The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  Foley clapped his hands together loudly, stinging the palms, producing thus a sound different from all those the gulls had accustomed themselves to in the life of the harbour; in the silence of panic they all rose and with superb lunges of the wings climbed rapidly and almost vertically into the softly nacreous sky. And as though that clap had been a summons also, an enormously fat man appeared at the opposite side of the harbour and approached him rapidly with a smooth, rolling motion. When he was still about twenty yards away Foley noticed that he had begun speaking, but at that distance the words were indistinct.

  ‘What did you say?’ he called.

  ‘Are you Mr Foley, Ronald Foley?’ enquired the fat man, drawing nearer. He spoke in the flat, self-protective accents of the Tees-sider, with a certain nasal plangency superimposed, which Foley could not immediately identify. He owned to his name and the man’s face seemed visibly to increase in extent, to spread with relief and a kind of triumph. He gave a breathy sigh and spoke on the ebb of it: ‘My name is Bailey,’ holding out at the same time a large white hand. In allowing his own to be engulfed in it, Foley was aware of a disagreeable moistness, an adhesiveness in the contact. ‘Glad to know you, sir,’ Bailey said.

  Foley murmured, ‘How do you do,’ by degrees withdrawing his hand, which the other seemed disposed to retain. As well as being very stout, Bailey was a tall man, taller than Moss even: Foley had not only to raise his eyes but to tilt his whole head back in order to look into the other’s face. He observed, with the unnerving distinctness sometimes experienced in dreams, that despite the great expanse of the face, the actual features, though properly formed, were freakishly minute; the round, almost lashless eyes and button nose formed the points of an inverted equilateral triangle; far, far below the apex of this, at a point where the face was already overdue for ending, moved a tiny excitable mouth; still further south the chins, a separate study altogether. Over that face Foley felt his eye might travel for ever and find no significant lodgement, no repose.

  ‘You see,’ Bailey went on in an explanatory manner. ‘You see, what I need are skulls, as a matter of fact,’ and while Foley still regarded him dumbly, he added: ‘About a dozen or perhaps fifteen.’

  There was a short silence during which Bailey’s eagerness was audible. Then Foley said ‘Skulls?’ and smiled painfully. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ he said.

  ‘That’s just not good enough, I’m afraid,’ said Bailey, with a sudden briskness that nearly had Foley recoiling. ‘I want to know whether you can do it. Come on now, can you or can’t you? Life-size they’ll have to be and I want them painted with that phosphorescent stuff.’ A cagey expression wandered over Bailey’s face. ‘I’m prepared to pay a fair price,’ he said. ‘I suppose it goes by weight?’ He regarded Foley steadily, and now that money had been mentioned, rather reproachfully, as though he had finally established himself as being in the right.

  ‘You mean you want me to make some skulls? Plaster skulls?’

  ‘That’s it. They told me … You were pointed out to me as the man for the job. I won’t say by whom …’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it?’

  ‘I won’t say by whom, because I am not at liberty to do so. You must respect confidences, in business.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Foley. ‘And, besides, I am not curious.’

  ‘I believe,’ Bailey said, ‘in dealing direct, going straight to the source, as you might say. You’re the man for the job, right-oh. It’s a principle of mine, that is. No middlemen, gentlemen’s agreement, see what I mean? Our word is our bond, they say that in the Stock Exchange, nothing else needed. Bloody marvellous, isn’t it?’ Bailey suddenly beamed with pleasure. ‘I know a bit about it, you see, I know a bit about commerce,’ he said. ‘I could say I’ve studied it.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Foley, ‘I should need an order properly made out.’

  ‘No red tape,’ said Bailey. ‘Too darn much red tape these days.’

  This last epithet, with its homely but alien force, finally cleared up for Foley the mystery of the other’s accent: that occasional, disturbing vibrancy was transatlantic; Bailey must have visited the States at some time or other.

  ‘But I should require a properly made-out order,’ he repeated.

