The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

Max drew back his head and smiled from one to the other. His eyes were very bright. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment, ‘what it is, my dears, you see, Simon’s coming.’ He said this with simplicity and a sort of finality as though this topic at least required no embroidering.

  ‘But that’s marvellous news,’ Foley said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Max, with the same delighted explicitness. ‘Yes. I had a telegram yesterday. He’s coming on Saturday. He’s going to stay for the week-end.’

  ‘He doesn’t come very often, does he?’ Moss said, seeming to surface abruptly from some rumination of his own.

  ‘He comes when he can,’ Foley said, trying by his tone to convey a warning to Moss. ‘Doesn’t he, Max?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Max said. ‘He comes whenever he can. He likes to come down here, but of course he’s a very busy person. He is in demand all the time. He’s been in Africa for the last three months, filming. You can’t expect him to get down here very often.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Foley.

  ‘Yes,’ said Moss, ‘I realise that, but how long actually is it since he was last here?’

  ‘Well, it’s a few months, but you can’t expect a famous actor, an internationally famous actor, to be free to please himself, when he has all these commitments, literally all over the world …’ Max was still smiling but his air of invulnerability had gone, and something anxious had crept into his tone, as though he were defending not Simon but himself, from some accusation inherent in Moss’s words.

  Foley noticed with horror that Moss’s expression of patience had returned. ‘Yes,’ he put in quickly, ‘we know how it is, Max. These celebrated people, they can’t call their lives their own. It’s like royalty, really; don’t you think so, Michael?’ He tried to catch Moss’s eye, but Moss was looking steadily at Max.

  ‘Is it more than a year since he was here?’ Moss said. ‘Or less?’

  ‘He likes to get it right, doesn’t he?’ Max said.

  ‘He could always fly,’ said Moss. ‘He’s got the money. If he really wanted to come he could always fly.’

  For a moment Foley regarded Moss helplessly, wondering how such obtuseness could be possible. Then suddenly the conviction came to him that Moss was not being obtuse at all: Moss, amazingly, was speaking with deliberate intention. What made him so sure of this he could not have said exactly. Perhaps it was something to do with the fixed and intent way in which Moss regarded Max; or perhaps it was one of those moments in which coincidence has to be abandoned in favour of design, when blundering becomes too accurate to be any longer believed in. For whatever reason, he knew that behind that calm and still slightly surprised face some process of calculation was going on.

  ‘It’s really great news, Max,’ he said, determined if possible to keep up Max’s euphoria, collapses from which, as he knew, were apt to be sudden and complete.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it marvellous,’ Max said. ‘He comes here to rest, you know. The strain of an actor’s life is terrible, absolutely terrible. He can forget all about the theatre here, for a while. Simon is at the top of the tree, of course.’ Max said this with great pride, but glanced at the same time in a curiously supplicatory way at Moss, as though to see how he was taking this praise of Simon.

  Foley, who had known Max to scream like a jay in fury at some slight to Simon and seen him keep off rudeness to himself with a close and quite deadly play of mockery, was astonished at this deference to Moss’s opinion, this ascendancy established so quickly. He had never seen anyone else do it. He could only suppose that Max’s usual imperviousness, his rapier arm as it were, had been dislocated at the outset when in his happiness at Simon’s coming and his assumption of the pleasure others must take in it, he had been at his most vulnerable. Moss, at least, showed no signs of letting his present advantage be lost.

  ‘Aren’t you an actor, too?’ he asked.

  ‘I once did some acting,’ Max said, raising his head and meeting Moss’s gaze at last. ‘A long time ago now. But I wasn’t any good, really.’

  ‘You stopped acting,’ said Moss, ‘and your friend, what’s his name, Mr Lang, went on.’

  ‘But I wasn’t any good, duckie, I didn’t have Simon’s talent. I was just a camp-follower. Very camp.’ Here, with an effort at jauntiness, he winked at Foley, who smiled back as encouragingly as possible.

  ‘But you’ll never know that, will you?’ Moss said. ‘You’ll never know how much talent you had because you stopped trying.’

