The Rain Before it Falls Read Free

Soon Imogen found her again and took her hand and asked: ‘What are you looking at?’
    ‘Oh, I was just looking at the view. You get a good view from up here.’
    ‘What can you see?’
    ‘You can see…’ But for a few moments Gill didn’t know where to begin. All she could see, in fact, was the formlessness of jumbled buildings, trees, skyline. It struck her that this was as much as she ever saw. But she could not describe it to Imogen in those terms. She would have to look at it in an entirely new way, piece by piece, item by item. And start… with what? The haze which blurred the line of transition from rooftops to sky? The sky’s barely perceptible gradations of colour, from the deepest to the palest of blues? The weird collision of outlines where two tower blocks stood on either side of what she took to be St Paul’s Cathedral?
    ‘Well,’ she began, ‘the sky is blue and the sun is shining…’
    ‘I know that, silly,’ said Imogen, and squeezed Gill’s hand.
    And even now Gill could remember it, so clearly, the pressure of those tiny fingers. Her first intimation of what it would be like, to have a daughter of her own. At that moment she had clutched to herself the knowledge that Catharine was growing inside her, and felt that she could hardly tolerate the fear and gladness.
    ∗
    Thomas, as usual, was the first to wake up next morning. Gill made him some tea, poached a couple of eggs, then left her father reading the newspaper while she fetched twenty or so boxes of Kodak slides from the lower reaches of the old mahogany bureau in the study, and took them into the dining room, where there was more sunlight. She spread them out on the table and tutted when she noticed that most of the boxes were unlabelled. The task of sifting through them more or less methodically took almost half an hour, and when Elizabeth came to join her, dressing-gowned and tousle-haired, she had only just found what she was looking for.
    ‘What’s up?’ her daughter asked.
    ‘I was trying to find a picture. Of Imogen. Here, look.’
    She handed Elizabeth one of the transparencies. Elizabeth held it up to the window and squinted.
    ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘When was this taken?’
    ‘1983. Why?’
    ‘The clothes! The hairstyles! What were you thinking of?’
    ‘Never mind that. Your children will be saying the same thing about you in twenty years’ time. This is the party I was telling you about. Rosamond’s fiftieth. Can you see her, and Ruth, and me and Grandma?’
    ‘Yes. Where’s Grandpa?’
    ‘He must have taken the picture. We’ll go and ask him in a minute, see if he remembers. Now – you see the little girl standing in front of Aunt Rosamond?’
    Elizabeth held the picture up to a patch of brighter light at the top of the window. Her attention was drawn, at this moment, not to Imogen but to the infinitely strange, infinitely familiar figure standing at the far left of the grouping: this ghostly projection of her mother’s younger self. It was what people might have called a ‘good photograph’, in the sense that it made Gill look attractive, beautiful even. (She had never thought of her mother as beautiful before.) But Elizabeth wished that it told her more than that: wished that it could tell her what her mother might have been thinking, or feeling, at this momentous family party, so soon after her marriage, so newly pregnant. Why did photographs – family photographs – make everyone appear so unreadable? What hopes, what secret anxieties lay behind that seemingly confident tilt of her mother’s face, her mouth slipping into its characteristic, slightly crooked smile?
    ‘Yes, I see her,’ Elizabeth said, finally, turning her attention back to the little fair-haired girl. ‘She looks pretty.’
    ‘Well, that’s Imogen. That’s who we’ve got to find.’
    ‘Shouldn’t be difficult. You can find anybody, these days.’
    To Gill this sounded over-confident; but Catharine, when she joined them