by Jonathan Coe
∗
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.’
Gill took the first tape from the top of the pile and squatted down beside Catharine’s stereo system. She hesitated, bewildered by the minimalist chic of the fascia, until Elizabeth crouched beside her, took the tape from her confused fingers and quickly set it up to play.
Gill and Catharine sat side by side on the low, saggy old sofa. Elizabeth sat opposite them, on a red hi-back swivel chair that Catharine had picked up cheap from an office sale a few months ago. They clutched their mugs of coffee, feeling the heat of the liquid transmit itself into their chilled and stony fingers. Catharine picked up the remote control, turned the volume up loud, and the first thing that they heard, after a few seconds, was a surge of hiss, followed by the boom and crackle of a microphone being turned on and then adjusted, scraped along a hard surface upon its plastic stand. Then there was a cough, and a clearing of the throat; and then a voice, the voice they had all been expecting to hear, although that did not make it any the less ghostly. It was the voice of Rosamond, alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, speaking into the microphone just a few days before she died.
The voice said:
I hope, Imogen, that you are the person listening to these words. I’m afraid that I cannot regard that as a certainty, because you seem to have disappeared. But I am trusting to fate – and more importantly, to the ingenuity of my niece Gill – to ensure that these recordings find their way to you, eventually.
Perhaps I should say no more on this subject… but it has worried me, in recent years, that you have not reappeared in my life. I am half-inclined to read something morbid into it, but no doubt I am more prone to such thoughts at this particular moment, when my own end is so – well, so palpably close. I’m sure there is a logical explanation. Various logical explanations, for that matter. Most likely, when your family – your new family, that is (I cannot think of them as ‘your’ family, even after all this time, which is probably foolish of me) – when they decided, more than twenty years ago, that you were not to have any contact with us any more – with me any more, to be more specific, since I was the only one maintaining contact with you at that stage – then they would have been in a good position to make a thorough job of it. You were very young. There was your disability. (Are we still allowed to use that word, nowadays?) Easy enough, I would have thought, to cut all the ties and burn all the bridges. So perhaps that was what they did. Destroyed all the letters and other documents, threw out all the photographs. Anything like that would have posed a threat to them. You may never have been able to see those photographs, after all, but there was always the chance, wasn’t there, that one day somebody might try to describe them to you?
And that brings us, Imogen, very much to the business in hand. The reason why I am speaking to you now. I am reaching the end of my life and for reasons which will, I hope, become apparent to you as you listen to this recording, I feel an obligation towards you, a sense of duty which has not yet been fully discharged. There are different ways in which I could relieve myself of this feeling. Of course, I am going to leave you some money. That goes without saying. But there are other things which
are not so easily done. There is something else which I owe to you; something far more precious; something which is, I suppose, in the most literal sense of the word, priceless. What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.
It seems to me that without such a sense you are at a great disadvantage. And that this in itself is compounded by your other disadvantages. One of the ways in which most people, most young people, acquire this sense of themselves is through looking at photographs: photographs of themselves, when they were children, and photographs of their parents and grandparents and even older relatives. But you have never been able to do this.
I say ‘never’. Perhaps there was a time, before you lost your sight, when your mother showed you one or two such things. But you would have been only a very small girl – three years old – and I very much doubt whether they could have made any impression, on such a young and undeveloped mind. Since then, there would have been nothing. Which is why I’m going to do the best I can, if it isn’t already too late, to correct the situation.
There are hundreds of photographs I could have chosen, Imogen. Hundreds and hundreds, going right back to the war and beyond. A few years ago, after my friend Ruth died, I sorted through them and threw away the ones that I didn’t want to keep. And in the last few days, I have been looking through those that I kept, and trying to decide which ones I should now set aside and attempt to describe to you. In the end, I have settled on twenty. Twenty seems a manageable number, somehow. Twenty scenes from my own life, mainly, because I suppose that is what I am also proposing to tell you: the story of my own life – up to the point where you left it, so soon after making your first appearance. I hope that it won’t seem entirely irrelevant to you. Doubtless I shall digress, sometimes, but everything I shall tell you is connected, in my mind at least, and if I can’t get you to understand that, then I shall have failed.
As much as possible, however, I shall just try to describe whatever I see in the photographs. I want you to know what they looked like, the people who came before you; the houses that they lived in, the places they visited. If you can know these things, if you can somehow imagine them inside your head, then that will give you… well, it will give you something, I hope. It will give you a context, in which to understand the difficult things, the painful things you will hear at the end.
Because there is a story that you don’t know, Imogen. A story about your family, and me, and most important of all, about yourself. Perhaps your – perhaps the people who brought you up, have told you some of it. Some distortion of it, most likely. But they cannot know the truth, because only I know that.
Soon now, I hope that you will know it too.
Very well. I’m going to start, now. Picture number one: a suburban house in Hall Green, a few miles from the centre of Birmingham.
I was six years old when war broke out. My sister, Sylvia, was fifteen. It’s always been a mystery why my parents waited nine years to have another child. This has never been explained to me. But then family life is full of mystery.
This is rather a tiny picture. I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to describe to you. Taken in winter, and the winter of 1938 or ’39, I would have thought. It shows the whole of the front of the house. The drive is on the left: it rises steeply from the road to the side gate and is very short, just about long enough to hold a car. Not that we had one, in those days. My father would cycle to work, and Mother would walk or take the tram.
Let me concentrate. A thin layer of snow covers almost everything. There is a little wrought-iron gate at the side of the house, but you cannot see down the passageway into the yard which I remember lay beyond it. My father used to keep his bicycle in that passageway, it may be that you can see the handlebars peeking out in this picture, but I may be imagining it. That part is very shadowy.
