The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘We didn’t agree not to discuss it,’ said Martin. ‘I just promised not to tell anyone else about it.’ His hands fiddled in his lap and he looked at them sulkily. ‘Anyone would think you didn’t trust me, Stel-la.’

  ‘I don’t trust you,’ I said, crossing the room and sitting down in the leather armchair. The sun from the window fell directly on it, and an ache sprung up immediately across my forehead. ‘I don’t know you well enough to trust you.’ This sounded unkind. ‘Although I’m sure I will,’ I added wearily, ‘eventually.’

  I was feeling rather unwell, having had no breakfast. Pamela’s failure to offer me coffee grated on my memory.

  ‘You look tired,’ said Martin sweetly. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Yes,’ I automatically replied. Seconds later I remembered that a trip downstairs would necessitate a further confrontation with the love-birds. ‘No, it’s too much bother.’

  ‘It isn’t. I’ve got everything up here. I’ve got biscuits,’ he said, leaning forward and whispering the word seductively in my ear, ‘which might tempt you.’

  I had a strong feeling that I was about to be blackmailed. Unfortunately, so importunate were my hunger and thirst that I was obliged to accept Martin’s offer.

  ‘OK,’ I grudgingly acceded.

  ‘One lump or two, Stel-la?’ said Martin, launching himself off across the room. I saw his pumping arms below his T-shirt as he passed; thin, articulated by muscle, like animals’ limbs.

  ‘None.’ He reached a cupboard with a slatted door, and when he opened it I saw a neat, minuscule arrangement of sink, fridge and kettle. ‘You’ve got everything!’ I exclaimed, surprised.

  ‘Well, I can’t go downstairs, silly Stel-la, every time I want something,’ he said, in an amplified version of his pantomime whisper. ‘Can I? I’d have no independence. Would I?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘You should think’ – he tapped his forehead exaggeratedly – ‘about what it’s like to be me. No fun, Stel-la. No fun at all. Nothing to think’ – again the tapping – ‘about except my little Stel-la and her secrets—’

  ‘Stop that instantly,’ I said, sitting up in my chair.

  Martin gave a high-pitched giggle and began filling the kettle at the sink.

  ‘I was only joking,’ he said, in a more normal voice. ‘It’s for your own good, Stel-la. It’s bad for you to bottle everything up. You’ll get cancer.’

  ‘If I get cancer,’ I replied, ‘it won’t be because I have refused to sate your curiosity about my private life. In any case, that was a very tactless thing to say. How do you know my parents didn’t die of cancer?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘In fact,’ I continued, rather unworthily determining to get my own back on him, ‘I was going to tell you a bit more about it. But now that you’ve said that, I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Oh, Stel-la!’ Martin wheeled round in his chair, his mouth opened wide in astonishment. ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘I can.’ The pregnant, silent kettle began to stir behind him. ‘You must think me very stupid if you doubt that I can beat you at your own game. And a very silly game it is too, I might say.’

  Martin ducked his head and began busying himself with cups.

  ‘You should know by now,’ I continued, ‘that the best way to find things out is to listen. If people feel they are being tricked or interrogated, they won’t tell you anything. If you give them time and silence, they’ll come out with it eventually. Either because they’re embarrassed or because they’re offended at your lack of interest. Most people are fairly selfish. They like to talk about themselves. And the more invisible you are, the more they’ll do it.’

  The click of the kettle punctuated this soliloquy. Martin said nothing more, although for a while I barely noticed this above the clatter of his preparations. When finally he had loaded everything onto a tray, however, and was bearing it back across the room in his lap, I saw from the compressed seam of his mouth and his too-nonchalant expression that he was implementing my policy in a manner which could soon become infuriating.

  ‘It doesn’t work if you make it that obvious,’ I remarked. He handed me a cup, and with the other proffered a plate of biscuits. I glimpsed his imploring eyes. ‘What on earth could you want to know?’ I said. ‘It can’t be that interesting.’

  He nodded energetically. I took one of the biscuits. I was rather impressed by Martin’s hospitality. It was, I had to admit, more pleasant being in his room than in any other room in the house. I shifted around slightly so that I was out of the sun and raised the biscuit to my mouth. As I did so, I caught Martin’s eye. He was watching me so intently that it was impossible for me to eat it. Instead I took a sip of coffee. He tipped his head back slightly, miming my action, and swallowed air.

  ‘What?’ I said finally, in exasperation. He shook his head mutely. ‘I met your brother just now,’ I continued conversationally, in the hope that it would jolt him from this irritating course. ‘In the kitchen.’

  ‘The kitchen?’ mouthed Martin silently, raising his eyebrows in mockery and putting a fluttering hand to his lips.

  ‘If you don’t desist from this unreasonable behaviour, I am going to leave you to do your homework.’

  There was a long pause, during which I could not restrain myself from putting the biscuit in my mouth and chewing it as unobtrusively as I was able. Its sweetness was unimaginable, delicious.

  ‘What did you think of him, then?’ enquired Martin eventually. His face was sullen. ‘Did you fancy him? Everybody fancies him.’

  ‘He is very handsome.’

