The Rain Before it Falls Read Online Free Page A

in England. Her mother came to the phone after what seemed like a lifetime, but she sounded perfectly composed and cheerful, if a little surprised to have heard from her daughter at that time of day. ‘No, the girls are fine,’ she assured her. ‘Why are you asking? They’re in the dining room right now, doing one of your old jigsaws. How’s your holiday, are you having a good time…?’ And so Gill had driven on to Clermont-Ferrand, shaken but thankful. And had tried to explain to Stephen, that evening, why she had been so frightened, only to find herself blocked by his habitual wall of amused, indulgent scepticism. ‘It seemed such an unpropitious omen,’ she had said. ‘So very strange…’ ‘Oh, you and your omens,’ Stephen had laughed, somehow managing to sound, as was his annoying way, entirely dismissive and yet not unsympathetic. And the next day they had returned home, the marital crisis unresolved and the omen unaccounted for: except that Gill had been forced to accept, on this occasion, that her anxiety had been fanciful. She allowed the incident to remain undiscussed, after that, but it left her with one more itch of dissatisfaction: a nagging awareness that she had allowed herself to fall in (as so often) with her husband’s more prosaic way of thinking.
    That itch had never really left her: Gill could feel it even now, years later, as she drove along the Shropshire road which in her childhood she had travelled at least twice every month. As a family, they had always taken this route to visit her grandparents, and although the memories associated with it had long lain dormant, today it came home to her that these fields, these villages, these hedgerows, were still inscribed upon her memory; they were the very bedrock of her consciousness. She looked around her and wondered how she would attempt to describe them to a blind person; to Imogen. The sun, which had been so dazzling this morning, had long ago been hidden behind thick banks of grey cloud, bulbous with the threat of snow. The whole world was monochrome now: everything was black, white or some shade of grey. Trees black and brittle against a grey sky, like charred bones; rough stone walls fuzzy with layers of grey moss; the fields, rising and falling in gentle undulations, English and undemonstrative, and grey as the snow-heavy sky itself. And now the flakes started to fall, thick, spiralling flakes, big as autumn leaves, and Gill, shivering convulsively, realized that the cold in her car was gelid – raw as the cold in her aunt’s house, or even worse – and the heater still wasn’t working properly, and she suddenly found herself wondering, in a kind of fury, why it was that she still clung to this country, why it was that to tear herself away from it would feel like an amputation, when it never seemed to have nourished her, never given her what she wanted. The feeling came out of nowhere, knocked her sideways, as she cast bitter reflections over some of the conversations she’d had with Stephen recently, conversations about all the things they could do now that the girls had left, all the different countries and places they might visit or even choose as a new home. And she understood, at that moment, that those conversations had not been real; that she had been talking to herself, that what she had said to her husband had sounded, to his ears, like meaningless noise, while she babbled on like someone who is decribing last night’s dream over the breakfast table to a listener who is bored witless by the details of something which he can never himself experience at first hand.
    ∗
    On a Wednesday morning in February, four months after she had made that journey, Gill took a train down to London. In her suitcase was the envelope addressed to Imogen, still unclaimed and unopened. Of the five letters she had originally sent, three were never answered, and two were answered by people who turned out not to be the woman they were looking for.