The Rain Before it Falls Read Online Free PDF Page A

the other side of the room. She placed it on the table between them without ceremony.
    ‘What time will we have to leave, do you think?’ she asked Catharine.
    ‘The concert starts at eight. So I suppose seven o’clock, to be on the safe side.’
    ‘Right. We’d better get on with it, then.’
    Gill took the fruit knife, wiped it on a paper napkin, and slit the envelope open. Then she took out the four tapes and stacked them on the table, neatly, in numerical order.
    ‘Four C-90S,’ said Elizabeth, thinking aloud. ‘If each of these are full, that means six hours altogether. We won’t have time to listen to them all now.’
    ‘I know,’ said Catharine. ‘But at least let’s get started.’ She stood up and added: ‘I’ll make some more coffee.’
    Gill took the first tape from the top of the pile and squatted down beside Catharine’s stereo system. She hesitated, bewildered by the minimalist chic of the fascia, until Elizabeth crouched beside her, took the tape from her confused fingers and quickly set it up to play.
    Gill and Catharine sat side by side on the low, saggy old sofa. Elizabeth sat opposite them, on a red hi-back swivel chair that Catharine had picked up cheap from an office sale a few months ago. They clutched their mugs of coffee, feeling the heat of the liquid transmit itself into their chilled and stony fingers. Catharine picked up the remote control, turned the volume up loud, and the first thing that they heard, after a few seconds, was a surge of hiss, followed by the boom and crackle of a microphone being turned on and then adjusted, scraped along a hard surface upon its plastic stand. Then there was a cough, and a clearing of the throat; and then a voice, the voice they had all been expecting to hear, although that did not make it any the less ghostly. It was the voice of Rosamond, alone in the sitting room of her bungalow in Shropshire, speaking into the microphone just a few days before she died.
    The voice said:

I hope, Imogen, that you are the person listening to these words. I’m afraid that I cannot regard that as a certainty, because you seem to have disappeared. But I am trusting to fate – and more importantly, to the ingenuity of my niece Gill – to ensure that these recordings find their way to you, eventually.
    Perhaps I should say no more on this subject… but it has worried me, in recent years, that you have not reappeared in my life. I am half-inclined to read something morbid into it, but no doubt I am more prone to such thoughts at this particular moment, when my own end is so – well, so palpably close. I’m sure there is a logical explanation. Various logical explanations, for that matter. Most likely, when your family – your new family, that is (I cannot think of them as ‘your’ family, even after all this time, which is probably foolish of me) – when they decided, more than twenty years ago, that you were not to have any contact with us any more – with me any more, to be more specific, since I was the only one maintaining contact with you at that stage – then they would have been in a good position to make a thorough job of it. You were very young. There was your disability. (Are we still allowed to use that word, nowadays?) Easy enough, I would have thought, to cut all the ties and burn all the bridges. So perhaps that was what they did. Destroyed all the letters and other documents, threw out all the photographs. Anything like that would have posed a threat to them. You may never have been able to see those photographs, after all, but there was always the chance, wasn’t there, that one day somebody might try to describe them to you?
    And that brings us, Imogen, very much to the business in hand. The reason why I am speaking to you now. I am reaching the end of my life and for reasons which will, I hope, become apparent to you as you listen to this recording, I feel an obligation towards you, a sense of duty which has not yet been fully