The Nature of Love (15 page)

There was time to have one more drink before he got the car out and drove across the park to where, as always, the girl would be waiting.

But suddenly, out of the crowd of parrot-heads and hats and glasses, he saw her actually there, on the lawn, not thirty feet away, watching him.

He felt himself go cold, drained of reaction. He could not move. He could not even lift his glass to his mouth. For more than a minute he simply stood staring at her, stunned and cold and without thought.

She was wearing a dress of pale yellow with a narrow black belt and long black gloves. Yellow was her favourite colour. Now it seemed to make her look taller than ever. The waist of the dress was rather high, and her long beautiful legs seemed to give the whole of her body a wonderfully elegant and elevated slenderness. Nothing she could have worn, he thought, could have thrown her so much into relief against the crowd of gabbling sucking faces.

Recovering a little, he looked across the lawn and raised his glass to her. It seemed to him that she looked deliberately away.

For the second time he felt himself go cold. He was shot through by a ridiculous and paralysing thought that she was never going to speak to him again. Always, at the back of his mind, there had been the notion that somehow, one day, for perhaps the most trivial of reasons, she would let him down. Now it came back.

It was not until he had lifted his glass to her a second time and she had looked away again, avoiding him completely, that he felt the full bleak pain of it. She was there, but suddenly she did not want him. He felt himself turn sick. He looked at her again, and again she turned away. She was wearing a large lacy transparent hat that matched her dress. Black yellow-stamened flowers were clustered on one side of it and the soft brim came down and touched her shoulders. And finally and completely, as she turned her back, the hat shut him away.

He went back into the house, stopping to get himself another drink from a tray in the hall. Always, at parties, he felt himself to be a stranger in his own house. People like beetles crawled about the place, admiring glass and furniture, gabbling, shouting to make themselves heard.

‘How does the drought affect you?' someone said, and he found himself in a corner with his local rector, a man with a face like a knobbed and polished club.

For some moments he exchanged absent-minded hopes and pleasantries about the prospect of rain.

‘We are offering prayers,' the rector said.

‘Are you?' he said.

He excused himself and went to get a third drink. Draining it down, he knew suddenly that he was being quite ridiculous, that he was behaving like a fool. It was perfectly obvious that she could not possibly speak to him there. Only an idiot could have failed to see that; or that she was behaving in the only possible and sensible way.

‘Your wife has a genius for parties,' someone said. ‘They are always terrific.'

With a stab of anger he remembered Cordelia. Malignant, leech-like, draining Cordelia. For the first time his mind was clear. Cordelia with the genius for parties, Cordelia with the nice notion of inviting the girl: stupid of him not to have seen that it was all Cordelia.

Out in the garden, as she passed him, Cordelia smiled. Its infuriating slightness seemed to propel him blindly to the far side of the lawn. He searched vainly for the yellow dress.
The party was thinning out a little and now people began to come to him and shake hands, to thank him and say good-bye.

‘You must thank my wife,' he said. ‘She's the genius who does these things.'

He walked beyond the pergola to where, in the vegetable patch, a few people were walking apart from the crowd. Here two tall prop-like maiden ladies poked with grey silk parasols at the cracked earth across which even weeds were blue and flaccid with drought.

‘We do not understand the vegetables with the purple flowers,' they said to him. ‘They are new to us.'

‘Artichokes.'

‘Oh! no, surely. They grow underground.'

‘There are two kinds,' he said.

‘How extraordinary, how interesting.'

Suddenly, from behind high half-withered rows of flowerless beans, he saw the flash of the yellow hat and dress.

‘But does one eat them?' the ladies said.

‘One eats the top.'

The girl, with the woman he took to be her sister, was coming up the path. He stared straight at her. His body was shot through with a single quivering start of pain as he saw the long slender legs moving under the yellow dress; he saw the taut full breasts, through the thin summery material, quivering slightly as she walked. He tried for a moment or two to fix the dark elongated eyes, but they did not look at him.

