The Country Life (40 page)

‘
Little boy!
' cackled Toby, leaning across the table and pinching Martin's cheeks so violently that his head flew backwards and forwards. ‘
Come here, little boy!
'

‘Get off!' shouted Martin, pushing him away. His cheeks were scarlet where Toby's fingers had been. ‘Just fuck off!'

‘Enough of that,' pronounced Mr Madden from the other end of the table, without looking up. He was examining his hands intently and his face was dark.

‘I'm simply
longing
for tomorrow evening!' said Pamela brightly. ‘It'll be the first time we've all been together as a family since – since when?'

She looked wonderingly about the table.

‘Since the last time,' said Martin morosely.

That night I dreamed of Edward; but even the dream itself had the guilty atmosphere of a concession, as if my subconscious was manifesting a concern more dutiful than sincere. The dream took place in Franchise Farm, where I was attempting to show him the house and gardens and tell him about my new life. In the dream I kept forgetting him, like a reluctant promise or some newly acquired but not yet treasured object, and would experience rush after rush of anxiety as I remembered him and went chasing back to where I had left him. The most arduous aspect of this peculiar cycle was that each time I went back to retrieve him, finding him sitting helplessly as a baby in the room in which I had last deposited him, I was forced to explain to him not only what I had been doing, but
how
I had been able to do it. In other words, I was compelled to spell out to him over and over again the principles of will and motion, of which he did not seem to have the faintest idea. Each time he gazed at me with an expression of almost idiotic incomprehension, and I would feel a sense of intolerable pressure or enclosure; and each time, just as I felt this, I would remember something persistently forgotten and look down and see that he was sitting in a wheelchair.

Eventually this dream yielded to a mute, horrible nightmare in which I lay in my bed in the cottage while birds flew about the room, diving and pecking at my body; and I woke sweating and aching, with the sense of some imminent and unavoidable misfortune lying in wait for me. Outside the window the day wore the ripeness of mid-morning, and I could hear faint sounds of industry, the buzz of a farm engine, the distant murmur of can. A sharp consciousness of time scythed through these languorous apprehensions. I bolted up in panic, the bedclothes flying back, before remembering that Pamela had taken the boys to see Aunt Lilian and that I had the day to myself. There are few things more pleasant than this type of realization. One is acquitted not only of the original crime, but also of the suspicion that one might in fact under other circumstances have committed it and of the consequences of having done so; all of which, in addition, are washed away in a matter of moments by some anticipated pleasure. I have often wished that I could make other problems vanish in a similar way. Subsiding back into the pillows, I considered my twice-granted liberty and wondered what I would do with it. With Mr Madden occupied at the ferm, both the day and the rest of the property were mine. In my mind I toured its facilities, inspecting them anew with a proprietary gaze. I was surprised to find myself so shamelessly sizing up what did not belong to me, as if I had merely been awaiting the opportunity to do so. Dimly it struck me that this was a consequence of my disfranchised state. Those aspects of life I would previously have regarded with the mild eye of entitlement now lay tantalizingly under lock and key. With the door to privilege left ajar and unattended, I could no more prevent myself from trespassing beyond it than a pauper could stroll past a banknote lying on a pavement.

Having established what I intended to do, and made my dark commitment to it, I found myself in no hurry to begin. I lay
for a further half-hour, only vaguely aware of the fugitive motion of thoughts flitting from beam to window sill; until the sudden consciousness of my empty mind seemed to invite more predatory notions. Quickly I got up to escape them; but crossing the room to find my clothes I glimpsed myself unexpectedly in the wardrobe mirror. Before I could fend it off, the sight had filled me with a sense of my destitution. Not being braced against my reflection, I had caught myself unawares and through this brief gap had seen the thing which presented the unfortunate but irremovable obstacle to my own disappearance. What surprised me was to realize how familiar this sight was. I had seen it on busy London pavements, amidst a throng of faces: one or two whose eyes looked out from their bodies as if from behind bars, as they paid for the crime of permitting their misfortunes to outweigh the space their flesh was entitled to occupy.

