The Country Life

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My thanks go to Bridget Lutyens and John Cox of Slade Farm, Dulverton, for showing me the country life; to my editor Katie Owen, as always, for the resilience of both her displeasure and her talents; and to Josh Hillman.

For my parents, with love

What makes the corncrops glad, under which star
To turn the soil, Maecenas, and wed your vines
To elms, the care of cattle, keeping of flocks,
All the experience thrifty bees demand –
Such are the themes of my song.

Virgil,
The Georgics

I was to take the four o'clock train from Charing Cross to Buckley, a small town some three miles, I had been told, from the village of Hilltop. The short notice at which I was required had left me with little time for more than a glance at the area on a map, where I had learned only that the two names belonged to the lower part of the county of Sussex, and where I had gained the impression of a series of subdivisions eventually resulting in a narrow scribble of road and terminating in the dot of my destination. The prospect of travelling away from London was an unnatural one. Some gravitational principle appeared to be being defied in doing so. Tracing the route with my finger, the distance seemed more unsustainable as it grew, and once beyond the city's edge took on in my mind the resistance of an inhospitable element, as if I were now forging out to sea or tunnelling underground. To me the town of Buckley was as remote an outpost as an Antarctic station, and, still further, the village of Hilltop – represented there by a dot, as I have said – seemed to promise neither oxygen nor human life.

It was normal, of course, that I should feel some anxiety about my departure. Not only was I setting out to a place I had
never been before; I was also embarking on a kind of life about which I knew nothing; and what is more, stripping myself of all that was familiar to me into the bargain. We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place; and if for some reason we are thrown off course, or the place itself, once reached, is not what we hoped for, then we must strike out at whatever risk to set things right. Not all of these forays need have the drastic flavour of my own leap into the unknown; some are such subtle turnings that it is only afterwards that one looks back and sees what it was all leading to. But to drift, blown this way and that, or for that matter to pursue a wrong course for the sake of fear or pride, costs time; and we none of us have too much of that.

I had been given only three days in which to make my arrangements, and as these were absolute required a consideration at once speedy and measured. Fortunately, I have a keen organizational facility, and am able to marshal a group of factors with speed. Judging the letters to be the most important of my duties, I accorded them first place. The tying up of all affairs concerning my flat had therefore to be put second, although the immediate anxiety caused by this deferral tempted me momentarily to promote it. The packing of my suitcase was relegated to the hours prior to catching my train.

As I had expected, the letters took far more time than was really – given the uncertainty with which I could prophesy their effect – their due. I found myself wretchedly unable to achieve the result I desired, despite the fact that, if I had been honest, I would have admitted that I had been writing such letters secretly in my head ever since I was a child. The problem with the letters, as they stood in my mind, was that the ramblings to which I had given subconscious voice over the years lacked the economy crucial to the rendering on the page of an atmosphere of severance. As one sheet became four – closely written on both sides – I grew increasingly dissatisfied
with the confessional, injured tone I had adopted. Such a tone, I realized, was useful only if covertly or otherwise one wanted to continue relations with the person addressed, but must get things off one's chest first. I tore up the letters and began afresh. Now, however, I spurned elaboration too forcefully. The tone was bitter, and the sentiments cruel with abbreviation. I worked late into the night and eventually achieved something which, if far from perfect, at least skirted the neighbouring chasms of self-pity and vitriol with relative composure.

I sealed these letters, there at the table in the middle of the night, just in case I was tempted to look at them again in the morning and tear them up. This later proved both an insufficient deterrent and an irksome obstacle to my crossing out that postscript in the letter to Edward, which I was driven to do after waking in the night, resealing the envelope with Sellotape.

My letter to my parents at least had the advantage of saving me time in consideration of the problem of my flat. While writing, I had had the opportunity to think things through, and had found that the very action of putting pen to paper had simplified the issue. The flat was not, in the very strictest sense, my responsibility; this sense being that although I had enjoyed unchallenged dominion over it since the day of its purchase, in fact it belonged to my parents. I had intended to rent it out for them, believing, in the way that a small sum of money can
repay in the mind debts several times its size, that my remaining time in London was so elastic that it could encompass ambitions which extended far beyond it; but I now saw this intention for what it was, a valedictory gesture designed to solicit the approval of those whose fury was the one certain outcome of my move to the country. It was to avoid precisely this type of intrigue that I was going; and I discharged the whole fraught matter without delay. In doing so I had the sensation of lightness I remembered from Rome, when it had been enough to convince me that I could jump from high up over the city where I stood and would not fall. Feeling it again, I could admit that its absence since had worried me. I had been relying on the memory of it and my memory had become a tattered paper, like the letter which sustains love between people far away from each other.

Of course, I wanted to leave things in as orderly a state as possible, so that when my parents eventually called at the scene they would find nothing to displease them; no trace, in short, of myself. This process gave me a feeling, which increased as the hours laboured by, of being gradually but forcefully expelled, not just from my home but from all that had constituted my life up until that point, So unaccountable, in fact, did I begin to feel that had I not been so busy I would probably have committed some criminal or otherwise irresponsible act. Let me say that the most powerful part of the sensation by far lay in my feeling not of being pushed out, but rather of being drawn irresistibly towards something new. My pristine flat had the still-warm, thronging emptiness of a station after a train has departed elsewhere. I should add here, lest this seems too poetic, that my great clean-out went beyond the merely sanitary and involved what could without exaggeration be called the destruction of all evidence that I had ever existed. The purge was far from easy, for my mementoes – I suppose inevitably – reminded me of forgotten episodes, both good and bad. I had not thought my life to be so large, and occasionally,
as I wrestled with it there on the sitting room floor, I felt myself to be engaged in mortal combat with a creature which writhed and bit as I sought to slay it. At other times I felt such a drowsy reluctance infuse my limbs that my resolution wavered in the very midst of its work. In these moments I felt quite outside myself, as if I didn't care whether I stayed or went, nor indeed about anything that might happen to me. Once or twice I came upon something particularly sentimental and was almost drowned in a wave of self-pity and regret, wondering why it was that I felt so keen to give away every vestige of love I had ever earned. Minutes later some article of shame would provide a bitter chaser for my sickened palate, and I would come alive with purpose, working faster to free myself as if from beneath a fallen beam.

Towards evening I unearthed a packet of letters, addressed to me at school, which my father had written to me. They did not come, I should explain, directly from him – my father found emissions of feeling difficult, and any betrayal of fondness was always followed by a pantomime of disownment – but rather via the persona of Bounder, our dog.