The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  Just then, the inviting turquoise of the swimming pool on the other side of the lawn caught my eye. It may seem curious that the idea of swimming had not suggested itself until that moment; but the ceaseless postponements to which I had been subject over the course of the past week had instilled their discipline in me. I had become servile; and was by now so used to regarding the pool as a mere feature of the landscape that I had more or less forgotten its purpose. I gave a yelp of joy and rose from my chair. My current dishevelment, combined with all the memories of this longed-for but withheld pleasure that I had accrued, stirred up in me an almost painful feeling of anticipation. My skin prickled and gushed at the thought of its imminent immersion. My scalp burned, yearning for the cool water. Having thought of it, it seemed unbearable that I would have to delay swimming by even one more minute; and given that any expedition in search of a costume would necessitate an encounter with Roy, not to mention trespassing into the mysteries of Pamela’s bedroom, I decided to eschew the appropriate attire and swim in my underwear. Who, after all, would see me? And even if they did, it would be with accusations of a far more serious nature than indecency that they would regale me.

  With this cavalier thought, I removed the cut-off trousers and T-shirt and streaked across the lawn towards the water. As I hovered for a few seconds on the tiled brink of the pool, my certainty that in a very short time I would be in it drove my longing to such a pitch that I thought I would burst. In that charged interval, every anxiety and regret seemed to rise from viscera to skin with the expectation of being discharged and washed away. A momentary despair, like pain felt through sleep to which one briefly awakes, suffused me; and then I jumped.

  How can I convey the glory of that transition from desire to fulfilment that I felt as the water closed over my head? One minute I had been diffuse, soiled, porous; the next I was purged, contained, that which had been widely strewn and trampled folded and zipped back into the bag of my body. I stayed under for a long time, flapping sideways with my arms to prevent myself from floating, until the advancing cold of the water succeeded in quenching me to the core; and then I surfaced, sleek and gasping, to feel the sun brilliant on my wet face. The Maddens’ pool was smaller than it looked, unsuited to serious swimming, and so after gliding blissfully to and fro on my side for a while I lay on my back and felt the cool tide lap against my scalp. I glimpsed the deep blue of the sky rearing above me, closed my eyes as the watery cradle bore my weight. The thread of my time in the country seemed all at once to snap, and I drifted away from the closely knitted stump of the past week, up to some higher region from where all the things of life appeared visible but remote, as the swimming-pool floor was to me now.

  Presently, as is in the nature of even the most pleasurable experiences, I felt the compulsion to conclude my swim; if only so that I could swim again at some future point. I heaved myself dripping over the side of the pool and made my way back across the lawn. Roy was as I had left him when I went to the side of the house to look. A blackbird was pecking at the gravel beside his body. I felt a sense of frustration at the resilience of this obstacle to my happiness, for again I had entertained the curious hope that the incident would have been erased, and indeed might still be if I waited long enough. Returning to the table, I sat down and drank some more of the warm champagne. The taste of it in my mouth released a memory, which moved elusively around my thoughts, just out of reach. Even in the shade, I was already beginning to get hot again. The sun had moved a considerable way to the left, so that blocks of shadow were advancing across the lawn, but its heat did not appear to have abated. I was dimly aware of my strange appearance, which was mostly owing to the extreme variations in skin colour on different parts of my body, but seemed exacerbated by the peculiar sight of my underwear in such a public setting. Anxieties began to stir and scuttle about my mind. I wondered what time it was and when Pamela would appear, whether I should return the umbrella to the shed immediately so that I would not forget to do so later, what I should do about Roy, how I was to manage the lesser concealment of the champagne; until all in all I began to feel fraught with worry, adding the curdling of my afternoon idyll to my catalogue of problems.

  It required a considerable effort of will to drive these concerns from my mind, for their power was merely enhanced by the fact that I recognized the pattern of their invasion from my previous life and regarded it with fear. It was precisely to escape this kind of anxiety that I had come to the country in the first place. I determined to think about nothing whatsoever until I had at least had another swim. Drinking down the last of the champagne, which by now tasted really rather disgusting, I got unsteadily to my feet and made my way across the lawn to the pool. The combination of alcohol and heat immediately had a stunning effect on me, and I stood swaying by the side of the pool for some time, my toes gripping the edge to prevent myself falling in. The sun pounded on my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was beginning to feel distinctly unwell. My eyes sought some object on which to focus, but when I looked up the garden seemed to take a great tilt. I staggered to one side, the blood pounding in my ears, the fuzzy outlines of trees spinning about me, and everything seemed suddenly to rush upwards at an impossible speed as I lost my balance and plunged head-first into the water.

