The Country Life (20 page)

Fortunately, nobody appeared to have heard the rap, and after a few minutes of waiting I judged that I was free to go. I
set off again across the scorched drive and soon gained the shade of the avenue. Feeling that I could now relax, and knowing that I was in for a long walk, I permitted my mind to wander to other things; and was surprised when I reached the road far sooner than I had anticipated. The empty tarmac shone and glinted before me in the sun. I stood on the brink of it, only then remembering what had happened to my shoes when last I had walked on this road. My only other pair was currently on my feet. I cursed myself, hovering at the silent tarmac as if it were a gushing river. If only I had thought to change my shoes! The prospect of trudging back up the avenue to fetch the ruined pair and then down again was uninviting; indeed, I wouldn't have time for it. The only alternative was to go back to the cottage and have my walk another day. I had already, after all, achieved my primary aim, which was the delivery of the leaflet. My desire to enquire at the post office was, however, too strong. Before long I had persuaded myself that the vandalism of my only remaining pair of shoes could be overlooked, and indeed might not happen at all, even though past experience insisted to the contrary. The aggravation of my sunburn, which weighted things still more heavily in favour of abandoning the walk, I regarded with similar insouciance. It might happen, I admitted; but then again it might not.

In committing myself wholeheartedly to a course which was neither savoury, profitable, nor necessary – and could turn out to be downright perilous – I was aware that a certain irrationality seemed temporarily to have taken me in its grip. My experience with the gate, however, had given me a sort of curiosity, a thirst for experimentation which I could see no real reason to deny. What I desired to discover was whether the process which, a few minutes earlier, had manufactured the gate according to my need to use it could in fact be mastered and then employed in reverse. I wanted in other words to see how much my intention of avoiding misfortune in the form of tar and sun – a resolution formed, as I have said, in the very
midst of a determination to tempt these misfortunes to their limit – would influence the outcome of my walk.

The heat hammered on my shoulders as I walked along the deserted road, and within minutes I had begun to repent my heedlessness. (My little mental game had, I soon saw, merely led me by a circuitous route to the misfortunes reason had long since visited.) I stopped to look at my shoes, and saw to my disappointment several dark and shiny bruises of tar on the soles. I set off again at a faster pace, yearning for the signal houses which would denote the fringe of the village. Just as I was about to break into a run in order to seek shelter, I heard the rapid approach of a car behind me and I bridled my agony, waiting for it to pass. So quickly was the car travelling that I barely had time to stiffen my aching frame into a simulation of leisure and force my unwilling cheeks into a rictus of enjoyment when it shot by. It was a new car, cast in coruscating silver which gave off lecherous winks in the sun, and its beefy rear was raised to me in a rude salute as it passed. A jet of liquid squirted obscenely onto its back windscreen, which its lazy synthetic tail spread foaming over the glass. I was tempted to make some offensive gesture in its wake, but stopped myself with the thought that even if the car didn't contain one of the Maddens it might be harbouring some acquaintance of theirs who would report the incident back.

The speed with which the brute had passed me, and the knowledge that while I had inched laboriously towards my destination he had doubtlessly attained and surpassed it, redoubled my weariness. My sunburn, however, demanded to be carried with all possible haste to a shady spot, and in the end I was forced to jog feebly along, one hand cupped about my neck and the other reached crosswise over my chest to shield my cheek, until finally I glimpsed the village crouched defensively on the hillside in the glare.

The High Street lay prostrate and almost empty and I flitted unseen from shady doorway to lamp-post towards the post
office. There was something disquieting in the silence of the place coupled with the emergency of the heat, as if minutes earlier a siren had sounded ordering evacuation. An old man sat alone at a table outside the pub, one bony knee extended and his hand expansively propped on his walking stick as if he were relating a story to an invisible audience, a cap flat as a coin on his head.

‘Good afternoon,' I said to him as I passed.

‘Afternoon,' he said, to my surprise, touching his cap. His riddled, crepuscular eyes looked straight ahead, blind with age, abandoned, like the discarded skins of snakes.

