The Country Life (26 page)

‘But what does it mean?' persisted Pamela naively. ‘It sounds rather rude.'

Toby did not reply, but sat motionless in his chair as if in a trance. The pause dampened conversation, and gradually our attention was drawn to him as his startled blue eyes gazed at some distant vista.

‘It
is
rude,' he said finally, as if in wonder. ‘It's very,
very
naughty!'

At this he suddenly lunged sideways in his chair with a shout and flung his arms around Pamela, who shrieked with delight as he began to tickle her. I was extremely embarrassed at the spectacle of Pamela writhing in her chair; and more so when Toby's fine, excitable hands found the fleshy tops of her bare arms and began to squeeze them energetically. ‘Woah! Woah!' he crowed as he squeezed, an unsettling imitation of a teenaged boy let loose for the first time on the female form.

‘Stop! Stop!' cried Pamela.

I stole a glance at Martin, confidently expecting him to be telegraphing his contempt, and was surprised to see him giggling in quiet volleys as he watched them.

‘Toby, sir!'

The curious exclamation caused us all to jump; but it was not until I had looked up that I realized it was Mr Madden who had pronounced it. I had never heard him speak with such force, and his face as he towered over the table was plump and red with compressed fury. He had a bottle of wine in one hand, and a wooden board with bread on it in the other.

‘
Darling
!' said Pamela coaxingly, laying a hand on his arm. ‘It was only a bit of fun!'

Toby was looking up at his father pugnaciously, his chin jutting out.

‘He's too old for that sort of thing,' said Mr Madden, ignoring Pamela's intervention just as his arm ignored the presence of her hand.

‘And what sort of thing might that be?' said Toby coolly.

‘Rough-housing. Playing with your mother. Not in my house, sir.'

Toby sniggered; but despite the admittedly comical sound of the words, he did not have the courage to dispute them. There was a long and awkward silence, during which Mr Madden put the bread and wine on the table, his eyes downcast. He appeared to have forgotten about the incident, but then Toby did a curious thing: he yawned, noisily and provocatively. Mr Madden's head snapped up so suddenly that his black hair flew skywards and I saw that his face had darkened to a violent purple.

‘Young man!' he said, lunging over the table and banging his hand hard beside Toby's place to punctuate the words. Everything on the table clattered and shook. Toby drew back in fear. ‘Don't imagine that I'm not still capable of taking you out onto the drive and giving you a bloody good hiding! I wouldn't think twice about packing you back off to London, but your mother wants you here. I'd advise you to keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself so long as you're at my table!'

‘Piers, please!' said Pamela weakly. I was surprised to see that she appeared to be as frightened as everybody else.

‘I won't have it,' said Mr Madden gruffly, straightening himself up. ‘Bloody layabout cheeking me at my own table.'

Mr Madden's table, despite the passionate references it was drawing, was in disarray. The salt cellar lay on its side, disgorging grains. The bread had jumped off its board. Knives and forks, meticulously laid, now formed exclamatory symbols on the tablecloth. I glanced at Toby. A distinct blush stained
the expression of scornful superiority he had assumed. I was surprised that he had submitted to his father's authority by remaining at the table. I would, in his position, have absented myself, whether for reasons of fury or dignity. I suspected that it was not fear that kept him tethered to his seat, but laziness. He liked being here, that much was obvious. Indeed, he was the sort of person I could not imagine being anywhere that he did not like; which made his acceptance of his recent humiliation even more perplexing. Looking at him, it suddenly struck me that his parents' munificence, the splendour of their lifestyle, had perhaps cultivated in him an opportunistically tolerant attitude to their company. This notion was utterly alien to me, given that any encounter with my own parents was always accompanied by the necessity for enduring the range of their peculiarities, whether at home or outside it. Going home had always been a trial, the reward for which had been that in the moment of leaving I occupied the point furthest in time from the next occasion on which I would have to return.

