by Jonathan Coe
While Thea slept, Rebecca and I sat on the edge of the long grass, just where the meadow sloped away towards the beach. We sat side by side, more glasses of wine in our hands, leaning into one another. My head was on her shoulder. The silence of that place was absolute, almost shocking. It obliged one to talk in whispers.
Rebecca was the first to speak. ‘You know what Thea said to you earlier,’ she murmured. ‘When she said that something can still make you happy, even if it isn’t real.’ I laughed and said: ‘Yes, she’s a crafty one, all right.’ ‘Do you think it’s true, though?’ Rebecca asked, and there was an odd note of insistence in her voice. I didn’t understand her. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean —’ Rebecca hesitated, as if full of fear, and as if to voice that fear was somehow to give it shape and substance – ‘I mean, this isn’t real, is it? What we have, the three of us. It’s not real.’ I laid my hand on her thigh and squeezed it. ‘You both feel solid enough to me,’ I answered. ‘Have I been hallucinating all this time?’ Rebecca didn’t answer; it had been a foolish response. ‘What are you getting at?’ Again, Rebecca said nothing. She sat beside me for a minute or two, still leaning fondly against me, and then, abruptly, she stood up and walked down to the water. She stood there, alone, her silhouette black and heavy in the moonlight. Her arms were folded, her shoulders tensed. I wanted to follow her but I was shocked by her sudden unhappiness, by the savagery of the fear that seemed to have ambushed her from nowhere. When I did step down to the water’s edge beside her, and tried to put my arm around her waist, her whole body seemed rigid and unresponsive. ‘Rebecca, this is real,’ I insisted. ‘Of course it is. These have been wonderful times, haven’t they, for the three of us?’ But when she answered me, it was in a voice I had never heard before: cracked, faltering, stricken with animal grief. ‘We won’t have her for much longer,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly over. This is the end.’
It’s a mystery to me, even now, where this intimation could have come from. Whatever the source, she was proved right, in a matter of weeks. Early in September, I received a letter from Beatrix. She was coming back from Canada, at long last, and in something like triumph, by the sound of it, with Charles in tow. Somehow or other, she had won him over, reconciled him to the existence of Thea, and even persuaded him to take a job in London. Furthermore, they now had a son of their own, called Joseph, born about six months previously. What a relief it would be, for me and Rebecca, to have the burden of looking after Thea finally lifted from our shoulders! That was what she was pleased to tell herself, in any case.
Less than a week after we received this letter, Beatrix had arrived. And less than two hours after she arrived, she was gone. And Thea was gone with her. Utterly bewildered, utterly forlorn: snatched away and thrust into the bosom of a new family. A family of perfect strangers.
Rebecca left a few days later. She did it in the traditional way – waiting for a time when I was out of the flat, and then clearing out her possessions, and writing a note, which was left propped up for me on the dining table. ‘I don’t want to be in this place without her any longer,’ was all that it said. There was an additional sentiment, implied but not actually written: ‘Or with you.’
So I was quite alone.
Rebecca wrote to me, a few months later, full of remorse. We met up for coffee, but it was a wretched occasion, and neither of us, I think, had the stomach for any more meetings. The last glimpse I had of her was… oh, forty years ago? More, in fact. It was in a London restaurant, but she didn’t notice me, so…
Ah well.
All of a sudden, I am feeling very tired, Imogen. Forgive me, but I don’t feel like finding that song now, and playing it to you. It is very late, and all I really want to do is go to bed. I shall play it to you some other time. Just so that you can hear it for yourself, the way her voice breaks in upon you… That moment, it always makes me think for some reason of a curtain being drawn back – drawn back to reveal, suddenly, a tableau: the cerulean blueness of the lake; Rebecca and Thea; and me, walking across the meadow to join them again.
So, now it is morning, and I am feeling much better. I am ready to tell you all about picture number thirteen: Beatrix and I, sitting on a bench together, late one summer afternoon, in the grounds of a rest home. The name of this establishment escapes me. I am reasonably certain that I only visited it two or three times.
