by Jonathan Coe
Anyway, the important thing, as I must always remember, is that I describe the picture to you, that I help you to see. So, let me focus my attention, once more.
Very well:
A beach hut, painted a rich blue, with the long grass of the sand dunes behind it. The thin strip of sky you can see at the back of the picture is several shades paler than the blue of the beach hut. The hut itself is a simple enough structure, just a wooden shed, really, with the two halves of the roof forming an apex at the top. Just beneath the apex, someone has painted the number of the hut, 304, and its name, ‘Sasparella’, which I think means the west wind or something.
The twin doors of the hut are flung open, and are painted white on the inside. They open to reveal a wide doorway, with a white lace curtain which has been pulled back and tied into place. Beyond the doorway, the interior of the hut is shadowy, but a few details can be made out. There is a small cupboard unit, also painted white, and on top of it, a little gas hob and a kettle. It is standing against the back wall of the hut, which is bisected diagonally by a large crossbeam. The interior of the hut is by no means large – about six feet square, I would guess. To the right there are three hooks on the back wall, one of them with a blue and yellow striped beach towel hanging from it. In the same corner, two children’s fishing nets are leaning against the wall. There are some buckets and spades, I think, on the floor – a confusion of more blues, yellows and reds, anyway, although this part of the picture is really too shadowy to make out very much more.
On either side of the hut, you can just see the walls of its immediate neighbours. There is only about two feet of space between each hut. In front of the hut is a wooden platform, about the same area again as the hut’s interior, and raised about one foot above the level of the beach. There is a windbreak set up on the left-hand side, patterned with wide blue, orange and yellow stripes. There are five people sitting on the platform: Beatrix and myself, to the rear, in deckchairs, and sitting to the front of the platform, with their legs dangling over the edge, her two youngest children, Joseph and Alice. Your mother, aged almost fourteen when this photograph was taken, is standing to the right of the others, positioning herself between the adults and the young children. Beatrix’s husband, Charles, is not in the photograph, so I assume he must have taken it.
It is always possible, however, that Charles was simply not with us on the beach that day, and that we asked a stranger to take the photograph. The whole of that long summer, which Beatrix and her family spent down on the south coast, he only came down to see them at weekends. The rest of the time he remained in Pinner, and went to work every day in the City.
I went down to stay with the family for a fortnight, I remember. It was the same fortnight that the children’s nanny had herself gone on holiday to visit her parents in Scotland. It turned out that it was very much in the capacity of her replacement that I had been invited.
Of course, I did not realize this at first. I assumed that Beatrix wanted my company. Perhaps my suspicions should have been aroused when I saw the room that I had been allocated. They had taken a short lease (two months or so) on a delightful house near Milford on Sea. It must have cost them a fortune, but then, I’m sure Charles was probably earning a fortune at that stage. It was enormous, with eight or nine bedrooms, a library, a games room and grounds extending to several acres, which included a formal rose garden and a private tennis court, all surrounded by woodland, giving them total seclusion and privacy. A more idyllic setting for a family holiday it is hard to imagine; and it came with the further benefit of the keys to this bathing hut, as I have described.
As for my room, it was at the very top of the house, in the attic. It was the kind of room you might have set aside for the scullery maid. Of course it was a privilege, and a pleasure, in my situation, to be spending any time in that house at all. I am not trying to imply that I was uncomfortable, or anything like that. I’m just saying that my status, from the very beginning, was made very clear to me.
I can’t say that I ever warmed much to Beatrix’s younger children. There was nothing objectionable about them – please don’t assume that I am saying that – but at the same time, there was nothing exceptional about them, either, and I’m afraid that, perhaps through some insufficiency of my own, I have only ever enjoyed the company of exceptional children. I am not talking about IQs or early signs of musical genius: I’m talking about the way they look, the way they talk, their sense of humour, their sense of fun, a certain quality of animation and vitality which you find in some children and which makes you glad to be around them. Your mother had these qualities in abundance: I had discovered that much during those years, those very special years, when Rebecca and I had been lucky enough to have her living with us. Joseph and Alice, I’m afraid, did not. For one thing, they were plain, which is odd considering that they had two handsome parents. Joseph’s complexion, as can be seen from this picture, was on the pale side – pale and blotchy, to be blunt about it – so that he tended to have a sickly look, as if always on the brink of ill-health. He looks worried, in this photograph, and this is how I remember him. He seemed to live life in a state of permanent, almost weepy anxiety, although it would most likely be provoked not by some great existential problem (some children, you know, can obsess over such things), but by more simple conundrums such as where his next treat was going to come from. He was despondent if somebody was not pampering him, fussing over him. From the look of abject misery on his face here, as he sits barechested in his navy-blue swimming trunks, shoulders hunched against the cold or perhaps just against the world in general, I would be prepared to wager that he had not had an ice cream for at least five minutes, and was not feeling at all happy about it. How old would he be, at this point? Almost seven, I should think, and Alice was a couple of years younger, so she would be five. She is prettier, by a small margin. Blonde hair, perfectly straight, almost shoulder length. She is wearing a red V-necked swimsuit, which is decorated at the tip of the ‘V’ with a single white flower like a daisy. She is gripping tightly on to the platform as if afraid of falling off, and looks vaguely cross about something but might just be squinting into the sunlight. Perhaps she has just had a quarrel with Joseph: they were always fighting, over the pettiest and most tiresome things – usually where to sit. They fought over where to sit at the dining table, at the cinema or at the circus, on the picnic rug or even at the back of the car. Endless, small-minded territorial disputes. You could understand the whole, sorry history of human warfare just by observing their behaviour for half an hour. It was very wearing.
