The Country Life (38 page)

‘Stel-la. Lunch.'

I opened my eyes to see a vast sandwich being projected by Martin's arm through the sunlight towards my face. From the curious angle afforded by my horizontal position the thick lips of bread with their lolling tongue of filling looked gargantuan and rough-hewn, like great slabs of stone. My stomach clenched in resistance.

‘Wine?'

A proffered glass joined the sandwich on its airy platform. I sat up painfully and took it, placing the sandwich on the grass beside me. Despite my biliousness, my mouth sought the glass as if it contained some elemental fuel without which the normal course of things could not resume. The wine was strong and potent and prickled against my palate. I felt an immediate and comfortable sense of dissociation, as if I had removed a pinching shoe.

‘This is very civilized,' I said, making an effort to speak above the loud but private rhythm of my physical needs.

‘This is the country life,' said Martin. He raised his glass. ‘Ambrosia in arcadia. How are you feeling, Stel-la?'

‘All right.'

‘Tell me about last night.'

Complicitly, he shuffled closer over the grass. Out of his wheelchair Martin looked tiny and grotesque. Before I could stop myself, I had permitted a shade of disgust at the memory of him touching me to fleet across my mind.

‘What did you and Mr Trimmer talk about?' he persisted.

‘Not much. Your family, mostly,' I added unguardedly. ‘Everybody seems to want to talk about your family.'

‘I know.' He seemed quite proud of the fact. ‘Just because we live in an old house they think we walk around with our heads under our arms.'

‘Not quite,' I said, surprised by his naivety.

‘What, then?' He leaned forward on one arm so that his shoulder joint bulged, and picked up his sandwich. ‘Cannibalistic dinner parties? Ritual torture of au pairs? I hope you've not been putting ideas into people's heads, Stel-la.'

‘Of course I haven't! Actually, it's more to do with sex.'

‘Ha! Ha!' barked Martin, with his mouth full. ‘That's funny,' he added.

‘Why?'

‘It just is. We're a family. What do they think we do? Have sex with
each other
?'

Martin could be very obtuse at times, and oscillated alarmingly between wisdom and immaturity. In this case it was fortunate that he had misunderstood me, given that I now felt myself to have been mistaken in bringing up the subject.

‘Of course not,' I said. ‘It's just gossip.'

‘What gossip?'

‘Forget I said anything.'

‘Tell me.'

‘No!'

‘What does Trimmer know, anyway?' said Martin presently. ‘He's retarded. Did he try and kiss you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did he?' said Martin delightedly. ‘What was it like?'

‘Revolting.'

‘I bet!' He puckered his lips, like a fish. ‘It must have been like kissing a piece of raw liver.'

‘Don't be disgusting.'

‘You're the disgusting one, kissing Mr Trimmer.'

‘I didn't kiss him! I fought him off. I think he was angry with me.'

‘You should watch out, Stel-la. He's a lunatic. So was his father. There's brothers, too, mad as snakes. That whole family. Inbred. They hate each other. They've got loads of guns. One day someone will go over to that house and find them all laid out flat in a pool of blood in the orchard.'

‘He won't hurt me, will he?' I found Martin's image sinister.

‘I shouldn't
think
so,' said Martin. ‘He'll kill his mother, though. He can't get away from her. He tried to move to Buckley once, took a flat and all that.'

‘What happened?'

‘He came back after about six months. Very sheepish. I think Dora beats him.'

‘How could she? He's enormous!'

‘Dunno. I once saw him with his shirt off. He had marks on his back.'

The blowsy meadow, and beyond it the luxurious reaches of the garden, cushioned our solitude. A breeze overhead stirred the trees and a deep rustling, almost like thunder, gathered and rolled across the meadow.

‘Do you know the person who runs the post office?' I presently enquired.

‘What, that weirdo? Not really. I've seen him around. Why?'

‘Just wondering.'

