Round the Bend (35 page)

“They call her Madé,” he said. “I did not hear the other name.”

“She does for them?”

He hesitated. “There is another girl who seems to take care of Phinit. They call her Ktut Suriatni. The two girls do the work between them, but Madé works mostly for Shak Lin.”

I said, “Is Phinit behaving himself, Gujar?”

He laughed in his great black beard. “With Ktut Suriatni? I do not think so. The village would probably be very insulted if he did.”

“Not going to make any trouble?”

He shook his head. “He is a good lad, from a country that is not so far away, and he knows the rules by which this game is played. He will do whatever is the right thing in the eyes of the village. There will be no trouble, Mr. Cutter.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “What about Madé?”

He looked more grave. “Ah, Madé,” he said. “She thinks nothing of Phinit, and in any case he could not have two women at one time. I do not think the village would approve of that. But Madé only serves the Teacher.”

“And is she getting any joy out of that?”

He shook his head. “No joy.”

I did not think she would, but it was an interesting situation. “Will the village take that as an insult, then?”

He smiled. “I do not think that they are very touchy. But in any case, Shak Lin is different to Phinit, and the village know it. Phinit is one of them, but Shak Lin is different.”

“How do Connie and Phinit spend their time, Gujar?”

He said, “They are at the airstrip working most of every day. But in the evenings they sit in the village and talk with the people. They can talk to them now fairly well.”

“What do they talk about?”

He grinned broadly. “What would Phinit talk about to Ktut Suriatni, Mr. Cutter? Your guess is as good as mine. But Shak Lin talks to the old men a great deal. A Buddhist priest came to the village the night I was there. He had walked from Besakih, a great temple in the middle of the island, to see the Teacher. He stayed after we had gone.”

“I thought they were Hindus?”

He laughed. “I think you English call every religion that you do not understand, Hinduism. But there are Buddhists in the island, just a few.”

“Shak Lin is finding out about the religion, I suppose?”

He nodded. “I think so.”

“And that’s bad luck on Madé?”

He nodded gravely. “He could have happiness for the asking, and give it, too. But the Teacher is different to other men.”

There was no arguing about that one. “I’ll go down there myself one of these trips, Gujar,” I said. “Stop over for a fortnight till the next one. It’s time I took a bit of leave.”

He said, “I think that would be a very good thing. It is a lovely island, and you should rest sometimes, Mr. Cutter. I think that would be very good indeed.”

We left it at that, but the idea stayed in my mind. Late that night before going to sleep, as I luxuriated in bed in a cold room with two blankets over me, I got what seemed to me a pretty good notion. The more I thought of it the more I liked it, and I drifted into sleep with a smile on my face. It was still there when I woke up.

I could hardly wait till I had finished dictating to Nadezna next morning. “Look,” I said when the last letter was done. “I’ve been talking to Gujar about your brother and how they’re getting on down there.”

She nodded. “I’ve asked Gujar about Connie, too.”

“Oh.” I grinned at her. “Did he tell you about Madé Jasmi?”

She smiled. “That’s the Bali girl who’s looking after him?”

“That’s the one. She’s a very beautiful girl.”

“So Gujar says.”

“What I thought was this,” I said. “I want a bit of a holiday. I was thinking we might get everything cleaned up here in the office and go down there, and stop over for one trip. Not this coming trip, but the one after. That gives us a clear fortnight in the office here to get everything buttoned up so that Dunu can look after things while we’re away. Go down on one trip and come back on the next one. That would mean we’d have about a fortnight there. We should be away from here about three weeks.”

I hesitated, and then I said, “You’d like to see your brother, wouldn’t you?”

She sat silent with her eyes cast down, tracing a little pattern faintly with her pencil on the cover of her pad. I was disappointed that she had not welcomed the chance of a visit to Bali, but a man gets used to disappointments as his life goes on. I said gently, “Wouldn’t you like to come?”

She said, “May I think it over, and tell you this evening?” She hesitated. “I don’t think we ought both be away at the same time.”

“Think it over,” I said. “Gujar and Dunu can cope with anything that’s likely to crop up. I’d leave Gujar here in charge.”

