The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  Moss was not easily diverted from his purpose, but after a brief pause he agreed. ‘I didn’t quite finish what I was going to say,’ he said. ‘But I can always tell you about it later, can’t I?’ And Foley knew he would, without fail.

  It did not take Moss long to get ready for the outing. He put on his invariable sports jacket, an extremely hairy cinnamon- coloured one with large leather buttons – his habit for all festive occasions. He gave his face a wash too; and it shone innocently while he waited for Foley, who always spent much longer preparing himself. Alone in his bedroom Foley was completely immobilised for quite some time by the habitual anxiety as to what should be worn for the occasion. In his mind there was an absolute standard of sartorial fitness, divorced from any actual social context, like a theory of ideal beauty for which there is no correlative in life. He chose finally his fawn, turtle-necked sweater, dark green jacket, tight-fitting trousers with a Prince of Wales check and suède boots. A last glance at his pallor in the looking glass and he joined Moss in the living-room.

  Moss drove. He said little on the way, but his sense of responsibility for the handling of the car came off him in waves to mingle with the faint odours of leather and petrol in the dark, draughty and capacious interior. From time to time Foley glanced surreptitiously at his face. Seen thus, in profile, intent on the road ahead, it had an appearance of brooding sadness. There was no trace of that demanding joviality which the exigencies of speech seemed to bring out in him. Foley was visited with feelings of affection and regret. With Moss so firmly concentrating on the business of driving he became more manageable, more negotiable as it were. It had always been at such moments, when the weight of Moss’s attention had been diverted from him personally, when he had watched Moss engaged in some neutral activity, that he had liked him best. He experienced, in realising this, a pang of regret for the old pioneering days of their partnership, the days of Moss’s reticence. It was not the facts themselves, the actual details of the relations, that troubled him so much, nor indeed their timing – strange though this often seemed – but the way in which Moss delivered them with his whole weight, this curious, disturbing intensity. It seemed that he was not so much being informed of certain of Moss’s perceptions and experiences, but invited – obliged, rather – to take on the extra burden of what it meant to be Moss. And this, he honestly felt, was beyond his capacity. He had enough with the constant running repairs his own life seemed to require. Besides, he liked people to keep their lids on; he had never had the slightest desire to pry into things, prise them open. He felt the same as when his seaside companions during school holidays had gone tramping miles along the rocks armed with long sticks with which they levered up the flat stones to see what was under them; he himself had no wish to see what ungainly creatures scuttled forth. School holidays pass quickly; and with that careful self-regard and nice sense of priorities that had always distinguished him, Foley had considered it more important to relax in the sun, fret his toes in the waves, acquire a tan deep enough to gild his acre all winter.

  From a long way off they could see on the horizon a diffused pink glow, cast by the ‘Jubilee’s’ huge, neon sky-sign. It gave them a homing feeling, coming out of the wastes to this focus of warmth and companionship. Their engine seemed to get throatier at the sight, like an animal sure of its prey.

  The sky-tinting capitals were repeated over the door in sloping blue script and the flagged threshold was bathed in pale blue, which made the face of each appear to the other momentarily ghastly as they paused to consider whether to go into the bar or the lounge. They chose, they had always chosen, the lounge; but that deliberation was part of their freedom and neither would have liked to forego it.

  The lounge was already full of people. Its familiar opulence closed round them as they entered, derived not from anything of intrinsic value there, but from the rosy twilight shed by the lamps and the impressionistic use by the decorators of red velveteen and dark oak stain, the whole combining in a sort of dust-free plushiness.

  They got pints of bitter and moved away with their drinks into the middle of the room where there was more space.

  ‘Isn’t it crowded?’ Moss said pleasurably. It took him no time at all to settle down in any gathering. It never seemed to occur to him that he might be out of place, or subject to the speculations of other people, or required to converse with them. His role as he conceived it was always external and, in a curious way, predatory. He appeared to regard the whole thing as a raid on the manners of everyone in sight, during which you stored up as many impressions as possible, till the next time you could get out. Very soon he began to make comments, too loudly, about the inhabitants of the lounge, and to repeat some of the things he heard them saying.

  Thus, for the first few minutes, Moss acted as a link between Foley and the outside world. Foley always needed to feel himself into his surroundings, by a process of minute observations and compliances, a sort of settling of the feathers. He had a great horror of being conspicuous in any way.

  ‘Those men over there are something to do with the police,’ said Moss. ‘I heard one of them say he had been to see Fabian of the Yard.’

  ‘He probably meant at the cinema.’

  ‘No, I heard him say that he had been to see Fabian, to have a word with Fabian he said. That one there, in plus-fours.’

  ‘It’s just a name to impress people with,’ said Foley. ‘That man is too small for a policeman. Keep your voice down, people can hear you.’ He was coming to himself now and able to look around with more composure.

