The Nature of Love (12 page)

As he drove in the jeep through the park on the following evening he decided to make a detour to the south side, to where, on a two-acre strip, he conducted trials on thirty or forty kinds of grass and clover variations. Soils deficient in nitrates, in limes, in potash, or whatever it was, were marked off in oblongs, to be given their trials of grass in endless permutations.

He stayed for a short time looking with pleasure and pride at the patterns of delicate and brightening green. It had been another beautiful day; there was a warm trembling everywhere of rising grass and leaf and flower. Flies were dancing and you could feel in the air, in the blackbird throatiness, the cuckoo mockery, the whole deepening pulse of summer.

Then as he drove the jeep back across the park, already quite dry and hard from the heat of sun and yellow now in brilliant varnished stretches of buttercups, he saw a man in shirtsleeves working out on the grass. He remembered then his plan of soil-testing the entire estate. That gigantic task, to be recorded in time on a great coloured map that would hang in a special section of the estate office, was something he supposed not one farm in a thousand, in England at any rate, had ever done. In America of course they did this sort of thing; America was soil-plotted. They were ahead of us there.

He stopped the jeep and walked across to talk to the man who, with an implement like a large auger, was making trial borings into turf.

‘Hullo, Pritchard,' he said. ‘How does it go?'

‘Good evening, sir.' The man, quite young, in his shirtsleeves, was sweating heavily. ‘Warm. See that?' He held up the auger, with its spiral of pale brown soil, crumbling away hairy rooted earth with his fingers. ‘Dry. As if there'd never been any rain. Ever.'

‘Extraordinary.' The dry rainless spiral of earth crumbled
like dusty brown cake, sprinkling the tall buttercups. ‘How is it here? What have you got?'

‘Sandgate beds. Not too good. You've got signs of spring water at twenty-two inches nearly everywhere. I'll let you see.'

Pritchard screwed the auger down into earth, and then with a swift jerk wrenched it up again.

‘See the little rusty patches? like veins?' He thumbed away iron-coloured crumbs of soil. ‘That's your water.'

‘Bad?'

‘Typical. Water everywhere.'

Fitzgerald knew that it meant more drainage schemes. They were very expensive; but he knew too that they had to be done and that he would come to them gradually too, all in good time.

‘I'm glad you're having this done, sir.'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘It seems amazing when you come to think of it that we walk about on land and haven't the slightest idea what goes on underneath it.'

‘Yes.'

‘I mean for example the water, You'd say the land here was bone dry. Never a drop of moisture in it. Yet there it is – water everywhere, all the way down water seeping through.'

‘It's a revelation,' he said.

Presently he said good-bye and got into the jeep and drove up through the buttercups to the house. It was striking six when he parked the jeep by the blackened and ruined army huts. A soft yellow bloom of buttercups had been beaten up and lay softly on the wheel-hubs, and by the army ruins crowds of white nettles were in flower.

Down the avenue he could not see the girl.

A curious feeling of disappointment suddenly gnawed at him as he stood there waiting. He had thought of the whole affair, the previous day, as something deliciously casual, almost offhand. He had not even wanted her, as he often wanted other women, out of loneliness, or in pleasure-spite against Cordelia, who would neither go nor let him go.

But now, as he walked up and down by the ruins and the nettles, he hated the idea that, after all, the girl was not coming: that she was going to let him down. It was not simply that he was used to people doing the things he wanted. It was something else; it was something not expected, an annoyingly elusive development he could not define.

Then suddenly he heard her call. He turned and, in a startling moment of surprise and pleasure and irritation, saw her coming from behind the big cedars at the side of the house. His irritation arose from the fact that she was once again wearing the same yellow scarf: this time tied over her head.

Even that irritation melted as he watched the long slender legs swinging through the grass. To-day he was not wearing his hat and he simply lifted his hand to greet her. She waved her hand too and he saw that she carried in it a spray or two of rose-pink flowers.

‘Camellias,' she said. ‘I found the trees.'

‘For a moment I thought you were not coming.'

