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

by Norman Levine

  I went back and forward like this for about an hour. Sometimes without the board. Just arms and legs stretched fully out, and as the wave carried me forward I rotated my hands once over, and my body followed, turning round and round in the salt water until I sank. Then, pleasantly exhausted, I walked back across the sand and lay down to be dried by the sun.

  It was a magnificent beach, the finest I had ever seen. An elongated C, lying on its side, facing the breakers, the Atlantic, and the horizon. Within it was a smaller C made by a line of dead seaweed and pebbles that the high tide had left. The sand within this smaller C was a light tan colour, and damp. A few boulders were embedded in the wet sand. The outgoing tide had made small pools around the boulders. Children were playing happily in the pools. In a long strip that curved the entire length of the beach, in between the two Cs, people lay on hot, dry sand; or in the shallow crater-like holes they had scooped out of it.

  The sun was beginning to burn. I turned over on my back and caught a light breeze. It ruffled the flags of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland—on top of sandcastles that a tanned boy, his hair the colour of linen, had made not far away—and the seagulls’ feathers he had stuck in others. And brought with it the sweet smell of suntan lotion.

  Just above me, on the slope of earth above the beach, was a cemetery. Around me, scattered in clusters on the strip of hot sand, families were stretched out. Surfboards were standing upright, stuck in the sand, by their heads. The sun caught the boards and reflected their white tops. They looked like the tombstones on the slopes.

  I told myself, I must remember that, and use it someplace. But I should have given it more thought. For the kind of images that one finds in a particular place are not as accidental as they appear. Surfboards around people lying on the sand getting brown—tombstones in a cemetery. Still, at the time I wasn’t interested in this place. I was living in a book I was working on, set in winter, in Montreal.

  For the next two weeks of July I did this walk and swim every morning. I would wake up around 9:15, just after the postman went by, have a light breakfast, then make up a list, do my shopping, wander around, have a coffee at Connie’s, go surfing, then sunbathe on the beach. And in the afternoon, on the beach again, then more wandering around. In the evening I worked until half past two.

  By the beginning of August I felt I knew the place and it gave one a wonderful feeling of possession and confidence. From the height of the terraces or the bus stop it looked picture-postcard but with a 3-D view; a small bent finger flung out from the mainland into the Atlantic with the inside of the finger, the harbour, and the outside, the beach. Then into the place—everyone walked on the road—a kind of valley with a lot of tight little streets and condemned cottages (with outside water taps and soapy water stagnant in the gutter) that were bought by tourists who came here with their savings to live out their lives, and pushed the locals into the council houses on the outskirts. There were brass piskies, brass galleons, for knockers; and low ceilings, and narrow stairs that went straight up soon after you opened the door—the double doors like horse-stables—and outside pipes painted to look like varicose veins. Castrated cats sunned themselves in the middle of the streets. And budgerigars were kept in cages. And as you walked on various levels it appeared all angles with small turnings off, dead ends, and narrow connecting tunnels. It reminded me of a doll’s house. Except for the outsize barn shapes of the Methodist and Wesleyan chapels.

  Then at dusk. Watching the long sunsets on the beach. When the wet sand was flaked pink and the pastel colours of the French crabbers, going across towards the shelter of the bay, were caught by the last rays of the sun. And later. The front lit as a stage set; lit from the inside like so many pumpkins. And in the dark water of the harbour the long brilliant scratches of yellow, green, faint red, white, from the streetlights and the cafés’ neons. And still later. After midnight. Standing at the end of the pier. The moon out. The water sparkling. And I could hear the French sailors talking on the crabbers out in the bay.

  When it rained the Scala (you could hear the soundtrack outside) and the Royal had lineups. The tourists huddled in raincoats on the beach, stood by the rails or in the narrow doorways, looking miserable like a lot of wet birds. I tried the library. It was small, drab, but not gloomy. The books were so old that it became a kind of grab bag. For the titles were rubbed out with use and neglect so that picking a book you didn’t know whether it would be The Gun-Shy Kid, or a first edition of Kirby’s Golden Dog, printed in Montreal, with illustrations, falling to bits.

  Then there was the morning exodus from the bed and breakfast places. Entire families came down the various slopes that led to the beaches carrying picnic lunches, plastic beach balls, portable radios, towels, flippers, paperbacks, surfboards. And returned, tired, the same way, at dusk. Then dressing up for the night, sunburnt and tanned, they promenaded around the front, Fore Street, the two piers, the Back Roads, the island, went into a crowded pub, a café, a restaurant . . .

  It was very pleasant for a while to just wander around and mix with people who were here for the avowed purpose of doing nothing.

  I have gone into this place at some length as it is this place, as much as anything, that is responsible for what happens. It was, at first, so colourful and remote, and so un-English, that I didn’t think I could ever become bored with it. But I did. And it didn’t take so very long.

