Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘ Darling !’ said Pamela coaxingly, laying a hand on his arm. ‘It was only a bit of fun!’

Toby was looking up at his father pugnaciously, his chin jutting out.

‘He’s too old for that sort of thing,’ said Mr Madden, ignoring Pamela’s intervention just as his arm ignored the presence of her hand.

‘And what sort of thing might that be?’ said Toby coolly.

‘Rough-housing. Playing with your mother. Not in my house, sir.’

Toby sniggered; but despite the admittedly comical sound of the words, he did not have the courage to dispute them. There was a long and awkward silence, during which Mr Madden put the bread and wine on the table, his eyes downcast. He appeared to have forgotten about the incident, but then Toby did a curious thing: he yawned, noisily and provocatively. Mr Madden’s head snapped up so suddenly that his black hair flew skywards and I saw that his face had darkened to a violent purple.

‘Young man!’ he said, lunging over the table and banging his hand hard beside Toby’s place to punctuate the words. Everything on the table clattered and shook. Toby drew back in fear. ‘Don’t imagine that I’m not still capable of taking you out onto the drive and giving you a bloody good hiding! I wouldn’t think twice about packing you back off to London, but your mother wants you here. I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself so long as you’re at my table!’

‘Piers, please!’ said Pamela weakly. I was surprised to see that she appeared to be as frightened as everybody else.

‘I won’t have it,’ said Mr Madden gruffly, straightening himself up. ‘Bloody layabout cheeking me at my own table.’

Mr Madden’s table, despite the passionate references it was drawing, was in disarray. The salt cellar lay on its side, disgorging grains. The bread had jumped off its board. Knives and forks, meticulously laid, now formed exclamatory symbols on the tablecloth. I glanced at Toby. A distinct blush stained the expression of scornful superiority he had assumed. I was surprised that he had submitted to his father’s authority by remaining at the table. I would, in his position, have absented myself, whether for reasons of fury or dignity. I suspected that it was not fear that kept him tethered to his seat, but laziness. He liked being here, that much was obvious. Indeed, he was the sort of person I could not imagine being anywhere that he did not like; which made his acceptance of his recent humiliation even more perplexing. Looking at him, it suddenly struck me that his parents’ munificence, the splendour of their lifestyle, had perhaps cultivated in him an opportunistically tolerant attitude to their company. This notion was utterly alien to me, given that any encounter with my own parents was always accompanied by the necessity for enduring the range of their peculiarities, whether at home or outside it. Going home had always been a trial, the reward for which had been that in the moment of leaving I occupied the point furthest in time from the next occasion on which I would have to return.

Still, I was at a loss as to Mr Madden’s reasons for behaving as he had done. I glanced at him repeatedly while we ate, in a near silence punctuated only by a sparse conversation between him and Pamela about affairs at the farm. The colour gradually subsided from his cheeks. He neither spoke to nor looked at his elder son. The first thing which intrigued me was how he felt about the fact that Pamela had so obviously sided with Toby. The second was why, at this late stage in Toby’s development, Mr Madden should feel so disturbed by his behaviour with his own mother. If Toby had always behaved like this, why had something not been done about it before? If not, why had Pamela and indeed Martin not reacted to it with more surprise? It had seemed, from my perspective, quite natural to all of them. Had Mr Madden never seen anything of the sort before?

The speed of his response to it suggested that he had. Was I to conclude, then, that Mr Madden’s objection was part of an ongoing and unheeded protest against Toby’s behaviour with Pamela, and perhaps Toby in general? It was evident to me that in some terrible, unguessable way, Mr Madden disliked his own son. Why?

‘Oh, this heat!’ said Pamela, pushing away her plate and leaning back in her chair so that her face protruded beyond the rim of shade cast by the umbrella. ‘It’s simply glorious . I shall be flat on my back by the pool all afternoon. How about you boys?’

‘I’m in,’ said Toby.

‘Darling?’ Pamela turned to Mr Madden. ‘Why don’t you just take the afternoon oft? You’re absolutely exhausted. It would do you good to put your feet up by the pool for a bit.’

‘Hmph,’ said Mr Madden.

‘Go on, why don’t you? The boys would love it. I feel like we haven’t spent enough time together as a family. If Toby will put the hoops up, we could even have a spot of croquet! Stella?’ Pamela’s gaze fell uninvitingly on me. ‘What are your plans?’

‘I thought I might go for a walk,’ I improvised, as it was clear that the poolside idyll did not include me. I was aggrieved by this, as I was longing to swim; but I could see that after their earlier contretemps, the family might require some time alone to regroup.

‘How lovely ,’ said Pamela approvingly. ‘Look, why don’t you just shoot off? We can manage the clearing up.’

Summarily dismissed, I rose from my seat.

‘I’ll see you later,’ I said to Martin; although when he did not look at me, I glanced more generally at the others, as if my farewell had been directed at them.

I walked quickly away from the table and across the lawn. So awkwardly did I feel myself to be moving that I almost expected to hear laughter ring out behind me. Once I had made it to the shaded gravel path to the side of the house I slowed down. I felt immediately the relief of being on my own. The strain of being always in the company of people — and their numbers seemed daily to be increasing — whose connection to each other was as profound as their relation to me was tenuous, was greater than I had anticipated. I had imagined, when I had first considered the idea of appending myself to a family, that the organism’s self-sufficiency would ensure my own liberty; that being by its very nature exclusive, I would naturally be disqualified from the politics into which I would ultimately and inevitably have been drawn by any other social grouping. It surprised me to realize that the Maddens, contrary to what I had expected, seemed if not to require then at least to have uses for the presence of a third party. It was not that they were ‘showing off in front of me — most of the time, in fact, I felt as if they had forgotten I was there; rather that by providing the necessary opposition to their congruity, by marking so clearly the place where they ended and all else began, I was giving it shape and purpose.

I remembered my father once accusing my mother of not being proud of us, her family. He longed, I believe, for us to have a story , if that doesn’t sound too obscure; and thought that my mother’s persistent practicality was the thing stopping us from doing so. She wouldn’t have believed it herself, was the inference. Admittedly we weren’t much good with strangers. We grew tongue-tied and deflated, while my father tried to coax us into the air like recalcitrant soufflés. By the time our troupe was one member down, my father had his story, although it certainly wasn’t the kind of story he’d had in mind; and I dare say my mother secretly wished that she’d gone along with it all while there was still time, so that she’d have had something to repeat to herself after it had all got so quiet.

I reached the fork in the path that led to the cottage and stopped, realizing that in spite of my relief at having been liberated from the society of the back lawn, in fact I had little idea of what I wanted to do. Bearing right I would reach the gate to the front drive. Although I was familiar with the route which led from there to the big house, I had little notion of what would happen if one went in the opposite direction. I decided to investigate; and if in the course of my journey I came across the ‘top field’ I could perhaps satisfy my curiosity over the conversation I had overheard between the Maddens the previous afternoon.