The Nature of Love (9 page)

Thinking of Parker, she listened for a final sound in the house. When she could hear nothing she opened the window. The young man was standing about two hundred yards away, waiting for her, and she began to wave her hands. At first he did not see her and suddenly she had a violent impulse to shout to him. She wanted to call his name. Then she remembered that she did not know his name and she felt herself framing the name Albert soundlessly with her lips instead.

Suddenly he saw her and began to wave his hand. She threw up her own hands in a great double gesture of beckoning, repeating it excitedly. He seemed to understand what she meant and began to walk down towards the farm, baring his teeth as he laughed and waved his hand.

A moment later she pulled back the bolt of the bedroom door and then turned the key and opened the door and stood on the landing outside.

She began trembling again as she saw the shattered bones of the ceiling and the mess of fallen plaster and its dust on the stairs. There was still no sound in the house. With a great breath she stiffened and found all her courage and called:

‘Mr Parker! I'm going now, Mr Parker. I'm saying goodbye now, Mr Parker. I'm going home.'

She waited a second or two for an answer that did not come and then she walked downstairs, crunching over fallen plaster.

At the door of the kitchen she stopped again. ‘Mr Parker,' she said. ‘I don't want to cause nobody no hard feelings but I'm going now, Mr Parker. I'm going home.'

Parker was not in the kitchen. There was no sound in the house. Then suddenly she saw her glove lying on the floor
of the kitchen, under the table, where she had dropped it the previous day.

She forgot about Parker as she ran and picked it up. All her life with Parker and her fear of him seemed remote and pointless in the moment of finding her glove. She felt quite calm again as she drew it on. She even found herself taking a final look at her hands, their coarseness hidden at last by the clean white kid, before she walked out of the kitchen for the last time.

She had hardly walked a dozen yards from the house before she heard the shot. A hundred yards away the young man threw his hands to his face and then clawed them away again, as if wrenching something from his eyes.

She was aware of wanting to scream his name. Then she remembered for the second time that she did not know his name and her mind began to scream ‘Albert! Albert! Oh! my God, Albert!' though her lips did not utter a sound.

Above and behind her, from the top of the house, she heard a yell from Parker. She turned and saw him with the barrels of the shotgun levelled on the rails of the little balcony. She screamed again but the sound of her scream was shattered by the blast of the second shot. She saw the young man blown backwards in the act of wildly trying to wrench the pain from his eyes and then his body, convulsive like a rabbit's, turn over and at last lie still.

‘Oh! my God, my God,' she said. ‘Oh! Albert – Albert – Oh! my God.'

She stood still for a moment longer, weeping. Then she began to run, raising her white gloves in agony against the sky.

When he stepped off the platform after another of those tiresome and long-winded village meetings in which people had argued for nearly two hours about the repairs of a little bridge he was pleased to see that everybody stood up again. He might have been a bishop leaving church. Some of the men, even the younger ones, touched their bare heads with their hands.

With amazement he could hardly bring himself to realize who and where he was. This was not the Russia of serfdom; it was not Ireland or Spain. He was not a bishop and these were not so many black peasant crawling beetles. This was England and these, he thought amazedly, were his people. They lived in his houses, paid his rents and – if it were not too harsh a term in these enlightened days – worked for him in his fields, on his four thousand acres.

‘Good night, everyone,' he said. Before putting on his black homburg hat – he had been to town all day, and springy enervating and sudden, had been rather exhausting there – he lifted it slightly. ‘Good night.'

‘Good night, Mr Fitzgerald, sir,' they said. Here and there a voice or two, he thought, said, ‘Thank you.' He walked up the aisle between the chairs. ‘Good night, sir. Good night.'

In the last fraction of a second before his hat touched his head, he saw, in the last row of chairs, by the door, the girl who had been watching him so closely throughout the meeting.

