by H. E. Bates
Instead it was she who broke away. Sitting up, she ruffled her brown hair with her hands – with pain he loved its cat-like fluffiness, all shining and free, as it fell and rose with the toss of her head – and then swung her legs to the floor.
‘It’s all over,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She touched his face with her hand. ‘The summer’s over.’ One of her fingers seemed to draw a mask across his cheek. ‘It was fun,’ she said. ‘Like you said it would be –’
He heard her go downstairs, her footsteps hitting emptily on the hollow treads, echoing emptily through the deserted house.
Then suddenly he heard her running back. A flash of triumph went through him. After all, he thought, she could not bear it without him; there was going to be one of those moments of reconciliation; she was coming back – he stood waiting, tensely, as he watched the swing of the opening door.
‘Only the key,’ she said. ‘I forgot the key. You’ll need it again some day –’
He left it where she let it fall on the bed. Sharply and painfully it made him remember the evening he had first given it her: the exquisite May evening of cuckoo sounds, of nightingales, among the oak flowers and all the warm sap of spring; and then the next evening, when she had found the camellia flowers and had wanted so much to see the house and had taunted and teased him because of his folly in not opening it, in leaving it all to emptiness and decay.
And frantically he said:
‘Wait a minute. Darling, don’t go for a minute. Darling, I’ve got something to say.’
‘Well?’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Don’t go. Sit down a moment –’
She did not sit down. He made an imploring tremulous effort to draw her down to the bed, but the old dry coldness of his fear paralysed him again when he found she did not move.
‘Listen – let’s talk rationally.’ He had never felt less like talking rationally in his life. He felt his teeth jar together, at the back of his dry mouth, making in his head a sound like the chattering of cold steel keys.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘what would you say if I opened the house? You always wanted me to open the house.’
‘Did I?’
‘You always loved it – you always wanted it open. I could do it,’ he said. ‘I could open it for you –’
‘You’ll never open it,’ she said.
‘Oh! please,’ he said. ‘Darling. I’d like to open it. I’d like to do it for you – open it up, open the gardens, make everything as it was –’
‘You’ll never open it,’ she said.
He sat on the bed, making a useless and unconvincing gesture of pain with his two hands, flinging them up and pressing them against his head. Then as they fell again he let them remain against her body, frontally, on the long smooth thighs. The rigid smoothness of her body, lovely and too familiar, made no sort of movement of relaxation.
‘Let me open the house for you. Let me do that,’ he said. ‘That’s what you always wanted.’
He looked up and saw her face, charming and maddening, friendly and tender, and yet distant as ever, and he knew that it was not something she had always wanted. He knew there was nothing of him she wanted. There was nothing of him she craved: neither himself, nor the house, nor even the little attendant charms she had loved as they came and went away: the camellias, the magnolias on the house wall – What was it Cordelia had said? If there was anything he wanted – something like that – he had simply to scream long enough and they gave it to him. He did not want to scream now, but suddenly he felt that he would have given anything, the house, the land, the grass, anything, in return for some simple gesture of hers, a word, the tiniest touch of friendliness, the merest indication that there was, after all, something of him that she wanted back. Was it so much to ask? he thought.
Instead he was aware only of the rigid unaltered position of her body, his own dry hard loneliness, and then her voice, saying again:
‘You’ll never open it. It’s like opening a tomb. There’s only the dead inside it. Whatever there was is dead and gone – it’s finished, all this, it’s the end.’
She moved away; the fine smooth thighs slipped out of his hands. He was tortured once again by blinding moments of futile agony combined with the renewed sensation of feeling ridiculous as he tried to clutch her body and bring it back. He began to say something about ‘Darling, you can’t go out like this, just like this – you can’t end it like this,’ and then she combed her fingers through her loose brown hair and tossed it back from her face and looked down at him sitting there, imploring and agonized, on the bed.
‘One of us had to end it,’ she said.