  Max was now definitely becoming distressed by Moss’s persistence. He had given up all attempts to smile and his lowbrowed, rather monkeyish face had a chided look. Suddenly Foley noticed with absolute dismay that there were tears in his eyes. He remembered someone telling him of an occasion in the Tolreath pub when one of the drinkers had quite inadvertently said something sympathetic to Max and brought out in him a mood of tearful self-abasement which, coinciding with an excess of drunkenness, had taken all power of movement from him, so that he had clung to people, weeping, confessing old sins. If that happened here among all these people it would be terrible: they would all be regarded as birds somehow of a feather, they would never be able to live it down. Foley felt convinced that Moss was working towards this, with a horrifying adroitness. What his motives were could only be guessed at. Perhaps he was simply trying in a drastic fashion to prove his point, to demonstrate Max’s unhappiness. Or, as seemed more likely, something in Max’s initial manner, that defensive insolence, had aroused a levelling instinct, brutality masked as plain speech, as it so often is. At all events he, Foley, was resolved at all costs to avoid being classed with persons who broke into hysterical weeping in public places.

  ‘Well,’ he said, intent on saving the situation. ‘What fibs you tell, Max. You’ve never stopped acting, you know you haven’t. You are not content with life as it is, that’s the thing about you. You are always trying to make life finer, aren’t you? You improve the quality of life, Max, that’s what you do. Acting is a kind of courage.’ He had spoken only half seriously. Now he waited briefly until he saw some slight stiffening of Max’s demeanour, then added swiftly, ‘But how can anyone say what you are like Max, you are so peculiar.’ Fear of a scene had given skill to his speech. The affectionate deflation of this last remark, coming so soon after the praise, and in such contrast to Moss’s bleak insistence, delighted Max and steered him back to exuberance. He burst out again into his loud, three-noted laugh.

  ‘Peculiar, odd, queer!’ he said. He handed his glass, empty now, to Moss and raised both arms, holding them out with a sort of dainty rigidity and snapping the fingers of both hands. Then he executed a lunging tango step, graceful and rather old-fashioned. Foley saw the figure of the manager hovering at the bar, no doubt wondering whether public feeling against Max was strong enough to warrant a rebuke. Foley had no doubt it soon would be. Moss for his part showed no awareness of being thwarted: he continued to regard Max with solemn interest and concern, rather like a naturalist who has just netted a new species, slightly wounding it in the process.

  ‘It’s fun to have fun,’ sang Max in a clear tenor, throwing back his head and snapping his fingers.

  At this moment he saw Gwendoline sitting with a young man whom he did not know at the far end of one of the alcoves. She had been concealed from view until then by the persons between them, but these had cleared a space around Max as soon as he had started his singing and dancing.

  Max repeated the tango step, backwards this time and with a tricky little half-turn at the end. Moss put out an arm as though to prevent him from falling. The manager uttered preliminary coughing sounds. It seemed to Foley a good time to withdraw.

  ‘Excuse me a minute,’ he said. ‘There’s someone over there I know.’ He made his way towards the alcove. Gwendoline saw him when he was still some yards away and smiled, but not in a very welcoming way. ‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you came here.’ He regretted this opening immediately: it sounded too injured.

 
; ‘I don’t often,’ Gwendoline said, ‘but we have a car tonight, you see.’ She indicated the young man at her side, who was beginning, somewhat reluctantly it seemed, to get up. ‘Ronald Foley,’ she said. ‘He lives here. Ronald, this is Bernard Scott, a friend from London who is spending a few days down here.’

  Foley acknowledged the introduction without a great deal of warmth. He had a rather confused impression of a tall, heavily built man of about his own age, with a fleshy, big-nosed face and plentiful fair hair arranged in exact waves all the way up like benches in an antique theatre.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m putting up at the village where Gwendoline is living. Landooly or whatever its name is. All these names sound the same to me.’ He had a rich voice and the sort of assurance which would always make his difficulties discredit their causes rather than himself. He had now effectively designated the whole region as one not to be taken seriously, cancelling out whatever advantage Foley might have felt at being in familiar territory.

  ‘Lanruan,’ Foley said.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘The village where Gwendoline is living is called Lanruan.’ He had spoken with intentional flatness, but he could see. that Bernard was far too complacent to be effectively derided in this way.

  ‘You live here all the time, I believe,’ Bernard said, smiling broadly. ‘What a lucky fellow you are.’

  ‘Come now,’ said Gwendoline in an intimate, teasing voice. ‘You know you adore London. You wouldn’t live anywhere else.’

  Bernard said, ‘Oh well,’ and smiled even more broadly at Foley. Now he had London too, supreme in both the Metropolitan and Regional divisions.

