The Nature of Love (11 page)

‘Are you coming? The soup's on the table.'

‘I'm coming,' he said.

As he walked across to the house, slowly, he knew that he did not want to eat. A whisky or two, combined with evening, was enough. He wanted, really, nothing but that: the whisky, the evening, the scent of summer. It was an arresting, enchantingly pleasant thought that for him there would be, and always was, more summer than for most people. Summer, for him, rose and blossomed from four thousand acres. There, in his special province, everything he looked at and touched and smelled, grass and bluebells and corn and chestnuts and grass again and still grass, was his own. More even than a province, perhaps: almost a kingdom. From the big empty house down to the shooting hut that the fellow had bothered him about after the meeting, in a territory so large that he was really never sure about the outer girdle of its geography, summer was not simply on the grand scale. It was his own.

In the dining-room his soup was cold, After tasting it once he got up and poured himself a second whisky and stared at his wife.

‘What else is there?'

‘Chops, I think.'

‘You think,' he said. ‘If you were here you'd know.'

She did not answer and the chop, when it came, was greasy and rather gristly; he sawed away at it, washing it down with whisky.

‘Couldn't we have pork again before the summer comes? What do we keep pigs for?'

‘I gave the last of the pork away.'

‘Why?'

‘You tired of it. You always tire of it. There's always too much of it. I gave it away to friends – '

‘Ah,' he said, ‘how are the horse-stealers?'

It was on old drab dry joke of his to call her friends the horse-stealers. She looked straight beyond him, not answering. She was getting rather fat in the face, he thought. Perhaps it was because she lived awfully well and did nothing; perhaps it was simply the podginess of forty a little before its time. Whatever it was he knew that he could not endure it, now, for much longer.

‘This meat is disgusting,' he said. He set down his knife and fork.

Again she did not answer. He remembered the days, before the war, before his father died, when splendid and beautiful meat had come up, after being properly hung, from their own slaughter-house. Pork and beef and lamb and pheasant and veal: whatever one wanted had always been at hand.

‘Our situation's rather like the meat,' he said, ‘isn't it? It's bad and if we were honest we'd say we didn't want any more.'

‘I've never said I didn't want any more.'

‘Because you're not honest.'

‘I don't think it's a question of honesty.'

‘No?'

How stupid it was; how stupidly idiotic to begin an argument like that. Only a tirade, an abusing match, already developing in the air, could possibly come from it. He gripped his hands under the table and determined that, if possible, he would stifle every single abusive word. It helped if you remembered that in a house as small as this the servants heard everything, and quite calmly, in a low voice, he said:

‘Could I talk to you reasonably a moment? Will you listen?'

‘I'm listening.'

‘Will you finish it? Will you let me get out?'

‘I've already said what I have to say about it,' she said.

In the quietness he could hear, through the open door, from far across the park, a series of haunting bell-like notes of a calling cuckoo as if they were chimes of a clock striking, and he recalled, for the first time since he had sat down, the girl swinging her scarf about her long slim legs under the chestnut trees.

‘I'll provide the evidence and so on, the usual thing,' he said. ‘I'll do everything.'

She did not answer. He noticed she had really not combed her hair properly before coming down to table, and he could see where it had been flattened and dishevelled by the scarf. That irritated him too; but another thought of the girl, so tall and slender and summery, pressed the irritation away. Someone like that: someone new and unknown and fresh, he thought. He remembered how, as she waved goodbye, he had let the thought of kissing her, to-morrow, all in good time, not too soon, lie pleasantly in his mind. All his anticipation about her had seemed to tremble gently on the very edge of summer.

‘There's nothing you need do,' he said, ‘really. I'll provide all that's necessary –'

‘Had you someone in mind?'

She had finished her chop to the last; her mouth, rather too magenta with lipstick, shone thick and greasy as she looked up.

‘No,' he said.

‘I thought perhaps you might have.'

‘Why?'

‘It was just a thought.'

