Still trying to decide if this should be expanded to include some of the other little glimpses into a doomed relationship, or if there's enough here to let it stand on its own. Read and debate for yourself, then fill me in.
The title is also tentative; it's a line from the song "Unchained Melody" :]
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A Long, Lonely Time
When they separate in 1966, she won’t be able to cry. She won’t allow her self-pity to swallow her whole, nor will she allow the open stares of her friends and neighbors to anger or shame her. She won’t look at their baby boy, the one she’d brought into the world just three months before the inevitable end of their relationship. She won’t think back on the good times, the romance, the months and months and months of bliss that should have really warned her of the incomparable heartache to come.
Geneva Wren will only be able to think of the rain.
The rain fell differently here in the country than it had up in London, where, until recently, she’d lived with a very serious man named Geoffrey, her fiancé, in a rather dreary flat on the south bank of the Thames. Geoffrey was still her betrothed and the flat he now occupied alone was still dreary – these were inescapable facts. But Geneva was getting used to the idea of a life away from the Capital, away from public schools, and certainly away from Geoffrey. That wasn’t the attitude with which to enter into a new phase in her romantic life, which was probably the reason why she’d refused to set a date and had not yet actually married Geoffrey.
But, the rain. It was certainly part of the same storm that had been dumping buckets upon London when she’d left the flat early this morning, yet it seemed to have a different personality. The raindrops were huge, heavy, and made for drenching travelers caught out in the storm. But it fell with a gentle splosh upon the windshield of her car as she traveled suburban back roads, the weather somehow comforting, rather than the assault the rain seemed to launch whenever the heavens opened up over London. Dusty Springfield was on the radio out of Southampton, her distinctive voice carrying the melody of love over the airwaves and making Geneva uncomfortable, alone in her Aston Martin. She spent too much time listening to Dusty Springfield and thinking about the rain; it was one of the reasons Geoffrey hadn’t yet pushed for a wedding date.
The song changed (the Rolling Stones) and Geneva relaxed. There was a young man walking along the side of the road, kicking at the mud puddles and draped head to toe in various rubbers and plastics to keep dry. She couldn’t be sure, what with the rain and his hood, but she was almost sure he’d looked up and made sure to meet her eyes. She blinked and looked away first, tightening her grip on the steering wheel and pretending to be a very cautious driver in a very tense situation. If she were him, she’d be laughing at her. Geneva was a terrible actress.
She was maybe a mile away from the walking boy when the car suddenly shuddered and came to a stubborn halt in the very middle of the deserted back road. The radio died and the lights went out, leaving Geneva surrounded by trees, mud, rain, and silence. “No,” she said firmly, the same voice she used to scold her students or an ill-behaved kitten. She even raised a finger to point accusingly at the dashboard, as if it were all the car’s fault the battery had chosen this moment to give out. “This is unacceptable.”
And it certainly was. In half an hour, Geneva was supposed to be presenting herself to the headmaster of the Miskin Academy for Inquiring Young Minds, filling the gaping wound left by the retirement of the school’s oldest and most beloved teacher of French and Italian. Geneva could do the old bird one better – she was fluent in all the romance languages and planned to offer them all to her new students, and she wouldn’t be adverse to tutoring those interested in any of the other languages she prided herself on knowing. Geneva was twenty-six years old and devoted to the spoken word. Again, she didn’t need to think for very long before realizing why she and Geoffrey had not yet married.
“I’ll give you one last chance,” Geneva said to her car, before turning the key in the ignition, first towards her, then away, and warily pressing down on the gas. No response, not even a guttural growl of pain. She sighed and hauled her overcoat from the backseat, taking the keys from the ignition and fighting her way into the coat awkwardly in the front seat. “Then you leave me no choice.” She pulled the coat up over her hair and counted to five, then threw the door open and ran around to the front of the car, squealing in fury as she went.
The rain was icy here, somehow colder than it had been up in London. Geneva was angry that her favorite pumps were certainly going to be useless after this little excursion, but, as she fought the hood open and peered helplessly down at the inner workings of her automobile, she almost found the rainfall exhilarating. It ran down the sleek sides of the Aston Martin and crawled into her hair and made her dress heavy and clingy. It was cold, but refreshing, falling thick, more like molasses than water. The rain was almost slow-moving, drenching everything it made contact with, including Geneva’s carefully prepared chignon. She would forgive the storm if it could only, somehow, make her car work and get her to work on time.
“1958?”
Geneva narrowly avoided knocking herself out on the hood of the car when she jumped in fright at the voice. It was a pleasant enough voice, with a politely inquiring tone, but she hadn’t expected company on the road. She’d been hoping for some, of course, preferably of the good Samaritan in a car going her way variety, but she didn’t want to give herself any false faith in humanity. She was mildly disappointed to see only the mass of synthetic materials that gave away nothing of the young man’s shape beneath. And why did men always insist on talking shop when there was work to be done?
She found herself nodding, noting that it was better not to bite the hand that fed you – or, rather, to annoy the local who may be able to give you a lift. “Graduation present,” she said, by way of explanation.
“It’s beautiful,” he replied. Geneva felt outrage well in her throat when she noticed that he was genuinely admiring the car, rather than giving her a sly wink, like what was supposed to happen in this situation.