  With a rush of aversion Foley saw that Bernard’s eyelashes were very long and almost white and that he had combed his hair with a wet comb; the corrugations rose one above the other at exact intervals. He could picture Bernard carefully blocking them in with a sort of light rabbit-punch action. He knew that at this point he should have contested London, dropped a few names of smart bars or head waiters, but none came to mind. Moreover he was possessed by an irrational fear of giving Bernard any clue as to his way of life in London. He decided, as always, to play safe by confirming the assumptions about himself that the other appeared to be making.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘for we provincials London always seems the centre of the world.’ I should have said ‘us’, he thought immediately, with a pang disproportionately large.

  ‘Bernard is a solicitor,’ said Gwendoline, ‘in a well-known City firm.’

  Bernard looked with mock resignation at Foley, but said nothing. There was a short silence, then Gwendoline spoke again in quite a different tone. ‘Won’t you join us,’ she said, and ‘Yes, do,’ urged Bernard.

  ‘No thank you. I’m with friends,’ Foley said, salvaging what dignity he could.

  ‘Do you mean that funny little man who was dancing?’ said Bernard, whose tone seemed to be getting more insulting. ‘He looks as if he’s had a few. Seems to have quietened down a bit now, though. Probably been chucked out.’

  Foley said to Gwendoline, ‘I’ll look in and see you one of these days.’ He wished Bernard a good stay and watched him beginning to slide down gratefully beside Gwendoline. Turning away he felt like one who has been given alms and dismissed.

  When he got back to that part of the lounge where he had left Max and Moss he found they were no longer there. Not believing at first that they could have left the pub, he spent some time looking round the room and even thought of having another beer while he waited. But he. did not want any more beer and as the minutes passed it became obvious they were not going to return, that they had left without him. This realisation so astonished him that for the moment even the disquiet engendered by the meeting with Gwendoline and Bernard was overlaid. One expected this sort of behaviour from Max, who was widely known as an erratic character – a habit of acting on the flawed impulse, a sort of impure spontaneity, had probably always characterised him. But for Moss this was a departure from all precedent: it seemed to presage the abandonment of all forms and ceremonies whatever. Standing alone in the crowded, noisy bar Foley felt the spectral presence of Anarchy.

  10

  He waited for a few more minutes to make quite sure, then went out into the car park. Their car was still there, so Moss must have gone in Max’s. If he had, he would without doubt be regretting it by now: Max was an extremely dangerous driver with a colourful history of endorsements, not reckless but seeming unaware of elementary rules, as though he had learned to drive and always driven in remote places, accessible only to his own car. The thought of Moss in this predicament – having to keep up an appearance of composure for the sake of his moral ascendancy, yet filled with apprehension at every wavering bend – made a strong appeal to Foley.

  He drove back slowly, stopping on the way to smoke a cigarette. When he had put the car away he wandered about the house aimlessly for a while, oppressed somewhat by the silence, which was emphasised rather than relieved by the very faint chime of the bell-buoy and thuds of a dazzled moth. He made coffee with a solitary, hypochondriacal sense of ministering to himself. His mind reverted continually to the latest lapse of Moss’s. What chiefly intrigued him was the concerted action of two such dissimilar people. On what basis could this sympathy have been established – so rapidly and after such an unpromising start? And what in the world could they be talking about? He recalled Moss’s attack on Simon, his deliberate attempt to undermine Max’s happiness at the impending visit. Perhaps he had wanted to strip away Max’s illusions and bring him to a rock-bottom view of his situation. If so, who but Moss would be so presumptuous? It was as though he were trying to get Max born again. And indeed there was something crudely evangelical about Moss, something of the spiritual bully, coercing people to admit their imperfections.

  His thoughts turned unhappily to the meeting with Gwendoline. It was only now that the wounds inflicted during that conversation actually began to give pain. The tone of pride in which she had declared Bernard’s profession, as though it were an Order of Knighthood; her acquaintance with his tastes and opinions, and the fluency with which she spoke of them: all this argued a good deal of intimacy. But most hateful of all to remember now was Bernard’s insolence and the way in which he had swallowed it, almost with deference.

  It had been, on the whole, a wretched evening. Still, as he sat on, the silence gradually supplied a balm, as though his present purely accidental loneliness were willed, a retreat from the stresses of the world and therefore healing. His temper indeed was almost restored and he was beginning to think of bed when he heard voices in the yard, the sound of car doors, and a few seconds later Moss himself appeared, blinking and smiling in the light.