Neither Beatrix nor I are wearing bathing suits, although it was a good summer, I remember, and we did swim off that beach, on several occasions. But today, it seems, was not one of those days. I have chosen a white, short-sleeved blouse, and a pair of beige khaki shorts which come almost to the knee. The ensemble is completed by sturdy leather sandals, open-toed, which reveal that I was not, unlike Beatrix, in the habit of painting my toenails. Hers are painted green, rather amazingly and inexplicably. She is barefoot and is wearing a floaty pale yellow and green summer dress, a sleeveless dress with a plunging neckline. Very glamorous, I must say. She would have turned heads wearing that as she walked down the main street of Milford on Sea! I look very dowdy by comparison. I think if I had cut my hair any shorter, at this stage, I might have been mistaken for a skinhead.
So, there we all are. The happy family, on holiday, minus the paterfamilias but with the useful addition of the loyal family friend. I almost said ‘maiden aunt’, because that’s what I was starting to feel like. It would be a few more years, still, before I met Ruth; and meanwhile, as things stood, it has to be said that I’d been single for a very long time. Rebecca’s departure, and my consequent loss of daily contact with Thea, had brought on a terrible sadness, which had long since settled on me and become a fixture. I had grown accustomed to living with this dull, insistent pain, which had a habit of flaring up, whenever I saw Thea, into somet
hing more deadly and piercing. To be readmitted into her presence was to be offered both joy and torture. Joy, for the obvious reasons; torture, because of the ever-present knowledge that this joy was to be temporary, short-lived. This summer I knew that I had just two weeks to enjoy her company. After that it would be back to London, work and loneliness.
I dare say that I was not the liveliest company, in these circumstances. But even if I was a rather gloomy presence in that household, at least there was a consistency to my mood, and children, on some level at least, appreciate that. Around me, around my melancholy, they could find stability. Beatrix on the other hand was volatile and unpredictable. She had always been like that, to a certain extent, but it seemed to me that her mood swings were now becoming extreme. Half of the time she behaved with a kind of desperate levity and high-spiritedness, but this could easily switch, without warning, into savagery. The dividing line between the two was very thin, although after a while I trained myself to observe when the change was coming. The mistake, I realized, was to leave her alone for more than a few minutes. The slightest opportunity for introspection meant that she would start brooding over her recent misfortunes, and soon afterwards a deadly bitterness would come over her. When this happened, nobody could escape her spite and rancour. Even Joseph and Alice were liable to find themselves being screamed at, usually for some minor domestic misdemeanour such as not picking their clothes up from the floor or spilling a drop or two of orange squash down the front of a shirt. Charles was not immune, either, and his daily telephone calls (he tended to phone most evenings, shortly after dinner) would often culminate in fearsome shouting matches during which I heard – as did the children – swear words, vile insults and obscenities which I didn’t even understand, in many cases, and had certainly never come across before: not from female lips, at any rate. Poor Charles, needless to say, had done nothing to merit any of this abuse, but it had become Beatrix’s firm conviction that he was having an affair, or perhaps even a series of affairs, while staying up in London without her. It was a most unlikely scenario, if you had ever met the man. Besides being devoted to his family, and a near-workaholic, he simply wasn’t affair material. That was my opinion, in any case. But Beatrix had somehow got it fixed in her mind that he was paying regular visits to a woman who lived a few doors down their street. A neighbour and family friend of theirs. She had no evidence whatsoever, needless to say, and, whenever Charles was actually with her, the delusion (which is certainly the right word for it) would quickly be forgotten. But I came to recognize the moments when it was stealing over her: moments when she would be sitting alone in an armchair by the French windows, overlooking the garden, a cup of tea in her hands, staring into the middle distance with a kind of fixed intensity, unseeing, her thoughts roaming treacherously elsewhere. Such moments would invariably be followed by an eruption of some sort.
And by now I’m sure you can guess – can’t you, Imogen? – who would bear the brunt of those eruptions. Your mother, of course. Your mother Thea.
As I said, she would scream and shout at her other two children, often for the most trifling misdeeds. With Thea, I am afraid to say, her behaviour could be considerably worse than that. Let me tell you about one episode in particular. The episode that brought a premature end to my visit, in fact.