The year of this photograph, I believe, would be 1959. Her accident was the year before, probably in January or February 1958. Following the accident, Beatrix was in hospital for almost a year. Her neck had been broken, and for a while it was thought that she might not be able to walk again. At this particular home, however, she was being treated not for physical ailments but for mental problems which followed in the wake of the accident.
A heavy, grey and uncompromising Victorian house. That is what you can see in the background. The sky behind is a pale blue, mottled with cirrus clouds. The house is symmetrical, with twin gables at each end, each with a pair of chimneys. The photographer (I believe it was one of the nurses) was standing to the right of the house, towards the edge of the wide front lawn, so we see the main building at an oblique angle, which makes it seem a little friendlier, somehow. There are eight windows on the first floor – I seem to remember one of them belonged to Beatrix’s room, which had a decent view over the garden – while on the ground floor there are large bay windows at either end of the house. One of these belonged to the recreation area or common room, where they had a grand piano and a small library. I found it a most restful and appealing house – it seemed positively luxurious, compared to my bedsit in Wandsworth, at any rate – but Beatrix hated it, I remember, regarding it in the light of a prison. I recall that they did some fairly unpleasant things to her there, so one can hardly blame her. Electro-convulsive therapy, and that sort of thing.
She and I are in the foreground of this picture, sitting on a bench towards the back of the lawn, just in front of a wonderful border of red and yellow verbenas. We are both dressed rather formally – I wonder why? I am wearing a navy-blue jacket and long grey skirt. My hair is shorter than ever, now – it almost looks like a man’s short-back-and-sides. The difference between myself, here, and how I look in Rebecca’s graduation photograph, for instance, is very striking. There is a certain grimness in the way my mouth is set, a sort of resigned fixity in the way I am looking at the camera – which of course I may just be imagining, or exaggerating: and in any case, this would hardly have been a happy occasion, after all. The same could be said about Beatrix, who is wearing a loose, somewhat shapeless and baggy dress, full-length, also in navy blue, with a pattern of tiny flowers in pale blue and green. Her expression is not so much grim, I suppose, as vacant and tired. She has a brace on her neck, which makes her whole posture seem very stiff and awkward. She had to wear that brace for about two years, I seem to remember. Awful for her. One couldn’t help but sympathize.
This was how the accident had happened. Beatrix and Charles, as I told you, had married and moved back to England. In addition to Thea and her son, Joseph, they now had a baby daughter called Alice. Charles was working in the City, and they had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the suburban lifestyle by taking a big house in Pinner. And one Friday afternoon, Beatrix had been seized by what was, to be honest, an uncharacteristic spasm of maternal generosity: she had decided to give Thea a treat: she told her that she would pick her up from school in the car, instead of making her walk home as usual. At five to three, two hundred yards from the school gates, she slowed down and came to a halt at a roundabout in order to allow another car to feed in from the right. Behind her a lorry, driven by a man who had had four pints of beer with his lunch, failed to anticipate her stopping and drove straight into the back of her car, with terrific force. Fortunately, both of her other children were at home, in the care of a nanny. Otherwise they might well have been killed. Beatrix was the only person in the car and she was jolted forward at speed. At least she was lucky – if that is
ever the right word to use in this sort of context – that the car she was driving was a Volkswagen Beetle. These cars were by no means common in Britain at the time. There was still a residual, deep-seated reluctance on the part of many people to buy anything German. I sometimes wonder if Beatrix had not bought it, in fact, for that very reason: because it was a good way of antagonizing her stuck-up, suburban neighbours. Anyway, it turned out, in one sense, to be the saving of her: if she had been driving a more square-backed vehicle, the lorry would simply have ploughed into it and crushed it; but because the back end of her Volkswagen was rounded, the lorry actually mounted it, and the impact was very slightly diminished.
