The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  Half-way up the slope he stopped and brandished the knife for the last time, shouting sentences Simpson had no hope of understanding, and then disappeared.

  ‘What was he saying?’ Simpson said.

  The Sikh, already turning back, one foot on the pedal of his bicycle, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Take no notice. Bad people –’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Oh! he says’ – he gave the curious half-negative tilt of the head – ‘he says the knife is for Malan. But take no notice – bad people.’

  They rode back together out of the village and Simpson was still thinking of the dipping and darting little woman, so delicate and startled and so like Captain Custance’s description, when suddenly he saw her again.

  She was lying just off the roadside, flat on her face, in the shelter of a strip of young bamboo, waiting and watching for him to go past. Again she was like a scared and skulking little fowl, staring incredibly at himself and the bicycle. Her only movement was to lift one arm to her face, framing it in the crook of the elbow, and the last he saw of her was a sudden lowering of the arm, hiding all the face except one bright dark eye that followed him with shocked curiosity as he rode away.

  That evening after supper – pineapples, drenched in sticky sweetened tinned milk and sprayed with rather stale limp nuts, had for the tenth successive night formed part of it – Simpson sat on the veranda, thinking of Malan. A figure built up from prejudice, from the light and shadow of preconceptions, from the behaviour of the Chinese girl and the voice of the shouting Tamil, from the presence everywhere of gadgets and the toy railway, lay already complete in his mind. The man, he was quite certain, was one of those smug inflated creatures of self-creation who are quite unpuncturable, who inflate and re-inflate and soar in bloated pride, endlessly, for ever. A prig: the great Malan: the very basis of it all was in the photograph. And while thinking he remembered the words called to him in Malay, by the Chinese girl – O! Ka-Kăsih, Ka-Kăsih – and he looked them up. O! Darling, O! loved one, his phrase book said.

  That night, in bed, he took the photograph out again, staring at it for some minutes before he slept. And again there the fellow was: even more colossally smug, if that were possible, than when Simpson had first looked at the photograph more than a week before. Even the appalling moustache seemed, if possible, to curl a little more.

  And he said, almost aloud, looking back at the girl with the pretty black hair, the fixed and fragile stare and the reputedly delicate nature:

  ‘Well: whoever you were, I think you were well out of it. Whatever it was and whoever you are, you were well out of it. I think so.’

  On Sunday Captain Custance came.

  Most of the bottle of gin he brought with him was drunk, in generous portions, with lime, in the hour before lunch. Glass in hand, Captain Custance swayed about in front of the railway train, bending sometimes to feel the legs of the billiard-table underneath it as if they had been the legs of a favourite horse he had not seen for some time. ‘Knock-out,’ he kept saying. ‘Bloody knock-out.’ He winked occasionally at Simpson. At lunch, consisting of roast snipe followed by the inescapable pineapple, which Captain Custance refused, he delivered garrulous sermons with the aid of his knife and fork, banging their handles on the table.

  ‘Wanted to tear my engine room to pieces once,’ he said. ‘Efficiency, more efficiency – reckoned he could replan it to give me about a hundred per cent more power. Dammit, the old tub was built in Barrow in ’97 – you might as well try to make the pyramids into blocks of bloody flats. Had any trouble with the locals yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Damn lucky. That’s all. Damn lucky.’

  ‘Shall we have coffee on the veranda?’ Simpson said.

  ‘Ought to be pushing off. Anyway I got to have one more look at that railway. That’s a damnation corker. Give me a drop more gin.’

  Gin in hand, Captain Custance stared again at the billiard-table and its load of flawless track and rolling stock. ‘Pity,’ he kept saying. ‘Pity. We could have played a hundred up for a bob. Damn pity.’ He became lost, in spite of himself, in admiration of Malan’s remarkable handiwork, saying, loose-lipped, a little drunk: ‘It’s a damn marvel, y’know. Come to think of it. No flies on it. No half larks. You got to give him his due. Eh? Don’t you think so?’ And then:

  ‘Seen any Chinese women yet?’

  Simpson shook his head.

