The Nature of Love (23 page)

Simpson, intent on the fusion of river and open sea, was not listening. The
Roselay
, caught in powerful twists of estuary currents, shuddered once again, as Captain Custance had said before, like a bloody factory. But there was a sudden breath of relief, a stir of sea-wind, clean and salty in spite of heat, that bore away in a refreshing moment the stupefying steamy heat of the river.

He looked down, a moment later, to see Mrs Malan on deck, standing in the bows. His impulses of tenderness started up again, waving away his sterility. He felt he wanted to go down and ask her, for the last time, if she had anything left for him, a trace of something, the smallest thing. He saw the wind from the open sea blow her dress against her legs and a stir of it, with sun, inflame into scalloped gold-black edges the fringe of her hair.

He knew it was only Malan she wanted: the dead Malan, back there, the efficient Spencer, the gadget king, the oracle who had been and done it all before, the prig: the great Malan. She had exterminated everything for that, extinguished it all: distance, time, all the others, the rivals and himself. It was all as obvious as it would ever need to be.

After a few moments he could bear it no longer. He went down to the deck and stood by the rail of the ship, close to her.

‘May I talk again?' he said. ‘Do you mind if I talk?'

‘No.'

A queer involuntary moment of agony locked his throat, choking him. The
Roselay
seemed to sweep a long way to open sea before he could speak again:

‘I can't bear it without you.'

She did not answer.

He put one hand across her shoulders, smoothing her bare arm. It was rigid and smoothly neutral, but she did not draw it away. At the touch of her body fires of tenderness began leaping up in him again, reaching his eyes in small tears, so
that he was dazzled by the running rose-brown tide of open sea.

‘Don't make me let you go,' he said. ‘I can't bear it – I can't let you go.'

He touched her throat very softly and she turned her head for the first time, looking at him with the old minute precision, clear and inexorable and dissecting.

‘I didn't expect you would let me go.'

Joy shot through him and it was as if also, at the same moment, the
Roselay
shot forward, almost out of the river currents, clear at last.

‘Oh! I love you,' he began to say.

He could feel the softest regular pulsing of the blood in her throat. ‘I'd do anything –'

‘You know now,' she said. ‘You know now how it feels.'

He did not answer. He could feel her body soft and pulsing and yet distant under his hand. He watched the sea, running now from brown to green and beyond, all pure in scintillation, a beautiful light cobalt that was like the sky. He wanted to think that he was clear and free himself and that now, at last, she belonged to him.

And yet it was not what he was thinking. He could think only of the eyes in the photograph: the small dark eyes, with their timeless, penetrating precision, the beautiful, relentless eyes – and behind them, always, the delicate nature.

The eponymous old lady is an eloquently drawn woman in her nineties, sharing the difficulties of age with a companion. There is fragile humour in her sadness when she contrasts her life now with her youth when, as a servant girl, she had two boyfriends at once. First published in
The Star
(1938), and not republished since.

She sat in the chair facing the window, looking up at the Budgerigars. They were blue, and today, since the sky was dark, they seemed very blue, a summer turquoise. Her own hands were like dead bird's wings, grey and fleshless, outspread. They lay at rest in her lap. ‘How do you feel?' I said. She shook her head. Her eyes reminded me of grey glass marbles. They were uncannily transparent. By contrast her head was of stone, yellowish, sun-baked stone, her hair nothing but wintry cotton. She had a great eagle nose and the high Indian cheek-bones of the very old. But it was the eyes which held me. They were icy and brilliant, and they seemed fixed on limitless distances. ‘You're not so young as you were.' I said. ‘What about that cake—with the ninety-one candles on? You can't expect to go frisking about.'

‘The days are so long.' She said. ‘They seem endless.'

What could I say? The Budgerigars flicked and mocked parrot-fashion above my head. Watching them, she seemed to take no notice of them. And then I saw that she was not watching them. She was looking far beyond them, into a different world.

‘The light's so funny' she said. ‘It's so strong. I can't see for it. Everything seems to be so white. I can't do with it.'

‘Have you been reading anything?' I said. I remembered how she used to read a book a day.

She shook her head, gave the wry, almost sourish pursing-up of her lips, the sudden shutting of her eyes that meant that things were not so good.

‘I've been trying to read Bunyan,' she said. ‘ “Pilgrims progress.” I started it. Have you ever read it? It's a terrible book.'

