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

by Norman Levine

  The only people in the place who did not look well were the Cornish housewives who took in bed and breakfast. You could recognize them by their tired, pale faces.

  Also in August the season’s parties were at their peak.

  This Friday it was Hugh and Lily’s turn for a party. Hugh’s “Atlantic Waves” had a large bare room on the ground floor and French doors that led straight on to Porthgwidden Beach. A bonfire was burning on the sand and couples were sitting or standing around the fire having hot dogs and hamburgers and wandered back inside to fill up with more drink or to dance. That’s how they all started. After the pubs closed; an easy, relaxed, gaiety . . .

  But by 1:00 a.m. a man had a girl down on the slope of the stairs, his mouth fastened on hers, and she couldn’t get up. Another had a girl in a corner; her dress was up above her knees. Two young effeminate boys were dancing together. There were several girls in long black stockings and loose sweaters. There were girls who were no longer young. There were mothers dancing with their sons by a former marriage. And all the time the record player played and things were happening in the dark corners. But like a damp firecracker they only fizzed and went out; rarely did they explode into life. As the night went on there was the invitation to come to the darkened kitchen. Or to one of the untidy bedrooms upstairs. Strangers came up to women and asked if they were lesbians. And strangers came up to young men and asked if they were queers. A young girl with a very long neck and a small snake head was dancing with a stocky middle-aged woman who had fuzzy black hair. Suddenly the fuzzy-haired woman forced the girl to the floor. The girl called out. Two men tried to pull the woman off the girl. But she held on, eyes closed, her mouth on the girl’s long neck. Another man joined the two, and in the end the men had to drag both the girl and the woman by their legs across the floor, across the sand of the beach and into the shallows before they were separated. A tall, strikingly dark girl, with a long squarish face, dressed like a flapper of the twenties, began to sing.

  My mummy told me

  That she would buy me

  A rubber dolly

  If I was good.

  A very thin young woman with short black hair and a sad, simple face came over to a man wearing a black shirt. “Hello, Patrick. Have fun in Tangier?” she said in an accent that had in it a trace of cockney.

  “Just as much fun as anyone has running away from things,” the man in the black shirt said, and offered her a cigarette.

  But when I told her

  I kissed a soldier

  She would not buy me

  That rubber dolly . . .

  “I was in Penzance yesterday.” A neat small man with fine features (slowly undermined by the extra fat) was talking, in broken English, to a young girl with glasses. “And a priest came along Market Jew Street. He was walking in the middle of the road. No one gave him any attention. About ten seconds behind him came a huge workman carrying a large TV aerial straight up, holding the stem by his belly, like people do with a cross. Immediately people stopped on both sides of the street and watched the man holding the TV aerial pass. That’s all you would need to make your point. It’s a wonderful opening shot.”

  The man’s name was Oscar. He was referred to as the Polish Count and he had made films in Vienna before the war. Now he had the very English surname of Preston and taught French and German in the local grammar school. He was full of “opening shots” of films he would never make . . .

  Hugh and Lily’s party ended in a fight, a swinging match, because someone was out too long on the sands with someone else’s wife. The party didn’t actually end; a few remained to finish off the rum punch, the bottles of cheap wine, and what remained in the beer barrel.

  If anyone had been out shortly after three that night they would have seen a fairly tall man walking unsteadily along the front, going from side to side. He saw himself in the plate-glass window of the Shore Café and began to walk on tiptoes, then bowed to his reflection, and did a little dance. Then he went to the harbour rails, leaned over, and gestured, encouragingly, with his hand to the clear water as it slid up and down the granite steps. Then, pulling himself together and with great dignity, he did a low bow to the empty front. And quickly walked up the alley of cobblestones, between Woolworth’s and Stevens Tours, and came out in Fore Street. As he started to walk down Fore Street he slipped and fell. He tried to raise himself but couldn’t. Beside him was a puddle. He began to shout. “Ferryman. Take me across. I want to go home. Ferryman. Take me across—”

  The man lying on the damp street was Abe Gin.

