The Country Life (7 page)

‘Goodnight, darling,' said Pamela, bending down from behind him to deposit a kiss upon his head. An unpleasant smirk appeared on Martin's face. Mr Madden began wheeling him towards the door. ‘Say goodnight to Stella, you rascal!' cried Pamela.

‘Goodnight, Stella!' called Martin mockingly from the door, without turning his head.

I stood up and began clearing plates from the table. I was desperate to be away from the house and on my own; parched of my own company, I felt as if I could drink down hour after hour of solitude. To my disgust, I saw that Roy had risen on his hind legs and was licking the insides of the dishes on the sideboard.

‘Oh, you revolting creature,' said Pamela genially, apparently with no intention of stopping him. ‘Don't worry about Martin,' she added, to me. I saw that she liked to think of herself as being able to read other people's minds. ‘He's a little monkey.
He likes to give everyone a real going-over before he lets them anywhere near him. He'll be devoted to you before long, I promise you.'

‘I liked him,' I said, weakly.

‘That's very sweet of you,' said Pamela. ‘He's a dear boy. He can be very rewarding.' She turned around abruptly and caught me leaning against the table. ‘Poor Stella, you must be exhausted after an evening in this madhouse. Why don't you just turn in?'

‘I ought to help,' I said, hoping that she would refuse.

‘Don't be silly. Piers loves fussing about down here late into the night. He contemplates the meaning of life and all that. We'll just put everything in the sink for him.'

Almost resentfully, I resumed my clearing. Seeing my opportunity, however, I decided that this might be the time to approach Pamela about my duties.

‘What time shall I be here tomorrow?' I said.

‘Tomorrow?' Pamela looked surprised. ‘We aren't expecting you tomorrow. It's your day off on Sunday.'

‘Oh,' I said, overwhelmed by relief.

‘Of course, you're free to wander over. We'll be having people for lunch, but you can come and go as you please. You'll probably want a day to yourself just to get your bearings.'

‘All right.'

‘On Monday we'll start properly. Martin's usually raring to go by about eight thirty. Poor Stella!' she said. Pamela was remarkably self-sufficient in conversation, and seemed to require few prompts from her interlocutor. ‘We haven't really explained anything to you, have we? It's all been such a rush, I can't quite keep track of things.'

‘Don't worry,' I said. Hearing my own voice, I was shocked by how terribly dull I sounded. ‘It'll all work itself out.'

‘But it won't!' said Pamela sharply. ‘Don't you see that with a boy like Martin, things can't just be left to work themselves out? It all has to be carefully planned and considered. He's quite
helpless without us, and he needs his routines, so don't think that we can just muddle along somehow, or work it out, as you say, as we go along.'

Things had suddenly, and without my quite knowing how, taken a turn. I felt my heart begin to pound again with embarrassment and anxiety. Pamela did not appear to be entirely in control of herself.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I didn't mean it like that.'

‘Well,' said Pamela, unkindly. ‘Just so long as we understand one another.'

‘If you could just tell me,' I continued, close to tears, ‘what exactly his routines are, then I'll find things much easier.'

This comment was clearly spoken in my own defence, making it evident to Pamela that it was through her fault, not mine, that my sense of my own duties was muddled. I had judged her to be a good-natured woman, but whether through tiredness or simply the wearing off of her initial veneer of politeness, I now saw that she had somehow become committed to a brittle and ill-tempered mood which my very presence was guaranteed to inflame. Even her figure seemed to have taken on sharp edges and angles, and as she spoke she gestured quite violently with her thin hands.

‘Stella, I really didn't expect to have to mollycoddle you and lead you by the hand every minute of the day. We need to have someone here to help us, not double the load. If you don't think you're going to be up to it, and be able to take responsibility, then you'd better tell me now rather than later.'

‘Mrs Madden,' I said. The evening had taken on a surreal character. I was unable even to gauge my own mood, and just then had no idea of what I might do. We had both, I remembered, been drinking, and I for one felt no confidence in my ability to keep my temper. ‘I think you might be getting things a bit out of proportion.'

