I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories

by Norman Levine

  But what to write about. I didn’t know.

  I thought at first that, at twenty-seven, I had run out of material. But as the weeks went by I realized it wasn’t that at all. I didn’t know what my material was.

  I sat at the table, smoked (the pipe kept going out), read the little magazines, went to the windows.

  What a pleasant place to be idle in.

  I decided to take a notebook and go out. I walked to the sea’s edge, and made notes. “The way the sun appears on the water on a hot summer’s day. The blue water sparkles. Then it seems as if it is raining sundrops. They are hitting the water—slanting down—golden moving streaks—just like rain.”

  “I walk by the tideline,” I wrote, “and I can see my footsteps behind me. But a little while later the footsteps disappear in the moist sand leaving no trace.”

  Then I sat on the granite pier and tried to describe the colours of the sea, the changing colours of the land as the clouds passed over.

  My wife asked me at lunch, “How’s the writing going?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  On Sundays we went for walks in the country. She knew all the wild flowers. She would tell me their names. And I would repeat. But when we went out the following Sunday, I had forgotten. So she would name them again.

  “What did you do as a child?” she asked.

  What did I do, I wondered.

  “We had other flowers,” I said.

  We passed a field with chickens. Horses in another. It was so still. So quiet.

  “See the mole-hills,” my wife said.

  I didn’t know they were mole-hills.

  “That’s buddleia,” my wife said. “Butterflies like it.”

  She was right. There were butterflies resting on this bush. The sun caught them. Some with their wings spread, others drawn up. I counted twenty. And there were more.

  “Those are Red Admirals,” she said. “That’s Tortoiseshell. That’s a Peacock—”

  But on Monday morning I was back in the large, high room by the wooden table. It was much better when I was out looking at things.

  That is how I met Mrs. Burroughs.

  I was out with my notebook. And she was standing by her front gate with a letter in her hand.

  “Are you going to the post office?” she said. “Will you take this for me?”

  After three more times taking letters for her she invited me into her house.

  We walked along the gravel path with the garden on one side. Mrs. Burroughs’ ankles were swollen and she had difficulty in walking. She used a cane. She was a large woman, slightly bent, with grey hair combed tight to her head and in a bun at the back. She had a large face, almost like a man’s, thin lips, a strong jaw with loose skin under it. But her china-blue eyes were delicate. They slanted upwards.

  “I don’t go out much,” she said quietly.

  It was dark when we came into the house. I thought, at first, it was because we came in from the sunlight. But the walls of the rooms were painted brown. And they had dark Victorian oil paintings on them. Cows by a stream. Trees in a field. In front of the fireplace was a highly polished copper screen. And hammered out in the copper was a sailing ship. On a dark wooden side table, in a glass case, were three exotic stuffed birds with long tails. Their feathers were blue and green, but the colours had faded. The brightest things in the room were various glass bottles, glass vases, on the window sills. They were all the same ruby colour but with different designs.

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Burroughs said. “I heard you are at the old schoolhouse. And you’re a writer. What are you writing?”

  “I have a novel coming out,” I said.

  The phone rang. She didn’t appear to hear it.

  “The phone is ringing,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. And quickly went out of the room. I could hear her shouting from the next room. When she came back she sat down in her chair and said:

  “What are you writing now?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “You mean you don’t know any stories?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I know lots,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” And she did.

  Every time I came up to see her she would show me into the front room, ask me to sit down, and tell me something else from her past.

  It began eighty-one years ago. Her father was a farmer. She was a teacher and taught in a country school. Then she married Mr. Burroughs, who had a timber business. They moved into Penzance and had two daughters and a son. She packed up the teaching and ran the accounts. As they made money, they put the money into land and houses. They had properties all over Cornwall. When her husband died her son ran the business. Then the youngest daughter, Shirley, died when she was in her thirties. And Mrs. Burroughs didn’t go out of the house after that. She didn’t get on with her older daughter, Brenda.

  “I don’t go to see her often,” Brenda told me, when I met her a few months later. “When I do, Mam begins to cry and says: why aren’t you Shirley?”

  I would sit in the darkened room with the Victorian paintings and watch how the light from the windows caught the ruby glass, while Mrs. Burroughs talked.

  “Last year,” she said, “I went to Jean’s—my granddaughter’s—wedding. One of Jean’s girlfriends had a quarrel with her boyfriend. They split up. And she didn’t have anyone to take her to the wedding. So she hired a boy from an agency—someone she had never seen before—to take her. At the wedding I saw this woman. I remembered her when she was a child. Her father and mother—they had their own farm—were devoted to each other. But they didn’t have children. Then when she was in her forties she got pregnant. The baby was born. But the mother died in childbirth. The father was out in the fields. When he heard, he went and shot himself. And there was this child, now a woman and married, at the wedding. Isn’t that a good story for you to write?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I have a cousin,” Mrs. Burroughs said. “She was going out with this boy. He worked as an accountant. Very neat. But the family didn’t think he was good enough. So there was opposition to the wedding. But they did get married. Then the war came along. The Second World War. The man was called up. And he cut his throat because he was frightened of being killed in the war.”

