Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘No. She’s all right.’

‘I don’t believe you. I’ll get the sack.’

‘No you won’t. I’ll look after you.’

I was becoming uncomfortable with Martin’s stroking, which had extended its compass to my neck. I felt myself growing tense beneath his hand, but I could not bring myself to tell him to stop. The only solution was to get up, but I feared for what would happen to my stomach, which had now found an acceptable level in this horizontal mode, if I changed position. The thought that Pamela might come in to investigate and find us thus redoubled my anxiety. Martin’s fingers caressed the back of my neck, entwining themselves in my hair.

‘Don’t,’ I said weakly.

‘I can’t help it.’

‘Please.’ A terrible tiredness lapped at my eyes. ‘It’s not a good idea.’

‘Let me. Just for a little while. I won’t do it again. You’re so lovely, Stel-la. Let me just touch you.’

I’m afraid to say that I let him do it. True, I was feeble with pain and sickness, and in need too of comfort and human contact; and in a sensual way, the feeling of Martin’s large hand on my skin was pleasurable; but deep inside me, far beneath the swirling ether of semi-consciousness, I had a small, hard sense of wrong. My limbs felt numb and vast, too remote from this tiny impulse to be powered by it; and so I lay, while Martin went about his solitary raptures, and did nothing but fail to reciprocate them. I must have fallen asleep, for some time later when I opened my eyes Martin was sitting by the window on the other side of the room watching me.

‘You should have woken me!’ I said, sitting up. My stomach felt much better, but my back sounded a chord of agony when I moved.

‘You probably needed to sleep,’ said Martin. He seemed embarrassed. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better.’ I rubbed my eyes and swung my feet off the bed. My shoes, I noticed, were sitting neatly side by side on the floor beside me. ‘I’m sorry about all that. Not my most graceful performance.’

I immediately felt that this was the wrong thing to have said. Martin fiddled with his hands, his eyes downcast.

‘What would you like to do?’ I persisted, slapping my knees enthusiastically. ‘We could go out for a walk, or — or we could stay here and do some homework’ — at this he gave a faint snort of laughter — ‘or— What do you want to do?’ I repeated.

‘Just — just slow down,’ he said finally. His expression was pained.

‘What’s the matter?’ I could not seem to say anything without sounding oafish and insensitive.

‘Just let me — God!’ He threw his head back with frustration.

Things had, I saw, changed between us as a result of the strange interlude on the bed. My regret at the realization was intense. I could not believe that I had allowed it to happen.

‘Martin,’ I began.

‘Don’t say anything!’ He held up a forbidding hand. ‘Just don’t!’

‘But—’

‘I’ll be fine. I just need to think, that’s all.’

He sat, accordingly pensive, looking out of the window. I stood awkwardly by the bed. I felt, despite his command, that he did want me to say something; and yet I knew that I was not skilful enough with words to form the delicate phrases he required. Any route from here, however circuitous, led to the denial of what he wanted. There was no step that I could take that would not advance us towards what he did not want to know. With nothing better to offer him than physical proximity, I crossed the room and threw myself into the empty armchair. This, in the event, unexpectedly proved the most direct path out of the tension between us; for when my bruised back made contact with the stiff leather upholstery, I leaped up again with such a scream that Martin involuntarily burst out laughing.

‘I know,’ he said presently. ‘Why don’t we have a picnic? We can go and get some stuff and then go off somewhere. You can tell me about last night. How about it?’

‘OK.’

We went down to the kitchen to inform Pamela of our plan. Mrs Barker, I was relieved to see, was not in evidence.

‘That sounds jolly,’ said Pamela, who was sitting at the kitchen table with her glasses on her nose, writing laboriously on a sheet of paper. ‘Actually, that would suit me just fine. The men are at the farm again today and I wanted to do some shopping, so I might shoot off now if you two are going to look after yourselves.’ She lowered her glasses and looked at me. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Much, thank you.’ I wondered whether she was referring to my fall, or had received a report from Mrs Barker on my subsequent behaviour in the bedroom. ‘I’ll have some pretty bad bruises, but I don’t think it’s too serious.’

