by Jonathan Coe
Bearing that in mind, I shall try to be kind about him, although I must say that I didn’t take to him at all, on the one occasion that we met. The occasion of this photograph, that is.
Well, here they both are, anyway, standing in front of the mobile home. Here you are, I should say – all three of you – because, yes, you are in this photograph too, Imogen! At long last. You are born! I bet you were beginning to think that we would never get there. You are only a few months old, however, at this stage, and all that can really be seen of you is your tiny face peeping out from the white blanket in which Thea has swaddled you. As I believe I said earlier, on another tape – days and days ago, it seems – all baby faces are much the same. So let’s take a good look at the faces of your parents instead.
Martin. Well. He was a little younger than your mother, I seem to remember. Probably about twenty-two, when this picture was taken. Too young to be a father. Much too young. He has dark brown shoulder-length hair, and a droopy moustache. Black leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans. The jacket has another of those terrible 1970s wide collars. He is very pale, with a prominent windpipe and Adam’s apple, and bad skin. His T-shirt has a picture of Adolf Hitler on the front, and underneath it the caption ‘European Tour, 1939–1945’. I seem to remember that he thought this very amusing. Thea told me that she’d had complaints about this T-shirt from other people on the caravan site: there were a lot of older people living there, including some veterans of the war. She did not seem to take these complaints very seriously. Her relations with the neighbours were not good.
From what I can see of your mother’s clothes – I can’t see much of them, because of the way she is holding you – she appears to be wearing a leather jerkin or waistcoat, over a white polo-neck shirt, which comes high up under her chin. Her hair is long and centre-parted. Leather sandals, open-toed, over bare feet, which I would not have thought was very practical, in that sort of weather. But I imagine that we were all outside for only a short time. Just long enough to take the photograph, and get back inside to the warmth.
And yes, it was warm inside that caravan, amazingly. They even had radiators in there, unless my memory is deceiving me, and a gas fire, and an electric bar fire too. You needed everything you could get, to fight against that dreadful North Sea wind. They were in a very exposed spot. But inside, it was almost cosy – except for the terrible chaos and untidiness. There was a good-sized sitting area, and a little open-plan kitchen next to it. Two tiny bedrooms – I mean really tiny, with no real floor space at all – and a tiny bathroom and a tiny toilet. The kind of place you might just about put up with, if you were only there for a few days, with someone you really liked, someone you didn’t mind being close to. As a place to bring up a small child, with a man who was practically a stranger… Well, I don’t think it was very suitable, to be honest.
A few weeks earlier Beatrix had sent me one of her very infrequent letters and in it she had told me the rather shocking news that she was now a grandmother. A grandmother, at the age of forty-five! She didn’t sound terribly pleased about it, I have to say. I wasn’t very pleased, either. I had seen almost nothing of Thea in the last few years. I knew that she was back in the country, but that was about all. My letters to her usually remained unanswered; one or two of them came back stamped ‘Not known at this address’, giving me to understand that she had adopted a rather peripatetic lifestyle. I was aware that, through one of her old schoolfriends, she had drifted into a sort of alternative circle, and had been living in squats with rock musicians and all that sort of thing. There was nothing I could do about this, and besides, it all seemed reasonably harmless. She certainly had no interest in taking any advice from me; that was made perfectly clear, more than once. As far as I knew, she had very few memories of the years she’d lived with Rebecca and myself in Putney. She did not regard me in the light of a surrogate mother – which was probably, at heart, how I wanted to be regarded; instead she appeared to think of me – if at all — simply as a sort of troublesome and interfering maiden aunt, best avoided if possible. So be it. As I say, there was nothing much I could do. In other areas of my life I was much more… well, ‘happy’ is perhaps not the right word – ‘fulfilled’, at any rate – than I had been for some years. At the publishing house, I had risen from the rank of lowly secretary to senior editor: an important position. And I had met a very nice woman – and an excellent painter – called Ruth, and we had developed a great fondness for each other, and moved into a little house in Kentish Town. We led a busy and interesting life. It was all very satisfactory, on one level.
