The Country Life (3 page)

‘Sorry!' he said. ‘Pamela's always telling me I'm a menace. Forgot you weren't used to it.'

‘I'm fine,' I shrilled.

A feeling of despondency came over me. I felt as if everything had been ruined by my overreaction. Combined with the mention of Pamela (that being, of course, Mrs Madden), the episode served to remind me that the sunny drive was but a prelude to the immovable and at that moment forbidding fact of my employment with the Maddens, which I had all but forgotten. I had been existing in the temporary heaven of believing that I was the guest, rather than the servant,
of this world of which so far I had had such an intriguing glimpse. I saw that my new situation in life would require a more extensive range of adjustments than I had anticipated. Any calculation of happiness or sorrow, satisfaction or complaint, would now have to include the weight of my inferiority. There would be benefits, I did not doubt, in relinquishing my stake in the world – it was with the certainty of collecting them that I was making this journey – but they would come at a price. I could not afford, on this budget, to imagine – as admittedly I had there in the car – that I was a friend of the Maddens invited to stay; and still less to entertain a scenario in which Mr Madden was my husband, bowling with me along these bright country lanes. I couldn't, however, help it; any more than I could avoid fostering an immediate and irrational dislike of Pamela. My premature but thriving hostility worried me. I wondered if the mere thought would ‘set' relations with her in the manner I described earlier.

‘Do you see these fields now on either side?' said Mr Madden, bellowing over the noise of the engine. ‘This is the boundary of Franchise. From here on in, the land belongs to the farm.'

I looked obediently out of the window. I saw the jolting fields, which looked no more sinister than those which had preceded them. The heat and the lulling motion of the car were making me drowsy. I wished the journey could go on for ever.

‘How long have you had the farm?' I enquired, in an attempt to wake myself up.

‘Hmm?' Mr Madden shot me a look of bright bewilderment. ‘Oh, it's Pamela's, really. Been adopted into a long line of gentleman farmers.'

‘Oh,' I said. I felt obscurely defeated by this information, as if I had been engaged in some form of competition with Pamela from which her landed superiority had now disqualified me. ‘Do you do all the work yourself?'

‘Me?' yelped Mr Madden, gripping the wheel. ‘I've got a manager.'

‘A manager? Like a film star?' I said wittily.

‘Eh? That's right!' He guffawed, nodding his head convivially. ‘He doesn't manage me. He manages the farm, does the day to day stuff. I just hang about getting in his way. Very good chap, although the girls like to have a joke about him. Look, there's Pamela,' he said suddenly. ‘She'll be pleased to see us.'

We were drawing up a straight gravel drive banked on either side by trees which abruptly shaded the car and filled it with a sticky medicinal scent. Directly ahead of us stood a large, imposing house. It was built of grey stone and was very square, with a strict symmetrical aspect and three rows of windows whose glass was dark in the sun. At the front of the house was an elaborate white plaster portico, on either side of which stood a large stone pineapple. The front door was open, and standing on the steps watching our approach with folded arms was Pamela.

There was a hiatus after Mr Madden stopped the car, like one of those pauses which occur in the theatre, when darkness briefly falls and the actors gather themselves in for a change of scene; surfacing from character for a swift second before plunging back into the drama which must, whether they like it or not, unfold. That second passed, there in the unshielded glare of the driveway. In the sudden silence of the engine I became oddly aware of smells, the waxy smell of Mr Madden's jacket, the doggy odour of the car, the tint his skin gave the enclosure, this latter more of a light pressure than a smell. Then Pamela's footsteps were crunching across the gravel and I saw her midriff, above which her arms remained folded, through the car window. She bent down and there was her face, grinning close to mine through the glass.

‘Hi!' she said, or rather sang, the word as radiant as her smile. A tangled, autumnal foliage of brittle brown and blond hair surrounded her face. She opened the door as I sat there and I felt strangely exposed, like a cross-section in a biological diagram. Mr Madden got out of the car on the other side, and with both doors now open I was something of a sitting duck.

