by Jonathan Coe
Well, in any case, I was the one who had been deluding myself, if I had thought that Thea and I were going to have any say in your future. As soon as you came out of hospital, you were put into the care of foster parents. That was a temporary arrangement, pending your mother’s trial. She was held in prison for almost six months before the case came up. She was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm – without intent, thankfully (that would have meant a much longer sentence) – and then sent back to prison for another six months. In the meantime, social services had the task of finding another family who were prepared to adopt you permanently.
In my opinion, the best and simplest solution was staring us all in the face: you would come down to London, to live with me and Ruth. We had a large, comfortable home. Neither of us had any other family commitments. And – from an entirely selfish point of view (grotesquely selfish, you might think now, considering what had recently happened) – it would light up the whole house, to have a young child living there. As I have said before, many times, I was enormously fond of Ruth. But it would not be true to say that she had filled, entirely, the emotional void in my life which had opened up after the loss of Rebecca. Whether she herself could sense this, I was not aware. I had never told her anything about Rebecca, in any case. And Ruth and I were happy with each other, and comfortable around each other, I am not denying that at all. But the thought of having you, Imogen, joining us, living with us, coming to love and depend upon us (and how much you would depend upon us, now that you had been so cruelly incapacitated) – it was almost too wonderful to contemplate. Nothing could ever compensate for the loss of your sight; nothing could undo the tragedy in which you and your mother had become embroiled. But something good might come out of this: I was determined. We would take you under our wing and give you, despite everything, a marvellous childhood: the best, most loving, most nurturing childhood anyone could wish for. We would give you everything your mother had never had. And in this way, perhaps, across the generations, the scales of justice might somehow be balanced. That, at any rate, was how I had come to construe the possibilities of the situation.
Ha! Well, I was mistaken. Sadly, sadly mistaken. And it wasn’t Ruth who thwarted my plans, as you might have expected. Oh, she was reluctant enough at first. She took some persuading: and indeed, while I was persuading her, I could not help remembering all the similar conversations I’d had with Rebecca, more than two decades earlier, on the eve of her graduation day. That crisis had seemed serious enough at the time; now it appeared almost comically trivial. What tiny children we had been! How little I had foreseen of all the strange twists of fortune that lay ahead of me, far in the future! If only I had known, then, what would happen to Thea, what she would become… But there is nothing to be gained – nothing – by going down that road. Turn back, Rosamond. Turn back at once.
No, it was not Ruth who stood in my way. The bureaucrats at social services were having none of it. It seemed that we were not suitable candidates for adoption, in this case. They sent us a cursory letter, in which it was stated that my own family ties with Imogen’s mother were too close. That was the reason they gave. And who knows? Perhaps they were right after all. Yes, I suppose I can entertain that idea now. But at the time I thought it a feeble excuse. And dishonest. What they really objected to (this was my suspicion) was our situation in life: two ladies who had chosen to live together, and made no secret of the nature of their relationship. I had come up against this prejudice – subtle, unspoken, but unmistakeably there — time and again over the years. Outside the rather progressive and liberal circles in which Ruth and I moved, we were under no illusions as to how the rest of the world regarded us. We had grown used to being considered deviants and pariahs.
Anyway, I was not prepared to let the matter rest there. After your mother’s conviction, when she had begun her sentence proper, I went to visit her again. It was the last time I ever visited her in prison; and on my way home, I had arranged to have an interview with my correspondent from social services. I had thought that, by meeting her face to face, it might be possible to break through her wall of obdurate officialdom. Which, to a degree – a very limited degree – I succeeded in doing. Certainly we had a civilized and, at times, almost cordial discussion. But I could not get her to understand my point of view. ‘What puzzles me,’ she kept saying, ‘is that you have only ever seen Imogen once, by your own account. And yet you seem to be trying to persuade me that there is some extraordinary bond between you, which mustn’t be broken.’ What was I supposed to say to that? Imogen, it has taken me hours and hours, and probably tens of thousands of words spilled out on to this tape, to explain to you how that bond came to be forged. How could I be expected to do the same thing, in the space of twenty minutes, for the benefit of this well-meaning but essentially small-minded officer of the welfare state? It was hopeless. And besides, I was already too late. ‘We have found a family for Imogen,’ she announced with a smile I can only describe as triumphant. ‘A lovely family.’ I sat there, open-mouthed, gaping like a fish and doubtless looking extremely foolish. It was the last thing I had expected to hear. All I could find it in me to say, once the reality of the situation had sunk in, was: ‘Am I to have no contact with Imogen, then? Is her mother to have no contact?’ She replied that this decision lay entirely in the hands of the adopting family. I asked for the family’s name. She refused to give it to me. This was intolerable – and I told her so, in no uncertain terms. It made no difference. She offered only one concession. ‘You may write to them, if you wish, care of this office. You may write to them requesting contact. Our advice, to them, would be that such contact is rarely desirable. Imogen’s relationship with her mother has been destroyed, damaged beyond repair. In these cases, a clean break is usually the most practical option; and also the kindest, for the child. Remember,’ she said – fixing me with a penetrating glare, for some reason – ‘that the interests of the child are paramount. Her interests, not those of the adults involved.’
