A few days later, I go out into the garden for my night-time walk, and find that rain is falling.
From the crown of my hat to the toes of my boots, an indescribable thrill runs through me. I stand poised at the edge of the lawn, and my starved senses open to this delicious, half-forgotten joy. Behind me the rain roars like a waterfall from the leaky gutter to the flat conservatory roof; it gurgles down the downpipes to the drains. I let it cover me. I let myself be soaked. Like a young plant, I let myself be watered well in. It is as though I am being kissed by the world, welcomed back to life.
On the other side of the little valley that runs behind our back fence is a chorus line of tall trees; I watch them as they wave their arms gracefully in time with the wind. In the garden itself, erratic branches from the dark-leaved cherry, a twisted wild-haired specimen, like a giant unkempt head, thrust frantically at odd angles. The feathery spire of the corner cypress splits and reforms, dusting the clouded, street-lamp-tinged sky.
My cap is weighing on my head, the hair underneath it hanging in rats’ tails. Rain has found an opening at the back of my neck and insinuates itself inside, inching down my vertebrae in a cool, stealthy stream. Drops mottle the lenses of my spectacles and set the skin on my face tingling; I tilt my head upwards to catch more. Unintentionally I breathe rain into my nostrils and gasp; yet the water, though surprising, feels mild and sweet inside my tubes, different from memories of inhaling swimming pools and the sea.
I start to circle the lawn. A skin of surface water slaps beneath my soles. The lower part of my long silk skirt grows wetter and wetter, winding itself round my shins, catching under my feet, pulling ever more heavily on its elastic waistband as it slides inexorably over my hips. I hoick the garment back upwards, but the folds of silk are so swamped that each time it soon recommences its descent. I am put in mind of the heroines of nineteenth-century novels, and reflect on how inconvenient it must have been to stride about the countryside swathed in long skirts.
Eventually the irritation starts to detract from the intensity of the experience, and I go back indoors. “I’ve been relating to the rain,” I say to Pete, breathless and exhilarated, as I stand in the kitchen with water pouring off me, like a dog that has emerged from a pond.
“Yes, I can see that, darling,” he replies, as puddles form on the linoleum. “Personally, I’ve been staying indoors.”
He has always had an unromantic attitude to rain.
Early in our acquaintance we went on holiday to Exmoor, and it rained most of the time, an intense threadlike downpour which soaked us as efficiently as a power shower. When it was not raining, the sky was a lugubrious unrelieved grey. I insisted on going for walks across soggy moorland, on the principle that we were in the countryside and ought to make the most of it. Pete was dour and monosyllabic inside his anorak. When we took refuge in pubs and tearooms, he complained ceaselessly about the weather. I began to find this mind-blowingly, relationship-threateningly boring, and eventually we had words.
He explained that his weather obsession was largely to do with opportunities for photography, and that he would also have complained, albeit not so much, if the sky had been unremittingly blue. What landscape photographers crave is good light—interesting light, the kind that comes from a mixture of cloud and sun; a break in the clouds towards evening, say, that throws a warm apricot glow on to boulders on a hillside; or a serendipitous shaft falling on a lonely tree beneath a stormy sky.
I looked at him across the table in the pub, and said, with a sudden access of clarity: “I think you’d sell your soul to the Devil for good light.”
And Pete, respectable citizen, supporter of charities and follower of rules, said, “Hmmm. D’you know, I’d definitely have to think about it.”