skirt. My hair is shorter than ever, now – it almost looks like a man’s short-back-and-sides. The difference between myself, here, and how I look in Rebecca’s graduation photograph, for instance, is very striking. There is a certain grimness in the way my mouth is set, a sort of resigned fixity in the way I am looking at the camera – which of course I may just be imagining, or exaggerating: and in any case, this would hardly have been a happy occasion, after all. The same could be said about Beatrix, who is wearing a loose, somewhat shapeless and baggy dress, full-length, also in navy blue, with a pattern of tiny flowers in pale blue and green. Her expression is not so much grim, I suppose, as vacant and tired. She has a brace on her neck, which makes her whole posture seem very stiff and awkward. She had to wear that brace for about two years, I seem to remember. Awful for her. One couldn’t help but sympathize.

This was how the accident had happened. Beatrix and Charles, as I told you, had married and moved back to England. In addition to Thea and her son, Joseph, they now had a baby daughter called Alice. Charles was working in the City, and they had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the suburban lifestyle by taking a big house in Pinner. And one Friday afternoon, Beatrix had been seized by what was, to be honest, an uncharacteristic spasm of maternal generosity: she had decided to give Thea a treat: she told her that she would pick her up from school in the car, instead of making her walk home as usual. At five to three, two hundred yards from the school gates, she slowed down and came to a halt at a roundabout in order to allow another car to feed in from the right. Behind her a lorry, driven by a man who had had four pints of beer with his lunch, failed to anticipate her stopping and drove straight into the back of her car, with terrific force. Fortunately, both of her other children were at home, in the care of a nanny. Otherwise they might well have been killed. Beatrix was the only person in the car and she was jolted forward at speed. At least she was lucky – if that is ever the right word to use in this sort of context – that the car she was driving was a Volkswagen Beetle. These cars were by no means common in Britain at the time. There was still a residual, deep-seated reluctance on the part of many people to buy anything German. I sometimes wonder if Beatrix had not bought it, in fact, for that very reason: because it was a good way of antagonizing her stuck-up, suburban neighbours. Anyway, it turned out, in one sense, to be the saving of her: if she had been driving a more square-backed vehicle, the lorry would simply have ploughed into it and crushed it; but because the back end of her Volkswagen was rounded, the lorry actually mounted it, and the impact was very slightly diminished.

Word of the accident reached me, a few weeks after the event, in a letter from my mother. I was living, as I said, in a bedsitter in Wandsworth, and I still had no telephone. I was not in regular contact with Beatrix at this time. Seeing her with the family was, I had found, too upsetting: upsetting for me, and disturbing for Thea, who for a good while remained much closer to me, and fonder of me, than she was of her mother. In these circumstances I had no choice, as far as I could see, but to back off, and keep my distance. So that is what I did. But of course, when I heard of the accident, I made contact with Beatrix immediately and visited her in hospital just a day or two later. She was just in the process of recovering from an initial operation on her neck which had, it transpired, gone quite seriously wrong. It was because of the failure of that operation, I seem to remember, that she had to return to hospital repeatedly over the next few years, often necessitating long absences from her family.

Poor Beatrix. She was no longer in pain when I went to see her, but her movement was very restricted. From then on she always carried herself stiffly – was never able to turn her head towards you, but always had to turn her whole body. She was told that it would be like that for the rest of her life. And then there was the seemingly endless hospitalization, which could not have come at a worse time. She had three children to look after – two of them very young. Charles was not much help, being very much absorbed in his work. He was a rather cold and unresponsive man, Charles, but thoroughly
decent
at heart, which I’m sure was to prove crucial over the next few years. I mean, Beatrix was hardly ever around, and there would have been great scope for him just bunking off back to Canada, or having an affair with the nanny or something, but he always did the right thing. He was straightforward and reliable. I’m tempted to say that these are essentially Canadian qualities, although perhaps you would consider that to be an absurd generalization. Anyway, his loyalty counted for a good deal, I know that. Where would the children have been without him, as their mother was shunted in and out of hospital for months at a time during their formative years?

