by Jonathan Coe
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.’
She did not allude to the subject again, after that. And she died just a week or two later.
Rebecca died, too. I saw an announcement placed in one of the newspapers a few months ago. ‘Beloved mother,’ it said. ‘Beloved mother of Peter, Mark and Sophia.’ I had known that already. Not their names, of course, but the fact that she’d married and had children. I saw her by chance in a London restaurant, more than forty years ago. There were four of them sitting around the table – Rebecca, a man, and two little boys – and she also had a tiny baby on her lap. I was supposed to be meeting a friend there and I walked straight in, saw Rebecca and her family, and walked straight out again. Luckily she didn’t see me. Her husband did, but he wouldn’t have known who I was. I hurried off down the street at a terrific pace and had to telephone my friend later that afternoon to apologize. I was so shaken, so surprised. And angry with her, as well, at the time, although that anger slipped away long ago. After all, if that was the compromise she had decided to make, why not? Who was I to judge, just because I couldn’t imagine doing it myself? She had looked happy, very happy. You could see that, at a glance. And probably I was all but forgotten. Me, and Thea, and the two years we had spent together…
I say that, but…
Perhaps I have been living here too long, all by myself. It used to be that days and days would go by, and I wouldn’t have spoken to a soul. More recently, yes, there has been Doctor May – she comes at least twice a week. In fact she will be here tomorrow morning and she will get a surprise, I’m afraid, an unpleasant surprise. I must remember to leave the door unlocked for her…
But I have been here too long, and too much alone, there is some truth in that. Sometimes I wonder if I have not been going a little bit mad. Ever since learning that Rebecca died, you see, I have been living with this… conviction, that…
No, you will think I am being ridiculous.
But supposing it is true? Supposing she is waiting for me somewhere?
Why do I cling to this now, after so many years – a whole lifetime – of not believing?
Is it madness?
I shall tell you what I have come to believe, and you can laugh at me if you will. Inside this house it is cold. And so dark outside, and still. But where she is waiting for me, it will be warm, and the sun will be shining, and the blueness of the sky will be reflected in the waters of the lake. Cerulean blue. And we will be sitting side by side again, in the meadow above the little shingle beach, and she will be leaning into me, and it will be as if the last fifty years have never happened.
How strange, that I should be thinking of her, and of that place, now that the moment has come. I always imagined that my last thought would be of Warden Farm, and Beatrix, the night we became blood-sisters, the night we lay together under the winter moon.
But no. That circle was broken years ago. That was how it all started, yes. Everything followed from that night, but the path it set me upon… It was all leading, I realize now, to the day by the lake – that was the culmination… Everything after that was wrong. When Beatrix came back, to take Thea away, that was when the world tilted, went out of shape…
But Imogen exists… The rightness of that…
Enough. I am going to fetch them now, from the bathroom. And while I’m up, I must check that the back door is unlocked.
Put this microphone… somewhere…
Right. Here we are. Not quite as many as I thought. Let me… tip them out on the table in front of me… Almost a dozen. I don’t think there should be any problem, in that case…
I wonder how quickly they will work. Perhaps I had better put the music on now, just to be sure.
Oh, the stiffness of my joints, these last few weeks!
Now, yes. Soon the violins, and the woodwind.
‘Bailero’.
Let it wash over me, while I drink a little more. Not hard to swallow these, after all. Slipping down.
There. Now better hide this somewhere. And the glass.
So, it’s done now. No second thoughts.
Ah, this music! The way her voice comes in… floods everything with light… like a curtain being drawn back.
Close my eyes now, and I will see it.
Not dark. Not here. Sunlight. Blue. Ceru…
Oh, I’m going. Much faster than I thought. It’s like a cloud, like riding on a cloud.
Someone pulling me.
Darling…
Are we back now? Soon?
Take my hand. Take it. Pull me towards you.
I see you now.
The lake…
And a little girl too! Just as I knew it would be.
Oh…
Imogen? It’s you?
I imagine her now, sitting here beside me on the passenger seat. Imogen, my daughter. Sighted. About to catch her first glimpse of the old farmhouse.
Never to be. In another life, maybe.
Forget these fantasies. Pointless. Pull over to the side of the road.
Windows steamed up. Can’t see a thing.
Best get out.
Yes, there it is. And I do remember. Was it really only the one time, that I came here? That Christmas? And yet it feels like coming home.
The shape has changed. Something new has been added. But still, this is the place. Where they lived – my grandparents, my mother. Warden Farm.
Get closer.
Car in the drive. Owners must be at home. How to explain what I’m doing here? Who are they? Family, my family? Descendants, cousins? Ivy, my grandmother, died long ago. Must have. Husband too. Too hard to explain.
Up the drive, just a little way. Beneath the oak. Stood there, what, forty years ago? More? Christmas night. Smoking.
Someone at the window. Seen me. Watching me now. Oh God.
Wave. Then back off. Back to the car. Too hard to explain.
Is she coming? No. Mustn’t linger, though. Drive on, drive on quickly.
Where to? Find the village, find the church, find the churchyard. Find my grandmother again.
∗
These Shropshire
lanes. Mud everywhere. Burnt umber hedgerows, dishevelled, wind-battered. Ploughed fields rolling on either side. Grey sky, looks as if it knows no other colour. This place feels ancient. Half a century behind the rest of the world. Feels like nothing has changed since I was here, nothing.
Now I see the spire. And a pub: Fox and Hounds. Empty car park. This will do.
∗
Nineteen seventy-two, she died. Don’t remember anything about it, don’t even remember being told. And my grandfather three years later.
Windy spot, this. An easterly wind. Wonder if it’s ever quiet, ever silent? Dead of night, maybe? But nowhere silent any more, not in this country. Traffic noise, even here, heart of the countryside. Must be a motorway near by. Wind in the trees, melancholy sound. Makes me think of time. The sound of time passing, implacable.