The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Axe you talking about Mrs Madden?’

  ‘Mrs Mad ’un.’ He nodded. ‘I don’t like her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I was resolved at any moment to put a stop to this bizarre conversation; but I could not resist letting Mr Trimmer run on, just to see what he would say. It is hard to convey how alien his manner of speech was to me. I could barely understand what he was saying; not because of his accent, although it was strong, but because his words and the sequence of his ideas, punctuating in addition vast lagoons of silence, did not conform to any pattern I recognized. It struck me that perhaps he didn’t talk very much. He was embarked now on another great pause, his mouth and eyebrows labouring as if with the effort of giving birth to a fully formed sound.

  ‘She’s a shagger,’ he pronounced finally.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen her. I see everything that happens. Not just that business.’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘That’s what gave him the heebie-jeebies.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘He doesn’t know it all, though. If he did …’ His fingers uncurled by his temples to form what I took to be a gun. He gave me an idiotic grin.

  ‘What business?’ I repeated.

  ‘Nothing to do with you,’ Mr Trimmer curtly replied. ‘You don’t need to worry yourself. It’s married business.’

  I had by this time finished my drink. Mr Trimmer was halfway through his. I wondered if he would offer me another, or whether I would have to wait until he finished.

  ‘What do you mean, the heebie-jeebies?’ I persisted, hoping that he would be more forthcoming on the subject of Mr Madden.

  Mr Trimmer shook his head.

  ‘He’s mental,’ he said presently. ‘He’s going to hurt his self one of those days.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Walk into one of his own traps, won’t he? I nearly done it enough times. Came near enough yourself, and all.’

  ‘In the top field?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I thought the step was broken?’

  Mr Trimmer swelled silently.

  ‘You mean it was supposed to be?’

  He folded his arms over his chest.

  ‘Why? To discourage people from using the footpath?’

  ‘Some people,’ he finally pronounced. ‘Some people.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re nosy.’ He tapped his nose and nodded at me. ‘You.’

  ‘Not nosy. Curious. So,’ I recapped, ‘Mr Madden sabotages his own footpaths to keep some people off them. It doesn’t make any sense. Surely if someone got hurt, they would go to the police and he’d get into trouble?’

  ‘Police come up.’ He gave me a crafty grin. ‘They don’t find anything, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I fixed it!’

  He burst out laughing; a terrible, preternatural sound, which made heads turn towards us.

  ‘So,’ I patiently resumed, ‘Mr Madden breaks things and you fix them before anybody can get hurt.’

  ‘That’s so.’ He nodded and tapped his head again.

  With the excitement of these discoveries I was becoming thirsty. Mr Trimmer had inched his way down his own glass, which now stood almost empty. I curled my fingers significantly around mine, in the hope that he would take the hint. He didn’t.

  ‘But why,’ I said, clearing my dry throat, ‘why don’t you talk to him about it? It seems a bit of a waste of your time, after all.’

  Even as I said it, I knew that I had taken a wrong turning; and I was rewarded with what could not have been less than five minutes of impenetrable silence. I fidgeted impatiently with my glass while Mr Trimmer absorbed my mistake. I was becoming exhausted with the effort of extracting information from the dark and tortuous passages of his mind, but I was not about to give up. I felt myself to be apprehending something of great significance. Who was Mr Madden protecting himself from? And was there a genuine reason for his doing so, or merely the fact that he was, as Mr Trimmer had put it, ‘mental’? I wondered if the creature and his undercover band of lobbyists had anything to do with it. It seemed unlikely that it was they whom Mr Madden feared. What threat could they possibly present to him? I remembered the nooses nailed to the creature’s wall, and felt a dark qualm of fear. Presently I realized that Mr Trimmer was staring at me and I gave him an encouraging smile.

  ‘What you saw was nothing,’ he immediately announced.

  Horribly, I saw that this was the way to coax from him what he knew.

  ‘You mean the broken step?’ I smiled again, this time more broadly.

  ‘That’s it.’ He nodded. ‘There’s guns.’

