The Country Life

Chapter Six

The damage I had done to myself during my walk surprised me, for I had been overwhelmed by feelings of good health both on the outward and return journey. Reflected in one of the cottage windows as I came up through the garden, I looked positively wild. What must they have thought of me in the respectable village of Hilltop? Worse still, what impression of myself could I have given the Maddens? My legs were the worst, particularly about the calves and ankles, which were raw and cross-hatched with a pattern of scratches. I had also been bitten by insects in various places, and my skin had risen there in a series of small red bumps.

I went to the bathroom, intending to run cold water over my legs. As I took off my shoes, I noticed that they were spotted with patches of a sticky black substance. I touched it lightly and then smelt it, after some time deducing that it was tar. Retracing my steps to the front door, I found that I had tracked tar across the sitting room carpet and kitchen floor. The carpet was quite a pale beige colour, and more or less mined. For a moment I was bewildered by this scene of destruction. Being very tired, I resisted fiercely the idea of doing anything other than rest, and as I stood there gazing at the floor found myself overcome by feelings of denial and indifference. Even though I was harried by the sight of the damage done to the Maddens’ property, and despite the fact that I knew responsibility for erasing it to be mine and mine alone, I could not, in that moment, bring myself to do anything about it. I did, however, work out that the tar must have come from the surface of the road, which had felt remarkably soft beneath my feet in places and must, I now saw, have melted in the heat. I had not known that roads could do that; indeed, never having really walked on one, I had not given roads even the slightest consideration before in my life.

I opened the front door and placed my ruined shoes outside it, and then returned to the bathroom. Looking in the battered little mirror above the sink I was met by a terrible vision. The short walk to the village and back had given me the appearance of a savage. My hair resembled a nest built upon my head, a distressed basket adorned by twigs and leaves, which gave off a light shower of seeds when I shook it above the sink. The sight of my skin — which I had fancifully imagined, during my walk, to be acquiring a healthful burnish — was a considerable shock. The right side of my face was morbid white, and had taken on an unpleasant texture, the pores enlarged, the tone blotchy, a sheen of sweat giving it a resemblance to raw dough. The left side, meanwhile, was badly scorched: the skin, not just over my face but also down the side of my neck and arm, had sprung up a furious red, and was emanating heat as if it were aflame.

My predicament was rapidly approaching the point at which the misery of a situation outweighs the desire to put it right. It seemed incredible that so much could have gone wrong in so short a time; a disappointment made all the more bitter by the high hopes with which I had embarked on my life in the country. It already seemed as botched to me standing there in the bathroom as everything I had left behind; and while, under normal circumstances, the desire to escape is propelled by a dissatisfaction with the world, to feel it in a place of refuge trains the dissatisfaction inwards. Having understood this, I knew that I was trapped and must confront my problems, those being the ruined carpet and shoes, the scratched legs, the tangled hair, the severe burning of one half of my face and body; and on a larger scale, the mean provisions on which I was hoping to survive until Monday; the offer of a swim, which I must turn down on account of having no costume or towel; the hostility which was beginning to characterize relations with the Maddens; the as yet unresolved matter of the driving licence; and the fact that on top of all of this I was far from home, with neither friend nor family to comfort me, and with no means of escape.

The tar stains were impossible to remove entirely from the carpet, but with a knife and the clever rearrangement of some furniture I managed mostly either to reduce or conceal them. I bathed my scratches and rinsed my hair with water, using a teacup from the kitchen. My lack of a towel did not actually trouble me, for I was still so overheated that I was content to let the water dry on my skin. My shoes I elected to throw away when the opportunity arose, and my torn skirt was folded and placed at the bottom of my suitcase to await some future surge of industry. Cleansed and orderly, my sunburn felt rather better, but I daubed it liberally with some lotion I had fortunately brought with me just for good measure.

