The Rain Before it Falls (21 page)

I must get a grip on myself. This isn’t what you need to hear. I haven’t even told you where we are or what we are looking at. Well, we are in Saskatchewan, Canada. A town called Saskatoon, to be more precise. We are looking at Beatrix’s house, and at four figures standing in the driveway: from left to right we have Charles, Joseph, Alice and Beatrix herself.

It is a very substantial weatherboard house, painted white. The photograph doesn’t show the houses on either side, but one has the immediate impression of being in a well-to-do neighbourhood. Behind the figures, in the top right-hand corner of the picture, one catches a glimpse of what is obviously a big, comfortable, expensive saloon car. The garden, what we can see of it, is laid to lawn, with bushes of white and pink rhododendron visible at the edges. It is a day of blazing sunshine, and all four members of the family are squinting into the camera lens.

I wonder about this house. Lovely though it is, I can’t believe that a house – any house – in Saskatoon would have been worth as much as their place in Pinner. I heard someone use the term ‘downsizing’ recently but I don’t believe it would have been current in those days. Why did they sell up and move back to Canada? Did Charles make some bad decisions in the City, I wonder, and come a financial cropper? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were just drawn to the fresh air and the wide open spaces. I imagine that the lifestyle over there was quite agreeable.

There is something uniquely attractive about a weatherboard house. This one has four wooden steps leading up to a wide, good-sized porch. Above the porch is a covered balcony, surrounded by window-boxes planted with red dahlias. You would be able to walk out on to this balcony from one of the bedrooms: Charles’s and Beatrix’s, I imagine. Above the balcony, the house rises to another floor: there is a little sash window at the apex of the roof, in the centre, where there must have been an attic bedroom, probably for Alice. Or even for Thea, I suppose, because she lived there for a while at least. Going back to ground level, on the left-hand side there is a long verandah, running the entire depth of the house. I can see two chairs on the verandah – there are probably more, but they are out of view – and a little table covered with a gingham tablecloth. On the table there is a clear glass vase, containing a large arrangement of blue, yellow and deep violet flowers, and next to that, a big brown earthenware jug.

I have to say that I like this photograph. It comforts me. Of course, it’s sad that Thea is not in it, although there is always the possibility that she was the one taking it. But I don’t think so. She would have been in her early twenties, now, and although she moved over to Canada with the rest of them and even went to university in Calgary for a while, I don’t think she ever completed her degree, and soon afterwards she came back to England, alone. It’s sad, very sad, that she was expelled, in effect, from her own family. I must not dwell on that; or rather, I
shall
be dwelling on that, at some length I’m afraid, while telling you about the next two or three pictures. But, as far as this one is concerned, as I said, I find it comforting. Beatrix looks happy here. They all do, for that matter. I know that everybody smiles for photographs – that’s one of the reasons you should never trust them – but this is what I call a
real
Beatrix smile. It looks as though someone has just told her the most wonderful joke and she has only just stopped throwing her head back and laughing at it. She even looks at ease in her clothes: a plain fawn blouse and pale blue jeans. She never would have worn anything like that in England, but it suits her. She has a nice little gold pendant around her neck, too. I wonder who gave her that.

I can remember one curious fact about her relocation to Canada. It was to do with the letter which presumably came with this photograph (which I’m sorry to say I can’t seem to find any more). Beatrix wrote to me very infrequently – there were Christmas cards, of course, usually with a few lines of family news scribbled on the inside. But letters were rare. Anyway, what I remember most distinctly about this one was the signature at the bottom, or rather the name: ‘Annie’. Not ‘Beatrix’, but ‘Annie’. Mulling it over, I decided it was just an absent-minded slip (though rather a large one, I would have thought) and when I wrote back I addressed her as Beatrix, as usual. And then towards the end of that year I received a Christmas card which was signed ‘Annie, Charles and the children’.

Well, it was her prerogative to change her name, I suppose, and it seems that from the moment she set foot on Canadian soil she dropped ‘Beatrix’ and never allowed anybody to call her that again, not even her husband or children. She had chosen to reinvent herself; to distance herself completely from the past.

