The Rain Before it Falls (24 page)

Getting back to your portrait (yes, I must get back to that, and quickly), I am sure that it was pressure from me that made her paint it in such a plain and realistic style. What I wanted most of all was that it should simply
look like you,
and in that, of course, she has succeeded quite brilliantly. I love the slight hunch that she has given to your shoulders, suggesting that you are hugging some kind of joyous secret to yourself. That is very characteristic. But what the viewer really notices are your eyes. This is where Ruth has really excelled herself. Everything centres upon your eyes: your deep blue, sightless eyes that somehow manage to gleam so brightly, with such…
energy
in them, such bottomless reserves of wisdom and sadness. Is it not miraculous, how she has managed to capture all that – to capture somebody’s
spirit,
to externalize it, to make it permanent and unchanging, using nothing more than a mixture of pigments and vegetable oil? I find it remarkable, what artists can do. ‘You have caught her,’ I said to Ruth at the time. ‘You have caught her exactly.’ She did not think very highly of the painting, as I said. ‘What do you mean?’ she answered. ‘It is just a likeness.’ That was one of her most damning, dismissive words – ‘likeness’. ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘It is more than that. You have said something about Imogen in this picture.
Proved
something about her.’ She took issue with that turn of phrase, and asked me exactly what this portrait had ‘proved’ about you. To which I answered: your
inevitability.

Let me try to explain what I meant.

As I have mentioned, the painting of this portrait was enough to open a channel of communication with your new family. Shortly after adopting you they had moved south, to Worcester, where there is a very good school for the blind. It was there that I visited you, on a few scattered occasions. My sister’s family, including David and Gill, my nephew and niece, lived not far from there, so I had a good pretext for coming to the area. Every few months – not wishing to impose myself, or appear too pushy – I would contact your new father and ask if I might see you, to bring you a little present and perhaps take you out for tea. Do you remember any of that, I wonder, Imogen? Do you remember your strange Aunt Rosamond (although I was never your aunt), who used to collect you from your home and hold you by the hand as we walked along the footpath beside the River Severn, while I described the scene to you? We would sit down on a bench beside the water, and I would tell you all the colours I could see, I would tell you about the curve of the river, about the crows and rooks flying home to their nests in the treetops on the riverbank, about the clothes worn by the people walking past us on their way home from the shops, and the games being played by the schoolboys and schoolgirls on the playing fields opposite. I was so anxious, Imogen, so anxious that you wouldn’t
forget
what the world looked like. I was determined to keep your visual sense alive, so that at least you had memories of what you had once seen – strong, vivid memories – even if everything else was now closed to you. And I was succeeding, I’m sure that I was. You listened and you nodded and you understood, I am convinced of it. Just as you will understand – I
have
to believe this, I have to take it on trust, or I will have been wasting my time, all my efforts will have been useless – just as you will understand all the things I have been telling you on these tapes. Am I being foolish, am I being naive again? I don’t know, I cannot know. And anyway, it is too late now, everything is too late…