Clothing myself anew was rather more problematic. With my skirt now out of action, I had only the smart dress and three pairs of trousers from which to choose. I stood in my bedroom, my flaming skin resisting the notion of trousers, and just as I found myself crying out for a pair of shorts was blessed by a remarkably inventive idea. My problem was finding an implement with which to perform the operation, and a brief reconnaissance about the house turned up only a pair of nail scissors from my washbag. I hesitated, deploring the notion of sacrificing with hasty butchery what patience — in the form of a sewing kit perhaps borrowed from Pamela at some point in the friendlier future I hoped for — promised to execute with precision and skill; but I was greedy now for shorts, and seeing in my mind the horrified face of my mother as I murdered a perfectly good pair of trousers, was provoked into action.

For some time I sawed away, not even pausing to stake out the line along which I intended to cut, and when both legs were off held up the amputated stumps to see how I had done. Predictably, the legs, though shorter, were now of drastically different lengths; and finding myself out of breath and awash with sweat, I resumed my cutting slowly and with rather more care. After some time, I had filed away so much of the cloth in pursuit of exactitude that I was left with very little. I tried them on before the wardrobe mirror, already regretting what I had done.

Considering that my alterations had been designed to subtract substance from my appearance rather than add anything to it, the transformation I had wrought with the nail scissors was quite beyond all understanding. I believed, standing there, that I had never looked so good, nor felt so abuzz with a curious power which I could only take to be that of sexual attractiveness. The shorts were very short, even if evenly and equally so, and while I have never been given to gratuitous displays of flesh I had to admit that there was something exciting in this revelation. It suddenly seemed that there was far more to me than I had imagined; that my body, which I had always believed to be immutable or finite in some way, possessed in fact a whole unmined tract of personality, a fresh range of potential to which I had, I now saw, the undeniable right.

I stood, transfixed by the mirror, for some time, accustoming myself to this stranger of whose desires and motives I was not entirely sure. Thoughts of Edward, as faint as the pop and drizzle of distant fireworks, flared sporadically in my mind. I could not match this version of myself with him. He would not, indeed, have recognized me; and my memories of him seemed all at once frustrating and unsatisfactory, as patchy and monochrome as those of childhood or drunkenness, as if the time we had spent together had not been fully lived. I had the brutal desire to be seen through new, less penetrating eyes, to experience a wanton exchange of surfaces. Fulminating with possibilities, my skin seemed all at once to possess a frightening autonomy, as if it could crave and consume, could overpower me with its appetites. The world outside my window pulsed with promise and invitation. I felt an inner fainting, a felling away of resistances: the desire for physical contact with another human being began to rage like a headache about my mind, drowning out the sound of other thoughts and finally gathering to itself such shape and purpose that it felt like a great horn protruding from my forehead. With so little about me that I knew, I was virtually unpoliced; and it was in this strange savagery that I began to touch myself in front of the mirror, while the dim protests of my more civilized self went unheeded.

For how long I remained in this curious state, which was half frenzy, half trance, I could not say. Perhaps it was a quarter of an hour, perhaps more; but eventually I came to my senses, and looking about my bedroom, which I had entirely forgotten, had a feeling of intense exposure and shame, as if the severe furniture and disapproving eye of the window had been observing my antics. I left the room quickly and went downstairs. In the kitchen, I set about making preparations to assuage my now quite fierce hunger. My body felt tremulous and weak. My hands shook as I struggled to tear the Cellophane packaging around the rolls, and once or twice I was forced to stop and lean against the kitchen counter until the rapid beating of my heart subsided. I examined the tin can I had bought, which contained something called ‘luncheon meat’; a substance widely consumed, I believe, during the last war, from which period the dusty, crepuscular tin appeared to date. Despite having little appetite for the stuff, I was relieved to discover that the tin carried a device for opening itself; but minutes later, searching a drawer for cutlery, I found a tin opener in any case. I assembled my meal, which consisted of two rolls without butter containing pink slabs of luncheon meat and a cup of coffee, and carried it on a plate out into the garden.

It must, at this point, have been early to mid-afternoon, and outside the heat was so searing that it seemed to have blanched the garden of colour. I arranged myself upon a blasted patch of grass, taking care to keep only my right side in the sun, and began to eat. I do not have a particularly weak stomach as far as food is concerned, but the ‘luncheon meat’ was grotesque in appearance. A more imaginative person than I would doubtless have seen all manner of horrors in the sinister pink mush, and I bolted it down, keen to avoid having this type of thought myself. I had progressed to my coffee, swatting at a gang of wasps and other insects lured by the crumbs on my plate to pester me, when the sound of Pamela’s voice caused me to jump.

