The Rain Before it Falls by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online

observation, and say no more. She is wearing a rather smart jacket, nicely cut, over a long floral-patterned skirt. In fact one of the striking things about this picture is how well dressed they both look. And how formal. Uncle Owen is wearing a tie, for heaven’s sake! On a picnic! But that is how things were, in the 1940s. Perhaps it is the effect of the tie, but here he looks almost handsome. He was always a big man, thick-set – it was inevitable, as he grew older, that he would run to fat – but there is no coarseness in his features. I remember him as rather a coarse man, but I think that had to do more with his manner than his looks. He has assumed a slightly strange position, crouching rather than sitting down, and this gives him a kind of tense, coiled quality, like a trap about to spring. He is gazing at the camera with enormous intensity. All I can say about this pose is that it is uncharacteristic.
    So much for the adults. Now, apart from myself, the two children at the front of the photograph are Ivy and Owen’s younger son, Digby, and their daughter, Beatrix. They were my first cousins, of course. I should also mention something else about Beatrix, in case you are not aware of it: she was your grandmother.
    When this photograph was taken, she would have been eleven. She is sitting upright, almost as though she has just sat on something uncomfortable. Her back is rigid. Bea’s posture was always good: she always carried herself well. She is wearing a cardigan, which, if my memory serves me correctly, was pale green. From the way it hangs on her body, you can see that her breasts are just starting to develop. Her hair is black, and quite short, but windswept: two strands hang over her eyes, one of them falling almost down to her mouth. Quite a fashionable cut, even by today’s standards, I would have thought. Her smile is broader than anyone else’s. Funnily enough, I never think of her smiling, but, looking through all of these photographs, I realize that she smiled all the time; when she was young, anyway. And it was like her mother’s smile, too – never far from an out-and-out laugh. Perhaps it is because many of the older photographs I have found of her capture her in social situations. Beatrix came alive when there were a lot of other people around: with friends, at parties – any occasion when drink was flowing and the everyday cares of the world could be forgotten. Whenever she was alone with me, she was a different person: insecure, ill at ease, afraid of the world. I do not think that this is just an effect I have on people. I think that this was her true self emerging. Fundamentally I believe that she disliked herself and that to be left alone, with only her own self for company, was the very thing that she feared the most. But I realize that I am projecting, now, a lot of things that I learned about Beatrix subsequently on to her character as an eleven-year-old girl, and I must not allow myself to race forward like this.
    Sitting next to her is her brother Digby. It is not important that you know very much about Digby. Like Raymond, the elder brother, he took little notice of me. This was upsetting at first, but later on, when Beatrix and I became close, it suited us quite well. He looks younger here than his thirteen years. Perhaps because he is wearing shorts. He is squatting, rather than sitting, and his calf muscles seem extremely well developed, I must say. He was a vigorous, athletic boy. There was a tennis court in the far reaches of the grounds and he and Raymond would often play there. They were both good players. They led charmed, perhaps spoiled lives. The war barely touched them. Living on a farm meant that the family was not affected by rationing; in fact they made a good profit, selling their surplus on the black market. The closest they ever came to the fighting was when a German bomber shed its load at random on a flight back from Wales and blasted a crater in one of the corn