The Rain Before It Falls

by Jonathan Coe

  It’s certain, at least, that we both look ecstatically happy. Baby Thea was at Warden Farm, being looked after by her grandparents (or more likely a member of their staff), and her absence always seemed to lift Bea’s spirits. That’s a shocking thing to say, isn’t it? But quite true. Furthermore, we were being paid for our day’s work: one pound and ten shillings each, an absolutely colossal sum in those days. With that money, I was able to buy myself any new book that I wanted, for more than a year afterwards! The whole town was suffused with a sort of carnival atmosphere. There were spotlights, cables and reflectors everywhere. Normal life was impossible and indeed had been abandoned by almost everyone. One or two unimpressed tradesmen and shopkeepers refused to cooperate and would not remain silent when the cameras were turning. There were a number of retakes on that account, and some angry words exchanged. The whole process, I remember, was extremely slow. It took most of the day just to achieve that particular shot, and there were long hours of standing about waiting for the sunshine. The crew seemed to find these delays boring; I was happy for them to go on for ever. Of course I was not brave enough to speak to Jennifer Jones herself: in fact the first time I glimpsed her, in the flesh, I almost fainted. She was only a few feet away from me, in full costume, and was chatting quite naturally and unaffectedly, not to a fellow actor or crew member, but to one of the townspeople! I suddenly felt guilty, and somehow… filthy (that sounds excessive, I know, but it is the truth) for having kept that picture under my pillow for so long, for having made a fetish of it like that. It seemed to take away my entitlement to have a normal conversation with her. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt, grass-green, with double pleats at the ankle and puffs at the sleeve, and a slightly battered straw hat which matched the blue of the sky and was circled with worn and faded orange roses. I think the point of the costume was to emphasize the contrast between her character’s dress, which was meant to be newly bought, and the hat, which was not. Her figure looked stunning in this dress, but I learned afterwards this was partly because she had spent hours getting herself squeezed into an incredibly tight corset. She must have been in agony. Anyway, despite being too shy to say anything to her, I was happy to spend the time between takes just bathing in her presence, in her proximity. She was every bit as beautiful in real life as on the screen; in fact more so, because, in repose, there was a kind of sadness to her expression, as if some settled melancholy had started to engrave itself upon her, and this somehow gave her face more character than it had seemed to wear in her photographs. I could not take my eyes off her.

  Beatrix, however, had found another way of occupying herself. Inside the buttermarket, last-minute work was still being carried out on some of the props and sets. In particular, they were busy putting the finishing touches to the market stall where Jennifer Jones’s character would soon be having a conversation with her cousin in one of the later scenes, and already Beatrix had managed to strike up quite a friendship with one of the carpenters there. He was not a local man – his name was Jack, and he had come up with the crew from London, where he had been working for some months at Shepperton studios. Beatrix would fetch him pints of beer from the George and Dragon and then they would share them, leaning together on the counter of the market stall and losing themselves in silly, flirtatious chat.

  I had better cut short what is rapidly turning into a very long story. In a matter of days, the production had moved on from Much Wenlock to Church Stretton, so that they could start filming in the real Shropshire hill country. My time at Beatrix’s house came to an end, and I took the train back home. I had enjoyed the experience – enjoyed it more than just about anything that had happened to me in recent years – but I could see that the film-making world was a different world to my own, one in which I did not altogether belong or feel comfortable. I was still a very withdrawn and awkward girl. To have stood in the street next to Jennifer Jones was, of course, something I could never have pictured even in my most outrageous fantasies, and I knew that I would never forget it (which has turned out to be true), but in spite of that, the life these people seemed to lead looked fragile and unreal to me. And although everyone connected with the film had been welcoming, and friendly, I did not mistake those qualities for anything else: I knew that when the filming was over, the two worlds would separate, life – routine, everyday life – would return to that corner of Shropshire, and the gods would move on, to whichever exalted place their orbit carried them next, without a single regret or a backward glance. That was the natural order of things.

