The Nature of Love (21 page)

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Will you tell me if you see I am making a fool of myself again? Will you tell me that?'

‘I'm sure there won't be any need.'

‘I don't want to make a fool of myself,' she said. ‘Will you tell me?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘You're very sweet,' she said. ‘Remember – I rely on you.'

After that she did not speak again until, perhaps twenty minutes later, she said, ‘I'm getting sleepy. I think I must go in,' and got up from her chair. He got up too but she said, ‘Don't get up. Please,' but it was too late and he found himself standing a few inches away from her, his gaze held for a second or two by the glowing magnetic stare of the small black eyes and then, suddenly lowering, of the cross-ward fold of her dress over her breasts. ‘Good night,' she said.

The palms of his hands were sweating as he shook hands. He had not expected to shake hands. Her formal cool
uplifted hand brought her an inch or so closer and then she drew it away. It was as fresh and smooth in texture as the skin of a fruit. ‘Sleep well,' she said.

He walked as far as the jetty, standing there for some time listening to the river advancing sea-ward in wide breaking flood-swirls that struck at banks and tree-roots in a fish-bone series of little waves. He smoked a final cigarette and looked at the stars and thought of Mrs Malan. He could not tell what lay behind that appeal about making a fool of herself and that rather desperate remark of hers: ‘Remember – I rely on you.' All the inside of himself melted in a strange fluidity of engrossed and tender wonder as he thought of her and tried, youthful and fascinated, to work it out.

When he got back to his bungalow the Sikh was still up, waiting to lock the doors. ‘Malan not in?' Simpson said and George, in a sharp, almost defiant flick, shook his head.

Afterwards he lay awake for a long time on his small camp-bed, under the mosquito net, thinking. In the Malans' bedroom the lamp continued to burn, keeping him awake even when he turned at last and tried to sleep, and Malan did not come in.

In two days, as Malan had promised, the electricity began to work. Lights, fans, refrigerator: there was an infinity of useful switches everywhere. By day, for two or three hours, the generator added to the discomfort of stunning midday heat a coughing brain-beating thud.

To the multitude of household gadgets Malan added an astounding, admirable efficiency in bigger things. Soon the offices were cleared of chickens; and an overhead cable, insulated on high poles of bamboo, took power for fans and light down from the bungalow, and the estate plan found its place over Malan's big teak desk on the wall. ‘I've got the idea for inter-comm. speakers all worked out too,' Malan said, ‘so that if we want each other or a boy or anything we don't have to go running and yelling round. You've got to save the sweat here.'

Simpson found himself full of reluctant admiration; the Curious moment of hatred did not obtrude again. Once, from the far side of the estate, down to the landing-stage, a narrow gauge railway had run. Time, with the coming of motor transport, seemed to have made it obsolete, but Malan did not agree. ‘Easier and cheaper to run. Quieter and never dusty. Trucks going past the bungalow would be hell for us. No, we'll get it going again. All we need is the labour.'

‘You're rather fond of little trains, aren't you?' Simpson said.

‘Oh! that? You mean the other one? I built that when I was here alone. You have to have something to amuse yourself when you're alone.'

The question of labour was something that Simpson finally thought it tactful to leave alone. Two or three Tamils appeared and assisted the laying of cables from the bungalow to the offices, but when he inquired of Malan how soon the coolies would be coming in anything like useful numbers Malan gave one of the sudden curt replies that had crushed the inquisitiveness of Captain Custance:

‘I'll deal with the labour. That's my pigeon. Never worry your head in this climate about things that are supposed to worry other people. That's the quickest way to belly-trouble.'

‘I just thought –'

‘Well, don't think. Thinking is bad in this climate.'

‘I know the thing is a headache,' Simpson said. ‘The way you're out there nearly every night trying to get it straightened out –'

‘I'll straighten it,' Malan said. ‘I've straightened it before. Do your work. Never mind where I go at night or for that matter at any other time. That's my affair.'

