Rosalie said, of course; while Starkie, back for lunch, ate in silence for several minutes. Finally he got angry.
“He’s been on that phone for twenty-three minutes talking about Van Guff—why doesn’t he get down to it and ask the woman for money?”
Two minutes later an agitated Starkie stepped into the other room.
“Look, boy, I’m the Joe who has to pay the phone bill when it comes, not you. So get on with it or hang up—”
And Starkie remained there while the man on the telephone became flustered .
“. . . I wouldn’t have worried you,” he spoke rapidly into the phone in a high-pitched voice, “but I’ve been going on by borrowing half-crowns and five bobs, I’ll have plenty of cash coming in, so could you lend me six quid? That’s sweet of you. I wouldn’t have worried you if I wasn’t so desperate, nobody is sending me any letters. That is sweet of you. And I’m stuck in this God-forsaken place. Absolutely cut off—”
The man hung up, thanked Rosalie graciously, and looked at Starkie as if he was a new form of peasant.
As soon as the man closed their front door, Rosalie said, “You didn’t have to talk to him that way. Think how it must be for a grown man to have to humiliate himself in this way.”
“I bet that bum—I’ve already lent him five pounds—goes around telling those other bums that I won’t let him use the phone.”
Rosalie was silent.
“I’ve also lent him some money, Jimmy,” she said quietly.
They looked at each other. And Starkie went over, put his arms around her. They kissed. And made telescopes out of their hands, put them on their eyes, touched hands, and said “Woo-woo, woo-woo,” like a pair of owls.
“That’s something that is our own,” Rosalie said. “No one can take that from us.” And she touched his hair.
But the truce didn’t last. A few days later Starkie came back early from the garage and found Rosalie with three young men sitting around a large open fire, drinking, and playing a game. In one corner was a drawn curtain and one of the young men was behind the curtain. He was the oracle. “Oracle. Oracle. How—shall I—my true—love know . . . ,” a young man with a faint Irish in his voice chanted melodiously.
Starkie was furious. He told them all to get out. Smashed a nearly full bottle of rum that was on the table. And he and Rosalie had another quarrel. That night she slept in the other part of Driftwood Heights. By noon they had made up again. Starkie said he was sorry.
“We can’t go on like this,” Rosalie said. “What do you think—”
Four days after Christmas Starkie received three letters. One was from his bank manager saying that he had gone 200 pounds over the agreed limit of the overdraft and that he was not prepared to meet any further cheques. There was a registered letter from his petrol company saying that he owed 162 pounds, and since he hadn’t replied to their last two letters they had placed the matter in the hands of their solicitors. The third letter was a Christmas card from a girl he met last summer, that he had forgotten.
On New Year’s Eve, Abe and Nancy gave the last party of the year. Their cottage was really three cottages knocked into one. The ground floor of two formed the Celebrity, the third cottage and the top floors of the others their living quarters. Fifty people could get in, quite easily, but it made the room warm.
For some reason no one seemed to be having the party spirit. Perhaps because people were getting ready to go away. On Monday, Helen Greenway and Peter Kroll and Nat Bubis were off to Spain. On Wednesday, Garry Diamond and Red Cutler were going to Rome to meet up with Garry’s banker. On Friday, Hugh and Lily were leaving for a month’s holiday in Paris. The season’s fun was over.
However, by eleven o’clock it livened up a bit. Abe had made a strong punch, more people began to dance, put on coloured paper hats, and more guests kept coming in. Around twenty to twelve, Rosalie came in with Garry Diamond and Red Cutler.
“Where’s Starkie?” Nancy said.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said, “and I don’t care.”
She stuck a new cigarette into her holder, inhaled, then blew the smoke out through her nostrils. “We just had to take a taxi all the way from St. Agnes—the middle of nowhere.”
