Foley’s feeling of security began to fade as he approached the village. It never lasted long in any case and always disappeared when encounters threatened. This morning it vanished quite away when he noticed how many of the houses along the road into Lanruan had already put up ‘Vacant Accommodation’ signs in the windows, although it was not yet May. He always watched for signs of the approaching season with apprehension. It was like an extremely searching annual personality test; every year he was afraid he might fail, impossible demands might be made on him. Besides, it was difficult during these months to conceal from oneself that one was battening on a taste one despised. Though you could hardly call it battening, he reflected, in view of the firm’s resources.
He began to arrange the calls in his mind. Graham first, of course, with the pixies; his house was on the way in any case. A few minutes there, a look at the painting, then on to Gwendoline. She would probably give him coffee, he would find an opportunity for the over-mastering passion gambit. Finally Barbara Gould: half an hour there to bring her up to date with the latest Mosseries, and home for a late lunch.
In order to call on Graham it was necessary to turn off just before reaching the main part of the village and start climbing again up a loosely gravelled lane which led to Graham’s gate. The car had to be left here but the journey was by no means over: to reach the house itself you had to pick your way some hundreds of yards along a very narrow overgrown footpath, intersected at one point by a wide and deep stream. The only way to get over this stream was to walk along a plank, green, slippery and rotten with age, which Graham in periods of world-weariness or heavy debt pulled up like a drawbridge, making his house virtually unassailable.
Foley left the pixies just inside the gate, having no intention of struggling down the path with them: the going was difficult enough even when one was unencumbered.
The single-storey wooden shack in which Graham lived was invisible from the road above and the village below because of the screen of trees around it, planted for purposes of concealment by the former owner, who either through shyness or distaste had cut down his human contacts to the minimum necessary for survival, and had kept bees and planted a lot of aromatic herbs, flowering shrubs and fruit-trees in the few acres of sharply sloping ground, which surrounded the house. Graham had kept up the misanthropy but totally neglected the garden. Most of the flowers planted so carefully had seeded themselves into a decline long ago and the fruit never sweetened now. But no neglect could affect the fertility of the place, the constant presence of water, the sunny, sheltered slope. In full summer the place swooned with germination and the tangle closed one in completely, despite the steepness of the slope, but now there were several places along the path from which one could get a view of the village. Immediately after crossing the stream, during which he slipped and almost fell, Foley stopped for a few minutes to look down and recover his nerve.
Lanruan lay below him, divided into its three separate zones. There was the old village, narrow houses with red-tiled roofs and well-spaced windows, clustered round the harbour, the quays and the fish market. Stretching back from the harbour on both sides of the road were new brick houses with neat gardens and strips of flagged path and bay windows, which looked at this distance like the bulging eye-cases of inert red beetles. These houses were nearly all used as private hotels or guest-houses during the summer. Thirdly, scattered over the cliffs above the harbour were villas, built in a variety of styles, whose terraces and rock gardens climbed yearly higher, driving back the gorse and fern. Plate glass twinkled at Foley from among forsythia, mock-orange trees and puny palms. Beyond all this was the sea itself, within the wall of the harbour pretty and manageable, gay with the reflections of small pleasure boats, glinting fish-nets and flexing spirals of light on the stone quays; outside this wall pale and featureless, another element altogether.
Foley continued his way along the path to Graham’s door, noticing as he did so how the ash-trees seemed to lean in towards the house. Their branches almost touched the windows, the sharp black buds split already by the fleshy leaf inside. Something ravenous in the appearance of these buds impressed Foley disagreeably. He did not knock but shouted, ‘Graham, hallo Graham,’ and immediately Flossie, Graham’s marmalade spaniel bitch, began to bark loudly. Foley heard the sound of a bolt being withdrawn, then Graham peered out warily from below the peak of his cap. Recognising his visitor he drew back without speaking and Foley followed him into the long narrow room in which Graham ate and slept and worked at his picture. It was untidy in a sordid way, littered with odd garments and scraps of food. Almost the whole of one wall was covered by two bed sheets which had been tacked together.