  With Beatrix, it was quite different. Her head had been completely turned by these events, and there could be no going back. For the next few weeks, she followed the crew wherever they went, first of all to the hill country and then to Shrewsbury, where they set up a makeshift studio in a disused aerodrome. If she could not leave Thea with her husband, she would leave her with someone else, or, as a last resort, she would take her along. She became a familiar bystander and hanger-on (and appeared in one or two more crowd scenes, I believe, although I have never been able to spot her). And she spent as much time as possible talking to Jack.

  This is how I imagine it happened. One day, he would have asked her if she could guess how much he was being paid for his work on the film. She would have named some extravagant sum, and he would have shaken his head, looking at her teasingly. Then he would have taken her on to the set, and he would have shown her the caravan.

  It was a real old gipsy caravan, solid and beautifully made. He had been restoring it, and painting it, and it was now a festive riot of yellow and blue stripes. It was going to be used as the backdrop to one of the key scenes in the film, after nightfall at the Shropshire County Fair. And this, no less, was the payment he had negotiated for himself. When work on the film was finished, he was going to keep this caravan, buy himself a horse and set off on a voyage of exploration. He was a free spirit and he had been doing other people’s work for long enough. It was time to do something for himself.

  ‘Where will you be going?’ Beatrix would have asked, mightily impressed. And he would have answered: ‘To Ireland.’ Yes, he was going to trek around Ireland in a gipsy caravan. Could anything have been more ludicrously romantic? All he needed to complete the escapade, when you think about it, was a companion: a female companion, obviously, one who was pretty enough to look good sitting beside him on the front seat of that caravan and who shared his sense of adventure, his willingness to break out of the shackles of convention. Until now, he had not had the good fortune to find this person. But now, suddenly, his luck was in. The search was over.

  Let me look at the lobby card my friend sent me. It is a good picture of her, of Jennifer Jones. In this scene, her character is having difficulty resisting a particularly strong seduction attempt from the villainous squire. The squire, played by David Farrar, has his back to the camera. The only clue to his character, in this picture, is offered by his shoulders, which are broad and masterful. His position towards her is domineering. Her face is soft and vulnerable. She is pleading with him, wordlessly, not to throw temptation in her path like this. She is drawn to him, but also repulsed. Why repulsed? The film never really explains that, except by making it clear that he is wicked. Jack was not wicked – not by any means, so far as I know. Nonetheless, it was not a good decision, on Beatrix’s part, to throw in her lot with him and his gipsy caravan. Perhaps it was just something she had to get out of her system. You can see a good part of the caravan here, behind the two incipient lovers. I was mistaken about the blue and yellow stripes – there are green ones, as well. Not that it matters. There are two candleholders on either side of the front door, with torches burning brightly in them. Does it help you, Imogen, to understand any of this, if I describe so minutely the things that you will never be able to see? Does it help you to understand why your grandmother walked out on your grandfather in the autumn of 1949, and took your infant mother along with her, and dragged her round Ireland in a gipsy caravan for more than
three years?

  I don’t know whether it does or it doesn’t. I can only give you the facts, after all. The facts of what I see before me, and the facts of what I remember, or believe that I do. I remember Beatrix leaving, anyway. I remember my mother receiving the news from her sister Ivy, on the telephone, and then telling me. I remember being terribly hurt that Beatrix had not troubled to tell me herself. But then it was all done in great haste. The first that Roger knew about it, so the story went, was when he came home from work one day and found that both his wife and daughter were missing. Goodness only knows what he must have felt, when the realization broke upon him. Relief, I suppose! Certainly he never made any attempt to follow them. He was free again, sooner than he could have dared to hope. To a man like him, that could only have been a blessing.

  A postcard, now, for picture number nine. The only postcard that Beatrix ever sent me, in all the years that she was away in Ireland.

