The Partnership

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘We could come again tomorrow if you liked,’ he said.

  Gwendoline smiled gently. ‘I shall have too much to do, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving at the beginning of next week.’

  In order not to seem too affected by this, Foley seized on a minor aspect of the situation. ‘Do you mean to say you’re giving up the cottage?’ he said. ‘Now, in the middle of the season? That’s hardly fair, you know, the landlord will find it difficult to let now. People have all made their arrangements by this time.’ Gwendoline maintained the gentle smile without apparent strain. She said: ‘It can’t be helped, I’m afraid. I can’t be thinking of his pocket when it’s a matter of my whole life. He overcharged me anyway.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Foley said.

  ‘Bernard has asked me to marry him,’ said Gwendoline. ‘That’s the point as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I see. He came and asked you, just like that.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid you don’t understand. We’ve known each other quite a long time, getting on for four years now.’ Gwendoline paused, and her tone when she went on had become perceptibly more stately. ‘We were together, as a matter of fact, in London, all this last year. You see, I’m telling you all this so that –’

  ‘Together?’ interposed Foley, but he knew from her dignified manner what she must mean.

  ‘But he began to take me for granted,’ Gwendoline said. ‘That was the trouble. I told him I wouldn’t stand it. He kept me out of his life, out of his real life. He was used to having me around. Then in the end I found out he was seeing another girl. Taking another girl out and then coming back to me! I could smell her on him.’ She was speaking rapidly now, wholly possessed by her narrative. ‘So I told him I’d had enough. Quite calmly, you know – we didn’t have a row or anything like that! I don’t believe in quarrelling, do you? I simply told him I was clearing out. That’s why I came down here for the summer. I had a bit of money put by. I don’t believe in being too dependent, do you? So I came down here. I felt I owed it to myself, if you see what I mean.’

  Foley saw that she was trying to enlist his support, to make him feel for her. But the immediate effect of her words was to antagonise him further. He felt that such frankness belittled him, neutered him almost, as though he was being regarded as some sort of eunuch retainer, his capacity for all but sympathy denied. Moreover, what she said induced a reluctant admiration for Bernard’s prowess and insolence: it was something, after all, to leap into bed with a girl like Gwendoline without so much as a pause to wash off the amorous residue of the girl before.

  ‘You took care to leave your address behind,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t want to lose touch altogether. I meant it as a sort of test for him, you see. To find out whether he really cared.’

  ‘Well it did the trick,’ Foley said. ‘It came off.’

  ‘I want you to understand,’ she said, ‘I always loved Bernard, but I couldn’t go on making myself cheap.’

  He wondered for a moment at her facility with these terms of love. It was strange, also, that in speaking of this, no doubt one of the crucial events in her life, her vocabulary seemed to drop several notches of sophistication, as though the material itself were too dramatic to require more than the immemorial clichés.

  He looked away from her in silence at the famous Ralland rocks below them which, though always called red by the local people, were in fact a dark lilac above the water and zoned in colour below, as though the sea contained acids of varying strengths: rose pink in the upper band, shading to cinnamon, then mauve, and black finally in the crabby depths round the base. Foley was struck by the flexing, spiralling light on the rocks. He saw after a moment that this was being caused by reflections from the crests of very small waves ridged up as the bay narrowed. He watched one, trying to calculate the extent of its life. Nine seconds, perhaps, from start to finish. Long enough, however, he thought, for almost anything: long enough to realise your death, for example, or for an orgasm, or the apprehension of beauty, or for any of the degrees of pain.

  He no longer had any deep sense of loss. What rankled now was a feeling similar to that which he had experienced after Moss’s revelations, a sense of having been duped. It was as though Gwendoline had advertised misleadingly, putting out fictitious details of her availability and her innocence. But why had he persisted so long in this belief? Looking at Gwendoline now he found it inexplicable. Her confession had debauched her before his eyes. Her very skin under the identical clothes would seem muskier now. The haplessness which had attracted him and roused his ferocity was clearly inalienable, however many times she was brought to bed.

