The Rain Before it Falls Read Free Page A

at the breakfast table soon afterwards, agreed with her sister. Neither of them was much impressed with the solicitor’s plan of action, which was to place an advertisement in The Times. Catharine thought this was ludicrous – ‘We’re not living in the 1950s, and besides, nobody reads The Times any more, do they?’ (‘Least of all a blind person,’ Elizabeth added) – and offered to start searching on the internet at once. By ten o’clock, she had presented her mother with a list of five possible candidates.
    Gill drafted a letter that afternoon, posted five copies on Monday morning, and then settled down to the uncertain wait for a reply.
    ∗
    Meanwhile, she decided that there was no point in deferring the task of visiting Rosamond’s house, sorting through her effects and putting it up for sale. It would no doubt be a tiring and complicated process. Having divined, from his silences, that Stephen wanted to have nothing to do with it, she braced herself for three or four days alone in Shropshire, packed a small suitcase and drove back there on a bright, windy and ice-cold Tuesday morning.
    Her late aunt’s house was hidden off one of the many mud-encrusted lanes which lay between Much Wenlock and Shrewsbury. The approach always managed to take Gill by surprise. Dense banks of rhododendron announced that you were nearly there, for behind them, she knew, stretched Rosamond’s shady, sequestered garden; but after that, the driveway slyly declined to reveal itself, and instead sidled out on to the carriageway at a preposterous angle which only the smallest car could turn without involving itself in awkward pirouettes and reversals. Once you had found this driveway, it soon narrowed to a rough, pebbly track, and the trees on either side closed in and entwined their serpentine branches overhead until it felt as though you were passing through a vegetable tunnel. Emerging, at last, blinking, into the autumn sunshine, you expected to see at the very least some crumbled baronial hall; but what you found was a modest grey bungalow, built some time in the 1920s or ’30s, with a greenhouse leaning up against one side and an air of absolute quiescence which could be quite unnerving. This had always appeared to be the main feature of the house, from the outside, even when Rosamond was alive and now, in the knowledge of her final absence, Gill stepped out of her car that frozen morning to be enveloped at once in a loneliness more complete than any she could remember.
    If the silence of the house and its grounds seemed almost unearthly, the cold inside was even worse. Gill could tell, without being morbid or fanciful, that it was more than a question of room temperature. This was a dead person’s house. Nothing could take the chill off it: no matter how many radiators she turned on, boilers she fired up, fan heaters she retrieved from forgotten cupboards. She resigned herself to the idea that she would have to work with her coat on.
    Gill drifted into the kitchen and looked around her. The sink was full of cold washing-up water: on the draining board a knife and fork, a single plate, two saucepans and a wooden spoon had been laid out to dry. These relics of Rosamond’s final hours made her feel sadder than ever. More cheeringly, she saw a coffee-making machine and, standing in readiness next to it, still vacuum-sealed, a packet of fresh Colombia roast. At once she broke it open and brewed up a generous helping, and even before she had taken her first few sips, she felt revived by the companionable noises of bubbling and frothing, and the rich, walnutty fumes that filled the kitchen with aromatic warmth.
    She took her mug with her into the sitting room. It was lighter and airier than the kitchen: French windows looked out over a pretty but overgrown stretch of lawn, and Rosamond’s armchair had been placed to take advantage of this view. Around the chair, just as Dr May had informed her, were stacked a number of photograph