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

by Norman Levine

  Minutes later he called for everybody’s attention.

  “We have been together for four days cut off from all the things we are used to. We have got to know each other. And we have got on well. What I’m going to do is something of an experiment. I have tried it before. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It depends entirely on us . . . I’m going to go out of the room. You select someone. Then I come back. And we’ll see what happens.”

  There was some excitement. People were talking. I listened. As Adolphe went out it was Sally whose voice I heard.

  “Let’s pick Sally,” I said.

  Another student called Adolphe back.

  He stood in front of us.

  “The brain is a generator,” he said. “It gives off electric waves. We can pick up these waves if we concentrate. Now close your eyes. And concentrate on this one person. Put everything out of your mind—just concentrate on this one person. Say that person’s name in your mind. Don’t think of anything else. Just concentrate . . . Concentration is what writing is all about . . . Put everything out of your mind. Just think of that one person.”

  I looked. They all had their eyes closed and their heads down as if in prayer. It was quiet.

  “Someone is not concentrating,” Adolphe said, his eyes shut. I closed my eyes. “That’s better,” he said. Another long silence. “It’s getting . . . better. Yes. Yes. I’m getting something . . . it’s coming through . . . it’s becoming clear . . . it’s Sally.”

  They opened their eyes. And looked surprised, pleased, excited. Adolphe was smiling.

  “Shall we do it again?”

  This time I picked Jimmy—a Scottish boy who was in Adolphe’s class. Jimmy was sitting beside his friend Christopher.

  Adolphe went through the same routine. And when he finally said Jimmy they were again surprised.

  The third time he went out I said we will have Mrs. Goodhand.

  A student said, “You always do the picking. Why don’t we pick someone?”

  “It doesn’t matter who does the picking,” I said calmly, and asked a student to call Adolphe.

  After Adolphe said Mrs. Goodhand the surprise was still there, though several looked puzzled and some suspicious.

  We had a break to fill up with wine or coffee. The students were around Adolphe. I finally got him alone. “They’re on to us,” I said. “They want to pick the next one.”

  “Leave it to me.” And walked away.

  “As it is working so well,” Adolphe said to everyone and smiled, “I’m going to ask Peter to go out and see if it will work with him.”

  I went out of the room and came back. Following Adolphe, I said, “Everyone concentrate.” And I saw them close their eyes and their heads went down. The room was silent. I waited. “I’m not getting anything,” I said. “Some are not concentrating.” And waited for as long as I could. Then, quietly, said, “Something is starting.” And waited. “Yes. Something is starting to come through . . . I can’t tell if it is a man or a woman . . .”

  I saw Christopher getting red in the face.

  I quickly said, “It’s becoming clear. It’s Christopher.”

  Again the mixture of surprise and puzzlement. Except for Jimmy and Christopher, who looked sideways at one another.

  Next morning we were outside. (Connie had called a taxi the night before to take us to Penzance station at nine.) Adolphe was in his element. He went around in his black fedora and mustard military coat saying, “Everything ends too soon.” Some of the girls were visibly emotional. He gave them his address. (Only Mrs. Goodhand and Sally asked for mine.) He went off with one girl—when they came back they were holding hands.

  The taxi came. We were getting in when Eric Symes appeared, walking as fast as he could.

  “The phone has been cut off.”

  “Why would they do that?” a student asked.

  “Because I didn’t pay the bill. I forgot. I forget a lot of things. Could you,” he asked Adolphe, “go to Penzance post office and put it right?” And Eric Symes gave Adolphe the bill and a cheque. “It’s kind of you—without the phone—”

  The taxi began to move along the drive. Adolphe was smiling and waving. So were the students. “Goodbye,” he called. “Goodbye . . . Goodbye . . .”

  As soon as the taxi turned onto the road Adolphe withdrew into his corner. We drove in silence and looked out at the landscape.

  Some miles later we were passing a granite outcrop. It went up in horizontal layers. I could hear Adolphe muttering to himself. “Things have to last, to endure.” About a mile later we were driving with the road on top. The moor on both sides of the road. And further down, to the right, the sea and the horizon. “Once we’re gone we will be forgotten,” he said. “It will be as if we have never lived.”

  Then, half turning to me, “Why do we go on?”

  Not waiting for a reply. “Because I have to go and see about that telephone. You have to get back to your wife. And who knows what we will have to do tomorrow—”

  A few miles further, with St. Just in the distance, he took out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. “A sentimental girl. I gave her my address. She gave me this.” He passed the paper to me without turning his head. It was a short poem called “Volcanoes” by one of his students. Under the title she had written. “For Adolphe—who made things happen.”

  Outside Penzance station the taxi stopped. I got out of the car with my bag and went around to the window where he was sitting. He looked different from the person on the moor. A shabby elderly man, older than his years, with bags under his eyes.

  “Now that you know my tricks the next one you’ll be able to do yourself.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He stared back at me. It became awkward. We didn’t know how to say goodbye.

