Simon looked down the hill, across the railroad tracks to the dense greenness that reached back towards a horizon of blue haze. The damp air still had a deceptively spring-like freshness.
“The first time is always the worst, isn’t it?” he said.
“You really do understand,” she said.
“If you won’t accuse me of going back on our pact, Mrs Lavis, I think you may be the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”
She was pleased, and did not pretend to hide it.
“I’m glad you came here,” she said. “And I think you could drop the ‘Mrs Lavis’ stuff. Do you mind if I call you Simon?”
“I was waiting for a chance to suggest it, Eve.”
She put a hand on the teapot to test its temperature.
“Would you like a cup of tea? It’s still hot.”
“I’d rather have breakfast. I’m the horribly healthy type.”
She glanced at a clock across the room.
“We’ll give Charles another five minutes, and then I’ll ring for it, whether he’s here or not.”
He was still trying to visualize her in bed with Farrast. There was nothing prurient about the effort, it was more like an exercise in abstract mathematics. Intellectually, he had no doubt left that his assumption was correct, but to translate it into a picture that he could believe emphatically was a form of confirmation that eluded him. Could that invulnerable air-conditioned poise really melt in the warm confusion of sex, abdicating its pedestal to lie with a cheaply handsome spoiled wilful and surely less than fascinating mortal like Charles Farrast?
“Isn’t he up yet?” Simon asked.
“Good heavens, yes. We literally get up at the crack of dawn here. Ketchil makan, and out to get the coolies started at six o’clock. Then back to breakfast after everything’s running.”
He still had the book in his hand as he sat down beside her, and he put it down on the table in front of him.
“I didn’t know how long it might be till breakfast, and I didn’t know I’d have better company,” he explained.
She leaned a little towards him to look at the title.
“Maugham,” she said. “I don’t think I know that one. Is it new?”
“No, it’s a collection. Ascony lent it to me.”
“Vernon? I never thought of him as the bookish type.”
“He said there was a story in it that he’d like to get my reaction to.”
“Really? Which one?”
“A thing called ‘Footprints in the Jungle.’ ”
She passed him a tin of cigarettes and took one herself.
“What’s it about?”
“Well, Maugham never does go in for very sensational plots, and this one certainly isn’t the newest one in the world. It’s about a woman whose husband is murdered, supposedly by robbers, and soon afterwards she marries his best friend, and the presumption is that they were the ones who actually arranged to knock off Hubby.”
She took a light from the match he held, without a wrinkle in her smooth brow. She was enjoying a civilized conversation, nothing more.
“It isn’t exactly original, is it?”
“It’s all in the writing. He makes you see them as quite ordinary people that you might meet anywhere, instead of monsters out of another world.”
“But I wonder why Vernon wanted your opinion of it.”
“The inside story is supposedly told by a police chief,” he said. “The policeman finds enough evidence to be fairly convinced that they did it, but he also knows that he could never get enough to stand any chance of convicting them. So he’s never done anything about it.”
She met his gaze with level untroubled eyes. “I wonder if Vernon has a problem of that kind and can’t make up his mind what to do. But I can’t imagine Vernon not being able to make up his own mind about anything. But of course, if he didn’t have enough evidence, there’s nothing he could do anyway, is there?”
Simon shrugged.
“He didn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t read the story until this morning.”
“I’ll have to read it myself.” She glanced at the clock, and stood up. “Let’s not starve ourselves any longer.”
She went to the dining table and rang the silver hand-bell that stood in front of her place, but they had hardly settled themselves when Farrast stomped up the front steps and shouldered blusterily through the screen door. “Sorry if I’m late,” he said perfunctorily.
He sailed a terai hat into an armchair as he marched through to the table and sat himself down heavily, his boots scraping the floor. He had the kind of complexion on which sunburn never loses all its redness, and it seemed more inflamed now, perhaps because he was warm. His khaki shirt was already wilted and clinging.
“Trouble?” Eve Lavis asked.
“Plenty,” Farrast said. “And I’m going to make more.”
“You’ll be able to do it better with a good breakfast under your belt,” she said practically.
It was a good breakfast, staunchly British, with bacon and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and strong tea to wash it down, as was to be expected, for that is one tradition on which no proper Colonial even in the remotest outpost of the Empire would make any concession to local cuisine. At other meals he may without protest eat bird’s-nest soup or stewed buffalo hump, and may even become an addict of semi-incandescent curries, but breakfast under the British flag is incorruptible from Hampstead to Hong Kong.
After the boy had finished serving and gone out, and they had started eating, Farrast said, “I went down to the plant. The krani was there, but no men. They were supposed to clean out a couple of the stills. I waited twenty minutes. Then I loaded him in the jeep and drove out where they were last cutting wood. The other krani was there, with a truck, but no men. I gave it another ten minutes. Nobody showed up. So you know what I did? I made the kranis pick up a saw and start cutting wood themselves. I said if they couldn’t get their crews on the job, the only way they could earn their pay was by doing it themselves.”
“Do you think that was wise, Charles?” Mrs Lavis asked. “You want to keep them on your side.”
“You told me last night to show who was boss,” Farrast answered belligerently. “If the kranis had been tougher themselves, perhaps we’d never have had this trouble. This ought to teach ’em a lesson. I told ’em not to come in till they could bring the truck full of wood, which is all we need to complete a batch that’s waiting to be baked. And then I hiked off to the Malay village.”
“By yourself?”
“No, I had a friend with me.” He drew his revolver, held it up for a moment, and thrust it back in the holster. “I was just hoping somebody would start something, so I’d be given a chance to use it. But when I got there there wasn’t a grown man in sight. They’d all sneaked off into the bush when they heard me coming. Except the penggulu.”