He could not look at her; the tips of his fingers were without feeling as he brought them together, hopelessly, where he sat, staring down.
‘It’s all dead,’ she said. ‘In your heart you know perfectly well it’s dead.’
He heard her walk away. This time he made no attempt to stop her. After what seemed a long time a breath of wind caught the balcony window and rocked it backwards and forwards against the mullion. He got up and walked across to shut it, his hands trembling so much that the shutters chattered as he pulled them together. The sun was going down fierily, at eye-level, through a gap in the cedar trees, and for some moments, caught by the flash of it, he could not see.
Half blindly he went downstairs and then, in one of his moments of forgetfulness, not thinking of the car, he began to walk across the park.
He walked for some distance before he saw Pritchard, driving the big auger into drought-baked earth with his customary furious energy, bare to the waist now, his face and body pouring with sweat.
‘You’re a maniac with that thing,’ he said.
‘Yes: I suppose I am a bit of a maniac, sir.’ Pritchard laughed. ‘Just a bit –’
Fitzgerald stared at the daemoniac driving auger stabbing down into burnt dead grass.
‘Not finding the water now?’ he said. He laughed himself, crookedly.
‘Oh! yes,’ Pritchard said. ‘Still here. Still signs of it. It’s here all right – everywhere.’
Everywhere the summer had bitten deep, almost cruelly, into earth and grass, and only a spark was needed to fire, in a flash, acres of lifeless, colourless grass and shrivelled miles of woodland.
‘Oh! yes,’ Pritchard said. ‘The water’s here. It takes more than this –’
‘Any good here for the cherries I spoke about?’
‘Fatal. The soil’s right, the situation is right – but the water –’
‘Good God, man,’ he said, ‘you can’t be serious about the water?’
‘Dead serious,’ Pritchard said. ‘You see on land like this it isn’t the drought that kills.’ He crumbled with his fingers a few grains of waterless rust-brown earth and let them fall away in a little dusty cloud. ‘It’s the year after. Or the year after that. That’s the one that kills.’
Fitzgerald, not answering, walked on across the park. Over on the heathland peat fires were burning more and more smokily, running underground where you could not put them out. All down the little valley there hung low blue-brown clouds from the fires and all across his land there was no longer a trace of the green of early summer he had loved so much, about the time of oak-flowers and the voice of the nightingale, and everywhere the grass was dead.
The Delicate Nature
1
Captain Custance, standing on the bridge of the coaster Roselay as she swung in from seaward to enter the river mouth through what seemed to be two walls of excavated carmine mud decorated by fantastic clumps of grey sea-skinned tree roots, remarked in a brittle Newcastle accent that ‘in a couple of minutes she would be grinding and grunting like a bloody factory.’
The swing of the Roselay to seaward had taken her wide and at right angles to a brilliant green and carmine barrier of coast; and now, as Captain Custance called down the engine tube for full ahead, she seemed to leap forward in a clumsy and shuddering charge, thrashing into the curdling sand-br
own current of disgorging stream. And in two minutes, as Captain Custance said, she was grinding up between the walls of forest roots like a long lump of floating factory. Below there was a guttural wrenching of all her moving parts and above, from a high iron smoke stack, a long curling flag of cloud that melted sulphur bronze against the sun. Through her decks Simpson could feel her convulsive thunder on the soles of his feet, as if somewhere below him giant presses were hammering out continuous patterns through two-inch steel.
‘You’ll be there in three hours,’ Captain Custance said. ‘And this is’ – he pointed to the shores – ‘about all you’ll see – this forest stuff – until you get there.’ The high old-fashioned bridge seemed to pitch forward, like a crazy cage, suspending itself out over the bows of the Roselay as she cut through rich brown waters. ‘The river’s high this week. More muck than ever coming down.’
The face of Captain Custance had been coloured a mixture of bright yellow and bark-like brown by tropical sun, and it reminded Simpson, in its cross pattern of cracks and fissures, of a battered pineapple.
