The Country Life

Chapter Seven

I awoke to find the garden shrouded in the delicate summer gloom of evening. All around was quiet, save for the last, fading strains of birdsong, and in the stillness I felt a profound calm holding me on the brink of sleep; a pause in which neither my mind nor body was properly engaged, and during which I lay, as innocent and unquestioning as a pebble, on the warm grass, with no memory of my capacity for thought or movement. This pause lasted for some time; and then several things happened at once. The dusky garden, whose soft: quiescence had minutes earlier been wrapped close about me, drew back with the menace of unfamiliarity. The silence of the looming trees grew sinister. I had not the faintest idea of where I was, and jumped up straight away from the grass. As I did so, every bone in my body cried out in protest. Bolts of cramp shot through my legs, and my skin felt as if it were crackling or crumpling like paper. Just then, a monstrous and unannounced surge of nausea rose up through my stomach to my mouth. I leaned over and vomited copiously where I stood.

That all this should have happened without my really having ascertained who or where I was left me in a state of shock. I stared at the heap of my own vomit in the dim light, and was surprised by its luminous pinkness, strident even in the dusk. The luncheon meat was thus summoned from my memory, and with it the reluctant cavalcade of the day’s events, so unexpectedly severed by sleep. I wiped my sticky, wet mouth with the back of my hand and turned to face the cottage. I had left the front door standing wide open and felt a guilty tremor of irresponsibility. I didn’t feel like going inside. Its peevish promise of enclosure was as appalling to my spirits as a warm sweater would have been to my sunburn. The garden, now defaced by my regurgitation and growing gloomier by the second, was no more appealing. I wondered how I was expected to entertain myself, with neither television, radio nor human company to fill the void of evening. I considered going over to the big house, but even setting aside the difficulties already thriving in the barely cultivated ground of my relationship with the Maddens, my day alone, and the peculiar activities to which this solitude had given rise, had left me diffuse and shapeless and unconfident of my ability to assume the coherent form necessary to social interaction.

The thought of a bath and an early night, with the remainder of the bread rolls to hand should I require them, was at least tolerable, and I went inside, closing the door behind me. As I crossed the sitting room, something caught my eye; a shadow of movement of some sort, which I had glimpsed but now thought I must have imagined. I continued on my way, but as I did so it came again; the faintest of shades, almost behind my field of vision. I stopped, my heart thudding. I sensed the pressure of another presence in the room, the slight bustle of air. It was clearly, however, nothing concrete, given that I couldn’t see it. I wondered, ridiculously, if the cottage was haunted. It surprised me to think this, not being a superstitious person, nor indeed having ever been aware of this dimension in my personal landscape of fears.

As I stood there, I noticed a white streak, about the size of a finger, on the carpet at my feet. My experience with the tar had left me with a more detailed recollection of the carpet than would be considered normal, and I felt sure that this streak had not been there earlier. I noticed another on the flowered back of the sofa, and then another splashed across the small side table. What on earth could it be? I was becoming quite disturbed by now, and felt a membrane of silent tension begin to gather thickly around me. I went to the door and switched on the lights to try and dispel it. The light was momentarily comforting and prophylactic; but then I caught the shadow again, over by the fireplace — as before, more of a feeling than a visual occurrence.

My mounting sense of unreality was becoming unbearable, and was frightening me more than the thing — for I still had no idea of what it was — itself. In an attempt to jolt the course of events back onto its proper rails, I gave a loud shout. This immediately made me feel better, and so I shouted several times, running about the room and thumping on the furniture to rout whatever spirit it was that oppressed me. I reached the fireplace, still shouting; and all at once there was a terrific squawking and beating, and a great bird rose up like a fury from behind the armchair, hurling itself through the air towards me. It reared above my head, its fat, feathered body suspended in a frenzied gyration of wings, its claws outstretched. I felt feathers fan against my cheek and screamed like a banshee, almost insensate with terror, pummelling the air with my fists and jumping up and down to try and repel the horror.

What happened next could only have been the work of a few seconds, although it possessed a startling clarity which, even though I was quite beside myself with fear, impressed itself for ever on my memory. Still suspended in the air, the bird shied away from my flailing fists, a look of affront in its tiny, stupid eyes. It took a great swoop across the room, a sort of leisurely dive; and then hit the far wall with a thud, sliding directly down onto the carpet.

For some time I was unable to move. At first I was braced for the bird to revive from its knock; but when after a few minutes I heard no sound coming from it, I crept over to the other side of the room to look. It was lying in a heap on the floor, utterly still. I was surprised by its inertia, and by the limpness of its feathered neck lolling to one side. I was relieved, in any case, that it did not appear to be breathing; for I feared that any claim to ‘aptitude for the country life’ would have to include the ability coolly to put a suffering animal out of its misery. In fact, I could not bring myself to go any nearer to it, let alone touch it, dead as it was. I recognized it as a pigeon, and realized that it must have flown through the open door while I was sleeping, depositing gobbets of its excrement about the room.

