The Nature of Love (20 page)

‘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 here. 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.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No.'

‘You've got a photograph of her too. Show me the photograph.'

‘No, really,' he said. A small quivering hammer made staccato stabbings just under his heart. ‘No honestly – it's true –'

‘You'll show me it later,' she said. ‘Men always do.'

Out on the veranda, pouring tea, slipping into each cup a quarter of lime like a little brilliant emerald-yellow boat, carefully and delicately, she said:

‘Some tea? How many sugars? It's awfully hot, isn't it? You've gone quite pale.'

That evening, at supper, Malan talked mostly about the electricity. In a couple of days he would have it working. The Sikh had been very good, keeping the generator clean and dry – the Sikhs were fond of engineering and that sort of thing, good mechanics – and Malan would give it the final overhaul to-morrow. He hoped to fit a silencer to it, so that the noise would not be too bad. In any case it did not need to run for many hours at a time. The demands on it were very limited: just the lighting, the fans, the refrigerator and –

‘Of course the train,' he said.

Simpson thought Mrs Malan, staring cross-wise, in a
dreamy oblique sort of way, between himself and Malan, did not seem in any way interested in the train.

‘We'll open the track next Sunday,' Malan said. ‘Break a bottle on it or something. And mind, no peeping till then –'

‘I wouldn't dream of peeping,' she said, her voice innocent and thin and cool.

‘Make it a party when Captain Custance comes,' Simpson said. The words came to him without thinking. There was the strangest sort of tension in the air between Malan and his wife that he could not explain. ‘Custance,' he said with sudden eagerness, ‘is dying to see it working –'

‘You showed it to Custance?' Malan said – he looked affronted rather than annoyed – ‘that nosey old rascal –'

Simpson, embarrassed, could think of nothing to say. Mrs Malan looked tense. Malan broke into a harsh splintering crackle the remains of a water-biscuit and the situation was saved a moment later by the entry of the Sikh, proudly bringing the inevitable dishes of pineapple and whipped milk and pistachio as if they were offerings either to or from the gods, and Mrs Malan finished the tension with a final cry:

‘Pineapple! That's just what I want to quench my thirst.'

Malan, in that moment, did a curious thing, followed a second later by another. He winked swiftly at Simpson, all trace of resentment or affront or annoyance gone, and then got up from the table, replacing his chair.

‘What's the matter? Don't you want your pineapple? Where are you going?'

‘I'm worried about this labour thing,' Malan said. ‘I'm going over to see Bruno.'

‘Bruno? Who's Bruno?'

‘He used to be one of my boys. He's got a lot of influence in the village – his brother-in-law's a trader. I tried to get him this afternoon but he was fishing up-river. He'll probably have a few fish I can bring back –'

‘Don't be long.'

As he came past her she held his hand, lifting her face, and he stooped to kiss her.

‘Have coffee with Bill on the veranda. It's cooler out there. Bill will look after you.'

‘Don't stay long,' she said and gave him, as he went out of the door, a wonderfully intent and pressing smile that reacted on Simpson with a start of pain.

Later, as they sat on the veranda, in darkness broken only by the reflection through the windows of the lamp burning in the dining-room, she sat in a cane chair some distance away from him, the table between them, and for some time there was hardly a sound from her but the creak of the chair and the occasional clink of her cup and coffee spoon. He was glad, for a time, that she had nothing to say. The night was full of a heavy plush-like beauty, with uncommonly brilliant and enormous stars. Everywhere there was a depth of darkness and scintillation, of purple and blackness, with flashes of fire and emerald, and a silence of impenetrable wonder that was almost grandeur as it folded profoundly away. He had sat alone, almost every night, like this, listening to the silence, feeling it about him like an enormous pulse-beat, and now it was more beautiful because there was someone to share it with him who had the sense not to break it with foolish words. He turned his head slightly and looked at her in the chair. He could see her hands, fine and delicate and small, on the edges of the chair, and her arms golden-white, not yet burned by sun, naked to the shoulder. Her breasts were mature and full, thrown out a little by the attitude of her body in the chair, her head leaning backwards, the outer edges of her black hair ignited to a flush of brightness from the glow of the lamp behind her.

At last she turned her head very slightly towards him and said:

‘I thought you'd gone to sleep, you're so quiet. There was something I wanted to ask you.'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Perhaps it sounds silly –'

He waited, staring at the stars.

‘Is there something funny about pineapples?' she said. ‘Is it a joke with you?'

‘No.'

‘It's a joke, isn't it?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Why is it a joke? Is it from something I said?'

He was surprised by a start of inner rage against Malan. It was so violent that it constricted his voice as he began to try to explain away the monstrously stupid business of the pineapples.

It was only that there were so many, he explained. They were a plague, just an indestructible weed. You couldn't get rid of them. The Sikh served them twice or three times a day and at first you thought they were wonderful but after a time they were like poison and you wanted to scream. That was all it was.

She listened in silence. He felt a glow of immense pity for her rise out of his now subdued anger against Malan. She moved at last, speaking in a distant way, quietly.

‘Thank you,' she said. And then: ‘There was something else I wanted to ask you.'