Some ten minutes later, I was washed and dressed, in the cut-off trousers – the only item, despite the freight of association they carried, that I did not now regard as a ‘uniform' – and a short-sleeved T-shirt. I had become so used by now to the heat that I had stopped expecting it to change – indeed, I had forgotten the cadences of weather entirely. Even so, I was forcibly struck as I opened the cottage door by the charged fury of the day. Something brutal had invaded the air. It rushed at me, unnatural and molten, and as I stepped out into the garden I felt the agony of it on my skin, fighting it into my mouth and lungs. I was becoming frightened of the heat. It was out of control. What if it just kept getting hotter? What were we expected to do? I had a desire for some authority to whom I could report it, and wondered if I should go and tell Mr Madden. It was quite some time before the idiocy of this notion struck me. I set off down the garden in search of some shade. It was by now almost midday, and due to my oversleeping and general languor about the bedroom I had had no
breakfast. The thought of food was repellent to me, but I felt this to be a trick of the heat and determined to go over to the house and find myself something to eat.

The back door was unlocked, and as I entered the dark passage its abrupt cool and shade caused my head to spin. For some seconds I was entirely blinded by the change, and I loomed dizzily, bumping against the cold, stony flanks of the walls. I was alert nonetheless for signs of Mrs Barker, for although I was not personally troubled by my intention of scavenging for food in the Maddens' kitchen – given that they had not yet offered to advance me any money with which I might buy some myself, nor indeed appeared to have given the matter of what I was eating for breakfast much thought at all – I recognized it to be rather indefensible – or at least to require an energy to explain it which I did not in that moment possess – to others. The house was quiet, and I deduced from the pungent scent of polish which harnessed the air that Mrs Barker had completed her morning's ministrations and gone home. Reassured, I stole up the passage and into the empty kitchen. The room was immaculate and oddly unwelcoming without its usual occupants. The neat arrangement of chairs and table, the scrubbed surfaces and gleaming floor, had a suspicious, superintendent air, as if they were witnessing my intrusion and would register any betrayal – a stray crumb or fingerprint – of it with disapproval.

With an artificially casual motion I strolled to the refrigerator and opened it. Its contents – carefully sealed dishes of leftovers, leafy fronds of salad, silver bricks of butter, packages of raw, pink meat, a number of expensive-looking jars of relish and suchlike – seemed both horribly private and utterly inaccessible. Any incursions there would, I felt sure, be complex both in execution and concealment. My appetite began to retreat. I made to shut the door again in defeat, but as I did so a large bottle lolled forward from the bottom shelf. Anxious that it would fall, I lunged down and caught it by the neck; at which
point there was a terrific explosion which almost knocked me over with fright, and a geyser of foam spurted up from the mouth of the bottle and splattered over my legs. It all happened so quickly that I could not comprehend the nature of the disaster for some seconds. My heart thudded in my chest as the sour smell of wine gave off its terrible clue. I lifted the bottle with a trembling hand. The dark green glass with its elaborate gold label confirmed what I already suspected. It was champagne, of a variety, moreover, which I knew from my previous life to be inordinately expensive. A shred or two of foil clung to the bottle's lip, from where its cork had evidently blasted as a result of my inadvertent agitations. I was surprised to see how much remained: despite my dripping legs, the bottle was still three-quarters full.

My first thought was to retrieve the cork and attempt somehow to stuff it back in. Still holding the bottle, I began a panicked search, which eventually turned up the missing cork, still in its wire cage and cloak of foil, lying on its side beneath the table. I saw immediately that I would not be able to force it back into the bottle unless I pared it down with a knife, for it had fattened into a stubbornly flared shape. Even were I to succeed by this method, I realized, the champagne would still be ruined by the loss of pressure.