  ‘Damned attractive, some of ’em. Sweet as little bantams.’ Captain Custance, more garrulous than ever, seemed unaware of having said it all before. He rolled a mouthful of gin round the back of his teeth. Water moistened his reddened happy eyes. ‘You ought to pick yourself one. While away the long evenings.’

  ‘I always understood it was the thing to do.’

  ‘Stick to you like burrs off a hedgerow,’ Captain Custance said. ‘Never leave you – ask the great Malan. You ask him. See what he says. Stick for ever.’ It was typical of Captain Custance, in this moment of repetition, to slip on the polished floor of the billiard-room, feet skidding on a panther rug, and fall down.

  By the time he was on his feet again, unsteady but unhurt, the whole question of the faithfulness of Chinese women, in reference particularly to Malan, seemed to have slipped his mind. He hobbled, belching and swearing, down to the landing-stage. Then, gin-clogged eyes shining in the sun, he shook hands several times, calling Simpson ‘my boy. Remember what I said, my boy. You know?’ and in a final moment of excessive affection, still looking round, fell up the gangway, from the top of which he bawled:

  ‘I’ll give you fair bloody warning when I bring him up. See what I mean? Don’t want to get you caught unawares. Six toots on the Joanna – just to give you time.’

  He giggled, tripped over the upper lip of the gangway and staggered in the arms of a waiting Malay.

  A week later, unexpectedly, without a letter of warning from the Company and with no signal except Captain Custance’s six sudden promised toots on the funnel whistle, given downstream about a mile away, Malan and his wife arrived.

  The signal from Captain Custance gave Simpson just time to get down to the landing-stage. The Roselay was bouncing for the second time against the string of motor tyres as he passed the derelict offices where the Sikh kept chickens. A few fowls, small, brilliant-feathered, reminding him not unnaturally of Captain Custance’s belief in the delicate bantam-like beauty of Chinese women but also of the fact that he had intended to clear out the chickens before Malan arrived, were scratching daintily about the dust. They rose and scattered in clouds of rosy powder as Captain Custance blew a toot of welcome on the whistle, at the same time waving his hand from his cage on the upper deck.

  And then, as the Roselay bumped to rest, Simpson looked up. It was a moment he never forgot. Malan, stockier than he had anticipated, dressed in khaki bush-shirt and shorts, with a soft felt hat, was standing side by side with his wife, who wore a simple frock of white silk, low cut at the neck, with unelaborate crimson facings. She stood there in an attitude of such fascinated precision, too familiar to be true, that for a moment or two Simpson forgot to reply to Malan’s very friendly waving hand.

  Even then he could not believe, for some moments longer, that the woman on the ship was the girl in the photograph: the girl in the tennis frock, with the pretty dark hair and the engaging penetrating eyes: the girl with the delicate nature.

  ‘Hullo there!’ Malan, cordially, with easy friendliness, came down the gangway and stood on the quay and shook hands. ‘Malan – no need to tell you, I’ll bet, either.’

  ‘I’m Simpson.’ He was conscious of a ridiculous sensation of deference. Malan was twenty years older than himself, and he wanted suddenly, for some idiotically compelling reason, to call him sir.

  ‘Simpson: this is my wife. We’ve both been looking forward no end to meeting you.’

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Malan.’

  He shook hands; she held him for a moment with the precise dark stare
he knew so well from the photograph. Her hands were uncommonly small: almost out of proportion to the rest of her body, which filled the white dress to perfection, generous but compact and still young.

  ‘Oh! not Mrs Malan: please, no Mrs,’ she said. ‘Eh? Not Mrs.’

  ‘Good Heavens,’ Malan said, ‘no.’

  ‘I’m Vera. What are you?’

  She smiled; she looked up at him and her eyes, intense and pretty, quivered in the sun. Everything about her had the profoundly disturbing familiarity he had gleaned from the photograph.

  ‘Bill,’ he said.

  ‘That’s lovely. At least we can start right. Even if we end by hating the sight of each other.’

  Malan had walked over to the edge of the landing-stage to give a final message, or perhaps simply to say good-bye to Captain Custance.