Still, I was at a loss as to Mr Madden's reasons for behaving as he had done. I glanced at him repeatedly while we ate, in a near silence punctuated only by a sparse conversation between him and Pamela about affairs at the farm. The colour gradually subsided from his cheeks. He neither spoke to nor looked at his elder son. The first thing which intrigued me was how he felt about the fact that Pamela had so obviously sided with Toby. The second was why, at this late stage in Toby's development, Mr Madden should feel so disturbed by his behaviour with his own mother. If Toby had always behaved like this, why had something not been done about it before? If not, why had Pamela and indeed Martin not reacted to it with more surprise? It had seemed, from my perspective, quite natural to all of them. Had Mr Madden never seen anything of the sort before?

The speed of his response to it suggested that he had. Was I to conclude, then, that Mr Madden's objection was part of an ongoing and unheeded protest against Toby's behaviour with
Pamela, and perhaps Toby in general? It was evident to me that in some terrible, unguessable way, Mr Madden disliked his own son. Why?

‘Oh, this heat!' said Pamela, pushing away her plate and leaning back in her chair so that her face protruded beyond the rim of shade cast by the umbrella. ‘It's simply
glorious
. I shall be flat on my back by the pool all afternoon. How about you boys?'

‘I'm in,' said Toby.

‘Darling?' Pamela turned to Mr Madden. ‘Why don't you just take the afternoon oft? You're absolutely exhausted. It would do you good to put your feet up by the pool for a bit.'

‘Hmph,' said Mr Madden.

‘Go on, why don't you? The boys would love it. I feel like we haven't spent enough time together as a
family.
If Toby will put the hoops up, we could even have a spot of croquet! Stella?' Pamela's gaze fell uninvitingly on me. ‘What are your plans?'

‘I thought I might go for a walk,' I improvised, as it was clear that the poolside idyll did not include me. I was aggrieved by this, as I was longing to swim; but I could see that after their earlier contretemps, the family might require some time alone to regroup.

‘How
lovely
,' said Pamela approvingly. ‘Look, why don't you just shoot off? We can manage the clearing up.'

Summarily dismissed, I rose from my seat.

‘I'll see you later,' I said to Martin; although when he did not look at me, I glanced more generally at the others, as if my farewell had been directed at them.

I walked quickly away from the table and across the lawn. So awkwardly did I feel myself to be moving that I almost expected to hear laughter ring out behind me. Once I had made it to the shaded gravel path to the side of the house I slowed down. I felt immediately the relief of being on my own. The strain of being always in the company of people – and their numbers seemed daily to be increasing – whose connection to
each other was as profound as their relation to me was tenuous, was greater than I had anticipated. I had imagined, when I had first considered the idea of appending myself to a family, that the organism's self-sufficiency would ensure my own liberty; that being by its very nature exclusive, I would naturally be disqualified from the politics into which I would ultimately and inevitably have been drawn by any other social grouping. It surprised me to realize that the Maddens, contrary to what I had expected, seemed if not to require then at least to have uses for the presence of a third party. It was not that they were ‘showing off in front of me – most of the time, in fact, I felt as if they had forgotten I was there; rather that by providing the necessary opposition to their congruity, by marking so clearly the place where they ended and all else began, I was giving it shape and purpose.

I remembered my father once accusing my mother of not being
proud
of us, her family. He longed, I believe, for us to have a
story
, if that doesn't sound too obscure; and thought that my mother's persistent practicality was the thing stopping us from doing so. She wouldn't have believed it herself, was the inference. Admittedly we weren't much good with strangers. We grew tongue-tied and deflated, while my father tried to coax us into the air like recalcitrant soufflés. By the time our troupe was one member down, my father had his story, although it certainly wasn't the kind of story he'd had in mind; and I dare say my mother secretly wished that she'd gone along with it all while there was still time, so that she'd have had something to repeat to herself after it had all got so quiet.

I reached the fork in the path that led to the cottage and stopped, realizing that in spite of my relief at having been liberated from the society of the back lawn, in fact I had little idea of what I wanted to do. Bearing right I would reach the gate to the front drive. Although I was familiar with the route which led from there to the big house, I had little notion of what would happen if one went in the opposite direction. I
decided to investigate; and if in the course of my journey I came across the ‘top field' I could perhaps satisfy my curiosity over the conversation I had overheard between the Maddens the previous afternoon.

