His drive home was occupied by bitter thoughts and when he got back he found that Moss too was missing, a most unusual thing. He stood for some minutes in the casting-room, sniffing the austere, baked smell. The pixies Moss had been working on stood stark white in their plaster in a row on the trestle table. The ovens, cooling, creaked intermittently. The room was loud with Moss’s absence. It wasn’t Sunday. What could Moss be doing, where could he be?
He left the casting-room and made his way slowly up to the attic studio, feeling the silence of the house around him. In here it was quiet, with a whisper of spiders. Foley had washed the windows recently, removing a thick coat of dust and cobwebs, and had been amazed at the improvement in visibility – he had been assuming dusk to be a permanent condition here. Of course you lost the mystery, the selectivity, of artificial light; the sudden golden sprawl of limbs below their shades. But daylight gave a total impact, a massiveness, that in Foley’s view more than made up for this.
All the windows were closed. All the morning’s warmth lingered in the room. The cherubs and putti hung listless on their wires, barely stirring. In this light they were paler, yellower, bloomed with dust. Foley stood still in the middle of the room, breathing devoutly through his mouth. All his doubts and sorrows left him.
It was impressive, no one could deny that. Two years’ work in this room. And now, as soon as the season was over, he would be ready. He could get started. He still had contacts in London, from his modelling days. He would issue invitations, on specially designed and printed cards, to visit these showrooms. Agents and travellers for the big department stores would be bound to come, they were always on the look-out for new ideas. He could secure contracts, work all through the winter developing new lines, escape finally from this trumpery trade of pixies, and the tyranny of seasons.
He went over to one corner of the room and took up his long-shanked, specially devised cherub-brush which always rested against the wall there. Much thought had gone into this brush. It had a cane handle several feet long and a tuft of pigeon feathers at the end – not tail feathers, which might have scratched, but the soft, short breast feathers. Wielding the brush firmly yet delicately he skirmished among his creatures, dislodging the dust from their dimples and orifices. His face grew absorbed and his tongue protruded slightly. The touch of the feather set many of the cherubs in motion and Foley, pausing among them with the long brush held aloft, his face raised reverently, resembled a figure in some disordered Assumption.
8
Moss, meanwhile, was walking on the cliffs. He had left his work on an impulse of restlessness increasingly frequent with him in recent days. At times, alone in the casting-room, impatience rose in him, like a criminal impulse. He would grow aware at certain moments of the terrible discrepancy between his outer, observable self, the patient ministrations of his hands, the periodic trips his body made to and from the ovens, and the other part of him which no one could see. This tension could often be relieved, he had found, by whispering words to himself, almost any words would do. ‘Testing, testing, testing,’ he would whisper, ‘are you receiving me?’ Or the words of songs passed repeatedly through his mind, impelling him in the end to utter them in the same whispering voice. Quite frequently, too, he was troubled by a sort of arbitrary dredging of his memory, which brought up old, incongruous things connected with his former life, before he had known Foley. Things he did not know he had remembered now attacked him with their irrevocability, the big round clock on a certain office wall, a garden gate with a number on it in white letters, things which had never been important. Yet the memory of them was now attended with anguish; and his heart laboured as though he were engaged in a physical struggle to shift them.
In the midst of this he would experience from time to time a sudden luminous focussing of his thought on Ronald, like a visitation; and then certainty descended on him, a sense of peace in the lineaments of Ronald’s face, the face of the photograph in the bedroom usually, so noble and still. He thought of the face always as efficacious, healing; the fine luminous brow, the serious eyes. There seemed to be, while he could cling to this image and keep it pure and untrammelled, a refuge against the violence that rose within him more and more frequently these days, the desire to smash and disfigure things, the tearing urge to be delivered from his own clumsiness and patience. He could never possess this safety for long because however hard he tried to isolate the face, seal it off from its own sneers or the effect of some remembered unkindness, it could not be managed for more than a very short time. Before long some chance remark of Ronald’s or simply some remembered movement or stance – Ronald turning from a window, Ronald standing still in a white shirt – would come to destroy his certitude, and he would be possessed by an anxiety which could only increase as similar images came flooding in on him, Ronald in a hundred trivial attitudes and occupations. The result was a kind of unlocalised pain which caused him to frown and whisper at the pixies. At these times everything – even Ronald’s enthusiasm and ambition – seemed like dangers to their partnership; and then, at the threat of loss or change, the violence would flush in him again, the revolt at his own acquiescence; and only with difficulty could he restrain his impulse to take the nearest pixie, set it down in some convenient position, and use his fist like a hammer on it.
