Rachel Cusk - The Country Life

It is difficult to consign any event to mere regret, no matter how unpleasant; and the thought of making simultaneous use of two of the darker episodes in my sojourn in the country in this way gathered more appeal with every moment. What, indeed, could be more pleasant on my day off than to sit in the sun and drink champagne; a plan I would never have conceived myself, but on which fate had now kindly insisted by bringing about the accident in the kitchen?

Borne along on this highly coloured wave of logic, I picked up the bottle of champagne, down whose sides chilly beads of moisture now alluringly ran, and went with it out into the garden. From the cool of the kitchen I had momentarily forgotten the heat outside, and as it bludgeoned me along the gravel path I wavered in my resolve. How pleasant could it be, sitting out in the sun? I would have to force myself to do it; and there was no point in being degenerate if it required an effort to do so. I rounded the corner and emerged on the back lawn, where the garden table and chairs sat displayed in an inviting circle. As I saw them, I had an idea. Placing the champagne on the table, I turned and retraced my steps back up the path. I was looking for the umbrella, which I clearly remembered Mr Madden producing on more than one occasion and slotting into the hole at the centre of the table. He had certainly carried it from the side of the house, but it seemed unlikely to me that such an unwieldy object would be kept inside. I guessed that it was in the shed, the door to which stood just beyond the back door at the end of the path. This process of deduction was far from arduous, but nonetheless I was gratified when I opened the shed door to find the umbrella collapsed and leaning against the wall directly in front of me. It was a clumsy object to carry, and surprisingly heavy, but I succeeded after some manoeuvring in removing it from the shed, whereupon I began to drag it along the path back towards the lawn.

At that moment I heard a faint, rapid patter of footsteps ahead of me. Instinctively I stopped short; but before I could even register the sound, a great dog came hurtling around the corner of the house, and skidded to a halt at the sight of me, planting itself in my path. I say ‘a dog’; of course, I knew it to be Roy, but detached from his owners he lost the patina of tameness and reverted to the condition of a beast. He lifted his head menacingly, ears alert. A stone of fear dropped down the well of my body. I could see the white points of his teeth flashing in his drooling muzzle. His black belly heaved surreptitiously beneath his rigid frame. The heat rained down between us.

‘Hello, Roy,’ I said.

At the sound of my voice, a terrible snarl began to emanate from within the vice of his teeth. He drew back slightly in a tensile crouch, his eyes yellow with suspicion.

‘It’s all right, Roy,’ I shrilled. ‘It’s only me.’

In a flash he was galloping towards me with a volley of savage barking, moisture flying from his gnashing jaws, his shining, muscled body madly contorted in a frenzy of attack. With the dreaminess of terror I watched him come. He landed in front of me with a giant pounce, his legs splayed, writhing as if swarmed by invisible bees, and seemed to gather himself in for another leap. What happened next was so clearly a matter of instinct rather than calculation that I cannot blame myself for it. As he readied himself to spring on me, I remembered the umbrella in my hand. In sheer self-defence I thrust it forward like a lance, rooting myself behind it. The dog leaped; and as he flew through the air, a chasm of horror and disbelief yawned open between us. I met his eyes, suspended in the moment before his collision, and saw them register the canopied pole, the unavoidability of impact. The seconds slowed to a crawl; and then snapped back with a thud as his forehead hit the metal head of the umbrella. His body gave a great flip, tossing itself high in the air and landing with a smack on the gravel, where it lay inertly on its side.

I stood, unable to move, the umbrella still gripped in my hands, for some time. The black heap at my feet was motionless, gorgeous with glossy fur and plump flesh. Roy did not, in so far as I was able to see, appear to be breathing. My fear of him dead was triple that which I had had of him alive, even during his last, brutal moments. I could not bring myself even to take a step towards him, let alone try to help or resuscitate him. Through this curious, shameful terror I tried to assess the implications of this latest and most unfortunate development. To have murdered Roy, even in self-defence, presented extraordinary, perhaps insurmountable, social difficulties. How could the Maddens comprehend, let alone forgive, it? I felt a constriction in my chest and had a sudden sensation of faintness. My entire body, I realized, was trembling. The sun seared the top of my head. Fresh cascades of sweat erupted from my pores. I had to get into the shade and sit down.

Weakly I hoisted the umbrella onto my hip, and slowly, pressing myself as far into the hedge to my right as I could, began inching my way along the path. As soon as I was past the body, I broke into a crazed, awkward run and heard a preternatural shriek stream from my lips. I scarcely felt the weight of the umbrella as I dragged it, still running, around the corner and on to the back lawn. Somehow I managed to lift it above my head and slot it into its hole. The thud it made as it fell into place provided a ghastly echo of Roy’s collision. I wrestled, whimpering, with the sprung mechanism which raised the canopy, and finally collapsed into the white plastic garden chair beside me.

For a while my thoughts thrashed about, trying to find some escape from the unalterable fact of Roy’s demise. It was becoming steadily more clear, in the oblique fashion of something profoundly denied, that I was going to be unable to do anything about the situation. My hand sought the bottle of champagne which sat before me on the table. The reminder it provided of the insignificance of my earlier crime was comforting. I drank some of it down. It was warm, having been sitting in the sun, and my empty stomach shifted queasily. After a few mouthfuls I got up again and returned to the corner of the house, where it met the gravel path. Peering around it, I saw to my disappointment that the black heap remained exactly as it had been. So incredible did the episode seem to me, and so forceful was my denial of it, that I had honestly expected to discover that I had imagined it, or at least that it had been negated by some greater and more rational force. I was troubled by the abject appearance of the body. It looked smaller than it had before. Also, something had happened to Roy’s fur. It was suddenly all rough and mangy. I wondered if this were an effect of the strong sunlight, and whether I should cover him up lest he actually begin to decompose. I went and sat down again. There was nothing else, marooned as I was in misfortune, that I could do. Tears of frustration filled my eyes and I banged my hand on the table, causing the bottle to leap in the air so that I had to throw myself forward to catch it. I broke into a fresh sweat. My bare thighs slimed grotesquely against one another, and I could feel the lagoons of moisture beneath my arms. I raised the bottle of champagne to my lips and drank thirstily from it.

Just then, the inviting turquoise of the swimming pool on the other side of the lawn caught my eye. It may seem curious that the idea of swimming had not suggested itself until that moment; but the ceaseless postponements to which I had been subject over the course of the past week had instilled their discipline in me. I had become servile; and was by now so used to regarding the pool as a mere feature of the landscape that I had more or less forgotten its purpose. I gave a yelp of joy and rose from my chair. My current dishevelment, combined with all the memories of this longed-for but withheld pleasure that I had accrued, stirred up in me an almost painful feeling of anticipation. My skin prickled and gushed at the thought of its imminent immersion. My scalp burned, yearning for the cool water. Having thought of it, it seemed unbearable that I would have to delay swimming by even one more minute; and given that any expedition in search of a costume would necessitate an encounter with Roy, not to mention trespassing into the mysteries of Pamela’s bedroom, I decided to eschew the appropriate attire and swim in my underwear. Who, after all, would see me? And even if they did, it would be with accusations of a far more serious nature than indecency that they would regale me.