  ‘Where do I come in, in all this?’ he asked finally. ‘I suppose I was just a way of passing the time.’

  ‘No,’ Gwendoline said. She put a hand lightly on his arm. ‘You mustn’t think that. You did me a lot of good, you know. You gave me back my self-respect. I was missing Bernard terribly, but I had to go through with it. I wanted to see just how strong this thing with Bernard was, and, of course, you are so good-looking, you are you know, I thought, well if someone as attractive as this can’t take my mind off Bernard, nobody can.’

  ‘But that afternoon,’ Foley said, ‘at my place, you remember.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything like that to happen, honestly. I mean, I don’t think you should, unless you love somebody, do you? It was the sight of that poor old man upset me somehow, made me feel, you know, why not? And then, you seemed to want it so much. But I was glad afterwards that nothing happened.’

  ‘Were you?’ Foley said.

  ‘I want to thank you for everything. And don’t think too harshly of me, will you?’

  ‘No,’ Foley said. ‘There must have been something, though, that caused you to dislike me. I never asked you what happened that afternoon, did I?’

  ‘I never disliked you. I don’t dislike you now. It’s difficult to explain, really. A girl likes to feel that there’s a place for her, I didn’t get that feeling with you, at all. And there was a sort of cosiness about things at your place that I didn’t like, it didn’t seem … manly, somehow, and when your partner was praising you up, I could tell you liked it, and something seemed wrong somehow, I can’t quite explain. He didn’t like me either, your partner, what’s-his-name, Moss.’

  ‘Moss, yes. Why?’ said Foley quickly. ‘What did Moss say to you? Was it because of Moss that you left so quickly that afternoon?’

  ‘It was, yes, as a matter of fact. I know it was rude of me to leave like that. He was just being loyal to you, really. He’s absolutely devoted to you, of course.’

  ‘It was while I was out of the room, wasn’t it?’ Foley said urgently. He remembered Moss’s placid face, and the demoralised bullocks. ‘What did he say to annoy you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t annoyed. He rather frightened me, you see, at the time. It was the way he looked at me, rather than anything he said, as though he would have liked to hurt me. Quite frightening. Of course he was just being –’

  ‘Loyal to me, yes I know.’ Foley began to feel rage. ‘He had no right,’ he said loudly.

  ‘It didn’t make any difference, really. I mean, I was upset at the time, I don’t mind telling you, that’s why I rushed off like that, but I was still intending to see you again if you had wanted. Then Bernard came and asked me to marry him. The very next day. He said he’d come to realise since I went away how much he needed me.’ She smiled at Foley with a sort of wary happiness, wanting him to see the marvellous element in this declaration, but Foley could find no response to Bernard’s whirlwind proposal and general princeliness, because of his mounting fury with Moss.

  ‘We’d better be getting back,’ he said. All the way back to the village and right up to the time of bidding Gwendoline goodbye, almost certainly for ever, he was quite unable to find appropriate replies to her gentle and elegaic conversation. This culminating treachery provided a reason more acceptable than any deficiency of his ow
n for his failure with her. Perhaps because of this he nursed his rage.

  ‘I wish you all the luck in the world,’ he said, when they reached the door.

  ‘You can kiss me if you want to,’ Gwendoline said, and he was surprised at the warmth of her lips. None the less, before he had gone two steps towards home he was thinking only of Moss.

  13

  Foley nevertheless withheld all expression of his resentment until late that evening. He did not want his denunciation to be spoilt by an intervening, practical issue of work. Moss was not going to wriggle out of this. So convinced was he of the rightness of his quarrel, that he forgot both his fear of Moss’s violence and the conciliatory feeling lately bred in him by being so unequivocally the object of Moss’s love.