Word of the accident reached me, a few weeks after the event, in a letter from my mother. I was living, as I said, in a bedsitter in Wandsworth, and I still had no telephone. I was not in regular contact with Beatrix at this time. Seeing her with the family was, I had found, too upsetting: upsetting for me, and disturbing for Thea, who for a good while remained much closer to me, and fonder of me, than she was of her mother. In these circumstances I had no choice, as far as I could see, but to back off, and keep my distance. So that is what I did. But of course, when I heard of the accident, I made contact with Beatrix immediately and visited her in hospital just a day or two later. She was just in the process of recovering from an initial operation on her neck which had, it transpired, gone quite seriously wrong. It was because of the failure of that operation, I seem to remember, that she had to return to hospital repeatedly over the next few years, often necessitating long absences from her family.
Poor Beatrix. She was no longer in pain when I went to see her, but her movement was very restricted. From then on she always carried herself stiffly – was never able to turn her head towards you, but always had to turn her whole body. She was told that it would be like that for the rest of her life. And then there was the seemingly endless hospitalization, which could not have come at a worse time. She had three children to look after – two of them very young. Charles was not much help, being very much absorbed in his work. He was a rather cold and unresponsive man, Charles, but thoroughly decent at heart, which I’m sure was to prove crucial over the next few years. I mean, Beatrix was hardly ever around, and there would have been great scope for him just bunking off back to Canada, or having an affair with the nanny or something, but he always did the right thing. He was straightforward and reliable. I’m tempted to say that these are essentially Canadian qualities, although perhaps you would consider that to be an absurd generalization. Anyway, his loyalty counted for a good deal, I know that. Where would the children have been without him, as their mother was shunted in and out of hospital for months at a time during their formative years?
And yet I would swear that it was his own son, and his own daughter, who received the lion’s share of his attention. Who can blame him for that, in a way? Nobody. Certainly not me. But where did it leave Thea? Where did it leave your poor mother?
In this picture, Beatrix and I are not sitting close together. There is a good six inches of space between us, on what does not seem to be a very large bench. Perhaps I should not read too much into that. If either one of us is leaning away from the other, it is Beatrix herself. She is resting one hand on the arm of the bench and inclining herself towards it. I am leaning slightly forwards, if anything, towards the camera: I look ever so slightly impatient, as if I would quite like to get up and walk around in a moment. There is only so much that one can deduce from somebody’s posture, but it would certainly be true to say that the nature of our friendship had changed, in the last few years. For some time, as you know, I had felt that I was tied to Beatrix by an unbreakable bond, a bond that went back to the time when I was evacuated to her home during the war. Well, I no longer felt that way. That notion had even started to seem a little childish to me; but it had been replaced by something else, something more real, and something which I believe was even more powerful. What drew me to Beatrix now, what kept me loyal to her, was my love for her daughter. It felt to me (this might sound strange, I suppose) that Thea was in danger. I could not have said what kind of danger, although now I can see it quite clearly: she was in danger of not being loved, or not being loved enough. Saving her from this fate had become my secret responsibility. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it had taken on, for me, the nature of a sacred duty.
But then after all these years, Imogen, nothing seems quite so simple, quite so clear-cut. Was it really your mother who was starved of love, or was it me? If I felt an ache, a yearning to be in Thea’s presence again, was that because, unselfishly, I wanted to help her, or because my own life was so empty and loveless? At this time I was working, by day, as a senior sales assistant at Arding and Hobbs department store at Clapham Junction; by night I returned to my little flat, cooked a cheap meal for myself, read trashy novels or listened to the wireless, and went to bed. I cannot pretend that it was anything other than a cheerless existence. I was making no real attempt to meet other people. I was not socializing with any of my work colleagues, or making any effort to appear friendly to them. Rebecca had been gone for more than four years, and I was still missing her terribly. (I still do, if you want to know the truth, although of course I have got used to the feeling, a long time ago.) The best way I can put it is to say that life had no flavour any more. Living without Rebecca was like living on an endless diet of bread and water. Somebody may have written that in a song once, it becomes so hard to remember what are your own ideas and what you may have picked up from somewhere else. Anyway, I must not start free associating again, and I must stop thinking about Rebecca; it is the story of me and Beatrix I am meant to be telling, me and Beatrix and how that all leads, inevitably, to you.