  ‘We talked so much about you,’ she said. ‘Those boys at Singapore – Ford and Harrison – they talked about you all the time.’ She held him with her precise dark stare. ‘Very nicely too.’

  A curious uneasiness, making him uncertain of himself, boyishly and self-consciously uncertain, made it impossible for him to look back at her. The Roselay began to move from the quay. He heard Captain Custance shout something and was glad of the chance to turn away from Mrs Malan and wave his hand.

  ‘Well, have you been bored, waiting for us?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s the funny thing about it here –’ he still could not look at her and, out of sheer uneasiness was watching Malan walking up from the quay – ‘time seems to go terribly quickly. It’s a different sort of time – it sort of dissolves away and you start forgetting –’

  He did not know quite what he was saying; his thoughts were out of all relation to his words. He had not the slightest idea what he meant by forgetting. ‘Well, as long as it always goes like that,’ she said.

  She started to walk up the road. He half-waited for Malan, who came up and put a hand on his shoulder: a friendly, perhaps too friendly hand, with an eager muscular squeeze.

  ‘Well, old boy, everything all right? How does it go?’

  ‘Very well – I’m afraid I haven’t done much except learn the lingo. I’m sorry about the hens in the offices. I meant to have got them out.’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought. Plenty of pineapples?’

  His sharp high laugh – like the squeeze of the hand, uncomfortable, over-eager – made Mrs Malan turn round and wait for them.

  ‘Now what have you two got to laugh about already?’

  ‘Oh! private joke. Eh, Bill?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘Oh! now, come on. So early in the day –’

  ‘Oh! it’s nothing,’ Malan said. ‘You’ll find out.’ It was all rather forced, Simpson thought, a little brittle, not happy, besides being tedious. Mrs Malan’s mouth was tight, unrelaxed in spite of its smile, in the sun, and he suddenly said:

  ‘Look, I’ll rush on and warn the Sikh about the bags and lunch. You’ll want a drink too –’

  He strode out up the road. Sweat prickled uneasy, like a nettle sting, all over his body, and Malan called:

  ‘We’d specially like some pineapples. Don’t forget the pineapples,’ and gave once again the high overstrung laugh that was something like a crow.

  At lunch Malan was like a man laying a long elaborate firing fuse. Carefully through the mulligatawny soup and its quartered limes, through the chicken and spice-hot rice, went the prepared trail that would blow, at last, the explosive joke of the pineapple into Mrs Malan’s face. It was like one of his gadgets, like the remarkable contraption for pulling the rattan blind: at a touch of Malan’s hand the thing went up, and Malan crowed.

  ‘Pineapples!’ Mrs Malan said. The joke had not misfired. ‘It’s years since I really tasted one – oh! marvellous!’

  ‘Marvellous,’ Malan said. ‘Jolly thoughtful of me to remember –’

  ‘Delicious,’ Mrs Malan said. ‘Absolutely delicious. It couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Fresh supplies every day,’ Malan said and turned to Simpson a face overjoyed, but impassive, at the success of yet another cunning device; but whether Mrs Malan too was aware of it, or not aware of it, or simply too used to it to care, he did not know.

  ‘What about this labour situation?’ Malan said. Lunch was over and the three of them were sitting, with coffee, on the veranda. Sometimes across the clearing, once a garden but now a pink arena of dust where fowls scratched, large butterflies of narcissus cream and yellow danced with great trembling strokes to disappear into the bamboo fringe beyond. Entranced, Mrs Malan gave an occasional cry of gasping, sighing delight at such loveliness; and at last, unable to bear the sight of a floating triangle of more lovely, more unreal brilliance than the rest, she got up and walked after it, stalking it, stealthily, like a child in the sun.

  Malan was glad of the opportunity to slip over and sit in the chair next to Simpson.

  ‘We must get this labour organized. What were you able to do? Any luck at all?’

  ‘No,’ Simpson said. ‘No work. That’s what they say.’

  ‘I see,’ Malan said, ‘I’d better go down there. Soon as possible. This afternoon.’

  Out in the compound Mrs Malan had kicked off her shoes and was running with naked feet after butterflies.

  ‘Put your shoes on!’ Malan called. ‘You want to get foot worm or some other damn thing?’