I went on with the day’s work in the office, but it was a weary day. I had counted on her coming with me for this holiday, and I didn’t see what there was against it. It couldn’t possibly be that she wanted a chaperon or anything like that, and I knew she was becoming fond of me. I wanted to be with her, to get to know her better, to find out what she liked and didn’t like outside the office. She must have known I’d never do her any harm. I spent the day uncertain, worried and impatient.

In the evening, as she was putting the cover on her typewriter, I said, “Thought any more about this Bali business?”

She turned and faced me. She was wearing a white drill frock, very simple. “I’ve been thinking about it all day, Tom,” she said. “I don’t think I’d better come.”

I suppose I’d known that was coming, though I didn’t know why. My face must have shown my disappointment, because she
looked up at me and said, “I’m just terribly sorry. It’s not that I don’t want a holiday with you. It’s Bali.”

I sat down on the edge of the desk. “What’s it all about?” I asked, as kindly as I could. “What’s wrong with Bali?”

She said, “I don’t want to go there, not just now.”

“Don’t you want to see Connie? I thought you’d like the chance.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to see him for a bit.”

I reached out and took one of her hands in mine. “Tell me why,” I said. “I’m only trying to help.”

“I know you are,” she said. She smiled a little. “You’re doing that in your own way all the time. That’s why this party runs so well.”

“I’d like to know why you don’t want to go and see Connie,” I observed.

“I know you do,” she said thoughtfully. “Otherwise you’ll think that it’s because I don’t want to go away with you, and it’s not that at all.”

“Thank God for that, anyway,” I said.

She raised her eyes and looked at me. “I want to leave him alone for a bit,” she said. “I don’t mind you going. It might be quite a good thing if you did. But I don’t want to go myself, not now. I think he’s better without me.”

“Why is that, Nadezna?”

She withdrew her hand, and walked over and stood by the open window. The people were beginning to go past to the place by the hangar for the evening prayer. She was silent for a bit, and then she said, “Did you meet this girl, Madé Jasmi?”

I was amazed that she should raise that thing again. Surely, she wasn’t jealous? I said, “Yes, I just met her. She was with her mother when we were settling how much they were to pay. I didn’t speak to her, of course. I couldn’t.”

“Is she nice, Tom?”

“She’s got rather a nice face,” I told her. “To look at her, you’d say she would be kind and even-tempered, and probably faithful.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s what Gujar said. Did Gujar tell you much about her, Tom?”

“He said that she looked after Connie mostly. There’s another one who’s looking after Phinit.”

“Did he tell you that she was in love with Connie?”

“Yes,” I said. “He told me that.”

She stood looking out at the muddled buildings between us and the hangar, with glimpses of the tarmac and the sea beyond. “If that’s true,” she said, “it’s the first time it’s ever happened.”

“The first time anyone has ever been in love with him?”

“I think so. You don’t know of anyone, do you?”

I shook my head. “I never saw him take an interest in a girl, or any girl in him.”

“Nor did I,” she said. “But now, if Gujar Singh is right, there is a girl, and she’s in love with him.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Well, you can put it like that,” I said at last. “I don’t know much about the Balinese, and I don’t think Gujar Singh does, either. She’s a very lovely girl, Nadezna, but it’s a very primitive village. She may want to go to bed with him. Probably she does. But whether you can put it any higher than that, I wouldn’t know.”

She said, “I only wish she would.”

I grinned. “Think it’ld do him good?”

She said gravely, “I know it would.”

She came and stood by me again. “I want you to try and understand about Connie, Tom,” she said. “There’s such a lot of nonsense being talked about him, that one can’t deny, because it means so much to so many people. So many people think that he … that he’s a prophet, or something. They do, honestly, down in the souk. They think that he’s a sort of prophet.”

I took her hand again, and examined it. “I know,” I said. “Some people quite high up are starting to say that.”

“You don’t believe that, do you, Tom?” She looked at me appealingly.

I smiled at her. “I don’t. I think he’s just a damn good chap who’s got a bee in his bonnet. Perhaps he’s been out in the East too long.”

She nodded. “I think he has. He always was interested in religions, ever since he was a little chap. And then, when we lived in America we were Asiatics, you see—different to the rest. Mother
was Russian-born and we always reckoned we were European, but we weren’t really—not Connie and I. And of course, it made a difference. I don’t think Connie ever had a girl friend in his life, not one. And his religion made up.”

