Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘You’re over in the cottage, aren’t you?’ he said then, as if my tenancy at least conferred on me a grain of fascination. Something in the way he said it informed me that the cottage bore some special significance for him. I remembered his mention of the name Colette during our telephone conversation, and his mention too of her unexpected dismissal. Unfortunately, I was reminded almost in the same instant of the conversation I had subsequently overheard, in which Pamela had confidently claimed that I was not Toby’s ‘type’. I felt disproportionately injured by this recollection, and experienced a dangerous desire to disprove it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonderful place.’

‘Isn’t it?’ He smiled, this time to himself. ‘Yes, you’re quite tucked away there. I might ’ — he appeared to be dragging this concession reluctantly from the very pit of his stomach — ‘I might wander over there a bit later, just to take a look at the old place.’

I had no idea whether my presence was a desirable or even necessary feature of this excursion. Fortunately, before this spark of ambiguity could set my thoughts aflame, the door opened behind me and Pamela’s quenching presence flooded the room.

‘Morning!’ she cried, coming through the door with such speed that she was halfway across the kitchen before she ground to a halt. The refulgence of the previous day had, I soon saw, returned; but I sensed something darker beneath it, something secretive and puffy in Pamela’s face which I could not explain, but which gave me the distinct impression that she had altered; as if some internal compass had twitched and thrown her off course.

‘Morning,’ drawled Toby, rustling his newspaper.

He was smiling beneath his hooded eyes, a smile of complicity meant, I saw, for Pamela. She put her hand on his shoulder, which was as finely turned as a banister.

‘Coffee?’ she said.

‘Please,’ acceded Toby, his gaze not flickering from the page. Pamela stood for a moment and read over his shoulder, a gesture the least part of whose motivation, I felt sure, was an interest in current affairs. Their bodies were very close, curled like parentheses around some shared but inadmissible aside. My intrusion on this intimate scene was becoming unbearable. Toby’s smile was broadening as Pamela stood there behind him, and as if his mirth had insinuated itself up her connecting arm, she too began to smile. Before long, to my bewilderment, the two of them were shaking with silent, private mirth.

‘Is Martin upstairs?’ I enquired in a clear voice.

‘What?’ Pamela turned and looked at me, bleary with interruption, her eyes triumphant and annoyed. For a moment, she didn’t seem to recognize me. ‘Oh, Stella, I am sorry!’ she said then, after a pause. ‘Yes, you’ll find him upstairs in his room.’

‘Thank you,’ I curtly replied.

I walked smartly from the room and closed the door behind me; and as I stood in the dark ante-room was mortified to hear the muted sound of twin laughters burst forth from the other side. My thoughts were so racked with confusion and fury that it was not until I had slammed my way from the cramped vestibule that I was able to give substance to them; but in the empty, polished vault of the vast hall I knew that what I had just seen was not the morning reunion of mother and son, but that of lovers. I was astonished, and rather ashamed, at the boldness and vulgarity of my deduction; and yet I knew that I had hacked with this single crude thought right to the heart of the matter. This, I might say, was for me a most unusual experience. I am habitually a person in whose thoughts the insignificant looms large, while the vast and more perilous range of realities forms a dramatic but distant vista, a long and tortuous journey away. I had never even encountered in my life a situation which might have beaten a path to this particular suspicion, nor was I subject in so far as I knew to any tendency — over-imaginativeness, for example — which might have eased its passage. No, the thought was merely a response to what I had seen, and once established it formed a magnet for other things, which adhered themselves to it and gave it weight. Pamela’s distracted behaviour the previous evening; her uncontainable disappointment at Toby’s lateness; her failure, earlier, to tell him the news of Caroline’s pregnancy; even her generally neurotic and overcharged demeanour, her drastic changes of mood, those irrational episodes in which I myself had played a reluctant part: the enormity of the accusation seemed capable of containing all this and more.

Within minutes, however, my exhilarating descent into moral turpitude had come to an abrupt halt. What was I thinking of, harbouring such horrible notions about people who, if occasionally maddening and often incomprehensible to me, were nevertheless decent? I lingered at the foot of the staircase, and in the prospect of its arduous slope saw the long and wearying climb back to reason which was the price of my brief but thrilling speculations. I tried as I slowly ascended the stairs to remember the details of my own mother’s behaviour towards my brothers, in the penitent hope that it might mitigate Pamela’s. There was certainly nothing of the kind between Edward and his mother either; but then, uncharitably I’ll admit, I was unsure whether there was anything of the kind between Edward and anybody. If only in the name of justice, there should surely have been some similar bond between fathers and daughters; but other than Bounder’s correspondence — which, if it signalled some special fondness, went both unappreciated and unreturned — I could think of nothing which distinguished my father’s treatment of me from that he gave my brothers. I regretted, nevertheless, that I had not treasured these tokens more. Their expulsion to the tundra of London’s waste-disposal system filled me both with retrospective guilt and with frustration at the impossibility of scanning them anew for evidence.

I had, at this point, reached the top of the stairs; and remembering that Martin was waiting for me, hurried the final distance along the corridor to his room. His door stood open, and through it I could see him sitting in his chair by the window. He was staring through the glass in deep thought. Seeing him thus, I was struck by how little I knew of his unattended life. The business of looking after him, the work of acquiring familiarity with his needs, permitted the other side of his nature to fall into neglect. I realized — although this may seem obvious — that what to me was employment was life to him; something which in other centuries or places was, I am sure, the grounds for envy and resentment, but here was the cause of feelings of personal good fortune.

‘Where have you been, Stel-la?’ he said when I presented myself He was wearing a red T-shirt which drained his skin of colour. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was in the kitchen. I thought I ought to wait for your mother before I came up.’

‘Why?’ He screwed up his face.

‘It — I don’t know. It didn’t seem polite just to march through the house.’

‘You’re so funny.’ He paused, as if concentrating. ‘On the one hand’ — he measured it mathematically with his hand — you’ve got the guts to leave your husband, abandoning everything you know and casting yourself on the kindness of strangers. And on the other, you’re scared of coming into someone else’s house, even if they’re expecting you.’

‘I thought,’ I said in a steely tone, ‘that we had agreed not to discuss that matter any further. As for the business of coming into the house, I did not say that I was scared; merely that I thought it polite to alert your mother to my presence, in case I interrupted something private.’