  I have very little recollection of what happened next, and believe I must in fact have fainted as I fell. I tumbled down what seemed to be a very long way, and then met with something hard which I dimly understood to be the bottom of the pool. I could only have stayed there a few seconds, but the interlude had the framework of a dream, in which everything real is replaced by an entire and quite illusory memory designed to support the thing experienced. It seemed to me, in other words, that I had always lain at the bottom of the pool: its profound silence was the sound of myself, its lovely columns of watered sunlight utterly familiar. On and on I lay; until suddenly I was rushing upwards, and was jerked forcefully from the water by something clamped painfully around the tops of my arms. I could hear a woman’s voice saying ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ over and over; but again, in this dream-state, it seemed to me that she had always been saying that.

  At the sound of the woman’s voice, in any case, something peculiar happened. I was in one way quite aware of it, and yet at the same time it was remote and beyond my control. It was as if I were on a train, watching the landscape fly past; and just as the appearance of houses and telegraph poles might have told me that I was about to arrive at my station, so the woman’s voice seemed to signal that I was going to wake up. But although the sound itself was clear, the words immediately sent my train lurching off course; so that suddenly I found myself speeding far away from where I wanted to go, on and on with everything around me a blur, until gradually, after some considerable time, it began to slow down. I felt the heat pulsing on my head and the pressure of something hard pushing against my stomach. Far away I could hear the sound of traffic, its faint cries rising discordantly from the steady buzz. Someone was saying ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’; but it was a man’s voice this time, which for a while seemed to have nothing to do with me. Presently I realized that it was Edward’s voice, and he kept saying it over and over again; so many times, really, that eventually I wanted to tell him just to be quiet and go away. It was impossible for me to do this, however. My physical predicament would not allow for it. I appeared to be upside-down, and even though I was too frightened to open my eyes my gradual recollection of events, as well as the sound of traffic from far, far below, told me that I was very high up and could fall at any moment.

  I remembered that I had been standing on the balcony of our hotel room, looking down at the busy street several storeys below. In my mind I appeared to be standing there again. The noise filled my head like the sound of an argument. The sun hammered on my shoulders. Edward wasn’t there. I remembered then that he had gone out on some forgotten business, but my thoughts were dark with the threat of his return. This was my honeymoon, perhaps the third or fourth day of
it, and the fact of my marriage still clung to me like an ugly, ill-fitting suit. I had woken each morning with the hope that it would have softened, loosened, accommodated me; but its tight, itchy grip, the shame of it, was unrelenting. I knew myself to be in the wrong place as surely as if I were looking at it on a map; and my head was filled only with panicked thoughts of escape and extrication, which as yet had found no outlet. It was with these thoughts that I leaned over the iron railing of the balcony. The deep, foreign chasm with its indifferent swarm of traffic opened itself to me with the promise of my own insignificance. I realized that there was nowhere else I wanted to be. It wasn’t that I liked it here; merely that at the invitation of this cruel vista I had searched, frenzied, for a sense of my own belonging, for my home, for somewhere I might be wanted more, and found nothing. There was no secret comfort, no lodestar, in my empty heart. I was merely lodged at the inconvenient junction – this small, crumbling balcony – between a past I had been glad to leave and a future whose alien prospect seemed to provide the proof that I would never visit it. It was at this moment, in my high, hot imprisonment, that I wanted to fly; that I knew it, indeed, to be my only course. And it was at this moment that I understood, as if I had conducted a scientific experiment, that the weight of my life would not be enough to stop me.

  In the event, the iron railing of the balcony saved what I had become convinced I did not want; for as I stood there, the shock of my discovery combined with the strong sunlight to bring about a sudden giddiness and I appeared briefly to faint. When I came to, with the sound of Edward’s monotonous exclamation in my ears, I was collapsed in a kind of V over the balustrade, which, had it given way, would certainly have resulted in my death.

  How long this unfortunate recollection endured I could not say. After I had gone through it in my mind, I was awash with strong emotions, which sluiced over me in inarticulate waves. Everything became very confused; but presently I began to come to my senses there in the garden of Franchise Farm. My eyes were closed, but I felt the warm, prickly grass beneath my back and legs and realized that I was lying down.

  ‘She’s still unconscious,’ said a man’s voice. ‘I think she’ll be all right, though.’

  I opened my eyes a crack. The man was crouched beside me. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and was looking away so that I couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t call an ambulance?’ said the woman, whom I couldn’t see without moving my head. She sounded young and was well-spoken.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. She vomited a lot of water, which is the main thing.’

  I snapped my eyes shut again, fully alert now.

  ‘Perhaps she banged her head.’

  ‘Might have. Doesn’t look like it. I’m sure she’ll wake up in a minute.’

  ‘God, where on earth is Daddy?’ cried the woman impatiently. ‘He’s never around when you need him! I don’t even know who she is or anything.’

  ‘She’s probably his mistress,’ said the man with a laugh. ‘Running around the place in her knickers.’

  I felt a blush begin to suffuse my cheeks. Now I dared not open my eyes, and began wondering how long I could reasonably prolong my coma.

  ‘Mark!’ said the woman reproachfully. I could hear a smile in her voice. ‘Thank God we were here to pull her out, though. A minute later and she’d have drowned.’

