The Nature of Love (2 page)

‘I'll get you home, Mr Parker,' she said. ‘Mr Parker, I'll get you home.'

For some few seconds she was torn between the problem of Parker, the hat, and the crying baby. She solved it by leaving Parker where he was and taking the hat to the pram. Then she pushed the pram to the farm-gate, rocking it up and down so that the baby stopped its crying. Finally she pushed the hat behind the pillow and then came back to where Parker was.

He was still dazed as she lifted him up with stout arms and, in the same solid way as she pushed the pram up and down the hill, carried him to the house. His fall had left a long streak of blood on his left cheek and she said:

‘Mr Parker, you might have killed yourself,' but Parker did not answer.

After she had dumped Parker into the big horsehair chair in the kitchen, her first thought was for the hat. She wheeled the pram to the kitchen door and then took out the hat and put it on the kitchen table.

‘I'll git you a cuppa tea, Mr Parker,' she said. ‘I'll wash
that blood off your face and git you a cuppa tea and you'll feel better.'

Again Parker did not answer. Nor did he seem to notice her movements about the kitchen as she filled the kettle, lighted the oil stove and got ready to bathe his face and make the tea. Cups and plates that Parker had used in the morning or the day before or even the day before that stood about the kitchen in odd places, on chairs, on the mantelshelf, on window-ledges, in a sink filled with greasy stew-pans.

‘You let yourself git into a rare mess,' she said and began to bathe his face.

Parker was a man of fifty-five and she had always thought of him, when she had thought of him at all, as being older than he was. Her first close look at his face did not change her mind. It was a face of small bone structure, narrow, with thin lips and sparse receding rabbit-coloured hair. A little frown of pained anxiety about something brought the small grey eyes rather close together.

Some time after she had washed his face Parker sat up. With stupefied eyes he looked glassily past her. He sat staring in this way until she brought him tea. She had the sense to bring it to him without a saucer and he sat with the cup grasped in both hands, staring, letting the tea fume up into his washed grey face without a word.

‘Feel any better?' she said. ‘You might have got yourself killed,' but again Parker did not answer.

While he drank the tea, she looked at the floor, splashed with grey hen-droppings, with mud and mud-straw from the yard and with old stray feathers; at the crockery lying on mantelpiece and window-sill and chairs; and at the colourless skeins of lace that had once been curtains; and she said:

‘Don't nobody come in and give you a clean-up once in a while?'

He seemed to shake his head; and suddenly she felt in a clumsy way sorry for him: drunk, womanless, lost, unable to answer her.

‘Well, it's time somebody did.' She pulled at her stockings that had slipped slightly down in concertina ruckles over her stout legs, but Parker did not notice them. ‘If I git time to-morrow I'll come in and give you a bit of sweep-up. Not afore you want it either.'

Parker seemed to nod his head, still as if not seeing her properly, and after some moments she said, ‘You take care of yourself, Mr Parker, you'll be killing yourself one o' these days,' and then she lumbered out into the yard and pushed the baby down the hill.

When she came up the hill on the following afternoon it was with the thought of Parker, rather than the hat, uppermost in her mind. She did not conceive the hat as an important thing. Spring was coming across the valley and puffs of blossom, like tranquil smoke, rose everywhere about the pastures below the hill. Under a sharp blue sky the beeches were brilliant masses of almost transparent lace-like leaf and it puzzled her, almost irked her, that a man could live as Parker lived in the spring time: womanless, unswept, curtains unwashed, the old crust of winter still clinging everywhere like a frowsy mould.

So she was glad to see Parker waiting for her by the gate; she was glad to see him looking in so many ways different from the day before. His face was clean and its drunken greyness had gone; he was no longer wearing his best black hat. He was a little working farmer in shirt sleeves, still too narrow of face, too pin-eyed and too cautious, but human and aware.

‘How d'you feel to-day, Mr Parker?'

‘Ain't so bad.'

‘Was your car hurt?'