‘How are you, Graham?’ said Foley. ‘I’ve brought you some more pixies, two gross. They have to be ready for Friday morning.’
‘Right you are, boy,’ Graham said in his hoarse, knowing voice which always made Foley think of a groom, or some sort of coach – a person, at any rate, intimately acquainted with form, mettle, temper; an insider’s voice, despite Graham’s solitary life, yet at the same time untrustworthy.
‘I left them at the gate as usual,’ he went on, watching Graham closely, trying to engage the warm brown eyes under the shadow of the cap. It was like trying to catch the eye of some intensely alive but completely unco-operative mammal; a resemblance intensified by Graham’s diminutive stature and the furry brown corduroy jacket he always wore. ‘You can do it for Friday, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Usual colours for the pixies, black for the ashtrays, with “Here’s Luck M’dear” in white paint round the rim.’
Graham did not answer directly but said after a moment, ‘I’m a bit down on the paint.’
‘You’ll have enough for this lot, surely,’ Foley said. He had been aware for some time that Graham was using part of the paint supplied to him for purposes of his own, but unwilling as always to disrupt established practice he preferred to condone this, so long as Graham was moderate in his pilfering.
‘I’m a bit down generally this week,’ said Graham, putting the discussion on a broader base. ‘Any chance of an advance on this lot? Half down now, say, and the rest when you collect?’
Foley said, ‘You know that’s not the way we do things, Graham.’ It distressed him just a little to have to refuse but there had not really been much hope in Graham’s voice. After a decent pause, but before Graham had time to get round to asking for a personal loan, Foley put the question which of all others was calculated to take Graham’s mind off scrounging. ‘How’s the painting going?’ he said. ‘I see you keep it covered up now.’
Graham became alert immediately. ‘I shall have to make a few changes,’ he said. He walked over to the wall and pulled at one corner of the sheet, which fell away, partially exposing a gigantic canvas crammed with painted forms. ‘I keep it covered all the time now,’ he remarked as he crossed to the other side. ‘Except when I’m actually working on it. Otherwise I find it gets me down.’ The whole sheet now fell to the floor and at once the room seemed to shrink. Foley had the feeling of not being able to get far enough back from the vast painting.
It was a painting of the whole village with its harbour, its new residential district and the creeping villas on the cliffs. The lines were refracted as though seen through a blur of heat and this gave to the whole a sort of sliding disintegration, not, however, uniformly advanced since some of the houses still appeared to be intact while others were listing or buckling already, their walls veined with delicate fissures. The inhabitants, nearly all of whom, despite the brutishness with which Graham had endowed their features, were clearly recognisable as local people, had been arrested at a particular moment and were in various stages of disarray. Many had gathered in the streets outside their houses, others stared vaguely at the sky from upper windows. Some faces showed merely a dull surprise, others were blubbered with tears; while here and there were black, open and perfectly rounded mouths of terror. Splintered ‘Vacancy’ signs spun wildly in the air, together
with pieces of masonry and household articles. It could be seen that some tremendous centrifugal force was being exerted on the village. In spite of this, on a slope of the cliffs in a shaft of sunlight, a pair of lovers lay embracing, their faces happy and calm; and elsewhere a group of children played unconcernedly together. The gay, banal holiday colours of the village had been preserved, emphasised. Sky and sea were clear and luminous, and sheep grazed on the hills around. But among the villas were pockets of yellow flame and some small figures could be seen waving wildly. Graham had called the painting ‘Crack of Doom at Lanruan’ and he had been working on it now for more than two years. It was remarkable for its scale and the energy of execution. Above all, perhaps, for the sustained malignancy of the numerous portraits it contained.
‘Here is where I mean,’ said Graham, pointing out a group of women at the far right of the picture who were clinging together in attitudes of helpless fear, all wearing night-dresses as though they had been roused from some kind of communal day-bed.
