Rachel Cusk: The Country Life

‘Was it really?’ he said, with gratifying astonishment.

He slammed the car door shut (I had sat down in the passenger seat by this time) and proceeded around the front of the car to the other side. I looked at him through the windscreen. The car was quite still for a few muted seconds. Then the door opened and he was in, noise and movement reinstated as abruptly as they had been suspended.

‘We’re off!’ he cheerfully cried, starting the car, putting it into gear and lurching forward in a single movement. ‘Sorry again to have been so late.’

I waited, assuming he would want to provide an explanation, although by that time I had forgotten that he had been late at all; and forgotten too, as before, the anxieties attendant on his lateness. He laughed suddenly, a single barking noise which jerked his head back as it exited from his mouth.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘No excuse, I’m afraid.’

‘Perhaps you got stuck behind a herd of cows,’ I said, much to my own astonishment.

‘Perhaps I did,’ he replied, rewarding me with another bark. I had been going to explain that this was how I might have imagined country life to be, making a joke of my being from London, but to my satisfaction he seemed to have understood my comment without further explanation.

We appeared already to have left Buckley, although I could remember nothing about the town, despite the fact that I had been looking out of the window. The road was now very narrow, and to either side I could see fields and trees which the bright sunshine gave a look of fixity, like a landscape in a painting. I thought of saying this but decided against it. Mr Madden drove very quickly, with a sort of proprietorial confidence which I was in no position to question, giving two sharp hoots of his horn at every sharp bend we approached. It seemed unlikely, given that our car clearly filled the width of the road, that this call would provide adequate warning to whatever might be travelling towards us. I sat rigid in my seat, oscillating between the secure thrill of fairground fear and the terror of real risk; and felt almost relieved when, rounding a corner, a vast, muddy tractor reared up at us on the road ahead. In that panicked, overcrowded second I knew we were going to crash and I must have cried out, for after Mr Madden had swerved unperturbed onto the verge, barely slowing his speed, and delivered us safely back onto the road beyond, he turned his head and looked at me.

‘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.’