The Rain Before it Falls (11 page)

Anyway, all of that – like so much else – is neither here nor there. In July there was a letter from Beatrix which contained all sorts of exciting news. Some members of the crew were already starting to arrive, including the actor who was going to play the squire. His name was David Farrar, and Beatrix didn’t really know who he was, but one of her friends had seen him once in a film about nuns (another one: nuns were very popular in those days, cinematically speaking) and thought he was really ‘dishy’ (I believe that was the word), and then just the week before, when she – this friend – had been cycling along the road to Wellington, she had seen him coming down the same road in the opposite direction, riding a horse! She had almost fallen off her bicycle with the shock. Another thing Beatrix told me was that a notice had gone up in the market hall at Much Wenlock, saying that they needed all sorts of help with the film: they needed craftsmen and carpenters to help build the sets, and they needed good riders to be in the hunting scenes, and they needed lots of extras just to come along and be in some of the street scenes, and anyone could come and take part so long as they were able to bring their own costumes, which should be at least fifty or sixty years old. And Beatrix told me that upstairs at Warden Farm, somewhere in one of the attics, there were all these trunks and chests full of clothes that had belonged to Ivy’s mother, Agatha, and she was going to go over and look through them and find some dresses that were suitable for both of us to wear, if she could.

Roger himself professed no interest in any of these doings. He gave us to understand that it was all so much female frippery, in his opinion. I thought this rather odd at first – he was not by any means immune to glamour, after all – until Beatrix informed me that her husband was already quite preoccupied, being fully absorbed in an affair with a neighbour who lived two or three doors down the road from their house. She was a very pretty half-Italian woman called Annamaria, who had annoyed Beatrix considerably a few weeks earlier by being chosen as ‘Carnival Queen’ of Much Wenlock, pipping her to the post by only a handful of votes. Beatrix hated her with a passion, there is no doubt about it, and she hated Roger for his betrayal, too, but she did not act as she did by way of retaliation, I don’t think. What happened that summer could have been predicted from the start. It had a kind of grand inevitabilty about it.

I can describe exactly the clothes that Beatrix found for us to wear for our appearance in the film. This is not a feat of memory on my part: it’s because I have the film on tape now, recorded from the television some years ago, and she and I can be seen quite clearly in one of the earliest scenes. Oh, the excitement, of glimpsing myself – just for a few seconds – on the big screen, when I saw the film with my parents when it was first released! We went and saw it four or five times in a single week, just for that thrill. (And most of the time we were almost alone in the cinema, for it was not a popular film, not popular at all.) And then the poignancy of glimpsing myself – of glimpsing
both
of us – once again, when the film was rereleased almost forty years later, and I saw it with Ruth at that cinema near Oxford Street shortly after our dinner party.
She,
I must say, was not in the least happy about this. A few years earlier (I will explain all of this in due course) she had made me promise to forget about Beatrix: not to write to her, and not to talk about her. So it was quite a concession, on Ruth’s part, to come and see the film with me, but we barely spoke about it afterwards; and when it was shown on television some time later, I did not tell her that I had recorded it, and I did not watch the tape until after her death. Since then I have seen it many times – so many times; it is the only
moving
record I have of Beatrix at all, the only one where she is not frozen in time. It is precious to me for that reason, mainly, although there are other reasons too.

Our little appearance takes place in what I believe the film-makers call an establishing shot. A sculptor is seen chiselling the date – 20 June 1897 – on to a memorial stone, against a background of bright blue sky. Behind this, already, we can hear the noise of horses’ hooves clip-clopping along the street. We then cut to the street itself – the bottom of the High Street, at its junction with Wilmore Street, so that the old Tudor guildhall and buttermarket buildings are also in view – and there, immediately, you can see Beatrix and me, standing in the left-hand corner of the frame, laughing and talking together. She is wearing a sailor suit with three-quarter sleeves. The blouse of the suit is Cambridge blue, but her skirts are darker, and pleated. She has a bow at her breast, and the collar of the suit is edged with white braid. On her head she wears a straw boater, I suppose to complete the nautical theme. For some reason she also has a length of skipping rope twined around her hands. I think she is meant to look like a youngish girl, although of course Beatrix was nineteen years old by now. Her hair is the same strawberry blonde as her mother’s, and is tied back behind the neck. Her pale skin looks slightly pinkened; she never tanned, but always went pink, and that hot summer she had already been spending too much time out in the sun. I am also wearing a straw hat – a large, round, wide-brimmed pink hat with a single ribbon tied around it – and a red checked pinafore over a high-necked white dress. The dress’s ruffle peeks out beneath the pinafore at my legs. My hair is longer than Beatrix’s, much longer: it reaches almost down to my waist in two thin, wiry strands. I had forgotten that I used to wear my hair so long, in those days. I have worn it short now for more than fifty years. I am also wearing a pair of white cotton gloves, which seems a peculiar touch, for a scene which is meant to be taking place on a bright summer’s day. These come into view after a few seconds, when I brush my hair back in a rather awkward gesture. (I appear to be much more self-conscious in front of the camera than Beatrix, who looks entirely at ease there.) A few yards behind us, a pony and trap crosses the screen from right to left, and a bewhiskered policeman stands directing the traffic. After the pony and trap, a man and a woman stroll across in the same direction: he in a grey bowler and dark grey suit, she in a full-length gown, chestnut-brown, and carrying a lacy parasol, unopened. Two schoolboys stand in the very foreground, just their heads and shoulders visible, with straw boaters and Eton collars. Behind them, the street is busy with more costumed extras, browsing at the market stalls, promenading up and down the street. The impression taken away by any casual viewer of the film, from these few brief seconds, would be of a generalized bustle and activity; the two girls in the bottom left-hand corner would attract no special attention, I suppose. But I have watched and rewatched that fragment of videotape, until the tape itself has grown worn-out and jittery, looking for meaning in those thoughtless gestures, the smiles we exchange, the raising of my hand, the turn of Beatrix’s head as she looks away and smiles into the distance, restless, independent. Perhaps it is wrong to look for meaning in such things. Perhaps the meanings we find that way are treacherous and false, like the wind in which my hair seems to wave, which was not a real wind at all, but came from a huge machine set up about fifty yards away, powered by cables which coiled and trailed around the street like a nest of snakes.

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.