by Jonathan Coe
Rebecca went out the next morning. Her parents were arriving in London by train; she went to meet them at the station and then spent the day with them, taking them to Lyons Corner House, the National Gallery, all the usual sorts of things. In the evening they took her out to dinner, so I had the opportunity to spend the whole day alone with Beatrix and Thea. At one point we went out and walked across Putney Bridge to Bishop’s Park. We took the river path down to the children’s playground, and it was there, while Thea was temporarily occupied with the swings and slides, that Beatrix told me of her latest dilemma.
There was a new man, of course. ‘Rosamond,’ she announced, ‘I am in love.’ ‘Congratulations,’ I answered. I thought of telling her that I was in love too, but decided against it. ‘His name is Charles,’ she said. ‘He’s from Canada. He lives in Vancouver.’ I could see, immediately, that this situation might entail some inconveniences. It was no surprise when she declared her intention of following him to Vancouver at the earliest opportunity. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked a flight to Toronto.’ This was an astonishing statement. We were living in the age before jet travel: transatlantic flights were by no means as commonplace as they are now, and they were impossibly expensive. I never did find out (or ask) where she found the money to finance this latest trip. Anyway. I was more interested in the fact that she had just spoken in the first person singular. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow night,’ she had said. Not ‘we’. ‘What about Thea?’ I asked, and she replied: ‘Yes. There is a difficulty there.’
Luckily, however, she had thought of a way of resolving this difficulty: and this, predictably enough, was where I came into the equation. Already she had made things stickier for herself than I could have imagined, because, having met this man Charles in Dublin, ingratiated herself with him, hopped into bed with him and goodness knows what else – despite all this, she had somehow neglected to mention to him that she was the mother of a four-year-old daughter. ‘Who was looking after her,’ I asked, ‘while this was going on?’ She told me that Jack had been taking care of Thea – which, I have to say, seemed very obliging of him, in the circumstances. Jack, she insisted, was devoted to Thea – had become like a father to her. For the last few weeks, apparently, he had been spending the evenings looking after Thea in the small Dublin boarding house that had been their temporary home, under the happy impression that Beatrix was hard at work, waiting tables in the Castle Hotel, while in fact she had been out carousing and canoodling with this Canadian businessman whom she had met on her second night there. When this discrepancy came to light, there was – as you might suppose – an almighty row, and that was that. The end of the affair. They had parted on terms of such acrimony that there was no question of their maintaining contact any longer, and Thea, in the process, had lost a valuable father-figure, although nobody seemed to be saying anything about that. Meanwhile Charles had returned to Vancouver, and it had now become Beatrix’s mission in life to follow him there and secure her place in his heart.
‘I have to be with this man,’ she insisted. ‘He means everything to me. Now that we’ve met, I just cannot bear the thought of life without him.’ She seemed confident that he could be made to return these feelings, if circumstances would only allow them a little more time in each other’s company. ‘We parted very badly,’ she confessed. ‘He could see that I was not being honest with him, that I was withholding something. I’ve had time to think about the situation now, and I see that I handled it wrongly, and now I know exactly what to do. If I can go over there, and explain about Thea, then I’m sure everything will be all right. Honesty is the only possible way forward.’ I opened my mouth to speak, but she stopped me. ‘I know what you are going to say,’ she exclaimed. ‘I know, it would have been far easier to do all this in Dublin.’ This was not, in fact, what I had been going to say. I had been about to suggest that at this point, now that the horse had bolted, so to speak, perhaps a telephone call would be a quicker and cheaper way of moving the situation forward. But I could see that I would be wasting my breath. Beatrix clearly felt that she had a big job of persuasion to do, and that, among her methods of persuasion, she would be obliged to employ some that were not entirely verbal. It was fairly obvious what she had in mind. Equally obvious was the fact that Thea would have to stay behind in England for the time being, and that someone, some trusted friend, would have to look after her.
