The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I been wanting to see you,’ he said.

  ‘Me? Why me?’

  ‘I wanted to say I was sorry I called you Mrs Parker.’

  She did not speak for a moment. She held her head sideways and put the honeysuckle to her nose and the curling flowers of it seemed to climb, tendrilwise and delicate, about her brown cheeks. It was like a small gesture of enticement that she had made unintentionally.

  ‘I’m sorry I said that,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know what?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘You don’t want to get ideas in your head.’

  ‘I only just come here,’ he said. ‘I don’t know folks –’

  ‘Still, you don’t want to get ideas,’ she said. ‘I don’t like people getting ideas.’

  He stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say. The hedge, with its pale yellow curling fingers of honeysuckle, stood between them like a barrier. Something made her run her fingers through the topmost leaves of it as she turned and moved along it and then he called:

  ‘There was something else. Did you ask him?’

  ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘About the pheasants – about walking over –’

  ‘I told you it’s more than my life’s worth,’ she said. ‘He flies into a two-and-eight now if anybody so much as looks at the land.’

  ‘Shall I ask him?’ he said.

  ‘You want to get your brains blown out?’ she said.

  She held the honeysuckle to her face again and once more, fine and tendrilwise, the flowers delicately fingered the skin of her summer-brown face and once more she responded by walking away.

  ‘The honeysuckle’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. It smells nice. I like the smell.’

  ‘There’s been a fine lot farther along the wood,’ he said, ‘on top of the hill.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s nice up there,’ he said. ‘Nobody ever goes much up there.’

  Later, as she walked away across the hill, she was aware of him still standing there, still watching her. She was aware also of wanting to look back. She did not look back and she began to feel vaguely uneasy about something without knowing what it was. A light prickling of sunlight came down through the beech-leaves and made a pattern of light and shadow on her face. Unconsciously she let the honeysuckle finger her mouth again, and it made her look more thoughtful than ever.

  Some evenings later, when she sat at supper with Parker, she began to cry.

  ‘Here,’ Parker said. ‘Here. What now?’

  ‘I can’t find the money,’ she said. ‘That money you give me.’

  ‘Musta mislaid it somewheres, that’s all.’

  ‘I looked high and low,’ she said.

  ‘When’d you see it last?’

  ‘That day I was gleaning,’ she said. ‘That day Albert was prowling around. I went out and never locked the house.’

  ‘Gawd,’ Parker said. ‘We gotta stop this.’

  ‘Don’t do nothing yet,’ she said. ‘We don’t want no trouble.’

  She cried again as Parker looked about him with small uneasy rabbity eyes.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘That won’t do no good.’

  ‘Yes, but I got nothing now. What have I got? I paid all that out – them curtains and all that – and now it’s gone –’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make it right,’ Parker said.

  After some time she stopped crying.

  ‘I made a mistake that first time,’ she said. ‘I added it up wrong. You put me off that night, coming into the bedroom. It’s twenty-four pounds ten to be right. I forgot two stew-pans and I never put the curtain-tapes down.’

  Parker looked troubled and reflective. Several months had gone by since that first evening she had washed his face and talked of new curtains; and it was hard now, almost impossible, to work out how much he might have owed.

  ‘It’s only a bit extra,’ she said. ‘It’s not much.’ Now she in turn took his head in her hands and smoothed his face. ‘You can’t have all the little extras for nothing, can you?’

  For some days Parker was troubled about the money. He began to make furtive and inconclusive searches among the biscuit tins. He had never been quite sure, to within forty or fifty or even a hundred pounds, how much they held; some times when he came home from market, over-drunk, jubilant at the thought of fifty or sixty pounds folded into his hat, he had woken up to find himself on the kitchen floor, some part of his memory paralysed, so that he could not remember exactly how much the hat had held.

  At the same time his thoughts of Dulcima deepened. He thought of how good she was, how capable, how hardworking; how she had got her head screwed on the right way. He thought much more of her brown, smooth, hardening body; he thought of her as she was in the bedroom. He felt that if he married Dulcima he could take her into his confidence. He would be able to tell her about the money upstairs. He had the impression that she was a shrewd careful girl who perhaps could help him, in time, to make more money. That was the sort of partner he wanted.

  Then again, he would think, it was cheaper to marry. Three pounds a week: that was a lot of money for a girl, too much money. The two of them could live for that. They could, he thought, enjoy all that they were enjoying now but enjoy it more often and enjoy it cheaper. Marriage was the thing; marriage was the answer.

  Then he remembered too that she had once been going to marry Albert and his jealousy about Albert began to be renewed. It was odd how Albert was always cropping up. He remembered the incident of Albert in the wheatfield, staring over the gate with his gun, Albert at the market, Albert prowling round, Albert having to be told about things, Albert always after her. He remembered how once the notion of Albert doing these things had seemed funny and how he thought he had cheated him. But now it was not funny; he was not so sure. He began to want Dulcima for himself. More and more he wanted to be sure of her and to be rid of Albert for ever.

  So he spoke of getting married. ‘Eh? How about that?’ he said. ‘You know how folks are – start talkin’. We could git married at one o’ them offices any day. Eh?’

