by Jonathan Coe
I have been an atheist all my life – since the age of about ten or eleven, at any rate. There was no question of my attending the service, but as for Thea, I had no idea whether she wanted to go or not. When the time came for everyone to leave, there was a confusion of boots and coats being pulled on, doors opening and slamming, cars being driven off into the night. I said goodbye to my parents, to Sylvia and Thomas, to David and Gill, knowing that after the service they would be returning directly to their cottage, and I wouldn’t see them until tomorrow afternoon. When that was done, all fell silent, and I went back inside, snugly believing that I had Warden Farm to myself for an hour or so: an agreeable prospect, I must say. The house was overheated by now, and the air inside was heavy and close. I decided, first of all, to step outside for a few minutes’ fresh air on the front lawn, beneath the stars of that lovely, crystalline night sky.
As soon as I stepped through the front door, however, I realized that Thea, too, had decided to stay behind. She was standing beneath the big old oak tree, leaning against its trunk and smoking a cigarette. Her back was to me, and to the house, and she was staring across the fields. There had been a fresh snowfall in the last few minutes. It was all but over now, but still a few flakes spiralled down from the branches of the tree, and rested a moment on her dark green overcoat before dissolving into nothingness. I approached her and when I touched her lightly on the shoulder, she turned sharply. She seemed to be alarmed that I had caught her smoking, but I told her that I didn’t mind. She offered me a cigarette, but it was many years since I had given up smoking, and I had no wish to start again.
Up until this moment, Thea and I had had no real opportunity for conversation. The train to Shrewsbury had been busy, and a compartment full of complete strangers was hardly the right audience for the kind of confidences I was anticipating. Since then, we had hardly once been left alone: the Christmas festivities had begun soon after our arrival at the farmhouse. Tonight, I would be sleeping in my old room, in my old bed beneath the eaves, and Thea would be sleeping next to me, in the bed where her mother used to sleep. How strange that would feel! What unexpected patterns were beginning to emerge; what curious circles of experience were being described. Certainly, it would be easy enough to talk once we were in bed, but I could not bring myself to wait that long. Circumstance had kept me at a distance from Thea all day, and I was hungry for closeness.
I began by asking if she missed her family. This drew an immediate, short response from her – something between an exclamation and a laugh – after which, her face resumed its former blankness. ‘Not really,’ was all she would say. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it has to be better than last Christmas’ – at which point she described to me how, the previous year, her mother and Charles had had a furious row on Christmas morning, following which Beatrix left the house – still wearing her dressing gown and pyjamas – drove off down the street and was not seen again for three days. ‘The worst of it was,’ Thea told me, ‘Charles wouldn’t let any of us open our presents until she came back, for fear of offending her. So they just sat there, under the tree. Agony for Alice and Joseph.’ ‘And for you,’ I said, taking her by the arm.
We walked on, across the lawn, crunching fresh footprints into the virgin snow. Light spilled out of the house, from the windows of the billiard room and the two sitting rooms: golden, cheerful Christmas light. As we moved away from the house, down towards the sunken lawn and the ha-ha, this light faded, and we were left only with the silvery glow of the moon – barely in its first quarter – amplified and reflected by the white mirror of glittering snow. All was quiet, deathly quiet. I was reminded, once again, of what a magical and solemn place this was.