  ‘Brandon Bay’, the caption says, in handwritten capital letters, in the bottom left-hand corner of the card. I have never been to Brandon Bay, or indeed to Ireland. It is somewhere on the Dingle peninsula, I believe. But I still know this landscape well. In fact I do not even need to look at the postcard to describe it to you. In my bedroom at my parents’ house in Bournville I worked at a little school desk. It was here, in the early months of 1950, that I sat every night doing my homework and working for my School Certificate. I pinned this photograph on to the wall, in front of me – a wall that was otherwise covered with revision timetables, lists of dates from history and quotations from Shakespeare and others. It was the one little bit of escapism I allowed myself. My mother did not approve, because the postcard was from Beatrix, and Beatrix had disgraced herself and the family (yes, people still thought like that, in those days) by abandoning her husband and running off with another man. But still, she did not try to stop me from pinning the picture to my wall. She knew that, where Beatrix was concerned, my loyalty could not be shaken.

  The colours have survived the last half-century remarkably well. The greens and golden yellows of the mountains are still strong and vivid. The ocean looks pale – grey rather than blue – but I believe it must always have looked that way. The photograph was taken from high up on a mountain overlooking the bay, on a day when the sky was overcast, a flurry of cumulus clouds. In the foreground, there is an outcrop of rocks, jutting out of the thick grass, and then this outcrop dwindles away into an archipelago of smaller, broken-up rocks scattered down the side of the mountain, as if a giant had tossed them there. The sweep of the mountain down to the bay is quite gentle, taking you across a mile or so of intermingled greens, browns and yellows – all uncultivated, and quite barren, with what seem to be the ruins of a cottage somewhere in the middle – and then sweeping down to the water’s edge. The sea lies placid and unmoving, and behind it, thrusting itself forward, is another shoulder of land, tapering into a spear-like strip of beach. A window of pale blue sky, the palest blue imaginable, is just opening or closing between the clouds. In the far distance is the hint, no more, of another bay, and beyond that, more land, an island perhaps, just the faint intimation of its shadowy bulk, rising up and falling back into the water like the body of some enormous whale or sea-monster.

  On the reverse of the postcard were a few words which I have also committed to memory. They were:

  ‘Dear Ros. Hooray for freedom! The open road and the clear blue sky! I have discovered how to live at long last. Love Bea.’

  It was the only message she sent me, and the only contact I had with her, for almost four years. The next time I saw her, I was already at university.

  Now, this one brings back some memories, I must say. Picture number ten: a boat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and a face I have not looked at for many, many long years: my fiancé, Maurice. And sitting beside him, the woman whom I suppose I must describe as the first, and greatest, love of my life – Rebecca. A unique photograph, I have to say, and one which records a most uncomfortable and ill-advised afternoon.

  I was a student at the time. Rebecca and I were both students, although she was in her third year and I was still in my first. We were studying at King’s College, London, and I was living in a hall of residence in South Kensington, not far from the Albert Hall. All very thrilling to me, as you might imagine, after almost twenty years in the suburbs of Birmingham.

  As for my engagement, that was something I had allowed to happen (my role in it being really no more active than that) just before coming down to London. His name, as I said, was Maurice, and we had met at Bournville tennis club and had ‘walked out’ together (the phrase will sound impossibly quaint to you, I’m sure) for just a few weeks before he proposed to me. He was my first boyfriend. I suppose that in those days, not being very interested in men, I somehow assumed that they would show no interest in me either. It was such a shock when somebody did take an interest that I felt absurdly grateful to him. This gratitude was easily mistaken for something else, and for a while I must genuinely have believed that I was attracted to Maurice. I must even have believed myself to be in love with him. However, this delusion, I am pleased to say, did not endure. I had Rebecca to thank for that.

  She was two years older than me, so there were not, in theory, very many reasons for us to meet. The first time was at a party given by mutual friends. I can’t remember the occasion, at all. I can only remember a room full of over-earnest young people – a positive sea of cardigans and pullovers, an ocean of wool – and in the midst of it – or, I should more accurately say, on the fringes – someone who clearly did not fit in, someone who had over-dressed for the occasion, misjudged it completely and was standing in a full-length, sleeveless evening gown, hovering on the edges of several groups, but too reserved, it appeared, to break into any of them. I could only marvel at how lovely and glamorous she seemed, compared to these other somewhat nondescript friends of mine. Her shoulders were exquisite. At the same time, I am ashamed to say, I rather despised her for her shyness and decided not to approach her, even though I was convinced that she was trying to catch my eye. And so we remained in this somewhat ridiculous situation for the next two hours, eyeing each other up surreptitiously, but neither of us brave or generous enough to make the leap into conversation.