  ‘I got to think it over.’

  ‘All right, you think it over.’

  And as the days passed she would think it over; or rather she would pretend to think it over. She would think instead of her bank-book, the money in the biscuit tins, and the way the money could grow; she would smile at the thought of Parker and his little extras and how, for some time longer, she would keep him waiting for an answer.

  Then as the days grew shorter, Parker began to think of long winter nights, with western winds howling wet sea-storms against the hill. He thought of snow. Sometimes snow lay so long and deep in the narrow hill-lanes that he could not get out for a month to the market. He felt he did not want to face the snow, the storms, the darkness, and the rain alone again in another winter. He dreaded a cold empty bed and the dark crust of winter settling over everything as it had done last year, before Dulcima had arrived to sweep it away.

  ‘Well, Dulcie, you made up your mind –?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t know. I want to – it ain’t that, but there’s a lot o’ things –’

  ‘It ain’t Albert, is it?’

  ‘Albert – good Lord, no.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Well, once you’re married, you’re married. I don’t want to jump out of the frying pan into the fire,’ she said, laughing, ‘do I?’

  ‘When are you going to make up your mind? Soon, eh? Afore winter?’

  ‘Some day.’

  She noticed how her little trick of mocking him started fires of excitement in his eyes. ‘Course you might have to marry me, yet. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘That wouldn’t worry me,’ he said.

  ‘I should think not,’ she said, ‘I’m the one to worry about a thing like that.’

  ‘You think it over then – quick,’ he said. ‘Think it over – afore winter c
omes.’

  But as she lay awake at night, on the soft windless darkness of early October, she did not think it over. She thought of other things. She thought mostly, at first, of the money, the biscuit tins, the bank-book and the simple way she had been able to arrange these things. She thought of how easily, after all, she had been able to get the things she had never had. She remembered her father, the barrier standing between herself and a new dress or new shoes or new white gloves or a little freedom or a little money. She remembered the children coming one after another, and then the days with the pram, all of them frustrating her. Now she was finished with them all: the children, her father, the pram, the days of tugging and standing and pushing until her legs were gross and hideous, and she was glad that they were over.

  She thought also of the young man standing by the hedge of honeysuckle, watching her as she walked away through the wood of beeches. She remembered the curious sensation that seemed to impel her to turn round and look back at him. In the warm October darkness it was a sensation that somehow began to magnify itself. It grew not only larger but more mystifying. It fascinated and haunted her, so that she lay awake for a long time with her eyes stiffened with sleeplessness, staring at the stars above the hill, wondering why it fascinated her and why it roamed tirelessly and hauntingly round and round in her mind.

  Then, at last, it began to trouble her.

  7

  One afternoon in late October she walked through the beech-wood, above the farm, to the keepers’ hut on the far slope of the hill. The leaves of the beeches were already making masses of fire against a sky that was blue and lofty and under them the glow of air was a pure orange, full of dancing flies.

  The door of the keepers’ hut was open but the hut was empty and her feeling of disappointment was so sharp that it took her by surprise. She had not expected that. Inside the hut there was a table, a camp-bed, two chairs, an oil-stove and a few cups and a box below the bed. A row of oiled steel traps hung on one wall and a neat pile of newspapers lay on the table, with a pair of leather gloves and a canvas bag.

  She felt a curious uneasy sensation of excitement as she looked at these things. There was a neatness, a swept homeliness about the hut that fascinated her. A bucket with a galvanized lip for soap stood in one corner with a towel folded over the side. A mirror by the window above it had a hairbrush and comb hanging on one side and a razor-strop on the other.

  For winter there was a stove and for some reason she thought suddenly of winter rain, of days of flying beech-leaves, of the little hut with the stove humming away behind the closed door. There was something wonderfully secure in thinking about these things, and that too took her by surprise.

  She walked away up the hill. At the crest of it a breeze came over the bare western slope where the copses of hazel had been cut down. It blew her hair about her face and down over her cheeks in untidy strands. The honeysuckle the young man had spoken about had dropped its flowers and now hung with reddening berries over bushes of hawthorn.

  She walked back down the hill. Half-way to the hut the sound of a gun-shot came from the far side of the wood, rushing like a rocket through the fiery ceiling of leaves. She went on and stood for some moments at the door of the hut. This time she noticed on the wall inside a pattern of blown birds’ eggs, some hundreds of them, blue and white and scribbled and spotted and brown, strung together in necklaces, the eggs graded like beads. They too fascinated her; They too had that wonderful neatness and secureness about them that left her uneasy and surprised.

  As she went inside the hut to look more closely at the pattern of eggs making ten-fold necklaces on the dark wall, she caught sight of her face with its untidy strands of blown hair in the mirror by the window.

