The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

Author:Rachel Cusk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2015-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The garden was flooded in moonlight as I made my way back to the cottage later that evening. The moon was vast, pendulous and iridescent as a lamp above the cottage roof, so that it cast a silvery path for me all the way up the lawn. In spite of this, my footing was uncertain. The reason for this was that I was somewhat drunk, Mr Madden having been over-attentive to my glass during the course of a long and not altogether joyous evening. I have a weak head for alcohol, and had probably drunk more of it in the days since my arrival at Franchise Farm than during the entire month which preceded it. In addition, the increasing atmosphere of tension around the table as the prospect of Toby’s arrival decamped from the imminent to the distinctly remote, gave the sanctuary of alcohol a temporary but inviting gleam. Pamela grew maudlin, Piers taciturn, and Martin unsettlingly knowing, casting lingering glances at me across the table, silent bulletins which were evidently designed to inform me that should I care to request them, new insights were available from their source into what I had told him earlier.

‘I shouldn’t think he’ll come now,’ said Pamela in the end, rising to her feet expectantly as if hoping that the very act of stating a certainty would immediately bring about its refutation.

‘Probably not,’ concurred Mr Madden, stubbornly lodged at the table amidst the wreckage of dinner.

‘Oh, he is a wretch!’ she cried; and I saw then that she was genuinely hurt, and was trying to disguise it with maternal exclamations of disapproval.

Intriguing as all this was, my eyes were closing; but now, staggering into the cottage and turning on the lights, I rather wished that I had stayed longer; for the cramped, empty sitting room, which admittedly I had done little to make more homely, seemed to look peevishly round as I entered, as if it had spent the evening entertaining a loneliness which I had been appointed to meet but had kept waiting for hours, tapping its fingers and getting in the way. I flung myself into the bony armchair with the cavalier but disturbing thought that I would welcome, were I to possess it, still more to drink. This, for me, was entirely out of character; but so committed did I become to the idea that I was driven to get up again and search the kitchen cupboards to see if a stray bottle lurked there. My compulsion did not strike me as depraved. Rather, I felt frustrated with my circumstances, that I was so ill-equipped as to lack the means of being sociable with myself. I sat for a while in a kind of stupor, unoccupied. Just as it seemed that no barrier remained between me and the misery which lay vertiginously below, I remembered that I could in fact go to bed. This I did, without pausing to do anything other than remove my clothes and fling them to the floor; and once there, I turned out the light immediately and closed my eyes.

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