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

by Norman Levine

  He drank some coffee.

  “One of the things you need is a good pair of eyes. I was in Paris last summer. Walking in a street. When I saw, on the pavement, outside a shop, cages with small animals inside. In one cage were pigeons. They were pecking at the grain on the bottom of their cage . . . sending some of the grains outside. A lone pigeon came flying along the street. It landed beside the cage. It began to peck at the outside grains. Then at grains it could reach between the bars. Someone came from the shop, clapped her hands, “Va t’ en.” The pigeon flew away. Those inside the cage went on pecking at the grain.”

  The students were making notes.

  “Take things from life,” Adolphe said. “Bad experience is better than no experience. Invent as little as possible. You are inventing the piece the way you use words and the way you are telling it. Wherever you go you will notice things.

  “After Paris I went to a small provincial town. It was the end of July. All day Christmas carols were being played on loudspeakers in the streets. I got to know a teacher in this provincial town. Her name was Natalie. She had taught French in a London school and had come back to where she was born because her marriage broke up. Her parents bought her a wool shop. And they kept an eye on her. Natalie and I were having dinner in a restaurant—it was nine thirty—and there was her mother and father standing outside the restaurant window, smiling at us, and pointing to the time. Next morning we were having a coffee in the wool shop and talking about Richard Burton . . . his death was announced . . . when Natalie said, ‘A young boy, from across the street, was killed last night in a car accident. He would always wave to me when he went by. I won’t see him again . . . We can’t talk about him.’ She said angrily, ‘But we can talk about Richard Burton and neither of us knew him.”’

  Adolphe waited for this to sink in.

  “Sometimes when you see something it will suggest something else. On the train coming down I saw two magpies. I remembered the rhyme:

  One for sorrow

  Two for joy

  Three for a letter

  Four for something better.

  “And made up this scene. There is this young family in a train. Mother, father, young daughter. They have just left their older son in a mental hospital. Mother and father are tense. The young daughter—standing at the window looking at the passing fields—sees two magpies. She calls out excitedly.

  “’We going to have joy. We going to have joy.’”

  He hesitated.

  “Of course if you have two magpies in a country cemetery. With one bird on a gravestone and the other on the earth beside it—you have other possibilities.

  “And if you are in this country cemetery. And see a man, as I did, bringing flowers to the grave of his wife. In the next scene you have that man carrying flowers as he goes courting his new lady friend.

  “Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “To end this evening,” Adolphe said, “Peter and I will read you something we have written—so you can see our credentials.”

  Adolphe read an amusing account about his experiences with a dating service. “All the women they sent were handicapped.”

  And I read a ten-minute story.

  That night, in the goose-house, I went to bed with the samples of writing my lot had brought with them. I looked forward to reading their work. When I finished, I thought, What am I doing here? The writing was amateurish. The prose flat, lifeless, and going all over the place. It was as if they wanted to write and didn’t know what to write about.

  We began at eight next morning. A student would knock on the door of the goose-house. It was Spartan but clean. I would have them sit opposite at the scrubbed wooden table. Someone had put primroses and violets in a glass. I asked them, why did they want to write? And they talked. One student (a heavy handsome woman from Birmingham), the oldest on the course, said she was married with two small children and her husband was unemployed. Another, a small lively girl from a northern provincial town, said she was having an affair with her husband’s closest friend (“He and his wife are constantly in and out of our house”) and things were getting difficult. They also told me that their teachers’ training college was closing at the end of the year. They were the last course. And none had jobs to go to when they graduated.

  “Our tutor has started to write a novel.”

  “What will you do?”

  They didn’t know.

  I went over their work. I showed them how to cut unnecessary words. And not to explain too much. After a few minutes they were able to do the revising themselves. I said their only responsibility—to discover their material. And gave them their first assignment. “Go outside. Describe something. So I can see it.”

  The last of the seven to come to the goose-house was also the youngest on the course, Sally. A small cheerful blond girl with a lovely smile. She had a habit of pushing her long hair away from her face. She wasn’t as bad as the others but she still had some way to go. And I told her this.

  “What does it matter,” she said, “if someone is writing without a view of getting published. I get pleasure out of writing. I like doing it. I just want to get better. That’s why I came.”

  I didn’t understand this. I assumed that everyone who writes wants to get published. But here was someone realistic enough, at so young an age. Yet she couldn’t stop. And neither, as I found out, could the others.

  Walking to lunch Adolphe caught up with me.

  “End of our surgeries for the day,” he said, a little out of breath. “I’ve been going non-stop. How did yours go?”

  “All right,” I said, without his enthusiasm. And told him about Sally.

  He smiled. “What makes people interesting is their dedication.”

  Tomorrow morning. It was Sally who came to the goose-house at eight. (The last person yesterday was the first person the next.) And as it was a warm sunny morning I suggested we have the lesson outside.