  Moss went for two more pints. The room was very crowded now and the noise was considerable. The man whom Moss had indicated was talking in a didactic manner and those with him listened gravely. He had an enraged face, like a cockatoo’s, and he pecked at the air for emphasis. Most of these people were holiday-makers. In the rosy light they looked assured and prosperous. The men seemed all to have thick necks and confident, slightly snarling voices. The women had touched up their holiday tan with lotion and nacreous ornament; many of them wore light summer dresses and their throats and arms shone softly. All seemed comfortably aware that at home in their suburb the house was secure, the garden well watered. Foley was swept suddenly by feelings of envy and deprivation. These people looked so settled, their comfort and security established beyond question. Why was it that only his own life seemed to require these ceaseless ploys?

  Moss returned with the pints. ‘There’s a funny man at the bar,’ he said. ‘That woman over there in the green dress, sitting at the bar, she had her handbag lying on the bar beside her and that little man in the yellow pullover came up and asked for a gin, I think he’s had a few already, and she just picked her handbag up to make room for him and he said “I wasn’t going to pinch it, duckie.” ’

  Foley said: ‘She’s rather an attractive woman, isn’t she? There doesn’t seem to be anybody with her.’ The woman’s dress was cut in a deep vee at the back and Foley noticed a pale strip of skin about an inch wide going across her back at about the third notch of the spine. That must have been made by a bikini strap. As an anodyne for his envy, Foley began to imagine the patterns formed by the sun on the front of her body, the breasts flushed to just above the nipple-line, the crescents below still white, and dazzling by contrast; a dusky tide over flank and belly and thigh – broken only by the faint diagonals at the pelvis where the strings had crossed; gold and white struggling in the roots of the first tender hairs of the hillock itself, and then the milky, inviolate triangle …

  He noticed that the people at the bar were edging outwards away from the man in the yellow pullover, leaving him finally quite isolated, holding what looked like a gin. A second later he recognised the man.

  ‘It’s Max,’ he said to Moss, and it seemed to him that a rather apprehensive expression appeared on the other’s face. Moss lowered his voice so that Foley could barely hear him.

  ‘You mean the Max who is the friend of that actor?’

 
‘Yes. You haven’t met him, have you?’

  ‘The one who has been kept by an actor?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Foley, somewhat impatiently. ‘Simon Lang. I’ve told you all about him, haven’t I?’

  Moss mouthed an ‘oh’ with exaggerated discretion and looked intently across to the bar where Max was still standing. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘I always thought of him as being taller.’

  Max’s feet were still but his whole body was swaying rhythmically from side to side as though he were keeping time to some distant, reedy instrument played slowly.

  ‘He looks drunk to me,’ said Moss, after several more seconds of inspection.

  ‘He nearly always is drunk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him not drunk. But he doesn’t usually come here. He sticks to the pub at the place where he lives – the Tolreath pub. They know him there and they look after him.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because he’s so unhappy that he drinks so much,’ Moss said. There was no doubt in his tone, despite the tentative form of the words, and it was clear to Foley that Moss was already making up his mind about Max. He found himself once again oppressed by the uncouth starkness of the judgement. Trying to discuss Max’s delicate, hysterical equipoise in terms of happiness was like training a blunderbuss on a butterfly.

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s as simple as all that,’ he said. ‘Things never are, really.’ He might have gone on, but he saw that Moss’s face had already assumed a heavy, ironic patience.

  ‘You’d better meet him,’ he said shortly, and turned to start on the rather complicated journey to the bar.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Moss said urgently, and at the same moment Max turned his head and caught sight of them. Immediately he broke into that smile of terrific social delight which was all his own and flung an arm into the air. He held this pose for an appreciable moment, then began to make his way towards them with an undulating, slightly pin-toed walk.

  ‘Dear boy!’ he called from several yards away. His high, fluting voice caused a slight stir among the plus-fours group, who were still apparently immersed in criminology. They all looked round at Max and a certain stillness settled on their features. Max seemed to have some difficulty in extricating himself from this group. He began to make courteous, side-stepping motions, without getting any nearer to Foley and Moss. He nodded and maintained his smile, to show them he was still on his way. Some of his gin slopped out on to the carpet and Max said ‘Oops a daisy’ brightly to the averted face of plus-fours. In his yellow pullover, with that vivid smile and the agitated grace of his movements, he looked exotic, and frail, like an oriole among pigeons.

  ‘Such a lot of people,’ he said breathlessly, reaching them at last. ‘And the men all look at me so sternly, it’s divine. They’re not really tough, though. What this pub needs more than anything, I always think, is a few stokers, scattered here and there, in their vests.’ He grinned from one to the other of them, with cultivated impudence. ‘So nice to see you. How are all the pixies? This must be the person you keep hidden away.’

  Foley said: ‘This is Michael Moss, my partner. Michael, this is Max Nugent.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Moss said ponderously.

  ‘But you remembered my name, my second name,’ said Max. He abandoned his smile and looked at Foley with ironical surprise. All his reactions had this quality of over-elaboration, and this made him at first appear artificial to the point of silliness; but after a while artifice impressed one as necessary poise, as touching and in a way brave, seeming to reflect Max’s awareness of being in a hostile world.

