by Rachel Cusk
‘Oh, he is a wretch!’ she cried; and I saw then that she was genuinely hurt, and was trying to disguise it with maternal exclamations of disapproval.
Intriguing as all this was, my eyes were closing; but now, staggering into the cottage and turning on the lights, I rather wished that I had stayed longer; for the cramped, empty sitting room, which admittedly I had done little to make more homely, seemed to look peevishly round as I entered, as if it had spent the evening entertaining a loneliness which I had been appointed to meet but had kept waiting for hours, tapping its fingers and getting in the way. I flung myself into the bony armchair with the cavalier but disturbing thought that I would welcome, were I to possess it, still more to drink. This, for me, was entirely out of character; but so committed did I become to the idea that I was driven to get up again and search the kitchen cupboards to see if a stray bottle lurked there. My compulsion did not strike me as depraved. Rather, I felt frustrated with my circumstances, that I was so ill-equipped as to lack the means of being sociable with myself. I sat for a while in a kind of stupor, unoccupied. Just as it seemed that no barrier remained between me and the misery which lay vertiginously below, I remembered that I could in fact go to bed. This I did, without pausing to do anything other than remove my clothes and fling them to the floor; and once there, I turned out the light immediately and closed my eyes. As soon as I did so, the room took an alarming swoop, as if I were in the hull of a ship. I opened my eyes again, perturbed, and saw the silvered silhouettes of furniture settle. Closing them again, the same thing happened. A feeling of nausea formed itself in my swilling stomach. My eyes grated open like rusty hinges; but I immediately felt so tired that I was forced to close them again.
How long this opening and closing went on for I do not know, but eventually I suppose I must have fallen asleep, for although when I opened my eyes again it was still dark, I could hear the shrill pulse of birdsong outside the window. My first thought on waking was that a foreign body had insinuated itself into my mouth. This proved, on investigation, to be nothing more than my own tongue, which had through dehydration formed a sort of crust which sat snug against my palate. My head, in addition, was clamped in a vice of pain; and I rose automatically from my bed in search of water. Down in the glare of the bathroom, I realized that I was naked; and further, that my body was covered once more in the white crosshatchings that had tormented me during my first night in the country. All in all I made a pitiful figure; and this gave substance to the first real pang of longing for Edward that I had experienced. This longing was not predicated on the notion that he would have been particularly sympathetic to my plight; merely that he would not have allowed it to happen in the first place. Even that gives an impression of a solicitousness which I cannot in all honesty ascribe to our relationship. Really, the only reason why I even thought of Edward at that moment was because he would have been against my coming to the country at all; and that much only because coming to the country was irrational, and besides, involved going away from Edward.
Unfortunately, the thought of Edward, even in so restrained a context, brought with it the cargo of guilt and anxiety I had tried so hard to shed when I left the flat in London; and I stood in the bathroom for some time, feeling myself blocked by this invidious freight even from returning up the stairs to bed. You will think me very unfeeling when I say that by far the greater part of this consignment of shame concerned money. Everything else relating to the appalling injuries I had inflicted on those closest to me I felt to be in some sense protean; or at least malleable, and tolerant of many different shades of thought. There were times, for example, when I could regard my desertion of Edward with a kind of mournful equanimity, the disappointing of my parents with grudging acceptance; but money never changed. It was as high and hard and intransigent as a wall, and I knew that I could never get over it. So much money had been spent, and it would never be recouped. So much money. One doesn’t recover from that sort of thing. I knew, standing there in the bathroom, that I wanted to have nothing more to do with money for the rest of my life. Of course, I had felt this subliminally for some time; it was one of the reasons behind my coming to the country in the way that I had. But standing there I knew it, as I had known few things before.
