The Nature of Love (16 page)

‘Well, what about the water? You made any use of it yet?'

‘No, sir,' Medhurst said. ‘We got none to use. We had none to use this three weeks.'

‘You mean the well has packed up?'

‘Dry as a bone, sir.'

‘Then why the hell didn't you speak of it before? Why didn't you speak to Captain Fawcett?'

‘I spoke to Captain Fawcett, sir. We been having water carted down there. It wasn't that, sir –'

‘Then what are you cribbing about?' There was too much sir, too much lying and hedging, too much shiftiness. ‘What are you driving at?'

‘I can't stand another winter there, sir. We had a terrible winter and a terrible summer. The place is not fit for pigs, sir –'

He wanted to laugh; his voice broke in his throat, dryly. Impotent fury, another recollection of the ghastly unwashed hut, the little place that had been so pretty in his boyhood and was now nothing but a monstrous and sordid slum under the hazel trees: all of it clotted his tongue so that not a syllable of either laughter or fury or protest came.

‘That's about as plain as I can put it, sir. I can't stand another winter –'

Where was the girl? he thought. For God's sake, where had she got to? He almost shouted:

‘I've no time to go into this now. You must come down to the office. You must see me there.'

Grimly, scowling, and yet somehow smoothly and terribly polite, Medhurst said:

‘I've worked for you and your father since I was thirteen –'

‘Then very probably it's time you worked for someone else.'

‘If that's the way you look at it, sir –'

‘It is the way I look at it.' He was tired, impotently, wretchedly, miserably tired, and said: ‘Good Christ, man, you can hear, I hope, can't you?'

‘Yes, sir.'

Fitzgerald turned to walk away and saw at last, far down the avenue, under the chestnut trees, the girl walking towards him. A stab of excitement and gladness whipped through his throat and he was really not listening when Medhurst said:

‘I want to get this straight, sir.'

‘Straight?' he said. There was a new sort of insolence in the air nowadays; there was not one of them that wasn't at heart, he thought, a damn bolshevik. ‘How do you mean straight?'

‘You mean I'm to go, sir?'

‘I do. You see Fawcett in the morning and Fawcett will fix you up.'

‘You bloody well ought to be shot, sir,' Medhurst said. ‘That's what you bloody well ought to be.'

Fitzgerald walked away. Nothing annoyed him more than passages of insolent and rowdy argument with disgruntled employees on the estate. He kept an agent for that. He walked on imperviously, as if indifferently; and at last, as he reached the stone steps of the house-front, he heard from Medhurst a cold low yell:

‘You ought to be shot. And there's one or two as'd be glad to do it. Me, for one! –'

He did not turn or glance or utter a word in answer as he pushed open the door and went inside the house.

He was still standing there, just inside, in the deserted empty entrance hall, with its scarred and ruined panels, when the girl ran up the steps.

He felt now that he could hardly wait for her. As she swung open the door and came inside he pressed her back against it, kissing her mouth hard and for a long time. Hunger, a curious dry loneliness, an ache not at all unlike fear, held him rigid.

‘I thought you were not coming. I had the most awful feeling –'

‘Am I late? I've been busy. I tried not to be.'

He was bursting to tell of Cordelia, and said:

‘Shall we go up?'

‘I really mustn't stay long –'

‘Not another party?' he said. Gladness that she had now arrived broke the small amusing irony about yesterday. ‘Surely not a party?'

‘Poor man,' she said, and laughed. ‘The look on your face.' Her laugh was nothing more than a few light chuckles
low in her throat. ‘As if I were never going to speak to you again.'

‘That's what I felt,' he said.

Upstairs, in the little room, she lay fully-dressed on the bed. He sat on the end of it, looking at her, his heart crowded with a new and extraordinary tenderness. He thought of her as she had looked at the party, in the yellow dress. There, in the garden, in the yellow dress, the long black gloves and the big hat that shut him away, she had woken in him these first startling, almost frightening impulses of new feeling. Queer that in that moment, held as it were behind a barrier set up by the two owl-like ladies talking of artichokes, in the moment when he could not touch her at all, he should have been first troubled by this uneasy, startling hunger of wanting her so much.