I set off to the left of the gate and within a few paces had left behind the gravelled area, which gave on to a corridor of rough, loosely cropped grass. To either side were tall hedges, the left flank of which, I calculated, formed the boundary of the cottage garden. Directly ahead, at the end of this corridor, the land seemed to give away, and I felt a looming spaciousness which suggested I might soon arrive at open farmland. I had little idea of how the grounds of Franchise fitted into the larger puzzle of the surrounding countryside. The windows of the cottage looked out only onto various manicured aspects of the garden, and even from the upstairs rooms of the big house I could remember seeing little more. The property appeared to be almost entirely screened from what lay outside it by clever arrangements of trees and hedges; which, although they certainly ensured privacy from it, meant that one had little idea of what might be going on in the world beyond.

I progressed along the corridor, the longer grass cool in the shade beneath my feet. Small birds landed ahead of me and then sprang away as I approached, vanishing, garbled ribbons of song trailing behind them. I went on like this for some fifty paces, the gloom appearing to deepen all the way, until I came to a small gate. I opened it; and quite abruptly, everything changed. I found myself flung from the verdant enclosure of the garden into a boundless blast of heat and light, a molten, flattened plain which unfolded as suddenly as if the tall hedges had collapsed like pieces of cardboard scenery to reveal it. I stopped, my eyes, which had grown briefly accustomed to the shade, shrinking from the radiant sea of gold which seemed to rise and fall before me in a warm tide. The vastness of the panorama, which stretched uninterrupted for as far as I could see, stunned me; and I thought that I had never seen something
so brutal and lovely as this long embrace of sky and land, breast to breast. I stood there for some time entirely emptied of thought or even the slightest awareness of myself, the sun hot on my face and my eyes filled with colour. My sense of wonder was acute, if inarticulate. (I could not, for example, have told you precisely what it was that grew before my eyes in such a mass of blond and slender wands – some variety of gram, I supposed.) The randomness with which I had stumbled on the silent, swaying field and caught it in this gratuitous display of beauty appeared to me as a benediction of sorts. I felt comforted by it, and at the same time diminished; by which I mean that the feeling of insignificance was in itself a consolation.

Eventually I felt compelled to move, though I didn't want to; some deeper impulse insisted on it. I felt sure that Mr Madden would not appreciate my walking through the field, much as I would have liked to do so. I decided instead to skirt its boundaries, and as there was a generous margin of dry, crusty soil between the field itself and the fence which hemmed it, it seemed I would be able to walk without difficulty. I set off, glad of the breeze which ruffled the great golden pelt of the land and then lifted past me to stir the heavy branches of the trees beyond. It is difficult to convey the contentment I felt in the presence of these sights and sounds. It was as if a certain roughness, a grubby layer of matted, misbegotten aims, was being sloughed from me; as if in this deluge of simplicity I were being absolved of some nameless, primordial confusion. I did not ascribe any more specific meaning to this feeling. I did not, for example, immediately fall on it as a vindication of my move to the country, nor evidence that I had arrived at, or even embarked on, some form of recovery.

Working my way across the top of the field, I saw that I was approaching a wooden fence whose trajectory extended across my path and away to the right for as far as I could see. I had imagined, from further off, that I would either have to climb over it or change direction; but from nearer I could see that a
quaint arrangement of steps had been built directly ahead of me over the fence. These did not conform to any image I might have had of a ‘stile'; they more resembled a chunky wooden ladder secured astride the fence, so that one could almost have walked up and over them without slowing one's pace. I took the presence of this clever construction as a direct approbation of my walking where I had been, and an encouragement to continue. A small yellow arrow affixed to the fence beside the ladder and pointing directly ahead confirmed this impression; and thus egged on, I was about to vault energetically over the fence when it struck me that the presence of these inducements hinted at a wider specification than my own incidental use of the route. My encounter with the creature rallied from memory; and I realized that I was standing not on the untried terrain of discovery and adventure, but on a public footpath.