It was quite late in the afternoon. The sky, which had been a clear blue when he entered Bailey’s, was curdled now with cloud, but still luminous. The sea was calm beyond the harbour wall, glazed-looking, as though it had a skin on it. Water was flowing back into the harbour, raising the little boats from the silt. A steamer crawled across the horizon, but the effort of following it hurt Foley’s eyes. His head ached a little, otherwise he felt no ill effects from the whisky. He went along the harbour, past The Fisherman’s Arms to a very small snack bar called simply ‘Snax’, whose owner had a side-line selling souvenirs and bought a few pixies from time to time. Here Foley had a rather scrappy meal of beans on toast and exchanged with some spirit remarks on business and the weather with the proprietor, who took a uniformly pessimistic view of both. Afterwards, however, he could remember nothing of this conversation, only the tendency of the proprietor’s right eye to water.
16
He drove home with conscious dexterity and found Moss waiting for him in the living-room; a Moss no longer attired in the homely habiliments of the casting-room, nor even in the hairy sports jacket of former outings, but in a square-cut, grey, double-breasted suit of old-fashioned appearance, which Foley could not remember seeing him wearing before. Nothing could have more firmly marked his break with the business. Sitting there, not quite at his ease, in the armchair, he looked like some sort of unfriendly official. He had darkened his hair with oil and swept it straight back from the forehead, emphasising the almost complete roundness of his head.
‘You ought to lock the door when you go out,’ Moss said. ‘Anyone could get in here.’
‘Someone did, it seems,’ said Foley, trying not to sound defiant. ‘You ought to be glad,’ he added. ‘Since it gave you somewhere comfortable to wait.’
‘I didn’t come just to wait for you. I came to pack my things.’ He indicated two large and battered suitcases standing against the wall. Foley looked at them steadily for some time, trying to find a way of gaining the initiative.
‘So you’re moving out,’ was all he could find to say.
‘I’m going away altogether,’ Moss said. He chewed briefly at something, then stopped and looked watchfully at Foley.
‘Do you mean to say,’ Foley said, ‘that you are clearing out now, without a second’s notice, in the middle of the season? How am I going to cope with all the work on my own?’
‘You didn’t think, did you,’ Moss said, ‘that I was going to stay on here after what happened?’
‘You speak as though I have done you an injury of some sort,’ said Foley coldly. ‘Do you consider that I have done you an injury?’
As soon as he had said this he realised that Moss was not going to answer him. It was quite clearly useless to expect Moss to embark on any analysis of the situation at this point, when he had decided to leave. Foley understood that his own rejection was implicit in this decision and that whatever anguish it had caused Moss at the time to make, nothing now could alter it, nothing could render it even discussible. The sense of his being disapproved of by Moss was what emerged most strongly – so strongly that Foley felt his comportment deteriorating rapidly, like a stage hypocrite’s when his plots have been at last detected.
‘Don’t think I’m going to plead with you to stay,’ he said as nastily as possible.
‘Nothing you could say would make any difference, I’m afraid,’ Moss said.
‘I’m not asking you to stay,’ snapped Foley. ‘You seem to imagine –’
‘I’m sorry,’ Moss said, ‘but my mind is made up.’
Clearly, he had come determined to be pleaded with. Foley perceived that the subject needed changing. ‘Where are you going, then?’ he asked, with deliberate carelessness.
‘You don’t care where I’m going,’ Moss burst out suddenly, losing his composure and flushing slightly.
‘Of course I do,’ Foley said. Moss’s sign of distress had given him some hope of an advantage, but even while he cast about for a telling phrase the other’s expression returned to its former lowering calm, and the moment had passed.
‘We are going, if you really want to know, to Siam,’ Moss said.
‘ “We,” meaning you and Max?’
‘Yes. Max tells me he has business contacts there, and it is far enough away from all his old associations.’