Finally I went back to bed, where I slept fitfully until it was light. Whatever cream it was that the creature had applied to my sunburn had worked wonders, for when I got up and looked in the wardrobe mirror I saw that the colour of my skin had completely altered from emergency red to an attractive brown. I had expected, at least, that the mirror would give back a true picture of the previous night’s excesses; but the glaze of good health disguised whatever ravages lurked beneath. As before, the strange night rash had left no trace, and I wondered fruitlessly what could be causing it. By this time it was well past eight o’clock, and having no time for a wardrobe debacle I merely picked up the previous day’s clothes from the floor and put them on. Downstairs in the bathroom I splashed my face with water, cleaned my teeth and quickly combed my hair. I had time to scrape at the tar on my shoes with a knife, and succeeded in removing the worst of it.
Outside the morning was still gentle with infancy, but behind the dewy innocence of the sky lurked the menace of maturity, and I knew that another day of cruel, triumphal heat lay ahead. I was growing very tired of the sun, and wondered what meteorological force would be strong enough to unseat it; for as yet I had not seen even a lone cloud brave enough to challenge it. I was glad, at least, that my skin no longer singled me out as its victim; indeed, I felt that my tan represented a clear progression in the matter of my aptitude for the country life. With this new armour I might find the courage to confront those problems which remained, being: the issue of driving, although this, it now being Tuesday, was demoted towards the bottom of my immediate agenda; the mysteries pertaining to my encounter with the creature, in which category I placed the ‘lovers’ tiff and the cryptic conversation I had overheard between the Maddens in the kitchen; the problem of food, and hence money, which, being relatively straightforward, I resolved to settle before the day was over; and the matter of my conversation with Martin, which had permitted my personal life to escape from its quarantine. I was pleased, at least, to be able to recall that my dealings with Pamela – a subject to which only the day before I would have accorded sovereignty among my problems – were showing distinct signs of improvement; that my sunburn had been cured; and that by scavenging at the Maddens’ table so frequently, I had survived my first three days in the country at very little expense to myself.
As on the previous day, the door to the back passage stood open; and entering the corridor I remembered my confrontation with Mrs Barker. Not wishing to repeat it I resolved this time to go and wait in the kitchen until Pamela should appear. Opening the door, I had expected to find Mrs Barker in office, and was surprised instead to see a young man sitting at the table reading a newspaper. His businesslike demeanour gave me the idea at first that he was an associate of Mr Madden’s, perhaps Trimmer the manager, but the fact that he was wearing a red silk dressing gown sat strangely with this notion; and I soon realized that this must be the errant Toby, arrived last night – unless he had for some reason travelled in this apparel – after all.
‘Hello,’ I said, for he hadn’t seemed to notice that I had entered the room.
Even after my salutation, he took his time to acknowledge me, and as his eyes taxied slowly off the page in front of him I realized that he had waited to finish whatever it was he had been reading before brooking my interruption.
‘Hel-lo,’ he said presently, having conducted a lightning – but apparently thorough – survey of my appearance. ‘You must be Stella.’
He said this as if his deduction came not from the common pool of information but was the fruit of a rarefied and entirely private process of calculation. He pronounced my name with relish and clearly hoped to have some effect by doing so. It required little more to put me on my guard against him; but the in
sinuating smile he dispatched across the room after it, a gesture as full of the consciousness of his own bounty in doing so as if he had been tossing a jewel or banknote at my feet, cemented my disdain. My dislike of Toby was not, although it may seem so, the work of preconception. I consider myself a fair judge of character, and was not merely acting out of blind obedience to the many factors which insisted that I form an automatic prejudice against him – his depraved treatment of Roy, whose absence from the kitchen was conspicuous; his disregard for his mother’s feelings; his own brother’s contempt. The truth was that when I entered the kitchen and saw him sitting there, my heart swooned in my chest; for I had never seen such an attractive human being, male or female. It is curious, I suppose, that my reaction to the sight of him should have been so visceral. I didn’t ‘recognize’ him, in the way I described some time ago in relation to Pamela. He might, in fact, have belonged to a different species from my own, so unrelated was his appearance to mine. In these circumstances it is normal to feel an appreciation that is more cultural, as it were, than sexual; a refined, abstract response to beauty, without the hope and hunger which are the features of attraction. My only explanation for this diversion from the norm is that it seemed to have more to do with Toby himself than with me: he radiated concupiscence, and I felt sure that anyone in his region would feel the heat of it, whether they liked it or not.