I left her office in a cold rage; and sat for some minutes in my car, weeping with frustration, before beginning the long drive south to London.
Time to turn off the tape again. I’m sorry. I thought I had more self-control than this.
That’s better. I have a glass of whisky by my side now. And a whole bottle next to it, almost full. Bowmore, it is, an Islay malt, nice and peaty. It will come in very handy, I am sure, in the short time that is left to me now.
While I was in the kitchen just now, fetching myself this drink, I had a good think about what I’ve just told you, and it became clear to me – for the very first time – how foolish I still was in those days. Everybody – your new family, the social services people, even Ruth – everybody except me, in short – could see what was best for you. The odds against you were stacked so heavily now – you had so much to learn – a whole new way of perceiving and relating to the world – and in order to achieve that you needed love and care and stability above all. All of these things suggested that it would be far, far better to keep you well away from your mother from now on. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? But I couldn’t accept it. Even in my midforties, I still had this callow, overly benign view of the world. I still believed that reconciliation was possible; and more than that, how flattering it was, to my own self-esteem, to suppose that I could be the person to bring it about! I conceived of myself as this secretive, self-effacing, benevolent agency, plotting behind the scenes in order to engineer climactic reunions and miraculous healings of wounds. I couldn’t quite see, yet, how it was to be done. But I knew that above all, my task called for two special qualities: patience, and cunning.
I kept in contact with your mother when she came out of prison. I do not like to think of the things she must have endured there, during those few months. Prisoners live by their own rules, and those who are known to have abused children are not treated kindly. Thea suffered badly, of that I have no doubt. Now that she was free again, we kept up
an occasional correspondence, but I could not help noticing that she was reluctant to see me in person. And there had been another, unexpected development. There was a new man in her life: a Mr Ramsey, who had begun writing to her in prison – letters of a moral, religious and in my view sinister character. Thea was vulnerable, at this time, dreadfully vulnerable, and I had no doubt that this nasty, predatory person (who had apparently read of her case in the newspaper) was bent on gaining control over her, using for his purposes some distorted version of the Christian ideas of redemption and forgiveness, ideas that someone in her situation might well find almost irresistible. Towards the end of her sentence he had begun to visit her; and now, it seemed, they were to set up home together. I did not like the sound of it at all, but of course there was nothing I could do.
Meanwhile, I had devised a plan. Some intuition told me that it would be ineffective to write to your new family and ask them, straight out, if I might be allowed to see you. A less direct approach was called for. Instead, I wrote them a letter, outlining my relationship to you, and sketching the history of my long involvement with Thea and her family. I told them that I understood, very well, how desirable it was that you should now sever all links with your unfortunate past, and be given a completely fresh start; but said that you were, at the same time, still very much missed by some of your relatives. And in the light of that, I wrote with a simple, forthright request: might we be allowed to have a memento? Might it be possible, in fact, to have your portrait painted? A picture, it seemed to me, in which the artist had captured the very essence of you, the ‘new’ you, as you embarked upon your second, more difficult but more hopeful life – this would be a marvellously consoling thing to have. It would be something very much more significant than a mere photograph or souvenir, gathering dust on some wall or mantelpiece. A good portrait, after all, has an intrinsic vitality of its own: it is living, and organic. And what was more, I knew the very person to paint it.
And here it is. Picture number nineteen. Ruth’s portrait of you, which she simply entitled ‘Imogen, 1980’. I have it now, resting upon my knee. Unframed, oil on canvas, probably measuring about ten by fourteen inches. It was never framed, so far as I remember. Ruth herself did not think very highly of it, and for many years it was kept hidden away at the top of our house, in the room where she stored all of her abandoned canvases. A cold, dead, unvisited place, it was. She used to call it ‘the failure room’. But it is a fine picture, in my opinion. One of her best. Her reason for disliking it had nothing to do with the quality of the picture itself.
It is quite dark outside now – quite dark and still – and the light in this room is very feeble. It is not a good light for looking carefully at this picture and describing it to you. Besides, I wonder if it would be possible even to make you understand the difference between one kind of painting and another: you might never even have seen a painting, in the first few years of your life, and if you did, you probably cannot remember it. I hope, in any case, that the fact you are listening to these words at all means that Gill has found you; which means that this portrait will also now be in your possession, since it forms part of your legacy. So you will at least be able to run your fingers over it, as I am doing now, and feel how thickly Ruth plastered on the paint. It feels rough and scaly, doesn’t it? That was her style, always. The especially thick part, at the top of the picture, is your hair. She has used a palette knife to apply layer upon layer of different oranges and golds and yellows. I know I am missing the whole point of the painting when I say this, but my memory, personally, is that your hair wasn’t quite as thick and tangled as Ruth has represented it. But I would really need to compare the original photograph that she was working from, and that has no doubt been destroyed.
Your family, you see, would not allow you to come down to Ruth’s studio for a proper sitting. She had to work from photographs, which was never her normal way of doing things. That defeated my main object, of course, but no matter. It was only a short-term setback. At least I was in contact with them, now, and it was not long afterwards that I started seeing you again, very occasionally. Altogether we had about three or four meetings, I suppose. Not very much, I know, but I still treasure the memory of every one of them. Anyway, I will come to that in a moment.