‘It's all right.'

‘I said I'd give you bit of a clean-up but I got to git back by four,' she said. ‘How if I came in for hour after tea? I could come up.'

‘You pick my hat up yesterday?' he said.

‘Yes, Mr Parker,' she said. ‘I picked it up. I put it in the kitchen.'

‘Oh,' he said.

‘You never lost nothing, did you?' she said.

‘Not as I know on,' Parker said.

She stood by the pram, rocking the baby up and down, talking a little more, and after a time Parker watched her go back through the wood. When she came back soon after six o'clock, without the baby, Parker was not there. She could hear the sound of a tractor down the hill.

The evening was very warm and soft and a deep fragrance of bluebells came from hazel copses above the house as she turned the kitchen furniture into the farmyard and then took the curtains from the windows and hung them, like disintegrating cobwebs, on the clothes line. She scrubbed the kitchen floor, the stove, and the stone steps outside. Water ran like mud, bearing away with it the stale rank odours of old grease, old cooking, old dust, and the curious close stench of winter decay. She washed up the crockery of the past week and opened the windows and let in the spring evening air.

When she had finished all this she walked into the yard to look for Parker. When she could not see him she walked across to a small orchard beyond the cow-barn. Down the hill Parker was harrowing ground for spring seed. The soil was dry and dusty and the tractor seemed to draw behind it a brown and smoky cloud.

Everywhere primroses, with drifts of white anemone, were growing in lush masses under hazel-trees and she gathered a handful while she waited for Parker to come in with the harrow. But after a time there seemed to be something wrong with the tractor and she gave up waiting and went back into the house.

She put the primroses into a little red glass jug on the supper table. She had already laid out all the food she could find, a little bread, a piece of home-killed bacon, and a lump
of cheese. Now she sat down to wait for Parker and after about ten minutes he came in.

For some moments he stood on the kitchen threshold with small rabbity eyes transfixed by all he saw. This transfixed narrow stare was not surprised or unbelieving or even doubtful. It was held in suspicion: as if he could not accept it without also accepting that behind it there lay some sort of motive. Nobody did such things for nothing; nobody gave things away without wanting something back.

‘I didn't have much time, Mr Parker,' she said, ‘but it's a bit better. It's a bit sweeter anyway.'

‘Ah,' he said.

‘I don't know what you want for supper,' she said. ‘That's all I could forage. I'll make you a cuppa tea.'

While she was in the scullery making tea Parker sat at the table in concentration on the food, gnawing with slow greed at lumps of bread.

‘You want some new curtains,' she said. ‘Them others'll fall to pieces if you wash 'em.'

‘I got no money for curtains.'

‘Well, it's your place,' she said. ‘You wanta look after it.'

‘I ain't made o' money,' he said. ‘I got a living to git.'

For a second or two it occurred to her to say something about the money in the hat; thirty or forty pounds of it, something that seemed extraordinarily vast to her. It seemed not only incredible but also idiotic that anyone with so much money tucked into the brim of his hat could speak as narrowly and meanly as Parker did. Such dreams as lay in the brim of Parker's hat were stupendous. They were dreams she had often thought about and had never attained.

She said simply instead: ‘I'll just pour myself a cup and then run along or else somebody'll be in a two-and-eight at home.'

He drew lumps of pork gristle from his mouth and dropped them on the new-scrubbed floor.

‘What's your name?' he said.

‘Gaskain.'

‘One o' Jim Gaskain's lot?'

‘Yes.'

‘Which one are you?'

‘Dulcima,' she said.

For the first time he smiled. This smile seemed no more than a bristling of dirty teeth from between thin greasy lips, but she was wholly aware of it. It seemed to humanize Parker a little further.

‘Funny name, ain't it?' Parker said. ‘What do they call you?'

‘Dulcie,' she said. ‘Or else Dulce.'

‘Worse 'n Dulcima,' he said.