I am losing my way again. Perhaps I should not have any more of this whisky, at least until I have finished this story. It is rather bitter to the taste, but the sensation it imparts is very welcome. So soothing, so calming. I will just take a little drop more… And now tell you about your mother, the last time I heard from her. It was not long after one of my meetings with you. The portrait was finished by then, I remember, and I stupidly thought that Thea might like to see it. I had been writing to her with news of you, every time I went up to see you, but she hardly ever seemed to reply. With my letter this time, I enclosed a good photographic reproduction of Ruth’s portrait. Something else about that letter, I now remember: it was then that I let Thea know your new address. That was wrong of me, no doubt, but not as wrong (or so I thought at the time) as the idea that your mother should be forbidden by law from seeing her own daughter. Anyway, I am quite sure that she never made use of it. A few days later, her reply arrived. An abominable, poisonous letter… I have never read anything like it, never read anything so twisted or insidious in my life. It was all down to the influence of that man, I am sure, that loathsome Mr Ramsey – whom she had now
married,
for pity’s sake – with his wicked perversions of Christian ideas. Somehow, it seems (why on earth am I telling you this? It can do nothing but hurt you) he had managed to persuade Thea that
you,
Imogen –
you,
a blameless, helpless three-year-old girl – had actually been to
blame
for the harm that had befallen you. Your
punishment,
was how she described it: a punishment not inflicted upon you by your mother, apparently, for wetting the bed or whatever it was you were supposed to have done, but handed down by God, working
through
your mother!
That
was how she had come to regard it! I know, I know – at least it is clear to me now – that this was only some kind of… psychological mechanism, she was simply trying to exonerate herself – to find a way of
living
with herself – using any means possible, but at the time, the horror and the
fury
that I felt… Well. I read the letter only once, I have to say, before screwing it up and throwing it on the fire.

On the mantelpiece above the fire was your newly painted portrait. After reading Thea’s letter I stood there and gazed at it for some time. Just as I am gazing at it now. It made me realize, then – and seeing it again just confirms my opinion – that Ruth was a very fine artist indeed. And yes, I will repeat the phrase – it is the inevitability of you that she has captured. When I look at this picture, the whole story runs through my mind – everything I know about Beatrix and her family, from my first encounter with them at Warden Farm in 1941, through her bad marriages and her accident and her neglect and mistreatment of Thea, and then the way your mother grew up feeling unwanted and worthless and incapable of emotion, and all of these things, all of these things that were so
wrong,
all these unsuitable relationships and bad choices… Yes, it was true, none of them should ever have happened, they were all terrible, terrible mistakes, and yet
look what they led to.
They led to you, Imogen! And when I see Ruth’s portrait of you, it is obvious that you had to exist. There is such a rightness about you. The notion of your not existing, never having been born, seems so palpably wrong to me, so monstrous and unnatural… It’s not that your existence corrects all of those mistakes, or undoes them. It doesn’t
justify
anything. What it means – have I said this before? I think I have, or something like it – or rather, what it makes me understand, is this: that life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes – often – all the time – two completely contradictory ideas can be true.

Everything that led up to you was wrong. Therefore, you should not have been born.

But everything about you is right: you
had
to be born.

You were inevitable.

The last picture. The twentieth picture. My fiftieth birthday party.

Fifty glorious years! We had moved to Hampstead by now, Ruth and I, and the party was held in our house there. It was a good day, a happy day, filled with family and friends. The sun shone brightly, and all was well.

You were there too, Imogen. That was my great triumph. I persuaded your family to let you come. And here you are, at the front of the picture. Let me see, now – who else do we have here? Ruth, of course. My sister Sylvia. Both gone now, I’m afraid. Thomas, her husband, was taking the photograph. He is still with us. Must be into his eighties, though. A nice man, an interesting man. You should get him to tell you about his life one day, if you ever meet him. He was a dark horse, Thomas. There was more to him than met the eye. The other person in the picture is Gill. She would have been about twenty-six, twenty-seven. Perhaps I am wrong, but she looks slightly pregnant. She was there by herself, I remember, and seemed a little lost. I don’t know why her husband wasn’t there, or her brother David. There must have been some reason.

I must describe, describe. And yet I am getting so tired. The story is over now, more or less. Just one or two more things to tell you. Do you really need to know about the clothes we were wearing, the way our hair was parted, the drinks we were holding in our hands? I cannot see that it matters any more. I know it’s wrong to give up at this point, so near the end, but…

Another drop of whisky, I think. There is still more than half the bottle left.

It was a mistake to invite you. It was lovely having you there, but a mistake. It was all too much for you. So many strangers, strange voices, a strange house for you to find your way around. By the end of the day you were exhausted. Gill was very kind to you, I remember. You recognized a friendly spirit in Gill and clung to her. Unfortunately she and her parents left the party before you did, and your family did not arrive to collect you for about an hour after that. You were very tired.