  We were sitting, quite near, at right angles. Sally was facing the gardens. I was facing the moor. Close by, the tall grass and bracken. Then the distances. Areas of water, earth, sky. How timeless and quiet. I told her that I liked her descriptions, especially the way she described an outcrop of granite. “As if a giant toothpaste tube had been squeezed and the granite came out in layers, one on top of the other.” For her next assignment, I said, I wanted her to try and trap an emotion. I was telling her how to go about doing this when I noticed a flash of light as the sun caught the windscreen of a car moving on the road across the moor. I turned my head towards Sally—her eyes were filled with tears. I went back to the moor—the car, like a toy, was now against the light green then the dark green—and talked as if nothing was happening. Sometimes I turned my head slightly—she was still crying—and continued to talk as I watched a kestrel hover, then glide, and turn into the wind and hover again, beating its wings without moving—in the wind—and not moving—then still. I cut the half-hour short, said I would see her tomorrow.

  The next to come onto the grass was the married woman, Mrs. Goodhand, from Birmingham. I was more upset than I realized, for I told her what happened.

  “I was sitting like this looking at the moor and talking about writing. When, for no reason, Sally started to cry.”

  I turned to look at Mrs. Goodhand. There were tears coming down her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?”

  She lowered her head and said quietly,

  “Because of you.”

  I didn’t understand. And must have shown it. For she said, “You’re on the page.”

  When I saw Adolphe I told him what happened. He wasn’t surprised.

  “They are reminding us we are writers.”

  Adolphe was taking me on one of his favourite walks. We passed four students playing croquet on the sunken lawn and I could hear the sound of wood on wood
as we went down a rough path between the bracken and the gorse. Then the small fields. Butterflies were flitting around. Small light blue ones that I hadn’t seen before. A light blue sea, in front, to the horizon. This immense sky. And, behind, the haunch of the moor. We walked along the curving side of a small potato field. Then another small field where the grass was high, the hedgerows full of campion, brambles, foxgloves, and primroses. We sat by a hedgerow, took our shirts off, lay on the grass facing the sun.

  “You know what writers have in common?” Adolphe asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “A lack of confidence.”

  Was this true? I didn’t think so. Not when I’m writing. It’s when I finish something that the doubts set in.

  “There are times,” I said, “when I think the whole business is a confidence trick. The last time I walked into a public library it was like going into a cemetery. All those lives. All those

  ambitions. What does it come down to? A few books on a shelf.”

  I could hear a rooster crowing from the farm. And further, towards the cliffs, a working tractor.

  “What else is there to do?” Adolphe said, his eyes shut. “You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was. For twenty-seven years. We were married in a thunderstorm . . . just after the war . . . seems like yesterday. She now lives with someone in television. She likes celebrities. People she doesn’t know. I have a housekeeper. She comes twice or three times a week. Stays the night. It’s the best tonic I know.”

  Again we were silent.

  I thought, he makes too much of being a writer. Perhaps I did too, once. But I had learned since not to make too much of anything.

  “I’m a little to the left,” Adolphe said. “In the thirties I was staying with an uncle in London. I went to dances. Sometimes two or three dances a night. I would pick at a lobster, a chicken done in something. Then, in the morning, walking to my uncle’s house, I saw men sleeping on park benches with newspapers around their feet. I thought something wasn’t right.”

  The sun was warm.

  “Isn’t this marvellous,” Adolphe said, sitting up, looking at the silent view. I watched the shadow of a cloud going across the moor. As the cloud moved the light green slowly became dark green, then light green. Close to the cliffs a small fishing boat, its mizzen up. The water white in front and behind. Seagulls low over it and around its sides.

  “I have led a futile life,” Adolphe said. “Perhaps futile is not the right word. But it’s days like the days here . . . They are nothing in themselves . . . but they help to give stability. I always come away from here feeling refreshed.”

  After another silence I asked him what happened after his poem was in that film.

  “A lot of people came into my life. They said they wanted to look after my interests, to promote me. The phone kept ringing. I was going out to lunches, to dinners. I put on weight. I read the poem throughout the country, in town halls, in churches. It was taught in schools. I travelled. In the South of France I took a villa and stocked it with drink and food. For a while I had an enormous amount of friends.

  “A few years later I wasn’t news any more. When the money ran out I did whatever I could get. Then five years ago the poetry started again. It started after a woman I loved was killed in a car crash. I kept writing. All the time waiting for it to dry up. But it wouldn’t let go. I sent the poems to the magazines who published me. But that was over twenty years ago. There were new editors. They sent them back. Sometimes they came back so fast I don’t think they read them. They just looked at the name. I was old hat.

  “For a while I did nothing. When you live alone—there are days when you do nothing. Then I decided to send them out under another name. They were accepted. I’ve been doing that since. I don’t write as many as I used to. Two or three a year at the most. But they get published.”

  “What name do you use?”

  “My secret. When I have enough for a book I’ll write an article for a national paper and expose it all.”

  The sun no longer warm. We put on our shirts and started to walk back. The estate, from below, looked like a fairy-tale castle. And what we were doing here also seemed make-believe. The students treated us as distinguished writers. They didn’t know about the little articles in the provincial papers, the radio scripts, the translations. And what, I wondered, did Adolphe do for a living?

