The Country Life Read online

  The Country Life

  RACHEL CUSK

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  My thanks go to Bridget Lutyens and John Cox of Slade Farm, Dulverton, for showing me the country life; to my editor Katie Owen, as always, for the resilience of both her displeasure and her talents; and to Josh Hillman.

  For my parents, with love

  What makes the corncrops glad, under which star

  To turn the soil, Maecenas, and wed your vines

  To elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks,

  All the experience thrifty bees demand –

  Such are the themes of my song.

  Virgil, The Georgics

  Chapter One

  I was to take the four o’clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley, a small town some three miles, I had been told, from the village of Hilltop. The short notice at which I was required had left me with little time for more than a glance at the area on a map, where I had learned only that the two names belonged to the lower part of the county of Sussex, and where I had gained the impression of a series of subdivisions eventually resulting in a narrow scribble of road and terminating in the dot of my destination. The prospect of travelling away from London was an unnatural one. Some gravitational principle appeared to be being defied in doing so. Tracing the route with my finger, the distance seemed more unsustainable as it grew, and once beyond the city’s edge took on in my mind the resistance of an inhospitable element, as if I were now forging out to sea or tunnelling underground. To me the town of Buckley was as remote an outpost as an Antarctic station, and, still further, the village of Hilltop – represented there by a dot, as I have said – seemed to promise neither oxygen nor human life.

  It was normal, of course, that I should feel some anxiety about my departure. Not only was I setting out to a place I had never been before; I was also embarking on a kind of life about which I knew nothing; and what is more, stripping myself of all that was familiar to me into the bargain. We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place; and if for some reason we are thrown off course, or the place itself, once reached, is not what we hoped for, then we must strike out at whatever risk to set things right. Not all of these forays need have the drastic flavour of my own leap into the unknown; some are such subtle turnings that it is only afterwards that one looks back and sees what it was all leading to. But to drift, blown this way and that, or for that matter to pursue a wrong course for the sake of fear or pride, costs time; and we none of us have too much of that.

  I had been given only three days in which to make my arrangements, and as these were absolute required a consideration at once speedy and measured. Fortunately, I have a keen organizational facility, and am able to marshal a group of factors with speed. Judging the letters to be the most important of my duties, I accorded them first place. The tying up of all affairs concerning my flat had therefore to be put second, although the immediate anxiety caused by this deferral tempted me momentarily to promote it. The packing of my suitcase was relegated to the hours prior to catching my train.

  As I had expected, the letters took far more time than was really – given the uncertainty with which I could prophesy their effect – their due. I found myself wretchedly unable to achieve the result I desired, despite the fact that, if I had been honest, I would have admitted that I had been writing such letters secretly in my head ever since I was a child. The problem with the letters, as they stood in my mind, was that the ramblings to which I had given subconscious voice over the years lacked the economy crucial to the rendering on the page of an atmosphere of severance. As one sheet became four – closely written on both sides – I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the confessional, injured tone I had adopted. Such a tone, I realized, was useful only if covertly or otherwise one wanted to continue relations with the person addressed, but must get things off one’s chest first. I tore up the letters and began afresh. Now, however, I spurned elaboration too forcefully. The tone was bitter, and the sentiments cruel with abbreviation. I worked late into the night and eventually achieved something which, if far from perfect, at least skirted the neighbouring chasms of self-pity and vitriol with relative composure.

  4 Hercules Street

  London

  Dear Mr Farquarson

  I am writing to inform you of my resignation, with immediate effect, from the firm. I do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

  Yours sincerely

  Stella Benson

  4 Hercules Street

  London

  Dear Mother and Father

  I know that this letter will come as a surprise, and probably a shock, to you, but I suppose that if we all lived our lives only to avoid worrying our parents nothing much would ever be achieved. The fact is that I have been unhappy for a long time. While I don’t exactly blame you for this I still think that it probably has a lot to do with you, so on balance I think it would be better for me if we didn’t see each other any more. I am going away, so that should be that. I have told Edward what I am intending to do. Please don’t try to find me.

  Your daughter

  Stella

  PS. I know you will be worrying about the flat. Perhaps you should just sell it, as I obviously won’t be needing it any more. I’ve left quite a few things here. You can sell those too. Please don’t be angry with me.

  4 Hercules Street

  London

  Dear Edward

  I hope you had a good holiday. You will have noticed that I was not around when you got back. That is because I have gone away for good, so don’t worry that I’ve had an accident or anything. I’m not telling you where I’m going, and I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than try and find out. I’m sorry I can’t explain this any better, but I don’t think you would understand. I hope you have a good life.

  Yours

  Stella

  PS. I can just see your face while you’re reading this!

  I sealed these letters, there at the table in the middle of the night, just in case I was tempted to look at them again in the morning and tear them up. This later proved both an insufficient deterrent and an irksome obstacle to my crossing out that postscript in the letter to Edward, which I was driven to do after waking in the night, resealing the envelope with Sellotape.

