He glanced up again. On the back of Moss’s large and powerful hands hair glinted like copper wires. He moved them restlessly in the labour of computing. Foley remembered suddenly an occasion the previous summer when they had been working on the car. A large nut had jammed on the cylinder head. It had not been set squarely on the thread, and he himself had been quite unable to budge it. Moss had taken the spanner and without seeming to exert himself had given it a twist of such staggering power that he had shorn the first inch or so of steel thread completely off the bolt. What Foley chiefly remembered was the expression of surprise on Moss’s face and the way the nut slid up and down on the useless bolt.
‘Milk,’ he heard Moss say very softly, ‘milk, milk, milk.’ Fat white moths fluttered against the window, beating to be let in. The question of Gwendoline’s departure came back into his mind.
‘Michael,’ he began, but Moss shut his eyes and shook his head. There was silence for several minutes more, then Moss sighed heavily and put down his pen.
‘We spent a good bit more than usual on petrol last month,’ he said. ‘That was because of all those extra trips of yours down to Lanruan.’ He regarded Foley with a close and solemn scrutiny. ‘Still, it’s only once in a while, isn’t it?’
‘Those were all business trips,’ Foley said.
Moss nodded. ‘I daresay they were.’ He felt he could concede this now. Ronald was looking particularly well this evening. The light was favourable to his appearance, bringing out the serious level-browed look, almost dedicated. The corduroy jacket suited him too, he looked so artistic in it. Moss found it now as ever impossible to dissociate such attractiveness from laudable qualities of character in Ronald: purity, integrity, nobility.
‘Do you know who you remind me of,’ he said suddenly. ‘You remind me of a boy I used to know at school.’ Only after the words were out did he really experience excitement, and then he had to control himself, his breathing particularly, at the sheer daring of yoking together in speech these two persons. ‘His name was Lumley,’ he said, and waited, almost in fear, as though the concentration of his thought on Lumley, his patient, painstaking re-creations of that twelve-year-old experience of battle, love and death, could somehow have been divined by Foley; but no repudiation of the connection appeared on the other’s face.
Foley merely said casually and with an air of having something more important on his mind: ‘Lumley? That’s an odd name. Is that a Christian name or a surname?’
‘His name was Lumley Irons.’
‘You must be joking,’ Foley said. ‘Nobody could possibly be called that.’
Moss began speaking rapidly in a flat, unemphatic voice. ‘He died when he was fourteen. He had leukemia. All the summer he had it and nobody knew till they got the doctor in. Well, he might have had it for years, for all I know. He used to get very tired, but then he wasn’t a very strong boy, he was delicate. They put it down to outgrowing his strength, the tiredness I mean. Nobody knew about it, you see. Perhaps if someone had known, Lumley might not have died, but, of course, that’s not true, because it’s an incurable disease, leukemia.’
Foley lit a cigarette. ‘That was bad luck, to get a thing like that, at fourteen,’ he said. He was considerably impressed by this remote and lingering death of the boy Lumley. Moss’s manner of relating it, too, had been unusual and rather disturbing: there had been in the hasty yet tireless accents something implacable, rather as though Moss had learned it all by heart, and was determined to get through to the end without mishaps; as though everything had to be said in just that order, or it wouldn’t do.
‘He was very like you,’ Moss said, and paused again. But Foley continued to smoke peacefully. ‘Very like you.’ A delightful sense of immunity began to steal over him. ‘Same sort of physique,’ he said. ‘On the slender side. Same colouring, same shape of face. And not only that, not only physical, but you both have the same sort of atmosphere about you. A kind of brightness.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The only other person I’ve seen like that was my cousin Frank and I only saw a photograph of him because he was killed in the First World War. He was a pilot.’
‘I’m the only one left, then.’ Foley spoke lightly in order to conceal his interest. ‘What did you mean by brightness, exactly?’
Moss felt an onrush of this almost choking excitement and was compelled to pause again. Deliberately he deadened his voice. ‘It’s difficult to explain, difficult to put into words. You are all three of you pale people but you have this spiritual quality, something like light, not a colour I mean …’
‘A sort of glow?’ said Foley, noting the rather curious way that Moss had of referring to the other two as if they were still alive.
‘Yes, that’s it exactly, a sort of pale glow.’ Moss was full of happiness at the sympathetic interest Foley was taking in what he had said and the ease with which they were understanding each other. ‘Your eyes are different from Lumley’s,’ he said. ‘Yours are hazel, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Foley, who knew very well. ‘They are ordinary brown eyes.’
‘You must know better than that,’ Moss said. He shifted on his chair and one of his hands came up chest high in a sudden clumsy gesture of expostulation. ‘You want to take a look at yourself some time,’ he said. ‘Just take a look at yourself. Lumley was just the same, quite careless of his own appearance. He often didn’t comb his hair even. Once we went for a bicycle ride in the country, just the two of us. It was a very hot day and we got hot cycling. We stopped and bathed in a stream, the water was cold, straight off the hills, you know. We splashed about in it. We took all our clothes off and just waded in. Lumley got his hair all wet but he didn’t bother about it.’ None of this had actually happened but Moss felt that he possessed the visual essence of it just as firmly as if it had: Lumley’s body wet from the stream, the water gleaming on his thin sunburnt arms, the white zones of belly and flanks where the sun had not been, the beads of water caught in the faint hairs on the legs, his head thrown back in laughter, the smell of crushed grass when they lay down together beside the stream. ‘Lumley didn’t care about things like that,’ he said.
