A Few Days in the Country (16 page)

English Lesson

So after a little indecision, and baring her teeth at the letterbox, Laura posted the letter. It dropped from her fingers, slid out of her control. She felt an instant's black surprise, as if the letter fell in her. Then she thought, Oh well, that's done. And went away from the red letterbox, across the road, and into the park, hearkening all the while to Leslie's difficult conversation. It was about himself. Surrounded by invisible lime trees, skirting the invisible pond and boys playing cricket, he addressed her right ear. She forgot the letter.

It was not important. She did not think it was important. But sensible people thought it was sensible to write it and send it. They sank back with folded hands on hearing that their will had been done, bereft not of the
right
to bully (for what thing is that?) but of the stuff, the wherewithal. Their will was done.

And alack! They were deprived. Their satisfaction was frustration before their very eyes.

As for Laura—touch me not; lay no further words on me. I have gone your way. I am not assailable.

The letter was written, the ground cut from beneath the feet of sensible persons. They champed gloomily and searched as if waiting for specific things, though they were not. Unless the return of their reason for living.

It was only a sort of business letter to a man who was purported to look after Laura's interests. She told him some news and asked for some advice. She had no idea what he was like, but he was purported to be looking after her interests. Anyway, the letter was polite. Laura wondered if it might not be ingenuous. Advisers set their jaws uncertainly when she allowed them to infer this. No, they said tremulously. He has some obligations towards you.

(Had he?)

What else is he for? they insisted.

No one answered.

Laura put discussions and well-phrased paragraphs behind her. After all, this was not the only thing in her life. The doing, the acquiescence, had pacified the country for miles around. Concord—everyone to be, if not happy, at least not looking bitter thoughts at people—is more to some natures than others. She would seem ingenuous, or even quite peculiar if necessary, to any number of businessmen, for concord's sake. It was a question of what mattered most to whom. And how she appeared and what she did mattered little to her. And that obligations were nicely fulfilled in all directions mattered much to others. A bun for a bun.

All that happened was that the man had been given a chance to say: Dear Laura, Yes. (Or, alternatively, No. Or practically anything.) An amiable exchange. Concord. Folded hands. For her—no words. For them—incipient, approaching satisfaction
here
.

And nonexistent.

Propelled by Leslie, the letters skated on the glossy starched tablecloth. Last down for breakfast acting postman, he had delivered mail at five other tables. Laura had watched him: American in a strange land and het up about it. Conspicuous and glad to be. Trying not to seem contemptuous of inferior Anglo-Saxon ways and not succeeding. Bearing his prodigious education heavily. And uneasy. Uneasy.

Airmail striped red, white, and blue. A catalogue with pictures of Italian shoes in it.

Oh. And that one.

Leslie recognised it, too, and languidly expressed his foreknowledge that it contained the most sanguine of replies. He stirred his coffee, and shook salt and pepper over his plate.

Laura read the letter, and her surroundings vanished.

Pausing over his egg, inviting news, Leslie as it were paused a second time. Yet again he paused and looked at Laura. Then he took the letter up, read it, and replaced it on the table.

Laura's hand lay on her bare collarbone. The bone was scorching. Indeed, her whole body burned, recoiled, retreated from her skeleton. She had been insulted. Someone almost a stranger had hit her across the face.
Why?

Unable to raise their eyes from the flip little note, the two spoke simultaneously and, it might as well have been, in a language foreign to both and understood by neither. The dining room was submerged fathoms deep. Everything echoed.

What the motive? Where the wit? Why the knife in the ribs? What had she done? Almost total strangers…Surfacing briefly, Laura began to say words in English to Leslie, and he spoke back to her in American, and they were able to hear each other with difficulty, very faintly.

For years unconvincing examples had been reported in books of human beings reeling under blows. Laura reeled, dizzy. Yet she had never been a sheltered person! Still, though she had known real malevolence and survived it, she was awed by the malice of the note. Its very littleness, its unexpectedness, its having less than no reason to it, made it strange.