‘Poor Beatrix…’ I began, but Thea interrupted me scornfully. ‘Poor Beatrix?’ she said. ‘What about us? What about the people who have to live with her?’ I replied, gently enough, that Beatrix probably still suffered a good deal of pain and discomfort as a result of her accident. To which Thea answered: ‘And do you think that justifies the things she says to me? Telling me all the time how useless and stupid and ugly I am, how she wishes I’d never even been born? Calling me every name under the sun? Accusing me of being a lesbian?’ I assumed that she was referring to the episode at the seaside, a few years ago, but seemingly this was not the only time that Thea’s mother had made this wild allegation. ‘She saw me once,’ she said, her voice low, bitter, thick with held-back tears, ‘walking with my friend Monica. We were walking down the street, back from school – arm in arm. She said it then, as well. She called us a pair of dykes. After that, she wouldn’t allow Monica to come round to our house. My best friend. I was fifteen, for God’s sake. I was only fifteen.’ I didn’t know what to say to this. What could I say? I must have murmured some well-worn, meaningless words of consolation. They seemed to have no impact at all on the stiff carapace of resentment Thea had wrapped around herself. ‘The worst thing,’ she continued, ‘is having to listen to everyone else – everyone she knows – telling us what a wonderful person she is, and how lucky we are to have her as our mother.’ I asked who she meant by ‘everyone else’, and Thea mentioned her mother’s work colleagues. It was news to me that she worked at all. Apparently she had taken a job at the local hospital: first as a volunteer, then in some paid managerial capacity. She was immensely popular with the staff, according to Thea.
I took her arm again and squeezed it tightly. Another banal, inadequate gesture, which failed to elicit any response. I looked at the moonlit, snow-covered garden all around us, watched over tirelessly by the secretive house, so inscrutable, so full of memories, and I thought for the hundredth time what a strange, contradictory person Beatrix was. I wondered if it would help Thea in any way – not to forgive her mother, but at least to understand her, to learn something of who she was, where she came from – if I were to explain how we had met, Beatrix and I, how the story of our friendship began. (Much the same impulse, I suppose, as the one willing me to talk on and on into this microphone.) Perhaps if words – phrases – gestures – were not enough, then narrative was what Thea needed: perhaps the narrative of that night, that night twenty-five years ago when Beatrix led me such a merry, circular dance, might help to unpick the tangles of her mother’s character? Might it even help me to do the same thing? – since, even after all this time, I was really no closer to understanding Beatrix than Thea herself was. I thought it an endeavour worth pursuing; so I began by asking, tentatively: ‘Does your mother ever talk about this house? Did she ever tell you how we met, during the war, and how we became so close?’ I had it in mind to lead Thea towards the edge of the garden and to find, if possible – even in this darkness – the hidden path that led towards the clearing and the caravan. But she forestalled me, completely and quite unexpectedly, by saying: ‘Mother never talks about you.’
I must have looked wounded, and my silence (which lasted I don’t know how long) must have impressed her; for she then repeated the word ‘Never’; and looked at me in something like – could it be triumph? – before dropping her cigarette and grinding it, fizzing and hissing, into the snow with a twist of her foot.
Then she turned and walked back towards the house. Leaving me to stand alone in the garden – abashed, even humiliated by what she had told me – until the cold drove me, too, back indoors.
On Christmas afternoon, while most of the family were sleeping off the effects of yet more turkey and wine, I did make my way to the secret path again. Over the years it had become densely overgrown – I had to force my way through a brittle chaos of unyielding branches, pockets of snow falling around me as I went – but in the end I reached what had once been the clearing, and the caravan was still there, slightly to my surprise. The door was locked, and the windows were by now too dirty to see through, even after I had brushed the snow away with my gloved hand; but even the very outline of it, that peculiar teardrop shape, summoned up a host of uneasy memories. After a few minutes I turned, shaking a little, and pushed my way back
through the trees. Afterwards, when I told Uncle Owen where I had been, he could hardly believe it; he’d thought that the caravan was long gone; he had truly forgotten its existence. Together, we spent a good while searching for the key, but it was nowhere to be found. He even volunteered to force the door open for me, or break a window; but I turned down these offers, chivalrous though they were. It seemed right to me, entirely right, that there could be no going back inside.
I’m not sure that I can put a very exact date on this one. What are we up to now – is it number sixteen? Five more to go, then. Thank goodness! I am growing tired of this story, and you must be exhausted, listening to me chatter on for hours on end. Can you bear with me for just a little longer, Imogen? It will be over now, all over, very soon. A relief all round, I am sure.
