The Country Life

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Don’t,’ I said weakly.

  ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘Please.’ A terrible tiredness lapped at my eyes. ‘It’s not a good idea.’

  ‘Let me. Just for a little while. I won’t do it again. You’re so lovely, Stel-la. Let me just touch you.’

  I’m afraid to say that I let him do it. True, I was feeble with pain and sickness, and in need too of comfort and human contact; and in a sensual way, the feeling of Martin’s large hand on my skin was pleasurable; but deep inside me, far beneath the swirling ether of semi-consciousness, I had a small, hard sense of wrong. My limbs felt numb and vast, too remote from this tiny impulse to be powered by it; and so I lay, while Martin went about his solitary raptures, and did nothing but fail to reciprocate them. I must have fallen asleep, for some time later when I opened my eyes Martin was sitting by the window on the other side of the room watching me.

  ‘You should have woken me!’ I said, sitting up. My stomach felt much better, but my back sounded a chord of agony when I moved.

  ‘You probably needed to sleep,’ said Martin. He seemed embarrassed. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Better.’ I rubbed my eyes and swung my feet off the bed. My shoes, I noticed, were sitting neatly side by side on the floor beside me. ‘I’m sorry about all that. Not my most graceful performance.’

  I immediately felt that this was the wrong thing to have said. Martin fiddled with his hands, his eyes downcast.

  ‘What would you like to do?’ I persisted, slapping my knees enthusiastically. ‘We could go out for a walk, or – or we could stay here and do some homework’ – at this he gave a faint snort of laughter – ‘or— What do you want to do?’ I repeated.

  ‘Just – just slow down,’ he said finally. His expression was pained.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I could not seem to say anything without sounding oafish and insensitive.

  ‘Just let me – God!’ He threw his head back with frustration.

  Things had, I saw, changed between us as a result of the strange interlude on the bed. My regret at the realization was intense. I could not believe that I had allowed it to happen.

  ‘Martin,’ I began.

  ‘Don’t say anything!’ He held up a forbidding hand. ‘Just don’t!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I just need to think, that’s all.’

  He sat, accordingly pensive, looking out of the window. I stood awkwardly by the bed. I felt, despite his command, that he did want me to say something; and yet I knew that I was not skilful enough with words to form the delicate phrases he required. Any route from here, however circuitous, led to the denial of what he wanted. There was no step that I could take that would not advance us towards what he did not want to know. With nothing better to offer him than physical proximity, I crossed the room and threw myself into the empty armchair. This, in the event, unexpectedly proved the most direct path out of the tension between us; for when my bruised back made contact with the stiff leather upholstery, I leaped up again with such a scream that Martin involuntarily burst out laughing.

  ‘I know,’ he said presently. ‘Why don’t we have a picnic? We can go and get some stuff and then go off somewhere. You can tell me about last night. How about it?’

  ‘OK.’

  We went down to the kitchen to inform Pamela of our plan. Mrs Barker, I was relieved to see, was not in evidence.

  ‘That sounds jolly,’ said Pamela, who was sitting at the kitchen table with her glasses on her nose, writing laboriously on a sheet of paper. ‘Actually, that would suit me just fine. The men are at the farm again today and I wanted to do some shopping, so I might shoot off now if you two are going to look after yourselves.’ She lowered her glasses and looked at me. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Much, thank you.’ I wondered whether she was referring to my fall, or had received a report from Mrs Barker on my subsequent behaviour in the bedroom. ‘I’ll have some pretty bad bruises, but I don’t think it’s too serious.’

  ‘You ought to be more careful, you know. We don’t want you breaking something and stuck in bed for weeks on end. Right!’ Her tone informed me that our interview was at a close. ‘I’ll get away, then. There are things in the fridge. You can pretty much help yourself to anything, except the salmon. That’s for dinner.’

  ‘Can we have wine?’ said Martin innocently.

  ‘Wine?’ Pamela looked at me. It was difficult to know what expression was required in response. I looked blankly back at her. ‘Oh, I don’t see why not. Just don’t take your father’s vintage hoard. There’s plenty of plonk in the cupboard.’

  Having plundered the kitchen, we set off in the sun, taking the path to the right of the house that led towards the rose garden. Martin held the picnic basket in his lap. We passed the pond into which he had nearly fallen on our first day. It was unchanged, forgetful of us, its surface busy through the delicate filter of shade.

  ‘That seems a very long time ago,’ said Martin from below.

  It was very painful wheeling the chair over the uneven ground. I thought of suggesting we stop by the pond, but it seemed too odd somehow to do so, as if it would signify that we were caught in some strange cycle of repetition from which it was impossible to progress. I braced myself, leaning in at an angle to put the strain on my shoulders. Presently we emerged from the wood into a sort of meadow.

  ‘This is my favourite place,’ said Martin. ‘Shall we sit under that tree?’