‘Perhaps Thea could stay with her father,’ I ventured, but this suggestion was dismissed out of hand. Roger was not in the least interested, apparently, being fully ensconced in a new life – and a new family – with Much Wenlock’s Carnival Queen of 1949. There was only one thing for it, then. ‘You want Thea to stay with us?’ I asked. ‘Here, in our flat?’ ‘Oh, Ros, that would be wonderful,’ Beatrix sighed. ‘That would be the most marvellous thing anyone has ever done for me.’ I took a long breath before asking the next, crucial question: ‘For how long?’ Beatrix put her head on one side and pouted; she hesitated for many seconds before answering, and as she did so, she looked at me shyly – or should that be slyly – from the corner of her eyes, as if in full knowledge of the outrageousness of what she was about to request. Finally she said: ‘Rosamond, darling, I know this is a terrible, enormous favour to ask, but could you manage for…’ (I waited, mesmerized)‘… two weeks? Or even three?’
In fact, knowing Beatrix as I did, this request did not strike me as very outrageous at all. I had been expecting much worse. To make me feel that way was part of her genius, I suppose. In any case, as I turned away and looked at little Thea, skimming down the tiny slide and then running up the ladder to skim down it again, with robotic regularity and a look of fierce concentration on her face, my heart melted. It would be impossible for anyone not to love this child, you would have thought. Of course I could look after her for that time – perhaps even longer. I clasped Beatrix warmly by the hand and assured her that, if Rebecca agreed with me, she could certainly trust us with the care of her daughter.
Whether Rebecca would agree, I had no idea.
Naturally, I did not have to wait long to find out. She came back from dinner that night rather early – at about ten o’clock. Beatrix and Thea had already gone to bed. I poured Rebecca one of those brandies for which we were rapidly starting to develop an appetite, and told her of Beatrix’s request.
She stared at me in silence for a few moments. ‘You didn’t say yes?’ she asked. ‘Of course not,’ I replied. ‘I said, “Yes, if Rebecca agrees.”’ ‘Well I don’t,’ she said, decisively, then finished her brandy and stormed off to the bathroom.
On her return I attempted to reason with her. I pointed out that it would only be for a short period of time, and that Beatrix was not just my cousin, but my oldest friend. All to no avail. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I’d like them both out of this flat first thing tomorrow morning.’ More words were spoken – harsher words – and the upshot was that Rebecca spent that night in the sitting room by herself, while I retreated to the darkened bedroom and sat down on the double bed, weeping. Beatrix put out a hand in the dark and rested it on my leg. Thea slept on.
‘Poor darling,’ Beatrix murmured, soothingly. ‘I’ve got you into trouble with your friend, haven’t I?’ I nodded and took my clothes off down to my underwear and got into bed on the far side, so that the sleeping Thea lay between us. Beatrix stretched out her hand, and we held hands over the little girl’s body. I remember her sighing and rustling over in her sleep. After a while Beatrix sniffed (I think she had been crying too) and said, ‘I’m an awful nuisance, aren’t I? You must be livid with me, just turning up like this.’ ‘I don’t mind,’ I said; which was the truth.