‘Far enough away, certainly,’ Foley said. He had not really intended to infuse this remark with any derisive quality, but Moss stiffened and said angrily, ‘I suppose you think it’s all very funny.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny at all, God knows,’ Foley said. He looked at Moss for some time in silence, at the square unlovely forehead and chin, the perpetual slight surprise of the eyebrows, the vulnerable, anticipatory mouth. The plastered hair, swept back over his almost perfectly spherical cranium, exposed his features in all their bluntness. It was not a face to stay the eyes in a crowd. It was the sort of face in fact that would never get the indulgence accorded to the more obviously and trivially eccentric, when the obsessions working behind it resulted in some sort of action. The owner of this face would always be subject to the shocked surprise of other people, because his deviations would always seem like a betrayal of conventions he so patently embodied and guaranteed. Moss might look at you over a garden gate with the same expression, and say good evening in the same way for twenty years, then after one such good evening no different from the others, go off and cut his throat or indecently assault a minor. Here he was in his clumsy suit talking about Siam.
‘I didn’t mean anything against Max,’ Foley said at last, conscious suddenly of his cold, rather hateful wonder.
‘Max is a wonderful person,’ Moss said immediately, with his trick of ignoring or not perceiving the intentions behind words addressed to him. Having established Max as a person to be defended he would go on detecting criticism where only appeasement had been meant. ‘He needs someone to look after him,’ he said. ‘Someone who understands him, who will give him the stability he needs in order to create.’
Suddenly at these words Foley knew what Moss had reminded him of earlier, what this new appearance signified. The lounge suit, antique enough, with its vast lapels and wide trousers, to be regarded as donned in the course of duty. The rather ghastly spruceness of the hair. Not an official, a nurse: a male nurse. He had all the qualities; he had acquainted himself with Max’s infirmities; he was padding already round Max in his mind as though Max were in a hospital bed. Foley could see him, in plimsolls, patting the pillows softly, bearing oranges and grapes and magazines. He would want Max to ail for ever, the two of them involved in an endless convalescent dream in which full health was at all costs to be avoided. Gentle hands, all germs slaughtered, aseptic as the body under the orderly’s suit. Hands that knew also strangleholds, if the patient grew obstreperous …
‘People like you,’ Moss said sharply, ‘wouldn’t understand.’
‘I told you I was not speaking against Max,’ Foley said, feeling suddenly tired of the conversation, and strangely discouraged too. Moss had simplified the relationship with Max to one of gifted invalid and devoted nurse. There was nothing now to be gained by hinting at complexities beyond this. A person like Simon Lang could not be rooted out cleanly, he was an integral part of the whole meaning of Max’s past. And yet it was unlikely that Moss would try to deaden the roots by making concessions to Simon and the past. His scheme of therapy for Max would tolerate no rivals, even retrospective ones. Foley felt sure he would be unremitting in his hostility to everything that Simon had ever been in Max’s life; and the roots, thus cut, would fester. He recalled Barbara’s saying that Max was beyond help. She had meant that he was untranslatable from his present context. Simon, after all, had sustained Max, more than materially. Those flying visits and long absences had given him resentments and jealousies to brood over, as well as the memories of love; and Simon’s fame had been a career for him too. What had Moss to put in place of all this? A time would surely come, in Sia
m or elsewhere, wherever an erratic prospecting led the pair, when all this would blow up in their faces. Foley wondered which of them would be the greater victim.
‘How will you manage for money?’ Foley asked.
‘I have saved a little in these three years. You didn’t know I had a separate account, did you? I was keeping it in case the business went through a bad spell. Max has a little of his own too. Simon didn’t support him altogether.’
‘No, I should think not,’ Foley said, waspishness once more getting the better of him. ‘Simon would hardly have given him so much drink allowance.’
An expression of vindictive pleasure came over Moss’s face, a startling and unpleasing lightening of the features. ‘Have your little joke while you can,’ he said. ‘You needn’t offer to buy me out, if that is what you are going to do. I’ve taken my payment already.’
‘Well, I must say that is magnanimous of you,’ Foley said, disturbed by the other’s expression but relieved at his words.