‘I've something to tell you,' he said. What was it Cordelia had said about love? It was no use without love –'

‘Tell on,' she said.

Outside, in the long dead forest of grass, he fancied he heard the dry shufflings of the peacock: the wandering dainty ghost that had trailed about there behind the house all summer.

‘Cordelia is going to let me go.'

The girl, staring upwards, seemed to be listening to the peacock too.

‘It was really why she invited you,' he said.

‘Why me?'

Her voice seemed to be echoed in the peacock's dry rustlings through dead grass.

‘I think it was the yellow dress that did it,' he said. ‘I think you scored quite a victory in the yellow dress.'

She did not answer. Her quietness was so strangely rapt and withdrawn and cool that it briefly occurred to him that she did not think there had, in fact, been any victory.

He lay down beside her on the bed.

‘Say something, please. Say something,' he said.

On evenings in May and June, when they had first come there, the clamorous chorus of birds and warm late evenings,
just before darkness, and even after darkness, had been wonderful. Now summer had killed all bird-sound except the delicate stalking of the peacock: an irritating haunting sort of a whisper in the ruined garden, in a world that was like an old and dusty vacuum.

‘I love you: that's what,' he said. ‘Don't you know?' Tenderly he tried to turn her face to him and found it withdrawn and rigid. ‘Don't you know? You love me too, don't you?'

‘No,'

He felt himself savagely hit between the eyes as if by a black and sickening flash of flame.

‘God –' As he began to speak he hardly heard her, in turn, talking quietly, almost as if to herself, as she stared through the balcony window at the hot September sky:

‘It's why I was late to-night. I've been packing.'

‘Packing? – for God's sake?'

‘I'm going on Wednesday,' she said. ‘The day after tomorrow.'

He sucked dry dusty air through his mouth, ejecting it again in odd dead words:

‘But all summer' – stupidly and incoherently he searched for words of argument – ‘after all that's happened – the things we've done.'

‘You never mentioned love,' she said. ‘You never talked about it.'

‘But how can you say? It's a thing that gets hold of you. It gets down inside you. You can't say what you want it to be. How can you say?'

‘You wanted it to be fun,' she said. ‘That's what you said.'

Suddenly, bitterly hurt, he had nothing to say. He was crushed by a dark complexity of emotions. He was not used to such complexity. His body was held rigid, in bloodless paralysis, and outside in the garden the damnable, infuriating rustle of the peacock was the only sound that broke the air.

‘I ought to go,' she said.

She moved as if to get up; but in an unbearable impulse to touch her, to hold her down there on the bed, he ran his hands across her neck and breasts, and she said:

‘I warned you what it might be. I warned you long ago.'

A terrible and dull soreness, like a bruise, seemed to drag downward across his chest.

‘It's been wonderful and I've loved the house,' she said. ‘I've loved everything. But everything comes to an end. I loved everything but it has to come to an end.'

He felt beaten about by emotions that were so baffling and complex that they made him feel ridiculous. It was cruelly stupid that in agony a man could feel ridiculous.

‘Let me get up now,' she said. She moved her long body quietly away from him on the bed.

‘May I kiss you?'

‘You know you may.' She was suddenly cool and withdrawn and shut away, as she had been that first evening he had brought her there: the evening she had called him ‘Careless man' as he clumsily broke the camellia flowers.

He kissed her for the last time. He wanted the kiss to flame against her mouth with the love he could not express in words; but her mouth in its responses was dry and cool, and the kiss was dry too, utterly removed from the molten complicated agony that raged inside him. He wanted to break away from the long supple body, exquisite more than ever now, always so beautiful and so obliging and so like summer, and let the agony release itself in a scream telling her that he could not bear it and that she did not understand.

