The Rain Before it Falls (3 page)

Next, Gill went over to the record player, which sat on top of a stained and weathered rosewood cabinet. Again, just as Dr May had told her, there was a record still resting on the turntable. She raised the perspex lid, carefully lifted the record – taking care not to touch the surface – and examined the label. Songs of the Auvergne, it said: arranged by Joseph Canteloube, sung by Victoria de los Angeles. Looking around, Gill saw both the sleeve and the inner sleeve lying on a nearby shelf. She put the album back in its sleeve and knelt down to open the cabinet, guessing that Rosamond would have kept her records there. There were about a hundred of them, neatly alphabetized. No CDs, however: the digital revolution seemed to have passed her by. But there were also, on the top shelf of the cabinet, a few dozen more cassettes, some blank and some pre-recorded, and standing next to them, something else, something quite unexpected – enough to make Gill draw in her breath sharply, so that her gasp rang out in that silent house like a scream of distress.

A glass tumbler: just a few drops of liquid at the bottom, giving off the unmistakably peaty smell of an Islay malt whisky. And next to it, a small brown bottle, the contents of which were spelled out on a label in feeble dot-matrix printing: Diazepam. The bottle was empty.

∗

At three o’clock in the afternoon, Gill phoned her brother.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked, cheerfully.

‘It’s miserable here. I can’t stand it. How did
she
stand it, for heaven’s sake? I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m going to spend the night in this place.’

‘So what are you going to do? Drive home?’

‘I can’t face it. It’s too far. Stephen’s away in Germany till Friday anyway. I…’ (she hesitated) ‘… I was wondering if I could stay the night at yours.’

‘Of course you could.’

∗

No, she would not tell anyone. She had made up her mind about that, now. What she had seen in that cupboard was not conclusive, after all. Perhaps that bottle had been there for months, years. Dr May had expressed herself satisfied as to the cause of death, and had seen no need to refer it to the coroner. Why upset things, then, why cause anyone any needless distress? And even if Rosamond had taken her own life, what business was it of Gill’s, or anyone else’s? She had known that the end was not far away; the angina had been causing her pain; and if she had chosen to release herself from that pain, who could blame her?

Gill was doing the right thing: she was quite sure of it.

David’s house was in Stafford, little more than an hour away. The last few minutes of daylight found her driving through the eastern parts of Shropshire, towards the M6. The route took her not far from the church where Rosamond was now buried, but Gill had no desire to stop. She entered a sort of trancelike state, and drove slowly, never faster than forty miles an hour, unaware that impatient cars were queued up behind her. Her thoughts were drifting randomly, dangerously, floating and untethered. That music her aunt must have been listening to, when she died… Gill had never heard Canteloube’s
Songs of the Auvergne,
but she had visited that part of France herself, once, many years ago. Catharine had been eight years old, Elizabeth five or six, so it must have been 1992: quite early that year – April or May… The girls had not come with them on that trip, anyway. The whole idea had been to leave them behind, staying with their grandparents. Gill and Stephen had stumbled into a crisis in their marriage (was that putting it too strongly? She remembered no arguments, no infidelities, just a sort of wordless distance opening up between them, a sudden, bewildered awareness that somehow, without anybody noticing, they had become strangers to one another) and their hope, presumably, had been that a few days in France together might help repair the damage.