  My letter to my parents at least had the advantage of saving me time in consideration of the problem of my flat. While writing, I had had the opportunity to think things through, and had found that the very action of putting pen to paper had simplified the issue. The flat was not, in the very strictest sense, my responsibility; this sense being that although I had enjoyed unchallenged dominion over it since the day of its purchase, in fact it belonged to my parents. I had intended to rent it out for them, believing, in the way that a small sum of money can repay in the mind debts several times its size, that my remaining time in London was so elastic that it could encompass ambitions which extended far beyond it; but I now saw this intention for what it was, a valedi
ctory gesture designed to solicit the approval of those whose fury was the one certain outcome of my move to the country. It was to avoid precisely this type of intrigue that I was going; and I discharged the whole fraught matter without delay. In doing so I had the sensation of lightness I remembered from Rome, when it had been enough to convince me that I could jump from high up over the city where I stood and would not fall. Feeling it again, I could admit that its absence since had worried me. I had been relying on the memory of it and my memory had become a tattered paper, like the letter which sustains love between people far away from each other.

  Of course, I wanted to leave things in as orderly a state as possible, so that when my parents eventually called at the scene they would find nothing to displease them; no trace, in short, of myself. This process gave me a feeling, which increased as the hours laboured by, of being gradually but forcefully expelled, not just from my home but from all that had constituted my life up until that point, So unaccountable, in fact, did I begin to feel that had I not been so busy I would probably have committed some criminal or otherwise irresponsible act. Let me say that the most powerful part of the sensation by far lay in my feeling not of being pushed out, but rather of being drawn irresistibly towards something new. My pristine flat had the still-warm, thronging emptiness of a station after a train has departed elsewhere. I should add here, lest this seems too poetic, that my great clean-out went beyond the merely sanitary and involved what could without exaggeration be called the destruction of all evidence that I had ever existed. The purge was far from easy, for my mementoes – I suppose inevitably – reminded me of forgotten episodes, both good and bad. I had not thought my life to be so large, and occasionally, as I wrestled with it there on the sitting room floor, I felt myself to be engaged in mortal combat with a creature which writhed and bit as I sought to slay it. At other times I felt such a drowsy reluctance infuse my limbs that my resolution wavered in the very midst of its work. In these moments I felt quite outside myself, as if I didn’t care whether I stayed or went, nor indeed about anything that might happen to me. Once or twice I came upon something particularly sentimental and was almost drowned in a wave of self-pity and regret, wondering why it was that I felt so keen to give away every vestige of love I had ever earned. Minutes later some article of shame would provide a bitter chaser for my sickened palate, and I would come alive with purpose, working faster to free myself as if from beneath a fallen beam.

  Towards evening I unearthed a packet of letters, addressed to me at school, which my father had written to me. They did not come, I should explain, directly from him – my father found emissions of feeling difficult, and any betrayal of fondness was always followed by a pantomime of disownment – but rather via the persona of Bounder, our dog.

  Kennel House

  Canine Close

  Barking

  Dear Stella

  How are you? Is it raining ‘cats and dogs’ there like it is here? I’ve had to repair the woof of my kennel as it keeps leaking. Sometimes, when it’s raining, my master lets me come into the house, but my mistress usually finds some excuse to throw me out again. It’s a ‘dog’s life’.

  I hope you are working hard. You don’t get a second chance with your education. And don’t get into trouble – you don’t want to in-cur any punishments!

  Your faithful friend

  Bounder

  I was very unhappy at school at this time, and as you can imagine, such letters did little to comfort or cajole me. It might give you a fuller picture of my parents’ characters to know that the ‘here’ and ‘there’ referred to in Bounder’s letter were in fact barely a mile apart. The notion that it could rain in one place and not the other certainly betrays a deep delusion on the part of my parents, who never otherwise hinted that they were anything but convinced of their decision to send me to a boarding school within walking distance of their house. Lest you think that I would have preferred a more far-flung institution, and that they kept me close by them for the sake of affection, let me tell you that I saw no more of my parents than the other girls did of theirs; and further, that I detested every day that I spent in that hellish place and begged to be sent elsewhere.

  My predicament was, I now see, the result of my parents’ own insecurities. Aspiring to a social position to which they had not been born, they believed it correct to expel their children from the family home and live amongst its empty, echoing bedrooms in miserable solitude. Being also, however, thoroughly provincial in nature, they believed it impossible that any school could be better than those found locally; and that the convenience with which they could visit us and attend school functions, not to mention savings in telephone calls and travel expenses, outweighed both the greater convenience and enormous financial benefit of having us at home.

  My brothers were scarcely any better off, and indeed once the tide of my own injury had drawn back and the years neutered its memory somewhat, I was able to feel more aggrieved on their behalf than on my own. Like me, they were sent ‘away’. The elder thought himself happy enough within those high and privileged walls; but when finally he returned it became clear that he had left something vital and precious behind. It was probably for his own good that he himself never seemed to notice the loss; and how could he? For it was as if, while maintaining his outward appearance, everything in him had been minced into an undifferentiated mass and then reformed in a blander, more homogenous shape.