‘Not here during the war, you said?’
‘No.’
‘Well: the country’s changed a lot. A lot to be done. When did you say the great Malan was back?’
‘In three weeks. Probably a month,’ Simpson said.
‘That’ll give you time to settle down,’ Captain Custance said. ‘It used to be a fine estate up there. Rubber and pineapple. Then they went mad to grub every pineapple in the peninsula and plant rubber. And then rubber went down until it wasn’t worth a dog’s hair. And then the war. I dare say it’s a bit rough up there with one thing and another – but it’ll come back. I’m glad they’re opening it up.’
Captain Custance, inspired perhaps by the presence of an only passenger, hardly ever closed his mouth. Even when not speaking he could not keep his lips still. He addressed the river before him with a series of preparations for spitting that never quite came off. Spittle seemed to be chewed into a ball and sucked about, from side to side, between the cadaverous fissures of his cheeks, to be finally and swiftly rolled forward, in a solid plug, behind his incongruously correct and scrupulous false teeth. At the moment when the ball of spittle seemed about to find access to the bows of the Roselay Captain Custance always thought of something fresh to say, and the spittle, hastily sucked back, was swallowed hard away.
‘So you don’t know the great Malan?’
Under the double wall of forest the air was clotted and terribly humid, paralysing, withering after the clearer heat of open sea. Sometimes, ahead, at a deeper bend of the stream, Simpson could see the flooding waters cut in at an angle against the brilliant forest banks, raising the smallest surface clouds of spray. It gave the impression, from that distance, seen against shadow, that the river was steaming under heat and sun.
It was now hardly necessary for Simpson to think of an answer to any questions about the great Malan. Sooner or later Captain Custance would answer them for him. He was anxious too, as he had been anxious down in Singapore during three days of waiting there, not to put a foot wrong, not to do anything to jeopardize his chances. Already Malan had the beginnings of legendary shape about him. That was bad enough. But what he wanted to avoid as much as that, if not more, was to give away any suggestion that would determine the shape of himself. It was too early; he was very keen, perhaps too keen, to make an impression; he was young and raw and he felt, as he talked to Captain Custance, very green.
‘He’s an old hand,’ Captain Custance said. ‘Well, I say old – you know the way I mean. Old in the game is what I mean. Came out young before the war. Went back when it started. I suppose he wouldn’t be older than you when I brought him up here for the first time and I brought him a time or two after that. Probably about forty now.’
A small brass bell, rung from the top of the companion-way by the brown hand of a Malay, called Simpson, down a moment later, the only passenger, to a lunch of what turned out to be greasy chicken, surrounded by brown rice, in the quaking, shuddering stifling confinement of the little saloon.
Captain Custance called after him to be excused. You never knew what muck there might be coming down. The trip before last there had been a floating tree as big as a church steeple that had nearly done his bows in.
‘Have a sleep down there in my bunk,’ he called. ‘The boy will show you where it is. There’s nothing to see up here – not a bloody thing till I land you.’ The flattened pineapple appearance of the face was heightened, as Simpson saw it, from the deck below. ‘I got a picture of the great Malan I’ll show you too – if I can rake it up.’
After the chicken and a slice or two of pineapple, un-sugared, cut thinly, fresh and delicious, Simpson was glad to lie down. In the captain’s bunk he stripped down to his shirt and lay in a stupefying sweat, listening to the throbbing shudders of the Roselay climbing against the stream. A few voices called high pitched conversation during the afternoon, fighting the clamour of the floating factory. He tried to sleep, but some time later a Malay steward brought him a cup of scalding coffee, waking him from a doze. He drank the coffee, when it cooled, purely for thirst’s sake and then lay thinking, suddenly lonely, of Singapore. There had been two very nice fellows, Ford and Harrison, men of his own age, in Singapore. They had looked after him; there had been much banter and drinking of farewells. For three days and nights they had gone out of their way to be nice to him, stinting nothing, giving him little tips on this and that, talking with airy reassurance of the up-river station, telling him what a simple, sweet assignment, for a new man, it was. They had agreed, over and over again, what a marvellously lucky fellow he was – ‘nobody to worry you, old boy. Your own boss. Back here in a month – six weeks at the outside. All you’ve got to do is wait for Malan.’