  I’d go and see Mrs. Burroughs on Saturday mornings because her grandson came in from Penzance to play the piano for her. They were old tunes, mostly waltzes.

  “It reminds her of the time when she was a girl,” he told me.

  I’d be in the front room, looking out over her garden; the sounds from the piano came from the other room, while Mrs. Burroughs talked.

  “My daughter’s husband is called Jack,” she said. “His grandmother—when she was a girl—fell in love with Mr. Doo. Mr. Doo was an artist. But he was poor. So she married Mr. Wilsher. He was very rich and old. They lived together for seven years. And then Mr. Wilsher died. And she then went and married Mr. Doo. And they lived happily. Then Mr. Doo died. And Mrs. Doo lived in that pink house opposite you. She had butlers and gardeners and servants and cooks. All these people to wait on her. And all she could talk about was her darling Mr. Doo.

  “Her daughter was brought up as a lady. And when she was getting on she fell in love with a young man—he was thirteen years younger. He worked on a farm. They married. And after they married, the daughter began to look more and more like a gypsy. And the young man dressed and behaved like a gentleman.”

  “That’s a good story,” I said.

  “I have lots more,” Mrs. Burroughs said.

  It was at Mrs. Burroughs’ that I met Mr. Oppenheimer. A neat man, about five foot two, bald, and with glasses. He was dressed in a hand-stitched tweed suit, a handmade shirt, and a woollen tie
. Mrs. Burroughs told him I was a writer.

  “I’ve met a lot of writers here,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “I used to visit D. H. Lawrence and Frieda on Sundays when they lived at Zennor.”

  “How was Lawrence?”

  “D. H.” Mr. Oppenheimer raised his voice. “He was a gentleman. One time I rode over on a horse. It was a hot day, and the horse gave me a rough ride. When I got there I must have said some swear words. D. H. got angry. ‘“No need to say words like that here, Oppenheimer. There is no need.’”

  “Arthur, my gardener,” Mrs. Burroughs said, “also thought Lawrence a gentleman. Because when he went out there with a pony and trap to deliver a loaf of bread, Lawrence always gave him a shilling tip.”

  “After D. H.,” Oppenheimer said, “there was Harris. And after him, another writer, Johnson. He was always talking about money. He stayed only a year. How long are you staying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I walked back with Mr. Oppenheimer to his cottage.

  “I’ve known Mrs. Burroughs for over forty years,” he said. “Very tight with her money. Never gives anything away.”

  How could I tell him that she was giving me all these things from her past.

  “She can’t hear very well,” Oppenheimer said. “But if you start talking about money. She’ll say wait—I’ll just get my hearing aid. She had a grand-niece getting married in Canada. She told me she sent her a pound as a wedding present. A pound. Come inside and have a drink. I start the day with a small glass of brandy. The doctor told me to take it. It warms the system up.”

  His cottage was small and untidy. There was a dog, a terrier, also old, sitting by the electric fire. There were papers, magazines, and books piled everywhere. Often when I would come down to visit Mr. Oppenheimer I would look in at the window to see if he was in. The place was in a mess, plates and cups still on the table. And Mr. Oppenheimer, sitting in a chair with his feet up, reading a book.

  He told me why he came here. His family owned freighters in Wales. He began to work in the Cardiff office. Then he got a spot on one lung. “The doctor told me to go to a warmer climate. Or else I wouldn’t make old bones. I’m seventy-six,” he said proudly. “I started a restaurant here just after the First World War. But I don’t have anything to do with that now. I still have my office there. Come and see me.”

  I did go.

  His office, above the restaurant, was as untidy as the cottage.

  “Augustus John sat where you are sitting and drank a half bottle of whisky. And little Stanley Spencer—he came up to here.” Mr. Oppenheimer stood up and put his hand under his chin. “I don’t think he changed his collar once in the three months he was here. Have you heard of Guy Gibson? During the war?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I gave Guy Gibson piggybacks on the sand,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. “He used to come here as a child. Have some more brandy.”

  His hand shook as he poured. But it was because of arthritis in his fingers. It was painful for him to shake hands.

  “Tell me about D. H. Lawrence,” I said.

  “D. H. He had a red beard. He worked at night. In the day D. H. went for walks on the moors. He was very good with his hands. He fixed things in the cottage. Why don’t you come and see my house in the country. I’ve got a lot of land around it.”

  I said I would. But as he had bought the house for his daughter Mary and her husband, George—and only went there, reluctantly, on weekends—I never did go to see the place.

  But on Monday afternoons I would go to see him at his cottage. I’d say.

  “How are things, Mr. Oppenheimer?”

  And he would say, “Have some more brandy.”

  This time he began to laugh. “I shouldn’t laugh,” he said. “But George had something else go wrong. George decided to cut some of the old trees—I shouldn’t laugh—there are fourteen acres. He got the wood.” And Mr. Oppenheimer began to laugh again. “I shouldn’t laugh,” he said, tears in his eyes. “He got the wood and started to cut it. And phlewt—half of his finger flew off. I shouldn’t laugh at this. But he couldn’t find the piece that flew off.”