It hadn’t worked that way. Stephen was being flown to Clermont-Ferrand for a conference, and his days were entirely spoken for. Gill had been left to wander alone for hours through the bars and sitting rooms of their empty, newly built, characterless hotel, until she had finally decided, on the third day, to assert her independence. This had involved hiring a car and driving out into the countryside. She retained only a few hazy memories – grey skies, an unexpectedly rocky landscape, a desolate lake surrounded by pine trees – and one other, very clear one: something she had not forgotten in all the intervening years. She had been driving back to the hotel, towards the end of the day; it was late afternoon, and the road she had chosen was narrow, winding, hemmed in by patches of densely planted and rather sinister woodland. Rain was falling in fits and starts, thinly and unpredictably. And then, as the forest at last fell away and Gill emerged on to an open road that was almost eerily flat and lunar, there had been a loud, sudden thud on her windscreen. A black shape bounced off it, then on to the car bonnet and then on to the road, where it lay unmoving. Gill braked to a halt in the middle of the road, ran back to see what the shape was, and found herself looking at a dark blot upon the asphalt – a dead bird, a young blackbird. And on the instant of seeing that lifeless shape another thud fell, leaden, upon her heart. She had turned off the car engine, so that the hush upon the road was now oppressive and shocking. No birdsong anywhere. Gill approached the dead object almost on tiptoe, picked up the small body gingerly, by the edge of one wing, and then placed it gently on a bed of moss under the branches of a lone shrub at the roadside, thinking to herself as she did so, ‘You know what it’s supposed to mean: a death in the family.’ The thought, unbidden and treacherous, caused her heart to start racing, and she drove at reckless speed into the next village, the village of Murol, where, upon finding a callbox, she jammed a handful of francs into the slot as fast as she could and telephoned her parents’ house in England. Her mother came to the phone after what seemed like a lifetime, but she sounded perfectly composed and cheerful, if a little surprised to have heard from her daughter at that time of day. ‘No, the girls are fine,’ she assured her. ‘Why are you asking? They’re in the dining room right now, doing one of your old jigsaws. How’s your holiday, are you having a good time…?’ And so Gill had driven on to Clermont-Ferrand, shaken but thankful. And had tried to explain to Stephen, that evening, why she had been so frightened, only to find herself blocked by his habitual wall of amused, indulgent scepticism. ‘It seemed such an unpropitious omen,’ she had said. ‘So very strange…’ ‘Oh, you and your omens,’ Stephen had laughed, somehow managing to sound, as was his annoying way, entirely dismissive and yet not unsympathetic. And the next day they had returned home, the marital crisis unresolved and the omen unaccounted for: except that Gill had been forced to accept, on this occasion, that her anxiety had been fanciful. She allowed the incident to remain undiscussed, after that, but it left her with one more itch of dissatisfaction: a nagging awareness that she had allowed herself to fall in (as so often) with her husband’s more prosaic way of thinking.

That itch had never really left her: Gill could feel it even now, years later, as she drove along the Shropshire road which in her childhood she had travelled at least twice every month. As a family, they had always taken this route to visit her grandparents, and although the memories associated with it had long lain dormant, today it came home to her that these fields, these villages, these hedgerows, were still inscribed upon her memory; they were the very bedrock of her consciousness. She looked around her and wondered how she would attempt to describe them to a blind person; to Imogen. The sun, which had been so dazzling this morning, had long ago been hidden behind thick banks of grey cloud, bulbous with the threat of snow. The whole world was monochrome now: everything was black, white or some shade of grey. Trees black and brittle against a grey sky, like charred bones; rough stone walls fuzzy with layers of grey moss; the fields, rising and falling in gentle undulations, English and undemonstrative, and grey as the snow-heavy sky itself. And now the flakes started to fall, thick, spiralling flakes, big as autumn leaves, and Gill, shivering convulsively, realized that the cold in her car was gelid – raw as the cold in her aunt’s house, or even worse – and the heater still wasn’t working properly, and she suddenly found herself wondering, in a kind of fury, why it was that she still clung to this country, why it was that to tear herself away from it would feel like an amputation, when it never seemed to have nourished her, never given her what she wanted. The feeling came out of nowhere, knocked her sideways, as she cast bitter reflections over some of the conversations she’d had with Stephen recently, conversations about all the things they could do now that the girls had left, all the different countries and places they might visit or even choose as a new home. And she understood, at that moment, that those conversations had not been real; that she had been talking to herself, that what she had said to her husband had sounded, to his ears, like meaningless noise, while she babbled on like someone who is decribing last night’s dream over the breakfast table to a listener who is bored witless by the details of something which he can never himself experience at first hand.

