The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said when I came in.

  ‘Nothing,’ I gloomily replied. ‘What do you want to do?’

  Pamela’s assault had, I felt, put a fatal imprimatur of misfortune on the day. None of its gambles, after such an opening, could possibly go my way; not only because the theme had been set and the tone determined, but also in that so many of its uncertainties depended for their outcome on my own confidence, a quantity which now lay blighted and forlorn in some shameful corner of my heart. I cursed my own recklessness in my decision to wear the cut-off trousers, and Toby for inciting it. The thrill I felt when I thought of his visit to the cottage the night before was now doubly despicable. Why had he come to see me so late at night? Perhaps, it struck me, he had come so late with the express purpose of not seeing me; to visit his memories of the place rather than its new tenant, at an hour when I could be sure not to accost him. This new theory seemed in genuine danger of being accurate; until I remembered that I had distinctly heard him knock at the door, and that besides, even on such brief acquaintance as ours, I could see that he was not a man likely to be given to reminiscence or contemplation. I did not, even in the heat of gratification, believe that Toby really liked me. My earlier disappointment in the cottage garden was still too fresh to permit such an idea. It was the cut-off trousers, I felt sure, which had lured him and lit his path to my door; and having admitted this I found myself in belated and embarrassed agreement with Pamela for her fury.

  ‘Ah!’ I said aloud, an exclamation driven to the surface by a surfeit of inner torment.

  ‘What?’ said Martin plaintively.

  ‘Nothing. I just got off to a bad start today.’

  ‘I don’t understand it when people say things like that,’ he said; thinking, I didn’t doubt, of his mother. ‘I never feel that way. They make it sound like they’re giving a performance or doing an exam or something. I just decide what mood I’m going to be in and then see what happens.’

  ‘Are you going to the centre today?’ I enquired; partly, I’m afraid, to remind him of his misfortunes; but mostly to ascertain whether there was any chance of further avoiding the debacle which, curiously, had grown more insubstantial in my mind with every deferral. I had managed almost entirely to block the driving problem from my thoughts over the past few days; or rather, like a pilot in a small plane, I had been flying just above it, roundly aware of but not feeling the texture of its contours, pulling just in time out of every lurch of fear to skim its menacing peaks. I hoped at least that when the inevitable wall of hard and insurmountable fact rose up before me, my collision with it would be swift and painless; for although I felt that I wanted time to prepare myself for what no amount of meditation could alter, I knew that to be conscious of my fear would be to endure every torment it could devise for me.

  ‘I think so,’ said Martin. His vagueness was agony. ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Well I am, then. Are you taking me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I shrilled.

  In moments of greater confidence than this, when I had dared to look down from the height of my denial, I had wondered what could possibly be so difficult about driving a car that the sheer force of my desperation would not overcome. I had sat beside people in cars often enough; so many times, in fact, throughout my life, that when I tried to recall the various manoeuvres I had, albeit half-consciously, witnessed, I found that I had unwittingly amassed enough images of the driving process to conduct a sort of lesson in my head. Steering was easy enough, a simple matter of instinct and clear vision. Acceleration and braking, once one had determined which levers caused them, could likewise not be hard. It was the gearstick which intimidated me; and the varying styles of using it which I summoned up from my memories of the passenger seat suggested that this, being the zone of personal embellishment, was also the kernel of difficulty. My mother had laboured over it with exaggerated caution; my father had flicked it carelessly from one position to the next; Edward, who drove, unlikely as it may seem, with a sort of epicurean pleasure, had almost caressed it in his manipulations. Mr Madden’s mastery of the process was the one which most interested me, given that it was his car I was going to drive. He changed gear with a rough confidence which I imagined experts would decry; but what disturbed me were peculiarities in his handling of the car which suggested that it was in some sense irascible or untamed, and required not only more than the average degree of skill but also some sort of personal acquaintance to drive it.

  ‘What time will we have to leave?’ I enquired, wondering if there was any way that I could slip out to the drive and examine my opponent in advance.

  ‘After lunch some time.’ Martin yawned. ‘Don’t make such a fuss.’

  The morning fled by with alarming speed. Every time I looked at my watch, it seemed to have made impossible advances; and in the end my resistance to the passing of time in proportion to its velocity was such that I felt as if I were trapped in some fast downhill ride, with the world a blur around me and the wind buffeting my face, the crowd of my other concerns left far behind at the top. We kept to Martin’s room, it having been implicitly understood that the hot spell had endured beyond the point at which it was imperative to go outside to that where it was imperative to stay in. I had instructed him to do his homework, swatting away every attempt he made to engage me instead in conversation, and sat in the window seat in gloomy contemplation and dread. There are few things more unpleasant than the anticipation of some inescapable, solitary trial. What begins as a distant blot can feed on all the intervening hours until it becomes a vast obstacle, in whose shadow it is impossible to feel the warmth of any future consolation. I could not foresee a time when my unhappiness would be over. I knew that at some point I would have driven, and would no longer be driving; but even this certain statement housed a hundred different outcomes, which left no room in it for comfort. The fact that I not only had to endure the interlude, but must give the performance of my life in it, meant that sheer survival was of little use to me. I wished then with all my heart that I had confessed the truth to the Maddens when the opportunity had first arisen; a truth which was now inadmissible, given that it had since gathered to itself so many lies.