Foley looked down into the palm of his hand. He had steadily lost interest since the conversation had veered from his glow. He could not see why Moss kept harping on about this Lumley person. ‘By the way,’ he said casually, ‘have you any idea why Gwendoline pushed off so suddenly this afternoon? Did she seem upset about something?’
There was a rather long pause and when Moss replied his tone had changed completely, returning to its normal, conversational weightiness: ‘We were talking about you, as a matter of fact. She suddenly got up and said she had to go. She said she’d be seeing you.’
‘I see.’ Foley was now further affronted with Gwendoline for having left at such a juncture, when she should have been glued to her seat with the sheer interest of the topic. Finding Moss’s eye fixed on him with what seemed mild enquiry, he thought that perhaps he had been allowing something of his pique to show. Instantly he flung his head up and opened his mouth in an ah. He held this a moment, keeping his eyes on Moss’s face, then slowly narrowed the ah down to a recollecting smile. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Now I remember. It would be getting on for five when she left, wouldn’t it? She’d promised to phone her uncle at five o’clock, I remember her telling me, and, of course, she would know there wasn’t a phone at the farm. Imagine my forgetting that.’
Moss’s expression had not changed but he now raised his own head and repeated Foley’s ah on a smaller scale.
‘The nearest telephone, of course, is halfway down to the village,’ Foley pointed out. He continued to watch Moss but could discern no signs of scepticism on his face. ‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘That explains it.’
Moss leaned forward and seemed to be gathering himself for further speech. Sensing that it was not going to be about Gwendoline, Foley stood up, quickly, tucking the scrapbook u
nder his arm. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said.
‘The only other person that reminds me of you at all is my cousin Frank and I knew him first of all,’ Moss said, reverting to his former manner. ‘At least, I didn’t actually know him.’
Foley began moving towards the door. ‘Busy day tomorrow,’ he said.
‘I only saw a photograph of him, at my aunt’s house, but he bore a very striking resemblance to you and Lumley.’
‘Frank and Lumley and me,’ said Foley over his shoulder, and went out. Going up the stairs he sang to himself a little.
‘Sleep well, Ronald,’ Moss called out after him, as he always did. He was distinctly disappointed at having to break off just when he was starting to tell Ronald about his cousin Frank, but glad on the other hand that he had made such a good start on his new policy of telling things to Ronald. Cousin Frank, though, really belonged in this first instalment and should have been included.
Moss continued for some time to sit at the table, remembering Frank and the pot miner. They had been the twin hearth-spirits of his aunt’s house and throughout his childhood Moss had seen them at least once a week: Frank’s sad beauty framed in gilt at one end of the mantel shelf and at the other the great ribald grin, protruding eyes and flat cap of the pot miner who was all face, and hollow moreover, and through whose perpetual snarl of clean pot teeth you could put odds and ends, pins, pencil-stubs, buttons, so that he was often crammed to the maw with scraps and threads straggled over his teeth, but his beastly grin never varied. In contrast was cousin Frank’s doomed, luminous seriousness, as he looked down in his priestly habiliments of a pilot, the symbolic wings of his order sewn to his breast. The photograph was old and formal, its prevalent tints being brown and mourning sepia, and Frank gazed out of it with sorrowful dark eyes and a pale oval face and straight brown hair. His features had a delicate, sculpted symmetry, rather unearthly, as though someone had known he was going to die and taken his face and chiselled it into a classic shape to serve as the epitaph for a whole generation. He was without apparent antecedents, just as he was without issue; and this for Moss had formed a large part of his fascination; it had been impossible, amidst the jovial blond snubness of the Mosses and the Carters – the two strains which had gone to compose Frank – to find any remotest trace of him. He duplicated no features of theirs and was impossible to explain, except in terms of a symbol.
His beauty would have been enough. But the aunt breathed a poignant lustre on it by the special voice she used when talking of him. Moss knew every detail of that brief career, knew that Frank had been as a little boy gentle and affectionate and had played much alone; had kept tame rabbits and mourned long when one died. Shot down in flames in 1918 they had recovered him from the North Sea and tried to revive him with brandy but he had vomited it up and died. This was always the highlight of the aunt’s relation because it demonstrated Frank’s purity and his abstemious nature. ‘He couldn’t keep it down, you see,’ the aunt said. ‘He hadn’t ever been used to it.’ And Moss had known that into cousin Frank’s white and wounded body no evil even in the last extremity could be admitted. Frank had died because of his goodness, it came down to that. Moss had never associated him with the life of action, with any lawless freedom of clouds and lightnings, even less had he anything in common with the cynicisms and recklessness of those early pilots read about since. The neat, symbolic wings were on his breast: wings and flames. Frank had taken an Icarus flight, gone too near the sun, but not inadvertently: he had been too good for the world, his purity had consumed him.