  In retrospect, it’s the sort of behaviour you might expect from two potential lovers. Needless to say, this reflection did not occur to me at the time.

  I saw Rebecca many times over the next few weeks, but usually at a distance, or in a crowded lecture theatre, or busy refectory. If I had taken the opportunity to speak to her on the first of these occasions and said something banal but friendly, such as, ‘Not much of a party the other night, was it?’, then we would have got started much sooner. Something always seemed to stop me, and yet nothing (I realized, after a while) seemed to stop me from thinking of her, or looking out for her. It rapidly became apparent to me that I was, in some sense that I couldn’t or wouldn’t define, obsessed with her.

  As one can see from this photograph, Rebecca had blonde hair, not quite shoulder length. She was very tall, and her skin was pale, with a hint of freckles. Habitually she wore a rather doleful expression – if you caught her offguard, in a private moment, you might think that she looked dejected – but she also had a lively, girlish sense of humour and was easily roused to laughter. When she laughed, her blue-green eyes narrowed to slits and her lips parted widely to reveal two perfect rows of large white teeth. It goes without saying that she seemed to me absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.

  When I did finally speak to her, it was on a Friday afternoon. Maurice was coming down for the weekend, and I was running out of Hall on my way to meet him at Euston station. She was standing near the front door, looking at one of the noticeboards. I was late and in a dreadful hurry. None the less, impelled as if by some magnetic force, I paused, altered my route and went over to stand by her. She was reading the flyer for some forthcoming concert, and I pretended to be interested in it too. I sto
od so close to her that I almost touched her shoulder, causing her to turn and look at me. It may have been my imagination but I was convinced that, when she saw who it was standing beside her, her eyes lit up, briefly, involuntarily, and a smile flitted across her face. It would be impossible, now, not to say anything to her, so I stumbled out some words. ‘Looks interesting, doesn’t it?’ I was referring to the concert, although I had barely glanced at the flyer, and had no idea which works were being performed. She answered: ‘Yes. I think I might go along.’ She asked me if I already had a ticket, and when I said that I hadn’t, she said that she would buy two. And that was that. The whole exchange had taken about ten seconds. But when I walked away, and out into the busy street, it already felt as though my life had been turned around and set in a completely new direction.

  That was a strange weekend, a weekend of mixed feelings. Excitement – an entirely irrational excitement, which I never allowed myself to analyse – at the prospect of an evening spent with Rebecca, mingled with irritation (there is really no other word) with Maurice and all his ways. We had been seeing each other for about three months, by now, and had been engaged for almost half that time. Of course, when he came down to see me for the weekend, he stayed by himself at an hotel, never in my room at Hall. Overnight visits were strictly forbidden by the university authorities. I once suggested, teasingly, that I should smuggle him in after the eleven o’clock curfew, but he was profoundly shocked, and afterwards I realized, on reflection, how relieved I was that he hadn’t taken me up on it. It was such a pleasure, I’m ashamed to say, after kissing him goodnight on the main steps, to feel the front door shutting between us, and to walk up the stairs to my room, alone. Free, and autonomous. All the same, we spent a lot of time together on those weekends, and got to know each other’s habits pretty well. Too well, as a matter of fact. I vividly remember a stupid argument we had over table manners. I accused him of making too much noise by scraping his knife across the plate while he was eating. It was setting my teeth on edge. What was really setting my teeth on edge, needless to say, was the fact that I was sitting having dinner with Maurice at all, when my head was already full of Rebecca. The feeling was unbearable, literally unbearable. I don’t know what stopped me from walking out on him there and then. But it’s amazing how long one can stay in denial, over certain things.