The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  All of which took me forward by a few minutes, at which point I noticed that a blue car had drawn up and was crouched on the forecourt some ten yards away from me. I had a feeling of abrupt drainage, as if a plug had been pulled on the pool of some inner world. The car sat for some seconds, like an unexploded bomb, before the door on the right-hand side swung open. A feeling of intense fear rolled heedlessly over me. I realized not only that the man who got out of the car and began to approach me must be Mr Madden, but that I was also to have the first human encounter – discounting dealings with ticket collectors, newsagents and the like – I had had since that last day in Rome.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ said Mr Madden, coming towards me with his arms flapping up and down.

  He was very tall, and quite large, with black, shiny hair which bounced over his face, which was red, as he walked. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, on which the peculiar motion of his arms revealed glimpses of two hidden islands of sweat. From a distance his face had looked oddly crumpled, but now I saw that he was smiling, a smile so forceful that it required the cooperation of all of his features to sustain it, so that it appeared oddly to be his fixed expression.

  ‘Sorry!’ he said again.

  He was right beside me now, although he was too large and mobile for me to get a sense of him, as if I were at the wheel of a car and had to concentrate with all my might to stay on the road.

  ‘Have you been waiting ages?’

  ‘No,’ I said. It just came out, without my even having decided what to say. ‘Only a few minutes.’

  In that moment, I knew, everything was set. By ‘set’, of course, I mean only in the most specific sense; I don’t want to imply that Mr Madden’s future, for example, was in my hands, nor that the more general pattern of events to come had been fixed by this one trivial exchange. What I am trying to describe is my belief that the first seconds of any encounter are those in which the important decisions are made, the fundamental characteristics established, the structural lines laid down. Had I, for example, produced some witticism in the course of my first exchange with Mr Madden, in place of what I actually did say, things might have turned out very differently between us. As it was, of all the shades of character I might have selected, I chose a kind of diffident reserve. He, as you have seen, presented himself as cheerful, kind and slightly distracted. I am not saying that our relationship did not progress beyond these roles, nor occasionally even move outside them; merely that this moment was the mould into which our fluid first encounter was poured, and that even when later we had gelled to form something firm and free-standing, its basic shape was always held.

  I must have assumed a slightly stunned expression, because Mr Madden stood before me with an air of polite expectation, as if waiting for me to come to life.

  ‘Ready?’ he said finally.

  It was only a second before he said it, but those early seconds, as I have said, seemed long.

  ‘Absolutely!’ I replied, even giving a little laugh. I knew that I was trying to escape the mould I had made for myself, and knew too that the attempt was futile.

  ‘I’ll take these, shall I?’

  He bent down to pick up my suitcases. I was immediately worried by how heavy he would judge them to be, and what he might infer from it. As he bent over, I saw the top of his head. Being so tall, it was evidently not a part of him that many people saw – as its aspect of overgrown neglect testified – and looking at it I felt a curious tenderness for him, as if I had chanced on a secret door to his nature which the maze of social intercourse might have kept hidden from me. He straightened up and began walking with my suitcases to the car. I followed behind and watched as he opened the boot and heaved them in. Then, either out of good manners or because I still appeared somewhat stunned, he came round to my side of the car and opened the door for me.

  ‘You might want to take your coat off before you get in,’ he said. I caught the fugitive glance of his small, bright eyes. ‘Pretty stifling in there. It’s been sitting baking in the sun all morning.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  For the first time since I had arrived, I noticed that it was indeed very hot, and that I was wearing far too many clothes. A fierce sun blazed overhead and the sky was brilliant blue. I had left London in an iron-grey bustle of turbulent cloud and gusting wind, and the change confused me. I tried to recall when it had happened, and wondered if I had fallen asleep on the train.

  ‘It was cold when I left London,’ I added, removing my coat. I was grateful that I seemed to have the possession of at least some of my faculties once more. Mr Madden would now know that I did not habitually dress for a hot day in winter clothes.

  ‘Was it really?’ he said, with gratifying astonishment.

  He slammed the car door shut (I had sat down in the passenger seat by this time) and proceeded around the front of the car to the other side. I looked at him through the windscreen. The car was quite still for a few muted seconds. Then the door opened and he was in, noise and movement reinstated as abruptly as they had been suspended.

  ‘We’re off!’ he cheerfully cried, starting the car, putting it into gear and lurching forward in a single movement. ‘Sorry again to have been so late.’

  I waited, assuming he would want to provide an explanation, although by that time I had forgotten that he had been late at all; and forgotten too, as before, the anxieties attendant on his lateness. He laughed suddenly, a single barking noise which jerked his head back as it exited from his mouth.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘No excuse, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Perhaps you got stuck behind a herd of cows,’ I said, much to my own astonishment.

  ‘Perhaps I did,’ he replied, rewarding me with another bark. I had been going to explain that this was how I might have imagined country life to be, making a joke of my being from London, but to my satisfaction he seemed to have understood my comment without further explanation.