  ‘Here,’ said Bailey, becoming confidential. ‘I’ve bought that place over there.’ He pointed across the harbour at a low, broad-fronted building with a narrow terrace approached by a short flight of concrete steps.

  ‘You mean The Harbour Café?’

  ‘No,’ said Bailey. ‘I don’t mean The Harbour Café. I mean The Smugglers’ Den. Oh, I know all about it, believe me, I could say I’ve studied the history of the place. That’s a principle of mine, get hold of the facts. It was a fisherman’s cottage to begin with, then it was The Wishing Well, then Lanruan Crafts, six months that lasted, after that it was The Kit Marlowe Tea Shoppe and then The Harbour Café.’ Bailey paused. He seemed to have a good sense of timing, or perhaps he had said all this often before. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘it’s The Smugglers’ Den now. A white elephant, you might say, but you’d be wrong. I was told there was a jinx on the place. Balls. No such thing as a jinx, not in business. People don’t realise that what a place like that needs is Atmosphere, something out of the ordinary. I saw it myself, right away. I know what this place needs, I said to myself, it needs a bit of Atmosphere, but I didn’t let on, of course, mum’s the word till you’ve got it in black and white, that’s a principle of mine.’

  Bailey threw back his great head suddenly and narrowed his eyes with rapturous shrewdness. ‘Drape some fish-nets about, barrels for tables, ships’ lanterns for lights, and there you are. And the skulls, of course. The skull and crossbones, you know, the jolly old Roger. I bet they did some rogering, too, up and down these coasts.’ Bailey winked vulgarly.

  ‘That was pirates,’ said Foley. ‘Not smugglers.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing. People on holiday, they like something a bit different. The place was noted for smugglers, wasn’t it, in the old days?’

  Foley uttered sounds of polite assent. He rarely questioned views so emphatically expressed. Besides, he could see that this was reasoning the other had lived closely with for some time. All the same, Bailey did not inspire confidence. He was too voluble for one thing. There was a fatal air of eccentricity about him. Of course it happened from time to time that somebody came to Lanruan, started something up and made a lot of money quite quickly. Lanruan was that sort of place. But these successful persons never expounded their intentions beforehand. Nor, in Foley’s experience, did they refer at all frequently to principles. Bailey’s, in any case, had largely cancelled one another out.

  ‘I’m prepared to offer,’ Bailey said, ‘for twelve skulls in good condition painted phosphorescent white –’

  ‘In view,’ Foley said firmly, ‘of the fact that a new mould would be needed, which would have to be scrapped immediately afterwards, since you will appreciate that it’s not every day we are asked for skulls, not to mention –’

  ‘Ten pounds the lot,’ said Bailey. He began a sort of smooth withdrawing motion intended to indicate finality.

  ‘Quite frankly,’ said Foley, raising his voice slightly as Bailey was now some yards away, ‘it would not be worth our while for less than a guinea a skull.’

  Bailey came to a halt. ‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ he said, ‘that there’s anything very tricky about a skull. Christ!’ he added, reproachfully.

  Foley said: ‘I don’t think you quite realise the amount of work that goes into … A skull is a complicated structure, anatomically speaking. And I take it you want yours to be realistic.’

  ‘How much then?’ Bailey asked, closing his eyes for a second in assumed weariness.

  ‘Well, it would be twelve guineas, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘For fifteen?’

  ‘No, for twelve.’

  ‘Knock off the odd twelve bob,’ Bailey said moodily.

  ‘A
ll right. Twelve pounds then. We can’t begin till next month, I’m afraid, because of previous orders. We could have them ready by about the middle of May if that’s all right.’

  Bailey recommenced his withdrawal, still facing Foley. ‘That doesn’t matter so much,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot to do to the place yet. I don’t expect to open till the beginning of July.’ He was quite a long way off now and beginning a slow and ponderous turn.

  ‘Isn’t that rather late in the season?’ Foley called.

  ‘Just in time for the peak period,’ said Bailey over his shoulder. ‘Well, goodbye for now.’ The turn completed, he put himself in rapid motion, but not the way he had come.