Instead it was she who broke away. Sitting up, she ruffled her brown hair with her hands – with pain he loved its cat-like fluffiness, all shining and free, as it fell and rose with the toss of her head – and then swung her legs to the floor.

‘It's all over,' she said. ‘I'm sorry.' She touched his face with her hand. ‘The summer's over.' One of her fingers seemed to draw a mask across his cheek. ‘It was fun,' she said. ‘Like you said it would be –'

He heard her go downstairs, her footsteps hitting emptily on the hollow treads, echoing emptily through the deserted house.

Then suddenly he heard her running back. A flash of triumph went through him. After all, he thought, she could not bear it without him; there was going to be one of those moments of reconciliation; she was coming back – he stood waiting, tensely, as he watched the swing of the opening door.

‘Only the key,' she said. ‘I forgot the key. You'll need it again some day –'

He left it where she let it fall on the bed. Sharply and painfully it made him remember the evening he had first given it her: the exquisite May evening of cuckoo sounds, of nightingales, among the oak flowers and all the warm sap of spring; and then the next evening, when she had found the camellia flowers and had wanted so much to see the house and had taunted and teased him because of his folly in not opening it, in leaving it all to emptiness and decay.

And frantically he said:

‘Wait a minute. Darling, don't go for a minute. Darling, I've got something to say.'

‘Well?'

‘Listen,' he said. ‘Don't go. Sit down a moment –'

She did not sit down. He made an imploring tremulous effort to draw her down to the bed, but the old dry coldness of his fear paralysed him again when he found she did not move.

‘Listen – let's talk rationally.' He had never felt less like talking rationally in his life. He felt his teeth jar together, at the back of his dry mouth, making in his head a sound like the chattering of cold steel keys.

‘Look,' he said, ‘what would you say if I opened the house? You always wanted me to open the house.'

‘Did I?'

‘You always loved it – you always wanted it open. I could do it,' he said. ‘I could open it for you –'

‘You'll never open it,' she said.

‘Oh! please,' he said. ‘Darling. I'd like to open it. I'd like to do it for you – open it up, open the gardens, make everything as it was –'

‘You'll never open it,' she said.

He sat on the bed, making a useless and unconvincing gesture of pain with his two hands, flinging them up and pressing them against his head. Then as they fell again he let them remain against her body, frontally, on the long smooth thighs. The rigid smoothness of her body, lovely and too familiar, made no sort of movement of relaxation.

‘Let me open the house for you. Let me do that,' he said. ‘That's what you always wanted.'

He looked up and saw her face, charming and maddening, friendly and tender, and yet distant as ever, and he knew that it was not something she had always wanted. He knew there was nothing of him she wanted. There was nothing of him she craved: neither himself, nor the house, nor even the little attendant charms she had loved as they came and went away: the camellias, the magnolias on the house wall – What was it Cordelia had said? If there was anything he wanted – something like that – he had simply to scream long enough and they gave it to him. He did not want to scream now, but suddenly he felt that he would have given anything, the house, the land, the grass, anything, in return for some simple gesture of hers, a word, the tiniest touch of friendliness, the merest indication that there was, after all, something of him that she wanted back. Was it so much to ask? he thought.

Instead he was aware only of the rigid unaltered position of her body, his own dry hard loneliness, and then her voice, saying again:

‘You'll never open it. It's like opening a tomb. There's only the dead inside it. Whatever there was is dead and gone – it's finished, all this, it's the end.'

She moved away; the fine smooth thighs slipped out of his hands. He was tortured once again by blinding moments of futile agony combined with the renewed sensation of feeling ridiculous as he tried to clutch her body and bring it
back. He began to say something about ‘Darling, you can't go out like this, just like this – you can't end it like this,' and then she combed her fingers through her loose brown hair and tossed it back from her face and looked down at him sitting there, imploring and agonized, on the bed.

‘One of us had to end it,' she said.

He could not look at her; the tips of his fingers were without feeling as he brought them together, hopelessly, where he sat, staring down.