Well, it is no good pretending I can remember all of our conversation like this. In any case, I suspect that we spent much of the next few hours in silence, wide awake but not talking to one another. I do remember Beatrix saying something to me, at one point, about how close Rebecca and I seemed – ‘almost,’ she added, in
sinuatingly, ‘almost as if you were more than friends’. I said nothing to that, but my heart beat a little faster when she went on, in a tone of even greater mock-innocence: ‘I’m sure your mother and father would be awfully pleased to know that you have someone like that in your life. Someone with whom you can share absolutely everything.’ I wondered what to make of these words, and what to make of the shine I could see in Beatrix’s eyes as I glanced over at her in the semi-dark. She glanced back at me and took my hand again and squeezed it and then, staring up at the ceiling, where shadows from the elm tree in the garden were drifting in hazy moonlit patterns, she said: ‘Do you remember…?’ She didn’t need to continue. I did it for her. ‘The night in Shropshire?’ I answered, dreamily. ‘When we both tried to escape.’ ‘Such a long time ago,’ she said, breathing the words rather than speaking them. ‘So much has happened since then. And yet…’ Again, I knew what she was going to say. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Sometimes it feels as though it was only yesterday.’ More than that, as a matter of fact: suddenly it seemed to me that that evening, that wonderful, terrifying adventure, did not belong to the past at all: it felt as though I was living through it again, at that very moment. Beatrix and I were not lying side by side in bed, but beneath the spreading branches of the trees at the edge of Uncle Owen’s fields; the motionless figure between us was not Thea, but my little dog Shadow, clutched tightly to my chest. Beatrix put her arm behind my neck, and I pressed myself against her, and we lay like that, on our backs, staring up at the stars. A barn owl was hooting, crying out in the night, very close to us. The trees rustled, the undergrowth was restless with hints of subtle, mysterious life. I could feel the warmth of Beatrix’s body, the pulsing of blood through the arm at the back of my head. Her sensations became mine. The moon continued to rise, and with a flurry the owl launched into sudden flight, skimming away beneath the branches of the trees. Despite the cold, I was happy here…
When I awoke, Beatrix was no longer with me. I sat up and looked around me, my heart pounding. Then I heard her next door in the sitting room, talking to Rebecca. It was morning. I immediately got out of bed and slipped on my dressing gown.
‘I know it’s your big day,’ I said to Rebecca, ‘and we’ve both got to get ready and everything. But I just wanted to tell you that I’ve made up my mind. Thea is going to stay with us for a few weeks.’
Rebecca stared at me, her lips hardening into a narrow line. Beatrix put her arms around me and kissed me gratefully. Thea, lying full-length on the floor in her pyjamas, colouring in the squares of a newspaper crossword with red crayon, did not look up. No more was said on the subject.
And that is why, in this photograph, Rebecca looks so cross with me, and why my hair is in such disarray, and why I have a very obvious ladder in my stocking, extending to almost three inches above my left ankle.
Rebecca’s anger did not last long, in the end. She loved me too much, in those days, to stay angry with me for any length of time. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ she conceded, that night, as Thea sat alone at the little table in the sitting room, dipping fingers of toast into the egg we had boiled for her. Beatrix had already said her farewells and left for London airport. ‘It might even be fun to have her with us for two or three weeks. We can take her to the seaside and all sorts of things.’ I smiled happily. Everything was going to be all right.
It took Beatrix rather longer than expected to achieve her goal in Vancouver, however. She did not return for more than two years.
‘Damn,’ said Gill, looking at her watch. ‘We’d better stop there.’
It was already six-thirty. Outside, it had been dark for almost two hours. The rush-hour traffic had started, swelled up to saturation point and was even now beginning to recede – all unnoticed by the three women high up in Catharine’s flat. Gill and Catharine still sat on the ancient, listless sofa; Elizabeth had by now forsaken the swivel chair and was sitting on the floor between them, her back to the sofa, her head resting against her sister’s knees. Catharine flicked the remote control at the stereo and the tape clicked off. They said nothing for a while, drawn together in wordless meditation, as the sounds of the world outside slowly re-entered their consciousness and established themselves there, pushing aside the spectral images that Rosamond’s narrative had raised. ‘Did you know about all this, Mum?’ Catharine asked, finally. ‘Had Aunt Rosamond told you any of it before?’
‘No,’ Gill answered. ‘No, it’s all new to me.’
‘But you’ve seen these pictures, haven’t you?’
‘Some of them.’ Gill was thinking, already, that as soon as she returned home she would have to retrieve all of Rosamond’s photograph albums from the attic, where Stephen had already stowed them, and look more closely at the pictures they contained.
‘I’d love to visit Warden Farm,’ Elizabeth said, dreamily. ‘What was it like?’
‘It was just as she describes it,’ said Gill, rising to her feet and stretching. ‘We used to spend Christmas Eve there every year, when I was a little girl. I think Aunt Rosamond was even there one time – and Thea was with her.’ She frowned, straining to resurrect a distant memory. ‘I can’t be sure, but there was an older girl there one year, and we didn’t quite know who she was. She must have been about seventeen or eighteen. Yes, I think it would have been Thea.’
