The Country Life (41 page)

At the sound of my voice, a terrible snarl began to emanate from within the vice of his teeth. He drew back slightly in a tensile crouch, his eyes yellow with suspicion.

‘It's all right, Roy,' I shrilled. ‘It's only me.'

In a flash he was galloping towards me with a volley of savage barking, moisture flying from his gnashing jaws, his shining, muscled body madly contorted in a frenzy of attack. With the dreaminess of terror I watched him come. He landed in front of me with a giant pounce, his legs splayed, writhing as if swarmed by invisible bees, and seemed to gather himself in for another leap. What happened next was so clearly a matter of instinct rather than calculation that I cannot blame myself for it. As he readied himself to spring on me, I remembered the umbrella in my hand. In sheer self-defence I thrust it forward like a lance, rooting myself behind it. The dog leaped; and as he flew through the air, a chasm of horror and disbelief yawned open between us. I met his eyes, suspended in the moment before his collision, and saw them register the canopied pole, the unavoidability of impact. The seconds slowed to a crawl; and then snapped back with a thud as his forehead hit the metal head of the umbrella. His body gave a great flip, tossing itself high in the air and landing with a smack on the gravel, where it lay inertly on its side.

I stood, unable to move, the umbrella still gripped in my hands, for some time. The black heap at my feet was motionless, gorgeous with glossy fur and plump flesh. Roy did not, in so far as I was able to see, appear to be breathing. My fear of him dead was triple that which I had had of him alive, even during his last, brutal moments. I could not bring myself even to take
a step towards him, let alone try to help or resuscitate him. Through this curious, shameful terror I tried to assess the implications of this latest and most unfortunate development. To have murdered Roy, even in self-defence, presented extraordinary, perhaps insurmountable, social difficulties. How could the Maddens comprehend, let alone forgive, it? I felt a constriction in my chest and had a sudden sensation of faintness. My entire body, I realized, was trembling. The sun seared the top of my head. Fresh cascades of sweat erupted from my pores. I had to get into the shade and sit down.

Weakly I hoisted the umbrella onto my hip, and slowly, pressing myself as far into the hedge to my right as I could, began inching my way along the path. As soon as I was past the body, I broke into a crazed, awkward run and heard a preternatural shriek stream from my lips. I scarcely felt the weight of the umbrella as I dragged it, still running, around the corner and on to the back lawn. Somehow I managed to lift it above my head and slot it into its hole. The thud it made as it fell into place provided a ghastly echo of Roy's collision. I wrestled, whimpering, with the sprung mechanism which raised the canopy, and finally collapsed into the white plastic garden chair beside me.

For a while my thoughts thrashed about, trying to find some escape from the unalterable fact of Roy's demise. It was becoming steadily more clear, in the oblique fashion of something profoundly denied, that I was going to be unable to do anything about the situation. My hand sought the bottle of champagne which sat before me on the table. The reminder it provided of the insignificance of my earlier crime was comforting. I drank some of it down. It was warm, having been sitting in the sun, and my empty stomach shifted queasily. After a few mouthfuls I got up again and returned to the corner of the house, where it met the gravel path. Peering around it, I saw to my disappointment that the black heap remained exactly as it had been. So incredible did the episode seem to me, and so
forceful was my denial of it, that I had honestly expected to discover that I had imagined it, or at least that it had been negated by some greater and more rational force. I was troubled by the abject appearance of the body. It looked smaller than it had before. Also, something had happened to Roy's fur. It was suddenly all rough and mangy. I wondered if this were an effect of the strong sunlight, and whether I should cover him up lest he actually begin to decompose. I went and sat down again. There was nothing else, marooned as I was in misfortune, that I could do. Tears of frustration filled my eyes and I banged my hand on the table, causing the bottle to leap in the air so that I had to throw myself forward to catch it. I broke into a fresh sweat. My bare thighs slimed grotesquely against one another, and I could feel the lagoons of moisture beneath my arms. I raised the bottle of champagne to my lips and drank thirstily from it.