  She stood by the mirror and began to comb back her hair with her fingers. Her hair had always tended to grow in heavy side-fingers that had the effect of thickening her face. It grew low over her forehead and was greasy. Suddenly she picked up the comb and began to comb the wind-blown strands of hair back from her forehead and her ears. The sensation of the comb scraping over the crest of her forehead and through her matted hair was so minutely painful for a moment that she bit her lips. She was angry with herself and suddenly hated the face she saw in the mirror, with the too thick, too dark, too greasy hair. It brought back for a moment a memory of her father. She felt a stab of her old grievance about being beautiful. She remembered how much she had wanted to have a different body: a different kind of face, different eyes, different hands, above all different legs and hair.

  ‘Who would look at a face like that?’ she thought.

  She was savagely brushing her hair when she heard the young man set his gun down by the door of the hut. She was so startled that she had no time to put down the brush. She felt the blood rushing to her face and then an embarrassing trembling of her hands.

  ‘It’s all right. Make yourself at home,’ he said. ‘I saw you coming down.’

  ‘You saw me?’

  ‘Not many people I miss,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘I didn’t think you saw me –’

  She did not know what to do with the brush in her hands.

  ‘I’m using your brush – the wind got into my hair. I can never do anything with it. I don’t know what you’ll think of me –’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘I really come in to look at your birds’ eggs. The door was open and I could see them and I come in.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  The blood was pounding up through her neck and face and into the roots of her hair, and she was gripping the brush with both hands.

  ‘I’m sorry – it’s not very nice coming in like that and using other people’s brushes and all that – but I never thought –’

  ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he said. ‘What about a cup o’ tea?’

  ‘I think I ought to go,’ she said. ‘I think I made a nuisance of myself enough for one day.’

  ‘That’s all right. Stay and have a cup o’ tea.’

  She watched him, still with the brush in her hands, put a match to a little oil stove on a stand by the window. She saw him fill an enamel kettle from a bucket underneath it. He put two mugs on the table, with a tin of sugar and a bottle of milk, and a teapot and two spoons. She was fascinated again by the neatness of everything, the order, the completeness of his private world.

  ‘You always live here?’ she said.

  ‘March to November.’

  ‘You sleep here?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  He turned to find a chair for her and she saw his eyes shine pale blue, almost white, in the brilliance of low October light by the doorway.

  ‘Don’t you find it lonely?’

  ‘Me? No: I like it.’

  ‘I think I should find it lonely.’

  ‘Depends what you’re used to,’ he said.

  It was only when she turned to sit down at last that she became aware again of the brush. She was still trembling as she laid it on the little shelf under the mirror.

  ‘I don’t know what you think of me – with your brush and all that –’

  But he was pouring water into the teapot, with his back to her, and did not answer.

  In her nervousness, as she sat at the table with him, drinking tea, she could think of nothing to talk about but the long necklaces of blown eggs hanging behind him on the wall. The semi-circles of blue and brown and white framed his face each time she turned to look at him.

  ‘Them?’ he said. ‘That’s my score. Three hundred and twenty since March.’

  ‘That keeps you busy. That’s why you’re not lonely,’ she said.

  ‘Found a magpie’s only last week,’ he said. ‘It’s one I missed somehow: one egg.’

  ‘That was one for sorrow,’ she said. ‘Or is it joy? I can never remember.’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re all magpies to me. All vermin. I can’t bother about sorrow or joy.’

/>   And then: ‘Talking about my score, I think the brush makes us even. You know – for when I called you Mrs Parker.’

  ‘Oh! that.’

  All of a sudden she was astonished by a wave of repugnance about Parker. It rushed up into her head to chill the last of the hot blood of her embarrassment about the brush.

  ‘I didn’t think,’ he said. ‘You know – it was natural.’

  ‘I just housekeep for him,’ she said. ‘He got nobody to look after him after his wife died. I felt sorry for him. I just did it to oblige. That’s all – I shan’t stay long.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to stay there all my life, do I?’

  For some moments he did not speak again. He held the mug of tea just under his face, in both hands, his elbows on the table, his lips blowing slightly. On his top lip the hairs were long and soft and remarkably golden as if the sun bleached them as they grew freshly every day.

  ‘Do you sleep there?’ he said.

  ‘Who me?’ she said. ‘Not likely. I go back home every night.’

  As she lied she felt a rush of new embarrassment spring up and meet, in a sickening impact, the cold wave of a new repugnance about Parker.

  ‘Here, I hope you don’t get ideas,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t think –’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I didn’t mean –’

  ‘I should hope not. I should think so,’ she said. ‘It’s bad enough having to be stuck up here, all alone half the time. Half the time nobody to talk to. Nobody to see –’

  ‘Well, now you can come and see me,’ he said.

  She felt at that moment a wave of quite different feeling gather and slowly proceed, without violence, up through her body. It had the effect of softening, then dispelling the last of her embarrassment and she said:

  ‘Is that asking me? Is it an invitation?’

  ‘I like somebody to talk to –’

  ‘Is it an invitation?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The remarkable flow of new warm feeling spread at last over all her body, making her smile.

  ‘Will you come?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like to.’

  Later, as she walked down the path through the wood, away from the hut, she had again the curious feeling that he was watching her from behind. She was harassed by an overwhelming instinct that she must turn and look at him. This time she did turn, and then when she turned he was not there. Only clouds of golden October flies were dancing by the hut in the sunshine.