The Rain Before it Falls (10 page)

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 Players 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.

I wish I had a picture of one of those picnics. I would like to look on our faces again, me and Beatrix, together, somewhere on those hills. But this picture of the kitchen, dreary though it is, tells more of the story. And it is appropriate, too, to dwell on the infant figure of Thea, your mother, as she lies in her pram, unaware of the turns her narrative is about to take, unaware that the fragile sense of security she has enjoyed in her short life up until this point is already on the verge of splintering for ever into fragments. How peaceful she looks, in her baby ignorance!

The eighth picture is quite different from those that I’ve chosen before. It was not taken by me, or Beatrix, or any member of our family. It was given to me, in fact, following a dinner party in London when I was well into my fifties. It features a caravan – another caravan! I am only just beginning to realize what an important part caravans play in this story. There will be other ones, too, before I am finished. But this particular caravan is rather special, and so are the two people standing in front of it. They are both actors. One of them is called Jennifer Jones, and the other is called David Farrar. I suppose it is just possible that you might have heard of them.

Where to begin? Ruth, the friend with whom I shared a good many years of my life, was a gregarious person and liked to entertain regularly. She was a painter – rather a highly regarded painter, at this time (by which I mean the late 1980s) – and the people we had to dinner were often people of similar leanings and temperament: fellow artists, writers, musicians, critics and so on. One evening we had among our guests a man who wrote what I always thought were fearsomely intellectual books about the cinema. He was not very good company, I have to say, although that is completely by the by.

The talk turned to films at one point, and our cinephile guest mentioned the director Michael Powell and his film
Gone To Earth.
He did so because he had heard that it was about to be revived at a London cinema. This was the first part of the conversation that had attracted my attention, because until then I’m afraid that it had (like most conversations about films) been boring me, and I had started to doze off. It was only when this title was brought up that I suddenly turned and addressed a question to him. ‘But surely nobody remembers that film?’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard it mentioned for years and years.’ He told me that, on the contrary, the reputation of Michael Powell had been in the ascendant recently, and that this film was now regarded – by some (he stressed that word most emphatically) – as a masterpiece. ‘You’ve seen it yourself, have you?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I saw it in Birmingham – several times, as a matter of fact – in the winter of 1950. But never since.’ ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said our writer friend, and then launched into a brief
précis
of the film’s disastrous fate: the producer had loathed it, apparently, and given orders for it to be reshot, re-edited, retitled and generally hacked about for its American release. In the years that followed, all traces of the original were believed to have disappeared. I was astonished to learn that it had now been restored to its former state and could soon be seen for the price of a cinema ticket and a tube journey to Oxford Street. ‘But Ruth, we have to go,’ I insisted, turning to her. ‘We have to go and see it as soon as possible.’ ‘Of course, if you wish,’ she answered, indifferently. ‘But why is it so important? What’s so special about it?’ ‘I would guess,’ said our friend, ‘that Rosamond must have seen it at an impressionable age, and it marked her for life.’ To which I replied: ‘Not exactly. I was at an impressionable age, yes, but not when I
saw
it. I’m talking about the time I was
in it.’

Two days after this conversation, he sent me a photograph – a lobby card from the film, which he had retrieved from his personal collection. This is the photograph I have in front of me now. I shall describe it to you in a moment. But first of all I shall have to give you some background.

It was in a letter, written in June 1949, that Beatrix told me the astonishing news: a film crew was coming to Much Wenlock. A real film crew, making a real feature film for the cinemas, with real British and American stars. Yes – American! Because the star of the film – and this was the really unbelievable thing, for me – was going to be Jennifer Jones, who only a couple of years earlier had reduced me to a state of slack-jawed astonishment with her performance in some Western (the title will come back to me shortly) in which she played opposite Gregory Peck and flaunted a brazen, swaggering sexual energy, the like of which I had never seen or imagined before. Ah, yes, I remember now – it was called
Duel in the Sun,
and I think my parents regretted taking me to see it from the moment the credits rolled. We saw it at the old Gaumont cinema in Birmingham, and I suppose I would have been about thirteen or fourteen years old. My first real crush, it would be true to say, was on Jennifer Jones. Gregory Peck left me completely cold. Afterwards I used some of my pocket money to buy a copy of
Picturegoer
magazine which contained an article about the film. It made great play of the fact that Miss Jones (or Mrs David O. Selznick, as she had become by then) had first won fame playing a nun or some such virginal role, and yet now here she was portraying a sleazy tramp of the Old West, and the headline on the article was ‘From Saint to Sinner in Under Two Years!’ Funny how some things stick in the memory. Alongside the article were some pictures of Jennifer Jones in her provocative lacy costumes, her dense black hair centre-parted, bee-stung lips frozen into a pout and vixen eyes always looking slightly aslant, away from the camera. Of course I cut the pictures out and slept with them tucked furtively under my pillow, but I never told anybody about my obsession – not even Beatrix, when I wrote her one of my weekly, gushing confessional letters. I felt somehow ashamed, embarrassed by the intensity of it. And at the back of my mind, I’m sure, was the guilty suspicion that it should have been Gregory Peck I was getting excited about.

Two years later – with the pictures still in my possession, crumpled and faded, although no longer kept under my pillow – Beatrix’s letter arrived, and I had to read it through many times before it made any sense to me. You have to consider my situation, Imogen: a lonely girl living in suburban Birmingham, with few close schoolfriends, practically an only child (for Sylvia, although still living with us, was now twenty-five years old and did not feel like a sister at all); it’s hard to conceive of anything more remote from the world that these pictures evoked. Sensuality; glamour; the unimaginable lives lived by those godlike figures thousands of miles away in Hollywood. The idea that this world might suddenly be
within reach,
its crazy, unpredictable orbit bringing it, unbelievably, to rest for a few weeks in
Much Wenlock
of all places, was more than my childish brain could take in at first. I remember running downstairs after I had read the letter for the third or fourth time and screaming something at my mother, some hysterical, babbling attempt at conveying Beatrix’s news, and being met with an incredulous dismissal: ‘Oh, don’t be foolish, dear’ – some such words – ‘Bea must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’ But she hadn’t; that was the amazing thing. It was all about to come true.

The next thing was to beg, persuade and implore my parents to let me visit Beatrix while the filming was taking place. By a great stroke of good fortune it was scheduled to start in August, during the school holidays. My mother and father had been planning to take me camping for a week, near Rhyl in North Wales, but I was already dreading it. (Can you imagine what the thought of it must have seemed like, to a sixteen-year-old girl?) Anyway, it was not difficult to dissuade them. It was agreed that I should go to stay with Beatrix and Roger instead, so I had the delicious prospect of a whole week in Much Wenlock to look forward to, while the filming was in full flow.

In the meantime I found out everything I could about the forthcoming production – which was next to nothing. I went to my local library and could find no references to it at all in the current newspapers or magazines. The best I could do was to borrow a copy of the novel upon which the film, apparently, was to be based. I devoured it in a couple of sittings and then reread it and then reread it again. I have not read it since, I must admit: my taste for that sort of overheated rustic melodrama has abated somewhat. At the time I thought it entrancing. It’s the story of an ignorant country girl who marries the village chaplain but meanwhile gets caught up in a torrid affair with the local squire, while quite sensibly preferring her pet fox to either of them. At the climax she comes to a sticky end by falling down a mineshaft. I suppose that now most people would consider it silly stuff, but at the time I loved it, for being rooted in the Shropshire landscape, saturated with the colours and contours of its hills, and the author’s feeling for nature is still what I remember best. There were some beautiful passages.