‘I was looking for Mrs Madden,’ I said awkwardly; and was rewarded, to my shame, with another smile which clearly communicated to me the fact that he had found as much in my charmless remark to flatter him as if I had flung myself at his feet.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I should go and look for her,’ I continued, when it became evident that he was to say nothing else. There are certain people in whose presence one’s own becomes so secondary, so crude, that it seems to require justification. Toby was one of those people. He merely arched his eyebrows at this piece of self-commentary; and with the last precious thread of my novelty snipped, I was powerless to prevent myself from providing him with another. ‘Or perhaps,’ I trailed miserably on, ‘I should just wait here.’
He gave an elegant shrug and his blue eyes hovered above his still spreadeagled newspaper as if on the brink of flight. Were I not to do anything interesting within the next few minutes, this glance informed me, his attention – on which precious commodity a meter appeared to be ticking – would have to be withdrawn.
‘You’re over in the cottage, aren’t you?’ he said then, as if my tenancy at least conferred on me a grain of fascination. Something in the way he said it informed me that the cottage bore some special significance for him. I remembered his mention of the name Colette during our telephone conversation, and his mention too of her unexpected dismissal. Unfortunately, I was reminded almost in the same instant of the conversation I had subsequently overheard, in which Pamela had confidently claimed that I was not Toby’s ‘type’. I felt disproportionately injured by this recollection, and experienced a dangerous desire to disprove it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place.’
‘Isn’t it?’ He smiled, this time to himself. ‘Yes, you’re quite tucked away there. I might’ – he appeared to be dragging this concession reluctantly from the very pit of his stomach – ‘I might wander over there a bit later, just to take a look at the old place.’
I had no idea whether my presence was a desirable or even necessary feature of this excursion. Fortunately, before this spark of ambiguity could set my thoughts aflame, the door opened behind me and Pamela’s quenching presence flooded the room.
‘Morning!’ she cried, coming through the door with such speed that she was halfway across the kitchen before she ground to a halt. The refulgence of the previous day had, I soon saw, returned; but I sensed something darker beneath it, something secretive and puffy in Pamela’s face which I could not explain, but which gave me the distinct impression that she had altered; as if some internal compass had twitched and thrown her off course.
‘Morning,’ drawled Toby, rustling his newspaper.
He was smiling beneath his hooded eyes, a smile of complicity meant, I saw, for Pamela. She put her hand on his shoulder, which was as finely turned as a banister.
‘Coffee?’ she said.
‘Please,’ acceded Toby, his gaze not flickering from the page. Pamela stood for a moment and read over his shoulder, a gesture the least part of whose motivation, I felt sure, was an interest in current affairs. Their bodies were very close, curled like parentheses around some shared but inadmissible aside. My intrusion on this intimate scene was becoming unbearable. Toby’s smile was broadening as Pamela stood there behind him, and as if his mirth had insinuated itself up her connecting arm, she too began to smile. Before long, to my bewilderment, the two of them were shaking with silent, private mirth.
‘Is Martin upstairs?’ I enquired in a clear voice.
‘What?’ Pamela turned and looked at me, bleary with interruption, her eyes triumphant and annoyed. For a moment, she didn’t seem to recognize me. ‘Oh, Stella, I am sorry!’ she said then, after a pause. ‘Yes, you’ll find him upstairs in his room.’
‘Thank you,’ I curtly replied.