‘I wanted to get here first. I wanted to see it in any case, whether you came or not.'

‘Did you think I wouldn't come?'

She seemed to consider this question for a moment. Half smiling, dark eyes again like elongated buds above the shell-like rosettes, so pure and waxen, of the camellia flowers, she said:

‘No: I knew you'd come.'

Together, then, they began to walk up to the house.

‘Where did you find the camellias? It's late for them.'

‘At the back,' she said. ‘Don't you know? You mean to say this is your house and yet –'

‘I always fancied they grew this side, on the wall.'

‘Curious man,' she said. ‘Don't you think they're beautiful?'

He said yes, he thought they were beautiful. It had been many years since he had seen them or even since he had been into the house; and as he drew out his great
bunch of keys and started to unlock the front door he said:

‘I warn you it's an absolute shambles. There's nothing to see.'

A moment or two later, as he pushed open the big white door, it was possible to see how true that was.

He stood inside the big hall-way with the girl, looking up at the stairs. They were elegant and wide and had once been white. Pictures had hung on the high walls. He remembered, as he looked at the dark unfaded rectangles left by them, that they had been very solid and sombrely ancestral. They had given tone. But now all pictures, all tone, and even half the stair balustrade had gone. An army had, in the army way, availed itself of several stair-rails, an odd window ledge, the shelves that had once held tea-services on either side of the fireplace. It had left blackening boot marks like dark repeated bruises all the way up the naked stairs.

‘You see,' he said.

He half turned away as if to go out again.

‘What's in here?' she said.

‘It was the drawing-room,' he said. Now it was marked ‘Company Commander: Keep out.'

Blinds with yellow silken tassels were drawn at the windows. By the side of the fireplace a few notices in typescript were still pinned, daily routine orders or things of that sort, and one or two sheets had fallen into the hearth, where showers of soot, pocked with rain, had covered them.

‘You see, it's all gone,' he said. ‘I told you.'

‘Upstairs,' she said. ‘What's up there?'

He knew that it could only be the same upstairs. Walking carefully, trying the bare blackened treads as he climbed, he led the way upstairs. A smell, dusty, sun-dried, greasily and stalely old, met him everywhere. No colour, even where the wallpaper of the main landing had once been a broad pattern of silver and chicory, remained now. Dust and time and the army locusts had eaten it away.

The effect of her walking into this, fresh and lovely, the spray of pink camellias in her hands, was startling to him as
he turned and looked back down the stairs. Once more a leap of excitement, accompanied by the slightest wave of impatience, went through him as he watched her.

She looked up. What he felt was evidently clear in his face and she said:

‘Something wrong?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Nothing wrong.'

It was useless, he thought, going through the whole business, quite pointless and silly, walking along empty dust-grey floors, from the derelict desert of one room to another. There was nothing to be got from it and his feeling of impatience grew. However much he wanted to kiss her he could not kiss her there among the ghost-ruins, on the broken stairs, in the sun-stale dustiness of a dead world.

He was glad when, on the second storey, they reached the far side of the house, where smaller rooms, one from a central balcony, looked out over what had once been the garden below. He had completely forgotten the geography of that floor, once the servants' quarters, until suddenly she opened a door and cried out:

‘But there's furniture in here. A bed and things –'

‘Odd,' he said. ‘It can't be. Good Lord!'

A single divan bed, with a bentwood chair, a kitchen table, and a little strip of carpet furnished the room that opened through French windows on to an iron-railed balcony. He stood for a moment in the doorway, puzzled by it all, and then he remembered.

Here, in blitz days, fire-watchers had brewed tea and kept a look out for the enemy and slept. From the little balcony they had been able to see all across the gardens, to the deserted hot-houses, and along the valley. He remembered it all: the ladder out on to the roof, the rows of fire-buckets, the shovels, the sand-bags, and the sand. Queer how one forgot these things. He had even had his own estate fire-engine, with seven or eight trained men and organized practices and a decent run of hose. It had been rather fun.

