The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  The lawn and sky went briefly out of focus in the ensuing silence.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nodding my head with confidence.

  ‘Actually, I could drop him off on my way home,’ said Caroline, whom I thought I would never learn to love. ‘I go right through Buckley.’

  ‘He’ll need to go straight off,’ said Pamela doubtfully. I was tempted to reach across the table and bludgeon her over the head with my heavy crystal glass. ‘Don’t you want to stay and have a swim?’

  ‘No,’ said Caroline, rising ever higher in my estimation. ‘No, I’ve got to get back. I’ve got such a lot to do. And Martin and I can have a nice chat on the way.’

  My betrayal of Martin was regrettable, I can admit; but my instincts of self-preservation were in this instance too forceful. I risked a glance at the condemned and was met by narrowed eyes. He mouthed something which I could not decipher but which I took to be an explicit promise of revenge. Much as I longed to offer him some apology, under the present circumstances it was impossible. Now committed to a selfish course, I wondered instead whether Pamela would offer me a swim during the afternoon; and if not, how I could tempt such an offer from her.

  ‘Dig in, everybody!’ cried Pamela, as Piers discharged his freight of laden bowls and platters upon the table. He produced a large parasol and began to wrestle with it. ‘Come on, Stella, don’t be shy.’ She looked around at us all. ‘Oh, what a happy day!’

  Chapter Eleven

  Some time later, I stood alone in the empty kitchen of the big house. Through the window I could see the deserted scene of our lunch on the lawn, the chairs still pushed back as if in horror or anger from the table where everybody had stood up. Caroline was now safely dispatched, and with her both Martin and the threat of driving duty, my evasion of which was a matter of great but temporary good fortune.

  Seeing an opportunity to entrench myself in the family affections, I had undertaken to clear up lunch. My offer had been roundly accepted and the company speedily dispersed in its wake, as if I might be liable to retract it. Pamela was now ‘resting’ upstairs, and Piers had returned to his indeterminate work on the farm. I had watched him go through the window, his solitary progress – as aimless and slouching as a boy’s, discreetly whistling as he ambled off – bespeaking a discomfort with family groupings, from which he was evidently rather glad to get away.

  I put the first consignment of dishes in the sink, aware that my solitude in the Maddens’ house – a somewhat improper condition, given the fragility of our acquaintance – was beckoning me towards an unwelcome analysis of my situation. I sensed that a clear picture of my predicament lay veiled nearby, like an exam result in an envelope, or a pair of policemen sitting in the next-door room, awaiting my arrival. Although I had already performed several smaller assessments, clods of percipience thrown up by the churning wheels of every passing hour, of how my life in the country appeared to be going, a grander survey required a journey back to all the chaos which had preceded it; and from there, perhaps even an expedition to the permafrost of human unhappiness which lay beyond. Having so recently emigrated from my past, I was not ready to revisit it; yet I felt a swollen, tremulous sorrow, as fragile as a bubble, floating so close in the air around me that it seemed inevitable that at any moment it would touch me and burst, whether I liked it or not. I whistled cheerfully as I ran the gushing taps; and was about to turn them off again and sob uncontrollably at the kitchen table, when I heard the far-off ringing of the telephone.

  Telephones, like children, cry out to their owners, and so it was some time before I responded to this shrill summons. Eventually, however, I remembered that Pamela was asleep upstairs, and with a jolt of dismay had an image of her being roused, bad-tempered, from her bed, furious that I had permitted her to be disturbed. This was, of course, an overreaction on my part; but it is the hegemony of an irrational or unpredictable character such as Pamela’s that it makes even the most innocent incidents pregnant with the possibility of accusation and blame. I rushed from the sink and through the kitchen door, pausing in the ante-room to locate the sound. For a moment I thought that it had stopped; but then it came again, from the direction of the hall. I flew through the swinging door and ran across the flagstones, my ears filled with the alarm of rings, to where the telephone lay stubbornly plinthed on a small table. The minute I picked it up, however, I felt strongly that I had made a mistake. I saw again, quite clearly, Pamela’s anger; but this time it was my presumption rather than my neglect which provoked it. I really had no idea of the correct thing to do. My parents had never relayed guidelines on such matters to me, and I was hard-pressed to see how else I was meant to have studied them.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, anxious now that I was incensing the caller, in addition to my unpopularity elsewhere.