  Foley walked slowly back towards the car. With the advent of Bailey he felt that the season had definitely begun. Every year they appeared, with the swallows, people on the make, people on the run, pedlars of every sort. From the middle of May to the middle of September, Lanruan throbbed with financial aspiration. Some, like Bailey, came with an Idea, others for pickings generally. Yet others – quite a numerous class this – were refugees from metropolitan involvements, brought to a halt on these shores by the impassable character of the Channel. They lingered for a summer, sustained by some hope or ambition, and vanished without trace.

  Foley hated to think of this seasonal wreckage, the anguish of these persons drifting without a hold on the future, without a plan. By some process impossible to prevent, this became his own anguish too. Perhaps it was simply that he had himself quite recently emerged from a similar existence – his life in London with its expedients and uncertainties. Only the pixies lay between him and resubmergence in that element. Only the pixies kept his life plugged – and his cherub-lamps, of course. Thoughts of these were always comforting. He thought of them now, softly refulgent in the quiet attic, the suspended ones trembling very, very slightly, the light shifting on their antique rotundities. A different class of thing from the pixies altogether.

  He drove along the far side of the harbour. Barbara Gould’s house was the last one, and faced out over the open sea. The road ended here, dwindling to a footpath which led over the cliffs to Tollynt, the next village, about five miles further down the coast. Foley left the car outside the house and proceeded down the path to the front door. He rang the bell and listened. No sounds could be heard from the interior. After a moment Foley opened the door himself and stepped into the passage. Here he coughed several times and tapped his feet. Barbara’s voice called from the sitting-room, asking who it was. Foley infused his own voice with a reassuring resonance. ‘It’s me,’ he called through the wall. ‘Ronald Foley. Long time no see.’ He regretted this last expression terribly, the moment he had said it. There was no reply, which meant at least that Barbara was alone: if she had been entertaining some man or other she would have told him immediately to go away. This had happened several times before. Foley opened the sitting-room door and walked in.

  When he had not seen a person for some time Foley was always apprehensive of finding some radical change in character or appearance; and he had not seen Barbara since the previous October. Thus for the first few seconds after entering the room he looked at her with anxiety. She seemed to be the same.

  ‘How was London?’ he said, knowing she would not let herself be thus interrogated. She was sitting near the window with a black towel round her head like a turban and a sort of pale blue wrap on, which Foley immediately decided was a kimono.

  ‘A few minutes earlier and you’d have found me in the bath, or just getting out,’ she said. ‘What would you have done?’ She had a voice that went with her plumage, harsh and carrying. Foley smiled, pretending to consider. ‘So far it’s always been tradesmen who have caught me in the bath, particularly grocers,’ Barbara went on. ‘Most disappointing. I always hope for the best, of course. But I see their faces change, through the steam. They say things like Oops! or Oompah! and bolt for the door. Grocers in particular I have found to be a most timorous class of men. They must use up all their nerve manipulating those bacon-slicers.’

  Foley kept on with his amused, considering smile. He knew of old Barbara’s habit of getting people where she wanted with this sexual talk, always more pronounced with strangers, or people she had not seen for some time. It was her way of keeping the initiative. The present subject was one he had no wish at all to pursue. Besides, he needed time, as always, to adjust himself to the extreme bareness and starkness of this room in which everything, except Barbara herself and the black divan against the wall, was white, flat white, without even a gloss: the ceiling, the walls, the sparse furniture, all dead white and shadowless. There was nothing, in fact, for the eye to rest on, except Barbara and the divan, a conjunction which Foley had ceased to regard as accidental. Reflected light from the sea directly below accentuated the blanched effect, but even without this there was scarcely anything that could have mustered a shadow. The thing one noticed almost at once was the complete absence of objects: there were no little boxes or bottles or receptacles for things, concessions made to the passing of time. Time indeed was not acknowledged in this room, even as inimical. There were no mementoes, no photographs showing Barbara’s younger faces, no clock. It was a room sealed off and curiously clinical, like the white rooms in hospitals where time is only a graph at the foot of the bed. Through the open window the notes of the bell-buoy sounded with absolute regularity, like the pulse of the sea. It would not have been possible to guess that this was a woman’s room, there was no female scent or spoor in it, no hairpins, no elastic, no smells of drying nylon. The room held out no intimacies save the ultimate one suggested by the divan against the wall, which was of a useful breadth and velvety black and which Foley had never so much as sat upon: reclining on it was inconceivable, unless for the recounting of old traumas or for some sort of operation.

