The Country Life (25 page)

‘So why did you marry him?'

‘I made a mistake.'

‘That's a pretty big mistake, Stel-la.'

‘I know.'

‘How long?'

‘How long what?'

‘How long were you married?'

I trembled on the brink of surrendering this final piece of information; for I feared what would happen when the slope of Martin's curiosity came to an end. What I was handing over to him was of so much more worth to me than to he himself; and while I could neither decipher nor control the impulse that had made me do so, still I flinched from the possibility that he was, after all, unworthy of my confidence, and that the very part of me which had most sought release would be the part most injured by it. Any form of confession, I now realize, is a process beset by this type of risk. Even when one's secrets are as besieged as mine were by Martin, the act of divulging them is by necessity selfish, and by implication weak. Revelation requires consent, in however disguised a form; and as such there is no case in which the confessional act can be free from retribution or blame.

‘A week,' I said.

The starkness of my admission was mitigated somewhat by the fact that Martin did not spring back in triumph or horror at it. I half expected him to burst out laughing as he had done the last time we had discussed this subject, while fearing that he would be shocked and disappointed, and would judge me harshly. He looked surprised, certainly; his expressive, malleable face could not disguise it.

‘What happened?'

‘Oh, I don't know.' I looked out of the window, embarrassed. ‘I just had to get away. I felt as if I was dying.' This seemed rather melodramatic, even in my turbulent state. ‘I expected, I suppose, to feel as if my life had begun,' I qualified. ‘And instead I knew it had ended. It was as if we'd been tricked and only found out afterwards, when it was too late. That we'd thought, you know, that getting married meant one thing and
in fact it meant another. It felt as if we'd been disabled, and that even though the rest of life was ruined we had each other, and couldn't get away from each other, and even if we did we'd still be disabled.' There was a pause. ‘Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. Anyway, we were on honeymoon, and I just came home. I tried to tell Edward, but he didn't really understand. And then various things happened, and then I left.'

‘On your own?'

‘Yes.'

‘But what did he say when he got back?' He leaned closer to me and I glimpsed his eyes, shining and perplexed. ‘Was he angry?'

‘I don't know. Probably. I mean, I didn't talk to him. I haven't seen him since then.'

I felt the tremor of something precarious between us, and knew that our fragile acquaintance was being overloaded with information. My own discomfort with the facts I was relating had undoubtedly contributed to this atmosphere of strain; for had I known them better, or even shared them previously with someone else, I might have worn them more easily. As it was I could make no more sense of my own actions than Martin evidently could.

‘Was this – recent?' he said, slightly awkwardly.

‘Just before I came here. Last week.'

To my surprise, I felt a furtive pressure on my hand. I looked down and realized that Martin had taken it in his own.

‘Poor Stella,' he said.

I cannot explain why the feeling of human flesh was so unbearable to me in that moment. It was not, I think, embarrassment that caused me to recoil, nor distaste at the pity the gesture conveyed. Rather, it was the loneliness it underscored, the reminder it provided that while I might have found a temporary palliative in company, my unhappiness was my own. Up until that point I had not had an urgent sense of this fact. By keeping myself in a form of oblivion, I had certainly,
as Martin pointed out, ‘bottled things up'; but while my problems lay beneath this anaesthetic, I had at least had the advantage of not feeling them. Now, as they awoke and unfurled themselves, they sent out latent shafts of pain, on which the presence of Martin's hand seemed to be acting as a conductor. I willed myself to keep it there, knowing that I would offend him if I flinched; and yet it was as if I were asking myself to keep my hand in an electric socket.

‘Please!' I cried eventually, freeing myself from his grasp. I saw him look at me for a moment in horror, as the quiet room echoed with the violence of this action, His rejected hand hung, half-withdrawn, in the air. His face was startled. ‘Don't ask me any more! I just don't want to think about it!' I said, rather too furiously; I thought that my physical reaction would be less conspicuous if backed up by an equally extreme verbal one. ‘Do you understand?'

