The Nature of Love (6 page)

‘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.

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.'

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 minutes 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.