  ‘Finished!’ said Martin triumphantly, waving a book at me. ‘Let’s go downstairs. It’s lunchtime.’

  ‘We’re just having a light scratch lunch in the kitchen,’ said Pamela when we presented ourselves. I wondered if her need to give so long and descriptive a title to something whose essence was informality signified a skill at hospitality or a terror of what lay outside it. ‘Toby’s helping Piers on the farm today, so I gave them sandwiches to take with them.’

  ‘What?’ said Martin gleefully, while I tried to work out whether the absence of Toby and Piers improved my situation or worsened it. I had certainly relied on Piers to promote calm during my first and inevitably chaotic manoeuvres on the drive, and on Toby to inspire panic; which left me, I decided, more or less where I had started.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Pamela was saying sharply. ‘I think it was jolly nice of him to offer.’

  ‘I bet he didn’t offer,’ said Martin.

  ‘Well he certainly didn’t refuse,’ snapped Pamela.

  ‘I bet he was pissed off.’ Martin caught my eye menacingly. ‘I bet he envisaged a day of chasing Stella around the swimming pool.’

  This, although I suspected he didn’t realize it, was the worst thing Martin could possibly have said. Pamela’s whole frame tensed at the remark.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t think Stella would have minded too much about that,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Whoah!’ said Martin, grinning. ‘Bitchy!’

  Although I was upset by Pamela’s comment, and offended by the exchange in general, I did not feel capable of intervening; partly because my anxieties about driving held me in an inescapable clinch, and partly because this type of conversation was so alien to me that I did not know how to enter it. Instead, I di
d something I rarely do: I bore the affront silently, and with a very apparent air of injury. We sat down at the table, and after she and Martin had made one or two desultory observations on other matters, Pamela turned to me.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Stella, don’t sulk,’ she said, her voice poised between anger and humour. ‘It was only a bit of fun.’

  This final outrage very nearly provoked me to fury. I remembered what Pamela had said earlier in the corridor about where I came from, as if it were, by implication and exclusion, a place of mysterious degenerations which I should, indeed must, concede in favour of the better sphere I now had the good fortune to inhabit; a place which, moreover, located as it was beyond the small circle of her concerns, could have no language of its own but merely an illiteracy in hers. I did not, in fact, think that Pamela regarded me as being beneath her; merely that she accorded such sovereignty to her own ideas about things, and those of people like her, that she took their authority to be a matter of universal agreement. Pamela, I saw, had been reared on the most general notions regarding people unlike herself; and with neither education nor acquaintance to fill in the detail, was possessed of that curious confidence which accompanies ignorance, and which is concerned more with keeping the world at bay than with understanding or even reforming it. Had it occurred under almost any other set of circumstances, she would not have been able to rebuke me for my appearance, nor draw from it the inference she just had; and it was here that her family, her house, and her station in life entered into a fatal collusion with her caprice. Pamela’s triumphs were not those of reason, religion, morality, or even etiquette; they were a mere triumph, though she didn’t know it, of numbers. She operated by a sort of inverted anomie; by which I mean that although she had rules, and plenty of them, their basis was the ever-shifting ground of what Pamela happened to find pleasing at the time, and their ultimate goal the proper delivery to Pamela of her own way. Where I come from, I wanted to say, we would never be so rude; but the mere thought brought on such a sudden ache of longing for the life I had left behind that I feared I would burst into tears if I articulated it.

  ‘I’m not sulking,’ I said instead. ‘I’m just thinking about something else.’

  Pamela had opened her mouth, ready, I guessed, with some convenient stricture concerning the impropriety of thinking about something else, when Martin intervened.

  ‘Oh, leave her alone, you old bag,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘She’d tell you to sod off herself if she wasn’t so embarrassed.’

  ‘Stella can tell me to sod off if she likes!’ said Pamela, with a look of gay amazement. I felt that I would never fathom the process by which personal insult invariably manufactured good humour in her. ‘She knows we don’t mince our words around here.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish you’d mince them more,’ I said daringly, glad that I had managed to fit in some form of retaliation, however belated.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Pamela laughed, throwing back her head. ‘Do you think we’re all frightfully rude to each other? I did used to worry about that, but I’ve got so used to it now. Oh, stop! That’s disgusting!’ Martin had leaned towards her and was chewing deliberately with his mouth wide open. ‘Goodness, look at the time! You two’d better get moving.’

  All at once my destiny was upon me. I had almost, in the second before Pamela noticed the time, forgotten what I had now to do; and as it rushed at me once more, I found my terror redoubled.

  ‘Right,’ I said, standing up. I was alarmed to notice a feeling of lightness in my legs. Nothing, in that moment, seemed quite real. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Mm.’ Martin stuffed in a last mouthful of food.

  ‘You know the way, don’t you?’ said Pamela, to me; evidently having been ignorant of the whole silent drama of deferral and relief in which I had been engaged over the past few days. She did not remember, I saw, that I had so far escaped driving Martin to the centre myself.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Martin can help if we get lost.’

