The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe Page B

her mother. Ivy is wearing something around her neck, incidentally, which would never be countenanced nowadays. It is not so much a fur stole as an entire dead fox. You can see its beady eyes staring out at you from her left shoulder, almost as if it knew the camera was there and was determined to be as much a part of the picture as everyone else. It seems incredible now, but the wearing of such monstrosities was very much the fashion of the time. It wouldn’t surprise me if Ivy had hunted the poor creature down and killed it herself only a couple of weeks before.
    Ivy’s face and Owen’s face are masks. Both of them have just about managed to force a smile, but there is nothing convincing about them. As for me: well, I am not smiling, but I think I’m enjoying the occasion more than anybody. I was still young enough, and foolish enough, to cherish certain romantic ideals. I can remember thinking it wonderful that Beatrix should already have found someone to marry. But there is a sadness in my eyes, too, which the photographer has unwittingly caught. Beatrix and I were blood-sisters, after all. I may have had no idea what that meant, in reality, but that did not prevent me from having a primal, immovable sense that there was a special bond between us, a bond that could not be untied and could not be severed by anybody – least of all (though I would never have articulated this to myself) by a man . And so the happiness I felt for her – which was certainly far deeper and truer than anything her parents or brothers were feeling for her that day – was tempered by some shadowy, nebulous emotion that I could not have put a name to, and perhaps still couldn’t: regret is too strong a word for it. So is jealousy.
    It is one of those occasions where the picture, the picture itself, is far more expressive than the words I can find to describe it. You really need to see the picture, Imogen, to know what I was feeling that day. Everything is here in the picture.
    Number seven. I do not feature in this one, myself. Nor in the two that follow.
    However, this is a momentous photograph, for you, Imogen. It is the first appearance of your mother. Your mother, Thea!
    Did you even know that that was her name? Perhaps not. They told you nothing, those people, did they?
    The kitchen of the house in Much Wenlock. Roger’s house, and Beatrix’s. The marital home. This one is a transparency, in colour. Most of the photographs I shall be describing to you from now on will be in colour, I think. I took this myself, on my father’s camera, which he must have allowed me to borrow for a few days. It’s pretty obvious that I didn’t really know how to use it. My object, presumably, was to preserve a record of the infant Thea, but being so inexperienced, I got the composition all wrong, so what you really have is a picture of Beatrix’s kitchen, with Thea as merely one small object contained within it. As a result, it is a much more interesting photograph than it might have been. Babies are all much of a muchness, as far as I can see, but no two kitchens are the same, are they?
    This one appears, first of all, to be impossibly small. I certainly remember it being narrow, but more than that, according to this picture, everything about it seemed to have been arranged in order to emphasize the impression of smallness and enclosure. The linoneum has a pattern of black and white squares, making the floor look like a chessboard. A large, heavy mahogany dresser occupies most of one wall, and the window next to it is tiny. This window looked out on to a small yard at the side of the house, and beyond that, into the garden of the house next door. To let in the light from Beatrix’s own garden, you had a window in the back door, but when this photograph was taken it was covered by a chintz curtain, with a red, yellow and green floral pattern. My memory is that this curtain was kept drawn almost permanently, so that the kitchen was always in