In the midst of all this, there was at least, for me, one bright spot: my elder sister, Sylvia, was married by now, to a man called Thomas. They had two children: a boy called David, and a girl called Gill. It is my niece Gill who, if all has gone according to plan, will deliver these tapes to you. They were just infants when this picture was taken but I do remember, round about this time, going up to the Midlands and spending a few days with my sister and brother-in-law, and liking it again, the experience of having small children around me. I would not say that I have been close to them as they have grown up, but I have watched over them, sometimes perhaps without their realizing it. That has been a source of consolation, I must say. Particularly over the last twenty years, after you and your mother disappeared from my life.
Just now, Imogen, a memory comes back to me. Something that happened not in the garden of the rest home, but in Beatrix’s room. Was it on this same day, the day recorded on this photograph? Hard to be sure, since all of my visits followed much the same pattern. I would meet Beatrix downstairs, in the library or common room, and then we would take a walk in the garden and sit on this bench, or perhaps on one of the other benches, beside the little herb garden which was divided up into squares by miniature box hedges. After that, Beatrix would probably be tired, so I would take her back to her room and talk to her for a few more minutes while she lay down on the bed. There were pills that she was taking three or four times a day, and these often made her drowsy in the afternoons. Her window had Venetian blinds, I remember, rather than curtains. I would close these for her, but they did not close completely: thin strips of light and shadow would fall across her face and across the pale blue bedspread as she lay there, her eyelids gradually drooping. It’s an image I remember distinctly. And one time – this time that I am telling you about – she had fallen asleep (or so I thought), and her breathing had become slow and regular, and I stood up and gathered up my things from her table and put on my coat and made my way to the door. Only, just as I got there and was reaching for the handle, I heard her slow, sleepy voice, saying: ‘Ros?’
And I turned and saw that her eyes were still closed, even though her face and her body were turned stiffly towards me. I said, ‘Yes, darling, what is it?’ And then, very drowsily, s
he started mumbling. I found it hard to catch the words at first but they were more or less to this effect. She said: ‘Why did he do it? Why did he just disappear like that?’ I lifted my fingers from the doorhandle and took a few steps back towards her. My first thought was that she was talking about the lorry driver, but then I remembered that he had not disappeared, he had been arrested and given some trifling fine for careless driving. Then I wondered if she was talking about Jack, and the ending of their adventure in the gipsy caravan, but Jack had not so much disappeared as been driven away by her, so it wasn’t him that she was thinking of, either. Nor was it Roger, the first husband from whom she was now divorced. ‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘Why did he just run away?’ And then I knew that in her half-sleep she was remembering Bonaparte, that foolish poodle of her mother’s, and that cold winter’s day, the day by the skating pond, the day he had run away over the horizon and disappeared for ever. ‘I keep thinking about it,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes no sense. What had I done to him?’ And I told her that she hadn’t done anything to him, that sometimes things happened for no reason. I sat down on the bed beside her and clasped her icy hand, but nothing I said could console her, she began to cry, still without opening her eyes, a tear leaked out from beneath her eyelids and ran on to her cheek, and soon she was sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably, and I clasped her even more tightly and said more things to her, many more things that were meant to comfort her, but I can’t remember what any of them were, and in any case she was somewhere else, by now, somewhere beyond comforting.
Shortly after this fourteenth picture was taken, my relations with Beatrix reached their lowest ebb.
I am not sure that you could guess that, however, from looking at the five smiling faces captured here. The year is 1962, and, my goodness, we look young in this picture, Bea and I! But then I realize, with a shock, that we were still young. I would have been twenty-nine, she would have been thirty-two; at which age, of course, the three-year difference between us, which seemed so momentous when we were both children, can have meant nothing at all. Twenty-nine, though! Is that all? A stripling, I would have been, an infant, and yet… and yet in my memory, the day this photograph was taken, I feel ancient. The reason can only be, I suppose, that a cycle was coming to an end; a circle was closing; the story of my friendship with Beatrix had not much further to run. That part of me which had been tied to her for so long was about to die.