The Nature of Love

by H. E. Bates

  ‘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.’

  ‘Come on, Bill,’ she said. ‘There’s no arguing with some people.’

  That evening, on the veranda still flooded with light from the electric lamps in the dining-room, she kissed him even before Malan had gone. It was as if she could not wait to be held by him. She called him darling several times in a voice loud enough for Malan to hear. All the time he could hear Malan himself talking to the Sikh on some question of fixing the silencer to the generator, and a few words of Malan came distinctly to him on the quiet air.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he whispered.

  ‘Oh! darling,’ she said loudly. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘I want you so terribly to-night.’ Her voice was contained in a high frenzied sort of whisper that seemed to carry better than a shout. ‘I can’t bear it –’

  A moment later Malan came on to the veranda, carrying his rifle. There was hardly a word that could not have been heard, Simpson thought, and Mrs Malan was still standing so close to him that it would not have been surprising if Malan had shot them. Instead he said, swiftly:

  ‘Well, I’ll be off. The coffee will be along in a moment. I kept the Sikh talking –’

  ‘Why the rifle?’ she said.

  ‘I just thought it might be policy to show that we could shoot if necessary, that’s all.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit provocative?’ Simpson said. In a confusion of nerves he felt a new insecure sort of hatred for the too-sure, too-efficient Malan.

  ‘Not more than most things,’ Malan said, and walked away.

  He had hardly walked a hundred yards down the road before she came to sit with him in the chair. She kissed him once but she seemed uneasy and suddenly she said:

  ‘It’s awfully hot to-night. I’ll go and put on my housecoat – it’s hotter than ever –’

  He heard her go through the house, calling the Sikh to delay the coffee until she rang the bell. He was nervous and actually got up and walked a few yards beyond the end of the veranda, standing there to listen, half-expecting Malan to come back. But there was nothing: only the customary pulsing silence, hot with suspense beating at the darkness.

  When she came back she had put on a house-coat of flowered crimson and yellow silk. She rang the bell – another of Malan’s efficient little gadgets for saving steps and sweat – and then half-lay, half-sat with Simpson in the cane long-chair, waiting for the coffee to come. And when the Sikh came at last on soft feet to bring the tray she did not get up. She lay there all the time, her face close to Simpson’s, while the Sikh poured the coffee.

  ‘You ought to be a little careful,’ he said. The Sikh had gone and in the dining-room all but one of the lights had been put out. It poured its bright shaft on her eager, excited face.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘I’m excited – I can’t wait for you. Don’t you want me too?’

  ‘Terribly,’ he said, and let himself be drawn down, feeling the unencumbered tautness of her body pressing up against him through the silk of the house-coat as the loose flaps of the coat fell away.

  Every night he was persuaded that the stars grew more exceptional in brilliance and beauty than the night before. That night they seemed to stab down in great pulses of emerald and ruby and orange, in surges of bright loveliness that matched the burst of his own feelings as he lay with her first in the chair and then, for another hour, on his bed. In the moment when her house-coat fell away and he felt the first touch of her body naked and free he remembered the day he had seen her unpacking her things. Her nightdress had fallen away from her body that day in much the same way and he had been shot through by the sharp beauty of it, the bright consciousness of seeing her really for the first time. He had wondered what her body was like; and in a way it had been inevitable to wonder and at last to find out, and now it was his.

  Later that evening, quieter, in a deadly, rather far-off voice, she spoke with great bitterness of Malan:

  ‘If it hadn’t been for me he wouldn’t have been here. I nursed him for six months. He was in one of those bomb-disposal units – no heroics, you know, just more gadgets – and something went off too soon. Eight of them were killed and he was a wreck. If it hadn’t been for me fighting for him – fighting all the time –’

  ‘I’ll get transferred to another company,’ he said. ‘We’ll get out of this.’

  She seemed to take no notice of that; she seemed wrapped in hatred of Malan.

  ‘The way you can fight for people – go on fighting too –’

  He felt her hatred become his own. All that he had gathered in that quaint period of pre-conception about Malan had, after all, turned out to be true: the gadget king, the oracle, the man who had been and seen and conquered before, the prig of experience, the great Malan. Hatred, not bitter but more allied in its hot surges with his feeling for her, rushed through him, taking the last of his reticence and caution with it.

  ‘If only we could get away,’ he said. ‘Somehow we have to get away – we simply have to get away –’

  ‘It’s a queer thing, love,’ she said, as if once again she were not really noticing what he said, ‘the way it drives you and beats you,’ and above him, he thought, the stars seemed to explode in fragmentary and more lovely, more brilliant cascades than ever before. He had never seen such stars.

  The Sikh woke him at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, muttering hoarsely.