  ‘More handsome than Edward?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Girls are so stupid.’

  ‘I was merely stating a fact.’

  ‘Did he try and get off with you?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Of course he didn’t. Anyway,’ I added incautiously, ‘I’m not his type.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘Was Edward your type?’

  I saw instantly Martin’s latest tactic, which was to lead me by a ladder of association to the precipice of self-revelation.

  ‘I suppose he must have been. I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re my type,’ he said then, sitting back firmly in his chair and folding his arms.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It’s true! What’s wrong with me, anyway?’

  ‘You’re too young.’ I wondered what this self-deluding boldness signified. ‘And besides, I work for you. This kind of conversation is inappropriate.’

  ‘I think it’s romantic,’ said Martin dreamily. ‘So what was wrong with Edward? You’re very fussy, Stel-la.’

  ‘If I was fussy I wouldn’t have married him,’ I said smartly, before I could stop myself.

  ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. He had – he had many good qualities.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, he was clever.’ I tried to think of something else to say about him. ‘He was pleased with himself, I suppose. Yes, that probably describes him best.’

  ‘Were you in love with him? I can’t imagine you in love.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ I crossly replied. I was troubled by this remark, coming as it did so close to what I had often suspected was the truth. ‘Anyway, you’ve asked me that before. I don’t know what love means. If it’s just a feeling, then it can stop. I don’t see the point of trying so hard to preserve it.’

  There was a pause. I knew that Martin was looking at me, although I didn’t meet his eye. I was beginning to feel rather upset, and sensed strongly that I should bring a stop to the conversation.

  ‘So why did you marry him?’

  ‘I made a mistake.’

  ‘That’s a pretty big mistake, Stel-la.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘How long what?’

 
; ‘How long were you married?’

  I trembled on the brink of surrendering this final piece of information; for I feared what would happen when the slope of Martin’s curiosity came to an end. What I was handing over to him was of so much more worth to me than to he himself; and while I could neither decipher nor control the impulse that had made me do so, still I flinched from the possibility that he was, after all, unworthy of my confidence, and that the very part of me which had most sought release would be the part most injured by it. Any form of confession, I now realize, is a process beset by this type of risk. Even when one’s secrets are as besieged as mine were by Martin, the act of divulging them is by necessity selfish, and by implication weak. Revelation requires consent, in however disguised a form; and as such there is no case in which the confessional act can be free from retribution or blame.

  ‘A week,’ I said.

  The starkness of my admission was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Martin did not spring back in triumph or horror at it. I half expected him to burst out laughing as he had done the last time we had discussed this subject, while fearing that he would be shocked and disappointed, and would judge me harshly. He looked surprised, certainly; his expressive, malleable face could not disguise it.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I looked out of the window, embarrassed. ‘I just had to get away. I felt as if I was dying.’ This seemed rather melodramatic, even in my turbulent state. ‘I expected, I suppose, to feel as if my life had begun,’ I qualified. ‘And instead I knew it had ended. It was as if we’d been tricked and only found out afterwards, when it was too late. That we’d thought, you know, that getting married meant one thing and in fact it meant another. It felt as if we’d been disabled, and that even though the rest of life was ruined we had each other, and couldn’t get away from each other, and even if we did we’d still be disabled.’ There was a pause. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Anyway, we were on honeymoon, and I just came home. I tried to tell Edward, but he didn’t really understand. And then various things happened, and then I left.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what did he say when he got back?’ He leaned closer to me and I glimpsed his eyes, shining and perplexed. ‘Was he angry?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. I mean, I didn’t talk to him. I haven’t seen him since then.’

  I felt the tremor of something precarious between us, and knew that our fragile acquaintance was being overloaded with information. My own discomfort with the facts I was relating had undoubtedly contributed to this atmosphere of strain; for had I known them better, or even shared them previously with someone else, I might have worn them more easily. As it was I could make no more sense of my own actions than Martin evidently could.

  ‘Was this – recent?’ he said, slightly awkwardly.

  ‘Just before I came here. Last week.’

  To my surprise, I felt a furtive pressure on my hand. I looked down and realized that Martin had taken it in his own.

  ‘Poor Stella,’ he said.

  I cannot explain why the feeling of human flesh was so unbearable to me in that moment. It was not, I think, embarrassment that caused me to recoil, nor distaste at the pity the gesture conveyed. Rather, it was the loneliness it underscored, the reminder it provided that while I might have found a temporary palliative in company, my unhappiness was my own. Up until that point I had not had an urgent sense of this fact. By keeping myself in a form of oblivion, I had certainly, as Martin pointed out, ‘bottled things up’; but while my problems lay beneath this anaesthetic, I had at least had the advantage of not feeling them. Now, as they awoke and unfurled themselves, they sent out latent shafts of pain, on which the presence of Martin’s hand seemed to be acting as a conductor. I willed myself to keep it there, knowing that I would offend him if I flinched; and yet it was as if I were asking myself to keep my hand in an electric socket.

