The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wanted to tell you I was leaving there.’

  He stopped on the path. His hands jerked across the front of his body as if for a moment he wanted to take hold of her.

  ‘Is that true?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ she said. Now when she told the truth she desired passionately to be believed. ‘Why? – don’t you believe me? Don’t you believe it’s true?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Only I wanted to be sure – I been waiting to hear you say that for a long time.’

  Suddenly she knew that there was a change in him; she felt that they were drawing closer together. She did not speak for a long time as they walked along the path. She could only look down at her new shoes and see them growing cloudier every moment with the dust she raised from the chalk, and it was the shoes that made her speak at last.

  ‘Look at my shoes – whatever do they look like? They look like nothing on earth.’

  ‘I can dust them,’ he said.

  He began to take out his handkerchief.

  ‘Not now. They’ll be as bad again if you do,’ she said. ‘You could do them at the gate, couldn’t you? Before I go down the road?’

  ‘Are you coming back to-day?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long before you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘About hour. About that. I just got to go somewhere – I got to go down to see after that job I told you about. The one in the café.’

  ‘Can I wait and take you back?’

  ‘If you want to,’ she said. ‘Do you want to?’

  They had reached the gate at the end of the path and in answer he pulled out his handkerchief and began to dust her shoes. She felt the touch of the handkerchief as it flicked against the silk of her stockings. She could feel his nervousness in the quick, too delicate movements of his hands, the nervousness exaggerating her own until suddenly she felt slightly giddy and put her hands on his shoulders.

  For a few moments this first touch of him made her blind with excitement. She felt the beeches tremble about her like great orange breakers in the act of plunging downhill towards the sun.

  When she could see clearly again she saw that he was standing upright. He was putting his handkerchief away in his pocket and speaking of how long she would be and how he hoped she would get the job and how he would meet her when she came back.

  ‘Where will you meet me?’ she said.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ll watch for you coming up the road.’

  She walked down to the café and ordered tea and sat drinking it slowly. She felt the flush of it heating her body, pounding through her blood and drugging her mind until there was no coherence in her thought. She felt mystified and wondering and slightly frightened of the change in her feelings exactly as she had been filled with wonder at the change in her body when she had first seen it, in its silky shell of corsets and stockings, in the glass.

  When her thoughts at last began to come back to her, as she walked up the hill, they were very simple. In the night she would pack her things. In the morning she would be honest with Parker. In the afternoon she could go. In that simple way, she thought, there would be the end of Parker.

  ‘I know where I am now,’ she thought. ‘I got to go while I can.’

  She wanted to run the last hundred yards up the hill to where the young keeper was waiting under the long smouldering arch of beeches. Instead she plodded heavily forward, her big legs striking back to gain their power from the slope of the hill exactly as they had done in the days when she pushed the pram.

  ‘Well here you are,’ she said. ‘Did you think I was never coming? Did you get tired of waiting?’

  ‘Did you get the job?’ he said.

  ‘I got to go back another day.’

  They walked for some distance along the path without speaking. Chalk dust rose again in small white puffs and gradually sprinkled its bloom on her shoes. He looked once or twice at her shoes before saying nervously at last:

  ‘They’re getting whiter and whiter. Shall I dust them?’

  ‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ll find somewhere to sit down in a minute. It’ll be easier like that.’

  They were three or four hundred yards from the farm when she sat down on a beech-stump and put her feet and legs together so that he could dust her shoes. In the strong flat sunshine she was dazzled and could see nothing of the valley beyond his head. Half blind again, she was aware only of the movements, for the second time too quick and too delicate, of his hands about her shoes and ankles.

  A moment later he was touching her legs. He was trying to say with coherence that he thought how beautiful she looked in the new shoes and the new stockings but the words, were too clumsy and too eager and suddenly the incredible stumbling fact of someone touching her legs and finding them beautiful was too much for her.

  She got up and stood against him. As he held her she felt the entire front of her body turn molten and quivering. She shut her eyes against the strong gold glare of the sun and felt suddenly an extraordinary sensation of nakedness as she stood there on the open path and let him kiss her for the first time.

  ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said, ‘but you’re all different to-day. You look all different. Somehow it don’t seem like you –’

  ‘It’s me all right,’ she said. ‘It’s only the things I got on – the new things.’

  She put her big awkward mouth up to him again, standing on the toes of her new shoes so that she could reach his face.

  ‘Be here to-morrow,’ she said. ‘I got my things to bring. You’ll be here, won’t you?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Two o’clock.’ She again had the queer uneasy sensation of nakedness, a strange impression of standing there starkly for the whole valley to see.

  ‘Come into the wood,’ she said. ‘It’s better out of the sun.’

  In the shadow of the wood, under the coppery diffusion of light filtering down through crowds of turning leaves, she held his face in her new white gloves. Under their whiteness the skin of his face seemed a darker bronze than ever. He looked down at her with eyes transfixed in a deep and fond transparence, running his hands backwards and forwards over her head, and she wondered if he could smell the strong clove fragrance of her hair.

  ‘How am I different?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Just different. I don’t know how it is.’