“Yes, well, the piece of rubbish also just died on me,” she said sourly. Her arms began to ache from holding her coat up over her head.
“Oh, right. Of course.” The young man (she assumed) shook his head. “Why else would you be out in the rain?”
“Well done you,” Geneva replied, sneering at him behind the cover of her overcoat. “Any chance you live nearby? Perhaps you have a car, can give me a jump? I’m almost certain it’s the battery that’s done for, I still have half a tank of petrol.”
To assert his male superiority, the boy leaned over the engine and poked around for a moment, before straightening with a contemplative look on what she could see of his face. “Yes, yes, looks like the battery,” he mused. Geneva rolled her eyes, but he missed it through the rain. He turned to her with a bright smile and she got her first clear look at his face. He was young, much younger than she’d expected. He could only be in his late teens, if that old, though tall for his age. He stuck out a hand for her to shake, so they could be properly acquainted. “Bram Miskin.”
“Right. Geneva Wren.” She took his hand, then gave a violent shake of the head. “Miskin, you said?”
“Uh oh. You’ve heard of me?”
“Not you – the school. The Miskin Academy? Any relation?”
He grinned. “Every relation, miss. Place has been in the family for generations.” He seemed to forget the rain as he puffed out his chest proudly and his hood slipped back off his skull. “Dad’s headmaster.”
“Dear God,” Geneva murmured to herself, though unsure whether she was reacting to his youthful appearance or the good fortune she’d had to run into him. He was only in his late teens, for sure, but – dear God! He was attractive, solidly handsome. Dark brown hair cut short in a rather old-fashioned style, eyes bright blue, features cut and defined, as if asserting his pedigree. He came from fine, educational stock, and it showed, in the deep set of his eyes and the roguish curl of his mouth when he smiled. She gave herself a good, hard mental shake and added hurriedly, “Then you can be my witness.”
“To what?”
“To the fact that I’m cursed with rather bad luck, not just poor time management skills.” She grinned when he laughed, then shouldered the inappropriate thoughts away. Dear God, he was a child. And she was getting rained on. “Is there any chance we’ll be able to flag down someone on their way to the school, then, Mr. Miskin?” she asked, eyes wide and hopeful.
He replaced the hood on his head. “Sorry, no. Hardly anyone ever uses this road to get anywhere. How the hell did you find it, anyway?”
“A map, of course,” Geneva scoffed, her tone a little harsher than she’d meant it to be. She didn’t appreciate him teasing her and considered telling him so, chewing him out for using such language around an older woman, and especially one who would, very soon, be teaching you how to correctly conjugate French verbs. “How far are we from the Miskin Academy right now?”
Bram seemed to consider the question carefully, looking one way down the road, then the other, before beckoning her closer. She shuffled in and he pointed to a now muddy, well-worn track through the trees about half a mile ahead. “See that dirt road, just there? Looks more like the Thames after a storm right now?”
Geneva nodded. “What about it, then?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what, sir?”
He smirked. “That’s the Misk. The sign fell down about a month ago and we haven’t gotten around to fixing it up yet. We could walk there, if you’re worried about getting in to see Dad on time. You just follow that path through the trees about a mile, then it widens and becomes a gravel driveway, leads right to the front doors.”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Don’t hate your car too much, love,” the boy replied easily. “You almost made it; this close, yeah?”
She contemplated the state of the road, adding up his estimates on mileage and weighing the risks of walking against the dwindling moments she had left before her first impression became a bad one. Better to walk in soaking wet and fifteen minutes early than an hour late, full of excuses, she decided. The day was already more or less ruined; what else could she do to make it worse?
Geneva slammed the hood of her car, then kicked off her heels and bent down to pick them up, shielding them under the coat that was doing little to keep her official first-day outfit prim. The young man watched, bemused, and she caught his eye and shrugged. “Your father likes people who take the initiative?”
“He’s something of a…a modern traditionalist,” Bram decided. “He’ll appreciate the effort.”
“A mile and a half?”
“Yeah. Just about.”
She nodded ahead, towards the track. “Lead the way, then.”
Until leaving in 1966, he would be the one to take the initiative at every step of their relationship. At the end of her first year at school, he was the one to admit that he loved her. She rebuked him, gently, kindly. By the following term, they were debating literature, politics, poetry, science, mathematics. When he tried to kiss her, in the fall of 1964, she agreed, voraciously, for a full thirteen and three-quarter seconds, before rebuking him again, none-too-subtly. It then took a mere three minutes for her to regain her senses and take heed of his adolescent logic, making passionate love to him on school grounds, behind the greenhouse at the edge of the forest.
She didn’t know, a year a half later, he would be walking away from her. She didn’t know she’d be sitting, alone, staring at herself in the mirror and asking herself, demanding of herself, why she had thought they could last. He was a child; in 1966, she would have a child’s child. And she would expect him to be a man.
It was the rain, the soft and insistent and enveloping rain, the kind that made you stop and ponder and wonder what letting go would feel like. Strolling in it that afternoon, listening to it as she unpacked that night, noticing it whenever it visited them again in her years at the Miskin Academy. It was the rain. She could only ever think of the bloody rain.
Ooooh. I really like this like I love all of your other stories. What actors did you have in mind for this?
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