Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

‘ I don’t hate anything,’ said Martin, perplexed.

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Like what?’

‘Your mother,’ I said cruelly, holding up my fingers as he had done, as if I were about to embark on a list.

‘My mother? Why on earth do you think I hate her?’

‘I — it’s obvious.’ I folded my arms.

‘No it’s not!’ he said. His body was rigid with affront and his voice young and anxious. ‘What made you think that?’

‘The way you talk to her, for a start.’ My brief flash of confidence began abruptly to fade, revealing a darker feeling of dread. ‘And that picture you drew. The one at the centre.’

‘That?’ Martin looked genuinely confused. ‘That isn’t like her at all!’

‘It seemed — critical,’ I said lamely.

‘It’s just not very good.’

‘Sorry.’

We sat in silence. I found the difficulty of remaining in a normal upright posture considerable.

‘It’s all right,’ said Martin presently. ‘I suppose I can see why you might have — well, she’s sometimes not the easiest person to get along with. She had a frustrating life, stuck here with the farm and all of us. I think she’d have liked to have a career, and some time on her own. She’s sad, too.’

‘What about?’

‘Oh, something that happened a long time ago.’ He tore up a few blades of grass and scattered them. ‘Father’s not the easiest person in the world to be married to, either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he depends on her for everything these days. He had quite an unhappy childhood himself. His father committed suicide.’

‘Why?’

‘Dunno. He was an army chap. Couldn’t cope when he retired or something. Dad was an only child. His parents were quite elderly. I think his mother went a bit mad after that.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, he won’t talk about it. Mum says it was pretty grim. Anyway, he joined the army himself eventually but then he got discharged because he went bonkers. Then he met Mum. She saved his bacon. She’d do anything for him. And for us. She’s the one that keeps it all together, Stel-la.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s no good saying that if people aren’t perfect you’re not going to love them, Stel-la. That’s what families are all about. They absorb things. They grow round them. They may end up looking all twisted and ugly, but at least they’re strong.’

There was a long silence. Martin plucked at the grass. I lay down again on my back and closed my eyes. As I did so, I was all at once transported away from Martin and the meadow by a memory which sprang up in my mind so fully-formed and clear that it seemed to pulse with life. The memory was of my family sitting in the garden of our house. It was before the death of my younger brother, which I mentioned early on in my story, and which cast a long and stifling shadow over everything that came after it. It was the absence of this shadow, rather than any real sense of my own age at the time, which located the memory in my early adolescence. It was distinctly sunlit; and by that I do not mean only that the background was that of summer, but also that the atmosphere contained an element of which I was not of course aware at the time but the chill of whose absence I felt afterwards, when it had drained from our house as suddenly as if a plug had been pulled on it. It wasn’t happiness, or even contentment; merely, I suppose, unawareness. We had not yet been singled out by tragedy; and as such could conduct our lives with an anonymity, a lack of self-consciousness, which was later unavailable to us.

In this memory I was lying on a blanket on the lawn. My younger brother was nearby on some forgotten business, a fleeting figure in a striped T-shirt. The other was sitting directly in front of me on a deckchair. He was wearing a pair of shorts, and his sturdy legs, over which crawled a fascination of dark hairs, were planted firmly in a V to either side of me. He was reading something out loud which was making us laugh; for he was a comedian in those days, a talent eroded by the steady, subsequent tides of sad years. My parents were sitting next to him at a small table, playing cards. I had entirely forgotten how much they used to love cards; how we would come downstairs in the mornings and find them already into their second hand of whist or rummy, the house littered with scraps of paper used as scoresheets, covered in my father’s exact writing.

I felt the warmth of the sun on my back, heard the sound of my brother’s voice and the giggles rumbling up from my squashed stomach. I was happy. I was happy. The memory stayed and stayed; and then gradually it became more muted, immobile, frozen into a single, inaccessible image, like a snapshot.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, shall we go?’ said Martin.

We packed up our picnic things and Martin hauled himself into his chair. My back was in agony when I stood up.

‘I could use a nap,’ said Martin, as we set off, ‘after all this excitement. Wine makes me sleepy. Would you mind?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve got plenty to do.’

I took him back to the house. Pamela was still out, and the rooms were quiet. I deposited him in his bedroom and went back down through the cool, empty hall and out of the front door.

No sooner had I turned away from the house with the intention of setting off down the drive than I caught sight of the figure of Toby advancing from a right angle across the gravel. He was striding from between the hedgerows, naked to the waist, his hair unkempt, stray wands of straw clinging to his jeans. I froze in my tracks at this vision, which had aroused in me an immediate feeling of panic.

‘Hal- lo !’ he cried, waving one hand while the other clutched his shirt. He was extremely red from the sun, the burnish of activity rather than the perilous scarlet of sunburn, and a varnish of sweat glinted across the tantalizing geography of his chest. I deduced that he had just come from his work in the top field: the labour, I felt, suited him far better than his customarily sybaritic demeanour. His face wore an almost joyous expression, although it struck me that it was perhaps in the novelty rather than the virtue of manual work that he had found pleasure. He drew close, grinning and panting; at which his physical presence became so overwhelming and pointed that it took on a distinct embodiment, as if a third person were with us whom it would be impolite, or at least strange, not to acknowledge.

‘The sun always makes me horny,’ he said presently, grinning wider still. ‘Doesn’t it you?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said bravely, after a pause. The words, or at least the sentiment with which they concurred, were unsuited to my voice. So clearly did they mark me out as an impostor in the region of sexual banter that I was certain Toby would expel me from it with a scornful laugh; but he merely stretched luxuriantly, showing me the bearded nooks of his armpits.

‘Off for a walk?’ he said, stroking his flat belly. I had a curious sensation as I watched his hands touch his own glandless flesh, the sense of some void or lack.

‘Yes.’

‘Very energetic of you, I must say, I was just going to wallow in the pool for a bit. I’ve been sweating like a pig all morning.’ He surveyed me idly. I wondered if he was going to invite me to wallow with him; but then his attention sauntered away. ‘How do I look?’ he said, flexing one arm and then the other and looking down at himself. ‘I’m turning into a bit of a hunk, don’t you think? It’s the equivalent of spending all day weightlifting. And you get far browner moving around than you do just lying there.’ He ran his fingers over the skin of his arm and peered closely at it, rapt in the science of his own vanity. ‘You’ve gone quite a nice colour,’ he added, extending his investigations to me. He held out his forearm, crooked at the elbow, as if offering to partner me in a dance. ‘Let’s have a look. Yes,’ he concluded, when I placed my arm beside his own, ‘you see, you probably won’t get much darker than that because you’re fair-skinned. I’m lucky, I go really black.’