  For all its magnificent scenery, and sunshine, I began to miss people. It wasn’t enough, I found, just being surrounded by tourists. I would wake up on a beautiful hot morning, a blue sky, hardly a breeze, and walk to the harbour. And watch . . . But for all the buoyancy, the jazzed-up activity, the gaiety of the outward appearance, there was so much inertia to the place. You didn’t have to do very much. The landscape did it all so brilliantly and monotonously.

  And I was tired of seeing the same kind of person around me. Every two weeks a new batch would arrive. And you could trace the way their paleness and enthusiasm disappeared. It began on Monday morning buying postcards, writing them on the green benches of the front. Then soaking on the sand. By the third day their determined gaiety would have taken in an uneventful trip “around the bay” or “to the lighthouse” or “to see the seals.” More soaking in the sun. And at night wandering through the streets, all eyes and comments about the smallness, the quaint cottages, the cobblestone streets with the names Virgin, Teetotal, Salubrious. And in the second week buying presents from the bric-a-brac shops along the front. And then a sudden flatness when they realized that, apart from what they had already done, there was little else for them to do. So that in the last few days they were looking forward to leaving this place for “home.” Boredom is such an essential part of a seaside town.

  I began to spend a great deal of time in the Harbour Amusements playing the pinball machines, when I could get a free one. I enjoy the colours, the balls moving, things lighting up, the sput-sput noises. Once you get a ball going there is something inevitable about it.

  Perhaps it was because my writing wasn’t going. I just lost interest in the book on Montreal. I could no longer become concerned with the antics of my hero, an optimistic Irish immigrant trying to survive his first Canadian winter.

  At night I sit by the desk until my eyes become watery, and I get sleepy. I listen. The surf on the beach. Just one steady noise. The cars have stopped. The lights have been turned off. No sounds, except the sea. I go out along the Back Road to the beach. The breaking waves, white scars in the dark. They gash the black in several places. The gashes grow wider. They join. One white line the length of the beach. Then I come back. Go up the stairs. And to bed.

  I tried all sorts of devices to snap out of this lethargy. I tried waking up extra early one morning and walked along the deserted front. But all that happened was that the gulls seemed extra loud. I saw several labourers walking to work, gas-mask webbing slung over their shoulders. And the slap-slap of water agains
t the tied boats in the harbour sounded like bacon frying. Then, tired, I watched the sunrise coming from behind the Towans, over the bay. A sleepy policeman stood by the rails and watched it as well.

  I tried going out with a few of the remaining Cornish fishermen. But they were old men, suspicious of my intentions. In any case the novelty of the physical act soon wore out—it was a kind of slumming.

  In a moment of desperation, on a rainy morning, I went and had my ears syringed. Small, hard, purplish lumps came out with the warm water. And then to hear the resonance of one’s voice. I went out, talking to myself, and listening to the sound of my voice, the different sounds the rain made on water, asphalt, wood. The wonderful sound of a car’s engine, the sound of tires on the wet surface. And in Connie’s hearing conversation all around me. Then back to the cottage. Hearing the clock in the room. The sound my shirt made as it crumpled. The rifle shots of my typewriter.

  I found I would wake up and have to give myself small destinations in order to get through the day. And there were mornings I used to wake up with nothing to look forward to except perhaps a letter.

  In the end it was this overwhelming boredom of the place and the tourists that made me seek out the people who actually live here. I don’t want to sound self-righteous about this, for I owe them a great deal, but at the time I didn’t realize that I was the one being used. They needed me as much as I needed them. For they suffered from another kind of boredom. And the way the residents fought theirs was by having parties.

  There was a party of a kind every night but the main ones were on Friday and Saturday. They began at the Sloop. One of the most uncomfortable pubs I know when it is crowded. You stand in the narrow passageway and people brush against you and drinks get spilled. Before closing time bottles are bought and everyone makes his way to wherever the party is given. If you were a stranger and bought a bottle, you were invited back.

  There was a wonderful feeling of comradeship, a kind of fantasy of brotherhood. People came down and were what they wanted to be. If someone called himself a writer or a painter, then you were that, and accepted as such by everyone. There was no examination of credentials. The bait was the sea, the peeling off of clothes on the beach, the three hundred miles from London, the Mediterranean colours; and a lot of people, like myself, anxious for some excitement.

  These were the people Bill Stringer met at the round of parties in the summer of 1959. Abe and Nancy Gin—Baby Bunting—Rosalie Grass—Jimmy Stark (whom everyone called Starkie)—Hugh and Lily Wood—Albert Rivers—Carl Darch—Helen Greenway—Nat Bubis—Oscar Preston. As the professional writer he took pride in being, he had them down for characters that he would someday use.