Bill Stringer brought her a whisky. Her eyes were moving everywhere. After another neat whisky, she said to Nancy and Bill Stringer:
“We decided to go to the Metropole in Truro—it’s a new place started by an ex-chef of the Savoy. We went in Jimmy’s car. Jimmy drove. Everything at first seemed to be fine. We had a delicious coq au vin, wine, liqueurs, coffee, cigars. Then we got the bill. It came to just under eighteen pounds. Garry said to Jimmy that they should split the bill. And Jimmy just blew up. ‘You want nine pounds for this when I don’t know how I’m going to pay my mechanic this week—’ Luckily Garry had a cheque book, and they took it. So we all got in the car and Jimmy started to drive back. Just after St. Agnes he went berserk. In the middle of nowhere he slammed on the brakes, opened the doors, and told us to get out. And drove off. Red walked until he found a kiosk and called a taxi. And we came straight here.”
Abe came up looking a bit drunk.
“Hello, Rosalie—where’s Starkie?”
“I don’t care where the bugger is.”
The Light Programme of the BBC was on the radio, and the crowds at Piccadilly, the notes of Big Ben striking midnight, filled the cottage. Those inside had formed a tight circle, crossed hands, sang “Auld Lang Syne,” wished each other a happy New Year, kissed and drank each other’s health.
By 2:00 a.m. it had thinned out. Some had disappeared upstairs to the bedrooms. Some went home. A few couples were dancing to the record player. And others stood around, or sat in the corners, drinking and talking.
VII
I felt very drunk and unsteady and decided to go up to one of the bedrooms. The first two rooms had their doors locked but the third was open and a couple were on a bed on the far side. I went to sleep on the small bed by the wall nearest the door. I remember a girl coming up in the middle of the night lying down beside me saying, I don’t like sleeping alone . . . and then being woken up by Nancy saying, Are you a vegetarian. No, I said. And then it was morning, and Nancy was asking me, “Are you a vegetarian?”
“No,” I said.
“Would you like bacon and eggs for breakfast?”
“Fine,” I said, “and some black coffee.”
She went away. A tight feeling of pressure in my head. I did not want to close my eyes. When I did I felt everything turning. I put on my shoes and went to the sink and threw warm water on my face, combed my hair, but it didn’t help much.
Downstairs, I saw Garry and Red, Hugh and Lily, Nat Bubis and Thelma Eskin. The room had the disorder of after a party and the smell of spilled beer and wine. Abe was the only one looking quite spry. I went over to help him collect the empty bottles and stack them in one corner. But from a few feet there was sleep in the inside corners of his eyes, he hadn’t shaved either, and there was the indelible imprint of failure in that large, sad face. Then the doorbell went. No one made a move. So I went and opened it. There were two smooth-shaven, cheerful young men in trench coats and trilbies. One was carrying a brown leather briefcase.
“Good morning, sir,” the one with the briefcase said, “would you like to discuss the importance of prayer?”
“I—” and mumbled something. “—Could you come back later. We’re having breakfast.”
They were reluctant to leave. And I wished I hadn’t encouraged them. But in the end they did go and said they would come back later in the morning. It was now 10:36.
“Who was that?” Nancy asked from beside the gas stove.
“A couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses,” I said. “They wanted to discuss the importance of prayer.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That we’re havi
ng breakfast. To come back later.”
We were on our coffees and smoking cigarettes and trying occasionally to say something intelligent when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll go,” said Abe. “I’m just in the mood to discuss prayer—”
He was back sooner than I expected. “Starkie’s dead,” he said in a flat voice. “He gassed himself in the garage. His mechanic found him.”
There is always a little excitement after a death, especially a violent one. And for the next few days people talked and discussed Starkie. Some said it was his financial position, that he couldn’t keep up Rosalie’s “salon” and the manor house. Others said he really wanted to be a painter; that he was becoming homosexual; that he realized how corrupt he had become. Others said he wasn’t intelligent enough to become corrupt. And in the Back streets Cornish parents used Starkie’s death as a warning to their restless children to “keep away from them artists.”
