I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “It’s soap,” she said, raising her voice.

  I said nothing.

  “It’s soap opera,” she said loudly.

  And she was angry.

  FROM A

  FAMILY ALBUM

  I returned to England to see my daughters who live in different parts. Early this March I returned to Cornwall, to St. Ives, to see the youngest who was starting work as a French teacher. While there, my late wife’s mother, Christine, eighty-one and on her own, had a fall near where she lived in Redruth.

  I took the morning train. And bought two hot pasties from the bakery in Redruth near the railway station, where I could smell fresh bread, and flowers (yellow roses) from a seedy florist on the road to her cottage. And I had a tin of Canadian salmon.

  I always bring her a tin when I come over.

  “I’ll keep it,” she said, “for a special occasion.”

  We sat in the small main room (a mixture of neatness and disorder) with little daylight. Ate, slowly, the pasties. They were still warm. She only ate half of hers.

  Old Staffordshire plates were propped up on the dark wooden dresser. And in front of them, photographs in simple frames. A black and white of her late husband, Sydney, when he was young. He is dressed for the occasion. Dark straight hair combed back, a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. He is smiling.

  I remember him as a handsome man reluctant to take risks. Because of asthma, he was in the Home Guard during the war. And worked as an accountant in a company that made containers: for toothpaste, shaving cream, and shoe polish. When he went off in the morning, in his homburg, carrying the Daily Telegraph and a brown leather case, he looked elegant. But he had to stop, struggling for breath, before the station slope, and use his atomizer. He also worried about losing his job. And taught himself to be a carpenter. When we married he gave us a wooden folding ironing-board that he made without using a nail. And on the day the doctor told him he had six months to live he went straight home and built his coffin.

  His younger brother, Albert, had been a lieutenant colonel in the British Army in India. After the war, Albert started a dating service in Brighton where he lived. When that didn’t work he started a business assembling crucifixes on wooden crosses. Then sold them to Catholic institutions, hospitals, bookstores. When he became bored with that he left his wife and children in Brighton, bought a trailer to his car, drove to a field above a deserted beach in Cornwall, and wrote two novels which did not find a publisher. Sydney and Albert’s favourite uncle, Stanley, was in the British Army. Sent to Canada. A Canadian winter finished him off. He is buried in a military cemetery in Quebec City.

  Next to Sydney was a black and white photo of Christine when she was the manager of a small Express Dairy by the station. Outdoor-looking, lots of energy, active in sports and Girl Guides. She did everything in a hurry and, when angry, slammed doors. They both liked musicals, especially Harry Welchman. In the house she sang:

  Blue heaven and you and I

  And sand kissing a moonlit sky

  The desert breeze whispering a lullaby

  Only stars above you

  To see I love you

  In January 1952, Elizabeth and I were married. Then went to live in Cornwall. When we were leaving for our first holiday in London, the taxi brought us to Penzance open-air station. As we walked by the standing train, I saw an elderly man in a camel-hair coat get on. Sometime after the train started, while Elizabeth stayed in our seats with our ten-month-old Ellen, I went into the dining car to have a coffee. The only other person there was the man in the camel-hair coat. We got to talking. He said he now lived in the country near Penzance. And asked what I did. Having just had a first novel published, I said I was a writer. He said he was Harry Welchman.

  The name meant nothing to me. I remained silent. He said: “I’m the Red Shadow.” I said that I was brought up in Canada and had not long lived in England. He said, before the war, he was well known in the West End of London. Suddenly he began to sing, the opening lines of The Desert Song. And this medium-height, elderly man, red in the face, largish nose, filled the empty moving dining car with a magnificent sound. Then just as quickly he stopped, slightly embarrassed.

  On Saturdays, Sydney went to the public library in Eltham High Street and came back with books for the week. In the front rooms, in with his books on accountancy, there were editions of W. H. Hudson, Conrad, and Thomas Hardy.