‘Hi, darling,' said Mr Madden from outside.

‘I'll bet you were late, weren't you? Did you have to wait
ages
?' said Pamela, to me. Her eyes glittered with expectation.

‘No,' I said, looking up from my seat. I felt that I had missed my cue to get out of the car, and as the imperative to do so grew louder, so my intention of rejoining the stream of events correspondingly curdled into that strange and static indifference to which, I find, politeness can at any moment revert.

‘Look at her!' said Pamela, to my horror. ‘You've frozen her to her seat with fear, darling. Come on, let's get you inside and we'll revive you with endless cups of tea.'

My cue, therefore, was finally provided, although in a manner far from that I might have wished for. As far as ‘setting' things went, Pamela certainly stole the show. In my doughy and rather pliant state, I immediately felt the force of her managerial nature. I knew that I would have to take urgent steps to prevent things from continuing in this vein.

‘
That'
s it,' said Pamela encouragingly.

As I got out of the car, I was able to continue with my preliminary assessment of Pamela's appearance. It has been my experience that people of a dramatically different physical ‘type' to oneself are harder to get along with than those whose flesh one's own instinctively ‘recognizes'. Pamela's physical presence immediately struck me as alien; not only in that she was as different from me as was (excluding, obviously, broader possibilities such as having only one leg) possible; but also in that I couldn't imagine what it would be like
to be her.
In looking at a man, this sensation might well be commonplace; but with a woman the problem becomes somewhat more visceral. It relates to the possession of shared sexual characteristics which, while inviting a superficial assessment of sameness, conceals a deep and, I believe, mutual repulsion. This is not merely the repulsion of a repressed and heterosexual nature for its own kind. In the circumstances I am describing, it is the imagination as well as the body that suspects and rejects its rival, for want of any common ground on which to begin the process of
understanding. There was, I could see straight away, no corner or crevice of Pamela's form that shared its secrets with my own; and as such I suppose I identified her as a threat, or at least a mystery. Perhaps you understand what I mean, but then again perhaps my mistake is not in the way I attempt to explain things. Perhaps, rather, it lies in my attempting to explain things as if they are universal, whereas in fact they are merely the defective impressions of my own mind.

In any case, having made so much of Pamela's physical appearance, I am bound to describe it now in a more neutral fashion. She was not, in fact, beautiful, although she was of the age – somewhere in her fifties – at which people would say that she
must have been
very beautiful. I, however, believe that she always looked like that; almost beautiful, that is, or post-beautiful, like the sky at the end of a lovely day, when the sun has disappeared but its aura remains, redolent of things past, a memory more piquant even than the thing remembered. She was quite tall, of slender, almost wiry build, with a skin made leathery by sun, and hair, as I have said, both brittle and profuse. Her face was very attractive, in an extrovert and absolutely unmysterious way, and, not unlike the face of a monkey, was both creased and childish at the same time. This, along with her dynamic and compact form, gave an alluring impression of youth and experience combined, and the whole energetic package was wrapped in a veneer of breeding at once impregnable and careless.

If you have kept in mind the fact that, in appearance, I was as different from Pamela as could be, then you will have gained some impression of me from this description. Unlike Pamela's, mine were not the sort of looks that slapped one in the face when one encountered them. They did not disrupt, nor seek, attention. One could, in the presence of my looks, get on with the matter to hand; something I have not found to be without its advantages, and have learned, on occasion, to turn to my own.

There is one further subject requiring attention before I can proceed, and that is the matter of the forms of address I have so far employed. A discrepancy may have been observed in my calling the husband Mr Madden, while the wife, before I had even met her, became known to me as Pamela. Unlike many people of my generation, I was brought up always to address adults formally; even, in some cases, after they had implored me to use their first names. My parents fortified this practice, as they did many others, with the belief that beyond these apparently fragile social barricades lay a wilderness of unimaginable degenerations from which good manners offered our only protection. They were even known on occasion bravely to erect a missionary outpost in the savagery beyond, and demand that some over-familiar friend of their children use the more polite form; and were any of us to affront
their
friends in this manner – even, as I say, if asked to – our presumption was regarded without mercy.

