The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  That night she lay awake for longer than usual. She thought of the incredible private neatness of the hut: the skeins of birds’ eggs, the singing of the kettle on the stove, the smell of tea and oil and spent cartridges, the way she had brushed her hair. She remembered his question about where she slept at nights and what she had said in answer.

  ‘I done wrong about that,’ she thought. ‘I never ought to have said that.’ She felt a sudden complication of thought that was too much for her. She stared sleeplessly, in remorse, at the October stars.

  ‘Now I don’t know where I am,’ she thought. ‘I don’t know where I am.’

  8

  As October went on she began to walk up into the wood almost every afternoon. ‘I’ll see for a few blackberries,’ she would say to Parker, ‘else a few nuts.’ Or she would suddenly get her black leather shopping bag and say, as if on the spur of the moment: ‘I just remembered I got no baking powder in the house. I’ll walk down as far as the shop. Is there anything you want? I’ll bring it if you do.’

  Sometimes the door of the hut was open and the hut itself empty. She would stand outside under the gleaming orange October beeches or sit inside at the neat swept table, waiting for a while. She would find herself fascinated again by the neatness of everything, the seclusion, the clean and solid privacy. She would feel herself grow excited by the smell of oil in traps, of tea, of spent cartridges and dying leaves. Then she would suddenly feel sick about Parker. Her repugnance about him would begin to drive her like an ugly rat. She would feel, again, that she did not know where she was. She was lost somewhere between the haunting repugnance about Parker and the haunting nervousness about the keeper, whose name she did not know. And suddenly she would turn and hurry back down the hill, through flying shoals of beech-leaves, frightened of herself, back to Parker and the farm.

  On another day the young man would be sitting in the hut, alone and quiet, exactly as she pictured him and exactly as she wanted him to be. She would sit for a time talking, listening to the quiet flame of the stove. He would make tea and she would watch, in stillness, but without assurance or confidence, the movement of his large bony hands.

  Then she would try, with hesitation, awkwardly, to find what lay behind the calmness, the assured quietness, the half-averted, pale, transparent eyes.

  Didn’t he ever go down to market? To the pictures once in a while?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘By the time I’m finished and cleaned up here I’m about ready for bed.’

  Didn’t he feel he wanted an evening out some time? Didn’t he feel he’d go off his head up there, alone in the wood, same thing day after day, without a bit of a change?

  ‘I sometimes get down as far as the main road on Sundays,’ he said. ‘Walk down and watch the cars.’

  ‘You do?’ she said. ‘I go that way sometimes. Do you know The Rose of Tralee? That’s down there. On the corner. It’s a café.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just walk round.’

  ‘They have tea,’ she said, ‘and ice-cream and all that. You can have it in the garden. They have tables in the garden.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘They wanted me to work there once,’ she said. ‘In the kitchen. They offered me a good job there once. I sometimes think I should have took it. I sometimes think I ought to go down and ask them if they still wanted anybody. What do you think?’

  ‘You should go down,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll walk down on Sunday. What time do you go down?’

  ‘Most Sundays I got to be here,’ he said. ‘If I got a big shoot on Monday I got to get ready for that.’

  She noticed he spoke with half-averted eyes, as if he were a long way away from her: as if, she thought, he could not bear to come nearer or even look at her.

  One afternoon she did not walk up to the wood. She took the bus and her big black shopping bag and went into town. She had begun to experience a sudden hunger for new shoes. She felt the need for a pair of gloves for her hands. She was troubled once again by the ugliness of her feet and hands and legs, the clumsy shortness of her body. She spent some time in shoe shops, buying herself finally a pair of black patent shoes with oval buckles and then a lighter pair, pale grey, with higher heels, in suede. She had never before had money for shoes like that and suddenly she felt driven by a new excitement.

  ‘And stockings? Would you want stockings?’ the assistant said. ‘We keep stockings.’

  As Dulcima fingered the silk stockings with her coarse and stumpy hands she recalled, once again with hatred, the ugliness of her thick legs and ankles. She bought three pairs of stockings and then ‘I gotta get a dress too,’ she thought. ‘No sense having new shoes and stockings and not a dress.’

  For the rest of the afternoon, as she went from shop to shop, it was as if she peeled off old skins of her life: shoes, cotton stockings kept up with black garters, straight print dress bleached by sun and washing, old underwear having broken straps fixed up with safety pins. As she tried on dresses in fitting cubicles she was more and more painfully aware of the shabbiness, the sloppy shapelessness of herself. The dresses seemed like stretched sacks on her big breasts and waist and thighs. ‘It’s not that you’re bad for size,’ assistants told her. ‘But you need support. You would find it better with support.’ She had never bothered with corsets and sometimes, alone up at the farm, in hot weather, with only Parker to see her, not even with a brassière. Now she bought them. She saw herself as she had seen so many advertisements of women, over and over again, in newspapers and magazines: her breasts cupped and held upright, her short thick back and thighs curved in oyster, the stretched front of herself gleaming silkily.

  She bought a pair of white kid gloves and she thought finally of a hat. It took her some time to decide against a hat. She decided on a perm for her hair instead. ‘You will have to make an appointment,’ they told her and she said:

  ‘It has to be before Sunday. I got to have it before Sunday.’

