The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  Barbara poured out tea from a pewter pot. ‘It is certainly a strange way to behave,’ she said, ‘Something is upsetting him, obviously. Haven’t you any idea at all?’ She handed him his cup, looking at him as she did so with a certain curiosity.

  ‘It’s driving me mad,’ Foley repeated, stirring his cup. He was uncomfortably aware that the weight of Barbara’s interest was not distributed as he had expected and would have wished: she seemed to have him under observation quite as much as Moss.

  It was a warm day. The windows facing the sea were open. A slight breeze stirred the thin curtains and little strips and blocks of sunlight expanded and dwindled on the glazed white walls. Foley could hear the pealing of the bell-buoy as regular as a clock ticking, although in clear sunny weather like this there was really no need for it, the reef then having its own colour, a band of vivid green over the sharp rocks. On the table between them was the skull that Barbara had asked for, which Foley had just brought for her. It lay grinning straight up at the ceiling, tremendously potent in that uncluttered room, even though too white and porous-looking to be taken for real bone. Foley had another in a cardboard box, that he was taking to show Bailey.

  Mrs Gould refilled her cup with neat quick movements characteristic of her, and raised her nose at Foley. ‘You mustn’t be so … passive, Ronald,’ she said. ‘You must tackle him, tax him, find out what’s bothering him. Tell him to go to hell if necessary, rather than lose your sleep. What is obviously needed is something explicit between you. Do you see what I mean, dear boy? You can’t go on for ever sagging under this burden of Moss, it isn’t altogether manly. Besides, if you lose your sleep your beauty will suffer, won’t it?’

  Foley remained silent. He disliked flippant reference to his looks. He disliked the whole tone of Barbara’s remarks. She was becoming altogether too ready to prescribe, too critical of him. Did she think he came to her for advice? His resentment was increased by the fact – and it was symptomatic of the change that was coming about between them that he did not care to admit this to Barbara – that he was distinctly frightened, physically frightened, by Moss’s behaviour, the intensity of which, quite disproportionate to the triviality of his themes, was so painfully conveyed in the unemphatic, droning voice, the lumbering and graceless persistence, and above all in the recent peculiar blindness to his, Foley’s, comfort and convenience. This last bothered him most because it confronted him starkly with his own inability to enforce these.

  A kind of pride prevented him from explaining any of this to Barbara. Later, when he took his leave, she accompanied him to the door, the first time she had ever done this. It gave a greater formality to the visit and confirmed, in a way he could not yet discern fully, his change of status. Her head came only to his shoulder. Glancing down at her he noticed a thin silver chain round her neck. The skin of the neck was quite smooth and unwrinkled and had a sallow lustre. Whatever hung from the chain had slipped down inside the front of the dark blue linen dress she was wearing and before he could prevent them Foley’s thoughts slipped down there after it and he pictured with quite disconcerting vividness the hard, jewelled pendant – keepsake or cross – resting exactly midway between Barbara’s breasts, which would be round and glossy and yellowish, something like old ivory, with the dark bruises of the nipples dead centre and a tracery of very fine blue veins …

  ‘And if sleeping becomes too difficult at home, my dear,’ said Barbara at the door, ‘there’s always a bed for you here. You might not find it too uncomfortable. And I have a fund of interesting stories. I could tell you about my Swedish friend who is always trying to persuade girls to take a cold bath with him, because the only thing that rouses him is goose-pimples.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just get hold of a goose?’ said Foley. He left her smiling and raising her nose in the sunshine and walked back towards the crowded quay.

  He had decided to put off his most important visit, to Gwendoline, to the very last, and so he headed directly for The Smugglers’ Den. Bailey should be just about ready for business by now, he thought. It was not very far but it took quite some time to reach because the whole area of the harbour was packed with holiday-makers, straggling all over the pavements, diving in and out of shops. He was pleased to notice as he walked along the number of shops displaying their pixies; particularly prominent were the money-box pixies and their latest line, an idea of Moss’s, two pixies paddling a leaf-boat. Seeing the pixies actually displayed for sale always reassured him, though they no longer relied entirely or even largely on the shops of Lanruan to take their stuff: all the holiday places up and down the coast were buying from them now.