  ‘Trouble,’ he said. ‘There is much trouble. Malan Sahib –’

  Out in the compound one of the Tamil boys stood crouched and trembling in the rose-grey sunless daylight.

  Together Simpson, the Sikh and the Tamil boy cycled down to the village. There was not much to be done. Malan was lying on the earth floor of a palm-hut with a knife slit deep down the side of the neck and cutting into the shoulder.

  Simpson stood outside the hut, sick, trying to collect himself, staring at the sun coming up beyond the deserted roofs of palm and corrugated iron. He started to say something about communists, about the bandits beginning at last.

  ‘No, no, no,’ the Sikh said. ‘No, no –’

  Simpson, remembering the little Chinese woman running to greet him on the path below, had nothing to say. He was still trembling so much on the way back that he could not ride the bicycle. He pushed it slowly along, his mouth so parched that he was even glad to stop, by the ramping grey-blue cactus wilderness, and a
sk the Sikh to cut him a pineapple. He buried his face in it as eagerly as he had done on the very first day.

  At the bungalow he walked up and down outside for some time, smoking a cigarette to calm himself before he went in. He was aware of a queer distorted sort of triumph waiting for him in the moment when he came to tell her. Not the great Malan now: only the dead Malan. Queer that for a second time – and not only queer but a miracle – something had misfired.

  When he went into the bedroom to speak to her she was still asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her as she began to wake up. She was wearing the white nightdress and sleep had crumpled it. He could see her breasts clear and pink through the bodice of it and suddenly he wanted to sit there on the edge of the bed, not telling her but only touching her with his hands. He wanted terribly to take her in the first free moment that they had had together. It would be time to tell her afterwards.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here? What time is it? Don’t you feel well again? You’ve gone quite pale.’

  He began to tell her as simply as he could. He had determined to make up a line about it. It was very simple: the communists, the bandits, had begun at last. She lay watching him with big fixed incredulous eyes and it was only when he spoke of communists that she seemed really to wake up, to understand what he was trying to say.

  She sat up and yelled at him:

  ‘Don’t tell me lies! Don’t try and tell me lies! What happened? Who killed him? – I don’t want lies.’

  ‘Communists –’

  ‘It was the woman, wasn’t it?’ she shouted. ‘The Tamil – I know, I know. I knew all the time.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We’re not certain. It’s no use probing into detail. I know how you feel –’

  She jumped out of bed and screamed at him starkly:

  ‘Don’t stand there talking like a raving fool! How do you know how I feel? How can you know?’

  Shocked, not knowing what to say, he stretched out his hands and tried to hold her. She beat them away, shouting for him not to touch her. Her eyes were tearless and brilliant and hateful and suddenly he had an awful feeling. It was that all the bitterness she had felt about Malan was being turned, more violently now, on him.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘Don’t upset yourself. It’s awful, I know – but it sets us free –’

  ‘Free?’ she yelled at him. ‘Who wants to be free?’

  He stood coldly, stunned, in the centre of the room. She was trying to drag on her house-coat. In her haste the zip had locked, so that she could not get it working. He stood helplessly looking on as she struggled and then suddenly she looked up and saw his lost, stupefied face and shouted:

  ‘What do you think I came out here for? I knew all about it. I wanted him back! – I wanted him! – He never wanted me to come! –’

  Her patience with the zip ended suddenly and the coat did not matter any longer. She pitched forward on the bed and lay there beating the pillow with her hands.

  ‘Oh! God, darling, why didn’t you listen to me? Why didn’t you listen? For God’s sake why didn’t you listen to me?’

  While she still lay there he walked out of the room and sat on the veranda. The sun was coming up brilliant and fiercely white. Once again the leaden ball had begun to swing heavily under his skull and he sat for a long time with his head in his hands.

  After a time she came out of her room and yelled for the key of the billiard-room. He gave it her without speaking. She rushed away and he heard her, in hysteria, smashing up the model railway.

  That was his only moment of gladness, and he did not stop her.

  Two days later they went down-river, with Captain Custance, in the Roselay. She had taken on a rigid distant calmness and spent most of her time in the cabin, lying down.

  At noon a Malay seaman rang the bell for lunch and Simpson went down to the stifling stove-hot little saloon. She was not there and after waiting a moment or two he went down the narrow passage to where she was lying in the cabin. He tapped on the door and called her name.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  He went in and stood looking at her, saying quietly: ‘Lunch is ready. Do you want lunch?’ knowing that she would say no.

  ‘Something to drink?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s cooler up above. You’ll find it cooler than here.’

  ‘I’m all right here.’