  With no further excuse for lingering in the kitchen, I was forced to grasp the handles of Martin’s chair and begin wheeling him to the door. I was profoundly worried by the feeling of physical weakness which had started in my legs and now spread down my arms. I could barely push Martin’s chair, and the room seemed to tilt this way and that before my eyes. Once out in the hall, I realized to my horror that Pamela was hovering behind us. I wondered if she intended to see us off, and tried desperately to think of some means of detaching her.

  ‘We’ll see you later, then,’ I said.

  ‘Have a good time, darling,’ she said, still on our trail.

  ‘Fat chance,’ said Martin.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said, more firmly, as we reached the door.

  ‘Do you want a hand getting him in?’ Pamela persisted, lingering in the doorway as Martin shot off down the ramp.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  I put my hand on the door as if to close it. Pamela stood her ground. Our eyes met.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ she said finally. She looked at me rather suspiciously; and then, to my relief, turned and made her way back down the hall.

  I closed the door firmly after her, and went feebly down the steps to where Martin sat in the sun beside the car.

  ‘Open the door, then,’ he said.

  I opened the door and he levered himself into the passenger seat. I closed the door after him and made my way round to the other side, feeling as if I were walking on something yielding, like marshmallow.

  ‘You forgot my chair,’ he said, when I opened the other door.

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  I returned to the passenger side, where the chair sat abandoned on the gravel. Martin wound down the window.

  ‘Don’t just stand there,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know how to collapse it.’

  ‘You put your foot on that thing at the back. That’s it.’

  The chair folded flat and I carried it to the boot. I had never in my life felt less competent than I did in that moment. I opened the boot and laid the chair in it.

  ‘Get a move on, Ste-la!’ cried Martin from the front.

  I realized that I had been performing every action in slow motion, so as to delay the moment when I would have to get in the car. The chair now stowed, there was however nothing else that I could do. I went back to the driver’s side and got in.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Martin plaintively.

  Before my eyes was the most alarming panorama I had ever seen. Across the entire vertical axis of my side of the car extended a vast control panel, a cryptic ridge of dials and switches, knobs and graphs, teeming not merely with numbers but also abbreviations (‘m.p.h.’, ‘k.p.h.’, grunts redolent of a prerequisite familiarity), coloured squares, ruled lines, and a whole register of hieroglyphics telling of strange vehicular adventures: a small petrol pump, a group of waving lines like rising steam, three lamps whose beams shone three different ways. From this background rose the mute black circle of the steering wheel, bristling with levers. Pedals lay at my feet like waiting irons. Through the windscreen, beneath the long flank of the bonnet, the engine sat coiled, waiting to burst into life.

  ‘I can’t drive,’ I said.

  There was a long silence. Beside me, Martin sat looking straight ahead.

  ‘Right,’ he said, finally.

  ‘If your parents find out,’ I continued, ‘they’ll send me home.’

  ‘Probably.’ He nodded. ‘They did say driving was essential, Stel-la.’

  ‘I know.’

  It seemed futile to explain the process by which, conveniently or otherwise, I had neglected to take notice of this requirement at the time, or to draw this neglect to anyone’s attention afterwards. What concerned me in that moment was what Martin intended to do about it. Having confessed to him, I had put myself entirely in his hands. Although I had been aware that our intimacy had gathered strength since the moment of our first meeting,
it had never occurred to me to test it. Now I had a sense of my bond with Martin vying with that of his parents; and as he sat beside me in the car, pulled in either direction by these conflicting loyalties, his ruling took on for me an importance beyond the merely expedient. My heart lay hollow, waiting to be filled by his regard; and the thought of his refusing me, and turning me over to be dealt with by the familial authorities while he withdrew into their ranks, was unbearable.

  ‘It can’t be that hard,’ he observed presently. ‘I know how it works. I’ll just tell you what to do.’

  ‘All right,’ I said recklessly. ‘If you’re sure you won’t be frightened.’

  ‘It would be an honour,’ said Martin, ‘to die with you, Stel-la. Turn the key.’

  I found the key, which was already in the ignition, and turned it. There was a stutter of life from beneath the bonnet, and then the car slowly began to tremble around us.

  ‘Is it on?’ I said. I had expected a roar of some kind.

  ‘Of course it’s on. Now, there are three pedals at your feet. On the right, the accelerator. Press it.’

  I pressed it with my foot, my hands gripping the wheel. The noise of the engine did grow louder, but the car did not move. Thinking this to be because I had not pressed hard enough, I put down my foot until it would not go any further.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Martin, above the scream of the engine.

  ‘Why didn’t we move?’ I said as it died away.

  ‘Because we’re not in gear. I only asked you to press it so that you’d know which one it was. The middle one is the brake. Press that.’

  I did so.

  ‘The pedal on your left is the clutch. You press the clutch when you want to change gear.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘When you press the clutch, you take your foot off the accelerator. Then, when you’ve changed gear, you put your foot back on the accelerator again.’

  ‘How do you change gear?’

  ‘You just – look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll change gear for you. I’ll just shout clutch, and you put your foot on the clutch, OK? You concentrate on steering.’