‘I can't read it.' I said

‘You think Bedford was like that?' She said. ‘And England? How he says they were? I don't like to think of it. He puts awful things in. I don't like to think of England being like it.'

Yes, it was an awful book. She had been trying to read it for 70 years. Perhaps she had waited too long? Perhaps it was not the book's fault, but hers?

‘The print doesn't seem so big,' she said. ‘They print books in such little print now. I can't see it. It's nothing but fly scratching's on the paper.'

‘Don't you read so much?'

‘It's such poor print. I can't see it. No, I just sit and look. Can you see that apple?'

Turning I looked out of the window. It was July. The leaves had joined in the tree outside to a dark canopy, but I could see no apples.

‘Yes' I said.

‘I sit and watch that.'

‘All day?'

‘What else can I do? When folks come in to see me, and they make jokes I can't hear. I have to ask “what're you laughing about? What's the joke?” They don't speak loud enough.'

‘What sort of apple is that? A Blenheim?'

Yes, it was a Blenheim. She had planted it. Over fifty years ago. Nearer sixty. But, the bigger it got, the fewer apples somehow it had on it. This year she had looked and looked, but there was only that one. ‘And I live in fear and dread that'll come off. We get such winds. Do you hear them? At night? It seems to blow all night long. I can't sleep for it.'

‘The tree's loaded.' I said. I teased her gently: ‘You want too much for your money. Here you sit – nothing to do but eat and drink, and talk. All your men friends coming in. Just what you like.'

‘Oh! Men. Yes, I like that. I get on well with men. I always have done.'

‘I bet you have.'

‘Its women I can't bear.' She said.

‘All powder and cocktails,' I said. ‘Is that what you don't like?'

‘No. I don't know. I just don't get on.' She crossed and uncrossed her hands, shut her eyes and opened them again. ‘Men are more fun.'

‘And then,' I said, ‘you say you're getting old.'

‘Oh! once, I remember,' she said, ‘when I was a servant girl. There used to be two boys who climbed into my bedroom window. That was such fun.'

‘Two boys at once?'

‘One one night, and one the other. They're both dead now.'

She sat silent, thinking of it. In repose, she was nothing but a carving in stone, the facial bones chipped out roughly and sharply, her gold wire earrings stiff in the stiff lobes, her eyes far beyond the Budgerigars and the apple tree.

Then she said: ‘Look in the drawer, under the cabinet. There's a bobbin in there. Read what's on it.'

As I sat with the piece of carved bone in my hand, reading its inscription, and jingling its ringlet of beads, I felt her looking for the first time not at the sky, but at me. On the bobbin was printed in scarlet letters ‘Abraham Thomas. Hanged June 18, 1872.'

‘Hanged?' I said. ‘For killing.'

‘Oh! yes, for murder. He killed a man. But it was a dog really. It was just a little thing. They quarrelled over a dog.'

I looked up. She was staring out of the window again, far into her limitless distances, her pose monumental, her eyes eternally icy.

‘He was such a fool,' she said. ‘Always making people laugh. A caution. Oh! such a –‘Suddenly, she left off. When I spoke again she was not listening. She sat with eyes shut. And I could tell that she was tired not only of the budgerigars, and the sky, and myself, but of all the world.

H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.

His first novel,
The Two Sisters
(1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.

During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym "Flying Officer X". His first financial success was
Fair Stood the Wind for France
(1944), followed by two novels about Burma,
The Purple Plain
(1947) and
The Jacaranda Tree
(1949) and one set in India,
The Scarlet Sword
(1950).

Other well-known novels include
Love for Lydia
(1952) and
The Feast of July
(1954).

His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with
The Darling Buds of May
in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.

Many other stories were adapted for the screen, the most renowned being
The Purple Plain
(1947) starring Gregory Peck, and
The Triple Echo
(1970) with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

H. E. Bates married in 1931, had four children and lived most of his life in a converted granary near Charing in Kent. He was awarded the CBE in 1973, shortly before his death in 1974.

Discover other books by H. E. Bates published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/hebates
.

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For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

First published in Great Britain in 1953 by Michael Joseph

‘Old Lady' first published in 1938 in
The Star

This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 1953 Evensford Productions Limited

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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eISBN: 9781448215157

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