I stood outside Buckley station, with one suitcase on the ground on either side of me, and waited. I had worried that Mr Madden would, never having met me before, have difficulty recognizing me when I arrived, but the station building and forecourt were more or less empty. As I stood there, however, my suitcases picking me out like quotation marks, I found that my attempt to conduct this simple train of thought in a logical manner was strangely confounded. I saw that the station was deserted, but failed to register the significance of this sight in relation to my anxieties concerning my arrival and recognition. Indeed, my acknowledgement of the emptiness of my surroundings, rather than reassuring me as to the ease with which I would be noticed standing there, lacked all memory of the importance the state of the station had assumed in my thoughts previously. This, it soon became clear, was the fault of an entirely new anxiety, which at the sight of the deserted station – a sight I did not, as I have said, find reassuring in any case – now came to torment me. What surprised me was how quickly this second anxiety had superseded the first. It suggested a certain powerlessness to my position, as if my only existence, my only mental function, was to register with each passing second the uncertain outcome of the next.
My anxiety, naturally enough I suppose, was as to the whereabouts of Mr Madden, whose absence at the scene of my arrival I had not, trapped as I was in this new, contingent, and entirely linear mode of thought, even considered. I wondered whether he could have had an accident on his way; a thought I entertained only briefly and with a distinct lack of concern. I could, and did, as I stood there, admit that Mr Madden’s existence was as yet a matter of complete indifference to me; and right up until the very second of his arrival would remain that way. It was interesting to think that, perhaps in five minutes’ time, I might care about something for which at the present moment I had no feelings whatever. The fact that I was giving such undue attention to my lack of feelings for Mr Madden began itself to seem rather portentous. I wondered whether some significance were being telegraphed to me from the future; a future in which, for example, I would fall in love with Mr Madden and look back on my former indifference with astonishment; or, if my love were unrequited, with longing. Perhaps, on the other hand, this message was reaching me not from the future but from a different room of the present. Were I to discover that Mr Madden had indeed met with an accident on his way to collect me, would I be glad of my impartiality or sorry for it? Could the very fact that I had thought of him having an accident have brought the accident about? And how would his accident affect my contract of employment with the Maddens? Was it selfish or merely practical to consider this aspect of things at a time like this, my indifference towards Mr Madden having already been established?
All of which took me forward by a few minutes, at which point I noticed that a blue car had drawn up and was crouched on the forecourt some ten yards away from me. I had a feeling of abrupt drainage, as if a plug had been pulled on the pool of some inner world. The car sat for some seconds, like an unexploded bomb, before the door on the right-hand side swung open. A feeling of intense fear rolled heedlessly over me. I realized not only that the man who got out of the car and began to approach me must be Mr Madden, but that I was also to have the first human encounter – discounting dealings with ticket collectors, newsagents and the like – I had had since that last day in Rome.
‘Sorry! Sorry!’ said Mr Madden, coming towards me with his arms flapping up and down.
He was very tall, and quite large, with black, shiny hair which bounced over his face, which was red, as he walked. He was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, on which the peculiar motion of his arms revealed glimpses of two hidden islands of sweat. From a distance his face had looked oddly crumpled, but now I saw that he was smiling, a smile so forceful that it required the cooperation of all of his features to sustain it, so that it appeared oddly to be his fixed expression.
‘Sorry!’ he said again.
He was right beside me now, although he was too large and mobile for me to get a sense of him, as if I were at the wheel of a car and had to concentrate with all my might to stay on the road.
‘Have you been waiting ages?’
‘No,’ I said. It just came out, without my even having decided what to say. ‘Only a few minutes.’
In that moment, I knew, everything was set. By ‘set’, of course, I mean only in the most specific sense; I don’t want to imply that Mr Madden’s future, for example, was in my hands, nor that the more general pattern of events to come had been fixed by this one trivial exchange. What I am trying to describe is my belief that the first seconds of any encounter are those in which the important decisions are made, the fundamental characteristics established, the structural lines laid down. Had I, for example, produced some witticism in the course of my first exchange with Mr Madden, in place of what I actually did say, things might have turned out very differently between us. As it was, of all the shades of character I might have selected, I chose a kind of diffident reserve. He, as you have seen, presented himself as cheerful, kind and slightly distracted. I am not saying that our relationship did not progress beyond these roles, nor occasionally even move outside them; merely that this moment was the mould into which our fluid first encounter was poured, and that even when later we had gelled to form something firm and free-standing, its basic shape was always held.
I must have assumed a slightly stunned expression, because Mr Madden stood before me with an air of polite expectation, as if waiting for me to come to life.
‘Ready?’ he said finally.
It was only a second before he said it, but those early seconds, as I have said, seemed long.
‘Absolutely!’ I replied, even giving a little laugh. I knew that I was trying to escape the mould I had made for myself, and knew too that the attempt was futile.
‘I’ll take these, shall I?’
He bent down to pick up my suitcases. I was immediately worried by how heavy he would judge them to be, and what he might infer from it. As he bent over, I saw the top of his head. Being so tall, it was evidently not a part of him that many people saw – as its aspect of overgrown neglect testified – and looking at it I felt a curious tenderness for him, as if I had chanced on a secret door to his nature which the maze of social intercourse might have kept hidden from me. He straightened up and began walking with my suitcases to the car. I followed behind and watched as he opened the boot and heaved them in. Then, either out of good manners or because I still appeared somewhat stunned, he came round to my side of the car and opened the door for me.
‘You might want to take your coat off before you get in,’ he said. I caught the fugitive glance of his small, bright eyes. ‘Pretty stifling in there. It’s been sitting baking in the sun all morning.’