“I see,” I said. This was a new light on the man I knew.

She said quietly, “Tom, I believe this is his chance, and it may be the last one that he’ll have. I don’t care who she is so long as she’ll be kind to him, and make him happy like an ordinary man, and give him children. If she’s an Asiatic, well, he’s Asiatic too, and so am I. I want her to have him. He’s never had a girl in love with him before, and that’s what’s made him into what he is. I want her to make him love her, and make him an ordinary man.”

I stood studying her fingertips, holding her hand in mine. “You think that’s what he’s missed?”

“I know it is,” she said. “He’s always been incomplete, because he’s never had that. He’s slid deeper and deeper into his religion, just to compensate.”

I stood thinking, perhaps, more about Nadezna whose hand I was caressing than about Connie. I was wondering if the same Asiatic nature of her birth had denied her boy friends, too. It might well be so. But she had had her mother to look after, and perhaps she had found compensation in that way.

“You’re a good bit younger than Connie, aren’t you?” I asked.

She nodded. “Eight years,” she said. “There were two others between us—both boys. There was a typhoid epidemic in our street down by the harbour in Penang, and my father and Ivan and Victor all died. After that, Mother took Connie and me to London, because my father died fairly well off and Mother didn’t want us to grow up as Chinese. My father had helped Sir Alan Cobham on one of his flights through Penang, and Mother wrote to him in London, and Sir Alan took Connie on as an apprentice. That’s how he got started in this business.”

I came back to the point that we had started from. “Why don’t you want to go to Bali, then?” I asked.

She said, “I might frighten her, and spoil it.”

“I see.”

She said, “Gujar and you say she’s just a village girl, living in a very primitive place. But Gujar says that she’s in love with him,
and Phinit, living there with him, is living with another of the girls there, one of Madé Jasmi’s friends. If ever Connie had a chance of knowing what love means it’s now. And if he can have that, I think he might snap out of all this prophet stuff, and come back to us as a normal man.”

“Why do you think you’d frighten her?” I asked. “You’re on her side.”

Nadezna said, “If she’s a village girl like that, she’d never believe it. Different clothes, different speech, different colour … If I turned up there as his sister she’d be terrified of me, and angry, too, because she’d think that I resented her and wanted to take him from her. I’d never get her to believe that I want her to have him.”

“No,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you would.”

“I think I’ll have to keep away,” she said. “However much one wants to help her I think this is a time when another woman just can’t help at all.”

“Would you rather I kept clear of them, myself?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I think it might be helpful if you went, if you can spare the time. Connie thinks so much of you, Tom. He may want to talk to somebody before he takes her.” She smiled. “He’s such a bunch of ideals,” she said. “He’s quite capable of keeping a girl hanging round while he consults a friend to ask him if he’s doing the right thing.”

I laughed. “You want me to push him into it.”

“I do,” she said, but she wasn’t laughing at all. “I think that it’s the only thing to save him now.”

There was real pain and anxiety in her when she said that, and for a moment I thought that she was going to start crying. I put an arm clumsily around her shoulders. “It’s not as bad as that,” I said. “After all, nothing’s going to happen if he doesn’t get this girl.”

“Only one thing,” she said sadly.

“What’s that?”

“I think he’ll turn into a prophet.”

I was silent.

“I don’t know how a man becomes a prophet,” she said quietly. “But thousands of people, spread all through the East—they
think he’s one already. I suppose that if a person gives up earthly things and preaches a new, simple way of life to people who are hungry for his teaching—I suppose that’s what a prophet is, isn’t it? Or is there something more to it than that?”

I pressed her shoulders gently. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know what a prophet is, or what makes one. I only know that it’s a very long time since there’s been a prophet in the world. Far as I know, Mahomet was the last, and he lived about fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a good long time ago. I don’t know what a prophet is, but I do know this: that it’s pretty long odds against our having one here in our little party, now. In all these ages, people must have been thought to be prophets who weren’t really, just ordinary chaps who’d been out in the East too long. That’s all that Connie is, Nadezna—honestly. And if we treat him that way, it’s the best thing we can do.” I paused. “I’d like to see him have a job in a cold climate for a time. In England or America.”