The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  Clothing myself anew was rather more problematic. With my skirt now out of action, I had only the smart dress and three pairs of trousers from which to choose. I stood in my bedroom, my flaming skin resisting the notion of trousers, and just as I found myself crying out for a pair of shorts was blessed by a remarkably inventive idea. My problem was finding an implement with which to perform the operation, and a brief reconnaissance about the house turned up only a pair of nail scissors from my washbag. I hesitated, deploring the notion of sacrificing with hasty butchery what patience – in the form of a sewing kit perhaps borrowed from Pamela at some point in the friendlier future I hoped for – promised to execute with precision and skill; but I was greedy now for shorts, and seeing in my mind the horrified face of my mother as I murdered a perfectly good pair of trousers, was provoked into action.

  For some time I sawed away, not even pausing to stake out the line along which I intended to cut, and when both legs were off held up the amputated stumps to see how I had done. Predictably, the legs, though shorter, were now of drastically different lengths; and finding myself out of breath and awash with sweat, I resumed my cutting slowly and with rather more care. After some time, I had filed away so much of the cloth in pursuit of exactitude that I was left with very little. I tried them on before the wardrobe mirror, already regretting what I had done.

  Considering that my alterations had been designed to subtract substance from my appearance rather than add anything to it, the transformation I had wrought with the nail scissors was quite beyond all understanding. I believed, standing there, that I had never looked so good, nor felt so abuzz with a curious power which I could only take to be that of sexual attractiveness. The shorts were very short, even if evenly and equally so, and while I have never been given to gratuitous displays of flesh I had to admit that there was something exciting in this revelation. It suddenly seemed that there was far more to me than I had imagined; that my body, which I had always believed to be immutable or finite in some way, possessed in fact a whole unmined tract of personality, a fresh range of potential to which I had, I now saw, the undeniable right.

  I stood, transfixed by the mirror, for some time, accustoming myself to this stranger of whose desires and motives I was not entirely sure. Thoughts of Edward, as faint as the pop and drizzle of distant fireworks, flared sporadically in my mind. I could not match this version of myself with him. He would not, indeed, have recognized me; and my memories of him seemed all at once frustrating and unsatisfactory, as patchy and monochrome as those of childhood or drunkenness, as if the time we had spent together had not been fully lived. I had the brutal desire to be seen through new, less penetrating eyes, to experience a wanton exchange of surfaces. Fulminating with possibilities, my skin seemed all at once to possess a frightening autonomy, as if it could crave and consume, could overpower me with its appetites. The world outside my window pulsed with promise and invitation. I felt an inner fainting, a felling away of resistances: the desire for physical contact with another human being began to rage like a headache about my mind, drowning out the sound of other thoughts and finally gathering to itself such shape and purpose that it felt like a great horn protruding from my forehead. With so little about me that I knew, I was virtually unpoliced; and it was in this strange savagery that I began to touch myself in front of the mirror, while the dim protests of my more civilized self went unheeded.

  For how long I remained in this curious state, which was half frenzy, half trance, I could not say. Perhaps it was a quarter of an hour, perhaps more; but eventually I came to my senses, and looking about my bedroom, which I had entirely forgotten, had a feeling of intense exposure and shame, as if the severe furniture and disapproving eye of the window had been observing my antics. I left the room quickly and went downstairs. In the kitchen, I set about making preparations to assuage my now quite fierce hunger. My body felt tremulous and weak. My hands shook as I struggled to tear the Cellophane packaging around the rolls, and once or twice I was forced to stop and lean against the kitchen counter until the rapid beating of my heart subsided. I examined the tin can I had bought, which contained something called ‘luncheon meat’; a substance widely consumed, I believe, during the last war, from which period the dusty, crepuscular tin appeared to date. Despite having little appetite for the stuff, I was relieved to discover that the tin carried a device for opening itself; but minutes later, searching a drawer for cutlery, I found a tin opener in any case. I assembled my meal, which consisted of two rolls without butter containing pink slabs of luncheon meat and a cup of coffee, and carried it on a plate out into the garden.

  It must, at this point, have been early to mid-afternoon, and outside the heat was so searing that it seemed to have blanched the garden of colour. I arranged myself upon a blasted patch of grass, taking care to keep only my right side in the sun, and began to eat. I do not have a particularly weak stomach as far as food is concerned, but the ‘luncheon meat’ was grotesque in appearance. A more imaginative person than I would doubtless have seen all manner of horrors in the sinister pink mush, and I bolted it down, keen to avoid having this type of thought myself. I had progressed to my coffee, swatting at a gang of wasps and other insects lured by the crumbs on my plate to pester me, when the sound of Pamela’s voice caused me to jump.

  ‘Didi, darling, you couldn’t fling over my sunglasses, could you?’

  I looked around, startled. The voice had seemed to come from nearby, and yet Pamela was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I sat in utter confusion; but when I heard nothing further, began to think that I must have imagined it. Seconds later, however, I clearly heard Pamela’s voice again.

  ‘Thanks, darling.’

  This time, I felt quite upset. I turned my head this way and that, telling myself that Pamela must be somewhere in the garden, but knowing in the pit of my stomach that she was not. At that moment I heard a laugh, long and low; again, definitely Pamela’s. I had heard that laugh in the hall of the big house the night before, and was not likely to forget it, nor anything else about that evening, in a hurry. Hearing the laugh, then, I thought that I would go mad. It was absolutely impossible that Pamela could be more than a few feet away, and in the end I was driven to get up and search for her, peering ridiculously behind the apple tree and to the sides of the cottage. Finding nothing, there was no more for me to do than sit back down again. I waited, electrified, my heart pounding. There was a much longer silence this time, but eventually the voice came again.

  ‘She is, she is,’ it said. ‘But it’s early days yet, you know.’

  I was concentrating so hard that I could hear the thud of my own heartbeat in my ears. It was so loud that I was unable to hear anything above its noise, and I slapped the side of my head with my hand to try and make it go away.

  ‘Well, it was so bloody dreadful last time. We were this close to just paying out to get someone professional in, you know.’

  This time I was able to analyse the sound closely enough to hear a slight echo at the end of each word. Through some freak of the landscape and the exceptional stillness of the hot air, Pamela’s voice must be being carried all the way from the back of the house. It was obvious to me now that what I was hearing was one half of a conversation; the ‘Didi’ referred to evidently being positioned behind some obstacle which prevented her responses from reaching me. In almost the same moment as I solved this bizarre mystery, I realized that it had a considerable – indeed, an unthinkable – bearing on me. Pamela, it was suddenly clear, was discussing me with her friend.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t time beforehand, and we’ve both tried to hold off from interrogating her before she’s had time to catch her breath. She seems nice enough, though. Rather mousy, you know.’

  I had stopped breathing.

  ‘That’s right!’ Pamela shrieked with laughter. ‘I know, I know.’

  I was kneeling by this time, my whole body straining in the direction of the house. The sun grated on
my sore skin, corrosive and painful.

  ‘Bog-standard middle, I’d say,’ said Pamela. ‘Well-spoken. She seems quite intelligent.’ Then, minutes later: ‘Oh, nothing very interesting. Some sort of secretary.’

  For a few minutes I could hear nothing at all. The sounds of the garden were amplified in the silence, and after a while grew so loud that I feared that I was missing something.

  ‘Do you know, I don’t think he even notices when we get a new one,’ said Pamela then. ‘He’s such a darling. They all adore him. This one’s got a dreadful crush on him already.’ I heard a long, horrifying peal of laughter. ‘Of course I haven’t. He’d be mortified. God, I must be the only woman in the world who doesn’t need to worry about her husband having it off with the au pair.’

  I cried out in dismay, there in the garden, and swiftly clapped a hand over my mouth as it occurred to me that the strange echo could just as easily work in the other direction. Some time passed, during which I remained kneeling and alert, but no further conversation came my way. I was profoundly upset and disturbed by what I had overheard. I could not even offer myself the obscure consolation of thinking that I had got what I deserved for eavesdropping, seeing as Pamela’s comments had been forced upon my inadvertent ears. My hatred for Pamela, which ever since my arrival at Franchise Farm had been struggling to burst the confines of propriety, broke free and coursed boiling about my veins. For a few minutes I was quite demented with anger and shame, and found myself thrashing and writhing on the spot like a wild animal. My thoughts were in havoc, a babble of concerns from which I could wring no sense, and before long I had exhausted myself so entirely that I fell to the grass, panting. Aware, even in the midst of this chaos, of my skin, I managed to heave my weary body onto its side so that the burnt patches were out of the sun; at which point, much to my surprise, I fell asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  I awoke to find the garden shrouded in the delicate summer gloom of evening. All around was quiet, save for the last, fading strains of birdsong, and in the stillness I felt a profound calm holding me on the brink of sleep; a pause in which neither my mind nor body was properly engaged, and during which I lay, as innocent and unquestioning as a pebble, on the warm grass, with no memory of my capacity for thought or movement. This pause lasted for some time; and then several things happened at once. The dusky garden, whose soft: quiescence had minutes earlier been wrapped close about me, drew back with the menace of unfamiliarity. The silence of the looming trees grew sinister. I had not the faintest idea of where I was, and jumped up straight away from the grass. As I did so, every bone in my body cried out in protest. Bolts of cramp shot through my legs, and my skin felt as if it were crackling or crumpling like paper. Just then, a monstrous and unannounced surge of nausea rose up through my stomach to my mouth. I leaned over and vomited copiously where I stood.

  That all this should have happened without my really having ascertained who or where I was left me in a state of shock. I stared at the heap of my own vomit in the dim light, and was surprised by its luminous pinkness, strident even in the dusk. The luncheon meat was thus summoned from my memory, and with it the reluctant cavalcade of the day’s events, so unexpectedly severed by sleep. I wiped my sticky, wet mouth with the back of my hand and turned to face the cottage. I had left the front door standing wide open and felt a guilty tremor of irresponsibility. I didn’t feel like going inside. Its peevish promise of enclosure was as appalling to my spirits as a warm sweater would have been to my sunburn. The garden, now defaced by my regurgitation and growing gloomier by the second, was no more appealing. I wondered how I was expected to entertain myself, with neither television, radio nor human company to fill the void of evening. I considered going over to the big house, but even setting aside the difficulties already thriving in the barely cultivated ground of my relationship with the Maddens, my day alone, and the peculiar activities to which this solitude had given rise, had left me diffuse and shapeless and unconfident of my ability to assume the coherent form necessary to social interaction.

  The thought of a bath and an early night, with the remainder of the bread rolls to hand should I require them, was at least tolerable, and I went inside, closing the door behind me. As I crossed the sitting room, something caught my eye; a shadow of movement of some sort, which I had glimpsed but now thought I must have imagined. I continued on my way, but as I did so it came again; the faintest of shades, almost behind my field of vision. I stopped, my heart thudding. I sensed the pressure of another presence in the room, the slight bustle of air. It was clearly, however, nothing concrete, given that I couldn’t see it. I wondered, ridiculously, if the cottage was haunted. It surprised me to think this, not being a superstitious person, nor indeed having ever been aware of this dimension in my personal landscape of fears.

  As I stood there, I noticed a white streak, about the size of a finger, on the carpet at my feet. My experience with the tar had left me with a more detailed recollection of the carpet than would be considered normal, and I felt sure that this streak had not been there earlier. I noticed another on the flowered back of the sofa, and then another splashed across the small side table. What on earth could it be? I was becoming quite disturbed by now, and felt a membrane of silent tension begin to gather thickly around me. I went to the door and switched on the lights to try and dispel it. The light was momentarily comforting and prophylactic; but then I caught the shadow again, over by the fireplace – as before, more of a feeling than a visual occurrence.