  The meadow was lovely, overgrown and surprisingly cool. Wild flowers danced amidst the long grass. I ploughed the chair through the dense, resistant stems, my back singing in ever higher keys of agony. By the time we had reached the tree I was sweating. Curiously, what I felt as I laboured behind Martin’s chair was not, as I might have expected, irritation with him for carelessly choosing so inaccessible a spot; rather, it was a more sober sense of the sacrifices his company entailed, sacrifices which I regarded separately from the fact that I was employed to make them. It was as if I was sizing him up for some other purpose; a development which I interpreted, with some annoyance, as a symptom of a more complex feeling, which his overtures in the bedroom had implanted in me. He had made me feel a responsibility for him greater than that which I was contracted to bear. I resented this imposition; and yet it felt in some way natural, as if all along I had been waiting for a burden to replace those I had shed by coming to the country in the first place.

  ‘My back hurts,’ I said, sitting down in the shade.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do everything. Just lie flat for a bit.’

  I did not want to lie flat, but I conceded that it might be efficacious. I heard Martin slither from his chair and closed my eyes. A warm breeze rolled gently off the meadow, stirring the leaves overhead. Images began to dance about in my mind. With them I felt the essence of myself unstoppered and diluted in my thoughts. Slowly, the partitions of time and place began to dissolve and my memories washed freely and incoherently like a great sea against the shores of the present. The crust of my body was pried loose; and I swam deep amongst flashes of childhood, faces at once strange and familiar, snatches of conversation, pieces of feeling broken off and left to drift far from their recollection; further and further, until finally I was washed up in a dry, hot place where the steady buzz of traffic rose from far below and a foreign sun pressed down hard on my back. Something dug into my stomach. My eyes were closed. I remembered a metal railing, rooted in the crumbling concrete of the balcony floor. Arcs of colour, strangely oleaginous, burst like liquid fireworks behind my eyelids. Blood pounded in my head, as if I were under water. I remembered then that I was upside-down, slung over the railing like a towel hung out to dry. Something curious had happened. I tried to recall what it was. There had been a change. I was no longer, for whatever reason, in the place I had always been. I had made some terrible journey, as if down a chute or across a bridge that had snapped behind me, from which I could not return. I had come to a place of i
nverse proportions to those which nature had dictated, where despair and darkness had overpowered light. I had a strong sense that I had committed a forbidden act in doing so; not because I had done something wrong, but because I had succumbed to a temptation which ought to have been resisted. Searching for some clearer recollection, I felt instead my sense of the meadow in which I lay grow immanent. My daydream wavered. I felt the grass beneath me, and the pain in my back, which had wandered like an idle guard, jumped smartly back into position. In that instant I remembered a dream I had once had, in which I had been shut in a dark room for hours and hours. Was that what I had been thinking of, as I lay there in the meadow? I had surfaced fully now into consciousness but my eyes remained shut. The memory of the dream was familiar, but it did not seem to fit. The more I thought of it, though, the more intangible the other recollection grew. I tried to grasp it but it dissolved, until I was no longer sure what exactly I was trying to remember.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Stel-la. Lunch.’

  I opened my eyes to see a vast sandwich being projected by Martin’s arm through the sunlight towards my face. From the curious angle afforded by my horizontal position the thick lips of bread with their lolling tongue of filling looked gargantuan and rough-hewn, like great slabs of stone. My stomach clenched in resistance.

  ‘Wine?’

  A proffered glass joined the sandwich on its airy platform. I sat up painfully and took it, placing the sandwich on the grass beside me. Despite my biliousness, my mouth sought the glass as if it contained some elemental fuel without which the normal course of things could not resume. The wine was strong and potent and prickled against my palate. I felt an immediate and comfortable sense of dissociation, as if I had removed a pinching shoe.

  ‘This is very civilized,’ I said, making an effort to speak above the loud but private rhythm of my physical needs.

  ‘This is the country life,’ said Martin. He raised his glass. ‘Ambrosia in arcadia. How are you feeling, Stel-la?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Tell me about last night.’

  Complicitly, he shuffled closer over the grass. Out of his wheelchair Martin looked tiny and grotesque. Before I could stop myself, I had permitted a shade of disgust at the memory of him touching me to fleet across my mind.

  ‘What did you and Mr Trimmer talk about?’ he persisted.

  ‘Not much. Your family, mostly,’ I added unguardedly. ‘Everybody seems to want to talk about your family.’

  ‘I know.’ He seemed quite proud of the fact. ‘Just because we live in an old house they think we walk around with our heads under our arms.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said, surprised by his naivety.

  ‘What, then?’ He leaned forward on one arm so that his shoulder joint bulged, and picked up his sandwich. ‘Cannibalistic dinner parties? Ritual torture of au pairs? I hope you’ve not been putting ideas into people’s heads, Stel-la.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t! Actually, it’s more to do with sex.’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ barked Martin, with his mouth full. ‘That’s funny,’ he added.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It just is. We’re a family. What do they think we do? Have sex with each other?’

  Martin could be very obtuse at times, and oscillated alarmingly between wisdom and immaturity. In this case it was fortunate that he had misunderstood me, given that I now felt myself to have been mistaken in bringing up the subject.

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s just gossip.’

  ‘What gossip?’