‘Can we go there?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Next time we come up to see you, can we all drive over?’
Gill found her handbag and rummaged around inside, looking for lipstick. ‘There wouldn’t be much point. Ivy and Owen handed it down to one of the sons – Raymond, I think – and the farm didn’t do well. He sold up, and the last time I went there it was all shuttered and empty. I think someone bought it in the end – tacked a swimming pool on, and all that sort of thing. But it’s not the same any more.’
They took a taxi from Primrose Hill to Marylebone. The sisters perched on the foldaway seats, with their backs to the driver, while Gill sat facing them, hemmed in on either side by instrument cases, a small amplifier, a canvas holdall cat’s-cradled-full of flexes and cables, and another small flight-case housing some electronic device which she had, so far, been unable to identify. Bright, fleeting amber light from the streetlamps flashed to and fro across her face as she struggled to get comfortable.
‘Do you really need all this stuff?’ she asked Catharine. ‘I thought you were just going to play the flute.’
‘Ah, but you haven’t heard what she does with her magical gizmo,’ said Elizabeth, swollen with sisterly pride. ‘Just wait. You’ll think there are twelve of her.’
Not understanding this remark, Gill sat back and gazed out of the window, huddling her raincoat around herself as she felt shivers running through her: whether from cold or anticipation she couldn’t say. She was nervous on Catharine’s behalf, even though she had seen her performing in public plenty of times before; at the same time, this little concert, which might have seemed a momentous prospect a few hours ago, had started to assume less importance since the playing of those tapes. She was sure that Elizabeth and even Catharine were feeling the same thing: that this recital – the whole reason for her coming down to London in the first place – had become little more than an interlude, now, a frustrating interruption to the progress of Aunt Rosamond’s story, an unwelcome incursion into the present when they were all suddenly preoccupied with the past, with the gradual unveiling of their family’s occult, unsuspected history.
As they drove on towards Cavendish Square, a freezing mist began to descend. It gave London – or at least this quiet, prosperous, solemn corner of London – a ghostly, unfamiliar air. The massive outlines of fine old buildings dissolved into shadows, purplish and inscrutable. Wreaths of mist unfurled in the glimmer of streetlamps, placed at silvery intervals along the length of Wimpole Street. Even though they could see, as they disembarked from the taxi, that a trickle of people had already begun to arrive at the church, there was little traffic here: most of the audience seemed to be co
ming on foot. They passed by in groups of three or four, clutching coats tightly against the cold. Catharine recognized some of the faces; greetings and hugs were exchanged while her mother and sister unloaded her cases and paid off the taxi driver.
Gill waited outside while her daughters lugged the equipment backstage, then she and Elizabeth entered the church together and made their way down the aisle towards an empty pew. She was conscious, now, of a mounting disorientation, a sense that she was half-removed from her surroundings. Shadows of the past, remembrances, continued to loom over her. This church: a church on a winter’s night, in the West End of London, playing host to a concert… It was hardly likely to be the same one, she supposed, as the church where Rosamond and Rebecca had attended their first concert together (that had been in Mayfair, hadn’t it?): but still, the coincidence – if that’s what it was – made her skin tingle. She gazed around her at the warm, muted colours, the candlelight glinting off the golden chancel rail, even bringing the figures on the stained glass windows to some sort of deceptive, flickering life, and she felt that the air was charged with something of the same wonder and bewitchment as on the night, more than half a century ago, when those two women had first dared to guess their feelings for each other.
When Catharine began to play, this intimation grew even stronger. She was third on a bill of five students from her music college, all performing to an audience of friends, colleagues and family. First, a pianist, who had chosen something long, dreamlike and unexpectedly melodic by John Cage. This was followed by a brutally modernist piece for solo cello. It then took a few minutes, and some help from two sound engineers – powering up amplifiers and adjusting the height of a microphone stand – before Catharine was ready to step forward. A hush fell upon the audience, who had grown restless, and a little disgruntled, during the setting-up of her equipment. In the near-silence that followed, the hum from Catharine’s amplifier was distinctly audible.