‘Didi, darling, you couldn’t fling over my sunglasses, could you?’

I looked around, startled. The voice had seemed to come from nearby, and yet Pamela was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I sat in utter confusion; but when I heard nothing further, began to think that I must have imagined it. Seconds later, however, I clearly heard Pamela’s voice again.

‘Thanks, darling.’

This time, I felt quite upset. I turned my head this way and that, telling myself that Pamela must be somewhere in the garden, but knowing in the pit of my stomach that she was not. At that moment I heard a laugh, long and low; again, definitely Pamela’s. I had heard that laugh in the hall of the big house the night before, and was not likely to forget it, nor anything else about that evening, in a hurry. Hearing the laugh, then, I thought that I would go mad. It was absolutely impossible that Pamela could be more than a few feet away, and in the end I was driven to get up and search for her, peering ridiculously behind the apple tree and to the sides of the cottage. Finding nothing, there was no more for me to do than sit back down again. I waited, electrified, my heart pounding. There was a much longer silence this time, but eventually the voice came again.

‘She is, she is,’ it said. ‘But it’s early days yet, you know.’

I was concentrating so hard that I could hear the thud of my own heartbeat in my ears. It was so loud that I was unable to hear anything above its noise, and I slapped the side of my head with my hand to try and make it go away.

‘Well, it was so bloody dreadful last time. We were this close to just paying out to get someone professional in, you know.’

This time I was able to analyse the sound closely enough to hear a slight echo at the end of each word. Through some freak of the landscape and the exceptional stillness of the hot air, Pamela’s voice must be being carried all the way from the back of the house. It was obvious to me now that what I was hearing was one half of a conversation; the ‘Didi’ referred to evidently being positioned behind some obstacle which prevented her responses from reaching me. In almost the same moment as I solved this bizarre mystery, I realized that it had a considerable — indeed, an unthinkable — bearing on me. Pamela, it was suddenly clear, was discussing me with her friend.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t time beforehand, and we’ve both tried to hold off from interrogating her before she’s had time to catch her breath. She seems nice enough, though. Rather mousy, you know.’

I had stopped breathing.

‘That’s right!’ Pamela shrieked with laughter. ‘I know, I know.’

I was kneeling by this time, my whole body straining in the direction of the house. The sun grated on my sore skin, corrosive and painful.

‘Bog-standard middle, I’d say,’ said Pamela. ‘Well-spoken. She seems quite intelligent.’ Then, minutes later: ‘Oh, nothing very interesting. Some sort of secretary.’

For a few minutes I could hear nothing at all. The sounds of the garden were amplified in the silence, and after a while grew so loud that I feared that I was missing something.

‘Do you know, I don’t think he even notices when we get a new one,’ said Pamela then. ‘He’s such a darling. They all adore him. This one’s got a dreadful crush on him already.’ I heard a long, horrifying peal of laughter. ‘Of course I haven’t. He’d be mortified. God, I must be the only woman in the world who doesn’t need to worry about her husband having it off with the au pair.’

I cried out in dismay, there in the garden, and swiftly clapped a hand over my mouth as it occurred to me that the strange echo could just as easily work in the other direction. Some time passed, during which I remained kneeling and alert, but no further conversation came my way. I was profoundly upset and disturbed by what I had overheard. I could not even offer myself the obscure consolation of thinking that I had got what I deserved for eavesdropping, seeing as Pamela’s comments had been forced upon my inadvertent ears. My hatred for Pamela, which ever since my arrival at Franchise Farm had been struggling to burst the confines of propriety, broke free and coursed boiling about my veins. For a few minutes I was quite demented with anger and shame, and found myself thrashing and writhing on the spot like a wild animal. My thoughts were in havoc, a babble of concerns from which I could wring no sense, and before long I had exhausted myself so entirely that I fell to the grass, panting. Aware, even in the midst of this chaos, of my skin, I managed to heave my weary body onto its side so that the burnt patches were out of the sun; at which point, much to my surprise, I fell asleep.