One of the things she associated with ‘the past’, of course, was her first daughter.

I have nothing more to say about this photograph, really; but perhaps I should add something here, by way of postscript. This is the last picture of Beatrix that I possess, and because the rest of this story does not concern her directly, this might be the best time to tell you what became of her. What little I know, anyway.

Very well: about seven or eight years ago, when I was doing some shopping at the market in Shrewsbury, I ran into Raymond, her eldest brother. He would have been about seventy years old: he was enormously tall, and was wearing a three-piece suit which appeared to date back to the 1940s, and he had bushy side-whiskers and a moustache. In looks and manner and bearing he seemed almost grotesque – the relic of an era long disappeared, long forgotten by all but a few. You could see that he belonged to the countryside – had belonged there all his life – and felt completely out of place in the town. He looked for all the world like one of the extras on the set of
Gone To Earth
!. Anyway, that is all by the by. He didn’t recognize me, of course, and in a way I’m amazed that I managed to recognize
him.
We talked for only a few minutes, just enough time to catch up on each other’s histories in sketchy detail. I was very selective about what I told him, as you can imagine. Towards the end of our conversation I asked him – with some trepidation – if he was still in contact with Beatrix. He told me that she had died, in 1991, at the age of sixty-one. A cancer of the throat, apparently. She had still been living in Canada, although she had separated from Charles. (I had long thought that was inevitable, given her paranoia about his non-existent infidelities.) In the last twenty years of her life she had resumed her career – very successfully, by the sound of it – in hospital management. Raymond told me that she’d ended up working at a small clinic in Alberta, where she was considered by the staff to be the best – and best-loved – manager they’d ever had. He said that they had been devastated when she died, and that her birthday was still marked there every year. One of the doctors had traced Raymond’s address in Shropshire and one year, during a visit to England, had called on him to hand over a box containing some of his late sister’s effects. It included a letter signed by all of the nursing staff, describing Beatrix as ‘the nicest lady we have ever met’ and ‘a saint’. They admired, in particular, the way she had continued to live life to the full, even after sustaining such a terrible injury when she was young.

And so, Beatrix… that is the end of your story. Beatrix, my cousin, my blood-sister. Very soon, perhaps, you and I will be in the same place again. But I’m not sure that I want to meet you there. Will you recognize me, even if I do? And how am I supposed to address you, nowadays – as ‘Beatrix’, still, or ‘Annie’?

Seventeen. Caravans again. More caravans. I told you that they would be back, before we were finished.

This is bleak, this picture. A chill comes over me when I look at it. It was an insufferably cold day, apart from anything else. The winter of 1975, somewhere on the Lincolnshire coast. An icy wind blowing in off the North Sea.

There are four caravans (or should I call them mobile homes?) arranged in a sort of crescent around a patch of grass. You can only see the front of these big, squat, ugly things in this photograph. The grass itself is scrawny and muddy, and dusted white with traces of snow or ice. Off the edge of the picture you would find more mobile homes, and then still more, and still more, stretching away into the distance. There were probably a hundred or more on that particular site. I sometimes wondered how it was possible to be sure of finding the right one. More than once, apparently, Martin had got lost trying to get home on his way back from a drinking session.

Now I’m getting ahead of myself again. You do not even know who Martin is, yet. Well, he was Thea’s partner. Not husband – I don’t believe they were ever married – but her partner, and the father of her child. Which of course makes him your father, Imogen.

Bearing that in mind, I shall try to be kind about him, although I must say that I didn’t take to him at all, on the one occasion that we met. The occasion of this photograph, that is.

Well, here they both are, anyway, standing in front of the mobile home. Here
you
are, I should say – all three of you – because, yes, you are in this photograph too, Imogen! At long last. You are born! I bet you were beginning to think that we would never get there. You are only a few months old, however, at this stage, and all that can really be seen of you is your tiny face peeping out from the white blanket in which Thea has swaddled you. As I believe I said earlier, on another tape – days and days ago, it seems – all baby faces are much the same. So let’s take a good look at the faces of your parents instead.