She did not answer. She had been a little sorry for Parker; she had been a little puzzled and baffled by him; and now she was hurt. It seemed a poor return for her kindness, and deep down in her there was kindled, for the first time, out of that terse and narrow uncharitableness about her name, a remote spark of resentment.

‘Well, I'll be going now,' she said.

He guzzled tea. She waited at the door for a word of acknowledgement, of thanks, of simple recognition for the things she had done, but he did not speak and she said:

‘How about them curtains? I could git the stuff for you if you wanted.'

‘I'll atta see,'

‘Everybody says they're goin' up again,' she said. ‘You could save a bit now.'

‘Ah?'

‘You could save ten or twelve shillings,' she said. ‘Very like more. You could be twelve or thirteen shillings in pocket.'

‘Ah?' he said. He appeared to consider this possibility; it seemed to appeal to him. Then the sudden touch of humanity that made her feel inexplicably sorry for him came out again:

‘Ain't had no new curtains since the missus died.'

‘Then it's time you had some,' she said. ‘You let me git 'em and fix 'em up.'

He hesitated for some moments longer, and then:

‘All right,' he said. ‘You git 'em.'

He spoke flatly, staring at the primroses, as if seeing them for the first time.

‘I shall want some money,' she said.

‘All right,' he said. ‘I'll atta see about that.'

After that she began to go up to the farm every evening. With the money Parker gave her she bought the material for the curtains and made them and hung them up. They were of bright yellow material, with scrolling scarlet roses, and they flapped like signal flags against the windows of the square drab house on the hill. As summer came on she cleaned through the sitting-room, the stairs and the landing, and then into the three bedrooms above. Parker had slept in a small back bedroom on an iron bedstead, throwing an old army overcoat over himself for extra warmth in winter. She turned him out of this frowsy unwashed room into another and then out of that into another, until the three were cleaned. She beat the dust from the carpets in the farmyard and washed the sheets until they too looked like long rows of signal flags strung out under the summer apple-trees.

From time to time Parker said ‘I shall atta settle for your time,' or ‘Soon as I git that hayin' done I'll settle up wi' you,' but on all these occasions she would simply look at him with her slow dark eyes, as if searching for something beyond him, and say:

‘It don't matter. There's no hurry, Mr Parker. There's plenty of time.'

Summer was dry and beautiful on the hill and in the evenings, from that high point about the farm, the sun seemed to go down very slowly across the plain of deep flat country below. Because of this she got into the habit of waiting for Parker to come in from the fields, no matter how late it was. Now that the rooms were all turned out and tidy it was easier to keep everything clean and sometimes there was nothing to do but lay the table for supper.

While she waited she got into the habit of sitting at the
kitchen table and writing down, in a small black notebook, a little account of all the things she had done. She wrote very simply. She wrote down: ‘Mr Parker, April 24th, 1½ hrs, 2/3; Mr Parker, curtain pins and tape, 7/6; Mr Parker, June 8, 2½ hrs, 3/9; Mr Parker, soap and scrubbing brush, 3/6; Mr Parker, making curtains, 16/6.' At the bottom of each page she added up the figure and carried it over to the next. Sometimes she checked it over for a mistake and when she heard Parker coming in from the fields she stuffed the book down between the front of her body and her dress. In that way it made no difference to the solid stoutness of her figure, squabby and shapeless from her bust down to the heavy plodding legs still covered with cotton stockings.

Every Tuesday and Friday Parker came home from market, driving wildly up the hill. She grew so used to it that after a time she got into the habit of going up to the farm a little earlier on those days so that she could take off his shoes where he had fallen on the kitchen floor, and loosen his collar and find his hat. There was always money in the hat, twenty or thirty pounds, and once, after some heifer calves had been sold, fifty or sixty; but she did not touch it. It was as if she did not regard the debt that Parker owed her as having any bearing on this; as if something in Parker or something in herself, his meanness and her own patience, were quite separate, and as if she could wait for a long time, perhaps years, before they came together.