by H. E. Bates
‘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.’
‘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 th
e 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: