The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Shall I help you down?’ I said solicitously.

  ‘Don’t be a vache,’ said Martin. ‘Just carry the chair.’

  Not being in a position – considering my earlier assault on Mrs Barker – to reprimand him for his language, I said nothing. Martin pulled a lever by the wheels which locked them, and then, with a single, terrifying movement precipitated himself out of the seat and slithered to the ground. For a moment I feared that he had hurt himself, but almost immediately he began to rotate himself with crablike movements upon his long, tensile arms, his shrunken legs dragging on the carpet behind him. As soon as he was positioned facing down the stairs, he began with remarkable alacrity to descend them, twitching his hips and reaching forward with each arm in turn to fling first one immobile limb and then the other ahead of him.

  ‘Come on,’ he called.

  I picked up the chair – which was not, contrary to Pamela’s assertion, particularly light – and began slowly to make my way down behind him. He sat waiting for me at the bottom in a kind of heap, and when I positioned the chair for him in the hall grabbed its handles and levered himself up, like someone emerging from a swimming pool. He disengaged the brake and spun off towards the front door, which he opened dextrously. He sailed through the doorway and then disappeared abruptly from view. Fearing that he had rolled down the front steps, I ran out after him, and to my surprise found him sitting leisurely in his chair on the hot gravel drive.

  ‘How did you get down?’ I said.

  He pointed to the side of the steps, where I saw a small ramp I had not previously noticed.

  ‘Dumbo,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no need to be rude,’ I said, descending the front steps. ‘What shall we do now? Would you like to go for a walk?’

  ‘I can’t walk,’ he said.

  I was beginning to weary of Martin’s confrontational style of behaviour. He seemed determined to obstruct me at every turn. Although no longer strictly afraid of him, his volatility made me nervous. I had no idea of what he might do at any given time.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said tersely. ‘You could show me around the grounds. By the time we come back, Mrs Barker will have finished.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, affably enough. ‘You’ll have to push me, though. My arms get tired on uneven surfaces.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I put my hands on the handles of his chair. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Through there.’ He pointed to a path running from the right of the house into some trees.

  We set off. The heat was very fierce at the front of the house and the burnt skin on my face ached. I was relieved when we made it to the trees, which I saw marked the beginning of a small wood. The wheelchair made quite heavy going over the rough path and I began to sweat and lose my breath.

  ‘What do you think of the show so far?’ he said from below, in a silly voice.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘What-do-you-think-of-the-show-so-far,’ he repeated, this time in the synthesized, unmodulated tones of an automaton.

  ‘Oh, I see. Lovely. Verdant,’ I hazarded.

  ‘Not this. I meant everything.’ We trundled over an uneven patch and he gripped the sides of his chair. ‘Maman. Papa. Moi, even.’

  ‘I don’t really know yet. I haven’t been here long.’ I was surprised that he should want to know what I thought of him.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, tipping back his head so that he could see me, with a smile which suggested that he thought the gesture winning. ‘Don’t tell me that you haven’t already made up your mind down to the last detail. You must think something.’

  His dwarfish appearance and leering mouth, particularly when seen from above, gave him the look of a sprite or ghoul; not wicked, exactly, but naughty and dedicated to disruption. I decided straight away not to tell him anything. His voice had that same imploring tone that he had used – vainly, I was glad to recall – to extract tales of past romantic disappointments; about which now he seemed to have quite forgotten.

  ‘Why are you so keen to know what I think?’ I said, heaving him over a delta of ruts. Seeing that I was not to be so easily seduced, he had given up his gamin gazing and was now looking straight ahead. I was struck, as I pushed the chair through the dark, lovely glade stilled by the profuse calm of summer, by the odd realization that this was exactly how, during those few days in London, I had imagined my life in the country would be. Or was I merely recognizing, in the paradisal picture around me, a kind of mental ideal which, based on what I knew while still in London of the place to which I was going, might have constituted such an image? In other words, had I really imagined it like this, or was it just that I had happened on an enclave of time and place so logical in its felicity that it transcended its actual existence to become a kind of paradigm; a vision which, being perfect – and corresponding too to the few things I had known about my future situation – took on the texture of memory, wherein all the flaws and stains of lived events are purged? I have often experienced this feeling of doubt when encountering extreme beauty or happiness.

  Martin had not replied to my question, and so I continued: ‘After all, it’s not as if you know me very well. Why should my opinion matter to you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Martin sulkily. ‘I think it’s obvious why. I don’t exactly get out much.’

  I felt chastened by this remark. I had humiliated him by attributing to prurience or mischief what was in fact a hunger for novelty. Trapped as he was, both now and for the foreseeable future, in the same stale set of circumstances, it was natural that a newcomer should exert more than the usual interest.

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, keen to made amends. ‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that I haven’t been here long enough to have any view which I could be sure wouldn’t change over the next twenty-four hours.’

  I was really quite tired out by this point. We had reached a kind of clearing, at the centre of which was a pond. Beside it stood a small, sagging tree – a willow – whose lachrymose branches drooped into the pool below, giving it the appearance of a vast melting candle. The stagnant water was thickly covered by a bright green blanket of algae, above which all manner of creatures circulated in a busy airborne community.