  The ‘Closed’ sign was still on the door of The Smugglers’ Den, but the door was unlocked. The place seemed nearly ready to start business. Bailey, it was clear, had been busy. Holding the box carefully in both hands Foley looked round, at the little ornamental barrels with polished brass hoops that were meant to be used as chairs, and the long boxes stained black and bound with heavy wooden ribs to resemble sea-chests, which presumably were the tables. Brown fish-nets were draped about here and there and strings of painted cork floats looking exactly like giblets hung from the walls. In the window was a huge and apparently genuine ship’s lantern with thick green panes. Smaller, less nautical oil lamps hung from the ceiling by slender chains. The only modern note was struck by a vast shiny tea-urn at one end of the narrow counter, and a calendar advertisement for Pepsi-Cola featuring a langorous and deeply cleft girl in a black negligée.

  There was no sign of Bailey and at first Foley thought the place was empty. Then, behind him, from the recess just to the right of the door, a hoarse swearing commenced. Turning sharply he saw a small man halfway up a ladder, propped against the wall. The man was wearing a cloth cap and holding a paint-brush. While Foley was looking up the man turned to look over his shoulder and Foley immediately recognised the mournful arrogance of that face below the heraldic visor of the cap.

  ‘Graham!’ exclaimed Foley. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m doing what they call a mural, boy,’ said Graham. He managed to make the word sound obscene by drawing out the first syllable. He turned his head and continued to climb down the ladder. When he faced Foley, the latter saw that he had a broad smear of paint over the left cheek and the bridge of his nose. His brown eyes regarded Foley with a doggy warmth and remoteness from under the low peak of the cap. ‘I only just got started,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been bringing me many pixies lately, boy.’ In fact Foley had not seen him since that disagreement over the Cornish; but no consciousness of that quarrel showed in Graham’s face.

  ‘We’ve been going in for some new lines lately,’ Foley said evasively. ‘How did you get this job?’

  ‘Old fat man came up and asked me himself,’ said Graham. On foot too, all the way. You should have seen him when he got to me. He was on the point of collapse, boy.’ Without otherwise changing his expression Graham opened his mouth wide and panted hoarsely to indicate Bailey’s exhaustion. Then he closed it again slowly and drew the corners down to show the deadpan way in which he had played the scene. ‘ “Can I help you at all?” I asked him. “Haven’t you anywhere to bloody well sit down in here?” he said. “Give me a chair, for Chrissake.” It was a hot day, that day.’ Graham’s eyes had begun to shine with pleasure. ‘And sweat, I’ve never seen anything like it. Most people just sweat on the forehead or upper lip, but he had little beads of sweat all over his face. Just like pimples. Every now and then one of them broke and ran down his face into his collar – you could follow it down all the way. I couldn’t take my eyes of him. “What the bloody hell do you want to live up here for?” he said. He saw me watching him sweat, you see, and it annoyed him.’ Graham smiled gloatingly. ‘ “Would you like a cloth?” I said. “Or perhaps a towel would be better. You appear to be perspiring rather freely.” I didn’t look him in the eye at all, just watched his face sweating.’

  Despite fairly frequent experiences
of it, Graham’s unkindness always surprised Foley. ‘But since he’d come to offer you a job …’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know that at first. As a matter of fact I thought he was from the Council, trying to get some money out of me. He offered me ten pounds for the job and I’m short just now so I took it. I’ve only just got started. A smuggling or a pirate theme he said, so I started with a ship.’

  Foley looked up and saw that Graham had painted a single ship, very small, a galleon in full sail, high on the wall.

  ‘Taken me quite a long time to get that ship right,’ Graham said. He advanced his face towards Foley a little. ‘I’ve got ideas for this mural. What were the bloody Cornish so well known for in the old days, hey, boy? Not pirates, I don’t see them as pirates, taking their chances with a man o’ war, too much bloody opposition. I don’t see them as deep-sea operators at all. Smugglers, yes, sneaking up the beaches, bashing the odd coastguard; but the thing they did best was wrecking, luring the big ships on to the rocks with their lanterns and their warm Cornish shouts of welcome. Then they waited a bit and cut up the survivors when they were weak enough. The whole bloody village would be in it. That was your Cornish dodge, specialists at it they were, and it suits their character down to the bloody ground.’