The post office was housed behind a squat terraced front, one of a long row of dwarfish red-brick dwellings, each with a single bay window to the street which bulged out like a pot belly or an insect's glassy eye. This window was hung with petitions and advertisements, some typed and some merely scrawled on various cards and slips of paper. I scanned them briefly out there on the searing, narrow pavement, and was able to determine that almost without exception the announcements took one of two forms: that of services required, and that of services rendered. It surprised me to be able to place myself so firmly in the second category, having for so long occupied the first; but I adapted to the change quickly enough. Habits are subtle scales, trained to measure whatever one might choose to put on them; and before long I was cheerfully engrossed in what the ladies of Hilltop were offering for a competent girl such as myself, and even wondering whether a covert few hours a week spent in the employ of Mrs Lascelles or Mrs Gower-Ward was entirely out of the question. My eye was soon, however, caught by a more familiar typescript; and looking up I saw that the same leaflet which had been put beneath my door was boldly occupying a central position towards the top of the display. I propelled myself from the window and through the door, which triggered the shrilling of a little bell when I opened it.

I found the post office – or ‘post office' – to be an even more perplexing place than the ‘shop' up the road. My first impression was that the pale room whose sepulchral coolness lapped at my burning arms like water contained nothing at all. Its atmosphere was pregnant with lack, and as I stood there I found myself overwhelmed by feelings of need; for food, although there was no reason at all for me to be hungry, having lunched amply with the Maddens; and more pressingly for something to drink. So furious was my thirst that I could look at nothing around me – the empty shelves lining one wall, the yellow Formica countertop leaning against the other, the glass window at the end behind which I could see an old-fashioned till with keys raised high like begging paws – with anything but an eye for its capacity to quench it. Perceiving that I was stranded in a desert of opportunity, my only thought was either to seek out human agency or leave immediately, my greater purpose utterly forgotten. My tongue was as dry as a sock stuffed into my mouth. I scanned the scene once more; and was surprised this time to notice the contours of a human belly tightly encased in a plaid shirt profiled behind the glass screen.

‘Excuse me?' I cried, my voice a dramatic croak.

The belly remained intransigent behind the glass.

‘Hello?' I cried again.

There was another pause, and then a man's voice issued faintly out to me from the side.

‘What can I do for you, dear?'

It was quite a high voice, and heavily accented, but it sounded friendly enough.

‘I'm very thirsty,' I said, directing my comments to the belly for want of a more conversational appurtenance. It required the greatest effort for me even to be polite. ‘I wondered if you would be so kind as to give me a glass of water.'

Before my eyes, the belly seemed to roll away as if attached to a large rotating wheel lodged behind the scenes, and in its place appeared a grinning human face.

‘Glass o' water?' it said – I could now not be sure whether it was a woman or man. Its hair stood up in a frizz above its pocked forehead as if electrified, and confronted with the disastrous, freckled spectacle of its features I felt the thrill of looking at the ugliest human creature I had ever seen. ‘It'll cost ya!' it said, grinning wider to show hoary teeth like a jumble of old gravestones.

‘But I haven't any money!' I gasped. ‘I was merely asking for a drop of human kindness. And besides, as this isn't a restaurant you can't charge me for water. It would be' – I put a hand to my fevered throat – ‘unethical.'

The creature looked at me quizzically, its brows – the hairs of which were preternaturally long and curled – furrowed to form a single line, as if a fake moustache had been attached to its forehead.

‘I was only joking, girl,' it said, quite sorrowfully. ‘If you come round the back, I'll put you right.'

It disappeared abruptly from behind the glass and after some protracted shuffling on the other side of the partition a door slowly opened to my left.

‘Come on,' coaxed the creature, beckoning me with a saurian claw. ‘Don't hold back, girl.'

It held open the door and I passed through into a narrow enclosure. A further door lay directly ahead of me, and to my right was the scene I had glimpsed through the glass, the old till on the counter with what looked a child's high chair drawn up to it. There was a paperback book lying open on the seat. The space was no bigger than a coffin, and was roughly the same shape.

