The Rain Before it Falls (2 page)

‘She came all by herself?’ Catharine prompted, but her mother didn’t seem to hear. She was thinking what a strange party that had been. Not in Shropshire, this time. No, this was a few years before Rosamond had retired, once and for all, to the beloved county of her wartime childhood. In those days, she and Ruth had been living in London, in a substantial terraced villa, somewhere like Belsize Park. It was a foreign country, to Gill and her family. For the first time in her life, she had felt acutely provincial, and saw her parents in the same light. She had watched as her mother and Rosamond exchanged awkward, halting greetings in the basement kitchen (‘Fancy having a kitchen in the basement!’ Sylvia had marvelled afterwards) and wondered how it was possible for two sisters to be so distant, even with almost ten years between them. And while few situations ever seemed to disconcert her father, who was, apart from anything else, the most widely travelled member of the family, even he seemed ill at ease on this occasion: still handsome, then, in his late fifties, with full silvery hair and a complexion only just beginning to verge upon the florid, he had spent most of the afternoon examining the bookshelves before settling down in an armchair with a tumbler of whisky and a recently published history of the Baltic States.

As for Gill herself, she had stood alone (why was Stephen not there?) for what seemed like hours on the steps leading down to the tiny garden (‘You’re so lucky,’ she had heard someone say to Aunt Rosamond, ‘having such a big garden in this part of town’), leaning against the wrought-iron rail and watching the ebb and flow of exotic guests as they drifted in and out of the house. (Why had so few of them come to the funeral?) She could remember feeling angry with herself: angry at the thought that she was now in her mid-twenties, had been through university, was already married (and not only married, but three months pregnant with Catharine), and yet here she was, feeling as gauche and shy as any teenager, utterly incapable of striking up a conversation. Her wine glass was growing warm and sticky in her hands, and she was on the point of going inside to refill it when Imogen came out through the French windows behind her. She was being led by Aunt Rosamond, who was holding her gently but firmly by the upper arm.

‘This way, this way,’ Rosamond was saying. ‘There are lots of people out here for you to talk to.’

They stopped beside Gill on the top step, and Imogen reached out a tentative hand. Instinctively, without quite knowing why she was helping her in this way, Gill took hold of the hand and laid it on the railing for her. Imogen gripped the railing solidly.

‘This,’ said Rosamond to the little girl, ‘is Gill, my niece. You might not be aware of it, but Gill is also one of your relations. You are cousins. Second cousins once removed, if that means anything to you. And she has come a long way to see me today, just like you. Aren’t I lucky, to have so many people come to visit me on my birthday? Gill, are you enjoying yourself? Would you like to take Imogen down into the garden for a moment? Only she’s a little bit lost, with all these people, I think.’

Imogen was very fair, and very quiet. She had a strong, prominent jaw, three missing baby teeth with gaps where the new ones had not yet come through, and her blonde hair fell in a tangle over her eyes. Gill would not have guessed that she was blind, had Rosamond not whispered the information to her before she turned and disappeared indoors. When her aunt had gone, Gill looked down and stroked the little girl’s hair.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

∗

They had all fallen in love with Imogen that afternoon. She was almost twenty years younger than anybody else at the party, which of course already made her the focus of adoring attention; but beyond that, the very fact of her blindness seemed to draw the other guests to her. They were drawn through sympathy, at first, and then by the strange quality of stillness, of centredness, that seemed to surround the small, fair-haired child. She was very calm, and the half-smile upon her face appeared to be permanent. Her voice, on the rare occasions when she spoke, was almost inaudibly gentle.

‘How funny,’ Gill had said, ‘to think that we’re related, and we’ve never met before.’

‘I don’t live with my mother,’ said Imogen. ‘I have another family.’

‘Didn’t they come with you today?’ Gill asked, looking around her.

‘We all came down to London together. But they didn’t want to come to the party.’

‘Well, don’t worry. I’ll look after you for a bit.’

Later that afternoon, Gill had taken Imogen upstairs to the toilet and then stood waiting for her on the landing near by. Soon Imogen found her again and took her hand and asked: ‘What are you looking at?’

‘Oh, I was just looking at the view. You get a good view from up here.’

‘What can you see?’

‘You can see…’ But for a few moments Gill didn’t know where to begin. All she could see, in fact, was the formlessness of jumbled buildings, trees, skyline. It struck her that this was as much as she ever saw. But she could not describe it to Imogen in those terms. She would have to look at it in an entirely new way, piece by piece, item by item. And start… with what? The haze which blurred the line of transition from rooftops to sky? The sky’s barely perceptible gradations of colour, from the deepest to the palest of blues? The weird collision of outlines where two tower blocks stood on either side of what she took to be St Paul’s Cathedral?

‘Well,’ she began, ‘the sky is blue and the sun is shining…’

‘I know that, silly,’ said Imogen, and squeezed Gill’s hand.

And even now Gill could remember it, so clearly, the pressure of those tiny fingers. Her first intimation of what it would be like, to have a daughter of her own. At that moment she had clutched to herself the knowledge that Catharine was growing inside her, and felt that she could hardly tolerate the fear and gladness.

∗

Thomas, as usual, was the first to wake up next morning. Gill made him some tea, poached a couple of eggs, then left her father reading the newspaper while she fetched twenty or so boxes of Kodak slides from the lower reaches of the old mahogany bureau in the study, and took them into the dining room, where there was more sunlight. She spread them out on the table and tutted when she noticed that most of the boxes were unlabelled. The task of sifting through them more or less methodically took almost half an hour, and when Elizabeth came to join her, dressing-gowned and tousle-haired, she had only just found what she was looking for.

‘What’s up?’ her daughter asked.

‘I was trying to find a picture. Of Imogen. Here, look.’

She handed Elizabeth one of the transparencies. Elizabeth held it up to the window and squinted.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘When was this taken?’

‘1983. Why?’

‘The clothes! The hairstyles! What were you thinking of?’

‘Never mind that. Your children will be saying the same thing about you in twenty years’ time. This is the party I was telling you about. Rosamond’s fiftieth. Can you see her, and Ruth, and me and Grandma?’

‘Yes. Where’s Grandpa?’

‘He must have taken the picture. We’ll go and ask him in a minute, see if he remembers. Now – you see the little girl standing in front of Aunt Rosamond?’

Elizabeth held the picture up to a patch of brighter light at the top of the window. Her attention was drawn, at this moment, not to Imogen but to the infinitely strange, infinitely familiar figure standing at the far left of the grouping: this ghostly projection of her mother’s younger self. It was what people might have called a ‘good photograph’, in the sense that it made Gill look attractive, beautiful even. (She had never thought of her mother as beautiful before.) But Elizabeth wished that it told her more than that: wished that it could tell her what her mother might have been thinking, or feeling, at this momentous family party, so soon after her marriage, so newly pregnant. Why did photographs – family photographs – make everyone appear so unreadable? What hopes, what secret anxieties lay behind that seemingly confident tilt of her mother’s face, her mouth slipping into its characteristic, slightly crooked smile?

‘Yes, I see her,’ Elizabeth said, finally, turning her attention back to the little fair-haired girl. ‘She looks pretty.’

‘Well, that’s Imogen. That’s who we’ve got to find.’

‘Shouldn’t be difficult. You can find anybody, these days.’

To Gill this sounded over-confident; but Catharine, when she joined them at the breakfast table soon afterwards, agreed with her sister. Neither of them was much impressed with the solicitor’s plan of action, which was to place an advertisement in
The Times.
Catharine thought this was ludicrous – ‘We’re not living in the 1950s, and besides, nobody reads
The Times
any more, do they?’ (‘Least of all a blind person,’ Elizabeth added) – and offered to start searching on the internet at once. By ten o’clock, she had presented her mother with a list of five possible candidates.

Gill drafted a letter that afternoon, posted five copies on Monday morning, and then settled down to the uncertain wait for a reply.

∗

Meanwhile, she decided that there was no point in deferring the task of visiting Rosamond’s house, sorting through her effects and putting it up for sale. It would no doubt be a tiring and complicated process. Having divined, from his silences, that Stephen wanted to have nothing to do with it, she braced herself for three or four days alone in Shropshire, packed a small suitcase and drove back there on a bright, windy and ice-cold Tuesday morning.

Her late aunt’s house was hidden off one of the many mud-encrusted lanes which lay between Much Wenlock and Shrewsbury. The approach always managed to take Gill by surprise. Dense banks of rhododendron announced that you were nearly there, for behind them, she knew, stretched Rosamond’s shady, sequestered garden; but after that, the driveway slyly declined to reveal itself, and instead sidled out on to the carriageway at a preposterous angle which only the smallest car could turn without involving itself in awkward pirouettes and reversals. Once you had found this driveway, it soon narrowed to a rough, pebbly track, and the trees on either side closed in and entwined their serpentine branches overhead until it felt as though you were passing through a vegetable tunnel. Emerging, at last, blinking, into the autumn sunshine, you expected to see at the very least some crumbled baronial hall; but what you found was a modest grey bungalow, built some time in the 1920s or ’30s, with a greenhouse leaning up against one side and an air of absolute quiescence which could be quite unnerving. This had always appeared to be the main feature of the house, from the outside, even when Rosamond was alive and now, in the knowledge of her final absence, Gill stepped out of her car that frozen morning to be enveloped at once in a loneliness more complete than any she could remember.

If the silence of the house and its grounds seemed almost unearthly, the cold inside was even worse. Gill could tell, without being morbid or fanciful, that it was more than a question of room temperature. This was a dead person’s house. Nothing could take the chill off it: no matter how many radiators she turned on, boilers she fired up, fan heaters she retrieved from forgotten cupboards. She resigned herself to the idea that she would have to work with her coat on.

Gill drifted into the kitchen and looked around her. The sink was full of cold washing-up water: on the draining board a knife and fork, a single plate, two saucepans and a wooden spoon had been laid out to dry. These relics of Rosamond’s final hours made her feel sadder than ever. More cheeringly, she saw a coffee-making machine and, standing in readiness next to it, still vacuum-sealed, a packet of fresh Colombia roast. At once she broke it open and brewed up a generous helping, and even before she had taken her first few sips, she felt revived by the companionable noises of bubbling and frothing, and the rich, walnutty fumes that filled the kitchen with aromatic warmth.

She took her mug with her into the sitting room. It was lighter and airier than the kitchen: French windows looked out over a pretty but overgrown stretch of lawn, and Rosamond’s armchair had been placed to take advantage of this view. Around the chair, just as Dr May had informed her, were stacked a number of photograph albums – some recent, some almost antique – along with three or four plastic boxes containing transparencies and a small battery-powered device for viewing them. There was something else, too, which gave Gill a jolt of recognition when she noticed it leaning up against the chair: an unframed oil painting, a portrait of the young Imogen, which she had certainly seen somewhere before. (Perhaps – though she could not be sure of this – at Rosamond’s house in London, at the fiftieth birthday party?) On the little table next to the chair was a tape recorder, a small microphone – the connecting wire now neatly coiled up and tied around itself – and four cassette jewel cases, standing in an orderly pile. Gill examined these curiously. There were no inlay cards describing the contents, and there was nothing written on the tapes themselves: all she could see were the numbers one to four, which Rosamond appeared to have cut out of cardboard, and then glued, in sequence, to the plastic cases. Furthermore, one of the cases was empty: or rather, instead of housing a tape, all it contained was a sheet of A5 airmail paper, folded up tightly, upon which Rosamond had scrawled the words:

Gill —

These are for Imogen.

If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.

Where, then, was the fourth tape to be found? In the machine itself, probably. She pressed the eject button and, sure enough, there was another cassette inside. It appeared to match the others, so Gill slipped it into the empty case and took all four of them over to a writing desk which stood in the corner of the room. She wanted to put these tapes out of temptation’s way, immediately. In the writing desk she found a large manila envelope; she dropped the tapes into it, sealed the envelope with a couple of quick, decisive licks, and wrote ‘Imogen’ on the front in capital letters.