  ‘Please!’ I cried eventually, freeing myself from his grasp. I saw him look at me for a moment in horror, as the quiet room echoed with the violence of this action, His rejected hand hung, half-withdrawn, in the air. His face was startled. ‘Don’t ask me any more! I just don’t want to think about it!’ I said, rather too furiously; I thought that my physical reaction would be less conspicuous if backed up by an equally extreme verbal one. ‘Do you understand?’

  I must admit that he was very good about it. If he was hurt, he barely showed it, and shortly afterwards we went out to sit in the garden.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We established ourselves beneath a phalanx of trees towards the bottom of the garden, which sent down the occasional light hail of fragrant missiles from the branches above, and in the rustling, deciduous shade I felt an exquisite languor; a sense of almost historical leisure which belonged, I knew, not to me but to the house itself. Martin had brought with him some schoolwork, a battered volume across whose yellowed pages moved a miniature army of arcane symbols; manoeuvres which he appeared to be interpreting with a pencil stub on a pad of white paper in his lap.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said oafishly, raising myself up on my elbow; for I had assumed a shamelessly horizontal position on the warm grass and had been staring up at the fluttering tracery of leaves against the brilliant blue sky with a mind as scrubbed of thought as a bone.

  ‘Greek. Translation.’

  ‘Oh. Is it difficult?’

  ‘Quite. I suppose I could cheat. Everybody else does. I like it, though.’

  ‘What’s your school like?’

  ‘It’s OK.’ A breeze ruffled the pages of his book and he clamped his hand over it. His face was secretive, shifty. ‘It’s normal, I suppose. Better than the centre, anyhow.’

  ‘Is it a boarding school?’

  ‘Mostly. There’s a few like me. Day bugs, that is. They’re all complete pillocks. The parentals wanted me to board, but it was too difficult.’

  I tried to imagine him in a classroom, amidst the riotous, scruffy jumble of his peers. I knew these boys from my brothers’ childhood, their fluting, patrician voices, their faces hewn of stone above the regulation déshabillé of their uniforms; all that casual, careless perfection incubating in the draughty chambers of a dream.

  ‘Why did they want you to board?’

  ‘Dunno.’ He shrugged. ‘Family stuff. We always have. And the journey’s a pain, I suppose.’

  ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘Hour and a half each way.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘What’s the alternative? They didn’t want to send me anywhere else. It isn’t for much longer, anyhow. This’ll be my last year. And besides, there’d have been no point moving me. They’d already paid for all the facilities and stuff.’

  ‘What facilities?’

  ‘You know, cripple stuff. Ramps and things.’

  ‘Your parents paid for them?’

  ‘Yup.’ He nodded. ‘And a swimming pool. That was a kind of present for the school. Well, it was more of a bribe, actually. They’ll take all the other stuff down once I’m gone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Spoils the look of the school. It’s crap anyway. Just tacky crap.’

  ‘What if someone else wanted to use it, though?’

  ‘Like who?’ He looked at me with adolescent contempt. ‘To be quite frank, I don’t think you’d find another set of parents prepared to send someone like me to a school like that.’

  I remembered my parents’ own inexplicable determination to send my partly deaf young brother to one of these privative institutions. In the spirit of refutation, I considered sharing this coincidence with Martin, but having already revealed so much about myself had no more appetite for confidences.

  ‘So why did they?’

  ‘I told you. We always have. The dogfucker. Grumps. Great-Grumps. Everyone.’

  He didn’t seem particularly put out by the presence of these corroded manacles around the tender, fleeting fl
esh of his own life. I realized then that, rather than resent his parents’ decision, he was grateful for it. At times like these I felt our differences so strongly that our moments of intimacy receded, their once-pungent reality framed and reduced, like holiday photographs.

  ‘I hated school,’ I said, collapsing my elbow beneath me so that I lay once more on my back.

  ‘You hate everything.’

  I found this comment excessively spiteful, particularly given that I had provoked it with an observation more passing than pointed; and one, too, which deserved if not sympathy then at least the lesser balm of politeness. I sensed in this bitterness the residue of our earlier conversation, which Martin’s sensibility had evidently been too undeveloped fully to digest. I wondered whether perhaps he was offended that I had come to him on the hoof, as it were, a fugitive from larger dilemmas in whose shade he was inevitably dwarfed; or whether, more realistically, he was still sore at my rejection of his comforting hand, a gesture which can’t have been easy for a boy of his age to make, and which I had rewarded with a reaction indistinguishable from revulsion. I searched, in any case, for some grounds on which to disagree with him, and to my perturbation was unable instantly to find any. As seemed to have become my habit, the longer I delayed making any answer the less I could seem to separate Martin’s accusation from the truth; and by the time I had thought through the reasons for his disaffection with me, the two had become inextricably melded. Was it true that I hated everything? It was certainly the case that I could think of little immediately that I loved; but it was for this very reason, I reminded myself, that I had sought to change my circumstances so dramatically. What I had said to Martin about feeling that I had, after my marriage, reached the end of my life was more or less true. Having up until that moment believed that I had hardly begun it, this was quite a leap. What I felt, more exactly, was that I had missed the substance, the filling between these two states, which I felt sure would have contained the meat of love; indeed, the essence of life itself.