  Out in the dust, small, intense-eyed, and hurt, she was caught in pained surprise by the sharp crow of Malan’s voice.

  ‘Put them on!’

  ‘Are you speaking to me?’ she said.

  ‘Put your shoes on and do as you’re told and don’t argue. Never run about without your shoes in this country.’

  ‘All the natives do –’

  ‘You’re not a native. Put them on.’

  An air of intense pain, of deeply injured affection not defiant but transfixed so that it gave her eyes exactly the appearance, very close together, of the double holes of a gun-barrel, held her there absolutely motionless for perhaps another fifteen or twenty seconds. Her shoes lay in the dust and Simpson, watching them, remembered the slippers of the little Chinese woman and how, like little scarlet tongues, they had lain in the dust too.

  ‘You know what you promised.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She put on her shoes.

  Malan, taking a sip of coffee and leaning over again to Simpson, said nothing beyond a casual, almost curt remark in explanation:

  ‘She’s rather delicate. She has to take care,’ and then:

  ‘Yes, I think I’d better go down there. By the way I’ve got letters for you –’

  ‘I’ll come down too,’ Simpson said.

  ‘No. I’ll go alone. It’s better. It’s probably going to be frightfully tricky and it would be simpler if I nipped down myself on the bike.’

  ‘By the way, I’ve been using your bicycle. The Sikh said –’

  ‘Oh! you have, have you?’

  That afternoon Malan was gone for three hours. Simpson spent most of the afternoon rearranging his things. He had slept for three weeks in the large bedroom, now to be occupied by Mr and Mrs Malan, but without fans to work and cool the air he had found it very hot indoors and now he decided to sleep on the veranda, in a small camp bed.

  ‘Are you really going to sleep there? Aren’t you worried about things creeping about?’

  All afternoon Mrs Malan kept up a flow of pleasant, idly personal conversation.

  ‘I should be worried stiff, sleeping out there. Is it always as hot as this?’

  ‘Always. You ought to rest in the afternoons,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it pays.’

  ‘Oh! I’m too excited to rest. The first day and all that, you know – how long are you going to be here?’

  ‘I don’t quite know. Perhaps another month,’ he said. ‘The idea was to send me to a plantation farther north –’

  ‘Spencer said if you were any good he’d like to keep you he
re. That’s if you wanted to –’

  Spencer – it took him some seconds to grasp that she was using Malan’s Christian name. Spencer Malan: it was like the name of an actor, a priest, an explorer or something. It had importance. It was incredible and yet it fitted him rather well.

  Mrs Malan too had been unpacking her things. At four o’clock the Sikh brought tea on to the veranda and Simpson, tapping on the open door of her bedroom and entering in answer to her voice, found her surrounded by the gay curtaining of many dresses on coat-hangers, night-gowns lying on the bed, silk stockings and feathery, flimsy lingerie spilling over chair. That array of soft pretty clothing seemed to heighten all her delicacy. At the door, seeing them, he hesitated a moment but she said, ‘Oh! come in, come in. Don’t mind all this,’ turning on him a pair of direct dark eyes with the curious magnetic precision he had seen so often in the photograph.

  That personal intimate glimpse of all her clothing lying about them gave him his first touch of heightened feeling about her. She was holding in her hands, as he came in, a chiffon night-gown, a soft yellow, rather the colour of the butterfly she had chased across the compound, and looking as if made, almost, of the same flimsy transparent stuff.

  He could not help looking at it. She saw him looking and smiled and held it across her body. ‘Isn’t it nice?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ and smoothed it down, across the front of her breasts, with one hand, smiling again.

  His heart started racing wildly and she said:

  ‘I’ve got the loveliest things. I determined I would have. I determined I wouldn’t come out here and be sloppy and look like a frump just because there weren’t other women here.’ She laid the nightdress on the bed and the revelation of her clothed body underneath it – she had somehow given the impression that it was all she had on – gave him a curious shock. ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Have you got a girl?’

  ‘No.’ he said. ‘By the way there’s tea on the veranda now –’

  ‘I bet you have,’ she said. ‘Somewhere.’