  Two impulses flowed quickly through him. He wanted to touch her, with all possible tenderness, as she lay there in the narrow wooden bunk under the open port-hole. He wanted to revive, as gently as possible, the feeling he thought she had shown for him that evening on the veranda, before Malan had died.

  ‘Do you remember asking me about making a fool of yourself?’ he said.

  ‘That was only because I knew he didn’t want me.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you something now?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Do you want me?’

  ‘I think you’re very sweet,’ she said. ‘It couldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been so sweet.’

  She held him for a moment or two longer with the minutely precise stare that had first captivated him in the photograph. The little cabin shuddered heavily, under the strain of engine revolutions, and it was as if, for a moment, her face quivered. But he knew that it did not quiver. It did not respond to him any more than the brown-yellow river he could see flowing past the port-hole above her head.

  ‘I wanted to know before we landed,’ he said. ‘I wanted to put a bit of a face on it, you see.’

  He waited for a moment longer to see if she would answer. She did not answer. It occurred to him that she would, perhaps, say that she was sorry; but she did not say it. She lay with dark eyes minutely staring, and presently he went on deck, telling the steward that he did not want to eat as he went through the saloon.

  He stood for some time with Captain Custance on the bridge. The Roselay had moved faster down-river than he had expected and now, through the carmine and emerald elbows of forest, he caught his first glimpse of open sea. The river was running fast, fanning out ahead with the strong silt-brown tide, discolouring the flat cobalt-vivid ocean.

  ‘Hellish tricky here sometimes,’ Captain Custance said. ‘I knew a master once who laid a ship up through taking her too close here. Looks wider than it is. It was blowing smoke at the time.’

  In an ensuing moment or two of silence he gathered spittle, chewing on it as if it were hard india-rubber.

  ‘Taking it as well as could be expected?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bloody rum go. Bloody rum. You could have knocked me down with a pint-pot when I saw her coming aboard.’ He rattled on, chewing his words, relaxing to gather spittle that was never ejected, his words glib in sailor-wise fashion, gossipy, not meaning much, his eyes on the open sea.

  ‘Well, he bought it. That’s all I can say. He bought it. He’s been buying it for a long time. Everybody up the river knew he’d been buying it for a long time.’

  Simpson stared ahead too at the open sea: sterile, not thinking, swiftly watching the river dirt discolour in its brown fan the vivid outer cobalt of sunlit water. The heat on the nape of his neck had all the stunning, bruising force of mid-afternoon.

  ‘Lucky you happened to be there,’ Captain Custance said, ‘Bit of luck or God knows what she would have done without you.’

  Simpson, intent on the fusion of river and open sea, was not listening. The Roselay, caught in powerful twists of estuary currents, shuddered once again, as Captain Custance had said before, like a bloody factory. But there was a sudden breath of relief, a stir of sea-wind, clean and salty in spite of heat, that bore away in a refreshing moment the stupefying steamy heat of the river.

  He looked down, a moment later, to see Mrs Malan on deck, standing in the bows. His impulses of tenderness started up again, waving
away his sterility. He felt he wanted to go down and ask her, for the last time, if she had anything left for him, a trace of something, the smallest thing. He saw the wind from the open sea blow her dress against her legs and a stir of it, with sun, inflame into scalloped gold-black edges the fringe of her hair.

  He knew it was only Malan she wanted: the dead Malan, back there, the efficient Spencer, the gadget king, the oracle who had been and done it all before, the prig: the great Malan. She had exterminated everything for that, extinguished it all: distance, time, all the others, the rivals and himself. It was all as obvious as it would ever need to be.

  After a few moments he could bear it no longer. He went down to the deck and stood by the rail of the ship, close to her.

  ‘May I talk again?’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I talk?’

  ‘No.’

  A queer involuntary moment of agony locked his throat, choking him. The Roselay seemed to sweep a long way to open sea before he could speak again:

  ‘I can’t bear it without you.’

  She did not answer.

  He put one hand across her shoulders, smoothing her bare arm. It was rigid and smoothly neutral, but she did not draw it away. At the touch of her body fires of tenderness began leaping up in him again, reaching his eyes in small tears, so that he was dazzled by the running rose-brown tide of open sea.

  ‘Don’t make me let you go,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear it – I can’t let you go.’

  He touched her throat very softly and she turned her head for the first time, looking at him with the old minute precision, clear and inexorable and dissecting.

  ‘I didn’t expect you would let me go.’

  Joy shot through him and it was as if also, at the same moment, the Roselay shot forward, almost out of the river currents, clear at last.

  ‘Oh! I love you,’ he began to say.

  He could feel the softest regular pulsing of the blood in her throat. ‘I’d do anything –’

  ‘You know now,’ she said. ‘You know now how it feels.’