  ‘We can manage Friday,’ they said. ‘At three in the afternoon.’

  When she got back to the farm after going to the hairdresser on Friday afternoon Parker had not come home from market. She went upstairs and sat in her bedroom and stared at herself in the glass. She saw her face as she might have seen the face of another person. She felt it was strange and unreal and beautiful. ‘You’re rather on the short side,’ the hairdresser had said, ‘so I’m going to build it up a bit to give you height.’ Her hair was mounted now in a series of stiff black lustreless waves that, rising to a crown, made her face seem longer and less podgy. The untidy strands that had covered her ears and the sides of her cheeks had been cut away. She was able to see, almost as it might have been for the first time, the shape of her ears. Free of hair, they were surprisingly long and shapely and they too, she thought, had the effect of uplifting her.

  For some moments she ran a comb through her hair very gently, hardly daring to touch it. ‘Comb it out carefully,’ the hairdresser had said. ‘It will look better when you have combed it and it has settled down.’

  Then she remembered the young man in the wood and suddenly she had an overpowering desire to go up to the keeper’s hut and discover what he felt about the strange and lovely change in herself. She did not think he could fail to see, as she did, a transformation.

  ‘I never thought I could look like that,’ she thought.

  Then she wondered about her clothes. If the change in her hair could do so much for her what about the change in her clothes? She considered for a moment the idea of putting them on and then she thought:

  ‘No. Sunday’ll do. I’ll wait till Sunday. I’ll have a good strip-wash and be clean for Sunday.’

  Then suddenly the overpowering desire to show herself to the young keeper came back. She wanted to share the sight of herself, so much changed, with another person.

  She gave a final touch or two to her hair with the comb and then went downstairs. It took only a few minute
s to go up to the wood, but she wanted to run with excitement. The smell of her hair was something new in her experience too and she wondered if he would notice its strong sweetness. It seemed to her to have a smell that was wonderfully dusky, a deep clove, like the smell of carnations.

  In the kitchen Parker was slowly counting money, note by note, out of the greasy rim of his hat. She stopped abruptly. She had forgotten Parker. She was embarrassed and repelled by the sudden realization of Parker. She was sickened by the sight of the greasy hands pawing, with measured greed, into the greasy recesses of the hat.

  ‘Eh, that you, Dulcima? I wondered where you was.’

  The bleary eyes of Parker seemed to be pencilled, at the edges, with lines of sharp raw pink. He squinted at her as if he could not see her properly.

  A few notes fell out of his unsteady hands into the bowl of his hat and he did not pick them up again. He seemed to grope, with moist, pink-lidded eyes, to focus a better impression of her.

  ‘Dulcie – eh, Dulcie – what you done to yourself? What you bin doing to yourself?’ he said.

  ‘I had my hair done, that’s all,’ she said.

  He groped for a moment or two longer in bleary astonishment, trying to correct the focus of the incredible image of her and the unfamiliar mass of piled curled hair.

  She did not move. He seemed to be trying to convince himself that what he saw was not a drunk’s illusion. He got up and began to come towards her with open hands, the pink-lidded eyes protuberant and inflamed.

  ‘What made you do that?’ he said. ‘Makes you look different – I like it, it makes you look different. It looks nice. I like it – what made you have it done?’

  ‘I had it done with that money you give me,’ she said.

  The excited notion flew down through his stupefied brain that, since she had done it with the money he had given her, she had also done it for himself.

  ‘Dulcie, Dulcie,’ he said. He began to grope for her neck and shoulders with excited, trembling hands. His nostrils gave a quivering upward start as he caught the extraordinary dusky smell of her hair. ‘Dulcie, Dulcie,’ he said, ‘you thought any more about what I said – you know, about us, about what I said –?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. Not yet – I want to wait a bit – I want to wait.’

  She stood rigid while he began to pour wet kisses on her neck and cheeks and soft exposed ears.

  ‘I can’t wait much longer,’ he said. ‘Dulcie, I can’t wait much longer –’

  ‘I want to wait,’ she said.

  ‘Wait what for?’ he said. ‘What for? You know me, don’t you? You bin here all summer – you know the place, don’t you? You know what I got. I got plenty – I got more’n I know what to do with, Dulcie. I bin fly – I got plenty –’

  ‘I want to wait,’ she said.

  He staggered about the table, reaching for his hat, picking up notes, laughing as he tried to give her the money.

  ‘I got plenty – you only got to say –’

  ‘I don’t want it. I want to wait,’ she said.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here –’

  He suddenly seized her by the shoulders, laughing again, dragging her out of the room and upstairs. She let herself be drawn rigidly, without a word. ‘You come with me, Dulcie – you come with me. I got summat to show you –’ Trying to find his keys, he stumbled, fell on all fours and crawled the last few steps to the attic door on hands and knees.

  ‘There y’are, Dulcie,’ he said. ‘What about that, eh? You never seen nothing like that afore.’

  She stood in the attic staring at the rows of biscuit tins. She had no surprise about them and her hands were stiff by her sides.

