The Rain Before It Falls

by Jonathan Coe

  In this way, the remainder of the afternoon slipped by. There was only one further incident worthy of mention. I opened my eyes, at one point, and noticed that the bedroom door was standing ajar. I had not heard it open. I glanced across and realized that Beatrix had returned to the house. She was staring at us. All I could see of her – or at least, all I can now remember – was her eyes: bloodshot, rounded, locked on to the recumbent figures of Thea and myself with a bulbous, mesmerized fixity. The image reminds me now, more than anything else, of the character Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, with his gaze and his thoughts concentrated on his ‘precious’. I don’t know why that comparison should occur to me, but it does: I hope it doesn’t seem too grotesque or inappropriate.

  Our eyes met, for the briefest of moments: Beatrix’s and mine. Then she was gone, silently. I allowed my head to drop back against the pillow and was surprised to notice how fast and fiercely my heart was beating.

  Slowly, as the evening progressed, the household returned to something like normality. I came downstairs and cooked supper for everyone, leaving Thea to slumber on for another hour or so. When she at last emerged from her bedroom and came down herself, the first thing she attempted to do was to hug her mother, who returned the gesture coldly and indifferently. I flashed Beatrix a reproving look, but it went unnoticed. She seemed to have cheered up considerably since the afternoon’s upheavals. I wouldn’t even say that her cheerfulness seemed forced or strained: she was in genuinely high spirits, and was even jollier when Charles phoned up to say that, earlier in the evening, he had locked himself out of the house and sprained his ankle trying to get in through an upstairs window. Beatrix thought this was hilarious, and for her youngest children she painted a most vivid word-picture of their father’s discomfort and misadventures. All of which I listened to with a certain bafflement, I must say. Thea herself did not join in.

  Finally the children were put to bed (by me), and the two of us were left alone together downstairs. The conversation which followed was one I have never forgotten.

  I had never once, in my life, spoken a word of criticism of Beatrix to her face. I suppose I had always been too scared of her. Tonight, if anything, I was more scared of her than ever. Nevertheless, I could hardly hold my tongue, after the scene I had witnessed this afternoon. And so, after we had both been sitting in silence for a few minutes, as the shadows lengthened on the lawn outside, I first of all spoke her name very softly and then, once she had turned her head stiffly towards me, I said: ‘I do think your behaviour towards Thea this afternoon calls for some explanation.’ On hearing these words, she smiled at me – a brittle, challenging smile – and answered: ‘How strange. I was going to say the very same thing to you.’ I did not understand this remark, and I said so, adding: ‘After all, I was not the one who attacked her with a knife.’ ‘I attacked her door with a knife,’ Beatrix corrected me. ‘There is a world of difference. I never laid a finger on Thea – nor would I, however much she provoked me.’ ‘You intended to harm her,’ I said. To which she replied: ‘What I intended is neither here nor there. I repeat: I never laid a finger on her.’ There was such a strong emphasis on the personal pronoun that I immediately caught her drift – and, not for the first time that day, found myself astounded and horrified beyond words. ‘Beatrix,’ I cried, ‘exactly what are you implying?’ She answered: ‘You know very well. You know very well that I saw you, beneath the sheets, with my daughter.’ And then, with quiet but careful emphasis, she added: ‘Touching her.’ I sat there for a few seconds, open-mouthed, my mind reeling, before saying: ‘Beatrix, what on earth do you mean?’ She looked at me coolly and said: ‘I know you, Rosamond. I know what you are. Don’t think that Thea has never told me: what you used to get up to, with that woman. When you were meant to be looking after her.’ And, having delivered herself of these words, she picked up a magazine from a nearby table, and began to read.

  I got up, left the room, and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, trembling with rage. The next morning, I packed my bags and returned to London.

  That rage has never left me, Imogen. I feel it even now. I saw on that day – that evening – what a cruel and manipulative person Beatrix had become. Perhaps she had always been that way, and I had been unable to see it. Once again, in any case, she had succeeded in separating me from her daughter, at a time when Thea really needed me. That was a tragedy, for both of us, but I did not see that I had any choice. And I was still determined not to abandon her entirely, however hard Beatrix tried to make that happen. I would find ways, somehow or other. That was still my resolve.