As I said, the precise date of this one escapes me. Late in the 1960s, I would think, or early in the 1970s. I am going by the hairstyles, as much as anything else. Joseph must be about fifteen in this picture, and his hair is almost down to his shoulders. The height of fashion at the time, I’m sure, although today it looks faintly ludicrous; like the collar on his shirt, which must be about four inches wide. It wasn’t just a teenage thing, either: Charles himself doesn’t look much better. What happened to everybody, at that time? How did we all suddenly lose our dress sense?
I must get a grip on myself. This isn’t what you need to hear. I haven’t even told you where we are or what we are looking at. Well, we are in Saskatchewan, Canada. A town called Saskatoon, to be more precise. We are looking at Beatrix’s house, and at four figures standing in the driveway: from left to right we have Charles, Joseph, Alice and Beatrix herself.
It is a very substantial weatherboard house, painted white. The photograph doesn’t show the houses on either side, but one has the immediate impression of being in a well-to-do neighbourhood. Behind the figures, in the top right-hand corner of the picture, one catches a glimpse of what is obviously a big, comfortable, expensive saloon car. The garden, what we can see of it, is laid to lawn, with bushes of white and pink rhododendron visible at the edges. It is a day of blazing sunshine, and all four members of the family are squinting into the camera lens.
I wonder about this house. Lovely though it is, I can’t believe that a house – any house – in Saskatoon would have been worth as much as their place in Pinner. I heard someone use the term ‘downsizing’ recently but I don’t believe it would have been current in those days. Why did they sell up and move back to Canada? Did Charles make some bad decisions in the City, I wonder, and come a financial cropper? Perhaps not. Perhaps they were just drawn to the fresh air and the wide open spaces. I imagine that the lifestyle over there was quite agreeable.
There is something uniquely attractive about a weatherboard house. This one has four wooden steps leading up to a wide, good-sized porch. Above the porch is a covered balcony, surrounded by window-boxes planted with red dahlias. You would be able to walk out on to this balcony from one of the bedrooms: Charles’s and Beatrix’s, I imagine. Above the balcony, the house rises to another floor: there is a little sash window at the apex of the roof, in the centre, where there must have been an attic bedroom, probably for Alice. Or even for Thea, I suppose, because she lived there for a while at least. Going back to ground level, on the left-hand side there is a long verandah, running the entire depth of the house. I can see two chairs on the verandah – there are probably more, but they are out of view – and a little table covered with a gingham tablecloth. On the table there is a clear glass vase, containing a large arrangement of blue, yellow and deep violet flowers, and next to that, a big brown earthenware jug.
I have to say that I like this photograph. It comforts me. Of course, it’s sad that Thea is not in it, although there is always the possibility that she was the one taking it. But I don’t think so. She would have been in her early twenties, now, and although she moved over to Canada with the rest of them and even went to university in Calgary for a while, I don’t think she ever completed her degree, and soon afterwards she came back to England, alone. It’s sad, very sad, that she was expelled, in effect, from her own family. I must not dwell on that; or rather, I shall be dwelling on that, at some length I’m afraid, while telling you about the next two or three pictures. But, as far as this one is concerned, as I said, I find it comforting. Beatrix looks happy here. They all do, for that matter. I know that everybody smiles for photographs – that’s one of the reasons you should never trust them – but this is what I call a real Beatrix smile. It looks as though someone has just told her the most wonderful joke and she has only just stopped throwing her head back and laughing at it. She even looks at ease in her clothes: a plain fawn blouse and pale blue jeans. She never would have worn anything like that in England, but it suits her. She has a nice little gold pendant around her neck, too. I wonder who gave her that.
I can remember one curious fact about her relocation to Canada. It was to do with the letter which presumably came with this photograph (which I’m sorry to say I can’t seem to find any more). Beatrix wrote to me very infrequently – there were Christmas cards, of course, usually with a few lines of family news scribbled on the inside. But letters were rare. Anyway, what I remember most distinctly about this one was the signature at the bottom, or rather the name: ‘Annie’. Not ‘Beatrix’, but ‘Annie’. Mulling it over, I decided it was just an absent-minded slip (though rather a large one, I would have thought) and when I wrote back I addressed her as Beatrix, as usual. And then towards the end of that year I received a Christmas card which was signed ‘Annie, Charles and the children’.