The young girl who helped in the kitchen came in, a moment later, to clear the plates away. He stared at the table and his wife said:

‘You have a pink in your buttonhole. That's nice.'

‘Summer has come all of a sudden,' he said.

Into this interval of polite conversation his wife pressed a new pin-prick of irritation:

‘What's for afters, Margaret?'

In a soft voice the girl said that there were gooseberries and his wife repeated, as if he had not heard it and it were a circumstance of exceptional joy:

‘The first gooseberries. Isn't that marvellous?'

There could be nothing marvellous about it, he thought. He detected too that south-country, half-cockney expression, so cheap in some way, by which afters signified dessert. Everything about his wife now fused into a central irritation: the scarf, the uncombed hair, the greasy mouth, and now the way she spoke, the words she used, her jubilation concerning commonplace things.

‘Custard with the gooseberries?' she said.

‘I don't want either,' he said.

‘As you like.'

‘I want to get this thing cleared up,' he said.

He stared at her grimly, tightening his hands under the table.

‘If I told you I hated you would that make any difference?' he said.

‘No.'

‘Would anything make any difference?'

‘No.'

She was eating gooseberries bathed in yellow custard. She ate with a certain hearty lustiness, like a schoolgirl, and slops of yellow stuck to her magenta lipstick. She fixed him calmly with her pale grey eyes and said:

‘I'm quite content with things. I like the house and I have friends.'

‘The horse-stealers,' he said, ‘spongers.'

‘Perhaps they don't like you, either.'

‘They like what I have,' he said. ‘That's what they like.'

He got up to take a little more whisky from the side table. As he stood drinking it, not knowing quite what to say, the girl came in from the kitchen and said:

‘Excuse me, sir, there's someone to see you.'

‘Who?' he said. ‘Who? I'm having dinner!'

‘Don't shout at the child,' his wife said.

‘I am not shouting,' he said and knew that he was. He walked out of the open door into the garden, banging his glass on the table as he passed.

A figure was waiting at the small latch-gate by the summer-house and as it turned he said, loudly:

‘Medhurst. What do you want?'

‘I been to see Captain Fawcett, sir.'

‘I'm having my dinner. Why the hell have I to be dragged out to listen about Fawcett?'

‘Captain Fawcett says he spoke to you about this cottage seven or eight times, sir.'

‘I don't recall it.'

‘Everybody knows you're rather forgetful, sir, and I daresay you forgot it.'

‘Forgetful? Forgetful?'

‘You're away a lot too, sir. You're away and you don't know what goes on.'

‘What does go on? Tell me.'

‘Well, sir,' Medhurst said. ‘Well –'

‘Well what?'

‘There's a lot said, sir. There's a lot of feeling.'

‘For Christ's sake about what?'

‘One thing and another,' Medhurst said. ‘One thing and another.'

He felt his heart raging inside him at the thought of the accumulating evil pettiness about him, at the vague insinuations of disloyalty and dislocation. There was no
doubt that here and there the damn bolsheviks were working their way in. It was not like the old days, when one had loyalty and trust and decency and continuity of service. Now there were always labour troubles, dissatisfaction, some feeling of unspecified unrest. He was about to say something about this when Medhurst said:

‘I don't want to keep you from your dinner, sir. But I'd like to ask you something.'

‘What?'

‘Will you come and have a look at this hut to-morrow? I don't think you've ever been down –'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll come.'

‘Very well, sir. You come down.' He opened the gate, went through it and stood the other side of it. ‘About six? I'll be home from work and had a wash by then.'

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll be down.'

It was only when Medhurst was twenty or thirty yards down the road that he remembered that, after all, he could not go at that time. He remembered his delicious feeling of anticipation about the girl in the yellow scarf: and how, to-morrow, they were going to explore the house together.

Then as he got back to the house he heard the sound of a car being driven away. Harshly the gears clashed up the quiet road, and he knew that, all too soon, before he could speak again, his wife had gone. It was almost dark and he was alone now with the whisky, the scented garden and the big empty space of the park, all grass, beyond.