Just then, the inviting turquoise of the swimming pool on the other side of the lawn caught my eye. It may seem curious that the idea of swimming had not suggested itself until that moment; but the ceaseless postponements to which I had been subject over the course of the past week had instilled their discipline in me. I had become servile; and was by now so used to regarding the pool as a mere feature of the landscape that I had more or less forgotten its purpose. I gave a yelp of joy and rose from my chair. My current dishevelment, combined with all the memories of this longed-for but withheld pleasure that I had accrued, stirred up in me an almost painful feeling of anticipation. My skin prickled and gushed at the thought of its imminent immersion. My scalp burned, yearning for the cool water. Having thought of it, it seemed unbearable that I would have to delay swimming by even one more minute; and given that any expedition in search of a costume would necessitate an encounter with Roy, not to mention trespassing into the mysteries of Pamela's bedroom, I decided to eschew the appropriate attire and swim in my underwear. Who, after all,
would see me? And even if they did, it would be with accusations of a far more serious nature than indecency that they would regale me.

With this cavalier thought, I removed the cut-off trousers and T-shirt and streaked across the lawn towards the water. As I hovered for a few seconds on the tiled brink of the pool, my certainty that in a very short time I would be in it drove my longing to such a pitch that I thought I would burst. In that charged interval, every anxiety and regret seemed to rise from viscera to skin with the expectation of being discharged and washed away. A momentary despair, like pain felt through sleep to which one briefly awakes, suffused me; and then I jumped.

How can I convey the glory of that transition from desire to fulfilment that I felt as the water closed over my head? One minute I had been diffuse, soiled, porous; the next I was purged, contained, that which had been widely strewn and trampled folded and zipped back into the bag of my body. I stayed under for a long time, flapping sideways with my arms to prevent myself from floating, until the advancing cold of the water succeeded in quenching me to the core; and then I surfaced, sleek and gasping, to feel the sun brilliant on my wet face. The Maddens' pool was smaller than it looked, unsuited to serious swimming, and so after gliding blissfully to and fro on my side for a while I lay on my back and felt the cool tide lap against my scalp. I glimpsed the deep blue of the sky rearing above me, closed my eyes as the watery cradle bore my weight. The thread of my time in the country seemed all at once to snap, and I drifted away from the closely knitted stump of the past week, up to some higher region from where all the things of life appeared visible but remote, as the swimming-pool floor was to me now.

Presently, as is in the nature of even the most pleasurable experiences, I felt the compulsion to conclude my swim; if only so that I could swim again at some future point. I heaved myself dripping over the side of the pool and made my way
back across the lawn. Roy was as I had left him when I went to the side of the house to look. A blackbird was pecking at the gravel beside his body. I felt a sense of frustration at the resilience of this obstacle to my happiness, for again I had entertained the curious hope that the incident would have been erased, and indeed might still be if I waited long enough. Returning to the table, I sat down and drank some more of the warm champagne. The taste of it in my mouth released a memory, which moved elusively around my thoughts, just out of reach. Even in the shade, I was already beginning to get hot again. The sun had moved a considerable way to the left, so that blocks of shadow were advancing across the lawn, but its heat did not appear to have abated. I was dimly aware of my strange appearance, which was mostly owing to the extreme variations in skin colour on different parts of my body, but seemed exacerbated by the peculiar sight of my underwear in such a public setting. Anxieties began to stir and scuttle about my mind. I wondered what time it was and when Pamela would appear, whether I should return the umbrella to the shed immediately so that I would not forget to do so later, what I should do about Roy, how I was to manage the lesser concealment of the champagne; until all in all I began to feel fraught with worry, adding the curdling of my afternoon idyll to my catalogue of problems.