‘How does one eat it?' the ladies asked. ‘It is like a thistle.'

‘One eats it at an earlier stage,' he said.

The girl, only four or five yards away, was looking straight ahead.

‘Cooked?' the ladies said. ‘One eats it cooked of course?'

‘Like asparagus,' he said. ‘With sauce.'

‘Strange how one never comes across it.'

‘It's eaten more in France,' he said.

As he spoke the girl came level with him and he stepped
aside to let her pass. He thought how extraordinarily beautiful she looked and he was moved by an intolerable impulse to touch her hand as she went by. For a moment it obliterated everything. He felt he had never wanted anything in his entire life quite so much as that. It filled him with a painful, blinding sort of hunger and there was nothing he could do.

‘Well, thank you, Mr Fitzgerald,' the ladies said. ‘It is Mr Fitzgerald, isn't it?'

‘Yes.'

‘We were not certain. We know your wife much better of course.'

He did not speak again. Wandering vaguely back into the crowd, across the lawn, he was aware simply, with dry and lacerating emptiness, that the girl had gone.

When the last car had driven away he walked upstairs to his room. It was dark and he felt he did not want a light. But as he came along the landing a door opened, a shaft of light pounced across the stairs, and he saw Cordelia waiting there in her dressing gown.

‘Good night,' he said.

The house was hot and stale. Suddenly he did not want to be in it any longer. He turned to go downstairs.

‘I must say she's very beautiful,' Cordelia said.

‘Is there any need to talk about it?'

‘I think we ought to talk about it.'

‘I don't see why,' he said. ‘I'm going down for a drink.'

As he reached the top of the stairs, Cordelia said:

‘I want to talk about it. Now.'

‘Oh?'

With astonishing and unexpected directness she said:

‘The whole district is stiff with gossip. There has been dirty, evil, rotten gossip.'

‘They're not happy unless they have a little gossip,' he said.

‘Happy!' she said. ‘It's nice the way you talk about happy.'

‘I didn't want to talk at all,' he said.

He had not stopped walking down the stairs. Now, halfway down, he heard her scurrying after him, her voice bitterly running too in a series of leaf-like whispers:

‘You might at least have the decency to stand still while I say something!'

‘All right,' he said. He had reached the foot of the stairs. He could hear the two maids washing glasses in the kitchen. ‘I'll stand still.'

‘Not here,' she said. ‘Not here.'

He unlocked the cellarette on the sideboard and found the whisky. With the decanter in one hand and a glass in the other he walked to the door.

Out in the narrow courtyard the scent of late summer, heavy and intoxicating with tobacco flowers, was so delicious that he walked for ten or fifteen yards, breathing fresh sweet air, before he realized she was following him.

‘If you'd have the decency to stand still a minute I could say what I have to say.'

‘I'm standing still.' He mocked her with an arresting flick of the decanter. ‘One minute.'

‘What I want to say won't take a minute,' she said.

‘Good,' he said. ‘Splendid.'

Always there was the same niggling, pointless, wearisome row after parties. He did not want to listen. There could be no point in listening. He remembered suddenly, for no reason at all, the old ladies who had not heard of artichokes. They were the sort of idiotic, suburban, boring people she knew.

It was so monstrously stupid that he began laughing.

‘I don't think it's any time for laughing.'

‘No? There were two ladies who had never heard of artichokes,' he said. ‘Your friends. Damn funny.'

‘Awfully funny.'

For a moment they were both tensely silent; and then she said:

‘If the joke is over I want to talk about the cottage. The one at Sandchurch. By the sea.'

‘Good God, why?'

‘I'm going to live there,' she said. ‘You're going to give it me,'

Vaguely, at last, he began to understand what it was she had wished to speak about. A few early stars were pricking the clear darkness across the park, above coast-like undulation of trees, and he watched them, fascinated, incredulous at what he heard.

