The Country Life Page 4

  ‘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.

  Chapter Four

  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.

  Not wishing to shut the door rudely on his retreating form, I strayed out into the garden after him, vaguely imagining that I could busy myself there. I walked around a little, shielding my eyes from the sun, but my botanical illiteracy – as opposed to the domestic fluency with which I was finding my way around the cottage – set me rather at odds with my surroundings. I don’t wish to give the impression that the garden displeased me in any way. It was simply that it seemed far less mine than the house, and I was very glad to re
call that Mr Thomas was to take responsibility for subduing it. Still, I stood my ground for several minutes there on the grass, until something large and buzzing swam up before my eyes and collided with my forehead. I recoiled, crying out, although there was no pain. It was then, as my heart thumped with the shock, that I became aware of a menacing edge to the heat of the day, as if the sun had boiled over or burst its confines in some way. All at once I could bear it no longer, and hurried back into the cottage.

  The two hours passed there quite quickly. Desperate suddenly to cool myself down, I ran a cold bath in the narrow tub, and lay in it for a while. The intimate sight of my naked body was oddly embarrassing in the foreign bathroom. It was difficult to relax while so exposed in a new place, the timbre of whose interruptions and emergencies were still unfamiliar to me. I was anxiously braced for another knock at the door, or for a face to appear at the tiny window beside me. As I rose, dripping, I realized to my dismay that I had brought no towel with me from London. I cast about, looking for something with which to dry myself, and finding nothing was forced to run, huddled and wet, up the stairs to the bedroom, leaving a dark trail behind me. There I was no luckier. I stood naked in the centre of the room, immobilized by frustration, as when one is unable to accept that a solution to a ridiculous and unforeseen problem does not lie close to hand. Eventually, ashamed and filled with self-doubt, I began to dry myself inefficiently with the papery, flowered edge of the eiderdown on the bed. As I did so, I was reminded of a time when, as a very small child, I had been caught on the lavatory with no paper, and had sat there casting about in a similar manner. Eventually, I had been driven to dab myself with a bath towel. (The very thing which now, of course, I lacked; the thought that I had had one surplus then, and had used it in such a wasteful manner, doubled my frustration.) My parents, although I could not remember how, had found out about my secret gaffe, and standing in the sloping bedroom I was beset by a painful memory of their – quite unjust, in my view – fury.

  In the event, the force of the sun streaming through the bedroom window was such that I dried quickly enough. Opening my suitcases, which I had so hastily packed, I was unfortunately reminded that I had brought with me very little appropriate for the hot weather. I am often crippled by dislike of my own clothes, and am possessed by the conviction that for every situation in which I find myself, there is some perfect outfit which I do not own; an outfit, moreover, in which I would best the situation in a manner entirely out of character. Sensing that I stood on the brink of an abyss of self-consciousness – a void into which I often fall, rendering me unable, even over several hours, to dress myself – I dug deeper into the cases and was surprised to find a summer dress I did not remember packing. It seemed imperative that having made this discovery I activate it immediately and with determination, before my first, faint protests – that it was, for example, too smart; that, conversely, it was also rather crumpled – gained any ground. I looked for a mirror and found one on the inside of the wardrobe door; an old and obscure mirror, which gave back so faint a reflection of myself that it was as if the glass were reluctant to admit that I was there. Averting my eyes from the dress so as not to provoke a crisis, I combed my hair, and boldly put on some lipstick.

  Finally, after this absorbing interlude, I strode through the garden in my finery, finding to my relief that the heat had levelled off into a more plangent strain of evening. I retraced the route I had taken with Pamela; a more impressive figure, I felt, than had made the outward journey. I twisted and turned along the tall hedges, the gravel sharp and pleasantly noisy beneath my feet, and came out by the big house at what seemed to be the spot at which we had left it. Standing there, I considered the propriety of my entering by the back door unaccompanied. The alternative – ringing or knocking at the front door – seemed, however, too formal. I tried, therefore, the handle of the back door but found to my surprise that it was locked. I tugged at it quite fiercely, to no avail. Now that I looked at it closely, however, the door did not in fact seem to be the same one through which Pamela and I had left the house. Looking about, I saw that there was another door a few paces further along. I hurried towards it and pulled it open, finding myself seconds later in what appeared to be a woodshed, a dark and musty enclosure which smelt of earth and sawdust. My presence in this inelegant place seemed to constitute some deliberate mockery of my attire. I retreated immediately and returned to the gravel path. Now, looking about, I could not even decipher the way around to the front of the house. The path was blocked by a hedge to my left as I faced out, and treading gingerly to my right and peering around the corner, I saw an unfamiliar flank of the building which seemed to be at the back. I stood quite still, having in effect no alternative, and just at that moment heard the crunch of footsteps behind me.