  ‘Shall we stop here for a minute?’

  ‘If you want,’ said Martin uncharitably.

  I wheeled him round to face the pond and let go of the handles of his chair, intending to sit down on the grass beside him. To my horror, however, his chair began abruptly to roll forwards towards the swampy water. I cried out, lunging for the handles while Martin sat, inert, his small body jolting as the wheels trundled down the slope. Just in time, I managed to grip the back of the leather seat, and dragged the chair back from the brink and up the slope, my chest heaving with panic.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ I panted. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin coolly. ‘You should always put the brake on before you let go.’

  There was a slightly menacing edge to his voice. I remembered having seen him put on the brake himself at the top of the stairs, and suspected, maliciously, I admit, that he had neglected to save himself on this occasion to upset me.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  I wondered if he would tell Pamela what had happened, and began to think immediately about how I would be able to broach this subject and gain the promise of his discretion before we returned to the house.

  ‘I can’t swim,’ said Martin. ‘I’d have drowned.’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that,’ I snapped. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t have let you drown. I’d have jumped in and saved you.’

  ‘How?’ said Martin. ‘I’d have sunk like a stone beneath all that muck. You wouldn’t have been able to find me.’

  ‘If what you require,’ I said imperiously, ‘is my assurance that I would have paid with my life to save your own, then you have it. We would have died together.’

  ‘My,’ said Martin. �
�How romantic.’

  ‘Quite,’ said I. ‘So if you would be so kind as to accept my apologies, then I should be grateful to hear no more about it.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Martin replied, eyes aglint. ‘I think my mother might be interested, though.’

  ‘That,’ I said firmly, although my heart quavered, ‘is up to you.’ I applied the brake to his chair and sat down in the shade beside him. ‘Obviously I would prefer it if you didn’t mention it to her.’

  ‘Perhaps we might strike a bargain,’ said Martin, after a pause.

  ‘Really! And what might that be?’ I knew filli well what the evil dwarf meant.

  ‘You know,’ said Martin, folding his arms across his chest.

  ‘I hope,’ I replied, ‘that you are not trying to blackmail me into giving dubious and ill-formed opinions of your family in return for not telling tales. If you intend to ask me what I think of you under such circumstances, then you will hear nothing flattering. It’s up to you.’

  Various insects had come to plague me as I sat on the grass, and I swatted at them irritably with my hands. I wished that we had moved ourselves elsewhere, away from the gloomy prospect of the pond, and the near accident to which it testified.

  ‘What makes you think that I care what you think of me?’ said Martin presently.

  ‘I asked you the same question not long ago,’ I replied. ‘Your answer, such as it was, suggested that you did care. If you deny it, then I will call your bluff. As I said before, it’s up to you.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks of me. It doesn’t make any difference. I was only joking, anyway.’

  A look of pain collected on Martin’s face, like something dense and murky at the bottom of a drain. Seeing the poor, naked savagery of his features, I was moved to feel pity for him. He made a sorry opponent; and I wondered at myself, that I should have been so unkind to him.

  ‘Shall we carry on?’ I said then, standing up. I had an awareness of time passing, wasted, untouched. It seemed imperative to me that we continue with our walk.

  ‘All right,’ conceded Martin grudgingly. ‘Although that was mean, what you just said.’

  ‘I withdraw it,’ I said magnanimously.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ muttered Martin, as I wheeled him in a half circle and headed back towards the path. ‘You’re getting on my nerves. Turn right here.’

  We emerged from the wood and before long arrived at a wall, which formed one end of an enclosure. The wall was about six feet high and several yards across, and, being built of apparently very old red brick, over the top of which spilled a froth of vines and flowers of various types, was extremely picturesque. At its centre was a black wrought-iron gate, through which I could make out some form of horticultural splendour within.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said.

  ‘This,’ said Martin, leaning forward in his chair to open the latch, ‘is the Elizabethan Rose Garden.’

  Having left behind the wood, we were once more exposed to the sun; which, it being now late morning, was astonishingly fierce. I found – and indeed have always found – that the heat exerted a peculiar effect on me. Sunshine can, of course, be very enjoyable, but when it becomes excessively strong, as now it was, I find that I lose sense of myself quite dramatically. I do not mean ‘lose my senses’, in other words go mad; rather, I am describing a certain loss or interruption of frequency brought about by the dominating presence of an external force. Heavy rain, I find, has precisely the opposite effect; meaning that it enlarges consciousness by waterlogging the other senses. The sun, however, has in my view a blanching, shrivelling influence upon thought; or rather, it seems to make everything the same, and thus melts the boundaries of self.