One morning, after breakfast, Simpson felt a thickness about his eyes; the whites of them were yellow and liverish and there was a dull beating, made worse by the Sikh's breakfast of fried eggs, on the bone of the forehead. He stayed behind for a time after breakfast, bathing his head
with lumps of ice in the bath-house, and when he reached the offices Malan was already working.

‘Late,' Malan said.

‘I felt a bit seedy.'

Malan caught him by the jaw in a movement that ejected his tongue a second before he had said the word.

‘I told you you'd get belly-trouble,' he said. ‘This your first touch of gyppy tummy?'

‘Yes.'

‘Go back and tell Vera to give you chlorodyne and one of the tablets in the yellow bottles – she'll know. You'll be all right after a bit – it's nothing, you'll be all right.'

Back at the bungalow Mrs Malan was sitting on the veranda, writing letters.

‘I thought you looked off-colour at breakfast,' she said, and he was pleased, comforted in his grey liverish state, to think that she had noticed it.

She mixed the chlorodyne for him in a tumbler and stood watching him with intent dark eyes as he drank the sweetish soothing milk of it.

‘You ought to take a day off,' she said. ‘You look all in.'

He shook his head; something bumped under his skull like a leaden ball.

‘How's your pulse?' she said. ‘Come here – let me feel it.' In expert fingers she quietly held his hand. ‘I used to be a nurse. During the war. I was nursing Spencer when –' She broke off, looking at the watch on her wrist.

It was her first noticeable sign of uneasiness about Malan. It struck him strangely: the quick, mistaken glance at the watch, born of habit and now prompted by nervousness, as if she were taking his temperature as well as his pulse.

He had an idea suddenly, also, that she was not even counting his pulse. The fingers were there, resting on his throbbing blood; but the mind was not there. For some reason he knew she was distracted, far away.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘I'll take your temperature at lunch. The thermometer's packed away somewhere.'

‘It's nothing – I'll work it off,' he said.

As he reached the end of the veranda she called to him:

‘By the way, have you a key to the billiard-room?'

‘Yes.' It was part of Malan's general habit of efficiency that each of them should have, except for purely personal things, a key for everything.

‘Would you lend it me?'

‘Yes: of course,' he said.

She smiled and said, ‘Thank you. I'll give it back to-night.'

In the evening he felt better. After supper Malan stayed for a short time on the veranda to take coffee and then, as on so many other nights, excused himself and walked down the road. She lay quiet in her chair; she might have been listening to his footsteps retreating down the pink-dust road between the wilderness of rampant pineapples. She seemed to judge the quietness carefully for five minutes longer and then her arm came out from the chair.

‘The key,' she said.

‘Thank you.' He took his wallet from the breast pocket of his bush-shirt. An aunt, efficient too in her kindly way, had given him a farewell present of a new wallet with a neat compartment for keys: better than wearing out the linings of his trousers pocket, she said.

He opened the wallet to put in the key and suddenly, before he could prevent it, she swung both hands across and clutched it.

‘Let me see,' she said. ‘The photo of your girl's in it. I know it is – let me see.'

‘Oh! no, please –'

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Own up – let me see.'

She twisted her body, sitting on the edge of his chair, half-wrenching the wallet from him. The chair rocked dangerously, tipping over at an angle with the weight of two bodies. He put out a hand to check it, touching the wooden floor-slats, and in that moment she slipped and fell against him. He felt the smooth shape of her leg fleshily touching his own, the weight of her breast, unsteadied by her hands, falling across his arm. He let go the wallet, tipping the chair back
into balance so that with the motion of it she was rocked back, laughing, against him.

It was a laugh of triumph that teased him too: because now she had the wallet and he did not stop her. He could feel the shape of her body outlined against his knee. There was a little light from the lamp in the dining-room and she turned her back to him, opening the wallet, so that she could look at it. Her hair, fired at the back by light, was scalloped into long and brilliant edges of dense black curls, and he was fired too by the frenzy of watching it, so close that he could touch it with his mouth. He knew that in a moment he would touch it with his mouth and then draw her back, by the throat; he knew that she could only have come to him like that because she wanted to come, soft and deliberate and laughing and excited, and because she wanted to be near him and because she wanted him to draw her down; and then he heard her gasp, softly:

‘Good God: how did you come by this? Where
did
you get it?'

