A Few Days in the Country (19 page)

The stricken animal thawed and fled, leaving only a haunted path. Sophie mourned for it, mourned for its view of her as an object potentially powerful and evil, hardened. How wise are you, cat, to resist my blandishments, my tender voice, my endless—I would have you think—capacity for kindness. It
is
almost endless, too. I would never hurt you, except by accident, and hardly even then. But, oh, how sad I am, cat.

Her mouth smiled at ‘sad'.

‘You look very contented and peaceful there,' Caroline said, wandering over to her. ‘That's good. Means you're settling in. Who volunteered to water the garden while I make some dinner?'

Syringa, woodbine, japonica, tangled cascades of roses hanging from old fences. Sophie wandered, trailing the hose, its silver spray hissing gently. Daylight was fading from moment to moment, the air cooling. Magpies held a dialogue as they flew, swooping low. Hearing them, Sophie told herself: I'm in the bush.

Then suicide thought of her. Unlike the instruction, which was of a labyrinthine complexity, suicide used simple words and images and, when it overcame the instruction and claimed her in a tug of war, it used them ceaselessly. Suicide was easy provided the balance of your mind was not disturbed. The essential point, neglected by faint hearts, was to commit the deed in a place where you would not soon be discovered. You would leave the city, taking with you a quantity of painkilling drugs or sleeping pills. You would post one or two letters before catching the train, because it would be cruel never to let yourself be found. And there were the reasons, the reasons you were dying for…Which no one wanted to know and would prefer never to understand, anyway…Then you would board a train going in a direction previously chosen, climb out at the selected station, walk to a secluded spot, lie down, and swallow the tablets. Having taken care, of course, to bring water.

Sophie sighed. A crude, peculiar,
material
way of dealing with extreme unhappiness. Like wars. Beside the point.

‘What will you have to drink? Whisky? There's everything.' Caroline stood at the front door looking out remotely at the sky and the darkening garden.

‘Thank you. Yes. I was watching the light on the hills there.'

‘Lovely. You've brought good weather. Whisky, then. Don't stay out in the cold.'

‘I'll just put the hose away.'

Light came on in the house. As Sophie went along the side path, she felt the consoling silence all about. Silence lay enormous behind the sound of her footsteps on grass, the dragging hose, late bird cries, insect scrapings.

Because
, the argument resumed, being dead was not what she wanted most. It was the only alternative. Just as, presumably, generals did not want, first and foremost, dead bodies and buildings fallen down.

Over dinner Caroline, who had emerged as funny, generous, and Christian, asked about their Sydney friends and showed an inclination to dissect them as though they were interesting cadavers. Dismay ground Sophie to an almost total stop when this disloyalty displayed itself. Any betrayal, of whatever order, instantly related itself to the great calamities of the world. Which of these had not originated in one person? Her knife and fork grew heavy in her fingers, and it was an effort to breathe. Her dear friends! Unfitted to judge though she might be—no Christian—she knew she would judge Caroline later. Though even dear friends were now like faded frescoes. That response in their defence was only an outdated reflex. It was of no consequence that they would never meet again, so how should Caroline's mild malice disturb?

While Sophie drooped over her dinner, Caroline grew more and more inclined to ramble, and finally rambled right out of the field of friendship into small-town scandal—unfrocked ministers and cows that ate free-growing marijuana.

‘Everyone drinks their milk. Can you wonder at the things that go on here?'

Sophie laughed with relief, a little too long.

In the morning Caroline left for the hospital at seven. Sophie showered, dressed, and brushed her hair, advancing jerkily from one operation to the next. No one and nothing could be relied on now. Nothing was automatic. The simplest habits had deserted. Everything took thought, yet thought was what she had nothing to spare of. Because she had so much to think about and it was so important. And nobody realised.

Wandering through to the kitchen, she made some toast and coffee and set it out on the back veranda in the sun. The grey cat appeared at the door and saw her, coffee cup raised to lips, and after a moment's paralysis slunk off like a hunted thing. Sophie called after it in a beseeching voice, then rose and went to stand in the doorway. She spoke to the breathing garden, hoping the cat could hear, but there was no sign of it. When the dishes were washed, she trundled out the lawnmower and mowed some square yards of Caroline's dewy grass. The day was beautiful.

It was rather feeble to attempt suicide and fail. It definitely placed a person's good faith in doubt. It was worse to make an attempt with the conscious intention of not succeeding. Anyway. Anyway, she felt contempt for suicide. Butcher yourself? Why should you? Fall into a decline because nothing was what it seemed? Some had ambitions perhaps to enter the higher reaches of blackmail. But Sophie had never thought of suicide. It was just that lately she could not stop thinking about it.

Little ridges of grass that had escaped her stood conspicuous. She pushed the mower to and fro, stopping once to throw off her sweater. Only a psychosis could make the deed anything but (Sophie pushed the mower so hard that it was airborne) pusillanimous. Pusillanimous. And had she any desire to be that?

Worn out by the violence of her repudiation, she stopped for an indignant breath. Then nervously ran the four fingers of her left hand across her forehead. It was just a fact that she wasn't safe, wasn't safe yet. And all you had to do was not be found too soon…

Small black ants were swarming over her bare feet and ankles. She stamped about, brushing the tenacious ones away, dropping the handle of the mower. Bent right over, hair hanging, her glance slanted suddenly sideways: the cat sat under a bush some yards away, watching with round yellow eyes.

Cautiously, Sophie lowered herself to the ground, sat motionless on the grass, exchanging eyes with the cat. Then she began very gently to talk to it, and the cat listened, for the first time showing no fear.

Sophie looked vaguely into its green retreat, and rested her cheek on her knee. She closed her eyes. It was the tone of voice, she told herself. Cats must be susceptible to voices. And there was a slight, but temporary, amelioration of her suffering.

