The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  If only Ronald would take his advice about other things too. Reluctantly Moss’s mind reverted to the impending visit. It marked a dangerous advance in intimacy, either a lowering of resistance or a hardening of intention on Ronald’s part. Moss could not think of this without intense alarm. She was just the girl, he felt sure, with a name like that, to assume a domestic demureness for the occasion, insinuate the need for a woman’s touch. Well, he swore to himself, she should find no bachelor squalor here. She would find that men could look after themselves perfectly well, and without a lot of female clutter. Silly, dirty clutter that women left everywhere like droppings … His mind flinched away. Women’s clothes should all be white and loose-fitting and made of cotton, not slippery silk, and they should be boiled for a long time. He grasped this vision of shining hygiene, and was about to get up when, without any preliminary warning this time, he had one of his flushes. He had time for nothing but a glance at his watch.

  As usual, the immediate sensation was one of complete inability to move; as though he was out of his depth in some thick, warm fluid which buoyed him up vertical and motionless, enfolding him in an outer layer of heat and climbing at the same time with a terrible agility the internal rungs of his helplessly suspended body. The early stages were not unpleasant and there was one point at which he experienced, briefly, a sort of subjugating sweetness; but as the heat rose, threatening to engulf him, his breathing became constricted and his vision blurred. Always at this stage he felt that he could not survive, that he was in process of drowning, of dissolution; but this was the culminating moment. After this the flush ebbed and the little gasps that Moss uttered were sounds of relief mainly, as he felt himself once more above the surface. He looked at his watch again.

  Still gasping, but at longer intervals, he went upstairs for his scarf and beret. He wore a scarf and beret until the beginning of June, no matter what the weather.

  Outside the cottage the sun halted him immediately. He stood still at the door with a vivid sense of his body recuperating. He felt planted and growing there, and with this confluence of energies came a rare sense of wonder at the miraculous interplay within him, between the eddies of his blood and his compact flesh. He pressed his hands flat against the frontal convexities of his thighs, pleased by their hardness. He raised his right arm and clenched his fingers slowly into a fist. The knuckles whitened under his gaze. Moss knew himself to be extremely strong. He regarded his strength as an identifying attribute, like the colour of his eyes. It had grown without any special effort or training on his part and had not resulted in any particular skills. It was simply there, almost in the abstract: a capacity to lift and heave, impose his will on inert things.

  He was still half turned towards the cottage, and when he raised his eyes from his fist, he saw for the first time in his years of living there that the stone of the wall supported a film of minute mosses, a seeping pale green tide pricking roots thinner than hairs into the seams of the plaster and even, where there was an irregularity in the surface, battening on the tiny pockets of dust left there by the wind or the decay of tissues. Such tenacity amazed him. There must have been a network of roots spiring through the masonry of the house like the burnished tendrils of a tumour. Strange, too, that he had never before noticed this intense life. He was about to take a closer look when Royle, their landlord, appeared, driving before him a black and white bullock with heavy blows of a stick. He was cursing in a soft, accomplished monotone. Moss guessed that the bullock had disobeyed some order, and was being taken to the punishment paddock for a beating. The punishment paddock was behind the farmhouse on the seaward side. The offence must have been serious, Moss thought, to have so incensed Royle that he could not wait until they reached the appointed place. When he drew level with Moss he looked up briefly. ‘We s’ll have more rain, I do believe,’ he said, in a soft voice, his face purple with rage. Moss nodded, not believing this. Royle proceeded on his way and was soon lost to sight, but the sound of the blows continued.

  Moss took a step nearer to the wall and scrutinised the plants. It seemed to be some kind of fungus mostly, but here and there, skeining the wall, was a different sort of plant, a creeper with glossy, denticulated leaves, gummy hoop-shaped tendrils and tiny dark blue flowers like microscopic violets. Moss advanced his face close to the wall, possessed by a kind of ardour. The little blue flowers were beautiful, bell-shaped, and each one had a speck of yellow, only just visible, in the centre of its throat … Suddenly Moss saw that they were actually rooted in previous clumps, putrescent now, and in fact extracting from these a sparse ooze; all over the wall, as it seemed, a swampy efflorescence was taking place, the new plants hooked into the nourishing corpses of the old. Simultaneously with this perception, and quite unmistakably, there came to his nostrils a stench of decay. The surface of the wall, from this close, smelled like a clogged drain. Disgusted, he stepped back quickly. No doubt caused by the high degree of humidity in the atmosphere, he thought, seeking for a formula to neutralise the indecency.

  Slowly he walked down the farmyard in the direction of the sea. The feeling of disgust persisted. He thought of the fertilising and corrupting moisture, invisible droplets of it in the air all around him, breeding plants that stank, fleshing the gum-pink undersides of mushrooms on the cliffs, fattening the fungoid umbrellas in the crotches of trees, that rotted as they grew and ended as malodorous puddles. Hang a piece of meat out in this air and the maggots would be at it before you could snatch your hand away.

  Beyond the farm outhouses he passed through a wooden gate and followed a faint track across two fields, then down through a narrow gully made by a dry stream bed. Entering this gully was always a strange sensation for Moss, a descent deliberate but curiously clandestine, away from the open fields, the arid certainties of the sea. The high banks enclosed him, the chestnut trees with which the banks were planted met overhead. Their great candles of flower were full out now and their scent filled the air. From time to time Moss was obliged to duck his head to pass beneath the branches. A blackbird, possibly with a nest in the vicinity, followed him, repeating a single fluting note at exact intervals. At its lower end the gully widened and led into a regular, bowl-shaped declivity about two acres in extent, in which there was an orchard of ancient, maimed apple-trees, bounded on the far side by a screen of hawthorn bushes. This was the farthest limit of Royle’s cultivable property; beyond it the gorse and broom began and the land took a steep tilt towards the sea. It was the place on the whole farm that Moss liked most. Except for him no one seemed to come here. Certainly, no one bothered about the trees. The small, sweet apples were allowed to fall year after year and the wasps got boozed on them. The trunks of the trees were scabbed with pale green lichen, and lichen draped the lower branches in petrified swathes giving the whole orchard the appearance of a marine grotto: one would not have been surprised to see fish at eye-level swimming about among the branches. Above this, however, through the crust of algae, the trees had thrust their blossom with improbable abundance, as though conscious of dying.

  Moss stood among the trees looking up through the gushes of blossom at the pale blue sky. The noises of the farm and the sea reached him here with an effect of reassurance, sustaining but not involving him. The hills around spluttered with the invalid cries of sheep. Out at sea and invisible the bell-buoy recorded the swell. Quite close, hidden among the leaves, a bird that he could not identify began to sing; the sweet, intensely inhuman phrases trickled through the foliage like something shed or spilt which could never be gathered again.

  He sat down at the foot of a tree and rested his back and the back of his head against the trunk. Bees were rifling the flowers above him; he could hear how their drone was deadened when they entered the cups. The ravished stamens gave off heady waves of scent. By degrees, amidst this sweetness, Moss became aware of a darker strand of odour, sweet too, but muskier, different from yet not altogether alien to the smells of propagation all around. He was still trying to iden
tify this smell when quite suddenly thoughts of Lumley came into his mind and the familiar narrative began again, with its attendant apprehension and regret, began, it seemed, without his volition, as though in these surroundings there was some irresistible stimulus or reminder. He could not think of Lumley now except as part of this narrative, beginning with the straggling double file of schoolboys walking through the cobbled streets towards the swimming baths. Habitual recollection had fixed an emotion to every point of the story and he could sense again after all these years his clumsiness among the others, the cap too large and worn absurdly straight on his head, the grey flannels hitched too high, flapping round his ankles. Preedy leading them, striped prefect’s cap at a knowing angle, blazer tight round substantial buttocks. Lumley somewhere in the. file, unknown then except as the others of the form were known, a slight, unassertive boy with a pale, oval-shaped face and very red lips, who had once made the whole form laugh by imitating the mannerisms of the organist, pulling out the stops with terrible grimaces; only this little spurt of mimicry in all that year redeeming him from complete obscurity.