  ‘Who’s that?’ demanded a male voice.

  ‘Stella,’ I replied; and was about to give a fuller account of myself when the man interrupted me.

  ‘What are you?’ he said.

  I was, naturally, taken aback by this question, having never been asked it before. It was difficult to know what sort of information the man required.

  ‘I am a servant,’ I said, guessing that he merely wished to know my status in the house – intruder, friend, etc.

  ‘A servant?’ said he. He sounded younger than I had at first thought. ‘What sort of servant? We don’t have servants!’

  ‘Perhaps servant was the wrong word,’ I conceded. I remembered a word Pamela had used, when I had overheard her in the cottage garden. ‘I suppose I am a sort of au pair.’

  ‘Oh, you’re Martin’s girl,’ said the man. ‘You must be new. What happened to Colette?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said.

  ‘Mummy must have sacked her.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Should have seen that coming. Oh well. Listen—’ he addressed me again loudly, ‘listen, Stella, I’m coming down, all right?’ I sensed that he was not asking for my permission, but rather was forcing the message through the undergrowth of my putative stupidity in the hope that it would reach his mother; for I had by now deduced that I was speaking to another of Pamela’s brood. ‘Later today or tomorrow. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes.’ I heard a telephone burr in the background, and the muffled sound of voices.

  ‘It’s a bloody oven. I’m going potty here. Dying for a swim. Tell her that.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘So I’ll see you later, Stella.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He rang off without saying goodbye. I put down the telephone and moved back across the hall, assuming an air of puzzlement which felt oddly self-conscious, as if someone were watching me. As I pushed the swinging door I fell still deeper into this distracted performance and by the time I reached the kitchen was moving so slowly that the sight of the gushing taps sending cascades of water over the edge of the sink to form a pool on the kitchen floor did not strike me as a disaster for several seconds. I shrieked aloud and ran to the sink, my feet skidding and my face spattered with foamy spray. Like a wild animal the accident beat off my attempts to control it, but finally I succeeded in turning off the taps.

  The silence which followed was terrible, a sepulchral calm punctuated by the cavernous sound of drips. Paralysed by my own ill fortune, I stood for some time while the miniature lake lapped at my feet. Presently I heard the menacing creak of a floorboard above my head. The sound informed me that Pamela must be rising from her bed; and all was now a panicked blur of action as I raced to erase the evidence of my crime.

  Grabbing anything I could find which looked capable of absorbing fluid – and scooping up great dripping handfuls of the water and returning them ineffectually to the sink – I laboured to reduce the gleaming reservoir now creeping across the tiled floor. Using tea towels, sponges, even a few chunks of bread left over from lunch, I fought to contain the capricious mass, which dodged and slid away from my every effort to capture it. I succeeded at least in spreading the spillage somewhat, so th
at although it covered a greater area its level was diminished; and had just gathered up the sodden cloths and screwed them into a ball when the kitchen door opened and Pamela stood before me. She had changed out of her bikini into a pair of jeans and a vest. Her face was still half-closed with sleep, and the cloud of her hair sat unusually high, as if it had attempted to escape her head while she lay unconscious and had been embarrassingly apprehended halfway through.

  ‘Goodness me!’ she said huskily, surveying the wreckage. I held the damp clump of towels behind my back and caught my breath. ‘You’ve washed the floor! You are kind.’

  ‘I haven’t quite finished in here,’ I declared in a high-pitched voice. ‘I was just about to wash up.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Pamela, teetering at the doorway; evidently with the intention of not spoiling my clean floor. ‘If you were going to do that, it might have been an idea to wash up first. You’ve rather hemmed yourself in, haven’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I have,’ I shrilled. ‘But by the time I’ve finished, it’ll be dry.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Pamela’s face wore a look of puzzlement. ‘Oh well, I’ll leave you to it.’