It was publishing business that had taken me to the North of England, I remember. I had been visiting one of our authors, a writer of historical romances, who lived in Hull, and whose latest offering presented some minor editorial challenges. A few glaring anachronisms, characters whose names kept changing from one chapter to another, that sort of thing. I spent two days at her home, going through the manuscript, and then, on the way back to London, I had arranged to call on Thea at this latest peculiar address I had been given by her mother: somewhere on the east coast. It would be the first time I’d seen her for at least two years.
I did not realize that she lived on a caravan park, and it proved to be a hellishly inaccessible place. I had to take the train to a town called Market Rasen, followed by a taxi journey of almost an hour. I arrived much later than I had promised, but neither Thea nor her boyfriend seemed particularly concerned. I got the impression that they had hardly been keeping an anxious look-out for me.
I disembarked from the taxi, and called at the site office to get directions to the caravan. I had with me a bunch of flowers, for Thea, and a small blue teddy bear, for you. I wonder what became of that bear. I suspect that it disappeared, into the chaos in which your mother and Martin lived. There was not just the usual domestic clutter you would expect from a couple with a young child – unwashed crockery, clothes hanging up to dry, and so on – but a good deal of musical equipment: electric guitars, instrument flight cases, even speaker cabinets. A ridiculous amount of gear, to keep in what was already a confined space. Martin called himself a musician, and indeed he treated me, at one point, to a rendition of some of his songs on the guitar, but I could see that he had little talent. Ruth’s brother worked in the music business, and through him, later on, I came to appreciate the very high standard of musicianship that is required to perform even the simplest pop songs with anything like proficiency. Martin did not possess this skill. He did not make his living by performing music, in any case. By profession he was a roadie – I believe that is the term – for a pop group who were scoring some modest success in the singles chart around this time. Thea had met him after one of their concerts. I imagine it was one of the group members she had been hoping to meet, but they were all otherwise engaged, and perhaps Martin seemed, at the time, to be the next best thing. I am sorry, these details will probably be rather upsetting for you. This group was based in Sheffield and he spent a good deal of time there, away from Thea and his daughter, even when he wasn’t touring, which in itself was at least half of the year. As you can imagine, she ended up seeing very little of him. And that was before he left her altogether.
How difficult it is to tell you all these things in the right order. As usual, I am supposed to be describing a photograph, and everything has gone higgledy-piggledy. But perhaps there isn’t a right order, anyway. Perhaps chaos and randomness are the natural order of things. I sometimes think so.
Back to the photograph, then. But I can think of nothing more to say about it. A windswept caravan park in the north-east of England, a small baby and a couple who clearly had no long-term future together. What else could there be to tell you?
Two things struck me about Thea, during that visit. One was her complete and unconditional devotion to Martin, a devotion which was in no way reciprocated. I can remember the way she clung to him at every opportunity, the way she pampered him and poured his beer and brewed his tea �
�� even, sometimes, when you, Imogen, were the one lying on your back in your cot and screaming for attention. The only time I heard her speak about anything with real passion and animation was later in the evening, after he had gone out to the pub and left us alone together, when she told me what a fine musician he was and how his songs were going to make them both a fortune some day. This faith was touching, but entirely misplaced, as far as I could see. The other thing I remember was her shocking temper. I first noticed it (again, after Martin had gone out – she seemed to be altogether calmer and more settled when he was around) when she was standing over by the stove, boiling up some water in a saucepan. It was the kind of pan where the handle itself gets hot, and she forgot to wrap a cloth around it when she was lifting it from the hob, and although she did not burn her hand badly it gave her a nasty shock. She dropped the pan with a scream and the water went all over the floor; she then yelled out a string of obscenities, and with all the strength she could muster she kicked the saucepan across the floor, then picked up a tea cup (which was still half full of tea) and threw it against the wall so that it shattered. Only then was she calm enough to run some cold water over her hands from the tap, and start helping me to clear up the mess. When you began crying, distressed by the sounds of your mother’s anger, I was the one who picked you up and comforted you, when it became clear that she was not going to do so.