  As if guessing my thoughts he said, “You know how we’re going to end up. Don’t you?” He was laughing. “On the street. Like those men with the newspapers.” But he wasn’t laughing when he said in a flat voice, “I will probably end my days alone in a rented room.”

  Early on the third morning the light woke me. I got up and went onto the road. It was quiet. The smell from the wildflowers. And in this light all the colours looked freshly washed. I was singing. Sometimes the road went down to a narrow valley with the earth high on either side. And sometimes the road was at the very top. And I could see for miles. Crows, rooks, gulls flew slowly over. And the occasional rabbit in the bracken.

  I wasn’t the only one out. I saw students, in different parts of the moor, doing the same thing.

  The morning surgeries also went well. Perhaps Adolphe was right about futile days. I was becoming impatient to get back to my wife and to a short story I had been trying to write for over a year.

  In the afternoon I went to see Eric Symes. He led me into a large room, spotlessly clean. High ceiling, a wall-to-wall purple carpet, a piano . . . the wood shining, a comfortable settee and chairs, white walls—paintings on them. It looked like an art gallery. I recognized a Soutine, a Terry Frost, a Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Patrick Heron, Alan Lowndes.

  “I bought them, very cheaply, after the war. Afraid I’ll have to sell some this year.”

  There were large painted dishes, with gold on the edges, propped up on the ledge above the fireplace.

  “People have been very kind.”

  While Eric Symes was showing me around (and asked how I liked it here, and how the course was going) I could hear soft music. A pleasant woman’s voice was slowly singing

  I’ll close my eyes

  And make believe it’s you . . ..

  He walked stiffly on shaky legs, leaning on his cane, into the hall. And asked if I wanted to see upstairs. More paintings above the stairs. And, in another high room, another piano with black and white photographs propped up of a young Eric Symes. With Ivor Novello . . . with Noel Coward . . . with others, who looked vaguely familiar, in double-breasted suits and with cigarettes in long cigarette holders. There were photographs of him in the costume of an Arab sheik, a hussar, and a Foreign Legionnaire.

  I’ll close my eyes

  And make believe it’s you . . .

  He led me along the hall into another large and high white room. A low bed, neatly made up, books on wooden shelves, paintings unframed on the walls. A window looked to the moor and the sea.

  “Haile Selassie slept here,” Eric Symes said. “He had a daughter at a school in Penzance. Before my time.”

  Then he led me outside. I could smell the flowers before we entered the gardens. And hear the wind. A narrow path. On either side walls of green. The path kept turning. Blue flowers, purple and white foxgloves, birds singing, slabs of granite covered in a green moss, fallen flowers on the path as well as on the trees. Clusters of red hanging, bushes of them. Some hung down from stalks, most pushed up. Delicate white-pink flowers, light purple flowers, splashes of yellow on the green.

  “I won’t go through,” Eric Symes said, out of breath. “Follow the path. I’ll see you when you come out.”

  The path was overhung in places by shrubs and branches of trees. I had to bend to go under. Some branches had broken and were on the ground, a light green lichen on them.

  As I continued to walk, on both sides, all kinds of exotic flowers
and moss and lichen. The sound of flying insects. And fallen petals, fallen flowers, decaying leaves.

  When I came out Eric Symes said there were seventy-three azaleas, sixty-five different camellias, ninety-three kinds of rhododendrons. And they came from Chile, New Zealand, and other far countries.

  We went back the way we came and stopped in front of the sunken lawn. There wasn’t a sound. The drop of bracken and gorse; the wooden poles going down with the single cable to the small green fields, the farm, and past the farm more small fields to the cliffs. Then sea and horizon. It looked so calm.

  “There’s always some battle going on,” Eric Symes said. “Others want to change it. I’m fighting to keep it the same. So far I’ve won. But they don’t give up. I had to fight developers who want to build hotels. I had to fight the war ministry. I covenanted the land to the National Trust. But I don’t trust them. All it needs is some small war somewhere, with British interests, and they will have soldiers and helicopters all over the place. Sometimes there is a drought. I have to get water from the fire department. And there is always something going wrong . . . pipes, roofs, ceilings, windows, pumps. A bit of money comes from these courses. And I let it out in the summer. But not everyone likes it. They like the scenery. They can’t stand the quiet or being cut off.”

  “What’s going to happen when you’re no longer here?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have children. I don’t have family.”

  The effort of walking and talking had exhausted him. I thought I would leave.

  “I read a lot,” he said. “Send me one of your books.”

  On the last morning and afternoon both groups were together in the dining room. The students read out their assignments. The others commented on them. Everyone was saying nice things. My lot wrote mostly about the different views. Adolphe’s wrote about railway journeys and funerals.

  In the evening there was a sense of occasion. We all washed, dressed in clean clothes. (We had caught the sun.) Adolphe looked ten years younger. The best cooks were on. Avocados with a French dressing. Roast chickens, roast potatoes, a salad. Apple pie with ice cream. And bottles of an inexpensive red wine. Everyone seemed to be in a light-hearted mood (telling us how much we had helped them, how much they got out of the course) so I thought of nothing when Adolphe came up to me with his coffee and casually said, “When I walk out of the room, the last person talking—that’s the one you select.”