The Rain Before It Falls Read online

  Beatrix’s wedding was a rather subdued affair, as I think this next picture illustrates.

  We are up to number six, now, aren’t we? And back at Warden Farm again.

  A group of eight people, photographed once again in black and white, standing outside the front door. On the far left of the picture is a short, fair-haired man whose name for the life of me I can’t remember: he was the best man. Then you have the groom’s parents: similarly, their names are lost to me, long since lost. Then the groom himself: Roger, standing arm in arm with Beatrix. Next to her, Ivy, of course, and Uncle Owen. And last of all, to the far right of the picture – myself, the proud bridesmaid. I am fifteen years old, and the year is 1948. Late spring or early summer, if I remember correctly.

  Beatrix herself was eighteen now. Far too young to marry, as I’m sure you will agree. Needless to say, she was pregnant. Why else would she have got married, at that age, to someone as obviously unsuitable as Roger?

  Let me look at him more closely, so that I can describe him to you. He is not so much smiling at the camera as glowering – that is the first thing you notice. I would say, from my brief acquaintance with him, that this was his habitual expression. He was an unsmiling sort of person. Whether this reflected his general outlook on life, or merely his feelings upon finding himself married to Beatrix, and the father of her child, I would not presume to say. To be tied down to a place you do not like, at a young age, to be married to someone you don’t love, and to believe that the remainder of your life will consist of efforts to provide for her and the children you do not want, would be enough to make anybody scowl, or so I would have thought. Anyway, in this picture he is scowling. His hair is cut short, and has been brushed and stiffened so that it stands upright – a bit like Stan Laurel’s. His morning suit is a good cut, and a good fit – he was a well-built, athletic man: nice-looking, too, there is no denying that.

  They had met a few months earlier, at a dance given in Wellington Town Hall by the Young Conservatives. Whether Beatrix herself was ever a Conservative, in any meaningful sense, is a question that I cannot really answer. She had no politics, so far as I know. Certainly, in all the thirty or more years that I knew her, I cannot recall her ever expressing a political opinion. However, she was a paid-up member of the Young Conservatives, and on the night of this dance made a considerable impression by all accounts. She was chosen as ‘Miss Conservative’ or some such title, and if there survived a photograph recording that occasion you can rest assured that I would have described it to you. She must have caught the attention of many young men that night, and I dare say the most handsome of them was Roger. A certain amount of beer and wine was consumed (she would not have been used to this, at such a young age), she was offered a lift home and… well, the rest you can probably imagine. Remember that Beatrix had left school a few months earlier and that she was desperate – and I do mean desperate – to find some way of escaping her parents’ household. Whether the actual conception (your mother’s conception, that is) took place that night, I cannot say with any certainty. All I know is that, three months later, she and Roger were engaged to be married. Much to the horror, I suspect, of both families. But back in those days, nobody would have had much choice in the matter.

  Beatrix told me only one thing about their courtship (if that’s the right word). I shall pass it on to you, if only because it suggests that, during their brief time together, it was not the case that they were at all staid or conventional, or that they never managed to have any fun. She told me that in those days Roger used to ride a motorbike – don’t expect me to tell you which model, I am the wrong person to ask about that sort of thing – and they would often take rides together through the Shropshire countryside. Now, on more than one occasion, apparently, he drove her all the way up to the top of the Wrekin – which, as you must surely know, is the most visible landmark in that district: it stands at the very heart of Shropshire, and can be seen rising, bell-like, from almost every point in the county. When you climb to the summit, at a height of about one thousand feet, you find a strange rock formation with a giant cleft between two of the rocks. This cleft is known as the Needle’s Eye, and it is only a few feet wide: if you are feeling really daring, you can attempt to squeeze yourself through it, which I believe can be a hazardous experience because there is quite a drop on either side. The story I remember being told, anyway, is that one evening, at sunset, Roger took Beatrix up to the Wrekin on the back of his motorbike and they actually managed to ride as far as the Needle’s Eye itself. I have always found it such a romantic image! The path is very steep, very rocky, and I honestly wonder whether such a thing has ever been done again, before or since. It strikes me that any man who could take his girlfriend – or fiancée, I suppose, as she must have been then – on an excursion like that could not have been an entirely bad catch.

