Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

Unfortunately, the thought of Edward, even in so restrained a context, brought with it the cargo of guilt and anxiety I had tried so hard to shed when I left the flat in London; and I stood in the bathroom for some time, feeling myself blocked by this invidious freight even from returning up the stairs to bed. You will think me very unfeeling when I say that by far the greater part of this consignment of shame concerned money. Everything else relating to the appalling injuries I had inflicted on those closest to me I felt to be in some sense protean; or at least malleable, and tolerant of many different shades of thought. There were times, for example, when I could regard my desertion of Edward with a kind of mournful equanimity, the disappointing of my parents with grudging acceptance; but money never changed. It was as high and hard and intransigent as a wall, and I knew that I could never get over it. So much money had been spent, and it would never be recouped. So much money. One doesn’t recover from that sort of thing. I knew, standing there in the bathroom, that I wanted to have nothing more to do with money for the rest of my life. Of course, I had felt this subliminally for some time; it was one of the reasons behind my coming to the country in the way that I had. But standing there I knew it, as I had known few things before.

Finally I went back to bed, where I slept fitfully until it was light. Whatever cream it was that the creature had applied to my sunburn had worked wonders, for when I got up and looked in the wardrobe mirror I saw that the colour of my skin had completely altered from emergency red to an attractive brown. I had expected, at least, that the mirror would give back a true picture of the previous night’s excesses; but the glaze of good health disguised whatever ravages lurked beneath. As before, the strange night rash had left no trace, and I wondered fruitlessly what could be causing it. By this time it was well past eight o’clock, and having no time for a wardrobe debacle I merely picked up the previous day’s clothes from the floor and put them on. Downstairs in the bathroom I splashed my face with water, cleaned my teeth and quickly combed my hair. I had time to scrape at the tar on my shoes with a knife, and succeeded in removing the worst of it.

Outside the morning was still gentle with infancy, but behind the dewy innocence of the sky lurked the menace of maturity, and I knew that another day of cruel, triumphal heat lay ahead. I was growing very tired of the sun, and wondered what meteorological force would be strong enough to unseat it; for as yet I had not seen even a lone cloud brave enough to challenge it. I was glad, at least, that my skin no longer singled me out as its victim; indeed, I felt that my tan represented a clear progression in the matter of my aptitude for the country life. With this new armour I might find the courage to confront those problems which remained, being: the issue of driving, although this, it now being Tuesday, was demoted towards the bottom of my immediate agenda; the mysteries pertaining to my encounter with the creature, in which category I placed the ‘lovers’ tiff and the cryptic conversation I had overheard between the Maddens in the kitchen; the problem of food, and hence money, which, being relatively straightforward, I resolved to settle before the day was over; and the matter of my conversation with Martin, which had permitted my personal life to escape from its quarantine. I was pleased, at least, to be able to recall that my dealings with Pamela — a subject to which only the day before I would have accorded sovereignty among my problems — were showing distinct signs of improvement; that my sunburn had been cured; and that by scavenging at the Maddens’ table so frequently, I had survived my first three days in the country at very little expense to myself.

As on the previous day, the door to the back passage stood open; and entering the corridor I remembered my confrontation with Mrs Barker. Not wishing to repeat it I resolved this time to go and wait in the kitchen until Pamela should appear. Opening the door, I had expected to find Mrs Barker in office, and was surprised instead to see a young man sitting at the table reading a newspaper. His businesslike demeanour gave me the idea at first that he was an associate of Mr Madden’s, perhaps Trimmer the manager, but the fact that he was wearing a red silk dressing gown sat strangely with this notion; and I soon realized that this must be the errant Toby, arrived last night — unless he had for some reason travelled in this apparel — after all.

‘Hello,’ I said, for he hadn’t seemed to notice that I had entered the room.

Even after my salutation, he took his time to acknowledge me, and as his eyes taxied slowly off the page in front of him I realized that he had waited to finish whatever it was he had been reading before brooking my interruption.

‘Hel- lo ,’ he said presently, having conducted a lightning — but apparently thorough — survey of my appearance. ‘You must be Stella.’

He said this as if his deduction came not from the common pool of information but was the fruit of a rarefied and entirely private process of calculation. He pronounced my name with relish and clearly hoped to have some effect by doing so. It required little more to put me on my guard against him; but the insinuating smile he dispatched across the room after it, a gesture as full of the consciousness of his own bounty in doing so as if he had been tossing a jewel or banknote at my feet, cemented my disdain. My dislike of Toby was not, although it may seem so, the work of preconception. I consider myself a fair judge of character, and was not merely acting out of blind obedience to the many factors which insisted that I form an automatic prejudice against him — his depraved treatment of Roy, whose absence from the kitchen was conspicuous; his disregard for his mother’s feelings; his own brother’s contempt. The truth was that when I entered the kitchen and saw him sitting there, my heart swooned in my chest; for I had never seen such an attractive human being, male or female. It is curious, I suppose, that my reaction to the sight of him should have been so visceral. I didn’t ‘recognize’ him, in the way I described some time ago in relation to Pamela. He might, in fact, have belonged to a different species from my own, so unrelated was his appearance to mine. In these circumstances it is normal to feel an appreciation that is more cultural, as it were, than sexual; a refined, abstract response to beauty, without the hope and hunger which are the features of attraction. My only explanation for this diversion from the norm is that it seemed to have more to do with Toby himself than with me: he radiated concupiscence, and I felt sure that anyone in his region would feel the heat of it, whether they liked it or not.

‘I was looking for Mrs Madden,’ I said awkwardly; and was rewarded, to my shame, with another smile which clearly communicated to me the fact that he had found as much in my charmless remark to flatter him as if I had flung myself at his feet.

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Perhaps I should go and look for her,’ I continued, when it became evident that he was to say nothing else. There are certain people in whose presence one’s own becomes so secondary, so crude, that it seems to require justification. Toby was one of those people. He merely arched his eyebrows at this piece of self-commentary; and with the last precious thread of my novelty snipped, I was powerless to prevent myself from providing him with another. ‘Or perhaps,’ I trailed miserably on, ‘I should just wait here.’

He gave an elegant shrug and his blue eyes hovered above his still spreadeagled newspaper as if on the brink of flight. Were I not to do anything interesting within the next few minutes, this glance informed me, his attention — on which precious commodity a meter appeared to be ticking — would have to be withdrawn.