I considered telling Martin about the creature's room and the leaflets, but something stopped me. It was as if, as I summoned the words to my mouth, the images which had seconds earlier been so clear in my mind melted away. I was gripped by feelings of uncertainty; and could no longer be sure
whether the leaflet, and my visit to the creature, and indeed all of the things that I had done on my own since being in the country, had been real or were the product of my invention.

‘Stel-la,' said Martin, after a while. ‘What are you going to do about Edward?'

‘What do you mean, do?' I said nervously. ‘There's nothing
to
do.'

‘Of course there is.' Martin leaned forward with the bottle of wine and sternly administered it. ‘You can't just disappear. You'll have to face him some time.'

‘I don't see why,' I replied. My voice had the hollow sound which signifies the proximity of some strong emotion. ‘What would be the point?'

‘You made promises, Stel-la. It's not worthy of you.'

A feeling of panic stirred in my chest.

‘It's shaming for him,' persisted Martin. ‘What's he supposed to tell people?'

‘I wrote him a letter.'

‘You disgraced him. In front of all his friends and family. He deserves some explanation.'

‘He does not!' I said viciously. I felt suddenly as if my face were wrapped tight in Cellophane, at which I would have to tear like a maniac in order to breathe. I had had this feeling before. The memory flashed across my thoughts, too quickly to see. Other things came too, pieces of recollection which seemed familiar but didn't belong anywhere.

‘All right,' said Martin. ‘But I do think at least that you should do him the courtesy of telling him where you are.'

‘And I think you should mind your own business. What do you know about anything, anyway?'

The wine was making me feel loose in the head, as if stitches were coming undone. My mouth was dry. My heart thudded uncontrollably. I thought of getting up then and there and running, across the meadow and the fields beyond, until I was exhausted beyond thought and far away. I closed my eyes for a
moment. When I opened them again, everything seemed so unreal to me that I began to wonder if I had even imagined the exchange I had just had with Martin.

‘I just think—'

‘Don't you understand?' I cried. ‘I don't want to think about it! All I want is to be left alone! All right? I just want to be left alone. Like a pair of eyes in a jar.'

Why I made this last remark I can't imagine, although in my overwrought state I might merely have thought that I said it.

‘You can't live like that. Firstly, it's cowardly.' He enumerated using his fingers. ‘Secondly, you'll regret it. Thirdly—'

‘How dare you lecture me?' I was by this time quite angry. ‘What gives you the right to do it? Other people don't judge themselves harshly – your own family least of all! Why should I?'

‘What do you mean by that?' sniffed Martin.

‘Just because you live a life of luxury.' I snapped, ‘you think you're all beyond reproach. But you've got problems! Anyone can see that!'

‘Well, of course we do. Nobody said we didn't.'

‘At least I've been honest.' I began ripping up handfuls of grass. ‘At least I don't sit around hating everything and pretending I don't.'

‘
I
don't hate anything,' said Martin, perplexed.

‘Yes, you do.'

‘Like what?'

‘Your mother,' I said cruelly, holding up my fingers as he had done, as if I were about to embark on a list.

‘My mother? Why on earth do you think I hate her?'

‘I – it's obvious.' I folded my arms.

‘No it's not!' he said. His body was rigid with affront and his voice young and anxious. ‘What made you think that?'

‘The way you talk to her, for a start.' My brief flash of confidence began abruptly to fade, revealing a darker feeling of dread. ‘And that picture you drew. The one at the centre.'

‘That?' Martin looked genuinely confused. ‘That isn't like her at all!'

‘It seemed – critical,' I said lamely.

‘It's just not very good.'

‘Sorry.'

We sat in silence. I found the difficulty of remaining in a normal upright posture considerable.

‘It's all right,' said Martin presently. ‘I suppose I can see why you might have – well, she's sometimes not the easiest person to get along with. She had a frustrating life, stuck here with the farm and all of us. I think she'd have liked to have a career, and some time on her own. She's sad, too.'

‘What about?'

‘Oh, something that happened a long time ago.' He tore up a few blades of grass and scattered them. ‘Father's not the easiest person in the world to be married to, either.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, he depends on her for everything these days. He had quite an unhappy childhood himself. His father committed suicide.'

