The Rain Before it Falls Read Online Free

as to the cause of death, and had seen no need to refer it to the coroner. Why upset things, then, why cause anyone any needless distress? And even if Rosamond had taken her own life, what business was it of Gill’s, or anyone else’s? She had known that the end was not far away; the angina had been causing her pain; and if she had chosen to release herself from that pain, who could blame her?
    Gill was doing the right thing: she was quite sure of it.
    David’s house was in Stafford, little more than an hour away. The last few minutes of daylight found her driving through the eastern parts of Shropshire, towards the M6. The route took her not far from the church where Rosamond was now buried, but Gill had no desire to stop. She entered a sort of trancelike state, and drove slowly, never faster than forty miles an hour, unaware that impatient cars were queued up behind her. Her thoughts were drifting randomly, dangerously, floating and untethered. That music her aunt must have been listening to, when she died… Gill had never heard Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, but she had visited that part of France herself, once, many years ago. Catharine had been eight years old, Elizabeth five or six, so it must have been 1992: quite early that year – April or May… The girls had not come with them on that trip, anyway. The whole idea had been to leave them behind, staying with their grandparents. Gill and Stephen had stumbled into a crisis in their marriage (was that putting it too strongly? She remembered no arguments, no infidelities, just a sort of wordless distance opening up between them, a sudden, bewildered awareness that somehow, without anybody noticing, they had become strangers to one another) and their hope, presumably, had been that a few days in France together might help repair the damage.
    It hadn’t worked that way. Stephen was being flown to Clermont-Ferrand for a conference, and his days were entirely spoken for. Gill had been left to wander alone for hours through the bars and sitting rooms of their empty, newly built, characterless hotel, until she had finally decided, on the third day, to assert her independence. This had involved hiring a car and driving out into the countryside. She retained only a few hazy memories – grey skies, an unexpectedly rocky landscape, a desolate lake surrounded by pine trees – and one other, very clear one: something she had not forgotten in all the intervening years. She had been driving back to the hotel, towards the end of the day; it was late afternoon, and the road she had chosen was narrow, winding, hemmed in by patches of densely planted and rather sinister woodland. Rain was falling in fits and starts, thinly and unpredictably. And then, as the forest at last fell away and Gill emerged on to an open road that was almost eerily flat and lunar, there had been a loud, sudden thud on her windscreen. A black shape bounced off it, then on to the car bonnet and then on to the road, where it lay unmoving. Gill braked to a halt in the middle of the road, ran back to see what the shape was, and found herself looking at a dark blot upon the asphalt – a dead bird, a young blackbird. And on the instant of seeing that lifeless shape another thud fell, leaden, upon her heart. She had turned off the car engine, so that the hush upon the road was now oppressive and shocking. No birdsong anywhere. Gill approached the dead object almost on tiptoe, picked up the small body gingerly, by the edge of one wing, and then placed it gently on a bed of moss under the branches of a lone shrub at the roadside, thinking to herself as she did so, ‘You know what it’s supposed to mean: a death in the family.’ The thought, unbidden and treacherous, caused her heart to start racing, and she drove at reckless speed into the next village, the village of Murol, where, upon finding a callbox, she jammed a handful of francs into the slot as fast as she could and telephoned her parents’ house