The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  She laid the camellia spray on the bed, beside the scarf, with gentle and almost ironic care.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now my hands are free.’

  Smiling again, she let the outward gestures of her hands fall away. It gave an impression of slight mockery to her whole body as she leaned back against the side of the open window, eyes half-closed. The sun on her eyes turned them once again to the shape of long half-open buds; and when her mouth opened slightly, quivering with what he felt might have been either excitement or amusement, he bent to kiss her again.

  There was a curious mixture of emotion behind that second kiss, or perhaps lack of it, that baffled him. She seemed one moment to stand there, arms open, free, ready to offer herself like something on a plate; and then the next moment she was gone, withdrawn, cool and charming, beautiful but shut away.

  ‘Queer how you found this room,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! no – I had no idea –’

  ‘It’s lovely. I like it. No garden, no gardeners, nobody here –’

  ‘It was used during the war by fire-watchers.’ He began to explain it with seriousness. She smiled again and out in the garden he thought he heard the first clipped charring notes of a nightingale. He saw her listening too; and when she broke away to lean against the iron railing of the little balcony he let her stay there for a moment or two alone, looking at the shape of her body as it curved forward, the legs long and firm, the thighs a little heavier and rounder in shape than he had thought them to be, sleekly pressing against the silky material of her dress. He could not resist the notion of touching her there, where the full roundness filled out the skirt; and it occurred to him once again how pleasant the growing summer was, how pleasant it could be there with her, in light, exquisite, and not too serious moments like this: quite alone, quite exquisite, quite without responsibility.

  The nightingale, breaking away from the first short charring notes, began to sing with high sustained flutings of clear ecstasy and the girl said: ‘There she goes again.’ All this time she did not seem to be paying any attention at all to the regular gentle caressing of his hand across her body. The strange tangled wilderness of great trees and nettles, billowing hedges of lilac, blackberries strangling catalpa-trees, elderberry swarming over beds of dying rose, seemed to fascinate her instead into a long oblivious stare.

  Suddenly she said: ‘We’re not alone after all. There’s somebody walking about behind the cedar trees.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You can hear it,’ she said.

  The evening was so still, quite without wind even up there at the top of the house, that he could hear the shuffle of dry footsteps, exactly as she said, among dead leaves and grass behind the cedar trees.

  ‘No one comes up here,’ he said. ‘The gates are locked.’

  ‘There’s someone. A child or something. You can see them now.’

  A ghost-like trail of something white, behind the low black cedar branches, became one with the dry shufflings of feet among grass and leaves.

  ‘It’s a peacock,’ she said. ‘A white one.’

  ‘I thought they’d been taken away –’

  She leaned forward to watch. Delicate and snow-white and finicky, the white peacock trailed slowly away, half-hidden, a ghost-bird in the grass; and as she leaned forward he let his hand curve upwards round her body. But once again she seemed as if she did not notice it; or as if it did not interest her.

  ‘Peacocks and camellias and rooms in the tops of houses,’ she said. ‘Do you know what you have got?’

  ‘One can’t live on peacocks and camellias and things,’ he said. ‘I’m a farmer. A business man, a landowner.’

  ‘This lovely house,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! lovely,’ he said. ‘Wonderful. Forty servants and a hundred tons of coal every winter –’

  ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I like it here. There’s something about it.’

  ‘Would you like to come again?’ he said. He moved his hand, touching and turning her body so that it moved upward and round to him. ‘Often?’

  ‘Often.’

  In that moment, as he prepared to kiss her again, she turned suddenly and drew him into the room.

  ‘Not there,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust anyone. Not even the peacock. And anyway I must go.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘I had a call to make on one of my men and I was going to ask you if you’d come along –’

  ‘To-morrow,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet here to-morrow and then go –’

  ‘No. Let’s go first, wherever it is, and then come back here.’