Here we are, anyway, standing on the steps down to the back garden. The five of us. No Beatrix at this party, of course. We had more or less stopped corresponding by then. Or rather, she had stopped answering my letters. Yes, it was all coming to an end, the whole… saga…

What happened afterwards was the worst thing, though. The cruellest blow of all. A letter from your father – your new father, whatever you want to call him – saying that he no longer thought it ‘appropriate’ that I should have contact with you. He said that you were finding my visits disturbing (whether that was true or not, I have no idea – I very much doubt it), that you had been stressed and agitated following my birthday party, and that it was time to attempt a clean break with your early life. Something he seemed to feel, in his heart of hearts, should have been achieved before. ‘In any case,’ he added. ‘I have been given a placement abroad, and we will soon be leaving the country.’ He did not say what he meant by ‘abroad’, exactly.

I remember that Ruth was working, in those days, in a rented studio a few miles away in East London. On the day I received this letter she returned home late, after dark, and found me sitting at the kitchen table, with the single sheet of paper still in my hand. I told her the news, and it was then, for the first time, that she spoke to me honestly about my relationship with you and Thea and Beatrix. Rosamond, this is for the best, she insisted. It has all gone on for far too long anyway. You owe Beatrix nothing any more. You owe Thea nothing any more. You cannot do anything for this poor little girl. For the time being she is in the care of a good family and when she grows up it will be her own choice whether she wants anything to do with you or not. (You must be thirty years old by now, Imogen, so I suppose you have made that choice.) For goodness’ sake, she insisted, wipe the slate clean. Forget them. Forget all of them.

Well, that was her advice, and very good advice it was too. From her point of view. And well intentioned, certainly. So I took it, as best I could. And from that day onwards I did not write to Beatrix, I did not write to your mother, I did not try to trace you or find out what had become of you. I took all Beatrix’s letters and I destroyed them. I took all my photographs of her out of my albums and I put them in a cardboard box and buried them in the attic under piles of junk. Even your portrait, as I have said, went up to Ruth’s ‘failure room’ and was never taken out, never looked at. And the only time, after that, that Beatrix was ever mentioned between us was a few years later when the film
Gone To Earth
was rereleased, and I insisted that Ruth came with me to see it at a cinema near Oxford Street. Which she hated doing, I must say. And I never told her that I had taped it off the television and I never watched that tape until after she had died.

Well, it is not
quite
true, I suppose, that Beatrix was never mentioned again. I forgot that, shortly before Ruth passed away, she did say something about her. To be more precise, she asked me a question.

It might seem odd, but towards the end our relationship became almost entirely silent. Despite living in the same house, and taking all our meals together, and sharing a bed, I don’t remember that we spoke to each other much. Hardly at all. What was there to say? We were lifelong companions. We knew each other’s opinions, and each other’s histories. Or thought that we did, at any rate. If there was anything we didn’t care to speak of, we preserved a decent reticence.

During her final illness, though, Ruth did ask me something. I was visiting her in hospital, and although she couldn’t walk very well, we had managed to get as far as a bench in one of the little courtyards, which was dominated by a rather ugly concrete water feature. And we had been sitting there for a few minutes when she said to me —most unexpectedly – ‘There is something I would like to know about Beatrix.’ I looked across at her, and she asked me: ‘Was she the one?’ I told her that I didn’t understand. Ruth said: ‘Before me, there was someone else, wasn’t there? Someone that you lost. You lost her, and then you settled for me.’ I could not meet her eye. I suppose I should have known, all along, that she had understood this, but we had never discussed it, had never mentioned any names, and I swear to you that it had never occurred to me that Ruth might have guessed anything. ‘Was it Beatrix?’ she asked once more, while I grappled with this new knowledge. After a few seconds I answered: ‘No.’