The Nature of Love (19 page)

Of Simpson's letters two were from Ford and Harrison. Friendly as ever, hearty and with a certain charm, they recalled for him evenings in Singapore and hoped he would soon return. The other was from the Company. It too was friendly, in a formal way, and requested him ‘to explore, as soon as is convenient to your good self, the question of local labour. Preliminary inquiries only at this stage, as to numbers available, are required, and no question of remuneration should be discussed, or suggested, at the present stage. Our Mr Malan will deal with such problems as may arise in that field on his immediate return.'

He rode off next day, with the Sikh, along roads of bludgeoning and dusty heat to the nearest village, four miles away. His taste for pineapples had declined. Even so he was glad, once on the outward journey and once as they returned, to stop and get the Sikh to slash open for him one of the fruits he could not destroy. Simpson sucked at it with dazed greed, washing the dust from his face at the same time.

At the village – he judged it to have, perhaps, three hundred people, housed variously in small palm huts, under bamboo stilts supporting sheets of corrugated iron and in square compounds of palm frond – the question of assessing local labour was not difficult.

There was no local labour to assess.

But a curious thing happened. He was pushing the bicycle along an open track dividing two rows of palm huts that had something of the look of a collection of crouching ant-hills when a figure ran down from one of them to meet him, laughing and holding out her arms.

She was one of the little Chinese women, pretty as bantams, delicate-eyed, slender arms branching beautifully from a simple frock of sleeveless shantung, of whom Captain Custance had spoken. As she came running down first one and then the other of her heel-less straw slippers fell off. In her excited joy she did not notice them and they lay behind
her in the dust, looking like two tongues of scarlet, the silk of their bright linings gleaming as if polished by the rubbing of her feet. Without them she ran springingly, the side slit of her skirt dividing as far as her thigh, and from twenty or thirty feet away he saw her mouth open in a flutter of laughter, tumbling and delighted as she called something to him over and over again.

‘O! Ka-Kăsih' it sounded like, ‘O! Ka-Kăsih,' the word so much part of her laughter that he could not relate it to anything the Sikh had taught. ‘Ka-Kăsih –'

And then, ten feet away from him, she stopped. He saw her look from the bicycle to his face, and then from himself back to the bicycle. She put both hands to her face, stopping her mouth, and then let the fingers run upward into her black hair like rigid ivory curls. She gave a little blubber of frightened astonishment and then looked from his face to the bicycle, shocked almost to despair, for the last time.

A moment later she turned and began to run. She darted back towards the house, as if remembering the slippers. A stunning yell came at the same moment from one of the huts, and she doubled round, floundering and swift, exactly like a tiny scuttling hen, dipping and darting between hedges of creeper and vine. From the hut a young Tamil, in a pair of greasy shorts tied up with rope, came running in long furious strides, yelling hoarsely, skidding in the dust as he seized on the fallen slippers, his voice squeezed to a long thin scream as he hurled them after her.

Still yelling, he came straight on for Simpson, who caught the incredible gleam of a knife whipped from the waist-band of the shorts.

And then the Tamil, exactly like the girl, stopped. He too seemed stunned by the relation of Simpson and the bicycle. He stood, panting, spitting his surprise sideways into the dust, moving the knife in his fingers with short venomous twists at body height, at about the level of the gleaming handles of the bicycle, before he suddenly turned and walked back to the hut.

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.