Within a short time, I had considered all my options; which were, admittedly, limited. The first was that I succeeded somehow in acquiring a bottle of champagne to replace that which I had ruined. I had, at least, the time to attempt this, but with neither money nor transportation was restricted to the faint hope that this bottle would be available in Hilltop, and available, moreover, in such a way that I would be able to steal it. The second option was that I conserved the remains of the bottle as best I could and confessed everything to Pamela – offering, perhaps, a portion of my wages in recompense – when she returned. The third was that I drank the contents of the bottle and proceeded similarly.

While the first of these two alternatives would undoubtedly result in the champagne being wasted, my response to the crisis would at least constitute an albeit futile attempt at virtue. The other was more pragmatic but easily misconstrued: I could, for example, be accused of inventing the story of the exploding cork – which, when considered in that light, did seem rather incredible – to conceal my craven theft and consumption of the champagne. The former course, though illogical, was evidently preferable. At that moment, however, I had a vision of Pamela's face as I apologetically handed her an almost full bottle of flat champagne. ‘Why on earth didn't you just drink it, you silly girl?' she cried.

Being by now familiar with the vicissitudes of Pamela's sense of etiquette, my vision struck me as a likely one. Addled, I thought the matter through again. It grew more and more irresolvable with every approach, until my mind was so knotted that I was forced to sit down at the table with my head in my hands and my eyes closed. As I did so, a notion slyly snipped its way through the tangle. I opened my eyes and regarded it with awe. What if I merely absconded with the champagne and then denied having had any involvement with its disappearance? Pamela had successfully been duped over the bottle of gin. Why should she not be again? In fact, her memory of that episode could be the very thing to undermine any conviction she might have about the champagne having been in the refrigerator when she left the house that morning. The whole affair began to gather significance in my mind, until I became convinced that I had been intended to steal the gin as a sort of foundation for the grander theft I was now designing.

It is difficult to consign any event to mere regret, no matter how unpleasant; and the thought of making simultaneous use of two of the darker episodes in my sojourn in the country in this way gathered more appeal with every moment. What, indeed, could be more pleasant on my day off than to sit in the sun and drink champagne; a plan I would never have conceived
myself, but on which fate had now kindly insisted by bringing about the accident in the kitchen?

Borne along on this highly coloured wave of logic, I picked up the bottle of champagne, down whose sides chilly beads of moisture now alluringly ran, and went with it out into the garden. From the cool of the kitchen I had momentarily forgotten the heat outside, and as it bludgeoned me along the gravel path I wavered in my resolve. How pleasant could it be, sitting out in the sun? I would have to force myself to do it; and there was no point in being degenerate if it required an effort to do so. I rounded the corner and emerged on the back lawn, where the garden table and chairs sat displayed in an inviting circle. As I saw them, I had an idea. Placing the champagne on the table, I turned and retraced my steps back up the path. I was looking for the umbrella, which I clearly remembered Mr Madden producing on more than one occasion and slotting into the hole at the centre of the table. He had certainly carried it from the side of the house, but it seemed unlikely to me that such an unwieldy object would be kept inside. I guessed that it was in the shed, the door to which stood just beyond the back door at the end of the path. This process of deduction was far from arduous, but nonetheless I was gratified when I opened the shed door to find the umbrella collapsed and leaning against the wall directly in front of me. It was a clumsy object to carry, and surprisingly heavy, but I succeeded after some manoeuvring in removing it from the shed, whereupon I began to drag it along the path back towards the lawn.

At that moment I heard a faint, rapid patter of footsteps ahead of me. Instinctively I stopped short; but before I could even register the sound, a great dog came hurtling around the corner of the house, and skidded to a halt at the sight of me, planting itself in my path. I say ‘a dog'; of course, I knew it to be Roy, but detached from his owners he lost the patina of tameness and reverted to the condition of a beast. He lifted his
head menacingly, ears alert. A stone of fear dropped down the well of my body. I could see the white points of his teeth flashing in his drooling muzzle. His black belly heaved surreptitiously beneath his rigid frame. The heat rained down between us.

‘Hello, Roy,' I said.