It was early in the afternoon, about halfway through what was supposed to be the second week of my stay. Thea and I had been out for a walk together that morning, along the winding lanes which lay between the house and the sea. We had been picking blackberries. After collecting almost a full bowl, Thea came back to the house and displayed it proudly to her mother, who glanced up briefly and muttered something but basically didn’t show much interest, even though she loved blackberries and it had really been to please her that we had spent so long picking them. Then, after lunch, I had gone outside to sit in a deckchair and read some more of my book, while Thea went to the kitchen to start making blackberry jam.
I should have mentioned that, only a few days earlier, Beatrix had gone shopping in Lymington and had returned with a new blouse for her elder daughter. It was a very nice, and very expensive, white muslin blouse. Rather a typical gift, coming from Beatrix: she didn’t buy her children many clothes, but when she did, they were the very finest that money could buy, and were often almost too beautiful to wear. This blouse would probably have cost more than ten pounds – a huge sum, in those days – but of course, you could hardly expect Thea or any other child to appreciate that. To her it was just another item of clothing, albeit an extremely pretty one, and one which she was truly happy and grateful to have been given.
You can see what is coming next, I imagine.
Sure enough, Thea was wearing the blouse – still only a day or two old – that afternoon when she began making her jam. She was boiling up the blackberries in a big saucepan and she had the gas turned up too high, and the berries started to bubble and occasionally spit out of the pan, and soon she had quite a few blobs of blackberry juice splashed over the white blouse. She didn’t even notice it herself, as far as I know, but her mother noticed it as soon as she came into the kitchen.
As I said, I was sitting outside reading at the time, so I could hear the gist of the conversation, if not all of it. ‘What the hell,’ Beatrix shouted, ‘what the hell have you done to that effing blouse?’ (I’m sorry, I cannot bring myself to repeat her words exactly.) Thea must have looked down at the blouse and gasped, and then things almost immediately got ugly. Ugly words, ugly deeds. Beatrix told her daughter that she was stupid, that she was the stupidest girl she had ever known. Thea burst into tears and said that she was sorry, so sorry, she would wash the blouse herself. Beatrix laughed and screamed at her that there was no point, the blouse was ruined now, and then she seized on this word and repeated it over and over, saying ‘You’ve ruined it! The way that you ruin everything! Everything!’ And the next thing that I knew she was accusing Thea – yes, I heard it with my own ears – of having ruined her health and ruined her life. ‘It was all because of you!’ she shouted. ‘It’s all your fault that I’m like this. The accident was all your fault. If it hadn’t been you that I was picking up from school…’ At which Thea screamed something inaudible, the words strangled by her tears, and ran from the kitchen, ran away up the stairs.
Her mother’s voice (just like the voice of Ivy, when I had stood outside her bedroom door all those years ago and listened to her chastising Beatrix) was murderous. There is no other word for it. I could feel at once that there was violence in the air. Bea was beside herself, completely out of control.
I was shocked beyond words, but also paralysed by indecision. I wanted to reprove Beatrix for saying such horribly cruel and unjust things to her daughter, but this was not the right moment, while she was in such a frenzy. To know that I had overheard would probably enrage her even further. While I was outside dithering, in any case, I heard her yank open a drawer in the kitchen and then leave the room. Her footsteps pounded up the stairs, in pursuit of Thea, and she continued to shout at the top of her voice – wicked, unspeakable words. She said that Thea had brought her nothing but pain and trouble; that she wished her daughter had never been born. I ran into the house myself and got halfway up the stairs when I heard Thea’s bedroom door slamming shut and being locked. Fortunately she could lock it from the inside; if she hadn’t been able to do that, God knows what would have happened. I could see Beatrix running along the corridor towards the door then, and I could see that she had a carving knife in her hand. At once I called out to her to stop, but she didn’t hear me. The next moment, thwarted by the locking of the door, she raised the knife and drove it into the door with tremendous force, again and again, scoring deep lines into the woodwork. All the time she was yelling at Thea to come out of there and calling her a little bitch and even worse names, names no mother should ever call her daughter. (Her fourteen-year-old daughter, for pity’s sake!) Without pondering the consequences, for myself or anyone else, I ran towards
her and seized her by the shoulders. I implored her to stop, and in a few seconds the knife had been dropped to the floor. Beatrix herself turned and stood with her back to the door, leaning against it, staring at me – or rather, through me. Her shoulders were heaving. She did not stay like that for long. Soon she pushed past me, hurried downstairs and left the house. Neither of us addressed any words to the other.
I think I need a few moments’ rest, after telling you all that. Would you excuse me, Imogen, while I turn this machine off? I think I might be in need of a glass of water.
Yes. That is much better. Now I can resume.
Where was I? Outside your mother’s bedroom, I believe.
I knocked on her door and asked if I could come in. She was distraught, and said nothing at first, just threw herself into my arms and stood there, crying. After a while I guided her towards the bed, and she lay down upon it. I lay beside her, and put my arms around her. We stayed like that, I remember, for some time, until Thea had calmed down and then fallen into an uneasy, exhausted sleep. Later on, when the sky clouded over, and the room grew chilly, I arose, fetched a spare blanket from the top of Thea’s wardrobe, and draped it over us. After that, we were more comfortable.