  “The most terrible thing that can happen to a writer is success,” he said in his flat voice. Then he started to smile, his face changed. “Expect a cheque in three or four weeks.” He waved as the taxi drove away.

  I walked into Penzance station. And the noise . . . of the trains . . . people moving . . . the clatter in the small café . . . Even the advertisements seemed an intrusion.

  THE MAN WITH

  THE NOTEBOOK

  If you saw him by himself, sitting in the park or in the corner of a pub, you would have noticed the clerical appearance of his face, the soft eyes, the grey straight hair, and the glasses. About his features there was an overall mildness. You felt certain that he had never raised his voice, no matter what the occasion, and that he would be prompt to apologize if he so much as brushed against another person.

  He lived by himself in a room in Bayswater. Every morning he would wash, dress, go down to the first step, and pick up his morning paper. Then come back and prepare breakfast in the kitchen at the end of the passage. He would have a raw orange, bacon, two cups of black coffee. After reading the paper he would wash the dishes, make the bed, clean the room. Then pick up a small inexpensive dark green notebook from his desk and go out.

  His favourite walk was to Kensington Gardens. In the early morning he would walk past the deserted playground, watch the birds—the fat wood pigeons with their small heads—avoid the water that lay in the hollows of the path, until he reached Round Pond. Here he would sit on one of the benches, take out his notebook, and write at the top of a clean page: Day cloudy. Wind moderate. Then he would put the notebook down, smoke his pipe, and watch.

  He came to the Gardens to observe people. The nannies, in grey uniforms with white collars, pushing expensive prams. The well-dressed men and women taking their dogs for their morning walk. The businessmen going through the park to work. But if, like today, he came early and few people were about he would take his notebook and write of the landscape around him. Trees without leaves. Sun getting warm. Water in pond, green, blue, grey. Groups of young b
irds at edge preening themselves. Ducks asleep. Flycatchers on a wire fence—sun catches the weeds in front of them and reflects the green to the underneath part of their bodies. And he tried even with this warming-up exercise to see in the familiar landscape something fresh—like this morning’s flycatchers.

  From the Gardens he walked to Hyde Park and got on a bus that took him to Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, the East End, or to one of the railway stations, a street market, or along the embankment—a choice that followed a list drawn up every month. And once there he would mix with people, go into a café, a pub, watch and listen. And write down what he saw and heard.

  In the late afternoon he would return to his room and type out what he had written that day. And from these notes, over the next three days, he would put together a sketch built around a particular person in each of these places. On Thursday night he would type out the 1,500 words and send them to a weekly journal. On the following Saturday he received a copy of the sketch as it had appeared and a cheque for thirty guineas. The editor of the journal, not long out of university, was a firm believer in taking things “directly from life.” When he had read two of the early sketches, sent in by chance, he accepted them. And, after he had published five more, contracted the old man to send a sketch a week. This arrangement had now gone on for over two years. The old man was always punctual with his story. And the weekly cheque removed the financial insecurity he had experienced before.

  He saved all his clippings, pasting them neatly in large leather-bound volumes. And in the evenings he often would sit and read about the different people he had written. Occasionally he wondered where some of them might be. For though his livelihood depended on being with people, watching them, listening to what they said—he had few friends.

  This uneventful life would have continued had not the government requisitioned the site where he lived for the construction of an office building. He disliked not so much the idea of leaving his room, or that part of London, but the fact that his routine would be upset. When his editor suggested that he move to a cottage, in a small fishing village in Cornwall, that he knew to be vacant, he was glad that the decision was made by somebody else.

  From his window he could look out at a kind of valley with a lot of narrow streets and stone cottages with chimneys belching out smoke around tea time. And though the cottage was small and damp it was much better than his room in Bayswater. He could now work in one room, sleep in another, and eat in still another. And the longer he lived in the village the more he grew to like it.

  He liked the way people recognized him when he walked in the streets, said good morning, or spoke about the weather. He liked it even more when they began to tell him the local gossip. He became a familiar sight along the front, the High Street, in the pubs. People referred to him as the man with the notebook. And after he had been there six months accepted him into their communal life. The editor continued to be satisfied with his writing.

  He had lived in Cornwall seven months and his morning began with the usual walk down the slope to get his paper, then to the fishmonger by the front. The fishmonger, a small ex-sailor, knew what his customers wanted. Their conversation, apart from fish, was negligible. The fishmonger selected a long thin mackerel from a wicker basket, cut and flicked off the head to the pail below. The fishmonger said, “Did you know Bill Stevens is dead?”

  “No,” the old man said. “No, I didn’t.”

  It was by the bandstand on the front that he first saw him. A row of chairs was placed near the band for the feeble-minded who came to hear the music. And Bill Stevens stood by the rails beside them. Otherwise he spent all his time walking. He was ninety-three. A small neat man in a grey double-breasted suit, very light blue eyes, always wearing a fedora, carrying a cane, and walking out his days.