  He sat at the table, still holding on to the smile, though he felt it was becoming rather frayed. ‘It might be a subject for research,’ he said. Barbara regarded him in silence. The towel concealed her hair completely, emphasising the beaky opulence of her features, the large, almond-shaped eyes. The folds of the kimono, or whatever it was, covered her slight form and only her bare feet showed, still rosy from the bath; they were beautiful feet, narrow and proudly arched at the instep; the nails were painted scarlet. Foley thought of saying how much he liked the kimono, but said nothing in case it turned out not to be one. The sight of Barbara’s red toenails immediately revived an old speculation as to whether she painted her nipples. He only wondered this about Barbara, not about any other women he knew. It would be with some gentle, non-abrasive lacquer, if she did. Milky-rose would be the shade, or gold, or that lovely silver-grey he remembered using years ago as an under-coat for model aeroplanes. The dark nipples would glow through …

  ‘You’d probably be just as bad,’ Barbara said.

  ‘As bad as what?’

  ‘As bad as all those grocers. Judging by the voice you put on for me when you came in, I’m afraid you’d be even worse. And without the bacon-slicer excuse.’

  ‘What voice do you mean?’ enquired Foley, to gain time.

  ‘You know perfectly well what voice I mean. That breezy, respecter-of-womanhood voice. It makes me feel elderly. Do you suppose I start worrying about being raped every time I hear muffled noises in the passage?’

  Foley tried to counter this with a sustained humorous gaze, intended to make rebuttal unnecessary, a mistake on his part, since Barbara proceeded to outstare him.

  ‘I do it to reassure myself, not you,’ he said at last, giving up the struggle to beat down those rigid lashes and lowering his own gaze instead. He was conscious of having somewhere else that morning encountered a similarly luminous and inhuman regard, but could not immediately decide where. ‘I know I’m doing it,’ he added, and the familiar confessional feeling began to come over him, derived from all the previous occasions when he had sat in this uncomfortable room and fluttered his ego in Barbara’s cold sunshine with the bracing sens
e that everything he said was sealed off from the world by her contemptuous discretion. Not that he trusted Barbara – he trusted no one at all – but he needed a hearer from time to time for the incessant dialogue he carried on with himself. It helped to clarify the issues, especially at times of stress. And in Barbara he felt he had found the almost perfect confidante. He was sure she never spoke of him to anyone else, no one that mattered anyway, partly because her local contacts were so slight. She divided her year between this cottage and her flat in London, and even her men visitors were not of the vicinity but came from far places wearing corduroy caps and silk cravats, details which distinguished them from the local bucks as effectively as if they had been from another planet; all this had incensed public opinion against Barbara but increased her security value from Foley’s point of view – he didn’t in the least mind people talking about him in Fulham or Pimlico, for example – wherever Barbara’s admirers came from; anything likely to affect the local trade concerned him. However, the main reason for his belief in Barbara’s discretion was her unfeeling way of bottling up people in anecdotes and then putting them away. She was only interested in the quintessential, and that only in order to dismiss. She lacked the compulsion of the real gossip whose interest in the subject is coextensive with life itself, who desires above all to impress others with special knowledge, special sources of information. Barbara would have seen little point in that. So Foley kept his relation undramatic—that part at least which referred to himself and Moss and the business – and felt safe, and pleased with himself too. Time, moreover, had proved him right: in the course of three summers nothing had come back to him. It was, he felt, quite long enough.