  ‘That’s money for you, ain’t it?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she said.

  She found herself staring out of the window, her mind wandering, all her vision expanding out of the narrowness of the little room, out of the world of Parker, the money and the biscuit tins, to the valley lying below in the late October sunshine. In the sharp autumn air its distances seemed to be heightened and enlarged, taking her farther away than ever.

  ‘There y’are,’ Parker said. In a stupefied ecstasy of secret-sharing he fingered the money with one hand and then herself, in clumsy excitement, with the other. ‘You don’t want no more’n that, do you?’

  She stared out of the window into a world whose distances seemed not only amazingly enlarged. They seemed to be pulsating, out as far as the quivering edges of horizon, bluish-copper from approaching sunset, with the deep discharge of her own emotions. She thought of the things she had bought herself: the shoes, the silk stockings, the underwear, the tight sleek corsets, the dress, and even, at last, the pair of white gloves that would hide her big coarse hands. She wanted suddenly to find them all and rush out with them, away from the ugly rat of her repugnance about Parker, and never come back.

  ‘I want to wait,’ she said.

  ‘All right, you wait,’ Parker said. ‘Here – take a pound or two now. Buy yourself something nice.’ He began to thrust notes into her hands and then, when her hands were too rigid to take them, into the neck of her dress. ‘You take ’em – buy something – just for yourself.’

  She was hardly aware of what he did to her.

  ‘How long d’ye want to wait?’ he said.

  ‘Not long now,’ she said. ‘Not long.’

  9

  She lay awake for a long time in the night, thinking again of the clothes she had bought, coming slowly to a decision. She felt she could not wait even another day before she wore them for the first time. She came to a decision, too, about another thing.

  ‘I got to go. I got to get out,’ she thought. ‘I don’t know where I’ll end up. I don’t know where I am.’

  Parker had a small orchard of late apples at the lower end of the farm and after dinner he took a horse and trolley and a long picking ladder and went down to gather them. He said what a nice day it was and how nice it would be if she came down, later, to give him a hand, and she saw him look with uneasy fondness at her hair.

  ‘I’ll see how I get on,’ she said. ‘I got to run down to the shop.’

  For some minutes she watched the truck bump down the stony track that led beyond the oast-houses and the bullock-yard to the field and the orchard beyond. Then she found herself wondering what it would be like to be seeing him for the last time, and the thought exulted her. She found herself trembling as she went upstairs. She took a jug of hot water with her and in her bedroom she stripped herself and began to wash her face and body. She could still smell the dusky, clove-deep odour of her hair, fading a little now but still strong, and she longed for it to remain like that for at least that afternoon.

  When she got into the new corset she stood for some time staring at herself in the glass. Then she put on her stockings and she stood up and stared at them too. It was the corset and the stockings, she thought, so sheer and smooth and shining, that did so much to alter all the tone and appearance of her body. The big bulges of her hips and stomach were carved down and held in a shell, and the veins of her legs, always like stiff blue worms, were hidden away. There was a division, too, between her breasts, instead of the sagging blown pillow that had always been there.

  She was ready by three o’clock. As she went out of her bedroom she felt a sudden urge to make quite sure where Parker was. She climbed the stairs to the little balcony on the roof and looked down across the fields. She could see the tip of the ladder pointing up through the old red trees of apple and on the top of it the squat grey head of Parker, under the greasy hat, staring emptily like an owl. And once again she felt that she might be seeing him, that day, for the last time, and again the thought exulted her.

  She walked up through the wood very slowly. Her body felt stiff in the unaccustomed corsets. She did not know quite what to do with her hands in the new white gloves and the heels of her shoes seemed to make her taller than she had expected.

  It seemed like a
strange accident when she saw the young keeper coming down the path to meet her. She felt nervous at the sight of him. The afternoon sun, low under masses of smouldering beeches, was dazzling in his eyes. She saw the blue fierce sparkle of them under ruckled brows.

  He seemed suddenly unable to believe in the reality of her as she came up the path. He stopped and held his head sideways and squinted. Then he walked slowly towards her, imprisoned for a few moments longer in disbelief about herself, her new clothes, her new identity.

  ‘It is you,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t believe it. It is you.’

  She felt herself trembling violently and could only say: ‘It’s my day off. You never saw me on my day off before.’

  ‘I thought it was some stranger. I thought your day was Sunday.’

  ‘It used to be,’ she said. ‘But now –’ She hesitated as if she did not know quite how to frame what she had to say. She had lied so readily in the past that now it was not easy to tell the truth in a simple way.

  ‘Will you walk part of the way with me?’ she said.

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘I want to walk down to the village – I got to go down there for something –’

  ‘I’ll walk part of the way,’ he said. ‘I’d like to. You want to go by the bottom path? – it’s nice in the sun.’

  They walked for some distance on the dry chalk path, carved white into the hillside at the edge of the beeches, before she spoke again.

  ‘I’m glad I saw you. I got something to tell you,’ she said.

  She looked down at her new black shoes. The toes of them were already dusty with the dry chalk of the path.

  ‘That wasn’t quite right what I said. It wasn’t exactly right about my day off. That wasn’t quite right.’