  I saw that she had been about to discover me, but perhaps because she was not yet alert had wandered past the matter. Unfortunately, at the very moment when it seemed I was to get rid of her, I remembered the telephone message. I wrestled, torn between self-preservation and responsibility.

  ‘Your son rang,’ I called out to her retreating back.

  ‘Toby?’ Pamela turned around. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He says he’s coming down,’ I replied. I had spotted a large and incriminating lump of wet bread lying by my foot, and was desperate not to detain her. ‘Either tonight or tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Pamela. She paused, thinking. ‘I wonder what he wants.’

  ‘He said it was like an oven. He wanted a swim.’

  ‘I see. What’s that?’

  ‘What?’ I innocently replied.

  ‘By your foot.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just some – I was about to—’

  ‘I’d better give him a ring. Find out what he’s up to. God, I really could have done without Toby this week.’

  Miraculously, she went away. I leaned in a sort of swoon against the sink, and felt the warm, filthy water lap against my shirt. An irresistible lethargy had suddenly come over me. I felt as if I could lie down where I stood on the wet floor and fall instantly asleep. The urgency of my half-concealed disaster grew remote and indistinct, and my eyelids were drooping shut when I heard Pamela’s voice.

  ‘No I jolly well don’t!’ she cried. The sound was feint, but I could make out her words clearly enough. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

  I moved away from the sink and in the direction of the communicating wall, from beyond which the noise was coming. My back felt chilly and damp where the warm caress of the dishwater had been.

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said Pamela, after a pause. ‘I just feel like it’s another thing.’

  I was pressed up against the kitchen counters by this time, my ear at the wall. There was quite a long silence now, during which I hazarded that Toby – for it was to him that I guessed Pamela was speaking – was making his case for ‘coming down’. My experience in the cottage garden had given me a certain skill at eavesdropping.

  ‘Look, we’ve got a new girl here, and everything’s in utter chaos … Stella, that’s right … Do you mean from your point of view or ours? … No, I’m not bloody well being oversensitive. You’re an absolute menace … No I don’t trust you, not one bit.’

  At this point Pamela broke into a long and complicit laugh.

  ‘You don’t waste time, do you?’ she chuckled. ‘As it happens you’re absolutely right. Not your type at all. Oh, damn and blast you, you old charmer, I’m longing for you to come now, God help me. What time shall we expect you?’

  Sensing that the conversation was winding down, I began to move stealthily back towards the sink, picking up the sodden piece of bread and depositing it in the rubbish bin as I did so.

  ‘I’ve got to know because of dinner,’ said Pamela plaintively. ‘All right. All right. OK. Bye.’

  Triggered into action, I began rinsing plates and lining them up in an orderly row on the draining board. Once or twice I slotted one into position so violently that I feared I had chipped the delicate china and was forced to retrieve and inspect it. Returned to a state of emergency, I had no time to meditate on the cause of my fury, which was injured vanity; the price, I had come to realize, of whatever illicit and solitary pleasure I gained from the practice of overhearing conversations not intended for my ears.

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  Being accustomed now to my passive role in discussion, it took me a moment to realize that Pamela was in the kitchen and was addressing me directly.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, nonchalantly. I drew a plate dripping from the water, and placed it gently on the draining board. My stomach was taut with expectation; for in that moment I had devised a way to injure Pamela, and to do so without inviting recrimination. My revenge, however, depended on Pamela entering into some form of exchange with me, and the difficulty lay in trying to initiate a conversation founded on what I had overheard without betraying that I had done so.

  ‘Ahhh,’ Pamela sighed, with vexation. I felt her linger behind me and waited to see if she would offer anything further. I heard the scrape of a chair and peered surreptitiously over my shoulder. She was sitting at the table with her head in her hands. ‘This was all I needed,’ she said.

  I took this as a direct cue for manifestations of concern on my part.

  ‘Is he coming down?’ I said. The intimacy sounded awkward.