  Once more at this customary point Moss paused to wonder at that obscurity and to feel gratitude for the boon of intimacy which had been granted him; because during that walk to the baths and during the changing in the cubicles, all that time Lumley had been afraid and no one else had known it; the vibrations of his fear reached no one at the time. Only afterwards was Moss given the privilege of sensing it, and it almost certainly would never have entered his range of perceptions at all without the feeling he had come to have for Lumley.

  The sequence of his memories, orderly up to the entrance to the baths, was broken and confused among the clanging doors of the cubicles, with their scratched, corroded sides, the pencilled slogans and drawings of copulations in defiance of anatomy which covered the inside walls; the steamy echoing pool, the hissing green water that slopped in the gutter all the way round and caused the cracks in the cream-tiled floor of the pool to squirm like eels as you stood looking down from the matted springboards.

  Lumley had been an inveterate shallow-ender; he would always have preferred to dabble about in the water, waist high, no more, jumping up and down to try to keep warm, head held rigidly back from the slopping surface; engaging from time to time in little shrieking battles with his peers.

  On this day for reasons of his own he had wandered along the edge of the pool to where the water was deep and the surface bobbed with sleek heads, threshed with flailing back strokes, dangerous. Why he did this on this particular day Moss had never discovered. Only since that time, during the years when it was no longer possible to ask, had it occurred to him to wonder. And on this day Preedy was in charge, who no doubt believed he was doing his duty, getting the shirkers into the water, but who was known most to enjoy duty when it meant pain for the timid or the inept.

  Preedy must have noticed Lumley at that moment, as he lingered at the edge watching the lordly ones in the water. Preedy would have observed immediately the dry swimming trunks, the dry hair, the clear whites of the eyes. Here was a boy who hadn’t even been in yet. And Lumley had not of course obeyed the order to get into the water at once—the water was six feet deep there. He must have attempted to edge back to the safety of the far end, but found his retreat cut off. Then Preedy had started flicking at him with the wet towel to drive him over the side – idly at first and then, roused by Lumley’s mincing passiveness, more deliberately. A wet towel, used as Preedy knew how to use it, was as good as a whip. From where he was standing halfway down the pool, Moss had seen the pain and shame on Lumley’s face, the absorption on Preedy’s.

  Moss raised his face and looked up through the foaming branches. Inside some of the flowers he could see the dark furry shapes of bees. The musky smell that was not from the flowers nagged him with something familiar in it which he could not yet determine, something which began at last to arouse a definite repugnance in him, a sort of protest. He was held back, unwillingly, from the memory of how he had saved Lumley. Instead, from Lumley’s tormented face in the swimming baths, his mind swung over to Lumley’s dying face as he had seen it the following summer, white and pinched in the pillow, only that vividness of the lips proclaiming blood in the body. And that, precisely, had been the reason: Lumley was losing all his red blood.