  ‘Coming in?’ said Mr Madden, stopping at the woodshed door several yards away from me with his hand on the handle. His face was friendly.

  ‘Oh yes, thank you,’ I said, hurrying towards him. ‘I got a bit lost.’

  He opened the door and disappeared. Following through behind him, I saw that I was in the long, narrow corridor I had gone along with Pamela. I closed the door behind me.

  ‘Easy to lose yourself in a place like this if you’re not used to it,’ said Mr Madden from up ahead. ‘But you’ll soon find your way around.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure I will.’

  ‘I think we’re in the drawing room.’

  He opened a door to the left and, following him, I found myself in the great front hall. I heard voices, Pamela’s voice and another, male, voice.

  ‘How hysterical,’ said Pamela, a long, light peal of laughter drifting out through the open door.

  Mr Madden stopped at the doorway and stood back, his hand out.

  ‘After you,’ he said.

  I entered a very large room painted a dramatic dark red, with two huge windows draped by long, heavy curtains in a gold material looking out onto the front drive. I noticed the ceiling immediately, which was very ornate and covered in leaflike mouldings with a type of flower, a sunflower by the looks of it, at its centre. There was a vast marble fireplace with a mirror above it, and in front of that a richly coloured rug. The room seemed to contain a great deal of furniture, and I had an impression of gleaming, finely carved wood, the delicate legs of velvet sofas and side tables. There were several paintings on the walls, large and dark with carved gold frames. Pamela sat on one of the sofas near the fireplace, her legs tucked by her side, with a glass in her hand. I noticed immediately that she was wearing the same clothes as she had done earlier, a faded shirt and a pair of worn, closely fitting jeans. Opposite her sat a young boy, with shining black hair, like Mr Madden’s.

  ‘Here they are!’ said Pamela, turning and smiling at us from what appeared to be a great distance. ‘Come in, Stella. Goodness, you look very smart! Piers, would you get Stella a drink?’

  ‘What will you have?’ said Mr Madden.

  ‘We’re on G-and-Ts,’ said Pamela helpfully, raising her glass.

  ‘Or you could have wine,’ interposed Mr Madden, ‘or vodka, or sherry. What would you like?’

  ‘G-and-T will be fine,’ I said hurriedly.

  ‘Come over here,’ said Pamela, patting the sofà beside her. She laughed, the residue of the hilarity I had overheard. ‘Martin’s just been telling me such a funny story.’

  I looked at Martin. He was looking at Pamela. He had a very large mouth, and a bad complexion. Curled beside him in a glossy black heap was Roy; an alliance, I felt, to be feared. I hesitated before sitting down, wondering whether Pamela would introduce us formally, and if so, whether I would be expected to get up again. I felt she had behaved slightly improperly in not introducing us, and so with the boldness which an unknown situation can sometimes grant instead of shyness, I held out my hand.

  ‘I’m Stella,’ I said.

  He turned his face rather menacingly towards me. With a frenzied pang it occurred to me that perhaps he did not have the u
se of his arms. Eventually, though, after long seconds, he reached up easily and took my hand. I was surprised at finding the dry, warm vastness of his hand at the end of his thin, tentacle-like limb. Slowly, again, he turned his head away from me and resumed looking at Pamela. I felt as if I had committed a social misdemeanour, and sat down awkwardly.

  ‘I think you two will get along very well,’ said Pamela. ‘Perhaps some of Stella’s good manners will rub off on you, Martin.’

  Everything was very quiet suddenly.

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Martin finally; quite casually, I tell you, his large chin jutting out from his shrunken, compacted chest, which appeared to be directly joined to his head without any neck. I glanced down secretly and saw his legs, which hung thin and tapered like roots from the tuber of his small body. His head, and facial features, were out of proportion with the rest of him; much bigger, that is, like the great lolling wooden head of a puppet on a stick of body. His exaggerated features made his face very expressive, like that of a cartoon character. The only other part of him which seemed to have any life were his long arms.

  ‘How did you get on?’ said Pamela, turning away from him.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ I said, too loudly. I was straining to penetrate the atmosphere of tension in the room.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Mr Madden, striding through the door with a tray. He handed me a heavy glass, made of carved crystal. ‘Get that down you, m’girl.’

  He sat down heavily on the sofa opposite ours.

  ‘How are you, old chap?’ he said, leaning over and ruffling Martin’s dark hair.

  ‘All right,’ said Martin. His voice was sullen, but his lips flapped open, showing a sudden gap. His mouth was very dark inside. He shook his head slightly after Mr Madden’s petting.

  ‘He was very rude to Stella,’ said Pamela.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean it,’ said Mr Madden cheerfully. ‘Did you, old chap?’