  II

  The first of these I got to know were Nancy and Abe Gin. I met Abe at the Sloop at lunchtime. We got to talking, found we were both Canadians, and when the pub closed he invited me back to the Celebrity for a meal. Abe was a sentimental, generous Jew from Winnipeg. Romantic and wanting to be liked by everyone. He had come over to England in 1949 as an academic. Spent a summer holiday in St. Ives. Was bitten by the “creative life,” and the people here. Decided to stay and paint. Unfortunately he hadn’t much talent, or discipline. But he looked like the public conception of a painter. Especially in summer when he wore his faded blue jeans and black high-neck fisherman’s sweater. The summer’s crop of art students, shorthand typists, and tourists, who came to St. Ives for “the artists,” inevitably fell for Abe’s leonine face, curly black hair splashed with white, and large melancholy eyes. And at forty-three he went out of his way to encourage them. In winter he received a daily allowance of a pound from Nancy and spent most of his time in the Sloop nursing half-pints of draught beer and playing table-skittles. He suffered from indigestion and belched often; when anyone heard him he excused himself by saying “Oxford.”

  Nancy was a plumpish, short woman of thirty-six, pale anemic colouring to her face. But there was a strong structure about it. It was almost a man’s face. It was far stronger formed than Abe’s. She comes from one of the London suburbs, south of the Thames. And came down in the summer of 1950, just out of art school, on a holiday, and fell for Abe’s considerable charm. They married. Had a rough time for the first six years. Until she realized that Abe would never be able to support them with his painting. She then opened, with borrowed money, the Celebrity, and runs it very efficiently. Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms come steadily from the record player by the cash desk. And paper flowers and paper grass hide the lamps hanging from the ceiling.

  As Abe has become less Jewish, Nancy seems to deliberately cultivate it. Her specialty is hot latkes, three for a shilling. And I’ve seen her mocking Abe, when he returns from the Sloop early to get another pound. “Well, Ginsberg,”—(normally she only called him “you”)—”what is it you want?” She also affects Yiddish attitudes. I was with her in the Sloop one night sitting on a bench by a long table watching customers coming to the bar for drinks. “He has a marvellous capacity,” she said of a red-faced man in a navy blazer. This, I discovered, had nothing to do with his ability at the bar, the dining table, or in bed. But his ability to make money. She is drawn to people with money. Although she is very generous herself (to those who come to her, especially if they are young and struggling painters and writers). You can see the mother hen spreading her wings. She wants to be involved. And she can do this only through other people’s lives. Abe and Nancy no longer sleep together—at least so gossip has it.

  I have found it difficult to meet anyone here for the first time without having some preconceived idea of that person. For all the people here seem to live on is gossip. They gossip continually, about one another, and of people they haven’t met. I first heard of Baby Bunting when I asked Nancy about an invitation card that was on the mantel above the fireplace in her living room. It said:

  TOMMY IS TWENTY-ONE

  Sir Louis Behnke, Bt.,

  invites you to a cocktail party

  at the Riviera Hotel

  St. Ives, Cornwall,

  between 6 p.m.–8:30p.m.

  on

  Friday, August 6th, 1959

  to celebrate

  T. L. Hudson’s

  coming of age

  RSVP

  “Baby owns the Riviera Hotel,” Nancy said, “and likes boys and innocence—but he’s ambidextrous. Except that all his girls he calls Camel. His wife goes in for the same sort of thing. Every winter he makes a tour of the slum places in the North and picks up what good-looking boys and girls he can. Then brings them here in the spring. Makes them waiters and waitresses in his hotel. And proceeds to corrupt them. It’s easy. He just stuffs them with expensive food and money. Gives them presents. Lets them use his Rolls. And when he’s had what he’s wanted out of them, he discards them. They can’t go back where they came from. So they drift, from one seaside resort to another.”

  “Baby really comes from the English aristocracy,” Abe said. “But he doesn’t belong there. He’s an eccentric. He says he bought the Riviera because he figures St. Ives is the safest place to be in, in England, when a bomb is dropped. He’ll quote you bits of the Bible to prove it—”

  “St. Ives is mentioned in the Bible?” I said.

  “No,” Abe said, “that a bomb will be dropped.”

  “Until then,” Nancy said, “he takes rejuvenating pills, tries a few sexual experiments, and has a party every Friday at the hotel . . .”

  That Friday night I went with Abe and Nancy to the Riviera Hotel. It faced the bay. There were about twenty French crabbers anchored in the deep water. With their lights on they looked like lit candles moving gently in the dark. The party was in a ballroom adjoining the one used by the hotel’s paying guests. Before you came to the ballroom you had to pass through a long bar. A few couples were already on the floor dancing to a three-piece band; but most of the guests were in the bar.

  I met Baby B
unting.

  “Been here long?” he said.

  “A couple of weeks.”

  He had got up from a green swaying couch that stood near the far wall of the bar, against a painted mural of old St. Ives dark with fishing boats. In his early fifties, tall, thin blond hair, a bronzed face with a small mouth, hardly any visible lips, glasses. He might have had a good figure once but he had put on weight.

  “How long are you staying?” Baby Bunting said.

  “I don’t know—maybe the winter.”

  “Then we’ll be seeing each other,” he said, and went to greet another of his guests, Albert Rivers, a composer, of thirty-four, with blond wavy hair that had a bit of red in it, and a worn baby-face. Albert Rivers lived in a cottage on the moors, and came in on Fridays and Saturdays for the parties and free drinks. His total income for the year was a hundred and four pounds—not quite what Baby Bunting received every week.