  ‘Guns?’ My smile slipped and I hoisted it back, shifting my knee out from under the table and putting it into full view for good measure. ‘Where?’

  ‘All over. Everywhere.’ He fixed his eyes on my knee as he spoke, as if he were reading from it. ‘Some have been there so long he forgot about ’em. I have to watch him. He’ll get his self shot up one of these days.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Walk in front of ’em.’

  ‘You mean they’re loaded?’

  He looked at me cross-eyed and made a strange motion with his hands, as if he were threading a needle.

  ‘Trip wires,’ he said finally. ‘Learned it in the army, he did.’

  I sat, dumbfounded, for some time. Mr Trimmer was staring reproachfully at our empty glasses. He shook his head and sighed. Then he looked at his watch, his eyebrows shooting up in an unconvincing expression of surprise when he saw what it said.

  ‘Better be going,’ he said finally.

  He stood up abruptly and began walking towards the door. I had no choice but to follow him. The inside of the pub was now penumbral, as the evening outside had faded to the point at which electric light seems to deepen rather than illuminate the darkness. Mr Trimmer opened the door and went out into the dusky High Street; but before I could go after him, I heard a familiar voice emerge from the shadows.

  ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘Fancy meeting you here!’

  I turned and saw the creature, slumped in a chair at a table in the corner by the door. It smiled at me delightedly.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Out with Mr Trimmer, are we? Wonders will never cease.’

  ‘I can’t stop. He’s taking me home.’

  ‘I’d watch yourself, dear. He can get a bit frisky when he’s had a drink.’

  ‘I think I’ve found out what happened to Geoff.’

  ‘Really?’ The creature raised a sarcastic eyebrow. ‘I wasn’t aware of any – how shall I put it? – ambiguity in the matter. Has Mr Trimmer been sweet-talking you? I didn’t think the oaf had it in him.’

  ‘It’s not what you think. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.’

  ‘As you like.’ The creature shrugged. ‘You know where to find me.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  It raised its skinny arm in a salute.

  ‘Toodle-pip!’

  Outside, Mr Trimmer was sitting motionless in the Land Rover. He started the engine when he saw me. My thoughts in turmoil, I barely noticed the fact that he drove considerably more slowly on our return than he had on the voyage out. Indeed, so distracted was I by all that I had learned during the evening that when a few minutes later the Land Rover ground to a halt in the darkness, it took me some time to realize that we were not sitting outside the house but lodged in the shadows at the bottom of the drive. I turned to Mr Trimmer, my arms and mouth open to form a protest, and at this invitation he lunged at me across the seat, chest-first like a diver, and flung his body against my own in an artless collision.

  ‘Oh, baby!’ he cried, squirming against me. ‘Oh, baby!’

  So utterly shocked was I by this turn of events that his wet, inert lips managed to make contact with my own before I succeeded in placing my hands on his straining chest and throwing him off. Disgustedly, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

&nb
sp; ‘Mr Trimmer!’ I said.

  I put my hand on the door, intending to get out and run, but then Mr Trimmer turned the key and started the engine again. He did not look particularly abject. In fact, he looked angry. His lower lip jutted out. From the side, with his eyes flat against his head and his pouting lip, he resembled a fish. He put the Land Rover into gear and accelerated up the drive so quickly that the wheels spun noisily on the gravel. He shrieked to a halt outside the house and sat, his hands gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. He began to mutter to himself, although I could not make out what he was saying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said anxiously. ‘I had a lovely evening.’ Still he did not respond. ‘Well, goodbye.’

  I got out of the Land Rover and carefully shut the door. I could not prevent myself, as I walked slowly across the drive, from glancing over my shoulder to see if he was looking at me. His dysfunctional glare burned at me through the windscreen in the gloom. As soon as I had made it around the corner and through the gate, I began to run. The night was moonlit, and I found my way up the path easily. At the cottage door, I could still hear the grumble of the engine idling. I stood there, waiting to hear him leave, my heart thudding in my chest. The minutes dragged on. I wondered what on earth he was doing. Finally, I heard the distant grinding of gears, and the noise of the engine grew momentarily louder and then faded into the silence. I went into the cottage and made straight for the cupboard in the kitchen where I had put the gin.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Stella!… Stella!‘

  I opened my eyes. The movement generated a wave of pain which gathered momentum as it rolled up my forehead.