  Graham paused, as though inviting comment, but Foley kept prudently silent, warned by the vehement spittle which had collected at the corners of the other’s mouth. What chiefly bothered him was a foreboding about the mural as a whole, and a vague commiseration for Bailey, among whose innocent commercial texts there could never have been warnings about people like Graham.

  ‘I believe Bailey is rather depending on this wall-painting,’ he said, ‘to make the place go with a swing.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll get his wall-painting all right,’ Graham said. ‘Only, I’ve got a few ideas for it, that’s all. He doesn’t know what he wants, Bailey doesn’t. Pirates, smugglers, wreckers, it’s all the same to him. He just wants his walls filling up. That’s what he’s paying me for, and that’s what I’m going to do for him.’

  Judging it better now to leave this subject, Foley pointed towards the harbour. ‘Lots of visitors this year,’ he said in conversational tones.

  ‘You can’t blame them,’ Graham said. ‘What can they do, with kids and not much money and only a couple of weeks. They get taken in by the travel posters.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s not a bad place, for a family holiday.’

  ‘See that harbour?’ Graham said earnestly. ‘You just come here at low tide. You ever been here at low tide? Take a walk round the harbour then, and tell me how many people you see snuffing up the ozone. You won’t see a bloody soul, and do you know why?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact –’

  ‘Because the place stinks, the whole place stinks. All this water goes draining out to sea and there’s about an hour when the harbour bed is uncovered. And it’s all slime, boy. Nobody goes near it because of the bloody pong. I’m telling you. You won’t see any windows open round the harbour at low tide, however hot it is, because the whole place smells of shit, and that’s your Lanruan, boy: a nice view and a stink underneath.’ Graham sighed, as though in weariness of spirit, but his eyes were bright with heartless energy. ‘Of course, it’s always high tide on the postcards,’ he said. ‘Well, I’d better be getting on.’

  At this moment Bailey came through the door at such speed that he very nearly cannoned into Foley and was unable to check his impetus until he had reached the middle of the room. Once here, however, there did not seem to be anything he immediately had to do, so there was no way of telling the reason for his haste. Remembering their first meeting, Foley wondered briefly whether Bailey put on these bursts of speed deliberately from time to time in order to give himself the illusion of high-pressure deals and negotiations.

  ‘Hullo, hullo, hullo,’ said Bailey grandiloquently. ‘What have we here?’ He shot a glance full of dislike and disapproval at Graham. ‘Taking a break?’ he said. Graham went on climbing up the ladder without answering. Bailey turned to Foley and his manner at once became bland and confident. ‘And how are you?’ he said.

  ‘Very well.’ Foley was rendered uncomfortable by this marked difference of address.

  ‘Come through here,’ said Bailey. He paused to give Graham’s back another long, nasty look, which Foley was obviously intended to notice, before leading the way past the tea-urn, through a door behind the counter, into a long narrow room equipped with a gas cooker and sink unit, a kitchen table with a formica top, and many wooden shelves bracketed to the walls. ‘Better in here,’ he said, closing the door. ‘Never discuss business in front of the men. Besides, I don’t trust that man in there. There’s something about him that I don’t trust. Do you know he lives miles away, in a shack surrounded by undergrowth, halfway up a bloody cliff? I nearly creased myself getting up there and all he did was sit and stare at me. He offered me a towel, as though I needed to rub-down, like a bloody horse. He doesn’t know how near I was to thumping him. There’s something dodgy, in my experience, about a man who lives in a place like that.’

  ‘You could have written. He’d have been down like a shot if he’d thought there was any money in it for him.’

  ‘Never commit yourself in writing. When you’ve been in business as long as I have … The bloody place was filthy too, regular pig-sty … No, I can’t say I like the man, I can’t bring myself to like him. Not that that matters, of course. Never let personal feelings get in the way of business, that’s a principle of mine. I always go for the best man, in his field, and they told me he was the best.’