  ‘She was pretty lucky.’

  The woman giggled suddenly. ‘She does look terribly odd. Look, I’m just going to run back over to the house and make sure he hasn’t slipped in the front way.’

  ‘OK.’

  There was silence. The man cleared his throat once or twice beside me. I was beginning to feel an uncontrollable desire to move. The sun was burning my face.

  ‘Mark!’ shouted the woman just then, from a distance. ‘Look at this!’

  ‘Jesus!’ he said after a pause. ‘That explains that, then. She must have been pissed. No wonder she’s out cold.’

  ‘I’ve just realized,’ said the woman, closer now. ‘She must be Martin’s au pair. What a scandal! Mummy’ll be furious.’

  I opened my eyes. The woman – girl, really – was standing above me to my left. She wore a short red dress with no sleeves.

  ‘Oh look!’ she said, meeting my eyes, ‘She’s waking up! Hel-lo.’ She knelt down beside me, suddenly solicitous, and put her hand on my arm. ‘How are you feeling? You nearly drowned, you know.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes from her face. She was around my own age and quite beautiful, dark and slender with a mass of black ringlets. Her expression was tender. Around her neck was a delicate gold chain. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone in my life as much as I hated this girl in that moment.

  ‘Welcome back!’ said the man cheerfully, kneeling down and putting his arm affectionately around her brown shoulders.

  As soon as I saw his face, I knew that everything was over. I sat up abruptly and our eyes met.

  ‘Stella?’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘So how do you know her?’ said Pamela again, as if she couldn’t take it in.

  ‘From university,’ said Mark. ‘Actually, I knew Edward better than I did Stella. I haven’t seen her for years. I didn’t recognize her at first. She looks different.’

  ‘Who is Edward? The ex-boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’ Mark sounded surprised. ‘He’s her husband.’

  I was standing behind the door in the dark ante-room, which I had discovered to be an excellent location for eavesdropping on the events of the kitchen.

  ‘Her husband!’ shrieked Pamela. ‘How on earth – why on earth didn’t she tell us? Are they divorced?’

  ‘Not so far as I know. They only got married a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Mark was supposed to go to the wedding,’ interjected Millie.

  ‘But then that Egyptian trip came up and I couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Can you believe it?’ added Millie.

  ‘Well.’ Pamela sighed dramatically. ‘I must say I’m absolutely astonished.’

  ‘Isn’t it a coincidence?’ persisted Millie.

  ‘But does he know she’s here? I mean, why hasn’t he been in touch? Why has she never mentioned that she had a husband squirreled away?’

  ‘I had heard,’ began Mark doubtfully, ‘that something had happened.’

  ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘An accident of some sort. I’m not sure of the details.’

  ‘Don’t beat about the bush,’ said Pamela briskly. ‘What sort of accident?’

  ‘No, really, I only heard the vaguest rumours about it. I couldn’t say for sure. I’d hate to get it wrong.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Pamela.

  ‘Come on, Mark,’ said Millie.

  ‘It happened when they were on honeymoon. That’s all I know. I think she had a bit of a fall or something, and that’s the last anyone heard of her.’

  ‘What can you mean?’ cried Pamela. ‘What sort of a fall? Do you mean she fell off a cliff and her husband couldn’t find her, and the next thing we know is that she’s washed up here?’

  ‘Calm down, Mummy.’

  ‘She fell,’ resumed Mark, his voice constricted, ‘and nearly went over the balcony of their hotel room. In Rome, I think. She wasn’t hurt. But she evidently went a bit funny.’

  ‘In the head?’ demanded Pamela.

  ‘Possibly. There was a suggestion that it might have been – deliberate, if you see what I mean. Don’t quote me on that, though. As I say, I’ve only heard the vaguest rumours. In any case, she came back to London without Edward and then disappeared.’

  ‘Well, perhaps she didn’t like Edward. Perhaps that’s all there was to it.’

  I felt a pang of fondness for Pamela as I stood crushed behind the ante-room door.

  ‘Why would she have married him if she didn’t like him?’ said Millie.

  ‘Oh, how should I know?’ said Pamela irritably. There was a clatter of saucepans. �
�Pass me that dish, would you? I really must get on with dinner. It’s getting terribly late.’

  ‘I still can’t understand what she’s doing here,’ said Mark after a pause. ‘Even if things did go wrong with Edward, it does seem rather extreme to pack in your job and leave London and all that.’

  ‘What job?’ said Pamela. ‘I thought she was temping.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. She was a solicitor, as far as I remember. Something like that, anyway. She had a degree, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I can’t see what having a degree, if that’s what she’s got, has to do with anything. We’re not exactly barbarians down here. You may think country people sit around discussing crop rotation, but—’

  ‘Mummy!’ said Millie.

  ‘I’m merely defending myself against the suggestion that we’re some sort of second best. I shouldn’t think Stella would say that she’s been bored. You’d need a degree to keep up with Martin, for Heaven’s sake.’