  Not fitted to ran with the elite, the younger was doomed in one way or another to become its prey. The accident occurred on the school playing fields, which my brother was crossing on his way back from his violin lesson. These lessons were a torment to my brother, who, unbeknownst to his teachers or fellow pupils, suffered from deafness in one ear. It is difficult to comprehend how this disability could have gone unnoticed; and perhaps in a more confident pupil it wouldn’t have. My brother, however, scion of the brutal bourgeoisie, carrying the weight of my parents’ hopes on his small shoulders, was an accomplice in the matter of his own oppression. He struggled to keep up in the classroom, learned with admirable skill to participate in conversations half of which he did not hear, sawed weekly at his violin, and never once considered that he might be happier were he to free himself from this intolerable burden. Labouring under it, then, as he crossed the grass, he did not notice a javelin competition being held at the other end of the playing field. Witnesses claimed that they shouted at him to duck as the pole came hurtling through the air towards him; and there is no reason, I suppose, not to believe them, when you consider that at least three of them required ‘counselling’ after the event, which suggests at least that they were, as individuals, less callous than the forms their community took. My brother’s deafness, as you will have guessed, made any warning to little avail. The deadly instrument felled him where he stood, impaling his small body on the grass like a bird struck by an arrow. He was thirteen yean old, a year younger than me.

  Many things came to pass as a result of this dreadful event. I will not go into them now. Of all the questions that were asked, however, of all the enquiries painfully made amidst expressions of regret and grief, one was never ventured: to wit, briefly, what arcane and pointless practice was this that deprived my brother of his life? That my parents never asked it was, to me, a measure of the unforgivable awe with which they still regarded the institution that had been so careless with their son. They didn’t dare; as if by questioning the sport they would have betrayed their inferiority, the public discovery of which they feared more than all the private sorrow in the world. It has haunted me through the years, even now that my brother is but a shadow, a ghost that flits, unrestful, about my thoughts.

  To return to my clear-out, I disposed of Bounder’s correspondence with mingled grief and venom. A similarly sized bundle of letters from my mother – with whose contents, which bored me even at the time, I shall not now detain you – followed it; and so on, until all the messy spoils of the past, accumulated over such stretch
es of time, won in conflicts both arduous and joyful; the whole long, tiring campaign of my existence was parcelled up into three large bags and put downstairs for the proper authorities to dispose of.

  Chapter Two

  I stood outside Buckley station, with one suitcase on the ground on either side of me, and waited. I had worried that Mr Madden would, never having met me before, have difficulty recognizing me when I arrived, but the station building and forecourt were more or less empty. As I stood there, however, my suitcases picking me out like quotation marks, I found that my attempt to conduct this simple train of thought in a logical manner was strangely confounded. I saw that the station was deserted, but failed to register the significance of this sight in relation to my anxieties concerning my arrival and recognition. Indeed, my acknowledgement of the emptiness of my surroundings, rather than reassuring me as to the ease with which I would be noticed standing there, lacked all memory of the importance the state of the station had assumed in my thoughts previously. This, it soon became clear, was the fault of an entirely new anxiety, which at the sight of the deserted station – a sight I did not, as I have said, find reassuring in any case – now came to torment me. What surprised me was how quickly this second anxiety had superseded the first. It suggested a certain powerlessness to my position, as if my only existence, my only mental function, was to register with each passing second the uncertain outcome of the next.

  My anxiety, naturally enough I suppose, was as to the whereabouts of Mr Madden, whose absence at the scene of my arrival I had not, trapped as I was in this new, contingent, and entirely linear mode of thought, even considered. I wondered whether he could have had an accident on his way; a thought I entertained only briefly and with a distinct lack of concern. I could, and did, as I stood there, admit that Mr Madden’s existence was as yet a matter of complete indifference to me; and right up until the very second of his arrival would remain that way. It was interesting to think that, perhaps in five minutes’ time, I might care about something for which at the present moment I had no feelings whatever. The fact that I was giving such undue attention to my lack of feelings for Mr Madden began itself to seem rather portentous. I wondered whether some significance were being telegraphed to me from the future; a future in which, for example, I would fall in love with Mr Madden and look back on my former indifference with astonishment; or, if my love were unrequited, with longing. Perhaps, on the other hand, this message was reaching me not from the future but from a different room of the present. Were I to discover that Mr Madden had indeed met with an accident on his way to collect me, would I be glad of my impartiality or sorry for it? Could the very fact that I had thought of him having an accident have brought the accident about? And how would his accident affect my contract of employment with the Maddens? Was it selfish or merely practical to consider this aspect of things at a time like this, my indifference towards Mr Madden having already been established?