  I am tempted, now, to crumple this photograph up and throw it away. The smiles on our faces nauseate me. Well, the smile on my face, anyway; and hers. None of the children are smiling, in point of fact – Thea with better reason than most. What a deceitful thing a photograph is. They say that memory plays tricks on one. Not nearly as much as a photograph does, in my view. Let me put this lying image to one side, close my eyes, and think back to that day.

  What do I see?

  Clouds. White clouds, drifting against a pale grey sky. The sky framed by the small latticed window in Thea’s bedroom, at the back of that sad, beautiful house. I watch the patterns, the ceaselessly changing patterns, forming and dissolving, forming and dissolving, as the long afternoon slips away in near-silence. Sometimes a cry from the garden, the sound of the younger children, as they carry on with their game. Thea asleep beside me: so young, so vulnerable, so bewildered. The pressure of her body against my arm, and the cloud patterns forming and dissolving, forming and dissolving. White against grey, and the pressure of her body…

  Number fifteen, and we are back to Warden Farm again. At long last! It’s Christmas, now. The night before Christmas 1966. They adored Christmas, Ivy and Owen, and could never wait till the day itself to start celebrating. The first of many big meals always used to take place on Christmas Eve. Just look at us – the whole family sitting around the kitchen table. Eleven people, I can count. I wonder if I can put names to all the faces, after all these years.

  Well now. There are my mother and father – that’s easy enough. And Ivy and Owen, of course. So that’s the older generation dealt with.

  Only one of Ivy’s sons is present: that must be Digby, who would already have been in his midthirties, and newly married to the tall, slightly toothy, rather giraffe-like woman sitting next to him. Her name, I think, was Marjorie, though I cannot be sure of that. The other son, Raymond, already had a wife and children of his own and must have been away with them somewhere. Beatrix and her family – most of her family, I should say – were in Canada. Sitting next to Marjorie is my sister, Sylvia, and next to her is an empty chair which should have been occupied by her husband, Thomas, my brother-in-law. Where is he, I wonder? Ah… taking the photograph, of course. How silly of me. I seem to have been sitting next to Thomas, and next to me, looking very sulky indeed in her yellow party hat (we are all wearing party hats), is Thea. Eighteen years old, she would have been. I shall tell you in a moment why she was there, all alone, without the rest of Bea’s family, and I shall tell you why I was there, too, but first of all, to complete the picture, I should just mention the two small children who are sitting opposite each other at one end of the table. These children are David and Gill, my nephew and niece. She is about nine and he is about seven, at this time. (Gill, of course, is grown up now and, as I think I have told you already, she will be looking after my effects when I am gone.)

  Meals at Warden Farm were nearly always taken in the kitchen, rather than the dining room. In that respect (as in many others) little had changed since the war. The dining room was dim, austere and forbidding. A chill seemed to hang over it; whereas the kitchen had always been one of my favourite haunts, during the time of my evacuation. Partly, I suppose, that had been down to the friendly, talkative presence of the cook. She was long gone, now: the days of Ivy and Owen’s prosperity were fading, and they no longer employed any domestic staff. But it
was impossible not to be cheered by the warmth and cosiness of that kitchen. I remember the colour of the flagstones, in particular, although you cannot see them in this picture: they were smooth and ruddy, the same reddish-brown colour as the mud that Uncle Owen would bring into the house on his Wellington boots after he had been out feeding the pigs. Everything in the kitchen seemed to be touched by this same reddish light; it bounced back off the copper ladles and saucepans which you can see hanging on the wall at the back of this photograph. The warmth of that kitchen was the warmth of a glowing hearth; the warmth at the crackling centre of a good log fire. It was a good place to be, on Christmas Eve. I was glad that I had chosen to come there, and glad, for all her obvious discontent, that I had persuaded Thea to come with me.