‘I don’t quite see what you mean at the moment,’ Foley said, looking hard at the distraught faces, prominent among which were the alcoholic barmaid at The Fisherman’s Arms and the highly respected wife of the vicar.
‘The figures aren’t defined clearly enough, boy, they merge too much together. They look like wraiths already in those bloody nighties, do you get me? Not what I wanted at all. Hell is waiting for them all right, every one of them, the bitches, but this is just the first hint of it. Everything has got to look more or less normal. The normal caught short. Do you get me?’ Graham paused for a moment, smiling. He smiled rarely, which was fortunate, because his upper teeth were wide spaced and unusually tapering and this gave to his smile an unpleasant gloating quality and narrowed down his general mammalian appearance to the rodent branch. ‘That would be another painting,’ he went on. ‘ “The Inhabitants of Lanruan in Hell.” I could do it after this one. But there’s a lot to do to this one yet. It’s nowhere near finished. I might put in some shiftings in the cemetery.’ His hand indicated an area of the canvas.
‘That sounds a good idea,’ said Foley. In spite of this talk of other pictures he felt sure that the painting would never be finished. Every time it looked about to be, Graham found changes that had to be made. The truth was that Graham wanted it to go on for ever; he needed it as a means of concentration, in the way that the Orthodox devout use ikons, as a focus for simultaneous discharge and replenishment; the only difference being that Graham kept himself charged with loathing. Every alteration he made was in intention punitive; he was not so much painting a picture as indulging in a process of retribution against the population of Lanruan. What the ground of his grievance was Foley had never discovered. He probably disliked the people to begin with, since he disliked everybody; but dwelling on them had engendered hatred. It was as though some revelation of human nastiness had been made to him in the silence of his shack. The element of caricature in the painting had grown steadily more savage and would soon, Foley felt, become pathological. Though caricature perhaps was not the way to describe it. These faces could not be dismissed as exaggerated. By subtle shifts of emphasis Graham had realised them, brought out the animality that lurked behind the decorous masks.
Conversation about the painting was satisfying for both of them. For Graham because it was the most important thing in his life, for which he scraped and dodged and sacrificed all comfort, and he had few people to discuss it with; and for Foley because the painting could be regarded as a constant factor in his life. At different times, sometimes when far away, it gave him a curious pleasure to think of Graham working on the painting. It would have dismayed him now to find it completed.
‘Think of it,’ said Graham. ‘A day like this perhaps, an ordinary day with everything just as usual, sea and sky behaving properly.’ He paused, but Foley said nothing, warned by the malevolent fluency. ‘The cafés marking up their prices for the season, the cosy widows in the guest-houses getting ready, with clean white pinnies and knees clapt close, the young couples with Vision sticking up the “Available” signs in the Seaview windows. Grasping their bloody teapots.’ Graham smiled again. ‘Teapot graspers,’ he said, ‘do you get it? To grasp something and –’
‘Yes, I get it,’ Foley said.
‘There you are, then, everything in order. Polish up the “To Let” board and back into bed again for a tumble with the wife. They’re the finest in the land, these lads, they can ride for hours; every time they’re getting near it they just have to think of the money they’re going to make in the season.’
‘Thinking of wirelesses is not a bad way either,’ Foley said. ‘If you know anything about wirelesses.’
‘The old phoney fishermen down at the harbour practising being local characters so the fools in the pubs will stand them drinks, practising their Cornish burr. Burr!’ said Graham with a shiver of disgust. ‘You know as well as I do they don’t go fishing. They hire their boats out by the hour.’
Why shouldn’t they? thought Foley, but he said nothing. He did not want to excite Graham, who was proving milder today than usual, perhaps because he was pleased with the pun he had made. Sometimes his rhetoric got out of control and then he would only stop when clogged by his own obscenities. What disturbed and rather fascinated Foley was the way Graham seemed able to contain his venom, keep it in the lonely vessel of himself, without allowing it either to leak internally and vitiate him with melancholy, or spill over into incidental and ill-timed rantings in public places which might have caused him to be arrested or certified. He simply poured it steadily into the mould of his painting and into the ears of people like Foley whom he had assumed to be sympathetic because of their acquiescence.
