The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK. Clutch.’

  I looked through the windscreen at the remote spectacle of the drive. The car was pointing directly down it, for which I was grateful.

  ‘Clutch, Stel-la.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  I pressed the clutch and Martin manoeuvred the gearstick beside me with his left hand.

  ‘Good. Now, keep your foot on the clutch for the time being. Release the brake.’

  ‘I’m not touching the brake,’ I said, bemused.

  ‘No, the handbrake. It’s beside you. You press the front bit and it goes down.’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘Fine. Now, hands on the wheel, Stel-la. Put your foot on the accelerator, and very slowly take your foot off the clutch.’

  I pressed the accelerator and the noise of the engine mounted.

  ‘Not that much!’ shouted Martin. ‘Just a little bit. That’s right. OK, very slowly off the clutch.’

  It is difficult for me to convey my surprise, despite the advance warning I had received, at the way in which with the command of my feet the whole world became a blur of noise and motion. Had I been able to drive entirely with my hands, I would probably have applied more natural instincts to the business of pulling away from the house. As it was, the simplicity of Martin’s instruction had been profoundly deceptive; for I had no premonition of the chaos my gentle paddling would unleash. I took my foot off the clutch and the car bolted forward at such speed that I pressed indiscriminately at the pedals in panic, while the jolting scenery bore down on us and Martin shouted vainly beside me above the roar of the engine. I had no time in this onslaught of events even to think about controlling them. All I could do was to try and recall, with a contrasting lassitude at once terrifying and inalterable, how to stop the car. Very slowly, my mind dimly remembered that ceasing to press the accelerator would have some effect on the speed at which we were travelling. Even slower, my foot responded; against its will, I should add, because instinct told it to press harder the faster we went. The car veered off the gravel drive and chugged across the grass. It heaved once, twice, and died.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Martin in a high voice. ‘Let’s try again.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’ Now that we had come to a blessed halt, I found that I was shaking with terror and relief. ‘I’m terrible at it. I should just accept that I’ll never be able to drive.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. No one can just drive. You have to learn.’

  Looking around, I was surprised to see that we had only come a few yards. The house stood patient and contemptuous behind us.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You have to, Stel-la. Besides, if you don’t get a move on, my mother will be out to investigate.’

  This proved the greatest spur to action yet. I turned the key again.

  ‘Now go a bit faster this time,’ advised Martin. ‘Then you won’t stall.’

  ‘I was going fast!’ I cried.

  ‘You were going about five miles an hour. Clutch.’

  My second attempt proved rather more successful than my first. Less afraid now of the accelerator, I was able to focus on the steering wheel as the guiding principle of the exercise. I directed us back onto the gravel, and with a thrill of confidence realized that I was able to propel the car in a straight line down the drive.

  ‘Clutch!’ shouted Martin.

  Stabbing about with my foot, I found the pedal. As I pressed it, the engine reared with a horrible shriek.

  ‘Take your foot off the accelerator, stupid! OK, now let go of the clutch and put the accelerator back on.’

  The car lurched forward as the engine began to sing in a new key.

  ‘We changed gear!’ cried Martin.

  Alarmingly quickly, the gates at the bottom of the drive loomed into view.

  ‘What do I do now?’

  ‘Foot on the clutch. Other foot on the brake.’

  I put my foot on the brake, and the car stopped so suddenly that both Martin and I were thrown forward.

  ‘Do it gently! OK, we’re turning right here. Clutch.’

  One way or another, before long we were out on the tarmacked road. My feelings were a curious mixture of the drunken excitement of achievement combined with the more sober consciousness of how fragile my control of the situation really was. Like someone walking a wire, I sensed that the moment in which I became aware of my feat would be the moment I ceased to accomplish it. I wasn’t quite sure, in other words, how I was driving the car. All I knew was that everything depended on my continuing to do so.

  ‘Clutch,’ said Martin.

  I was fortunate, at least, in that the remoteness of the narrow roads meant that there was little chance of meeting anybody else travelling along them. This did not particularly strike me at first – I was interested only in my own progress, and had not considered the fact that the realm I had entered was communal and open to invasion by others – but when after some time the fringes of Buckley came into view, replete with obstacles, I felt the force of my presumption in taking the wheel.

  ‘We’ve got to stop.’

  ‘Now just stay calm,’ said Martin anxiously. ‘It’s not far to go now.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. At the sight of houses and other cars, I had surrendered my authority over the car. I took my feet off the pedals.

  ‘Stella!’ shouted Martin. ‘We’re in the middle of the road! You can’t just stop!’

  The car slowed down and then shuddered violently to a halt. I could hear the whirr of a fan in the silence.

  ‘OK,’ said Martin, more gently. ‘Turn the key.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have to. We can’t stay here. Turn the key.’

  My sudden consciousness of my own incompetence, and my retrospective astonishment at the fact that I had driven the car almost to Buckley, was effecting a sort of paralysis in my limbs. I had lost, I knew, the nerve on whose buoyancy I had delivered us to this inconvenient place. I had also experienced an abrupt attack of amnesia, and could not remember anything at all that Martin had told me about how the car worked.