It really seemed possible, in that moment, that I might have a fight with Pamela. The lateness of the hour, the featureless
darkness outside the kitchen windows, the despoilt table and blur of food and drink; all this, as well as our unfamiliarity with each other, seemed to permit anything. She wouldn't look at me, and was furiously busying herself at the sink. ‘I don't see how I can take responsibility if you haven't explained what you expect of me. Perhaps,' I said, ‘we had better both just go to bed, and talk it all through in the morning.'

Pamela did not reply.

‘Would that be all right?' I persisted.

‘Look,' she barked suddenly, her back still to me. She stopped what she was doing and leaned with both her hands on the kitchen counter, her head down. Her shoulders were rigid. ‘Just be here at eight thirty on Monday. Do you think you can manage that?'

‘Yes,' I said. I was both furious and upset. I could not understand how all this had taken place. ‘Goodnight.'

She said nothing, and did not turn around. I hurriedly left the kitchen, and through some stroke of instinct or good luck found myself immediately outside on the gravel path. I ran along beside the hedges in the dark, my heart jammed against my ribs, my breath heaving in my mouth, my head awash with confusion. The black mass of trees flew by me and suddenly I was at the cottage gate and then through it, and then thudding up the path to the door. I opened the door and slammed it behind me and tore up the narrow stairs, without switching on the light, to my bedroom. There, in the dark, I threw myself upon the bed and wept.

Some time later – perhaps only three or four hours, I thought, as it was still dark (it was late July and the mornings came early) – I woke up. I was very confused when I opened my eyes. I did not recognize my surroundings; partly because they were unfamiliar to me, and partly because the darkness of the countryside is far blacker than that of town. Indeed, for a few moments I was quite terrified, for when my eyes opened I appeared to see nothing more than when they had been shut. I opened and shut them a few times, unable to transcend my need to apprehend the physical world. I was lodged so deeply inside myself that my consciousness was in that moment but a simple junction of the senses, like that of an animal. I thought at first that I had gone blind, and then that I was dead and in my own grave. Presendy I heard a faint rustling of leaves outside my window, and from this single clue was able slowly to piece together my circumstances.

This process was arduous, and as each block was put in place I felt as if I were struggling beneath an increasing burden, like a packhorse being loaded up with cargo. I began with the fact that I was lying in a strange bed wearing my nightdress. Struggling to remember changing into this nightdress, I came
instead on a recollection of lying crying on the bed, and with a contraction of the heart plunged anew into the terrible scene with Pamela, which was webbed in my thoughts with the viscous confusion of a dream. It took me some time to disentangle its reality, but finally I possessed it in all its terrible clarity. Like an awful jewel, I worked it into the setting of the day before, the arrival at Franchise Farm, my first meeting with the Maddens, the cottage where now I lay. Monumental as all this already seemed, it lacked, I felt, the sinister adhesive of truth. There was more to my misery; but unable to bear the thought of being roused further from the anaesthetic of confusion, I attempted to coax myself back into ignorance and sleep. The face of the boy, Martin, sprang upon me, however, like that of a ghoul. My eyes snapped open again, and the tide of an irresistible alertness rose in my stomach.

Now that I was really awake, I became aware of something else, something throbbing and sublimated which had borne me from sleep into consciousness. Slowly I groped towards the source of this other discomfort and soon discovered that it was a physical pain. The skin on my body – mainly across my arms, legs and back – felt as if it were burning, and as I considered the sensation, my lethargic nerves conveyed to me the information that I was sleepily scratching myself, and had indeed been doing so before I even awoke. Suddenly alive, I ran my fingertips across the inflamed tracts of skin and found them raised into what felt like a series of long, narrow ridges. I sat up, alarmed, and after some fumbling succeeded in switching on the bedside lamp. Seeing the room illuminated around me I received a secondary tremor of unfamiliarity, as the scene of my swimming thoughts was drained of darkness, leaving close, unfriendly walls and suspicious lumps of furniture. I examined my arms, and to my dismay saw that they were a furious red, cross-hatched with hundreds of thick, raised white lines, as if I had worms embedded beneath my skin. Crying out, I flung back the eiderdown. My legs were similarly inflamed, and
leaping from my bed and rushing to the wardrobe mirror, I lifted my nightdress and strained to see my back. The skin there was the worst of all, and seeing it I heard myself make a series of catlike mewlings.