Over the next couple of days I was able to piece together what happened to Starkie when he left the others. He drove back to St. Ives around midnight, tried several houses, found no one in.
“I think, had he met anyone that night when he was wandering around,” the local doctor said to me, “he would still be alive.”
I walked around the empty front, the piers, the deserted Back streets, and thought of the utter loneliness of Starkie wandering around that night in this place, knocking on doors, while we were at Abe and Nancy’s party. For some reason it brought back, very clearly, my first month here.
We didn’t know whether or not to go to Starkie’s funeral. Nancy took charge. “I don’t think the Cornish would like a lot of us around at a time like this.”
I went to Drew’s to send a small spray. There were wreaths and sprays there from Baby Bunting, Abe and Nancy, Garry Diamond and Red Cutler, Hugh and Lily, Nat Bubis, Oscar Preston, and Rosalie. I wrote my name on a card and gave it to the boy.
“Do you want it sent to the death house?” he said.
I went out of Drew’s wondering about the Cornish acceptance of death and their insatiable curiosity with all its details. Starkie’s funeral card appeared on the shelters, in the grocery store windows, the butcher shops; like that of everyone who died, who belonged here. The North Star Garage closed its doors. And on the day of the funeral the unemployed dressed up and went en masse to the cemetery. In the end none of us did go. And Starkie was buried in unconsecrated ground overlooking the long beach and the Atlantic breakers.
I left St. Ives after Twelfth Night. Of those that were still here, no one came to see me off. I waited in the train’s empty compartment, by the siding above the beach, and looked out of the lowered window. The sky was full of clouds.
Then the sun came through a break. It was like a spotlight, bringing out the pastel colours of the far shore fields, the magnificent ice-blue of the cliffs, the deeper blue of the bay, and the white of the lighthouse. “Such a nice-looking place.” And I was back, I thought, where I started, with my immediate response to the physical sense of this place. But that wasn’t quite right. I could never return here without bringing back these people and the events that went to mark a certain time in one’s life. “That’s what was made out of this stop.” And as the train began to go up the gradient I watched the sun shine brilliantly on the discarded Christmas trees floating in the harbour to be swept out to sea. Perhaps it was a fitting end.
HELLO,
MRS. NEWMAN
I would see them in the street and we would say hello. And walk on. The men wearing suits and sometimes carrying shopping bags. The women well-dressed, well preserved. Sometimes as I saw them I would think—he used to be in charge of the waterways in Thailand, or, he was a bank manager in India, or, he was in control of a territory in Africa almost as large as Wales. Now they were walking in the streets of this small seaside town carrying their wives’ shopping bags. The women were more friendly. I remember Mrs. Holland scrubbing her front door steps and calling out to me.
“If my servants could see me now.”
They looked ten to fifteen years younger than they were. The sea air, the mild climate, and money helped to preserve them. The men played golf, the women bridge. And they lived in the large houses on the heights and on the outskirts.
One of the finest houses was owned by the Newmans. I got to know them not long after I came to England in the summer of 1949. I arrived in London towards the end of June. And as it was hot I thought I would go down to this small seaside town on the south coast.
On the second day I was having a drink in the saloon bar of the Antelope, standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Newman and their only son, Tom. We got to talking. Tom was leaving for Canada—going to Vancouver. I told them a bit about Vancouver. And they invited me back for a drink. I gave Tom some names and addresses. And in return they let me rent a wing of their house.
I had never lived in anything like this before. Not so much the house but the setting. I used to borrow Tom’s bicycle and ride up and down the long gravel drive just to look at the view and see how it changed.
Along one side of the drive was an avenue of large pines. And on the other—sloping well-cut lawns that ended with a border of flowers and shrubs. And past the flowers and shrubs, a few small trees. Then the side of a cliff with more pines going down. And below that a beach with fine yellow sand and the sound of a gentle surf. Further out was the water of the bay and the far shore fields. When the tide was out you could see the light blue of an estuary with yellow sand on either side. And I have seen sunsets when the far shore fields appeared to be lit up by a pink spotlight.