  Chris went as far as elementary school but kept in touch with her teacher (a widow, Lily Hay) long after Lily Hay retired. Chris pronounced Michigan ‘Mitch-igan.’ Menu, ‘mean-u.’ And when, as a widow, she came with us on a day trip to Dieppe, her daughter said, “When you want to say everything is all right, OK, say d’accord.” When Chris said it, in public, she said Dachau.

  Whenever she phoned from the lobby of a hotel, she put on what her daughter called her posh accent.

  Beside the photograph of Chris there was a photograph of Chris’s mother, Grandma, a Jehovah’s Witness. When she was in her eighties. A tall woman, now stooped, in a new hat and coat, about to board a ship at Southampton for a Jehovah’s Witness get-together in Germany. She became a Witness after her husband was killed in a road accident.

  “Left with five small children, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the Bible, opened it, and read: ‘“Go out and do good.’”

  Then a photograph of Chris’s late daughter, Elizabeth (my wife), when a schoolgirl. Someone had hand-coloured the blue summer-dress, the short blond hair, the blue eyes. She looks like her father. And smiles like him.

  But the room, the cottage, was dominated by Chris’s paintings. Unframed they were everywhere. On all the walls. In the entrance hall, in the main room, in the small kitchen, on the side of the stairs, in the toilet, and in the two cramped bedrooms upstairs. They were copies of other paintings. And they were all unbelievably bad.

  One, a small seascape, she had not copied. I told her it was the best thing she had done.

  “I painted it in Scotland while on holiday. You can have it. Why don’t you take it?”

  “I don’t want to take it now.”

  It was a good visit.

  She talked about her mother when her mother worked (before she married) as a teacher on the Royal Estate in Windsor. And how, after her mother died, she went to Windsor and was shown the handwritten punishment cards where her mother recorded who was caned, who was sent out of her class. She insisted on going up the stairs (one at a time, with her stick) and came back with copies of these punishment cards. They gave them to her as a memento.

  “You can have them,” she said.

  I remember Grandma coming with Chris to see us in St. Ives. She always had on some little thing we had given her: a silver maple leaf, a brooch, a scarf. She never tried to convert us to being a Jehovah’s Witness. But after a visit we would find a copy of Awake on the piano. In summer she would walk down to the front and the harbour. And sit out the afternoon on one of the green benches. Listening to the Salvation Army Band at the slipway. When she came back, she came back smiling.

  “Everyone talked to me.”

  Then all of us (the children as well) sat around the kitchen table having tea. And Grandma, her eyes opening wide, talked about her grandfather.

  “The miser. He would sit at the kitchen table with tea in a glass and cut the flies that landed on the table with a knife.”

  And about a brother, Willie.

  “He went abroad and married an African person. He sent us photographs of his fine and handsome children.”

  On another visit (as they were leaving) our Cornish neighbour, Martha Leddra, a spinster in her late seventies, a ship’s captain’s daughter, a strict Methodist, on her hands and knees scrubbing the outside granite steps to her house, called out to Grandma.

  “We’ll go off to the South of France,
my girl, and you shall spend all my money.”

  The last time I saw Grandma was in Truro Hospital. Very alert. She said to Chris, who talked about her going home, “Do you think I ever will?”

  As we said goodbye, Judith blew a kiss. And Grandma put both her hands to her mouth and waved them towards us.

  Then Chris talked about her teacher, Lily Hay, who had died since my last visit. She looked shocked as she told me that Lily Hay’s son, a doctor, had left his wife to live with a man. And because of that, Lily Hay left all her money (her husband had been a builder) to a society that arranged séances. Then she told me about her annual treat: going with her art class to London to see this year’s Royal Academy exhibition. Afterwards, a good meal at Simpson’s in the Strand. And in the evening, a musical (this year it was Spread a Little Happiness) before coming back.

  When I left her, I left feeling cheered up as I walked through the rundown streets of Redruth to the railway station. No train to St. Ives for two hours. I got on a train that was there going in the opposite direction—to Truro.