  ‘What?’ Pamela lifted her head, confused. ‘Oh, yes. Tonight. I’d better go and make sure that Mrs Barker’s changed the sheets on his bed. Piers will have to move his things.’ She made this last observation as if to herself. I wondered why Piers should have left a trail in Toby’s room, and was so dumbfounded by what this immediately implied that I was almost derailed from my plan. ‘God, I’m exhausted,’ she groaned.

  The chair scraped again, signalling that Pamela had stood up and was about to leave. The moment was far from ideal; but I had no choice.

  ‘Was he pleased about Caroline?’ I lightly enquired.

  There was a profound and menacing silence from behind me. I busied myself nervously at the sink.

  ‘Caroline!’ uttered Pamela, in an awed whisper. ‘I completely forgot. Oh, God, how awful of me!’

  My heart gave a little pirouette of glee. So pleased was I, in fact, with my own ingenuity that I had difficulty in restraining myself from rushing from the sink and engaging Pamela in a congratulatory embrace.

  ‘Selfish, selfish cow,’ whispered Pamela; not to me, I realized. ‘Oh, Stella, how could I have forgotten?’

  ‘You’ve got a lot on your mind,’ I consoled her. ‘It’s not surprising.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she wailed. ‘I’ve just got to get myself sorted out! Oh God, I’d better go and phone him again.’ I heard footsteps approaching behind me, and then the light, penitent pressure of Pamela’s hand on my back. ‘Thank you, Stella. You’re very good. Look, why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off, once you’ve finished here. Martin shouldn’t be back until six.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said.

  ‘No, that should be fine,’ she conceded, after a pause. ‘I think I can manage. When you come back, we could all go for a swim.’

  ‘Great!’ I replied.

  She shuffled mournfully from the room, leaving me to celebrate my triumph alone. I ran the taps and even hummed loudly, not wishing to hear anything of Pamela’s subsequent conversation from beyond the wall. I realized that I had become somewhat addicted to cunning; but even though I could see that so far I had lost more than I had gained by it, like a gambler this latest victory encouraged me to persist. The normal forms of control over a situati
on not being available to me, I felt that for the time being I had discovered a more covert way to survive.

  Along with the satisfaction I had gained from rattling Pamela, the scene had yielded an additional bonus. Piers’s exile could, of course, be explained by a number of factors. My own parents, for example, had increasingly, as they grew older and the rooms became, through death and desertion, available, slept apart. The cause was prosaic – my father’s snoring – but there had never been any question of moving personal effects. My mother merely decamped when the noise became intolerable, and returned automatically when it had subsided. Her night-time paddings up and down the dark corridor were a midnight extension of the treadmill of their marriage, a tour of duty undertaken in a spirit of deep and sacrificial secrecy. The cautious creak of the bedsprings bore the imprimatur of love: for despite the glottal riot which had woken her, my mother’s own manoeuvres were conducted with pathological quiet.

  Piers’s predicament, however, emitted the distinct scent of a mystery. I could not imagine the lovely Pamela snoring, although the possibility that she routinely roused Piers from his snores and ejected him, rather than move herself, was a distinct one; but the presence of his ‘things’ – so many ‘things’ that they presented an obstruction to Toby’s visit – hinted to the devious mind at a disaffection more malignant and incurable. If a falling-out were the reason for the separation, however, why would Pamela have revealed it so unthinkingly? I had certainly caught her at an unguarded moment, with the weighty prospect of a domestic assignment now before her. I had also, apparently engrossed in my washing-up and with my back turned, given the appearance of not listening to what she was saying. It did occur to me that Pamela considered me to be of so little consequence that I was more or less invisible to her; but the frequency with which she seemed to refer to me in her private conversations suggested that this was not the case.

  Having pondered this latest development at such length, I found that the washing-up was done and the kitchen returned to its former glory. Judging by the silence from the hall, Pamela had finished her conversation and gone elsewhere. I looked at my watch and found that it was half-past three. Beyond the windows the afternoon simmered, unstirred by breezes. I longed for the postponed swim. There was still the problem of the sodden dishcloths to confront, however, and I decided that this might be the moment to make my escape to the cottage, where I could lay them out to dry in the sun, and think over all that I had learned.