I ended up staying the night with you all, although that had never been my intention. Martin had promised to drive me to Market Rasen in time for the last train at about ten o’clock. However, he did not return from the pub in time. When there was still no sign of him, and it was getting on for midnight, Thea and I both went to bed. I squeezed myself into the smaller of the two minute bedrooms, and slept fitfully for a while. When I heard Martin get back, I glanced at my watch, and saw that it was three o’clock in the morning. He made a great deal of noise coming into the caravan, then got some food for himself and started playing his guitar, with the amplifier turned up loud. After a few minutes of this, he opened the door to the bedroom where you and Thea were sleeping. I could hear voices. Thea’s voice was sleepy at first, then wakeful. Soon I heard the sound of Thea carrying you, in your carrycot, out into the caravan’s living area, and leaving you there. She went back into her bedroom and then I heard your mother and father make love for a while. Then there was silence. Then you started crying. I lay in the dark, waiting for one or other of your parents to go and comfort you, but they didn’t. After a while I got up myself, fetched you a bottle of formula milk from the fridge, and fed it to you. Gradually, you settled back into sleep. I sat there for two or three hours, watching dawn break over the caravan site, over the distant North Sea, while you continued to sleep in my arms.
That pale, forlorn winter sun had been struggling to break through the clouds for almost an hour when you finally woke up again. This time you did not cry out, or scream to be fed. You lay there, quite placid, and stared at my face, your eyes wide open and deep blue: cerulean blue, the colour of the sky over Lac Chambon… Yes, that same colour… It was as if you were trying to take in every detail of my features, commit them permanently to your infant memory. You still had excellent vision in those days, Imogen, as you doubtless know.
Here we are, then. Number eighteen. I have been putting it off – putting it off for days, now, telling you about this one. But it cannot wait any longer. The time has come.
And then, after this, there will be just two more pictures. We are near the end. And I am near to my end, too, Imogen: very near. Just an hour or so now, I should think. And then it will all be over. Just an hour! Not much, is it, when I think of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of hours I have lived through. But there is nothing to be done about that. I am quite calm, now, and quite prepared. The only important thing, at this stage, is that I do my duty: that I repay what is owed to you. Which means describing this picture, and telling you, as best I can, the dreadful story that lies behind it.
Very well. This is your mother again. It is the last picture I have ever seen of your mother, in fact. I don’t know when or where it was taken. It is in black-and-white, even though we are, of course, well into the era of colour photography. I clipped it out of a newspaper, and the reproduction was poor to begin with. Now the ink has started to fade, and the paper has started to curl, and it is harder than ever to make out your mother’s features. No matter. This picture is all that we have.
It is really impossible to say, but I would guess that she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight when this photograph was taken. It is not a good picture of her face: her eyes are averted and she is looking both downwards and away from the camera, to the right of the frame. Her eyelids are half-closed. She is wearing (so far as I can see – it is all terribly hard to make out) a voluminous Afghan coat. And yet she is clearly indoors: you can see some sort of patterned flock wallpaper in the background. Her hair is full bodied, shoulder-length and parted slightly to the left, showing off her high forehead. A long strand of it hangs over her right eye. Her nose, in this picture, looks long and thin, which I must say is not how I remember it, but there you are: these things can be deceptive. Her expression…? Well, that is not easy to describe, either. Would it be too evasive of me, if I were just to say ‘inscrutable’? She is half-smiling: as if keeping some private joke to herself, withholding it from us, and from the camera. That is really all I can say. As I mentioned before, it is not a good photograph, and the newspaper’s motive in publishing it, needless to say, was not to offer its readers any insight into Thea’s character, but merely to enable them to identify her. In that respect I’m sure that it served its purpose well enough.