  Christmas was always a problem, in those days. It is a difficult time for the single woman. Yes, Imogen, I was still alone, and still living in my bedsit in Wandsworth, although in other respects, life was starting to improve. I’d handed in my notice at the department store, taken courses in typing and shorthand, and found myself a job as secretary to the director of a publishing house with offices in Bedford Square. It was the beginning, did I but know it, of my career in publishing: my introduction to the circles in which I would, a few years later, meet my dear companion Ruth. However, that was still in the future.

  In the meantime, I was not sanguine at the prospect of another Christmas spent in spinsterly isolation. My father had retired, by now, and my parents had moved to Shropshire, to a large, very lovely cottage which lay only a mile or two from Warden Farm and indeed formed part of Uncle Owen’s estate. It came with a substantial garden and three adjoining fields which were usually occupied, under some informal arrangement, by a pair of racehorses belonging to one of their neighbours. My sister and her husband visited regularly, and a tradition of spending Christmases there was soon established. David and Gill loved it, of course: loved everything about it. But only six people could sleep there, so I was left to make my own arrangements. There seemed to be an assumption that, because I lived alone in London, I must have been part of a wildly Bohemian circle of like-minded souls, and the idea of a conventional family Christmas in Shropshire would have horrified me. In fact it was exactly what I wanted.

  This year, anyway, my mother hit upon the bright idea of asking Ivy if she could put me up at Warden Farm. She agreed – I don’t know how readily – and I arranged to travel up by train on Christmas Eve.

  Since the incident at Milford on Sea, my relations with Beatrix had, to put it mildly, been more difficult than ever; although the strange thing was that the difficulty appeared to be all on one side. She liked to pretend that nothing had happened. Just a few weeks later, she had telephoned and invited me out to dinner. I had been expecting her, at the very least, to offer some sort of apology for her shocking behaviour; but instead, she chattered away all evening, generally on the most trivial of subjects, apparently quite oblivious to the terrible damage she had inflicted upon her daughter, and upon my feelings, earlier that summer. It was most peculiar; and I confess that, from that point onwards, I was not just wary of Beatrix (I had been that for some time) but actually found it difficult to sustain a civil conversation with her. As always, the force that kept drawing me back towards her was Thea: my desire – you might almost call it a need – to watch over her, to make sure that she was not being entirely starved of love and attention. None the less, Beatrix made it as difficult as possible for me to fulfil this desire. Invitations over to the house in Pinner were rare. If I tried to arrange a weekend outing with her family – to Richmond Park, for example, or Box Hill – it would often mysteriously turn out that Thea could not come, having a prior engagement with one of her friends. Beatrix did her level best, in other words, to ensure that I saw her elder daughter rarely, if ever at all.

  It was late at night, the night before Christmas Eve 1966, when the telephone rang in my flat, and I heard Thea’s voice on the line. She was eighteen years old now, and was ringing to tell me that, following the latest argument with her mother, it looked as if she was going to be spending Christmas all alone. The rest of the family had gone to visit Charles’s parents in Canada for three weeks. Thea had either refused to go, or been forbidden from going – I never did quite establish the full details. What was clear was that she didn’t relish the prospect of rattling around in a six-bedroom house in Pinner all by herself for the whole of the festive season. She asked if she could come over and stay with me, in my flat. When I told her that I wouldn’t be there, because I was planning to spend Christmas with her grandparents – whom she had met perhaps two or three times in her life – she was at first nonplussed. And then I made the obvious suggestion: that she should come with me. I must say, I thought that the prospect would appeal to her; even excite her. Warden Farm was (to my mind, at least) such a thrilling and mysterious place, still, that I could not see how the opportunity of spending a few days there could seem anything other than tantalizing. But Thea betrayed no emotion at all when she agreed to catch the train with me the next day. Her voice was quite flat and toneless, and I have to admit that I was disappointed. I got far more of a reaction out of Ivy when I telephoned the next morning and informed her that I would be bringing her eldest granddaughter to stay with me over the Christmas period. I wouldn’t say that she sounded pleased, but the news certainly seemed to affect her. ‘Flabbergasted’ might be the best way to describe her response.