‘Goodbye, then,’ Moss said heavily, moving towards the suitcases.
‘Take the car if you like,’ said Foley, ‘and leave it with Reg at the garage.’
‘No thank you,’ Moss said. He had lifted the cases now.
‘At least let me wish you good luck.’
‘We don’t need your good wishes,’ replied Moss. ‘And you won’t feel like that for long anyway.’ Nevertheless, he turned to face Foley, still holding the cases. Their weight effectively prevented any gesture he might have liked to make. For a moment his face had the open, stricken look which with him indicated emotion.
‘What do you mean?’ Foley asked, but Moss turned abruptly and went out, carrying the cases. Foley watched him go down the path towards the gate. He did not look behind him. The cases, which must have been quite heavy, did not appear to incommode him. For a few seconds, watching that stalwart back in the ill-fitting suit, Foley was swept quite unexpectedly by feelings of envy. Moss was brave and strong and loving and had, or thought he had, a destiny which he was striding off with his horrible suitcases to meet. Moss boldly accepted the necessities of his life, while he – what did he do? Cowered here, spiritless, without substance, afraid of the abyss.
Moss had barely passed through the gate and disappeared behind the hedge before Foley’s mood had passed to one of cautious rejoicing at the thought of not having to pay him any money. Moss had been most generous. He had asked for nothing when he might have demanded much. He might at least have asked for his capital back. Plus interest. It would have been awkward, finding a sum like that at present. He needed the money behind him, now above all, when he was about to branch out a bit, get out of the pixie business. Moss had not even asked for the fare to Siam. He had in fact behaved like a gentleman. Foley felt an appreciative warmth. Good old Moss.
He became aware of hunger. The beans on toast had not been very sustaining. He went into the kitchen but had no idea what to cook. Moss had always done that. After rather aimless explorations he found some eggs. He would have boiled eggs. He put three eggs in a pan of water and lit the gas under them. Later, perhaps, he would engage a cook. Cook and housekeeper, female of course. He would advertise. Please send a recent photograph with your application. He went back into the living-room and sat down to wait for the eggs. The silence of the house settled round him. Dusk was gathering outside and after a moment or two he got up again to light the lamps. Almost immediately several moths began fluttering and thudding round the milky globes.
Pixie production, of course, was more or less at an end. For this season, anyway. He couldn’t do the work of both of them. Besides, he didn’t really understand the preparation of the plaster, nor the process of casting. Too late in the season now to engage anyone, even if a reliable person could be found. Perhaps a female assistant. Please send a recent photograph. No, this season would have to be written off. Some money perhaps would have to be returned. He would have to live on capital for a bit. In the autumn, when he could get around with the cherub lamps, none of this would matter anyway. No one with half an eye could fail to recognise the excellence of the cherub lamps. Moss had prevented him from getting ahead, had been too cautious. He had meant well but he had no vision, that was his trouble, you had to have enterprise, you had to be capable of the large gesture. That’s a maxim of mine. Something continued to trouble Foley without his being able for the moment to fix it precisely. Something about Moss? ‘I’ve taken my payment already.’
It was quite dark outside now. Foley got up to draw the curtains and sat down again in a different chair, one of the two hide-covered club armchairs they had got from a local sale for three pounds each. A bargain. He lit a cigarette, remembering how Moss had carried the chairs in himself one after the other on his back into the house. He had obediently put them where he, Foley, had thought they looked best. He had always deferred, in matters of taste, to Foley, the arbiter of elegance.
Through his mind as he sat smoking there passed a succession of images of Moss, each one sharply distinct: Moss as it were frozen in characteristic attitudes, swinging an axe to chop wood, lifting a bucket of water, prising out the pixies from their rubber pods. And despite the diversity of the actions, Moss’s expression remained almost constant: always credulous, possessing only the narrowest range. For nearly the whole period of their association, Moss’s face had scarcely changed at all.