He opened the French windows. For some moments he
stood half in and half out of the room, looking at the wilderness of cedars and nettle, lilac and thistle below. The room had a western aspect and now warm sun poured in, heavy with scent from many old sweet lilac trees.

Turning to explain about the room, its bed and its fire-watchers, he found the girl just behind him, looking across the valley. Once more the scarf roused in him a sharp sense of excited annoyance, and once more she caught the swift look of it in his face.

‘What is it –?'

‘Just the scarf,' he said.

‘Don't you like it?'

‘I hate it.'

He took the scarf between his fingers and began to untie it. She shook her dark hair free as he pulled the scarf away and threw it on to the little bed. A half-smile on her face parted her lips very slightly, as if she were going to say something, and her long body was pressed against him, close and supple, as he kissed her.

‘Did you bring me here to do that?' she said.

‘You wanted to come here.'

‘Was I the only one?' She smiled, holding her lips up to him a second time. He wanted to take her quickly, in a sudden rush of over-exquisite feeling, but she said softly: ‘Careful of the camellias. They're too lovely to spoil. Let me put them on the bed.'

She laid the camellia spray on the bed, beside the scarf, with gentle and almost ironic care.

‘There,' she said. ‘Now my hands are free.'

Smiling again, she let the outward gestures of her hands fall away. It gave an impression of slight mockery to her whole body as she leaned back against the side of the open window, eyes half-closed. The sun on her eyes turned them once again to the shape of long half-open buds; and when her mouth opened slightly, quivering with what he felt might have been either excitement or amusement, he bent to kiss her again.

There was a curious mixture of emotion behind that
second kiss, or perhaps lack of it, that baffled him. She seemed one moment to stand there, arms open, free, ready to offer herself like something on a plate; and then the next moment she was gone, withdrawn, cool and charming, beautiful but shut away.

‘Queer how you found this room,' she said.

‘Oh! no – I had no idea –'

‘It's lovely. I like it. No garden, no gardeners, nobody here –'

‘It was used during the war by fire-watchers.' He began to explain it with seriousness. She smiled again and out in the garden he thought he heard the first clipped charring notes of a nightingale. He saw her listening too; and when she broke away to lean against the iron railing of the little balcony he let her stay there for a moment or two alone, looking at the shape of her body as it curved forward, the legs long and firm, the thighs a little heavier and rounder in shape than he had thought them to be, sleekly pressing against the silky material of her dress. He could not resist the notion of touching her there, where the full roundness filled out the skirt; and it occurred to him once again how pleasant the growing summer was, how pleasant it could be there with her, in light, exquisite, and not too serious moments like this: quite alone, quite exquisite, quite without responsibility.

The nightingale, breaking away from the first short charring notes, began to sing with high sustained flutings of clear ecstasy and the girl said: ‘There she goes again.' All this time she did not seem to be paying any attention at all to the regular gentle caressing of his hand across her body. The strange tangled wilderness of great trees and nettles, billowing hedges of lilac, blackberries strangling catalpa-trees, elderberry swarming over beds of dying rose, seemed to fascinate her instead into a long oblivious stare.

Suddenly she said: ‘We're not alone after all. There's somebody walking about behind the cedar trees.'

‘Where?'

‘You can hear it,' she said.

The evening was so still, quite without wind even up there at the top of the house, that he could hear the shuffle of dry footsteps, exactly as she said, among dead leaves and grass behind the cedar trees.

‘No one comes up here,' he said. ‘The gates are locked.'

‘There's someone. A child or something. You can see them now.'

A ghost-like trail of something white, behind the low black cedar branches, became one with the dry shufflings of feet among grass and leaves.

‘It's a peacock,' she said. ‘A white one.'

‘I thought they'd been taken away –'

She leaned forward to watch. Delicate and snow-white and finicky, the white peacock trailed slowly away, half-hidden, a ghost-bird in the grass; and as she leaned forward he let his hand curve upwards round her body. But once again she seemed as if she did not notice it; or as if it did not interest her.