She was sitting in the extreme corner, alone, leaning her bare arms on a chair in front of her. In the entire hall she was the only person not standing up. When he had first noticed her it was for an entirely opposite reason – during his speech she had not once sat down: as if perhaps, he
could not help thinking, she had wanted to see him better. During all that time he had seen her framed against the back wall, smoky-brown eyes watching him from under the yellow scarf tied across her head.

With some annoyance he thought that he did not like women who wore scarves on their heads; it was one of those sloppy frowsy war-time habits from which his wife never recovered. But as he looked at the girl she shook her head with a short upward toss so that the scarf fell free. He saw that she was quite young. Loosely the scarf fell about her neck like a kerchief and all the mass of her short thick brown hair was tousled free into a shining and fluffy ball, like the fur of a cat caught in a sudden wind.

She looked at him coolly, with a touch of arrogance that caught him off his guard. He felt a second spasm of annoyance – spring had really been rather too much in London – and something made him raise his homburg hat. She did not speak or move in reply. He was not even absolutely sure if she let herself be aware of that abrupt and quite courteous raising of the homburg hat. It was queerly impulsive on his part and it was all over in a second. He simply felt a small stab of anger and excitement go straight up through his throat and the next moment he saw that she was staring at the floor.

Outside he walked some distance before realizing how warm and beautiful the evening was: that the oaks, merely sprigged with buds a week ago, were now in full flower, lovely tasselled curtains of olive-yellow, already browned at the tips by the great burst of sun. All among them, too, down the road, big hawthorns were in solid pillowy white blossom, and he could smell the heavy vanilla fragrance of them as it weighted the warm wind. Spring seemed suddenly to have rushed forward, too warm, too leaf-rich, too flowery, out of the cold tight distances of a week ago. Luxuriantly the tender and dark, the sharp and misty shades of green had been kindled down the little valley, alder with beech, oak over hornbeam, all along the river
and all across the wide tree-broken park to the line of white-cliffed hills that flared with miles of beeches.

He could not decide for some moments which way to go home. He stopped, looking for a little while at the country about him, the green spring world that seemed to be nothing but a series of wonderful fires of green and white quivering under the blue May sky.

He decided at last to go by the river. He had permanently locked the gates to the park some time ago. He carried the key of course: but the other way, by the small white bridge, where the river flowed shallow and bright through tunnels of purple alder and then into and out of a long, lily-padded lake, was very beautiful.

Running footsteps down the road behind him made him turn and look back as he opened the gate to the field; and a figure calling ‘Sir, sir' in a sort of enlarged whisper came up by the wood.

‘Yes, Medhurst,' he said, ‘what is it?'

Dark, almost swarthy, with the tight southern forehead that was obstinately unpleasant, almost foreign, Medhurst touched his cap and said:

‘I wanted a word with you, sir. If it's convenient, sir.'

Thick and unctuous and drawling, the voice had a touch of polite treachery in it that once again set Fitzgerald on edge. He had never quite got used to this foreign southern obstinacy, a feeling of treachery behind the politeness, the kow-towing, the touched hat.

‘It was about the cottage, sir.'

‘Cottage?'

‘You remember you said you'd have one free in April, sir.'

‘You must speak to Captain Fawcett,' he said. It was Fawcett's job to deal with this sort of thing; Fawcett was estate bailiff and it was entirely his business.

‘It's no use speaking to Captain Fawcett, sir.'

‘Oh?'

‘He's terribly off-hand, sir. He's going to do this and he's going to do that and he never does.'

‘I've never had any cause to think that Captain Fawcett was like that –'

‘I'm living in a hut, sir,' Medhurst said. He stood tense, rather upright, glowering, almost menacing, it seemed, out of pure nervousness. ‘We got no water. We have to go half a mile for water –'

‘Where is this?'

‘Down by Sheeracre, sir.'

‘I never knew there was a hut there.'

‘No, sir? It was the old shooting hut. It used to be halfway round the long beat. They used to have the shooting lunches there in the old days.'

‘Wood or something?'

‘Wood and tile, sir. It's half-tidy hut –'

‘Then what are you cribbing about? There are thousands who haven't even huts.'