  ‘Look, there’s someone coming behind us. Turn the key.’

  Wildly I turned the key, against every internal protest. We were facing directly into the sun, and it beat down on my face through the windscreen. In the thick glare, the road beyond was a group of indistinct shapes.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘Fuck. Hang on.’ He reached across me and flipped down the sun shield. ‘Is that better?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Right. Clutch.’

  ‘Which one’s the clutch?’

  ‘On the left!’

  The car surged forward and I clung to the wheel, steering this way and that while Martin shouted indistinct warnings beside me. Several times as we entered the town I closed my eyes and gasped, for the body of the car seemed so broad to me that an intake of breath was required to get it through apertures of impossible narrowness.

  ‘Slow down a bit,’ said Martin shrilly. ‘That’s right. We’re going to turn left in a minute.’

  The astonished faces of passers-by flashed past me in a blur of houses and shopfronts and parked cars. I had no sense whatever of my own control over what was happening.

  ‘Left!’ yelled Martin, gesturing wildly with his arms.

  My body responded only to the direction of the command rather than the proper procedure for executing it. I slewed the wheel automatically to the left, without slowing down, and there was a tremendous shrieking all around us as we shot into what was evidently a car park and came to a timely, if unintentional, halt.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Martin.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I felt drained of all life and could only sit limply behind the steering wheel. Martin, when I looked at him, wore a blanched expression of exhaustion.

  ‘You’d better get me out,’ he said. ‘I’m late.’

  When I opened the car door and stepped out, my knee
s gave way beneath me and I staggered, almost falling over. Clinging to the car, I inched my way round to the boot and opened it.

  ‘Stella,’ called Martin from the front. ‘How are you going to get home?’

  I had not given any consideration to this question, but it was immediately obvious to me that I could not drive the car alone.

  ‘You’ll have to stay,’ continued Martin, who had evidently reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Stay here? What will I do?’

  ‘I dunno. Help out or something. Meet my interesting friends.’

  ‘What about Pamela?’ I heaved the chair unsteadily out of the boot. ‘She’ll be expecting me back.’

  ‘There’s a remarkable invention,’ said Martin, ‘called the telephone.’

  I got Martin into his chair and then, my hands shaking, locked the car. On the far side of the car park was a low modem building made of red brick. Releasing the brake with my trembling foot, I began slowly to wheel him towards it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We entered a reception area, with plastic chairs in a row against one wall and a long desk along the other. Both walls were almost entirely covered with drawings held there by drawing pins. Some were very childish; others quite accomplished. My attention was caught by a portrait of a woman drawn in bold pencil. She was sitting rather self-consciously, with her hand beneath her chin, and a slightly tense, impatient smile on her lips. I immediately recognized her as Pamela.

  ‘Did you do that?’ I said to Martin.

  ‘Yes. She hates it. She thinks it makes her look old.’

  I could not comprehend how Pamela could fail to be pleased by Martin’s evident talent for drawing; but looking at it again, I saw how her vanity might have overpowered her delight. Martin had certainly caught her likeness in a manner which foreshadowed what was to come, rather than reflected past glories; but there was something ineffably more real to the picture also, which could only be the work of intimacy and which revealed things about Pamela that I suspected but could never properly have expressed. He had captured her self-regard – a form of insolence which surprised me – and a certain affectation of manner too. Most tellingly, he had included in his picture the fact that its subject did not like being examined; that she regarded his scrutiny as presumptuous and threatening, and the act of drawing itself as rather suspect. It was difficult not to wonder, with his animadversion so publicly displayed before me, what else Martin thought about Pamela.

  ‘Afternoon, Martin!’ said a cheerful voice.

  ‘Hello, Mary,’ Martin replied. ‘This is my friend Stella.’

  A woman had emerged from a door at the far end of the room, and now took up a position behind the desk. She was quite elderly, with grey hair set in waves. I was momentarily confused, thinking that I recognized her.

  ‘Stella, is it?’ she said, to me. ‘Nice to have you here, love.’

  I realized that she resembled the woman who ran the village shop in Hilltop.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You’d better hurry in,’ she said. ‘I think they’ve started without you.’

  ‘Started what?’ I said, following Martin through a doorway at the end of the reception area and down a long corridor.

  ‘Discussion,’ he said. ‘That’s how they kick off. You’re not supposed to miss it.’

  The corridor, like the reception area, was hung with drawings. From the far end, I could hear a growing rabble of voices. Although it didn’t particularly resemble mine, the place reminded me unpleasantly of school. I was conscious, strangely, of my physical size, and of the freedom of my own clothes as I walked. We reached the end of the corridor, and Martin pushed open a door directly ahead which stood slightly ajar. The noise I had heard from the corridor was abruptly silenced. I followed behind him, and as the door swung shut I was confronted by an extraordinary scene. The room was large and very light, with windows all along one wall; and in the centre of it, the sun glancing off them in blinding flashes of steel, was a throng of wheelchairs.

  ‘Well, look who’s here!’ said a woman’s voice.