  He began speaking to Moss in a gossipy, mock-confidential manner: ‘So few people do, you know. I am one of those whose surnames are seldom remembered, we are a race apart. I don’t know why, I’m sure. It’s awful, really, to be always Max or Maxie to absolutely everyone, as though one were a dachshund or one of those political cartoonists. It gives you no place in the world. I feel sometimes like the regimental mascot, if you’ll believe me. Not that I’d mind, when you think of all those busbies.’ All this time he had been keeping his deep-set, rather simian eyes fixed on Moss and now quite unexpectedly he marred the apparent seriousness of his manner by a sustained wink. Moss too had been regarding him with an unwavering intensity.

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Moss said at last, in measured tones, and Foley, even while he winced, knew that this was just another example of Moss’s tenacious sense of fitness. His sense of timing suffered like everything else, from his inability to judge the effect he was having on others. For Max, however, the remark at this juncture had a strong accusatory force and even his practised imperviousness was not quite proof against it. His face slackened with annoyance or surprise, it was impossible to say which, but a second later he was smiling again, his slightly wizened, durable smile, in which there was no mirth, and no real mockery, but a watchful, combative gleam – a duellist’s smile.

  ‘But he’s priceless,’ Max said, peering up at Foley. ‘What can you have heard, my life is blameless. You must tell me sometime what it is, in private of course. Hearing discreditable things about oneself is one of life’s greatest pleasures I always think, don’t you? It revives the illusions of youth. One felt capable of such wickedness then.’

  There were no signs of drunkenness about Max now. The unsteadiness he had displayed at the bar had quite disappeared. All the same, there was a recklessness about his speech this evening that made Foley suspect he might be primed with something more than gin. He was usually quite free in his allusions, of course, especially when he felt sure of his company. And he displayed the usual air of keyed-up frivolity, as though he were convinced that all interlocutors were basically inimical and the main thing was not to be trapped into earnestness or anything approaching self-revelation. But tonight there seemed to be some extra quality of excitement in his speech.

  ‘Don’t you think, honestly?’ he repeated, smiling up at them.

  ‘You sound like your incomparable namesake when you say things like that, or perhaps Oscar Wilde,’ Foley said, wishing suddenly to please Max. Max in fact was delighted. He raised his head and uttered his manic laugh on three ascending notes, the third one audible throughout the lounge.

  ‘That was my period,’ he said, reaching for their glasses. ‘Dear boys, let me get you another.’

  ‘Well,’ said Moss, ‘you might take that view, of course, or you might think that the good opinion of the community is well worth having and gives you something to live up to.’

  If Max was like an overwrought Oscar considerably dwindled, reflected Foley, Moss sounded like Ralph Waldo Emerson at his least inspired. He was a little apprehensive of the effect of all this on Max whose poise was in some ways very precarious, but the latter had adjusted himself by now to the double tempo of the conversation.

  ‘Get you!’ he simply said. He took the empty tankards, holding them both in one hand. All his movements had a nervous, slightly unco-ordinated grace, a quality of struggle, as though he were, in some imponderable way, hampered. ‘There’s something I’m dying to tell you,’ he said over his shoulder as, clutching the tankards and his own glass, he began to make his way back to the bar. As before, he side-stepped frequently with elaborate and unnecessary deference, as though to avoid collisons.

  ‘Quite a case, isn’t he?’ said Foley, while they waited. ‘All this archness, you know, you needn’t take it seriously. It’s Max’s persona, that’s all. I suppose it is necessary for him, but it’s all talk really, just a habit. As a matter of fact after such a long course of gin I should think the poor fellow would be impotent, if it came to it.’

  ‘I don’t think we should talk like that about him,’ Moss said. His gravity had deepened to the point of exultation. ‘You’re not going to tell me,’ he said, ‘that this is a happy man?’

  Foley was rather puzzled for a moment, then he realised that Moss had reverted to that point in their conversation immediately prior to Max’s joining them. Probably he had been put o
ut by Foley’s contradiction. He seemed in any case to feel that the interval had somehow proved him right.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Foley said. He looked across at Max who, having reached the bar by now was talking with vivacity to the blazered manager and eliciting from him a series of reluctant smiles. ‘He’s happy tonight, I think. Don’t you?’

  Moss assumed his patient expression. ‘I didn’t mean on the surface, of course,’ he said. ‘A person surely is either happy or unhappy. Basically, that is. No one could keep his self-respect living on money sent by another man.’

  There was such a depth of conviction in this last remark that Foley experienced a sudden weariness at the need to reply at all. Why had Moss taken up this issue with such firmness?

  ‘I don’t know why it is,’ he said, ‘but you always seem to choose the wrong sort of words to apply to people. Max is just constantly in a state, that’s all. You seem to be taking it for granted that there’s a sort of definite territory of happiness that Max has somehow wandered out of, that he could get back to again if he could find the way or someone would show him. I don’t think that’s true, not for anybody. I don’t believe Max was ever in such a place, even in the early days with Simon.’

  As usual Moss seemed somewhat staggered by the figurative turn the conversation had taken, but he was on the point of replying when Max rejoined them, holding the three glasses, two large and one small, between his palms with exaggerated care.

  ‘I was just saying that you seem on top of the world this evening,’ said Foley.