He switched off the light and turned his back on the scene with a sense of discretion, descending the stairs with a certain composure, as though he had terrible news to break to someone waiting below and must in duty restrain his own natural grief. Back once more, however, in the well-lit, familiar but curiously changed living-room, the magnitude of the blow came home to him fully. He was alone here, abandoned even by his assailant, with nowhere to turn. Three years’ patient work gone into those lamps and not a trace left, not a single survivor. Worst of all was the brutal severing of the line by which he had clung to his craftsman’s pride, his sense of his own distinction. He was as other men now, no samples, no showroom. It was the cruelty done to him that hurt him most, since it seemed so gratuitous. It was the first time in his life he had been dealt with so. The wrongs that are done with an object to be gained, however slight that object might be, he understood. He had suffered them, dealt them out, the petty forms of commercial deceit, the treacheries of sex, partial damage, incidental cruelties: all the attacks from which there is a refuge in custom. But before this blow he felt without resilience. There was not, however desperately he sought for it, any precedent for that shambles upstairs. He was exposed, raw. Gazing blankly from object to object in the room, Foley felt acute pain.
To escape from it he tried thinking of Moss again. Moss must have suffered a spasm of rage while waiting for him, or while packing in silence the sheer familiarity of things must have envenomed him, so that he could not bear to leave without effecting some radical change, something to record that he had lived and suffered in the house. The thoroughness of the destruction, of course, was typical. Moss was mad. One or two, in a temper, you could be sane and break. But to break them all, systematically. That was mad. How had he got at the high ones? Thrown things up at them, probably, an aerial cherub-shy. Like knocking fruit off a tree. No, not that way. The feather brush, that was it. Moss was tall. He would get a chair and stand on it and hold the brush by the feather-end and stretch as high he could and lash out. He had actually used that feather brush, and then thrown it down among the wreckage …
Moss’s using the feather brush, instrument of cherishing and symbol of loving care, for his brutal purposes, was the last straw of outrage and Foley’s fortitude broke under it. He felt his face crack into a grin of grief and thick tears welled into his eyes. He wept for several minutes, gulping and sniffing. As his weeping became less abandoned, it occurred to him that he was standing in exactly the same place as Moss had stood, when he had wept. It struck him as a remarkable coincidence and went some way towards restoring his composure. How long ago had that been? A week? All that was undifferentiated now, non-sequential, belonging simply to the time when he had possessed his cherubs.
After a while he found the familiarity of the room unendurable. He wandered for some time around the house, his face still wet with tears, pursued by pungent smells of burning from the kitchen. Finally he went to the door and stood looking out into the darkness. Nothing here could be perceived except in the sky to the seaward side a faint glow from Royle’s upper storey lights. They were in bed then. The night was dense, moonless. No sound came from the sleeping sea. But while he stood there an owl hooted once sharply and in a few moments repeated the call and after this, as though his senses had been refined by it, he became aware of a stirring around him which was not so much a sound as a sort of texture or graining of the night: moths’ and bats’ wings, trembling of grasses and leaves, the wrinkling skins of rats in the barns. He made out the vague bulk of the car where he had left it near the gate and with the sight, as though the decision had already been made and needed only that reassurance, he knew what he was going to do. He stopped only to make sure he had the car keys in his pocket. His intention grew urgent so that he dreaded finding some mechanical fault which would prevent or delay him. But for once the car started at the first attempt. The lights lit up suddenly an expanse of field and the laneside hedges, a whole new dimension culled from the darkness.
He drove quite mechanically, squashing what might have been a hedgehog at the end of the lane, as he came out on to the road. The headlights, swinging from side to side as the car nosed round the bends, lit up tangles of vegetation in the high banks, held them transfixed and frozen-looking in the white beam, like weeds trapped in ice, then slid past, releasing them. Occasionally brilliant moths or gauzy flying creatures swirled in the beam as in a vortex, sucked down against the glass of the lamps.
He came to the first houses. The village was quite deserted, the houses closed and containing their kindness. Foley felt a stab of desolation at the thought of all those people warm and safe in rooms, their ambitions intact. The Fisherman’s Arms was long since closed. The harbour water lapped softly against the walls, as Foley walked the last few yards or so to Barbara’s cottage. As he reached her gate someone on the hillside above whistled a few bars of a song and a second later there was the sound of laughter. Courting couples. He knocked softly and almost immediately heard her coming. She opened the door wide and peered out with her head thrust forward. ‘Who is it?’ she said. ‘Oh it’s you. But how sweet of you to come in the dark. I was beginning to associate you only with pure morning. Come in.’
Foley stumbled blinking into the blinding white room. He had a confused impression of the black divan, Barbara in some sort of cyclamen-coloured garment: a kimono? The glossy skull grinned at him from a bare white wall. Foley stood still in the middle of the room, bewildered by his emotion and the brilliant light. He closed his eyes for a moment.
‘Is the light hurting your eyes?’ he heard her say in an entirely conversational voice. ‘I like a strong light, personally.’
He opened his eyes again and saw her face quite close, raised towards him. Sloe eyes, unblinking; the opulent, Semitic nose.
‘Moss has cleared out,’ he blurted. ‘He’s broken all my lamps.’ The enormity of it, experienced again with this utterance, caused his voice to break. The knowledge that his distress was public, now that Barbara knew it, upset him even more. Only the sense that Barbara despised him kept his features stiff, braced against that former cracking.
‘That was naughty of him,’ Barbara said.
‘Naughty?’ The understatement increased Foley’s sense of helpless humiliation. ‘He has broken all my lamps. Every single one. Deliberately.’
‘He could hardly have broken all of them accidentally, darling,’ Barbara said, ‘Now could he?’ She had moved again and was now standing very close to him, so close that her thighs touched his legs. She did not seem to be wearing much under her robe.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t keep the moulds. Moss has ruined me.’
One of her windows must have been open because now in the silence he heard distinctly a double note from the sea-bell. It had the effect of a warning or a reminder. He wondered whether any woman could be unkinder than Barbara. ‘You don’t understand what it means to me,’ he said. ‘Can’t we have this light off?’
‘It’s the only light there is,’ Barbara said. ‘I like to see what I’m doing.’
‘I burned the eggs, too,’ he said, gulping a little.
‘Never mind,’ Barbara said. ‘You’ll get over it.’
She raised her hands without haste to his breast and as he closed his eyes once more, against the harsh light, he felt her thin, hard fingers undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Barry Unsworth won the Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, his next novel, Morality Play, was a Booker nominee and a best seller in both the United States and Great Britain. His other novels include After Hannibal, The Hide, and Pascali’s Island, which was also short-listed for the Booker Prize and was made into a feature film. He lives in Umbria with his wife.
BY BARRY UNSWORTH
The Partnership
The Greeks Have a Word for It
The Hide
Mooncranker’s Gift
The Big Day
Pascali’s Island
Th
e Rage of the Vulture
Stone Virgin
Sugar and Rum
Sacred Hunger
Morality Play
After Hannibal
Losing Nelson
Copyright © 1966 by Barry Unsworth
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
All rights reserved
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Unsworth, Barry, 1930–
The partnership / Barry Unsworth.— 1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-32147-0 (e-book)
1. Cornwall (England : County)—Fiction. 2. Garden ornaments and furniture—Fiction. 3. Partnership—Fiction. 4. Businessmen—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6071.N8 P36 2001
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The Partnership Page 25