Given that I was unwilling to touch the creature and could therefore achieve nothing by just standing about, I presently found myself on my way once more to the bathroom, where I had been headed before the unfortunate incident waylaid me. I ran a bath in the narrow tub and glimpsed my reflection in the small mirror above the sink, being for some minutes gripped by compelling feelings of alienation and concern at the sight of myself. In a sort of dream, I got into the bath. The water was quite hot; and after some time I realized that a painful tingling sensation was coursing down the right side of my body, particularly around the leg and arm. I washed quickly, unable because of this tingling to endure the long, comforting immersion I had imagined, and by the time I had finished was in such pain that I literally sprang from the water, sending great waves of it sloshing over the sides of the bath and onto the floor. Examining myself, still dripping wet, I saw to my dismay that my right arm and leg — I had been wearing the cut-off trousers, as I am sure you will recall — as well as the skin on my right cheek and neck, had turned a violent purple.

I had had no idea, when I lay down on the grass that afternoon, that the sun could be so powerful at that hour. As well as the dreadful pain of this latest discovery, I was aware that it had had a peculiar effect on my appearance. A brief survey turned up the following: right arm and right leg to the upper thigh, severely burnt; left arm burnt; left leg, marble white; left cheek and neck, burnt; right cheek and neck, severely burnt; torso and upper arms, marble white; central panel of face and neck — a strip no more than an inch wide — marble white.

It was by now dark outside, and I thought of going out into the garden so as to cool myself off; but my recollection of the pile of vomit, though vivid, was not so precise that I could be sure of not treading in it in the dark. The sitting room, where the bird still lay in ghoulish state, was no more inviting. In defeat I retreated upstairs to my bedroom. My skin was still wet, and within seconds of leaving the bathroom I became very cold and began to shiver uncontrollably. Upstairs I tried to dry myself, as before, with the edge of the eiderdown, but the crisp fabric felt like sandpaper as I rubbed it over my sore skin. The lotion skidded about on this raw, wet surface when I tried to apply it, and would not be absorbed. Presently I gave up entirely, and lay down whimpering on the bed.

It was difficult not to have the most desolate thoughts about my predicament as I lay there. Determined as I was not to regret my decision to come to the country, the effort of will required to prevent myself plunging into an abyss of despair was considerable. So occupied had I been with damming the pressing flood of my past life that I had been unprepared for assaults up ahead; and it was tempting, oppressed as I now was on all sides, to relinquish my control of the situation entirely. There are moments at which great blocks of life seem to hang on the slenderest of threads; at which whole limbs of future and past pivot on the tiniest of fulcra. I trembled in that moment in just so exiguous a place. Like someone crouching on a lofty window ledge, I sensed that the slightest movement could undo me. I dared not even shift about on the bed, lest it provide the wing-beat of doubt required to topple me.

In the event a twinge of cramp in my empty stomach drove me to flop over onto my side; and it was then that my eyes fell on the bookshelf propped against the wall opposite. I am not a particularly keen reader, but my thirst for distraction was such that I was prepared to labour over this primitive receptacle to wring from it even a few drops. I got up and went to the bookshelf, squatting down beside it. Idly running my eyes over its offerings I saw several tides that I recognized, and some that I had already read. I dithered, pulling out first one then another from the mêlée of battered spines; and was about to make off with quite an exciting-looking detective story when a most curious thing happened.

At the far end of the shelf, tucked in amidst a crowd of rather tawdry romances, was a book that had my name on it. I blinked, thinking that I must be mistaken, and indeed lost it for a second or two; but there it was again. Stella Benson. Quivering and somewhat afraid, I drew it from the shelf. It was quite an old book, with a hard, mildew-green cover. In gold script on the front was the tide: The Runaway Bride. Transfixed, my heart pounding, I sat crouched on the floor with the book in my hands. What could it mean? Was it a joke, or magic, or something more sinister; an inexplicable collision of worlds, a piece of jetsam tossed up by a mocking wave from an inscrutable sea? Opening the cover, I looked at the flyleaf. The mystery accrued substance, became concrete. The Runaway Bride by Stella Benson.

Trembling, I began to turn its dry, yellowed pages where I sat. I must have stayed like that for some time, for when I rose, still reading, to He down on the bed, my legs ached and tingled. In the end it wasn’t about me at all, but about people far away; although it was a fine story, and quite sad. The hours passed, there in the dry, dark pit of the night. Eventually I forgot the abrasive shock of the coincidence; or at least settled into a warmer accommodation with it. My namesake had evidently been a woman of some substance, well travelled, independent, compassionate; and kind, too; for she had thought, all those years ago, to set down this interesting tale, so that I would find it in my hour of loneliness and despair and be comforted.