Things had suddenly, and without my quite knowing how, taken a turn. I felt my heart begin to pound again with embarrassment and anxiety. Pamela did not appear to be entirely in control of herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Well,’ said Pamela, unkindly. ‘Just so long as we understand one another.’
‘If you could just tell me,’ I continued, close to tears, ‘what exactly his routines are, then I’ll find things much easier.’
This comment was clearly spoken in my own defence, making it evident to Pamela that it was through her fault, not mine, that my sense of my own duties was muddled. I had judged her to be a good-natured woman, but whether through tiredness or simply the wearing off of her initial veneer of politeness, I now saw that she had somehow become committed to a brittle and ill-tempered mood which my very presence was guaranteed to inflame. Even her figure seemed to have taken on sharp edges and angles, and as she spoke she gestured quite violently with her thin hands.
‘Stella, I really didn’t expect to have to mollycoddle you and lead you by the hand every minute of the day. We need to have someone here to help us, not double the load. If you don’t think you’re going to be up to it, and be able to take responsibility, then you’d better tell me now rather than later.’
‘Mrs Madden,’ I said. The evening had taken on a surreal character. I was unable even to gauge my own mood, and just then had no idea of what I might do. We had both, I remembered, been drinking, and I for one felt no confidence in my ability to keep my temper. ‘I think you might be getting things a bit out of proportion.’
It really seemed possible, in that moment, that I might have a fight with Pamela. The lateness of the hour, the featureless darkness outside the kitchen windows, the despoilt table and blur of food and drink; all this, as well as our unfamiliarity with each other, seemed to permit anything. She wouldn’t look at me, and was furiously busying herself at the sink. ‘I don’t see how I can take responsibility if you haven’t explained what you expect of me. Perhaps,’ I said, ‘we had better both just go to bed, and talk it all through in the morning.’
Pamela did not reply.
‘Would that be all right?’ I persisted.
‘Look,’ she barked suddenly, her back still to me. She stopped what she was doing and leaned with both her hands on the kitchen counter, her head down. Her shoulders were rigid. ‘Just be here at eight thirty on Monday. Do you think you can manage that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I was both furious and upset. I could not understand how all this had taken place. ‘Goodnight.’
She said nothing, and did not turn around. I hurriedly left the kitchen, and through some stroke of instinct or good luck found myself immediately outside on the gravel path. I ran along beside the hedges in the dark, my heart jammed against my ribs, my breath heaving in my mouth, my head awash with confusion. The black mass of trees flew by me and suddenly I was at the cottage gate and then through it, and then thudding up the path to the door. I opened the door and slammed it behind me and tore up the narrow stairs, without switching on the light, to my bedroom. There, in the dark, I threw myself upon the bed and wept.
Chapter Five
Some time later — perhaps only three or four hours, I thought, as it was still dark (it was late July and the mornings came early) — I woke up. I was very confused when I opened my eyes. I did not recognize my surroundings; partly because they were unfamiliar to me, and partly because the darkness of the countryside is far blacker than that of town. Indeed, for a few moments I was quite terrified, for when my eyes opened I appeared to see nothing more than when they had been shut. I opened and shut them a few times, unable to transcend my need to apprehend the physical world. I was lodged so deeply inside myself that my consciousness was in that moment but a simple junction of the senses, like that of an animal. I thought at first that I had gone blind, and then that I was dead and in my own grave. Presendy I heard a faint rustling of leaves outside my window, and from this single clue was able slowly to piece together my circumstances.
This process was arduous, and as each block was put in place I felt as if I were struggling beneath an increasing burden, like a packhorse being loaded up with cargo. I began with the fact that I was lying in a strange bed wearing my nightdress. Struggling to remember changing into this nightdress, I came instead on a recollection of lying crying on the bed, and with a contraction of the heart plunged anew into the terrible scene with Pamela, which was webbed in my thoughts with the viscous confusion of a dream. It took me some time to disentangle its reality, but finally I possessed it in all its terrible clarity. Like an awful jewel, I worked it into the setting of the day before, the arrival at Franchise Farm, my first meeting with the Maddens, the cottage where now I lay. Monumental as all this already seemed, it lacked, I felt, the sinister adhesive of truth. There was more to my misery; but unable to bear the thought of being roused further from the anaesthetic of confusion, I attempted to coax myself back into ignorance and sleep. The face of the boy, Martin, sprang upon me, however, like that of a ghoul. My eyes snapped open again, and the tide of an irresistible alertness rose in my stomach.
Now that I was really awake, I became aware of something else, something throbbing and sublimated which had borne me from sleep into consciousness. Slowly I groped towards the source of this other discomfort and soon discovered that it was a physical pain. The skin on my body — mainly across my arms, legs and back — felt as if it were burning, and as I considered the sensation, my lethargic nerves conveyed to me the information that I was sleepily scratching myself, and had indeed been doing so before I even awoke. Suddenly alive, I ran my fingertips across the inflamed tracts of skin and found them raised into what felt like a series of long, narrow ridges. I sat up, alarmed, and after some fumbling succeeded in switching on the bedside lamp. Seeing the room illuminated around me I received a secondary tremor of unfamiliarity, as the scene of my swimming thoughts was drained of darkness, leaving close, unfriendly walls and suspicious lumps of furniture. I examined my arms, and to my dismay saw that they were a furious red, cross-hatched with hundreds of thick, raised white lines, as if I had worms embedded beneath my skin. Crying out, I flung back the eiderdown. My legs were similarly inflamed, and leaping from my bed and rushing to the wardrobe mirror, I lifted my nightdress and strained to see my back. The skin there was the worst of all, and seeing it I heard myself make a series of catlike mewlings.
For a few seconds I scratched, tearing at my nightdress like a maniac, and then understood that I was going to lose control of myself if I continued in this fashion. I sat, hot and exhausted, on the corner of the bed, my head in my hands. My skin tingled and itched now that my fingers were not attending to it. I bridled my urge to scratch, forcing my hands into my mouth. My back felt unbearably hot. Around me the night was shrunken and dense, like the pupil of an eye contracted to a pinprick. I was stranded on an island of time from which the only escape was sleep. Reluctantly I got back into bed. Seconds later I sat up again and removed my nightdress over my head, knowing that I would have to make some concession to the inflammation before it would permit me to sleep. Lying down again, the bedclothes felt slightly cooler, and aware that this novelty would last but seconds and could be followed by a rebellion even more severe than the first, I turned off the light, closed my eyes, and forced myself, as one would force the head of a man beneath water to drown him, into sleep.