  To continue, I was not feeling quite myself – a dangerous condition, leading to the sort of behaviour people describe as being ‘out of character’ – as we entered the Elizabethan Rose Garden. This did not, however, blur my impression of the lovely enclave in which I now stood. The garden was quite idyllic; indeed, my amorphous mental state may well have been responsible for the force of my reaction to it. It was rectangular in shape, and consisted in several long rows and wedges of rose bushes with a maze of well-kept gravel paths between, all perfectly symmetrical; a geometrical theme which gave the garden a look of arcane symbolism, like an astrologer’s map. Here and there wrought-iron benches were placed; and at the very centre of the garden, standing on a smooth circle etched in gravel, was an old stone sundial. The roses, being in filli bloom, were a grand, faded pink and many of them were very large. I reached out to touch one beside me, whose head hung engorged from its stem. To my embarrassment, it disintegrated instantly beneath my fingers in a gentle explosion of velvet petals, falling in a sort of confetti about my feet. I could not help but think, looking at the naked stem, that I had murdered the lovely flower; and I cast about for Martin, hoping that he had not witnessed my act of vandalism.

  Fortunately he was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that he must have wheeled off along one of the paths, I set off at no great pace down the nearest avenue to hand to find him. I was, in fact, happy to be alone. The garden was very quiet, its only music the faint, chirruped chords of summer, and in the scented hush I found myself transported back through time to its ‘Elizabethan’ ancestry, imagining myself there to be an altogether more favoured and elaborately costumed Stella, enjoying privileged seclusion in a world as orderly beyond these walls as within them; a respite of scale rather than substance, furnished by an authority who granted her every whim as systematically as it confounded mine. I often, incidentally, have fantasies of this type. Being essentially happy with myself, my daydreams strive instead to transform my circumstances; usually preferring a more kindly age, offering iron-cast certainties and a less vertiginous view of the future.

  I had sat down on a bench beside the sundial by this time and – perhaps, again, due to the peculiar effect of the sun – all at once found that my daydream had delivered me, as if through a secret tunnel bored beneath a fortress wall, to the outermost, unpatrolled reaches of thought where lately I had forbidden myself to wander. The garden faded and then vanished before my eyes, and in the analgesic white light which followed it I was unexpectedly met by a vision. The vision was of a crowded street seen from high above; not an English street, but a narrow, Continental chasm. Everything was very brown and dusty and noisy. From my vantage point I could see the lacy balustrades of balconies depending high up from the elaborate, crumbling fronts of buildings; and then realized that I, too, was standing on a balcony with my fingers gripping the iron railing. I leaned perilously over the edge and saw far, far below trails of tiny, dusty cars beetling along the floor of the ravine. The sun was hot on the back of my head. I was leaning so far over that the rail dug into my stomach. The weight of a solid but indeterminate misery pressed at my back as I leaned, forcing me further over still. The blare of car horns filled my ears. My heart was thrashing in my chest with terror. Then, all of a sudden, I flipped over and fell; but to my surprise, I did not plummet to the pavement. Instead I floated, my weightless body describing elegant arcs like a fluttering leaf, and as I gently descended I looked about. One or two people stood on the balconies opposite and when they saw me they waved. I waved cheerfully back; and it must have been at around this point that I woke up, or came to, and found myself back in the rose garden.

  Perhaps less than a minute had passed since I had exited so importunately from the present moment. When I returned the loveliness of the quaint garden, momentarily forgotten, struck me with redoubled force. In this instant of recognition – whose constituent parts, memory and perception, were in this case particularly charged – I experienced the magical, elusive flash of certain happiness: something I had not felt for some time and which, arising as it did from a rapid modulation of fear to safety, provided the substance for my first, indelible identification of Franchise Farm as home.

  ‘What are you doing here, Stel-la?’


  Martin was sitting beside me on the gravel path in his chair, his presence so complete and unheralded that it had the flavour of an apparition. His face was screwed into a grimace in the sunlight so that it seemed frozen in an attitude of rigid surprise, as if a door had been slammed on it.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ I said. His question, insinuating as it was, demanded a fuller reply. ‘I was thinking,’ I improvised, ‘of how amazing it is that this garden has been here since Elizabethan times. One imagines history to be inorganic, and yet here it is, written into the landscape.’

  I was rather proud of this insight, but Martin seemed to find something funny in it.

  ‘Ha, ha!’ he brayed, mouth agape. ‘Ha, ha!’

  ‘What?’

  I fully expected him to repeat my comment, in a voice which would ensure that not one of its nuances was left unmocked. This feeling was not altogether new to me: I find speech a precipitous and exposing business, and often perform it with palpable ‘stage fright’; a feeling which, I don’t doubt, has resulted over the years in the formality with which now I am unable to avoid expressing myself.

  Martin, meanwhile, having prolonged his hilarity beyond all reasonable limits, finally gave me his reply:

  ‘The garden isn’t Elizabethan, you idiot! It’s a breed of rose, the Elizabethan rose. Grumps planted them.’

  ‘Who,’ I enquired, ‘is Grumps?’

  ‘My grandfather,’ said Martin primly, as if he were offended that I hadn’t heard of him.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m not disappointed,’ I maintained, after a pause. ‘Although he did a good job of it.’

  ‘It’s open to the public,’ said Martin, still apparently affronted. ‘Every Saturday during the summer. It’s very well known. People pay to come and look at it.’

  I found this information rather surprising, suggesting as it did that the Maddens had been driven by penury to make a going concern of their own garden.

  ‘I think that’s sad,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s a private place. I liked the thought of it being secret. Knowing that it’s an exhibit spoils it.’