  “What happened?” I said. I wondered why I was laughing.

  “Mary got the ambulance. They rushed him to Penzance hospital. But it was too late. They couldn’t sew the two pieces together.”

  Next morning, sitting at the wooden table in the high room, I thought how rich Mr. Oppenheimer’s talk was and Mrs. Burroughs’ talk. Compared to Sam’s and mine. Sam never once talked about his Old Etonian past. Just as I didn’t talk or even refer to my past. I was like Sam. We were both trying to cut out our pasts, to cover them up. And it made us boring.

  The next time I saw Mr. Oppenheimer he said, “I don’t have the dog any more. I took him out for his walk. We went along the harbour. The dog always peed against the railing. This time he went on the wrong side of the railing. There was no rail. He flipped over. Fell into the harbour. The tide was out. He broke his back.”

  Besides visiting Mrs. Burroughs and Mr. Oppenheimer, I also found two places that I would make for on my walks. One was in the country, just off the road. It had a broken-down gate, then a slope up, a field of green grass, and at the top of the slope, this house. An ugly house. With two dormer windows downstairs and two upstairs, and a white door that was always half-open. All the paint was peeling. The curtains were grey, half-drawn, and falling to bits. But there was something marvellous about a broken-down place with a sign at the front gate that said Venton Vision. No one lived in the house now except the animals: a goose, some cows, chickens.

  Then, in December, with a mist closing in, in grey light, I found this field of anemones. The flowers were not very high above the ground. But the colours stood out. There were blues, purples, deep reds, light reds, and whites and pinks. Low colours, rising from the green, moving from side to side in the wind. Some were wide open with their dark centres. Others in bud, others opening. Very delicate colours, in the grey light, the mist closing in. And here and there a tall dead stalk from last summer’s thistles. A lovely field. And no one picked them.

  And I couldn’t get over seeing the anemones, and the surrounding green fields, because it was December. I think of December as snow, ice, double-doors, double-windows, and skating on frozen rivers. I would come here just to look at this field. And wish I was back to the snow, the crisp air, the harsh glare on sunny days.

  I went to see Mrs. Burroughs to tell her about the field of anemones. I found her crying.

  “What’s the matter, Mrs. Burroughs?”

  “I’m remembering the happy times,” she said.

  She was holding a photograph of herself, before she was married, as a teacher with her class.

  Meanwhile the problem was getting clear. How was I to earn a living if I couldn’t write my next book? I started to make lists. Of the people I grew up with in Ottawa. Of the popular songs I knew when I was at school. Of the streets, the streetcar lines, the market, the library, the parks. But the money was running out. The novel was due in two months. It was time to leave.

  I went to see Mr. Oppenheimer. The door of his cottage was locked. I looked through the window. Things were just as I last saw them. The newspapers, the magazines, the books.

  On Saturday morning the taxi came to take us to Penzance station. We said goodbye to Sam. He still dressed like a Tolstoyan farmer, smiled easily, and talked of his pot-boilers.

  We wished each other luck.

  I told the taxi driver to go to Mrs. Burroughs’. As I went along the walk I could hear her grandson playing the piano. And as soon as I came in she said. “You haven’t been up for a couple of weeks. Sit down. I have another story for you.”

  “I can’t stay, Mrs. Burroughs.”

  But she interrupted or else she didn’t hear what I said.

  “You know the farm that you can see
from where you are? That farm was run by Mr. and Mrs. Brill. She died when she was fifty-five. And six months later Mr. Brill had a heart attack. And he died. The relatives were saying how sad it was. How he tried and couldn’t live without her.

  “When the relatives came to divide the valuables they found a camera with a half-used film in it. They had the film developed. And it was full of pictures of Mr. Brill and his girlfriend—she was someone else’s wife. There were pictures of this woman in his wife’s kitchen. In her favourite chair. And Mr. Brill had made plans for them to go away to London. Now the relatives were saying the heart attack was the best thing that could have happened.”

  “What has happened to Mr. Oppenheimer?” I said. “He’s not at his cottage.”

  “He fell in the street,” Mrs. Burroughs said. “He is gone to live with his daughter in the country. We won’t see him again. That’s what happens. The family takes over and the friends don’t see you any more. When that happens to me, I’ll have to go and live with my daughter Brenda. Then no one will see me.”

  “Oh, you’ve got lots of time yet, Mrs. Burroughs.”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly.

  “I came to say goodbye,” I said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To London.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  I could hear her grandson playing Morgenblätter. Since living here I had learnt the names of a lot of things.

  “Do you like my red glass?” Mrs. Burroughs asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Take the one you like.”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not. They will only fight over it when I’m gone. Do you like this one?”

  And she gave me a red glass vase with a pair of cockerels etched in it.

  I returned to the taxi with the red glass.

  “Look what Mrs. Burroughs gave me,” I said to my wife.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  But she was looking out of the window as the taxi drove along the coastal road. On one side—the earth with the small green fields, the yellow gorse, a stone church with old gravestones. And on the other—an immense sky against the thin flatness of the sea.