I still, therefore, find it unnatural to use the first name of a person older than me, even though I myself am no longer really young. (I am twenty-nine.) I say this lest it seem that I was Mr-ing and Mrs-ing the Maddens through a sense of my own servility or inferiority to them. This was not at all the case. My free use of the name of Pamela now, however, doubly requires explanation. Suffice it to say that I only adopted it
after
Mr Madden – Piers, incidentally – had revealed it to be Mrs Madden's name, and that, moreover, I was using it strictly in my own thoughts. As soon as I was required to, I would verbally address her as Mrs Madden; but being, in those early stages, mentally intrigued only by her role as Mr Madden's wife, and by his feelings for her, it seemed natural to think of her by the same name that he himself did. Once the habit had been acquired – well, I think I've explained myself pretty fully.

To return to the scene in the driveway, my suitcases were retrieved, as they had been stowed, by Mr Madden. Meanwhile, Pamela had taken me by the arm – a gesture of
appropriation entirely unnecessary, given that her aura of ownership hung like a great canopy over the very air we were breathing – and was leading me towards the front steps of the house.

‘Piers likes to batten down the hatches,' she informed me in a conspiratorial tone. ‘So we'll leave him to it, shall we?'

The skin of her bare arm was dry and very warm on mine. I could smell her perfume and beyond that the more general scent of her, which I was dimly aware was arousing muddled feelings of attraction in me. I had a remote sense of some inner derangement, whose faint call I could hear as if momentarily borne on a favourable wind from a great distance.

‘All right,' I said.

I glanced behind me and saw that Mr Madden was indeed occupied with locking the car doors one by one, and, from what I could gather, inspecting the battered bodywork. My suitcases stood obediently side by side behind him on the gravel. My connection with him seemed all at once dreamlike, and he was less familiar to me standing there than he had been minutes earlier in the car.

‘Now tell me all about your journey,' continued Pamela, guiding me through the open front door and into the cool, dark hall. I had an impression of many pictures and mirrors pressed against the walls in the quiet and capacious gloom. Directly ahead a grand polished staircase swept lavishly upwards. The floor shone darkly: it was made, I saw, of great, gleaming flagstones, on which my shoes made a clicking sound as I walked. Pieces of furniture stood frozen in elegant poses about the shadows, slim-ankled chairs with elaborately carved backs, delicate side tables bearing a vase or lamp. A grandfather clock loomed still and straight as a butler at the far end, its throaty, leisurely tick punctuating the cavernous silence. ‘It was so good of you to come at a moment's notice. I feel terribly guilty. Did you have a
dreadful
amount to do?'

At that, I guessed that I was being presented with an
opportunity to speak. I opened my mouth; but just then there was a furious sound of scuttling and panting up ahead, and all at once a great black bolt of fur and flesh flew at us from the end of the long hall. Taken by surprise, I shrieked as the animal charged my legs, describing crazed circles of excitement around me before plunging his drooling muzzle directly between my thighs.

‘ROY!' bellowed Pamela. ‘Stop that! Get down!'

The dog was sniffing at me feverishly, his nose rooted deep in the folds of my skirt. Finally, Pamela yanked him back by the collar and administered a sharp slap to his heaving, glossy side.

‘You're quite
disgusting
!' she cried; addressing Roy. ‘Oh, he
is
vile,' she said, to me. ‘Did he get gunk all over you?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘God, what a
madhouse
!' She set off again, still clutching Roy by his collar. His cowed legs slid and scrabbled over the stone floor. ‘You must be wondering what you've let yourself in for!'

We passed the staircase and left the hall through a door to the right. After several twists and turns, and by a manoeuvre about which I was not entirely clear, we entered a large and sunny room which I took to be the kitchen.

‘Let's get the kettle on, shall we?' said Pamela, releasing Roy, who skulked off into a corner.