  He kissed her again; and there, by the bed, with the sun coming in a long warm shaft through the open window, he received in return the same restrained, cool, withdrawn, and yet half exquisite sort of kiss that had baffled him before. In the garden the nightingale was charring and whistling on high notes. The white peacock, like a bird sleep-walking, rustled with dry, almost harsh echoes through dead leaves and grass. The girl picked up her scarf and the spray of camellias from the bed. And as he moved to kiss her for the last time he touched by accident, for a second, the too delicate waxy flowers; and the rosette of petals, breaking like round pink wafers, fell to pieces.

  ‘Careless man,’ she said.

  4

  He could not help feeling that there was far too much fuss, the following evening, about the water-supply for Medhurst.

  Twice, as the girl sat waiting in the jeep under the narrow arch of hazels that spanned the stone track leading through gated copses to the old wood-frame shooting hut, he stepped out the distance from the back door of the house to the well about which there had been so much complaining. It was not more than fifty yards.

  ‘You said the thing was a hundred yards away,’ he said.

  ‘You git a morning with a foot of snow,’ Medhurst said, ‘and it seems like half a mile.’

  ‘It seems, it seems,’ he said. ‘But the fact is it’s fifty yards.’

  Medhurst, dark and glowering, in his shirtsleeves, stood watching Fitzgerald pace the field. His wife, a sort of half gipsy creature, Fitzgerald thought, with scrawny black hair and a black blouse pinned across her hollow chest with a safety pin, stood at the back door nursing a greasy-nosed child of eighteen months naked except for a rag of overall.

  ‘Well, let’s leave the question of how far the water is,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘What about the water? Is it good?’

  ‘It’s quite good, sir.’

  ‘You’ve no complaints about the water?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  He stood looking at the shooting-hut. Perhaps, sometimes, under pressure of events, of business, of time itself, he was rather forgetful; he granted that. But now he clearly remembered the hut. As a boy he had come with his father on shooting parties there. It was a convenient half-way house on the perimeter of the estate as it then was. He remembered the little hut crowded with shooters; the smell of good tobacco, the sharp rich reek of whisky, the aroma of fatty delicious hams fresh from under starchy napkins in shooting baskets. He remembered the beaters with plates of good beef and glasses of golden beer standing about on autumn mornings under the yellowing boughs of hazel and hornbeam; the clack of voices in the wintry woodland air.

  It had been very pleasant in those days; the shoots were not the same now.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what about the house?’

  ‘Well, there it is, sir. You see for yourself.’

  Of course he saw. It was an oblong asbestos-and-frame affair with a brick porch and chimney and square sash-windows. A tiled roof, once red but now a pleasant shade of ochre-green from a heavy growth of lichen, sat on the place like a crumpled and sagging hat. Paths of coal ashes led about a garden of gaunt cabbage stalks, undug as yet after winter, and a line of grey washing hung by the woodshed.

  ‘How many rooms have you got?’ he said.

  ‘One,’ Medhurst said. ‘Yo
u see there’s one big room.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  He supposed there never had been more than that one large room; he supposed too that there ought to have been some sort of conversion of the interior, but he could not remember. His only memory of it was something extraordinarily aromatic and pleasant and snug.

  ‘You like to have a look inside for yourself, sir?’

  ‘If that’s convenient.’

  ‘I’d like you to have a look, sir.’

  At the door, as he followed Medhurst, the wife stood apart, dangling the greasy snoffling child in the air so that he caught a glimpse of naked limbs, unwashed as it seemed for weeks. Her face too, young but colourless, was ditched in its neck wrinkles by earth-dark grime. Her shoes were tied with string; and she stared dully, half vacant, as he removed his hat before going through the door.

  Inside, half as he thought, it was not precisely as Medhurst said. A kitchen with sink and oil-stove, from which led off a small scullery with copper, made in the first place two rooms. Then there was a third, divided in turn into three by screens of plywood that did not reach to ceiling height: making a sitting-room with two bedrooms beyond.

  ‘I thought you said there was one room,’ he said.

  ‘Well, rightly it’s one, sir.’

  ‘I don’t get that. By my computation it’s five.’