For a few seconds I scratched, tearing at my nightdress like a maniac, and then understood that I was going to lose control of myself if I continued in this fashion. I sat, hot and exhausted, on the corner of the bed, my head in my hands. My skin tingled and itched now that my fingers were not attending to it. I bridled my urge to scratch, forcing my hands into my mouth. My back felt unbearably hot. Around me the night was shrunken and dense, like the pupil of an eye contracted to a pinprick. I was stranded on an island of time from which the only escape was sleep. Reluctantly I got back into bed. Seconds later I sat up again and removed my nightdress over my head, knowing that I would have to make some concession to the inflammation before it would permit me to sleep. Lying down again, the bedclothes felt slightly cooler, and aware that this novelty would last but seconds and could be followed by a rebellion even more severe than the first, I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.

When I woke up again, the room was brilliant with sunlight. The window was a square of deep blue, and beyond it I could hear the twitter of morning and, further off, the buzz of a lawnmower. I lay for a moment, adrift in that formless, unaccountable ether that swirls just beyond sleep, before all the tallies of self are presented. The daylight was cheerful, and in it my nocturnal activities, which presently I remembered in a more or less complete fashion, seemed sharp and reduced, like the small, shiny negative of a photograph. So preposterous, to the common sense of morning, did my argument with Pamela appear that I felt it was barely required of me to be troubled by it; as if it had disqualified itself, through exaggeration, from inclusion in the normal course of things. I was aware that this
process of denial was a form of submission to what I clearly knew to be wrong; but it was good to have been relieved so painlessly of my grievance against Pamela, which was admittedly an inopportune burden to have acquired at such an early stage of my life in the country. Having persuaded myself to pardon one injustice, I found myself tempted to forget every qualm which had haunted me in the depths of the night; and thus I was coaxed, as one would lure a horse into harnesses, back into a state of contentment.

My skin bore no trace of the night's rash, and there being no cause or purpose to thinking more about it, I dismissed it from my mind. Longing to be out in the sun, I got out of bed and dressed quickly. I made the bed, tidied the room a little, and was about to start unpacking my suitcases and hanging things in the wardrobe when a lack of conviction, or perhaps certainty, stopped me. Instead I folded my things there where they lay in the suitcases, and pushed the cases with my foot neatly against the wall.

My first thought was to go outside into the garden, and indeed when I flung open the front door and breathed deeply of the country air, it was a lovely prospect. Feeling in a luxurious mood, I decided that it would be nice to make myself some breakfast and eat it out in the sun. I returned to the kitchen and continued my investigation of the cupboards where I had left off the previous afternoon. The sun was to the front of the house at that point, and the kitchen was rather more dingy in the shade than I had remembered it. The cupboards were very shabby, and several of the linoleum tiles covering the floor had begun to curl up at their edges. Two or three flies were swimming in a dreamy, pointless circle at the centre of the low ceiling and I brushed at them briskly with my hand. They dispersed silently, but seconds later had drifted back again. Aside from a set of old-fashioned blue crockery – two of everything – the cupboards were more or less empty. I noticed a jar of instant coffee in one, however, and took it down, along
with a cup and saucer. Beside the oven stood a small, yellowed fridge, and opening it I found a fresh pint of milk. Knowing that Pamela must have placed it there, or ordered it to be placed at least, the carton struck me as both a kindness and a reproof. There was nothing else in the fridge.

I deliberated for several moments, trying to decide what to do. The idea of making coffee, and then sitting and drinking it in the sun, was appealing. The day, however, being my own, held no promise of nourishment other than what I might procure for myself. It was out of the question to call at the big house and ask for supplies to tide me over; indeed, I had already decided to dedicate myself to avoiding any encounter with the Maddens whatsoever during the course of the day. Consequently, I could not apply to them for information about where I might do my shopping; but having no means of transport, I was in any case in no doubt that the answer lay in the village of Hilltop. I had not seen the village, but I knew it to be nearby, and remembering the road along which I had driven with Mr Madden, deduced that the village would probably be found in the other direction. I was quite hungry by this time, and feeling this pang decided that I would attempt the walk first, leaving me with the rest of the day to enjoy the garden.