They were very nice fellows; he would miss them very much. He felt loneliness, dry and vacant, consume the pleasant recollections. Even under gin he had omitted to disclose to those two nice fellows that he had not the vaguest idea what a rubber tree looked like; or whether a pineapple grew, like coconuts, on a tree, or simply by the grace of God.
He slept a little after that, in a sweating, shuddering drowse, and Captain Custance woke him about four o’clock.
‘I’ll be putting you down in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘One of the boys’ll get your kit. You think you got everything you need?’
‘I think so.’
‘Got chlorodyne? You’ll need chlorodyne if your guts go wrong.’
‘No.’
‘You’d better have chlorodyne. I’ll give you some from the chest. And if you need anything bringing up remember I’ll be coming down-river Thursday about midday, and up again the Monday after.’
Captain Custance went on deck and Simpson dressed and followed him. He stood for a moment or two dazzled and drugged by a clash of white sunlight that descended with the stunning flatness of a board.
Then he walked up to join Captain Custance on the bridge and from there, poised on the quaking high-suspended cage, he caught his first sight of the Company’s landing-stage, the waterfront. It seemed to consist simply of the timber of three packing cases nailed above a dozen jetty piles reinforced by a chain of cracking motor tyres.
Captain Custance, calling down the tube for slow ahead, did not seem to be interested in the desolation of this small deserted quay with its leaden glare of corrugated roofs. Simpson – he discovered later that these squares of glinting wreckage had been, and were still now called, the offices – could only stare.
‘Nobody about,’ Captain Custance said. ‘There ought to be a boy or two. Need waking up.’ He yelled down the speaking tube. From the funnel, in answer, came three blasts, short, sizzling, and booming, of the Roselay’s whistle. Sound and echo and sound and re-echo chased each other over forest and river in queer bloated jumps, uncanny and hollow, but from the jetty there was no movement or sound at all in answer.
‘The bungalow’s back there,’ Captain Custance said. He pointed to
vague recessions of reddish dust – once, Simpson later discovered, the main central road of the whole estate – penetrating the final corner of forest. ‘Used to be there. I stopped off a time or two with the great Malan to have a drink.’
The landing-stage remained deserted. A glare of corrugated roofs, through one of which a tree had grown up and turned back a triangle of iron as neat as a segment cut from a pie, flashed back to Captain Custance and Simpson all the answer they were to get from another blast on the whistle. Some seconds later the Roselay hit the rubber tyres, bouncing back, churning to rest, and in that moment Captain Custance remembered the photograph of Malan.
‘He left it in the cabin one day – always meant to give it back to him. Then the war came.’ He held the picture out to Simpson, yelling incomprehensibly to the Malay crew letting down the gangway and forcibly reminding Simpson at the same time that he himself did not know a word of Malay, and then suddenly the engines stopped and with them, at last, all the thunderous quaking of decks that had convulsed and rattled the soles of Simpson’s feet for the last four hours.
In that queer stillness and silence he was so surprised to find himself immobile at last, instead of jigging like an imbecile, that he forgot the photograph.
Captain Custance’s stubby forefinger, pointing, reminded him of it and he looked down.
‘That was soon after he first came out. In ’thirty-five.’
Simpson stared vaguely at a picture, the background for which seemed to be an English suburban back-garden with a swing on a tree, of a young man in riding breeches – a tall, robust, angular man with a girl in a tennis frock at his side.
‘That’s the girl he was going to bring out,’ Captain Custance said. ‘But it never came off. Too delicate or something. Don’t look above seventeen or eighteen there, does she? He told me once she’d never stand the climate. Not with her delicate nature.’