Her heart hammered. She was insufficiently acquainted with physiology to know what else was happening inside her because of a dozen casual words, but she was learning. For instance, an insult recorded by the eye could cause an entire organism to react as though it had been violently smitten with an axe.

Consider calmly. Had she not been insulted in the old days many times, and borne it with an even mind? Why the fuss now? Today? Yes, but rarely, never by anyone she cared about; never by anyone who cared about her. (She temporarily shelved this remarkable and complicated fact, merely giving it a startled look in passing.) But she and this man did not know each other! No question of emotion one way or the other! Anyway. Anyway, she was grateful to have been reminded what it felt like to be angry. She had forgotten. It was interesting, too, to find that a man could be so…

Oh, was it? Was it? Let the world, the walls of this room, and these rickety bits of furniture understand: she felt herself to have been insulted! What use all this retaliatory chatter with Leslie's American accent over poached eggs? She was anguished, struck back, hacked to the ground. The man's very unknownness made it seem that the universe had gratuitously spoken against her.

Nothing but today's lecture would have drawn Leslie from the fascinating case she represented to him. Laura rallied him, urging him to go, groaning soft asides to her spirit till she would be free to attend to its wounds. Reluctantly, he analysed his way to the front door and disappeared. He would like to have been
studied
…

Upstairs, distraught, holding herself with her arms, stopping now and then to read the note again, Laura trailed about her room.

And yet, wasn't her behaviour extreme?
Think
. A moment's spite, ennui, thought of private troubles, on the part of a man she hardly knew, and this reaction. Come…

Unexpected, uncalled for, unprovoked, unkind, unusual, unbearable…She had a second shower and dressed again. Unusual, unexpected, uncalled for…She looked in no mirrors.

Most peculiar (she addressed herself chattily), but I understand that this is how people start ulcers. Her body was considering whether or not to begin one. A true story she had once heard of a man who had a heart attack and died when his special restaurant table was given to a stranger made sense. If you were old and so indignant, you could die of it.

In the communal kitchen she tried to drown herself with cup after cup of coffee. She ate a large piece of stale cake. In her room, on the bed, she read
The Fall
, splitting her mind neatly in two so that she at one and the same time debated the novel and gently humoured her fevered spirit, whispering softly and soothing it.

She finished that book and started another. Oh, my heart, my heart, she thought, through its pounding. The insult was hours old, yet the heavy thuds would not abate for cake or Camus.

People (the unshaken Laura addressed her languishing body with an increasing hardness and lack of sympathy) are insulted every day. Salesmen. Politicians. All kinds of people. Did they collapse if someone said a brutal word? Did they fall down in the streets? Did they lie about as if their loved one had been seen dropping poison in their porridge? Was this the worst thing that had ever happened to her? Ludicrously far from it! It was trivial. Trivial. Well, then. Enough is enough. The scornful and the wounded both agreed. A moment's grim standing fast.

But unusual, unexpected, unkind, uncalled for, unprovoked, unnecessary…

That man…There had to be some suitable names for him in the language, but her efforts to recall any were strikingly ineffectual. To be natural at all, she saw, she ought to dig up some invective and fling it, at least mentally, at him. She had to
want
to. Leslie had done it for her at breakfast. One of them was wrong—either she or the man. He had a will to be unpleasant; she had no will to name-call. Pig. Lousy thing.
Rude
, she had thought him. He was bloody awful and not nice into the bargain.

Obligations. She had no obligation to pay Mrs Chaloner for the milk. Sandals flapping, unconscious of legs, of mouth with lipstick, she dropped downstairs. A hollow cave. A beating drum.

Money for milk, Mrs Chaloner. I owe you money for milk. She handed it over. Mrs Chaloner stared, but Laura had left her face to its own devices. She was off somewhere under anaesthetic. If her face was grey, if the cheeks cleaved to the bones, if the eyes were glazed and blank, she knew nothing about it.

Upstairs she read the letter again and drank coffee and drifted and was racked with futile wonder. Still her heart pounded. Lying down, she saw it lift the pink blouse she wore, felt its deep unnatural reverberations through her body. Its capacity, for feeling insulted, astonished and exhausted her.