‘Step this way, if you would,' the creature said with sudden formality, as if I had all at once ascended a level in some cryptic hierarchy. I felt it hovering at my elbow, and looking down realized that in height the creature barely rose above my waist.

‘Thank you,' said I, moving forward through the second doorway. I was now in a dark corridor which smelt very damp.

‘All the way to the end, madam. That's right.'

We entered a room about which, the curtains being drawn to exclude all but a faint white seam of light, I could discern almost nothing.

‘Now, let's see, shall we, madam?' murmured the creature, straying from my elbow. I heard the whisper of its feet against the floor, but could not make out in the dark where it had gone.

‘It might be easier if you put the light on,' I advised. ‘It's pitch black in here.'

‘Oh, no need for that, my lady,' it said. ‘We'll manage.'

‘I think I would prefer it, actually,' I asserted; for I had suddenly become nervous at how I had been lured into this shadowy lair, where no one would ever think of looking for me. ‘I insist that you turn on the light!'

There was a pause, there in the dark. I could hear no sound of movement at all and began to feel positively frightened. I was about to turn and flee when a steely grip on my arm pulled me down so that I was bending almost double.

‘Are you a sympathizer?' the creature whispered fiercely in my ear. Flecks of spittle rained on my cheek. ‘Is that why you came?'

My heart was pounding hard with the surprise, but I was not so cowed that I could not think clearly. Having no idea of what I might be supposed to be sympathetic to, still I could see that it would be a good idea to concur.

‘Yes,' I responded, in a loud voice.

‘Ssssh! Good. Well, then. You've come to the right place.'

The grip on my arm was released and a moment later the light came on; a naked bulb which depended so far into the room from a length of flex that I felt its heat against my hair. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw around me. The tiny room was no less than a shrine, a votive chamber dedicated, to my astonishment, to the Maddens.

‘Good God!' I exclaimed, my eyes frantically combing the
walls thickly billeted by leaflets and posters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and what looked, more worryingly, like instruments of torture – nooses made from wire, with a chain attached – hanging from nails like commemorative wreaths.

‘Impressed?' said the creature, who had been busy meanwhile at a small sink – hardly bigger than a cup – which stood dingy and serene in the corner of the tumult. It crossed the room as coyly as a party host and handed me a large glass of water. ‘It's taken me years to get it like this.'

My thirst, forgotten amidst this drama, flamed anew at the sight of the glass. Delicious pearls of liquid trailed down its sides. I took it and raised it trembling to my lips.

‘Course it picks up at this time of year,' continued the creature, while I drank. I believe that there is no sensation on earth more pleasurable than the one I was at that moment experiencing. ‘We get all sorts down here in the summer, especially round the bank holiday weekend. That's my busy time. Come next week, I'll be flat out.'

‘Do you work alone?' I gasped, draining the glass and handing it back. ‘Can I have another?'

‘Certainly, madam.' It took the empty glass, lost in contemplation of its handiwork. After a moment, and with a last longing look at the noose on the far wall, it shuffled back towards the sink. ‘When it started it was just me,' it called, over its shoulder. ‘Now there's hundreds, just contacts mostly, but it comes in handy. I'm still the boss, mind. I tell them what to do, and they do it. Day to day, Darren over at the Dog mucks in when he can.'

‘Did you put that leaflet under my door?'

‘Me?' The creature looked round. ‘No fear. I've got a contact at the farm does that kind of thing for me. No, too risky for me over there these days.'

I wondered who the creature's ‘contact' could be. Mrs Barker? Thomas? Thomas was the most likely suspect, given his presence at the scene of the crime. From behind I still could
find nothing either in the creature's attire nor its physique to determine its sex. Its back and shoulders were round and quite strong, but tapered into bony shanks from which its dirty dark-brown trousers hung in folds. They were too long in the leg, and the hems gathered into frills around a pair of scuffed slippers. It seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time fetching the water, and with the selfishness of physical need, I resolved to make no further enquiries which might slow the rate of service until I had the glass in my hand. This plan paid off, for the creature, head jerking up slightly at the silence, looked swiftly over its shoulder as if to make sure that I was still there.