And opposite was the pot miner with his vast snarl of mirth. At times it had seemed to Moss that the two faces were simply dual aspects of some divinity, a reconciling of the spirit with the flesh; and although he nearly always found the pot miner repulsive there were occasions when the stress of meeting Frank’s high regard drove them into an alliance. For Frank had been an exacting ideal. Because of his purity, the sterilising flames in which he had fluttered to earth, his rejection of the brandy, he was in an unassailable moral position, and backed up, of course, by the whole family. Moss had found him difficult to countenance, with that very faint smile, the irrevocable parting in his hair. So from time to time, driven by a sense of his unworthiness he had veered to the Rabelaisian miner, who was a great accepter of things, whose perpetual grin condoned everything, just as articles of the most diverse nature disappeared through his jaws.
Moss stirred and sighed. There was no sound from above. Ronald must be in bed. He rose and moving in an unhurried manner tidied up a bit, patting cushions, carrying cups through to the kitchen. He put his account books in their accustomed place. Then, making sure that all lights were switched off below, he made his way upstairs. He paused outside Foley’s door for a moment to listen. Standing there it seemed to him more than ever a pity that he had not been able to finish what he wanted to say about Frank. Ronald had almost certainly wanted to hear it too but had gone to bed rather than seem importunate. After hesitating a moment longer he crossed to the other wall, moving very softly, and switched off the passage light. Now, standing in complete darkness, he could see that there were no cracks of light round Ronald’s door. Fumbling cautiously he found the knob, turned it quietly and let himself in. He closed the door behind him with a slight click and stood just inside the room, listening in the darkness. He could hear no sound of breathing and knew therefore that Ronald was awake.
‘Are you awake, Ronald?’ he said, in his normal speaking tones. There was no answer. ‘I wanted to tell you a bit more about my cousin Frank before I went to bed. I told you you are like him, didn’t I? I used to see him nearly every week at my aunt’s house. I mean his picture, because he was dead, he died before I knew him. He was shot down in flames and when they tried to get him to drink this brandy, he was sick, he couldn’t keep it down. If he’d been able to keep that brandy down …’
Moss’s voice went on, steady, rapid, without particular inflections. It seemed after a while to abandon all narrative sequence and become circular and spiralling, returning on its tracks again and again like very complicated chamber music. Foley, lying in the dark, his whole body clenched in resistance to the meaning, was unable to ignore the convolutions of sound. And beneath his sense of outrage, much more potent, a kind of alarm was uncoiling.
7
‘He comes to my room every night now,’ Foley said. ‘Sometimes he only stops for a few minutes, sometimes for hours, but he never fails to put in an appearance, or rather, no, he doesn’t appear, because it’s always dark, he materialises, that’s the word. It’s driving me mad I don’t mind telling you. Imagine, just a voice in the dark going on and on.’
‘Well, you could always tell him to go away,’ Barbara said. ‘Couldn’t you?’
‘Do you think I haven’t told him? The other night, for instance, he was just settling down when I asked him would he please, please tell me about it all the next day instead, because I wanted to go to sleep. You can’t be plainer than that, can you? He didn’t take a bit of notice. He just paused a second or two and then went on again as if I hadn’t said anything at all. Moss is so obstinate, you see. It doesn’t matter what I do, ten minutes after my light goes off, there he is. If I stay up reading or something, he stays up too. Even if he goes to bed first, he lies awake waiting for me to come up. The bedroom door doesn’t lock and even if it did a fellow can’t lock his door like a nervous virgin, can he?’
Foley looked fixedly at Barbara, trying to convey his sense of outrage. It was not a situation, he felt, with which a civilised man could deal. Moss, merely by blundering through the conventions which protect privacy, had complete command of the situation. ‘I’d put the light on, suddenly,’ he said, ‘if the switch was near the bed, but it isn’t. It’s just inside the door and that’s where Moss always stands and quite frankly I don’t fancy barging into him in the dark. Otherwise that’s what I’d do, put the light on. I strongly suspect that the light would drive him away.’
/> ‘What do you talk about?’
‘Good God, we don’t have a conversation, I don’t say a single thing, it’s no good, he doesn’t listen anyway. He goes on about his childhood, people he used to know, things like that. Sometimes he tells me about things he’s seen around the farm. He was on about some foxes, the other night, that he’d seen hanging up somewhere, with their tails cut off, but I never know what he’s talking about, really. Sometimes I doze a bit, you know, and when I come to he’s gone off on some other subject. And he’s very difficult to follow because of the peculiar voice he puts on, different from his normal voice. He seems to know it all by heart, somehow, it’s hard to explain. But what worries me is that it’s getting worse. Before, at the beginning, he used to continue in the dark conversations we started before going to bed and that was bad enough, but now he saves it all up till the light’s off. He prefers to talk in the dark, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to.’
The Partnership Page 11