To the far left of the picture, slightly overhanging the wrought-iron gate, you can see a few withered branches. These belong to my father’s apple tree. It almost never bore any fruit: I don’t suppose this year was any exception. But it was good for climbing, I remember. Later on, when we moved, we had four or five apple trees in the back garden. But there was no back garden at this house. Just this one patch of earth where my poor old father tried his hardest to grow some fruit for us.
These houses were semi-detached, and I suppose built at the end of the last century. The nineteenth century, I mean. Small, unyielding, redbricked houses. You couldn’t enjoy much of a life in them. Looking at this picture, I can make out the number, forty-seven, just above the letterbox in the front door, which my father painted yellow, I remember. There are no colours here, of course; it is a black-and-white photograph. Next to the door is a small frosted window, with a design on it, in stained glass. I can remember this design very clearly. A circle of red – deep, ruby red – with spokes of green and lemon-yellow radiating from it. Little green triangles at each of the four corners. I can remember sitting at the foot of the stairs in the hallway and looking at this window, watching the way the sunlight would brighten and darken behind it, with the passing of the clouds. The play of colours, like a kaleidoscope. This is one of my earliest memories, I think. Perhaps I did it many times, perhaps just the once. As I try to remember it, I can hear the sweep of my mother’s broom near by, behind me, on the lino in the kitchen. The two things – the image and the sound – go together in my memory. These things have resonance for me – an enormous, almost supernatural resonance – but it’s terribly hard to convey that, in words. To you they will probably seem banal.
Well, back to the photograph. I have just noticed something which allows me to date it a little more exactly. To the right of the drive – the drive that is just large enough to hold a car – is an area of grass, of about the same size, with a little sumac tree in the middle. This was what we used to call – rather laughably – the ‘front garden’, and it did not shelve as steeply as the drive, so that near the bottom, just by the pavement, there was quite a sharp drop from the one to the other. After my friend Gracie fell over this drop and hurt herself, my father put up a little wooden fence; and you can see it in this picture, see the snow which forms an even carapace along the topmost beam. The snow looks clean and white and fluffy enough to eat: which is just what I would do sometimes, creaming it off with a sweep of my gloved hand and then taking an icy, tingling bite out of it, feeling it crumble and melt on my tongue. There’s nothing like the taste of freshly fallen snow. Anyway, my father took down that fence not long after the war broke out and used it for firewood; but I am sure it was still there when Gracie was evacuated, because I can remember leaning on it that morning, and watching her go by. That was in the autumn of 1939. So the picture was taken before that. The winter of 1938, in all probability.
Do you know, Imogen, about the evacuation of children during the Second World War? (I’ve no idea what they taught you, in those schools of yours. I know that ignorance is rife among children today. But then, you’re not a child! I keep forgetting that, have to go on reminding myself. In my mind, you are frozen, still the age at which I last saw you, when you were seven years old.) The biggest upheaval came at the very beginning of the war, when hundreds of thousands of children – more than a million, even – were taken away from their parents by train in the space of a few days. I did not experience that phase, myself. That turned out to be something of a false alarm, and most of those children were back with their families not long after Christmas. And then, in the late summer of 1940, when the Blitz started, the process began again, although less systematically than before. This time my father knew that the threat was real, and something had to be done. But I was one of the lucky ones, having family in the country. The people who took me in were not strangers, absolutely. Whereas poor Gracie was not so fortunate.
A photograph is a poor thing, really. It can only capture one moment, out of millions of moments, in the life of a person, or the life of a hou
se. As for these photographs I have in front of me now, the ones I intend to describe to you… they are of value, I think, only insofar as they corroborate my failing memory. They are the proof that the things I remember – some of the things I remember – really happened, and are not phantom memories, or fantasies, imaginings. But what of the memories for which there are no pictures, no corroboration, no proof? I’m thinking, for instance, of that day not long afterwards, the day the evacuees walked past, the day that Gracie left. Our house was on the route between the school and the railway station, so we were able to watch the whole sorry procession. They came early in the morning, at about nine o’clock, I suppose. How many children? Perhaps fifty (although I’m merely guessing), led by their teachers. None of the children were wearing school uniform, and all they were carrying were their gas masks in one hand, and little suitcases or knapsacks in the other. They also had labels tied around their necks. Gracie was near the front of the procession, walking side by side with another friend of hers, a boy of whom I was wildly jealous, someone she often chose over me in the school playground. I’ve forgotten his name now. They were laughing and playing a silly game together, seeing who could walk backwards for the longest, or something like that. I felt a terrible pang of envy but at the same time I couldn’t understand why they were looking so happy, because my mother and father had told me what evacuation was all about, and for some reason – even though I was no older than Gracie – the meaning of it had sunk in, and I knew that something terrible was happening, that she really was going to be leaving home that day and nobody knew when she would be coming back. My mother was standing next to me, perhaps with her hand on my shoulder, and then something happened, something to do with the fence, which is really why I remember all of this so well. Where I was standing, the fence had a hole in it, a little knothole, and I was exploring this hole with my finger as the children walked by. And then suddenly I realized that my finger was stuck. A panic took hold of me and for the next few seconds (it can’t have been longer than that, although of course it seemed an eternity) all I could think of was the horrible prospect that I might be there for ever, that I would never be able to pull my finger free. I pulled at my finger desperately and forgot to look at the children walking by, until my mother shook me by the shoulder to draw my attention to the fact that Gracie was waving at me, and then at last I raised my left arm – my free arm – to wave to her, but of course it was too late, Gracie had gone by, and was not looking at me any more. I didn’t wonder then, but I wonder now whether she was hurt by the way I ignored her, whether she felt rejected because I didn’t wave to her at the beginning of this great adventure. Certainly, when I saw her again – three or four years later, it would have been – she treated me differently. But there may have been other reasons for that.