Then, abruptly, as he reviewed the last few weeks, that calm surface was damaged, cracked across. Moss’s hurt and confiding voice in the dark, his eyes brilliant with desire, then full of tears, his face mysteriously contorted in that embrace, then closed and sullen with hostility. Moss had cracked up in the stress of this particular spring. It was the fire of spring that had buckled him. With gathering speed the images flashed through Foley’s memory, dangerous now and violent, always violent: the bolt stripped of its thread, Moss’s numbing grip on his arms, the slashed thistles, Simon staggering back with his hands to his face, the blood on the dog’s muzzle. He knew now what had happened to those crushed pixies on Moss’s work-bench. And he remembered suddenly the last expression of all, that curious and uncharacteristic expression of malice or vindictiveness that had lighted Moss’s face with a sort of happiness in the moment before he had turned to go. I’ve taken my payment already.
A dreadful suspicion chilled him, for a moment, with a goose-flesh awe, then with sweating apprehension. He got up and made his way out to the passage. There he was arrested by a strong smell of burning coming from the kitchen. Rushing in he found that all the water had boiled away. Charred remnants of eggs adhered to the blackened bottom of the pan. Pausing only to turn off the eggs, he went back along the passage to the rear part of the house and began to mount the stairs towards the attic. He ascended mindlessly, not comparing his sensations to anything, not fully admitting his fear, rather as though he might just conceivably have lost something of great value or unique beauty and was, without conceding the possibility of loss, checking up stealthily.
Looking into the room he knew with anguish, even in the darkness, that all was not well here. Instead of sweet dust and cobwebs there was a sharp smell of slaughter and from all sides intimations of violation and disarray. For some moments he stood there in the dark, mustering what fortitude he could. When he moved to the switch of the overhead light, he trod underfoot something substantial yet yielding, that resisted briefly before subsiding with a dry grinding noise.
The light revealed a scene of carnage worse than he could have imagined possible. His seraphs and cherubs, defenceless on their stands or brackets or suspended from their beams, had been battered to pieces. Systematically. By what seemed blows of some heavy but wieldy instrument, blows of extreme violence which had sent mangled limbs flying to all corners of the room. The floor was littered with golden fragments bleeding white. In the clarity of the first shock Foley saw that pieces still hung from their wires or adhered to brackets that resembled model gibbets now, draped with dismembered felons. Here a body had been s
truck off at the neck and sent flying to shatter into fragments against wall or floor, leaving a trunkless golden head, its curls intact, its blind ecstatic gaze unwavering. Here nether limbs still writhed beneath a bent lamp shade, the torso gone, stark white dust spilling out like powdered intestines.
Foley stared about him, aghast at the thoroughness of the execution. This had been no random, petulant gesture. Nothing had been spared. His pride, the large angels planing on outstretched wings high up in the ceiling, had all three of them been dashed to the ground. Even the lamp shades and the stands had been twisted and rent and glass from the shattered bulbs littered the floor and made it treacherous. His feather brush lay amidst the debris. Moss’s onslaught – it could not be anyone but Moss – had exposed without pity the unenduring, tawdry nature of these creatures. The suavely rippling limbs, clad in gilt, would never without this wreckage have given the beholder cause to suspect that they were stuffed with dust only, lacking fibre and grain. It was this that rendered their remains so disgusting, denying them the dignity that would have been retained by fragments of metal or wood or stone. There they lay, leaking their vile dust, not even remains, simply rubbish now, a litter to be swept up quickly.
Now he understood the contempt there had been in Moss’s voice when he had referred to the unlocked doors. With the strange and probably slightly mad discontinuity of his nature, Moss had been able to regard with scorn that carelessness, which had been through his agency – impersonal now, all passion spent — the cause of Foley’s loss. In the last moments, before the extent of that loss overwhelmed him, while he was still able to consider the havoc as a sort of universal disaster, not to be supported by him alone, Foley considered the pitiful shreds of angels that still hung from the ceiling and thought that they bore a strong resemblance to the revolving clay figures that he remembered seeing at fairground rifle ranges, hanging splintered and formless after the shattering pellet.
The Partnership Page 24