  IV

  I didn’t worry very much about the book I wasn’t writing. Getting through the day was quite easy. I would sleep late in my darkened room, drop in to Connie’s for a coffee and later to the Celebrity for lunch. After lunch I would go to the beach, perhaps surf, and then join the others on the sand and soak in the sun. We were all a nice brown. The afternoons were pretty lethargic. In the evenings we came to life . . .

  We were lying on the beach on this hot, still, late August afternoon. Hugh and Lily Wood, Nat Bubis, the blond girl Thelma Eskin, who was posing for Nat—her eight-year-old daughter was happily playing by herself in the wet sand—myself, Helen Greenway, and a happy, sensual little man, Peter Kroll, who owned a smart restaurant in London and had appeared at Hugh’s party. Peter Kroll had an inexhaustible curiosity about Canada and Helen Greenway. She was lying beside him in a white bathing suit, very white against the colour of her body. Helen Greenway at thirty-four was a spidery kind of woman with an anxious voice, a largish head, and a nervousness that made her physically exciting. She gave the impression of a tense, playful kitten, wearing an old face, and being very brittle. She had a neat, whitewashed cottage along the front that she inherited from her mother, who had come down here to retire and to paint. I also knew, from gossip, that Helen was a small-time actress, divorced twice. I could see Peter Kroll pretend to look sideways, but it was to admire her figure. Helen Greenway kept it that way by going out after a heavy meal and being sick in the toilet.

  “If you make people do routine jobs,” Nat Bubis was saying, “fifty weeks in the year, then give them two weeks’ holiday, they don’t know how to enjoy themselves. They don’t know what to do on holiday except go back to those days before they started to work. So they come here and undress and behave like children, chasing a ball and splashing each other in the water . . .”

  Gulls wheeled over. Their shadows skimming across the dry white-yellow sand. From somewhere came a train’s whistle and further away a church bell clanged twice. And the surf continued to break, carrying the bathers with their boards into the beach.

  “I guess you’re right,” Hugh answered Nat, because no one else had bothered. “Did you know that Elizabeth is pregnant?”

  Hugh was lying on his back, slightly propped up in a sand hole, wearing light tan shorts.

  “Is she going to keep this one,” Nat said, “or go to see Gurland in Penzance?”

  “I think she’ll go to Gurland,” Hugh said.

  “I bet Gurland’s fixed just about every woman down here,” Peter Kroll said. “Why doesn’t he charge—?”

  “Because he doesn’t believe in unwanted children,” Helen said. “He’s a socialist.”

  “He sure is,” Lily said with scorn. “He takes his time, keeps you coming to see him for weeks, and has his kind of fun—I had to threaten I’d report him if he didn’t leave me alone.”

  “Did you hear what happened to Maria? Shall I tell . . .” Hugh appealed timidly to Lily, wanting her approval.

  “You will anyway,” Lily said.

  “You know Maria, the Swedish girl,” Hugh said. “She was having an affair with Baby Bunting’s Tommy—she’s pregnant.”

  No one seemed very concerned. And how could we be, for we vaguely saw Maria at one of the parties. The sun was hot. Helen turned over on her stomach and Thelma Es
kin sat up to see where her daughter was. Her eyes finally found her by the shallows watching a lifesaver ride the waves on a board-like boat, legs in stirrups, leaning back, and overturning in the shallows. It was very hot and still and we all felt lazy and apathetic.

  “I thought I knew this place,” Hugh said slowly to no one in particular. “But our black kitten, after we let it out for the night, didn’t come back. So I got up early in the morning and went out to look for it. It would be hungry then. And looking for the kitten—I began to see all sorts of things I hadn’t seen before. The streets seemed to be full of stray dogs. I found alleyways, waste-grounds, passages that I didn’t know existed.”

  “Did you find the kitten?” Nat Bubis interrupted.

  “No.”

  Again we were silent.

  I watched a blue and white French crabber come gracefully across the front of the beach, its mizzen the colour of dried blood.

  “This is really a Chekhov situation,” Helen said. “All we do here is talk. Nothing happens.”

  “I’ll write a Chekhov story for you,” Hugh said, “about this place.”

  “You,” Lily said grimly. “You may have been able to fly airplanes once, but when it comes to people they’re nothing but pieces of cardboard shit. What a shit you are.”

  Nobody said anything.

  Hugh looked embarrassed.

  “I thought we agreed to forget it.”

  “I can’t forget it,” Lily said. And stood up, took her clothes and towel, and walked briskly away.

  “We had another row,” Hugh said apologetically. “It was something at last night’s party.”

  Nobody said anything. The strains of Music While You Work came from a portable to the left. And a white launch carrying passengers to Seal Island went smoothly through the sparkling blue water. From the wet sand a child was shouting “meanie Poosie, meanie Poosie” at a woman who had lifted the child out of a pool and carried it back to the dry sand. I watched a young girl, burned a deep brown, in a light blue bikini, walk slowly and sensually across the beach.

  “Did you hear Oscar’s latest opening shot?” I said by way of making conversation.

  “The one with the priest and TV aerial, in Market Jew Street,” Thelma said.

  “No, this one has an Irish maid coming up the stairs of a cheap hotel in Paddington. In one hand she carries a breakfast tray with fruit juice, kippers on a plate, toast and coffee—in the other hand, a bed-pot.”

  No one thought it funny.

  “Oscar’s got a thing about pots,” Thelma said. “The first time I met him we were at a Baby Bunting party and in the middle of conversation he interrupted himself to say he just thought up a wonderful opening shot. It’s of a huge ballroom with grand dukes and grand ladies all dressed up with medals and ribbons and things. And they are dancing in this ballroom. The camera sort of weaves through them unpeeling one layer after another, getting closer to the very centre. Where, under a huge chandelier, in the middle of all these dressed-up people, is a small, nude child, sitting on a pot and straining—”

  We thought that funny.

  And Helen said, “I remember when Toby was three, running around in the morning in the nude. She couldn’t talk very well. And as she ran around the house she kept on shouting, ‘I’m in the mood, Mummy. I’m in the mood—’”

  We laughed. And Thelma said, “When Betty was learning to write she began leaving me notes in all sorts of places. One of them was ‘To Mummy with All My Hart.’ I said to her, ‘Betty, h-a-r-t doesn’t spell heart. Try again.’ She said, ‘H-u-r-t, Mummy—”’

  “She’s a bright girl,” Hugh said.

  I watched the child. She had a long stick of bamboo and a small bit of white muslin at the end around a wire. And she was hunting imaginary fish in a pool.

  “The best my kid’s ever done,” Nat said, “is sing ‘Old Man Reefer. That Old Man Reefer.”’

  “He don’t plant taters,” Peter Kroll sang on, imitating a Southern voice. “He don’t plant cotton. And them that plants ‘em are soon forgotten . . .”

  But there was no direction to the conversation. And again we lay silent, soaking in the late afternoon sun. I watched a cormorant fly low across the water, its black neck stretched full out, and two narrow grey specks on the horizon, French crabbers coming in for the night.

  “I couldn’t get to sleep last night,” Nat Bubis said. “And lying awake in bed I thought how it will be a hundred years from now. The beaches, the bay, the far shore fields—they will be the same. But in little churchyards around here, there will be our names on stones. And no one will know anything about us, or the kind of life we lived.”

  No one spoke. “Rain will spread from the west,” came from the portable to the left.

  “Have you seen Nancy lately?” Helen asked Thelma Eskin. “You remember how pretty she was? Now her face has gone fat—she must have put on half a stone. She said hello to me in the street—for a minute I thought it was Rosalie.”

  “Maybe she’s unhappy so she eats,” Nat said.

  “I don’t know why she and Abe keep on like this,” Thelma said. “It’d be better if they lived apart—”

  “Abe tried it,” Hugh said, “but he came back. He said he couldn’t stand being alone.”

  “Who is Rosalie?” I asked.

  “Rosalie—” Hugh began, and doodled in the sand, “—is a collector. She collects people.”