Such an impulse now had driven him out. He walked slowly, with dogged thrusting movements of his thighs, through the summer vegetation of the cliffs. He had frequently to climb over low walls of unmortared stone which, following the curve of the hills, were edged on either side by a strip of lush green like fat round a bone, contrasting with the paler, quick-wasted grasses on the open cliff side. Gorse blazed in the sunshine, filled the air with its sweet, excessive odour; but the sea-pinks were finished now, spent with May, almost colourless under this leeching sun. Huge, virulent foxgloves had replaced them, their flaring magenta linked the cliffs like beacons, in the midst of glossy nettles and the pale new leaf of brambles. Below, the sea was ridged with small indentations, dappled with shadows that scuttled continuously across its surface as quick clouds moved across the sun. There was a single fishing boat out to sea and in the sky overhead a kestrel loitered on sharp wings. Moss’s feet in the bleached grass disturbed hordes of thin brown grasshoppers.
He descended through a narrow rocky cleft lined with ferns and broom. An occasional stunted elder writhed its moribund branches across the path and Moss was obliged to stop and insinuate his body through the branches since there was not room enough to walk round. Several times he did this without thinking. The branches were damp and slippery and a thick green mould rubbed off them on to his hands, and the breast and sleeves of his jacket. Then, as he was half climbing, half crawling through one of the elders, he was halted by the very strangeness of what he was doing, this probably unprecedented and almost certainly never to be repeated series of actions: a man creeping through a tree. And at this moment a cluster of shiny green elder fruit, a few inches from his nose, began to remind him of something. He paused, still involved in the branches, in an effort to remember. For a moment no thought came into his mind. He stilled his breathing. It was as though his whole life was in abeyance, waiting for the momentousness this unusual position had conferred on his body. He waited calmly and after a while he began to remember.
The fruit was like frog-spawn, frog-spawn in brackish pools below allotment gardens near where he had lived as a boy. Fishing in the frog-spawn pools with home-made nets, fishing for the newts that you never saw unless you caught them, because they lived in the dark ooze of the pool bed. You scooped up netfuls of liquid mud, hoping that when the mud had drained away through the meshes of the net you would find the wriggling iridescent reptile there. He had gone fishing there one day with another boy of his own age, a fair curly-haired boy whose name he had long ago forgotten. Two girls had appeared and sat by the side of the pool watching them; bold, talkative girls with sun-tanned legs; nameless, gypsyish girls from nowhere, existing only in tha
t one scene by the pool, before and after too remote even for speculation. They had watched ironically at first and then with open mockery and teasing, sitting at the side of the pool with their skirts up over their knees, loose summer skirts that they twitched and drew forward and flicked back again and which were constantly falling away from their slender, active legs. Moss remembered with shame and a kind of impotent rage his own extra grimness of absorption and how his companion had exchanged gibe for gibe with the girls, leaving the fishing finally to sit near them, talking and laughing. He himself, before a scrutiny now three-fold, had gone on doggedly scooping up the mud, sullen and ridiculous. How old were they all then, eleven, twelve? He had seen one of the girls raise a hand carelessly and scuffle the other boy’s hair. ‘What lovely curls, you should of been a girl,’ she had said, and his friend had laughed. ‘I’m not though, am I? I could prove it if you liked. Would you like me to prove it?’ So witty and so bold had been this retort, that Moss had not been able fully to believe that he and the curly-haired boy occupied the same planet; and for years afterwards it had seemed to him a supreme verbal felicity. The other girl, though, had perhaps been interested in him, attracted in some way by his aloofness. She had tried repeatedly to goad him out of his silence; but he had remained dumb. And then at last he had caught a newt in his net, seen the creature wriggle free from its accretion of mud and assume its lithe and wary form, its bright, resigned gaze. Turning to the three of them in his pride and loneliness, holding up the net, he had demanded, ‘What do you think this is then?’ and been amazed, overwhelmed, by their unanimous laughter. Now, after nearly twenty years, he could understand that laughter, see how discordant to their mood his demand had been, how comical. But he felt now there was a more important question behind. Lying against the damp branch, he considered gravely. Those two girls had appeared so promptly by the pool, stayed for that time only. It was difficult now not to think they had been provided specially; but if so he had missed a chance, failed to take an offer that had not been repeated. They had been girls apt for hot experiments, leggy and careless; he remembered their dexterity with the skirts. Perhaps one of those girls, the one that had gone on talking at him (but who had also laughed), if he could have gone with her somewhere quiet and screened from view, might have revealed some joy to him while there was time. Then, in childishness and guilt some essential sweetness might have been shown him, an appetite fostered, a direction set. Then, there had been time.
Slowly Moss disengaged himself and continued along the path. He resolved conscientiously, as he went along, to tell Ronald of this incident in his boyhood at the earliest opportunity. He would try to convey his sense of the irrevocability of that distant retreat. He looked forward to these sessions with Ronald, the triumphant facility of speech he discovered in the dark, the sense of immunity.
After a few minutes the path broadened and flattened into a kind of marshy plateau, screened on three sides by steeply rising ground and on the fourth by a sycamore of venerable girth and low, sweeping branches, which presumably owed its existence, in that otherwise treeless place, to the sheltered position and the presence of water underground. As Moss emerged from the tangled path, practically the first thing he saw in the clearing was a black-faced ram crouching under the sycamore looking straight at him. What was a ram doing here? And it didn’t move even fractionally when it saw him, which in itself was strange. Then he heard a concentrated, stealthy buzzing and saw the glints of flies round the ram’s head. Still he was puzzled by its uprightness and thought it must be sick until looking closely he saw it was not crouching but trapped there and held upright by black mud; the spring below had seeped through here and made a bog several yards in extent, which though caked grey elsewhere was gashed black round the ram’s body. The creature’s legs were stuck fast and invisible, and the mud had risen to its breast and held it firmly braced. Its eyes were open mildly, and so natural and reposeful was its position that the fact of its death was difficult to accept, strangely disconcerting. He could detect no signs of violence or infirmity: its tightly curled, sand-coloured fleece appeared in good condition and the mild, libidinous face was quite unmarked.
He was perplexed by the question of how the animal could have reached that point, since behind it and all around the deep mud was crusted over. It must have come down from the cliffs, perhaps using the same track as he had, to drink at the watery verges of the bog, and waded in too far. One thing seemed clear, the ram had starved to death, not suffocated.
The flies round its head were vivid blue and green and their combined buzzing made a sound like distant adorations; their wings and bodies, traversing the zones of sunlight shafting down through the sycamore leaves, flashed with a brief and gauzy radiance; and this was all the sound, all the movement there was in the clearing.