  I hadn’t seen Truro for several years. It hadn’t changed. Not the turning road, the narrow sidewalk, down from the station. The bookshop at the bottom with books on trains in the window. The store where I would buy Manx kippers and homemade Kea plum jam. By the Cathedral, feeling hungry, I went into a restaurant that had red chequered tablecloths. It was crowded and noisy. And those inside seemed to know one another. On the walls were black and white faded photographs of people in old-fashioned clothes. On the wall where I sat, there was a photograph taken in a field. A slim young woman with dark hair. In one hand she had a wicker basket. In the other the hand of a girl in a white dress. The girl has curly blond hair. Beside the woman, a man with a cap on, jacket, grey trousers. About the same age as the woman. They look handsome, optimistic.

  I sat and ate. All around others were also eating and talking. I wasn’t curious about them. But I kept looking at these faded photographs.

  I asked the waitress. She didn’t know.

  I asked the owner.

  “No one knows who they were. Or anything about them. They were there when I bought the restaurant over forty years ago. And no one knew anything about them.”

  On my next visit she couldn’t put on her shoes. Her feet were swollen. I got the shoes on but I couldn’t tie the straps. She didn’t want lunch. But asked if we could walk to the nearest pub, The Miners Arms.

  She walked with a stick, and rested often. Along a narrow passageway—by the backs of terraced houses—the ground was uneven.

  “This is where I fell.”

  The pub (opposite a fish-and-chip shop called The Jolly Friar) was old and small. The saloon bar empty. We sat by a polished wooden table near the door. She ate slowly, one crisp at a time. Took a long time over the shandy. And looked around the room with an intensity, an awkward fixed smile, as if she was looking at these things for the last time.

  “I always come here to collect for cancer,” she said. “They always were very good.”

  I phoned the doctor. She phoned the following afternoon.

  “The doctor came. She left me all kinds of pills and tonics to take.”

  I met Avril on the next visit. A widow, short, energetic. Her husband had been a miner. He had given her a parrot, Lucy, now fifteen years old. Since Chris had her fall she came twice a day. Tidied, washed dishes, clothes, did the shopping, put the garbage out, mailed letters, went to the bank, paid the bills.

  The following Wednesday, at noon, Avril phoned. She sounded upset.

  “The doctor was here this morning. Chris has gone into hospital. The ambulance just drove away. She said to me, ‘“Don’t be sad. I’ve had a good life.’”

  Next morning I took the early train to Redruth, then walked through the town and into the country, to a small hospital at Carn Brea. It was at the bottom of moorland. Five other patients were on one side of a ward, in front of their made beds, waiting for the doctor. She was last, by a window. (The moor began a few yards outside). Washed, dressed, her hair combed. She looked better than she did in her cottage. In her lap a letter from my daughter Judith who lived in Norwich. And photographs of the two great-grandchildren.

  Before leaving Canada I had arranged to see Ellen and her family in Derbyshire. Ellen wanted Chris to come and live with them.

  “Could you bring her with you?”

  “I don’t think she is strong enough for the train.”

  “Then Kevin will come and drive her back.”

  “I don’t think she is strong enough for that.”

  Three days later, on my way to Derbyshire, I got off at Redruth. Chris was in bed, sitting up. In a new woollen sweater that had large outlines of squares. It suited her. We talked quietly about the family. And just looked at one another. She looked younger than her years. When it was time to leave it felt awkward and incomplete. I said I would see her when I came back in four days.

  Late Thursday I was back in St. Ives.

  Friday morning. The gulls woke me. It was still dark. I made coffee, went to the attic, looked across the bay. The orange lights of Hayle and Camborne were going off and on as if faultily connected. Gulls, dark shapes, were over the roofs of the houses and cottages and narrow streets. Then the sun, not yet on the horizon, began to lighten the sky. Across the bay a mist began to clear. I could see the white-blue water of the bay. The browns, yellows, greens, of the far shore fields. Godrevy Lighthouse. And Carn Brea.