Whoever laid out the grounds had an eye for light and dark. For at the very end of the garden—pulling the dark green from the old pines along one side of the drive and the lighter green of the grass lawns from the other—were two large golden elms. A splash of light yellow that held the whole thing together.
For the first few weeks I just enjoyed being in these grounds. There was so much to see. And it was quiet. There were butterflies and bees. And sometimes a gull flew over and a jackdaw. And several magpies came down onto the lawns. There was so much space. And, at dusk, the smell in the air of different flowers. This, I thought, is what money can buy—quiet and space. And—in a place by the sea that is almost all stone—trees and large well-kept lawns.
In the mornings Mrs. Newman brought me wicker baskets of fresh vegetables from her garden—lettuces, sweet tomatoes that had a nice smell, large eating-gooseberries that had a bit of pink in them, and apples and pears that had fallen from the trees. And Mr. Newman asked me into the house one evening. And on the white wall of the sitting room he screened home movies that he had taken in Africa. They showed flickering images of Mrs. Newman with her servants, Mrs. Newman playing tennis, Mrs. Newman out riding, Mrs. Newman at the club, at a summer house, on a boat—always immaculately dressed. And Mrs. Newman told me proudly about the princes she knew and showed me the jewellery they gave her.
They brought something of their life away from England back with them—the stuffed animal heads on the walls, the large teak gates at the entrance of the drive, the drinks outside on the stone veranda.
Sometimes I used to tease Mrs. Newman without meaning to. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to go deeper than what I could see. When she was showing me the large rooms in their house I blurted out, “What a nice place to have an affair.” I meant a wedding or a party. But then I said, “Have you had any affairs lately, Mrs. Newman?”
The expression on her face didn’t change at all.
She was in her early forties but she looked ten years younger. Slim, dark hair with dark eyes, a small mouth. She seemed a determined woman and self-contained. Mr. Newman was in his middle fifties. He was short and thin. He had fine grey hair combed neatly back. He had a largish nose and his long face usually had a flush about it—the legacy of malaria that he got while in Africa. He looked a dour man who smoke
d one cigarette after another, wore silk scarves at his throat and colourful summer shirts. He didn’t speak for very long. He let Mrs. Newman do most of the talking.
And Mrs. Newman had this voice. And people, as I discovered, can be put off by a voice. It was high-pitched. It sounded affected and unreal. Mrs. Newman’s parents were a gentle couple, now retired, who once had a small fruit and vegetable store in the town. Mr. Newman came from the North of England. His people, I heard, made their money from wool. He had come here on one of his leaves. They met, married, and he brought her out to Africa and to the sort of life that white people lived in the colonies.
But the Empire was coming to an end. They had to leave. And she came back home with this voice and with a manner that indicated she was used to having other people do things for her. This didn’t go down very well with those in the town who knew her before she left. “She’s Elizabeth Green,” said the middle-aged woman serving me in the tobacconist. “We went to school together. Now she doesn’t know me—”
And a quiet man, a bachelor, who looked seedy, said he knew Mrs. Newman before she married. He told me that in the late 1920s there was a naval establishment near here. “Mrs. Newman,” he said softly, “used to go after the officers. In the mess she was known as the guinea girl.”
Whether this was true or not I don’t know. I know that whenever I was with Mrs. Newman in the street and she saw this man she walked by him as if he didn’t exist.
I was working then as a travel writer for a Montreal paper. And like all journalists I got things wrong. The slight exaggeration, the wrong phrase. I was at that time writing about things I didn’t know much about. I would go to a nearby town, spend a few days in it, then write an article about the place for the Montreal paper. Perhaps that’s why I got on with the Newmans. Casual friendships—when young—are pleasant. We made little demands on one another. And there were always the drinks on the stone veranda. The lawns, the trees, the splendid views of the bay. And an air of easy living, of idleness.
I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well Page 40