  ‘Stella! Are you there?’

  Sunlight poured onto my face through the bedroom window. Dimly I remembered that I had forgotten to draw the curtains the night before. My body was heavy and lifeless on the bed, like a great anchor to which my bobbing head was attached.

  ‘Are you there?’

  Slowly, the vast and far-flung continents of thought, perception and memory, shrouded in the receding mist of sleep, were drawn together into the bright pinprick of consciousness. I bolted up in bed and looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. I had overslept. Pamela’s voice asserted itself, reconstituted in my mind. She must be downstairs, come to find out where I had got to. I threw back the covers and ran to the top of the stairs in my nightdress.

  ‘Stella?’

  What happened next could only have been the noisy activity of a few seconds, but for me it possessed the heightened deliberation, the glassy silence, of a dream. I reached the top of the stairs. I looked down the well and saw Pamela’s upturned face at the bottom. I opened my mouth to speak, took a step forward, and flew. As I fell, I was struck by how impassive Pamela’s expression was, watching me; and even before my back had made its first, brutal contact with the stairs, I had registered the embarrassment of my accident, regretted the foolishness of my facial expression as I had it, considered the social difficulty it would present, and decided on the exertions necessary to the re-establishment of normality in the wake of my unforgivable violation of it. I bumped once, twice, three times, before sliding, stiff and prone as a board, to Pamela’s feet; where I lay for some time, gazing up at her, without moving. I was waiting, as one would wait for examination results or a salary, to be informed of the exact quantity of pain my tumble had earned me; quite a lot, I thought, judging by the sound I had made as I hit each of the steps. I tried to prolong that moment of anticipatory numbness; but too soon, a symphonic swell of agony, powerful beyond all my imaginings, rose up in a great chorus from the back of my body.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Pamela sharply.

  ‘I don’t know. Shit.’ It was unlike me to swear, but the word seemed to offer some appeasement to the pain. ‘That really hurt,’ I added helplessly.

  ‘Yes, you positively flew,’ said Pamela. She looked as if she were about to smile. I wondered whether she was going to do anything.

  ‘Shit,’ I said again. The ache reached a crescendo and held there. Pamela folded her arms. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Look, take your time, why don’t you,’ she said eventually. ‘Come over to the house when you’re ready. I simply came to find out what had happened to you.’

  ‘I overslept,’ I said, wild now with pain.

  ‘Well, there’s no hurry. Just come when you’re ready.’

  She turned and trod lightly off, before I had a chance to say anything more or even get up from where I lay on the stairs. Her response to my accident seemed, on the surface, profoundly cruel; but oddly, even though the vulnerability of my position exposed me to feelings of self-pity, I did not believe that Pamela’s had been an entirely wanton display of indifference. I had forced on her a moment of intense intimacy by falling down the stairs; an intimacy she was unable, whether through ineptitude or fear, to sustain, and whose attendant demands for sympathy, kindness and practical help she could not meet. She was not maternal; by which I mean that she did not appear to have given up, as so many mothers did, her self-regard. Yet her protection of her independence was so fierce – preventing her, as we have seen, even from offering the most desultory help to someone in need – that it suggested one of two things: either that her hold over it was fragile; or that she felt herself to be so constantly importuned by others, who might commandeer her mind and body, that she drew back from any physical or emotional invitation as if it were a trap. Remembering her inappropriate style of behaviour with Toby, it struck me that perhaps what I had seen was of a significance less dark than I had initially thought. Perhaps the language of sexual allure was the only one Pamela knew; or the only one, at any rate, in which she could communicate.

  By this time I had picked myself up and carefully ascended the stairs to my bedroom. Twisting round to look at myself in the mirror, I saw several stunned, white areas on my back which I felt sure would bloom before long into bruises. The skin was so searing to the touch that it took me some time to dress; and even longer, crouched at the top of the stairs, to pluck up the courage to inch my way down them. Finally I managed to stagger along the path in the heat and up the back passage into the big house.

