Rachel Cusk: The Country Life

‘I know it’s awful to think of it now in this heat, but you can light a fire here in winter. The whole place gets pretty cosy. The kitchen’s through here,’ said Pamela, leading the way through a door on the far side of the room. ‘It’s all fairly basic, I’m afraid, but you can always gallop over to us for a bit of television and comfort in the evenings.’

Pamela, I realized, spoke a language of energetic emergency, in which problems were approached as violently as they were escaped from. We entered the kitchen, which was exiguous, and contained one or two old-fashioned cupboards and a stove such as I remembered from kitchens when I was a child. It had a similar smell, a vague and not unpleasant scent of gas and vinyl. There was a wooden table, two chairs, and a rickety little window which looked directly out from the back of the cottage onto a green wall of hedgerow.

‘It’s not ideal for dinner parties,’ said Pamela. She was not, it appeared, joking. ‘But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have someone to stay now and again.’

By ‘someone’ I guessed that she meant a relative or friend. I felt again the momentary, putative shadow of her disapproval, which swam deep beneath her conversation like a predatory fish. She opened a door to the right and proceeded into a tiny hallway. There were stairs up one side of it, and I realized that contrary to my original assessment there was in fact an upper floor.

‘The bathroom,’ she said, briskly opening a door beyond which I glimpsed a slightly cramped arrangement of bath, toilet and sink, with a squinting window sharing the same view as the kitchen. She shut the door again. ‘Up we go.’

The wooden staircase creaked as we ascended it, and Pamela bowed her head beneath the low ceiling.

‘And this is your bedroom,’ she said. ‘I think it’s rather sweet, don’t you?’

We had entered a low doorway and were now in a room to the side of the cottage with a slanted ceiling. I recognized the window as that which I had seen from outside. It was quite a light room, with beams similar to those downstairs and a floor which canted steeply downwards to the outer wall. In it there was a double bed with a flowered eiderdown, a wooden bedside table on which sat a lamp, a dark, polished wardrobe which leaned sideways with the floor, and a bookshelf with books on it.

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, proceeding to the window. When I looked through it, I received a shock. Although at an angle, the back of the big house and much of its garden was clearly visible. I had failed to orientate myself during our walk, and had thought the cottage much further away. I saw, as if by design, Mr Madden walking slowly across the lawn with a spade in his hand, thinking himself unobserved.

‘Look, there’s Mr Madden,’ I confessed.

‘You certainly can spy on us from here,’ said Pamela, crowding at the window behind me and looking out. She laughed. ‘It’s a pity we’re so terribly dull.’

After a few minutes we turned and proceeded carefully back down the narrow staircase, and seeing it all for the second time I was filled with a pleasantly proprietorial feeling. I opened the front door for Pamela and stood hospitably on the threshold while she took her leave.

‘Why don’t you take an hour or two just to feel your way around,’ she said, stepping out into the garden. ‘And then come over to the house for a drink at about six. Martin will be back from the centre by then, so we can all have a good chat before dinner.’

‘Fine,’ I nodded, accepting the plan with the mechanisms of a whole new system, which worked around me now like so many ropes and levers and pulleys.

‘See you later!’ said Pamela, and with a wave of the hand trod lightly off in the sun down the path. I watched her go from my front door, until she disappeared around the corner into the trees.

I will not go deeply into the state of my mind at this point, nor my feelings as I watched Pamela disappear from view and found myself alone. Indeed, it was not so very long — perhaps no more than an hour in all — since my solitude had been interrupted there at the train station, and returning to this element, made familiar to me over the past few days, I was surprised to notice that I felt more or less the same, despite the violent change in scenery, as I had in London. The brief and brilliant novelty of arriving at Franchise Farm seemed to be no more than a detour on the long, featureless road of my loneliness. Taking the first opportunity to examine myself, I had expected to discover that my metamorphosis had already taken place, or at least was exhibiting sure signs of being in progress. My disappointment when I found that nothing, as yet, had happened to me was intense; but personal change, I now know, is a long and slow process of attrition, its many meticulous blows invisible to the naked eye. My first encounter with the Maddens, though I didn’t see it at the time, was but a wave crashing against a stony flank of rock, whose wet glister dries and fades within seconds in the sun. It would take many, many repetitions for this effervescence to erode hard and stubborn stone; but it would. It had motion on its side, and the moon. There was, of course, a darker destiny written within my metaphor if one cared to look for it; for at the end of it all, these ancient tides would remain unchanged, while I would be diminished.

As it happened, I did not have much time to reflect on this or any other matter. I had closed the door and begun to wander slowly about the downstairs rooms, engaging in the subtle wrestling for dominion which more usually characterizes the first encounter between two humans, urging my surroundings to submit to familiarity and liking. I had begun, rather primitively, I am afraid, to open the kitchen cupboards and pry inside them, when a loud knock came upon the door. In so small a cottage, with the fragile barrier between inside and out which I mentioned earlier, a knock on the door can be a rather threatening thing. In a larger house, a knock or ring is a plea for entrance; in a small place such as my own, it is a demand. I hesitated. The knock came again. I realized then that I had been frightened by the unexpected noise, rather than the identity of the knocker; for who could it be but one of the Maddens, or perhaps dear old Thomas, the gardener? Hurrying now, I skipped through the sitting room and opened the door. There, indeed, stood Mr Madden, tall and rather out of place in my quaint and miniature garden. A blast of heat came in around him.

‘Settling in?’ he enquired. His face was very red, and he was wet. His shirt was sticking to his chest at the front, forming a long, damp delta between his ribs. At first I thought that he must have fallen into a body of water on his way, but soon realized that he was merely sweating profusely. ‘I’ve brought over your cases.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. I wondered whether I should invite him in, knowing that my decision would ‘set’ all future policy for visits between the two properties. ‘It’s terribly hot, isn’t it?’

‘Going to be a heatwave,’ puffed Mr Madden, wiping his brow. ‘Good news for us, of course.’

He turned and looked at the bright, twittering garden.

‘Well, I’ll let you get on,’ he said finally. He picked up the suitcases and heaved them past me just inside the front door, withdrawing immediately from the threshold. ‘You’re coming over later, are you?’

‘Pamela said to come at six.’

‘Righty-ho.’

I saw that our early intimacy was struggling to survive, and that we were now speaking through Pamela, as if on telephones linked by her exchange. Unfortunately, I could think of nothing to say which would rescue our nascent friendship. Mr Madden turned with a sort of lurch, and trod heavily off down the path, raising his hand behind him in farewell.