  The word leukemia meant nothing to Moss at this time, when he heard it applied to Lumley. Not till later did this particular conjunction of sounds assume such a soft, avid, insinuating quality. It was then only a word, a definition in a dictionary; it might have done for a girl’s name. What in his boy’s mind – already intensely obstinate and pragmatical – he decided was happening, was that Lumley’s blood was being turned white and that when this process was completed even Lumley’s lips would be white and then he would die. Vague agents of blight were doing this inside Lumley’s body, so that his life all that summer was draining away without wound or pain. He had been dying then, while Moss looked down at him holding the useless squashy grapes he had brought. Lumley’s face had worn no particular expression and yet it had been quite changed. Even when he smiled with those bright lips, his eyes had not seemed to be looking at Moss. Below the grief and awe he had felt, below the sobbing of Lumley’s mother heard in a room below, a feeling of horrified distaste had stirred in Moss, a disgust he was helpless to repress, to think that Lumley’s blood was whitening all the time in his body under the fluffy, white blankets. On a little round table beside the bed was a bowl of bronze-coloured roses. Their cool, decided perfume hung in the air. Underlying it there had been another, coarser odour, coming from the folds of the bed, from the reclinations of Lumley’s body. To Moss it had seemed that this must be the smell of Lumley himself, who had been so many weeks dying …

  He got up and after hesitating a moment began to walk slowly through the trees. Beyond them there was a gap in the hawthorn hedge. He passed through this and after pausing again briefly to sniff the air, turned right and followed the hedge for a few dozen yards in the direction of the sea. The smell grew stronger as he proceeded, less ambiguous; it was no longer possible now to confuse it with the burgeonings of spring. It was a smell of animal decomposition. The line of bushes thinned as he went on until they could not really be regarded as a hedge at all, but grew unkempt and straggling at intervals of several yards. Beyond the protection of the hollow nothing much grew save these windswept thorn-trees and the tough broom. Moss’s feet struck against rock. Suddenly he became aware of the pale, unruffled expanse of sea again and with surprise he saw at practically the same time where the smell was coming from.

  On the very last of the thorn-trees three dead foxes were hanging, roped together by their necks. The light wind moved their dangling feet continually through a brief arc. Clearly they had died by violence. The throat ligaments of the middle one had stiffened, wrenching its head up, so that the tortured muzzle pointed vertically to the sky. The others looked out to sea, submissive forelegs raised to the soiled white bibs on their breasts, as though begging; a docility not congruous with the rictus on their faces. Moss thought that perhaps they had spent some time alive in gin traps before being found and shot by Royle. He could see no wounds on them, but their brushes had been removed, only limp membranes, scaly with dried blood, remaining. The sun reddened their pelts; and the stink of them seemed like the fumes of this slow combustion. They grinned and swayed there under his gaze …

  Preedy’s face had changed, that day at the baths, from absorption to anger, when Moss got between them. He had acted without a plan. Then Preedy’s anger braced him. Preedy advanced his face, narrowed his eyes, in an attempt to intimidate, but, of course, by this time Moss had known he was bluffing. Their eyes had been on a level in spite of three years’ difference. His eyes had seen the uncertainty in Preedy’s. Just below the mouth, below the right corner, almost on the line of the jaw: that was where he would have struck with his balled fist which knew it could smash Preedy and Preedy knew this too, knew he must
act quickly, retire with dignity before a crowd gathered, making a fight obligatory. ‘I’ll settle with you later,’ Preedy had said at last, and turned his back on them both. But no settlement ever came. Preedy avoided him thereafter. Preedy in fact, at this point, his connection with Lumley severed, his introductory function performed, ceased altogether to exist – Moss had no further recollections of him.

  He could not remember any form of words that had passed between Lumley and himself after Preedy had gone. Something they had said to each other, but nothing so appropriate to the occasion as thanks or disclaimers. He had turned to Lumley still with the light of battle in his eyes and had possibly in these first moments seen the other boy as the prize for which he and Preedy had been contending. As indeed in some measure Lumley had been, was: to hurt or console, a victim in any case. But it was he himself who was conscious of being placed under an obligation at the time. He had felt so indebted to Lumley for allowing himself thus to be protected. So although it was tempting now, in a way, to imagine a firm handclasp at the edge of the pool, in fact all he remembered was this gratitude and Lumley smiling at him, luminously, through tears of pain. His face had worn the same smile when a little later, the swimming period over, he came carrying his clothes over his arm along the row of cubicles to Moss’s, to share it with him, a thing which particular friends did sometimes …