Though billed as a comedy of errors, for all that happens in Bates’s “A Month by the Lake,” the lake might as well be Lake Coma.
There is, however, a Bates a lovely picnic in the summer of 1937, enhancing the slow-paced relationship of the middle-aged English spinster Miss Bentley and the earnest bachelor Major Wilshaw.
It’s a sedate affair during which Wilshaw is aroused while watching Miss Bentley eat a fig: As the major watched Miss Bentley quietly peeling a ripe fig and then sucking the light pink flesh from the broken purple balloon of skin, he made up his mind that he would, somehow, get her to walk with him, after lunch, farther up the mountainside.
John Irvin. A Month by the Lake (1995). Vittorio Balsarei (Alessandro Gassman), Miss Beaumont (Uma Thurman), Major Wilshaw (Edward Fox), and Signor Bonizzoni (Carlo Cartier) at their picnic on the grass.
Shy about sexuality, Bate is effusive about food: “For the picnic lunch, there were piles of cold pork and salami, pink stacks of ham, two dishes of pâté, a whole Bel Paese, large nests of hard-boiled eggs, much bread and two baskets of fruit, primarily green and black grapes, with a few last blue figs and big butter-coloured pears. There were four flasks of Valpolicella to drink, with white vermouth for those who preferred it, and mineral water for the angels [children].
See H.E. Bates. A Month by the Lake and other Stories. New York: New Directions, 1987; John Irvin. A Month by the Lake (1995). The screenplay by Trevor Bentham and Josep Llurba based on Bates’s story was first published in (1974).