Oh dear. This is so very difficult. For the first time (perhaps you will laugh to hear me say this) – for the first time since I began describing these photographs to you, I find myself lost for words. Or, to use a common expression in its most literal sense, words fail me. However difficult it has been, over the last few days, matching words to images, trying to find the words which will help you to imagine colours, shapes, buildings, landscapes, bodies, faces – however hard that has been, I don’t believe that words have actually failed me, before now. But at last I find myself having to tell you the most difficult thing of all, and I simply don’t know where to begin.
Let me turn this machine off for a moment, and allow myself a little while to reflect.
All right. This cannot be said easily, or kindly, so I shall just say it. It was your mother, Imogen. Have you guessed that by now? I dare say you have. It was your mother who blinded you.
I would like to say that it was an accident, but that was not the doctors’ judgment; nor was it the judgment of the court, in the end. She lost her temper with you – I don’t know what you had done, something very minor I am sure – and she struck you, and she shook you; shook you so violently that, since that day, you have not been able to see a thing. You were just a little more than three years old.
Do you remember, I wonder? Do you remember that happening? They told me that you didn’t, that you had blanked it out. That you remembered other things, things that happened to you before then; but that day, that morning, that… attack – no. You had wiped it from memory. ‘The mind has fuses,’ as somebody once said.
Perhaps you should turn off this tape yourself, for a minute or two. You might want some time to think about these things.
In the meantime, I shall continue, anyway. I would quite like to get this over with.
It was Beatrix who told me, by telephone, a week or two after it happened. She had flown back from Canada as soon as she heard, and paid what I believe must have been a brief visit to her daughter. She was still in London when she telephoned me, although we did not see each other, on that occasion. ‘Ros,’ she said, ‘it’s Annie here.’ Always Annie, by then. Never Beatrix. She had even begun to develop – or affect – a Canadian accent. She did not tell me much, only that Thea had been (these were her words) clumsy and stupid again, and that there had be
en a nasty accident. Her tone was, if not offhand, then certainly a little on the matter-of-fact side. She did not mention the seriousness of the damage to your eyesight. I found that out later. As a result I did not really take in the horror of what had happened, at all, until she told me where your mother was. In prison. A women’s prison in Durham. The court had refused her bail, apparently, and she was there on remand, awaiting trial. I told Beatrix that I would go up there at once.
It was a difficult time. A horrible time. The prison was a ghastly place, much worse than anyone could have imagined. Your mother looked… Well, once again, words are inadequate. Pointless. She was in a state of shock, of course. She was obviously incapable, at this stage, of taking in the enormity of what she had done. That blankness, that lack of response, which I had noticed during our Christmas at Warden Farm (twelve years ago! – twelve years, already) was ingrained upon her now. Her eyes were cold and lifeless, the eyes of someone who could no longer afford the risk of looking upon the world. It was impossible to tell whether she was pleased to see me or not. She hardly spoke to me, as I recall. I tried to extract the barest details from her, about what had happened on that terrible morning, but it was a hopeless task.
Martin had gone – I had guessed that much. Long gone, leaving you and your mother alone. Not on the caravan site any more, but in a little house, part of a new council estate somewhere near Leeds, I think. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t know what became of him. Frankly, it is of no interest to me, although I did notice that the only time Thea showed any sign of animation – any sign of life during that first visit – was when she implored me to try to find him, and bring him back to her. The poor, deluded thing. It seemed far more important, to me, that we should concentrate our efforts on securing the best possible future for you, Imogen; but that subject (it is dreadful that I should have to tell you this) barely seemed to interest her. That should give you an indication, at least, of what sort of place her recent experiences had brought her to. A place where her maternal feelings could not survive, could only wither and die; and not just her maternal feelings, but all feeling, except for this vacuous, affectless obsession with Martin. Martin who could not have cared less about her.