His wife's name was Cordelia: and somehow he had never quite come round to that, either.

Every morning in spring and summer he was up by seven o'clock in order to make, sometimes in a jeep, sometimes a small dog-cart, a tour of the estate. It was wonderfully pleasant, often a tonic of exhilaration for him after a bad evening with Cordelia and the whisky, to drive into deep woodland roads, under high banks of primrose and bluebell
and bracken, through plantations of birch and sweet-chestnut, in and about the little valley. There he had almost everything; on those four thousand acres there were endless variations. Hop-gardens on the south-west slopes, from which on fine days you could see the line of sea, flanked old and excellent cherry-orchards and tasselled plantations of hazel-nut. In copses about the park rhododendrons had been planted for game-cover and from under startling magenta fires of flower cock-pheasants would come serenely stalking, themselves on fire with flames of brilliant scarlet and green and blue. On the lake water-lilies, both yellow and white, grew in thousands and wild duck inhabited the small upper islands of sallow. Where the cherry-orchards finished their snowy blossoming there were many acres of pink apple and then, in high summer, the great fragrance of limes about the park. The largeness and width of it embraced everything, from prize cattle to a white peacock or two that still roamed about the old wild lawns behind the big house, among the rose-pink camellias he had forgotten.

It had not always been so large. At the time of his father's death there had been not more than two thousand acres. They were the slump days. His father had been rather a mean but in many ways admirable landowner, conservative and human, liked and feared, of the old nineteenth-century school. Everything had been cautiously solid, thorough, unscientific perhaps, but profitable. Labour had been cheap; men were two a penny. Twelve gardeners, with a number of apprentice boys, had raised delicious things in the old walled gardens and hot-houses sheltered from cold winds by Atlantic cedars. Peaches and asparagus were always ready to perfection before their time; there were always amaryllis and gardenias and carnations and orchids for the house. A loveliness flourished, unhurried and quiet and prodigal, that had never come back and now never would.

His father could not have died, in a sense, at a better time. The slump was grim and stubborn; estates everywhere were breaking up. His father had been a man who believed in eating his apples only from the trees he had.
Solid entrenchment, capital sagaciously invested, had built up an estate that was like a bastion, If times were bad you did not venture out beyond it; if they were good you still remained at home. That was what prudence and capital and sound sense and foresight gave as their reward: an antidote of comfort against evil days, another spread of butter for the good.

His father, in consequence, had never bought land. Expansion, like spraying fruit trees, was not in his philosophy. But after he had gone it was different. All about the edges of the estate were pieces of land, either other estates or little farms, that the slump had beaten into decay and that were ripe for selling. And so another fifty or a hundred acres were added here; a hop-garden or an orchard there; a number of useful little farms, many pieces of woodland and another mile of stream. Where other people were shedding land against the evil of the times, the slump and the threat of war, the son acquired it. And he went on acquiring it, cheaply, thoughtfully, and as it turned out wisely, until the beginning of the war.

As a landowner, a farmer, though young, he did not go to the war. It was after all not necessary; a modern army did not merely fight on its stomach; at least six, and later ten or more persons were needed to keep a single soldier in the field or a pilot in the sky. Not everybody was needed for fighting. So he had stayed at home, in the country, raising food that everyone needed, putting the plough firmly back into soil that had never seen a share for centuries, unlocking richness.

About that time too he had closed the house in the park. He had never liked that dog-eat-dog existence, with servants feeding on servants, butlers lording it over underlings, pocketing the perquisites of the pantry, and he had never really cared for hot-house flowers. Orchids and gardenias and poinsettias, all so un-English and precious and unreal, were symbols of a world he found he could give up without a flicker of regret. Soil and grass, things of depth and substance and reality, replaced them; and gradually he
had brought to them, to grass especially, a scientific interest that was more than a theoretical passion. It became a creed.