  ‘Forget I said anything.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘What does Trimmer know, anyway?’ said Martin presently. ‘He’s retarded. Did he try and kiss you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Martin delightedly. ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Revolting.’

  ‘I bet!’ He puckered his lips, like a fish. ‘It must have been like kissing a piece of raw liver.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting.’

  ‘You’re the disgusting one, kissing Mr Trimmer.’

  ‘I didn’t kiss him! I fought him off. I think he was angry with me.’

  ‘You should watch out, Stel-la. He’s a lunatic. So was his father. There’s brothers, too, mad as snakes. That whole family. Inbred. They hate each other. They’ve got loads of guns. One day someone will go over to that house and find them all laid out flat in a pool of blood in the orchard.’

  ‘He won’t hurt me, will he?’ I found Martin’s image sinister.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Martin. ‘He’ll kill his mother, though. He can’t get away from her. He tried to move to Buckley once, took a flat and all that.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He came back after about six months. Very sheepish. I think Dora beats him.’

  ‘How could she? He’s enormous!’

  ‘Dunno. I once saw him with his shirt off. He had marks on his back.’

  The blowsy meadow, and beyond it the luxurious reaches of the garden, cushioned our solitude. A breeze overhead stirred the trees and a deep rustling, almost like thunder, gathered and rolled across the meadow.

  ‘Do you know the person who runs the post office?’ I presently enquired.

  ‘What, that weirdo? Not really. I’ve seen him around. Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  I considered telling Martin about the creature’s room and the leaflets, but something stopped me. It was as if, as I summoned the words to my mouth, the images which had seconds earlier been so clear in my mind melted away. I was gripped by feelings of uncertainty; and could no longer be sure whether the leaflet, and my visit to the creature, and indeed all of the things that I had done on my own since being in the country, had been real or were the product of my invention.

  ‘Stel-la,’ said Martin, after a while. ‘What are you going to do about Edward?’

  ‘What do you mean, do?’ I said nervously. ‘There’s nothing to do.’

  ‘Of course there is.’ Martin leaned forward with the bottle of wine and sternly administered it. ‘You can’t just disappear. You’ll have to face him some time.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ I replied. My voice had the hollow sound which signifies the proximity of some strong emotion. ‘What would be the point?’

  ‘You made promises, Stel-la. It’s not worthy of you.’

  A feeling of panic stirred in my chest.

  ‘It’s shaming for him,’ persisted Martin. ‘What’s he supposed to tell people?’

  ‘I wrote him a letter.’

  ‘You disgraced him. In front of all his friends and family. He deserves some explanation.’

  ‘He does not!’ I said viciously. I felt suddenly as if my face were wrapped tight in Cellophane, at which I would have to tear like a maniac in order to breathe. I had had this feeling before. The memory flashed across my thoughts, too quickly to see. Other things came too, pieces of recollection which seemed familiar but didn’t belong anywhere.

  ‘All right,’ said Martin. ‘But I do think at least that you should do him the courtesy of telling him where you are.’

  ‘And I think you should mind your own business. What do you know about anything, anyway?’

  The wine was making me feel loose in the head, as if stitches were coming undone. My mouth was dry. My heart thudded uncontrollably. I thought of getting up then and there and running, across the meadow and the fields beyond, until I was exhausted beyond thought and far away. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, everything seemed so unreal to me that I began to wonder if I had even imagined the exchange I had just had with Martin.

  ‘I just think—’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ I cried. ‘I don’t want to think about it! All I want is to be left alone! All right? I just want to be left alone. Like a pair of eyes in a jar.’

  Why I made this last remark I can’t imagine, although in my overwrought state I might mere
ly have thought that I said it.

  ‘You can’t live like that. Firstly, it’s cowardly.’ He enumerated using his fingers. ‘Secondly, you’ll regret it. Thirdly—’

  ‘How dare you lecture me?’ I was by this time quite angry. ‘What gives you the right to do it? Other people don’t judge themselves harshly – your own family least of all! Why should I?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ sniffed Martin.

  ‘Just because you live a life of luxury.’ I snapped, ‘you think you’re all beyond reproach. But you’ve got problems! Anyone can see that!’

  ‘Well, of course we do. Nobody said we didn’t.’

  ‘At least I’ve been honest.’ I began ripping up handfuls of grass. ‘At least I don’t sit around hating everything and pretending I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t hate anything,’ said Martin, perplexed.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Your mother,’ I said cruelly, holding up my fingers as he had done, as if I were about to embark on a list.

  ‘My mother? Why on earth do you think I hate her?’

  ‘I – it’s obvious.’ I folded my arms.

  ‘No it’s not!’ he said. His body was rigid with affront and his voice young and anxious. ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘The way you talk to her, for a start.’ My brief flash of confidence began abruptly to fade, revealing a darker feeling of dread. ‘And that picture you drew. The one at the centre.’

  ‘That?’ Martin looked genuinely confused. ‘That isn’t like her at all!’

  ‘It seemed – critical,’ I said lamely.

  ‘It’s just not very good.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We sat in silence. I found the difficulty of remaining in a normal upright posture considerable.