  ‘Well,’ said Foley, ‘what have you been up to?’ He spoke lightly, almost playfully, having decided that it would be both more polite and more dignified not to seem to mind too much.

  ‘I went off with Max,’ Moss said. Something almost abashed about his stillness, and his thickened voice, told Foley he was drunk.

  ‘I gathered that much.’ Despite himself, his tone took on a certain tartness. He was irritated to see Moss’s drunkenness, irritated too by the other’s failure to explain immediately. ‘You might at least have told me you were going,’ he said. ‘Not that it matters, of course, really.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Moss replaced the smile with a look of wooden contrition, an expression difficult for him to maintain, because of the confused delight he was experiencing at seeing Ronald at last as the injured party. ‘We acted on the spur of the moment,’ he said, ‘It was wrong of us, really.’

  ‘Yes,’ Foley said, ‘you couldn’t have discussed it very long. I was only gone five minutes.’

  ‘That was Gwendoline you went over to speak to, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Who was that she was with?’

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘I
should think it was a friend,’ Moss said rather boisterously.

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  ‘That word covers a multitude, I always think, don’t you? And then, when you got back, you found we’d gone. You must have felt a bit …’

  Moss paused, as though inviting Foley to supply the word, admit his misery, and Foley perceived at last that the other was actually enjoying the conversation, a fact which if he had not been so taken up with the modified expression of his grievance he might have noticed sooner. Moss was definitely elated, there was no other word for it. The drink, probably. Still, Foley resolved to utter no more complaints. ‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Moss. ‘Yes, definitely.’ He knew he ought to explain, knew Ronald was expecting him to, but he himself had not yet understood the impulse that had driven him to suggest that abrupt departure. Or rather he had not yet put into communicable form his strong sense of the momentousness of those few minutes in the pub after Ronald had left them. He had known only, obscurely and with a sort of dark excitement, that this was an important, a crucial juncture of his life. In the silence which had fallen between Max and himself after Ronald had gone, this sense had brimmed in his consciousness, impelled him to action. It had been his idea, not Max’s, to leave without waiting for Ronald. He had known that Max would agree – his certainty of Max’s acquiescence was another element he would have found difficult to explain in any form of words; it had seemed anterior to calculation, like an instinct. So he had acted quickly, mindlessly almost, aware only of the urgent need to dissociate Ronald from anything further that might pass between Max and himself. This in fact at the time had seemed his only motive – to plant Max and Ronald as far apart as possible. He had seen how opposed to his own Ronald’s attitude to Max had been, how Ronald was really concerned only to avoid anything unseemly. He had known that he would never get anywhere with Max while Ronald was about, because what Max needed was someone to be frank with him, not to confirm his weaknesses with tact. During the first few minutes after they had left the ‘Jubilee’, Moss had thought it was simply this, that the urgency came from his impulse to subjugate Max’s self-damaging illusions. He had not realised for some time that now his own needs, not Max’s, had driven him; not until they were in Max’s car and on the road and he was talking Max out of stopping at the next pub. Not until Max had said, ‘Let’s go home then, duckie, plenty of gin at home,’ had it really come to Moss, with a mixture of fear and exhilaration, that this very glibness was what he aspired to; that Max’s style, his whole public identity, signified above all a high degree of initiation. Sitting beside a prattling Max, Moss had felt, as an increasing difficulty to breathe freely, the acknowledgement he now made less equivocally than ever before that he wanted, needed, an introduction into that world, a means of entry. This helpless recognition of his destiny had only failed, as he afterwards felt, to suffocate him completely, through his noticing that Max was driving on the wrong side of the road, a fact which changed the nature of his perturbation very considerably. Later, at Max’s house, his excitement had returned, this breathless sense of irrevocability – not caused by anything personal or particular that Max might say, but by his increasing sense of the other’s total commitment to that other camp. Max, who had suddenly become drunker, less taut, when they reached the house, seemed nevertheless to put on authority, being the first fully fledged homosexual that Moss had ever knowingly conversed with, the embodiment then of innumerable broken speculations and desires. Over the gin Max had become archetypal; for Moss too the bitter drink which he had always disliked seemed to signalise a change of heart, sufficiently unpalatable to be regarded as sacramental. He had a stealthy, metamorphosed feeling as he stood there, looking down at Foley.