∗

On a Wednesday morning in February, four months after she had made that journey, Gill took a train down to London. In her suitcase was the envelope addressed to Imogen, still unclaimed and unopened. Of the five letters she had originally sent, three were never answered, and two were answered by people who turned out not to be the woman they were looking for. Advertisements had been placed, repeatedly, in every newspaper and magazine. Gill had contacted the Royal National Institute for the Blind, but they had no record of Imogen. Searches on the internet threw up tens of thousands of results, all of which turned out to be irrelevant and misleading. Gill’s ideas were about to run out, and she was beginning to wonder if it might still be possible, even today, for someone to vanish without trace, into the ether. Finally she had decided (with her daughters’ eager collusion) that it would now be sensible to listen to Imogen’s tapes, if only in the hope that they might contain a clue to her whereabouts.

She checked into her hotel and then walked across Regent’s Park towards Primrose Hill, where Catharine had recently found a small flat to rent. When she arrived, slightly shell-shocked as usual by the traffic noise and the pace at which everybody in London now seemed inclined (or compelled) to live, both sisters were waiting for her.

‘Did you bring it?’ Elizabeth asked, answering the door without even saying hello.

‘Of course I brought it. Lovely to see you too.’

They kissed, and Elizabeth led her up four flights of stairs to the attic rooms, where all Catharine’s familiar chaos was laid out. Gill looked around approvingly, still enjoying a thrill of recognition – more than that, of inexplicable relief – whenever she saw these books again, these pot plants, the scattered clothes and magazines, the music stand and flute left lying carelessly by the window, the old pine desk strewn with sheet music and scraps of manuscript paper. Taking it all in with a rapid, expert glance, she also scanned the flat for signs of Daniel, the boyfriend she instinctively mistrusted, for no reason that she could explain to herself or anyone else. Although she could hardly stop Catharine from seeing him, she was firmly against the idea (which had more than once been mooted) of him moving into this flat. But there were no stray underpants or electric razors or textbooks on literary theory; none that she could see, anyway.

‘Hi, Mum,’ said Catharine, coming over from the sink in the corner, with soapy hands. ‘Did you bring it?’

‘Is that the only thing you two can think about?’ Gill reached into her bag and took out the manila envelope. ‘It’s here, OK?’ She laid it on the coffee table, and both her daughters leaned over to inspect it, as if they suspected their mother of trying to deceive them. ‘A cup of tea would be nice,’ she added.

While Elizabeth attended to this, Gill asked her elder daughter: ‘Are you nervous about tonight?’

‘Not really,’ said Catharine. ‘I don’t get nervous any more. Besides, it’s only in front of friends.’

But Gill didn’t quite believe her.

∗

The afternoon light soon faded. It took Catharine a long time to prepare what seemed to be quite a simple lunch, and at three o’clock they were still sitting amidst its debris, beneath the muted, greenish glow cast by an overhead lamp. Gill, who did not normally drink wine at this time of day, felt her perceptions beginning to dull, and found herself staring intently, for no reason, at the gleaming bell of her wine glass, mesmerized by the peculiar paleness of the golden liquid as she swirled it gently in her palm. Outside, an ochre sun would soon be washing its last tired light over the North London rooftops, and the sky would purple into darkness: the topmost branches of the plane tree in the front garden pattered feverishly against the windowpane. Another kind of light began to glint: the flash of Elizabeth’s blade as she deftly peeled and quartered an apple. She wordlessly passed the pieces around. It was some minutes since anybody had spoken. London seemed quiet this afternoon: even the inevitable police sirens were distant, unaffecting, like rumours of war from a country you knew you would never visit. Finally Gill rose to her feet and fetched the manila envelope from the other side of the room. She placed it on the table between them without ceremony.

‘What time will we have to leave, do you think?’ she asked Catharine.

‘The concert starts at eight. So I suppose seven o’clock, to be on the safe side.’

‘Right. We’d better get on with it, then.’

Gill took the fruit knife, wiped it on a paper napkin, and slit the envelope open. Then she took out the four tapes and stacked them on the table, neatly, in numerical order.

‘Four C-90S,’ said Elizabeth, thinking aloud. ‘If each of these are full, that means six hours altogether. We won’t have time to listen to them all now.’

‘I know,’ said Catharine. ‘But at least let’s get started.’ She stood up and added: ‘I’ll make some more coffee.’