Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘Hello?’ I said, anxious now that I was incensing the caller, in addition to my unpopularity elsewhere.

‘Who’s that?’ demanded a male voice.

‘Stella,’ I replied; and was about to give a fuller account of myself when the man interrupted me.

‘What are you?’ he said.

I was, naturally, taken aback by this question, having never been asked it before. It was difficult to know what sort of information the man required.

‘I am a servant,’ I said, guessing that he merely wished to know my status in the house — intruder, friend, etc.

‘A servant ?’ said he. He sounded younger than I had at first thought. ‘What sort of servant? We don’t have servants!’

‘Perhaps servant was the wrong word,’ I conceded. I remembered a word Pamela had used, when I had overheard her in the cottage garden. ‘I suppose I am a sort of au pair.’

‘Oh, you’re Martin’s girl,’ said the man. ‘You must be new. What happened to Colette?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said.

‘Mummy must have sacked her.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Should have seen that coming. Oh well. Listen—’ he addressed me again loudly, ‘listen, Stella, I’m coming down, all right?’ I sensed that he was not asking for my permission, but rather was forcing the message through the undergrowth of my putative stupidity in the hope that it would reach his mother; for I had by now deduced that I was speaking to another of Pamela’s brood. ‘Later today or tomorrow. Have you got that?’

‘Yes.’ I heard a telephone burr in the background, and the muffled sound of voices.

‘It’s a bloody oven. I’m going potty here. Dying for a swim. Tell her that.’

‘All right.’

‘So I’ll see you later, Stella.’

‘Yes.’

He rang off without saying goodbye. I put down the telephone and moved back across the hall, assuming an air of puzzlement which felt oddly self-conscious, as if someone were watching me. As I pushed the swinging door I fell still deeper into this distracted performance and by the time I reached the kitchen was moving so slowly that the sight of the gushing taps sending cascades of water over the edge of the sink to form a pool on the kitchen floor did not strike me as a disaster for several seconds. I shrieked aloud and ran to the sink, my feet skidding and my face spattered with foamy spray. Like a wild animal the accident beat off my attempts to control it, but finally I succeeded in turning off the taps.

The silence which followed was terrible, a sepulchral calm punctuated by the cavernous sound of drips. Paralysed by my own ill fortune, I stood for some time while the miniature lake lapped at my feet. Presently I heard the menacing creak of a floorboard above my head. The sound informed me that Pamela must be rising from her bed; and all was now a panicked blur of action as I raced to erase the evidence of my crime.

Grabbing anything I could find which looked capable of absorbing fluid — and scooping up great dripping handfuls of the water and returning them ineffectually to the sink — I laboured to reduce the gleaming reservoir now creeping across the tiled floor. Using tea towels, sponges, even a few chunks of bread left over from lunch, I fought to contain the capricious mass, which dodged and slid away from my every effort to capture it. I succeeded at least in spreading the spillage somewhat, so that although it covered a greater area its level was diminished; and had just gathered up the sodden cloths and screwed them into a ball when the kitchen door opened and Pamela stood before me. She had changed out of her bikini into a pair of jeans and a vest. Her face was still half-closed with sleep, and the cloud of her hair sat unusually high, as if it had attempted to escape her head while she lay unconscious and had been embarrassingly apprehended halfway through.

‘Goodness me!’ she said huskily, surveying the wreckage. I held the damp clump of towels behind my back and caught my breath. ‘You’ve washed the floor! You are kind.’

‘I haven’t quite finished in here,’ I declared in a high-pitched voice. ‘I was just about to wash up.’

‘Ah!’ said Pamela, teetering at the doorway; evidently with the intention of not spoiling my clean floor. ‘If you were going to do that, it might have been an idea to wash up first. You’ve rather hemmed yourself in, haven’t you?’

‘I suppose I have,’ I shrilled. ‘But by the time I’ve finished, it’ll be dry.’

‘Hmm.’ Pamela’s face wore a look of puzzlement. ‘Oh well, I’ll leave you to it.’

I saw that she had been about to discover me, but perhaps because she was not yet alert had wandered past the matter. Unfortunately, at the very moment when it seemed I was to get rid of her, I remembered the telephone message. I wrestled, torn between self-preservation and responsibility.

‘Your son rang,’ I called out to her retreating back.

‘Toby?’ Pamela turned around. ‘What did he want?’

‘He says he’s coming down,’ I replied. I had spotted a large and incriminating lump of wet bread lying by my foot, and was desperate not to detain her. ‘Either tonight or tomorrow morning.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Pamela. She paused, thinking. ‘I wonder what he wants.’

‘He said it was like an oven. He wanted a swim.’

‘I see. What’s that?’

‘What?’ I innocently replied.

‘By your foot.’

‘Oh, it’s just some — I was about to—’

‘I’d better give him a ring. Find out what he’s up to. God, I really could have done without Toby this week.’

Miraculously, she went away. I leaned in a sort of swoon against the sink, and felt the warm, filthy water lap against my shirt. An irresistible lethargy had suddenly come over me. I felt as if I could lie down where I stood on the wet floor and fall instantly asleep. The urgency of my half-concealed disaster grew remote and indistinct, and my eyelids were drooping shut when I heard Pamela’s voice.

‘No I jolly well don’t!’ she cried. The sound was feint, but I could make out her words clearly enough. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.’

I moved away from the sink and in the direction of the communicating wall, from beyond which the noise was coming. My back felt chilly and damp where the warm caress of the dishwater had been.

‘It isn’t that,’ said Pamela, after a pause. ‘I just feel like it’s another thing.’

I was pressed up against the kitchen counters by this time, my ear at the wall. There was quite a long silence now, during which I hazarded that Toby — for it was to him that I guessed Pamela was speaking — was making his case for ‘coming down’. My experience in the cottage garden had given me a certain skill at eavesdropping.

‘Look, we’ve got a new girl here, and everything’s in utter chaos … Stella, that’s right … Do you mean from your point of view or ours? … No, I’m not bloody well being oversensitive. You’re an absolute menace … No I don’t trust you, not one bit.’

At this point Pamela broke into a long and complicit laugh.

‘You don’t waste time, do you?’ she chuckled. ‘As it happens you’re absolutely right. Not your type at all. Oh, damn and blast you, you old charmer, I’m longing for you to come now, God help me. What time shall we expect you?’

Sensing that the conversation was winding down, I began to move stealthily back towards the sink, picking up the sodden piece of bread and depositing it in the rubbish bin as I did so.

‘I’ve got to know because of dinner,’ said Pamela plaintively. ‘All right. All right. OK. Bye.’

Triggered into action, I began rinsing plates and lining them up in an orderly row on the draining board. Once or twice I slotted one into position so violently that I feared I had chipped the delicate china and was forced to retrieve and inspect it. Returned to a state of emergency, I had no time to meditate on the cause of my fury, which was injured vanity; the price, I had come to realize, of whatever illicit and solitary pleasure I gained from the practice of overhearing conversations not intended for my ears.