  She remembered how long she had wanted to be different and her wonder at being a new person in the eyes of someone else became, for a moment, almost too much for her to bear. In her happiness she felt her eyes slowly filling with tears.

  ‘Come and meet me to-morrow,’ she said. ‘You will, won’t you? Come down to meet me – because to-morrow I’m coming for good.’

  10

  That afternoon she did not know at first, though she knew it afterwards, that Parker stood watching her as she came down the hillside from the wood in the strong flame of sunlight to the farm. For a few moments, as she walked into the kitchen, still dazzled by what had happened and by the fierce brightness across the hill, she did not even remember that he existed. She stood slowly taking off her gloves, pulling at the white fingers one by one, staring and dazed and not seeing the kitchen about her.

  The sound of Parker’s voice was like the grating of a rusty hinge.

  ‘Where you bin? Where you bin gone all afternoon?’

  ‘I been out – I had to go out somewhere,’ she said.

  Slowly the squinting rabbity-eyes enlarged, grey and then stark white in their distension, under the powerful disbelief of what he saw. She saw his mouth quiver in a jibber of astonishment as he stood by the table and stared. Like the young man he seemed unable to recognize in her the person he had known.

  ‘What you done to yourself?’ he said. ‘Dulcie – what you done?�
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  In disbelief, touched by wonder, he started to come towards her. He moved in a groping sort of fashion, his hands slightly outstretched.

  ‘Dulcie – it don’t look like you – where’d you get them things?’

  For a second or two she felt afraid of him. She was locked in fear by the enlarging, colourless, possessive eyes. Then, in her fear, before she was aware of it and before she could stop it, she said the natural thing:

  ‘You give me the money for them – don’t you remember? You give me the money –’

  His sudden joy at remembering this simple fact made his eyes contract. They closed with a paroxysm of delight. When they opened again they seemed to flare warmly, almost with laughter.

  ‘Gawd, so I did – I did, didn’t I? I give y’it, that’s right –’

  ‘I better go upstairs and take ’em off,’ she said. ‘I got your tea to get. I don’t want to get ’em mucky.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t go. Keep ’em on – it’s Saturday night. You keep ’em on. We’ll go out somewhere –’

  ‘I don’t want to go out nowhere,’ she said. ‘I got work to do. I got things to do –’

  He came close to her, putting his hands on her bare thick brown arms. His excitement, swollen by disbelief, seemed to suck greedily at recollection.

  ‘Dulcie, I ain’t seen you lately – you know, we ain’t – You know what I mean – you know, like we used to.’

  ‘I got to take my things off,’ she said. ‘I got to go upstairs afore I get ’em spoiled.’

  ‘I won’t spoil ’em,’ he said. ‘I got a right to see ’em haven’t I? You got ’em for me, didn’t you?’

  ‘No!’ she said. The word seemed to shriek itself, ejected by a pure shot of fear, before she could prevent it.

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘You never?’

  This time the sudden enlargement of his eyes was frenzied. They shone with glassy fury, swollen grossly.

  ‘No?’ he shouted. ‘Then who the ’ell did you get ’em for?’

  ‘Nobody. Nobody.’

  ‘You got yourself up for somebody! Who was it?’

  ‘Nobody. Nobody,’ she said.

  She started to back away from him. The one glove she had taken off had dropped on to the kitchen table and now she remembered and tried to grab it as she moved. It fell from the table and she stooped anxiously to pick it up. She became aware at the same moment of his hand swinging savagely in air, but whether to hit her or grab her or pick up the glove she never knew. She ducked and ran.

  As she ran upstairs she heard the incredible stupefying shout:

  ‘It’s Albert, ain’t it? I know – it’s Albert – it’s Albert, ain’t it?’

  She had forgotten Albert. She was so much at a loss to know what he meant by Albert that she stumbled against the stairs, grabbing the old-fashioned banisters to prevent herself from falling down. She clung there for a moment and then shouted back, angry:

  ‘They ain’t no Albert! They ain’t no Albert! That’s somebody I made up. They never was no Albert.’

  His face appeared suddenly, thin mouth bared, at the kitchen door.

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘They never was no Albert, wasn’t they?’

  ‘No, they ain’t no Albert! I made it up –’

  ‘I seen you!’ he shrieked. ‘I seen you up there! I seen you! – I bin watching all afternoon! – I bin watching!’

  She saw the gleam of the shotgun barrel as he whipped it from behind the door with the air of violently conjuring it from nowhere. She slipped in her new shoes on the carpet-less stairs as she ran. She began to sob again that there was no Albert, that it was only a name, a someone she had made up, and then a shot blasted the stairs and the landing, spraying the walls and the woodwork as she slipped in her new shoes for the second time.

  It was the slip of her shoes that kept her down under the high trajectory of the shot. She fell against her bedroom door, opening it at the same moment, and threw herself inside. The second shot roared up the stairs, shattering the ceiling this time so that a hail of rotten plaster fell on the stairs and the bricks of the narrow passage below.