‘And then the first tremors, you see,’ continued Graham. ‘They are interrupted in their domestic duties, working out how to save on the breakfasts, extracting the meat from the pasties, watering down the cider. Suddenly the houses shift on their foundations, the sea darkens. This itchy-palmed, feuding, calumnious … They don’t know what’s happening at first, it’s never happened before. And the beauty of it is, it’s too late to do anything about it, too late for repentance. The bastards have nowhere to run to …’
‘My goodness yes,’ said Foley. ‘It would be quite a sight. But we wouldn’t see it of course. I mean, it would be happening to us too, wouldn’t it?’ He waited for a few moments, but there was no answer and looking at Graham’s face he found it closed in a sort of rapt complacency. It was impossible to tell whether he had heard the words.
‘Or are we exempt?’ said Foley, more loudly. He felt a need to assert himself, as though Graham by this insulting finality had somehow broken the rules of their intercourse, which required at least a token deference. But Graham’s expression did not change, nor did he look towards Foley. After a moment he turned back to the picture. ‘I’d better cover it up,’ he muttered. ‘It gets me down if I don’t.’ All at once Foley knew that Graham despised him, regarded him simply as a receptacle, a sort of stooge; and with this perception there came a cold irrestible urge to wound Graham. He thought of the people of the village as he knew them individually. Reviewing them thus he could not immediately fix on anyone whom he would much mind seeing involved in cataclysm. There was Gwendoline, of course, but she could hardly be classed as an inhabitant, she was merely a visitor, and besides he had taken her out of all other conceivable contexts, given her a previous engagement which made it impossible for her to be present even at Doomsday. Suddenly he thought of the girl who had just started work at the post office in Lanruan. She was very young, about fifteen he supposed. This would be her first job after leaving school. She was slow and made mistakes and people quite often became impatient and spoke to her sharply or sarcastically. At such times she blushed darkly and her eyes regarded the customers through her little wire grill with a tearful lustre. It would be a pity, Foley decided, for her to be engulfed.
‘I suppose there are exceptions,’ he said at last, keeping th
is vulnerable face in his mind, feeling the excitement of being about to deal a blow at Graham, the unsteadying excitement he always felt when going against the bias of another person’s will, risking enmity. Graham was beginning to hang up the sheet again. He had to stand on a chair to hook the top corners.
‘What are you getting at?’ Graham said, without looking round.
‘I should have thought it would be obvious. They can’t all be lost souls down there. Some people, apart from you I mean, must be worth saving. If they’ve all had it, where do you stand? I mean, in that case you’d be either less or more than human.’
Graham had turned now to look at him, but still made no move to get down. His face looked different from below, dignified, mournful and undernourished. The peak of his cap stuck straight out from his forehead like a knightly accoutrement.
‘Which are you, Graham, sub or super?’ asked Foley, straight up at this strange face.
Graham got down from his chair slowly and came up close to Foley with a very serious expression. ‘Are you defending the bloody Cornish?’ he asked. There was an intensity in his tone which Foley did not care for.
‘I was only saying –’ he began.
‘I never thought I’d hear you defending the bloody Cornish,’ Graham said, this time with a sort of horrified reproach, as though Foley had been guilty of some racial infamy. His eyes looked quite quenched.
They were beautiful eyes, Foley realised, now that he was seeing them so close, completely without kindness, with little flecks of gold in the irises. He saw that Graham had no intention of attacking him. His feelings had been hurt, that was all, and he didn’t for the moment quite know what to do. His own satisfaction at having paid Graham back was fading rapidly as the suspicion grew that he had been unwise. He had not expected to make such a palpable hit. The damage to their relations might well be irreparable.
The Partnership Page 3