  ‘By rights it’s one, sir. It always was one and it’s no different –’

  ‘Well, one or five –’

  He looked about him, depressed, angry, resentful that his snug recollection, aromatic with hams and whisky and tobacco, had been so vilely extinguished by the frowsy filth, the uncleared table, the couch piled with bed-junk, the floor littered with wreckage of gum-boots and sacks and an occasional battered toy. Icily, yet raging inside, he said:

  ‘What are your complaints about the place?’

  ‘Well, first there’s the water –’

  ‘You said you had no complaint about the water.’

  The woman, still dangling the child, came and stood staring in, with open mouth, at the door:

  ‘We gotta sleep in two rooms, we gotta sleep in two rooms –’

  ‘The three of you?’

  ‘No, sir: six,’ Medhurst said. ‘You see we got two more boys and a girl, sir. They’re growing up. That’s the trouble.’

  Fixed by the dark and groping stare of the woman, Fitzgerald was shaken by a short repugnant wave of sickness. He was repulsively amazed by the thought of physical contact. Sleep, children, the exquisite nature of women and love: he could not grasp that here, among the dark fibres of this revolting and infuriating existence, these things had ever had the remotest reality.

  ‘We gotta sleep in two rooms, we gotta sleep in two rooms –’

  ‘What are you making now, Medhurst?’ he said.

  ‘Just under the five, sir.’

  ‘You get the allowances?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘That’s another fifteen, isn’t it?’ he said. He was not waiting for an answer. ‘Your wife – surely she makes a little? Hopping and pea-picking and that sort of thing? And the boys? They make something?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  His final revulsion spat itself out:

  ‘Then what in heaven’s name are you cribbing about?’

  While Medhurst stood flushed and speechless, the wife began to whine by the door: ‘We gotta sleep in two rooms –’

  ‘First you pretend it’s one room. Then it’s two. In point of fact it’s five.’

  ‘I suppose it is, sir.’

  ‘Of course it is. You twist it to make one. Just as you twist the water. What do you want me to do?’ He was trying to make for the doorway, almost shouting. ‘Look at it. Look at it for yourself. It used to be a charming, civilized little place – it used to be tolerably decent –!’

  His own words seemed to eject him past the unwashed woman and the snoffling child, through the unwashed kitchen. Behind him he heard the grousing mutter of Medhurst’s voice throwing a broken word or two of final complaint at him down the coal-ash path. In his rage an awareness of another exquisite evening, all gold-floating light, lovely with oak-flower and tenderly drowsy with bluebell scent from below crowded hazels, was almost too much to bear.

  It occurred to him then, as he walked back to the jeep, that he had been longer than he thought. The girl was no longer waiting. For a second or two he stood in the narrow lane, his rage slowly declining and leaving in its place the queer haunted sense of gnawing disappointment he had experienced the previous evening: the distant, not wholly tangible fear that somehow, in an odd casual moment, when she chose, she would let him down.

  He was relieved and glad to see her coming along the woodland path under the hazels.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said.

  ‘Again?’ She smiled. ‘A flower for you.’ She stood close to him, so that her body almost touched him, threading a pink-white bottle-brush flower into his buttonhole. ‘An orchid.’

  His dislike of those other orchids, the exotic purple leopard mouths his father had been so fond of growing, crossed his mind; but he forgot it immediately.

  ‘We are being watched,’ she said.

  She was being expressly gentle and careful, almost deliberately finicky, with the flower.

  ‘The people from the house,’ she said. ‘Now the stories will begin.’

  From the corner of his eye he saw Medhurst, the woman and the bare-buttocked child against a background of gaunt cabbage-stalks, ash-paths and grey washing by the wood-shed.

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘I am threading a flower into your buttonhole. I am riding in a jeep with you. What more do they want?’

  His revulsion at the fetid depravity of the little house came rushing back. Hatred, both for the malignant shattering of recollections pleasantly stored from childhood and for the mere existence of the three unwashed people now staring at him, darkened his mind.