  My predicament was not simplified by the fact that I appeared, doubtlessly by virtue of the empty stomach on which I had finished the bottle of gin the night before, to have acquired a hangover. It had seemed necessary at the time to staunch the turmoil of my thoughts with liquor; but the evening was even more confused now in my mind than it had been in its tumultuous aftermath. I had not solved anything by my drinking binge, which was probably in addition to blame for my uncertain footing on the stairs. Filled now with self-disgust, I concluded that I had a drinking problem. Indeed, I had been drunk at the end of almost every evening I had spent in the country. I had gone so far as to steal drink to appease my habit. In fact, the only evening on which I had not been drunk was when I had been prevented by poverty from becoming so. Even thinking about drink caused a swill of nausea in my stomach. I laboured up the stairs, bending now forward, now back, undecided as to which of my ailments to favour.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ I announced, bursting into Martin’s room.

  I was dimly aware, borne along on this rush of necessity, of two startled faces looking up at my entry. The first was Martin’s. The second belonged to Mrs Barker; the horror of whose presence I was forced to delay while I sought some outlet for my imminent regurgitation.

  ‘In the sink,’ said Martin immediately. ‘Over there in the closet.’

  He sped along a diagonal trajectory towards the sink, while I approached at an adjacent angle from the door. We met at the closet door; he opened it; I lunged inside; and immediately gave forth a hot stream of bitter bile. Halfway through, Martin placed his hand on my sore back. I shot up with a howl of protest, banging my head on a ledge above the small sink.

  ‘What?’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Hand!’ I sputtered.

  He removed his hand and I vomited aga
in, retching hopelessly from my withered, empty stomach. Placing my hands on the sink I hung my head, exhausted.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ I heard Mrs Barker say from behind me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Martin in a low voice.

  ‘Too much to drink last night, I’ll be bound,’ said Mrs Barker, with horrible accuracy. ‘Will you be all right here, young man? I’d better get on. I’ve lost enough time already this morning thanks to this one.’

  Waves of humiliation coursed down my spine. I tried to summon the strength to speak but could not. Instead, I retched again.

  ‘Hmph!’ said Mrs Barker triumphantly. ‘She’s had a bellyful.’

  ‘It’s probably a stomach upset,’ said Martin. ‘Off you go, Mrs Barker. We’ll be fine here.’

  I stood over the sink for some time after she’d gone. Finally I raised my head and saw myself in the mirror above the sink. My face was bright red and my mouth covered with slime. A white mark stood out on my forehead from where I had banged it against the shelf. Tears of effort shone around my eyes.

  ‘Have you a tissue?’

  ‘Hang on. Here.’

  Martin’s hand insinuated itself into the compartment, waving a tissue like a flag of surrender. I wiped my face and blew my nose and then turned shamefully around.

  ‘Come on. Why don’t you lie on the bed?’

  Martin took my hand and wheeled me trembling to the bed. I lay down, curled on my side.

  ‘I fell down the stairs,’ I said, closing my eyes. ‘This morning.’

  ‘That must have been why you were sick. It’s very common if you’ve taken a knock.’

  I felt something cool on my forehead and realized that it was Martin’s hand. He began stroking my hair, which had stuck around my face, matted with sweat.

  ‘Poor Stel-la,’ he said.

  ‘Mrs Barker. Will she tell your mother?’

  ‘No. She’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. I’ll get the sack.’

  ‘No you won’t. I’ll look after you.’

  I was becoming uncomfortable with Martin’s stroking, which had extended its compass to my neck. I felt myself growing tense beneath his hand, but I could not bring myself to tell him to stop. The only solution was to get up, but I feared for what would happen to my stomach, which had now found an acceptable level in this horizontal mode, if I changed position. The thought that Pamela might come in to investigate and find us thus redoubled my anxiety. Martin’s fingers caressed the back of my neck, entwining themselves in my hair.