Martin. Well. He was a little younger than your mother, I seem to remember. Probably about twenty-two, when this picture was taken. Too young to be a father. Much too young. He has dark brown shoulder-length hair, and a droopy moustache. Black leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans. The jacket has another of those terrible 1970s wide collars. He is very pale, with a prominent windpipe and Adam’s apple, and bad skin. His T-shirt has a picture of Adolf Hitler on the front, and underneath it the caption ‘European Tour, 1939–1945’. I seem to remember that he thought this very amusing. Thea told me that she’d had complaints about this T-shirt from other people on the caravan site: there were a lot of older people living there, including some veterans of the war. She did not seem to take these complaints very seriously. Her relations with the neighbours were not good.

From what I can see of your mother’s clothes – I can’t see much of them, because of the way she is holding you – she appears to be wearing a leather jerkin or waistcoat, over a white polo-neck shirt, which comes high up under her chin. Her hair is long and centre-parted. Leather sandals, open-toed, over bare feet, which I would not have thought was very practical, in that sort of weather. But I imagine that we were all outside for only a short time. Just long enough to take the photograph, and get back inside to the warmth.

And yes, it
was
warm inside that caravan, amazingly. They even had radiators in there, unless my memory is deceiving me, and a gas fire, and an electric bar fire too. You needed everything you could get, to fight against that dreadful North Sea wind. They were in a very exposed spot. But inside, it was almost cosy – except for the terrible chaos and untidiness. There was a good-sized sitting area, and a little open-plan kitchen next to it. Two tiny bedrooms – I mean
really
tiny, with no real floor space at all – and a tiny bathroom and a tiny toilet. The kind of place you might just about put up with, if you were only there for a few days, with someone you really liked, someone you didn’t mind being close to. As a place to bring up a small child, with a man who was practically a stranger… Well, I don’t think it was very suitable, to be honest.

A few weeks earlier Beatrix had sent me one of her very infrequent letters and in it she had told me the rather shocking news that she was now a grandmother. A grandmother, at the age of forty-five! She didn’t sound terribly pleased about it, I have to say. I wasn’t very pleased, either. I had seen almost nothing of Thea in the last few years. I knew that she was back in the country, but that was about all. My letters to her usually remained unanswered; one or two of them came back stamped ‘Not known at this address’, giving me to understand that she had adopted a rather peripatetic lifestyle. I was aware that, through one of her old schoolfriends, she had drifted into a sort of alternative circle, and had been living in squats with rock musicians and all that sort of thing. There was nothing I could do about this, and besides, it all seemed reasonably harmless. She certainly had no interest in taking any advice from me; that was made perfectly clear, more than once. As far as I knew, she had very few memories of the years she’d lived with Rebecca and myself in Putney. She did not regard me in the light of a surrogate mother – which was probably, at heart, how I wanted to be regarded; instead she appeared to think of me – if at all — simply as a sort of troublesome and interfering maiden aunt, best avoided if possible. So be it. As I say, there was nothing much I could do. In other areas of my life I was much more… well, ‘happy’ is perhaps not the right word –
‘fulfilled’,
at any rate – than I had been for some years. At the publishing house, I had risen from the rank of lowly secretary to senior editor: an important position. And I had met a very nice woman – and an excellent painter – called Ruth, and we had developed a great fondness for each other, and moved into a little house in Kentish Town. We led a busy and interesting life. It was all very satisfactory, on one level.

It was publishing business that had taken me to the North of England, I remember. I had been visiting one of our authors, a writer of historical romances, who lived in Hull, and whose latest offering presented some minor editorial challenges. A few glaring anachronisms, characters whose names kept changing from one chapter to another, that sort of thing. I spent two days at her home, going through the manuscript, and then, on the way back to London, I had arranged to call on Thea at this latest peculiar address I had been given by her mother: somewhere on the east coast. It would be the first time I’d seen her for at least two years.