  ‘They’re the people who govern us,’ he said. ‘They’re the power now. Look at them. The masters.’

  Only a little later, struck once again by the beauty of the evening – the track curled upward through old orchards of late apple still in deep pink blossom – he calmed down. He almost forgot it all. The scent of apple-blossom was so soothing and sweet in his nostrils that he began to drive more slowly, with one hand: the other on her knee.

  ‘What about the stories they’ll tell of you?’ he said. ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘I’m only here for the summer.’

  ‘Long enough for the horse-stealers and mongrels,’ he said. It was unlikely she would understand that expression; but he did not explain it. ‘Shall we go up to the house?’

  ‘I love it there.’

  A final mutter of his discord came back:

  ‘They tell nothing but lies, these people. They whine and lie and touch their caps and all the time they hate you.’ And then: ‘Oh! I’m sorry. Awfully boring for you. It really isn’t important. Let them live in their cesspool. They made it. It doesn’t matter.’

  She smiled and said simply:

  ‘Are you supposed to caress my knee or break it in half?’

  He laughed and put both hands on the wheel. He had not realized how physical, how tautened, his feelings were.

  ‘I’m supposed to be caressing you.’ A rush of excitement pricked up through his throat. He spoke softly: ‘All of you. Is it possible?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  In the house, in the westward sun, still warm enough to give her body exactly the smooth soft heat of a bird’s egg, they lay for a long time on the little bed. Wood-pigeons, taking up from each other chains of unfinished notes, cooed drowsily from the cedar trees. A butterfly, sulphur yellow, floated leaf-like about the balcony.

  During some part of this time he could not help thinking of Cordelia. This, perhaps, was the first, the perfect opportunity to break Cordelia’s bridge-playing, impervious heart. Even Cordelia, perhaps, would not be
able to bear, without some sort of action, love on the doorstep. Perhaps it was after all an excellent thing that Medhurst and his slut had seen the little ceremony of threading the orchid into his buttonhole: perhaps not a bad thing after all that in two days, even less, everyone would know of it, Cordelia included. Fitzgerald with a lady-friend in the village: even Cordelia, perhaps, would find it hard to put up with that. So out of it he would have loveliness and fun and then, by the summer’s end, finish Cordelia too.

  ‘I still can’t understand why you don’t open this house. It’s so beautiful –’

  ‘Economic impossibility.’

  ‘What words. If it were mine I’d open it and damn the economics. Make the gardens nice again. Live in a little part of it –’

  ‘And what are you doing now?’

  She smiled, turning her body, her mouth swift in its teasing flicker:

  ‘Loving in a little part of it.’

  Her legs, long and golden-naked on the grey fire-watching blanket, were fuller and more lovely than he had, only the previous evening, imagined they would be. He touched them softly with his hands. He felt instantly a sharp quiver of response, fiery, almost painful, run up through her body and end in a convulsive hungry flick of her mouth against his own.

  ‘Be careful how you do that,’ she warned him. It was still with a little smile. ‘You may be sorry –’

  ‘Didn’t I start it?’ he said. ‘Didn’t I let you in with the key?’

  ‘I’ve still got the key. But just be careful how you do that to me –’

  In a long almost drowsy movement she stretched herself full length on the bed.

  ‘What are you thinking of?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing –’

  ‘Admiring me?’

  ‘You’re so lovely –’

  ‘Nice man,’ she said.

  Outside, beyond the sun-bathed balcony, he could hear summer growing in the evening voices of drooning pigeons and in the throaty sweetness of several blackbirds in woods along the river. Bees were still working, perhaps on a tree of roses, just beyond the window, on the house wall. He could feel all summer growing and deepening in those sounds. He could feel it in the turn of her body, in the flame of butterfly wings darting yellow across the sun. He could even feel it in a curious softening and mounting ache in his own limbs. It was mounting and deepening and richening everywhere, rapidly and luxuriantly, with his own miles and miles of grass.