Turning away from the creature’s mild gaze, Moss climbed up the slope beside the tree, using the lower branches to help him, and abruptly the closed world of the bog was left behind as he once more confronted the great sweep of the cliffs, the immense sea. But all the way home thoughts of the dead ram occupied him, and chiefly the fact that at the moment of death, the moment of release, the ram could not possibly have moved; not even the least bit, since by then it would have been too weak and, moreover, settled in its final position in the mud, posed irretrievably. It had not so much as declined its head or closed its eyes. There had been absolutely nothing to distinguish that moment from any other during the hours and days the ram must have stuck there dying. This seemed wrong to Moss. His mind continued to protest vaguely against it, even when he was back in the casting-room again, working on the pixies. He was affronted by such a meek manner of dying; though he did not formulate it in words he demanded that death should be more marked, more definite. Otherwise, death invaded life. He felt himself, as he chipped away at the pixies, intensely alive. He felt the power in his body and knew how it would struggle and convulse itself before submitting to die.
Certain small sounds overhead convinced him that Ronald was up there with his cherubs, but he did not pause in his work. From time to time his mouth shaped words without uttering them.
9
That evening Moss made pancakes for tea. He made them exactly as Foley liked them, not too puffy, lightly coated with a sweet lemon paste of his own invention. Foley ate largely of them, and said admiring things during the meal about Moss’s skill in cooking and efficiency in domestic matters, compliments intensely gratifying to Moss, in spite of his modest disavowals, so much so indeed that in the end he became quite flushed with pancakes and pleasure. It was like old times. All the time he was washing up he whistled piercingly indistinguishable airs, but even this could do nothing to ruffle Foley who had settled himself in the living-room all set for a studious evening reading a Life of Benvenuto Cellini, a craftsman with whom he felt he had a lot in common.
Tonight when the washing-up was over, Moss felt so happy that he wanted to involve Foley in his thoughts without waiting for bed-time. He sat for some time in silence, his hands between his knees, regarding with the accustomed mixture of pleasure and pain the naturally graceful reclinations of Foley’s body as he moved in his armchair. ‘Oh … Ronald …’ he said.
Looking up from his book, Foley saw Moss’s solemnly confiding face aimed at him from the sofa. He knew that look. Moss’s mouth moved for a moment without speech as though slightly convulsed by the pressure of its imminent disclosures. Foley sought desperately for some way of eluding the confidences that were to come; but nothing presented itself.
‘I had rather a strange experience today,’ said Moss. ‘While I was out walking. I was going down this path, this very narrow path, and I had to keep stopping all the time because of the trees. They were growing across the path. Elderberry-trees. I had actually to crawl through the trees because there was no room to get round. The path was very narrow, as I say, and these trees were growing right across it. There might have been a way round actually but I found it easier to work my way
through the branches. What I mean is, I didn’t stop to look for a way round …’
A suffocating impatience rose in Foley. He felt an impulse to halt Moss by making some unexpected demonstration – uttering a series of shrieks for example. It was not only the intrinsic boringness of what Moss was saying at that moment, but the accumulation of all their previous sessions. Foley had reached a point at which the mere assumption by Moss of his Ancient Mariner voice, flat, rapid and monotonous, was enough to set him helplessly grinding his teeth and digging his finger nails into his palms. Yet he had so far concealed these frantic symptoms from Moss – out of innate politeness, as he liked to think; but he was aware of a deeper reluctance.
‘The path was very narrow,’ Moss said. ‘So every minute or two I had to stop and sort of crawl through these trees. It’s a funny feeling, crawling through the branches of a tree. It’s not exactly climbing.’
He paused for so long at this point that Foley was able to bring off a coup. Rapidly he narrowed his eyes, dropped his jaw and nodded his head up and down several times. ‘That must have been a remarkable experience, Michael,’ he said. ‘I can see what a remarkable experience that must have been.’
‘No, but just a minute –’ Moss began.
‘Having to stop like that,’ said Foley, ‘every few minutes and go through those peculiar motions.’ He went on quickly, before Moss had time to gather himself. ‘I don’t feel much like reading tonight, do you? Shall we go down to the “Jubilee?” It was, he thought, distinctly the lesser evil; Moss was quite clearly set for the whole evening. At least in the pub there would be distractions, a less enclosed feeling, the prospect of intruding acquaintances.
The Partnership Page 13