If she were ever to meet him…Are you always so
bad-mannered
? Oh, killing. He would curl up and die. She had a genius for sarcasm. Terrible to unleash a talent like that on a perhaps quite sensitive man!

She moved her head on the pillow restlessly. Death, death…Death, she thought, while her heart struck deafening chimes through her body.

If she were to meet him…

Oh, sickening. Out of all proportion. Too frail for this world. When things
mattered
, she fortunately refrained from this sort of performance. It was ridiculous beyond words in the person who had lived her life. Face it. To mind
this
much you have to be megalomaniac. No. Just—just…It was not
right
. Think what he said! Oh, what he said, what he said. The burning smoking strokes of her heart continued. The very bed shook under them.

Laura! Laura!

Disembodied, she jerked herself up and meandered to the landing. Yes?

A drink for you, gasped Mrs Chaloner, looking at her amazed. I thought you might be able to do with it. It's so hot. Here.

She offered up a clinking tumbler, icy, lemony, ginny. She was kind.

Oh, thank you! How kind of you! If ever I need anything! Laura said with alarming vivacity.

It's so hot up here, Mrs Chaloner told her.

Laura gazed about in a vague stupor. Yes, it is, she agreed insincerely, beginning at once to sweat now that the fact was pointed out.

Indeed it was hot. It was roasting, boiling, and had been for hours. Laura simmered slowly, drinking the icy drink, burning, hammering, and insulted.

Sagging, far from convalescent, she sat on the edge of her bed. Through the window she could see children playing on the lawn of a distant school. Little did they know…Shock. That was all that was wrong. Brandy, blankets, a St Bernard dog…No, sweet tea, blankets…But could shock have the effect of bringing about a permanent physical change? Could she doubt it? Everything about her, physical and metaphysical, had sunk, shrunk. She was shorter, pruned, slightly murdered.

The world, human beings. Her mind reviewed every fact she had ever learned. She recollected all the significant scenes of her life, and the meaningful words. She contemplated the perfect love that casts out fear, rested in it, knowing that to be reality and herself to be, in truth, beyond harm. Smiled.

But just the same…

Dinnertime, and Leslie returned to his room along the corridor and to the table. All day, in his mind, he had written letters to that guy. He stated doubtfully his opinion that Laura would survive. Then he repeated it. Appointing himself chief distracter and analyst, he distracted and analysed while the undiverted heart thumped.

Late that night, when she was alone, the banging stopped quite suddenly. Hurt pride and vanity, her whole vast sense of the dreadful wrongness of what had happened, up in smoke. The heart that knew how to act temperately in crucial situations gave up being a burning mountain on this inappropriate occasion, and was all at once lightless.

I know something, Laura thought before falling dead asleep. It did not speak against me; it spoke to me. And I know what insulted means. I was never insulted before. I'll never be insulted again. I'll always know what insulted means. As I know what some other words mean.

11

It Is Margaret

Before the ceremony began, the woman with hairy legs and an air of having just abandoned a cigarette wandered as though at a party to the coffin where—though it was impossible and not so—Clelia's mother, Margaret, was. Three days ago, four days ago, Clelia had said to her mother, ‘Come and see the blossom I've brought back.' She had just returned to Sydney after a three-week absence in the mountains.

‘Can't it come to me?'

‘No,' she said gaily, insistently, not thinking really, never wondering. ‘No, you'll have to come out here. It's so tall. I can't move the vase.'

So her mother left her chair in Clelia's sitting room and walked through to the kitchen, where the bower of japonica and peach and pear blossom was.

After the two-hour weekly visit permitted by Theo they said goodbye beside the car in the black soft night.

‘I'll hear from you before you go away next week?' her mother asked, knowing, saying nothing.

‘Of
course
. Naturally.'

‘I do feel old tonight,' her mother said, knowing.

‘No.' She smiled and hugged her. ‘No, you're not.'

Uneasy, affronted, the minister approached her and leaned down, referring to the woman with the hairy legs now swaying past the coffin, reading the cards on the sweet spring flowers. ‘Who is that?'