‘You ought to be more careful, you know. We don’t want you breaking something and stuck in bed for weeks on end. Right!’ Her tone informed me that our interview was at a close. ‘I’ll get away, then. There are things in the fridge. You can pretty much help yourself to anything, except the salmon. That’s for dinner.’

‘Can we have wine?’ said Martin innocently.

‘Wine?’ Pamela looked at me. It was difficult to know what expression was required in response. I looked blankly back at her. ‘Oh, I don’t see why not. Just don’t take your father’s vintage hoard. There’s plenty of plonk in the cupboard.’

Having plundered the kitchen, we set off in the sun, taking the path to the right of the house that led towards the rose garden. Martin held the picnic basket in his lap. We passed the pond into which he had nearly fallen on our first day. It was unchanged, forgetful of us, its surface busy through the delicate filter of shade.

‘ That seems a very long time ago,’ said Martin from below.

It was very painful wheeling the chair over the uneven ground. I thought of suggesting we stop by the pond, but it seemed too odd somehow to do so, as if it would signify that we were caught in some strange cycle of repetition from which it was impossible to progress. I braced myself, leaning in at an angle to put the strain on my shoulders. Presently we emerged from the wood into a sort of meadow.

‘This is my favourite place,’ said Martin. ‘Shall we sit under that tree?’

The meadow was lovely, overgrown and surprisingly cool. Wild flowers danced amidst the long grass. I ploughed the chair through the dense, resistant stems, my back singing in ever higher keys of agony. By the time we had reached the tree I was sweating. Curiously, what I felt as I laboured behind Martin’s chair was not, as I might have expected, irritation with him for carelessly choosing so inaccessible a spot; rather, it was a more sober sense of the sacrifices his company entailed, sacrifices which I regarded separately from the fact that I was employed to make them. It was as if I was sizing him up for some other purpose; a development which I interpreted, with some annoyance, as a symptom of a more complex feeling, which his overtures in the bedroom had implanted in me. He had made me feel a responsibility for him greater than that which I was contracted to bear. I resented this imposition; and yet it felt in some way natural, as if all along I had been waiting for a burden to replace those I had shed by coming to the country in the first place.

‘My back hurts,’ I said, sitting down in the shade.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll do everything. Just lie flat for a bit.’

I did not want to lie flat, but I conceded that it might be efficacious. I heard Martin slither from his chair and closed my eyes. A warm breeze rolled gently off the meadow, stirring the leaves overhead. Images began to dance about in my mind. With them I felt the essence of myself unstoppered and diluted in my thoughts. Slowly, the partitions of time and place began to dissolve and my memories washed freely and incoherently like a great sea against the shores of the present. The crust of my body was pried loose; and I swam deep amongst flashes of childhood, faces at once strange and familiar, snatches of conversation, pieces of feeling broken off and left to drift far from their recollection; further and further, until finally I was washed up in a dry, hot place where the steady buzz of traffic rose from far below and a foreign sun pressed down hard on my back. Something dug into my stomach. My eyes were closed. I remembered a metal railing, rooted in the crumbling concrete of the balcony floor. Arcs of colour, strangely oleaginous, burst like liquid fireworks behind my eyelids. Blood pounded in my head, as if I were under water. I remembered then that I was upside-down, slung over the railing like a towel hung out to dry. Something curious had happened. I tried to recall what it was. There had been a change. I was no longer, for whatever reason, in the place I had always been. I had made some terrible journey, as if down a chute or across a bridge that had snapped behind me, from which I could not return. I had come to a place of inverse proportions to those which nature had dictated, where despair and darkness had overpowered light. I had a strong sense that I had committed a forbidden act in doing so; not because I had done something wrong, but because I had succumbed to a temptation which ought to have been resisted. Searching for some clearer recollection, I felt instead my sense of the meadow in which I lay grow immanent. My daydream wavered. I felt the grass beneath me, and the pain in my back, which had wandered like an idle guard, jumped smartly back into position. In that instant I remembered a dream I had once had, in which I had been shut in a dark room for hours and hours. Was that what I had been thinking of, as I lay there in the meadow? I had surfaced fully now into consciousness but my eyes remained shut. The memory of the dream was familiar, but it did not seem to fit. The more I thought of it, though, the more intangible the other recollection grew. I tried to grasp it but it dissolved, until I was no longer sure what exactly I was trying to remember.