Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘What do you want?’ I finally enquired, impatient at his failure to state his intentions. I felt a surge of valour in the wake of my earlier cowardice, as if I had strained my capacity for self-protection and now didn’t care what happened to me.

‘What are you doing?’ he said finally, still breathless. He looked me in the eye, and it was then that I saw how the two sides of his face seemed to meet in a point or ridge at the centre, as if he had two profiles but no head-on aspect. His eyes were very close together and turned slightly inward; a physiognomical misfortune, giving the bizarre impression that he was looking at himself. Otherwise he was not unattractive. He looked healthy, at least, and had a generous head of brown curly hair.

‘I am going for a walk,’ I replied. ‘As this is a public footpath, I don’t see that it is any of your business.’

It was backhanded of me to use as my vindication the very thing I had bemoaned minutes earlier; but as I still had no idea of who the man was, I was forced to defend myself in any way I could.

‘I wouldn’t walk over that if I were you,’ he said presently, nodding at the ladder. He had quite a broad accent, of the sort I had already heard in the village. ‘It’s broken, see?’

He lunged purposefully towards me and I drew back. In the event it was only so that he could demonstrate a fault in the step on which I had been about to place my weight. It had come almost entirely away from its bracket. Had I stepped on it, I would almost certainly have injured myself.

‘How could they leave it like that?’ I cried; before remembering that ‘they’ was in fact Mr Madden, whom I had defended against the creature’s accusations so passionately only the day before. ‘This is a public right of way!’ The man’s expression was impassive, which inflamed me further. ‘If you knew about it,’ I added, ‘why didn’t you inform somebody?’

This, I felt, was a pertinent enough question; but you would not have guessed from the man’s face that I had asked him one. Indeed, he seemed to be waiting for me to say something more.

‘Why didn’t you tell somebody?’ I repeated. I wondered if he was in some way backward. His head cocked from one side to the other at hearing the question again, with the beady, rigid stupidity of a chicken.

‘You like walking, then?’ he said finally.

‘Yes I do,’ I briskly replied. I had been about to pose my question for the third time; but the apparent futility of the whole encounter stopped me. It irritated me to see that the man’s obtuseness had triumphed over my own rationality. With curious clarity, I quickly understood that my ideas about how the conversation should proceed, and indeed about everything that had happened in the past few minutes, were entirely misplaced; not because they were wrong, exactly, but because they belonged elsewhere. The fact that the man and I did not appear to be communicating clearly seemed, in this light, to be more my fault than his. In my mind I went over what had happened and realized that he had come bounding over the field in such an alarming fashion solely to alert me to the broken step; and what is more, that he had found my ingratitude, as opposed to the admission of irresponsibility towards which I had vainly been trying to direct him, something of an affront. I began to regret the confrontational style of my approach; and at the same time became aware of news of an indisposition being telegraphed to me from several regions of my body at once.

‘I’ve seen you about,’ said the man, fixing me with the single beam of his misaligned eyes.

‘Have you?’ I vaguely replied. Suddenly I was not feeling at all well. My head had grown heavy and a strange prickling sensation coursed about my nose and eyes and down my throat. I tried to focus on the man, and concentrate on what he was saying, but with the mounting turbulence in all my senses he seemed remote. I felt a wave rise between my ears and I sneezed three times in quick succession.

‘You’ve not been here long,’ I heard him say. ‘But you’ve been busy.’

I rubbed my eyes, which had swollen so rapidly that I feared they might shut altogether. Dimly I realized that the man would not be capable of acknowledging my sudden decline, nor of encompassing it in whatever plans he might have had for this social encounter. Were my eyes really to seal themselves shut, I might even have to ask him to lead me back to the cottage. It was essential that I escaped immediately, and I summoned every reserve of will I possessed to detach myself as quickly and politely as possible.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said thickly, ‘but I’ve just remembered that I’m late for something. I have to go.’

I glimpsed his face as I turned on my heel, and the image of it stayed in my mind as I fled streaming through the heat along the top of the field, through the gate, and back along the shady corridor towards the house.

Pamela and Martin both looked slightly startled when I burst into the kitchen, their heads jerking up in unison and their eyes wide with enquiry. I was now so besieged by allergy that it felt as if a great swarm of bees were milling around my face. Even so, I was dimly surprised to find the two of them indoors, having thought they were to spend the afternoon en famille by the pool. Pamela was sitting at the table reading a newspaper laid out flat in front of her like a bolt of cloth, a pair of glasses balanced on her elegant nose. Opposite her, Martin sat with his chair drawn up, absorbed in the same loving transfer of information from book to pad which I had overseen on the lawn that morning. Seen from the side their heads were barely six inches apart; and at my entrance they sprang away from each other, as if I had caught them at some guilty pursuit, like cheating or espionage.

‘What’s happened to you?’ cried Pamela; a cry, if I were to be honest, expressive of a dangerously threadbare concern.

‘I don’t know,’ I slurred. ‘It started in the field. I think I must be allergic to something.’

I was beginning to feel quite dizzy, and I pulled out a chair and sat down beside Martin.

‘Which? The top field?’ said Pamela.

‘The gold one.’ I sneezed. ‘Beautiful.’

‘The top field. It must be hay fever.’

She nodded firmly. I wondered if she intended to do anything about it. In spite of my distress, I was becoming acutely aware of some fast approaching limit on Pamela’s kindness. Martin was looking from one to the other of us, as if he were watching a play.

‘Let me think,’ said Pamela presently. I understood from this comment that she had, in the period since her last remark, been considering my plight rather than ignoring it. ‘What have I got? Oh, I know. Have a look in that cupboard over there beside the door. See if there’s a packet of something called Zortek or Zartek. Something like that.’

I realized that she was speaking to me, rather than some other factotum, and felt slightly injured that she should not be sufficiently moved by my condition to get the packet herself. Permitting myself a pathetic sigh, I got heavily to my feet and went to investigate the cupboard.

‘See it?’ called Pamela unhelpfully from behind me.

I found the packet and went directly to the sink for a glass of water. I had to admit that Pamela’s diagnosis had been accurate; for only a few minutes after I had taken the pill and sat down again, I felt the inflammation of my eyes and nose begin miraculously to subside.

‘What were you doing in the top field?’ Pamela lightly enquired.

‘Walking,’ I replied, somewhat belligerently. ‘There’s a public footpath.’ My conversion to the whole business of footpaths, though opportunistic, was proving profound. ‘I met a man.’