  As usual, Hugh was only partly right. Rosalie Grass did not collect people exactly, but painters. She was living with Starkie in the finest house I had seen in St. Ives, called “Driftwood Heights.” It was on the outskirts, on the high ground. A square stone manor house with lots of narrow windows, on a plateau. I could see it from the harbour—like a monument—above and a little removed from the town. A small wood and farmers’ fields were behind it. Then the moorland with the gorse, heather, and granite boulders. In front, a long gravel drive came from the main road. Various trees lined one side of the drive. On the other, sloping well-cut lawns with flower beds. Then the continual slope down to St. Ives. And a marvellous view—especially at sunrise—of the bay, the harbour, the cottages with their numerous chimney pots; the railway line, above the beach, with the cut-granite station building.

  When one first looked at Rosalie Grass—tall, with an attractive face, pale skin, a long neck, light blue eyes, long light-red hair, a pleasant smile—one thought of something English. But it was an England of the flat in South Kensington, of dogs and the country house, and frequent travels abroad. And Jimmy Stark was a smallish energetic man, with cropped brown hair, very blue eyes, and a hooked nose that was somewhat pointed. He was the only Cornishman in the group I met down here. He rented the North Star Garage along the front. At thirty-six he was six years older than Rosalie. They teamed up, according to Hugh, not long after Rosalie had come for a holiday from Southern Rhodesia. She would not accept the limitations of camp life in a mining town of the bush, nor those of her engineering husband. Starkie had also come back restless. He had been a commando in the war and having been away he could not return to the cottage in the Back Road, the Methodist chapel, and a simple, doting Cornish girl who took in bed-and-breakfast visitors in the season.

  When I first met him I thought he was the most volatile person I had ever seen. A bundle of energy that was rarely still. And his enthusiasms were infectious—words just seemed to flow out of him once he started to talk. And he could mimic almost anyone he wanted to.

  During the day they seemed incongruous. Rosalie on the beach, in her green bathing suit, smoking cigarettes out of a gold cigarette holder, reading a book, surrounded by young men. While Starkie never turned up on the beach. Even on the hottest day I would see him in his garage, in light blue overalls, working at the open end of a car, or underneath it, calling out to some local person who was passing by, or running into the office to answer the telephone. In
the evening he appeared with Rosalie at the Sloop, dressed neatly in a dark blue sport shirt, light trousers, sports jacket; buying other people drinks until closing time. Then back to Driftwood Heights.

  It was the best place for parties. It was free of Wesleyan or Methodist neighbours, and therefore free of having a policeman come to the door and ask the party to quiet down—as had happened several times at Hugh and Lily’s and Abe and Nancy’s. Driftwood Heights wasn’t all theirs. They had only one large wing of it. The house belonged to Sir Edward Lolli, an international banker who bought it for his boyfriend, Garry Diamond, a pleasant, shy young man of twenty-seven who wanted to be a painter. The banker installed Garry at Driftwood Heights and only turned up at Christmas, Easter, and for a few weeks during the summer. So when Rosalie and Starkie asked about renting a wing, the banker agreed. And they did it up wonderfully well. Starkie was very excited about the new place, the modern furniture, but mostly, I suspect, about him living in the manor house of the town.

  V

  The first formal party Bill Stringer attended at Driftwood Heights was a hat party on September the first. Rosalie wore a lampshade held by a ribbon under her chin. Red Cutler, a young man with canary-coloured hair (a discard of Baby Bunting’s of two seasons, who was now staying with Garry Diamond), had an elaborate Edwardian hat with large feathers and flowers in tiers and lots of veil hung in front and tied under his chin. When he danced he had to without moving his head. Starkie wore a Victorian kind of nightcap, or perhaps it was a baby’s bonnet—a piece of linen that came around his head and ears and tied under his chin by a white string. A small man in a beard had on a large sombrero. Most of the girls wore trilbies. Bill Stringer came in a ski cap.

  “You know what I liked about you on the beach,” Rosalie said to Bill Stringer as they were dancing. “The flatness of your belly.” She pressed her belly against his. He didn’t move away.