  We took the train to Shrewsbury the next day, Christmas Eve, and it was my father who picked us up from the station and drove us over to Warden Farm. The sky was silver-grey. A pale late-afternoon sun washed the meadows and hedgerows in winter light. In London there had been dustings of snow. Here it lay thick and deep: unbroken swathes of smooth, white velvet. I had not travelled these roads for ten years or more. They seemed utterly familiar; and at the same time, utterly strange and otherworldly. I could not reconcile these two feelings. I can remember this sensation – this thought – very clearly. The realization that sometimes, it is possible – even necessary – to entertain contradictory ideas; to accept the truth of two things that flatly contradict each other. I was only just beginning to understand this: only just beginning to acknowledge that this is one of the fundamental conditions of our existence. How old was I? I was thirty-three. So, yes: you could say that I was just starting to grow up.

  As we came close to the farmhouse, I asked my father to take the longer way round, through the village, so that we approached it from the south. This way, we could stop about half a mile from the house and have a good view of it through the elder trees by the side of the road. So this is what we did. And there it stood, just as I remembered it: ancient, commanding, ivy-clad; rooted in the soil, and seeming to belong so organically to the surrounding landscape that it was easier to believe it had grown from some seed scattered two centuries ago, than that it had ever been designed or constructed. Today its roofs were snow-capped, as were the tops of the trees that surrounded it. The fields that lay before it were ploughed, now, and carpeted in snow that rose and fell in furrows of pure whiteness, like waves on an Arctic ocean.

  We drove on, and entered the farmyard through the back gate. Hearing my father’s car crunch its way across the ice-covered yard, Ivy came running to the back door to greet us. I was reminded, powerfully reminded, of my first arrival there, more than a quarter of a century ago. Once again I felt myself enfolded in her smoky, doggy embrace, and heard her stretch out the words, ‘Hallo, my dear,’ to an unprecedented length. Then she saw Thea, and gasped. She put a hand on her shoulder, keeping her at a distance, and looked her up and down, delight and amazement on her face. ‘Is that my granddaughter?’ she asked, disbelievingly, then seized her with incredible violence (Thea looked briefly stunned and also, if truth be told, ever so slightly bruised) and clasped her in a vicelike embrace. While she found herself being clutched in this way, Thea’s face was towards me: I looked at her, searching, again, for signs of emotion – joy, affection,
discomfort, any kind of feeling, in short – but I could see nothing. There was no light in her eyes, nothing behind them, no spirit animating her at all.

  Deadness.

  At least in this photograph there is some expression on her face, even if she just seems to be cross that she has been made to wear a party hat. These hats had come out of Christmas crackers, the remains of which can be seen here lying strewn across the kitchen table. The debris of the meal is visible, too, or some of it: I can see traces of ham and cold turkey and celery, and the discarded jackets of baked potatoes. Aunt Ivy has not changed, noticeably, since the last time we saw her in a photograph (1948, at your grandmother’s wedding, wasn’t it?). Uncle Owen, on the other hand, seems to have doubled in size. He is holding the half-chewed leg of a turkey in his right hand, and his lips are purple – which means, I think, not that he is about to have some sort of seizure, but that he’s been eating beetroot. David and Gill seem to be lost in some conversation of their own – not surprising, I suppose – and David’s hat (a red one) has slid down over his eyes: it is far too big for him. My mother, I have to say, looks a little remote and preoccupied. Was this the Christmas when she’d just been doing her jury service? They gave her a rather grisly and distressing case to deal with, I seem to remember. But I honestly couldn’t say whether that was this year, or another year altogether.

  No doubt we played charades at some point – that was a long-standing family tradition, though a very tedious one, in my opinion – but my next clear memory of the evening comes much later. Some time between eleven-thirty and eleven-forty-five, everybody left for the parish church, to attend midnight communion. Even David and Gill, despite being so young – I recall that quite vividly. Aunt Ivy was due to read one of the lessons: a regular duty, on her part. She was much in demand for this purpose because even in ordinary conversation her voice could be heard as far as the Wrekin. The only people who didn’t go were myself and Thea.