  At seven the phone. The staff nurse said she had died in her sleep.

  My daughters came. And what was left of Chris’s family. A younger sister . . . her two children . . . a nephew, a director of Rolls Royce in Derby . . . Members of her local art class in Truro. And Avril.

  Afterwards we packed into the saloon bar of The Miners Arms. Had coffee and sandwiches that Ellen had organized. (The sandwiches that she made from the tin of Canadian salmon she offered first). I had told Ellen that Chris wanted to come to this pub for her last outing. I also told her that Chris got better as she got older.

  “I’ll miss her,” Ellen said. “She was, above all, straight.”

  I saw Chris’s friends from the local art class. They had, like her, started to paint when they came here to retire.

  Most had lived abroad.

  I had met them once before. When Chris took me to the annual exhibition of her art class. It was held in a large house in the country (fields in front leading to a river). The woman whose house it was (a handsome woman, a widow. Her husband, a doctor, had been mayor of Truro) didn’t belong to the art class, but grew up with one of the women who did. So she provided the food, the drink, the household help. And these large rooms with spacious walls.

  It was a French evening. With aperitifs we had pâté de foie gras on toast. Then sat down to melon. Followed by lampreys in a dark chocolate sauce. The lampreys had no taste but a texture, that of crumbling liver. A delicious tomato salad (light mustard on top). Cheese from different regions of France. Wine from the Médoc and Saint Emilion. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. We danced to the music of Sidney Bechet and Barney Bigard. And the songs of Yves Montand. While on the walls were these terrible amateur paintings.

  I talked to a lively blond woman in her sixties. Colour in her face. Large eyes. She sat most of the time. She said she needed to have a new knee.

  “I’m near the top of the waiting list.”

  We began to talk about dogs. I asked about her dogs.

  “All gone to heaven.”

  I told her about the dog I had in Toronto.

  “Who is looking after it?”

  “There is someone.”

  “You married again?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s my wife’s dog.”

  “I was forty when my husband died. Had a heart attack. I couldn’t fault him on anything. It’s living on your own that
’s not nice. I was a planter’s wife in India. We had to have six gardeners because of the caste system. One gardener wouldn’t do another gardener’s job if he was of a higher caste.”

  “Did you know Mrs. Goodhand?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “We were friends.”

  “I liked her. But she found it difficult to adapt.”

  “You do come down with a bang when you return to England.”

  From The Miners Arms we walked to the cottage. There were too many to go inside. So we stayed outside on the gravel. In twos, threes, and fours. Not quite knowing what to do. Then Ellen came out from the cottage with one of Chris’s paintings. Holding it, in front of her, her arms fully extended, she walked, directly, to a person. And, without saying a word, gave the painting formally. Then she turned. And walked back into the cottage. And soon came out holding another painting in front of her. And walked towards someone else. We watched in silence as she solemnly gave one bad painting after another. To all the relatives. To all the members of the art class. To Avril. I had the small seascape.

  Twenty-nine years earlier, not long after his fifty-second birthday, Sydney died. We had not long moved to St. Ives. The children were small. I stayed to look after them, and my wife went up to London for the funeral. After she came back she said she had a pain in her right foot. Then she began to limp. The doctor gave her cortisone injections. And told her it was probably a reaction to the death of her father.

  In the spring, she heard that an art class was being given in the St. Ives library. She signed up for it. And looked happy when she came back from buying the material she needed. And excited as she went off to her first class. But she only stayed two sessions.

  “As soon as the others arrive, they all know what they want to do. And they get on with it. I don’t know what to do. An elderly man beside me has been going there for years. As soon as he comes in he arranges everything neatly, the way he wants. And begins to paint.

  “That’s a nice sky,” I said.

  “I can only do this one sky,” he replied.

  A year before she died she told me: