The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  I had turned and placed my foot on the first, broad step of the ladder when I heard a shout. I stopped immediately and looked about. The cry had sounded far off, and I wondered if it had been an echo from the house or road, for I could see no one in the vicinity. It came a second time, and I looked about again. At first I could see nothing; but then a distant shape snagged my gaze, moving quickly between the two planes of field and sky. It was a man, and he was waving his arms and coming rapidly towards me through the field, leaving a dark furrow of flattened stems behind him. He had something in his right hand which I understood, surprisingly calmly, to be a gun. I remained exactly where I was, with one foot on the step, which I felt was the most sensible thing to do. In fact, there was nothing else I could have done, for despite having no real consciousness of fear, at the first sight of the man I had experienced a rapid sensation of drainage, as if everything warm and pulsing in me had been voided through a trapdoor. I was no more animate standing there than a lamp-post, and no more capable of running away.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted the man – rather unnecessarily – quite close to me now. My first impression of him, being entirely dedicated to assessing his potential for harming me, was blurred. He was young – in his thirties, I thought – and if not big then fairly square. In those panicked seconds I was surprised to notice the burly movement of his thighs as he ran, like two large hams beneath the rippling cloth of his trousers. His face, if I were to be honest, did not look like it bore the intention of murdering me; in fact, as he waded from the field and jogged to a halt in front of me, I was almost distracted from my terror by the curious look of him. His was unlike any face I had ever seen; but its peculiar aspect was characterized more by lack than by the presence of anything unusual. Some dimension appeared to be missing from it, although it was hard in those moments to get a sense of what it was. He had by now been standing in front of me for some time, catching his breath. The gun, I was glad to notice, was held behind his back.

  ‘What do you want?’ I finally enquired, impatient at his failure to state his intentions. I felt a surge of valour in the wake of my earlier cowardice, as if I had strained my capacity for self-protection and now didn’t care what happened to me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said finally, still breathless. He looked me in the eye, and it was then that I saw how the two sides of his face seemed to meet in a point or ridge at the centre, as if he had two profiles but no head-on aspect. His eyes were very close together and turned slightly inward; a physiognomical misfortune, giving the bizarre impression that he was looking at himself. Otherwise he was not unattractive. He looked healthy, at least, and had a generous head of brown curly hair.

  ‘I am going for a walk,’ I replied. ‘As this is a public footpath, I don’t see that it is any of your business.’

  It was backhanded of me to use as my vindication the very thing I had bemoaned minutes earlier; but as I still had no idea of who the man was, I was forced to defend myself in any way I could.

  ‘I wouldn’t walk over that if I were you,’ he said presently, nodding at the ladder. He had quite a broad accent, of the sort I had already heard in the village. ‘It’s broken, see?’

  He lunged purposefully towards me and I drew back. In the event it was only so that he could demonstrate a fault in the step on which I had been about to place my weight. It had come almost entirely away from its bracket. Had I stepped on it, I would almost certainly have injured myself.

  ‘How could they leave it like that?’ I cried; before remembering that ‘they’ was in fact Mr Madden, whom I had defended against the creature’s accusations so passionately only the day before. ‘This is a public right of way!’ The man’s expression was impassive, which inflamed me further. ‘If you knew about it,’ I added, ‘why didn’t you inform somebody?’

  This, I felt, was a pertinent enough question; but you would not have guessed from the man’s face that I had asked him one. Indeed, he seemed to be waiting for me to say something more.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell somebody?’ I repeated. I wondered if he was in some way backward. His head cocked from one side to the other at hearing the question again, with the beady, rigid stupidity of a chicken.

  ‘You like walking, then?’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes I do,’ I briskly replied. I had been about to pose my question for the third time; but the apparent futility of the whole encounter stopped me. It irritated me to see that the man’s obtuseness had triumphed over my own rationality. With curious clarity, I quickly understood that my ideas about how the conversation should proceed, and indeed about everything that had happened in the past few minutes, were entirely misplaced; not because they were wrong, exactly, but because they belonged elsewhere. The fact that the man and I did not appear to be communicating clearly seemed, in this light, to be more my fault than his. In my mind I went over what had happened and realized that he had come bounding over the field in such an alarming fashion solely to alert me to the broken step; and what is more, that he had found my ingratitude, as opposed to the admission of irresponsibility towards which I had vainly been trying to direct him, something of an affront. I began to regret the confrontational style of my approach; and at the same time became aware of news of an indisposition being telegraphed to me from several regions of my body at once.

  ‘I’ve seen you about,’ said the man, fixing me with the single beam of his misaligned eyes.

  ‘Have you?’ I vaguely replied. Suddenly I was not feeling at all well. My head had grown heavy and a strange prickling sensation coursed about my nose and eyes and down my throat. I tried to focus on the man, and concentrate on what he was saying, but with the mounting turbulence in all my senses he seemed remote. I felt a wave rise between my ears and I sneezed three times in quick succession.

  ‘You’ve not been here long,’ I heard him say. ‘But you’ve been busy.’

  I rubbed my eyes, which had swollen so rapidly that I feared they might shut altogether. Dimly I realized that the man would not be capable of acknowledging my sudden decline, nor of encompassing it in whatever plans he might have had for this social encounter. Were my eyes really to seal themselves shut, I might even have to ask him to lead me back to the cottage. It was essential that I escaped immediately, and I summoned every reserve of will I possessed to detach myself as quickly and politely as possible.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said thickly, ‘but I’ve just remembered that I’m late for something. I have to go.’

  I glimpsed his face as I turned on my heel, and the image of it stayed in my mind as I fled streaming through the heat along the top of the field, through the gate, and back along the shady corridor towards the house.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Pamela and Martin both looked slightly startled when I burst into the kitchen, their heads jerking up in unison and their eyes wide with enquiry. I was now so besieged by allergy that it felt as if a great swarm of bees were milling around my face. Even so, I was dimly surprised to find the two of them indoors, having thought they were to spend the afternoon en famille by the pool. Pamela was sitting at the table reading a newspaper laid out flat in front of her like a bolt of cloth, a pair of glasses balanced on her elegant nose. Opposite her, Martin sat with his chair drawn up, absorbed in the same loving transfer of information from book to pad which I had overseen on the lawn that morning. Seen from the side their heads were barely six inches apart; and at my entrance they sprang away from each other, as if I had caught them at some guilty pursuit, like cheating or espionage.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ cried Pamela; a cry, if I were to be honest, expressive of a dangerously threadbare concern.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I slurred. ‘It started in the field. I think I must be allergic to something.’

  I was beginning to feel quite dizzy, and I pulled out a chair and sat down beside Martin.

  ‘Which? The top field?’ said Pamela.

  ‘The gold one.’ I sneezed. ‘Beautiful.’

 
‘The top field. It must be hay fever.’

  She nodded firmly. I wondered if she intended to do anything about it. In spite of my distress, I was becoming acutely aware of some fast approaching limit on Pamela’s kindness. Martin was looking from one to the other of us, as if he were watching a play.

  ‘Let me think,’ said Pamela presently. I understood from this comment that she had, in the period since her last remark, been considering my plight rather than ignoring it. ‘What have I got? Oh, I know. Have a look in that cupboard over there beside the door. See if there’s a packet of something called Zortek or Zartek. Something like that.’

  I realized that she was speaking to me, rather than some other factotum, and felt slightly injured that she should not be sufficiently moved by my condition to get the packet herself. Permitting myself a pathetic sigh, I got heavily to my feet and went to investigate the cupboard.

  ‘See it?’ called Pamela unhelpfully from behind me.

  I found the packet and went directly to the sink for a glass of water. I had to admit that Pamela’s diagnosis had been accurate; for only a few minutes after I had taken the pill and sat down again, I felt the inflammation of my eyes and nose begin miraculously to subside.

  ‘What were you doing in the top field?’ Pamela lightly enquired.

  ‘Walking,’ I replied, somewhat belligerently. ‘There’s a public footpath.’ My conversion to the whole business of footpaths, though opportunistic, was proving profound. ‘I met a man.’

  ‘A man?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, what sort of man?’ said Pamela finally. She appeared exasperated. ‘Didn’t you ask who he was?’

  ‘I don’t see that I had the right to ask,’ I said. ‘It was a public footpath, as I said.’ This was not, I suddenly remembered, strictly true – the man had approached me right over the field. ‘He pointed out,’ I continued, mounting a new offensive, ‘that a step had broken on the ladder over the fence. I had been about to stand on it and he wanted to prevent me hurting myself. That was all.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ persisted Pamela. I should probably have noticed that her interest in him was unnatural; but the fact that I myself wanted to know who he was gave Pamela’s curiosity the illusion of being merely an extension of my own.

  ‘Very odd,’ I said. I couldn’t think how to describe him, so instead I placed both hands over my face so that they formed a sort of vertical roof. ‘Like that.’

  ‘Oh, that was Mr Trimmer,’ said Pamela quickly. She sounded relieved. After a moment she smiled. ‘I should watch out if I were you. He’s probably taken a fancy to you. He’s absolutely notorious. Of course, he’s terribly sweet, but simply desperate for a girlfriend. I shouldn’t think there’s a woman in a twenty-mile radius that hasn’t been asked out by Mr Trimmer.’

  I was beginning to feel rather offended that Mr Trimmer hadn’t in fact asked me out, and then remembered that I’d run off before he’d had the chance. It irritated me, nonetheless, that Pamela was so keen to ridicule the notion of someone taking an interest in me. I realized that I had felt flattered by Mr Trimmer’s heroic run across the top field, which now had been diminished to public comedy.

  ‘I thought he was nice,’ I said. ‘He looks peculiar, but there must be plenty of people who don’t mind that.’

  Martin’s head shot up disconcertingly at this remark.

  ‘Oh, he’s terribly nice,’ intervened Pamela. She did not, I sensed, wish to be thought unkind; although I had the feeling that this was for reasons more of vanity than conscience. ‘No, he’s an absolute darling. The problem is with his mother.’

  ‘His mother?’

  ‘Yes, he lives with his mother,’ said Pamela, in a confidential tone. ‘Mrs Trimmer. Dora. She’s a real old battleaxe. She’s got poor Jack utterly under her thumb and scares off anyone who comes near him. She thinks they’re after his money.’

  ‘Has he got any?’

  ‘Oh, not really. They live in this wonderful house, though. It’s an absolute pit inside, but it must be worth a fortune. Jack’s father left it to him when he died, and Dora’s worried that if he mames, his wife will boot her out. So she tells him the most dreadful things about everyone he meets – simply makes things up!’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Oh, you know, that they’ve all got horrible diseases, that sort of thing. She got into terrible trouble once’ – Pamela lowered her voice, as if someone might be eavesdropping – ‘for saying that a girl in the village was a convicted thief. Poor Jack had been quite taken by her, so he stuck his neck out and brought her round for tea anyway. Afterwards Dora said that some silver had gone missing from the house, so what did he do but go marching over there in the middle of the night to demand it back!’ Pamela shrieked with laughter. ‘There was the most terrible set-to with her father, right out in Hilltop High Street!’

  Martin yawned conspicuously. I saw the moist, red cavern of his mouth.

  ‘He’s Mr Madden’s manager, isn’t he?’ I said, only then remembering why his name was familiar to me. The creature had mentioned him in connection with the shooting of Geoff.

  ‘That’s right. Piers adores him. Couldn’t do without him. And Dora has given us her seal of approval, so there’s no trouble from her. Old George Trimmer, her husband, worked here for years.’

  There was a pause. The house ticked and creaked around us. Outside, through the window, shadows surreptitiously advanced across the lawn in the cooling afternoon.

  ‘Right!’ said Pamela briskly, standing up. I wondered if she was offended that she had not been implored to continue with her narrative. ‘I’d better get on. Can you two amuse yourselves until supper?’

  ‘I – yes,’ I said firmly. I had been about to say ‘I think so’, before remembering Pamela’s aversion to qualified statements. ‘What would you like to do?’ I said, to Martin.

  ‘Dunno,’ he ungraciously replied.

  ‘Well,’ said Pamela tersely. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll get on.’

  I realized that, having achieved the first steep slope of novelty with regard to looking after Martin, I had slackened off slightly in the efforts I was making to fill his time. It is one of the difficulties of change that the work of one’s own accommodation with it can obscure any real assessment of success or failure; and of unhappiness that improvements or otherwise in spirit become the focus, and dictate the sense of outcome, of a day’s work. Suffering from both, I had neglected Martin in favour of tending myself; and I saw another ascent rise before me as I acknowledged within the triumph of my own survival the inadequacy of its accomplishments.

  ‘How about a walk?’ I said. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but my eyes still itched a little, and my throat was thick. ‘Or do you want to carry on with that?’

  I was intensely aware of Pamela, who was now busying herself with her back to us at one of the kitchen counters. I could tell from the tense set of her shoulders that she was listening, and willed Martin to respond in an obliging fashion.

  ‘No, I’ve done enough,’ he said, his manner all at once remarkably pleasant. ‘Let’s go out while it’s still light.’

  Once outside, Martin’s amiability persisted.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been allergic to anything before. I don’t know why it should have happened just then.’

  ‘Maybe you were allergic to Trimmer.’

  ‘As I said, I thought he was nice.’

  It was now early evening, and as I pushed Martin along the gravel path at the side of the house, I was struck by how lovely the hot days were in retreat. The air was as thick and soft as the faded petals of the rose garden, and induced a feeling of wistful calm; a curiously alloyed sense of contentment, as if through the sudden stillness the noise of distant troubles could all at once be heard.

  I had for some time been shamefully mindful of Toby’s supposed visit to the cottage; an intention so vague that I
felt I would have to spread my net wide to catch it. Since my return from my walk, a worm of anxiety had been gradually working its way across my thoughts, as events had trespassed further and further into the swath of time with which I had hoped to surround the possibility; and now I began to search deviously for a means of luring Martin to the cottage garden so that I would be able to take up my vigil. I was not fully conscious of the development of this matter in my mind from the seed of suggestion to full-blown expectation; indeed, it was probably for this reason that it had been permitted to grow unchecked. Once or twice I had examined its deleterious progress and hacked it back, appalled; but as soon as I turned my thoughts to other things it would continue its subtle creep through my heart. I did not really like Toby; and if I had dug at the soil beneath these wild hopes I would probably have found the desire for them not to be fulfilled. His attraction was all in the moment, like the taste of something sweet on the tongue.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ I said to Martin, pausing at the junction where the path to the cottage snaked away between the hedges. ‘We could go and sit in my garden if you like. It gets the sun in the evenings.’

  I waited, my heart suspended in hope.

  ‘OK,’ said Martin innocently. I felt immediate guilt at the effortlessness with which I had tricked him. It was, I realized, remarkably easy to husband motives in the presence of those who had none. ‘Have you got anything to drink?’