  My mounting sense of unreality was becoming unbearable, and was frightening me more than the thing – for I still had no idea of what it was – itself. In an attempt to jolt the course of events back onto its proper rails, I gave a loud shout. This immediately made me feel better, and so I shouted several times, running about the room and thumping on the furniture to rout whatever spirit it was that oppressed me. I reached the fireplace, still shouting; and all at once there was a terrific squawking and beating, and a great bird rose up like a fury from behind the armchair, hurling itself through the air towards me. It reared above my head, its fat, feathered body suspended in a frenzied gyration of wings, its claws outstretched. I felt feathers fan against my cheek and screamed like a banshee, almost insensate with terror, pummelling the air with my fists and jumping up and down to try and repel the horror.

  What happened next could only have been the work of a few seconds, although it possessed a startling clarity which, even though I was quite beside myself with fear, impressed itself for ever on my memory. Still suspended in the air, the bird shied away from my flailing fists, a look of affront in its tiny, stupid eyes. It took a great swoop across the room, a sort of leisurely dive; and then hit the far wall with a thud, sliding directly down onto the carpet.

  For some time I was unable to move. At first I was braced for the bird to revive from its knock; but when after a few minutes I heard no sound coming from it, I crept over to the other side of the room to look. It was lying in a heap on the floor, utterly still. I was surprised by its inertia, and by the limpness of its feathered neck lolling to one side. I was relieved, in any case, that it did not appear to be breathing; for I feared that any claim to ‘aptitude for the country life’ would have to include the ability coolly to put a suffering animal out of its misery. In fact, I could not bring myself to go any nearer to it, let alone touch it, dead as it was. I recognized it as a pigeon, and realized that it must have flown through the open door while I was sleeping, depositing gobbets of its excrement about the room.

  Given that I was unwilling to touch the creature and could therefore achieve nothing by just standing about, I presently found myself on my way once more to the bathroom, where I had been headed before the unfortunate incident waylaid me. I ran a bath in the narrow tub and glimpsed my reflection in the small mirror above the sink, being for some minutes gripped by compelling feelings of alienation and concern at the sight of myself. In a sort of dream, I got into the bath. The water was quite hot; and
after some time I realized that a painful tingling sensation was coursing down the right side of my body, particularly around the leg and arm. I washed quickly, unable because of this tingling to endure the long, comforting immersion I had imagined, and by the time I had finished was in such pain that I literally sprang from the water, sending great waves of it sloshing over the sides of the bath and onto the floor. Examining myself, still dripping wet, I saw to my dismay that my right arm and leg – I had been wearing the cut-off trousers, as I am sure you will recall – as well as the skin on my right cheek and neck, had turned a violent purple.

  I had had no idea, when I lay down on the grass that afternoon, that the sun could be so powerful at that hour. As well as the dreadful pain of this latest discovery, I was aware that it had had a peculiar effect on my appearance. A brief survey turned up the following: right arm and right leg to the upper thigh, severely burnt; left arm burnt; left leg, marble white; left cheek and neck, burnt; right cheek and neck, severely burnt; torso and upper arms, marble white; central panel of face and neck – a strip no more than an inch wide – marble white.

  It was by now dark outside, and I thought of going out into the garden so as to cool myself off; but my recollection of the pile of vomit, though vivid, was not so precise that I could be sure of not treading in it in the dark. The sitting room, where the bird still lay in ghoulish state, was no more inviting. In defeat I retreated upstairs to my bedroom. My skin was still wet, and within seconds of leaving the bathroom I became very cold and began to shiver uncontrollably. Upstairs I tried to dry myself, as before, with the edge of the eiderdown, but the crisp fabric felt like sandpaper as I rubbed it over my sore skin. The lotion skidded about on this raw, wet surface when I tried to apply it, and would not be absorbed. Presently I gave up entirely, and lay down whimpering on the bed.