He half-turned away, curt with fresh annoyance. He heard Medhurst begin ‘It's the water, sir. It's fetching the water for the baby, sir', and then down the road, a hundred yards or so away, he saw the girl again, coming towards him. She was taller than he had thought. She was swinging the yellow scarf, first in one hand and then in another, so that it flapped about her long slender legs almost like a bright apron in the sun.

Watching her, unaware of Medhurst, really not listening now, he experienced once again the curious stab of excitement in his throat. She walked with long supple strides, idly swinging herself a little from the waist, with a gliding easy movement of slender thighs.

‘We had the tap froze up fourteen or fifteen times this winter. My wife was bad. We couldn't bath the baby –'

He nodded vaguely, as if really listening. He was aware only, at that moment, of the sharp and hollow noise made by the girl's footsteps as it beat up into the ceiling of thickening branches. Down through the wood, at the same time, the evening air was full of a warm throaty whistling of several blackbirds, lovely and bell-like, and beyond it the bubbling call of a cuckoo on the wing.

Presently as she came level with him he again made his own quick impulsive gesture with the homburg hat; and this time he thought he saw perhaps the slightest flick of her face in answer. Then she went past, still swinging the scarf in her hands, so that from the back the ends of it moved outwards from her long thighs like two yellow fins.

He was still thinking of how much taller and much more supple she was than he had first supposed when Medhurst said:

‘Well, have I to speak to Captain Fawcett, sir?'

‘I suppose so. Yes, of course.' What was one to say? On the whole estate there were a hundred and twenty people to house and now, after the war, as things were, it was very difficult to make up one's mind not to – ‘I don't want to show favouritism,' he said. ‘You understand?'

‘You said the cottage up by the Thorn would be empty, sir –'

‘Well, it may be. It may be. You must ask Fawcett. It's really his affair.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Fitzgerald began to walk away: not, as he had intended, through the field, by the wood side, but along the road, towards the gates of the park.

‘If you don't come to some arrangement with Captain Fawcett you must speak to me again.' He was simply talking automatically as he walked away. ‘But after all it's a roof. Summer's coming on and you'll probably have to make do –'

‘Yes, sir,' Medhurst said. ‘Good night.'

‘Good night.'

The thought of Medhurst went out of his mind swiftly, a moment later.

A hundred yards away the girl stood trying the gates of the park. He heard the hollow clatter of the iron handle. Once again an echo of the sound she made beat up into the curtain of spring leaves and again a whole chorus of blackbirds broke into singing in the wood, and a cuckoo,
answered now by another, called in a mocking, floating sort of voice far down along the meadows.

Twenty yards away he called to her:

‘I'm afraid the gates of the park are locked. I'm afraid there is no footpath now.'

She turned slowly and looked at him.

‘There used to be. There always was.'

It struck him that there was a kind of accusation in that. Her eyes, dark and warm, like elongated buds, did not seem quite open. They held him in a narrow sleepy stare.

He had again already raised the homburg hat; now he took it off completely.

‘It has been closed for more than a year. Nearly two years,' he said.

‘It was always open.'

‘At one time, yes.' Her long fine-skinned hands did swift little twisting tricks with the scarf. They reminded him of the mesmeric habit of a conjurer. He said: ‘One has frightful bother with people. They abuse things. Trippers and all sorts of people used to come here and do heaven knows what damage –'

‘It's an awful pity,' she said. ‘It's very beautiful –'

He felt for a bunch of keys in his pocket.

‘Did you want to go in? Were you thinking of walking through?'

‘I was.'

‘I could let you through. I'm going through myself –'

There was no change in the elongated drowsy stare of the eyes as she said: ‘After all I think I'll walk back. It's late and perhaps there isn't time.'

‘It simply isn't any trouble. I have the key. I always carry the key.'

He held his keys, a big silvery bunch, in one hand, trying to pick out the gate-key with the other. He had thirty or forty keys in the bunch. He knew it was a longish clumsy sort of key.