‘Right,’ I said.
For the first time since I had arrived, I noticed that it was indeed very hot, and that I was wearing far too many clothes. A fierce sun blazed overhead and the sky was brilliant blue. I had left London in an iron-grey bustle of turbulent cloud and gusting wind, and the change confused me. I tried to recall when it had happened, and wondered if I had fallen asleep on the train.
‘It was cold when I left London,’ I added, removing my coat. I was grateful that I seemed to have the possession of at least some of my faculties once more. Mr Madden would now know that I did not habitually dress for a hot day in winter clothes.
‘Was it really?’ he said, with gratifying astonishment.
He slammed the car door shut (I had sat down in the passenger seat by this time) and proceeded around the front of the car to the other side. I looked at him through the windscreen. The car was quite still for a few muted seconds. Then the door opened and he was in, noise and movement reinstated as abruptly as they had been suspended.
‘We’re off!’ he cheerfully cried, starting the car, putting it into gear and lurching forward in a single movement. ‘Sorry again to have been so late.’
I waited, assuming he would want to provide an explanation, although by that time I had forgotten that he had been late at all; and forgotten too, as before, the anxieties attendant on his lateness. He laughed suddenly, a single barking noise which jerked his head back as it exited from his mouth.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘No excuse, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps you got stuck behind a herd of cows,’ I said, much to my own astonishment.
‘Perhaps I did,’ he replied, rewarding me with another bark. I had been going to explain that this was how I might have imagined country life to be, making a joke of my being from London, but to my satisfaction he seemed to have understood my comment without further explanation.
We appeared already to have left Buckley, although I could remember nothing about the town, despite the fact that I had been looking out of the window. The road was now very narrow, and to either side I could see fields and trees which the bright sunshine gave a look of fixity, like a landscape in a painting. I thought of saying this but decided against it. Mr Madden drove very quickly, with a sort of proprietorial confidence which I was in no position to question, giving two sharp hoots of his horn at every sharp bend we approached. It seemed unlikely, given that our car clearly filled the width of the road, that this call would provide adequate warning to whatever might be travelling towards us. I sat rigid in my seat, oscillating between the secure thrill of fairground fear and the terror of real risk; and felt almost relieved when, rounding a corner, a vast, muddy tractor reared up at us on the road ahead. In that panicked, overcrowded second I knew we were going to crash and I must have cried out, for after Mr Madden had swerved unperturbed onto the verge, barely slowing his speed, and delivered us safely back onto the road beyond, he turned his head and looked at me.
‘Sorry!’ he said. ‘Pamela’s always telling me I’m a menace. Forgot you weren’t used to it.’
‘I’m fine,’ I shrilled.
A feeling of despondency came over me. I felt as if everything had been ruined by my overreaction. Combined with the mention of Pamela (that being, of course, Mrs Madden), the episode served to remind me that the sunny drive was but a prelude to the immovable and at that moment forbidding fact of my employment with the Maddens, which I had all but forgotten. I had been existing in the temporary heaven of believing that I was the guest, rather than the servant, of this world of which so far I had had such an intriguing glimpse. I saw that my new situation in life would require a more extensive range of adjustments than I had anticipated. Any calculation of happiness or sorrow, satisfaction or complaint, would now have to include the weight of my inferiority. There would be benefits, I did not doubt, in relinquishing my stake in the world – it was with the certainty of collecting them that I was making this journey – but they would come at a price. I could not afford, on this budget, to imagine – as admittedly I had there in the car – that I was a friend of the Maddens invited to stay; and still less to entertain a scenario in which Mr Madden was my husband, bowling with me along these bright country lanes. I couldn’t, however, help it; any more than I could avoid fostering an immediate and irrational dislike of Pamela. My premature but thriving hostility worried me. I wondered if the mere thought would ‘set’ relations with her in the manner I described earlier.
‘Do you see these fields now on either side?’ said Mr Madden, bellowing over the noise of the engine. ‘This is the boundary of Franchise. From here on in, the land belongs to the farm.’
I looked obediently out of the window. I saw the jolting fields, which looked no more sinister than those which had preceded them. The heat and the lulling motion of the car were making me drowsy. I wished the journey could go on for ever.
‘How long have you had the farm?’ I enquired, in an attempt to wake myself up.
‘Hmm?’ Mr Madden shot me a look of bright bewilderment. ‘Oh, it’s Pamela’s, really. Been adopted into a long line of gentleman farmers.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I felt obscurely defeated by this information, as if I had been engaged in some form of competition with Pamela from which her landed superiority had now disqualified me. ‘Do you do all the work yourself?’
‘Me?’ yelped Mr Madden, gripping the wheel. ‘I’ve got a manager.’
‘A manager? Like a film star?’ I said wittily.
‘Eh? That’s right!’ He guffawed, nodding his head convivially. ‘He doesn’t manage me. He manages the farm, does the day to day stuff. I just hang about getting in his way. Very good chap, although the girls like to have a joke about him. Look, there’s Pamela,’ he said suddenly. ‘She’ll be pleased to see us.’
We were drawing up a straight gravel drive banked on either side by trees which abruptly shaded the car and filled it with a sticky medicinal scent. Directly ahead of us stood a large, imposing house. It was built of grey stone and was very square, with a strict symmetrical aspect and three rows of windows whose glass was dark in the sun. At the front of the house was an elaborate white plaster portico, on either side of which stood a large stone pineapple. The front door was open, and standing on the steps watching our approach with folded arms was Pamela.