The portrait, first. You appear to be sitting astride a wooden fence, which runs diagonally from left to right, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture. The composition cuts off just above your knees. You are wearing pale green trousers and a dark blue T-shirt. In the photograph it was creamy white, I remember, but Ruth didn’t like that colour. The contrast between the rich ultramarine of the T-shirt and your hair is certainly striking. I imagine that was the effect she wanted to achieve. The background is a mottled confusion of different greens, giving a vague suggestion of foliage, with perhaps a hint of whitish sky peeping through. Because of the way you are sitting on the fence, the angle of view is not quite full-frontal, and you are not quite in profile, but somewhere halfway between: what the artists refer to as a three-quarters view, I believe. None the less, your face is turned directly towards the onlooker, and you are smiling: a good, contented smile, which causes your jaw to thrust forward. I suspect that Ruth has exaggerated the size of your jaw, in fact, just as she has exaggerated the thickness of your hair. She had a dislike of pure realism, in literature as well as art.
Certainly this is one of her more accessible paintings. Even in her portrait work – of which she could be rather disdainful, even though it paid a lot of our bills – her take on the visual world was often somewhat skewed. There were several cases of patrons asking for their money back once they saw the results of their commissions. Ruth used to laugh about this, because by the standards of the time, her aesthetic was really very conservative. She was never going to be a fashionable painter. She never won prizes and she was rarely bought by any of the bigger galleries, at least not in this country. Sometimes this made her bitter – especially towards the end of her life. She felt that her work was considered to be too adventurous and difficult by some people, and too conventional by others. Neither one thing nor the other, in other words. I remember her hinting, just before she died, that she was angry with herself for not letting go more, for not giving her imagination freer rein: I think she felt that, both in her life and her work, she had been too cautious – hidebound by something, some fear of stepping out of line, of giving offence – something to do with her family background, possibly. Or perhaps it was me, holding her back all that time. I have hardly been one of nature’s rebels or mavericks, after all, and despite the fact that Ruth and I never made any secret of our relationship, I made sure that we lived a pretty respectable life in every other way.
Getting back to your portrait (yes, I must get back to that, and quickly), I am sure that it was pressure from me that made her paint it in such a plain and realistic style. What I wanted most of all was that it should simply look like you, and in that, of course, she has succeeded quite brilliantly. I love the slight hunch that she has given to your shoulders, suggesting that you are hugging some kind of joyous secret to yourself. That is very characteristic. But what the viewer really notices are your eyes. This is where Ruth has really excelled herself. Everything centres upon your eyes: your deep blue, sightless eyes that somehow manage to gleam so brightly, with such… energy in them, such bottomless reserves of wisdom and sadness. Is it not miraculous, how she has managed to capture all that – to capture somebody’s spirit, to externalize it, to make it permanent and unchanging, using nothing more than a mixture of pigments and vegetable oil? I find it remarkable, what artists can do. ‘You have caught her,’ I said to Ruth at the time. ‘You have caught her exactly.’ She did not think very highly of the painting, as I said. ‘What do you mean?’ she answered. ‘It is just a likeness.’ That was one of her most damning, dismissive words – ‘likeness’. ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘It is more than that. You have said something about Imogen in this picture. Proved something about her
.’ She took issue with that turn of phrase, and asked me exactly what this portrait had ‘proved’ about you. To which I answered: your inevitability.
Let me try to explain what I meant.
As I have mentioned, the painting of this portrait was enough to open a channel of communication with your new family. Shortly after adopting you they had moved south, to Worcester, where there is a very good school for the blind. It was there that I visited you, on a few scattered occasions. My sister’s family, including David and Gill, my nephew and niece, lived not far from there, so I had a good pretext for coming to the area. Every few months – not wishing to impose myself, or appear too pushy – I would contact your new father and ask if I might see you, to bring you a little present and perhaps take you out for tea. Do you remember any of that, I wonder, Imogen? Do you remember your strange Aunt Rosamond (although I was never your aunt), who used to collect you from your home and hold you by the hand as we walked along the footpath beside the River Severn, while I described the scene to you? We would sit down on a bench beside the water, and I would tell you all the colours I could see, I would tell you about the curve of the river, about the crows and rooks flying home to their nests in the treetops on the riverbank, about the clothes worn by the people walking past us on their way home from the shops, and the games being played by the schoolboys and schoolgirls on the playing fields opposite. I was so anxious, Imogen, so anxious that you wouldn’t forget what the world looked like. I was determined to keep your visual sense alive, so that at least you had memories of what you had once seen – strong, vivid memories – even if everything else was now closed to you. And I was succeeding, I’m sure that I was. You listened and you nodded and you understood, I am convinced of it. Just as you will understand – I have to believe this, I have to take it on trust, or I will have been wasting my time, all my efforts will have been useless – just as you will understand all the things I have been telling you on these tapes. Am I being foolish, am I being naive again? I don’t know, I cannot know. And anyway, it is too late now, everything is too late…
