The Nature of Love (8 page)

‘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.'

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?'

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.

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.

This transformation seemed even deeper with her hair. She combed out the waves, wetting them with the tips of her fingers and setting them back into place. During all this time, about an hour, she listened for the sound of Parker and for the sound of the church clock striking the quarters from below the hill, never hearing the one but always the other, her fear lessening and her confidence growing at the same time.

When finally she was ready she stood in front of the glass again, turning sometimes to see if the seams of her stockings were straight, touching the waves of her hair, thinking how wonderful it was that her legs and her hair were not as they used to be, thinking how much of herself was different.

‘I'm all different,' she thought. ‘He said I was. You're different somehow and I don't know how, he said.'

Just before two o'clock she stood at the bedroom window, watching the track that came down along the edge of the wood. She drew on her one glove slowly, remembering at the same time how she must pick up the other.

After a few moments she saw the young man coming down under the edge of the beeches. He had put on a new brown tweed jacket and she felt her heart give a pained start of joy, almost a stab, because he had dressed himself in his best clothes to come to meet her. She saw him come
down past the point where he had dusted her shoes and she had taken him into the wood because her eyes were dazzled by sun. She could see him with wonderful clearness and she knew then the reason for that strange stark feeling of nakedness the previous day. It was her own queer premonition that Parker was watching her.