‘You always get what you want,' she said. ‘You always have done. In time.'

He did not speak.

‘That's the way you were brought up,' she said. ‘All you had to do was to scream long enough and they gave it you.' She stopped and then went on: ‘I don't think you're selfish. You're just not aware of other people.'

The tobacco-plants, pale and ghost-like under the wall of the house, were almost the only things that had survived, with any freshness, the long blistering heat of summer. He took a slow deep breath and held the sweetness of them in his mouth.

‘Well, you've got this,' she said. ‘You wanted it all summer and now you've got it.'

Her generosity seemed to call for some sort of remark, but he could think of nothing; and she said:

‘All I want is the cottage and a little place and enough to live on.'

‘I think that's more than fair.'

‘I'm not trying to be fair,' she said. ‘But you can't go on without love, can you? It's silly to go on without love.'

For a very long time, he thought, there had never been any question of love. That, above all, had never intruded.

‘Once there's no love,' she said, ‘it's the end.'

Well then, he thought, thank God there was no love. The stars over the dark line of trees were growing brighter every moment, flashing crystal green in the hot September sky. To the right of the big house, in the hollow, reflections of fire filled the darkness, and he remembered there were hop-pickers camping there. It was lovely weather for the hopping.

In a flat voice Cordelia said:

‘I apologize about the party. The girl I mean. It was not vindictive.'

‘No?'

‘I didn't even know her name till this week. I didn't even believe she existed. I had to invite her to make sure.'

Well, that was decent, he thought. And really without rancour.

‘I had to know her name, after all,' she said. ‘I have to name her –'

For a moment it occurred to him that she was going to cry. He thought he heard her sniff in the darkness, but it might have been her shoe grating dry gravel as she turned to go. It did not strike him as curious that she did not say good night. But he said good night himself, and afterwards, as she walked away, thank you.

Later, for some time, he walked about the garden, deliciously breathing the deep scent of tobacco flowers. How wonderfully they had done all summer, he thought, how marvellously they had stood the drought where other things had failed. The sky was full of stars. An owl called with fluffy notes across the park. He walked up and down the garden, thinking. He thought of the girl, the yellow dress, her brown arms in the long black gloves, the little room, the long matchless summer and of how, at last, because of it, he was going to be free. Curious that his own key, in his own gate, in his own park, on that first evening, had begun it all.

When he went to bed he fancied he heard Cordelia crying in her room. But he was not sure; and he did not stop to see. Women cried for the oddest things – sometimes for pleasure; but mostly you never knew why.

When he drove across the park the following evening it was still very hot and the peat land fires were still smouldering, raising smoke that hung about in thin blue-brown clouds.

He had come up to the house a little earlier than usual, and when he reached the room in the top of the house the girl was not there. He felt suddenly more than worried. He felt once again the gnawing misery of the notion that she would let him down.

For a short time he sat on the bed, trying patiently to wait for her. It was unbearably hot in the little shut-up room and he found himself sweating. It was a sweat of anxiety, touched by fear and aggravated by sun; and after ten minutes or so he could not bear it any longer.

He went downstairs, through the empty airless house and out into the front courtyard of withered grass and weeds to look for her. He walked once round the house and stood looking vainly down the long avenue, past the ruined army huts and drifts of premature shrivelled chestnut leaves, dead and brown on the road.

‘Sir?' a voice said. ‘Excuse me, sir?'

He turned and, in a moment of sharp annoyance, saw Medhurst, touching his cap as he came from behind the army huts.

‘What do you want?' he said. ‘How did you know I was here?'

‘I saw the car, sir.'

‘What are you doing sneaking about the house here?'

‘I wanted a word with you, sir,' Medhurst said. ‘It was about the water.'

God, he thought, the water again. Always the water. He remembered with revulsion and annoyance the fetid hut, the naked unwashed baby. If you gave them water, Good God, they hadn't the faintest notion in hell what it was for.