  For a moment I could not work out which among the blank, mute faces which stared at us from within the vast metallic tangle of apparatus had spoken. Looking up, my eyes met a pair level with my own, and I realized that the woman who stood at the centre of this curious circle must be the teacher.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, addressing myself to her. ‘I’m Stella.’

  ‘Hello, Stella!’ she replied; not, I felt, entirely convinced by my attempt to communicate with her as one adult to another. She looked down at her blood. ‘Say hello to Stella, everybody!’

  There was a dissonant chorus of ‘Hello, Stella,’ which began as a rumbling groundswell and tailed off into fluting chirps of welcome. Martin wheeled himself towards the group and took up a position on its fringes. His face was sullen. I lingered awkwardly, looking around for a chair.

  ‘Stella, why don’t you sit over there?’ said the woman, pointing to a chair by the wall.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Why can’t she sit with us?’ interposed a boy’s voice gruffly. The words were slightly slurred.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ chorused some of the others in agreement.

  ‘I see.’ The woman laughed ingratiatingly. I sensed that she was not pleased by this minor uprising. ‘Who thinks Stella should come and join our group?’

  There was an immediate bristling of raised arms and straining torsos.

  ‘OK,’ she said, looking around the group with an expression of concentration, as if conducting a serious calculation of votes. ‘Well, it looks as if you’re very popular today, Stella! Do you want to draw your chair up just there? That’s it.’

  I moved my chair and sat down again. Raising my eyes, I saw that every face was turned towards me and I smiled stiffly. From where I sat, I could only see Martin’s shoulder and the side of his head.

  ‘Martin!’ said the woman, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes wide. ‘Would you like to tell us why you were late again?’

  She spoke very clearly, as if there was some danger that he wouldn’t understand what she said. The portion of Martin I could see didn’t move.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.

  ‘We talked about this last week, didn’t we? I think we all felt that your lateness was a problem, and that the others felt undermined by it. I think you said that you were going to make an effort to be on time, didn’t you?’

  ‘It was my fault!’ I interrupted, horrified by the woman’s remarks.

  ‘Stella says it was her fault,’ said the woman after a pause, never taking her eyes from Martin. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I was supposed to drive him and I got delayed,’ I insisted.

  At this the woman turned to look at me. Her expression was steely.

  ‘We like to let the children speak for themselves here, Stella,’ she said. ‘Is that true, Martin?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Martin.

  Trying to distract myself from the extreme dislike I was taking to this woman, I looked around at the group. There were about thirty of them, in roughly equal numbers of boys and girls. Most of them seemed considerably younger than Martin; several were barely more than children. It was very odd to see in replica the features I had come to associate with Martin’s singularity. In numbers they took on the look of a species; and realizing this, I am afraid to say that I found myself in strong disagreement with the whole character of this convention, and not merely with its leader. The notion that Martin’s misfortune should be promoted to the status of a characteristic struck me as wrong. It did not now surprise me, given the indignity of his qualification to attend it, that he disliked the centre so intensely.

  ‘I think some of the others feel that by being late you’re giving out strong messages that you don’t want to be part of the group,’ persisted the woman. ‘I think you felt that, Marie, didn’t you?’

  Her wide eyes described a significant arc, landing on a girl of about Marti
n’s age sitting opposite me on the other side of the room.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marie. Her voice was high-pitched. She had long, fair hair and a tragic expression.

  ‘I think you felt that Martin was trying to seek attention, didn’t you?’ said the woman presently, when it became clear that Marie was to say nothing more.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marie.

  ‘What do you say to that, Martin?’

  ‘It’s crap,’ said Martin.

  One or two people sniggered.

  ‘Miss!’ said a younger boy with a thick basin of dark hair, his arm shooting up. ‘He said crap!’

  ‘I know he did, Stephen,’ sighed the teacher. ‘Don’t you remember that we agreed Martin could sometimes use that sort of language, because that’s how they speak at home? Do you remember that?’

  ‘It’s true,’ I assented, nodding.

  ‘Martin, do you see now how distracting your late entrances are? Do you see why the others might think you’re attention-seeking?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good. So will you be making more of an effort in future?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin irritably.

  ‘OK!’ said the woman brightly, the musical cadence of the word signalling a change of subject. ‘Let’s begin our discussion, shall we? This week I wanted to talk about feelings.’

  ‘Feelings,’ repeated the group. There was something incantatory in the woman’s tone which made the response automatic.

  ‘Now,’ she continued. ‘Who can tell me what feelings are?’

  Hands shot up into the air.

  ‘Let’s see.’ The woman pursed her lips and made a selecting motion with her hand, as if she were choosing a sweet. ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘They’re emotions,’ said Elizabeth, an unfortunate-looking redhead.

  ‘Ye-es,’ said the woman coaxingly, implying that the answer had been insufficient. ‘What sort of emotions?’

  ‘All sorts,’ said Elizabeth quizzically.

  ‘That’s right. Good and bad. Who can tell me a good feeling? Stephen.’

  Stephen was straining again with his arm aloft.

  ‘Eating chocolate!’ he cried.