I must admit that he was very good about it. If he was hurt, he barely showed it, and shortly afterwards we went out to sit in the garden.

We established ourselves beneath a phalanx of trees towards the bottom of the garden, which sent down the occasional light hail of fragrant missiles from the branches above, and in the rustling, deciduous shade I felt an exquisite languor; a sense of almost
historical
leisure which belonged, I knew, not to me but to the house itself. Martin had brought with him some schoolwork, a battered volume across whose yellowed pages moved a miniature army of arcane symbols; manoeuvres which he appeared to be interpreting with a pencil stub on a pad of white paper in his lap.

‘What's that?' I said oafishly, raising myself up on my elbow; for I had assumed a shamelessly horizontal position on the warm grass and had been staring up at the fluttering tracery of leaves against the brilliant blue sky with a mind as scrubbed of thought as a bone.

‘Greek. Translation.'

‘Oh. Is it difficult?'

‘Quite. I suppose I could cheat. Everybody else does. I like it, though.'

‘What's your school like?'

‘It's OK.' A breeze ruffled the pages of his book and he
clamped his hand over it. His face was secretive, shifty. ‘It's normal, I suppose. Better than the centre, anyhow.'

‘Is it a boarding school?'

‘Mostly. There's a few like me. Day bugs, that is. They're all complete pillocks. The parentals wanted me to board, but it was too difficult.'

I tried to imagine him in a classroom, amidst the riotous, scruffy jumble of his peers. I knew these boys from my brothers' childhood, their fluting, patrician voices, their faces hewn of stone above the regulation
déshabillé
of their uniforms; all that casual, careless perfection incubating in the draughty chambers of a dream.

‘Why did they want you to board?'

‘Dunno.' He shrugged. ‘Family stuff. We always have. And the journey's a pain, I suppose.'

‘How long does it take?'

‘Hour and a half each way.'

‘But that's ridiculous!'

‘What's the alternative? They didn't want to send me anywhere else. It isn't for much longer, anyhow. This'll be my last year. And besides, there'd have been no point moving me. They'd already paid for all the facilities and stuff.'

‘What facilities?'

‘You know, cripple stuff. Ramps and things.'

‘Your parents
paid
for them?'

‘Yup.' He nodded. ‘And a swimming pool. That was a kind of present for the school. Well, it was more of a bribe, actually. They'll take all the other stuff down once I'm gone.'

‘Why?'

‘Spoils the look of the school. It's crap anyway. Just tacky crap.'

‘What if someone else wanted to use it, though?'

‘Like who?' He looked at me with adolescent contempt. ‘To be quite frank, I don't think you'd find another set of parents prepared to send someone like me to a school like that.'

I remembered my parents' own inexplicable determination to send my partly deaf young brother to one of these privative institutions. In the spirit of refutation, I considered sharing this coincidence with Martin, but having already revealed so much about myself had no more appetite for confidences.

‘So why did they?'

‘I told you. We always have. The dogfucker. Grumps. Great-Grumps. Everyone.'

He didn't seem particularly put out by the presence of these corroded manacles around the tender, fleeting flesh of his own life. I realized then that, rather than resent his parents' decision, he was grateful for it. At times like these I felt our differences so strongly that our moments of intimacy receded, their once-pungent reality framed and reduced, like holiday photographs.

‘I hated school,' I said, collapsing my elbow beneath me so that I lay once more on my back.

‘You hate everything.'