‘Why?'

‘Dunno. He was an army chap. Couldn't cope when he retired or something. Dad was an only child. His parents were quite elderly. I think his mother went a bit mad after that.'

‘In what way?'

‘Oh, he won't talk about it. Mum says it was pretty grim. Anyway, he joined the army himself eventually but then he got discharged because he went bonkers. Then he met Mum. She saved his bacon. She'd do anything for him. And for us. She's the one that keeps it all together, Stel-la.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's no good saying that if people aren't perfect you're not going to love them, Stel-la. That's what families are all about.
They absorb things. They grow round them. They may end up looking all twisted and ugly, but at least they're strong.'

There was a long silence. Martin plucked at the grass. I lay down again on my back and closed my eyes. As I did so, I was all at once transported away from Martin and the meadow by a memory which sprang up in my mind so fully-formed and clear that it seemed to pulse with life. The memory was of my family sitting in the garden of our house. It was before the death of my younger brother, which I mentioned early on in my story, and which cast a long and stifling shadow over everything that came after it. It was the absence of this shadow, rather than any real sense of my own age at the time, which located the memory in my early adolescence. It was distinctly sunlit; and by that I do not mean only that the background was that of summer, but also that the atmosphere contained an element of which I was not of course aware at the time but the chill of whose absence I felt afterwards, when it had drained from our house as suddenly as if a plug had been pulled on it. It wasn't happiness, or even contentment; merely, I suppose, unawareness. We had not yet been singled out by tragedy; and as such could conduct our lives with an anonymity, a lack of self-consciousness, which was later unavailable to us.

In this memory I was lying on a blanket on the lawn. My younger brother was nearby on some forgotten business, a fleeting figure in a striped T-shirt. The other was sitting directly in front of me on a deckchair. He was wearing a pair of shorts, and his sturdy legs, over which crawled a fascination of dark hairs, were planted firmly in a V to either side of me. He was reading something out loud which was making us laugh; for he was a comedian in those days, a talent eroded by the steady, subsequent tides of sad years. My parents were sitting next to him at a small table, playing cards. I had entirely forgotten how much they used to love cards; how we would come downstairs in the mornings and find them already into their second hand
of whist or rummy, the house littered with scraps of paper used as scoresheets, covered in my father's exact writing.

I felt the warmth of the sun on my back, heard the sound of my brother's voice and the giggles rumbling up from my squashed stomach. I was happy. I was happy. The memory stayed and stayed; and then gradually it became more muted, immobile, frozen into a single, inaccessible image, like a snapshot.

‘What did you say?'

‘I said, shall we go?' said Martin.

We packed up our picnic things and Martin hauled himself into his chair. My back was in agony when I stood up.

‘I could use a nap,' said Martin, as we set off, ‘after all this excitement. Wine makes me sleepy. Would you mind?'

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘I've got plenty to do.'

I took him back to the house. Pamela was still out, and the rooms were quiet. I deposited him in his bedroom and went back down through the cool, empty hall and out of the front door.

No sooner had I turned away from the house with the intention of setting off down the drive than I caught sight of the figure of Toby advancing from a right angle across the gravel. He was striding from between the hedgerows, naked to the waist, his hair unkempt, stray wands of straw clinging to his jeans. I froze in my tracks at this vision, which had aroused in me an immediate feeling of panic.

‘Hal-
lo
!' he cried, waving one hand while the other clutched his shirt. He was extremely red from the sun, the burnish of activity rather than the perilous scarlet of sunburn, and a varnish of sweat glinted across the tantalizing geography of his chest. I deduced that he had just come from his work in the top field: the labour, I felt, suited him far better than his customarily sybaritic demeanour. His face wore an almost joyous expression, although it struck me that it was perhaps in the novelty rather than the virtue of manual work that he had found pleasure. He drew close, grinning and panting; at which his physical presence became so overwhelming and pointed that it took on a distinct embodiment, as if a third person were with us whom it would be impolite, or at least strange, not to acknowledge.