  We appeared already to have left Buckley, although I could remember nothing about the town, despite the fact that I had been looking out of the window. The road was now very narrow, and to either side I could see fields and trees which the bright sunshine gave a look of fixity, like a landscape in a painting. I thought of saying this but decided against it. Mr Madden drove very quickly, with a sort of proprietorial confidence which I was in no position to question, giving two sharp hoots of his horn at every sharp bend we approached. It seemed unlikely, given that our car clearly filled the width of the road, that this call would provide adequate warning to whatever might be travelling towards us. I sat rigid in my seat, oscillating between the secure thrill of fairground fear and the terror of real risk; and felt almost relieved when, rounding a corner, a vast, muddy tractor reared up at us on the road ahead. In that panicked, overcrowded second I knew we were going to crash and I must have cried out, for after Mr Madden had swerved unperturbed onto the verge, barely slowing his speed, and delivered us safely back onto the road beyond, he turned his head and looked at me.

  ‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘Pamela’s always telling me I’m a menace. Forgot you weren’t used to it.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I shrilled.

  A feeling of despondency came over me. I felt as if everything had been ruined by my overreaction. Combined with the mention of Pamela (that being, of course, Mrs Madden), the episode served to remind me that the sunny drive was but a prelude to the immovable and at that moment forbidding fact of my employment with the Maddens, which I had all but forgotten. I had been existing in the temporary heaven of believing that I was the guest, rather than the servant, of this world of which so far I had had such an intriguing glimpse. I saw that my new situation in life would require a more extensive range of adjustments than I had anticipated. Any calculation of happiness or sorrow, satisfaction or complaint, would now have to include the weight of my inferiority. There would be benefits, I did not doubt, in relinquishing my stake in the world – it was with the certainty of collecting them tha
t I was making this journey – but they would come at a price. I could not afford, on this budget, to imagine – as admittedly I had there in the car – that I was a friend of the Maddens invited to stay; and still less to entertain a scenario in which Mr Madden was my husband, bowling with me along these bright country lanes. I couldn’t, however, help it; any more than I could avoid fostering an immediate and irrational dislike of Pamela. My premature but thriving hostility worried me. I wondered if the mere thought would ‘set’ relations with her in the manner I described earlier.

  ‘Do you see these fields now on either side?’ said Mr Madden, bellowing over the noise of the engine. ‘This is the boundary of Franchise. From here on in, the land belongs to the farm.’

  I looked obediently out of the window. I saw the jolting fields, which looked no more sinister than those which had preceded them. The heat and the lulling motion of the car were making me drowsy. I wished the journey could go on for ever.

  ‘How long have you had the farm?’ I enquired, in an attempt to wake myself up.

  ‘Hmm?’ Mr Madden shot me a look of bright bewilderment. ‘Oh, it’s Pamela’s, really. Been adopted into a long line of gentleman farmers.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I felt obscurely defeated by this information, as if I had been engaged in some form of competition with Pamela from which her landed superiority had now disqualified me. ‘Do you do all the work yourself?’

  ‘Me?’ yelped Mr Madden, gripping the wheel. ‘I’ve got a manager.’

  ‘A manager? Like a film star?’ I said wittily.

  ‘Eh? That’s right!’ He guffawed, nodding his head convivially. ‘He doesn’t manage me. He manages the farm, does the day to day stuff. I just hang about getting in his way. Very good chap, although the girls like to have a joke about him. Look, there’s Pamela,’ he said suddenly. ‘She’ll be pleased to see us.’

  We were drawing up a straight gravel drive banked on either side by trees which abruptly shaded the car and filled it with a sticky medicinal scent. Directly ahead of us stood a large, imposing house. It was built of grey stone and was very square, with a strict symmetrical aspect and three rows of windows whose glass was dark in the sun. At the front of the house was an elaborate white plaster portico, on either side of which stood a large stone pineapple. The front door was open, and standing on the steps watching our approach with folded arms was Pamela.

  Chapter Three

  There was a hiatus after Mr Madden stopped the car, like one of those pauses which occur in the theatre, when darkness briefly falls and the actors gather themselves in for a change of scene; surfacing from character for a swift second before plunging back into the drama which must, whether they like it or not, unfold. That second passed, there in the unshielded glare of the driveway. In the sudden silence of the engine I became oddly aware of smells, the waxy smell of Mr Madden’s jacket, the doggy odour of the car, the tint his skin gave the enclosure, this latter more of a light pressure than a smell. Then Pamela’s footsteps were crunching across the gravel and I saw her midriff, above which her arms remained folded, through the car window. She bent down and there was her face, grinning close to mine through the glass.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, or rather sang, the word as radiant as her smile. A tangled, autumnal foliage of brittle brown and blond hair surrounded her face. She opened the door as I sat there and I felt strangely exposed, like a cross-section in a biological diagram. Mr Madden got out of the car on the other side, and with both doors now open I was something of a sitting duck.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ said Mr Madden from outside.