And yet I would swear that it was his own son, and his own daughter, who received the lion’s share of his attention. Who can blame him for that, in a way? Nobody. Certainly not me. But where did it leave Thea? Where did it leave your poor mother?

In this picture, Beatrix and I are not sitting close together. There is a good six inches of space between us, on what does not seem to be a very large bench. Perhaps I should not read too much into that. If either one of us is leaning away from the other, it is Beatrix herself. She is resting one hand on the arm of the bench and inclining herself towards it. I am leaning slightly forwards, if anything, towards the camera: I look ever so slightly impatient, as if I would quite like to get up and walk around in a moment. There is only so much that one can deduce from somebody’s posture, but it would certainly be true to say that the nature of our friendship had changed, in the last few years. For some time, as you know, I had felt that I was tied to Beatrix by an unbreakable bond, a bond that went back to the time when I was evacuated to her home during the war. Well, I no longer felt that way. That notion had even started to seem a little childish to me; but it had been replaced by something else, something more real, and something which I believe was even more powerful. What drew me to Beatrix now, what kept me loyal to her, was my love for her daughter. It felt to me (this might sound strange, I suppose) that Thea was in danger. I could not have said what kind of danger, although now I can see it quite clearly: she was in danger of not being loved, or not being loved enough. Saving her from this fate had become my secret responsibility. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it had taken on, for me, the nature of a sacred duty.

But then after all these years, Imogen, nothing seems quite so simple, quite so clear-cut. Was it really your mother who was starved of love, or was it me? If I felt an ache, a
yearning
to be in Thea’s presence again, was that because, unselfishly, I wanted to help her, or because my own life was so empty and loveless? At this time I was working, by day, as a senior sales assistant at Arding and Hobbs department store at Clapham Junction; by night I returned to my little flat, cooked a cheap meal for myself, read trashy novels or listened to the wireless, and went to bed. I cannot pretend that it was anything other than a cheerless existence. I was making no real attempt to meet other people. I was not socializing with any of my work colleagues, or making any effort to appear friendly to them. Rebecca had been gone for more than four years, and I was still missing her terribly. (I still do, if you want to know the truth, although of course I have got used to the feeling, a long time ago.) The best way I can put it is to say that life had no flavour any more. Living without Rebecca was like living on an endless diet of bread and water. Somebody may have written that in a song once, it becomes so hard to remember what are your own ideas and what you may have picked up from somewhere else. Anyway, I must not start free associating again, and I must stop thinking about Rebecca; it is the story of me and Beatrix I am meant to be telling, me and Beatrix and how that all leads, inevitably, to you.

In the midst of all this, there was at least, for me, one bright spot: my elder sister, Sylvia, was married by now, to a man called Thomas. They had two children: a boy called David, and a girl called Gill. It is my niece Gill who, if all has gone according to plan, will deliver these tapes to you. They were just infants when this picture was taken but I do remember, round about this time, going up to the Midlands and spending a few days with my sister and brother-in-law, and liking it again, the experience of having small children around me. I would not say that I have been close to them as they have grown up, but I have watched over them, sometimes perhaps without their realizing it. That has been a source of consolation, I must say. Particularly over the last twenty years, after you and your mother disappeared from my life.

Just now, Imogen, a memory comes back to me. Something that happened not in the garden of the rest home, but in Beatrix’s room. Was it on this same day, the day recorded on this photograph? Hard to be sure, since all of my visits followed much the same pattern. I would meet Beatrix downstairs, in the library or common room, and then we would take a walk in the garden and sit on this bench, or perhaps on one of the other benches, beside the little herb garden which was divided up into squares by miniature box hedges. After that, Beatrix would probably be tired, so I would take her back to her room and talk to her for a few more minutes while she lay down on the bed. There were pills that she was taking three or four times a day, and these often made her drowsy in the afternoons. Her window had Venetian blinds, I remember, rather than curtains. I would close these for her, but they did not close completely: thin strips of light and shadow would fall across her face and across the pale blue bedspread as she lay there, her eyelids gradually drooping. It’s an image I remember distinctly. And one time – this time that I am telling you about – she had fallen asleep (or so I thought), and her breathing had become slow and regular, and I stood up and gathered up my things from her table and put on my coat and made my way to the door. Only, just as I got there and was reaching for the handle, I heard her slow, sleepy voice, saying: ‘Ros?’