  She locked the door and then pressed with all her weight against the long old-fashioned bolt, ramming it into place with a rattle that was like the echo of the second shot. In the act of doing this she used her ungloved hand and then she remembered the glove that had fallen from the table to the kitchen floor.

  She began to cry. The recollection of the glove she had lost seemed suddenly more painful and more bitter than anything else that had happened. She lay face downwards on the bed in her new clothes, clenching with one gloved and one ungloved hand the edges of the canopy, sobbing with bitterness into the pillow, her face dark in terror.

  From outside she heard the staggering crash of Parker as he lumbered up and down the stairs.

  ‘You never thought I see you, did you?’ she heard him yell. ‘You never thought I could see – well, I see you, I see you – plain as daylight, you bitch!’

  The word had the effect of pinning her down, in final paralysis, to the bed. It terrorized her more than the sound of the third shot, fired wildly across the landing with echoes of broken glass.

  ‘You hear that?’ he yelled. ‘That’s what bitches get! That’s what you’ll get too, you bitch – I can wait for you!’

  She had nothing to say in answer. He fired a fourth shot and she heard it rake along the bones of the ceiling, bringing down a fresh hail of plaster.

  ‘Y’ain’t got nothing to say now, you bitch, have you? Well, that don’t matter! – I can wait as long as you do. I can wait – I’m going to shut your mouth for you. I’m going to shut it for a long time. I can wait for you!’

  She lay on the bed all night, not moving. Sometimes she heard Parker staggering about the house, yelling her name. There was no sound of another shot. In the deep darkness she could not sleep, but she cried from time to time as she remembered the glove she had dropped in the kitchen below. Then gradually her thoughts mounted and became an obsession about the glove, scared and fixed and predominant, and of how, sooner or later, by some means or other, she must go downstairs and find it again and go away.

  11

  Sometimes if the wind was right she could hear the chimes of the church clock coming up from below the hill and all through the next morning she lay on the bed and counted the hours by the strokes coming faintly through the quiet October day. Then she heard the ringing of bells for morning service and she knew that when they stopped it would be eleven o’clock. She still did not move as she listened to these things. Her thoughts remained obsessed, fixed always on the glove she had dropped and how, when two o’clock came, she would have to bring herself to face the business of unlocking her door and going downstairs and finding the glove and going away.

  After the bells had stopped ringing for morning service, an enormous quietness came down across the hill. She found herself listening for sounds of Parker. It seemed strange not to hear the sound of a rusty cow-stall hinge and the clank of a half-door thrown back against a wall. It was odd that there were no sounds of cow-hocks whispering in straw or padding down through the flint yard to lower pastures. The mornings were always so full of these noises that they were as natural to her as the rising sun.

  It was the deepening of this curious silence that made her turn over at last and lie on her back and listen more intently. It was strange that there was no sound of cows or feet in the yard, but it seemed stranger still that there was no sound of Parker. She thought of this for a long time. Then she began to think over Parker’s habits and she remembered that he had a Sunday morning habit of cleaning his boots in the shade of the bullace-tree that hung over the hen-house across the yard. He liked to sit there for two hours or more spitting on the toe-caps of the boots and rubbing spittle and polish round and round with his fingers. The hens would cluck about him, scratching in the straw, and towards dinner-time she would take him a jar of cider and a glass and he would sit there drinking and
polishing for another hour. That too, like the sound of waking and walking cattle, was as natural to her as sunrise.

  Towards midday she got up for the first time and looked out of the window. It was possible to see the hen-house from the window of her bedroom but she saw at once that there was no Parker there and that the hens had not been let out for the day. There was no stir of anything about the bullace-tree except a blackbird attacking one of the fallen fruit as it might have attacked a snail, knocking it from side to side with its beak and exposing the raw green-yellow flesh. She saw then that the cow-barn had not been opened either and as she listened for the noise of animals moving she was aware of the silence amplifying and deepening all across the hillside in the late October sun. It seemed to cover everything with a soft close curtain and once again the wide low valley did not seem large enough to contain the deep discharge of her feeling, her fear that Parker was waiting, her joy at the thought of the young man, a profound cold wonder that such a thing could ever have happened to her. Then as she stood there she came aware, suddenly, of an extraordinary lessening of her fear. It was exposed as baseless in a flash that arose from a sudden twist in her mind.

  ‘Because if I’m late he can come down all the way to meet me,’ she thought. ‘Then I’ll be able to see him from the window. Then I can wave to him and he’ll come down and nothing can happen.’

  Her reassurance about this was so complete that she began to get herself ready. In her mind the solution to things fell into place as simply as her scheme about the exploitation of Parker and Parker’s passion for her and Parker’s money had once fallen into place.

  She stripped off her clothes. Her body was moist and creased from her night on the bed and her hair was pressed into a waveless mass that fell untidily about her neck. She washed her body as she had done the previous day, drying herself slowly, and then carefully putting back her clothes. She felt again the heavy pulse of satisfaction at seeing her body, coarse and floppy when naked, grow gradually into something that became smooth and silky and beautiful as she covered it with the corset, the stockings and lastly the dress and the shoes.