Rachel Cusk: The Country Life

‘Thomas been yet?’ said Mr Madden behind me. ‘I want to tell him about that gate. Bloody nuisance.’

‘He telephoned earlier. He’s had to drive his wife to the dentist.’ Pamela laughed, and began to speak in a voluble country brogue. ‘ Mrs Ma-adde? The wife’s been taken poorly with ‘er tooth. She’s in tumble pain.’

‘Well, did he say when he’d be over?’ said Mr Madden.

‘Mr Thomas is our gardener,’ said Pamela, turning to me. ‘He’s a very dear old chap, but he does find things like telephones rather difficult. It scares the living daylights out of you. That you, Mrs Ma-adde? ’ she said, doing her deafening imitation again, in spite of the scant encouragement she’d received for it. ‘He said he’d be over later, darling, so do stop worrying.’

We were all seated around the table by this time, Mr Madden with his tea now in front of him. I could not prevent myself from being intrigued by what I had seen of the Maddens’ relationship to each other, and the part in it which I had so far played. There was something almost combative in the way they behaved, and by my playing a part I only mean that the presence of a third person appeared to have set their game in motion, as a net would a tennis match or a pitch a bout of football. I noticed — not without some satisfaction, I’m afraid — that Mr Madden had seemed far happier in the car with me than he did in the presence of Pamela. Indeed, he looked rather sullen, staring down at his tea like an adolescent, his black hair flopping over his eyes, his large frame recumbent with that limpness slightly menacing in men, as if at any moment they could explode.

‘Jolly good,’ he said.

‘I think Stella would probably like some time to just regroup,’ said Pamela after a pause. She said it brightly, looking at Mr Madden. ‘Shall I take her over and settle her in?’

Mr Madden, still slumped in his chair, took in a large quantity of air and held it in his lungs so that his cheeks puffed out. He nodded vigorously, and then expelled the air slowly through his nostrils.

‘Right!’ Pamela stood up and grinned at me slightly wildly. ‘Shall we go?’

I stood up obediently and began immediately to make my way to the door. Behind me, Pamela lingered.

‘Darling, you won’t forget to dig up some potatoes and things for dinner, will you? And if there are any gooseberries left you could get those too and I’ll make a pie.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Right,’ said Mr Madden. I heard his chair scrape across the floor. ‘I’ll go and do that now.’

Pamela’s footsteps came behind me, and I moved forwards through the doorway. Ahead of me was a small and very dark hallway which I did not remember, with three doors, all of them closed. I stopped, confused, and felt Pamela crowd behind me.

‘It’s the one on the left,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

We entered a long, narrow corridor, with white walls and a low ceiling.

‘Right down to the end,’ said Pamela from behind.

I proceeded to the end of the corridor, which lay around a bend, where I found a door. There being no other option, I opened it, and was surprised when a bank of sunlight and a haze of bushy greenery burst upon me. I could hear the sounds of birds, and the faint, throaty noise of an engine far away. My feet crunched on gravel, and I felt the sun pound on the top of my head.

‘We’ve put you over in the cottage,’ said Pamela, taking the lead. We were following a gravel path leading away from the house, on either side of which was a tall, perfectly squared hedge. Surreptitiously I ran a hand along the green wall, half expecting it to be solid, and was surprised by its prickly give. ‘It’s tiny but very sweet, and I thought you’d want your privacy. If you get lonely you can always bolt back to the house and we’ll sign over one of the spare rooms.’

It took me some time to absorb this information. Naturally, I had assumed that I would be living at close quarters with the Maddens, and having abandoned all thoughts of privacy or independence in my new life I greeted their unexpected return with ambivalence. It struck me then that the cottage arrangement could, on the contrary, entail privations more dire than those of which I just been relieved; namely that I would in all probability be sharing it with another of the Maddens’ dependants, perhaps Mr Thomas and his ailing wife. I did not relish this prospect, and yet it seemed impossible that I would have a cottage all to myself. Not wishing to appear grasping or ungrateful, I felt unable to quiz Pamela on the subject, which taunted me along the path with alternating delight and dread.

We rounded a bend in the path and there, suddenly upon us, was a vision. It was an old white cottage, built on a single storey, with a thick thatched roof which slanted so low over the front that it resembled a long fringe with two eyes and a nose — the windows and door — beneath it. From the top protruded a chimney, and to the side, I could just see, was a tiny window in the angle of the roof. It was so small that one could take it all in from a single standing position. There was a wrought-iron gate in front of us, beyond which a narrow path led up to the door. On either side of the path was a square of garden, and the whole thing was surrounded by a tall, thick tangle of hedgerows and trees which gave it an atmosphere of shady secrecy. The garden itself was unruly, with sprays of wild flowers and some kind of fruit tree in the middle. On the front of the cottage was a splash of vines, as if the garden had risen up like a large wave and crashed against it.

‘Mrs Barker’s been in to tidy up, but Heaven knows what kind of state it’s in,’ said Pamela, opening the gate. ‘Our last girl was not the most responsible creature in the world. You’re free to brighten it up with anything you can find, and Thomas will come and do battle with the grass for you every couple of weeks.’

At this I deduced, with a cautious pirouette of glee, that I was to have sole command of this vision. We were standing in the buzzing garden now, in the sun, and the heat fused with the birdsong to form a single, pulsing note which thrilled in my heart. The cottage seemed to me to be the loveliest thing I had ever seen. It was in my mouth to ask Pamela why she herself did not live here, before I remembered that of course they had the big house, and that my rhapsodies were those of scale and expectation. Like a child in a room of adults, I had sought out only what was in my line of vision, what represented my own proportions; and consequently found more to please me in this miniature place than I had in its grander neighbour.

‘So what do you think?’ said Pamela coyly, turning to me with her hands on her hips. Her eyes were wrinkled in the sun.

‘Oh, it’s lovely!’ I said. ‘I didn’t expect anything like this at all.’

‘Well, it is rather useful,’ said she, with evident satisfaction. ‘These arrangements can be tricky, and this just makes everyone feel a bit more their own person.’

She led the way to the front door and wrenched it open.

‘You’ve got to give it a good shove,’ she said.

I followed her inside and immediately felt the stony coolness which is a feature of older buildings. The front door gave immediately on to a small sitting room — there being no hallway — with a low ceiling boned with dark beams and the two windows on the other side of which we had been seconds earlier. I had never been in a place with so insubstantial a threshold between inside and out. At one end of the room was a fireplace with another beam above it, and in front of that were a sofà and armchair covered in flowered material with a low table between them. There were several faded, brownspotted pictures on the wall. They looked like maps, although the lines were so faint that it was impossible to see what they might represent.