  His opportunity came soon after his bath. Dressed in pyjamas and a dressing-gown of imitation Japanese silk with red, whiskery dragons embroidered on it – dressing-gowns were a weakness of Foley’s; he had five altogether – he was sitting turning over the pages of the Listener. This was normally a sealed-off, unimpassioned time. Pores unclogged and limbs still dazed from the mild scalding, he felt all gross secretions had been for some little while suspended, and this trance of the hormones seemed to him supremely civilised. Leafing through the Listener he felt languid, a connoisseur. Whiffs of the lavender bath salts he used liberally rose now to his nostrils from the depths of him as though distilled from his own essence. Under these circumstances the wrath he had been nursing against Moss was too liable to go drowsy. He resolved to speak at once.

  He looked up from his Listener when he was sure that Moss was not for the moment regarding him. Moss in fact was busy repairing the radio. His head was lowered, presenting Foley with a rather endearing view of the round, cropped crown. His large, blunt fingers moved gently, without haste, amongst the intricacies of valves and transformers.

  ‘I spent the afternoon,’ Foley said in a meaningful voice, ‘with Gwendoline.’

  Moss looked up immediately. ‘I wondered where you’d been,’ he said. There did not appear to be anything guilty in his expression. He returned Foley’s gaze with the intensity characteristic of him these days. ‘I took you up a cup of tea at about three,’ he said. ‘But you weren’t there. I thought you must have gone out.’

  ‘Yes,’ Foley said. ‘I was out with Gwendoline.’

  ‘So that’s where you were. Is she still around then?’

  It was perhaps the slight shade of surprise in Moss’s tone which – presenting itself as unrepentant insolence – revived Foley’s rage. ‘You thought you’d got rid of her, didn’t you?’ he said loudly. His own words angered him further. He flushed and tears pricked his eyes. ‘You thought that was the end of it, didn’t you? That’s what you thought. How dared you try to bully that girl?’ Moss’s face seemed to be slowly drawing itself into an expression of astonishment.

  ‘I hope you are pleased with yourself, anyway,’ Foley went on. ‘You succeeded in frightening her away on that occasion. You must be crazy, that’s all, you must be crazy, even to imagine for a moment that you could have had any lasting effect on her. She is far above you.’

  He was distinctly conscious of over-praising Gwendoline now, especially after her performance that afternoon; but the desire to wound Moss was so urgent that he could not care about this. He recalled with a fresh access of fury how he had tried to cover his own discomfiture by inventing the story of the phone call and how Moss had listened impassively, known the real reason all the time.

  ‘You are poles apart, don’t you know that, poles apart,’ he said, staring wildly at Moss.

  ‘I have nothing against the girl,’ Moss said.

  ‘Nothing against her? That’s very tolerant of you, I must say. She’s done you some injury, I suppose, that you are generously overlooking.’

  Moss still seemed bewildered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s done nothing to me. Nothing at all.’ He began to glance round the room as though noting the objects in it. ‘What’s she been saying, then?’

  ‘She has not been saying anything,’ said Foley, more collectedly, ‘if you mean by that spreading stories. She has simply told me what happened on that afternoon when she came here for tea.’

  His first rage had passed, leaving him somewhat depressed. He watched Moss’s slowly travelling gaze, still lighting on object after object.

  ‘You threatened her,’ Foley said quietly. ‘You made her frightened to stay in the room with you. Why did you do that?’

  Moss rubbed his hands on the insides of his knees. ‘I quite liked that girl,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like her name, though.’

  Foley stared at him, amazed. The enormity of this lie made his voice gentle when he replied, as though he were talking to an afflicted person. ‘But you know you never liked her, Michael,’ he said. ‘Right from the start.’

  ‘I did,’ persisted Moss. ‘I did like her. I thought she was a nice girl.’ He looked at Foley with a sort of solemn obstinacy. ‘She was a bit flighty, of course,’ he added. His face slackened, attempting to convey indulgence for girlish follies. ‘A bit immature, you might say.’