  However. The marriage did not work out well. I suppose you have guessed that by now. I can see it all, the whole sequence of events, implied in this photograph, but perhaps I am being over-imaginative; and relying too much on the benefit of hindsight. Beatrix at any rate looks happy enough. She is wearing, of course, the traditional bride’s outfit, all in white, despite the fact that this could not, strictly speaking, have been considered a white wedding. Her face has aged considerably since the photograph of her at the skating pond. It is noticeable how tightly she is clinging to Roger, how close together they are standing, while there must be a whole foot of distance between Beatrix and 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, presu
mably, 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 semi-darkness. Why Beatrix wanted to keep it this way, I cannot imagine. Perhaps she did not want to look at the garden, which lay infertile and untended, neglected by both Beatrix and her husband for the whole of their short tenure of that house.

  The kitchen looks so cramped, in part, because it is dominated by your mother’s enormous pram: an absurdly bulky and unwieldy vehicle, about the size of a small family car, it seems to me now. It has an iron frame and looks as though it must have weighed a ton – I honestly don’t know how Beatrix would ever have found the strength to push it. It is standing in the middle of the kitchen and it leaves literally no room to pass on either side. Thea is lying on her back in the pram, wrapped up in some sort of muslin blanket, her eyes shut tight with a kind of furrowed concentration, as though sleeping is yet another one of the difficult grown-up tasks she must set herself to learn. I cannot really think of much else to say about her. She has no hair to speak of, the requisite number of eyes, ears, noses and so on. Let me concentrate on something more interesting. To the right of the pram is a table which has been painted bright green. Whose idea was that, I wonder? It looks hideous. Perhaps it was that colour when they bought it. Roger and Beatrix had no money to speak of. He worked for the County Council, something to do with visiting the local farmers and checking that they were meeting production quotas laid down by the government. (In fact his work quite often took him to Warden Farm, although that was not, as I said, how he and Beatrix had met.) He picked up quite a few nice little gifts in the course of this job – not bribes, exactly, simply tokens of friendship (I’m sure this is how he would have put it) from people anxious to stay on good terms with him. What this meant, in practice, was that he and Beatrix did not have to rely entirely on their ration book, and were never short of good farm produce. There are a dozen or more brown eggs sitting in a bowl on the green table, and a big slab of yellow butter in a butter-dish. Such items were still in short supply, even then, and there would have been housewives in Much Wenlock who would have longed to get their hands on them. What a pity that Beatrix hadn’t the faintest idea how to cook. The phrase ‘she couldn’t boil an egg’ was literally true of her. She was still just a girl, remember, and she had never been expected to do much for herself at home. Finding that she was suddenly expected to run a household must have been a terrible shock. I went to stay with them on a few occasions, and each time I was astonished by what Beatrix gave us to eat for dinner. Potatoes as hard as stones, chicken lily-white and leaking blood over the plate, runner beans that had not even been topped and tailed. Roger would push his plate aside without comment after a few mouthfuls, as if this was exactly what he had (already) come to expect, put on his coat wordlessly and go out to the pub.

  It was an adventure for me, certainly, at the age of sixteen, to stay unaccompanied in the house of this newly married couple. Thinking about it, I am rather surprised that my parents were happy with the arrangement. No doubt they would have been less happy with it had they known that Roger once made a crude pass at me while Beatrix was out of the room. (Although she was only next door, in the kitchen, doing the washing up.) I was too mortified ever to mention this episode to anyone, even Beatrix herself. Roger took my rejection with perfect equanimity – indeed with that air of indifference of which he was a perfect master. He seemed blithely unconcerned – or perhaps simply unaware – that it might affect my feelings towards him, or make for an uncomfortable situation when the three of us were together. There was a matter-of-fact coarseness about him – a moral coarseness, I mean – which infected the household, and to which Beatrix herself was either indifferent or, worse still (and I do think this is the truth of the matter, in retrospect), attracted. That, above all, is why it seemed such a loveless and unwelcoming house, and why I find this picture of the darkened kitchen so evocative.