  Foley wondered vaguely who could have put in a good word for Graham. It was difficult to believe that he had any friends in the village. Whoever it was had probably spoken in malice.

  ‘You have to take people’s word sometimes,’ Bailey said. ‘No time to familiarise yourself with all branches. I was told he was the best, as I say. Personally, I don’t see it. At any rate I haven’t seen it yet. One bloody boat for a whole morning’s work.’

  ‘Artists can’t be hurried, you know.’

  ‘He just grunts at me,’ Bailey said, with a transition to pathos. ‘When I ask him how things are going he just grunts. I told him he could have a tea-break from ten-fifteen to a quarter to eleven, and do you know what he said to me? He asked me if I thought he was a fitter. “A fitter?” I said. “That’s a better tea-break than a fitter would get.” Now I find him wasting time while my back is turned. No offence to you, of course.’ Bailey was silent for a moment, then raised one huge, very pale hand. With the fingers splayed he turned it slowly and let it fall again. The gesture was curiously impressive. ‘He better do the job properly, that’s all,’ he said in a hushed voice.

  Foley felt oppressed. Bailey was obviously disturbed though it was difficult at the moment to see why, exactly. Perhaps just having Graham on the premises was unsettling, like knowing there were rats about.

  There was a short silence, then Foley said: ‘The skulls you ordered are just about ready. I’ve brought one to show you, in this box.’ He handed the box over to Bailey upon whose face an expression of pleased incredulity had slowly been forming.

  ‘My, my, think of that,’ said Bailey, looking down at the lid of the box. He shook it a little as though to gauge the contents.

  ‘Aren’t you going to look at it?’ said Foley. Bailey really was extraordinary; he seemed to be regarding the skull as some sort of gift.

  ‘No, I am not. I am not going to look at it,’ Bailey said in immensely emphatic tones. ‘And do you know why? Because I trust you. Deliver those skulls whenever you like.’

  ‘The bill, of course, will accompany the goods,’ Foley said in deliberately formal tones.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Bailey said. ‘How do you like the place, your real opinion? Do you think it has atmosphere?’ He made an expansive, sweeping gesture, with his arm. It was clear that he was once again in the big-time, on the plane of negotiations,
released, at any rate temporarily, from such petty concerns as Graham’s competence. The increased plangency of his tone indicated this, as well as the amplitude of gesture. It occurred to Foley that Bailey must have a rich and vivid fantasy life.

  ‘Have you engaged any assistants?’ he asked.

  ‘Handle it all myself,’ said Bailey. ‘That’s the beauty of it, one-man business, no wages to pay.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve been in the catering business before?’

  ‘What people don’t realise, is that all businesses are the same, basically. What you need is the business brain – and business training, of course. If you’ve got those, you can run any business.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Foley, ‘you could arrange to pay cash on delivery for the skulls?’

  ‘Opening next week,’ said Bailey. ‘Just in time for the peak season. I expect a big turnover, cover my costs in a month or less. You can wait that long, can’t you?’

  ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘Not a matter of life or death, is it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, then,’ Bailey said, very loudly and heartily. ‘There you are then.’

  On this jovial note they parted, Bailey billowing with farewells, then subsiding suddenly before Foley had got through the door, in order to write rapidly in a little black pocket book he had produced from some fold of his person. Foley said cheerio to Graham as he passed, but received no reply. From what he could gather in a quick upward glance, Graham was busy in the vicinity of the galleon with some dangerously jagged-looking rocks.

  He went next to Gwendoline’s cottage, as he had planned, but there was no answer and when he tried the door he found it locked, which was extremely mortifying because it was the third time that week it had happened; he had not succeeded in seeing Gwendoline since the day she had come to tea and left so suddenly. Perhaps she was away. But when he looked through the window he saw clothing on the back of the chair, tea-things on the table. The room had the look of a room recently occupied. Quite suddenly Foley was visited by the suspicion, damaging alike to his vanity and his sense of justice, that Gwendoline was not out at all, but lurking somewhere in the house and simply refusing to come to the door. He gave a loud double knock on the door, to show her at least that he was not deceived; but it was impossible, walking away, not to feel routed, ignominious.