Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

I set off to the left of the gate and within a few paces had left behind the gravelled area, which gave on to a corridor of rough, loosely cropped grass. To either side were tall hedges, the left flank of which, I calculated, formed the boundary of the cottage garden. Directly ahead, at the end of this corridor, the land seemed to give away, and I felt a looming spaciousness which suggested I might soon arrive at open farmland. I had little idea of how the grounds of Franchise fitted into the larger puzzle of the surrounding countryside. The windows of the cottage looked out only onto various manicured aspects of the garden, and even from the upstairs rooms of the big house I could remember seeing little more. The property appeared to be almost entirely screened from what lay outside it by clever arrangements of trees and hedges; which, although they certainly ensured privacy from it, meant that one had little idea of what might be going on in the world beyond.

I progressed along the corridor, the longer grass cool in the shade beneath my feet. Small birds landed ahead of me and then sprang away as I approached, vanishing, garbled ribbons of song trailing behind them. I went on like this for some fifty paces, the gloom appearing to deepen all the way, until I came to a small gate. I opened it; and quite abruptly, everything changed. I found myself flung from the verdant enclosure of the garden into a boundless blast of heat and light, a molten, flattened plain which unfolded as suddenly as if the tall hedges had collapsed like pieces of cardboard scenery to reveal it. I stopped, my eyes, which had grown briefly accustomed to the shade, shrinking from the radiant sea of gold which seemed to rise and fall before me in a warm tide. The vastness of the panorama, which stretched uninterrupted for as far as I could see, stunned me; and I thought that I had never seen something so brutal and lovely as this long embrace of sky and land, breast to breast. I stood there for some time entirely emptied of thought or even the slightest awareness of myself, the sun hot on my face and my eyes filled with colour. My sense of wonder was acute, if inarticulate. (I could not, for example, have told you precisely what it was that grew before my eyes in such a mass of blond and slender wands — some variety of gram, I supposed.) The randomness with which I had stumbled on the silent, swaying field and caught it in this gratuitous display of beauty appeared to me as a benediction of sorts. I felt comforted by it, and at the same time diminished; by which I mean that the feeling of insignificance was in itself a consolation.

Eventually I felt compelled to move, though I didn’t want to; some deeper impulse insisted on it. I felt sure that Mr Madden would not appreciate my walking through the field, much as I would have liked to do so. I decided instead to skirt its boundaries, and as there was a generous margin of dry, crusty soil between the field itself and the fence which hemmed it, it seemed I would be able to walk without difficulty. I set off, glad of the breeze which ruffled the great golden pelt of the land and then lifted past me to stir the heavy branches of the trees beyond. It is difficult to convey the contentment I felt in the presence of these sights and sounds. It was as if a certain roughness, a grubby layer of matted, misbegotten aims, was being sloughed from me; as if in this deluge of simplicity I were being absolved of some nameless, primordial confusion. I did not ascribe any more specific meaning to this feeling. I did not, for example, immediately fall on it as a vindication of my move to the country, nor evidence that I had arrived at, or even embarked on, some form of recovery.

Working my way across the top of the field, I saw that I was approaching a wooden fence whose trajectory extended across my path and away to the right for as far as I could see. I had imagined, from further off, that I would either have to climb over it or change direction; but from nearer I could see that a quaint arrangement of steps had been built directly ahead of me over the fence. These did not conform to any image I might have had of a ‘stile’; they more resembled a chunky wooden ladder secured astride the fence, so that one could almost have walked up and over them without slowing one’s pace. I took the presence of this clever construction as a direct approbation of my walking where I had been, and an encouragement to continue. A small yellow arrow affixed to the fence beside the ladder and pointing directly ahead confirmed this impression; and thus egged on, I was about to vault energetically over the fence when it struck me that the presence of these inducements hinted at a wider specification than my own incidental use of the route. My encounter with the creature rallied from memory; and I realized that I was standing not on the untried terrain of discovery and adventure, but on a public footpath.

My idyll having met with unexpected foreclosure, I stood rooted beside the fence for some time. It was hard to suppress the memory of the leaflet slipped beneath my door, and still more the menacing armoury of the creature’s room; all of which suggested that I had wandered into a zone of personal danger from which at any moment some undreamed-of assault might come. Too alarmed now even to take another step, I pivoted myself about from the waist to examine the ground at my feet, swaying unsteadily with the attempt not to move. I was mindful of the nooses I remembered from the creature’s room; but tried to be alert also to any other form of trap which might have replaced them. The sky was a hard, hot enamel of blue overhead; and as the wind rolled off the field the shifting ocean of gold sent up wordless whispers to my terrified ears. Eventually I knew myself to be at an impasse; for having found nothing specifically of which to be afraid, the whole landscape entered into the collusion. One way or another, I would have to journey through risk and conjecture to get home. Having understood this I felt rather more courageous; and with courage came the retrospective notion that I had been rather too craven in my fears. The dangers which moments earlier had paralysed me now seemed like no more than superstitions; and before long I had decided to continue with my walk as if nothing had happened; which, of course, nothing had.

I had turned and placed my foot on the first, broad step of the ladder when I heard a shout. I stopped immediately and looked about. The cry had sounded far off, and I wondered if it had been an echo from the house or road, for I could see no one in the vicinity. It came a second time, and I looked about again. At first I could see nothing; but then a distant shape snagged my gaze, moving quickly between the two planes of field and sky. It was a man, and he was waving his arms and coming rapidly towards me through the field, leaving a dark furrow of flattened stems behind him. He had something in his right hand which I understood, surprisingly calmly, to be a gun. I remained exactly where I was, with one foot on the step, which I felt was the most sensible thing to do. In fact, there was nothing else I could have done, for despite having no real consciousness of fear, at the first sight of the man I had experienced a rapid sensation of drainage, as if everything warm and pulsing in me had been voided through a trapdoor. I was no more animate standing there than a lamp-post, and no more capable of running away.

‘Stop!’ shouted the man — rather unnecessarily — quite close to me now. My first impression of him, being entirely dedicated to assessing his potential for harming me, was blurred. He was young — in his thirties, I thought — and if not big then fairly square. In those panicked seconds I was surprised to notice the burly movement of his thighs as he ran, like two large hams beneath the rippling cloth of his trousers. His face, if I were to be honest, did not look like it bore the intention of murdering me; in fact, as he waded from the field and jogged to a halt in front of me, I was almost distracted from my terror by the curious look of him. His was unlike any face I had ever seen; but its peculiar aspect was characterized more by lack than by the presence of anything unusual. Some dimension appeared to be missing from it, although it was hard in those moments to get a sense of what it was. He had by now been standing in front of me for some time, catching his breath. The gun, I was glad to notice, was held behind his back.