  Aside from the contents of the green table, there is not much evidence of food in this photograph. The jars on the shelves of the dresser mostly appear to be empty. They look like the kind of jars in which you would keep home-made jam, but I would be amazed if Beatrix ever made any. Similarly, the way that one tin is visibly labelled ‘FLOUR’ and the bread-bin bears the proud inscription ‘BREAD’ strikes me as poignant: these are references to what they should have contained, not what was actually in them. There is a chopping board, a pair of scales with a set of weights neatly stacked beside them, a hand-operated mincer clamped to the side of the table, a large brown teapot ringed with green and creamy horizontal stripes. Everything looks cold and untouched. I wonder where Beatrix was when I took this picture. She might have been out at the shops – always a lengthy excursion in those days, the queues for the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s used to stretch halfway down the street – or she might just have been in the living room next door, where they kept their black Bakelite radio, tuned permanently to the Light Programme. Beatrix never listened to the news or to educational programmes or even variety shows: she only wanted to hear music, music bubbling out of the radio in a continuous stream. Light orchestral music, in the main, the sort that the BBC had started to commission from composers with the clear aim of boosting morale: jaunty, up-tempo, foot-tapping pieces which were meant to bring a smile to your face and could be fitted on to one side of a ‘78’ record. There was one tune she was particularly fond of: the title was ‘Portrait of a Flirt’. (I will not draw the obvious conclusions.) I suppose such compositions acted as a sort of musical Prozac for depressed post-war housewives. I don’t know whether it worked, in Beatrix’s case, but she was certainly in need of it.

  The walls and door of the kitchen are painted that creamy, brownish white that was so popular at the time. It was as if people were afraid to let any real light and brightness into their lives – or it had never occurred to them that they were allowed to do so. On the left-hand side of the picture – the opposite side to the green table and the mahogany dresser – is a large and deep porcelain sink, with a blue chequered tea towel thrown over the edge to dry. Next to it is a wooden draining board, which appears to be covered with newly washed clothes, waiting to be dried – it’s hard to be certain, since most of the pile is off the edge of the photograph. There is no fridge in the kitchen, I notice: not many households had them, back in those days, and in any case there is not enough room.

  It’s possible that I may have washed those clothes myself. It was the kind of thing Beatrix persuaded me to do whenever I visited. There was no washing machine, of course: just a basin of hot water, soap powder, a mangle and a washing line. My hands would be chapped and wrinkled for hours afterwards. I also did a fair amount of babysitting, while Beatrix went out in the evenings: by herself, that is, never with Roger. She had joined a number of local societies, throwing herself with particular gusto into amateur dramatics. She belonged, if I remember correctly, to the Much Wenlock Women’s Institute Playe
rs and took a leading role in their production of Mystery at Greenfingers, by Priestley. As for some of her other activities – bridge clubs and sewing circles, and so on – I suspect that they were really just a pretext for bored women to get together and drink and laugh. It is very apparent to me, in restrospect, that Beatrix and Roger had no future together, from the very earliest days of their marriage. At the time, I suppose I must just have taken it for granted that this was what married life was like. I can’t say that it whetted my appetite for it. But I was too young, far too young, to dream of criticizing Beatrix for accepting this. I was still devoted to her, still felt bound and obligated to her, and the only thing I felt on her behalf was sadness, really, a sort of unspoken, unexamined sadness at the thought that so much of her joy in living already seemed to have been snuffed out. I could not help seeing that she was unhappy, and desperately frustrated. It was a narrow, pinched little life they were making for themselves. Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out – twice, I think – to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I’m now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the late spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me – to all of us – because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century… It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger – the beginnings of the Welsh mountains, already hinted at by one of the wilder and more eerie features of the Long Mynd itself. I mean the Stiperstones, of course, that long dark ridge of massive, serrated rocks, cast by the ravages of weather and time into weird formations, the weirdest of all being the Devil’s Chair, which has spawned all sorts of fanciful and macabre legends. Anyway, now is perhaps not the time to elaborate upon those stories. I have my own story to tell, and in any case, Beatrix and Roger never took me to those more remote regions. (I first explored them a few years later, with Rebecca – but I have not yet told you who Rebecca was, and that, too, must wait its turn.) We would usually drive no further than Church Stretton, and then up to the Cardingmill Valley. There is a lovely and famous walk you can make there, up to the Light Spout waterfall and finally (although the three of us never made it that far) to the summit of the Long Mynd itself. If that landscape, to me, seemed visionary and unreal (you must remember what an impressionable sixteen-year-old I was), the response it evoked in Beatrix and Roger was – how shall I put this? – somewhat earthier. It seemed to have an almost sexual effect on them, not to mince words. I have a vivid memory of them disappearing into some shady recess, leaving me alone with Thea and the picnic things, the two of us lying side by side on the thick woollen tartan rug while her parents busied themselves secretly, their dormant animal attraction for each other reawakened, no doubt, by the sunshine and the sense you always had in this place of proximity to nature, of closeness to some primal, life-giving force. It’s amazing in a way that Beatrix never got pregnant again. What kind of difference would that have made, I wonder, to subsequent events? I think on the whole it’s better that it didn’t happen.