The Country Life (2 page)

I was very unhappy at school at this time, and as you can imagine, such letters did little to comfort or cajole me. It might give you a fuller picture of my parents' characters to know that the ‘here' and ‘there' referred to in Bounder's letter were in fact barely a mile apart. The notion that it could rain in one place and not the other certainly betrays a deep delusion on the part of my parents, who never otherwise hinted that they were anything but convinced of their decision to send me to a boarding school within walking distance of their house. Lest you think that I would have preferred a more far-flung institution, and that they kept me close by them for the sake of affection, let me tell you that I saw no more of my parents than the other girls did of theirs; and further, that I detested every day that I spent in that hellish place and begged to be sent elsewhere.

My predicament was, I now see, the result of my parents' own insecurities. Aspiring to a social position to which they had not been born, they believed it correct to expel their children from the family home and live amongst its empty, echoing bedrooms in miserable solitude. Being also, however, thoroughly provincial in nature, they believed it impossible that any school could be better than those found locally; and that the convenience with which they could visit us and attend school functions, not to mention savings in telephone calls and travel expenses, outweighed both the greater convenience and enormous financial benefit of having us at home.

My brothers were scarcely any better off, and indeed once the tide of my own injury had drawn back and the years neutered its memory somewhat, I was able to feel more aggrieved on their behalf than on my own. Like me, they were sent ‘away'. The elder thought himself happy enough within those high and privileged walls; but when finally he returned it became clear that he had left something vital and precious behind. It was probably for his own good that he himself never seemed to notice the loss; and how could he? For it was as if,
while maintaining his outward appearance, everything in him had been minced into an undifferentiated mass and then reformed in a blander, more homogenous shape.

Not fitted to ran with the elite, the younger was doomed in one way or another to become its prey. The accident occurred on the school playing fields, which my brother was crossing on his way back from his violin lesson. These lessons were a torment to my brother, who, unbeknownst to his teachers or fellow pupils, suffered from deafness in one ear. It is difficult to comprehend how this disability could have gone unnoticed; and perhaps in a more confident pupil it wouldn't have. My brother, however, scion of the brutal bourgeoisie, carrying the weight of my parents' hopes on his small shoulders, was an accomplice in the matter of his own oppression. He struggled to keep up in the classroom, learned with admirable skill to participate in conversations half of which he did not hear, sawed weekly at his violin, and never once considered that he might be happier were he to free himself from this intolerable burden. Labouring under it, then, as he crossed the grass, he did not notice a javelin competition being held at the other end of the playing field. Witnesses claimed that they shouted at him to duck as the pole came hurtling through the air towards him; and there is no reason, I suppose, not to believe them, when you consider that at least three of them required ‘counselling' after the event, which suggests at least that they were, as individuals, less callous than the forms their community took. My brother's deafness, as you will have guessed, made any warning to little avail. The deadly instrument felled him where he stood, impaling his small body on the grass like a bird struck by an arrow. He was thirteen yean old, a year younger than me.

Many things came to pass as a result of this dreadful event. I will not go into them now. Of all the questions that were asked, however, of all the enquiries painfully made amidst expressions of regret and grief, one was never ventured: to wit,
briefly, what arcane and pointless practice was this that deprived my brother of his life? That my parents never asked it was, to me, a measure of the unforgivable awe with which they still regarded the institution that had been so careless with their son. They didn't dare; as if by questioning the sport they would have betrayed their inferiority, the public discovery of which they feared more than all the private sorrow in the world. It has haunted me through the years, even now that my brother is but a shadow, a ghost that flits, unrestful, about my thoughts.

To return to my clear-out, I disposed of Bounder's correspondence with mingled grief and venom. A similarly sized bundle of letters from my mother – with whose contents, which bored me even at the time, I shall not now detain you – followed it; and so on, until all the messy spoils of the past, accumulated over such stretches of time, won in conflicts both arduous and joyful; the whole long, tiring campaign of my existence was parcelled up into three large bags and put downstairs for the proper authorities to dispose of.

I stood outside Buckley station, with one suitcase on the ground on either side of me, and waited. I had worried that Mr Madden would, never having met me before, have difficulty recognizing me when I arrived, but the station building and forecourt were more or less empty. As I stood there, however, my suitcases picking me out like quotation marks, I found that my attempt to conduct this simple train of thought in a logical manner was strangely confounded. I saw that the station was deserted, but failed to register the significance of this sight in relation to my anxieties concerning my arrival and recognition. Indeed, my acknowledgement of the emptiness of my surroundings, rather than reassuring me as to the ease with which I would be noticed standing there, lacked all memory of the importance the state of the station had assumed in my thoughts previously. This, it soon became clear, was the fault of an entirely new anxiety, which at the sight of the deserted station – a sight I did not, as I have said, find reassuring in any case – now came to torment me. What surprised me was how quickly this second anxiety had superseded the first. It suggested a certain powerlessness to my position, as if my only existence, my only mental function, was
to register with each passing second the uncertain outcome of the next.

My anxiety, naturally enough I suppose, was as to the whereabouts of Mr Madden, whose absence at the scene of my arrival I had not, trapped as I was in this new, contingent, and entirely linear mode of thought, even considered. I wondered whether he could have had an accident on his way; a thought I entertained only briefly and with a distinct lack of concern. I could, and did, as I stood there, admit that Mr Madden's existence was as yet a matter of complete indifference to me; and right up until the very second of his arrival would remain that way. It was interesting to think that, perhaps in five minutes' time, I might care about something for which at the present moment I had no feelings whatever. The fact that I was giving such undue attention to my lack of feelings for Mr Madden began itself to seem rather portentous. I wondered whether some significance were being telegraphed to me from the future; a future in which, for example, I would fall in love with Mr Madden and look back on my former indifference with astonishment; or, if my love were unrequited, with longing. Perhaps, on the other hand, this message was reaching me not from the future but from a different room of the present. Were I to discover that Mr Madden had indeed met with an accident on his way to collect me, would I be glad of my impartiality or sorry for it? Could the very fact that I had thought of him having an accident have brought the accident about? And how would his accident affect my contract of employment with the Maddens? Was it selfish or merely practical to consider this aspect of things at a time like this, my indifference towards Mr Madden having already been established?

All of which took me forward by a few minutes, at which point I noticed that a blue car had drawn up and was crouched on the forecourt some ten yards away from me. I had a feeling of abrupt drainage, as if a plug had been pulled on the pool of
some inner world. The car sat for some seconds, like an unexploded bomb, before the door on the right-hand side swung open. A feeling of intense fear rolled heedlessly over me. I realized not only that the man who got out of the car and began to approach me must be Mr Madden, but that I was also to have the first human encounter – discounting dealings with ticket collectors, newsagents and the like – I had had since that last day in Rome.

‘Sorry! Sorry!' said Mr Madden, coming towards me with his arms flapping up and down.

He was very tall, and quite large, with black, shiny hair which bounced over his face, which was red, as he walked. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, on which the peculiar motion of his arms revealed glimpses of two hidden islands of sweat. From a distance his face had looked oddly crumpled, but now I saw that he was smiling, a smile so forceful that it required the cooperation of all of his features to sustain it, so that it appeared oddly to be his fixed expression.

‘Sorry!' he said again.

He was right beside me now, although he was too large and mobile for me to get a sense of him, as if I were at the wheel of a car and had to concentrate with all my might to stay on the road.

‘Have you been waiting ages?'

‘No,' I said. It just came out, without my even having decided what to say. ‘Only a few minutes.'

In that moment, I knew, everything was set. By ‘set', of course, I mean only in the most specific sense; I don't want to imply that Mr Madden's future, for example, was in my hands, nor that the more general pattern of events to come had been fixed by this one trivial exchange. What I am trying to describe is my belief that the first seconds of any encounter are those in which the important decisions are made, the fundamental characteristics established, the structural lines laid down. Had I, for example, produced some witticism in the course of my
first exchange with Mr Madden, in place of what I actually did say, things might have turned out very differently between us. As it was, of all the shades of character I might have selected, I chose a kind of diffident reserve. He, as you have seen, presented himself as cheerful, kind and slightly distracted. I am not saying that our relationship did not progress beyond these roles, nor occasionally even move outside them; merely that this moment was the mould into which our fluid first encounter was poured, and that even when later we had gelled to form something firm and free-standing, its basic shape was always held.

I must have assumed a slightly stunned expression, because Mr Madden stood before me with an air of polite expectation, as if waiting for me to come to life.

‘Ready?' he said finally.

It was only a second before he said it, but those early seconds, as I have said, seemed long.

‘Absolutely!' I replied, even giving a little laugh. I knew that I was trying to escape the mould I had made for myself, and knew too that the attempt was futile.

‘I'll take these, shall I?'

He bent down to pick up my suitcases. I was immediately worried by how heavy he would judge them to be, and what he might infer from it. As he bent over, I saw the top of his head. Being so tall, it was evidently not a part of him that many people saw – as its aspect of overgrown neglect testified – and looking at it I felt a curious tenderness for him, as if I had chanced on a secret door to his nature which the maze of social intercourse might have kept hidden from me. He straightened up and began walking with my suitcases to the car. I followed behind and watched as he opened the boot and heaved them in. Then, either out of good manners or because I still appeared somewhat stunned, he came round to my side of the car and opened the door for me.

‘You might want to take your coat off before you get in,'
he said. I caught the fugitive glance of his small, bright eyes. ‘Pretty stifling in there. It's been sitting baking in the sun all morning.'

‘Right,' I said.

For the first time since I had arrived, I noticed that it was indeed very hot, and that I was wearing far too many clothes. A fierce sun blazed overhead and the sky was brilliant blue. I had left London in an iron-grey bustle of turbulent cloud and gusting wind, and the change confused me. I tried to recall when it had happened, and wondered if I had fallen asleep on the train.

‘It was cold when I left London,' I added, removing my coat. I was grateful that I seemed to have the possession of at least some of my faculties once more. Mr Madden would now know that I did not habitually dress for a hot day in winter clothes.

‘Was it really?' he said, with gratifying astonishment.

He slammed the car door shut (I had sat down in the passenger seat by this time) and proceeded around the front of the car to the other side. I looked at him through the windscreen. The car was quite still for a few muted seconds. Then the door opened and he was in, noise and movement reinstated as abruptly as they had been suspended.

‘We're off!' he cheerfully cried, starting the car, putting it into gear and lurching forward in a single movement. ‘Sorry again to have been so late.'

I waited, assuming he would want to provide an explanation, although by that time I had forgotten that he had been late at all; and forgotten too, as before, the anxieties attendant on his lateness. He laughed suddenly, a single barking noise which jerked his head back as it exited from his mouth.

‘That's it,' he said. ‘No excuse, I'm afraid.'

‘Perhaps you got stuck behind a herd of cows,' I said, much to my own astonishment.

‘Perhaps I did,' he replied, rewarding me with another bark.
I had been going to explain that this was how I might have imagined country life to be, making a joke of my being from London, but to my satisfaction he seemed to have understood my comment without further explanation.

We appeared already to have left Buckley, although I could remember nothing about the town, despite the fact that I had been looking out of the window. The road was now very narrow, and to either side I could see fields and trees which the bright sunshine gave a look of fixity, like a landscape in a painting. I thought of saying this but decided against it. Mr Madden drove very quickly, with a sort of proprietorial confidence which I was in no position to question, giving two sharp hoots of his horn at every sharp bend we approached. It seemed unlikely, given that our car clearly filled the width of the road, that this call would provide adequate warning to whatever might be travelling towards us. I sat rigid in my seat, oscillating between the secure thrill of fairground fear and the terror of real risk; and felt almost relieved when, rounding a corner, a vast, muddy tractor reared up at us on the road ahead. In that panicked, overcrowded second I knew we were going to crash and I must have cried out, for after Mr Madden had swerved unperturbed onto the verge, barely slowing his speed, and delivered us safely back onto the road beyond, he turned his head and looked at me.