  ‘But good heavens –’ Foley began, then checked himself, feeling suddenly sure that Moss meant what he was saying; meant it for the moment, anyway. Moss took one in by his extraordinary, almost infantile simplicity. He had divined that the affair with Gwendoline was finished and had chosen the attitude he thought would be most acceptable. It did not seem to occur to Moss that the past could in any way invalidate his claims: he expected others to effect the same severance of past and present as he himself did. Whatever beastly things he had said to Gwendoline belonged to another plane of existence altogether. They had no reality now. He was not accountable, any more than a child who waves a broken toy in proof that a new one is needed. He even praised Gwendoline in the past tense, as though she were dead. It was a little sinister, but neither cunning nor hypocritical, this freedom from the past. It had given him the advantage over Max, that evening in the ‘Jubilee’. It was threatening to give him the advantage now.

  Foley took a deep breath. There was no sense, he perceived, in arguing. It seemed that he had Moss completely in focus at last.

  ‘She might have misunderstood something I said,’ Moss ventured after a lengthy pause.

  ‘You told her to keep away from me,’ Foley replied. ‘There was only one way for her to understand that, surely?’

  ‘I was thinking of your interests. Anything I might have said was in your interests.’

  ‘So you admit it, that’s something,’ Foley said. He was tired of the whole conversation and pursued it only from a sense of justice. ‘What do you know about my interests?’ he enquired, reaching again for his Listener. ‘Anyway, things can’t go on like this much longer.’

  ‘Not know your interests,’ Moss said, warmly. ‘I know that better than you do yourself. Supposing I did say something to her. Supposing I did. Do you think I was going to stand aside and see you throw yourself away on a girl like that? She would never have settled down, here, burying herself in the country. She was a town girl. She’d have had you back to London.’

  ‘You’ve got no right to interfere in my life,’ Foley said. ‘No right at all.’

  ‘You may be feeling upset now,’ said Moss. ‘But in a little while, when you can see more clearly, I know you will thank me for what I did.’

  ‘God, you are talking rubbish,’ Foley said. ‘It’s my resentment at your interference I’m trying to express to you, not my sorrow at losing Gwendoline. And anyway, it wasn’t anything to do with what you said that broke us up. She’s getting married to someone else, someone she knew before she came here.’

  ‘A friend,’ said Moss in vibrant tones, ‘sometimes has to do … distasteful things, for the sake of his friend. Things that go against the grain.’

  ‘I don’t think it was for my sake at all,’ said Foley sharply. He laid his hands on the arms of his chair, and leaned forward, preparatory to rising. ‘It’s no good,’ he a
dded, ‘we’re not on the same wavelength.’

  Moss stood up suddenly, anticipating him. Odd pieces from the interior of the wireless fell from his lap to the floor and were disregarded.

  ‘Careful,’ said Foley, alarmed. ‘You’re dropping things.’

  ‘You won’t understand, will you?’ said Moss loudly. His face had suddenly become flushed and patchy, strange looking. ‘You only think of yourself,’ he said. He took a step forward so that he now stood directly in Foley’s only possible line of retreat from the armchair.

  ‘We used to be happy, didn’t we?’ he said. ‘Why can’t we be like that again? Everything that was unpleasant for you, I did it. I always tried to make things easy for you. I did the cooking, kept the place clean, made out the shopping lists. I always looked after the money. Who would have done it if I hadn’t? You? You never had to worry about anything, only getting on with the business. And we’ve done well, haven’t we? We’ve built up a good business here.’

  Trapped in his armchair, Foley looked up warily. ‘I don’t deny it, Michael,’ he said soothingly. ‘I owe a lot to you. You were marvellous,’ he added, faithful to the traditional phrases of acknowledgement. ‘The way you managed! Absolutely marvellous. But you must see for yourself that things –’

  ‘Don’t give it all up now, Ronald,’ said Moss. ‘We can go back to what we were before.’ His emotion seemed to express itself mainly in an increased stiffness, even woodenness, of feature; but Foley, looking upwards, saw that his mouth hung open a little and the lower lip was minutely quivering. ‘We used to get on so well,’ he continued. ‘We had our own ways of doing things. You can’t just wipe out three years. Maybe I was wrong, speaking like that to the girl …’