  ‘I’ll bet you were late, weren’t you? Did you have to wait ages?’ said Pamela, to me. Her eyes glittered with expectation.

  ‘No,’ I said, looking up from my seat. I felt that I had missed my cue to get out of the car, and as the imperative to do so grew louder, so my intention of rejoining the stream of events correspondingly curdled into that strange and static indifference to which, I find, politeness can at any moment revert.

  ‘Look at her!’ said Pamela, to my horror. ‘You’ve frozen her to her seat with fear, darling. Come on, let’s get you inside and we’ll revive you with endless cups of tea.’

  My cue, therefore, was finally provided, although in a manner far from that I might have wished for. As far as ‘setting’ things went, Pamela certainly stole the show. In my doughy and rather pliant state, I immediately felt the force of her managerial nature. I knew that I would have to take urgent steps to prevent things from continuing in this vein.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Pamela encouragingly.

  As I got out of the car, I was able to continue with my preliminary assessment of Pamela’s appearance. It has been my experience that people of a dramatically different physical ‘type’ to oneself are harder to get along with than those whose flesh one’s own instinctively ‘recognizes’. Pamela’s physical presence immediately struck me as alien; not only in that she was as different from me as was (excluding, obviously, broader possibilities such as having only one leg) possible; but also in that I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be her. In looking at a man, this sensation might well be commonplace; but with a woman the problem becomes somewhat more visceral. It relates to the possession of shared sexual characteristics which, while inviting a superficial assessment of sameness, conceals a deep and, I believe, mutual repulsion. This is not merely the repulsion of a repressed and heterosexual nature for its own kind. In the circumstances I am describing, it is the imagination as well as the body that suspects and rejects its rival, for want of any common ground on which to begin the process of understanding. There was, I could see straight away, no corner or crevice of Pamela’s form that shared its secrets with my own; and as such I suppose I identified her as a threat, or at least a mystery. Perhaps you understand what I mean, but then again perhaps my mistake is not in the way I attempt to explain things. Perhaps, rather, it lies in my attempting to explain things as if they are universal, whereas in fact they are merely the defective impressions of my own mind.

  In any case, having made so much of Pamela’s physical appearance, I am bound to describe it now in a more neutral fashion. She was not, in fact, beautiful, although she was of the age – somewhere in her fifties – at which people would say that she must have been very beautiful. I, however, believe that she always looked like that; almost beautiful, that is, or post-beautiful, like the sky at the end of a lovely day, when the sun has disappeared but its aura remains, redolent of things past, a memory more piquant even than the thing remembered. She was quite tall, of slender, almost wiry build, with a skin made leathery by sun, and hair, as I have said, both brittle and profuse. Her face was very attractive, in an extrovert and absolutely unmysterious way, and, not unlike the face of a monkey, was both creased and childish at the same time. This, along with her dynamic and compact form, gave an alluring impression of youth and experience combined, and the whole energetic package was wrapped in a veneer of breeding at once impregnable and careless.

  If you have kept in mind the fact that, in appearance, I was as different from Pamela as could be, then you will have gained some impression of me from this description. Unlike Pamela’s, mine were not the sort of looks that slapped one in the face when one encountered them. They did not disrupt, nor seek, attention. One could, in the presence of my looks, get on with the matter to hand; something I have not found to be without its advantages, and have learned, on occasion, to turn to my own.

  There is one further subject requiring attention before I can proceed, and that is the matter of the forms of address I have so far employed. A discrepancy may have been observed in my calling the husband Mr Madden, while the wife, before I had even met her, became known to me as Pamela. Unlike many people of my generation, I was brought up always to address adults formally; even, in some cases, after they had implored me to use their first names. My parents fortified this practice, as they did many others, with the belief that beyond these apparently fragile social barrica
des lay a wilderness of unimaginable degenerations from which good manners offered our only protection. They were even known on occasion bravely to erect a missionary outpost in the savagery beyond, and demand that some over-familiar friend of their children use the more polite form; and were any of us to affront their friends in this manner – even, as I say, if asked to – our presumption was regarded without mercy.

  I still, therefore, find it unnatural to use the first name of a person older than me, even though I myself am no longer really young. (I am twenty-nine.) I say this lest it seem that I was Mr-ing and Mrs-ing the Maddens through a sense of my own servility or inferiority to them. This was not at all the case. My free use of the name of Pamela now, however, doubly requires explanation. Suffice it to say that I only adopted it after Mr Madden – Piers, incidentally – had revealed it to be Mrs Madden’s name, and that, moreover, I was using it strictly in my own thoughts. As soon as I was required to, I would verbally address her as Mrs Madden; but being, in those early stages, mentally intrigued only by her role as Mr Madden’s wife, and by his feelings for her, it seemed natural to think of her by the same name that he himself did. Once the habit had been acquired – well, I think I’ve explained myself pretty fully.