  He came across Stevens often when he was out. And they always stopped and talked. Stevens told him what this place was like when he was a boy. When winter was the busy time, not summer. And the visitor such a rare thing that, if one came, it was news and his name and where he was staying appeared in the local paper. Fishermen, at the start of the season, were blessed at the slipway. And coffins were carried through the streets. When the pallbearers tired, they stopped, and small stools would be placed on the road. The coffin put on the stools. And everyone rested.

  The old man put it all in, in his sketch of “Mister Bill,” as he called it. He had liked Stevens. He had written about him. Now he was dead. As he drank his second cup of black coffee he went to his book of clippings and reread “Mister Bill.” He wondered if in his way he had made Bill Stevens alive for thousands of people who had never seen him.

  In a couple of weeks’ time he had forgotten about the funeral. Though it was only the start of February—snowdrops were out and the crocuses beginning—the place was getting ready for the summer season. The harbour rails were repainted silver; the summer cafés and restaurants redecorated; the holes in the streets repaired. The sand that the winter tides had swept up to the walls was bulldozed back into the sea. And the few remaining fishermen were repainting their boats and bringing out the mended gear from storage.

  The old man enjoyed this activity and recorded it in his notebook.

  But this sensation of feeling part of this village changed abruptly when he realized, with the death of the pier car park attendant, that all the funerals since he arrived in this village were the funerals of people he had written about.

  Most of the early sketches from Cornwall were descriptions of the sea, the village, the harbour. He had written about few people: “The Town Crier”; “The Man with the Heavy Eyelids”; “Jack the Fisherman”; “Mister Bill”; “The Pier Car Park Attendant.” But all these people, soon after he had written about them, died.

  At first he thought it was coincidence. After all, he wrote mainly about old people.

  He went to the notebook, read over the beginning of the week’s sketch that he was working on.

  The bell was tolling at ten on the Monday morning and I knew that someone was being buried. This was Mister R.’s daughter. Our landlady said that when she was being born he told the hospital to ring him up. If it was a boy, they were to say “strawberries,” if it was a girl, to say ‘’peaches.” He came running down the hill to tell the landlady. “It’s peaches,” he said. “It’s peaches.”

  That was as far as he had gone with it and he knew he would go no further.

  For the next two days he was depressed. I am reluctant to leave this cottage and be seen in the streets, he wrote in his notebook. Therefore I wake up just before six. Then I go out for my walk and get to see what the place is like. I do some window shopping. Walk around the front. Along the pier. Watch the gulls, the black-backs, the sparrows. And I am back to the cottage by seven.

  The next day, because a gale was blowing, he felt safe enough to go out at noon.

  There are five French crabbers in the Bay, he wrote in his notebook, facing the land, anchored and swaying violently. In front of them about a dozen gannets are diving for sand eels. They rarely go higher than the masts of the crabbers. I watch, from a shelter by the ladies’ lavatory. They come low across the water, turn into the wind, climb sharply, drift across, then plummet down, entering with a splash.

  But these were the reflexes of a writing animal. The human was no longer observed or noted down.

  After another day of trying to come to terms with himself he decided to satisfy his conscience by deliberately writing about someone young and healthy for his next sketch.

  He chose his next-door neighbour’s son. A young man in his twenties. He worked in the post office by the Methodist chapel. It seemed odd to see him—looking like something from a physical fitness poster—sit on a high stool and give out stamps in the small post office. His girlfriend was a waitress in a café along the front during the summer and a telephone operator in the winter.

  The old man went to the pos
t office with his notebook. It was not an easy job. For not only was he under a strain, but the young seemed to wear a mask for him. His first draft of “Hal,” as he named him for the sketch, was not of a young man, but that of an old person. He tried again. Not knowing what he was after he wrote too much. Besides describing the restless eyes, the trace of boredom already showing in the mouth, the power of the body; he noted down every poster, every announcement and warning that was on the walls. He decided that he would write “Hal” as a paradox: the young man, full of vitality—and the drabness of his surrounding and lightness of work.

  He sent off the sketch on the Thursday night. He did not return to the cottage but walked aimlessly by the harbour in the light rain. He was not certain whether he believed that there was a link between the recent deaths and his writing—or whether, getting old, he wanted to give his work some kind of recognition.

  They found his neighbour’s son on Monday morning. He was lying at the bottom of the courtyard. Apparently he visited his girlfriend by scaling the side of the house, going across the gable roof, and then entered her room through the bedroom window, which she left open. The policeman thought he probably lost his footing and fell some thirty feet onto concrete. The scandal that this accident revealed helped to talk out the tragedy. But to the old man Hal’s death was no accident. And neither were the others.

  He spent Monday and Tuesday by himself. He ate sparingly and didn’t bother to wash up or tidy the room. In the evenings he took down his leather-bound books.

  His first sketch was of “Konrad.” A Polish actor he met by chance in Soho. They spent the afternoon drinking and “Konrad” told him how he was liberated.