A day or two before he had cut the picture in half, throwing Malan away.

‘I found it here.'

‘But it's ancient – years old – ghastly –'

He held her gently by the throat, drawing her back until her face was level with his own. His wallet fell away somewhere, slipping down the unencumbered silky front of her body and clattering with its keys on the veranda floor. She did not say a word. A twist of her body brought her half round to him, so that she lay across him, turning her face. Her mouth in another moment was full against his and fire, in a series of running, beating waves, ran wildly up through him as she kissed him, almost hurting him with the fixed long strength of it.

‘Fancy me,' she said, ‘me – how was it me?'

‘Who else?' he said.

‘Oh! God,' she said and he saw, as in the photograph just so minutely and with just such precision, but now so inflamed and so profoundly dark that he could hardly bear to
look at them, the deep eyes staring and holding him transfixed.

In another moment, in a loud whisper, quite loud enough, he thought, for Malan to hear if he were coming up the road, she called him darling, and instinctively he turned to look in the direction Malan would come.

‘Let's walk to the river,' he said, ‘it's better there. In case –'

‘No,' she said; she spoke in the quietest compelling sort of breath, almost a sigh, her lips just brushing his face. ‘No, here. Here will do. It's better here –'

He kissed her again, searching the front of her body excitedly with his hands, feeling its full tautness, the lovely nest-like hollow, without a word of protest from her.

‘You're not afraid of anything, are you?' she said. ‘You're not afraid?'

‘No, not afraid,' he said. He felt her trembling with excitement and joy. ‘Not afraid.'

After that, every evening she would wait for him on the veranda, swinging quietly in her chair until Malan had gone. Every evening, she wore a different dress. The two meals of the day at which the three of them were together, the evening one especially, became more and more of a pain, and sometimes he could not bear to look at her. Yet whenever he did look she was always looking in return: with that delicate undisturbed precision of hers, quiet and magnetic and powerful, holding him completely. It never failed.

The curious thing was that he could not help feeling it was directed just as much at Malan. At first that part of it troubled him. Then he got over it; he saw that of course, naturally, there had to be a smile for Malan too. Deception as well as love had to have its smile. He even grew used to her lifting her face to Malan, to take his kisses; he could even ignore, almost, the fondness of the departing word:

‘Don't be long, dear. Please.'

On the question of the labour force Simpson now waited a cue from Malan. It appeared one evening that Malan was
worried by communists: ‘That's half the trouble here. They're infiltrating everywhere. They're the trouble makers. They don't want you to have labour – prevent it by every damn means in their power.'

‘You think there'll be trouble?' Simpson said. ‘I mean –'

‘Not bandits?' she said.

‘Good God no. It's a local thing. They're like children – they need soothing gently.'

‘Anyway Bill's an awfully good shot, aren't you, Bill? Bill can take care of me.'

‘I know. I want him to.'

‘In fact I think he takes care of me better than you do.'

‘Good,' Malan said. ‘That's what I like to hear.'

Serenely, with a sort of stiff innocence that chilled him with terror, she put her arm into Simpson's as they walked from the dining-room. ‘He's a very good escort.' Her eyes held Malan with the most engaging frigid charm. ‘He's very good to me. Aren't you jealous? He spoils me.'

‘I'm not jealous.'

‘Then you ought to be.' She quite snapped the words, hard and short, and her face coloured up. ‘Men don't deserve to have nice wives if they're not jealous of them.'

Malan grinned; nothing of that curious conversation, which chilled and horrified Simpson so much that he felt his breath locked in his throat, seemed to affect him.

‘I'm not jealous,' was all he said. ‘I wouldn't know how to be.'