I found this comment excessively spiteful, particularly given that I had provoked it with an observation more passing than pointed; and one, too, which deserved if not sympathy then at least the lesser balm of politeness. I sensed in this bitterness the residue of our earlier conversation, which Martin's sensibility had evidently been too undeveloped fully to digest. I wondered whether perhaps he was offended that I had come to him on the hoof, as it were, a fugitive from larger dilemmas in whose shade he was inevitably dwarfed; or whether, more realistically, he was still sore at my rejection of his comforting hand, a gesture which can't have been easy for a boy of his age to make, and which I had rewarded with a reaction indistinguishable from revulsion. I searched, in any case, for some grounds on which to disagree with him, and to my perturbation was unable instantly to find any. As seemed to have become my habit, the longer I delayed making any answer the less I could seem to separate Martin's accusation from the truth; and by the time I had thought through the reasons for his disaffection with
me, the two had become inextricably melded. Was it true that I hated everything? It was certainly the case that I could think of little immediately that I loved; but it was for this very reason, I reminded myself, that I had sought to change my circumstances so dramatically. What I had said to Martin about feeling that I had, after my marriage, reached the end of my life was more or less true. Having up until that moment believed that I had hardly begun it, this was quite a leap. What I felt, more exactly, was that I had missed the substance, the filling between these two states, which I felt sure would have contained the meat of love; indeed, the essence of life itself.

I made, then, no reply to Martin as we sat there beneath the trees; and as he had during my silence turned unhappily back to his book, we were stranded far from conversation for some time, before an indistinct shout from the house caused us both to turn.

‘Lunch,' said Martin decisively, slamming his book shut, although I had been able to make no sense of the sound.

I was grateful for the distraction; and grateful too for the work of pushing Martin back up the lawn to the house, which gave our relationship a clarity our conversations frequently lacked. The heat was very fierce as we made our way over the long, striped perspective of the grass, but although I soon felt the familiar grind of it on the top of my head, it no longer had the character of an assault. Indeed, I felt almost flippant at the speed with which I had adapted to this new element, and walked through it as proudly as if I had sprouted gills or grown wings. Ahead of us I could see the dormant arrangement of garden furniture being activated by Mr Madden, who went about the business of removing the chairs from where they lay doubled up over the table top and setting them in an orderly circle with the bored efficiency of a factory assembly line worker. His demeanour was not particularly abject, and yet I found myself wondering as I watched him whether he was happy. Seeing him so obedient in solitude, I had the sense that
he was waiting for something, or even waiting something out, although I had no idea what it could be. Mr Madden possessed all the attributes of what could reasonably be described as a happy life – but in that moment I had a flash of identification with him which informed me, in the vaguest possible sense, that like me he did not feel entirely at home here.

Pamela and Toby came jauntily around the side of the house, arm in arm, and when Mr Madden hoisted the umbrella from the centre of the table they quickly took their seats, as if at any moment it might start to revolve like a propeller and lift the whole arrangement into the air. Seconds later we reached the table, and after I had slotted Martin's chair into position I looked up to find Toby's eyes on me.

‘You're sweating,' he said, as intimately as if we had been alone; or as if some circuit had already been established between us along which such currents of significance could now flow.

‘I'm hot,' I said, not wanting the others to think me rude, although the remark had not seemed to me worth dignifying with a reply.

I was in fact sweating quite profusely, despite my earlier feelings of acclimatization; and I was far from grateful to Toby for pointing this out. There are some men, I have noticed, who are driven continually to make observations of this type; who appear to see no reason why what enters their head should not exit from their mouth.

‘Say hello to your brother, you scallywag,' said Pamela to Martin, leaning across the table awkwardly so as to jollify the remark further by ruffling his hair. Martin flinched at the gesture, screwing up his face with a child's distaste.

‘Hello, bro,' he said dully.

‘Wotcha, Mart-hole,' Toby replied, with a fluting attempt at an accent.

‘Why on earth do you call him that?' tinkled Pamela, looking from one to the other of them with charming bewilderment. She was wearing a blue sleeveless dress made of silk, and blue
earrings. Her shoulders looked very narrow, and her bare arms brown and taut. The impression was one of doll-like fragility; and she was emanating it so indiscriminately that even I felt tempted to place a protective arm around her tender frame.

‘Because he thinks it's
funny
,' said Martin in a loud voice.