And I turned and saw that her eyes were still closed, even though her face and her body were turned stiffly towards me. I said, ‘Yes, darling, what is it?’ And then, very drowsily, she started mumbling. I found it hard to catch the words at first but they were more or less to this effect. She said: ‘Why did he do it? Why did he just disappear like that?’ I lifted my fingers from the doorhandle and took a few steps back towards her. My first thought was that she was talking about the lorry driver, but then I remembered that he had not disappeared, he had been arrested and given some trifling fine for careless driving. Then I wondered if she was talking about Jack, and the ending of their adventure in the gipsy caravan, but Jack had not so much disappeared as been driven away by her, so it wasn’t him that she was thinking of, either. Nor was it Roger, the first husband from whom she was now divorced. ‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘Why did he just run away?’ And then I knew that in her half-sleep she was remembering Bonaparte, that foolish poodle of her mother’s, and that cold winter’s day, the day by the skating pond, the day he had run away over the horizon and disappeared for ever. ‘I keep thinking about it,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes no sense. What had I done to him?’ And I told her that she hadn’t done anything to him, that sometimes things happened for no reason. I sat down on the bed beside her and clasped her icy hand, but nothing I said could console her, she began to cry, still without opening her eyes, a tear leaked out from beneath her eyelids and ran on to her cheek, and soon she was sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably, and I clasped her even more tightly and said more things to her, many more things that were meant to comfort her, but I can’t remember what any of them were, and in any case she was somewhere else, by now, somewhere beyond comforting.

Shortly after this fourteenth picture was taken, my relations with Beatrix reached their lowest ebb.

I am not sure that you could guess that, however, from looking at the five smiling faces captured here. The year is 1962, and, my goodness, we look young in this picture, Bea and I! But then I realize, with a shock, that we
were
still young. I would have been twenty-nine, she would have been thirty-two; at which age, of course, the three-year difference between us, which seemed so momentous when we were both children, can have meant nothing at all. Twenty-nine, though! Is that all? A stripling, I would have been, an infant, and yet… and yet in my memory, the day this photograph was taken, I feel
ancient.
The reason can only be, I suppose, that a cycle was coming to an end; a circle was closing; the story of my friendship with Beatrix had not much further to run. That part of me which had been tied to her for so long was about to die.

Anyway, the important thing, as I must always remember, is that I describe the picture to you, that I help you to see. So, let me focus my attention, once more.

Very well:

A beach hut, painted a rich blue, with the long grass of the sand dunes behind it. The thin strip of sky you can see at the back of the picture is several shades paler than the blue of the beach hut. The hut itself is a simple enough structure, just a wooden shed, really, with the two halves of the roof forming an apex at the top. Just beneath the apex, someone has painted the number of the hut, 304, and its name, ‘Sasparella’, which I think means the west wind or something.

The twin doors of the hut are flung open, and are painted white on the inside. They open to reveal a wide doorway, with a white lace curtain which has been pulled back and tied into place. Beyond the doorway, the interior of the hut is shadowy, but a few details can be made out. There is a small cupboard unit, also painted white, and on top of it, a little gas hob and a kettle. It is standing against the back wall of the hut, which is bisected diagonally by a large crossbeam. The interior of the hut is by no means large – about six feet square, I would guess. To the right there are three hooks on the back wall, one of them with a blue and yellow striped beach towel hanging from it. In the same corner, two children’s fishing nets are leaning against the wall. There are some buckets and spades, I think, on the floor – a confusion of more blues, yellows and reds, anyway, although this part of the picture is really too shadowy to make out very much more.