Well, it was her prerogative to change her name, I suppose, and it seems that from the moment she set foot on Canadian soil she dropped ‘Beatrix’ and never allowed anybody to call her that again, not even her husband or children. She had chosen to reinvent herself; to distance herself completely from the past.
One of the things she associated with ‘the past’, of course, was her first daughter.
I have nothing more to say about this photograph, really; but perhaps I should add something here, by way of postscript. This is the last picture of Beatrix that I possess, and because the rest of this story does not concern her directly, this might be the best time to tell you what became of her. What little I know, anyway.
Very well: about seven or eight years ago, when I was doing some shopping at the market in Shrewsbury, I ran into Raymond, her eldest brother. He would have been about seventy years old: he was enormously tall, and was wearing a three-piece suit which appeared to date back to the 1940s, and he had bushy side-whiskers and a moustache. In looks and manner and bearing he seemed almost grotesque – the relic of an era long disappeared, long forgotten by all but a few. You could see that he belonged to the countryside – had belonged there all his life – and felt completely out of place in the town. He looked for all the world like one of the extras on the set of Gone To Earth!. Anyway, that is all by the by. He didn’t recognize me, of course, and in a way I’m amazed that I managed to recognize him. We talked for only a few minutes, just enough time to catch up on each other’s histories in sketchy detail. I was very selective about what I told him, as you can imagine. Towards the end of our conversation I asked him – with some trepidation – if he was still in contact with Beatrix. He told me that she had died, in 1991, at the age of sixty-one. A cancer of the throat, apparently. She had still been living in Canada, although she had separated from Charles. (I had long thought that was inevitable, given her paranoia about his non-existent infidelities.) In the last twenty years of her life she had resumed her career – very successfully, by the sound of it – in hospital management. Raymond told me that she’d ended up working at a small clinic in Alberta, where she was considered by the staff to be the best – and best-loved – manager they’d ever had. He said that they had been devastated when she died, and that her birthday was still marked there every year. One of the doctors had traced Raymond’s address in Shropshire and one year,
during a visit to England, had called on him to hand over a box containing some of his late sister’s effects. It included a letter signed by all of the nursing staff, describing Beatrix as ‘the nicest lady we have ever met’ and ‘a saint’. They admired, in particular, the way she had continued to live life to the full, even after sustaining such a terrible injury when she was young.
And so, Beatrix… that is the end of your story. Beatrix, my cousin, my blood-sister. Very soon, perhaps, you and I will be in the same place again. But I’m not sure that I want to meet you there. Will you recognize me, even if I do? And how am I supposed to address you, nowadays – as ‘Beatrix’, still, or ‘Annie’?
Seventeen. Caravans again. More caravans. I told you that they would be back, before we were finished.
This is bleak, this picture. A chill comes over me when I look at it. It was an insufferably cold day, apart from anything else. The winter of 1975, somewhere on the Lincolnshire coast. An icy wind blowing in off the North Sea.
There are four caravans (or should I call them mobile homes?) arranged in a sort of crescent around a patch of grass. You can only see the front of these big, squat, ugly things in this photograph. The grass itself is scrawny and muddy, and dusted white with traces of snow or ice. Off the edge of the picture you would find more mobile homes, and then still more, and still more, stretching away into the distance. There were probably a hundred or more on that particular site. I sometimes wondered how it was possible to be sure of finding the right one. More than once, apparently, Martin had got lost trying to get home on his way back from a drinking session.
Now I’m getting ahead of myself again. You do not even know who Martin is, yet. Well, he was Thea’s partner. Not husband – I don’t believe they were ever married – but her partner, and the father of her child. Which of course makes him your father, Imogen.