I walked smartly from the room and closed the door behind me; and as I stood in the dark ante-room was mortified to hear the muted sound of twin laughters burst forth from the other side. My thoughts were so racked with confusion and fury that it was not until I had slammed my way from the cramped vestibule that I was able to give substance to them; but in the empty, polished vault of the vast hall I knew that what I had just seen was not the morning reunion of mother and son, but that of lovers. I was astonished, and rather ashamed, at the boldness and vulgarity of my deduction; and yet I knew that I had hacked with this single crude thought right to the heart of the matter. This, I might say, was for me a most unusual experience. I am habitually a person in whose thoughts the insignificant looms large, while the vast and more perilous range of realities forms a dramatic but distant vista, a long and tortuous journey away. I had never even encountered in my life a situation which might have beaten a path to this particular suspicion, nor was I subject in so far as I knew to any tendency – over-imaginativeness, for example – which might have eased its passage. No, the thought was merely a response to what I had seen, and once established it formed a magnet for other things, which adhered themselves to it and gave it weight. Pamela’s distracted behaviour the previous evening; her uncontainable disappointment at Toby’s lateness; her failure, earlier, to tell him the news of Caroline’s pregnancy; even her generally neurotic and overcharged demeanour, her drastic changes of mood, those irrational episodes in which I myself had played a reluctant part: the enormity of the accusation seemed capable of containing all this and more.
Within minutes, however, my exhilarating descent into moral turpitude had come to an abrupt halt. What was I thinking of, harbouring such horrible notions about people who, if occasionally maddening and often incomprehensible to me, were nevertheless decent? I lingered at the foot of the staircase, and in the prospect of its arduous slope saw the long and wearying climb back to reason which was the price of my brief but thrilling speculations. I tried as I slowly ascended the stairs to remember the details of my own mother’s behaviour towards my brothers, in the penitent hope that it might mitigate Pamela’s. There was certainly nothing of the kind between Edward and his mother either; but then, uncharitably I’ll admit, I was unsure whether there was anything of the kind between Edward and anybody. If only in the name of justice, there should surely have been some similar bond between fathers and daughters; but other than Bounder’s correspondence – which, if it signalled some special fondness, went both unappreciated and unreturned – I could think of nothing which distinguished my father’s treatment of me from that he gave my brothers. I regretted, nevertheless, that I had not treasured these tokens more. Their expulsion to the tundra of London’s waste-disposal system filled me both with retrospective gu
ilt and with frustration at the impossibility of scanning them anew for evidence.
I had, at this point, reached the top of the stairs; and remembering that Martin was waiting for me, hurried the final distance along the corridor to his room. His door stood open, and through it I could see him sitting in his chair by the window. He was staring through the glass in deep thought. Seeing him thus, I was struck by how little I knew of his unattended life. The business of looking after him, the work of acquiring familiarity with his needs, permitted the other side of his nature to fall into neglect. I realized – although this may seem obvious – that what to me was employment was life to him; something which in other centuries or places was, I am sure, the grounds for envy and resentment, but here was the cause of feelings of personal good fortune.
‘Where have you been, Stel-la?’ he said when I presented myself He was wearing a red T-shirt which drained his skin of colour. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was in the kitchen. I thought I ought to wait for your mother before I came up.’
‘Why?’ He screwed up his face.
‘It – I don’t know. It didn’t seem polite just to march through the house.’
‘You’re so funny.’ He paused, as if concentrating. ‘On the one hand’ – he measured it mathematically with his hand – you’ve got the guts to leave your husband, abandoning everything you know and casting yourself on the kindness of strangers. And on the other, you’re scared of coming into someone else’s house, even if they’re expecting you.’
‘I thought,’ I said in a steely tone, ‘that we had agreed not to discuss that matter any further. As for the business of coming into the house, I did not say that I was scared; merely that I thought it polite to alert your mother to my presence, in case I interrupted something private.’
Given what I had just seen in the kitchen, I didn’t have the impression that Pamela was particularly concerned about guarding her own privacy; nor, if I were honest, that she thought my presence important enough to want to conceal things in it.
