Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

I opened my eyes on a day whose prospect was so alarming that it was some time before I could bring myself to get out of bed and begin it. Outside my window the tyrannical sky slyly proffered again its unnatural heat, as if from a never-diminishing wad of banknotes; but I knew that storms were being smuggled in for me beneath its innocent blue. Today was not a day like any other. Today, I felt sure, my luck with regard to the matter of driving would run out; and the whole edifice of my life in the country, which I had begun to believe to be secure, seemed to strain and groan beneath it. In the shadow of this great dread, other smaller concerns lurked: my forthcoming evening with Mr Trimmer; my muddled and inappropriate feelings for Toby, to which his moonlit visit had added an altogether dangerous dimension of fulfilment; and the vague but certain sense I had, which seemed to have been implanted in me while I slept, that despite Martin’s efforts I had been judged to have transgressed in wearing the cut-off trousers and would be made to pay for it, whether directly or later as part of a wider tally.

It surprised me that the last and least of these concerns should be the first to flower; but no sooner had I quietly entered the big house by the back door and begun to creep, soberly dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and trousers, up the passage, than the very thing I was hoping to avoid — an encounter with Pamela — rose up in my path.

‘Stella!’ she said, emerging furtively from the kitchen and closing the door behind her. ‘A word.’

She drew to my side in the gloomy corridor. From her air of emergency, I guessed that she had been waiting for me; and from her confidential tone and stem, decided expression that I was to be reprimanded. There are some women on whom authority sits violently, who can use it only as a tool of reward or censure. I had little sense of Pamela’s expectations of me between these two extremes, which was probably why I failed so frequently to meet them.

‘Forgive me for being bold,’ she said in a low, rapid voice. ‘But I didn’t like to say anything last night in front of the others and I feel I must get this clear.’

I saw that she was becoming agitated, in the way that she often did: like a bottle being shaken hard to stir up what was in itself disposed to settle.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ I began, in the hope of deflecting her.

‘Now I don’t mind if we’re out by the pool or whatever,’ she continued, apparently not having heard me. ‘But to dress provocatively in the evening when the men are about really isn’t on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I interposed.

‘If you don’t have enough clean things then for God’s sake come and see me first and I’ll sort you out with something.’

‘It won’t happen again,’ I said.

‘It’s easy to forget,’ she persisted, ‘in this day and age that some things are still unacceptable. I know that you don’t know us very well, and perhaps that sort of thing is fine where you come from, but with young men in the house I really must ask that it doesn’t happen again.’

‘It won’t,’ I said.

‘All right?’ she finished, meeting my eye. ‘I’m sorry to have started the day off on such an unpleasant note, but I felt something had to be said. Let’s forget all about it, shall we?’

‘Fine,’ I weakly agreed.

‘Good. Now I think Martin is waiting for you upstairs, so off you go.’

She disappeared back through the kitchen door and shut it after her. Exhausted, I leaned for a moment against the wall, and then made my way heavily through the hall and up the stairs to Martin’s room.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said when I came in.

‘Nothing,’ I gloomily replied. ‘What do you want to do?’

Pamela’s assault had, I felt, put a fatal imprimatur of misfortune on the day. None of its gambles, after such an opening, could possibly go my way; not only because the theme had been set and the tone determined, but also in that so many of its uncertainties depended for their outcome on my own confidence, a quantity which now lay blighted and forlorn in some shameful corner of my heart. I cursed my own recklessness in my decision to wear the cut-off trousers, and Toby for inciting it. The thrill I felt when I thought of his visit to the cottage the night before was now doubly despicable. Why had he come to see me so late at night? Perhaps, it struck me, he had come so late with the express purpose of not seeing me; to visit his memories of the place rather than its new tenant, at an hour when I could be sure not to accost him. This new theory seemed in genuine danger of being accurate; until I remembered that I had distinctly heard him knock at the door, and that besides, even on such brief acquaintance as ours, I could see that he was not a man likely to be given to reminiscence or contemplation. I did not, even in the heat of gratification, believe that Toby really liked me. My earlier disappointment in the cottage garden was still too fresh to permit such an idea. It was the cut-off trousers, I felt sure, which had lured him and lit his path to my door; and having admitted this I found myself in belated and embarrassed agreement with Pamela for her fury.

‘Ah!’ I said aloud, an exclamation driven to the surface by a surfeit of inner torment.

‘ What?’ said Martin plaintively.

‘Nothing. I just got off to a bad start today.’

‘I don’t understand it when people say things like that,’ he said; thinking, I didn’t doubt, of his mother. ‘I never feel that way. They make it sound like they’re giving a performance or doing an exam or something. I just decide what mood I’m going to be in and then see what happens.’

‘Are you going to the centre today?’ I enquired; partly, I’m afraid, to remind him of his misfortunes; but mostly to ascertain whether there was any chance of further avoiding the debacle which, curiously, had grown more insubstantial in my mind with every deferral. I had managed almost entirely to block the driving problem from my thoughts over the past few days; or rather, like a pilot in a small plane, I had been flying just above it, roundly aware of but not feeling the texture of its contours, pulling just in time out of every lurch of fear to skim its menacing peaks. I hoped at least that when the inevitable wall of hard and insurmountable fact rose up before me, my collision with it would be swift and painless; for although I felt that I wanted time to prepare myself for what no amount of meditation could alter, I knew that to be conscious of my fear would be to endure every torment it could devise for me.

‘I think so,’ said Martin. His vagueness was agony. ‘What day is it?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘Well I am, then. Are you taking me?’

‘Yes,’ I shrilled.

In moments of greater confidence than this, when I had dared to look down from the height of my denial, I had wondered what could possibly be so difficult about driving a car that the sheer force of my desperation would not overcome. I had sat beside people in cars often enough; so many times, in fact, throughout my life, that when I tried to recall the various manoeuvres I had, albeit half-consciously, witnessed, I found that I had unwittingly amassed enough images of the driving process to conduct a sort of lesson in my head. Steering was easy enough, a simple matter of instinct and clear vision. Acceleration and braking, once one had determined which levers caused them, could likewise not be hard. It was the gearstick which intimidated me; and the varying styles of using it which I summoned up from my memories of the passenger seat suggested that this, being the zone of personal embellishment, was also the kernel of difficulty. My mother had laboured over it with exaggerated caution; my father had flicked it carelessly from one position to the next; Edward, who drove, unlikely as it may seem, with a sort of epicurean pleasure, had almost caressed it in his manipulations. Mr Madden’s mastery of the process was the one which most interested me, given that it was his car I was going to drive. He changed gear with a rough confidence which I imagined experts would decry; but what disturbed me were peculiarities in his handling of the car which suggested that it was in some sense irascible or untamed, and required not only more than the average degree of skill but also some sort of personal acquaintance to drive it.