by Jonathan Coe
‘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.
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 ev
en 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.