It was not a thing you could do, not in an immediate, noticeable way. It was not considerate to wreck other people's lives for no better reason than that you would prefer to be dead. Wreck? Well, perhaps that did overstate the case. Inconvenience, she amended.

‘What a pity!' Sophie muttered. ‘What a pity!' It was hard to understand, something she could never be reconciled to. Real love was not so common even in so large a place as the world.

Mortal wounds, the instruction said. The psychic knife went in; the psychic blood came out…

My own doing, Sophie reflected, while the instruction rattled on in the background monotonously. It was she who had done the empowering, delivered herself over. Nothing she had previously understood or learned had prepared her. Yet her life had never been sheltered. Again now, the magnitude of her surprise, of her mistake, bore down on her. Public violence, bombs, wars were this private passion to destroy made manifest on a large scale.

‘That grass is wet, Sophie. I have to call on old Mr Crisp out past the church, so I came in to see if you were all right.'

As Caroline emerged from the tunnel of honeysuckle and may, Sophie scrambled up uncertainly, rubbing damp hands and cut grass on her damp slacks. ‘Oh, Caroline…I was mowing the grass…I was talking to the cat.'

‘Did she let you?'

‘In a way. Almost.'

‘I don't think there's time, or we could have a cup of tea together. Walk back up to the car with me, anyway. I only looked in. She was operated on once, poor Cat, and I'm convinced the vet was led astray by curiosity. He'd just qualified. She lost faith in the human race.'

Leaf mould lay thick beneath the trees.

‘How awful,' Sophie said.

‘Mmm.' Caroline frowned at the path for a few steps, then looked up briskly, glancing at her watch. ‘You could try feeding her if you want to be friends. There's plenty of stuff in the fridge.'

‘I don't think she's hungry.'

Her right hand on the gate, Caroline paused. Sophie looked at this small tough hand and waited obediently. She had the impression that she was expecting a message, and that perhaps Caroline was the person who was going to deliver it to her.

But Caroline just said absently, ‘No, it isn't that. It's a bit demoralising to have her flitting about like the victim of a vivisectionist. Which she is. I really wondered if I'd find you practising. I was going to creep off. It isn't right, Sophie, that you should throw away your talents.'

Though once upon a time she herself had said this sort of thing to encourage other people, Sophie smiled with a sort of heartless gaiety. ‘Did you really come back for that?'

‘I did indeed. You practise, my girl, or we'll turn you into a medico and send you overseas to do good.' Her concern, which seemed real enough, disinterested, made Sophie feel ashamed of her own duplicity, though the concern was so misplaced and even preposterous that she laughed aloud.

‘How can you think it matters, Caroline? Talent. Playing pianos. And even give it priority over doing good?' She felt tremendously amused, full of laughter.

‘Just get on with it!' With a minatory nod, Caroline made for her little yellow car, and Sophie waited and waved through the familiar grating and humming of gears; then Caroline was gone, and so was the hilarity that had felt so permanent.

Alone again, Sophie conversed with herself about the weather as though to distract an invalid acquaintance. But, really, the light
was
dazzling, like the first morning of the world. Radiance pealed across Caroline's small valley from sky to dandelion. After staring into it for a time, Sophie continued back along the path to the uneven square of cut grass. Safely there, and gazing as if to count the blades, it seemed to her that something as mesmeric, as impersonal, and of the same dimensions as the sun was before her eyes. And this was the instruction.

‘The Coopers and Stephen rang to say how much they enjoyed the other night.' Caroline looked up from the telephone directory.

‘How punctilious! They were nice.' On her way to the kitchen with a large copper vase, Sophie paused.

‘You were a great success.'

‘I liked them, too.'

Caroline began to turn the pages distractedly. ‘I'm looking for that new garage man who took Alec's place. The car's due for an oil change.' She sighed and let the book fall shut. ‘I'll call in when I'm passing. It's a shame you have to go tomorrow. There's no reason to rush away.'

‘I do work,' Sophie reminded her. ‘Someone's going to notice I'm not there.' While she would almost certainly be nowhere, there was no reason to burden Caroline with that information.

‘I daresay.'

‘You've been marvellous.'

With Caroline gone, chains dropping from her, Sophie sank from the platform in space where it was laid on her to make conversation and act as if she believed in the great conspiracy. It was amazing what quantities of time could be passed out there when necessary, she reflected, filling the vase with fresh water. Some people spent the whole of their lives there without even knowing it. Like Ivan Ilyich and innumerable other characters who crowded to suggest themselves. Sophie clasped her hands round the cold vase and rushed through to the sitting room, leaning slightly backwards to avoid the spreading branches of japonica. Placing the vase carefully on the low table by the windows she escaped from the house to the open air, and stood bathed in surprise.

Here was the real world you could never remember inside houses: soft rounded hills and trees that had been there before history. Sophie looked at them and breathed. Help, her eyes said to the hills. Help, to the clouds, treetops, and grass. They bore her appeal like so many gods, with silence, no change of expression. She continued to look at them.

She continued to look at them, but addressed no more petitions. Words trivialised. Thought trivialised. Her unhappiness was so extraordinary that it was literally not to be thought of.

She stood motionless. But from a distance she was being stared at. After a time, her eyes were pulled to the cat's eyes, and she slowly roused herself and looked into them with some sense of obligation. Knowing it would come to her, Sophie drew a breath to summon the cat. Then she frowned and closed her mouth, repelled by her power over something more vulnerable than herself. She felt physically a nausea of the heart, and understood that ‘heartsick' wasn't, after all, poetic rhetoric, but a description of a state of being. One which it would be preferable never to know.