It required a considerable effort of will to drive these concerns from my mind, for their power was merely enhanced by the fact that I recognized the pattern of their invasion from my previous life and regarded it with fear. It was precisely to escape this kind of anxiety that I had come to the country in the first place. I determined to think about nothing whatsoever until I had at least had another swim. Drinking down the last of the champagne, which by now tasted really rather disgusting, I got unsteadily to my feet and made my way across the lawn to the pool. The combination of alcohol and heat immediately had a stunning effect on me, and I stood swaying by the side of
the pool for some time, my toes gripping the edge to prevent myself falling in. The sun pounded on my shoulders and the back of my neck. I was beginning to feel distinctly unwell. My eyes sought some object on which to focus, but when I looked up the garden seemed to take a great tilt. I staggered to one side, the blood pounding in my ears, the fuzzy outlines of trees spinning about me, and everything seemed suddenly to rush upwards at an impossible speed as I lost my balance and plunged head-first into the water.

I have very little recollection of what happened next, and believe I must in fact have fainted as I fell. I tumbled down what seemed to be a very long way, and then met with something hard which I dimly understood to be the bottom of the pool. I could only have stayed there a few seconds, but the interlude had the framework of a dream, in which everything real is replaced by an entire and quite illusory memory designed to support the thing experienced. It seemed to me, in other words, that I had always lain at the bottom of the pool: its profound silence was the sound of myself, its lovely columns of watered sunlight utterly familiar. On and on I lay; until suddenly I was rushing upwards, and was jerked forcefully from the water by something clamped painfully around the tops of my arms. I could hear a woman's voice saying ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!' over and over; but again, in this dream-state, it seemed to me that she had always been saying that.

At the sound of the woman's voice, in any case, something peculiar happened. I was in one way quite aware of it, and yet at the same time it was remote and beyond my control. It was as if I were on a train, watching the landscape fly past; and just as the appearance of houses and telegraph poles might have told me that I was about to arrive at my station, so the woman's voice seemed to signal that I was going to wake up. But although the sound itself was clear, the words immediately sent my train lurching off course; so that suddenly I found myself speeding far away from where I wanted to go, on and on with
everything around me a blur, until gradually, after some considerable time, it began to slow down. I felt the heat pulsing on my head and the pressure of something hard pushing against my stomach. Far away I could hear the sound of traffic, its faint cries rising discordantly from the steady buzz. Someone was saying ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!'; but it was a man's voice this time, which for a while seemed to have nothing to do with me. Presently I realized that it was Edward's voice, and he kept saying it over and over again; so many times, really, that eventually I wanted to tell him just to be quiet and go away. It was impossible for me to do this, however. My physical predicament would not allow for it. I appeared to be upside-down, and even though I was too frightened to open my eyes my gradual recollection of events, as well as the sound of traffic from far, far below, told me that I was very high up and could fall at any moment.

I remembered that I had been standing on the balcony of our hotel room, looking down at the busy street several storeys below. In my mind I appeared to be standing there again. The noise filled my head like the sound of an argument. The sun hammered on my shoulders. Edward wasn't there. I remembered then that he had gone out on some forgotten business, but my thoughts were dark with the threat of his return. This was my honeymoon, perhaps the third or fourth day of it, and the fact of my marriage still clung to me like an ugly, ill-fitting suit. I had woken each morning with the hope that it would have softened, loosened, accommodated me; but its tight, itchy grip, the shame of it, was unrelenting. I knew myself to be in the wrong place as surely as if I were looking at it on a map; and my head was filled only with panicked thoughts of escape and extrication, which as yet had found no outlet. It was with these thoughts that I leaned over the iron railing of the balcony. The deep, foreign chasm with its indifferent swarm of traffic opened itself to me with the promise of my own insignificance.
I realized that there was nowhere else I wanted to be. It wasn't that I liked it here; merely that at the invitation of this cruel vista I had searched, frenzied, for a sense of my own belonging, for my home, for somewhere I might be wanted more, and found nothing. There was no secret comfort, no lodestar, in my empty heart. I was merely lodged at the inconvenient junction – this small, crumbling balcony – between a past I had been glad to leave and a future whose alien prospect seemed to provide the proof that I would never visit it. It was at this moment, in my high, hot imprisonment, that I wanted to fly; that I knew it, indeed, to be my only course. And it was at this moment that I understood, as if I had conducted a scientific experiment, that the weight of my life would not be enough to stop me.